Fortune Leaders Forum 2026

Daisy Ho, Managing Director of SJM Resorts, S.A., takes the stage to open the Fortune Leaders Forum Macau with the event's keynote address.

Daisy Ho, Managing Director, SJM Resorts, S.A.

Opening Keynote | Fortune Leaders Forum 2026

Conferences

Mr. Lee Williamson, distinguished guest, good morning. Lee, thank you for setting the tone for our discussions today and together with your fortune colleagues for bringing together leaders of such exceptional caliber. It is a great pleasure to welcome all of you to Macau and to the Grand Palace. This is the first Fortune Leaders Forum to be held in Macau. And SJM is proud to serve as host partner to an organization that for almost a century has been one of the world's most respected voices in business. I believe our theme, leadership in the age of convergence and complexity is particularly resonant today as it features, as it captures a paradox that many of us experience firsthand. No generation has had more information, more computing power, or easier ways to connect. Yet business leaders often find it harder, not easier to see what lies ahead. Why is this so? The reason is not simply that change is accelerating. Economies and industries are also now so tightly connected that when one part sneezes, others could catch cold. In such an environment, leaders must understand not only the decision before them, but how it will affect and be affected by the wider world. When we must deal without complete clarity of the future, clarity of purpose becomes decisive. Decisions will be taken at different times by different people and under different assumptions. Yet purpose remains the one constant, the North Star that keeps everyone moving in the same direction. For Macau, being at the center of a collusion of forces is nothing new. We have long connected East and West, China and the world, commerce and culture. Our city's identity was built through exchange, and our progress has come from an ability to turn changing circumstances into new opportunities. Among Macau's integrated resort operators, SJM is the only one with roots in this city. For more than 6 decades, we have walked alongside Macau from the opening of its tourism market in the 1960s through the handover, the liberalization of the gaming industry, the years of the pandemic, and the city's integration into the Greater Bay Area. At each stage, we learned that progress did not depend on knowing exactly what came next, but on recognizing what was worth carrying forward. Our foundations are in gaming and hospitality. But as Macau continued to evolve, we looked inward at the strengths we have built over decades and how we could make them relevant in the new era for Macau. Gastronomy is a strong case in point. Long before it was widely recognized as a defining part of the travel experience, our founder, my late father, Doctor S Stanny Ho, invited the legendary Joel Rubuchon to open, to open Rubichon Aguilera at Hotel Lisboll in 2001. When the Michelin Guide arrived in Hong Kong and Macau in 2009, it became the first Western restaurant across the two cities to receive 3 stars, placing Macau firmly on the international culinary map, and has retained those three stars for 18 consecutive years. From that beginning, we have built a dining portfolio that together with our parent company now hosts 10 Michelin stars across 8 establishments, the highest total in Hong Kong and Macau. In the process, SJM has become a cradle of culinary talent, a proud contributor to Macau's standing as a UNESCO Creative city of gastronomy and giving the world another compelling reason to experience our city. The same spirit also lies behind our longstanding involvement in the Macau Grand Prix, the International Dragon boat races, the Macau Golf Open, and many more events that are deeply woven into the histories of both SJM and Macau. Over the years, we have helped nurture them, expand their intention international reach and establish them as signature features of the city's tourism calendar. Importantly, the value they create does not stop at our doors. Our support for cultural traditions help keep them alive in the community. The international events we champion bring recognition and opportunity to the city, and our investment in people helps local talent grow and flourish. Visitors experience Macau as a whole, and we are one part of that whole. What held us together was the conviction that SJM success is inseparable from Macau's. That conviction has allowed us to look beyond the immediate return from a restaurant or sporting event and consider the wider value each can create for Macau as a destination. It is also why lending our full support to this forum is so meaningful for us. At a time when no single industry posses all the answers fortune has brought to Macau, leaders who might not otherwise share a table. This exchange will not only strengthen our our city's role as an international center for business dialogue and collaboration, but its substance is directly relevant to Macau's next chapter. Today's discussion on technology and talent, finance and health, travel and destination economies, and the future of the Greater Bay Area all touch upon Macau's 1 + 4 diversification strategy. Their relevance lies not only in each field individually, but in the connections between them. And those connections matter as much to the economies represented in this room as they do to ours. Therefore, on behalf of SJM I thank fortune for bringing this forum to Macau, and I thank all our speakers and delegates for contributing your experience and perspective. This evening, the Grand Hall will bring together 6 of our Michelin recognized restaurants and the chefs behind them. What I have described this morning is better experience than explained. I hope you will also find time to enjoy the city itself, and that you leave with a sense not only of what Macau has been, but of what it is becoming. Thank you.

Fortune at Cannes Lions 2026

The traditional talent agency model is dead. The modern talent agency is no longer just a toll booth trying to broker a quick deal. It's moving into the center of culture and operating as a full-service, data-driven agency. United Talent Agency’s Darnell Strom and digital content creator Gstaad Guy explore what happens when agents work directly with creators to turn an online following into a full-stack commercial ecosystem. 

The Creator Evolution: How to Craft High-End Content Without Losing Your Core

Workplace Innovation Summit 2026

Organizations regularly face intense expectations: Ambitious performance targets, stakeholder demands, public scrutiny, and government oversight. All of these forces routinely put leaders’ values to test, especially when short-term trade-offs promise speed, approval, or financial gain. This panel brings together business leaders who have chosen to prioritize their beliefs despite external pressures. Panelists will discuss how today’s leaders can protect their values without undermining performance at a time when compromise can be tempting, or even prescribed. 

Dr. Bernice A. King, Chief Executive Officer, The King Center  
Theresita Richard, Chief People and Culture Officer, Patagonia   
Jotaka Eaddy, Chief Executive Officer, Full Circle Strategy  
Moderator: Phil Wahba, Senior Writer, Fortune; Co-Chair, Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit

Holding the Line: Leadership Under Pressure

Brainstorm Tech 2026

Everyone is racing to put satellites in orbit. Far fewer are building what it takes to make them useful. As constellations scale and data volumes surge, the bottleneck is shifting to the ground. Without the infrastructure to move that data, it goes nowhere. Bridgit Mendler left entertainment, earned degrees from MIT and Harvard, and bet everything on one of the least visible and most critical problems in space. What does it take to build the layer everything else depends on?

Bridgit Mendler, Co-Founder and CEO, Northwood 
Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Content Officer, Fortune

Ground Control

Davos 2026 World Economic Forum

Scott Galloway joined Fortune’s Diane Brady at Davos for a frank conversation on how the mood of the World Economic Forum—and the global climate—has shifted since his last visit in 1999, reflecting a move away from optimism and cooperation toward uncertainty around America’s credibility and leadership.

Scott Galloway on America’s Credibility and Global Leadership

So let me bring up our guest tonight to set us all off. Scott Galloway, who has not been here in, I believe, 1999, was the last time he was here, and Scott and I met, um, I believe we were mentoring young people with Dick Fold, who knows the Dick Fold, the former Lehman Brothers, uh, at the stock exchange. With a very confident kid named Encore Jay, who now is a billionaire, and I don't know where Dick Fold is. Do you know where Dick Fold is? I have not seen Dick. OK, so there we've lost track of Dick, but, um, here we are today. What brings you to Davos, sir? Let's start with that. Uh, Larry Finn called me and said, I want you to come, and that's enough. That's all it takes. That's way more than enough. OK, very good. Well, give us your impressions. I know you've been doing some video. Let's start with that. It's been a while, 26 years, yeah, 27 years. So when I was here 27 years ago, I would describe it as, so Bill Clinton gave the speech of the day. That was what everyone was excited about, slightly different speech than the one we heard yesterday, uh. I would say the American brand or as I was an American entrepreneur. I was one of these guys, you know how you can't run into, can't go 10 ft without meeting someone who has an AI startup they're dying to tell you about. I was one of those guys pitching e-commerce startups back in '99. The biggest shift, so is the internet. The brand of America though, I sort of feel like this is a gathering to basically let Americans just boast and Europeans just politely listen. Um, the, Call sign of America back then was kind of consumerism. It's very consumption oriented. It was it was more cooperation, I would say alliances. And now transition 27 years later. My impression is now it's not the internet, it's AI. It's all AI, and the American brand is sort of Chaos, corruption, and. Coercion. Uh, I'm just incredibly fucking embarrassed as an American. Um, there's no getting around it, and. I feel as if, You know, we begin the week with this language around annexing a sovereign nation, an ally, which is Latin for invade. And tariffs And the market crashes, and then by the end of the week, invasion is taken off the table and the tariffs go away. And my question is, if you're running the largest economy in the world, and in 96 hours, you reverse decisions like that. What what does that do other than erode trust? And credibility just around the world and as someone who loves statistics and math. We're under the impression. Two of the four most valuable companies in the world, most valuable companies in '99 were Microsoft, Exxon General Electric, and Walmart. Now it's Saudi Aramco's in there. They're still an energy company, number 3. it is, um, Apple, Nvidia, Saudi Aramco, and Alphabet. So two of the four companies have an operating system. If you have the operating system the world lives on. You can just figure out all sorts of ways to monetize different applications that have to comply with your code. Essentially, America's been the operating system for the world since 1945, kind of our laws, our means of going about business. Has it changed, do you think? I mean, you were complimentary of Carney, for example, and taking a stance. Yeah, so we're 33% of the world's GDP and we were the operating system for 60 or 70%. And somehow we've decided that we can go at it alone with 33%, which just to me is nothing but. A pure self-inflicted injury of diminishing our own power. It's like it's, it's as if Android decided to kick 80% of their handsets off of the Android operating system. So I find the whole thing, and there's also the, I don't know if I'm getting older and more depressed, but it feels that there's just a sense of unease where in '99 we were like, we want more, whereas now it feels like we just hope things don't get worse. There's just a really unsettled feeling here and someone called me and said, what would you have done differently, someone from the European Union? And I said, someone should have got a hold of Mark Carney's speech, realized it was the best speech any of you were giving. And all 27 EU member states should have been sitting behind him. And you should have had a list of to do's. We're going to start selling treasuries as a unified group. We're going to have our own trade zone and just lay out these things sequentially, calmly and carefully. Right now, the EU, I mean, the reality is they're leaderless as a, as a result of pushing back on Trump. Who, who, who on earth represents the EU right now? I mean, raise your hand. Yeah, no, nobody in here. That's all good. It's like, you know, Germany and the 26 dwarves. It's just sort of and also the reality is. The reality is the economy here is just a wet blanket. Um, I was, I was at the Black Rock dinner last night, and one of the gentlemen there pointed out correctly, there was someone there who'd started a company 5 years ago that would be one of the 7 most valuable companies in Europe right now, anthropic. So, it, it's, It's just, um, I find it very, I leave here exceptionally unsettled is, and I, I, you wanna be optimistic, but I find all of this very, um, quite frankly embarrassing as an American and unsettling as someone who thinks about their kids and stability and. And taking for granted how much peace and prosperity we've had the last 80 years. So what advice do you have? I don't know if you caught Elon Musk's speech. What do you say better to be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right, which I disagree with, but What advice do you have? I mean, obviously I know you've just for this room full of leaders. I know you talk a lot about AI, and we've talked a lot, you know, the whole Lost Generation Gen Z. There's been a lot of attention on that here at Davos, right? So I'll come back and you feel like a woman too. You mentioned that in your video, so thank you for that. Yeah, I won't say why because it was crude. Um, everyone, everyone, when, whenever a bunch of mammals get together, there's a hierarchy. I don't care if you're sniffing each other's butts or looking at your badge, but I feel like a woman, and that is people look at my eyes and then they look at my chest to see my badge, um. That's why I'm not wearing my badge, I guess, yeah. Yeah. I, I thought that'd be fun. It is on the record. There you go. Sorry, yeah, go ahead. So look, uh. If I were a business leader, I feel like, I feel like the EU is leaderless and pushing back on some of these uh ideas breaking apart, the greatest alliance in history, and I feel like US leaders, US corporations are leaderless. If you go back to the early 30s in Germany. The darkness all started with Hitler creating informal alliances with corporations and basically said, if you support me or stay quiet, I'll get rid of the unionists. And the corporations decided that shareholder value is why we're here, and they made these deals with Hitler. And I feel like the silence, I'm going to list, so the Fortune 500. There are a lot of great Americans, a lot of people who wake up in the morning and say, hello, Mr. President, when they look in the mirror who think they should be leaders, and I'm, I'm on to do list of Fortune 500 leaders who have, who have pushed back on what is an irrational and sometimes weird and cruel policy of the administration. OK, done. So, uh, the problem is if anyone, if anyone goes first, they're punished. So it strikes me that we need a leader, a corporate leader in the United States who calls people on the lowdown and says, unless 50 of us come out at the same time. We can't do it, so I feel like people who consider themselves leaders are showing a striking lack of leadership and aren't familiar with the history in Europe around the role that corporations played in the lead up to an incredibly dark period in Europe. AI, the thing I'm worried about, we were talking about this before. I'm an AI optimist. I think it's going to create more jobs than it destroys. I've never bought into the notion. If you look at every technology in history, short term job destruction, but over the medium and the long term, it creates jobs. I don't see any reason why this would be any different. The V might be deeper this time, but I find a lot of my colleagues, we sound smarter when we catastrophize. So, you know, 90% unemployment. I, I just don't think that's true. And so far we haven't really seen it. There'll be certain pockets that are hurt more than others. I was an investment banking analyst. I imagine that job's going to get, we won't need as many of them. But The thing I'm most worried about is um synthetic relationships, and that is character AI. And uh I'm sort of a hammer. I, my focus is, or my big issue is, uh, young men in America and the West. No cohort has fallen further faster than young men. They're 4 times as likely to be addicted, 3 times as likely, excuse me, 3 times as likely to be addicted, 4 times as likely to kill themselves. If you go into a morgue in the United States and there's 5 people died by suicide, 4 men. Um, 12 times more likely to be incarcerated. 1 in 3 men under the age of 25 are still living at home. 1 in 3 men at the age of 30 are still living at home. Only 1 in 3 men are in a relationship, whereas 2 in 3 women under the age of 30 are in a relationship, you think, well, that's mathematically impossible. It's not because women are dating older because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. Trus, it's true. That's, and on a note of hope in the last, no, I'm just kidding, um, but it's got about a minute, in a minute, and limerick, whatever you want. Well, how do you, what anything else you want to lead this group with? Uh, what gives you hope? What gives you joy, Scott Galloway? How about that? What gives you joy? I hate my life less and less every day. No, but you're, I mean, you like your, you love your job. There's, what gives me joy? Do. OK, good. Oh, OK, you want, you want to end on a cheery note here? No, I do not want. I want to end on a you note. I don't know there's you. Well, first off, in terms of the markets, let's be clear, the, uh, the optimists have won. Right? I said Tesla was vastly overvalued 10 years ago or 8 years ago. Elon started calling me names on the internet, and he won. His stock's up 700%. By the way, the most overvalued company in the world right now, with the exception of Palantir. Um, but the optimists have won the last 10 years. That's the bottom line. So I think it's always healthy to ask what could go right. I always ask myself what could go right because I tend to see the glass is half full, but the most encouraging statistic or piece of data in the world right now is they've begun tracking the amount of time that people spend. Helping people either through volunteer work or financial contributions that they will never meet, right? That number is at an all-time high. So there's more people globally planting trees the shade of which they'll never sit under. So that's a reason to be optimistic. Um-hum. Great. Please join me in thanking Scott Galloway. Thank you.

Brainstorm AI San Francisco 2025

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has suggested that Hollywood may be the canary in the coal mine for the disruption AI is bringing across industries. The entrepreneur behind the Emmy-winning creative collaboration platform HITRECORD has become one of the leading voices calling for fair compensation when human creativity is used to train machine intelligence. As he directs a new AI-focused thriller for Netflix, Gordon-Levitt reflects on how generative technology is reshaping art, authorship, and the meaning of originality.

The Artist and the Algorithm

Thank you for being here. All right, good morning everybody. I know, right? Can you feel the caffeine flowing? Um, so you were giving an interview last month, um, and you said, I love new technology. Are you a tech optimist, tech pessimist, a tech skeptic? Well, I, I do hold quite a lot of optimism for AI. I think it could be so great in so many ways, uh, but I also think there are probably potential pitfalls, and we're running right towards them in many ways. And, and I think that if we let this technology unfold driven purely by business incentives and there's no guard rails that are put there for the public good, we could see some really dark outcomes. That's what we've seen with a lot of tech over the last 20 years. We've seen it with social media, which was so good in so many ways and like it'd be hard for you to find someone who is more positive and optimistic about social media than me. I did this online community for creativity and using social media tech called Hit Record. But obviously we've also seen all these sort of damaging side effects and maybe we could have avoided some of those with some proper guard rails and let's hope we don't make those same mistakes again. Yeah, indeed, so you have been quite out there about these guard rails, this need for policy change. I mean, there's there's a whole litany of things that we can do to solve for this, and hopefully, hopefully we'll talk about it today. Um, you signed a petition for safer super intelligence as we're calling it now. Um, you've been rather well, supportive of one and more critical of another AI bills here in the state of California, um, and you have definitely been critical of the chatbots by Meta and other companies that have merged into, um, shall we say, erotic content. Yes, for kids, for erotic content for eight year olds. Are you in favor of erotic content for 8 year olds? Yeah, exactly, because that is what the chief ethicist of Meta approved. In their AI companions on their platforms, so you know we're in a moment right now where it feels like all of the wins from the White House, from the states, from certainly from the tech companies, everybody's just trying to, well, it's framed in a sort of global competitive way, right? It's it's, it's no one's saying well we're To make more money. It's more just like we have to get there first, but of course all of the concerns that you're, you know, you have are being kind of pushed to the side in that. So what do we need to do? We should talk head on about that key argument that they make like, oh we have to get there first. We have to, I mean, it turns very quickly into this geopolitical thing, correct? We have to beat China. That's right. OK, so what, what do we do about that because clearly, uh. That's where the winds are blowing. So this is a uh. A very powerful stroke of what I would call storytelling. This is what I've, you know, I'm a spent my life working on is storytelling, and there's, you got to unpack the layers of the story when they say we got to beat China. The implicit and actually sometimes explicit comparison there is to the race to nuclear weapons during World War II. Indeed there was this moment in history where the US mounted the Manhattan. And the US was racing against the Nazis to take Einstein's theory and build a bomb within it. Whoever would get there first and push that button was going to win the war and kind of decide whether the world was going to become fascist or liberal, not liberal in today's sense. And that story is told today. As if the same thing is gonna happen, as if there's this thing they, they use terms like super intelligence, you just said they also use a term called AGI. There are no definitions for these terms. You can ask the most informed engineer or policy person in AI, and I have, and they're like, yeah, there's, there's not really a definition for this. Because it's all a story, it's hand waving. It's a sleight of hand. There is not going to be a moment where they push a button and all of a sudden win the war and decide that America is going to dominate instead of China. That's actually not coming. But if you try to say, hey, maybe we need to put some guard rails in place, maybe instead of just accelerating towards your maximum profits, we need to steer and we can still go fast, but let's build stuff that's going to also be good for everybody, not just for profits. The first thing they say is, yeah, but then we'll lose to China. Yeah, but it's, it's sort of a paper thin story that doesn't really make sense. Do you, this is an unfair question, but do you feel that Artificial intelligence as it is. Framed today is more dangerous or less dangerous than nuclear weapons in the in the middle of the century. Oh, obviously the dangers are very different, but yeah, look. I, I've spent the last because you mentioned I'm about to direct a movie about this stuff and so I've spent the last several years talking to all kinds of experts and, uh, you know, engineers and policy people and people who work in the big tech companies and people who work in academia and everyone in between governments. And there's no agreement on this, so I, I don't know. I don't know the answer. There definitely are a lot of people, a lot of experts. There's, there's like a survey that I think half of published AI researchers give it a 1 in 10 chance that like something extremely catastrophic happens with AI along the lines of, you know, nuclear warfare or whatever. I, I don't know. I certainly don't know, but if these experts are giving it a 1 in 10 chance. And it's not just a few of these experts, it's like half of the experts. That sounds pretty bad to me. Like, you know, they make the analogy like if, if, if half the avionics engineers said like I'd give that plane a 1 in 10 chance of crashing, would you get on the plane? No, you probably wouldn't get on the plane. So I don't know. I mean, I, I think those concerns are real. I think there are also a lot of other related but important concerns that might not be. So catastrophic is that, but get really dark and dystopian if you take them down the road a few steps into the future, and those are important to talk about. Sure, sure, sure. I've seen enough sci-fi movies and television shows to know that it can get pretty dark and dystopian. It's a funny thing, right? And speaking of movies, this is, this is one of the things that the folks who don't want any laws will say, your concerns are science fiction. But the real people now, the real ones making this stuff are saying this isn't science fiction, this is really happening. So again, there's all these sort of evasive tactics that I think are thinly veiled attempts to just protect their bottom line. Sure, sure, and I will just say I don't buy that argument either because let's face it, most of what we saw in Minority Report all those years ago. It's kind of real now. I'm right. It's remarkable to me that every with every passing year we managed to knock off one more of those technologies that was seemed so futuristic at the time. All right, so. You know, there have been attempts. One of the other things that you've come out against this, is, um, the, the notion because right now it's just a notion of, of, um, a federal suppression of state's ability to regulate AI um. The White House has made itself, you know, its position clear on that, how it goes about doing that. That's a matter of debate. It's tried to slip in a couple of passages in what, 2 bills? It tried in the big beautiful bill, correct. And then the other one, then it just tried in the what do they call it, the National Defense Authorization Act. Or whatever, like the yearly procedural budget passage for the military, they tried to sneak it in there exactly and so that's not happened, but the latest is that Trump wants to just, as he is want to do, put through an executive order kind of doing that. Now setting aside the legal, you know, support of that. You're not a lawyer and neither am I. What's your take on this because obviously you're against, you know, kind of clearing the path for AI. You want some of those speed bumps, but, uh, here we are finding a Republican White House in tension with Republican states even. Yeah, I was just in Utah. Yes, we have a wonderful brainstorm tech conference there, uh. I was sitting at a dinner with a whole bunch of Republicans and just agreeing left and right about how important it is to make laws that govern this technology and in fact that for many of them it's it's around kids, right? It's supporting a lot of kids that's definitely an alignment on that yeah but it's about kids, but. Also for Republicans who are in favor of things like competition, sometimes you need laws to make sure that there is a fair playing ground for business and competition to flourish, so that there was a lot of talk about that too, and Utah has actually done more than just about any other state to regulate AI and besides right wing and left wing lawmakers, I think the public, yeah, left, right and center, and I've, you know, looked at polls about this. They want regulation on AI. They don't trust these big businesses to do what's in the best interests of normal people. They know that that's, they, they know that these businesses can't do that. And it's not because the businesses are full of bad people, not at all. It's because if you're a business. And everyone here at the Fortune event probably knows this better than I do. Like if you're a business, you have to try to do good business. If you try to prioritize the public good, if you try to take the high road, you're just going to get beat by a competitor who's taking the low road. You can't really prioritize the public good if you're a business. That's why there needs to be an interplay between the private sector and, you know, laws and, and. Every other sector that impacts people's lives have laws. They, you know, whether it's the companies building cars or the companies who have banks or the companies making medicine, whatever, everybody has to follow some laws. Why should, why should the companies building this technology not have to follow any laws? It doesn't really make any sense. Indeed, we even have international laws about the use of nuclear force, so you know, cheers. Um, you posted on your social media recently something that resonated with me quite a lot as the father of two boys. Now my boys are young. I have a 5 year old and a 3 month old, as quite a few. Thank you, as quite a few of you know because he was born in the middle of the last brainstorm that we had. Um, it was about artificial intelligence in toys, um. You have 3 kids. I can already feel the dad energy coming off of off of you on that subject, but tell me a little bit more about that again as a dad, uh, that, uh, the AI is seeping into, I mean, we usually talk about AI in the sense of the LLMs and chatbots and interactions that way, but toys is a whole another ball game. Yeah, well, so. We're not against our kids using technology and, and my kids do use computers quite a bit. Um, I think there's lots of great stuff you can do, um, like shout out to Beast Academy and the Art of problem solving. It's like that's that's the one we found, uh, that teaches math so super well. um, one of my sons is really new at music and makes music with the computer amazingly, uh, and we let them spend a lot of time doing that. But these kinds of tools are different than addictive algorithms that are designed to prey on your human weakness and suck up as much of your time and attention as possible and make sure that you keep coming back. Um, that's the same technique is like a slot machine really. There's reasons why there's laws that don't let kids go into casinos and play slot machines and the psychological technique. Used to get gambling addicts hooked to slot machines are the same exact psychological techniques studied at Stanford and other places in Silicon Valley that make their products addictive. For sure. It doesn't make sense to have kids using these things. It's just it's bad for their brain and then when you get into AI companions. Yeah, yeah, that's, I mean, even deeper when you're a kid. There's, as far as I understand, um, I was talking to the, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt about this and any parent out there, I highly recommend his book, The Anxious Generation. Um, and he was saying there's a, there's quite a bit of scientific evidence that shows that when, when young brains are developing. It's human interactions that really help develop those neural pathways, and an AI toy or whatever chatbot you want will imitate those human interactions, but they don't develop those neural pathways in the same way because it's fake because you're not talking to a human, you're talking to an algorithm that's designed to hook you and keep you and ultimately serve you ads. It's very different than speaking to another person. And you know whether we're talking neurologically, you should use your common sense as a parent and you're trying to raise a kid who's going to be a strong and compassionate and smart feeling person. To me it's pretty obvious that you're going down a very bad path if you're subjecting them to this synthetic. intimacy that these companies are selling. Who knew that the 90s chat rooms would be the, the good thing, you know, because it was other humans, you know, think of that, think of that. Um, anyway, um, alright, let's, let's change gears a little bit and talk about you as a creator, OK, um, because I mean you just said, you know, one of your kids plays music. I do too. There are AI music tools. How do you feel about that? So, um. You know, you have definitely strong opinions working in Hollywood in terms of the impact of AI on creativity. Um, have you The dangers are clear. Do you feel, do you find any hope in what you can use as a person who Acts, produces, writes, you know, any, any creative goodness in all that. Well sure, the idea that, you know, uh, like I used to make so many videos when I was a little kid, and the idea that, you know, a couple of 10 year olds or something could use these tools to make a movie and have it look as good as, you know, the Hollywood big shots can make their movies look bad. Great, that's unequivocally great. My only concern is where's the economics because right now the way the companies are positioning it is they've built their models out of stolen content and data, didn't ask permission. They aren't offering compensation or they are kind of offering compensation, uh, here and there, but mostly they're claiming, no, this is fair use, we don't have to offer compensation, which sort of turns them into hypocrites, the fact that. They they've paid a few companies or maybe I guess they're just covering their bets or maybe it shows that they don't actually have a moral stance here, they're just trying to make money, um, but they've built their models out of stolen stuff. And their claim is that OK, whenever these tools are used 100% of the economic upside should go to the tech companies and 0% of the economic upside should go to all the people whose writing and voices and art and creativity and labor and time and skill and perspective went into making these products valuable. These products would have zero value, would be able to do zero things without all of that human input. So why shouldn't some of those humans get paid? I think it's actually a principle that applies far beyond entertainment. This is something that if we're going to have a functioning economy moving into the future as this tech gets more and more common. We need to establish the principle that if someone does some good work, has a good idea, makes that idea happen, puts it out into the world, they're allowed to gain economic value from it. But if an AI company is allowed to just take it for free and monetize it without paying that person, how is capitalism going to work anymore? Right, right. So I, I, I see it going down a pretty dystopian road unless we can establish. this principle that your digital self, your thoughts, your ideas, your work belongs to you and any economic upside from that should be shared with you totally, totally. I, I wanna come to the audience for one question before we wrap, uh, but I, I wanna ask you a very simple one before that which is just, um, if some of these things were worked out, you as a, I will just call you a Hollywood creative to take all the roles and wrap them into one. Um, would you in fact use AI tools for your work? I'm not against the technology. Yeah, if, if it were set up ethically and people were getting fairly compensated and we had all the proper upgrades to our systems to make this work fairly, absolutely, yeah, this could propel a great. Leap forward in our creativity, but I think if we, if we leave it as it is, it will only just serve to concentrate power in the hands of a few enormous companies, and that's not really good for anybody. Understood. All right, one question, please. Yes, right over here. Forgive me, the lights are very bright. Your name and who you're with, please. Yes, OK. 00, that's on. Hi, my name is Steven Messer from Collective I. Thank you for being here. Um, uh, you're obviously a great storyteller, and we've appreciated listening this morning. The hard part is it's the whole room full of AI people, and the story falls apart pretty quickly about how this won't hurt our race for winning. For anyone who watched the destruction of facial recognition, which was a key US industry where we dominated. Where a lot of the other countries were years behind us, privacy advocates stood up and told all the horrible things that could go wrong, that destroyed the ability to get funding. We watched that industry in 6 months go to China. Thankfully, we now have China who's doing the greatest things with facial recognition because the US has no companies left that's there. How is it possible to make the argument that there's no risk at all for the frontier models. Um, when we actually have a live real example. That destroyed an entire key critical industry that is now to potential adversary. Yeah, sure, and, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't protect intellectual property, quite the opposite. And, and I'm not saying that it's OK if China steals somebody's tech like that. stolen. All the different states created so many regulations that nobody was able to get funding and the industry was lost because of that. The slowing it down was enough to make a country that was so far behind us in 6 months the dominant player. That, that is a really good point then, and, and thank you for that context. Look, I would say this stuff isn't simple and we, when we get up on a stage, you have to speak for 20 minutes and you have to speak in pretty broad terms. I think that if we're talking about the basic principle that there should be laws as opposed to no laws, I think that. Logic holds. I think for sure it gets more complicated once you get into the art and craft of good regulation and less than good regulation, and I'm not a lawmaker and I'm not going to lecture us on like what makes effective regulation. I certainly wouldn't say that 100% of laws are good. Uh, and I probably would imagine that any even good piece of regulation probably has drawbacks that you could point to, and anti-regulation arguments often cherry pick those drawbacks and say, therefore we shouldn't have any regulation. I'm saying we have to find a good middle ground. Probably we need some regulation and for sure, to your point, we have to do it in a smart way. Thank you for your question, Joe, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you.

Brainstorm Design 2025

Companies everywhere are racing to turbocharge their products and services with AI. How can we harness the power of this new technology in a way that enhances our humanity rather than eclipses it?  Mauro Porcini argues that the next era of brand leadership depends on a straightforward equation: AI multiplied by emotional intelligence and human warmth. AI × (EI + HI). He explains how design can be used to restore narrative and meaning to products built on advanced computation, how leaders can craft a voice that stands out in an age of automated sameness, and why even the most technologically driven companies must double down on humanity.

Amplifying Humanity: Design and Brand Vision in the Age of AI

Fortune Innovation Forum 2025

The defining quandary for today’s Fortune 500 CEOs: how do you lead a global business in an anti-global age? In an era of rising protectionism, fractured supply chains, and deepening geopolitical rivalries, the old CEO playbook–emphasizing scale, efficiency, and integration—is being rewritten. The new imperatives: resilience, localization, and national interest. How can CEOs lead organizations with operations in multiple markets when the world is turning inward? And should they even try?

Competing in a 'Post-Global' World

Fortune Global Forum 2025

Hosted by H.E. Fahd bin Abdulmohsan Al-Rasheed, Anastasia Nyrkovskaya, & Diane Brady.

Fortune Global Forum 2025: Opening Ceremony and Welcome

That I. Ma. What if I yeah. I did yeah. Mo. I still fuck. I. Yeah I. I. God bless you. What. Oh. More. one more time. Fortune guests, please now welcome to the stage. Fortune Chief Executive Officer Anastasia Nukovskaya. Anastasia Norkovskaya. Good morning. It's an immense pleasure to be here today. And um the journey for me to be here today started almost 2 years ago when we made the promise that we will bring business fortune events to Riyadh. Earlier this year, we did Most Powerful Women International event here in Riyadh. It was in May, and today we're bringing our global forum, which is our signature fortune event. Fortunately has been around for almost 100 years. I brought a copy of the magazine. This is how it all started back in 1929 with the magazine, and it's still being printed today. We have the website. We have our iconic list such as Fortune 500, most admired companies, most innovative companies, all sorts of other things, and also our live media and events. Again, this journey is a long journey, and why are we here is the big question. Fortune's mission is to make business better, and we're doing doing it through our excellent reporting and journalism. Saudi Arabia is the frontiers of the business world today and that's why we wanted to be here and that's why we're here now again, everybody needs a good partner to get things started. So I wanted to talk for a second about our partner here as well. His Excellency Fahad Al-Rashid is our partner. He's the advisor in the general secretariat of the Council of Ministers and the chairman of SEGA. For those of you who know him, he does many things transforms cities, thinks about human capital growth companies transforms he left two cities, build the port, build the metro, and help, help us to to be here as well. So I wanted to say a huge thank you. Enjoy the next two days, and I hope to speak with you and see you around. Thank you. Since 1995, the Fortune Global Forum has convened in great cities on the dynamic frontiers of business. Singapore, New York, Beijing, Paris, Cape Town, New Delhi, Abu Dhabi, Toronto, and Rome. Now, nearly 30 years on, this well-established gathering returns for the second time to the Middle East. Today, the world turns its attention to Riyadh, a vital and expanding hub for global trade, technology, and economic transformation, guided by its ambitious Vision 2030 plan. Saudi Arabia is embracing creative solutions to the forces reshaping global business on a monumental scale. At this pivotal moment when leaders everywhere are navigating artificial intelligence, new economic pressures, and opportunities for growth, the Fortune Global Forum provides a unique stage for dialogue that defines the future. Here in Riyadh, we unite the world's foremost business and thought leaders, Fortune Global 500 CEOs, policymakers, and innovators. Together, they will set the agenda for business in a rapidly changing world. Welcome to the Fortune Global Forum. Where the future of business begins. Fortune guests, please welcome to the stage advisor, General Secretariat of the Council of Ministers, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Chairman of the Saudi Conventions and Exhibitions General Authority, His Excellency Fahad bin Abdul Mohsen al Rashid. Behar and I mean this bit so or is me marat Mahaliata had been Abdel messen a rushid. Of hasmu Mali wasada Sara Malekomoramaullahi Oakata. Your Highnesses, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Riyadh and welcome to Saudi Arabia. Welcome to the Fortune Global Forum 2025. We are honored to have you all here at this great moment. So many things happening in the world, so many challenges, and so many opportunities. But you've come to the right place because this is the land of opportunity. Saudi Arabia, with Vision 2030 has made major strides, not only economic, but social. Female participation in the workforce. Has hit 37%. Ahead of our 2030 targets. We started with the tourism sector, targeting 100 million visitors. Last year, we did 120 million visitors. But we have so much more to do. Because our leadership pushes us because we as people are ambitious. We want to do more. We want to do more because we are people of the desert. And think about what you have to do to survive and build a city the size of Riyadh in the desert. Riyadh is 100. 1200 kilometers in terms of size, double the size of Singapore. We have 8 million people living in Riyadh. It's the 44th largest city economy in the world. What does it take to do all of this? Ambition Patience And unlimited boundless. Optimism. And this is Saudi Arabia. This is the Saudi people. But how does Vision 2030 mechanically work? We have KPIs set for all sectors of the economy. Just like business do. But then to achieve them, we've launched initiatives. Actually we've launched 1,052 initiatives across the board. And 85% of them are on track. How can we do it? We're doing it together, men and women. Across the country. We're doing it with great talent that we've attracted from all over the world. And most importantly, we are doing it through the power of partnerships. We have partnership partnered with our friends from all around the world like you. To do this, these partnerships have allowed us to scale, scale our capability and scale the depth of our knowledge. And we've achieved, like I said, so much. Just a few months ago we've launched Humane in artificial intelligence. And signed $23 billion of partnerships just right after that. So we are here, we are ready, we are opening our arms and extending our hands to you. Thank you for being with us and enjoy the next 2 days. Thank you very much.

Most Powerful Women Summit 2025

It’s been said Kristalina Georgieva can make or break a nation’s finances. As head of the International Monetary Fund, she is leading the 191-member organization through a turbulent era. From tariffs and geopolitics to inflation and uncertainty, Georgieva joins us to discuss how the IMF navigates times of crisis and fundamental shifts in the world economy.  

The Pursuit of Global Economic Security

Managing director at Geva, I have to say that you said good music walking on. It makes me wonder, do you have a favorite walk-on song for IMF meetings? Yes, I do. Oh, really? What is it? We will, we will. OK, I think that sets the tone right there. This must be the most wonderful time of the year for you. You've got the annual meeting of the World Bank, IMF. You've got 191 member countries coming in. Give us a sense. This is day one. Thank you for joining us. Um, what have you been hearing so far? Give us a bit of a highlight. Well, the world is in a Very interesting place. Uh, so what I hear is mostly questions. Hey, how is it going to be? What would the world economy look like? Are we going to survive the trade war? And what about my country? What advice do you have for us? I actually started the day with The delegation of Tajikistan. Tiny country in Central Asia. Used to be a basket case. They had the Civil War. And then they lucked with leadership. I was delighted to have them as my first meeting because their growth is strong. Inflation is Below 3%. Their public debt is coming down, uh, and how are they doing that? Strong fundamentals, they pay attention to their policies, strong institutions, and hey, the IMF is there for them. So my message to my membership. If you come here so we can see better through the fog of uncertainty lying over our heads together. And what I'm asking you is leave your trade wars, your cold wars, your hot wars outside of my room. You can why mothers should be in charge, right? Yes, we keep it outside. Keep it outside. Well, you talked about what's heartening, what's disheartening to you right now. Uh, what is most disheartening is the risk we face for many countries. To lose hope for converging with those that are better off. What we have experienced over the last years, shock upon shock, upon shock. has pushed the fate of many poor countries into a more desperate place. And why should we care? We should care for two reasons one, Because when part of the world is falling behind, that means more insecurity for you guys, those who have global companies, shrinking market, and 2, because it is morally wrong. You know, I'm struck you, you led the World Bank. You're now in your 2nd term, you know, at the IMF. These are two organizations that really grew out of Bretton Woods in a spirit of globalization. Let's start with how do you lead an organization of people that is devoted to globalization in this fragmented environment? Well, the IMF is devoted. To help countries do better for their people. It happens that a more integrated world economy works better for the majority of people, but not for all. And one thing we have been saying now for some time is pay attention to those who are left out or left behind. Uh, and if we don't, then we risk more trouble. But let me deliver two messages to you. The first one is that despite the fragmentation in the world economy, we are still seeing. Countries reaching out to each other. And if globally we have more difficulty then at the regional level, subregional level, we seek compensation. Gulf Cooperation Council, ASEAN regions countries are looking for ways in which they can trade more with each other. And second, frankly, this thing that trade is dead is completely overstated, um. Trade is like water. You put obstacle, it goes around it. What we are seeing, and this has been like this for thousands of years, um, when we came to assess where is the world economy these days, we look at what is happening with trade and actually the impact of trade tensions is more muted for three reasons. One, Because the tariffs that were announced in the United States in April that shocked the world at that time 23%, now nominally they are still high, 17.5% but less, and when you look at collection, how much is collected, it is more around 10%, still much more than the under 3% before, but Not as dramatic impact as initially we anticipated. 2. The rest of the world has chosen not to retaliate. 188 of our 191 countries said. We're good. We actually like to continue to trade on most favored nation rule. And 3, and the tree is very, very interesting. When we look at the upswing in regional engagements, it's actually amazing and frankly these guys should have been trading more with each other. They're right next to each other and they have been kind of obsessed with shipping all the way to the to the United States rather than say ASEAN trading among themselves. So I think I'm, I full disclosure, I'm an optimist. I believe in the good of people and I think that ultimately we actually find the high road to do better and I see that this world, we are a more fragmented world, a more uncertain world. It is also getting people to recognize that. We are in this one big boat. It is a rough sea. We better row together. Well, let me go back to 2 a second when you talk about this resilience in the economy and the fact that people are not retaliating, that sounds like a bit of a fragile piece to me. Do you think that's going to last? Give us some message to the US and those of us here who are US based leaders. Uh, the Most important factor that determines how we look at the economy today is uncertainty, and my message to business leaders is very simple, buckle up. Uncertainty is here to stay. And uncertainty is driven by just far too many very powerful factors. You have technology, you have geopolitics, you have policymakers being less predictable. You have demography, some countries aging, some countries exploding. All of this is creating a foggy world. I was actually talking to Diane before we came here. We know the world we lived until recently, that we know. We don't know where we are going to land in this period of transition. That is the saying, the king is dead. Long live the what? And in this week we will see many of our members actually concentrating on how can we provide more anchors of certainty. So what we do, we do work on two of these anchors. First one is policies and institutions and we are telling. Loudly to everybody. You need good policies, you need Good institutions and you need independent institutions in some anchors of policymaking protected to private sector. I understand that the majority of you here are business people. Well, good news for the world. Private sector is more agile, more adaptable. Over the last years we have seen in many countries where there was big state presence in the economy. Including because of IMF urging them to pull back more private sector initiatives and in this time. of strong winds. You guys are an anchor of stability because you adopt, you just keep doing it. You know, I think about another quote from one of your favorites, John Maynard Keynes. In the long run we're all dead, which is another that's either optimistic or pessimistic, but I do think about that essay which I know you've quoted from the economic possibilities for our grand. Children and just the arc of the last 100 years, the progress we've seen, we're very much in a short game right now. Talk a bit about the long game from where you sit. I love John Maynard Keyne's little essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. Basically, he says there. In 100 years we are going to be about 8 times better off. 100 years later we are about 8-9 times better off, so he nailed this one in parenthesis, what he got wrong, he was saying we would be so productive that we don't have to work 5 days, 6 days a week. We would be working only 3 days a week. And we would be writing poems in the rest of the time. Why did he get that wrong? Totally. And actually I love when I read the AI enthusiasts that say now AI is going to deliver a lot of free time and we would be having only 3 days to work. The rest we would write poems. I think, I think it is in human nature we actually are keen to deploy ourselves. We like to, I mean, we like to work. Um, let me ask you actually this, how many of you like to work? So that's the, so when I look forward, I do believe that we will be much better off as humanity. In 100 years' time. And if medicine decides to advance faster than it is doing right now, we will be there to see it, right? You know, one of the things I find So in addition to being the 2nd woman to lead the IMF, I should ask you, do you hang out with Christine Lagarde? Do you guys? We do, yes. Christine was, as you probably remember, she was the managing director of the IMF before me, first woman, so Christine came, broke the glass ceiling. I came after her. No scratchy. Well, you're the first woman. You're the first, you're the first leader from an emerging market economy, so you've got your own first. You're also somebody who did your PhD in environmental protection policy and growth in the USA. Now climate change, environmental policy, that is not something that is Very high on the radar right now in some countries. Uh, how are you feeling about that as a factor in growth? So we at the IMF, we work on macroeconomic and financial stability for growth and employment. Anything that is a risk to macroeconomic and financial stability, we have to take into account. Some of my members, some of our members say Caribbean states. Uh, they can get 100 to 100% of GDP wiped out just by one hurricane. So obviously we have to integrate this in the way we think about supporting countries. We want to help them help countries have good insurance policies. Uh, we want them to have good thinking about how at low cost they can be more resilient to climate, and I want to give you just one example why it matters. Um, Bangladesh, Bangladesh is a country that gets flooded on a regular basis, and so they were thinking how they can have resilience policies that are affordable. They worked at that time I was with the World Bank. We worked with them on investing in dual purpose infrastructure. So you build the school, the school is a school. If there is a flood, it's lifted, people with their animals go there for shelter. One of the measures that we came up, they came up and we reinforced was they used to have lots of chicken. And they switch from chicken to ducks. When the flood comes, chicken die, ducks swim. I love that the index. It doesn't have to be expensive, but you have to put some thinking and then translate it into economic activity. That's very smart. You know, um. I notice you, you bring your granddaughter occasionally to events, and you are the great granddaughter of a revolutionary Ivan Karshovski, who was a great revolutionary in Bulgaria and also a journalist. I think you started out wanting to be a journalist. I dodged a bullet. No, I'm just kidding, but, but I'd love to talk a little bit about what is your message to her? I mean, she's now studying in the US you came. An Alexander Hamilton scholarship here, give me some sense of of the legacy and how you think about, you know, leadership in your own family and what you tell her. So what I'm telling her is one change is unstoppable, unstoppable. So lean forward because that's going to be in front of you. This is going to be your life. 2, do the right thing. Even if it is not popular, even if it is not politically correct, do the right thing. This is what my father taught me. This is not what my great grandfather left for us. And 3, the world is fabulous. We have to protect our ability. To work with each other, we need to protect that, uh, making the world a really small place and you, your generation has a role to play. By the way, fun fact, imagine communist Bulgaria, we are just coming out of it. There is a Alexander Hamilton scholarship I can apply for. I did. I'm going for the interview. Now, as you can imagine in communist Bulgaria, they didn't teach us more about much about the founding fathers here. So The main question the journalists are asking, sorry, the interviewers are asking is, who is Alexander Hamilton? No Google, no phones, and I'm saying, I saw, I saw him recently. Where did I see him? And then The good of being dollarized at that time, I saw him on a $10 note. So I walk in the interview room. They asked me who is Alexander Hamilton, and I said, Who the guy on the $10 note? They didn't know. They started, there you go. This is my, my message is create, you know, never lose your cool, whatever the situation, come through it, come out of it victorious. I love that. This is also what I teach. I teach my granddaughter. I love that. Well, well. Have you seen the play, by the way? Hamilton? Of course, the first thing I did when she came to the United States, I took her to see Alexander Hamilton, and she loved it. So, so let's end on a note around back to the global economy. You've got a lot of anxious people, I'm sure, who are in town this week. What is your message to them in terms of these 191 member countries, excuse me, you've got finance ministers, central bankers, leaders. First of all, that's a Tough group to manage, but what is, what does success look like right now? So what we, what we provide to our membership is to see the world from the same vantage point. We produce global economic world economic outlook. Financial stability report and fiscal report and then we say, look at this, what strikes you the most? Three things. One, Better than feared, worse than we need. We touched, we, you know, ditched the bullet. But It's not over, so please you guys cooperate. Don't get out of this meeting. In the lunacy of economic wars. 2 Look at your finances. You're in trouble. Your debt levels have shot up during the pandemic, everybody had to borrow to support households and businesses. But nobody is pulling this support out. Why? Because people like it. What is not to like? Have the guts. To come to fiscal consolidation because if you don't, when the next shot shot shock comes and it will. You're in a very bad place. And 3, there are imbalances. Across countries, let's figure out a way to reduce them because they're an obstacle to a better global economy. Great woman leader, we have 18 seconds left. What is your message to this room of women leaders? But my message is think of the unthinkable. So you're ready when the Anticable comes because we know from COVID, we know from the war in Europe, it will come, and we women, we women are so strong and resilient we can face it. I love that. Please join me in thanking managing director Georgieva. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Brainstorm Tech 2025

Delivery robots, drone drops, new business lines, and global expansion: DoorDash has transformed into a full-stack commerce platform for local businesses. CEO and Co-founder Tony Xu joins us to explore how DoorDash is approaching automation, international expansion, and a broader push into hospitality and retail.

