Capgemini CEO warns of AI ‘FOMO’ and investment traps
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — The fear of missing out (FOMO) on the artificial intelligence (AI) boom is gripping boardrooms worldwide, pushing chief executives toward massive financial bets with uncertain returns, according to Capgemini Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Aiman Ezzat.
In an exclusive interview with Fortune before his company’s recent divestiture of a United States government subsidiary, Ezzat cautioned that business leaders are treading a precarious line between investing too aggressively in unproven technology and falling dangerously behind the competition.
“We have to do something, right? So, you have to be investing—but not too much—to be able to be aware of the technology, following at the speed to make sure that we are ready to scale when the adoption starts to accelerate,” Ezzat explained.
Navigating the ‘sweet spot’ of AI ROI
Kamal Ahmed, Executive Editorial Director at Fortune Europe, writes that Ezzat claims corporate leaders have a complex task in selecting the rate and extent of their AI adoption, without saying that going too fast is equivalent to going too slow.
He proposes that when executives run ahead of the technological curve, they risk investing in capabilities and infrastructure that the market has not yet needed, in effect creating solutions to a problem that does not yet exist.
“You don’t want to be too ahead of the learning curve,” Ezzat stated. “If [you are], you’re investing and building capabilities that nobody wants.”
Conversely, hesitating to engage with AI poses its own existential risks, prompting the very FOMO that is now driving C-suite anxiety.
To navigate this uncertainty, Capgemini is adopting an “agility” approach, investing in exploratory labs for frontier technologies such as 6G mobile, quantum computing, and robotics without fully committing to large-scale commercialization.
“We want to be there to be able to see when things start to mature, when we can really start scaling up, not waiting to see, okay, oh, now it’s moving,” Ezzat explained, emphasizing the need for calculated, incremental investment to remain ready for the moment adoption accelerates.
He also emphasized, “AI is a business. It is not a technology.”
“There are technologies behind it, but it’s really about transforming the business. It cannot just be used to keep the house running.”
Why ‘Human-in-the-Lead’ beats ‘Human-in-the-Loop’
Beyond the financial and technological hurdles, Ezzat emphasizes that the core challenge of AI integration is fundamentally human, requiring a shift in philosophy from treating people as mere supervisors to putting them in a position of leadership over the technology.
He challenges the industry-standard concept of “human in the loop,” arguing that the real goal must be “human in the lead” to foster genuine trust between employees and intelligent agents.
“Basically, the need to integrate AI with humans. How do you get humans to trust the agent?” Ezzat posed. “The agent can trust the human, but the human doesn’t really trust the agent.”
This dynamic requires a shift towards AI-human-centricity, a principle that Ezzat equates with the ergonomics movement of the 1950s, which shifted the philosophy of design from fitting people to machines to designing machines to fit people.
Ahmed writes that just as poorly designed office chairs lead to physical ailments, Ezzat implies that AI systems built without a human-first approach could have far more significant negative consequences for businesses.
He stresses that AI should not be viewed as a siloed “black box” but as a core business transformer, warning executives that the critical question is not simply how to make individual departments like finance more efficient, but rather “how can your business be significantly disrupted by AI.”
With this warning, the future of work hinges not merely on how aggressively companies gamble on AI’s technological promise, but on their ability to master the far more complex transition from treating humans as mere supervisors to placing them in the lead, ensuring that the risky investment gamble pays off by building a future where people, not just algorithms, remain the architects of business transformation.
