Making Gen AI Your ‘Thought Partner for Innovation’

“The thing that excites me the most is that we’re going to be able to give good education and good health-care advice to people who traditionally have not had access to it,” said Ayesha Khanna on the Convene Podcast.

When asked what shifts she foresees for business models as AI evolves, Ayesha Khanna, Ph.D., thinks it requires us to rethink, at a fundamental level, how organizations are run. Khanna, cofounder and CEO of AI solutions firm Addo and recognized by Forbes as a groundbreaking entrepreneur in Southeast Asia, will be the keynote speaker at the upcoming PCMA APAC annual meeting — The Business of Events 2025: Master. Mind., April 13-15, at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.

Before she spoke to the PCMA APAC audience, Khanna talked on the Convene Podcast about the nature of changes we can expect as AI use becomes more widespread at work.

“First, if you look at every single process and the operating model part of it, [they] can be automated using artificial intelligence, whether it’s generative AI combined with forecasting, optimization, whatever it may be,” Khanna said. “And then the second thing is that. … it becomes kind of a tool, a thought partner for innovation as well. And not enough people are talking about this at the moment, because at an enterprise level, they’re still thinking of it really as an automation tool.”

But this shift requires that leaders proceed with caution, Khanna said. She talked about what that looks like.

What emerging AI trends should business leaders be watching and preparing for in the next few years?

There are a couple of them. One, of course, is what are the new things we expect AI to come up with? And AI agents is something people are talking about a lot.

An agent is different from a chatbot. If you talk to ChatGPT at the moment, you ask it something, it replies, gives you something, and you’re having this back and forth. Now we’re going to have that. You’re going to ask it to do something. For example, go and find the best hotel for me in Paris during Thanksgiving and book two rooms with adjoining doors for me, my husband, and two kids. And just go away from your laptop, grab a cup of coffee, go to a meeting and come back. And it would autonomously do a chain of tasks, including looking up on Google Map, including going to trip.com, hotels.com, comparing prices. If it already knows your price range, then [it will] literally [book] them using your credit card. That’s called an AI agent.

We are seeing glimpses of this. We’ve seen this in [AI intelligence company] Anthropic, which [developed gen AI assistant] Claude. AWS [Amazon Web Services] just announced one. These are early days, but it’s very interesting because you can imagine that frees up time. But, you know, you need to manage these AI agents also. You [wouldn’t] just let anybody into the house. You wouldn’t just let anybody into the firm. You just can’t let any AI agent from any vendor inside. Workday — they create human resource software where you can put in the performance, review the salary, what that person, [say] Ayesha Khanna, has access to which department data, etc. —  they’ve created one for AI agents also where you can say, “Oh, I got this AI agent from Salesforce and I’m paying this much for it. And it can access all my customer data, but it can’t access my CFO’s financial data and so on and so forth.” And then you can review it.

And when you start seeing that kind of software emerge, you know that in a couple of years, if not sooner, we’re going to have these AI agents come in.

The second thing is that AI in itself is going to become much more ambient, literally called ambient AI now, because it’s not just going to be in our laptops, in our mobile phones. We’re going to be wearing it a lot more. That’s wearable AI, whether it is in our glasses, and you can literally look at something and it will describe it for you. You can imagine being in a surgery theater or being in a chemist lab and having AI help you look things up or look at scans without having to take your eye off what’s in front of you. And [internet tech company] ByteDance actually has airpods like this,[which] also has AI in them, and it can do live translations.

What’s going to happen is that we’re going to see AI everywhere. Over 50 percent of our time, honestly speaking, is going to be spent speaking to AI, not in a very emotional way, but it will be in our car, it’s already in our car, in our microwave. It will be everywhere. It will be embedded as these chips get smaller and the AI compute gets cheaper.

We’re going to have a slew of entirely new companies come out that are going to be for this ambient AI. And just like we lost interest in the laptop, we will begin to lose interest in the mobile phone and maybe our grandchildren will [be asking], “What is that odd thing you used to carry around for no reason?” Those are [the] two big things that are going to change the way we interact with the digital world and how the digital world helps us do so many things behind the scenes now on its own, autonomously.

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What excites you the most about AI and also what are your biggest concerns?

The thing that excites me the most is that we’re going to be able to give good education and good health-care advice to people who traditionally have not had access to it.

People who are underprivileged for no fault of their own, but because they happened to be born in a poor neighborhood or in a war-torn, famine-ridden city in the world, or have had to work instead of going to school. Now with AI, personalized AI tutors on a mobile phone, they can learn. And they’re so intelligent and compassionate and wonderful human beings who’ve never had the opportunity to do that before, who will now. And that’ll be very cool for the rest of us because they’ll be our partners and our colleagues and our bosses. And that’s really exciting for me.

At the same time, because they sometimes live in places where the health care is not there, they have not been able to enjoy good health. And that will also change because you will have AI nurses and AI doctors. These kinds of things are so important. These are basic human rights that we will see a proliferation — and a dilution — of the digital divide and hopefully not an increase in it.

But of course, the worry is that over time there will be some people who will control the AI because some very big companies will have access to it more than the rest of us. And because AI is so convincing and emotionally capable of manipulation, it could be kind of like a drug that affects us or it could do things that we could underestimate and not correct. That’s something that is very much a concern.

I’m quite an optimist. I’m not naively optimistic, but I believe that if we are aware of this — through educating our children, through educating our colleagues and ourselves — then we can put those circuit breakers in and we can be, with eyes wide open, demanding the kind of governance and the democratization of access that will make sure that all of us benefit.

Because when we try to stop others from benefiting from this, we are encouraging the monopolistic behavior of people that will eventually turn it against us as well.

Magdalina Atanassova is digital media editor of Convene.