TL;DR
Technology companies are increasingly deploying their AI tools internally before selling them externally. IBM’s HR chatbot now handles 94% of staff queries, while companies from Asana to Orange are embedding AI across operations—though questions remain about whether automation will displace workers.
Eating Your Own Dog Food at Scale
A growing number of technology companies are adopting AI extensively inside their own organisations before offering it to customers. The strategy serves dual purposes: demonstrating the technology’s transformative potential to buyers while extracting genuine productivity gains.
IBM’s internal AskHR chatbot exemplifies this approach. According to Joanne Wright, senior vice-president of transformation and operations, the tool has handled 94% of staff queries about human resources since last year, using generative AI to produce answers from policy documents. The company also uses AI to review every contract passing its mergers and acquisitions desk, identifying “30 times more non-compliant terms” than previous methods.
Wright says internal AI use has “freed up millions of hours” across IBM’s 270,000-strong global workforce. However, IBM announced in November that it intends to cut a “low single-digit percentage” of positions, affecting several thousand jobs.
From Startups to Industrial Giants
The pattern extends beyond IBM. Asana has rolled out AI across engineering, customer service, and marketing teams for tasks from code generation to campaign management. Cyber security firm SentinelOne recently deployed an AI coding tool called Windsurf across its 800-strong engineering team.
French industrial giant Schneider Electric has created a dedicated chief AI officer position. Philippe Rambach, who has overseen AI rollout for four years, says salespeople now access tools that trawl through “millions of historical quotes” to generate proposals. The company has also deployed AI for electrification project planning, field technician deployment, and customer communications.
At London clean tech startup Tem Energy, employees are actively encouraged to leverage AI. Staff are equipped with models including Claude Sonnet, ChatGPT, and Gemini, participating in hackathons to develop internal tools. “We believe a human using AI well will always outperform one who doesn’t,” says CEO Joe McDonald.
Looking Forward
Whether AI amplifies workers or replaces them remains the critical question. Cognizant’s chief AI officer Babak Hodjat believes AI works best as an “amplifier of human potential”—the company doubled its graduate intake this year, finding newer staff saw a 37% productivity increase through AI compared to 17% for experienced workers. The coming years will reveal whether this optimistic view prevails across the industry.
Source: Financial Times