Tony Xu
Cofounder and CEO, Doordash 

Jason Del Rey
Tech Correspondent; Cochair, Fortune Brainstorm 

Now Serving: Global Ambition

Brainstorm AI Singapore 2025

The AI race is no longer just about scale—it’s about standards, trust, and strategic agility. As major powers build ever-larger models, Singapore is charting a different course: investing in global assurance frameworks, cross border digital integration, and a radically expanded pipeline of AI-skilled talent. Its approach is systems-first and credibility-focused—offering a model for how small states can lead by shaping norms rather than dominating infrastructure. But in an increasingly fractured landscape shaped by open-source disruption and deepening U.S.–China tensions, can neutrality still deliver influence? We'll discuss what makes Singapore’s AI strategy distinctive—and consider what other countries might learn from the Singapore model in crafting their own AI strategies. 

Beyond Scale: How Small Nations Can Lead In The Age Of AI

Now, to kick this off, I'm thrilled to introduce our opening conversation led by Fortune's executive editor for Asia and Brainstorm AI co-chair, Clay Chandler in conversation with our first guest, Singapore's Minister for Digital Development and Information, Josephine Teo. When we talk about global leadership in AI, it's easy to focus on the big players, but Singapore continues to prove that small nations can lead in big ways. This isn't just a story about scale. It's about strategy, standards, and Singapore's bet that credibility can compete with compute. Please now join me in welcoming Clay Chandler and Minister Teo. Thank you. Thank you, Jeremy, and welcome everyone and especially welcome Mr. Chou. It is such a delight to have you back. Uh, you were our kickoff speaker last year when we first launched this franchise in Singapore. We had a great discussion. Uh, that explored the ways in which Singapore was really pioneering how small and medium sized economies could punch above their weight when it came to artificial intelligence, and I'm really quite eager to have a kind of catch up conversation with you about that because so much has changed just in the last year since you were last here. Um, I wonder if we could start maybe by just a reference to the um. The AI action summit in Paris this year, which is a big event that got a lot of people's attention. Singapore there launched a global AI assurance pilot. And more recently, it's established a thing called the AI Verify Foundation. Can you tell us about these initiatives and and what they are and how they evolved? Well, it's great to be back and I'm also very happy that you've returned to Singapore for AI event. Um, you. Referenced what we were doing at the AI action summit. Uh, perhaps for context for the audience in the room today, uh, the AI action summit that took place in Paris is a 3rd edition of what started out in Bletchley as the AI safety summit. And then in between, there was a summit that was held in Korea. And by the time it got to Paris, our French colleagues decided that They didn't want to focus so much on safety, they wanted to focus on action. But if we ask what we really want to see in AI development, the way Singapore thinks about it is that this being general purpose technologies, you do want um it to be very widely adopted across many industry settings as well as across a whole range of organizations. So when we updated our national AI strategy, we thought that we needed to ensure that um uh people understood what this was going to be for. So we said that the vision for Singapore was AI for the public good, for Singapore and the world. And why we decided to focus on public good was that The incentives would naturally create many commercial applications of AI, but for the whole of society to benefit, for people to appreciate its value, and this being general purpose technology, you also want AI to be applied towards public healthcare, public transportation, uh, public safety in policing, for example. So that's one dimension of AI development that we wanted to see in Singapore. The other dimension is equally important. In many of these commercial settings, you would want AI to be implemented, deployed in a responsible way. So the question, however, is what does responsible AI look like? Well, it really depends on the application and at which layer of AI development you're talking about. Are you talking about the infrastructure, you're talking about the models, or you're talking about the applications? And Apart from being able to articulate what responsible AI looks like, you also need to answer the question of, well, how do you get that? And if you say that you are implementing responsible AI, how do you test for it? How do you assure people that in fact this is happening? So, As we were also promoting AI adoption, we decided at the same time that these questions deserved investigation. You need to put aside resources to research, but at the same time, it's useful for us to start developing practical tools. To answer the question of what responsible AI looks like. That's how the global AI assurance pilot came about. It was to create uh a number of methods by which AI developers as well as deployers were able to assure their stakeholders that they were implementing in a responsible way. And the idea was also to learn from it, accepting the fact that at this early stage, there are no interoperable standards that apply across the globe. We don't know when we will get there. And so Singapore's modest hope is to contribute to this conversation and to bring about international collaboration so that we can all develop best practices in AI development. There is a lot to think about there. Um, I want to come back and maybe talk a little bit more about how Uh, assurances, the strategy aligns with the kind of commercial competitiveness objectives of Singapore, but I want to, before we get to that, uh, ask you about one of the other big developments that's happened in the last year, which happened just about the time. Uh, a lot of people were in Davos, uh, and, uh, I remember being in Davos and hearing people at the beginning of Davos sort of pooh poohing China's ability to catch up to the United States. Oh, Silicon Valley is so far out in front in these foundational AI models that China can't play the same game. And then, uh, right in the middle of Davos there was this kind of announcement that emerged that there was this thing called Deep Seek. There was a Chinese hedge fund that had, uh. Sort of issued this new platform in AI that was produced with a fraction of the resources of OpenAI or Gemini, but seemed to be pretty close on all the significant benchmarks of performance. Last year we talked about, you know, the age of. Uh, you know, big data and, and AI superpowers and whether that created daunting obstacles for smaller states like Singapore. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the implications for countries like Singapore. For the deep sea breakthrough, we've had a couple of these other really kind of fast follower platforms come through in China recently. Um, is this something that even Singapore can now compete, you know, by following those kinds of examples? How does it open up and democratize the the the AI game for a country like Singapore? Well, the thing that we ask ourselves is what are the impediments of using any sort of technology for innovative purposes. And inevitably cost becomes an issue because for a company that is uh deploying technology already in a certain way to use AI as an alternative or as an addition, the question of cost must come up and it has to be weighed against the benefits. So when the cost comes down, then whatever benefits you were able to get from it may look more attractive. So from the perspective of bringing down costs. Innovation such as Deepeek are very much welcome. But I would also say that um this whole dynamic is not necessarily only a competitive one. It is also mutually reinforcing. Let me give you an example. We don't use deep per se to develop our own large language model, but within the context of Southeast Asia, we know that large language models that are trained primarily on the Western corpus, primarily on perhaps English as the language, um, they will have difficulties being applied in the Southeast Asian context. Um In our case, there are already probably more than 1000 local languages and if you build AI tools on top of these large language models that didn't incorporate the kind of data that could be found in our part of the world, then naturally the quality, the way it performs, the way it responds to prompts will perhaps not meet. The requirements of Singapore, as well as our neighboring countries. What we did was to therefore develop our own large language model, not necessarily the biggest, but certainly trained on languages that we find commonly in our part of the world. You know, um, Malay language, Tamil, Indonesia. This is sea lion, you are very familiar with it. So I think there is room for both, uh, and indeed, many companies, when they are thinking about how they can develop, for example, chat assistance that could be useful in our context, they would use a combination of both. And so that's how I think about it. I think that in an innovation ecosystem. Um, ways in which we can bring down the cost, ways in which we can complement one another in terms of the models that are available. I think they just open up the space for innovation to a larger extent. And in the Singapore context, um, when we think about AI governance and in AI innovation, The two are not necessarily at odds with each other, being able to assure ourselves of the safety and proper governance actually, I think can enable innovations to go further, because then the developers and deployers know where are the markets that they should work with. It's very interesting because it's a very, it's a much more kind of neutral approach to evaluating technology and And AI platforms in the US right now, a lot of this stuff is very politicized, so we thought that TikTok was a terrible national security risk until we realized that it was so popular that we couldn't really stop it and you know certain political leaders realized it was to their advantage to embrace it, but deep. See there's still a lot of ambivalence about deep seek in the US. The US government is prohibiting, uh, government agencies from, from using it, uh, uh, and trying to discourage companies from using it, whereas I gather in Singapore there's none of that. There's, well, let's look at it and is it useful or not? Or perhaps I would put it another way. I think when Companies, developers, deployers, they think about what model they want to use. There is always an assessment of a couple of things. One of the things would be, of course, performance. The other thing that they, they would take into consideration is security and resilience. And it's up to every organization to evaluate all three and draw their own conclusions about what can be used and what cannot be used, although they do not wish to use. And I would imagine that there will still be concerns about deep sea and other models that would cause companies. needs to take a pause and say that maybe this is something that we are still not very comfortable with. I wouldn't be surprised at all. This is a very natural consequence of organizations having to weigh the cost and benefits as well as the many dimensions of what makes an innovation worth the effort. So the other thing that's related to this and that that's new over the past year is that you know we in the US we have a new president now. And relations between the US and China have gotten, uh, safe to say much more tense and in many ways more acrimonious. President Trump is imposing very large tariffs on China. China has been retaliating in kind. The US has tightened restrictions on selling chips and other technologies to China. I wonder whether you know and we talked last year about Singapore's strategy of being sort of non-aligned, uh, being a kind of a Switzerland of Asia, a space where both Chinese and and uh uh US companies and tech players could could operate together. And so my question is can Singapore still do that? And this also sort of applies to the rest of ASEAN. Can it remain strategically unaligned, or are the two giants trying to force small and medium sized economies like this one to pick a side. I think Singapore's consistent approach is to act. In a way that meets our own interests. And that is the starting point that has to be our guiding principle. Now We would certainly hope that relationships between the two giants can warm up to a much greater extent, but it's not something that we can wish to happen and it will happen. I wish that was, um, you know, something that uh we didn't have to deal with, but it's a reality. Um, the way in which we go about it is to engage, you know, uh, all countries, not just China and US. Um, and Build upon our bilateral foundations. And to try and make headway in new technology areas too. So with the US, we have a dialogue on continuing and contin critical and emerging technologies. Similarly with China, we have a digital policy dialogue. They cover different areas of interest um that um we mutually believe are important for our own countries. But, you know, it doesn't prevent us from seeking to understand each other's concerns better and then continuing to find ways to move forward. So in AI Assurance in AI governance, for example, with our US colleagues, we did a mapping of our own risk assessment model against us, and this serves as a basis for us to engage with colleagues elsewhere around the world, particularly those that are involved in the AI safety network. Um, with our Chinese colleagues, we noticed that um there are industrial Uh, foundation is so broad and deep that the application of AI would be very interesting to watch and learn from. So there are different ways in which we engage with our ASEAN countries, we say, for example, that um even if we are not ready to move into the era of standards in AI governance, there's nothing to prevent us from agreeing on what the ethical principles could look like first. And then with other countries um that are like us, small, um, we created a digital pillar in the forum of small states, which Singapore is the convener of. And with countries like Rwanda, for example, we created an AI playbook for small states. So these are the ways in which we are coming together for conversations around different aspects of AI hoping to meet, make progress. Interesting and, and, and thoughtful. Um, I wanna ask quickly if I can about um. Scaling the digital workforce to kind of support a lot of these initiatives. The last time we spoke, you described for us, the government's plan had a goal for training 5000 AI practitioners in Singapore, and you have since tripled that, as I understand it, to 15,000. Why the increase and how will you achieve it and what will be the background of these practitioners? Well, number one, I think there's a lot of interest, um. So many people in, in, in Singapore are aware of the potential benefits of AI and they are themselves finding ways to acquire the skills. Uh, I would say that, um, whether it is AI creators or AI practitioners, Uh, I'm overall optimistic about what can be achieved through our workforce if each and every one, were enabled to acquire some AI related skills. And you imagine that um certain basic AI skills will become as ubiquitous as you and I being very familiar with using emails, um, and perhaps in the earlier stages, Maybe it was not so common for people to be able to use um digital tools, you know, whether for word processing or making slides and so on. But over time, we all acquire a certain level of competence. But we think that it's not enough just to have basic level of competence. So what you described, the 5000 and 15,000 are what we call AI practitioners, we are hoping also to grow another pool to complement the data scientists and machine learning engineers. We're talking about people who who are in the professions, lawyers, accountants, doctors, who will become the early adopters of AI and then they show their peers how to make better use of it. We're also talking about people in different sectors, whether it's manufacturing, whether it is, um, you know, in healthcare or um in financial services. They themselves also acquire this facility with using AI and then they demonstrate how it can create more value for their organizations. This group of AI practitioners will have to exceed the 15,000 that I talked about to a much greater extent. So in the Singapore context, our workforce is maybe 3.5 million. I think. At the level of AI users that are AI, they are competent, you, you will need to get to a much larger number than what we were talking about last year. So watch this space, we will have more to say about this. We, we will watch it with great interest. We've got just a couple of minutes here. I wonder if we can come back to this initial point about assurance. Uh, it's very interesting to me because it seems that what Singapore is doing is it's trying to become a kind of a test bed for safety and responsible AI and And to create a kind of haven. And build a brand around that in much the way that Singapore has done with FinTech regulation and cybersecurity services. Is that, is that the idea and Maybe you could say a little bit more about the philosophy behind the emphasis on insurance. The broad idea is that this technology um can have many applications and you don't want to overly restrict its growth and development. On the other hand, for a technology that can be used in so many different contexts. You've got to watch that it doesn't cause harm because the moment it does, and people become very wary of seeing it being used in even more ways, then it's much harder to recover from that sort of loss of momentum. So the way in which we'd like to go about it is to set out the broad directions and also to set out what are the principles that we should be working along. And then to uh say to industry as well as organizations that are using AI, let's try and find a way to define the risks and also then to find ways of mitigating those risks. That's generally the approach that we take. Small steps, um, not necessarily always big bang, but when we're ready to move, then move quickly. It's always fascinating for us to kind of watch those small steps and to try to observe them and analyze them. I think that many of them are of great relevance and and benefit to other kind of medium sized states as to how they can navigate in. This really rapidly changing technology environment. We look forward to tuning in again and coming back for the next installment of this conversation we hope in years to come. Thank you so much, Minister, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Fuel up with Fortune, Cannes 2025

Elite leadership isn’t just about vision—it’s about action, resilience, and the relentless pursuit of growth. At Fortune’s exclusive Fuel Up With Fortune panel in Cannes, Snap Inc. EMEA President Ronan Harris and Mars Wrigley North America President Anton Vincent share their top leadership learnings and what truly sets outperformers apart.

Elite Leadership: Unlocking Growth at the Top

Elite Leadership: Unlocking Growth at the Top Pannel at Cannes

At the Fuel Up With Fortune panel in Cannes, Snap Inc. EMEA President Ronan Harris and Mars Wrigley North America President Anton Vincent share their top leadership learnings.

Fortune COO Summit

How are the companies pioneering artificial intelligence technology actually using it internally? These two preeminent operational leaders at the forefront of the AI revolution will share the strategies they are using to deploy the very technologies they're developing—while writing the future of AI for the world. We’ll hear how they are leveraging AI to optimize operations, fuel growth and share specific advice for corporate leaders about how best to implement today’s most cutting-edge innovations in their own organizations.

ARCHITECTS OF AI: DRIVING TECHNOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION FROM WITHIN 

Fortune MPW International Summit 2025

Hosted by ROSHN Group  
Around the world, significant strides have been made to increase the number of women in corporate leadership positions. In the U.S., women make up 29% of C-Suite level roles and hold approximately 30% of board seats. And here in Saudi Arabia, nearly 10% of board positions are held by women, a new reality made possible by the Kingdom’s ambitious Vision 2030 strategy and other significant government-led reforms. Even with such progress, untapped opportunities remain in industries where women have traditionally been underrepresented – from construction and engineering to technology and energy. In this special lunch program, we’ll explore the strategies needed to advance women into C-suite positions, create more inclusive workplaces, foster untapped talent, and create a path to parity – not just progress – for women at all levels of business.
Panelists:
Dr. Maryam Ali Ficociello, Group Chief Governance Officer, Red Sea Global
Giovanna Carnevali,	 Executive Director, Master Planning, ROSHN Group
Dr. Saeeda Jaffar, Senior Vice President and Group Country Manager – GCC, Visa
Jena Ladhani, Chief Executive Officer, Global Workplace Solutions, KSA, CBRE
Renée McGowan, Chief Executive Officer, India, Middle East, and Africa, Marsh McLennan
Moderator: Michal Lev-Ram, Contributing Editor, Fortune

WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP LUNCH PROGRAM: ADVANCING WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE

Workplace Innovation 2025

Does DEI promote or prevent meritocracy? After a growing number of companies announced they’d be rolling back their DEI programs, some employees were left wondering if the pre-2025 DEI movement in business was wholehearted or largely performative. How will the private sector navigate external pressures while fostering inclusive and equitable environments for employees and customers? Netflix’s inaugural Vice President of Inclusion Vernā Myers joins Anson Frericks, the author of the recent New York Times opinion essay “Working at Anheuser-Bush, I Saw What Went Wrong With the D.E.I. Movement,” for a thought-provoking and multifaceted conversation about how America got here--and where DEI is headed.  

DEI IN 2025: RETREAT OR REINVENTION?

And welcome. Thank you for being with us today. We're excited to start our 2nd day of conversations and connections. We have lots to dive into today, like multi-generational workforces and how to manage them under one roof and the debate over return to office policies. We'll look at the trend of skills over degrees. We'll talk about integrating AI as your new employee. We'll hear lessons on career building from a Hollywood power player and we'll step into the world of the hit show Severance to see how corporate dystopia is brought to life. It's gonna be so much fun and we're going to get right to it all, but first, a quick reminder about what can be shared and what's off the record. What's said on stage or in our breakout sessions is on the record, including the open Q&A. Feel free to post on social media. And tag us using hashtag fortune workplace summits. What's said over the table during a meal or on breaks is private and off the record unless that's agreed upon by those involved. In just a moment, Fortune's next to lead editor, Ruth Umo, we'll kick off our conversations, but first, our partner McKinsey and Company wants to share some thoughts on getting the most out of tech. Tech has limitless potential, but how do we turn that into value? Unlock the power of AI at scale, reinvent tech delivery, build innovative products, and entirely new businesses. We rewire organizations to get the most out of tech, from strategy and talent to operating model, data and governance, capabilities, and culture. Great tech is essential, but with McKinsey, it's never just tech. Hey, good morning, everyone. Let's start with a big question. Is DEI DOA dead on arrival? Diversity, equity and inclusion in America is at a crossroads. Critics argue DEI initiatives have gone too far, creating new divisions and unfairness. Supporters say DEI strategies are necessary to address workplace inequities and can drive business success. We're gonna dive into both sides of the debate, and we have two great guests to do just that. Anton Ferris is co-founder of Strive Asset Management and a business leader who believes talent and results should take priority over diversity metrics, and Bernie Myers is founder and president of the Vernie Meyers Company, which helps organizations build effective DEI strategies. Please welcome them to the stage. Welcome, welcome, thank you both for joining us. Let's cut straight to the chase. Anson, you have argued that one of the fundamental failures of corporate DEI movement is that no one has ever clearly defined what it was trying to do. Let's do just that to level set. How do you each define DEI? What do you think it is actually trying to accomplish? something you want to take it first here, Renee, ladies first here. Thank you, thank you. So I am now start not saying DEI anymore. I'm saying diversity, equity and inclusion. When I say diversity, I mean talking about a difference and a mix, quite frankly, of culture and identity and experience when I'm talking about inclusion. It's about how do you make all of those differences work on your behalf, right, creating an environment where people of all backgrounds feel included. I often say expected, respected, and also reflected that's that's the idea of inclusion and with equity it's what you need to do the processes and. And the, the kinds of, uh, I would say tools that are necessary in order for that inclusion to actually flourish and for you to get the best out of human talent. Same question for you. Yeah, and I think, I think one of the biggest problems with diversity, equity, inclusion, it's never been well defined. If you ask everybody in this room, they're going to give you a different answer. I think that. Bernay's answer was a very plausible answer for DEI, and I think if you go back in time 5, 10 years ago, I think probably everyone in DEI wanted just to go out and find the best and the brightest. DEI was about finding a diverse group of candidates, trying to make sure they had an equitable opportunity or an equal opportunity to be able to succeed, and then we want to be inclusive of all people and walks and different backgrounds. I think there was a lot of positive in the initial DEI movement. why it's become controversial and I'll define why I think it's become controversial is DEI instead of just providing equal opportunities for people of diverse backgrounds. I think it's about now perceived in a lot of circles as forcing equitable outcomes for people as opposed to equal opportunity. So based off of your race, sex, gender, etc. the diversity piece has been about a lot of quota systems in certain. Companies we're going to hire people based on their race, sex, gender. That's become very controversial. The equitable piece is not about sort of equal opportunities, but making sure that everybody gets promoted in an equal way or an equitable way based on race, sex, gender, and then even the inclusive pieces, I think, become very challenging because the inclusive piece is very difficult to define and I actually think stifled a lot of open debate and free speech and dialogue. So I want to thank you for Having this conversation because I think it's incredibly important, but that's how I think about DEI and think about the two different definitions of what it was and I think what it's become. Well, Renee, let me turn to you then. What is your response to critics who argue that DEI, to his points, often rewards identity over performance and risks sidelining the most qualified candidate, um, in the name of representation? I'm gonna say poppycock. Right, because the whole point of DEI is to allow for merits, right? And it is much older than 5 years ago or 10 years ago. We've been doing the work of DEI since the civil rights movement. In fact, that's the birth of diversity, equity inclusion, and the idea is that it is hard to get to merit when there are obstacles, unfair. Obstacles in the way and so there is no MEI without DEI. In fact, it is impossible and and and what is so upsetting for me and I feel like it's, I would say morally unjust and bankrupt to suggest that we could just move forward as if we had somehow managed to level the playing field. You cannot get. To equality without recognizing inequality, it is impossible to do that and in no other business setting would we have an objective, not measure it, not looking at outcomes and how well the actual operation is either delivering on equality or not. And so we've got plenty of data that would suggest that it's not equal. I mean, if I look at women right now in the C-suite. We've got, uh, I, I actually brought the numbers because I am always not, I'm not always on numbers, but I know that there's 28% now women in uh the C-suite and that's up. It was 17% in 2017. So the work we did to get women to be recognized for their merit is working. In fact, I think this backlash against the EI is because we're winning, is because we are leveling the playing field and not because by identity. But by allowing people to actually share and exhibit what they're capable of, I will also say that if we look at women of color in the suite, C-suite, it's much, much lower. So let me jump in here because I do want to hear from you, Anton. Yeah, thank you. Uh, and, and I love that this is a spirited debate because Anne Sandy, you wrote, uh, a New York Times op ed, um, and you pointed to Anheuser-Busch, where you worked for some time as a cautionary tale of DI gone wrong, but was the real failure DI itself, or was it the clumsy way that DI was executed? Why is it a failing of DI overall and not just how they leveraged that business strategy potentially in a in a way that was erroneous. I think that DI there was a failure in terms of definitely how it's been implemented in companies, and I think what I think about sort of a company and why does a company exist, you have a clear mission statement that most companies have, you know, if you're a beer company, you were supposed to, our mission as a company was to create a future with more cheers. That was the mission of the company as a as a beer company, perfectly good mission. There's lots of other missions as well. Coinbase is doing crypto. Indeed is, I don't know, empowering people and finding jobs, whatever it is. Those missions are great. Then I have a view that we should find people and attract people that's going to help the company fulfill that mission. And if you're, you know, in the business of fighting fires, you want to have firefighters that are brave and resilient and all these things. If you were a beer company and the way that InBev worked and Anheuser-Busch and 3G, it was a very hard-nosed finance kind of driven company. And if you're a healthcare company, you probably have different people for that, and you should have different sort of characteristics and adjectives that you can describe to recruit people, and I think that each company needs to define those own adjectives to create. the sort of workplace they went in, but every company, I think before defining what those values were of who they wanted to recruit, they first looked at it through a DI lens, and I think that was problematic in saying that before we find people that are brave or empathetic or compassionate or hardworking or whatever adjective you want to describe for that company, first you have to look through this lens of, well, what's people's race or sex or gender or others, and I think you know there's a why is it you used the word before. Why can it all happen at the same time? This is just my experience working at Anheuser-Busch and then also running Strive Asset Management where we're investors in hundreds of different companies across the S&P 500. It just didn't. It probably can, but I think most people, they look through sort of the lens. Wells Fargo is a good example of a company that said in 2020 that we're going to have to interview 50% of all candidates have to be minority candidates for any job that's over $100,000 and then they were actually accused of literally encouraging minority candidates to apply for jobs after they'd already been filled just so they could check a box. And I think that's sort of the problem of like a lot of people just implemented DEI policies poorly and wrongly. And they became, I think, frustrating for, I think, a lot of minority candidates. They were supposed to help. And then also conversely became very frustrating, I think for non-minority candidates or even say candidates of background that were Asian or Indian or others that might have been passed over for a job because they weren't called the check the box right minority. Let's dig into it really quickly, and I think you might actually be about to touch. On this because you mentioned DI quotas, hiring quotas, and we saw a number of companies, uh, that instated the certainly post George Floyd and so if, if, if the argument is that DI initiatives result in these diversity quotas, Verne, how is that not trade in one form of exclusion for another? Let's, let's, let's get the language right. There's no such thing as quotas. Quotas are illegal. They've been illegal for a very long time. Kenji Yoshino last night yesterday explained to us it's not about quotas. That's another example of a disinformation campaign. It was about goals. And every company, if you want to achieve a change or cultural transformation, you have to have goals. How else are you knowing whether you are making a difference with what you're implementing, right? So people said unless we pay attention to this problem, the problem being the underrepresentation of groups of people over a long period of time due to exclusion, both intentional and Unintentional. This work does not get done unless you pay attention. It's attention and intention. People often think, well, just let it go. It'll just happen. It never just happens. I mean, you know, people will quote that like the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Thank you, MLK, my love. It doesn't bend by itself. You have to bend it. I'm a, I, I came into the legal profession. I was the first black person in my law firm, the only black lawyer, I should say, in my law firm. When I went back to my Harvard Law School, um, women in Harvard Law School, I learned that in 19. 53 when they finally let in women, they had no toilets for no bathrooms for the women. So you can say they had gender diversity maybe, but you cannot say they had gender inclusion and if you arrive in an environment and it's not set up for you, it's not conducive for you. It's insisting that you emulate the person or the group that has been there. And who have dominated for a period of time and if you don't, you can't advance because somehow we have this idea of fit and that's about our own comfort and it's a lot about our prejudice and also our biases and that is what DEI is hoping to do to create an environment where everyone can succeed versus being. Held back because of an identity, it's just the opposite of what is being perpetuated these days about the disadvantaging effects of DEI. Who has been disadvantaged? We have no data that would suggest that white men are being disadvantaged by the work of DEI. Well, let me ask you that, do you think that white men have been disadvantaged by the work of DEI? No, but I think definitely like Asians have 100%. If you take a look at Harvard versus Fair admissions, it was all the Asian students that had to essentially have twice the SAT scores, twice the whatever the scoring rubric was that that that black students have to have to get into Harvard. So I think yes, there's definitely been, and if you look at med school admissions, you look at other admissions, definitely certain races have been excluded, and I think We have to get back to the MLK's dream is that we have to get back to finding a place where we don't discriminate based off of race, sex, gender. Like any type of even reverse discrimination is discrimination. And so if we're discriminating against Asian people for advantaging black people, that's discrimination. I think we have to have an open and honest dialogue and conversation about that, and the data shows that the people are being discriminated. No, I don't think which data? Well, if you look at any admissions data for Harvard University, that's why affirmative action was overturned. And even if you go back like, you know, you're right, the Civil Rights Act that started in 1964. Hubert Humphries, who was the floor leader at the time, said this ever leads the quota systems, I'll eat my hat. Affirmative action, you're lower by background. California versus Bakke essentially said that you cannot have quota systems. When the California system literally set aside a quota of 16 positions for minority students in med school, they said that's illegal, but you can do affirmative action to take into race considerations. That was upheld in Michigan in the Supreme Court case in 2003. But even Sandra Day O'Connor at that time said at some point the affirmative action has to go away. At some point we can't just keep giving. Certain people an advantage based off race, sex, color, gender, and Sandra Day O'Connor said within 25 years. And so maybe it was 5 years earlier than she originally anticipated when Harvard versus Fair Students for admission overturned affirmative action, but it went away and at some point we have to get to the point where we're not looking at people based on race, sex, gender, sexual orientation. We're looking at them as individuals and say when do you want to do that? When do you want to do it? Do you want to do it now when we still have deep Equality and disparities not just in outcomes but just how people are being treated and in fact I feel like what we're doing what we're hearing is a way of trying to divide and distract and keep people from being connected and being unified across their differences and their commonalities and so I'm saying to you, when do we just stop doing it and. When do we start to acknowledge that there is still an enormous amount of work to do? We've been at this DEI work for a long time. It's not time to stop it. It's time to continue to evolve it. So let's talk about that evolution because we are running up on time. If we strip away all of the buzzwords, is there a version of diversity, equity and inclusion that both skeptics and supporters could agree on? What does that look like? And let's try and make it quick. OK, I think that what it looks like is, uh, I'm going with the, I'm going with the R's. I think we have to actually reassess. We need to redefine, we need to reimagine, and we need to re-engage. We need to redefine what we mean because obviously folks have a different opinion about what DEI means and what it means to have equality, right? And I do think we need to really try to do an assessment. What are we doing that is working and what are we doing that might be holding people back or making certain people feel excluded and then how do we reimagine a new idea, a new possibility, and then how do we re-engage, which is a lot of listening and a lot of caring? Yeah, 20 seconds for you. Yeah, I think it's the most exciting time if I was in the HR world because we don't have to do DEI specifically anymore and every company essentially adopted DEI. Yes, they had a different little flavor of it, but it was very similar to DI. Every company should have their own program to hire people and as long as we have a baseline, we don't, we don't discriminate based on race, sex, gender, then come here with your own program. It could be MEI, it could be whatever program you want to come out with. But talk about what's unique about your company, the people you want to attract, the values that they have, and talk about that and extol that being unique to your company. I think that will create an amazing workforce. We'll create amazing HR, uh, business partners in this room where you guys can really define what is unique about your company and who's gonna thrive there. Well, we'll end here. Thank you both for an illuminating conversation. Although you have cons shots and viewpoints, clearly, uh, your insights underscore the importance of continued dialogue. So thank you, thank you. So that's That's this way. OK, thank you so much.

Brainstorm AI London 2025

When no one was looking, the global semiconductor business became a smash-mouth, no-tariffs-barred affair. But in an age of AI, business is still (very) good. The founder and CEO of one of SoftBank's newest multibillion-dollar acquisitions weighs in on the future of AI compute, the changing cast of industry power players, and the shifting geopolitical landscape ahead.

Iron in the Fire

Peter and Daniel. So there's a lot of excitement about what AI can do, right? That's why we're here. But none of it's possible without the right infrastructure and the right chips. The competition to build the next generation of AI hardware isn't just a business story, it's a strategic one touching on everything from investment and innovation to geopolitics. Today we're joined by one of the most respected leaders in technology and semiconductors to help us understand what's at stake and where the future is heading. So please welcome Renee James, chairman and CEO of Ampere. Hi Renee. Good to see you. All right. Thank you for joining us. So You worked at Intel for a very long time, um, and you worked with the great Andy Grove. You were for a long time, you were first as chief of staff, is that right? And then you, you know, right before you left Intel, you were the president of Intel. So, When you look at that, I promise I will ask you questions about your company Ape, which was acquired by SoftBank for $6.5 billion earlier this year, but I promise we'll get there, but I have to know as an, as an Intel vet. What would Andy Groves say about the state of Intel today? Thanks. Yes, um. He would be very disappointed. Why? Because it's an industry that Intel um invented literally invented the means by which you fabricate modern semiconductors, um, the what we think of as fabs that everyone likes to talk about and weirdly wants to build everywhere. Uh, and the process that goes into them was pioneered by Intel, developed by Intel. The modern transistor technology was invented by Intel, um, the first modern CPU that powered, you know, computing and the entire PC mobile, everything. Was Intel. So when you think about that, and these were people who left Fairchild because they had a different view of how the future could be and started with venture capital, if you can believe it, in the late 60s, 6869, this is, you know, their life's work and then to see Intel fall behind. Um, a company that was a great partner, has been a great partner, still is, I think of Intel forever, my supplier TSMC was started in collaboration with Intel, um, because we needed an additional source. So you look at it and you think, wow. That's kind of scary and sad. And Intel is not that sort of enzymatic uh uh uh actor that it was in in its heyday is, is kind of what you're inferring. And a lot of the technology that we use today, I mean, the Mellanox interconnect technology of Nvidia was invented at Intel and spun out there, you know, my company, uh, not just me but several of the key leaders, we're X Intel, we built every server product that built every data center. it started, you know, all of this cloud stuff. So, you know, a lot of good came out of it and a lot of spinoff companies, you know, the modern way that we think about building silicon and semiconductors that we all take for granted like a miracle occurs. You turn something on and it just works and like, you know, 70 billion of something you don't even know what they are is going on and on a little piece of silicon and we don't know, you know, it just works it it truly is miraculous, but then you think about the state of the company today and And I, I wish them recovery. I really do. I think they're super important to global semiconductors. They're super important to the future of where we're going because at its base Intel is the company that invents the future of transistor. still today, even in their current situation, super important. We will come back to the sort of global implications of that in a second, but I do want to, I do want to talk about Amper for a second. So Renee, you're one of two women who run semiconductor companies. It's extraordinary. And then you I'm happy that there's someone else now. That's right. That's right. And you went even further because you said, I'm going to start one. Like that isn't exactly how that went, but yeah, I think Andy said, what are you doing with your life? Why don't you start the next one? So what what what leads one to start a semiconductor company because I've always gotten the sense that um sort of like an automaker, you can't just turn around and it's not exactly a software company, you know, you can't just spin it up overnight. You need a lot of capital. Yes, um, well, so first of all you have to have a passion and a vision for where you think things are going because you, you know, you're not, you wouldn't start a company at the kind of the scale of a CPU company or GPU company, um, from the ground up at this point in the history of semis given the the hurdle rate and the investment rate and costs, um, unless you had a passion for doing something that hadn't been done before because you know you're not gonna start a company to like compete with Nvidia. That's ridiculous. Um, so we said the problem that we hadn't solved, the thing I was passionate about after 30 years of building microprocessors, was we have always, whenever we got into trouble we would just say like, oh, you know what we can do, we'll just put more power onto it. We can just release the power and I'll get higher performance or we'll put down more transistors. I mean, we did a lot of things that at the time it didn't matter. It didn't cost as much. It was, you know, no one was going to freak out that we went from 350 watts to 400 watts to, you know, whatever. I mean these were conscious decisions to change because you have to change the spec on what the server is and what goes into the data center and all that stuff, but more was more, more was more and you could get paid for it. Um, so the thing we didn't do was something that we knew about. I mean, good and physicists know that at some point, you know, you need to constrain the power and figure out how to improve the performance through other techniques, and that's a lot of R&D and a lot of thinking. About thinking differently, thinking differently about how we designed the architecture of X86 for the last 20 years that we had been working on it, um, before I was president until I ran R&D for a long time, so we spent a lot of time thinking about this, so we, um. I said, you know what, that's what I want to work on. I want to work on how we build out what comes next, knowing that not AI in the way that we think of it today, but we were working on machine learning and everything already. We knew that was the next big thing. We knew that cloud computing, the way that the cloud used software was different than the way that the enterprise consumed software, like in this linear scaling, always on, always on demand. Um, and, and the microprocessors that we had built were meant to turn on and off in a way to be efficient for different workloads but not for the cloud, so that was our thesis and um. I gathered around people that were retired or that had worked for me before and I said we should do this and they're all like, you've lost your mind because we had built like 80 microprocessors, 80, and they were like, really, are you sure? I'm like, we can do this. If not us, then who? And then Andy says. He was still alive and not really that helpful in the sense that he was like, we taught you everything, you know, this is what we what Bob and Gordon and I did. This is what, you know, this is, this is the history of Silicon Valley. Someone has to do it, so that's what we did and I was really fortunate because the Carlisle Group, who doesn't. Usually do venture um back to us in our first round um and then we had a couple of strategic, our largest strategic being Oracle over time um and we ended up raising billions of dollars over the course of the last 8 years and um last month announced that, um, SoftBank Group is buying the company for $6.5 billion. In cash. So let's talk, let's talk a little bit about that. So what. Some folks were scratching their heads when that deal was, was, was announced. What does SoftBank give Ape? What does Ampere give SoftBank? Um, well, of course the deal isn't closed, right, so we're in the regulatory period, but in general, um, we've pioneered, we have a lot of patents and a lot of technology we've built, um, 5 generations of product already that have been deployed into major hyper scale data centers, um, how to build very, very high performance in an air cooled, meaning 500 watts or less envelope, um, and we could release the power and use liquid cooling. And go even, but the performance is that of like an AMD leading edge processor today we have integrated AI acceleration inside of that envelope. We can add additional functionality on and only release the power, you know, 50, 100 watts. So I think that that whole thing allows you to build out a vision of AI, you know, scale data centers that are more efficient over time. Um, we were, we are an arm architecture licensee, so a sister company in the SoftBank Group, um, so we had taken an architecture that's inherently low power but had not been known for the highest performance, and we had, um, invented ways to bring it up to. The level of, you know, that kind of performance, and I think that it's very synergistic with their overall vision and the mission that Masasan has for Stargate. For sure, for sure, and, and we will get to that in a second. I, I wanna ask you, I want to come back to the, the geopolitics question so. When you and I were talking about Intel previously, um, you were expressing to me kind of the importance of that company in the overall ecosystem, um, honestly, in the US, but, but in as as outdated the terms as it is with the West. Um, we are in a very US versus China moment in time right now and you're very concerned. Um, what is the future of SEI right now and What's it look like if we don't get it right here in the UK? In the UK, um, what do you mean by don't get it right in the UK? What, what is the landscape, right? What is the playing field given these tensions and you know what, how do we remain competitive given that sort of binary choice, you know, semiconductors historically have been a global product that have been available globally, um. That you know the predominance of semi semiconductor business is distributed around the world both in supply chain and design. Um, some of the great design teams in different segments of semiconductors are in Europe, and many of the industrial companies in Europe do their own semiconductors, so super important. Um, the predominant and and currently an EUV only lithography equipment is from Europe, so I think we have a long history of a very open design design and manufacturing ecosystem. I, I do think that there is, you know. An importance in the global nature that this business has always been, it was never just a US business that went global. It was global from day one. So I think we have to think about where the people are who do this, how, how the, you know, how it moves, how it affects every segment of the economy in all these different countries, because computing is not just about people doing office work anymore, it's how we live our lives. It's everywhere, right? So, um, I think as long as we're conscientious about open market and and how we move forward on that I think that's important. The China thing is a separate situation because China has capabilities that are self-contained and to some extent I don't know what direction that will go it, you know, I have always participated in a global market, so it's hard for me to speculate on what that would look like, but it's the US and. Um, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, European, you know, design capability for global semiconductors is profound. I mean, it is hard to imagine doing, you know, some level of networking and mobility and everything without teams in France, for example, right? Like there's just specialties around the world, Poland. Right, right, I will come to the audience for a question in just a moment. I wanna just quickly ask you to tell me, you know, does AP have a role in the Stargate project? And if so, what? Um, well, I can't comment too much on that, um, but as we said in the press release, we, we do have a role in that, so yeah. All right. All right, let's go to the audience for questions. Questions for Renee James. They're all wishing they were in semiconductors, like, really? All right, well, I have, oh yes, right here up in the front, just wait, wait for the mic to reach you. Way up here. It's on the couch. And as always, your name and who you're with when it comes to you, OK? Thank you. I'm Doctor Shiva, I bank, and like I said yesterday, we're building a data center and also I'm from Sri Lanka. I don't know whether you all know Bain graphite, the pure graphite is in Sri Lanka and only 1% is exported. And now there are people looking at graphene, which is the GPU. Uh, you know, for graphene chips, you need graphite. Is there any, you know, experiments that you are doing or what's the plan? Yeah, so we don't do base level. Um, Ampere is a fabulous semiconductor company unlike Intel. We don't do um base level metallurgic, um, material science at MPR. We do design, advanced design and IP um development, um. So I am sure there are people looking at that, but most of that work is done in process fabrication, um, in conjunction with that. So at TSMC and Intel and places like that. Yeah. We have a question. Thank you for your question. We have one right back here, yes, your name and who you're with. Uh, I like, yes a business school. So I had a question about the overall ecosystem around CPUs and GPUs. So where do you see this going? Nvidia is now very dominant in the GPUs. Um, you know, X86 is still powerful in the CPUs. Where, where do you see this in 5 years, you know, Nvidia, ARM, everything. Yeah, thanks for the question. Um, in the, in the, you know. GPUs, as you know, grew out of gaming. So a large portion of the GPU, you know, the shaders and the things you need for rendering and gaming aren't used to um train large language models. So, Um, while it's a lot of horsepower, it isn't the only way that you can do the computation required for AI. And in fact, um, as we've discussed in multiple roundtables here, um, as we go to smaller models, as we use, let me say the appropriate AI technology or machine learning technology for the job at hand, you might just run it on an enhanced CPU. In fact, that's probably the most efficient way. So all the CPUs are being enhanced with AI acceleration, and we have a product that we've talked about Ampeer1 Aurora, that actually has um the AI functionality because we have 512 cores you can put, you know, AI cores and compute cores and into that's one of the great innovations that we've been working on. Um, so I think that 5 years from now what we're going to see is a convergence of AI and compute and architecturally there's an underlying thing that is super insular, uh, Silicon Valley Wars kind of thing which is the micro architecture of computing. Will it be X86 or will it be something else? Um, Nvidia is an ARM licensee. Nvidia builds their things on ARM as well. I do think given the progress we've made and now under our new ownership that um our proposed ownership that that arm is looking like a long term it's the architecture that Apple uses they're in a licensee that Samsung uses that Qualcomm uses that Broadcom uses. And um because of the developer community being on phones, laptops, you see, you get this bulk of developers that know that environment so I, I, I think the future is relatively bright there. And of course, SoftBank owns arm. Yes, right here. Hi Seth Dober in Quantum AI and Infinity Adventures. Hi Renee. Um, so one of the biggest challenges in, in AI, especially training is not necessarily compute, it's the distance between compute and memory. Are you guys doing anything in that space? That's my favorite topic. Oh my God. See, I, yesterday at lunch I was like, I love that guy. I, uh. Yes, Seth, of course we're working on that problem that we've had for the last 30 years. Um, if it exists, if it, if it was a problem in mainframes, it's still a problem. Um, of course there's high speed memories, but one of the things, of course I, I'm not gonna reveal how we're doing it, but all of us have been working on moving memory closer, staging memories, uh, flexible different kinds of memories that you might want to put in and out depending on costs, so there's a bunch of things that we're doing to, um. Deal with moving the workload in and out more efficiently. It's not just memory, it's a lot of the die to die interconnect as well, as you know, right? So we've done a lot of innovation. We have patents in it and die to die and how you move things across, but you know, the other thing that's quite fascinating only to me but probably not the rest of this room, but maybe to you, the way you lay out the chip where you put computation versus IO actually matters because it determines some of the. Length of travel and so we've been very attentive to that as well. Thank you for your question. I feel like I saw one more. Yes, was just my memory. I wanna talk about semiconductors. Come on now. Oh yes, right up here. Oh yes, your co-host. Yes, that's right. Just wait for it right here, Maddie. Thank you. Hi Renee, Jason Del Ray from Fortune. Um, I spent a lot of time, probably too much time thinking and reporting about Amazon, and I'm curious what you see as their potential future in the chip space. Um, I know they've made a lot of investments and are you bullish, bearish on them in the future, and either way, where, where do you see them fitting in? Yeah, so, um. Thank you for that question. It's, it's Amazon uniquely has an outstanding team that they've had together for years, and one of the hallmarks of a successful semiconductors is how many generations has a team done together, and the answer to Amazon is a lot, and they also use ARM architecture and have been quite successful in building chips, as has Google, by the way, um, that are specific to the pathology. They have a really unique way of accelerating data inside their own network and they're and they have an outstanding silicon team that's been able to build, you know, really great products that for their own use. I think given you know their their might and their team and everything that they'll continue to be very successful with that strategy. I, you know, the hyper scalers have the wherewithal to. Do that kind of thing, but the other half of the market is the enterprises of the world that need to use AI that don't have it, and that's where I think, you know, commercial chips have to fill that gap and they're not all gonna build out massive Nvidia infrastructure either, right? So there's still an enormous market opportunity and let us not forget, despite the fact that we never talk about it. Pure computational data, non-AI is growing as well at a double-digit kegger. So there's kind of a, there's other stuff going on as well. Thank you. Everyone, the fantastic Renee James.

