Artificial General Intelligence: EY on the Short-Term FutureArtificial General Intelligence: EY on the Short-Term Future

Q&A with EY global AI sector leader Beatriz Sanz Sáiz

Berenice Baker, Editor

January 22, 2025

5 Min Read
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Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of AI that promises to disrupt several industries and address some of the world’s biggest problems by matching or surpassing human cognitive capabilities.

Despite the concept originating in science fiction, AGI could be closer than once thought. According to Beatriz Sanz Sáiz, EY Global Consulting data and AI Leader, it could be here in as few as two years.

In this Q&A, Sanz Sáiz discusses the current state of AGI development, how AGI could transform multiple industry sectors and the regulatory challenges and responsible AI principles that need to be in place to ensure its introduction is done safely.

AI Business: What is artificial general intelligence (AGI)?

Beatriz Sanz Saiz: It's the next evolution of not just generative AI but also agentic AI, where everything comes into play. It's generative and agentic with the ability to reason. It's a superintelligence from a cognitive perspective, more powerful and smarter than the smartest human.

Industry experts identify agentic as one of the most important technologies in 2025. How does that fit in the evolution toward AGI?

AGI can perform tasks like agentic AI but can also make decisions on the flow to develop an end-to-end function and respond to changes. Take objective-based workflows, the steps can change depending on what the agent finds, that's like real-life interaction.

Related:Deloitte Survey: Businesses Show Tempered Optimism on Generative AI

Agentic AI is the first practical at-scale application of AGI, but its agents do not yet have a proper reasoning capability, although it will come.

In AGI, the workflow is not predefined, the steps evolve. This is highly dependent on using an open architecture, so agents can interact with other agents and the output of one agent becomes the input for another. That's a game changer when you think about the workplace.

Experts estimate the event of AGI to be as soon as 2027 or as late as 2060. What’s your opinion?

Look at the evolution of what's happened in the last 24 months, from generative AI to agentic AI to where the technology is today. You can interact with ChatGPT or other language models almost in real time, it starts to make a live workflow real. We are making gigantic steps and there's no doubt that it will come.

As important as the delivery, implementation and R&D around this technology is, is how to make it safe, so running those two streams in parallel is essential.

This technology has mind-blowing potential to be a game changer from a societal perspective. In education, you could give access to everyone and democratize kind of the rights to education and health. These technologies could provide productivity improvement in the long run to increase the well-being of societies.

Related:Emergent Minds: How Agentic AI is Transforming Industries

But while technology can do amazing things for society, the same technology can do the worst things for society, like cyber threats, misinformation, security breaches and fake news. So how to make it safe? How to make it secure? Humanity needs to do serious research into how to make it work.

There’s no crystal ball, but given the current pace of change, AGI could be two, three or five years away.

What are the use cases for AGI?

Think about how industries are using the AI we have today. Industries like financial services have a clear goal around productivity improvement, so they are looking at the application of this technology horizontally, looking at workflows where they can get productivity gains.

Other industries, for example, oil and gas or life science, use AI in a completely different way. For them, it’s about completely reinventing the workflow. They are thinking, how can we reinvent the world of drug discovery, for example, or in oil and gas, how can we make the industry safer?

We don't find one common pattern for every sector; they are driven by different purposes and that explains the different ways in which they will adopt AGI and the use cases they will use it for.

How should organizations prepare for AGI?

EY has just concluded a survey that found 85% of CEOs say they could move faster if they had the right the right data and 34% say the lack of the right infrastructure and data is already a constraint.

I think agentic AI will be a trigger for enterprises to start decommissioning old technology and moving to new technology, using AI for data and tech. Tech itself is going to be a major agentic AI use case, possibly the biggest one. That will be fundamental because it will modernize entire organizations so I think that’s the first use case they need to prepare for.

Also, companies don't talk enough about the integration of technology with humans. Humans need to adopt, need to start using AI and co-pilots and agents seamlessly.

Efforts should be focused on data, technology and then the talent reskilling operations. For me, these are the two fundamental use cases that industries need to be looking at.

You’re a champion for EY’s #WomenFastForward program. How do we ensure no one gets left behind in the AI revolution?

AI is a lot about mindset, getting hands-on and being more intentional about using it to do what you do in a way that is more effective and with broader insights. It's not just productivity; it's also the quality.

Women are intrinsically curious, and I think this is to our benefit in the long run because this technology requires curious people willing to experiment. Being curious and intentional is essential for anyone to not get left behind in using and adopting AI.

About the Author

Berenice Baker

Editor, Enter Quantum

Berenice is the editor of Enter Quantum and co-editor of AI Business. Berenice has a background in IT and 20 years of experience as a technology journalist.

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