Strauss Zelnick moderated a fireside chat with media pioneer Bob Pittman today at the Paley International conference in Palo Alto, California. Their topic was radio, but Zelnick took a question from the audience on his thoughts on AI in the gaming industry.
He gave a longer answer than expected, and it was interesting to hear the thoughts from the CEO of Take-Two Interactive, which, after the pending acquisition of Electronic Arts, is going to be the largest independent public game company in the U.S. Among his notions: AI is going to create jobs, not destroy them.
Zelnick said, “You have to look at this tool set, and our business has been involved with digital tools since its inception, and I think we’ll probably be able to create a bunch of efficiency, and we’re already trying to do that.”
AI is sweeping through the games industry now, with startups like General Intuition raising $133.7 million a couple of weeks ago and EA announcing today it is partnering on AI game tools with Stability AI to enhance the work of programmers, artists and developers. At the same time, it has met objections from professionals who are concerned it reduces the jobs available and also doesn’t properly respect the creations of human artists.
Overall deal activity across all stages remained steady, with 81 financings in 2024 and 60 financings in the first three quarters of 2025. It’s worth noting that most companies now include an AI narrative in their fundraising pitches and positioning, according to Drake Star Partners.
Zelnick said the company might be reviewing like 200 different opportunities at any given time.
“But what AI is not going to do — because, remember, [AI is] the combination of big data sets with a bunch of compute a large language model. And by definition, a data set is backward looking. By definition, creativity is forward looking,” Zelnick said. “And to the extent that AI appears to be forward looking, it is a predictive model. And predictive models work really well when the data is clear. So for example, if you want to predict whether I’m going to floss my teeth before bed tonight based on the data set of having lived all these years, you’re going to get a very solid prediction.”
But then he said it gets more difficult.
“If you’re going to predict the questions that I was going to ask Bob Pittman, ChatGPT would have gotten them about 30% right, and 70% would have gotten wrong. I’m sure my team used ChatGPT,” he said.
But it couldn’t know, he said, that he would get up early in the morning and start rewirting those questions. And that result was not predictable.
“The same thing applies to every creative enterprise,” Zelnick said. “The reason it’s so extraordinary is right now we have a combination of meta data with a parlor trick. But we’re all going to get used to it. We’re going to get really used to it in the same way that if this were 25 years ago and I handed you today’s version of Google, you would have been blown away by what it could do for you.”
“This is the future of technology,” he said. “It will not reduce employment. It will increase employment. Technology always increases productivity, which increases GDP, which just increases employment. And you know, in 1865, 65% of the U.S. workforce was involved in agriculture. Today we make food for America and food for the rest of the world, and 2% of the workforce is involved with agriculture.”
But he challenged the audience “to find anyone who recently said to you, ‘It’s so horrible I can’t get a job as a farmer.’ And employment is way up. AI is a great thing. It’s great thing for every industry. Will it create genius? No. Will it create hits? No. It’s a bunch of data with a bunch of compute with the large language model attached. Sorry, you asked.”