Brainstorm AI San Francisco 2024

Colin Kaepernick, Founder and CEO, Lumi; Super Bowl Quarterback, San Francisco 49ers Interviewer: Andrew Nusca, Fortune

Brainstorm AI 2024: Colin Kaepernick’s Next Revolution 

Hey Collin, how's it going? It's great. How are you? Good, good. We uh we got a lot to talk about my friend. Um So why don't you explain the origins of loom me? Because I was fascinated to find out that it's really focused around comic book, illustrators, graphic novels, things like that. And I thought Colin Kaepernick, so please indulge us. Yeah. So part of this came out of 10 years building a media company, five years building a publishing company um and seeing the challenges that creators face. But the other part was I grew up on comics. Um And we had a whole stash of comic books. We had boxes and boxes of them. Um My brother is actually the one who really got me into them. He's 10 years older than me. Um We used to have a sounds a little sketchy now, but there was a house down the couple blocks away, we ride our bikes to and the living room was just comic books. Um So we go through and grab the ones we wanted and go back home. Um But as I went deeper down creating graphic novels, being on the publishing side and seeing the challenges that creator are facing, whether it's writers, illustrators, anchor, um colorists. Uh What we found is a lot of them are living paycheck to paycheck project to project. They actually aren't creating things that they want to. Um Because they're just looking for that next gig and a lot of them have their own ideas that they want to bring to life and are just looking for the avenue and opportunity to do so. Is your company focused around the kind of creative tool and support part, the distribution part? Because that's important with publishing too, where does it come into play if you're one of those folks? Yeah, both of those. OK. Um So very focused on creating that tool set for creators to give you A I assistance where and if you need it. Um So you can go on the platform and create and never touch A I if you don't want to or you can use it through the process to help you. Um And then that is distributed directly on the platform. Um trying to solve that distribution issue that a lot of creators face. How does this company make money? Because that's the number one question when you're talking about media and publishing? Absolutely. Um So a few different ways, the first way is we do a monthly subscription. Um that's our immediate revenue generator. But as we look more broadly, we have on-demand publishing for physical publishing publishing. We've realized creators want that they need it. Um And it's a way for us to do that profitably from the first copy sold, which is a anybody that has worked in the publishing industry. Um you know, it has a very difficult space to work in and be profitable. So we solve that. And then the last piece is we help with the merchandizing of the stories that they're creating. And I've released graphic novel, multiple children's books. Um I talked to a bunch of artists around this and what we've realized a lot of them aren't merchandizing very well. And I actually didn't merchandise my own uh projects because it wasn't an easy process to be able to do that. So that's something that we're looking to solve for them as well, right? What's harder publishing for football? Depends which part. I mean, the physical tool, football definitely harder. Um figuring out how to be profitable and scale a publishing company is no small fee. Yeah. Fair, fair, fair, fair. So what is the status of Lumi right now? Where are you at in terms of a product? Where are you headed? Yeah. So right now we have a product beta testers on the platform. Um Interesting enough, we actually have contracts with school signed right now. Um And they're looking to use that as something to advance learning um project based learning to help literacy, literacy rates, um student voice, student engagement. Um So seeing a lot of traction there in use cases that they want to elevate students with. How are your uh how is your company handling? Ip we've talked about uh copyright and, and concerns about that on this stage already today. Um I think that's the big question throughout the industry, how we look at is creators own everything that they create on the platform, anything that they bring to the platform they own. We're not touching that we don't wanna touch it. We wanna be a space where creators are owning the content because that gives them longevity. And if we're serving them in the best way possible, that creates a much more reciprocal relationship. Um And it also pushes us to be the best company that we could beat for creators. Um We don't want anybody controlled or constrained by that. So that's a great point around that. If someone creates a breakout comic or graphic novel, they could take that and sell it to Netflix or Disney or any other platforms, nothing that we're doing on our end to restrict that in any way. Got it. I'm going to come to the audience for questions in just a minute. But I want to ask you one more. You've already raised funds for this company uh that took you on a, you know, the, the show uh with investors. What did you learn from that experience? Um Yeah, very similar experience to playing football. Um Oh, please go on. Yeah, so what you realize is you aren't gonna be everybody's cup of tea. Um, in football when I was getting drafted, even when I was going to college, you always looked at, it only takes one, you need one person to believe in you and then that gets the ball rolling. Um And ultimately, you want to have a chance to be in the game. We found some great investors that support us in that way. Um So any other founders or people looking to raise funds? I, you're going to get a lot of nose through that process, keep going and just look for that one person that truly believes in you and is going to support you. Yeah. All right. Let's go to the audience for questions, please. Questions for calling. Oh, yes. Right up here. Well, please wait for the uh the mic your name and who you're with when you get it. Thank you. Thank you. So, uh Lorenza Ple and I work or have worked for a while with the economist. So I think it's great what you're doing, especially uh you know, trying to help the community and to people with low resources, to create content to sell, etcetera. Um So I'm curious to, especially because I've worked for a long time, mobile apps, engagement subscriptions, etcetera. Uh Yeah, I would like to understand what do you think is the best way uh to, you know, grow your platform, but at the same time making sure that it's affordable for people uh with low resources. And uh are you partnering with any other, let's say third party companies that will help you perhaps or get them like free credits? Like, I don't know, like to publish on Amazon books or to, you know, like get some sort of partnerships with, with publications to uh yeah, help uh help those with low income. Thank you. Yeah, that's a great question. Um So that's actually part of the foundation of why we built the platform. Um So right now, subscriptions start 20 to $75 a month. So we take a tiered approach to make sure we're trying to give access to people who may be financially constrained. Um The other part to step back and look at the difference in where we're at on this is if you look at the lowest bar of where creators are typically entering a publishing space today, typically is through a Kickstarter and they're raising 5 to $10,000 to get a project off the ground. Um So we're drastically lowering that barrier. Now, if you look at projects that I've done in the past, typically, you're looking at a six figure investment and you're looking at a two plus year production timeline um before it ever sees the light of day. So we're trying to break down both the expense and the speed of creation for creators to be able to get their ideas out into the world. Right on another question for Colin, please. Yes. Right up here in the front. Hey, Steven Steven Wolf Beta. I'm the CEO of AL Fund company. But before that I started a kids media company focused on diverse kids media called Nandos. And one of the great areas for creators to really monetize their I pe is actually with merchandizing. Do you envision the platform actually expanding into products and giving the ability to actually have storefronts? Um Just because there's so much more to just the content, it's actually all the merchandise. 1 1000% you are, you are dead on with how we are thinking about it. Um No, one of the things that we realize is the people who are consuming the content, the people who are buying the books are also the people that are most likely to buy the merchandise, like it's a natural progression. Um Most people aren't doing it. Um And the ones who are actually, they don't love the process of doing it. They just do it as a means to an end. Um So we want to help simplify that process all the way through for the creator from creation, taking that idea to a finished product, to the publishing, to the merchandizing. So one, they can create the things they actually want to. And two, they don't have to worry about the being the business owner, the operator handling all the logistics. Um Every creator we've talked to they're like, I just want to create, I don't want to do those things, but a lot of them end up doing it because they have to today and those are barriers that we can break down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. II, I understand that mindset very well. Let me ask you a question. Colin um, you know, you've gone on this, uh, this journey po you know, post, post football every morning, by the way, you still training, of course, OK. You heard it here. He's still training. I was, I was training before I got on my flight to come out here. Now you're making me feel bad. OK. So, so, II I would love to understand, you know, who you see as a mentor for this part of your career, whether that's in Silicon Valley or somewhere else. That's a great question. Um I think there have been a few different people that have really helped me get to where I'm at today. Um One has been in the VC community, Ben Horowitz has been great person to lean on. It's given me phenomenal insight. Um Williams has been another one who has really helped me my thinking. Um Having the opportunity to sit on the board of medium has been incredibly insightful and very helpful for my own development. Um And the other one just thinking about where I'm at today is Alexis Christina, the 776 team um who is our lead investors. They're incredibly brilliant and also great people. Um so to be able to have them to lean on and ask for guidance. Um And also just pick their brains on things that we're working on. Um how we can scale things more effectively, how we can reach, reach creators more effectively. Um Especially when you have someone like Alexis who's built reddit. Um You know, you have a great person to be able to lean on in that regard and an enthusiastic one. All right. Well, let's go for one, one more question. I think there was one over here, but I cannot recall. Oh, it's way over here. Yes. Hey, Carol. Hi, I'm Carol Vanda. I chair um responsible A I for Mars Incorporated. But outside of that, I'm actually an author. So I have a question because I know a lot of authors have negative feelings when it comes to A I, they feel that it's stealing their copyright, their IP how do you overcome those objections to launch Loy? And thanks for your great work. Oh, of course. Um Phenomenal question. And we have talked to a lot of writers about it. Um I think one is understanding that A I isn't going to do the work for you. Um Two is understanding that most of the writers are already using A I, they just don't know it as A I, um we talked to a lot of writers that hesitant, they wanted to see the platform, what it was um as we talked to them and they showed us their workflow, most of them are using grammarly um and the A I in their workflow already then as we get them on the platform and they see how it actually works and how we're looking to engage with them. Um We aren't looking to do the work for them and we're looking to be there to be helpful in that process if they need help brainstorming ideas, if they're struggling and, you know, they hit writer's block and they're looking for, where can I go with this? Where can I take it? Um So we're looking to help them through that process, but they also have the opportunity to use it as much or as little as they want. And that's one of the things that was really important for us. Um, both on the writers and the illustrator side is making sure that they have the opportunity to opt out if they want to, um, or engage when they do want to. Fantastic Colin, thank you so much for joining Fortune Brainstorm A I Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Ok.

Brainstorm Design 2024

Bob Dennis, Senior Director of Creative Studio & Resort Development, Universal Beijing Resort, In conversation with Nicholas Gordon, Editor, Asia Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: Designing Memories

Bob Dennis, Senior Director of Creative Studio & Resort Development, Universal Beijing Resort, In conversation with Nicholas Gordon, Editor, Asia FORTUNE  

So I thought there would be a fireplace. Uh Fortune invited me to a fireside chat. So I thought there would be a fireplace. But we brought is, is how is is wordplay part of your tool kit for memorable experiences. Yeah, it's immersion. Don't you feel cozy? So we're, we're going to get into your thoughts on park design, how to build immersive experiences, how to leverage emotions. But I have to ask, I'm a fervent player of video games. What was it like for Universal to work with Nintendo? Oh Amazing. First of all, Miyamoto. So is a genius and uh it's a learning curve for both of us. Uh because in the world of video games, it's digital and our world is physical with steel and concrete. Um So it's a learning curve on both sides but an amazing partnership. So, so as mentioned, you know, you've worked in this space for over 30 years. I believe your first gig was working for a San Rio theme park back in 1988. How has theme park design changed over the decades? Well, I'm old. So um when we were designing theme parks back in the eighties we didn't have any computers, we didn't have computer assisted design. It was all done with a pencil and then ink and then of course you pulled your prints. Um But everything was exhibition then and the industry has changed so much that now it's immersion. Um And we're getting better and better at that, but we've been doing immersion since before the term was even coined. So, I mean, let's split at that. I mean, given your long experience kind of working with immersive experiences, you know, before, was a buzzword that people used. You know, how do you actually create such an immersive memorable experience? What's your toolkit? And I believe we have some slides, maybe even some audience engagement a little bit as we go through this. So I think the table stakes because of where we are, it's a good reference. The table stakes are excellent storytelling and of course, um you'll hear this often today. Um visual stimulation, sensory input. So you need a, you need a beautiful picture, but you also need a logical story that the guests can connect to and find their place in what it is that you're trying to present. So that's cable stakes and where you have to go further is you have to, you want people to connect to the story you have and most people forget about emotion. So every memorable experience can be done by senses here in Macau, you get a sense of awe, a sense of grandeur. But what's missing to make it an episodal autobiographical memory is emotion. So the best connection is always made through emotions and often people confuse feelings with emotions. So there's a million colors and everything that we do happens here, it happens inside the brain, regardless of how good your design is or how grand your experience is, all of it has to be encoded so that we have an experience without the memory. What's the point? Right? So most people don't realize that with three colors, you can make a million, a million different colors with eight basic emotions. You can also make a million different feelings. And it's very important to understand the difference between emotions and feelings. OK? Can you guys guess what this emotion is? We don't need mics, you can just yell it out just fine play along, right? So this is obviously joy. I created these images um to trick you in a minute. Um But yeah, these are facial expressions uh that evoke that particular chemistry happening in your limbic system. So you understand joy, the opposite of joy. Of course, the next one, sadness, right? And after sadness, I'll, I'll see if you can guess this one. This is the trick. Most of you are thinking love, however, love is not an emotion. Love is a feeling that is a combination of several emotions. It could be joy, sadness, disgust, right? And um these all come together in a symphony inside our brain that we equate with the feeling of love. So it's trust, trust is the emotion. This one is a good one discussed, right? This is baked into our limbic system for your survival. Um And so memories that are formed along with this emotion are deeply encoded anger when we have a perceived wrong. Um These also are strongly recorded, not as moments but as experiences. So they're, they're like little videos instead of a snapshot. If somebody makes you afraid, you will retell this experience over and over again in great detail. OK? Anybody anger, right? Same process. So every oh they made me so mad and then they'll tell you every little detail because it's been recorded as an autobiographical memory. It was, it was an experience. OK? This one, this one, Alfred Hitchcock was a master at this. We use it often too um anticipation. And then finally, uh this is where you take your redirect. So if you use the emotion of anticipation, the brain starts creating all kinds of scenarios on its own and it engages deeply in the frontal cortex. And what this does is creates more engagement and people are doing their own self reflection. And then of course, you do the redirect, you take them into a way that they did not expect the outcome to be and we get surprised. So we have these eight emotions then how are you kind of putting them all together? And leverage them into a memorable experience. I mean, some of these emotions make sense for a theme park setting, joy, surprise anticipation, even fear, some feel a little bit, you know, maybe not quite as easy to put into an entertainment setting like discussed. So how are you leveraging all of these emotions together to kind of tell a story in the real world? It's a good point. So you don't want to manipulate people and you don't want to use uh emotions as trickery. So it has to be authentic. And so I think most designers forget about engineering those emotions in putting together a recipe or a symphony that causes crescendos and date crescendos. And that, that working together engages the person into a story and they, they're all useful, but some, we use more than others, obviously joy. Um There's a great one, anticipation. We try to stay away from fear and disgust, but they're used, we, we do use them. Um I want you to dive a bit deeper about kind of adapting these ideas, you know, a lot of universal zone properties, the properties of your partners like Warner for Harry Potter or Nintendo. These are things that exist on the page or on the screen. They don't exist in the real world. You know, as much as some of us would love magic to exist in the real world. It, it it doesn't. But how do you take these things that only exist? You know, in fiction basically and make them work as a real world experience. So this is why I'm losing my hair. Um So our, our creatives um Miyamoto Song JK Rowling, um They're amazing at creating worlds in print or production designers like Stuart Craig for film and they can pretty much create anything that they can imagine. So our job is to take that world and those stories and connect our guests to those characters. But we have to do it with steel and concrete building codes, safety requirements, throughput, operability. Um Basically, we shouldn't do anything because it's almost impossible. And yet we have many parts around the world that do just that. So um it, it's very difficult to, to translate, but we're very fortunate because we work with our IP partners and the films are there, we only get three or four minutes to, to kind of get people through that experience. Um And so we do a lot of callbacks, a lot of bringing up things that they saw or remembered in the film. And we have to do that in a way they can touch it. So a gag has to work every time, every day for years, not just to catch it, capture it on film. So I would say we use all the sciences um and all the arts and that our attractions are some of the most sophisticated machines there are. And I think that when you go to a theme Park. We don't want you to know that we try to keep that secret, but it's a fact. Um I want to stick on this film point for a second and how it connects particularly to one memory I have of going to Universal Studios, Japan when I was a very small child. I still remember seeing the Water World Exhibit for those who don't know. Water World is a 1995 film starring Kevin Costner. Um I'll say reactions to the film were mixed and being charitable. Um But I dare say the attraction is more, is, is, is more famous than the film at this point. Um It's in, it's in many of um universal parks. Um And so kind of why do you think this attraction in particular is so popular? And how does it fit in your philosophy for immersion and experience? We actually have some video that you can have talked for a bit first. It's a very good example. So the film mixed reviews on the film II, I don't think it was a blockbuster. Um But we were able to take uh from that film and use the emotions that are created by it and do a stunt spectacular. So not only was it visual, which is great and great sound and great lighting and great special effects, but everything is real. We don't use projections, there's real flames, we set the entire lagoon on fire and you will feel the heat from that and you will get wet. Um But in the story itself, we also engage many of the emotions, you may be angry at the villain. Um You feel some joy. So I think that the theme park experience in this example um has outlived the film and we're gonna show a little bit of it what actually happens on screen. Um So I want to talk about kind of another stakeholder in this discussion. We've talked about designers universal, we've talked about it partners, but there's also the fans um these are worlds with uh I'm going to call them very devoted fan bases, very passionate fan bases. That's true of Harry Potter. It's true of Nintendo, it's true of your um your peers at Disney, you have to work in Star Wars. Fans are passionate, they are also a little nuts. Um And so how do you kind of design these experiences in a way to kind of give fans what they want to make it memorable for them, but also managing expectations and managing it for those who maybe haven't read every single book a dozen times. So I think as designers, we often get caught up in our own story and um we, we wanna engage our visitors to remember what they want to experience. So at Universal, we really believe our guests are co creators. We engage often and constantly with those, not just the deep fans, but with uh the people that may not be deep fans, it's very important to get that feedback so that you're telling the story that they can get, that you're telling the story that they want to experience and that you don't get too stuck in what you want. Um So it has to be more objective, a little less subjective and constantly engaging with the feedback from the fans and we love hearing from them. Um And you're right, some of them are a little crazy, but we love that kind of crazy. Um You know, just kind of, it's gonna bring a kind of more examples of rides we've worked on. I mean, what's maybe another one of these exciting rides that you've worked on that really kind of shows your philosophy on, on designing immersive and memorable experiences. So the the awards are, are Industry's Oscars and we received it last year for Jurassic World Adventure. You all have to come to Beijing. That's the only place that attraction exists right now and that I believe really checks all the boxes on visual stimulation, um experiential design, but more importantly, emotion. So I remember when we opened, uh there was a 12 year old boy that was a guest of a friend of mine. And after going on that attraction, he asked me quite seriously, uh what do we feed our dinosaurs, right? So, so that type of sense, the suspension of disbelief um can only be found in, in, in the major players in this and that was why that is my favorite. I'm going to have to find an excuse to go find a story to write about it and then get work to expense it. Um But thank you Bob for, for walking us through the toolkit on how you build immersive experiences at universal. We're going to take a short break right now. Please help yourself to coffee, which will be served right outside the ballroom. Don't forget to pick up a copy of Gensler's design forecast 2025 report available at the desk on a first come first serve basis. So grab your copy. Now we'll meet back here for our next conversation promptly at 1045. When we come back, we'll hear from two of Silicon Valley's leading industrial designers and a panel of accomplished design leaders on customer experience. We'll see you back here soon.

Fortune Global Forum 2024

Abby Joseph Cohen, Professor of Business, Columbia University Graduate School of Business
Gary Cohn, Vice Chairman, IBM; Former Director, U.S. National Economic Council
Lynn Martin, President, NYSE Group
In conversation with: Diane Brady, Executive Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media and Co-Chair Fortune Global Forum

Fortune Global Forum 2024: Business at the Speed Of Change

Photograph by Michael O’Shea for Fortune

Abby Joseph Cohen, Columbia University Graduate School of Business
Gary Cohn, U.S. National Economic Council
Lynn Martin, NYSE Group
Diane Brady, Fortune Live Media and Co-Chair Fortune Global Forum

Most Powerful Women Summit 2024

Get to know the attendees of the Most Powerful Women Summit 2024

Most Powerful Women Summit 2024: Welcome And The Big Get-To-Know-You

Impact Initiative 2024

Debbie Dyson, Chief Executive Officer, OneTen Zakiya Carr Johnson, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, US State Department Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., SHRM-SCP, President and CEO, SHRM Moderator: Phil Wahba, Senior Writer, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Impact Initiative

Impact Initiative 2024: DEIA's Next Act

Photography by Rebecca Greenfield/Fortune

Debbie Dyson, OneTen, Zakiya Carr Johnson, US State Department, Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., SHRM-SCP, SHRM, Phil Wahba, FORTUNE

COO Summit 2024

Leslie Motter, Chief Executive Officer, Make-A-Wish America
Jessica Orkin, Chief Executive Officer, SYPartners
Moderator: Lila MacLellan, Senior Writer, Fortune; Co-chair, Fortune COO Summit

COO Summit 2024: Closing The Say-Do Gap - Executing On Purpose

Um I have to say as a journalist, I have mixed feelings about this topic because this is our bread and butter finding the places where companies are not doing the thing that they say they're all about, right? They have a lofty purpose, but that's not what they're executing on. But I know this is a problem. We need to learn how to close it. So I just wonder if you can talk to me, Jessica a little bit about the, the say do gaps that you've seen out there in the wild when you with your clients and how they come about? Sure. Um So at the highest level, every single company in here, all of your leaders, all of you, you have a purpose, probably a purpose statement. Um You probably have cascaded that then into what is your strategy? What are your key priorities, etcetera. Um This is the work that Xy partners does uh with our clients all around the world. The heartbreak and the um disappearance of trust happens when that does not translate into the lived experience of all of your employees, of your customers. And so it's one thing to go out and say in big beautiful language. Um the change that you're seeking to create in the world, the impact that you're seeking to deliver. Um But if the day to day realities don't express that um you lose credibility and this is an economy that is run on trust and the weakening and erosion of trust is affecting all of our businesses for profit and not for profit. Uh And we work with both the how of connecting those two things is something that we can get into through this conversation. Great. Thank you. Um And Leslie, I know that you are in the nonprofit world right now, but you had for profit experience, especially at American Express. What in this room full of coo s what advice do you have from a company that's all about executing on purpose? What can they take away from the nonprofit world? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the purpose at where I am now make a wish is very clear. We are creating a life changing wishes for Children with critical illness that is very clear purpose and one that so many rally around whether it's our own employees, our partners, et cetera. And it is so critical. I think that the beauty is though we have the same capability, whether we're with a for profit or a nonprofit. As you mentioned, I spent 11 years with American Express previous to this role with make a wish and we absolutely had just as strong of a purpose about being the world's most respected service provider or service brand. And as part of that, we've tried to make sure that resonated with our employees. And that's really the key, whether it's for profit or nonprofit is having that employee engagement aspect of the brand. So I ran the largest service center at American Express at the time, we had about 3500 employees and it was making sure that every single employee felt that every day they came to work. It was about providing exceptional customer service, not just answering the phone. Great. Thank you. Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about like how the gap actually erupts if you've ever if you have a way of pinpointing that and if you have any examples from your own companies about gaps that you discovered and how you managed it sometimes strategy gets well ahead of the operational realities. So I think we've been talking about actually in some previous sessions about you're really working on two time scales, you're working in the far future in the transformation that you're trying to drive through your company. But then you're working the absolute day to day and the day to day is built on legacy systems. And so no matter how fast and how agile our companies can be, there is going to be a gap between those two. Um A lot of times, front line workers, baristas we've worked with Starbucks, um starting with Howard in 2008. Um, through to the present, you can have a disconnect between what the company both stands for its values, the strategy of where it's going. It's very bold vision and then actually being able to innovate and update the operational systems, the processes, the ways of working that cascade through the whole organization and touch both your front line employees and then your customers. Right? Ok. Yeah, it's interesting, you mentioned Starbucks because recently they hired a CEO who's going to commute by jet, not every day, but people are pretty upset about that because Starbucks is also talking about part of its purpose being green, right? Um In the audience, please, um be thinking about any questions you might have for our panelists. I'll come back to you in just a few minutes. Um Have you found any examples that make a witch where you had, you discovered a gap in your purpose and what, how you were executing and what have you done to really drive home purpose for your employees? I think, um we also have a very bold vision to reach every eligible child, which we're not doing currently. So in order to do that, I think one of the things that we've been really focused on the last few years is making sure we have engaged employees because it's so important to where we're going. And one of the I guess gaps, um I would say is that our internal culture did not match the power of our brand externally. I mean, you talk to anyone about make a wish and you get the, oh my gosh. And you get the, it's, it's about community and support and lifting each other up, etcetera. And so we've been very intentional the last couple of years about making sure our internal culture is raised to really match the power of our brand externally. And if we get there, we're gonna be unstoppable, having every employee feel that way about coming to work every day. And it's important, I mean, I hire technology folks, finance folks operations. So it's not necessarily, I mean, it's, it's a competitive skill set, whether they could go somewhere else and make more money. So making sure that they have that power of being connected to the ultimate mission of the organization. And then they feel that every day is so important. Do they have an opportunity to meet some of the, the people, the Children or the parents who are? That's a great question and that, and that's one of the things that we found. So, you know, as we have people working in it behind the scenes, they could feel very disconnected from the mission. And that is um one of the things I talk about about bringing the power of the brand externally internally is exactly that. So we now have things like mission moments where we start meetings with an actual make a wish that has occurred. So regardless of where you are in the organization, wherever you're sitting, because we're also remote as well. You feel connected to ultimately what your position is and how it's so impactful in the world. Great. Um Those, yeah, that sounds lovely. Actually, I wish we could have mission moments right here. Um Is there anybody in the audience who would like to ask a question? You can raise your hand and yes in the back, sir. Good morning. My name is Martin Vanneman. I'm joining you from New York City. Question to three of you and everybody. How are you on tiktok? Sorry, on Tik Tok. How are your thoughts on Tik Tok? Uh Interesting. Now, do you use Tik Tok as part of your strategy, either with your employees or with your customers? Not with our employees? And really for us, uh the Tik Tok is much more organic as Children are having wishes or waiting for wishes, etcetera where uh we really utilize both Insta and um and other channels much more from that perspective. But we're out there, we're pretty much everywhere with the reach that we have and especially with our demo demographic. We serve Children ages 2.5 to 18 and they are all over it. And then you think about the 20,000 volunteers we have across the US and all of the employees, et cetera. It's happening organically, but Insta is really where we're targeting more with our corporate partners like a Disney fanatics, et cetera. We don't, we're a very quiet brand, uh very quiet company. We work with many people and companies in this room, but you might not know it. Um because what we do is so kind of precious and needs to be quiet in terms of the transformation that we're doing. If what you're talking about is sometimes what's under that question is sometimes a disconnect um between what a company stands for and how it's showing up in the world. Um There also needs to be some communication with your employees about where and why there might be disconnect. So it's actually something to lean into versus to pretend it's not going on. Um Rena Moskowitz, who is the coo and CMO of Etsy and she speaks a lot about this. Um She was telling me that the combination of those two things, both being the chief operating officer, but then really being responsible for the communications. Um And the marketing of the organization is a shift she's seeing uh generally with the CEO role you're becoming in many ways, one of the primary ambassadors champions and communicators, um which is maybe a shift from the deep, deep technical expertise uh that was driving the coo role in the past. So, so interesting because I know there was a study out of Paris that found executives are, you know, have no problem sort of describing what a company's purpose is, but as you went lower and, you know, down into the ranks of the company, it was much harder, like 60% of employees can't explain what a company's purpose is, which is way too low. So, um I imagine also that during a time of crisis, it would be very easy for a coo to drop purpose or to not keep their eye on that aspect of a job of the job. How do you maintain it? Um when there's a lot of financial pressure. So I actually was the coo of make a wish prior to moving into the CEO position. And I held that role during quite a few um the pandemic being one of them, uh quite a few of, of um those crisis if you will. And I think it's actually more important than, than ever to make sure that you're making that link for all of your employees. Um We had to actually have some pretty major transformation during that time. Uh Previously, we had a couple of volunteers that went into the home of each child and helped discover their wish, et cetera. We really had to transform overnight because we were not able to do that anymore. And we still wanted to find creative ways to deliver these life changing wishes to Children when they it most. And so that really took the engagement of all of our stakeholders to think creatively about what we could do. So if we weren't really tying into the overall purpose, it would have been, it would have been a completely different, I think, experience. But we were able to transform both the way that we delivered wishes, virtually, wish discovery et cetera as well as the way. Um you know, many of our stars interacted with Children since they weren't having concerts, they could do video wishes, et cetera. So that transformation during that time and of crisis only beca came because we were tying back to the purpose and how do we still maintain what we're doing and what's so important to do during this time? That's great. One of those silver lining stories in the pandemic. Um And how do you track whether or not a gap is opening or whether or not you've maintained that closure between the say do gap. Um Jessica. Sure. So one of the things we do a lot of is um actually looking at the incentive systems of your organizations. Um So again, how do you tie the big picture purpose into strategy? Bold moves focus areas and then Kpis or metrics that ladder out from that. But there's a step deeper which is looking at how are your people actually incentivized? Are you valuing through actual performance reviews, career progression, mentorship compensation. Are you valuing in actuality, the things that you say you value up top? Um And again, legacy systems, sometimes you crash into legacy performance systems, operational models, et cetera? That were wired for a different time. And so you have to do the work of actually bringing those into alignment. And then to your point about communicating your purpose, understanding your purpose, identifying some of those really operational changes as an expression of purpose and then how it ties back up. So that might include compensation. Yeah, the company. Yeah. Yeah, we've done our own work on this at Syp. So um our purpose is to unlock collective potential to build more vital futures. The collective potential is really important. Um in your organizations, there's so much potential uh held by teams and larger groups, but it's stuck because of many, many issues, many reasons. We all know it and we crash into them. Um within SYP, we do all of our work by bringing different people together with different disciplines. So we have strategists and analysts and tech people, but we have designers, we have filmmakers, we have people from real anthropologists, right? And so what we were realizing was because the market values different skills and different roles differently. So somebody with an MB A, somebody who has a deep strategy background often gets paid more than, let's say a designer, we had that gap in our organization as well because we were looking out at what the market was telling us that did not align with our own values. And so we did a full compensation philosophy overhaul. We changed how we pay people and how we um communicate our values uh to everybody in the organization, how did people react just quickly? You know, it took a lot of communication because on the one hand, um some people really felt seen for the first time. Um and it was a very practical example um of putting your purpose into action. Um But for other people, because they're so used to how the market rewards you, right? It took a little bit of time to get their head around it. And so again, consistent communications, the drumbeat of why we do what we do is so critical. Thank you so much. This is some great practical tips. It's really lovely to have you both. Thank you and thank you for the question.

Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024

Torrey SMITH, Co-founder and CEO, Endiatx Moderator: Ellie AUSTIN, FORTUNE

Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024: Swallow This! The Transformative Power Of AI-Enabled Micro-Robotics In the Human Body

Brainstorm AI 2024: The Transformative Power Of AI-Enabled Micro-Robotics In the Human Body

So as I said, we're talking about micro robots here that are ingested into the body that in itself poses a lot of questions. It sounds a bit like a science fiction film, which is both a source of fascination. But also I think for many people probably in here a source of skepticism. So if we could start off by you explaining to me briefly why you think pill bot is more effective than the traditional endoscopy? Well, thank you. Our hope is that with little tiny robots that can swim around in the body, you can actually supplant or augment the existing tech that's out there. I'd, I'd like to think that pill bot could be a little scout to go out and find illness out in the world and then bring that illness into a hospital to treat properly. Ok. Ok. So it's, it's speeding up the process that it's making it more efficient. Um Looking at your website, the pil bot team, it's made up of a lot of engineers. Now, some people might expect there to be doctors, scientists on your core team. Can you explain to me why that isn't the case and where the medical expertise comes from in this process. Well, so besides a group of almost 20 deep tech engineers, we actually have leading gastroenterologists from all over the planet that have joined the company and many of them have even stepped up and invested and put their, put their names on the line. And are they part of the team or are they an advisory panel? What's the structure? Well, we're very proud to count Vivek Kumari, a leading gastroenterologist as one of our co founders and a very close friend. OK. OK. So some people here in the room are going, I would imagine the draw comparisons to something like Elizabeth Holmes and the an of scandal in that this is an outlandish idea that promises to transform the healthcare industry. Some might say it's too good to be true and we're going to see the technology demonstrated in a minute. I mentioned that you're in the process of seeking FDA approval. How else are you going to legitimized pillow within the scientific and the medical community to silence those skeptics? Well, the key here is just uh putting a robot where our mouth is, right? If we can create a technology that lets a doctor have a look around inside you to the point where it's maybe a little bit more inexpensive or a little bit more accessible. And if doctors start to say we'd like to use this in our actual patients, then we're starting to do our job. But until we get to the point where doctors are demanding to use pill bot, you know, it really is just a R and D project, but we're excited to show it off right here. So you can kind of start to judge for yourself. So it's word of mouth. Obviously, that's the FDA component is that also going to be peer reviewed research. How does that side of things work? Actually, that's been one of the things that's helping us most of all uh attract brilliant doctors is uh to be honest, uh everyone wants to publish on til bot. It's an exciting new platform that can open up all all sorts of new research avenues. And so people are actually realizing that uh you know, joining the team and, and getting a hold of the robots could actually help them in their, their academic career as well. And are people publishing? I know PBO? Yeah, it hasn't featured hugely in the mainstream press. But if we're looking at the scholarly academic side of things, kind of what level of publication has that been so far around Pil Bot, the biggest publication so far that's coming is that we have officially done our first patients uh in Auckland, New Zealand uh in our IRB uh clinical trials. And we're actually starting to see Pil bot do some clinical work, but of course, that's just uh under, under under active progress right now, trial gets complete, will basically bring all that data together and we can think about publishing. Ok. So nascent, but you're looking to have more data in the future. For sure. My final question before this part of the session is so pilot or your, your company has raised $7.5 million I believe in funding since it was founded in 2019. And it's worth noting that 1.5 million of that dollars, um 1.5 million of those dollars comes from the Singapore based Virge Tech Health Fund. Um 7.5 million. It's a good amount. It's not a huge amount. And I imagine that this is deeply expensive technology to develop. So where's the rest of the money going to come from? Well, we're obviously excited to continue that adventure. You can always do things with new amounts of funding. But the thing that we're really proud of is with the support of Verge Health tech funds here in Singapore and the support of some of the most passionate deep tech engineers in Silicon Valley. And, and actually beyond, we've been able to make some magic happen using pretty limited resources. But when we show you the robot today, you'll see that it's not perfect that you'll definitely see opportunities for it to improve. And that's kind of where the next rounds of funding might be able to help us. Ok. So you're going to continue pitching right on that note, I know you've got a couple of slides to show us to uh to explain in a bit more depth how the robot works. So take it away. Yeah. So let's just briefly look at a robot and we'll start to ask ourselves, you know, if we go back in time, you know, the way that you would get data uh from someone's health inside the human body, um was very difficult, you could cut into the body, you could slide a tube into the body. But in a hospital and we're asking ourselves, could we potentially have microscopic robots travel throughout your body? Not only finding out what's wrong, but maybe actually starting to fix it. So that's the adventure we'd like to go on today and we'll have to acknowledge that it's a difficult challenge. But where we're going to begin is the human stomach. Because in the human stomach, we have this unique opportunity for a robot that is maybe not microscopic. This is the size of your fingertip. But pill bot contains a live video, three dimensional motion with pump jets. If you're willing to drink some water, you can get some motion um and the ability to control it in XY and Z. And so the goal here is to basically show there's a part of the body that we can actually send a robot to right now. The stomach, we can probably do an amazing block of work there. Then where do we go next? And so you'll see right here is kind of where we are in the current process of miniaturization. I want these to be rice brain size. I want to do brain surgery with it. Um So looking inside till bot, you'll see a pretty elegant combination of pump jet motors, really high powered lithium batteries that we work really carefully to make safe live video, right? A lot of the stuff you would see in a drone. But the reason that we're doing these robots is that they give us the data, right? Data is how we understand what's wrong data is how we train up A I. And from here, there's a bright future for this. But you know, let's start to talk about what we can actually do with uh one of these. So OK, this, this is pill bot and I need to turn this thing on and if I'm gonna turn this thing on, I'm gonna need my chief engineer Quentin to come out here, Quentin. Let's bring this thing to life. OK. So, and Tori and Quentin, I need you to talk us through what you're doing here at. So Quinton is using an optical signal, a bright light to wake til bot up, it's been sleeping. And so now you'll see til bot um start to uh swim around. He just got some water into the thruster lumen. So we don't get vapor locked. And what we have here is basically a swimming little drone. And can I just highlight how Quentin is controlling it. He's using what looks like an Xbox controller. Yeah, we, we find that a lot of younger gastroenterologists really understand the value proposition. Um, but basically what we're doing here is we're saying, let's make a swimming robot. Let's call it a little eyeball. Let's drink some water. Let's swallow the robot. And let's take a procedure that would be done in a hospital after several physical hospital visits. Let's take that whole adventure and let's digitize it. Let's turn it into a telemedicine, call it home. Let's let a I do some of the boring work for us. So this is about accessibility. How much does a pill boat cost? So cost of goods uh can often hover around 35 to 50 bucks, right? It's a relatively inexpensive physical article. All of the value is in the hard work that miniaturized it and in the data that comes off of the robot. But if we can't make it inexpensive to build, then there's no way we're going to get it out into the world and actually go find problems. What do you expect it to cost when it comes to market? Um In the US market, it'll be a couple of $100 just like a normal pill camera. But if we're going to take it to Asia and beyond, um honestly, I envision a future where these would cost maybe 10 or $15 or maybe even less, but you'd have hundreds of millions of people accessing this kind of care. But the amazing thing is that while we're doing that, the health data that would come off a platform like that would be incredibly valuable. OK? Um So Tori, I believe you are not going to swallow pill bot. I, you know, honestly, we came all this way. I think we might as well might as well go ahead and swallow. It would be rude not to. Ok. So you're, you're gulping down a glass of water to prepare your stomach. I imagine I need a little fish tank in my tongue. You need a fish tank in your stomach. Ok? And for context, Tori told me earlier, this is the 45th pill box that he has swallowed in his lifetime to date. It's, it's a lot of fun. We really enjoy this process. Ok? Perfect. And for those who can't see, I was like, oh wow. More. Ok. I would say the pill bot looks like the size of a pretty large multivitamin. Um It's, it's not small, it's not a small robot. In fact, it's probably just about the biggest thing that someone could ever reasonably swallow. And even maybe half of people might not be able to do it. But the thing that bugs me is that we transact as much as $55 billion every year in the old way of how we do endoscopies. But that only reaches 1% of stomachs and So we're, we're really not reaching people where we need to reach them. And what do you think? Should we uh go ahead, we get you guys. OK. All right. So Quinton is gonna hand me this guy and uh let's uh let's do it. I'll get it nice and wet and uh hopefully let's get a live video up on the screen. Here we see. Oh, here we go. There we go. OK. So you can see. Oh, and I need the uh antenna a little bit closer to my tummy. There we go. So hopefully you can see me. You can all see yourselves. And now let's go ahead and swallow pills out. All right. So let's have a look at my stomach. I've been starving all day. Ok? I can whip it around a little bit and then the hope is that we'll sort of break into the bottom of the stomach and you'll kind of see what's going on. There we go. So, the idea here is we want to make sure that you can quickly and easily give a gastroenterologist a live view inside the stomach and the ability to move around. I want this to be like the tip of an endoscope, but just in virtual form. Ok. Um Here we go, we're traveling through your intestine. Um Tori if how are you feeling, first of all? So sometimes I'll feel it when I swallow it. But honestly, once, once I swallow it, that's OK. I think we're gonna cut the video now because that's enough intestines for one day. But Tory, I, I've just got a few questions like quick fire questions that I want to ask you as, as we come to a close. Um, is there anyone who can't take pillow? I'm thinking pregnant women, Children. Well, right now, the, the weird thing is if you're like a child or a cancer patient, you'll have a really delicate G I tract and inserting an endoscope is actually kind of traumatic. And so if we can make it maybe a little smaller, so it would be appropriate for a kid. You might actually be opening up treatment avenues for people that are actually kind of prohibited from them. Ok. And you said that you mentioned this, all that some people call it. The what happens that? Well, we have been swallowing camera pills that don't move but still contain many of the components. We just saw, uh for more than 25 years. And during that time, we've learned how to do it safely and we've also learned that maybe one in five, maybe one in 10 people are going to have trouble swallowing a camera pill. So for us, even if we make it the same exact size and shape, we're going to be missing out on maybe 10, maybe 20% of the population. The thing is though those camera pills because they don't move, they only address about 1% of the population, you can't use them on everyone. And so we're actually talking about going from addressing 1% of people to maybe 80 or 90% of people by making it a virtual experience. And worst case scenario, pill goes rogue within, you know, what, what are the potential health dangers as a result of that happening? Because as incredible as it sounds, we're putting a small drone into the human body and that must come with risks. Well, we had a, we had a pretty amazing uh chat with FDA back in December and they sat us down and the thing that was really thrilling was to hear enthusiasm coming from the biomedical engineers over at FDA, from the regulatory bodies, from the doctors working with them. And they said honestly, this is tech that everyone is kind of hoping for and we want to sit down with your team and figure out how do we do it safely? How do we do it? Right. And what were they concerned about the FDA when you spoke to them? We were concerned about the fact that we use lithium batteries and we were curious if the FDA would be willing to even entertain the conversation. And they actually said, absolutely, sit down. Let's go over your engineering plans. Let's see how you test these batteries. Let's see what happens when a battery fails. Can you contain it? And so far it looks like we're actually on track to being able to turn this into a safe platform. Ok. There's so many more questions I have Pretoria, I'm sure you have Pretoria as well. But thankfully, he will be sticking around for the next two days. So please do feel free to find some at a coffee break, flag him down and continue the conversation because this, as I said is quite an outlandish idea. Thank you for demonstrating it to us today and I look forward to seeing what happens next and thank you so much. Thank you.

