Fortune COO Summit

For forward-thinking corporations, what used to be the administrative “back office” are now hubs of advanced productivity, specialized knowledge, and innovation. In this session, we’ll hear from experts at the forefront of the reimagination of these hubs - now called Global Competency Centers - and learn how decentralizing decision-making in this way can provide organizations with a distinct competitive edge.

AGILITY AT SCALE: WHY DECENTRALIZED DECISION-MAKING BRINGS A COMPETITIVE EDGE

Conferences

COOs require actionable strategies for prioritizing today's unique operational challenges, from shifting trade policies, to recession indicators, and the potential fallout of lagging consumer sentiment and spending. Through data-driven insights, real-world case studies, and practical frameworks, this session will tackle best practices for how operations leaders can address cost structures, prioritize talent development, and leverage AI capabilities to build sustainable and resilient competitive advantages during volatile times.

LEADING THROUGH VOLATILITY: WHERE SHOULD COOs FOCUS THEIR ENERGY AND TIME?

For mega consumer brands like McDonald's and Levi’s, customer satisfaction isn’t just a goal— it's a business imperative. In this session, Mason Smoot will reveal McDonald's secret sauce for  digital transformation, from AI-powered drive-thrus to next-gen restaurant innovation.   Jason Gowans will dive into Levi’s data and tech-driven approach to winning customers through personalization that fuels lasting loyalty to one of America’s most iconic brands.

GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT: LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY TO WOW YOUR CUSTOMER

Well, good morning and um we're ending the bulk of the conference on a really fun note um consumers take for granted all the technology that goes behind serving them in stores or in restaurants and today let's talk a little bit about um how that's evolved in the last few years. I mean jobs in restaurants and in retail have changed dramatically in the last few years because of expectations on the retail front. You know, the, the involvement of e-commerce has changed what store workers do on a daily basis and did in restaurants. So from each every point of view, what has been the biggest change in how technology is affecting the customer experience? Why, why don't we start with, with, uh, with Jason over there. Um I would say the biggest changes is really internally, which is not to think about the channels, um, but to really try and put the customer at the center. So, um, an example for us would be um omnichannel shopping. I mean, 80+% of in-store purchases start with an online experience. And so, you know, to be an aspirationally a world class omnichannel retailer, you really got to be thinking about that journey end to end and not just what happens in the four walls or not just what happens on your.com site. And over at McDonald's I would say that we find that uh customers are just more demanding than than ever and their expectations continue to raise and they raise much more quickly and the one way to meet that is through technology and our focus has been on how do you create the largest consumer platform which means you have to have the most efficient restaurant platform to to have. Those two pieces of meat, but I think the changing expectations and redefining what their needs are is, is what we're seeing most. Well, let's just follow up on that. So what do you think, uh, when you say their expectations have risen in what way is it, is it faster, uh, services that the ability to order more quickly and not have to wait to make your way through a ute and get to a cashier? What is it? I think if you think about our history, we started the, the drive-through from an innovation standpoint as a matter of fact, right here in Arizona in Sierra Vista. And from drive through it then became an expectation that I want more control in how I order, how I receive my food, how I pay so that was kiosk that was being able to pay digitally and today it's a desire for a little more one on one personal interaction. So if I'm gonna share my data with you through through your app, then what benefit do you provide me from a uh offers that are important to me, from understanding when I'm arriving to get my food. Uh, and having it prepared for me, so I, I think those are the changes in expectations. It's, it's a little more one on one expectation that if I give you something about me, you'll meet the needs I have. And over at Levi's, you, you guys are, um, you're not getting out of, uh, wholesale and department stores and things like that, but you want to sell a lot more through your own site and your own stores. um, how's that affecting? I mean, where's technology helping you in that way? Yeah, so. You know, Levi's by this point is more than 170 years old and as you point out, for, for most of our history, um we've sold men's jeans to um um to other businesses, to department stores and and other outlets. Um, and part of our strategy is what we call DTC first. So at this point, about half of our business is direct to consumer, the other half being wholesale. Wholesale is still massively important. We want to be excellent at that. We want to be a great partner with our, with our wholesale partners. Um, but for our DTC first ambition, um, we know that we got to be excellent. And I would say that. Probably one of the biggest things that's had to change internally is truly building that that focus on the consumer. So as Mason just pointed out, you know, really understanding who these people are, what they care about, um, when you're producing products, um, what is the complementary product that they might otherwise that they might also be interested in. It's really going deep and obsessing about the consumer in a way that when you're a wholesale. Uh, business, you're one step removed from the consumer. Um, and so for us, it really is about building, um, uh, that expertise around the consumer. And so how do you know that these changes are working but also worth it because you know there's uh there's so much there can be a tendency maybe to adopt implement technology changes, but how do you know that they're worth it? Um, well, we, we just, uh, actually just put a piece out just a couple of weeks ago that outlined that we, we've seen 12 consecutive quarters of double digit, um, growth in our DC in in our econ business, uh, and also in our our direct. Consumer channels. So you know if you're looking just through a financial lens we we'd say it's, it's certainly working, um, but there are other things that that we look at too. We have almost 40 million customers now or fans in our red tap program um around the world, um, and so that's another um uh uh way in which we think about is this strategy working or not, um, the extent to which customers want to have a relationship with Levi's. Um, the other thing we look at obsessively is is customer satisfaction, CAP, what's happening in the four walls, what's happening online, um, because sometimes, you know, the, the, the financial metrics themselves are a bit of a lagging indicator and CSAT tends to be something that can be an early warning signal where we've got opportunities. I would agree. I think Jason said it well, being obsessed about the consumer and understanding what they're telling you, so 1 in 4 transactions in the US is done through our my my uh McDonald's rewards app so it tells you if they're using the app, then it's, it's providing and meeting a need that they have. Equally 50% of those are through mobile order and pay. So it's, it's providing a convenience. I mean you look at it on the, the crew side and, and our, our restaurant team. So are we providing technology that makes it easier for them to do their work and reduces some of the cognitive load and CSAT customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction scores all are moving in the right direction? OK, well, that's good to hear because we titled this session something about wowing people with technology and I, as a consumer. You know, sometimes bells and whistles are fine, but I just want if I order something online and you say it's going to be delivered at such a date that it's actually that that's gonna happen, you don't need to make it Star Wars of of retail or you know um using a mobile app to order coffee or a meal, you know that it doesn't become mayhem when you arrive at the restaurant. So you know, do you think it, it, it's easy to lose sight of of. You know, maybe get blinded by all the shiny things and, and, and lose sight of what you really need. It it can be if you're, if you're not paying attention to what the customers telling you. So in our case, the number one reason why customers might be dissatisfied with their experience shopping Levi's is product availability. And so in response to that, one of the ways in which we use technology was we built an application called Back Pocket. um, and so this is an application, a tool that the stylists in the stores use. Um, to help the customer find the perfect pair of jeans that may not be in the four walls. With that, they have access to the consumer's profile, so they can understand what their fit preferences are and hopefully help them walk out the door happy. Either come back, pick the product up, or we'll ship it to them. One of the things that I think is especially neat about that particular application is that it was a tool for the stores that was built by the stores. So the product manager for the application, she's been with Levi's 13 years, 10 of those years she worked in the stores. So She knows intimately what the true needs are of the store. So in that scenario, it's not us building technology or being this, you know, the Star Wars of retail. It really is grounded in what is the consumer problem and what does the store need