How Fortune 100 Companies Are Already Using GenAI to Reshape the Business

C-suite leaders from three of the nation’s largest companies — United Airlines, Target and AT&T — said they are actively deploying generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) even with its imperfections because they want to grab onto opportunities at this seminal moment in technology that is reinventing business and society.

Jason Birnbaum, chief information officer of United Airlines, compared the impact of GenAI to the 2007 unveiling of the iPhone, which completely changed how people conducted their digital lives. Since then, trillions of dollars of value have been created across industries and mobile transactions the likes of which no one could have anticipated.

“We’re starting a similar journey” in AI, Birnbaum said during a panel discussion at SXSW 2025 in Austin, Texas.

But Birnbaum said executives must be willing to touch the “third rail” of the business — taking bold moves that might mean reinventing entire processes or removing sacred cows — otherwise AI will not make much of an impact.

“If you’re using it to get 2% better then I think you’re missing tomorrow,” Birnbaum said.

Prat Vemana, chief information and product officer of Target, said he tells his engineering staff, “This is the best time to be living,” because of the potential of AI. For example, a consumer could ask an AI agent how to make chicken noodle soup. The AI agent would move a cursor to do an online search, find the recipe and then order groceries for delivery.

Kellyn Smith Kenny, chief marketing and growth officer at AT&T, said the telecom giant actually was involved in coining the term “artificial intelligence.” Claude Shannon from AT&T’s research division, Bell Labs, was part of a small group at Dartmouth College in 1955 exploring AI topics. It led to the first ever AI conference organized by John McCarthy, who was then widely attributed as having come up with the name, “artificial intelligence.”

Read more: OpenAI Product Chief Says ChatGPT Will Become Agentic in 2025

What AI in Customer Centricity Looks Like

The three executives zeroed in on how generative and agentic AI is helping their organizations become more customer-centric.

As a carrier, United Airlines has to deal with a lot of factors that are moving dynamically: weather, customer mishaps, travel changes and the like. Birnbaum said that when flights are on time 80% to 90% on a given day, it’s a good day. No other business would count that as a success with a miss of 10% to 20%, he added.

Birnbaum hopes that GenAI can remove some of the stress from traveling. He said traveling involves a lot of waiting — such as at the airport lobby and at the gate.

“Why do you have to wait in the travel process?” Birnbaum asked. Harnessing AI, “How do we anticipate what you’re going to need when you arrive? … [and] Can we use AI to solve your problem before you have it?”

For example, when flights are canceled due to a storm, the airline could proactively rebook the passenger in anticipation of inclement weather instead of waiting for the flight to actually be canceled.

In customer service, United Airlines uses GenAI to listen to customer calls and suggest to human agents what they can say to the caller. Birnbaum said chatbots will get better as well.

“Let’s be honest. Chatbots are terrible in any industry. … Especially for something complicated like an airline, they’re hard” to do right, Birnbaum said. “I think generative AI is going to fix it.” He added that United is working on “really upping the game” on the chatbot experience so travelers “can do it all without ever turning to an agent” but still get a good result.

Birnbaum said there are many more applications of generative and agentic AI for United Airlines now and in the future. They include the following:

• A GenAI agent that can help travelers solve issues and also help employees do their jobs better.
• An AI agent that can help developers write code to improve speed to market.
• Use of computer vision to understand what’s happening in the environment as planes land and people are gathered around.
• Use of GenAI for real-time translation so flight attendant announcements don’t just have to be in English and one other language but in dozens of languages.

Read more: Airbnb CBO: AI Will Enable a ‘Concierge in Your Pocket’

AT&T Rerouting Network Traffic; ‘Joy’ at Target

At AT&T, the company is using synthetic data and AI to anticipate storms and natural disasters before they happen. “We can predict that,” Kenny said. “We can offload traffic to different parts of the network” to prevent outages.

AT&T is also using AI to block spam calls, with 1.5 billion robocalls blocked per month, Kenny added.

In call centers, AT&T uses GenAI to help its call center agents improve the quality of their customer service. Five years ago, AT&T’s customer service representatives said they felt they were rushing customers off the phone.

Kenny said AI can help predict why the customer is calling. If the AI determines the caller can help themselves, it will route the call to self-service options. It turns out that 50% of their callers are fine with self-service, Kenny said. That leaves its customer service representatives handling callers with more complex issues.

With that change, “our customer care experience has gone way up and the employee experience is far better because they have more accurate, more [holistic] information about the customer,” Kenny said.

Vemana, who has been at his position at Target for only a month, said his North Star in deploying AI is to bring joy to customers.

That spans the gamut of using GenAI in digital channels to enhance customer interactions, develop creative assets to help their marketing teams and deploying its GenAI chatbot Store Companion to help employees find information they need for their jobs or to answer customer questions.

“When it comes to joy, it’s Target,” Vemana said to laughter from the crowd.

GenAI also helps the Target shopper’s experience by getting related product recommendations right. For example, if a shopper puts a coffee table in their online shopping cart, GenAI can more precisely recommend other products the shopper might want by knowing the customer.

“Every recommendation is powered by generative AI,” Vemana said.

Read more: Target Aims for $15 Billion Revenue Boost, Focuses on Digital and In-Store Experience

Advice to Business Leaders

The three executives had the following advice to other leaders:

• Dare to experiment. Vemana said experimentation is key to unlocking GenAI’s benefits, especially since the technology is so new. Birnbaum agreed, adding that “There are no experts in the space because it’s too new. … So try to innovate. Get out there and try it.”

• Know your proprietary data. “Your data … is king,” Birnbaum said. Make sure the company data is prepped to be useful because AI is advancing fast.

• Set up an AI coalition with key leaders internally. Make sure the right stakeholders are at the table, such as the legal team, compliance executives, data privacy folks and others, Birnbaum said. “So that when you go fast, you’re all on the same page and you don’t get way down the road and find out … ‘We missed a step.’”

• Create a culture of acceptance within the company. “If it’s technology against the world and employees, you’re going to fail,” Birnbaum said. “You’ve got to bring everyone along.”

Kenny said change is tough for most people, and it’s the leader’s job to remove roadblocks for employees. She said staff go through five stages before accepting change.

• Denial: They don’t want to change how they’re doing things.
• Waiting: They want to see someone else do it first.
• Disorientation: Fear and confusion once they see change is coming
• Reappraisal: Their thinking starts to change.
• Commitment and acceptance: They are on board.

Overall, the maxim that fits this moment of disruption is, “If you want to live the future, invent it,” Kenny said. “I’ve had a lot of people in my organization who are waiting to be told [what to do] by their leader. I wish people would just lean in faster. … Don’t wait for your leaders to tell you or ask you.

“Be a co-author with AI,” she added. “What we can unlock, if we are in the driver’s view of this and we are the architects of it now, is going to be so much greater than if you’re waiting.”

Photo: From left Kellyn Smith Kenny, chief marketing and growth officer at AT&T, Prat Vemana, chief information and product officer of Target, Jason Birnbaum, chief information officer of United Airlines, and moderator Steven Norton from Metis Strategy.

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