Brainstorm Tech 2024

Aicha Evans, Chief Executive Officer, Zoox Interviewer: Emma Hinchliffe, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Making The Robotaxi A Practical Reality

Brainstorm Health 2024

Cathy Friedman, Executive Venture Partner, GV (Google Ventures)  Alyssa Jaffee, Partner, 7wireVentures  Anarghya Vardhana, General Partner, Maveron  Moderator: Andrew Nusca, Editorial Director, Fortune

Brainstorm Health 2024: Building Resilient Healthcare Companies

Cathy Friedman, Executive Venture Partner, GV (Google Ventures)  Alyssa Jaffee, Partner, 7wireVentures  Anarghya Vardhana, General Partner, Maveron, Andrew Nusca, Editorial Director, Fortune

Hey, everybody. How are we doing? All right, we've got a great, a great session in store here. Um I want to start off by reading something that I was reading in a report uh from last year, so much has changed since last year, but it was a report last year about kind of the market conditions. It was, it's hard not to have a glass half empty view of the health tech market. Uh The reasons were that the public market markets were underwhelming. Uh that venture capital funding uh had been down since about 2021. Um It is however way up from a decade ago, I want to just say that um now we have lots of macroeconomic anxiety, soft landing versus hard interest rate cuts. A few, many, nobody knows what's going on. So I want to ask, are you feeling optimistic or are you feeling cautious? I am feeling optimistic. Uh And the reason I'm feeling optimistic is that there are a ton of great technologies and companies out there that need to be financed because they're meeting unmet needs for patients. Um And at our fund, we have a really long term view and I think if you have a long term view, these needs need to be met. There's money to be made and patience to be served here. So I am optimistic. I'm so sad to hear that people are feeling that the glass is half empty because while the heyday of the pandemic is over, what came out of Pandora's box was the consumer empowerment that we've all been craving in health care. So we're all looking to become better stewards of our health, right? Patients are people that have things done to them and consumers are active stewards of their health. More companies are getting funded today. The bar to start a company is lower. And so we're seeing innovation come in health care that we've never seen before. So while the funding markets may tell one story, the actual um capabilities of these businesses, the commercial traction they're getting from health plans, from health systems, from Pharma orgs Employers is beyond. I think what any of us thought could happen five years ago and please, I'll, I'll start with the hard part which I think if you're an entrepreneur right now, it can feel like fundraising is really, really hard, it can feel like the bar is higher than ever, which it is, it can feel like there's a lot of pressure from your board to hit certain unit. Economics hit certain goals. So the glass can feel kind of hot half empty as an entrepreneur. But I think the positive side of it is that now is the time to build an incredible company, the resilience, the grittiness, the forced constraints are allowing for companies to discover new business models, innovative ways of reaching customers in non expensive previously, Facebook and Google and also creating environments where companies and payers and providers who are purchasing the products are also demanding really, really high quality. So I think the clinical outcomes that will come out of this batch of companies is going to be better than ever before. Let me stay with you for a second. So you can invest in lots of different kinds of companies. Health as a category has different considerations. Share your perspective. What is great about a health uh uh uh company from an investment standpoint. What is a difficulty, a challenge? Yeah. So for context, I'm a consumer investor. So I invest in companies who think of the end patient as the consumer. So a lot of the business models are B to B to C, some are B to C and in health care. Unlike many other companies, there's so many considerations including ethical clinical clinical ones. Are you doing? What's right for the patient at end of the day? Are you driving better results? I think in the heyday of a lot of funding, we saw companies that were trying to deliver growth at all costs. That wasn't always the best thing for the patient. And I think we could all name a number of companies that were driving for that growth without always having the necessary guard rails around the company to protect the patient at the end of the day. Yeah, we um so our thesis is called the informed Connected health consumer. So how to all of us here in this room today? How do we get access to information, connecting into the system? The system connects back to us to improve our own health outcomes. But the thing is health care companies are not consumer companies and there became a very blurred line early on about in the pandemic of what those companies were and how companies were marketed or where the bulk of the dollars lie in health care, the bulk of the dollar dollars still lie with the incumbents and a lot of companies believe that if you build it, they will come and in health care, they will not come. That's and so creating business for they might come and stay for five minutes or they'll do a pilot and and not pay nothing, ask you to actually pay for that pilot. So I think ultimately, um what wasn't working? What doesn't work is people that don't have that understanding, people that don't have founder market fit, right? We talk a lot about product market fit. But why are you your team the right people to build this to do this? There's way easier ways to make money than to do this in health care. You've got to be here for something else. And that's what's most important, you know, you said founder Market Fit, is that right? So, so I was, I was, that was gonna be my next question, which is in this moment. Yes, thank you. I appreciate it. Well, no, in this moment, it's clearly a kind of a moment of reckoning. So what's working and what's not, are founders sufficiently resilient is capital, sufficiently patient, you know, are are the cost structures sustainable. This market environment is really tough to fundraise the bar is higher. What investors are looking for is different than what investors used to look for in the past and it's causing friction and frustration. But I think it also creates resilience in companies. I have not heard so many conversations about profitability in all my years of being a venture capitalist than I have in the last 18 to 24 months that we are actually building the right kind of companies, the appropriate level companies. And I think an argue says as well of clinical outcomes, like we are in this business to actually drive value in health care, to improve outcomes and to reduce costs. And that's not a buzzword on a slide, although we see it often on those slides, that is really the mission and the goal of what we're trying to do and many people miss that. So if you're building a company that actually shows how you can do that often, those companies will become the most successful. Yeah. And you have to have a clinical out comes, but you also have to have financial outcomes. So the best companies create dashboards that they say they set up uh goals that they want to reach and they, if they reach them great, if they exceed them even better. But if they don't reach them, they rejigger themselves and figure out how they can reach them because not setting goals. And just assuming some great story is going to take place because you have some great patient, something to deliver doesn't work in this market at all. I think that we're seeing uh a batch of founder who are incredibly mission and purpose oriented and financially oriented and want to build a business versus perhaps in the previous set of companies, there was a lot of mission, a lot of purpose and there was a hesitancy to even say, hey, we're building a business that can actually sustain itself with revenue and it feels like the two are finally coming together, maybe, maybe also the naivete around. Um I, I built this thing in tech or I built this thing in consumer. But gosh, being a health consumer is so hard and so frustrating and creates so much friction. I gotta go do that thing now. And it's an amazing passion and mission. But welcome to this world that all of us know is extremely complex and convoluted. And so if you aren't able to understand how to unlock it, many companies have found themselves really stuck in that process. Yeah. And I think you need to decide if you're gonna play inside the current system, meaning the payers and the providers, the employers, how it is right now, or if you're gonna do something completely different and play outside and we've done some investing on outside as well, which is also interesting. So folks, I'm gonna come to the audience in a few minutes with questions. So think about it. All right, I, I wanted to ask you. So where are we seeing in? What subcategories are we seeing success versus not that BioPharma comes to mind. Uh uh V BC comes to mind where in your particular portfolios, where are we seeing good and not so good? We tend to be vertical investors. So we really focus on companies that solve problems. Um We're less of a horizontal investor. Technology is great. A I is incredibly transformative, but it is not a one stop shop. And so where we focus on is how can A I be an application or component for care delivery? Um But it's not the thing. And so what is the thing that drives value? All of us are actually on a board of an amazing women's health company called Caraway that focuses on Gen Z women. So how do we help young women gain independence and agency in their health care? Journey. We're seeing a lot of these types of solutions start to really materialize because of their focus on the communities that they serve. I have a slightly different angle um which is a lot of the companies I'm seeing now have a different focus on the actual clinician than I've seen previously. I think that pre pandemic, a lot of clinicians, which I think a lot of you here in the audience are clinical practicing folks. Um We're almost seen as just a part of the business you use them, you move on, you get new ones, whatever. And for the first time, I'm seeing a focus on hiring great clinicians, retaining them, keeping them happy, developing them. And actually thinking of your clinicians as your big best and biggest asset, which is a big shift. I think in the start up world where that can sometimes feel slower and more cumbersome than let's just grow users by any means. Yeah, I think also really focusing on access because there are a lot of um areas within medical care where there just isn't uh a big enough supply. And the examples I can think of in our portfolio in menopause. We have midi, we have ULA, we have a Lara where you just don't have doctors that cover those specialties. So by providing that on in a telehealth way with the ability to go somewhere else for four wall treatment, you can make access so much better. So you don't have as many care deserts around the US. You know, I was actually that, that, that leads into, uh another question I was gonna ask is, you know, COVID and the pandemic just exposed a lot of gaps in the system and then there was a big rush. So, in your opinions, do you feel that those gaps persist? You know, are we starting to solve for any of them? You know, I think the gaps still persist, but the one that's been the most heartening for me is the focus on behavioral health. I think the pandemic showed America and, and the larger world, how lonely people are, how much connection they need and how important mental health is equally, if not more important than our physical health. And that acceleration, you know, we see tons of companies and behavioral health where investors and things like two chairs and bend and really being able to see companies focused on folks with mental well being I think is heartening and just continuing. I would, I would add to her comment, which is the physical and the mental are very connected. And in our prior prior to COVID world, it was sort of you had a mental health problem and you had a physical problem. And I think through COVID, it's become much more of common knowledge that those are very related. So you can't just have a mental health solution, you can't just have a physical health solution. They have to be integrated. The thing is Andrew. We are um I think we, we're at this time today where we're going to spend our entire lifetime and multiple lifetimes over trying to solve these problems in health care. And that's scary, but also um enticing of how big this thing can be. And we talk about access to care and the Medicaid population and companies, the number of who are here today Summer House, who does uh Tebas pediatric care, a company called Ground Game that does uh works with CB OS and a number of kind of scoh opportunities to really close gaps in care. There's so we can name a million more companies that are starting on this journey and even just getting initial penetration, we heard from Sarah London and the CEO of Centene. There's just so much that we have to do. Um And I think that should hopefully be an encouraging message to those in the fans today who are actually working to do this on the front lines because we are making progress. It just, it does take time and a brief follow up before we go to the audience. Um So many lifetimes, you know, investing does require a return. Have you heard this longevity thing? We're gonna live for many lifetimes. Keep investing. I see. OK. OK. Got it. Got it. All right. Let's go to the audience. They will live on forever. All right, let's, let's right over here. We'll wait for the mic for and please uh introduce yourself. Just name and, and organization, please. Hi there. I'm uh Doctor Natalie Davis from prevent Scripts. Alyssa, I can remember on a start up health call. Probably this was pre pandemic. I think you talking about series A metrics. Um Could you give us an update on series A metrics for 2024 and how that goal post may have tweaked on the Yeah, on the record, I don't actually think my answer personally has changed much. My answer is again, um We invest mostly B to B to C 50% of our capital comes from strategic organizations, health plans, health systems, pharma, employers. And so what I look for is if you know, Cigna is an amazing partner to us, for example. And if Cigna says, wow, your business is so amazing. I wanna do this. I wanna roll you out to all my national accounts. Are you gonna thrive or are you gonna be crushed? That is how we look, get a series A it's uh we don't have a definitive metric around revenue. I'm sure that, you know, my, my amazing panelists can give some more guidance, but at the end of the day, the core of what we think about is is your business in a place where we can take you to these large incumbents and you are able to carry whatever comes of that. Hopefully very, very large and long lasting contracts. Yeah, I would just add on to that. We don't have any specific tailored revenue tax, whatever, but we're very focused on the number one thing, which is the team, the number two thing, which is the product market fit and the number three thing, which is the ability to scale and that usually involves having some tech that's very good and deep. Um, so those things have not changed in this market at all. Well said, all right, let's find one more another, another audience question. Forgive me. It's very bright. Yes, way back here. Hello everyone. My name is Elena, the co founder and CEO of generation lab and we actually work in longevity. So that word is becoming bigger and bigger in the space right now. What we are doing is starting out from 19 different organ health and build a personalized plan from lifestyle, nutrition, medicines and also workout. So I want to hear a perspective of health care because it's becoming a new world from sick care that we used to be. How do you guys think about the new healthcare world is changing? Especially longevity is becoming a real trend right now. So, um I believe that the most important thing in health care is early detection right now before I joined Google Ventures, I was the chair of Grail. And to me, we can detect things early and that was cancer. But there are many other things and some people earlier today were talking about Children and detecting things early. So you have to be able to detect them early and that requires diagnostics and other things there. And then once you detect them early, you have to have personal medicine to deal with them. I'm less concerned with living to be 100 and 50 than I am living to be some age where I can be active and healthy and whether that's 80 or 90 or 65 doesn't really matter. Um But I don't want to be into the business of longevity investing just for the sake of living longer. I I think that a lot of the longevity conversations, content products are really tailored to certain like niches of society. And as a consumer investor, I think a lot about how does this get mainstream, how do regular people in the world use this access this and that feels like a lot of the missing gap. Of course, stuff has to launch first and they are early adopters and such. But, you know, my vision is with the power of A I, there is a possibility where people can know what is exactly the personalized tailored thing for them because right now the question is like, what test do I use? What protocols do I follow? Should I listen to this podcast or that one? And the more that can be personalized and accessible, the better also payers have to pay for it. So, you know, I think you you even in V BC and the, the journey to value based care is much more complex and not as straightforward as we thought. And we longevity fits. I'd say there's probably still a, you know, a knock on the fee for service door of how you can think about the entry way to build that relationship with the health plan in order to get to a real bundle or a real risk based contract, given the value of longevity. All right. Well, um, 2025 then is it gonna be the year of Pretenders or the year of contenders contenders? Absolutely. I think a lot of companies that are building right now are gonna be of a strength and girth and revenues w um, that it's gonna be a great market and you, you know, they're 30 companies right now that could break out to be phenomenal companies in 2025. 1 2nd. I'm gonna say contenders because great companies get funded. All right. All right. Ok. And Contenders. Ok. But please, that, that, that's our time. Give them a round of applause. Thank you so much. Yeah, that's correct.

Future of Finance 2024

Robert Goldstein, Senior Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer; Member, Global Executive Committee; Co-chair, Global Operating Committee, BlackRock Moderator: Lee Clifford, Executive Editor, Enterprise, Fortune

Future of Finance 2024: BlackRock and the Future of Finance

Robert Goldstein, Senior Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer; Member, Global Executive Committee; Co-chair, Global Operating Committee, BlackRock Moderator: Lee Clifford, Fortune

Good morning, everyone. All right, Rob, you made it here in the nick of time. Brave some awful traffic. Let's dive right in. A little traffic is good. It shows the city is sort of back. I like it. Absolutely. The city might be too back. Um OK, so you guys founded an A I lab in 2018. You've been at this for a little while. Tell us where is it, what does it do? What have you learned? And I think that when people talk about A I, they forget that the A I lab at MIT was actually founded in the 19 fifties. So a lot of these ideas, these concepts, these methodologies are actually not brand new. What's brand new for the past few years has been this confluence of there's more data than anyone could have imagined even a few years ago. And the amount of compute capacity in the world and how you access. It has just fundamentally changed a couple of years ago, even less when Chachi Pt started what I would call a gen A I revolution, the world changed again. So we have started our A I lab in 2018 we've been using these methodologies really for a couple of decades and what the purpose of the A I lab, which is literally like right on the border of the campus of Stanford. And we have a lot of people who are affiliated with the math department, the electrical engineering department of Stanford, who are effectively running the lab. And the vision at the time was a very simple vision, which was, we have a lot of things we're solving for. We have a group of people who are solving for them using a variety of methods we've been trying for many, many years. And let's get a group of people who are more focused on natural language processing optimization, more focused on the math than the finance. And let's throw the same problems at them and see how they would ultimately solve those problems. And we've had great, great success with that. What changed a couple of years ago? And I think at the most basic level, you could think of it as everything we were doing really was centered on numbers. Now. What's happening with gen A I is that you're able to extend your problems and solutions to be more about words and language. And that unlocks what I believe will be the most significant technology innovation evolution, revolution of my 30 year career because the kinds of things you could do have just expanded greatly. And I'll, I'll give, can I give one quick example? OK. So, so the quick example that I would give is we had a presentation to Blackrocks Board several months ago. It was uh either October or November or last year. And the presentation was on Gen A I. And what our strategy associated with Gen A I is. And as part of that presentation, because we normally would write a memo as part of the board materials, we had the idea of let's actually use chat EPT to write the memo. So we took what our strategy document was and we fed it into chat EPT with a very simple prompt and that prompt was write an executive summary. I think it was 500 words, maybe 1000 words um for the board explaining our strategy, some of the risks and so on. So it gave us a memo and then we gave that memo to a bunch of people internally to read. And what was most amazing to me is and, and we have some tough graders within Blackrock. Let me be very clear as we gave the memo to those tough graders to read. Everyone had comments and the comments were typically things like I hate the tone. The comments were like, I think you're selling yourself short. The comments were like, what about this? No one realized it was actually written by a computer. A couple of people when we told them it was written by a computer, they said, I don't like the computer's tone I'm like, well, you should take that up with the computer. And then what became clear is that even something like the tone, the computer will be able to modify its tone a little nicer to or you feed it 10 other memos with the right tone and you say give me the tone of those memos. So it's just those are the kinds of problems you would have never thought of a computer solving three years ago, writing the memo describing your strategy. So the unlock here is a generational unlock and particularly through the lens of a coo it's a incredible force with regard to how you need to think about operating a company, the talent strategy and just the overall strategy of how you engage with and communicate with clients, how you process information to generate investment ideas. It's a whole new world one. Let's talk about strategy a little bit. One thing I'm hearing from a lot of companies is suddenly you need to re evaluate your strategy every three months, every six months, it's no longer something that you know gets evaluated every couple of years. As what are you finding? Well, I think is a starting point without question, everything is just happening faster. So if you take a step back, I think this is another we would think of technology innovation and consequence, maybe an unintended consequence, but everything is happening faster in this world. And a big part of it is because one of the fundamental ingredients for change is information flow and the information flow is just accelerating, accelerating accelerating. So I think we view strategy as an incredibly fluid assignment. But what's interesting from a black rock lens is that the strategy has been uh largely unchanged because from our perspective, we're really looking at what are the challenges that clients have with their whole portfolio, with the whole investment portfolio. And the core of our strategy is really fulfilling that whole portfolio requirement. And if anything many of the forces that are happening, including the forces that we're describing now are just accelerating the client requirement to work with people who could do more and more things for that whole portfolio. When you look back over your 30 year career at Blackrock, what are some of the things that you think are unique about your company and have made it so successful over the past 30 years? We only have six minutes. II, I think I could talk for a year about my 30 years. But importantly, I think that if you look at the history of Blackrock and if you look at what Blackrock is today and even as we were being introduced, we spoke about Blackrock, we spoke about the Aladdin platform, we spoke about the ETF platform, the is shares platform that we have. And what's interesting is that if you think about the asset management industry, particularly if you go back 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, you could argue even today, it really is organized much more around the service providers, the asset managers. And then there's this expectation that the clients have to put all these service providers together. So even if you look at Black Rock and our size and scale, it still is under 10% of the market, the industry is incredibly bifurcated, which leads to the client having to do a lot of work. And the strategy that we've been employing at the most basic level is that the clients are our compass for where we take the company. So the clients are building these whole portfolios. Those whole portfolios involve taking investment strategies that seek alpha investment strategies that are designed to provide exposures through replicating indices, public markets, private markets across a whole array of things. Then you need to understand the risks in those portfolios. You need to understand asset allocation, you need technology to do the processing. So our strategy has always been how do we be able to solve the client's whole problem or any building block piece or the technology infrastructure? Now, if you look back when we started to provide Aladdin, people said, why would an asset manager provide technology when we bought Barclays global investors? And we as part of that had the ishares leading ETF franchise. People basically said you need to be an active manager or you need to be an index manager, they would call it back then, a passive manager, there could be nothing further from the truth. You can't be both. It was religious. And we just said, why is it religious? If clients are taking all these pieces and putting them together, isn't the industry an industry designed to serve its clients? And I think if you look at the past three decades, the industry is just shifting more and more. And I like to think Blackrock is leading in that shift to how can you really service the whole portfolio and how could you be able to talk to clients where even if they buy one LEGO piece, one building block from you as an individual product, you recognize it's in the context of that whole portfolio and you can talk to them about that LEGO piece in the context of the whole portfolio. OK. Well, we're here at the Future of Finance conference. So now it's time for some bold predictions. We're sitting here 10 years from now. What is going to look different about the whole finance industry? I I think that the Black Rock was founded and from the earliest days, there was a thesis that at its core, the asset management industry is an information processing industry. And I think the past three decades have been, if you look at it as a line, it's been going like this towards that vision. I think the line is gonna go like this. I think that the asset management industry and the broad business of investments in aggregate is gonna just increasingly become an information processing and technology business. There's gonna be mass personalization that clients are gonna be able to experience. There's gonna be a mass ability to look at all the data that's being created. And, and, and remember if you look forward as a prediction, I'm not smart enough to know if it's five X 10 X 100 x 500 X. I just know it's lots of x more data in the world that asset managers will need to understand and process and these businesses are just gonna increasingly become technology businesses in every way possible. I think it's also quite clear that the lines between the public markets and the private markets, the lines between where you are within a, a capital structure and a capital stack, all of these lines are getting more blurry. So the portfolio of the future will clearly have public market exposures and private market exposures. It will clearly have fixed income and equity, but it will clearly be thought of more as a series of exposures than the convenience technology of being able to label things a certain way and assume as a simplifying assumption, assume that that label behaves a given way. Last question, you've said tech a lot I haven't counted but it's many times. Is it changing who you're hiring? What, what type of background are you looking for now? That's a great question. We within blackrock, roughly um a little over a quarter of the company would be people who are technologists. That is something that we've been doing for for quite some time. But it's interesting because I feel like is we have more and more conviction that we need more technologists. We also have more and more conviction. We're, we're, we're a firm that has a very large analyst class every year that we hire out of university. We also have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history in England in things that have nothing to do with finance or technology. And it's that diversity of thinking and diversity of people and diversity of looking at different ways to solve problems that really fuels innovation. As a history major, we have to stop there. But as a history major, I'd love to hear that. Thank you so much for joining us.

Brainstorm AI London 2024

Zoubin Ghahramani, Vice President, DeepMind, Google; Professor, Information Engineering, University of Cambridge Dr. Anne Phelan, Chief Scientific Officer, BenevolentAI Dr. Marc Warner, Co-Founder and CEO, Faculty Moderator: Jeremy Kahn, AI Editor, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm AI London 

Brainstorm AI London 2024: How The Latest Breakthroughs In Generative AI Will Transform Business And Society

Photography by Joe Maher Fortune Brainstorm AI

Brainstorm AI: How The Latest Breakthroughs In Generative Ai Will Transform Business And Society

Zoubin Ghahramani, DeepMind, Google; Information Engineering, University of Cambridge, Dr. Anne Phelan, BenevolentAI, Dr. Marc Warner,  Faculty, Jeremy Kahn, FORTUNE

Thank you all for being with me and thank you all for joining us. So general A I is creating a lot of buzz. A lot of excitement about what is coming in the future from these models. I want to start by talking a little bit with been who's Amelia to write about Gemini. This is a very powerful model that Google has, has developed and has just come out with a couple of new versions of what is so special about Gemini Zubin. And how is this potentially transformative? Let's start there. Yeah, thanks Jeremy. It's a pleasure to be here. So, um first of all, Gemini is, is a whole family of models going from on device models to our very largest models. And uh what's really exciting about Gemini is that they're built multi modally from the ground up so they can process uh images, audio, video, et cetera alongside text. And our latest version of Gemini um actually has uh what's called a, a 1 million token context window, which means that it can process and keep in memory a tremendous amount of information much larger than any of the other models out there. It's like a whole book's worth of material. It's many books, a whole podcast, a video, an entire code base. And you know, if you think of that, not just if you think of that in terms of like the short term memory that the model has, that you can query and interact with the capabilities of that. We've only really scratched the surface of that. Interesting. Now, I know when Gemini came out at least one version of the model, there was an issue around the image generation capability of the model that in an effort to try to make sure that the images were you represent a diverse set of people and overcame some of the historical biases in the data that people complained about with these models. You guys created a model that it was actually very hard to get it to generate images of white people even in historically appropriate context for that. And it was quite embarrassing for you. How do you, how do you overcome issues like that? Because I think, I think that's one of, I think that's one of the problems now is that people want a model that you can just say, OK, well, you know, be diverse when that's appropriate and when it's not appropriate, you know, be correct to the historical context, but you can't just tell the model that apparently. So yeah, how do you overcome the first of all? Thanks Jeremy for asking, you know, it's, it's actually you know, it really highlights the fact that these challenges are difficult, right? First of all, you know, we want the tools, the generative A I tools to be relevant to people all around the world. So if you ask a model to create images of, let's say a nurse in a hospital or a school teacher or you know, a board member of a company, it has to be relevant to people all around the world. Google is a global company. We have, you know, people using our tools on every continent. Um but the guard rails that we put in uh in that case, we were clearly wrong. We came out, we actually said that we then um pulled the image generation for Gemini off so that we can improve it and put it back out in a way that's more acceptable to more people. Um You know, this is really part I think of the iteration process where you create tools, these are cutting edge tools, you put them out there, people find them really useful, sometimes, sometimes they find them offensive, right? And you know, I think this is a a healthy thing that the whole A I community is really grappling with right now. Mark I want to get you in here. You faculty help a lot of different businesses, try to figure out how to implement A I technology, help the government do this to some extent. I think, you know, this all comes down to reliability. You have these very powerful systems were very excited about the sort of headline capabilities, but then they start playing around with it and they're like, oh, but it's not reliable. How do I? And I think a lot of business leaders are struggling with the idea of how do I implement something that's not reliable? What advice are you giving people around that? Yeah. So we think that people need to think about these in a human centric way. So they are tools to be used in combination with people. And so if you're careful and you're thoughtful about how you design that in from the start, you give yourself this ability to sort of tune the workload between the person and the machine and that ultimately, well, one puts you in a much better place right now because the models aren't perfect and will have small failure modes that can mess up a particular workflow. But two, it does also future proof you to an extent because over time, you can tune that balance between the person and the machine so that as these developing capability and the truth is, nobody knows how fast they're going to develop and how far they're going to get. But as they do develop in capability, you will be able to tune that workflow as you go. And so you'll have this nice possibility of being relatively future proofed and benevolent. You're using these to help with drug discovery a lot of people are very excited about the potential transformational effect on science. Maybe you can talk a little bit about where you see this going and how big an impact you think these models will have on science. Yes, actually your comments resonated really clearly for me because we do think of it as human in the loop we have now the capacity to surface huge amounts of data by medical data. The field is expanding at a colossal rate, all mixed data, patient level data and to be able to carefully curate and amalgamate all that to be able to pose biological questions to our data foundations is something that we've given an awful lot of thought and some elements are moving really quickly in terms of automation and some are very heavily reliant on the human in the loop kind of process. But fundamentally drug discovery is very, very difficult, it's expensive, it's time consuming something like 95% of drugs don't make it through clinical development to launch and it costs something in the region of $2.5 billion per drug. So anything that we can do even incrementally to increase our probability of success in each incremental process step of the process and inevitably bring down costs is going to have a massive societal impact with the use of A I is carefully applied to drug discovery. And when you talk about carefully applying, I mean, can you talk a little bit about what's involved there and, and how do you prevent some of the potential failure modes? As Mark was saying of these models? Yeah. So I mean, I think incrementally, the first step of drug discovery is identifying the target that you want to modulate. So we spent a lot of time thinking about trying to integrate all biomedical data so that we can understand the signaling pathways and mechanisms of health and disease. So we can choose the right target because fundamentally, if you have the wrong target, doesn't matter how good you are, the rest of it, the whole thing's doomed really. So starting really carefully with the with the right target is a is a big first step. And actually, as we use some of these more generative models, really thinking carefully about the prompt and asking very careful questions of the technology so that you don't get these kind of hallucinatory answers that you can very carefully. It's not just one question, one answer. It's a series of very carefully crafted questions that get you a more and more refined answer back that then we can use, you know, actual data that we can use for the next step of the process. Interesting speaking of questions, we're going to go to questions from the audience in a minute. So please think of your questions. Um When you talk about using these tools for science, I know deep mind has done a lot of work around this alpha fold, you know, a huge success. Um recently, though there was a paper you guys had on material science that had been published in nature came up with, you know, thousands of new materials with unknown properties of science. It sounded very exciting. There's recently been some criticism though that a lot of those materials are not really synthes, sizeable, not easy to manufacture. Maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. I mean, as someone who's been in this area for a long time, looking at the research potential of these models, how are you thinking about it? Are we, are we over hyping? What these can do for science? So I don't think we're over hyping because I think actually one of the most exciting things that A I can do for humanity is uh advancing our ability to create new technologies, new other technologies. So let's talk about material science. This is a very exciting area. Um uh So the paper in question um actually uh had uh 2.2 million new stable crystals that were automatically generated from the A I model. And if you think about what new materials can help you do, they can help you um design uh better batteries, they can help you um design better uh photovoltaic solar panels and all sorts of things that will help us address, you know, medical devices, all sorts of things that helps us address um you know, societal challenges. Now, um the uh the process that we stand by the results of the paper, it was peer reviewed in nature, which is really the top journal academically. Um, and, you know, it's part of a healthy scientific uh uh process where you put out some results and people come out and question them, you go back and forth and, you know, hopefully that the truth comes out. But the paper is really exciting along along with a lot of the other work that has been done in A I for the sciences in, you know, many areas like biology with Alpha fold or, you know, fusion energy and mark, do you think the hype sort of getting ahead of ourselves here in terms of what, what these models can accomplish? Uh Well, I mean, I, I like, I think that A I for science that deep mind does is unbelievable and totally brilliant. But I do think in other contexts it's easy to over claim for these models. So, like, you know, you look at when we were promised or fully autonomous cars and it's taken a bit longer than we expected. And I think if people are thinking in the context of like, these are just going to automate away jobs, one for one that will be like much further away than most people anticipate, hopefully much further away as well. I think it's both true and good that it would be further away. But none of that is to say anything other than like the science these guys are doing is totally amazing, right? Uh I wanna go to questions from the audience. So please, if you have, if you have a question, please raise your hand and please wait till mic gets to you and I will call you. There's a question here if we can get a mic to this uh lady here. Uh And if you could please state your name and, and your affiliation. Um, when you stand up. Hi, I'm Natalia Yashu. I lead product in a net tech called Learn Light. Um, and actually I just wanted to respond to the last comment you made around. Well, it takes us longer than we sometimes expect to progressive technologies partly is due to our acceptance or no acceptance of risk. Maybe we could have progressed far faster with autonomous cars if we're ready for more accidents, right? So it feels to me like it's the same with um A I, so I wonder how do you think we can actually find that balance between accepting some risk? Is there less a risk that we're ready to accept because it's technology and not a human error or actually do we need to? That's, that's a great question mark. I want you to answer that first. Like when you're advising people on that question, like how much risk should I accept? How do they, how do you reach that balance was obviously context dependent. So if somebody is saying we want an algorithm that will put a red jumper or a blue jumper top of our website. Then, you know, it's basically use whatever you want. It doesn't, it doesn't matter too much. Then in something like a medical context where the ultimate decision can in principle come down to life or death care much, much, much, much more greatly about um about that risk tolerance. Um At the moment, you know, I don't think there is anything better or more thorough than working with the organization themselves because it is important to remember that even though A I is a new technology, the thing you're using it for is still the thing you are always doing in almost all cases. So if you're a doctor, you are always making life and death decisions and now A I is coming into that. So whether that was like a bureaucratic decision or a technological decision or some simpler algorithm, in any case, you are used to wrestling with exactly the ethical dimensions of that problem. And so in the context of any given problem, there's almost always like a large amount of pre existing thought that you can tap into carefully and, and when you're dealing with a process that, you know, costs 2.5 billion and takes 10 years, how do you view that sort of risk assessment? And, and can you, you know, is it, oh, if we can save any time and money off? Of that. It's worth it or, you know, not always. Yeah, I think, I mean, there is a risk associated with it, but I think the risk can be quite a positive force for disruption. So when you think about drug discovery, as in designing the actual drug, we have very experienced and very seasoned medicinal chemists who can design, they're augmented now with all sorts of different predictive tools to enable them to make different molecules. And sometimes the tools will suggest something the chemist would never ever have thought of. And they inherently think well, it could be, that's not right, you know, that's too dangerous. But I should then, you know, you kind of think, well, actually maybe components of that could be useful. So I think it's the risk management if you, you've got to be open to the notion of risk and what it can do in terms of disruption, but there has to be like guard rails and controls around how you view that, that kind of prediction. So I think, yeah, the scope for this as long as it's carefully monitored, right? Other questions from folks in the room, please raise your hand. There's a question right here, please stand up and say, yeah, he l Southern Methodist University and the board of Directors of Hitachi. Um at lunch, we spoke about the importance of the triangle between on one hand, it backbone. On the other hand, data analytics, data science and domain knowledge you talked about the human in the loop to make sure we get the right quality. But often the person with the domain knowledge, it's the hardest to get into the loop. Can you, can you give some practical advice? How do we make sure that we actually get this human in the loop in the right way? That's a good question mark. Do you want to take that? Yeah. Well, we think of it as human in the loop and human over the loop. So initially, when you start building a system, you probably do want a human actually in the loop as in nothing goes out without human seeing it. But over time, as you build confidence, you can have a human in over the loop putting policies to guide it. Now, the problem is that you do actually have to build your systems in a slightly different way. Like if you want to make them properly human centric, it requires a different set of slightly different set of technologies, a slightly different set of design principles. So we've thought quite a lot about how you do that and have not not published it in an easily accessible form. So I, I promise I will write a blog and I will send it around. Uh but they're like in essence, the way you do it is you start by designing for human and machine to work together and then you structure the algorithms in a more modular fashion so that you basically inherently build in more explainability and more causality into the system. Fascinating other questions here. There's a gentleman here hand up uh marksman from the Times and how, how do you address the issue of concentration of power in A I given the resources needed to build models, etcetera and compute. How do we, how do you answer that one from Google Jeremy? Um So, yeah. No. Uh I, I think it's a, it's a very good question. Um When we look at the, uh what's happened in A I over the last few years, um it's actually really exciting to see uh how many start ups have come out with state of the art models. It seems like, you know, uh every week we have a new entrant into the field, the barriers to entry have been continuing to decrease with open models. We've also contributed to that. We, you know, we've published a lot of our work, but we also have produced open models and then if you look at the um cloud providers, um the whole model is to make these uh tools available very widely. Um So I think it's actually a pretty healthy ecosystem of competition right now. Um It's, you know, although it's expensive to train the very largest models, once you train it, once you can make it available and then people can build on it and use it. And we've seen an incredible thriving of the ecosystem So, um, you know, we'll have to see what happens over the next few years. But, um, I'm, I'm, you know, not concerned about that myself, but, you know, and that brings up an interesting question though, which we were talking about earlier about sort of, do you, do you build these models yourself? Do you buy them? Do you use open source models? How is benevolent sort of looking at that? And then also in the industry of pharmaceuticals, like there's this issue about power, all the big pharmaceutical companies have traditionally had a lot of data. How have you guys as a start up sort of thought, compete with that? Yes, in terms of the models, we have a hybrid model. Actually, we have some proprietary capabilities, we have open access capabilities, we have open access capabilities that we sort of customized and made them more bespoke to our needs. So, you know, in case of access to data, we've systematically brought in a whole range of different data types from the literature or makes compound structures, all this kind of totality of biomedical data so that we can reason over it. But we will always be have smaller data foundations and the really big pharma who have got decades of drug discovery data in house and that's for them to build their models and reason over. But for us, you know, there's a surprising amount of literature publicly available, well, literature and other data modalities that if you systematically build, you can get really decent picture of human biology and mark when you're talking about customers and clients, how do you advise them on this issue of bill versus buy? And do they use an open source model or do you use the proprietary model that seems to do better on a benchmark? What we, I mean, we think about A I is just better software, right? So it's the perennial build vs by question and the only two answers we know are wrong is all build or all buy. Anything in the middle is almost, is at least justifiable. And then our view is that it depends on how it compares to your capabilities and your competitive advantage. So if you have like if it's close to your competitive advantage, you want to be leaning to more towards, more towards build. If it's further from your competitive advantage, you want to be leaning more towards buy. Fantastic. That's all the time we have for today with this group of panelists. But thank you very much for being here and thank you all for listening and we'll get on to the next panel. Thank you very much.

Innovation Forum 2024

The Honourable Paul Chan Mo-po, GBM, GBS, MH, JP, Financial Secretary, Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region In conversation with Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief, FORTUNE 

Innovation Forum 2024: The Innovation Imperative

Good morning everyone. Mr Chan, you fill a room. There's so many people here. It's great to see you all. It is very encouraging. Welcome. Good morning to you all. Good morning. Um So we have some questions about the economy and and your view of it. So I'd love to just start with your snapshot of it. You've recently said the economy is registering positive growth but the growth is not even. So I'm curious from your vantage point, the brightest spots and the most challenging spots. Well, you know, the more challenging part would be merchandise exports, which is affected by the higher for longer interest rate environment as well as geopolitics, both causing dampen the external demand, the brightest spot I would say come to Hong Kong, not just as a tourist or business visitor, but invest here over the past 12 months. We have seen tremendous interest in Hong Kong in terms of strategic business coming to Hong Kong in terms of talent coming to Hong Kong. So to spare some time to explore this city and we have tremendous opportunities to offer. So I want to explore a lot of those opportunities, some of the challenges how we can innovate our way to prosperity, um even further. But first, um the pandemic is something that's been difficult for everybody to uh get over. And it has changed habits in a lot of ways, whether it's been spending or tourism. Um What have been some of the biggest surprises and learnings as you've watched the recovery of Hong Kong. Well, you know, during the pandemic period, we have been very bold in terms of utilizing our financial resources to roll our counter cyclical measures to support the economic growth. Now, in terms of the post COVID level, in terms of public finance, we are entering into a what we call a fiscal consolidation process on the one hand, controlling the expenditure growth to make it below our economic growth. And at the same time, increase of our income by growing the economy and increasing in a very moderate and careful way additional revenue to the government so that in 23 years time, we will be able to return to balance. And at the same time, we would have enough resources to put to the areas that we want to develop like the technology and innovation area and build capacity for Hong Kong, for example, investing in the infrastructure in the northern metropolis. So that is one strategy going forward. And secondly, we see it as a very important move that is to leverage on the technology and innovation sector to diversify our economy, Hong Kong is well known as an international financial center. This is important, we will continue to further develop it to make it even more competitive. But at the same time, we want to grow the technology and innovation sector. So as to offer even more job choices for people as well as bringing our economy to the next level. If it sounds like diversifying the economy, beyond the financial hub that you've really established is a top priority. True. Yeah, wonderful. Um So I wanna remind the audience that at the end, we will have time for two questions. So be thinking hard. I will call on you at the end, but we'll leave a little bit of time for that. Um So Mr Chan Hong Kong's economy has always had its skeptics. Um and also it's always proved to be very resilient uh and decides with skeptics given that the recovery from COVID has maybe not been as swift in all areas as desired. Uh The skeptics are getting louder and there was recently uh op ed that caught a lot of attention in the financial times from a long time, Hong Konger who said um it pains me to say but Hong Kong is over, it's over. I'm sure you have opinions on that. And what do you say to those naysayers? Well, not at all. When you look at the tourist arrival last year, tourist arrival, about 34 million this year, we expect to have at least 46 million people and with the resumption in international fight continuing, I think this will be on the increase. And at the same time, let's share some facts. Look at our asset and wealth management, industry, asset under management, about $3 trillion. Look at our private equity, our venture capital sector, very vibrant altogether. They are managing about $220 billion, $220 billion and hedge fund. In terms of we are Asia number one, in terms of private equity, we are next just to the mainland in Asia. So all these sectors and growing when you look at our banking sector, total banking assets at the moment is about $2 trillion. And our banking sector has a lot of buffer, very resilient. Uh The liquidity ratio at the moment is over 100 and 60%. Whereas the international requirement is only 100% the capital adequacy ratio is over 20% while the international standard minimum is only 8%. So when you look at these figures, you will notice our financial market is still very strong and bonus is here. Our chief executive for the stock exchange, uh the total capitalization of the Hong Kong stock market three trillion uh let's see, $4 trillion and it is growing and we are diversifying our sources of new companies coming for this new capital, coming to use our platform. So I'm optimistic. Um you know, one of the challenges are there are some headwinds that could be long lasting and are just not entirely in your control. Um One of which are geopolitical tensions. Um Hong Kong's superpower has always been being a global super connector where you have this great relationship with China and you're also available to the rest of the world to engage with. Um how do geopolitical tensions uh change that I've had all? Well, you know, the geo geopolitical challenge will continue to be there for quite some time. We have to find a way to navigate all these and find new opportunities. I think that given the current situation, the unique status of Hong Kong under the one country two system becomes even more important and more apparent by coming here, you have convenient and even priority access to the mainland market. And at the same time, Hong Kong's unique character as an international city has been there. And we continue to be here like the rule of law, the common law legal system, the FIFA of capital goods, talent data and the separate currency, the Hong Kong dollar pack to the US dollar and it is freely convertible. So all these make Hong Kong very unique. So I think for us on the one hand, we need to communicate with the international community, coming to Hong Kong. You are in China, but we are different from the rest of China in terms of our way of doing things in business, our standards, which is best international standards. This is a natural platform for you to get access to the mainland market and as a springboard for the Asian market. And at the same time, I think we have a lot of attractions for talent and this going forward will be one of our key competitive advantages because whatever business you are in talent is the basis of competition. And I think we have very strong attraction for those of you coming to Hong Kong for this conference to find some time to explore this city. Uh Well, say for example, if you like wine and dine, we don't have any tax on wine. We have over 200 Michelin recommended restaurants. And you can also go to some of the mom and pop shop, which is also very interesting. So a lot to offer uh also in terms of lifestyle. So I'm very confident that if we continue to do the right thing, we will remain relevant and very attractive. Um Just one more point before we move on. Uh you know, one of the questions also in the article was um Hong Kong's ability to have autonomy to distinguish itself from some of these greater headwinds has always been a key part um with the passing of recent legislature, some of that has been called into question. Do you think it needs to be? I think you mean the reason and end of article 23. It is a constitutional responsibility, it is to compete uh one of the remaining work for Hong Kong as part of China to safeguard national security. And in fact, this piece of legislation, when you scrutinize it, it is no different than those in leading jurisdictions like the United Kingdom. So what we have in mind is that, well, we went through the difficulties, social unrest in 2019. Subsequently, we had the national security law enacted. We want to at the one hand ensure political stability and safety in this city and at the same time, so that we can concentrate our efforts to develop our economy. That is the idea and we appeal to you to work with us and to engage with different sectors in our community. And I am sure Hong Kong will remain one of the safest cities in the world and for the business sector, political stability is important. Thank you. Um So I want to talk about innovation, that's why we're here, right? Uh the innovation imperative. Um I'm curious for what do you think are some of the biggest bets? Um Hong Kong should make right now in innovation to set itself up for a path of prosperity. Well, innovation can be in a number of forms not necessary technology innovation. So for example, innovation in business models and the way we see it is that number one, the digital economy would be one of the driving force for innovation because it changed business models, transform businesses. But that assign we also need to focus on technology and innovation. Number one, as a sector to grow. Number two, as a means to transform and modernize the different sectors in our economy. And specifically when it comes to an sector of its own, we choose four areas to concentrate our energy. One is artificial intelligence and big data analytics. The second one is health science and health tech. The third one is fin tech and the final one is new materials, advanced manufacturing. We see these four areas offer tremendous opportunities. Say for example, for A I, we are building the infrastructure, increasing our computing capabilities. And more importantly, we are in a very aggressive mode of attracting companies in the A I space to come to Hong Kong to set up their business. I think A I I mean you you can't have any conversation with anyone in the world that lasts more than 10 minutes without us going into A I. It is so important. Um It has been called even though the Lisa Chat JP T was referred to as the Sputnik moment. Um the whole world is clamoring to create this amazing future. How do you um view Hong Kong's position now that we're on the precipice of this? Great A I change. How can you position this to be a big winner? I think the fundamental advantages began over as a hub for A I sector is the one country two system. Uh It is because here you can have convenient access to mainland data and international data and data is very important for this sector. Number one, number two is talent attracting different talents. Number three is our determination to grow this sector by increasing the computing capabilities. Say for example, in the budget, we talk about building a supercomputing center, here we are also inviting companies to come to grow a sector. And in this area, it may be interesting to note that if we marry A I with some other sector, say for example, the health science, the drug pharmaceutical sector that offers tremendous opportunities for pharmaceutical companies in the US or in Europe. If they want to tap the mainland market, where can they get the bio data of the Chinese? Where can they conduct clinical trial in order to enable their products to be registered and then be able to put on sale on the main market which offers 1.4 billion people. So in this area, I think we have uh we have a unique value proposition to offer. That is why in the budget we mentioned about hey along the border with sen uh not much of loop, let's develop that sector in the into a technology and innovation sector, bringing in those A I companies bring in those health science companies there. So that in in that particular song, we we try to work with the mainland authorities to get the approval to have more convenient or even free, full of data talents and capital. So that with these key factors of key elements, we can grow this sector more vibrant and build an ecosystem. And as you mentioned too, attracting global talent is a top priority for the chief executive for you for the whole team. Um How are you bringing the talents in? Why should entrepreneurs come here to build the start ups of the future, the biotechs of the future A I as a future? Well, you know, we have a dedicated office for this purpose. If I can, I may share with you some figures since December 2020 this office has was set up up till now. We have received over 220,000 applications. We we have approved about 100 and 60,000 of them and about 100 and 10,000 people have already arrived in Hong Kong. And among these people, there is one category we call them top talents, meaning that people earning about more than 2.5 million Hong Kong a year or those who graduate from the global top 100 universities without asking any questions, they can come. They do not need to find a job beforehand. And so far the response has been overwhelming and then we zoom in those who have arrived in Hong Kong. The top talents usually relatively young in the age group of 35 to 50 young family and these people have an average income double than a median income in Hong Kong. So we are very optimistic. I think Hong Kong's attraction is here. On the one hand, you are part of China, but on the other hand, the international character, the lifestyle and when I talk to those people coming, particularly with young families, they said the education here is excellent. Five of our universities are among global 100. And imagine how many international schools we have here? Over 50 offering curriculum in the US UK, German Swiss, Italy, Singapore, Japan, Korea. So this is indeed a an excellent hub for people who is interested to pursue a career. But at the same time, maintain the international character and have pop style lifestyle. Thank you. I want to give the chance to the audience to ask a question. If anyone has one, you can raise your hand. If not, I will continue to happily ask. Don't be shy. We have one right here in the corner, right. Go ahead. Yep. He's, he's coming with the mic right now. Thank you very much. Hi. Uh Lovely to see you here. I'm Brian. I'm an assistant professor at HKU. My question essentially concerns Hong Kong's relationship with the Middle East with ASEAN and also other parts of the world. I mean, historically Hong Kong had benefited off this vibrant Sino Western Sino American engagement and relationship which obviously due to geopolitical headwinds is no longer necessarily the case. But the reason why I'm not necessarily pessimistic is because I do think that as you, we self affirmed previously, we're actively engaging partners in Middle East in Southeast Asia, where Indonesia is now the fourth largest country in the world by population and also Central Asia, West Asia, Latin America and beyond. So, could you perhaps share with us here in the room? You know, what are the plans and initiatives you've got in mind for engaging the world beyond the West and also beyond the conventional partners on Gong had? Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you, Brian. I think for us in Hong Kong, uh us Europe, very important market, very important sources of investment so that we need to reinforce. But at the same time, we need to open up new opportunities. I went to the Middle East in October 2022. And in that particular visit, I made an effort to visit all the key ministries involving in innovation, technology, finance and investment. And I realized they also saw the need of diversification and they are interested in this part of the world. But traditionally the focus of investment uh in the US and Europe. So this part of the world is less familiar to them. That is why we reach out and we invite them to come and we even consider using the Hong Kong investment company to see some of the investments together with them. The idea is to open up new capital sources and new sources of quality issuers coming to Hong Kong for listing the same applies to ASEAN in particular quality issues, quality companies coming to Hong Kong. And we talked about geopolitics. Earlier on we observe because of geopolitics, the industry chain has been changing and manufacturers on the mainland, quite a number of them try to diversify and have certain parts of their operations, moved to Asia. Then Hong Kong can play a very unique role as a supply chain management center and Trade Finance Center. That is why in the budget, we said we are going to develop ourselves as a multinational supply chain center here. And ASEAN for us is good market and sources of quality companies. We also want to attract those talents to come to Hong Kong to work. When I went to the University of Malaya and University of Singapore, talk about the the opportunities here. I can feel the energy and we welcome them by open up. So as you look ahead, what do you think is the most important thing for Hong Kong to get? Right as we head into this new technological era um to come out on top and what is the last advice you would leave to executives in the room or who may be watching this, who are thinking about is now the right time to invest in Hong Kong. Well, for us, the one country two system is very important. We have to preserve that the legal system, the law of law, very important, the free movement of goods, capital, data and talents and the international character and dimension of Hong Kong is something that will continue to communicate with the international business community. We know that there has been some misunderstand misunderstanding about the situation here, even sometimes some uh narrative which is not very fair about us. Uh that is understandable. So we we would reach out but at the same time, invite people to come. And most importantly, if people can come and to make an investment and can make money and for people to come to work here, they have carried development and enjoy the lifestyle, then we will be able to succeed. So we will continue to work hard on that and on different funds. Be it IFC be it International Trading Center, uh be it the innovation and technology. We keep asking ourselves how to in a way how to work better, how to collaborate with different uh different people, different investors and different funds. Yeah, Mr Chen. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Brainstorm AI 2023