to solve that problem. I think whenever you bring any kind of technological solution for for a customer, you have to. Be very quick at understanding whether it meets the need, and we at times when we first introduced our app customers let us know where there was, um, uh, it made it too difficult, too many steps. If it took me too many steps to order a cup of coffee. Then we were making it too difficult, so we've had to go back and make some of those improvements and continually look at it. I'm gonna come to you all for some questions in a moment, but um, let's move a little bit away from the consumer and, and let's talk maybe about the aspects of technology that are not consumer facing but are just as important, your employees and things like inventory management and supply chain. Um, first of all, how do you, how do you get, uh, employees to embrace all these changes and, and, uh, and adopt them? Maybe I'll start, uh, so, um, I, I think first of all that the changes that we work on and develop are informed by what employees tell us are our pain points, so they're very clear in in communication with with crew and and restaurant managers when you're in the restaurants, but also through surveys where the pain points are in executing so we try to build solutions that that solve. All those pain points and I think one of the things we've learned over the last couple of years is that many of the omnichannel options that we've given consumers didn't necessarily connect well to the back of the house so you've you've heard us talk about this most efficient restaurant platform and that is getting it right in the back of the house to make it easier for a crew and managers to execute. Similar, I I think um there was a woman up earlier Rashby in the financial services and she talked about, I think 50, 40, 50% of their time was spent on their sales folks were spent on back office type tasks and very similar in in a retail environment. Um, you know, when you think about what we call our stylists, folks who work in the stores. Um, a large percentage of their time is focused on non-selling activity. And so how can you increase the amount of time that they're spending in front of customers. And so a really simple example would be, um, in our stores, everything is RFID enabled, so all of the genes all have RFID tags. And so, you know, if you're someone like me that comes and works a shift during the holiday season to try and help out. You know, I'm walking around with a with a mobile device able to find the right fit, the right size to get it out in front um so that we can serve the customers, um, but again, these are examples that are very focused on the key pain points in the store. Well, I'm glad you brought up working in the store because, uh, a few weeks ago I interviewed, uh, Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright who was here yesterday. And I asked him what's the thing you miss most now that you're CEO and he said, as a COO I was in stores 4 days out of 5, and now it's 1 day out of 5 if I'm lucky. I really, I'm afraid of losing sight of what is needed at the restaurant level. How often do you guys visit your stores and restaurants respectively and just to make sure that you know you're, you're, you're not removed from from the reality of what's needed. So I'm in our restaurants all of the time. I mean, we, we actually have a restaurant in our office building, so you're, you're always close to the consumer, what's happening. But I'm responsible for the 14,000 restaurants across the US, so being around the US in restaurants, talking to crew and managers, so 2 to 3 days a week is, is constantly, yes. I, I'm not responsible for our, our store network, but uh obviously support it and, you know, I'm a consumer. I, I love fashion, I love brands, I love um understanding consumers, so I'm out there every week, um. My local Levi store at University Village in Seattle. I was there last weekend and opened the door and the door was rattling and one of the screws was a little loose in the in the door handle and Sam, the manager and I were talking about, all right, let's get that fixed. Um, so yeah, love being in the stores. Um, are there any questions in the audience? Um, so when the mic comes to you, just introduce yourself, please and let us know who you're with. Thank you. Sonia Huffman La logistics, um, just curious as you're thinking about, um, two things one, the data you're receiving from customer surveys are you seeing that becoming a little a little less valuable to you and if it is, what are some of the. Other channels you're trying to get uh uh customer data from and to um have you found that you're aggregating so much data you almost don't know what to do with that data and what value it's actually adding to your business and how are you thinking about that? I'll maybe offer a quick anecdote, quite the opposite. I think supporting the digital and technology teams, it's very easy to gravitate to the behavioral data, how many transactions, you know, what's happening with the funnel, all that kind of stuff. Earlier this year, actually at the end of last year, we started seeing some anecdotes in the CSAT surveys about site speeded. And when we talk with the tech teams and we go through our operational meetings, we can see while the metrics are telling us that we're fine. And that went on for longer than I'd like to admit, probably a month or two where there was starting to be a groundswell of feedback in the CSAT surveys that we were having performance issues and yet the metrics were not telling us that we had performance issues. Long story short, we dug in with new observability stuff, found that there was indeed performance issues with the site, um, and we obviously then started acting on it, but that took longer than it ought to, and it was a lesson for us to remember that on the other end of this stuff, there's real people that are having real, um, you know, a real experience with you, whether it's good or bad. So for our case, I think that taught us that we got to pay a lot of attention to the CAT surveys in addition to the behavioral stuff. Yeah, I, I, I agree. I think the the consumer information we get customer information is invaluable and continuing to refine the questions so that you can really get underneath it I think becomes important. But then mixing it and comparing it to what you hear from your crew and then what you actually see in the way customers purchase because sometimes you might think they're saying this, but then you see it connects in a problem they're seeing and how they purchase something so bringing it all together I think it becomes even more important. Let's talk a little bit about the, well, you know, I have to get to a question about AI. So, um, the pace of technological change is accelerating and your employees have to keep up. Is are you using AI to um uh as a training tool so that to get people up to speed more quickly than before or what what is the role of AI in all this? Yeah, so I, I would say we're, we're learning and using AI in a lot of different, different places so we use it on the customer side as an engine on how do you, how you what you offer customers, uh, from a, a, um. And offer a promotion we use it on the crew and customer side uh if you think about we have a hiring app called McHire, so it takes a lot of the work off of the the crew and management team and hiring it does the recruiting, um, promotions follow up, and it has an AI assistant called Olivia and the AI assistant responds and answers questions so it takes some of the the work away from the restaurant teams and I think we know that AI. And automation is going to be the key to even tighter one on one relationships with the customers, but even more so on the cruise side. Yeah, and, and Levi's is really becoming a retailer much more than it ever was. So, so are you using AI to for client telling and and customer service and things like that? We are across the business. So if we think about kind of three broad constituents, we've got our consumers, we've got our corporate employees, then we've got our stylists in the case of stylists. We actually are rolling out today um and this was born out actually last year we did a hackathon where one of the folks built an application for the for the stylist where they could get information on denim education. Denim is obviously a very involved in personal purchase. Not everybody understands the fits or or why they should care about salvage, and so we saw an opportunity to help teach and and be an instructional tool for our stylist. So we Tested that last year real real quick test. Um, today we're rolling that out to more to 10 stores and we plan to roll that out to um to more stores. So the idea here is how can we supercharge their, their selling abilities um around denim. So on that note, um, thank you, Jason and Mason, that was, uh. Not on purpose by our our programming team, but I love it that the names rhyme, but just to show you how McDonald's and Levi's can really come together, not just at beautiful, uh, fortune events but also to make beautiful, um, aprons, uh, Levi's has made this for our friends at McDonald's, so. And I don't know, do you want to give a bit of a detail on, well, this is obviously a very beautiful apron. I hope you wear it, but one of the things I was telling these guys is I believe, and I'm going to sound like a pretend I'm an expert, but I think this is change stitch embroidery. So this is all hand stitched by one of our tailors, um, and they make really beautiful custom. Um, products and if you go into one of the Levi stores, um, there is a tailor shop and they can do really amazing things for you guys on your truck jackets or or your jeans. So clearly I'm gonna be the envy of my team when I get back. Hope so. That's very much. You're very welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thank you.

