Fire allowed humanity to warm itself and cook, but it has also become a weapon of destruction. Centuries later, the automobile shortened distances and boosted economic growth around the world, but it has also contributed to filling the atmosphere with fumes and polluting gases. History shows, therefore, that the great inventions that have transformed humanity have almost always had two sides: that of progress and that of risk. That of opportunity and that of threat.
If today one were to ask what is the great invention of our century, generative artificial intelligence would undoubtedly be one of the first answers. And, like the great inventions of humanity that have preceded it, this new technology opens up new possibilities, but also raises questions about its consequences and its threats. What happens when a tool with the potential to boost business growth can also become a threat to companies that do not know how to adapt to it? Where is the line between opportunity and risk? And, therefore, if a SWOT analysis of the Catalan economy for 2027 were to be drawn up, on which side should artificial intelligence be placed: on that of opportunities or on that of threats?
The answer depends, to a large extent, on how companies face this technological revolution and their ability to integrate it into their business strategy. This has been one of the reflections that have focused the DAFO Barcelona 2027 conference, promoted by Banc Sabadell and The New Barcelona Post, with the collaboration of the Círculo Ecuestre, under the motto The year in which ambiguity ends. A conference to move from uncertainty to strategic decisions and face with confidence the changes that will mark the future of companies.
But what is needed for artificial intelligence to go from being a technological promise to a true engine of growth? For Aleix Valls, CEO of WeAI, Jungle's artificial intelligence consultancy, the key is business leadership. In opening the second block of the day, focused on technology, before the hundred entrepreneurs gathered at DAFO Barcelona 2027, Valls was emphatic: "The real bottleneck in the adoption of artificial intelligence is not the cost of the token —a small fragment of text that AI processes and that serves to calculate its cost of use— nor the technology: it is management." That is, the challenge is no longer accessing these tools, which are increasingly economical and simple to adopt, but knowing how to integrate them into the business strategy to generate value and boost its growth.
To explain this distance between technological potential and companies' ability to take advantage of it, Valls recalled the arrival of mobile devices. Society quickly incorporated these devices into their daily lives, but many companies took years to transform processes. Now, he warned, AI runs the risk of repeating this same story: incorporating these new tools but without modifying the underlying processes.
The key, therefore, is not to accumulate pilot tests that are then not scaled —as Valls warns happens in many companies— but to rethink processes from start to finish. According to Valls, only companies that do so are those that already achieve an impact even on economic results. "We must stop understanding AI only as an instrument to reduce expenses and start seeing it as an instrument that multiplies income," he stressed.
But Valls does not only direct this recommendation to large corporations; with increasingly accessible tools, small and medium-sized companies can also automate tasks that previously required months of development. But technology, by itself, does not guarantee results. Valls emphasized the importance of combining it with people who supervise AI agents, evaluate their responses, and provide human judgment.
The cost of the technological revolution
But, for Valls, if companies are slow in adopting AI, Europe is even further behind. According to the data he presented during the talk, the continent represents only 5% of global computing capacity and it takes between seven and thirteen years for a data center to be approved. "Europe has sold us a great product called fear, geopolitical fear," he stated, referring to an excessive European overregulation that, in his opinion, too often stems from distrust towards artificial intelligence.
However, the threat of this race is not only economic, it is also economic. Valls warned that large tech companies are investing huge amounts in data centers and chips, but that the challenge will be to demonstrate that the revenues generated by AI will allow them to recover this investment. "We are facing the construction of the largest infrastructure humanity has ever attempted," he said. The doubt is whether these companies will be able to pay this "mortgage": if revenues do not cover investment costs and accumulated debt, the consequences could affect the entire economy and trigger a financial crisis.
But, just as companies can move artificial intelligence from the threat side to the opportunity side of their SWOT if they know how to integrate it into their strategy, Catalonia can also take advantage of this technological race to gain competitiveness. One of the opportunities is to attract large-scale infrastructures, such as the artificial intelligence gigafactory planned in Móra la Nova, with an announced investment of up to 5,000 million euros by the State, Telefónica, ACS and Banco Santander.
Integrating AI to transform companies
The intervention by Aleix Valls has thus highlighted one of the keys of the SWOT analysis: the same technology can represent a threat or an opportunity, depending on how it is responded to. In the case of artificial intelligence, everything depends on the capacity of companies to go beyond experimentation, integrate it into their processes, and scale its use so that it has a real impact on results. In the subsequent round table, representatives of three large technology companies —Accenture, Telefónica, and HP— detailed how they face this challenge and how they apply AI both in their own organizations and in those of their clients.
Jordi Giné (Telefónica): "The success of a technological hub like Barcelona's is not measured by the number of technology companies it concentrates, but by its ability to make the rest of the productive fabric also adopt and leverage these tools"
In fact, Mercedes Oblanca, president and CEO of Accenture in Spain and Portugal, specified that it is no longer necessary to talk about business transformation, but rather about "technological reinvention": a continuous process to rethink business models and respond to changes. But for this reinvention to reach the entire economy, technology must move beyond large companies in the sector and reach the entire productive fabric. "The success of a technological hub like Barcelona's is not measured by the number of technology companies it concentrates, but by its ability to make the rest of the productive fabric also adopt and leverage these tools," warned Jordi Giné, director of Public Administrations and Large Accounts at Telefónica in the Eastern Territory.
But how does this reinvention translate into practice? Daniel Martínez Harris, director of HP Barcelona, cited artificial intelligence agents as an example, tools capable of automating tasks and working with a company's internal systems. HP already has 50,000 in operation, but the challenge now is to ensure that they are used in a controlled manner and serve to solve specific needs. Rather than deploying agents to accumulate them, he argued, it is necessary to know what each one is for and what value it brings to the organization.
From HP, Martínez has highlighted the importance of deciding which artificial intelligence operations are carried out in the cloud and which are executed on local servers, within the same organization. This second option can facilitate the control of confidential data and allow AI to work with information and knowledge specific to each company. According to Harris, this trend will gain weight in the coming years: "2027 will be the year of inflection in this regard. In fact, it is expected that by 2030, 50% of the calculations that AI performs to generate responses and execute tasks will be carried out on local servers, instead of in the cloud. Today, this percentage is only 5%."
But, just as it poses risks, artificial intelligence also opens new opportunities. Oblanca has exemplified this in the field of talent: the digital twin of knowledge created by Accenture allows reducing the time a junior worker needs to be ready to add value to clients, from six months to six weeks. Thus, far from replacing jobs, AI can facilitate the incorporation of new professionals: in fact, Accenture has increased the hiring of junior talent by 8%. Because, as she has argued, these tools need people to design the agents, supervise them, and guide them to respond to real needs. Without this human intervention, technology can hardly bring all its value to the company.
Because, ultimately, artificial intelligence poses a challenge that accompanies almost all great inventions of humanity: how to harness its potential without losing sight of the risks. From fire to the automobile, every great invention has opened new possibilities, but has also forced society to learn to live with it. Now, the challenge also extends to companies, which must decide how to incorporate AI into their processes and business strategy.