Eric Effron, Editorial Director, NewsGuard Christina Montgomery, Vice President; Chief Privacy and Trust Officer, IBM Jim Steyer, Founder and CEO, Common Sense Media Moderator: Ellie Austin, FORTUNE

Brainstorm AI 2023: Tackling Misuse and Misinformation in a World of AI

All right, there's a lot of fear surrounding artificial intelligence that extends beyond security when prompted for information A I has produced hallucinations with inaccurate and sometimes even harmful information. So in this session, we'll hear from business leaders on how their organizations are tackling misuse and misinformation. Please welcome to stage Eric Ephron, editorial director at News Guard, an organization tracking A I enabled misinformation. Christina Montgomery, Vice President and Chief Privacy and Trust Officer at IBM. Christina testified in front of the Congress this past May to share IB M's recommendations for how to set guardrails for A I and Jim Steyer Ceo of common sense media, an organization that reviews media and technology content with children's safety in mind. They'll be interviewed by Fortune's Deputy editorial director for live media. Ellie Austin. Hi, everyone. And thank you to our trio of panelists for joining us. So Jim, I'm going to start with you. We heard then um in the introduction about the work that you do to safeguard Children and young people and I know that last month um Common Sense media unveiled its first ever rating system for A I products. Actually, you say the world's first ever rating system A I products. It was a five point scale. Some organizations came out of it. Well, some, not so well, I'd love to know what big tech's response to it was. And did you hear from any specific leaders about their results? OK. Fair question. So, number one, nice to see you all. Um I hope you're big common sense media fans. Uh I would say that big tech's response was this would be Sam Altman Sundar and James Weike, Google, Satya Nadella, et cetera. Number one. And it's very gratifying to us. They all agreed common sense should be the group that does independent third party ratings. That was a big deal because it matters that, that they, that they understand we're going to do this just like we've done it for all other forms of media and tech. Second, some of them did not like the grades they got in their first rating. Um because we were pretty tough on issues that related to transparency, fairness, um efficacy. It's very different than rating a movie or TV show. So I definitely heard from the CEO S of several of the companies that we rated, which just to me is a good sign means we're getting their attention. So what comes next? We're going to basically, we think that this is incredibly important for the public at Writ large here in the US and globally to understand what A I means. And in a very basic way, understand how it can impact their lives, their kids' lives, but also democracy and, and, and the bigger and the bigger frame that I think A I is going to cap and it's really important. I think the public understands that because there needs to be legislative efforts to put guardrails in place. And I think the ratings also help us understand what kind of legislative strategy and guardrails need to be in place here in the US. And globally Christina, you've argued for regulation to focus on use cases rather than the technology itself. Can you elaborate a bit on why that is? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, these technologies are very context dependent. Um a recommendation for, you know, what restaurant you might enjoy is obviously very, very different than a recommendation for, you know, who you're gonna hire or whether somebody qualifies for a loan and the like. Um so, uh that's been a big point of advocacy that coupled with the fact that the technology is evolving and developing so quickly and if you start to try to regulate um something like, you know, the the capabilities of the technology, your regulation is never gonna keep up. So, absolutely, we've been focused on uh directing regulation to the highest risk uses of A I and to take into consideration the socio technical concerns and the context in which it's deployed. We'll come back some of that in a second. But Eric I want to come on to you. So at News Guard, you analyze the trustworthiness of news sites and you were doing that long before a I was a prominent issue. What happens? What steps do you take when you find a website that has repurposed content from a top publisher? Is there a human that you can get in touch with to speak to? What happened to that? You know, one of the earlier panels um Alan Murray mentioned that one of the themes that's emerged from the last couple of days is that there's a feeling that there needs to be a human in the loop. So News Guard, we think of ourselves as the humans in the loop. Um We're, we're a journalism organization, we rate and review websites and we've done about 8000 now in um nine different countries in four different languages. Um based on some very basic criteria, journalism criteria. Does the website run corrections? Do they tell you who owns them instead of nothing very controversial? Do they distinguish opinion from news? Do they tell you what their agenda is? And we developed a ranking ratings scores and reviews of these websites. Um The A I angle is that the, the, as we all know from the last couple of days and we've all known this before. A I can do great mischief and it can do great good. Um We think that it does better, good when it has good information. So our content both our website ratings. And also we have over 1000 debunks of very prominent narratives can help teach these tools what to believe and what not to believe. And if you do a Google search is Ukraine uh run by Nazis, you'll find lots of articles that say yes, Ukraine is run by Nazis. They may be from um RT and Sputnik or Far, right. Pro Russia us sites, um News guard can tell you that those are not credible news sites or you at least you should take it what they with a grain of salt. So really, our tools are meant to sort of make the information that's available both to humans and to bots more reliable. And what responsibility do you think the companies who are creating the bots which are repurposing the content have in this whole process? Well, I think they have a tremendous amount of responsibility because the potential harm is really almost can't be understated coming into an election year. Obviously, there's a lot of mischief that can be done. Um There already is very, let me just mention this. Since the advent of um the Israel Hamas War, October 7th, we've identified 75 narratives that um are very prominent on social media and on, on websites. Um And with the election coming up, we've already noticed we've already found examples of some mischief that's being done with deep fakes. Um So it, it's the, the, the, the good needs to be bound the, I'm sorry, the, the, the A I companies really can be much smarter and more aggressive about how they monitor information and produce information that actually comes from decent vetted sources. And Christina on that note, as we do head into an election year, what collaboration do you want to see between government political campaigns, corporate America to try and mitigate what could become pretty chaotic as we head up to the end of next year. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it comes down to trust, right? Because people verify what they're seeing and I think that's true with the technology even more broadly than in the context of elections and misinformation in general, right? So it has to be a collaboration with governments and companies both having really critical roles to play. I mean, for companies, um they have to be responsible and be held accountable and have accountability mechanisms for the A I that developing a kind of mechanisms. So for IBM, for example, we have a set of principles that we've built uh an internal governance program around with respect to A I um in terms of where we're gonna deploy and use it uh that it had the trust, you know, that it have uh be fair and explainable and the steps that we take in order to build that trust and the like uh we develop practices like ethics by design throughout our company to hold ourselves accountable to those principles. And we work on solutions for our clients to do the same so that they have the capabilities to do things like generate nutrition labels, right? Fact sheets associated with the A I models that they're putting in context and do things like uh algorithmic impact assessments and high risk use cases and the like and then advocating for policies that support, you know, sort of that um risk based regulation focusing on the highest risk uses and being clear in terms of like, what is high risk. Um And what do we expect from companies when they're deploying something like a solution in the high risk space? What is an algorithmic impact assessment look like? And when is it required? So I think it's absolutely a collaboration required on the part of both Jim. Do you want to add? Yeah, I'm deeply skeptical of what's going to happen in 24. I think it's going to be a total shit show in terms of misinformation. I think we'd be honest about that. Look, Elon has gutted the trust and safety division at Twitter X, whatever he calls it. So has Facebook, right? So we know that, remember we're the biggest advocacy group in the field on these issues and they've just gutted their staff. I'm not worried about IBM. I'm worried about Twitter. I'm worried about Facebook and Instagram. I'm worried, look, and there's been no regulation of those platforms. One thing I would say in the context of A I is how do you think we did with the social media regulation? Terribly right. I run the biggest group in the country on those issues. And it's a joke Washington hasn't passed a law about privacy. We had to do it in California or about social media regulation since Mark Zuckerberg was in kindergarten. And so these are really serious issues. I think you're going to have a really, really scary 24 election because you have so many different actors, both domestic and foreign who are going to try to interfere with this election and put out disinformation and the companies have gutted the staff that was supposed to do it. And I think we need to call them out by name and we need to hold them accountable. I don't think the federal government will do anything other than job owning. But I think this is an, this is an extraordinary moment for our democracy and we all be and as a kids advocate, I'm mostly worried about it in terms of young people and what world they're going to inherit. But I think we have to be extremely serious about this because I think 24 here and there are hundreds of elections around the world that are also going to be impacted by disinformation and the ability to regulate that. So I'm very, I think we really have to call out the key platforms and shame them into behavior and whose responsibility is. It's call out those platforms and what does that shaming? It's all about, it's ours. I mean, we're the biggest advocacy group. So it's on us. But I think it's also on, I think it's on folks like IBM to call out their, I'm not, as I said, I'm not worried about IBM. I'm worried about Facebook X, some of the other platforms that I think could really damage the democratic systems in our country and leave this country and the world with a whole mess on our hands. So this is very big stuff and I don't think regulation will come. We've been very involved in Europe with the new A I regulation but and privacy. But I think this is, this is a watershed moment for our democracy and we should all be speaking out all of you, whether whatever field you work in should be concerned about this because our democracy is on the line in 24 and global global democracies are as well. And were you about to say you don't think regulation will come in 2024? I think you'll see regulation A I regulation. No, I think you'll see it in California. Maybe because you'll see what we do here just like we did with the privacy law in 2018 and the ballot initiative we ran in 2020. So I think you'll see California. I think you'll see England pass some stuff this year and the eu just came out with the A I regs this week. Um, but I Washington, nothing will come out of Congress. They can't even get their act together to pass a budget. So they're not going to pass a comprehensive A I legislation. So I think corporate responsibility on that and I think the public speaking out and the media speaking out and holding some of these platforms accountable. You know, if I, if I could, um, just to back up, um, your Jim, your thought about how we can't really rely on the platforms. Um Because News Guard is a journalism organization, we always call for comment if we're saying something negative about a platform. And if I had a dollar for every time that we've got in touch with X tiktok, Facebook, you name it and say, hey, we, we've just noticed that you have, you know, dozens of these um A I generated videos on your platform which falsely claim fill in the blank. They say, oh, thank you for letting us know we'll take them down. And I think that's not good that they're relying on this little news, this little organization in New York with, you know, 35 employees as their fact checkers. And so that really, to me sort of exposed that there are solutions and we think we're part of the solution, but that the platforms themselves really have had a lot of work just to add, look, you have an election denier who's leading in the Republican nomination, who's lying every day about the fundamentals of our democracy. So to me and by the way X has changed their, they just let what's his name back on the platform? That was really smart, Elon. And, and I just think you have a situation where as I said, you have a fundamental election denier running for president in the United States, which to me should be held account, the platform should not put up there. So if you're just starting with that, but think of the other mis misinformation that can happen, I think it's a very, very critical moment for the for America and also global society. And I think Czech leaders should be calling out their colleagues for failing to do this because because I, because I think it's a bad moment and that, that import to, I want to see if anyone has a question in the room. Yes, over here. Could we get a mic over hippies? And could you um tell us your name and your company? Thank you so much. Hi, I'm Sammy Hasan from a RP. But it's a personal question. So you say people should speak up, media organization, speak up, corporate organization, speak up. But even in this room, you can get everybody to agree what to speak up about. So how to deal with that? There's different points of view. I don't, it's not that I disagree with you, but society is larger than speaking with one voice. So you can, you can scream all you want about. People should speak up and corporate America should do something and brands should do something about it. But how do we deal with it? Well, I think there's a couple of examples. You've seen all the, all the brands who fled the Twitter platform. I think that's really good and they should do it. I also think there is something called truth and I don't think that there are multiple versions of truth in fact. And I think part of, and I think that companies should, should stand up for what's right and not like there's no question about what happened in the 2020 election or what happened on Jan Se. So companies that go on, on the one hand, on the other hand, that's just a BS response and that's just catering to an, I think, I think you sometimes have to stand up for bigger principles. And I think that on basic stuff around misinformation and disinformation, it's not that hard to do it when you're talking about this perspective on the situation in Gaza, that's somewhat different. But I think on fundamentals of election integrity. And by the way, I'm glad you brought up Twitter because I think Sho Zi has a big, a big platform that he needs to do that influences young people at times. I think that Neil and the people at youtube have to be really careful on this too. But fundamentally, the ones to watch. I'm scared of are Facebook always because they don't do their job and Twitter, they've gutted their trust and safety divisions. You haven't? But they have. Yeah. And I would just say another thing, you know, section 230 reform. So we've been, this is social media, this is an A I but it comes back to social media reform that never happened. Um, there needs to be a reasonable care standard and that's something you can ask, you know, you can write your con congressional representatives and ask them to advocate for that. I mean, I don't know if it'll happen, but it's absolutely something that we've been advocating for at IBM for years now. And, and on that note as we kind of come to the uh oh, we've got time for one more question. I can see Ma and Pa in the clone now and I wanna get one more question in, I'm Ryan close. Um What's the likelihood of having a A I generated news source that's non biased? Mhm. By the way, I'm a complete Luddite. Why you would ask me? I could barely turn on my phone. Uh I would say that's a really interesting question. We should ask that to re read my friend Reed who was just up here or Sam or some of the technology people. I don't know. I, I do have a couple of thoughts about that. Um So one of the things that makes that, that marks good journalism versus bad journalism is that you don't assume that you've got it right. You call for comment, you are skeptical, um some would say cynical. Um And so it's hard for me to imagine like an algorithm, you know, calling for comment, for example, just to make a sort of a very basic point. But there's also the, the, the uh the principles that sort of underlie good journalism, um at least, you know, theoretically that you're trying to get it right. You're trying to be fair, you're trying to not approach it with preconceived notions. And so I think between the, the, the actual physical work that journalists do, if you can think of calling for communist physical and the values that under underline good journalism, I think it's hard for me to imagine like AAA trustworthy completely. A I generated say website. Um But, you know, we'll, we'll have to see what the, who the humans in the loop are to see how that actually works. Ok. Unfortunately, we have to leave it there. Thank you for such an impassioned discussion to Jim, to Christina and Eric. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Ok. So that wraps our mainstay conversations this morning. It's now time to head into our strategy sessions and those begin at noon and please do go to the session that you signed up for. If you're confused, if you've forgotten, ask someone from Fortune and they will help you. We'll meet back here at 1 p.m. for our lunch and keynote conversation with the nod Kohler and Fortune senior editor Jeremy Kahn. Thank you so much in your in your car. We keep trying to talk about us. I'm someone. You may be my love. I'll be your cry afternoon. Be your overnight rush. Make you crazy over my no cry. Oh, ladies and gentlemen, we ask your kind cooper in clearing the room once again so that we may prepare for the next session. Thank you and I do everything right and you call I forgive.

Brainstorm Design 2023

Scott Doorley, Creative Director, Stanford d.school

Brainstorm Design 2023: Living With Emerging Technologies

When change is constant, the path ahead is full of uncertainty, the way we think about new technology will, will help unlock its vast promise and unearth its perils. Scott Doley is here to share new ways of thinking about and making the most of our ever emerging tech. Scott is creative director at Stanford D School and an expert working at the intersection of design and media. Please welcome Scott Doley. Thanks so much. I really appreciate the time. Uh Your time is valuable and uh I'm excited to talk for a little bit. So I'm gonna talk about emerging tech and uh I'll get into it in a sec, but I just want to share one thing before I do. Can I be honest right now? Um I'm a little nervous about giving this talk. Uh It doesn't end in the way I give a lot of talk, it doesn't end in the way they normally do. It ends kind of unresolved a little bit. And I'll be honest, I'm slightly uncomfortable with that. Um In fact, it ends with the sentence that is, that's an open question that I think we have to solve. So it's really really unresolved at the end. Now, I think that's ok. At least I'm trying to convince myself that's ok because I feel like we're in a moment right now where things, uh, don't resolve themselves quickly and I think we just have to get used to living with that. I think maybe that's the point is that we have to cultivate the skills to, to live in this unresolved world. Now, I've tried to fill it with lots of the talk with lots of practical takeaways. So I hope you won't be disappointed. But why don't we just dive right in? So I, as I mentioned, I'm going to talk about emerging technology. And often when we talk about emerging technology, we focus on the second half of that phrase, we talk about the technology that makes perfect sense because the technology that we're talking about, whether it be synthetic bio Blockchain A I is very powerful. But there's something about that first part, uh the emerging part that I think is worth spending a little time on because I think it's affecting us in an equal way. It's the technology. Just that constant change itself is kind of pushing us in ways that we're not used to. In fact, that word didn't used to be put in front of technology, it used to be new technology or just technology. So why is this uh emerging? I've got three questions to answer during the talk. One is about how, how that makes us feel the other is how we think about it. And the last is what we might do about it. So let's start with the first one. How does it feel? So, so to me, there's something particular about how emergence feels that we'll talk about right now. This is a graph on the bottom of the timeline. It's roughly the last century on the vertical, on the left hand side, that's the percentage of Americans that have adopted a new technology. Now, this is done for lots of technologies. We're looking at how fast do people in America adopt technology? Up to 80% of the population. We're going to look at the phone right now and start with all the versions of the phone. So first we've got the landline, landline starts a little bit before this graph. You can see it kind of has a little bit of a down slope. The slope is kind of a curve. Now let's go to cell phones. Um and I'm not talking about smartphones, I'm talking about dumb phones, the flip phones and brick phones and the like that starts off with a little trickle in the eighties. You know, these are the car phones, the big mobile phones, but for the early adopters, then it really does start to pick up and in about two decades, you're up to that 80% level. It's a little bit off the chart, but you're up to that 80% level. And then lastly, let's look at smart, so smartphones pose a similar pattern to the cell phones, but the uptake is a little bit quicker at the beginning and then it kind of rockets uh in, in under a decade up to that 80% level. Now, if we went even a step further and got to like the chat interfaces like clad and chas GP T um that would be just a sliver. It's not, I don't know that it's up to 80% yet, but it's on track to just be a sliver on the right side of that. Um So how does that make us feel? Is the question? Well, I work with a guy named Glenn Fajardo, kind of a brilliant guy and he has a framework that he uses to think about how that adoption feels and most technology starts as a nice to have. So you think about when the iphone came out, which was the first, you know, popular smartphone, it's kind of nice to be able to open up the maps and pinch and it was cool to have music in your pocket along with the phone and messaging, but it wasn't like a mandatory thing to do business. Um Over time that moves to what you can't ignore, right? So when the technology gets to, can't ignore stage to just actually function in society or in your work, you can't ignore it. You have to either just do it or decide specifically to opt out. Now what's happening now is the distance between nice to have and can't ignore is getting shorter, right? You can see that on the graph. Let's look at one more graph. This one's about A I, this is how fast the A is uh on, on different tasks can learn to be as good as a human at that task. So you can see, I don't even, this is a much shorter timeline. It's about 20 years. I don't have to get into all the details. But if you look at say like handwriting recognition which begins on the left has like a similar kind of slope to the landline as you go to the right, which are newer things coming out. Now you get to language understanding that's like a straight up with a little hitch and then a straight up, right? So it's following that same pattern. I think this is creating a certain type of feeling in us, this quick adoption that distance, shortening and the change in the improvement happening. And it's putting us in a situation where we're never up to speed, right? We're never up to speed. And if you take that and make it into an acronym, we have N for never ut si think you can see where this is going. It's nuts, right? It's making us nuts. Now. Now in American slang, uh there are a couple of definitions of nuts that I think are useful here one is that it's mentally disorienting. So, uh, if someone's playing a song that I don't, like, I might say that song is making me nuts. Right. It's not making me feel good. The other though is kind of the opposite. It means extremely alluring. So, like, if I have a song that I love, I might say something like, oh, my gosh, I'm nuts about that song. I'm nuts about that band. Right. So, on the one hand, you can think of the mentally, um, disorienting folks as being the, the pessimists and the extremely alluring folks as being the optimists. Um, but either way it doesn't really matter, the mental state is still this excited mental state and I don't know about you, but I don't make great decisions when I'm in an excited mental state. When I'm sort of mentally frustrated, I eat a lot of sugar and things I shouldn't eat when I'm overexcited. I make a lot of rash decisions that I shouldn't do. So, I think this is actually an issue that we're kind of like hyper, hyper, excited. Next. How do we think about it? So, how do we imagine what's to come is the question that I have. It's a really interesting question because we're actually not that good at this. You know, we don't know what the technology is going to do. We can't really totally understand it. So, what we have to do is take old mental models and put them on the new technology and see what comes out. So let's look at generative A I, again, there are lots of metaphors. I've been kind of collecting. This one is a representation of a calculator. For words, this one is particularly popular with some of my students. A calculator for words suggests that, oh, this is a tool we have it under control and it does our busy work for us. That's sort of what that metaphor reveals. On the other hand, I'm giving a lot out in the media that there's a, it's like these are like nuclear weapons, right? We there, there's an existential threat here. We need to have some treaties around how fast this moves, there's a political solution to it. And so that like highlights kind of the threat and the power of it. Now there are tons of other ones. Electricity has come up fire manufacturing. I've used one which is Margarine that maybe it's a synthetic thing that in the long run is going to turn out to be not so good for us. Who's right? Who's right? Which of these metaphors is right? The answer is, who knows? Because we haven't seen what it can do yet. And I think I would add, who cares? Because to be honest, it's not really about being right anymore. I think when we're in this never up to speed moment, what that means is we have to operate in ignorance. And so what we need to use these frames of mind for is not to make sure that we're right or wrong. It's actually to find the space that we're missing. And so the main thing is, it's both right. It's all of it, but we shouldn't get hung up on one too much because when we get hung up on one too much, it narrows our field of vision and we end up being stuck in that metaphor. So I think the goal here is just to switch switch frames of mind. OK. So now we're coming, coming to the end, what do we do about this right now? What or what now? What happens next? How are we going to make sense of all the opportunities and all the perils that are here? I've been playing around with what I call rules for emerging tech. I'm really interested in like, why are we lumping all these technologies together again, synthetic bio Blockchain A I? Why are we saying these are all emerging tech when we didn't say tech was emerging before? Um So what I'm looking for is a way that we can have a framework that allows us to have what I call the ability to respond. So the ability to respond is very similar to what my colleague, Sarah Stein Greenberg was talking about this morning in teaching students to be able to be adaptive learners. It's about, you know, developing the capacity to learn how to learn this has kind of become a phrase that's used all over the D school Cortland Butts who does equity work with us uses this phrase Lisa K Solomon, who does futures work with us uses this phrase. So in very different areas, this phrase is, is popping up. And I think the interesting thing is if we look at the peculiarities of this technology, it can help us get ahead of it. So I'm sure there are like 42 of these, I've come up with three. I'm still not even sure that they're right. These are hunches or hypotheses that I'm testing out, but let's work through those three right now. So we're going to look at the peculiarities of emerging tech. So one is that they continue to grow even after we're done with them. So you can see this very specifically in something like synthetic biology, right? Synthetic biology. It just literally keeps growing after, after we're done with it, you can see it in A I the way machine learning can kind of progress and can get smarter even after we ship it. Um So what does that mean for us, another colleague of mine, KSA Carter, who's the academic director at the B school. And I have been throwing around this idea for a while that actually maybe delivering products is going to look more like shepherding or farming than it is going to look like shipping. Now, we still use this mental of shipping when we're talking about even things like software and I think that's probably outdated. It's even outdated already. Right. Because software development is kind of a dress rehearsal for what I'm talking about with like constant version releases, beta testing, uh, constant debugging that when we push things out into the world, our responsibility is going to continue long after the shipping date. Um, and it, it, it, it seems like that should always have been the case, but frankly, it hasn't. So I think what you could do is if you're thinking about shipping a product, how do you create a nimble team that's going to be able to interact with that product over time? And again, it's already happening. Next one is they seem like us but they don't work like us. And I think this one can be, this one can confuse us a little bit. So they do a lot of human things. You know, if I go into chat GP T or I look at stable diffusion and create an image, it kind of looks like something a human could have made. But the way it actually happens is very different. You know, they get these huge pre training data with uh stable diffusion that's about creating noise and then subtracting it to get the image, which is not how a human does. That. The reason I bring that up is because we get so excited about the capabilities because the capabilities are so powerful, they they're actually lopsided and they have really weird vulnerabilities. So this is going on San Francisco right now with the um driverless taxis, people who are kind of not in favor of this are taking traffic cones and putting them on the hood and that stops the tra the taxi debt in its its tracks. And so it's just like a weird vulnerability that it has. So in terms of, of um putting things out to the world, I think what this means is that we are not just thinking about the features, but thinking about the faults. We're actually designing features and faults. At the same time again, this probably should have been done for years and it's increased in popularity. And I've heard a lot of people talking about it today, but I think that's like the critical shift there. And then uh Sarah and I have actually been talking about this, the side effects come along with the effects. So let me give just a quick illustration of that. Uh This is Carl Sagan, the scientist in 1985. He's speaking to Congress about what was then called the greenhouse effect that we now know as climate change. This is over a century after the industrial revolution. So the effects of the the side effects of the industrial revolution took that long to come into play. This is a similar moment. This is Frances Haugen also talking to Congress about this time, her concerns with social media and how it was affecting teens and then also how it's affecting society. This is less than a decade after the shift in social media that a lot of people think sort of spawned these issues, right? So that distance between when an effect happens and when the side effect happens are getting shorter, I think, you know, again, just recently, um Sam Ullman was in front of Congress talking about the worries about uh generative A I which had only been released with under a year at that point. So they're getting closer and closer and closer. I think you could think of this as a, as a major problem and it is uh as a big concern. But I actually think there's a silver lining in this one, which is that when things are changing at that rate, it's actually easy to perceive what's happening, right? Because you can very quickly see the causes and effects. So it actually makes it easier to act. The other thing is I think it really lowers the cost of investing in a hunch because if you invest in a hunch, you can validate it more quickly if those changes are happening in succession like that. All right. So, um so I mentioned that there wasn't going to be a big resolution and this is the moment of, of non resolution. Um What I want to say is, uh there's, I'll just, I'll just begin with a quote. Um or I'll end with a quote, I guess there's a French philosopher, um named Paul Valerie and he ha he has a quote that just like sticks in my brain. Uh And I repeated it all the time. He was dealing with emerging tech when he said it, his emerging tech was radio in the 19 thirties. And what he said is, can the human mind deal with what the human mind has created? And I'm not sure all the time, I'll be honest, like sometimes I feel like, no, absolutely not. Other times like today, I feel like, yeah, you know, if we can develop this ability to respond, if we can get comfortable, never being up to speed and kind of getting in touch with the things that we don't know. Uh Yeah, I do, I do think the human mind can respond to it and we can be a little bit less nuts, but to be totally honest, uh I think that's an open question that's for us to solve. Thanks so much.

Fortune Global Forum 2023

Majid Jafar, Chief Executive Officer, Crescent Petroleum Francesco La Camera, Director-General, International Renewable Energy Agency In conversation with: Peter Vanham, Executive Editor, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Global Forum  

Fortune Global Forum 2023: The Global Energy Transition 

Majid Jafar, Chief Executive Officer, Crescent Petroleum Francesco La Camera, Director-General, International Renewable Energy Agency In conversation with: Peter Vanham, Executive Editor, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Global Forum 

Majid Jafar, Chief Executive Officer, Crescent Petroleum Francesco La Camera, Director-General, International Renewable Energy Agency, Peter Vanham, Executive Editor, FORTUNE

So let's stay on the topic of climate and sustainability. A recent report put together by the United Nations found that if current projections hold 20 major fossil fuel producing nations will make approximately 100 and 10% more fossil fuels in 2030 than the quantity consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5 °C. The UN Secretary General says these governments are doubling down on fossil fuel production and that spells double trouble for both people and the planet. While the goal of limiting global warming is a challenging one, it's not impossible to reach. So let's talk about the innovative forms of renewable energy that are emerging in an effort to keep combating climate change whilst serving all stakeholders. Joining Fortune, executive editor and Fortune Global Forum, co-chair Peter Bum. For this conversation are Majeed Jaffa, Ceo of Crescent Petroleum, which is the oldest and largest private sector energy company in the Middle East and Francesco La Camera, Director general of the International Renewable Energy Agency which works to promote and accelerate the adoption of renewable energy sources worldwide. Please welcome them to the Fortune Global Forum. Well, hello, it's good to see everyone here and I must say, of course, we are going to address in this debate, obviously the elephant in the room. And I think you all know what the elephant in the room is for the gentleman here, which is tie or no tie. And you can see uh that we have two contestants here. Uh uh Francesco, you went for the tie in Madrid. You did not uh do you care to comment? Well, I don't have a cool shoes as Francesco. So neither of us does I have a few things in the, in the day where I need to have a tie. So I signed an agreement today and you know, just a photo, you must have a tie. We, we appreciate that. Now, I want to move to the actual elephant in the room, uh which in the energy transition debate, of course, is the role of oil and gas, fossil fuels versus renewables. And we're in a great place to talk about that here and have great guests to talk about that. I want to start with you Francesco because you know, you represent the International Renewable Energy Agency which obviously uh is advocating renewables. And you are also based here in Abu Dhabi. The offices are here. I think some of us actually passed by if you remember that this morning in Masdar City at your beau beautiful headquarters. So tell us how you see the role of oil and gas producing countries and companies in this transition towards renewables. So we have to set the scene for saying what could be the role. So for us, our Bible is the I PV C report only 1.5. So this means that uh at 2030 we have to decrease our co two emissions by 43%. This is global, global and naturally, this means that the fossil fuel sector is to decline for having less a mission there. In the same time, we have not to create a disruption in the uh in the energy market. So the gap between supply that should decline, the fossil fuel and demand should be covered, right? And this is what is renewable energy is from in this particular moment. And this is the reason also for us for calling on the triple of renewable solar capacity until 11 terabytes and 2030. So this is a number that is just a translation or what is the IPCC report in time of gigabytes? That's a scientific, you know, sort of consensus declined by 43% CO2 emissions. Now, obviously different countries and different companies will have different interests in, in that equation. Uh But are you confident? Are you um do you believe it's probable that everyone will be pulling at the same side here in, in that joint ambition for 2030 you know, the the the climate change puts everyone in front of the same question. So there is no one that can do something different from the others. So we have a, this is a common goal. We have to contribute to the goal and naturally country and their sector should contribute differently based on their circumstances. It just also the language of the Paris Agreement. II, I wonder if your previous life, you were a politician, Francesco because you treaded that needle very carefully. But we actually have somebody here who can talk about their particular interests, which is Majid. Um you know, you run a company which is called CRE Petroleum. Um So does that mean that by 2030 your company will be called Crescent Sun Winds and water or how do you see that transition for your company? So, first of all, I think we step back, we've only been given 20 minutes to cover global energy. It's which is an important topic and obviously I'm biased, but without energy, which is the lifeblood of the economy, none of the other panel sessions would have anything to talk about. So I think that's an and I encourage all of you as leaders understand energy, more understand where your own energy comes from, for your businesses, for uh even in your homes. Uh I think that awareness out there outside of our sector is lacking and that's important. If we look at the world today, we have at the moment, more energy used by the 1 billion people in the OECD in the rich countries than the rest of the world combined by the other 7 billion. And we still have nearly about 2.5 billion people without clean cooking solution, 859 100 million without electricity and that number is still rising. So we must remember the needs, the development needs of those developing countries. So it's not actually that is where that is where the net increase is coming from for emissions. It's not in Europe or the US where emissions have actually been falling. And that's where the more of the investment and the finance is needed. And the trebling of renewable energy is now a common goal. The UAE has called for President Xi and President Biden more recently. In reality, to replace the current system, you would need 100 times more, not three times more. And so far renewable energy and it's very important and it's contributing more and more and the costs have come down. Although there are limits set by physics to how far they can come down has been a supplement, a compliment. It has not, it has not met the total increase in global energy demand. It's just about now in the last year met the increase in electricity demand. I think important use has been at an all time high in 2022. So I think we need to recognize that we will continue to need. Now, when is it going to peak the demand of oil? Is it now already peaked or is it in a few decades? The reality is we lose 5 to 7 million barrels a day annually from decline rates of oil fields. So you need to add a new Saudi Arabia every two years just to maintain the current demand. A natural gas is playing a fundamental role, backing up renewables when the sun is not shining and the wind isn't blowing, you need something and it's 200 times more cost effective than using batteries, for example. Right. So I want to talk about that because I think you want to distinguish between oil and coal, of course, and then the use of natural gas is a fossil fuel. Why do you find that so important to highlight the role of natural gas in a transition towards a net zero economy? So I think uses of energy are what defines the difference. So gas is for power as is renewables and coal. Unfortunately, by not investing in gas, we've seen more of coal in developing countries, namely China and India, which uses the two countries use 70% of the world coal, which is why emissions have been going up and the cost was going up and we had energy supply shocks last winter. So we were failing on all three legs of the sustainability affordability availability that the so called energy trilemma oil. On the other hand, even if you replace light transport, we still have trucking, shipping and air and people are working on cleaner solutions for those and you have petrochemicals, everything the transition is relying upon whether it's the solar panels or the wind turbines or the electric cars themselves from their tires to their interiors is actually made of oil and medicines. And the reliance in the food sector. I think these are underappreciated, the different uses of energy and the continuing needs through the energy transition for the different forms of energy. So I think it's not a versus as you said, it's all of the above and a lot more and a key area where I'm not seeing enough investment is also in the grids and in particular, in transmission distribution, there's a focus on the generation only and there needs to be a lot more investment on that. If there's gonna be more electrification briefly before I get back to Francesco. When he talks about those 2030 goals, you know, decline of 43% of global Co2 emissions. Is that an ambition that you share that you understand that you stand behind on a global level. So I think for us as an industry, first of all, understanding how what we produce contributes positively. So we are in the developing countries, we're not in rich countries. We are here in the Middle East and we went from 50 years ago, an oil producer. Now we are 85% of the gas producer, the gas we produce in this region by displacing diesel for power generation avoids more than 5 million tons of co two a year, which is more than all the Teslas in the planet. But how we produce must be cleaner. So we've spent seven years reducing our emissions, reducing flaring to basically zero and then offsetting the remainder supporting wind power projects in China and Mongolia and places like that to achieve carbon neutral production two years ago. And we've sustained that. So how we use it is going to change and how we produce it must be decarbonised, right? Um But so do you support that analysis that we need to decline our dependency on? I mean, that that is a global, you know, uh target set by different organizations and there's debate and an upcoming in cop, there'll be a lot of work by governments on that. What I'm talking about is the role of us as private sector companies in our own businesses. Um Francesco, so now we've heard from somebody who obviously uh produces oil and gas. You advocate obviously for renewables, what are for you the most promising renewables? Acknowledging, of course, this other reality that we're going to ramp up production have to ramp up uh uh uh capacity. And that so far renewables have only played what Majid says is a complementary role. Uh So, first of all, uh concerning the complementary role, the fact is that in the last year, the last year, 83% of the new standard capacity was renewable, electricity, power, energy power. And concerning the a sector, uh the most uh clean way to, to to to manage it is through hydrogen. And the green hydrogen mainly and concerning transport along shiny biofuel also hydrogen could be used. So I is for you one of the most promising renewable, you know, I don't like this kind of question in which sense, all the type of renewables, I wish I could take it back. But unfortunately, with my Children, you know, and I always like to, to look at those as an uh uh uh answer to the problem. So for example, country that have a long hydropower uh capacity, so they have the the na the best natural battery in the world so they can arrange the system of vessel debt. So it depends on the character is that a country where wind is blowing, where the sun is shining. So what is important? And I think he completely agree with him if I can react on what they say that we have to post a lot of more attention to the grid, the the interconnectivity, the balancing the flexibility of the grid, but also the suit also the port will change nature. If you go to the Buy Port, you will see how this port is changing its nature to be ready for the next energy system, not to the past one. And do you believe because you've been focusing on, we've been focusing on 2030 which is almost, uh, six years away only. Um, do you believe that hydrogen can become widely available in six years? I don't think we bring me to the usual anecdote that I want to, to present here. Uh, it was 2021. So less than two years ago when Bloomberg come to during the summer, say that hydrogen was going to be competitive at 2050. Well, finally can be produced with $2 per ton. No far away. Of course, yes, we, we came later and said it was going to be competitive in 2030. Now, this country is already exporting hydrogen and it's there to be competitive. So this, I make this anecdote for showing how dramatic are the changes. You remember that uh renewables a few years ago was still considered niche. How is that what it is? No 81% you said last year, always a cap for power naturally. Um But if you hear that, you know, this incredible advances in technology prices coming down essentially, um you know, we can imagine of course, that you would be starting to invest also in renewable energy. If you do that, do you have the ability beyond your financial ability? Do you have the ability to do that with the people that you have and with the uh capacity that you have? So there's a lot of debate in the oil and gas sector. Should you also be a renewables? Company or should you focus on doing what you're doing? But decarbonize it and, and that debate is somewhat across the Atlantic now between the US companies that are more in the latter camp and the European companies that are transformer. My own view is it's quite a business renewables is more of a utility and it's a finance game and it's a different kind of risk reward balance. I'm not convinced that oil and gas companies can be the most effective in that sector. However, they do need to focus on decarbonizing their own products. We do as a group as the Crescent group invest in clean energy companies. I'm personally an investor in renewables, also in in hydropower in uh in Europe. So as a whole, those investments uh need to happen, right? But also recognizing, I mean, you mentioned about cost hydrogen today, it's cost prohibitive. And unfortunately, despite the amazing investments that are being made by Adnoc or a MCO and others, the market is not there. They have tried in Europe and elsewhere, people are unwilling to bear that cost, but there are these pilot projects trying to bring them down, including here, including here, energy is not however, like digital, you're not going to have more slow and dropping of costs, right? We are getting close to the physics limits for um both solar and wind. We're not gonna have 10 times the cost reductions. For example, we will still have some cost reductions but the big challenge is on storage, right? A battery battery today to store uh you know, a barrel worth of oil and energy is about $200,000 worth of batteries and it would weigh 20 tons, right? And, and, and that is a significant challenge. So there does need to be more investment as Bill Gates and others say in the technologies of the future, not just the incremental improvements in the technologies of the last century, which is what we're living with today. So you're doing that, separate your investments in renewable and your investments in oil or in gas particularly. Uh because you see a very big difference finally uh because we're going to wrap up uh Francisco, you're laughing because you know why uh you get the last question, that means the last 60 seconds, you know, um stresses on you. Um Can we do that? We're going to talk about it at COP 28 in a week's time. Can we see that ramp up in renewables or is it going to be more like Majid says we are not there yet. Uh We will see the COP 28 will come with a strong call for renewables. I have no doubt. Uh I think the president's designators already make this very clear and we are working on, on that. And what is good that the call of the president come on the basis of our number, our analysis and our outlook for we are so we are very proud of uh of that. Naturally, we have seen also some progress in the loss and damage. So we are quite confident that uh this and is inevitable. So I want to make this very clear. We have no choice. The question is not. If we have to do or not, we must do. It's a different thing. We have to reimagine our world where the ratio that there is today between renewables and the rest will change because it has to change and it will change. So no one can stop this process. The only aspect that is there and closing is the speed and the scale. That is the challenge. It is not where we are going, right. We have to ramp that up. We have tried to cover this debate in the time that we had and we hope of course, that the energy world will follow in the time that they have, which is about six years until 2030. We want to thank both of you for joining in the debate and thank all of you for listening to us. Thank you so much.

