Let AI go ‘a little bit rogue,’ says SharkNinja CIO. Better we find the limits than someone else does

Ask the executives who run AI inside some of the world’s leading companies whether the technology is going to kill us, and you get an answer that looks vastly different from some recent headlines.

“For sure, it won’t kill us,” said Athina Kanioura, PepsiCo’s global chief strategy and transformation officer and CEO of its Latin America Foods business.

Kanioura was responding to that very question from Fortune ’s Diane Brady during this year’s Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Calif.

She and other executives on Brady’s panel said the latest public discourse about AI and its impending doom has fixated on the wrong thing.

Much of the recent alarm stems from AI labs’ own stress tests—and their, at times, tardy or less-than-fulsome disclosures—in which frontier models are pushed to deceive, break rules, or resist shutdowns.

“The models themselves are not AI.

AI is so much more,” said Shibani Ahuja, senior vice president of data and AI strategy at Salesforce .

The recent media coverage is about “testing that is by design and intentional around the models, and the models going rogue by design.” Ahuja said there is additional context that adds more nuance, and said she’d like to see more discussion about two main points.

The first is about the guardrails labs use while testing their models, and secondly, she’s interested in the “harnesses” companies are building that let businesses use the models safely on a day-to-day basis.

Velia Carboni, chief information officer of consumer appliance business SharkNinja, went even further and defended the lab’s boundary-pushing as a strategic necessity in the AI race.

“I want them to be a little bit rogue because I’d rather we find [the limits] than someone else finds it,” she said.

“We wouldn’t want to lose that as a country.” At SharkNinja, Carboni said guardrails around AI tools are firmly in place, but she doesn’t lead with how they police it when she talks with employees.

“I don’t want to limit creativity,” she said.

“As a CIO, I have to have the guardrails and security… but I don’t lead with that story because I think that also takes away some of the creativity.” Kanioura noted the onus for deploying AI safely is on businesses of PepsiCo’s size being “extremely responsible” with how they use the technology at every facet of their interactions with consumers, customers, employees, and in operations.