The rise of AI is reshaping workplace dynamics, creating both opportunities and challenges for corporate leaders. This session provides practical frameworks from two operational experts. Cognizant will share its trusted playbook for building cultures where AI and humans exist in harmony. And, through their unique approach to talent development and organizational design, Zillow will share insights about empowering and upskilling their workforce with AI and digital collaboration. We’ll hear from both how AI tools further their mission of fostering innovation and collaboration across geographically distributed teams.

CREATING CULTURES WHERE BOTH AI AUTOMATION AND HUMAN TALENT THRIVE

Hey, hello again everyone. uh, so I wanna start off with, uh, an interesting fact I just found out. So my colleague Brainstorm editorial director Andrew Neska recently turned me on to an interesting study done by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who staffed a fake software company entirely with AI agents, and the results were not great. I'm sure you two might know about this, but the best performing agents. struggle to finish just 24% of the jobs assigned to it, so it's clear that we're a long way away from a world in which AI agents entirely take human jobs, uh, but that sets me up to ask you both, how are you preparing for a future where AI agents will be taking on more than ever before and how are you talking about it to your current workforces and June, let's start with you. Yeah, I mean, I'll start off by saying that, you know, while Chat GPT created this massive moment that machine learning is nothing new and at Zillow, this estimate actually was created 15 years ago using machine learning. We created the Zillow showcase product after years of research on computer vision and machine learning. So our employees are pretty familiar with AI as a tool. Now what's new is the generative AI and agentic AI capabilities. Um, and so what we've been doing to prepare, uh, folks is one, recognizing the moment, so making sure that we understand. Uh, to me it's very analogous to maybe the um the introduction of the iPhone and back when that happened, this was actually a pivotal moment for Zillow where we realized that we needed to change how we engineered our products and we went to this mobile first philosophy. If you could not build it on the phone, then you were not going to build it at all. um, so it became this expectation and sort of a cultural norm and we're trying to do the same thing right now with AI where. The idea is that you're going to use AI, um, it's coming, you're going to use it. It's not really a choice, and the question is which tools are you going to use and which problems are you going to solve, how are you going to adopt it. So we've been, um, we introduced something called AI days where employees will come and really showcase their products or that they built so product managers building prototypes and repli and engineers using cursor to to to write code. So, uh, employees really showing how. AI can augment their work and that takes a little bit of the focus away from replacing to augmenting and making humans more effective. That is helpful. And, before you say your answer, can you also just give us a brief overview of what cognizant is and does before you answer too? Yes, so I think Cognizant is a 360,000 people company where we collaborate with our customers in technology landscape, to put it simply. The business which I represent, um, in traditional terms is called BPO. I refuse to call it BPO and I'll give you, uh, I'll tell you why, uh, because if you look at these 93,000 people, we are known for deep industry vertical specific BPO. I have 4000 doctors, nurses, pharmacists amongst these 93,000 people. I have music composers, uh, and you have these AV rooms where they can go and record music. Um, similarly, we have, uh, uh, you know, geospatial specialist on our workforce. So that's our calling card if I may, and I would describe this business what used to be as human-led and human powered, and we are now pivoting to human-led and AI powered business in this space. See, the, the effort that went in that powered the system of action for our customers was human effort. Now, we will see a world where you will have a blend of human and AI agents working together. And that's why we would, uh, I mean, our business has done well, arguably in the last 5 years, 3 years we were the leading group in the, in the industry. Uh, going forward, we want to be the best in class AI powered BPO company on this planet. How many of you out here feel like your company has a clear AI strategy? OK, all right, a little less than half, I think that's what I figured. I'm curious from both of you what is the hardest pushback you faced from employees or leaders when trying to implement AI and how did you work to overcome that, June? Yeah, I mean, I think for Azilla what what I've seen is that the hardest um. The hardest block is actually inertia and it really is not that different than any new technology that we've asked people to adopt um I remember when we switched from Microsoft Office to the Google Cloud, um, you know, there's there's a learning curve there and there's inertia and I think in general people become, uh, you know, very familiar with certain ways of doing things and breaking habits is really hard and so in that sense getting people to. AI is actually nothing new. It's actually the same, you know, I think of it as a very similar to the problem we have when we're selling software where, um, you know, you can sell the software, but in order for clients to really adopt it, you have to point out the benefits and connect the dots maybe a little bit in an obvious way how it can help them um and then once you focus on the benefits of what AI can do for the humans, then the humans, the light bulb goes off and you'll see the early adopters, um, really take off. And then you'll see other people going, oh shoot, I should, I really need to catch up. And so we're right at that inflection point right now where a lot of the early adopters are doing great work with AI and the rest of the employee base is realizing, oh, I need to catch up. I feel like I need someone to give me an instruction on like, here is how you should do it and here is how it can help your life. Gesh, how do you, how do you figure that out at cognizance? I think I would like to reframe the question. It's not just people, even I'm scared. So when we think that others are resisting and I'm with it, I think that's a fundamentally in my view, a flawed approach that is fear, fear of uncertainty, fear of unknown, fear of ambiguity. In many ways this, this conference is helping me overcome fear because I'm listening to greatspective, great perspective, right? So, um. I, I believe senior leadership does not have monopoly on good ideas. So if we can involve them in our future, if they find their fingerprint in the painting that we are going to create of the future, uh, they get co-opted and it's not just your team members, it's actually customers. It is extremely important for us to co-opt our customers in the journey. Because what we create has to be relevant for our customers. So, uh, the methodology which I adopt is co-opting them. Rather than telling them what to do, and we also have an acronym, sorry, I mean, I, it's a short time, so but I'll, I'll share it with you. We discussed about sculpt the future, and each alphabet has uh S stands for strategy and structure. CU stands for culture and customer. L stands for leadership, P stands for people and process, and P stands for technology. And for a specific reason, P is last. Because there is so much chatter about technology, it, it literally dominates everything, but this is also about strategy, culture, structure, leadership, people, all of the above, and I think it is the biggest opportunity for me. Along with my team in 38 years of being in the industry, it's, I feel like a kid in a toy shop. Yeah, I think culture is so important, and I'm gonna come to the audience in just a second for questions, but I want to touch on culture, and I'm curious how AI has changed each of your cultures for better or for worse, um, in the past couple of months. Ganesh, I'll start with you. I think, um, as I said, if you want to co-opt them, we really need to build a culture of experimentation. Uh, and we need to have a tolerance for failure. Not failing our customers, but failing early internally because we are going to try things and there are things which will not work and uh and we really need to celebrate responsible failures as well. So culture is a tough thing, it's not easy to, to navigate. It's easy to speak about it on on the stage, but whether it gets practiced, whether it gets percolated down to to individuals, there will be subcultures. But ultimately, we are going to have a structure where it is not hierarchical so that the culture Uh, also permeates faster in the organization. It's a journey ahead. Are we there? No, we are not there yet, but we intend to be there. June, what's the most surprising way to change Zillow's culture? Um, I'm not sure if it's surprising, but a delightful way that it has changed our culture is that it's, um. You know, uh, it's really enhanced our culture of excellence, and we really, um, you know what AI does is it allows your top performers, uh, your most valuable employees to be more productive. I, you know, I'm not sure about the digital twin technology yet, but, but there is this idea of multiplying. There there's an idea that you can multiply yourself through AI, right? You can take AI to go and use it as a tool for communication, expression. One of the, um, you know, we, we moved to cloud HQ with COVID and stayed there, and one of the skills, sorry, Cloud HQ is basically fully remote work. So all of our employees are fully remote, and we had to relearn how to do a lot of things. One of the things that our employees really had to learn was moving from Um, slides with bullet points that you could voice over to actually being able to write documents so that you can communicate asynchronously with someone in a different time zone and we found that our employees were actually lacking in some of those writing skills. So what AI has been able to do is now, you know, everyone has this employee who has great. Ideas but struggles getting the words out and chat GPT can help them. They can write in bullet points and prompts and now they can write this beautifully worded document. So it's really kind of helped our best employees become better and really extended this culture of excellence that we have. We have time for one question. I see one here in front. Angel, Mike is coming to you. I have a question for you around um like enterprise optimization. So the idea of being able to like augment and get more performance out of individual people makes a ton of sense and I we're doing that quite well today, but when I'm thinking about like what would it look like to have like a, you know, kind of an order of magnitude optimization by with AI, how are you identifying those use cases? Do you feel like you've been able to do that already? And I think there's also so many companies that are starting to spin up with recommendations and offerings. Um, and we're trying to move fast. How are you making those decisions? Yeah, I think the key there, I mean, actually I'll go back to an example that's not even generated AI, the older machine learning, so we have this product called Zillow Showcase where just to describe it, a photographer goes into a home, takes some pictures, 3D home panoramas, and then it gets stitched together into a 3D home tour and an interactive floor plan. And the initial version of this required a lot of human intervention and was very expensive and was never going to be scalable. Traditional coding was not. Help us solve this problem, so the team leaned on AI and we were able to lower the cost of producing these interactive floor plans by something like 90%. So I think if you identify a problem and if you have AI experts in your organization who can look at a problem and say, oh, this is an area where traditional coding is going to fall short, but machine learning will get us an order of magnitude. That's where I would focus the AI efforts. And so a lot of what I try to do is Um, identify the problems where we want to direct the resources because I'm not the AI expert. I, I think there are two spectrum, if I may 1 is this whole concept of productivity. I, uh, and this belongs to our customers. I'll give you an example of Life Sciences customer, the regulatory compliance, what used to take 22 people, 6 months to do. Now 6 people are able to do it in 2 days. So that's the productivity and this is real, live and running. Uh, but the other spectrum, we carry the concept in order to personalize we need to do something, we need a critical mass or certain scale. I think with the advent of agent T KI and if we create micro agents, literally the atomic unit can be one, and you can hyperpersonalize for the unit of one. Without necessarily increasing the cost. So this is going to present tremendous opportunities for all of us to, uh, to capitalize on this ability of agent TKI going forward, and that's what I think would be exciting for all of us. I totally agree, and I wish we had time for more questions because you know I can ask them away, but thank you both for your time and thank you for the great questions.

It's safe to say that the global trade landscape today is like a rollercoaster, with corporate leaders being left to manage the cascading impacts of shifting tariff policies, a head- spinning geo-political landscape and talks of stagflation. The challenges make building a resilient supply chain a business imperative. Is AI the solution to navigating these turbulent waters? We'll hear from two leaders about their strategies for building adaptive supply chain frameworks that are made to withstand geopolitical pressures and regulatory changes –  essential knowledge for operational executives balancing short-term volatility with long- term strategic vision. 

BUILDING A RESILIENT SUPPLY CHAIN IN TODAY'S TURBULENT WORLD

Venture capital and private equity trailblazers Heather Kennedy Miner and Elle Lanning have made their mark on companies like KIND, Cava, Lululemon, and McAfee by applying strategic growth strategies to turn them into powerhouse market leaders. In this session, they’ll share their battle-tested frameworks for identifying investments with the potential for hyper-growth, and the hands-on operational tricks of the trade that can propel any company to sky-high value and scale.

