Take-Two Interactive is using some AI tools in areas of its business that aren’t creative, but the company is not looking to use those tools to replace any staff, CEO Strauss Zelnick said during Take-Two’s November earnings call.
“I think there are plenty of areas of business where the tools we have rolled out at the enterprise are helping us. We are not either using this as an excuse to, or frankly seeing the opportunity to, reduce headcount,” Zelnick said on the call, answering a question about how Take-Two has rolled out AI tools in the non-creative areas of its business. “We are seeing this as an opportunity to take our very talented people and release them from more mundane tasks so they can do more creative and more interesting tasks and we can work better as an organization. But if you said, ‘Can you cut your cost profile by 5% tomorrow by using all things AI?’ The answer is no.”
Zelnick has previously said in interviews that he thinks the capabilities of generative AI tools are overstated, and that AI can’t replace games made by humans like Grand Theft Auto 6. During the earnings call, he clarified those comments somewhat, but he also reiterated that he thinks AI can potentially be a useful tool in game development in the future, if “properly deployed.”
“To be clear, I didn’t say that I don’t see it as a positive,” Zelnick said. “What I said was that AI is based on backward-looking data sets meeting compute, meeting LLMs, and none of that replaces forward-looking genius. That’s not an opinion, that’s factual. I defy anyone to controvert those facts.
“Of course, technology drives a lot of what we do here. Now, creativity is our lifeblood, but how do we express our creativity? We do so with computers, with technical tools. We always have. So as toolsets improve, we can become more efficient, we can become more effective. And our creative people, therefore, are freed up to be more creative. So AI, depending on how you define it, and properly deployed, of course is positive for creativity, and therefore is, of course, positive for game creation.”
Zelnick’s comments that AI won’t lead to layoffs at Take-Two come in contrast to other executives. Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson and Microsoft’s Brad Smith have both said that AI advancements will lead to job losses in the short term, though they claim AI will eventually lead to higher employment rates.
