- GM's top executives have turned AI adoption into a friendly competition.
- The finance team is "middle of the pack," GM's chief financial officer said.
- GM says AI can cut costs and speed up car development as Chinese rivals gain ground.
General Motors executives are competing with each other over AI use.
On Wednesday, GM's chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, said the top brass who report to CEO Mary Barra compare monthly AI-usage figures by function and department.
"We have a healthy competition among all of Mary's senior leaders, where every month we show usage by function and department," he said in London at JPMorgan's US All Stars Conference in London. "That's a good, healthy competition across the board."
Jacobson said his team is "kind of middle of the pack" in that race. A spokesperson for GM reiterated that it's a "friendly competition" between the executives.
General Motors has been stepping up its AI across several departments. The company previously told Business Insider that AI tools are offering car design recommendations and alerting the company about potential risks to its supply chain. The automaker's chief product officer, Sterling Anderson, said his team's goal is to hasten the design-to-production timeline.
AI has become a central focus for Detroit automakers, especially as Chinese car companies expand their control of global markets with cheaper, longer-range EV technologies.
Jacobson referenced that tension: He called America "a little bit of a safe haven" as manufacturers direct more capacity here to escape intense Chinese competition elsewhere.
He added that GM's AI ambitions remain in the "infancy" stage as it tries to understand how the tech will change its business. He pointed to potential applications in vehicle features, quality, and manufacturing — and warned that companies unable to become more efficient will fall "further and further behind."
Within finance, Jacobson wants AI to help GM's analysts develop some clairvoyance. Today, he said, they spend about 80% of their time explaining past results and 20% anticipating what comes next; he expects AI to flip that, with 80% of their time spent on predicting next moves.
"That makes us more effective as a finance team across the board, versus sitting here thinking about what's happened and extrapolating that," he said. "AI's going to do that so much faster than any of us can."
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