Most Powerful Women Summit 2023

Mellody Hobson, President and Co-CEO, Ariel Investments Interviewer: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE


MPW Summit 2023: Leadership Lessons With Mellody Hobson

You Community Melody. Hobson is CO CEO of the Global Asset Management Firm, Aerial Investments. She's chair of the Starbucks Board of Directors, a board member at JP Morgan Chase and an influential force in the world of finance. Melody is a longtime advocate for closing the racial wealth gap. And earlier this year, she launched project black, a groundbreaking fund designed to create and support minority owned businesses of scale. She's known for her business acumen and recently shared her wisdom, teaching a master class on strategic decision making. Melody is no stranger to Fortune's most powerful women in business list ranking once again in 2023 her fifth time on the list. We're delighted to have her with us at the summit to talk about her recent projects, the the decisions that shaped her career and to offer lessons in leadership, she joins Mahala Brahm for this conversation. Please welcome them to the stage. Thank you for joining us Melody. Um So you literally uh taught the master class on strategic decision making as we heard and I wonder if you could start out by just sharing with us? Where do you feel like your lessons in strategic decision making um throughout your career, where, where, where did most of that come from? Was it from the boardroom from your childhood? From somewhere in between? So, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I always love coming to this conference and I used to dream of being here when I was really young and reading fortune. So it's very exciting to sit on the stage and to be on the list and just meet and be with so many amazing women. Um My strategic, my point of view around strategy came through growing up. My mother had really practical advice for me all the time. From my life experience, generally, the hardest things and the worst things taught me the most about strategy when things weren't going well. And then I've had the opportunity to work with some iconic leaders like Howard Schultz, Jamie Diamond, Jeffrey Katzenberg, being in a room with David Gethen. Um people who John Rogers be married to an icon like George Lucas. And so those titans all have been great um uh advisors and I try to eat up and soak up wisdom. Uh best lesson from your mother though was what? Well, I was telling some of my mother's stories in the green room, which were hilarious. Um But I think in work, her number one lesson was make myself indispensable. She always said, make it so you couldn't lose your job that everyone would want to work with you. And I used to joke with John Rogers when I first started Ariel, I want one of me because I really did make myself indispensable. But this was also the mother who told me which I made the joke in the other room. No one wants to see you eat all of that. So she would say if you're out at any kind of event, you know, with dinner with people half she's like, never or does anyone want to see you eat all of that? That hilarious. That's hilarious. True. It started at very young. So it wasn't like at 13, she started saying it, she started saying it very young. That's very funny. Um, so you were a four year old who left half your plate as it started pretty, I was like, oh, I supposed to eat half. So, um, one of the things you've talked about in the past and the master class as well is kind of the, the, the art of having tough candid conversations. And, um, I wonder if you could just give for us, like some of your biggest lessons over the years when it comes to that something everybody in this room has to deal with. And so many of us have a hard time doing. Gambi Sa Moyo was the person who crystallized this for me. She's one of my best friends. We're doppelgangers. She grew up in Africa, I grew up in America and was an economist. Right. And um she always used to say to me in the very early years, feedback as a gift, it is not a right. And that was something that I realized was really important. I think people think we have a right to feedback when we don't. And so she was like, what, wherever you can get it, however you can get it, you should be excited about it. We had a coach inside of Ariel who always used to tell us that um you, we'd ask permission to get feedback because he, he said everyone doesn't want it. So when we were in a situation, we would say and still at Ariel, do you want feedback? And don't say yes if you don't want it. And so getting feedback in that situation. And then last, lastly, don't qualify feedback by who gives it to you. I think what typically happens is we say I don't really like that person. So therefore I'm going to discount everything that they say when sometimes someone you least like admire maybe think has the values that you have. There is a kernel in there that could be helpful to you. And so being accepting of feedback from anyone at any time anywhere is the goal that I've always had. And then I can tell you, you know, being willing to accept it. And there have been many times in my life where the feedback was extremely tough and I have had a rule do not cry. Because if someone gives you feedback and you start crying, then they have to spend a lot of time putting you back together and they never want to do it again. So they're thinking to themselves like, I don't have 30 minutes to give melody when I give her this feedback. So do not cry. I tell people, you know, if you cry, you sort of ruin the possibility of getting feedback again. Don't cry. Eat half your plate. What does he eat all of that? Um So Alan Murray, our CEO and I recently interviewed the Newish CEO of Starbucks for our, our podcast leadership. Next. And it was fascinating hearing him talk about his sort of immersion into Starbucks, not just doing the, you know, typical listening tour, but actually taking months getting to be a certified barista working as a barista across the world. And, and this is something that you and Howard Schultz really put to Howard really thought of it. So I want to give Howard credit because that's really the person Howard said, let's give him six months to get totally immersed. And during that time, he said I'll stay longer because he was supposed to leave earlier than he did. I'll give him that time where no one is reporting to him. He doesn't have to make any really hard calls and he can spend the time just learning the business from the ground level up. And then we slowly layered on, um, reporting responsibilities. But he was unencumbered for a long time to really move around the world and be behind the counter and in being behind the counter, it's the way you really learn the business. You got to spell everybody's names. It's not easy. If only it were just that. Yes, I'm sure the baristas is hard. I have zero doubt. But one of the interesting things to me was that he mentioned, as we were asking him about this process that in kind of the Western mentality, it's like, oh my gosh, how did you take so long to train for this to do this, you know, immersion and the Eastern mentality is why was it so short? Just six months? So can you talk about just your role and and in in shaping that helping to shape that? And why as chair of the board um of Starbucks, you decided that this was really worth his time because the culture of our company is so important to our success and understanding that culture is truly um critical to understanding the customer, the partners who work inside the company and what makes us different. And you know, when you think about it on the one level, we sell a commodity. On the other level, we sell an experience that is so ingrained in cultures, not only here in America but around the world and it's so important to people and they choose this third place because it makes them feel something like they belong or special or um valued. Noticed it's the name on the cup. All of those things. They set us apart from a traditional um mind competitor. No disrespect. And I think making sure that someone could really assimilate inside of that culture was, was very important. When you think about many careers, you know, there were jobs where you were an apprentice for a long at aerial. We talk about our analysts being apprentices, their apprentice, they're an apprentice for a very long time where they're just learning the craft. And that's what Lakshman had the opportunity to do. Again. It was Howard's idea. And as a board, we were fully, fully behind that idea based upon we thought what we thought ultimately would be important to his success and therefore the success of the company. Amazing. Um I know this audience loves to hear from you. So I definitely want to give you all an opportunity to ask melody some questions as well. Please raise your hand and we'll bring a microphone over to you. Um But I, I wanna pivot a little bit in the meantime, um we saw so many um diversity initiatives um after the murder of George Floyd in particular um and so many commitments um and, and, and, and statements put out and um and now we're seeing at least uh in some companies uh de prioritization um of those commitments of those initiatives. And so obviously, this is near and dear to your heart and to Ariel and the whole mission from the get go. But what's your advice to other companies on how to, how to keep your eye on the ball, how to keep it a priority and why? What's the argument? The argument is very simple. So my perspective around diversity and initiatives, inclusion belonging is that if you want to be a world class 21st century company, if you want to understand your potential customer, if you want to understand the people who work in your company, you need diverse perspectives, diverse ideas, diverse backgrounds, all to come together for better outcomes. If you don't want that, then stay monolithic and over time you will disappear. And I think that, you know, people are trying to make this about the right thing to do. This is good corporate governance. This is about being a fiduciary to all the stake holders that are important to a company. And unfortunately, the pullback after the horrific murder of George Floyd that shined a light on an issue that anyone who was black or brown already knew about. There was no revelation for us is that the pullback has certainly been been directly related to the Supreme Court decision with Harvard in the sense that they're coming for us. If we have diversity on our agenda, I say don't give in to that. I think companies have to stand firm because this is ultimately in the best interest of the company, the shareholder and our society. Are you? And we have a question over here, but I wanna just real quick ask a follow up. Are you concerned about the legal landscape? You've got projects Black, the, the fund that you started? Um Does that concern you? How are you navigating? No, I'm not concerned at all. We've looked at all of the legal possibilities and we feel very, very strong and, and confident in our point of view about what we're doing to grow and scale minority black businesses, uh minority businesses, black and brown in the United States. So this is a good business decision and that's ultimately, you know, what matters over time. Hello, um The Hair Washington, Ceo of Otri M Melody. I just wanna thank you for your leadership example. Um You spoke, uh my company is Index back and um you spoke at a conference earlier this year and you looked across the room and you asked where were the Black and Brown founders and CEO S? And you know, if you saw me, I was one of the ones, but I wanted to thank you for at least for example, 11. Exactly. That was meant to say that you often speak truth to power in rooms that need to hear the message. So thank you for that. The question on a lighter note, I'm a Seattle Seahawks fan. So when Russell came over to the Broncos it was definitely one of those who had mixed feelings. I wonder how your ownership in the Broncos with the sports franchise has changed your leadership or perspective on winning and losing in business. Curious, since it's so public and emotions run so wild. So, first of all, I just want to be very clear. Never in a million years did I imagine I'd own part of a football team just so like, just to be super clear, I didn't like grow up thinking that's what I'm going to do. But what I will tell you is you can learn anywhere and I've learned one a lot from sports. It's hard, it's a very hard thing. And I have two takeaways that I think have really influenced me in the last year of ownership. One, I was on the phone with Sean Payton, our coach very recently on a Zoom and he said you have to earn the right to coach hard, wrote it down. And I was like, you have to earn the right to coach hard in any setting. And I thought about why I could co chart at aerial after 30 years or how I show up in boardrooms because I've said in those rears for a lot rooms for quite a while, but you have to earn the right to coach hard. I think that's a really intuitive statement. The other thing that I learned from and I, I used this example with my young colleagues who are very excited about hybrid work and maybe never done it before. And it's not my favorite thing. I'm being very honest and I always told them, I said, listen, I want you to just imagine the Super Bowl huddle. I want you to imagine the two teams on each side. I can assure you neither was hybrid, even like the time in the weight room is together. It, you can't win like that. And so, you know, just using that as a real life example, it's hard to argue with, but it's true at melody. Super, super quick. What's next for you? Like what's on your, you know, we talked about vision boards earlier. You've done so much. Is there something that you're like, just dying to, to, to own or to, to work at, or to accomplish that you haven't done yet? There are so many times that I wanna do. I mean, I, I can't even, my list is long. Um, you know, I, I, there's so much, I mean, it's, it's hard for me to, I want all kids to learn financial literacy in schools. I mean, that's one of the things I wake up every day thinking about. I want Ariel to be um great and that's, you know, so I've never looked for another job or something else that I wanted to do. I wanna do a really good job as chair of Starbucks because, because right now, which is tragic of the Fortune 500. I'm the only black woman chair that doesn't make sense. And so these are things that are all really important to me as understand being cognizant of the fact that they set trails for other people and needing to do a good job. So there's a lot, I, I think we're all in awe of your to do list. So thank you for coming and sharing with us. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

CEO Initiative 2023

Debbie Dyson, Chief Executive Officer, OneTen, Ken Frazier, Chairman, Health Assurance Initiatives, General Catalyst; Co-founder and Co-chair, OneTen Moderator: Alan Murray, Chief Executive Officer, FORTUNE

CEO Initiative 2023: Leveraging Tailwinds To Navigate Headwinds

Debbie Dyson, Chief Executive Officer, OneTen Ken Frazier, Chairman, Health Assurance Initiatives, General Catalyst; Co-founder and Co-chair, OneTen Moderator: Alan Murray, Chief Executive Officer, FORTUNE

Debbie Dyson, OneTen, Ken Frazier, Health Assurance Initiatives, General Catalyst; OneTen Moderator: Alan Murray, FORTUNE

Right. Everyone in this room knows that 2020 started a mass a massive push to bolstering den I and ESG commitments in companies, uh companies working to make public commitments and to live up to those commitments and entities that didn't factor those considerations into their strategies. Felt pressure both from their own employees and from the outside to, to step up. But what we've seen in the last year, year and a half as we've discussed uh earlier today is uh backlash a political backlash and some backsliding. I've seen evidence that some companies are at least pressing pause and saying, wait, hold on. I don't want to talk about this right now. And so that's what we want to spend a little time talking about now. Joining us to talk more about it and the reasons and how leaders can respond are two people who have put themselves at the very forefront of the dei movement. Debbie Dyson, who is CEO of 110 uh the a coalition that aims to bridge the opportunity divide by creating 1 million jobs for Black Americans in 10 years. And Ken Frazier, who is chairman of the health Assurance initiative but was also a co-founder of the 1 10 initiative. So please join me on the stage, Debbie. Thank you so much. You're welcome. It's been since yesterday. Yeah, we, we Ken and I did this this routine yesterday. So I, I have a preview of, of uh his answers for a different audience. Um But, but look, I, I, I'd love for you, Ken first to start about to talk about why you created this initiative. And I'm gonna get Debbie to talk about how it works. So it's sort of amazing how quick the political environment in the country has changed. But if you went back to 2020 in the wake of the tragic murder of George Floyd companies were asking openly in the Business Council and the Business round table, what should we do about these kinds of issues of racial injustice in this country? And Ken and I were in some of those discussions and people were talking about making donations and putting out statements and all the things that normally happen. And we said, you know, what's in the wheelhouse of our companies is to hire people. And we pointed out that the census said that 76% of African Americans at age 26 did not have a four year degree and more than 95% of the jobs in our coalition, which is made up of 70 leading companies required a four year degree for almost any job So what we said is we really ought to look at the question and it reminded me of the discussion we just had about artificial intelligence where you look at the taxonomy of jobs and decide what the real skills are. And we said, what if we took a skills first approach to hiring for certain jobs instead of acquiring the credential of a four year degree. We said we wanted to actually have people be hired because they had certain skills and uh the goal of the coalition, it was initially to hire 1 million African Americans who lacked a four year degree into family sustaining wage jobs. Important. Basically, that's $50,000 a year or more. It's of course adjusted whether you live in Mobile, Alabama or Seattle, Washington. And that was the goal. And for the last two years, we've been active in that area with some success. So Debbie, how's it, how does it work and how is it working? Yeah, let me start with the latter first in terms of how it's working. So as Ken mentioned, we're entering our third year, we've hired to date about 108,000 jobs in terms of hires and promotes. We have over 70 some odd members in our coalition, representing about 65 different types of jobs. We have 23,000 current profiles that sit on what we call our platform, which is where our employers can go look for talent. So simplistically, the way that it works is we meet with our coalition members to try to understand what their human capital management, talent acquisition journey is. What are the types of jobs that they're looking for? What are the location, what are the skills that they're looking for? Based on that criteria, we post the jobs on our platform. We then work with an ecosystem of what we would call talent developers and talent partners that are really sort of dedicated to trying to skill up the talent so that we can make sure that talent is actually work ready by the time that they're presented. And so, you know, call it a little bit like a match making. So it's, here's the job, here's the talent and hopefully there's a match and then from there we go. And is it explicit? And you know why I'm asking this question? Is it explicitly for Black workers? So at its inception, we, we had a mission of attempting to close the talent gap explicitly for Black talent. But I know why you're asking the question and we've addressed that recently, you know, with the Supreme Court's opinion and the change in the atmosphere, we've been very clear that while that was indeed the initial reason for it, it's open to anybody who needs help. So it's not exclusionary in any way. Um It's really more and more about getting companies to focus on skills first because if they change systemically, how they think about jobs. I mean, again, 76% of African Americans lack a four year degree, but 50% of all Americans lack a four year degree. So the 1 10 goal is 1 million jobs in, in 10 years. Right. Not necessarily just for blacks, but for people without college degrees. Absolutely. And, you know, just to add on to what Ken said, what's been kind of fascinating is as we've been putting together and sort of identifying talent, we are seeing a wide range, it's not just black talent, it is every range. And many of our coalition members have said, once we sort of put this thinking into the mindset of our coalition, they've actually see the benefits that they're opening up the opportunities for others to apply that do not have a four year degree as well. But Ken, let's go back to the race issue because as you know, there's, there's not only the Supreme Court decision, there's been a real backlash. We have a member of this group, Elizabeth Gore who runs an outfit called Hello Alice to help small businesses who is being sued for having a program that pro provide explicitly provides help to black owned businesses. The Fearless Fund is another example which is being sued uh in the wake of the Supreme Court decision for providing grants explicitly uh uh to black owned businesses. What's going on here? I mean, is there a legal case? You must think there's at least some legal risk or you wouldn't have made the change with 1 10. And how do you explain what's happening? So, first of all, I think it's pretty clear that there is a movement afoot in our country against some of these programs and the lawsuits have started to build before the Supreme Court case. I think it's important to point that out. Um, you know, the way that I look at this situation is in our country, we have a couple of challenges. Number one is we want to be a country where we don't judge people by extraneous factors like gender and sex and things of that nature, right? So as an organizing and governing principle, most people would agree that race neutrality or color blindness, whatever you want to call, it is a good thing for a multicultural and multi racial society. On the other hand, I think most people would acknowledge that there are still continuing vestiges of the way this country is run for 400 years that explain why the unemployment rate for African Americans is so much worse. Why life expectancy is so much worse? Why after years and years of red lining neighborhoods are segregated? So the question becomes, how can we deal with those issues? You know, which of course people were worried about when people were in the streets about George Floyd. How do we deal with those issues in a way that balances our need to treat people fairly. But at the same time, acknowledging, not everybody has had the same life experience. If I'll just use one autobiographical example, I'm the eighth of my dad's nine Children, my younger sister and I came along in a birth order where the social engineers in Philadelphia decided to make race conscious decisions about who went to what school he called that school desegregation. So the youngest two of my dad's Children were bused out of the ghetto to better schools. Because if you lived in my neighborhood, your parents didn't, couldn't afford real estate, that was proximate to where the good public schools were. I happen to think that that obviously it benefited me, think it might have benefited Merck at some point. But the fact of the matter is, I don't think that that actually hurts somebody. Creating that opportunity for me wasn't at the expense of somebody else. And so the question becomes, how do we keep these two seemingly inconsistent goals in mind? That is to say, treating people fairly. On the other hand, creating opportunity for people whose lack of opportunity in some ways relates to the history of this country on race. So can't let me, let's push this a little bit further because I, I spend a lot of time talking to CEO S different CEO S different industries, I would guess. And I'm, I, I don't have the data on this, but I would guess 90% of them would agree with what you just said. But I can also tell you 90% of them say, but please, please, please keep me out of politics. I don't want to have anything to do with it. I, I it's, it's, it's broken, it's pernicious, it's polluting everything you, you played a really for, for, for whether intentionally or unintentionally. You played a really critical role in the politics of the last five or six years in, in 2017, you were the one after Charlottesville when the president made ambivalent comments about that, unite the right uh rally. You were the one who said I have to resign from his committees and all the other CEO S and I know this from talking to him and the other CEO S who resigned, resigned because you resigned. So you led that movement. It was a critical point. A lot of backlash 2020 after the election when the Georgia State uh legislature, the Republicans adopted a Voting Rights Act. You and Ken were the ones who called Ed Bastian at Delta Airlines, uh called the CEO of Coca Cola, convinced them to get involved, which prompted a huge political backlash. Um So how do you, how do you think about your role as a CEO versus your role as a citizen in politics? Because I can tell you and I think, you know what I'm saying is correct. Most CEO S don't want to have anything to do with it. So let me just say that while I found myself in a lot of those situations, it wasn't my goal to be a political person. It seems to me that businesses and CEO S don't want to get in the middle of every political dispute, especially given how divided our country is right now. But at the same time, I firmly believe that there are a series of principles and conditions that make our democracy what it is and they are conducive to human beings and they are conducive to commerce. And there are situations where people in elected office, either neglect or abandon those principles, you know, free and fair elections is one rule of law is respect for private property, equal treatment. All of those things that we were taught in grade school are the fundamental principles of this country. It is my view that while I don't want to drag my company into every political dispute that when those kinds of principles are not being upheld by our elected officials, it becomes the responsibility of the citizenss really, it is the government of us to take a position on those things. And I think ceos obviously are among the most influential citizens. So my whole thing is pick your spots. Ask yourself, do you have a right to speak to this issue? Does your company's values speak to this issue? And if so, I think ceos should not be cowed into not speaking because at the end of the day. If it is, in fact, a principle like the right to vote, the fact that someone else politicizes that principle doesn't make that principle intrinsically political. And I'll just make the point that came up this morning. The US business community has acted in unison around democracy in Ukraine. It strikes me as a mildly amusing. I'll say that we have a hard time talking about democracy in these United States. Yeah. No, it's so your message to this group is pick your spots but get involved when you have to get involved. But by the way, and I say to people don't allow your company to be pushed to one way or the other by the left or the right. Do what your company's values say that you're supposed to do. Because at the end of the day, there are a lot of young people in our companies and they're watching us and when we give up on the things that we've said were our values for decades, why would they believe us about anything else you did? I just want to stick with this for a second because you're in a regulated industry, obviously resigning from a government advisory council when you're in a regulated industry. And by the way, the president was already talking about legislation to increase or to control over drug prices is pretty significant. Did you talk to your board about this? Was this this a decision you made by yourself or I'm gonna get back to you, Debbie. I haven't forgotten you, but did, did you talk to your board about this or how, how, how did you handle it? I had an obligation to talk to my board. I mean, the fact of the matter is, is a company that is regulated in that way, not necessarily by the president's tweets though. I want to point that out. Uh, I did call my board and I said to them as a person of conscience, I cannot remain after these comments. Um But when I put out a statement and I intended to withdraw in a public way, I want the board to opine on whether I should speak to my personal conscience and values or should I speak to the company's values? And I can tell you unanimously, they said we want you to speak to the company's values. Every one of every, everyone back you up on it. Anyone have any questions on this before I want to go. Yeah, go ahead, please. I like Wilson Hispanic Association on corporate responsibility. My, my question, um Ken is, can you, um, give guidance to many of the CEO S here in the room who um sometimes on one ear, they may getting guidance from their uh Chief Diversity Officer on the other ear. Their general General general counsel, I used to be a general, you know, and in this environment where, you know, G CS who are not as willing to lean in, um, and stand by those principles out of fear that doing that, I can tell you. So my bottom line is you have to uphold your values. I'm, I'm a lawyer but not in the pejorative sense of the word. And the fact of the matter is that lawyers often feel their job is to protect the company from being criticized or sued. I think when you look at what the law is, by the way, the law did not change around race and hiring the Supreme Court brought the law around education into compliance with title seven. I think there's still a lot of maneuverability here and I think it's a mistake to overcorrect because you might be criticized. At the end of the day, I think ceos ought not be pushed around. If we have values, we ought to uphold those values, but we ought to do them sensibly. That's why we made the change in 110 to make sure that while we originally did it to close the talent gap for Black Americans, we say, but no, we want to help anybody who needs our help. That doesn't stop us from helping a lot of people. Let's get back to, let's get back to 110 because it is important work. And, and you know, we know we've seen the data inequality in our society has increased. The, the there's a sense that the escalator of mobility has slowed or stopped. You have a program to address that. What can the people in this room do to help? Yeah, I mean, a couple of things that I want to make sure just from something that Ken said. So I was retired, I had retired after 34 years at a company called ADP and in, I guess it was November. I had an opportunity and obviously you're all enthralled with Ken as I am every single day. It's like a gift. No, seriously, it's like a gift, brownie points. So why I say that is the case. So this is sort of a long winded way to get to the answer your question. But it was really just through the conversation with him and Ken and the other members of the board that honestly pulled me out of retirement. I could have stayed out of retirement. And my, my answer is it was important for me to, I wanted to say something. I wanted to be something and I wanted to do something. And so when we're meeting with the CEO S and we had a call just recently to talk about the whole scotus, it was probably one of the most inspirational discussions because we talked exactly about this. And what was rewarding was this resiliency and almost like, um and anger to, to be honest with you, of wanting to really lean in further of what can we do as a coalition to spread the word of impact. I mean, we're sitting here as the numbers that Ken sort of mentioned with excellent opportunity of untapped and underestimated potential of talent that is in the workforce today that has just been unseen, unheard and unappreciated. And so how do we as a nation sort of start to see that talent that for whatever the reasons were, didn't have the opportunities to go down a collegiate path for all the reasons that I think we know. And here is an alternative path to say, put the four year degree to the side and look at the skills and the potential of the talent in front of you and offer them the opportunity. So that's the, that's the, it's also a really important collective action effort. Uh because we know what's happened in the past, even with very well intentioned companies have had de i efforts and changed the way they hire a lot of times you end up just competing for the same group of educated people and, and bidding up their wages, but not addressing the problem you're trying to address. So, so kudos for you, uh both uh for doing it. Um by the way, if you're interested in, in, uh if you're as enthralled with Ken as Debbie is, and you're interested and you're interested in hearing uh uh more on what we were talking about earlier. The, the conversation that we had yesterday was for Fortune's Leadership next podcast and that'll be out in a week or so. You can get it on, on Apple or Spotify. It was really a fascinating uh 30 minutes and I would urge you to listen and dig in more and I would urge you to reach out to Debbie uh and get involved in 1 10, any contact information you want to give this 1 10 spelled out as it is dot org. So just, just feel free can make closing comments. We're talking about leadership. You know, I think leadership is about upholding what we think our values are ultimately and we can't let people outside our companies tell us what our values are. You know, my dad worked for United Parcel in the early 19 sixties and the company made a decision that it was no longer going to have segregated facilities. The law and the custom in many American states was that segregation was the right thing to do today. When we look back at that, we can all pretend that we would have been brave enough to make that decision. That was the right thing to do before the law caught up with it. And I think we can ask ourselves, do we think it's the right thing to create opportunities for talented people, irrespective of their race because we know that they can do jobs without regard to their four year degree credentials or not. I think that's the right thing in a country where our working age population is not growing at all in terms of the overall size and it's becoming more diverse here here. Thank you very much for what you're both doing and appreciate you being here. Thank you for having us here.

Impact Initiative 2023

Ryan Seacrest, Emmy-winning television and radio host, producer, entrepreneur, and
philanthropist
 Interviewer: Alan Murray, Chief Executive Officer, FORTUNE

Impact Initiative 2023: Wheel of Fortune's Ryan Seacrest on prioritizing philanthropy

Wheel of Fortune's Ryan Seacrest on prioritizing philanthropy

So as I mentioned, just before we started the Food. Tonight's guest is a name we see in here pretty much everywhere. In addition to becoming the host of Wheel of Fortune, one of the longest running game shows of all time and posting and producing some of the most popular television and radio shows around. He somehow also finds the time to be the founder and chairman of the Ryan Seacrest Foundation here to talk about the future of the foundation and the work it is doing to bring state of the art media centers to pediatric hospitals across the country. Please welcome Emmy winning television and radio host, producer, entrepreneur and philanthropist Ryan Seacrest together with Fortune Ceo Alan Murray, Brian. Thank you so much for, for being here, Alan. No pressure. Yeah, we didn't plan on that. Alan, no pressure that um I'm very happy to be interviewed and not having to ask the questions and I'm happy to do it. I got to tell you, I have done hundreds of interviews at these Fortune events. This is the first time I've had to do an interview in front in front of the interviewee's mother. Well, that's a that's that about a particular pressure tag, by the way, brag her about all those interviews. But uh mother OK. Would you like you can chime in my mom is here. She, it's like I can't ask you a tough question. Sure you can, she'll answer them. We can put, we can put a chair up here for you. No, no, no. She had her hair done but she's fine right there. You look at you. Look beautiful mom. Good to see you. My parents live here. So uh well, it's great to have you here. We're, we're uh we have a lot of questions about this guy which we'll get to in a minute. Yeah, thank you. But I, but, but I, but I want to start with secret studios. Tom introduced uh his son got an experience of it. What is it? And why did you do it? So, through my work, I had spent time in different children's hospitals around the country and after I would visit some of the patients, I'd spend time with their parents and I would ask them questions and the story I heard most often was um my son, my daughter run out of things to do or things to look forward to or reasons to get up out of their bed and even walk down the hallway. And as I left it really resonated with me that potentially there is an idea here that we could create a nucleus a heartbeat, a real destination within, inside the walls of the hospital. And then I asked myself the question, what if and is it possible for kids at some point to actually look forward to coming to receive treatment at a hospital and what would draw that excitement out of them? So the idea, as I talked with my mom, my dad and my sister that night at dinner, we were all together. The idea was to build multi media content, creative spaces inside children's hospitals that are fish bowls where the patients and their families can come to interact and, and really come alive inside the hospital. It's a great idea and I want to go into it in a little more depth. But before I do, I mean, you do and have for a long time, done a five hour radio talk show every day. You were doing Kelly and Ryan every day. You've been doing American Idol for 21 years. It's not like you needed something to do. Why, why add this those things are important? But this is really important. Um This is something that is, um it's, it's very meaningful to me to hear and see the stories from, from parents, from patients. There's a, there's a story from a Dallas patient. Um there was a young girl who was in the hospital and she was working on her self confidence and she really wanted to be a part of the Sea Crest Studios. But she didn't want to be seen, she didn't feel good about herself. So through the technology that we have inside these studios, which are live broadcast studios, we create an avatar for her. And she developed this personality through her avatar. Well, after she gained more and more confidence, she finally said I want to go in the studio and I want to host the show and she became a star inside our studio at the Dallas Seacrest studio and hospital there. Well, I think we have a picture of the studio maybe. Yeah, there you go. Um And so these are in the hospital. So these are mainly in the lobby in the atrium of the hospitals. And if you think about any, if you think about GMA in the morning or you think about a sound stage where you think about a green screen, a radio studio, a podcast studio. I know you do a podcast, all of those capabilities can be executed inside these studios, all of the content that is created inside hosted many times by the patients. All of that content is then broadcast into the rooms of the hospital. So the patients who are in their beds can partake in it and interact with it. Do you, does it have, do you think it has medical effect, health effect? I definitely think it helps with the healing process. We know that it helps with the mental health of these patients when they are going through difficult things. But, you know, to have a young patient tell their mother that they wake up in the morning, excited to go for treatment because they're going to be on TV, and they're going to see their friends inside the studio. I mean, that's why this is important to me. Yeah. Yeah. And, and by the way, it's not just the studio. Can we pull up the other picture? You, you, you bring in people to Russell and Sierra? Yeah. Yeah. They get to meet people that the rest of us don't get to meet. I mean, that's part of the magic. It's, it is, uh, just 10 days ago, Ed Sheeran stopped by and, and these celebrities just do it. Ed Sheeran came by our studio in Colorado that he played, he played two songs and that habit and perfect. He sang with the kids. He let them ask every thing and they're great at creative questions. I mean, they ask what we want to know and they're not shy about it. And so they had a chance to interact with him. Taylor Swift opened our Nashville studio with us. The Jonas brothers have come through recently and that electricity, even the anticipation of these celebrities coming through. That's part of the programming as well. That's part of the excitement. Then of course, there's the payoff, then there's the after effect of talking about it, sharing those stories with other patients. I, I, but I want to go back to this question of why on top of everything else that you do, did you do this? I mean, everybody in this room you got a bunch of very busy corporate executives sitting in this room, they all have very busy. Talk faster. Yeah, they all, they all, we are in Atlanta. It's ok. You can say that they, they, my own town careful. They all, uh, struggle with work life balance. You don't struggle with work life balance, you have none. You can't possibly have any. I mean, five hours a day doing the radio show, you know, I really do. I segment my days to be very heavy and efficient in terms of production. I am very um focused on what meetings are most important to have for me. When I'm in a meeting, it's very efficient and when there are phone calls or conference calls that we need to have, I strategically take those when I'm in transit to another job. Uh so that I know in my head space that between, you know, by, by four o'clock, I've got free space to exercise to take a walk, to play with my dog to eat dinner. But the front end of it is efficiently and strategically. Um Do you ever just say I gotta, I gotta take the next five days off? I'm sorry, you know, I'm checking out. I say I want to take two weeks off. I mean, and I do, you know, over the summer I get my breaks and I, I take that time and it's important to see this is where I want your mother on the stage. I mean, like, was, was he always like this always? Right? And the, you know, the other thing I've always this, I've wondered this for a long time. Your business. There are people who are, who want to be famous, they are talent and there are people who want to get rich who want to be moguls. Um You're doing both, you're doing both at the same time. Did you set out the dude? No. Listen, did you set out? Did he know he wanted to? I, I really would rather it next year. Always want to do both. Mhm She says yes, I always wanted to be able to go out for dinner and afford to have what I wanted on the menu. Even when I was a little kid. I thought that was cool. Um We would go when I was, when I would do well in school, we'd go to La Paz Mexican restaurant or dos Amigos in Sandy Springs. And I thought, wow, this is living like three cheese enchiladas. I want three cheese enchiladas with two sauces on the side. Like that's what I want in life. You, you, I think you have achieved that. Well, I, I, but I, I also looked, I, I looked at Dick Clark, I looked at Merv Griffin. I looked at these legends in, in broadcasting who were not only in front of the camera, they were also behind the camera. They also understood the dynamics of production and ownership and having assets as well. And I, I studied that and I wanted to do that. Yeah. Uh something we were talking about earlier, that is another thing everyone in this room struggles with. Uh uh because these are people who are really trying to drive companies to social purpose, to do social good. And the problem that they faced in the last couple of years is they're getting pulled into a political ring that they don't want to be in. You've done an amazing job in your career. You talked to everybody about everything all day long, but you've done an amazing job staying out of politics. How do you do that? Why do you do that? Who, who taught you to do that? Well, the, the, the programs that I front and the programs that I have produced in the past are general broad mainstream programs that appeal to large audiences and we want everybody to tune in. We want all ages to feel welcome. We want all ages to feel included. I'm thinking of the radio show that I do in the morning, which is broadcast back to Los Angeles on a station called Kiss FM. Um, you know, we look at the ratings from, you know, six plus, right? You know, we, we're, we're trying to make sure that this is a destination and this is a place that when you're commuting with your kids in the car, you will hear a conversation that you'll be interested in that they will also not be turned off by it or there will be nothing that is offensive to them or have to be explained to them about a conversation that we're having. So I do look through that lens of appeal. I mean, what if someone calls up and wants to talk about, you know, should, should people be able to play sports and uh in a gender different than the one they were born in? I mean, the, the all the controversial topics that everybody's getting pulled into every day. Do you screen those out? I mean, I don't screen them out. Um That's probably a caller that wouldn't come, call into our show because if, if they're familiar, if they're familiar with it, they know it's not our show. I mean, um we are talking to do and this morning Demi Lovato, you know, it's like, and, and, and if any of those conversations come up with some of those artists, then they are fluid and they happen. But we do want everybody to feel welcome and comfortable and appeal to large audiences. What I want to. If anyone else has questions here, we do have microphones of somebody. I have 100 questions I could keep and Sasha is going to come out in a minute and cut me off. So I, but I, I'm happy to take questions from anyone else who mother. Yeah. Go ahead. Is there anybody question you've been dying to ask him? Yes, ma'am. I don't want to say your favorite book, but a book that you gift most often or a couple of books. Great question. Yeah, I just started reading. Well, so one I've fallen in love with recently, which is maybe a little bit bizarre, is unreasonable hospitality. It's this book about uh 11 Madison Park and the story of it and exceeding expectation when it comes to entertaining people or hosting people or being hospitable hospital, hospitable. Um And I see myself as someone that is in the hospitality business. And so that's a book that I really gravitated towards. And the other one we were talking about back backstage is, is uh Second Mountain by David Brooks is Second Mountain. I love that book too. Yeah. Have you read Second Mountain? You have, you're in favor. I, I heard that. Yes, you have a, a question right here. Yes. How do you manage your energy? Not? Well, um I, what, how have I always been like that? I guess so. Yeah, I fortunately I, I wake up with energy. I absolutely love the opportunities that are in front of me. I like people. I enjoy it when someone says, do you mind if I, I mean, someone said to me, I'm so sorry to bother you for a selfie. I'm happy. Like I, I love that. You know, you sleep? How many hours do you sleep at night? I sleep well, you do you, I don't know how many hours I get it. My ring is off right now. But you're right. Yeah, I sleep. I sleep well, I'm tired by the time I go to bed and then I, how about diet? What kind of a diet do you? I eat a plant based diet. I don't eat no meat. I eat a little bit of meat when I'm traveling. If it's a great place and it's authentic to the region, I'll have something. Um, but generally fish and, and a plant based diet and I don't have breakfast in the morning, but I do have coffee. Question mark here. Hi. Hi, my name is Carmen and I wanted to ask because impact when you think about impact many people think is always good. But have you gone through a tough moment that was decision making in your life and change you for the better and change through that time by going through that time? You really ended up in a good place. Well, I mean, I, I think that for me, um, fortunately, I've, I've known what I wanted at a very young age and I've had a very ferocious appetite to try and achieve that. And I've been focused on that. But one of the most difficult things for me just in terms of career we're talking about here was at the beginning when I was at the University of Georgia here. And I come from a very traditional family. My father is here. He's a lawyer. My parents have been married. I'm sorry, not to mention your father. I was focused on your mother. That's just the thing we got, he got his hair done today too. Um, but, and you've been married 53 years. Yeah. And so when I was at the, that's pretty good too. Not married another topic. And you're 54 48. Um, but to go back to your question, I was, I was at the university. I knew that traditionally in my head, you're supposed to go to school, get your degree, get your job. But I was losing sleep at school because I wanted to so badly drop out and pursue my dream in Los Angeles. But I didn't have a contact, I didn't know how or who or, or really what I was going to do, but I knew if I didn't try and do it, I would regret that for the rest of my life. So I packed up my little Honda prelude. I drove down to Atlanta from Athens and I told my mom and dad, I'm dropping out of the University of Georgia. I'm going to go pursue this and I said, I really hope that you will support me, but I want to know no matter what I'm going to do it and it was a very difficult you guys ever doubt he would succeed. No. Oh, sure. Now you say that. So, so that was, that was a very difficult at 19 years old moment for me. I I've saved the really big question for last. Yeah. Are you gonna keep Vanna White? So I am going to, I'm fortunate enough to take over for the legendary Pat next year, which I am. So my energy is gonna go up sir on that. I'm telling you. Um I have been the biggest fan of that show forever. I love Vanna White. I've known Vanna for a long time. We sat in important places next to each other and I hope for nothing more than to be able to walk out on that stage and host with her. That's cool. So I have a present for you. You don't know about this. Um uh This is the very first issue of Fortune magazine February 1930. You were not there then. I was not the CEO at that time. How did he get you back? Feb February 1930. You know what this is? Yes, that is the Wheel of Fortune, is it? That is the first cover, the first cover of Fortune Maggie. So we're kind of like brothers. I'll call her mom. It's so funny. I thought this was like from Six Flags. I was like, oh, that's the Ferris Wheel of Six Flags. Uh Thank you. That's very kind. Yeah, you can put that. You can put that in one, by the way, the subscription annual, you know what it was $10 a year. You can do it. Yeah, anyway, thank, thank you so much very in what you do. Really great to have you with us. Thanks man. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for, thank you guys.

