During the mid-20th century, the world entered the information age, with industries gradually transitioning to information technology. This era began with the miniaturization of computers and reached its peak with the emergence of the World Wide Web, enabling people to easily access information. However, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), this information age seems to have come to an end, as noted by Prakhar Mehrotra, Senior Vice President and Global AI Leader at PayPal, at the recent "Fortune Brainstorm AI" conference.

Mehrotra stated that we have transitioned from the "age of information" to the "age of intelligence." This "age of intelligence" is characterized by industries gradually moving away from traditional models of storing and retrieving data. The capabilities of AI allow data to be generated more spontaneously, and the ultimate goal for companies is to achieve autonomy in certain work areas.

Although companies have invested heavily in applying AI to improve productivity and output, the results have been inconsistent. According to a study by MIT, 95% of corporate AI workplace projects failed to quickly drive revenue growth. Mehrotra admitted: "This will be a journey... you must go through crawling, walking, and running. This statement was true ten years ago, and it still applies in this era."

Meanwhile, Marc Hamilton, Vice President of Solutions Architecture and Engineering at Nvidia, stated at the conference that the way companies build AI in the workplace in the future will involve investing in "AI factories," whether internally or in the cloud. This is because the data required by companies will no longer mainly be extracted by humans or computers, but by AI itself.

Hamilton pointed out that when you ask AI to generate a PowerPoint slide or write code, it does not retrieve information from a database, but rather generates data based on the model. Mehrotra added that for companies to effectively build the computational power they need, they must focus on a new fundamental unit: tokens. Tokens are the basic components that text-based AI understands and processes, serving as both information segments used for training data and content generated by AI after receiving prompts.

"Every company must think about their data in terms of tokens in order to extract intelligence from it," Mehrotra concluded.

Key Points:

✨ AI technology is driving the transition from the information age to the intelligent age.  

📈 Companies face challenges in applying AI, with many projects failing to achieve expected revenue growth.  

🔑 Tokens have become the new fundamental unit for companies building AI capabilities, with the key being the generation and utilization of data.