OPERATING STRATEGIES THAT POWER COMPANIES TO SCALE UP, UP, AND AWAY

No. Our next two speakers have invested in some of today's most innovative companies. Think of Cava, Lululemon, Kind, snacks, many more. Their expertise is first identifying uniquely high growth potential companies and then expertly scaling them to become the powerhouses that they are. Please welcome to the COO summit, Heather Kennedy Miner, Chief operating officer at Advent International. And Ellie Lanning, president of investing at Camino Partners. They'll be interviewed by Fortune's senior writer and co-chair of the COO summit, Lilah McClellan. Oh. Hello, thank you. So before we start, I just want to say a little bit more about who we have on stage here. Um, so Elle, uh, sorry, Ellie, you, um, who here has heard of Shark Tank, the TV show. OK, that's everyone. Great. So. Um, you, today we all had Kind bars in the lobby, which is great. So you worked at Kind with Daniel Lubetzky, who is the newest sort of permanent judge on Shark Tank, and and now you're running Communal Partners, which is an investment platform connected in some ways, right? Yeah, I would say Shark Tank is his connection to the true entrepreneurial community and Uh, investments at Camino are much greater scale. OK, great, thank you. And Heather, you spent two decades at Goldman Sachs. You had a CEOO role there and now you have a CEO role at Advent International, um, which is an investment, private equity investment firm with 91 billion under assets under management, um, and you're in charge of growth overseeing 320 investment professionals, right? Is it? Yeah, Advent has over 16 offices around the world, 90 billion of AUM, 100 portfolio companies, 650 employees, of which 350 are investment professionals. So we have very different perspectives. I think it's going to be great. Um, let's just start with the first principles. How, how do you identify which companies before we talk about scaling, how do you know which ones are worth scaling, which investments are worth scaling? Yeah. So I've spent my career in consumer and demand businesses and on the operating side and now I'm looking at it from the investing side um I think it starts with really an individual or a team that is very clear on the problem that they're solving um and then from a kind of KPI that I look at often early on is gross margin. Um, and maybe counter to kind of software and technology, I expect gross margin in a consumer business to be really strong out the gates because that signals that the consumer is saying and will pay for a solution you're providing. You should be able to scale that gross margin over time, but you're probably gonna have to invest it back into price and other things to reach a growing consumer base, um, but that we look at as an indicator of kind of ready for growth. OK, so it's very sector specific for you OK. Um, and how about that. So at Advent, um, we are very sector specific. We cover consumer health care, industrial, business and financial services and technology and are known for deep subsector expertise in places like payments and chemicals, um, where we like a sector, we get a sourcing sell we. We often bring in a former CEO that's been in that business and we'll do deep dives to really identify companies that we want to spend more time with. And then as we start to unpack those companies, it's really understanding their market position, their pricing power, the competitive landscape. Can they enter new markets? What is their value proposition? And then ultimately, as you think. About that growth forward and that trajectory, it's what does their operating infrastructure look like and do they have the flexibility to scale with limited incremental cost and then of course, do they have the funding and the capacity to actually execute all of that for us, we take a very operationally intensive approach to our portfolio company management. We have a value creation plan for every portfolio company that we partner with and so what it means is we're very willing to get our hands dirty and think through those dynamics. Great. Well, so let's talk a little bit about that. So now scaling CEOs trying to scale a particular project or business. What strategies have you seen really work for inventive companies that you work with? Yeah, so I would say, I guess I'll, I'll start it with a problem that we see often that is focused on can slip into a real growth strategy, so. Um, again focused on more consumer and demand businesses, but we see often a over diversification of demand generation strategies. So whether that's starting within your, you know, sales and marketing teams really wanting to put too many irons in the fire almost, and what we talk about is doing enough trial to really understand where you should pour more water and so we talked to. Our companies about the differentiation of kind of a peanut butter spread strategy where you're, you know, spreading your dollars across everything and really trying to shift that to a champagne tower strategy where where you're, you know, if you can all visualize the champagne tower, really finding the strategies of greatest return and maxing out your dollars investment and time in those and only then going to the next tier. So you don't have to be so well rounded all the time, maybe in life but not in, not in scaling, correct, um, and from a COO's perspective, what, how would you answer that question? Look, I think in all of our roles as COOs having a really well defined operating plan is incredibly important, and that needs to follow the strategy of the firm and needs to be very clear around priorities and goals. And so what are the product priorities, the distribution priorities of the organization. Um, is following and then ultimately who's responsible for achieving those and how are those um measured? I think ultimately then it's about people process technology right that's all of our day jobs is how do we make all of that happen for me something that's incredibly important is the data piece of this. How are we measuring. Are the KPIs and then ultimately you know thinking back to reporting that out and making sure that the teams have full transparency around how we're progressing towards those goals. OK, thank you. I'm going to be coming to the audience to take your questions in a moment, so please be thinking of what you'd like to ask. I'm wondering for COOs, is there a mind shift mindset shift between sort of keeping things running day to day and then figuring out how to scale a business? What is that mindset shift in your, how would you approach that? Yeah, so I, I think, um, you have to be thinking of both, right? I think a lot of the we used to within kind we called it, you know, making sure the trains were running on time. I think that's where you really have to lean on team and your number one job there is clarity and decisiveness and moments. Of escalation and then I think you know your role is really to be more focused with the executive team on charting where those next investments are gonna be and where you're readying to move the resources you know that flow up to you too for continued growth. OK, great. I fully agree with Ellie. I think the majority of my job needs to be strategy. One of the things that we did organizationally last year is set a new strategic ambition for the firm, and we articulated it to our LPs, to our people. What that has allowed us is to really identify growth priorities. And then who's responsible then for executing on those growth priorities if if the organization is operating as it's such, the trains running on time should be happening, right? And obviously if you need to reengineer processes or implement new technologies or swap out talent to make sure that that's happening, you can do that, but. I think from our perspective the growth angle has to be consistently top of mind, particularly in a private equity industry that is maturing and that is more competitive and so making sure that we understand how we are positioned to win. No time to snooze here, do we have any questions from the audience? Yes, uh, a mic will be coming your way and let us know who you are. Um, when you get it, thank you. Yes, hi, uh, I'm Moha Chima. I'm the CEO of CoreLogic. Um, the question is for if you think about companies helping companies, uh, your Porco companies improve their evaluation and the role of AI, um, not just in efficiency but as well as getting price and other value. Do you have any early successes or how you were helping the companies get there as well in, uh, leveraging that as well? Yes, AI is on my list as well, um. I can start. We have a group of 50 individuals globally known as our portfolio support group who work alongside our management teams to execute value creation plans. Within that team we have future ready and AI specialists who really understand power lanes and what's happening, playbooks that we have. have worked in one portfolio company that can then transfer to another. We then have a separate team of data scientists who are able to use both, you know, third party data but also on-prem data from our portfolio companies and then we think through operating efficiency, go to market strategy, how do we improve straight through processing. Power pricing as we think about where you actually want to price various dynamics and so we're using AI within portfolio companies you know we're starting to use it within Advent as well, but ultimately, as we all know, we're at early stages here and thinking about use cases from one portfolio company and how we ultimately can transfer that to another. Great. And what about AI for you? Is it, is it something that you're looking for in every company that you might invest in or not quite? No, well, I would say on the investor side every company is somehow embedding AI in their pitch whether it's really kind of true to their business or not so I, I believe it kind of creates equal parts skepticism and excitement. I think the way we're thinking about it both within Camino and then the way we are trying to help our partner companies think about it. Is being pointed and prioritized and so really looking you know I think the greatest kind of thing it can do in the early days is lift up the human powered work to be judgment um and kind of context and so you know we on the investment side spend a lot of time combing through data uh looking at companies looking at how they might stack up we have you know data feeds we pay for we have proprietary data we get from companies. And augmenting that and being able to produce the what is for uh then human uh and kind of judgment based team to then be able to say what could be um is where we see it having a lot of power. OK, that's helpful. Any other questions from the audience? Yes. So I'm gonna try and link uh earlier panel discussion here. Uh, just want to point of view from you guys with the uncertainty or the changes, policy changes that we're seeing. How are you navigating it being In your decision making whether in terms of adding a portfolio company or cross leveraging portfolio companies and I'm referring to essentially tariff changes or if you take take into consideration the uh the quick technological advances that are happening in different industries so we had a really nice morning discussion so I'm just curious how you're leveraging it in your portfolios essentially. Great, and we only have about 2 minutes, so I'd love to. Thank you for that great question. Go ahead, um, so I would say, you know, it's, you know, these are very dynamic times that's certainly been the theme of everything that I've heard about and so building agile teams and cultures that, you know, we don't necessarily believe so much in playbooks because you grow out of them in you know in a day or. Um, and so we really try to look at applied learners and right now, you know, we have a number of businesses that are exposed to um. Whatever the day the tariff may be and we're trying to create kind of cross learnings and a lot of optionality right in terms of kind of how can you think about ways the company may bear some of that ways your customer base may bear some of it and ways that your end you know consumer or customer may bear that and sharing successes really quickly. Um, we certainly are trying to make sure it, it's not stopping us from, uh, being front footed on investing. I think we actually think that this is a great time and great opportunity for people who aren't gonna be kind of paralyzed by uncertainty. That's such an important question. Do you have a 30 seconds, sort of 1 minute? Look, I think ultimately it is such a case by case dynamic and we are micro investors at Advent. We have to be macro aware, but we are. Highly analytical and decomposing the entire dynamic around supply chain and around the customer demand chain and the implications, but we're doing deep dives on all of our portfolio companies to understand potential implications, and it's very hard to paint a broad brush. I think we feel good that we have the analytical tools today, but of course new information is coming out every day and it's hard to predict. And so being agile and responsive is incredibly important in this environment. That's a great note to and Don, thank you so much. I hope you all have time to meet and mingle in the hallway as well to continue some of this. Thank you.