Brainstorm Tech 2023

Andre Iguodala, Forward, Golden State Warriors and General Partner, Mastry Ventures
Ryan Smith, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, Qualtrics; Chairman and CEO, Smith Entertainment Group; Owner, Utah Jazz
In conversation with: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE 


Brainstorm Tech 2023: Big Bets: On And Off The Court 

Andre Iguodala, Mastry Ventures
Ryan Smith, Utah Jazz
Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE 


MPW Next Gen 2023

Sandra Douglass Morgan, President, Las Vegas Raiders
Interviewer: Emma Hinchliffe, Senior Writer, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune MPW Next Gen

MPW Next Gen 2023 - Taking The Field 

Our final speaker for today made history last year as the national football league's first black female president, Sandra Douglas Morgan is no stranger to shattering the glass ceiling before her time at the NFL. She was the first black person to serve as the chair of the Nevada Gaming Commission. During her time at the gaming commission, she helped develop policies on harassment and discrimination and was responsible for closing and reopening casinos during the COVID-19 pandemic and it was Sandra Douglas Morgan who was hired by Raiders owner Mark Davis to reinstill a positive culture and value system for the team and franchise management. Today she is gearing up for her second season with the Raiders and preparing to host the 2024 Super Bowl. Let's welcome Fortune's Emma Hili and Las Vegas Raiders President Sandra Douglas Morgan to the stage. Thanks. Hi, Sandra, how are you, Emma? It's great to be here. I'm great. Uh Thank you for being with us. So, yeah, so as my colleague just mentioned, you are the first black female president in the NFL. How has that influenced your experience in this job so far? Whether it's how you approach the role or how others have perceived you in the role. You know, I, I knew coming in um that I would be the first black woman to, to serve as, as a president, but I honestly didn't understand the gravity of it on until I actually got in the role and met so many different women in sports and entertainment. Um that said, you know, they've been waiting, you know, for this moment just to even have visibility that other people that don't, you know, I look very different obviously than the other 31 presidents in the NFL. But still able to lead a team and understanding that it's not about selecting players, right? That's what the G M is for. It's not about coaching players, the head coach is for, but really running the business operations of an NFL team which the Raiders have done, you know, in my opinion, even before me moving to Las Vegas, an incredible job. We have a stadium that we're responsible for and making sure we're booking talent and obviously creating a good culture there. We want people to know that the Raiders is an amazing place to work. We have so many new employees that have been with the team for maybe less than 2 to 3 years since the relocation and obviously, you know, very long tenured employees and understand the tradition and the grit and the history of the team. And so it's just been, it's been a great experience. But as you know, a woman of color, you know, the way I was raised, my father is black and my mother is first generation Korean American, just making sure that people feel seen, feel valued and the the Raiders have always been um a great place to work for um and have always embraced diversity, equity inclusion. And so we're having a lot of new employee resource groups now and it's just a great way for people to connect with others. Yeah. You know, speaking of the experience of working for the Raiders, you came in after there was a period of time where employees spoke up about um with allegations of harassment and a kind of traditional boys club culture at the Raiders. You know, there's been an investigation, we can go into that a little bit, but I would love to hear about for you knowing that going in, knowing that that would be a challenge that would be part of your mandate to address and deal with the aftermath of. Why was this a job you wanted to take in a challenge you wanted to take on. You know, again, the Raiders have, have a rich legacy. I've worked at different companies that are small that are large. I've been an attorney for 20 years. So, you know, being involved in investigations or see them or I've been on a special litigation committee for a public company. Those challenges are not new for me, but for me, it was more personal knowing that the Raiders were going to be in my hometown of Las Vegas, a place where I was raised, my sister was raised, my Children were born and being raised and I knew the great impact that an NFL team could have on my community. And so that's why I definitely leaned into the challenge and I encourage everyone to lean into challenges. A lot of times, you know, my friends have often joked for me not to go back to the public sector because when I did, there was a recession in the pandemic. So I'm going to stay on this side. I was head of the gaming control board during the pandemic, which is an incredibly challenging time that had, you know, and actually was a commissioner during really the beginning of the me too movement which, you know, a lot of, you know, executives at different companies and different industries were being, you know, a lot of the attacks were being questioned whether they be settlement tactics or just the way people were treated at work. So, you know, the challenges are not new to me. I encourage people and definitely women to lean in and be part of those solutions when challenges kind of come to fruition. But for the Raiders, it was just such a historic franchise. It was really a no brainer in full transparency. My husband is a former player and when I even discussed the opportunity. He was like, what are we talking about? But really the conversation with Mark Davis saying, look, Sandra, we're in a new city. If there's challenges here, don't. So them under the rug, you know, we want to, I want to face them head on and hearing that from our team owner was definitely a huge factor in me deciding to take the position. Yeah, you mentioned your longtime ties to Las Vegas. What has the impact been on the city and its economy of the Raiders moving to Vegas? I mean, we talked about in addition to football, you hosted Taylor Swift. A couple of weeks ago, Beyonce is coming in September to your stadium. How is the team in the stadium influencing the city again like this. So I grew up in Las Vegas, my father retired at Air Force Base when I was, um, well, he worked, we moved there when I was two and maybe 400,000 people at that time. And, you know, we went to the strip when someone came into town, but for the most part, you know, everyone kind of stayed in their own areas. Um And so now we're in a city of 2.5 million. Um You know, my mother worked in the gaming industry. It was always kind of frowned upon major league sports wouldn't come there. And now we have, you know, obviously the Raiders, the Knights, the world champion Aces to be able to know, my Children are saying, what game are we going to this week? And that wasn't something that I grew up knowing about. You know, obviously we had the running rebels, which we're still hoping, you know, kind of come back to the glory days when they won the championship in 1990. But now there's just additional events, you know, Taylor Swift being there for two nights was seeing our stadium transform in a place where you had tons of swifties. But even people that maybe weren't, didn't every single word of the production was just amazing. So being able to offer that to the Southern Nevada community is just um really important. And even again, just look, having executives be there and looking at the stadium, whether it be soccer matches, we're gonna have Barcelona and Ac Milan. I don't want to get on like a promotion for now. But um and Manchester United and these events, you know, would not have been able to come if it wasn't for the stadium. Yeah, that's amazing. Um Well, I guess it is also set to host the Super Bowl next year. What does it take to prepare for that a lot? You know, we've done, our team went to Los Angeles, we went to Arizona and you know, the NFL, you know, really kudos to them because they have an amazing events team, they transformed our headquarters when we hosted the Pro Bowl. It's the second year in a row that Las Vegas hosted the pro bowl and this is the first time we're hosting the Super Bowl. And it's an interesting fact that more people actually come to Las Vegas than where the Super Bowl is hosted anyway. Right. It's because of the amazing experiences and activations we have. So it will be the first time where everyone's coming. Maybe you just have, you know, people that want to enjoy it and then people actually coming to the game. But you know, it's, there's so many, so many of the Raiders amazing partners and whether it be gaming properties and hospitality properties up and down the strip that are really committed to knowing that people will have a good time. If they come there. Even if they're not going to the game, there's always going to be concerts, events, different sporting events and we're also hosting F one, the city is hosting F one in November before then. And so I think it's really going to show Las Vegas on the grand stage and it's really great for the NFL to really embrace know Las Vegas as a, a real Super Bowl hosting um city team. And we're definitely hoping they come back. Yeah. Um I'll come to everyone for questions in a moment, so start thinking and raise your hand if you have any. But um you know, we've talked before about uh your goal to bring inclusivity to the sport into the team in a lot of ways, including the fan experience and welcoming more women as fans. You know, how do you do that? How do you make the Game Day experience? Something that more kinds of people are interested in participating in? Well, women are 50% of our fans, right? It's just that we need to lean into them and embrace them. And you know, we have a new social media and digital creator. Me being a woman looking at even our merchandise that we're selling. What does that look like? You know, every, we love our rats. They're amazing and auditions are happening now, but maybe everyone doesn't want everything to be bling from, you know, from head to toe and making sure that we're marketing to women of all ages and even a younger demographic, right? We, you know, we grew up where our maybe our parents had a team and that's the team that you embraced with the growth of fantasy football and sports betting. People identify with players. So how are we marketing to our younger consumers to making sure that we're highlighting our great pro bowlers. You know, we have Matt Crosby Demonte Adams making sure that we're, if that's your, that's your player, we're going to make sure that we, we want you to be a raider. Obviously, the digital experience is really important, you know, everyone wants everything now on their phones. And so when you go into the stadium, being able to, you know, get your food, get your beer, your drink and being able to do it mobilely is something that we really embraced in the stadium and honestly, as well, you know, encouraging people to sustain their seats, seats and be able to scan a QR code on the back of the seat and have that delivered to them. So we have great partners that we're working with um from our food and beverage teams that are, you know, making that experience a little more seamless. And initially we started them obviously in the upper decks just because there's more people there. But people even in the lower bowl, they want that experience as well. So we'll be activating those this season. Great. Did you have any questions for Sandra? Um Oh, I think we have one right here. Hi. Um Courtney Robinson. You speak so earnestly about your family and weaving the narrative alongside talking about your career and leaning into challenge and that really resonates with me. So I'm wondering when you stepped into this role, knowing how historic it was going to be. How did you weigh the considerations of how it would impact your family and um the work that you were going to have to do being a figurehead and someone who is the first to do this with all of those other things in mind. So I didn't know how impactful it was gonna be on that role. But I, you know, I, I have an incredibly supportive husband and my Children are amazing. They're 12 and 16 and um my parents live in Las Vegas as well. So that's incredible help. That's an incredible help. My mother in law as well and I have an amazing tribe of girlfriends that I've had for about 15 to 20 years that I tell you when it means just the world because we all go through different challenges where there with our Children or just job changes and things like that. So I really didn't know how, how it was going to affect me. And I'm still, I'm not going to be, I mean, I'm gonna be honest with all of you, you guys are all executives and leaders in your own, right? You know, you just have to take it day by day, but I try to do the best with what I do with the Raiders, with my family, with my marriage, with my friends. You know, every single day is something that I kind of intention have to wake up and, and know that I'm gonna try to give everything my own and some days it's not gonna happen and, and we know that the public side of it, I don't think you're really prepared for that until it actually happens. Um And, you know, every day isn't 100% but I, I wanna go out and make sure I make my team proud and make my family proud. And um that's what I just have to focus on every day and then just, you know, doing your best and giving, giving your own. Yeah, thank you. I think we have one more question back there. Hello, Najma Roberts. I'm with Democracy Fund and we're a grant making organization that gives grants for organizations to be more civically engaged. And in 2020 we did a training with a couple of NFL teams around voting and I was astonished at how many players were not registered to vote and just didn't really have a sort of civic or philanthropic individual or collective strategy. And I'm curious on how you're thinking about that um particularly for the Raiders and sort of grooming the, particularly the rookie players to come in and have that and what resources you may need to execute your strategy. That is um I, I so welcome that question. So me being from Las Vegas, it's important that we can be engaged in the community and part of that means civic engagement to me. Um For the first time, I hired a vice president of government relations for the team and we had an entire, not an NFL vote strategy but Raiders vote. And we were able to have players engage in that on social media, not only encouraging the community vote, but making sure that they were engaged as well. And we had all of our employees on the business side as well supporting that. You know, this is more of a support for the football team, but they just hired a new director of team growth and development that is really focused on rookie camp, obviously financial literacy and making sure that you're a good member of the community is important, but they're also having certain executives from the business side actually present to them and understand what, not just what does it look like after your career because he wants to think about that, right. But what does it look like to be a raider to be a part of this community? And we're also asking them, what are you interested in? We know our foundation has certain pillars that are going to be focused on mental health and youth development, military and veterans with us being a big military community. But we want to make sure we know what they're involved in because that's going to encourage them to participate even more instead of us just telling them to go to certain events. So, um excellent question. I'm really looking forward to working with our, our football team and our G M to making sure our players um want to be engaged instead of just, you know, making them and to do certain appearances. So, thank you. Thank you, you know, on the policy side as well. Um Given your background in Nevada and in the gaming commission, um what's your take on how the legalization of sports betting is changing the sport for better or for worse? You know, I again, growing up in Las Vegas, probably a little more desensitized to it because I'm used to just having gaming around. Mother worked in the gaming industry. I was on the commission and then chair of the board when the Papa was repealed to allow sports betting or at least to allow states to enact sports betting regulation. And it really comes down to, I think good policy and as being a former regulator, the integrity of the game is incredibly important and making sure people understand the policies and understand how it's the integrity is not. If everyone's not having a high standard of integrity, how it can really affect the game. And obviously the fan engagement, if people don't think they're looking and watching a fair game, they're not going to watch and responsible gaming is always going to be, you know, top of mind, I think we should care about not only as consumers but as mothers and as people that care about the community to make sure that our partners and all the Raiders partners have definitely have a responsible game plan and making sure people are aware of their limits as a regulator as well. I was encouraging when we get to more digital options for social gaming that there be an opportunity not only for the operator to set limits, but also for people to set limits for themselves when they're doing online gaming, you know, diversity and inclusion has been a priority for you and a theme of your priorities at the Raiders and your own appointment. But, you know, football is such a particular industry to be stepping into and diversity and inclusion in football is probably very different than what it might be in industries that we've covered on stage so far today. You know, you obviously have male players back off and front office with not that many women. And there's also the dynamics of ownership, mostly white owners and mostly uh black players. So for you, you know, what does diversity and inclusion in football looks like for you? Are those dynamics that have to change? Can they? What is true? D N I in football? Yeah, I I don't, I I'm saying this in all honesty is that the Raiders before D E N I was something that was discussed, you know, we had the first female CEO and Amy Trask, the first black head coach with Art Shell, the first Latino head coach with Tom Flores. So these were things that were done in the eighties before people were even talking about this, right? If you look at our fan base, if you look at our employee base outside of even the players, we have an amazing group called Fear. It's our women's er G 80 employees over a third of our employees on the business side are women. Um We have a new API er G group that's growing um with just amazing employees that are in every single part of the organization. And um you know, I'm just looking forward to growing those. So that is something that's important to me, but it's also been important to our team, which makes it that much easier to implement. So when I'm working with hr to talk about recruitment and retention and training and promotion, they know that we're looking at it from a lens to make sure that our, our team does reflect not only our customers but our fan base, which has always been incredibly diverse. We in order to give the customers and the fans what they want, we have to make sure we know who they are. Um And so, having a diverse um team and to me, it's just hand in hand with making sure we're delivering a better product, delivering a better game experience and, and making sure that we're growing our fan base. Well, thank you so much Sandra. Thank you.

Fortune Brainstorm Health 2023

Zak Williams, Co-founder and CEO, PYM 
Moderator: Chrissy Farr, OMERS Ventures

Brainstorm Health 2023 - Prepare Your Mind: The Journey To Launch A Mental Health Startup 

The Journey To Launch A Mental Health Startup 

So next up, we're going to be talking about mental health. Um May 1st coming up is the start of Mental Health Awareness Month, which is so important because according to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one in five adults lives with a mental illness. Our next guest has experienced first hand the difficulties, the strains and heartbreak that mental health issues can bring. He's a friend of mine. Um His wife is a very old friend of mine as well. Um Zach Williams is the son of the late great actor and comedian Robin Williams. As you probably remember, Robin Williams died by suicide in 2014. He suffered from undiagnosed Louie body dementia, a brain disease that causes a decline in mental abilities and mobility. It's the second most common type of progressive dementia after Alzheimer's disease, Zach said his own mental health went into overdrive after his dad's death. But his personal winding journey as he's called, it led him to where he is today. Zach is a vocal mental health advocate and the co-founder and CEO of Prepare your Mind, also known as P MA company designed to help others achieve mental wellness. Let's hear more about his personal and professional journey right now, please welcome Zack. Yeah. Um So let's just start out by kind of grounding us in where we're at now. Um You've been in mental health a long time, but the past say decade, it's been your life mission and, and a lot of where you spend your, your time. So why mental health of, of all the things that you could have done and, and focused on? Sure, great question. You know, I, I didn't set out to be a mental health advocate. At the beginning of my career, I have a background in consumer technology, entertainment, and media. And after my dad died by suicide, I was diagnosed with complex PTSD generalized anxiety disorder and depression and was doing super unhealthy things like self medicating using alcohol. And uh I realized something had to change. Ultimately, that path to change started in the prison system at San Quentin Prison where I started teaching a financial literacy class. Ultimately, I segued into mental health advocacy because it gave me more of an opportunity to share my journey, be vulnerable and also learn from others around what they're doing to manage their mental health while I could support organizations around strategic support, organizational development, fundraising and so forth. And so through that journey, I realized I could actually start healing my trauma through service. And I discovered that service is my path to happiness. And so for me, it's an ongoing journey to learn more about myself and find meaning and joy through service. So, one of the things we, we've been talking about the past few days is the pandemic. And um I think, you know, for a lot of us, we're still living the after effects of it and, and arguably still in the midst of it. I mean, Dr Walker was here yesterday. Um speaking about how many cases that that still continue to be, but we've been left with this with this sense of shared trauma and most of us probably haven't dealt with it. Um So what do you think we need to do to heal from this experience? And, and by the way, it's not even just the, the pandemic, it's, you know, everything going on with the markets right now and, and recession, people losing their jobs. Um Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a confluence of things that are going on in the world related both to the pandemic, but also our media environment, our political environment. Now, the emerging economic environment with market correction and so forth, that's creating uh an overload for people. There's a physiological component to that. We all have a static systems and when the aesthetic system is overloaded, we feel overwhelmed. We have chronic stress issues, it leads to all sorts of medical and health conditions. Um And so, you know, from our end, we started a company, my wife Olivia June, who's in the audience today um turned me on to nutritional solutions. Uh when I was having a really tough time and decided to not use um specific things like pharmaceuticals because they made me feel numb and so forth. So, you know, in seeking support and help, I discovered amino acid formulations to help me specifically. And that, that combined with some behavioral lifestyle considerations like meditation, mindfulness, community support for me specifically, but also, you know, for other people, therapy is very helpful, other things like breath work can be very helpful. And, and you know, through my personal journey, I realized that there were populations all throughout the US and the world that were experiencing extreme amounts to overwhelm our medical system, specifically our mental health care system in the US. But also abroad was not equipped to manage crisis care at scale that this sense of overwhelm this collective trauma was activating in people and one in one in five now experiencing mental illness, we just, I mean, I can't imagine that we could ever produce enough enough therapists to keep up with it. It's, it's an ongoing question in consideration is can we train enough people? And, and you know, there were triage solutions like enabling nurse practitioners during the pandemic to provide uh prescriptions for uh you know, mood stabilizers, mental health meds and so forth and you know, that's, that is a triage solution, right? And, and you know, there likely aren't enough nurse practitioners who can be trained in a specific way to manage the population at scale and their mental health needs. So, you know, I think we need to actually start orienting towards looking at preventative solutions and lifestyle interventions as a means of providing support for people. Because there's just not enough people, there's, you know, in, in, in counties in the US, there's one psychiatrist for 5000 people and uh it just blows your mind. Yeah. And so, you know, there are institutions that are, that are doing incredible work, whether it's Stanford Medical School, um what's going on at the Meta Psychiatry Center? There is fascinating in terms of how lifestyle interventions can help retrain people's metabolism and so forth towards managing their mental health conditions. But uh you know, also practically, I mean, there's a lot going on and it's, it's almost too much to cover uh over the course of an entire day. So, you know, um hard to do it in 15 minutes. Exactly. Right. Um If anybody has questions in the audience, feel free to chime in otherwise I have so much more to ask you. Um So the role of celebrity in, in this discussion, you've, you've obviously grown up with kind of one ft in the entertainment world. Do you think that Hollywood L A has a big role to play in just kind of reeducating, raising awareness around mental health? And has Hollywood done a good job overall with that? Um As you kind of survey, what's out there? Yeah. Well, I'd say, you know, it, it's a complex consideration. You know, first we need to actually look at the definition of stigma and how stigma manifests in people. Stigma in many ways is a protection mechanism for people. It's helped, it's helped them get through potential periods of their life. It helps them feel safe or isolate for situations that make them feel uncomfortable. But if you actually break apart what Sigma is, it's a collection of biases. And we actually need to look at the underlying biases that occur in things like media and so forth. And the first thing we need to do is acknowledge them. That's the first step. There are biases that could be perceived as positive that help us better connect with people and so forth. But, you know, in the case of stigma, it's generally negative biases that isolate us from people that generally lead to negative interactions and so forth. But um in the case of Hollywood and so forth, we don't flag and identify those biases in their individual. Um you know, in their individual, right? Versus just saying, hey, we need to break down stigma. It's OK. Not to be OK. We actually, I think need to take a deeper dive and start establishing more research around how we can better frame conversation and language around that collection of biases that generally can have negative effects upon people and populations. So it sounds like we're at kind of step one of a very long journey that, that we should be, you know, going much deeper on. And I agree with you. That's not enough to say something like it's ok to not be ok. Like we can do, we can do better than that. Um Talk me through your suicide hotline. You have a, that was something that you, you spoke about recently and I just listened to a podcast you did on it. Um Well, to know more about, yeah. No, I I'd love to speak more about it. Um First off, you know, just wanna frame it's OK to say it's OK not to be OK. The, the main consideration is I think people who are in, whether they're influencers or celebrities need to be uh need to have access to information and evidence back solutions that better help them share scientific medical information and make it accessible relative to the uh the podcast series we did around 988. It was called Call For Help. And we worked with Lemonade Media, which is a wonderful organization focused on mission oriented content. And what we did is we broke down how the sausage is made around developing and deploying a government backed program around mental health crisis. And so we talked to everyone from Tom Insel, uh who, who ran, who ran N I mh, we talked to um several congressmen, uh congress people. We, we spoke with mental health advocates we spoke with researchers, we spoke with clinicians and really started understanding how challenging it is to establish um evidence backed navigation solutions that could evolve a narrative around what it means to get help. Um Because often the case is when you're in mental health crisis and you dial 911 you're going to elicit a law enforcement response when 95 times out of 100 you don't need one. And so, you know, it's about establishing more focused precision oriented navigation solutions and, and it was, it was fascinating to learn how everything was done and it's challenging. It's still in the works. It launched in July of last year and it, it's had incredible adoption and using things like text and so forth. It, it, it's enabled, uh it's enabled the, the, the access and accessibility of, of the service to expand greatly. And so it was fascinating. Congratulations. That's incredible work. Um Any questions from the, from the audience? Alright. Oh, here we go. Hi Emily. She with a worldwide. Um, hi. So my, my husband is actually, he's been an, er, nurse for 20 years and he's going back to school right now to become a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and will be able to prescribe medication. Um uh but I've been kind of talking to him about, you know, don't be one of those just throw pills at people. There's so many other, you know, solutions and, and so my question to you is are you doing anything? I know you're direct to consumer right now. But are you doing, doing anything with, you know, provider education or any other distribution channels? Because I think, oh my God, I'm so happy you asked me that question. So, so yes, we, we started with direct to consumer and expanded into retail. We're expanding quite rapidly into retail. So we need to focus specifically in retail scaling right now. We're doing two randomized controlled trials which are multi leg studies this year starting with uh our mood shoes, which is for which will be, you know, the disease claim that we're seeking to establish is for anxiety relief. And then for an upcoming attention to that, we seek to provide a disease claim around ADHD support for, we can't yet do that and we need to establish trials for that. Ultimately, we'd love to see our products qualified as medical foods so that they can be distributed through the doctor recommended channels. The key thing for us and really what it's about is accessibility and expanding people's awareness around things like natural solutions that are just an expansion of the tool kit. You know, it's not about replacing pharmaceuticals, it's about, you know, giving people an option and an opportunity to discover natural solutions involving things like distilled nutrition for mental well being because our collective neurotransmitter health um in many cases in the US, specifically with the western diet leads to deficiencies. I'll give you an example for things like Gaba, which we need to manage our Gaba system that's present in, in high concentrations and things like fermented foods, which we don't get a ton of in the western diet. And then things like supporting uh psycho biotics that help develop and evolve the serotonin synthesis environment with the microbiota. We're not getting a lot of things to help support that environment in terms of the Western diet. I'm, I'm speaking in aggregate. So there's a, there's a, there's a, there's some nuances to it. Um expanding beyond that. Um The thing is uh consumer preference, Americans preference is changing 66% of, of Americans who are open to taking mental health products prefer taking natural products. So the environment is changing. That wasn't the case four or five years ago, you know, four years ago, pre pandemic, it was 50% before that. It was much less. And so, so we just want to find uh opportunities to, to establish, you know, clinically backed solutions to support people around their mental health and mental well-being journeys. Well, if there's one takeaway, it's that there is no one size fits all. Um So thank you so much for being here with us and think, you know, enjoy the rest of your evening. It's just been a wonderful conference so far. Thanks everybody. So with that, we are wrapping up brainstorm health 2023. Um on behalf of the brainstorm health coach, chairs and Fortune. I want to express my thanks to all of our discussion, leaders and speakers. Um I also want to extend our tremendous gratitude to our event partners, Bristol Myers Squibb, City of Hope CV S Health, the health care, Sage Therapeutics and our academic partner, Stanford Medicine. Thank you so much for your partnership and we are thrilled to announce Fortune Brainstorm Health 2024 is going to return to Southern California again next spring. It's going to be held May 20th and 21st. So please mark your calendars in Dana Point. By the way, don't come here, it won't be here. Um, and uh please join us at the reception in just a few minutes on the ballroom terrace that starts at five o'clock. Thank you so much to all of you for being here for participating um, in all of the conversations and enjoy the reception, safe travels.

Brainstorm A.I 2022

Reid Hoffman, Partner, Greylock; Founder, LinkedIn; Co-founder Inflection 
Saam Motamedi, Partner, Greylock 
Moderator:  Jeremy Kahn, FORTUNE

Brainstorm A.I. 2022  - The Next Billion Dollar Ideas

Impact Initiative 2022

Vicki Hollub, President & CEO, Occidental Petroleum
Interviewer: Alan Murray, FORTUNE


Impact Initiative 2022 - Realizing The Energy Transition

oil and gas producers have a central role to play in addressing climate change among them. Occidental Petroleum recently announced a big expansion into its carbon capture program if we're focusing on emissions. A carbon neutral barrel of oil is possible if we're extracting C. 02 from the air and pumping Co two underground as part of the oil recovery process. We'll sit down with the head of Occidental and explore how carbon credits and greater collaboration can help us reach Net Zero. Please welcome Vicky Hello, President and Ceo of Occidental Petroleum for a conversation with Alan Murray. Fortune Ceo. Thank you Vicky. Thank you so much for joining us. I was really eager to have this conversation because as an observer, it seems to me that you're getting hit by everybody, right? The environmentalists don't like the fact that you're drilling oil and feel you're gonna be drilling oil way into the future. Uh, the uh, the the oil industry isn't happy about the fact that you're spending so much time talking about carbon capture and direct air capture and and I think you're alone in the oil industry in endorsing scope three goals in the US oil in the U. S. Uh, so you're getting hit on all sides. Why? Well, I think that we as an industry definitely need to change. We need to evolve and unfortunately we haven't been able to or felt like we weren't able to be as transparent about what we're doing as we would like to be um saying anything in the US usually creates an opportunity for someone to sue you. So we were worried about that, but we get sued anyway. So now we've decided we just need to do the right thing and be as open and transparent about it as we can be. So I talk about a lot and 11 of the things I'm trying to do is help people outside our industry and especially those who, who have a passion about the planet and who are uh really engaged in trying to make sure that we're doing the right thing. I wanna, I wanna help everybody understand exactly what we're doing and why it is the right path for the industry to take and why if we don't take this path that we're on, I don't believe we'll ever be able to cap global warming yet. Um, not only 51.5 degrees, but not even at two degrees. It would be too expensive. It would be almost technically impossible to do, uh, to do it by 2050. So we believe we have the right story, the right strategy, the right pathway to do it. And we're trying to get others to um, to buy into that and to help us with it Past clearly. But let's, let's talk about that story. First on the energy side of it. You see oil, fossil fuels as being part of the energy picture for a long time into the future. Maybe indefinitely into the future. Yeah, I would say that a lot of models are showing that even by 2040, If you tried to do your best in terms of building renewables and other things and alternatives that even by 2040, the demand for oil would still be around 67-70 million barrels were at 100 million today. Um, unfortunately if you don't invest in the oil industry, uh, the by then the supply would be 27. So when we talk about a just transition, we have to remember that there are places around the world that have tremendous oil and gas resources. But if they can't develop those, they're the ones that will get left behind those. They are the ones that will suffer. They're the ones that won't be able to achieve the quality of life that we have today. So we have to figure out how do we continue to develop oil and gas reserves? But doing it stood in a way where we can get everybody focused on the emissions and not the source. For example, only 15% of greenhouse gasses are generated by, By the actual production of oil and gas. That's 15%. The rest is generated by the use of the products. And when I say use of products, there's a lot of things in this room that wouldn't be here today if we didn't have oil and gas. Our company in particular, we produce the products that make the I. V. Bags and tubes for hospitals that make a lot of the medical equipment for hospitals that make the products that go into building cars and building homes and chlorine for water PVC to transport clean water. We do a lot of things that make build a lot of things that make our quality of life a lot better. So it's the it's building those things that causes the basically the rest of the emissions along with the electrical generation. So we've gotta do, we gotta understand what the impact would be too. Is that so hard? I mean you're talking about simple math basically. Why is that so hard to get across the smart people? I happen to have been at the uh Harvard Yale football game and I did not go to either school by the way but I was at the football game where students from both schools sat down in the middle of the field at halftime and said we're not gonna leave until both schools agree to disinvest from any fossil fuel company. Why is it so hard to get smart people to understand that to solve this? Well I think part of it's our fault. Um Part of it is we didn't make the transition start making the transition soon enough. We started, yeah we we should have started years ago and doing what we're doing today and that is trying to find ways to further reduce methane, methane is about 11% of the greenhouse gasses. Um C. 02 80%. So both of those together, the two things that we have to attack the most. Um So trying to completely and dramatically change our industry is something that we're now trying to push and get others to get on board to do uh completely changing the way we we produce it and trying to ensure that it's a closed loop system and um and progressing in terms of ensuring that we do the right things to capture emissions from point sources like from cement plants, steel plants, electrical generation plants. And then we're doing um one thing that Uh that nobody else has done yet and that is to to build a facility that will have the capability to extract one million tons of co two from the atmosphere annually. And that's critically important because right now 37 billion tons goes into the atmosphere annually so that we need to start the process of reducing CO two from the atmosphere. That that's huge. You and it's a big investment for you. A lot of people say never gonna work just a waste of time. You're just doing that to cover up your fossil fuel story. Uh Tell us why you believe direct air capture because that's a game changer. If you can actually take carbon out of the atmosphere, that's a complete game changer. Tell us why you believe it can work. Well I would say we would not be spending $1.2 billion dollars for a greenwashing campaign. I can assure you that uh but we feel like that we have the unique capability to make it work. And a lot of others have said it won't work. So a lot of others have walked away from it. But what what gives us the confidence to do it is that there are so many synergies between what we're trying to do and what we've always done. We're leveraging our core confidence of using CO two for enhanced oil recovery for almost 50 years, were the largest handler of C. 02 for that in the world. So we've got the experience with CO two and the way we'll extract CO two out of the atmosphere is using a a fluid that are chemicals department of chemical business makes. And it's potassium hydroxide and we're the largest marketer of potassium hydroxide in the U. S. Second largest in the world. So that's the synergy. So we'll we'll take these huge radial fans will pull air uh and push it through a contact tower within that contact tower. The potassium hydroxide will be mixed with the air and um the diffuser in there to make that mixing better is PVC and we're a marketer and maker and marketer PVC as well. So those synergies will put it in the premium basin where we already have the infrastructure to put it in a pipeline, get it uh to question either in a saline reservoir or in our enhanced oil recovery uh projects. So if there's anybody that can do this and if there's any then make it commercial, it's it's occidental because of all that experience and all those synergies. And so the way we look at it is it's not something that that we have the choice to do or not, it's something that we feel like we should do and need to do to help the world advances technology and then share it with others. Some of the critics say, oh, but it's a it's a very energy intensive technology, so you just burning up a lot of energy in order to do this. Is that true? That's that's one of the reasons we have now invested in another technology which could which could be game changing for the power industry. And it's called Net Power. It was developed by a company called 88 rivers. And they're a bunch of guys from Duke who are really smart and developed a process that will combust hydrocarbon gasses with oxygen instead of air. And by doing that, you you eliminate all the volatile organic emissions and you capture the CO two as a part of the process because it's actually what drives the turban and to generate the electricity. So some of that CO two is recirculated to drive the turbine, some of it comes off as a pure stream of CO two that we get can then convert to products or saline reservoirs and put in the O. R. So that according to some of the power industry people, I've talked to former Ceo of Nrg told me he believes this is the game changing technology for the industry. So that will be the technology that we use to use our hydrocarbon gasses from the Permian to generate that electricity for our direct air capture facilities. And we'll use solar as a part of it as well. I want to go back to this scope three issue because every I think everybody in this room to some degree is wrestling with scope three. You know, am I how how do I become responsible for my consumers use of my product or for all of my suppliers? Why did you and Occidental alone in the U. S. Petroleum industry agree to take on this responsibility because we think we're going to have the capability to do it, others um you can't have that capability to do it unless you have a way to provide the users of your product and opportunity to get CO two offsets. And we believe that with the technology that we're using will be able to do that. And and the problem with that the world is facing that many of you are probably going to face to is there there won't be enough um biomass to um to offset the emissions that we have today. There's just not enough, there's not enough trees, there's not enough natural sinks. Um And the trees are some of the trees are shorter term but we need that to happen anyway because we've got to have something to help us get to 2050. So we have to have everything happen. We have to have E. V. S. Um solar wind, nuclear uh carbon capture and the by biomass projects to work to make this happen. But there's just not gonna be enough biomass. So our process is like a mechanical tree. It's pulling CO two out of the atmosphere. We're just having to build it to make it do it. The good thing about it it will never decay. So it'll it'll always be it will be able to sequester that Co two permanently. I want to open it up to anybody who has questions or or comments. Please raise your hand and we'll get a microphone to you. Um And I will say I I so appreciate being here because I've never talked to a group like this before and so please don't worry if you about offending me. I really want to know what you think and I really want to know what about what we're doing? You might not like or you might think I should talk about differently. Go ahead right here. Hello. Ben jorgensen from combatant boards. Just a question how much does the board actually discussing this and what's the discussion that you're having with the board? Well the our board has come along on this it's um what their concern was. How do we make sure our shareholders are on board with it. And so you ultimately to to make it work for everybody. We have to make a business out of it too. So we have to at some point uh generate cash for some of the CO two credits that will that will sell to those industries that are hard to to carbon eyes. For example, we already have in place to contract with Airbus. Airbus is going to buy 100,000 tons per year from our first direct air capture facility. They've committed for four years and now we haven't recently announced a contract because right now people are starting to realize that there is a deficiency of CO two credits. So now the prices are starting to go up on C. 02 credits. And so we uh we believe that we can generate value for our shareholders and doing this as well. It's it's pretty amazing to think of an oil company selling uh selling C. 02 credits. Other questions or comments. Peter so peter Peter van executive editor. I just want to know, do you have any fans at this point you're talking about for the director capture. We have the radial fans that will use are used in other industries supporters know those kind of not the big one. Actually I do. We we do. We've had recent endorsements. I will say uh Warren Buffett recently came into our in our stock in March in a big way and and um Berkshire now owns more than 20%. I like to call him a fan. I'm not sure if he would view that to be a correct assessment, but he he's investing in us, he um he's investing in us because we're also really good operator. We have great people and we have amazing people that got us through the the pandemic the transition and all of that to uh to never lose focus on our technical excellence and our ability to make things happen. Hey, it's Kathleen Mclaughlin from walmart. Thank you so much for being here. Um I think the scenario that you've laid out is really interesting and I'm wondering if you've had a collaboration with some of the organizations who specialize in climate scenarios and new climate economy and so on. So like World Resources Institute or Environmental Defense Fund to to put that together with their scientists. Well, we have with the carbon capture coalition with the Clean Air Task Force with the Environmental Defense Fund. We're working with a lot of those agencies who support what we're doing and understand what we're doing and and to to help them become supporters and collaborate with us. We do have to let them in and see the data and we have to be transparent with them and we have them uh and we've worked with the D. F. Two on methane regulations because we believe that um we believe that we've just helped with with their help put together the most stringent, uh, methane regulations that were adopted by new Mexico actually in the, in the US. And so we're trying to do everything we can with with those uh, kinds of agencies that have their expertise to ensure that we're advancing forward. And we have and we have some certification from others on what, on what our plan. Is there another question over there? Yeah, Go ahead. Quick question, Jeremy Hansen from hydrogen struggles. How do you, you have to collaborate across, collaborate and compete across the energy sector. How are you managing that? Uh, you know, across your traditional hydrocarbon, competitors, renewables, the whole sector because it really takes an integrated whole to get where we're going. Yeah, well, we've, we've gained a lot of ground, I would say over the past, um, a couple of years, I'm now the first, um, us chair of the world Economic forum, oil and Gas governors community. And so we, that's a, that's an organization working with West where we're able to collaborate beyond our, our peers, um, here in the US and, and with the Europeans who act quite frankly have been ahead of us for a few years, but they're doing things a little differently. They're buying and selling or buying um, solar and wind companies and, and building that. And what we felt like is we, we didn't want to deviate and get away from our core confidence. and so we're using our core confidence in our strategy, I proud what they're doing, they're pouring capital more capital into the building of solar and wind and we're just leveraging our core confidence to to do a different kind of strategy. But somebody's got to pull the CO two out of the atmosphere because right now we have 50% more C. 02 in the atmosphere than in pre industrial times. Even if we shut down all emissions today, we would still need to reduce CO two from the atmosphere. Vicki last last quick question. Uh you feel the political polarization around all these issues more than most people do, but everybody's feeling it to some degree. Uh you know, as I said, you're getting it from, from both sides, you've got democrats who think you shouldn't exist. You know, the President has been particularly kind of oil companies on on the, on the other side, you've got people who think you're, you're awoke oil uh Baron, what's your advice to people on how to deal with the political situation in the United States in particular. It's the most challenging that I've ever seen in my career. But I would say take the best from all that you can get. I love President biden's commitment to try to reduce emissions and to try to get us in a better place with respect to climate. So that part of it we're talking with the Republic with democrats and we're trying to work with them and the I. R. A. Bill that was pushed through um you know, by Senator Manchin, that was amazing for us. It's gonna be very helpful to to advance our technologies. Um and then we work with the republicans on on other things around making sure that we don't shut down the industry in the United States because we don't want to become your uh we want to ensure that we not only maintain the quality of life here in the United States, but that we maintain our energy security and that's critically important. Remember we're the largest producer of oil in the world and to lose that status, makes us lose leverage. And if you recall, you know, losing, not only do you have the european case study, but in World War Two, part of what happened to uh to end that war was that the evil aggressive back then ran out of fuel and that wasn't the complete reason they lost. But it helped accelerate the end of that war. And if you don't have oil or fuel then in this world, then you're putting yourself at risk. Vicky, thank you. Great to hear someone telling it straight, thank you for being here and speaking

MPW Next Gen 2022

Sarah Harden, Chief Executive Officer, Hello Sunshine
Moderator: Emma Hinchliffe, FORTUNE

MPW Next Gen 2022 - Purpose-Driven Storytelling

CEO Initiative 2022

Marc D’Amelio, Chief Executive Officer, D'Amelio Brands
In conversation with: Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune CEO Initiative

CEO Initiative 2022 - The Creator Economy Playbook: How To Build A Brand (And A Fortune)

The Creator Economy Playbook: How To Build A Brand


CEO Initiative 2022 - The Creator Economy Playbook: How To Build A Brand (And A Fortune)


when your family includes two of the biggest influencers on Tiktok, why settle for endorsing brands when you can start and sell your own. That's what the family of Dixie and charli, D'Amelio have done. The two tick talkers pulled in nearly $30 million last year and their father, Mark heads up the newly founded D'Amelio brands. The family plans to develop and launch their own fashion, beauty and lifestyle lines. Mark joins us to share his insights from the top of the creator economy with our ceo audience will delve into value proposition of top tier social celebrities and surface the opportunities and risks of building brand equity on social platforms. Please welcome Marc D'Amelio, chief executive officer of the Emilio brand in conversation with fortune editor in chief. Alison Chantelle. Alright, you guys, these conversations have been heavy, It's been a long two days. We are here to lighten the mood. We've got some Tiktok stars, the monetization strategies you all can tap into with the mastermind behind it all, Mark, um, Mark, thank you for being here with us today. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So for those of you who are not on Tiktok, um, I can tell you for and just joined Tiktok were 92 years old, cut us a break. Um, but your daughters have been on it and they have been very successful. Dixie is 21 charlie is 18. Um, as a family, you all generated an estimated $70 million over the last two years and charlie has 100 and 45 million followers on Tiktok? I have that. Right. So when did you first realize that your kids were not normal teenagers on social media very late? I thought they were very normal and they were very normal. We're just living in the suburbs in Connecticut and Charlie. In the summer of 2019, she was just posting some videos on an app called Tiktok and I kind of heard in the background and next thing you know, she had 100,000 followers and 500,000 followers and then we went out to L. A. And it's been a wild ride since then. Did your wife and you just like your ears perk up one day and be like, wait a minute, how many followers do you have? Like what, what's happening? Can we get a peek? I didn't know. Uh, I didn't know it was as big as it was just because there were other, there were other apps like vine came and then went. So I was like, it was so new that and I didn't even realize it was real at first. And then I started asking around and, and, and started to talk with people who were in social media and said, is this anything yet? And I got mixed, I get mixed Mixed answers. Some people said there's people that have millions of followers and can't move the needle selling products and there's people that have 50,000 followers and do really well. So, and so this isn't what you anticipated. I mean from what I understand you and your wife actually tried to not give them phones for a long time and not have them on social media. So what happened? No, we were we were we were we did we we, I think we got them phones and and computers pretty pretty uh early on. I was always uh I always believed like my mom always gave me a lot of freedom and with that I didn't abuse it. So I I looked at it if you if you you got to monitor it, but I gave them T Apple computers, phones, whatever. They were always pretty good with it. You guys make the decision to move to L. A. It's a family joint decision. You're like, let's give this a shot. Fame can be fleeting. Tiktok could be fleeting. We don't know. Let's go, let's go all in right now. Um you move to L. A. And then how do you start figuring out this monetization? Um Playbook for something that's so brand new. Yeah. I think one thing I've learned in business and I learned it as when I started my own clothing brand is I tried to do everything. I try to be a designer, tried to be an accountant and and I learned pretty easy pretty quickly like to get surround yourself with professionals. And I saw the red about the horror stories of parents involved in their kid's Hollywood careers and I certainly didn't want to be the person that got in the middle of that. So we hired, first was an attorney, then a business manager, then managers then, uh then we got signed with Uta as an as an agency and Uta was interesting because they weren't just looking at charlie, they were looking at all all by that time from october of 19 to january of 20 when we signed with UTA, we were all on social media, tiktok and they looked at us as a whole package and they and they signed us, my wife myself, my older daughter Dixie and charli all together. So just so everybody understands sort of how the business works. So dixie estimated to have made about 10 million last year charlie, 17.5 million. Um they were paid an estimated $200,000 per eight minutes Snapchat Snapchat episode of charlie versus Dixie um brands like amazon and Duncan pay up to $250,000 just for them to post about it. Um so that's, that's a lot. Uh and they're one of the first episodes of your Hulu show um you're presented with binders of things for all the kids to do from different platforms to different platforms to different platform and your wife stops and says like where's the time for them to be kids. So how have you balanced that in with all their business initiatives. Is that even possible? Yeah, that's extremely difficult because you're dealing with as a, as a parent, I understand that this opportunity could be short lived, I mean, um of age that I've seen, 50 charli d'Amelio, 100 charli d'Amelio before my daughter and there's probably more than that and I knew there's a, there's a very potentially short window of opportunity. So we want to go after that, but then we also want to Protect them and make sure that their mental health is fine. So I battle with that all the time. I battle with my dealing with with at the time, a 15 year old young lady who just doesn't want to get out of bed or is it, is it bigger? And I have to protect them from all the vultures and the people circling around in Hollywood and also protect them from themselves sometimes where they might not want to do something that we think is probably a great opportunity. Yeah. God, that's parenting snafu. Yeah. Well, um well there's a lot to dig into their, but um before we kind of go in that direction, I just wanted to ask you a little bit more about the playbook, um we have a lot of c suite in this room, how do you best, what's a great example of a partnership gone right with your daughters? How do you pick and choose opportunities? How do you know when they're gonna be great brand alignment? Yeah, I mean, I think first it starts off the one thing that, that we had the luxury of and the privilege of is we weren't desperate for this opportunity, it kind of came to us and with that when you, when you pick deals from a position of strength that always makes it easier. So it was basically our, our agent was just saying what charlie, what do you like? And she said I eat Taki, The next thing, they should have a talk deal and she was, she and Dixie used to drive to school together in Connecticut and they would go and get some donuts coffee every morning and those are some deals that we just willed into existence just because she really liked like the, like the brand, my husband and I also Dr. Duncan, but we don't get paid 250 k to do it. Maybe we're doing something wrong, I don't know. Um so you have a lot of ventures going on, you're taking a piece of the pie and a lot of cases um these are joint ventures, so like there's a Hollister clothing line called social Dreamer um when does this kind of teaming up with a brand in an influencer works best and what have you learned from kind of that joint partnership and joint venture? Yeah, I mean I think it works, that's that, I think it works for a lot of companies depending on who the influence for most companies, depending on who the influencer is, it's worked great. I mean we know that for Dunkin donuts, they sold out of cold brew nationwide. We know for um from, from a campaign she actually had had a drink that charlie named after her and we were hearing throughout the country that cold brew coffee was sold out because it was in that. So that was interesting. Invisalign is a publicly held company I think in 2000 ceo came out and said mentioned charlie is changing the market cap of uh of a huge company so it works and uh But it started, we just gradually did it, it started off as someone asking her to do a $50 uh post for a music uh for a song sound and then it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger to where we are now. Now you also have launched a new company called Emilio brands and I would normally be suspect because it's pre launch pre employee and has $100 million valuation um the sign of normally a disaster in Silicon Valley. However, um it seems like the money was easy to come by. What's your plan? Um what are you gonna build there? So I think I've kind of looked at at this into different buckets, I still think we should do endorsement deals with Fortune 500 companies or brands that we can help elevate them where they can help elevate us amazon is a perfect example um Duncan has also been great charlie and I just did a deal with with ford that that should be launching in the next few weeks. So those are, we're still going to continue to do those things and then we, as we did other deals, we found that there is an opportunity for us to actually start something from the, from the ground up and I have experienced with that. I started my own, you know, my own clothing brand when my wife and I first got married, um I've been very entrepreneurial and I've been involved in all types of different brands so, and, and we've learned that both of my daughters, although they're extremely polite and on set, they kind of listen to all the people around, they do know how to market to their generation and, and so I have, I have everything now, we have everything now that they didn't have when I started my clothing company, when I started my clothing, government had great ideas, great designs, I just didn't have the ability to get to the, get to the public and there was that retail barrier also that people don't talk about, you had to go if you wanted to sell the Macy's or Bloomingdale's, you had to compete with ralph Lauren and all these big companies now we can just, we have the consumer base that and we nurture them, we know how to to communicate with them. So I think we have a great opportunity to start two or three brands under this D'Amelio brands umbrella and do some something pretty cool. Is this sort of like, I mean look, the Kardashians have done this famously to extreme wealth. You have kylie cosmetics, um all the millions of brands that I do. Are you taking a chapter out of that playbook? Yeah, I think, I think whether it's Jessica, Alba Reese Witherspoon, I think they've all shown that they can create brands and, and be successful and, and I think we're probably the first ones to do it pre anything. But what's cool is we own, you know, we, I think we sold 6% we raised $6 million on $100 million valuation. We could have raised, we could have raised at a higher valuation valuation and we could have raised more money if we wanted to. But but it was more for me, it was more like shark tank. I wanted to get these incredible investors with us. Like Michael Rubin invested um Jon Feltheimer from invested, eddy cue from apple invested. We have pretty, pretty wild roster of people invested in the company. And what is the secret you think to marketing to gen Z your daughters are obviously fantastic at it. But what's the secret, I will tell you 100% nowadays its authenticity. I think, I think back 10 years ago it was more trying to stage things and trying to make things look, I think I tell this story all the time and I'm sure people haven't heard it? But as a brand guy when my daughter charlie first started doing Tiktok, what was cool about Tiktok? And I think what was why it blew up so quickly is because it was so personal. Most kids were in their bedrooms or in their bathrooms, taking videos. And as a brand guy, I would think like your room would have to be spotless and I would say, I can't, I can't believe what I'm looking at. Your bed's not made, there's clothes everywhere. And she was just like, that's what the, that's what everybody wants. So I think there is something to be said for the authenticity. And I also see it when people see dixie and charli or, or us on the street, they have this attachment to us because it's so personal. They hold us in their hands and they're watching these things and they know our dogs, they know our what our house looks like. It's just, it's pretty wild. So to answer your question in a long winded way, authenticity is number one. And um, I'm gonna open it up to questions in a little bit to be thinking, um, allowed to ask anything. Um, but I had a question about just the creator economy in general. Um, there has been the number one job, um, that teenagers these days wants, they want to become an influencer, like charlie or dixie? How long do you think that's actually sustainable? Do you think there's gonna be consolidation of the industry? Um yeah, I mean, I mean, I think it is sustainable. I think, I think all the platforms seem to be kind of trying to figure things out, but I think it's incredible. I think it's, it's amazing that you, anyone could actually just pick up a phone and, and, and if they're authentic, start to build a following and I think it's here to stay um any questions from the audience yet? Yes. one here in the front. How do you not compromise authenticity when you're selling to ford and selling for amazon and selling for Duncan and selling for whomever else can rustle up the money? Yeah, I mean that's, that's a, that's a great question. We, we think less is more so, I mean we've had a ton of opportunity for all the things that we say yes to for everyone, we probably say no to 10. So, and, and we, we've, I've done a lot of work in the behind the scenes like Hollywood is a very strange place and, and they will chew you up and spit you out and it seems like it's easy for kids to get in there, hamster wheel of just deal after deal after deal and we've put a premium on, after learning, put a premium on making sure that we're not oversaturated, that the deals that we do or things that we, companies that we like, companies that we believe in and we believe less is less is more and you know, and I go out to our team and tell them that I would much rather do a deal that I'd rather do less um than, than more and, and I want my kids and our whole family to have a whole full life. And so it's just, it's a balance and not compromising and, you know, your values and just making sure that, that we're just looking at things the right the right way question up here in the front too high. Uh, this is really interesting mary Pat Kessler from the Project Management Institute. Um I find this really interesting and personal, my niece is also a Tiktok er and probably knows your family, Katy feeney. So, um, and I know that it's led to a lot of opportunity, but I'm wondering from your perspective, what what will you do when your kids don't want to do it? You know, that's another really good question. We talked about that all the time. I mean, this is a vehicle, obviously it's a vehicle to create um, you know, for income and wealth and all that stuff, but really it's more about creating opportunity for my kids to figure out what they want to do. You know, I don't, I don't foresee them being tiktokers for, you know, for, for the next decade, I think this is a, is a way to build and I say this to everybody. I say whether you're a doctor lawyer, um I think building your platform and being able to express yourself on social media just gives you a lot of, a lot of opportunities. But I'm constantly telling my daughters like, you know, where, where do you see yourself down down the road and if we have a show on hulu and one of the things that charlie did was kind of come, she when she had an opportunity to do anything, she let the noise and everything kind of break her a little bit and she even stopped what she was an incredible dancer. She stopped dancing and she came to me and said, dad, I think I'm letting you know all this, get to me, what, what do I, what do I do? I said, do whatever you want to do, what would you like to do if you want to try singing, you want to do dancing, you want to try acting. And this opportunity gave her those options. She just released a song she's on, has been on dancing with the stars when she and my wife are on dancing with the stars right now. So for me it's all about understanding that this isn't gonna last forever and take advantage of the opportunity and making sure that they could do, find out what makes them happy going forward. So mark, you touched on this a little bit earlier, but when your family is the business, it puts a lot of pressure on everybody. Another thing I was struck by just watching the first episode of your hulu, um is, you know, in the end of the first episode, Dixie essentially has an anxiety attack, there's the bullying she did a vogue um and she got such um negative feedback if you can even call it that on social media, she really broke down as a parent. Like how do you balance like ways? Like, is this opportunity worth it? Like, and also, then how do you think the platform should do a better job combating that? So, first of all, I I look at it like, uh as parents, the noise around us, as these people are, you know, charlie's the golden goose and like we were, I can't stress enough how normal and how great our life was prior to this. We're living in the suburbs of Connecticut. Both kids are in high school, my wife and I are going out on dates on friday and saturday night hanging with friends and covid happens. We go to California and be careful what you wish for because it's been it's been a wild ride. But we constantly have these meetings of us for and we say, are we, are we happier today than we were in our little town in Connecticut and, and the story is not fully written yet. Um it's tough, you know, but I do think it's similar to if, when you have a boy or girl athlete that's incredible and and their, you know, their star pitcher or star whatever and, and it's a parent's responsibility not to push, but to kind of help them figure out this opportunity and not to waste this opportunity. And that's what Heidi and I deal with all the time. Well, thank you so much for being here with us, Mark, maybe you can find them after you've got more questions that we really appreciate it and good luck. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Thank you.

