Andrew Wilson

Andrew Wilson (born 1974) is an Australian executive who joined Electronic Arts in 2000, rose through EA Sports running the FIFA franchise, and became CEO in September 2013. Under his leadership EA leaned into live services and, in 2025, agreed to one of the largest buyouts in history, taking the publisher private in a roughly $55 billion deal.

“The very core of our business”

At EA’s September 2024 Investor Day, Wilson made the most sweeping AI commitment of any major game publisher, telling investors the technology is not a “buzzword” but “the very core of our business.” He described more than 100 novel AI projects across three categories — efficiency, expansion, and transformation — and said EA could not have shipped College Football 25, with its 150 unique stadiums and over 11,000 player likenesses, without AI tools. Earlier that year he told analysts that around 60 percent of EA’s development processes could be impacted by generative AI, a technology the company was “embracing deeply.”

The timing sharpened the criticism: Wilson’s 60-percent remarks came shortly after EA laid off five percent of its workforce, and further cuts followed as the company centralized decades of 3D assets into what executives called a “Smithsonian”-scale library to feed its tools. Developers and players widely read the Investor Day as a pitch aimed at Wall Street rather than creators, and “the very core of our business” became a shorthand in the industry’s AI backlash.

Wilson’s long-term vision extends past efficiency into what he calls transformation — AI-supercharged franchises hosting user-generated content, personalization, and “experiences that cannot be imagined today.” Among the big publishers, EA under Wilson is the clearest bet that generative AI is not a tool for making games cheaper but the next platform for making them bigger.