Financial institutions are grappling with unique challenges in the age of AI, including keeping up with head-spinning innovation at legacy organizations designed to manage risk. How do these leading COOs in finance lean into long-term stability while staying agile in the face of change? You’ll hear about how these global institutions are using ground-breaking tech to modernize the customer experience, detect fraud, conduct cutting edge research, streamline processes and more. 

INDUSTRY DEEP DIVE: HOW FINANCE COOs ARE LEADING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY’S RISKS & RETURNS

Well, OK, as Diane said, AI has the potential to be transformative to the finance to the finance function. So I want to start by asking both of you. You, you, you're both in big financial institutions. Where does your institution, Jack and we'll start with you. Where are you on your AI? Path Thank you. So let me start by just providing a brief background. RBC Royal Bank of Canada, uh, is one of the largest global financial institutions. More than 100,000 employees as part of our AI journey, happy to say that we started our MLAI journey almost a decade ago and where we are just recently earlier this year, we shared in our investor day and made a very bold, ambitious goal that by the end of 2027. We will generate $700 million to a $1 billion of enterprise value through AI-based initiatives. And the reason we were able to make such Uh, bold back is based on how we have, uh, responsibly invested in technology over the period of last decade starting from Whether data analytics, API, private cloud, public cloud journey, uh, machine learning, AI, and now what we all are really hyped about generative AI. Bye. Yeah, thank you, Rashmi. Same thing. Yeah, so you know, TIA is primarily a retirement company. We oversee about $1.4 trillion in assets. I'll walk you a little bit through our AI journey. We are a very mission oriented company. So it was important for us to ensure that when we innovate, we innovate in a responsible manner. So one of the first things we actually did was establish a responsible AI policy which tells our employees the dos and don'ts of AI essentially. We also then created a center of excellence for AI. We have 3 major business lines. We have our retirement business, Novien, our asset management arm and wealth management, of which I'm a part. Each of these businesses identifies the use cases based on the, you know, their work process and what they need, and they work with the center where we govern those use cases. We train employees, we monitor the usage of AI, we deck the right capacity to it. So really setting up, I would say first and foremost the controls, the governance was important. The second thing we wanted to do was obviously create uh the ability to build AI solutions. So we set up our own in-house proprietary AI platform called TIAA Gate. Um, it's in-house, but I will tell you our strategy in this space is to be hybrid, to be hybrid hybrid, yeah, because you know, the best solutions are not going to always be in-house. So the approach we're taking is to say. We'll leverage third party solutions with providers we already work with, for example, you know, we may work with Salesforce and use one of their agents, and then where the solutions are unique, for example, our lifetime income products are pretty unique in the industry. So for those solutions, an AI option is best done on our own proprietary platform. So really our strategy is going to be hybrid, um, and I would characterize the evolution of AI is. We set the tools. We've got the governance, we've got the controls. We've started the training, upskilling. We've experimented with use cases. I think the next phase is really beginning to do the use cases at far more scale. Yeah, yeah, hybrid for you also at RBC. Yeah, it's very, very much aligned and I think as I, as I was saying, right, as part of the last 10 years of journey. All the lessons we learned from the previous technology that came and we all were talking in various conferences, right? We learned a lot. We harvested all those lessons learned, whether it's related to data privacy, the security aspect of it, making sure we understand the ethical nature of uh using the technology, being responsible about it. So similar to what Rashmi is saying, right, we, we applied that as part of our cloud journey because in order for us to leverage public cloud, we had to go through the same rigor on top with respect to data privacy and security. We use this foundation to build a similar level of governance for our AI, and now we are taking that for JNAI, right? And as part of that AI JN AI journey, we also have, uh, responsible AI principles that we have established and it's publicly available. So if anyone wants to check it out, you can, you can access it. It's a publicly available information for RBC and as part of it, we have also invested and created Borealis AI Institute. Which is basically, uh, employing 100+ PhDs, world's best, I would say AI scientists, and 800+ machine learning AI developers and data engineers. Uh, and, and the reason for that is that has helped us. Understand not just the business applications and the power of AI, but also understand how we can Leverage all the investment we have made over the period of the last many years using technology because at the end of the day with the recall of AI GAI or agent T AI, it has to tap into your ecosystems of the data which is your primary asset that you are hosting uh related to your customers across the line of business. Um, and then what we have done is we have created a very, uh, detailed development and governance framework. To allow various teams in a large RBC organization to understand, learn, design, develop, and test AI and AI model in a very responsible manner, and there is a very clear guidance and governance when they can make a decision how and when to take this to the production, so there is a very well laid out structure. Got it. So let's get very specific this time. What are the current use cases that you are working on now? Yeah, you know, I would categorize the use cases we typically see in wealth management in three different patterns is how I describe them. Uh, content summarization, content generation, and large scale data analysis for the purpose of insights. There's also core generation, by the way, but that's far more, I think, in the tech space. So these are the patterns we see. The impact of a lot of these use cases is AI as a co-pilot and AI not as an autopilot necessarily for our employees and advisors. So I'll give you an example of a use case. We are working on a meeting preparation. A use case for our financial advisor. So when an adviser is meeting with their client, they often have to spend time preparing for that meeting, right? What were the last notes from the last interaction? Did the client call between the last meeting and this meeting, and did they have a service issue? Are they on track with their financial plan? Are their life events likely to happen? This takes time, so we are actually. Looking at a solution where we can use AI to create a summary for the adviser that saves them time and then frankly go the next step and say give them recommendations on the next best action to have a conversation with the client on and by the way, Jeff, we think there is tremendous value in this because there are studies that have said financial advisors are spending 40% to 50% of their time on non-client facing activities. And close to 15-20% of that on administrative tasks. So the opportunity is clearly there to get more productivity. Yeah, and a follow up there, what you're describing would be equally valuable to many other financial companies. Are you creating your own? Are you using some that at least have elements that are being used elsewhere? We are definitely using creating some new ones and then leveraging others that we see can be applied enterprise-wide. So an example of another use case that's very common in the investment spaces you want to be able to summarize the investment researcher portfolio manager. uses to make investment decisions. By the way, our asset management firm Nve has to do the same thing, as do our wealth management investment advisors. We don't need two separate use cases, and that's where that center comes into play so that we can govern and leverage core capabilities. Yes, use cases now at RBC. Yeah, so. The way we look at AI and AI is two ways, I would say. One, how we can provide, uh, services, products and services we are offering to our. Our clients and the experience we are giving to our employees, how we can do this thing better. And secondly products and services or the experience that we wanted to offer to our clients and employees that were not possible that something now AI and GNAI is making it possible now. So these are the two different buckets. So when we talk about use cases for the period of the last 57 years, we have, uh, Made AI machine learning AI based products and services available to our clients across different line of business. Uh, if I talk about capital markets, we have Eden, uh, that's a brand name, uh, that is a MLAI based model that helps with equity trading, and it allows our client to have a better efficiency and Uh, quality of their trades. Now we are taking to the next level and it's all helping us with the research and insights and as, as Rami mentioned, right, enabling our frontline, uh, team basically to focus more on engaging with clients and having a quality, uh, conversation versus doing a lot of backend research work by themselves. If I talk about from a retail perspective, uh, through our RBC mobile app, uh, we have made available know me insight. Uh, what it does is basically it looks at all your financial cash flow transactions and allows at an individual level to avoid you to go below a certain balance and it automatically if you if you're given permission to move money from savings to checking because you have set up autopay. And it knows that there is a bill coming and it's roughly about this amount. So we don't want our clients to go through insufficient fees type situations. So we are leveraging technology to make our clients' life easier and same way to small market customers, they are able to look at their cash flow and understand and predict and help them properly run their business and and focus on their business rather than worrying about the, the financial cash flow aspect of it. If you, if you go into the broader enterprise side, same way there are a lot of use cases, but the foundational is. What we are most proud of is this BorealS AI and and 800 to 900 top of the best of the best world's talent have created a proprietary large transaction model, we call it atom. It is Running across 1 billion events that we generate every day, and it was trained using 65 billion client transactions. So we are, we are sitting on this intelligence that is allowing us to unleash the power to help our employees better serve our clients and our clients receive the product and service. That they were hoping but we were not able to provide so far the quality and experience that they were hoping for. Yeah, super exciting. There's a human element in this as in everything, it does seem to me that whenever there is something new like this, especially profoundly new, uh, and I think especially so in the finance function, there will be resistance to change, right? It's inevitable. How do you respond? So you know, I would say. Given the nature of the use cases we're seeing AI as a co-pilot, it, it really means humans who use AI will replace humans who don't. And so getting the human element right and getting them ready to use AI, I think is to your point, the biggest focus area now, and I think you need 3 things for that. You clearly need to give them access to tools. You need to give them the skill set. Right. Um, and then you need to, frankly, in our experience involve them in the creation of the solution. So co-creation is a big lever. um, so to give our folks access in March, we took our proprietary AI platform and created an associate version of it where people can now and we're rolling out access throughout this year so our employees can go in and use AI for their day to day tasks. Whether it's editing documents, writing emails, creating meeting notes from a Zoom session, you know, whatever it is, um, but it gets them comfortable from an upskilling perspective, we have focused a lot on, it's an interesting concept. We've established guilds. There are about 9 different guilds. These are informal networks in the company where employees come together, learn, and experiment. We've got over 5000 employees already members of the guilds. And then I will tell you co-creation we had, you know, we have estate planning attorneys who create, uh, give estate planning council to our clients. They spend a lot of time going through the estate planning documents and they're testing two different AI solutions, giving us a lot of feedback, and their involvement in it has been, I think, instrumental in driving adoption, you know, for both of you. There is also a leadership element here. I mean, you are at the heads of large organizations within your organizations. What's the leadership lessons you've learned so far in this very uh, profound change, so. All the, I would say leadership lessons that we all have aggregated over the period of many years, 1020 years when new technology came, I would say all that applies one or the other way, right, because I, I think your question is specific to AI AI, so I'm going to switch and say, assuming that we are not chasing technology for the sake of technology, we are applying business plans, we are being responsible about it. We are thoughtful about it. We are thinking about hybrid and not just going one way and then learning later, right, that this was the wrong path. So all those given what AI and GAI, if I, if I make it specific leadership lessons, is one is around. being in a highly regulated industry as a global FI. How do you, how do you create an ecosystem? Where the individual end user, the client, customers. is also trying to figure it out what does AI AI means for them. So we have partnered with a company called Kohre. Which is basically, uh, helping us create uh a financial services GNAI framework platform to allow, uh, creating a platform where our end user and client can develop their product and applications using GNAI. Why? Because we want to make sure that there is an independent party, uh, who we are partnering with who is protecting the security and privacy aspect of the data. We are sharing the relevant information, uh, and the, and the learning that we have. And the second part is as part of the broader journey. First, you have to win hearts and minds of your employee when you are going through this change. But same thing applies to your client, same thing applies to your community as well. So we have established respect AI. As a portal, as a framework where we are openly sharing tutorials, framework, knowledge article, that is also something available in public. So if anyone wants to to check it out, to help yourself, help your company, do that. And the reason is this is where we are. We cannot just take this new technology and say. Smart enough, we understand, we figured it out. Let's just use it. We need to think about the overall ecosystem. Great, Rami. So I would, I would echo, don't do tech for the sake of tech. I would say focus on the foundational. I've called it fix the leak. Don't just patch the drywall, do that. The other thing I do want to say is the skills of the future are going to be different. There's going to be a premium on certain skill sets, so speed or structure. Insight over title, judgment over certainty and frankly clean slate thinking or continuous improvement. So we as leaders need to ensure we are evaluating for these skills, hiring for them, performance managing for them. That's where the future is. Uh, that's a great note on which to end. And so I want to thank Jakin and Rajmi so much, really good. Thank you. There you go.