Most Powerful Women Summit 2022

Melinda French Gates, Co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Founder, Pivotal Ventures 
Interviewer: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE


Most Powerful Women 2022 - Disrupting Inequality

Melinda French Gates, Co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Founder, Pivotal Ventures 
Interviewer: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE




Most Powerful Women 2022 - Disrupting Inequality



our first guest wants to take that power up a notch. She believes that we need to take a more holistic approach to empower more women at all levels of society and of all backgrounds. It's part of her mission to make the world a better, more equitable place. Please welcome back to the N. P. W. Stage, Melinda french Gates, co chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and founder of pivotal ventures for a conversation with my colleague. Okay welcome Melinda. Thank you. Um I know you're look everybody's taking your photo already. I love it. Good morning. So I know you're obviously you're out and about again you're traveling around. Um and I know you finally got to go to africa again after a long time of not being on the continent. Um you went to Rwanda and Senegal tell us a little bit about just what you saw and what your impressions are of where things progress for women, where things regressed globally abroad um and then we'll get to the U. S. Okay? So yes the reason I hadn't been out traveling obviously was because of covid and the pandemic. And finally this summer um I got to go out traveling again on the continent which I always learned because you talked to so many people, men and women and for me at least that experiential learning is how I learned and You know it's interesting. I mean you have to look globally at where are we as women and we are further behind than when I was at this conference. I think back in 2014 we are three generations away from gender equality in the world, that's my granddaughter granddaughters and to me that's just not acceptable. And so but when you go places like Senegal and Rwanda, you actually see I see the hope. So. I sat with a group of women who were creating businesses. They were part of an investment club and it was so interesting to hear them talk about they have these amazing businesses But how hard it was to get venture capital. 30% of businesses in Senegal are owned by women and yet 3% of venture capital moves to them. And I thought that's just like what I hear when I talk to women in Silicon Valley, less than 2% of venture capital goes to women led businesses from Silicon Valley. You go to Rwanda which I think I've been to at least a half a dozen times now. Maybe more. So interesting to see what's happened because president Kagame after the genocide put in a quota that said 30% of our parliament will be women today, 60% of parliament are women. And they will tell you and the men will tell you that it has changed society. The way they view women. The head of the Kigali Bank, the most powerful black bank, the largest bank in Rwanda is headed by a woman. And so I see changes happening but we're not getting them quickly enough and we're not getting them globally quickly enough around the world. So let's let's pivot to the U. S. And I think obviously everybody is very familiar with the Gates Foundation. You also you found it and um and share pivotal ventures which is really focused on the U. S. And advancing women and people of color here. Um, last time you were here in 2014, you were talking to us about family planning summit in London, you'd raised billions of dollars for contraceptives for distribution in the developing world and fast forward to today and where we're sitting here um this summer we saw the constitutional right to abortion being struck down by the Supreme Court. There's fear that contraceptives are in in risk in certain states. Um and that there's going to be more restrictions there. So given everything that you know globally that you've seen about the correlation of reproductive rights to sort of the broader advancement of women. Um what do you see ahead here? What are we, what are we in for? So I think we let me just talk to stand back from and talk at large. We have so long as the development community which I've been part of for over 20 years through the Gates foundation. We've so long for long talked about empowering women and I think we just need to stop and say no, no, no. We have to make sure women have their full power in society. What do I mean by that? I mean that in their homes and communities and at the very top levels of society that women can control resources, make decisions and shape policies and perspectives. I am convinced that roe v wade would not have been rolled back. You know, a law for women's health on the books for almost 50 years. I was in Rwanda frankly when that got announced and people in Rwanda were just shocked like how can the U. S. Role something like that back? Had the Supreme Court been put there by women? I don't think that decision would have would have happened. And so, you know, we keep talking in Congress about, oh isn't it great, we get another one or 2% of our congressional leaders are women, Well it's Good, but until we get to 50% being women, we don't have a single woman in the Senate who's black, not a single woman. And yet I look out in society and there are a lot of amazing black women, so we can't accept that anymore. We have to make sure women get into seats of power and take their power. And so that is what I'm committing my life to do both through the Foundation globally and pivotal ventures in the United States. So, you know, I love this concept, not just putting women on the agenda, but women making the agenda. Is that politics political or or does it just across the board. How do you just explain that to us? What does that mean? So I grew up in a household where my mom always said to me and my sister as a young girl, set your own agenda or somebody else will. And um I see it as in politics because that's where our public policy gets made. I think women need to be equal across the top. I think in media because that's who tells our stories and shapes our perspective. Look at the difference since Shonda Rhimes has been writing for television or Ava Duvernay with the movie she's making, I think finance because finance, money is power and so you need to have women at the top of financial institutions. I notice Shonda is going to speak later and I think you need to have women at the top and computer science because I look at what's happening. You know, my background is computer science and economics, but I look at the bias being baked into artificial intelligence and I think, oh my gosh, this is just like the US constitution, look what happened. Women and minorities weren't represented there and we're still fighting now to have true equality. You can't have the tech sector which is so prevalent in our lives run by essentially a small group of white men. So midterms are coming up, what is what is your approach and what are the initiatives that you're involved in and pivotal of course when it comes to specifically the political side, Well, I'm everything I do and this is true, both at pivotal ventures and at the Foundation, we invest in partners. And so I'm investing in a number of partners who and I am also putting directly money into candidates elections. But I'm in partners who are looking at how do we get the harassment down in the system? How do we help women and people are L G B T Q fight the harassment in the system? That's a big reason women don't run for office. And how do we make sure their political campaigns are funded at the same level as a man because it is expensive to run for office. It's hard to run for office. So the partners, I'm working through those, that is our big agenda on the political front, I want to ask you also, you know, you you're such an optimist and yet you've seen and talked to so many people who are in such hard positions and you see this, you know, rollback of rights in in this country. What is it that gives you that sense of optimism and hope as you do your work. Um and have you always been an optimist? I think I've probably always been an optimist. I believe in human beings, we are the ones that change the world and I believe in human ingenuity. And so I think when we talk about the real things going on society, unpaid labor, you know, we expect women to care for Children de facto right. And usually for the elderly, that's over 50 million caregivers in our country. And yet we don't create the right policies so they can have affordable quality child care so they can care for the Children and have a job. What I see though is more people talking out about it. We got this close to a paid family medical leave law in our country at the federal level. Those partners aren't going away, I'm not going away. We're gonna keep fighting that. It was one white man that didn't get that passed. Um So I've just seen a Kadre now of women and like minded men saying this shouldn't be, society is going to be better off. The last thing I'll say just about this specifically is, you know, again, so often the women's issue is the nice to do issue the side issue, the backburner issue. I hear this essentially from prime ministers and presidents when I go places like the U. N. Or I meet with them. But you know, let's talk economics, we care economics. If women had the same lifetime earnings of men around the world, we'd add 100 and $70 trillion to the global GDP. So it also just makes economic sense. And so I think it takes all of us to talk about all the factors and then push them forward. And I see women like in this room who are in positions of power are changing things inside of their companies. And I see men like minded men saying, look I know great female scientists, let's make sure that we keep the resume pool open till we get more female scientists on the list, not just white male scientists before we hire. I just I see society changing and we just need to keep pushing because it is humans and human ingenuity that changes society. So I know I mentioned all of the hardships that you've seen across the world and that that you've dedicated yourself to. Um, you had your own set of personal challenges over the last few years. And and definitely since we we saw you here, um, I shared with you earlier that when I got divorced nobody other than my friends and family care, it wasn't, you know, I'm not a public person, like I cannot imagine going through that um more or less in in in the spotlight. And I'm curious how has it changed you if at all um as a leader as you go around and you talk to women across the world, has it changed your perspective? I think what it has taught me is something I had always longed to do, which is to be my most authentic self in every place I show up. And it's funny we have, you know, society is changing. We have said society up essentially in the U. S. So that men, you know kind of went off to work and the women stayed home and cared for the Children. That is completely flipped now right? Most um couples who are partnered, 52% have dual incomes. And so when I think about what we used to say, even to men in the workforce, you kinda you went into the workforce and you talked about work, you didn't talk about your personal life, there has to be boundaries around that. Of course, I know people go into work and you want you bring your whole self to work. You know, you do want to talk a bit about your kids and what's important to you and what's important in society. So I just feel unleashed to do that all the more now and to use both places, both the foundation to forward the agenda I believe in and that we believe in as a foundation and the agenda that I care about in the United States through globally through the Foundation and through pivotal ventures really working on the inequities that happen in this country. Um I know that your your co chairing, by the way, if I ask for a show of hands, I'm not gonna do this, but I'm sure there are other women here who have been divorced, but I don't think that we get other any hands up. If I ask, do you co chair a billion multi billion dollar foundation with your ex husband. So how is that going? Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know, I do realize I'm charting unchartered waters, um but I will say that we are both deeply committed to that institution, look my values are baked into that institution and so what I know is that I have to show up as my best self every single day, um I was saying backstage just briefly, I saw Esther Perel, who I know is going to speak on this stage, I just finished her master class about relationships and one of the things she talks about is power, right? So I both, I'm gonna have, I both have a relationship with my former husband at work and hopefully eventually I'll have a relationship, you know personally with somebody outside of work, but we have to think about power inside of a relationship and how do you share that and share that collaboratively, and so I spend a little more time thinking about that today. But the other thing I will say at the Foundation is we have an amazing board, now we have incredible governance and so I also know it's possible. Yeah, and that actually brings me to my next question. Um Bill Gates made some headlines just recently at a philanthropy conference talking about how the foundation is not going to live beyond the next 25 years, or what you know. I realized this was this was baked into sort of your original intention, it sounds like, but what is that all about? Like explain to us how this works and what your, what it says about your approach to philanthropy that this was not meant to be, you know, your your name, put on something to live for all eternity, you want to have Impact in your lifetime, right? So first of all, just to be clear, the governance documents of the foundation, which I'm a signatory co signature on, I'm a co chair say that it will last till 20 years after the death of the last of us. Got it. So that is the current stated plan. Um but the intention is that the resources that have been amassed from Microsoft that have ended up for whatever reason in both of our hands, that those resources will return to society. And both he and I have thought for a long time we can't predict the problems 100 years from now, we couldn't have predict some of the things that happened in the last five years. So we want to solve today's problems and what we know is that they're enormous and they're even bigger frankly post pandemic because of both the health shocks. But really the economic scarring one for instance, there is, you know, there are many more people this year that will go hungry than last year because of the fuel and fertilizer and food crisis coming out of the Ukraine war, 100 and 50 million more women will go hungry than men. So what I, my job as a coach er, is to say, okay, thus what do we do about it? So we don't just work on hunger at large, but we make sure that food and nutritious food gets into women's hands because guess what? Women not only feed themselves, but they decide who eats in the family and what they eat. Okay? And thank you for clarifying, I assume he wasn't, you know, prophesying a future demise, right? Like that's not something that an ai No, no, I was thinking something and said it before. We have made a decision. All right, do we have a question for Melinda in the audience? A least we'll bring a microphone over to you and if you could introduce yourself. Hi Elise Johnson, Ceo, vital voices. Thank you Melinda for using your platform and your full force and I'm so thrilled to have your most authentic power on these issues. But as you know, it's all about money. Women can't get to power without the money. And we know that only 2% of development charitable giving goes to women and women's organizations. You obviously have, you are not in that category. You have done far more. But how do we get the rest of, you know, whether it's corporate foundations, private foundations to do the same to follow suit and to realize this is the issue of our lifetime. I think we all have to use our voices. I think we have to keep pushing. I think you form grassroots organizations like moms rising saying this is what's right. Uh, Reshma here, she has mom's marshall plan. I think you get inside of corporations, corporations starting to say this is what's right for our employees, not just in the U. S. But globally. And I think it's also by demonstrating so part of the reason I'm using my capital and being so vociferous about it and you're seeing some other women do that who have means in their hands. Like were were unbelievably privileged to have these these means in our hands. You see them living their values in society. And I think by doing that, then you see others follow, but it's gonna take all of us. This is, you know, we're pushing against barriers that are baked into society writ large and um, we have to name and speak our truth if we're going to change that. Um, I wanna end here by throwing out some numbers. Um, since the Gates Foundation started more than two decades ago, you provided more than $60 billion 50 billion. And last year you committed an additional 50 billion collectively. Um, and you've also committed one billion of your money to pivotal. These are astounding numbers. The level of impact that these numbers have is just incredible. And I just want to hear from you. I mean, you touched on this already, but what else can women in the room do today, whether it's in this country or they're looking you know, more globally? How do they have impact? Okay, so let me just add one thing to what you said about the amount of money that is not just the resources from Microsoft, that is also warren Buffett's collectively, I'm not correct you, I'm just saying it's really important for us to recognize that because he believes in women having their full power and he has for a long time. So what I would say to all of you collectively is wherever you sit inside a corporation. If your policy maker, if you're a mom who works empower people around you use your resources, use your voice, vote for the right people who you think should be at the top, get others to vote, bring young women along with you, Any of us that have platforms, we need to open them to other leaders, global leaders, female leaders, young women coming up behind us, this is not a one generation and it's going to solve this problem, it's gonna take all of us to move forward in the world. Thank you so much, Melinda. Thank you

Brainstorm Tech 2022

Eynat Guez, CEO, Papaya Global 
April Koh, CEO, Spring Health
Kate Ryder, CEO, Maven 
Moderator: Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech



Brainstorm Tech 2022: The State Of Unicorns

Eynat Guez, CEO, Papaya Global 
April Koh, CEO, Spring Health
Kate Ryder, CEO, Maven 
Moderator: Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief, FORTUNE; 

Brainstorm Tech 2022: The State Of Unicorns



 Eynat Guez, CEO, Papaya Global 
April Koh, CEO, Spring Health
Kate Ryder, CEO, Maven 
Moderator: Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Good afternoon aspen. It is so nice to see all of you here in person with us and for those of you on the screen. Hello! Great to see you too. Um Hello to all my amazing panelists. I want to point out a really cool step. We've raised a billion dollars on this stage. That's an amazing feat. Really cool. And not too long a time frame either. And over $7 billion so I want to get all of your perspectives on how you got to that point also what point we're in now and how you're looking ahead? Um but the first question is is there's no doubt startup valuations have been through the roof recently. An unprecedented speed. I think people have been reaching these startup valuations of a billion or more. Um What do you think created these market conditions and how many of these unicorns are actually sustainable. I know you want to take that one first. Well I think the hard one first. So I think that in reality two things happen. Companies started growing on super speed. So I mean on on a really kind of growth phase that haven't been done before and haven't been seen before. So everyone was kind of preempting round and so on. But from the other hand, yeah, I agree that when you are looking on valuation currently of private company versus the public market, I mean there is some discrepancies that eventually I think over time in the probably the next 12 to 24 months. I mean we need to ensure that we are growing or we are taking those unicorns to the stage where they meet the current valuation. Yeah, I think we just saw or read about Lorna's attempting fundraise at the moment, it's not going well. Apparently could raise down 85% from its last valuation. Um How are you both looking at this environment, you are you thinking we're going to see more of that. What's your take on the market of where we are now in private companies? Sure. You go for it gun Sure. All right. Well, I I think um it's uh starting with right down the middle of of what everybody's thinking about um at the executive level, I think we were talking earlier how this is kind of on the minds of everyone. Um and you know, really for us, what we see is a lot of the last decade, a lot of companies rewarded for growth, so growth at all costs. Um And so I think you're seeing a lot of those public companies that maybe don't have the underlying economics to reach that profitability um getting hammered at the moment. And so I think, you know, for what we're really happy to be a private company at the moment. Um but uh but I think it, you know, for us at least we've always as as a company in the women's and family health space, you know, struggled to raise funding early on. We've always had to be scrappy, we've always had to kind of, you know, create a sustaining business model. And so, um, so you know, I think at least in our, as we talked about it on our team that may have been, um, you know, we're, we're kind of looking forward to the next few years because we have a strong business. We have tons of tailwind in our market and we have a, you know, a business that can reach profitability pretty soon. Yeah, I think you alluded to it. Um, I think that this panel used to be called the state of female lead unicorns. Um, and then we change the state of unicorns, which I think is awesome. And I think it's amazing that we're all women here. Um, but you mentioned, you know, in the early days, you struggled to raise capital and that led this led you to lead your company in a really disciplined way and I can't agree more. Um, so as a young woman, I struggled in the early days to raise venture capital. So I knew just how precious the millions of dollars uh, were that we were raising. And so we've always been extremely disciplined about how we raised how we raise capital, what evaluations are, how we run our business. And I would say as a tiger global portfolio company. I know this is strange to say, but I tell investors and I tell our team we are undervalued and I believe it. And I think that There's so many companies out there and I were founders that I need just out and about and I say, Oh my gosh, you're a $5 billion $10 billion dollar business. Like what is your revenue like what have you scaled at? It was scale too and they will say a revenue that's lower than ours and it's just um and we're $2 billion dollar business at this point, right? And so there are multiples I would say are insane, unsustainable. Um but for us, our multiples are very much in line with normal fast multiples or digital health multiples even before the hype cycle. So your undervalued based on your revenue, you're under value based on your revenue, your current, what should your valuation? That's the million dollar question. There may be another billion dollars. There you go. Um So you, you all, I think had issues raising fundraising in the beginning, as many startups do at a certain point that uplift and you've raised um april's raised 300 million cakes raised 200 and I'm not raised for 45 million. Um so there's been a frenzy. I know I'm not, you went out to raise 40 million um not too long ago and all of a sudden you had 140 million that you raised, can you talk a little bit about what it was like being a founder that was suddenly very sought after in this environment that we just saw. Yeah. So I think it took me a while to understand the kind of to flip the things because honestly in the early 33 years that we started the company I raised less than $5 million. I can speak on every dollar that we raised and how hard was that. And I mean for me the biggest challenge was actually to kind of get the market and and the investor kind of convictions that this is a huge market that we are disrupting. I mean it started as is it a real market is it's a real need and so on. And once this and I think then it flips to a place where they believe that this is a much bigger problem than what we think it is and this is when I and I remember I mean this conversation when I why do I need to raise so much fun and yeah, because you you can do things on a much quicker and you can dream bigger. And I think that when you are kind of understand that Yeah, you need to be, I mean very cautious, you need to understand what you're doing. You're not like throwing funds all over in. This is a really big enabler. I mean for companies to grow. So not a bad time to have a workshop. That's not a bad time to have a big work. Yeah. And April your valuation jumped about $2 billion right. Yeah. Yeah. So what? There you go? Less than one. So what flipped for you? What was it that um What was the frenzy like? Well I mean it's undeniable that spring health is a remarkably strong company and a very compelling story. So we started the company six years ago um in response to the global mental health crisis that we're all in. Which by the way began before the pandemic. And it was accelerated by the pandemic. Um But you know we we grew because um you know even before the pandemic, we were growing forex then the pandemic just accelerated everything and we grew six x. And that led us to have that jump in valuation. Um The reality is we are in the middle of a crisis. People need our help. People need our support. Unfortunately suicide rates are increasing at an alarming rate. I think half of 11 to 17 year olds in 2020 reported feelings of suicidality. Um or you know the urge to self harm. These are just alarming statistics. And I think the demand just created a really strong business and we were rewarded for that with a very good valuation. So a question I'm curious about as well is what kind of direction are you getting? And pushing are you getting from your investors? How are they pushing you to proceed at the moment? Things are looking a little bit shaky. People aren't sure how anything is going to pan out. The free money has stopped. Um, how are you planning for the future and what pressure are you getting from investors one way or another on how to lead? So first, I think that the one thing that we all need to do is start off currently is beat the metrics as long as you're building the metrics. I mean you're in a good shape second. You need to take care of your one way. So obviously, I mean, you need to ensure that you have the worst case scenario, best case scenario That you are past 24-36 months from now. And I think as long as you can be confident about that, you'll be okay in terms of investors. But in reality, I think that, you know, it's a dialogue. I mean, we should listen to investors obviously. I mean they want to create value. I mean, this is why they invested in the company's um, so it's really about, you can't ignore the market. You can't ignore signals. You can't ignore things that eventually are kind of flagging. So it's not, I mean, we are, we are part of it as well, but it's really about being very conservative and very cautious about the metrics and how do you grow? And, and obviously, I mean, I think that everyone is thinking about efficiency and about profitability and maybe, I don't know. I mean, it seems that we have similarity in the stories. I think that we all kind of were very, very cautious about that from the very early days. So maybe currently we kind of, we don't have this pressure of changing everything or transforming everything internally, but it's very important. And how are the rest of you adapting to endure? And what kind of signals are you getting from your investors? Like rays, more rays, more rays more or like conserve, conserve, conserve and how's the path to profitability going? Well. I think a lot of investors are just struggling the price in this market because things are so volatile. Things are all over the place. Are we, you know, have we massively overcorrected? Where's the bottom? And so I think our investors at least um, are, you know what? We're facing two simultaneous trends, which is the market downturn at the same time as growth accelerating our category. I think, you know, digital health is still pretty special in the sense that there's just so much growth over the next 10 years. And so how do you treat right now if you're looking at, you know, your investment over a 10 year time horizon. Um, and so, you know, I think it's the, make sure you have enough runway for three years if in the, in the worst case scenario. Um, but also, you know, don't don't pull back on growth because at a certain point the markets are gonna start rewarding on growth rates again and not just profitability and so, you know, we need to be right there because we are in a high growth category and so, um, I think, you know, one of our investors said, listen, the capital markets haven't frozen up for more than 3 to 6 months at a time, and so I think we're in like month three of a little bit of a freeze, but um, you know, certainly one of my, you know, one of my investors a few weeks ago, there was a big off site with this fund and um, he was like, I haven't made any investments all year, but like, I better start doing something in the fall, so it does feel like people are getting antsy. Um and so it'll be interesting though, if everybody comes into the market at once in the fall, is there gonna be competition again to kind of, you know, increase prices? So we'll see totally, I hear that VCS are kind of checked out until september, like literally on vacation. Um and so I think conferences there, I saw someone saying that they're just sitting it out there, just waiting, Things will get better in september, I'll throw my hat back in then. Yeah, so I don't think deals are happening right now. And so, you know, we get the classic advice like three years, it seems like the three year advice is like, um, basically the advice to give us Vcs, um, but I would say for us, you know, every company has a bull case, they have a base case in the bear case and um you know, for us the way that we find it, it's like bullets like growth at all cost mentality kind of in line with what you were saying before the bubble burst I guess and then the base case which is still very strong for us just given all the tail winds that we're seeing in our industry and the strong demand that still exists for mental health care for employees. And then there's the kind of the bear case, what we've done is we've kind of taken the growth at all costs bull case off the table, we've continued to stay focused on the base case. So in a lot of ways our company operations have not really changed and our strategy hasn't really changed. But I think also we've we've actually shifted the bear case to be a lot more pessimistic just in case, right, we don't know what's gonna happen, we don't know how long this recession is gonna last, We don't know how it's going to impact budgets for our enterprise customers. And so because of that, you know, we've made those adjustments and move forward as a company. Um and you know with the word test that you all have raised in capital, there is m and a possibility. How are you? You just did a big m and a deal not too long ago. How did you make that calculus of like, okay, now's a good time despite whatever the heck is going on out there. So first I think that we started the seminar we signed disseminate just when this kind of current crisis started. So you could, you could debate if this was a good timing or bad timing. I think that the, the way that we looked at is is it going to do good for the business? I mean, so it's not about how much it cost us that much, how much we can do more we said and I think that M and A is becoming a very interesting issue currently. I mean we are very big believer that eventually, if you have possibility to grow and to eventually merge teams better. I mean we, we are very, we like to buy technology because we believe that eventually the accelerator to what we want to build on the payroll space and when you're looking on public companies currently actually there are, I think that there are much more opportunities on acquiring public companies and private companies because in the private companies, I mean there is still a chaos. I mean what's my evaluation with should, I mean and where the market stands, but it's definitely a very good timing to kind of look around on the public market and local m and opportunities. Right? So I want to switch to um, leadership strategy, you all have had to scale tremendously. Each of you has hundreds if not thousands, of employees at your companies, um it's not easy to do and it's not easy to scale responsibly in a healthy way, in a sustainable way. Um april I know this has been something that you've worked on at your company, I believe. Um last october you sent an email to your team saying we've had a systemic issue of burnout at Spring health. Um and also that, you know, there's a natural tension between hyper growth and mental health. So how have you um what happened there and then how have you taken things moving forward? Yeah, I mean, just to reiterate, I do think that there is a natural tension between hyper growth and and mental health. Um and I think mental health means a lot of different things to people. And so for us as a company, we've really clarified what it means to be a mentally healthy company and what it means to be mentally healthy at Spring Health, I'll say to address the burnout issue, everyone is burned out. Every single company is struggling with this issue. For us, it is existential as an issue because we are a mental health company, right? Like it is uh in a way it's it's very it can be disingenuous if we as a business are not able to um have a mentally healthy workforce when we ourselves are delivering a service that promises a mentally healthy workforce for others. And so given the existence show gravity of of the the need for a mentally healthy workforce, we've put a lot of work and a lot of time and a lot of resources behind it. About two years ago, we were very explicit about our goal as a company to not just grow and serve others, but also to be the mentally healthiest and highest performing company in the world ourselves. And to do that, we've actually allocated protected cross disciplinary bandwidth to helping us get there. So we believe that in order to be mentally healthy and high performing um two concepts that really are not thought of together in other companies, but at spring healthy, really trying to marry the two for us to to be mentally healthy and high performing. We need not just, you know, people leaders um working on this. Uh we need therapists working on this, we need and mental health professionals, we need data scientists to understand where we are a baseline and working where we can go and what what impact the experiments that were running internally are having. And we've just invested a ton of time, a ton of energy and resources to it. And I think, you know, we have a long way to go still, but we've made a ton of progress, right? Um there's, you know, every company as you said is experiencing burnout. There's also pressure and ceos are experiencing burnout. There's expected to be a record number of ceo turnovers this year because people have been waiting through the pandemic to make sure their teams are okay um to then hand over the baton. Um So I think we're expected to see that as well. Another pressure that Ceos and founders have that they didn't have before is to wade into social issues and to be very transparent with their teams about their thoughts on things outside of the bottom line business. Um kate, you are in this in the thick and you are a women's health clinic provider for for many companies and for employees. Um Roe v. Wade like how did you address that with a team? What's your advice for for others who are addressing and what did it do to your business? Yeah. You know I think uh one of the we were talking earlier, one of the things that's just a shame is that women's health is so politicized because the way that we've always seen it which is consistent with all the major medical associations in the U. S. Is that you know, abortion access is just a healthcare issue. It's part of the core prenatal care model with one out of four women will have abortions in their lifetime. You know, from ectopic pregnancies to um you know feed that will not be viable at birth that this this happens all the time. And. And you know routine care. And so for us this has just always been part of women's health and I think now more than ever our team feels that urgency to um to step up. I mean Maven was founded because women and families are underserved. Women have, women's health has always been underserved and now it's just even more so and so we're, you know, we've been really encouraged. We have um you know, we work with nearly half of the fortune 15 and um most of the major national pairs and so, you know, in the lead up to roe v wade being overturned, um we're having conversations and and people, you know, there's a ton of uncertainty, there still is, but I think we've been really encouraged ever since that court decision came down on friday and the actual, you know, it was, it was set in stone, it wasn't just a leak. Um everybody, even our most conservative clients have stepped up to actually, you know, provide support because they see it as this is a healthcare issue and an access issue and and you know, no more than that. Excellent. Well, a lot away here on this stage. Um congratulations to all of you for building the businesses to this point um and for the efficiency that in which you've done it and hopefully we'll set you up for much success moving forward despite whatever is around the corner um seems like you all are well set up, thank you all for tuning in and um we are concluding, thank you, Okay.

Fortune Brainstorm Design 2022

Nina Bianchi, Solutions Principal, Public Sector, Medallia
Nina Walia, Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Senior Adviser, White House Presidential Innovation Fellows
In conversation with: Jason Mayden, Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Design


Brainstorm Design 2022 - Redesigning Democracy 

the federal government could be viewed as the ultimate design client given the tremendous scope of his activities and the fact that it touches every member of our nation. But it also presents a myriad of challenges, negative perceptions from those who find it hard to access government services, clunky technology interfaces and unresponsive silo bureaucracies but changes on the way a presidential order is enlisting designers to transform the way government services are designed and delivered with the goal of rebuilding trust in government. We'll hear from two designers at the center of this undertaking who are helping to solve the ultimate design Shannon's challenge designing democracy. Two point Oh, please welcome to the stage. Nina bianchi Solutions Solutions, Principal public sector of Medallion and Nina WAlia entrepreneur residents and senior advisers to the White House presidential Innovation fellows. Thank you guys welcome welcome. Welcome selfishly. This is special for me because these are two of my heroes. So I've known them for so long, they're phenomenal. So I'm excited to dig in and get a sense of your background and have you both share your story. So Nina B and Nina W welcome to the stage, the powerful to Nina's exponentially needed to the, to the second power. Um, so I want to ask both of you briefly to share your backgrounds, the organizations you work for and then, you know, coming at this challenge from from two different directions, you know, tell us a little bit about that work and how you got started on it. Um, so I usually direct uh, teams and experiences for emerging technology and I've had the pleasure and privilege of doing so at companies like google Nike ge healthcare startups. But now I'm bringing all that experience and build expertise to the government where um I am a White House presidential innovation fellow um acting as a senior adviser and thought partner to federal leaders so that we can better design, build and deliver public services. Awesome. And Jason, thank you so much for having us here today. I'm thrilled to be here and we're closing this amazing event out at Medallion. The solution principal and we're elevating the human experience of government by putting people's voices at the center of everything and I will get into more detail what that means, my history, my short history. I recently served in the federal government as well. So I was Chief of People and Culture at the U. S. Food and Drug Administration. That tour of duty coincidentally coincide with the global pandemic. So it was a grand challenge, an honor to serve our nation at that time and previous to serving as the FDA, I was also a White House presidential Innovation fellow where I was initially deployed on then Vice President biden's cancer Moonshot to really bring the patient voice at the center of personalized medicine phenomenal in his real life superheroes. Can you both discuss how the mandate to deploy designed to help transform government comes directly from the top from biden and if so you know what does it mean with the executive order that was put out for C. X. And the X. Policy that are changing the way that democracy is being designed today. Yeah I'm trying to stay calm because these are things I get very excited about that. I I was thinking about bracken yesterday he answered a question and I think the question was where to get started in the design transformation and I think he said um but it starts with the Ceo and I was like that's so true. We have our nation's Ceo gets it. And so President biden put out this executive order for transforming customer experience and uh delivery of services, public service delivery. Not only that but then it's also really important pillar of the presidential management agenda. So what all this means is number one for the first time the government is going to have to account for the for public like the public experience with with getting benefits and interaction with government. That's huge like someone once said that's a big freaking deal. Um so stoked about that. It means assessing performance, publicly reporting the performance and continuously integrating customer feedback and all of this will be on performance dot gov. There's already some pre information there but you'll be able to follow along, I no longer work for the government so I can speak a bit more freely. This is a seriously huge deal. Um on the record this is monumental. It is truly transformative and I want to say former President Obama did start this transformation part of that was designing the White House presidential innovation program to bring all of these amazing people into government to help fuel this change. But what we're looking at now is a moon shot of the greatest order. And uh, we hear a lot of federal leaders speaking to this moon shot and it's all of agency, it's all of industry. So everyone out there, you are part of this too. And our job is to take this Moonshot rally around the moon shot and make it a moon landing. And that's what I'm most excited about because we know how to make this work, right? We know how to take the idea and put it into action. Yes. And just to add to that, you know, like it's coming at a time of of crisis where multiple crisis, climate covid and this is not just to recover from those, this is exciting because it's about overcoming this on a, on a sustainable basis. So what's fascinating is that both of you have had government experience, you've had corporate experience. Are there many designers and government right now working on this that you believe understand the problem and how to actually get after the solutions. Yes. Um, and that and that's that's part of, I think the work that we're also doing, I think, you know, do you want to speak to some of them? I think, I mean it requires all to learn new ways of working out so a lot of agencies are going through tremendous learning curves and learning journeys themselves. So I'm really excited right now last week I just had a call about it this morning helping federal leaders at the top of all agencies learn design thinking, learn what is an experienced mindset, what does it take to really think in a systemic way and what does it take to put people's voice at the center of their decision making. So I'm gonna shout out to the White House Leadership Development Program working with that program to lead amazing labs. Really great and also the C. X. Fellows. It's a lot of training learning coaching. So you said something I think that's very important you said putting people's voices at the center of government what was there before. So I'm not I'm not like government for the people by the people they wrote it down, imagine you're having a life event which requires you to navigate a web of government services and every you know, they all talk to in different ways. There's a phone, there's an email, there's a letter um that's the current reality, right? And part of this mandate is to actually look at these life events as a customer journey which is so exciting. So so you know, introducing this concept um as we look at major life events that that have major impacts on people's lives and um have a large volume coming in and saying, instead of having to go to each one of these doors, let's anticipate and understand your needs. And so right now um there is an effort to begin research on a few major life events like um turning 65 and retiring. I mean there's so much their Medicare, Social Security housing considerations facing a disaster um having a child and early childhood of low income families and a couple others. I'll add a little to that as well and it's true the voice of the people have always been there and these life events have always been there. However, we're starting to look at them with the power of design and technology and I think sometimes the government The voice of the people in the ye olde days with like quills and inks and but yet we live in 2022. So being able to leverage data, machine learning. So for example the veterans affairs bringing the voice of the people through data parsing insights, making it actionable. All the things we do as designers. Right, bringing that straight up to the secretary's office and say, hey this is what our people are saying, how are you going to make a decision about it? And then on a micro level, let's say in a veterans hospital, being able to look at feedback from patients say, hey I don't think our physicians are sitting down long enough with our patients at discharge, let's make a change there. So macro micro people's voices in the form of data. You just reminded me of a fun fact which is I was just thinking about like how would speed back coming like back in the day. Oh yeah Lincoln has like an open door policy at the white house and you could just walk in and you could talk to him and like that that was that was true. Direct feedback, the user experience. It's true. It's like hey I'm not really happy with the government. Can we talk about it? And the fact that you're able to track that with data and we laugh. But the reality is this is a monumental shift in how we've seen the governance of our country. You know evolved because now we're considering that each data point is a human being. It's a life that it should be considered, that should be discussed, that should be accounted for us, not just for a census. You know, it's for actual improvement of our well being. So it is phenomenal important work. And I think you know, need to be for you being on the outside. Now how are you helping dozens of agencies that are contracting with the government be prepared to take on this type of work, taking the best from customer employee experience from industry and bringing it into the government and I decided to leave the government take a break join Medallion and we are really working at scale and helping many agencies. U. S. D. A. CMS. V. A. Work through this in an iterative process. So it's human centered design process to bring the voice of the people to those who need it when they need it within the agencies. And that's critically important because that's where our resources and our taxes get deployed when we know what problems are actually relevant to our society. And so for you, Nina, w how do you actually do the goal setting and what are some of the current goals of the work that you're undertaking? You know, with this new initiative around design and experience. So how this all came to be, why we're even seeing this um, happen Or around two major goals. one is to rebuild trust in the government. And the second is to enact equity. Really speaking to a few words you said earlier and I'm just gonna dive into those a little. Um, I mean government should just work right, every interaction that we have with anyone, you know, but especially with the government is a chance. You know, whether you're um filing your taxes and waiting for your return, trying to renew your passport. That is a chance to show, hey, you can trust me. This is just going to work and rebuilding that trust and that face in democracy is such a big part of how design is being used here. So rebuilding trust. Um, the second part and this is where I know like you have to keep time because I can go off on this one. Um, because it's amazing is to enact equity because every interaction again that you have with everyone and with the government is a chance to serve and treat people with dignity and respect. And I mean we all know what administrative burden is. We like with the government like be real, it's there, but we don't all experience it equally. And the truth is there are um, traditionally underserved communities who face a disproportionate amount of administrative burden. I mean we're talking about, we're talking about time tech. I mean we all have the most of us have the privilege of working from home now. I'm thinking about like there are people providing what are essential services, They don't have that chance and they may even be working more than one job. Where is that time is that time to deal with that all of this burden. Um, there's, there's the learning of, you know, if if, if you, you've had the understanding of how to navigate a system, you don't have to take all that time to understand how it works. And then one thing that I've been thinking about because of the discussions that we've been having around, um, for trauma informed design. It's also just the psychological burden that also comes and and like Rachel said, you know, we all have different ones. So imagine, um, you know, you know as a brown person, you know if I'm being asked over and over by the government um what's your name and who are all the people in your household? Well I'm coming with some other stuff like why are you, why do you keep asking why you keep checking on me? So I was kind of getting excited. Well I was getting excited by everything George was saying but all of those things are listed in um we have an office of management and budget and they put out all these government words, a memory a memorandum which charges agencies when they are doing this work, they have to account for all of those burdens. So in a way George it's building a code of ethics. I was getting really excited thinking about that, building kind of ethics and accountability because that like it's written in there, you'll have to address these burdens cities, communities. I mean because we those of us who worked on mobile apps, we understand the impact of you know cognitive fatigue and decision fatigue. Right and how many choices you have to make, how many swipes, how many steps And if english isn't your first language or you have an impairment, it becomes even more detrimental to your experience. And so a lot of what you all are doing is being discussed on the podcast solving for X. Like that type of work I would love to know like what is the goal of this project and what are you hoping to you know um you know get people to pay attention to these discussions. Yes. So we are working on a podcast called solving for X. And I think the core of the question like what is X, what is the future of experience? What is the future of government experience? I hypothesize hypothesize it is work experience. So really looking at what it takes again to make this Moonshot into a moon landing and really develop healthy, robust equitable, fair compassionate society in which we all are receiving and connecting and serving one another better. Um there is this strange tendency I think of the government to separate everything and create silos and I'm learning this is also a thing in big companies um but bringing I. T and HR and operations together two truly prototype the future of work with better experiences. Yeah. And so one of the last questions I have is the government is clearly making investments in design. So what opportunities exist today that are unfilled that people may need to be made aware of or any initiatives that you would like to highlight for us to be able to participate in the work that you're doing with the fellowship? Yes, so many. Okay, um first I want to say um where the administration is making an investment in creating a front door to government. So imagine a world where you would, you can just go to this one place, the usa dot gov and that's where you could find out about all the your benefits you're eligible for, do do all the work you need to, without having to go to all these different doors um, and, and, and, and proactively kind of understand what you are, you are eligible for. Um, the, the other plug I'm going to give is um, two that you can all do is to establish support, um, do whatever you can to bring forth civic leave programs at where you are now, a lot of uh, some big tech companies already have these in place, but it gives a chance for really practice leaders to come in and contribute. And not only that, I promise you just from like my experience, they will, they will come back better leaders. They will, they will learn a version of leadership which is servant leadership where you were in service of others, not in charge of others that it is. I don't know if you can get anywhere else. Um, so there's that and then I also want to put a plug that we are solving. I mean if you want to talk about scale, There's No, No 1's skills like the government. So if y'all are interested in in solving them, some like really impactful problems. We are hiring designers, we have created the actual position of designers were in the, in the midst of doing that, the levels, the language because right now if you if you were to go on usa jobs and search you would not find the word design. It's not well understood. So that's something that we're really investing in establishing this career path. So we're hiring. Um, I want one more plug on the Civic Lead programs. There's there's right now applications are open for the program. I'm a part of which is the presidential Innovation fellow. So they're open till I think June 24 or so. Um, and this is that this is sort of senior senior leaders to come be thought partners. But we also have opportunities for um early or junior technologists, designers, data people in a newly established program called the U. S. Digital Core. And I just highly recommend taking advantage of these programs. Wonderful. So hopefully you got all those names. If not we'll make sure that the information is distributed. But thank you both for having us in conversation. Thank you. Thank you.

Most Powerful Women 2021

These are the most important women in business.

Introducing the 2021 Most Powerful Women list

fortune's most powerful women list is a ranking of the most influential and important women in business. It ranks executives by doctors like the size of their business, their influence in the global economy and the trajectory and health of their business. We look at the arc of the career of the executive and we look at her social and cultural influence as well as a relatively new criteria for us, which is how she using her power. And it's not really important to us because business has changed so much in the priorities of business have changed that. It's very difficult for companies now to just be about the size and the revenue and the profits. Uh there's also the question of purpose. There's also the question of how you are helping your workers, How are you helping the communities that you operate in And you know, it felt very important to see that reflected on the list. I think what is interesting to me about the list is how many people at the top are relatively new in their job with five women in the top 10 who stepped into their current jobs during the pandemic. Karen lynch from CVS health jane fraser from city carol tomei ups roz brewer at Walgreens Boots alliance and the Underground Duckett at T I A So one of our newcomers on the list is jennifer salke, she's ahead of amazon studios and she really stood out to us because she is running this enormous budget. Amazon clearly is interested in taking on netflix and some of the other big streamers and she has been making some enormous moves during a year when the company as a whole has gotten even bigger and more power. What's interesting about this group is a couple of them really took a stand on some big social issues this year. Sure do be a match, for example, has been one of the only public company ceos to really speak out against the regressive abortion law in texas. NASDAQ Ceo Adena Friedman who's been leading that company since 2017 but joined the list this year after NASDAQ joined the Fortune 500 for the first time and after she one sec approval for a really groundbreaking for diversity proposal. The list represents 14 different industries, with tech and finance really being the dominant ones. I think the list really reflects how much progress women have made in corporate America. There are so many women at the top of companies and at the top of corporate America more broadly that just the breath of women across industries and the number of women in really powerful roles who don't make the list speaks to just how much has changed in the past 20 years. Mm