Capgemini chief executive Aiman Ezzat has urged businesses to take an agile approach to artificial intelligence, warning that companies risk wasting money if they invest too far ahead of what customers are ready to adopt.
Ezzat said firms should run small trials and build their capabilities gradually, rather than attempting a single, sweeping transformation. The aim, he said, was to be ready to expand when demand for AI began to accelerate.
“You don’t want to be too ahead of the learning curve,” he said. “If [you are] you’re investing and building capabilities that nobody wants.”
The comments come as corporate boards weigh substantial spending on AI while struggling to judge which technologies will deliver lasting commercial value. Capgemini’s share price has also been under pressure amid a wider sell-off in technology stocks linked to concerns over AI expenditure.
The French technology and consultancy group has recently agreed to sell its US subsidiary, Capgemini Government Solutions, which had provided tracing and removal data for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ezzat said in a LinkedIn post that the American business had acted autonomously to protect classified information in the US.
Speaking before the controversy surrounding the subsidiary emerged, Ezzat said leaders had to find a balance between moving quickly and avoiding costly bets on immature technology.
Capgemini has established laboratories focused on 6G mobile technology, quantum computing and robotics. Ezzat acknowledged that not all of these fields were ready for widespread use, but said the company wanted to understand them early enough to identify when they began to mature.
“Is everything ready to mature? No,” he said. “But we want to be there to be able to see when things start to mature, when we can really start scaling up, not waiting to see, ‘Okay, oh, now it’s moving.’”
He added: “We have to do something, right? So, you have to be investing—but not too much—to be able to be aware of the technology, following at the speed to make sure that we are ready to scale when the adoption starts to accelerate.”
Capgemini chief calls for business-led AI strategy
Ezzat said companies should view AI as a business transformation rather than a separate technology project. Many large organisations, he argued, were initially using it to make individual departments more efficient, without connecting information and processes across the wider enterprise.
That approach could involve linking areas such as finance, human resources, procurement and supply chains, allowing data and operations to be used in new ways. Ezzat said chief executives should focus less on whether a finance team could work more efficiently and more on how AI might fundamentally disrupt the business.
“AI is a business. It is not a technology,” he said, warning against treating it as a “black box that’s being managed separately”.
“There are technologies behind it, but it’s really about transforming the business. It cannot just be used to keep the house running.”
A further challenge will be persuading employees to work confidently alongside AI systems. Ezzat said the relationship between people and automated agents would need to be designed around trust, with humans remaining central to how the technology was used.
“Basically, the need to integrate AI with humans. How do you get humans to trust the agent? The agent can trust the human, but the human doesn’t really trust the agent,” he said.
For Ezzat, the lesson is that AI should be shaped around people, rather than introduced solely for operational convenience. Poorly designed systems, he suggested, could have consequences far beyond the inefficiencies created by badly designed workplace equipment.