Xerox CEO Steve Bandrowczak’s rise from working on the railroad to taking the helm of Xerox is the kind of career story that reads like a movie script. Now, as CEO of one of America’s most iconic brands, he’s leading a transformation that will define Xerox’s future—with AI at the center. In this candid conversation, Bandrowczak reveals how his hands-on operations background shaped his leadership style, why he believes AI is the key to unlocking a new era of workplace productivity, and what it really takes to steer a legacy company into the digital future. 

SUCCESSION SPOTLIGHT: STEERING XEROX THROUGH A HIGH-STAKES DIGITAL REINVENTION

Next speaker hails from a company that is much more than a household name. It is a brand that is so iconic that it is used as a standard moniker for the product in its category. It's not a photocopy. It is a Xerox copy. But how do you bring a company that was founded in 1906 into the tech technological age of AI? That is exactly what CEO Steve Barazek is tackling today. This interview is part of our succession Spotlight series, as you'll hear about Steve's journey from humble beginnings as a railroad worker up through COO and now into CEO. Please welcome him to the stage along with Fortune's Dianne Brady. Hi everybody, um. So Steve, as Kristen mentioned, you know, Xerox has this mythic properties. I have to say in my own life, my dad used to play poker once a month with the head of Xerox Canada, and my first big feature in the US was on a guy named Rick Thoman way back, I think '99, and there are two things I remember. He said the word digital dreams and he liked French cooking, and here you are, 2018, your approach to be the present. COO for Xerox. Lots of history, lots of tough times too. What was your first reaction? What an incredible honor. Really an honor when you think about the iconic brands around the world and you think about the environments that we've built, the impact we've had on countries, on families, on environments, on the workplace, right, when you think about the mouse and you think about all the things that Xerox Xerox Park, how about the researched, but that was a case study. In lost opportunities. It is, it's got to tell a bunch of good things. They invented a variety of different technologies that ultimately other companies took to market, so we're still part of the foundation, right? So if you think about changing the workplace and the position that Xerox has had through the years around the world, and you think about the families, you think about the environment, you think about the jobs we've created, it's an honor to take on this brand and a famous sales force. Well, let me ask you, um, being in a CEO. because then you became CEO under quite tragic circumstances, you know, the CEO died when you had that vision initially going and you spent a couple of years in that job, you have to be aligned with the guy in charge. At what point did you say, OK, now it's my, my ballgame? What did you see as the opportunity for you to put your own imprint on it? Clearly, sadly when John passed, the CEO at the time, and I took the role of CEO in August of 23. Um, the world had changed. The office had changed. COVID had profoundly changed supply chains, what we saw with the Ukraine-Russia war and so lost $2 billion of top line, uh, when the company was going through COVID and the supply chain challenges. So when you think about it. It was a unique opportunity to think about how do we reposition Xerox for the future but still stay close to our values and what we've always done and we've always driven productivity in the workplace. So how do you think about the workplace in the future? Workplace when you're working from home, you're working from from Starbucks, you're working from the air around the world, and then you think about the dynamics of data. Whether it's AI, how we think about data with AI, how we think about changing the way we work with data and motion and sensors, so we had to come up with a view of how do we play in this world of print, but how do we diversify our revenue in the workplace and still become relevant to our clients. What was it that was different? I mentioned Rick Thoman in digital Dreams because he saw the power of the data that Xerox had, and of course there are many different leaders Ursula Burns, many great leaders at Xerox, but What is it that you see as the unique opportunity right now because you're facing a lot of headwinds and you're carrying on, so give us the vision. A big shift, right? We've become an OEM manufacturer of print, and we could generate back 1015 years ago, we could generate a billion dollars of revenue by the next great device. And so when I took the CEO role, I realized that we had to be client-focused, client-centric, meaning we needed to understand what was happening with our clients, what was happening with our partners. Everything that we did was taking digital information and putting it on paper and printing it out. Well, if you think about just paper as paper, you're losing the whole fact. Today AI without data is like a cell phone without a network connection, completely useless. We play in billions and billions of data environments today. And so we help our clients aggregate that data. It's physical data from paper to digital, whether it's data in motion, help them and then serve it up into AI world to be able to change the way that they work. You make it sound so easy, so let me just, I just want to talk a little bit about the environment. One thing that happens first when you're going through a profound change, a lot of companies go private and they sort of say. I'm so glad to have these people off my back, whether it's a shareholder activist, you had that share price that. The wind is in your face, if that's a good way to put it. What's the value of being a public company right now? Do you ever contemplate maybe this would be easier to do behind closed doors? Look, when you're reinventing a company, it is always a lot easier to do it private because you can do certain things that you can't do in a public world, very specifically quarter on quarter pressure. However, we rebuilt an incredible board. Our board today. Second to none with CTO from Dell, CTO from MasterCard. We have incredible people on our board. Tammy Irwin comes from Verizon, people who want to make this company successful, but more importantly, understand the shift from an OEM company to a services company and a software company, right? Our mixed shift will come from IT solutions, digital services, and then growing and expanding in our print arena. And so when you do that, you reinvent the board, you set your vision, but more importantly, I want to reward the shareholders that have stuck with us for so many years, right, as opposed to you go private, the people who are going to take advantage or get the most out of it is whoever acquires you from a private company. They will get all the upside. I'm taking my shareholders on that journey. But you're, but you're also making some tough choices, and I, and you, you recently suspended the dividend. It sounds like I'm putting you on the spot. You're actually a story of bravery. Let me step back. We'll talk about your dividend in a second. You started out as a railway worker and I, your, your backstory to me is probably one of the. I hate to say purest Horatio algebra, but talk a little bit. You grew up in Long Island. You worked in the railway, you went to school part time. You just did a commencement speech not long ago. I mean that must give you some grit for this situation. Yeah, Diane, I, I am a, a, you know, a rags a success story. I grew up, got disowned by my family at 16. Uh, was going from garbage to garbage scraps and getting enough money that I can get gas, put it into a car and I can go to a 2 year school at night while I was working full time. I worked on the Long Island Railroad and then ultimately got to this career and so that progression gives you a sense of I can go through. It took me 10 years to get my 2 year degree because I'm working at night part time. Um, and so, you know, during that progression, yeah, um, during that progression, you know, you learn an awful lot. You learn an awful lot about hard work, resilience, but more importantly, I don't fear anything. I don't fear anything. So as we're going through a transition and we think about hard times and the things we got to go through, because I've had that background and a lot of the team around me have had a very similar background, there's nothing that we fear. And so we don't worry about the quarter of a quarter of challenges, we don't worry about the challenges when you're going through a reinvention. I always say this and I said this publicly, reinvention is difficult, OK? And the hardest part of the second half of the reinvention, which is what we're starting right now, literally. But when you lay out everything that we've done to date, whether it's around how we changed our largest activists on our board, how we changed the board, how we donated Palo Alto Research Center to recent acquisitions, 30% of our revenue will come from non-print over the next 20. 