Join The Club
Electronic Arts' president of enterprise development Laura Miele says the rise of artificial intelligence in game development can bring about "a real rise in creativity" by removing tedious grunt work and enabling faster development processes overall.
Miele expressed her thoughts on the matter earlier this month during a Game Business Live showcase at Summer Game Fest, where she was asked if the growing use of AI tools will result in shorter development cycles overall.
"Perhaps in some parts they will," Miele said. "I really believe in what I've seen, that I'm pretty excited about. I've always wanted to help our studio developers remove friction and I've always kind of wanted to be a hero to them and help them create career-defining experiences.
"And I think that AI, what I've seen, how AI has enabled removing friction from our pipelines and our tools and our workflows, has been pretty exciting. It's removed some tedium out of their jobs. And I've seen faster prototyping. I've seen faster creativity and shorter, faster conversations around creativity and coming to alignment. So, we're seeing it and I think there's a real rise of creativity that comes from removing some of the tedious tasks out of development."
earlier this weekFumito Ueda at GenDesignExactly what sort of AI is being discussed here isn't made clear, and there's a big gulf between, say, the AI-powered project management tools used by Shadow of the Colossus director Fumito Ueda at GenDesign and the generative AI slop machines that have become such a pox on, well, everything.
But EA hasn't been shy in the past about its enthusiasm for generative AI. CEO Andrew Wilson said in 2024, for instance, that the company is "embracing [generative AI] deeply," and that "about 60% of all of our development processes have high feasibility to be positively impacted by generative AI."
EA is also reportedly counting on the power of AI to bring down its operating costs and help cover the $20 billion in debt financing the company took on as part of its $55 billion acquisition by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. (If you're wondering why EA, the target of the acquisition, is also taking on billions of dollars of debt to pay for it, PC Gamer's foremost finance wiz Lincoln Carpenter explains. The short version: Everyone's terrified.)
Employees are reportedly less upbeat about the AI-powered future, which some suspect is being used to justify layoffs at the company. Whether driven by AI or not, EA has laid off hundreds of employees at BioWare, Respawn, Cliffhanger Games—which was closed outright—and elsewhere since the Saudi investment was announced in September 2025. The most recent round of cuts reportedly occurred earlier this week, putting an undisclosed number of people out of work.
