Chamber of Commerce Predicts ‘Virtually Every’ Business Will Use AI

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says the time has come to regulate artificial intelligence.

Envisioning a world in which “virtually every” business and government agency will use the technology, the lobbying group is calling on policymakers to develop rules to make sure artificial intelligence (AI) is developed responsibly and ethically.

“A failure to regulate AI will harm the economy, potentially diminish individual rights, and constrain the development and introduction of beneficial technologies,” the Chamber said in a report published Wednesday (March 8).

The report notes the promise of AI, saying the technology “offers great hope for increasing economic opportunity, boosting incomes, speeding life science research at reduced costs, and simplifying the lives of consumers.”

It’s why — as PYMNTS has written — there has been an uptick in investments in AI. These include Microsoft’s January decision to invest $10 billion in ChatGPT maker Open AI, and Google’s $300 million partnership with AI firm Anthropic (which itself is now embarking on a $300 million funding round).

The Chamber report warns that, as with “most disruptive technologies, these investments can both create and displace jobs.”

The report, compiled by the Chamber’s AI Commission, marks a departure from the group’s typically anti-regulatory stance.

The past year or so has seen the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest lobbying group, join forces with Big Tech firms in their battle against Washington’s antitrust measures and sue the Federal Trade Commission over the agency’s alleged regulatory overreach.

And when it comes to AI, the Chamber still recommends caution in terms of regulation, saying new laws should be created in tandem with new technology.

“Rather than trying to develop a one-size-fits-all regulatory framework, this approach to AI regulation allows for the development of flexible, industry-specific guidance and best practices,” the report said. “Such an ‘as necessary required’ legal approach, however, does not preclude additional regulatory requirements.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS on Wednesday looked at the way AI is leading to advances in the automated tools used to streamline operations in the financial services and payments world.

“We really are surrounded by AI in our daily lives,” Michael Haney, head of Cyberbank Digital Core at Galileo, the sister company of Technisys, said in an interview with PYMNTS.

“In some ways it goes back to the emergence of business rules engines in the 1980s and the applicability of those in the banking industry, where they were often embedded into workflow and case management tools.”

From there, Haney added, those business rules engines suddenly got a lot more sophisticated.

“There’s an extension that some people lump under AI of a type of business process automation which we call robotic process automation that replaces or enhances what a human does by interacting with various systems and taking a lot of the low value tasks away for the humans so they can focus on more value-add tasks,” he said. “These robots, they can work 24/7 at a speed that you or I cannot work at.”