4 months. All the things that we're doing growing in IT solutions in areas that people never would have thought of us as cybersecurity, security as a service, all those things you have to transition your company. If you got any fear and you worry about quarter over quarter challenges, you'll never get through it. Fearless in in an environment that's tough. Many people here are feeling it. Let's let's talk about Lexmark, for example. You need approval from both China and the US for that. Discuss how's that going? Yeah, look, Lex is owned by a Chinese company today. It's on the CFRus. We're taking two great American brands. If you remember, it came out of the IBM. Organization when they spun Les off. We're now putting two great American icon brands together and we're going to become a powerhouse in this industry, you know, we've got obviously regulatory approvals both on the US side, which was pretty much done. We'll get the China regulatory approvals done here in June and we'll put these two together. I am. We'll get these two companies together. Is there anything you want to say about tariffs? Look, I think tariffs today, everybody is dealing with tariffs. Everybody's dealing with not just tariffs, but the geopolitical and the economic issues that are around the world. We've been here 100 years. We've gone through the dot-com crisis, the financial crisis. We'll navigate through it. We'll be fine. Obviously the changing environment to which you're in, some people will thrive in it, some people will be challenged by it, but you know, we see it as an opportunity and we'll thrive through it. Talk about how you thrive in it, and I'd be remiss not to acknow it's a succession, you know, it's, it's a, so you went from the COO role to the CEO role. What did that feel like first of all, because all of a sudden you're in charge, you're now it's your company. Big challenge. Uh, you know, I was a CIO for many years and you always think you're ready for the next role. As a COO, you think you're ready for the next role. I've sat in board meetings as a CEO. I've sat in committee meetings. I've presented, I've made materials. The reality is, once you're in that seat. Dramatically different. OK. Building a board is different than working with a board. Owning committees is different than working and being on committees. And so when you go from a COO to a CEO, there's a dramatic shift, dramatic change. However, you bring a lot of experience with you. COOs drive change. COOs make cultural shifts, drive outputs. The difference is the CEO role is you're now the leader in the face of the company, right? So you've got to be able to drive the culture with shareholders, with employees, with partners, but more importantly, Understand the things that you did not know and the admission of the things that you did not know. So one of the things I would tell COOs who want to be CEOs, there are board classes. Go take a class on understanding how to be on the board. I do. I teach today. You know, um, what is your message to your students as to how to succeed in these roles? Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. First of all, I always start with today is the slowest change you'll ever be in our life, and you can either be slowest change. You either be fearful of change or you'd be excited. About change, right? And I know a lot of our audience is thinking about AI and where AI is going to fit. If you're not excited about that and realizing that you can change industries, you can change your companies, you will get changed, right? So the first thing is today is the greatest opportunity you may ever have. Second thing is you own your own destiny. You don't like it, look in the mirror. If you don't like what's there, you got to change it, right? And then the third the mirror, put down the mirror. Then the last piece is the wall. The last piece is, and I think all too many people don't realize is you have to own your own destiny. You've got to build it. I think one of the things that's unique about the situation you're in is you're continuing this path. Your stock price has taken a hit in part because you said no dividends. We need this money right now for this acquisition. That must be tough. Those, those are your bosses. Look, it's hard. Anytime you make a dividend change or anytime you make a shareholder policy shift change, but priorities change, right? Interest rates have significantly changed over the last 18 to 24 months. So we prioritize paying down debt. We prioritize getting the deal closed with Lexmark. We prioritize and shifted a little bit away from dividend, uh, in terms of what we paid previously as a percentage of our equity value. It'll come back. We'll be fine and, uh, we'll be just fine going in the future. Paint a vision for us. Of you said you're halfway through now. What does Xerox look like? I mean, I, I know we talk at the 30,000 ft level. How does it feel different? What is it that you want us to think of it still as a copier? Yeah, look, I think there's three areas. One is print is not dead. People don't realize the billions and billions of pages and print happens, uh, print on boxes, print on farmers, you know, pickets, rin happens still a tremendous amount. But more importantly, if you think about print. There is a tremendous amount of value in print, whether it's around marketing, whether it's around legal docs, and Xerox will play in intelligent documents, right? The documents are there, there's intelligence on it. How do we take that information and serve it up to industries, law firms, uh, universities, hospitals. We're gonna play in hospitals like we've never played in hospitals before in law firms. So that's the first piece. Second, IT solutions. People don't realize we now have, you know, a large IT solutions business that is. Growing significantly in cyber as a service. Security is a service desktop is a service. We are platinum with some of the largest OEMs, whether it's Dell, HP, HPE, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, right? And so we're driving and helping our clients specifically in the mid-market that don't have the capabilities to be able to go through these technology advancements. The last piece is digital services. We play significantly in the world of AI with digital services. Why? Because there's a tremendous. The amount of data that's sitting on paper. How do you take that paper? How do you take your SharePoint documents? How do you take all the information you have, serve it up to an LLM privately with your data so that you can actually have actionable outcomes. Now we have about 53 seconds left as you can see you've worked at places like Nortel, Lenovo. You've been in brands that have been in trouble. What, what, what have you learned about that that you would convey to others about leading through these tough times? You've got to love it. You gotta love change. Uh, you gotta love, I mean, I'm prideful about building Lenovo. When Lenovo came out of IBM, uh, it had a high, high degree of failure, high degree, uh, what we did at HP, what we did at DHL. I mean these are all brands that were a dramatically different set of companies before I arrived and not just me but the team, uh, and you created a brand that sustained, you know, you take a look at where Lenovo is today or HP is today or. DHL is today, uh, even we spun out a company out of Aon called the Light, uh, just extremely private, but you got to love it because it's happens and bring it on. That's your, thank you very much. Please join me in thanking Steve. Great story.

In today's hyper-competitive landscape, a COO's operational strategy is only as effective as the talent executing it. The difference between a business thriving and merely surviving comes down to how well leaders attract, develop, and retain top talent. Hear how operational leaders are cultivating high- performance teams by navigating the evolving expectations of today's workforce, from return-to-office policies, to upskilling and reskilling in the age of AI, to career growth and well-being.

