Inside the AI divide roiling video game giant Electronic Arts (www.businessinsider.com)

Electronic Arts has pushed a company-wide AI drive—encouraging nearly 15,000 employees to take multiple AI courses, use generative tools daily, and treat AI as a “thought partner” for everything from writing code and concept art to scripting sensitive manager-employee conversations. Internal memes and anonymous staff accounts reveal deep pushback: employees report flawed outputs and hallucinations from tools (including EA’s in‑house chatbot ReefGPT), worry they’re being asked to train models on their own creative work, and fear displacement—one recently laid-off senior QA designer said AI handled key parts of his role. EA’s embrace comes amid financial pressure (net income down 9.4% for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, and down 28% in the final quarter) and broader industry churn—about 14,600 game-industry job cuts in 2024 and a global workforce roughly 318,000 today. The situation at EA crystallizes a broader enterprise dilemma: executives rapidly adopting AI as a productivity lever while many employees see heavier workloads and job risk. Surveys show 87% of executives use AI daily versus 27% of employees, and 92% of C‑suite leaders expect productivity gains while 40% of workers say AI increased their workload. Technical implications include IP and ethics concerns when creative work trains models, reliability issues from hallucinations, and shifting skill requirements as automation handles routine tasks like feedback summarization. Experts recommend orienting AI toward tasks where it demonstrably outperforms humans (forecasting, numeric estimation), keeping humans in the loop for identity‑laden creative work, and preserving oversight to rebuild trust.