CGI’s artificial intelligence boss knows his job title won’t exist for long

CGI’s artificial intelligence (AI) head knows his current job title won’t exist in the future, when AI is established in enterprise environments.

Russell Goodenough, UK head of AI at the IT services firm, finds himself evangelising the use of AI at a pivotal moment for the technology.

While there are fears that AI will lead to many of today’s jobs no longer existing, Goodenough is looking forward to the day the technology’s maturity means the title he holds is defunct.

“I’m head of AI for our company, but I think my job is going to be quite transitory,” he told Computer Weekly. “For example, I think it wouldn’t make any sense if we had a head of the internet.”

But while the job title still exists, Goodenough is helping all CGI staff take advantage of AI in their everyday jobs.

Following an extension of its agreement with OpenAI, he is upping the ante, with the entire CGI UK workforce of 9,000 gaining access to the enterprise version of ChatGPT AI technology.

“In the UK, absolutely everybody, whether you’re an operations person or a project manager, a service manager, or our finance and commercial and HR teams, we’ve made sure that everybody has access to the enterprise version of ChatGPT,” said Goodenough.

All aboard

CGI started with ChatGPT in what Goodenough described as “a relatively small way” 18 months ago. “We started with 250 licenses, and at that stage, CGI UK was running an evaluation of ChatGPT and Microsoft Office Copilot,” he said. “There’s something in it for absolutely everybody.

“Whether you’re a corporate support function like our finance and HR teams, or you’re a software developer, there are ways you can use the tool to get faster and quicker, and increase your throughput.”

CGI, like many other IT suppliers, has been involved in machine learning, neural networks and data science for many years, but in 2023, the world changed when ChatGPT came on the scene. “Since the world started talking about AI in a different way, we’ve put a different wrapper around those and we’ve tried to grow it as a centre of excellence,” said Goodenough.

He is heading up a programme to drive ChatGPT adoption across the business, which includes its use in the services it delivers to customers and supporting its own operations.

In its own operations, CGI has monitored the use of AI and can point to real gains in productivity.

“In certain teams, moving more and more into agentic, we are starting to see big productivity improvements in discrete workflows,” said Goodenough. “I heard last week that automated testing was getting a five-times productivity improvement, and in some rapid prototyping environments, where we’re doing front-end development with clients, I’m hearing even more.”

He said the significant productivity gains are enabling the company to grow the business rather than cut costs.

“How it seems to be manifesting itself is nobody’s losing their job at the moment,” said Goodenough. “It’s about throughput. We’re mostly engaged in [supporting customers] in critical national infrastructure, and we’re able to address big ticket problems much, much more quickly.”

Avoid top-down pitfalls

Goodenough said the company has attempted to avoid pitfalls caused by a top-down, and even centre-down, approach to AI adoption.

“I’ve always worked with teams of evangelists and enthusiasts across the business, so I know who my change agents are and I work with them,” he said. “I’m on the front foot of communicating it and talking about the positives, putting people who’ve done amazing stuff on a pedestal internally.”

Goodenough said that last year, the company saw AI use among coders “go through the roof”. “In the past year, that’s the area that’s come on the furthest,” he said. “It has moved from them saying, ‘Maybe I’ve saved an hour in a week’ to, ‘Dear me, I’m doing my work five times faster’.”

CGI has 92,000 global staff, and while the UK is leading on OpenAI initiatives, other regions are spearheading activity with other AI platforms.

For example, in the APAC region, a team is responsible for the equivalent programme to work with Google Gemini, and in Canada, similar work is being done with Anthropic Claude. “Somebody always takes the lead on the relationship,” said Goodenough. “I run the relationship with OpenAI.”

While different regions spearhead work on AI platforms, all regions have access to the results. CGI has just under 18,000 people using ChatGPT, of which 8,000 of those are in the UK.

“Those 10,000 users that are outside the UK are distributed across all our other businesses,” he said. “That’s the way we work. Somebody always takes a lead on an initiative.”

Worrying signs

But while huge amounts of resources are being invested in the development and adoption of AI across the globe, Goodenough believes there are worrying signs.

“I don’t quite understand why, when we’ve got the backlog in the NHS and the court service, and there are big-ticket things to do, why we’ve got AI creating images of women with no clothes on,” he said. “I find that to be despicable, and I don’t understand why we’ve managed to catch that side of things.

“I promise you what I’m trying to do is apply AI to big-ticket stuff, because when it is policing or justice or working with health, you’ve got to figure out ways to do good with it.”