YOUR POWER IS YOUR PEOPLE: THE TALENT PLAYBOOK EVERY COO NEEDS

Right, every organization is navigating the evolving workforce of today with issues like return to office policies, AI implementation, and employee well-being all front and center. Having a strategic talent playbook is a must to talk about these and much more. Please welcome to the stage Alejandro Perez, chief administrative officer of Bank of New York, and Raimondi, chief operating officer and head of business at ASADA, and welcome back my colleague Kristen Stoller, Fortune's editorial director and co-chair of the COO summit. Hey, good morning everyone. How are you doing? Great. OK, I wanna go and start off with a quick experiment. So if you are a leader who has had to rethink your talent strategy in the past year, maybe it's because of AI, maybe it's because of return to office mandates, hybrid work, you name it, raise your hand. All right, we got almost everyone, and that's what I was expecting. So good. So let's start off there. Anne and Alejandro, I want to know what is the most unconventional thing you have done to attract or keep talent in the past year that has actually worked. And Alejandro, let's start with you. Wow, I think for us we have truly Transform the office experience for our employees and and just to give you a little bit of context, I don't want to get just some background on who we are. Bank of New York is the oldest bank in the United States of America. It was founded by Alexander Hamilton 241 years ago, rich history, great legacy, but with that comes a lot of baggage, a lot of clutter. People are stuck in their own ways. So you talk about being. You know, innovative in the way we attract people to the office. We started with things such as modernizing the workspace. I mean, the office space used to be, uh, for, for many of the previous leaders, um, the place where you saved the most, you didn't invest anything. So now we're creating world class experiences for our employees and clients alike. Uh, we're bringing amenities to our facilities, fitness centers, free, you'd be surprised in our, in our headquarters, free Starbucks, probably the best money we spend. Starbucks free Starbucks, and I'm telling you, I'll give you a tidbit like during the volatility earlier in the year with tariffs, etc. we had to go back and revisit our budget, and the one thing we didn't talk about was Starbucks. We talked about consulting. We talked about many different things, but we didn't touch Starbucks because it's a place where people come, people are proud of, they talk, they, they, they, they convene, so things like that, like those amenities that experience really providing unreasonable hospitality to our employees is what we're really focused on. OK, I like the free coffee and, um, for us we're a little bit smaller, um, we're a little under 2000 employees, uh, global tech company, um, and I would say a couple of things that we've always done is our. Founders have always thought about culture building culture the same way you build product which is an iterative process. You think about who are your customers in this case it's your employees what experience do you want to provide for them, how do you want to measure that success and then how do programs and policies reinforce that but then most importantly it's to get their feedback, right? Is it working? Is it not working? and then adjust and so for us over this past year or more. The biggest transformation is AI both affecting the software industry but affecting our employee experience what's expected of employees and to make that transformation less, you know, as smooth and thoughtful and intentional as possible over the last year what we've actually done is just focus everybody on our customers and so we declared this year the year of a customer that was the theme for kick off everything that we're doing brings all of the change back. To how is it impacting our customer experience, how are we delivering value for them, um, and not just customer facing teams, uh, because that can be really easy of like oh it's just the go to market teams, it's just the teams that are providing support, but we really activated our whole employee base to get much closer to customers, build those relationships, build empathy, and I think that's helped people focus on the North Star and then be able to know that they're part of that. Having a purpose, yeah, that makes sense. I wanna come back to AI in a bit, but I, Lana Alejandro mentioned the office and our dinner table. I had the pleasure of sitting across Alejandro and all of my amazing dinner table mates out there. Thank you for teeing up this conversation so perfectly. We had a big return to office debate last night at our table, and I think, you know, I, I wanna start there. Um, how many of you in the audience have changed your return to office policy more than once in the past 18 months? OK, about half, um, can each of you walk me through how your companies think about return to office? Are you 5 days a week? Are you hybrid, um, and what has informed your decision to do this, um, Alejandro? Sure, so, um, when we came back, we came back, um, with a hybrid model 3 days in the office, um. And to be candid, what we started doing was just collecting data. We, uh, a lot of what we do, I mean half of our population in, um, we have 51,000 employees, about 21,000 are just in operations, uh, performing processes, manual processes. We basically have we execute 500,000 manual processes per day in BMY, um. So what we started doing was measuring productivity whether you're at home or you're in the office we started also um cataloging errors. What are those errors occurring? What are the team members associated with that? Are they at home? Are they together? Are they sitting in the office? And by collecting that data we started really understanding that productivity was actually um decreasing with everybody. At home. We also adopted an agile methodology at the firm beyond engineering. So now we're working on two weeks with product engineering, operations, sales, customer service. So when you're working on 2 weeksprints, you're making decisions. On the spot you're delegating you're you're empowering your employees and leaders to make decisions, uh, but to do that you have to be together, um, so then we had to, we were forced or with data made the decision to move to 4 days, um, in the office, which we're actually gonna, we're gonna activate in September because we want people to have the time to make the accommodations at home, so people have to make accommodations. But we believe that 4 days is for now we think is is is is plenty. I think providing flexibility to our employees that one day to either come to the office or work from anywhere is important. Um, we also are stressing flexibility being in the office, uh, just being on Zoom or Teams or in an office is not really the value we wanna get. We want people to work together to collaborate, to socialize, um, and the other thing we're doing is we're complementing, augmenting that with other. Benefits such as we give our employees 2 weeks uh work from anywhere that they take with vacation and maybe they go off for a month, 2 week vacation, 2 weeks from anywhere. They really value that at the end of the year in in the holiday period we provide a recharge 2 weeks of recharge period where we ask our managers, our employees, and our leaders to just focus on core business, critical business, and forget about on like, like the meetings, the weekly meetings, etc. so that people can get a little bit more time to recharge to spend at home and get ready for. Next year that makes sense and I think a lot of people use Asana to manage remote teams. So how are you at? Yeah, um, and I loved the intentionality. I think how all those pieces tied together and we, um, so yes, we're a tech company, um, we provide a platform that helps organizations and teams work asynchronously and at the same time we, um, we're pretty intentional about return to office and. A little bit different in the beginning than a lot of tech companies who went straight to anybody can work from anywhere anytime um part of it is we're a very data and research driven company so a lot of the studies continue to show that in person, especially given our demographic of, you know, we have early career engineers early career sales folks that in person collaboration is the best way for people to learn. Um, and build cross functional relationships, so we are what we call office centric hybrid. So, um, for all employees in offices globally it's Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, um, and we picked the days because we didn't want what Alejandro said, you know, a lot of companies that are like, OK, we're hybrid, but you pick the days or different teams pick different days exactly, exactly, and we've always had, um, no meeting Wednesdays, so that was a really logical day. To keep flexible and then Fridays we sort of leave up to the teams so we really find that the energy in the office on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday is high, it's intentional people are building those cross functional relationships. Now I want to come to the audience for a question in just a second, um, but first I want to talk about well-being and culture, and I, I was just at a workplace innovation summit, um, a few weeks ago talking with a bunch of Gen Z employees who say that obviously culture and well-being is top of mind in addition to pay. Um, but I'm wondering, should well-being and culture be a KPI for COOs? And if so, how can you actually measure that? Uh, Anne, let's start with you. Yeah, I think that, um, speaking of Gen Z, you know what we find, and we have a healthy amount of Gen Z employees, I think the things you pointed out are what we hear and see. Um, Gen Z wants to have purpose. They wanna know that. They're making an impact um and that their direct work connects to a company's goals and so being able to show them how that happens and how their work matters is really important. I think they do wanna form connection and community so whether that is employee resource groups whether that's just feeling that their colleagues are part of, you know, not just their work community but their broader community, I think we see that a lot in our. Employee base and then I do think that this whole idea of a much more balanced like being able to show up as your whole self and so the ways that we measure it are probably not so different as folks in the audience but our employee engagement survey um really tells us like how we're doing against these metrics um and one of the most important things we measure is employees feeling like they know directly how the work that they do on a day to day week to week basis. Connects to the company's goals and objectives um and we obviously do that in our own platform, but I think that being able to make sure that when they show up on a day to day basis, their um their work matters. So I think that's one of the major things that we invest in hunter, do you have a? Yeah, look, it's super important, right, when we think about, um, our strategic pillars, we have three strategic pillars that we live by at um BMY. Last 3 years, uh, first, um, be more for our clients. Second run our company better and third and most important is power of culture. So the way, as I said before, we design our spaces we're basically redesigning and remodeling or updating every single office that we're planning to stay on and it's basically with the employee and the client um in mind. So whether it is like in our headquarters where we're gonna build a fitness center. Before we did that actually we see employee input. We wanted to know from our employees what do you want? We have a basement that we're gonna basically utilize do you want a childcare? Do you want a restaurant? Do you want a playroom? Do you want a fitness center? And overwhelmingly employees said we want a fitness center so now they feel heard, um, so that was important for us, um, when we, we have a, we have purpose in everything we build with the employee input in mind, but we'll do things for example which are important. Um, we have a large presence in Lake Mary, Florida, that's north of Orlando, um, prone for, um, storms, hurricanes, etc. So almost every year now we're getting hit. Last year we got hit. My main goal, our main goal at the leadership level was to have the building ready to be open and everybody thought, oh, you wanna make sure everybody can get back. Work I'm like, no, no, no. What we want is a building to serve a shelter for those who are gonna need power, food, and just some accommodation because I've been victim of being in a storm and you wanna charge your phone, where do you go? So our with our employee oh absolutely employees and clients alike. So our goal was not, I mean we had already um. We had already transferred the work as part of a we have activated our business continuity plan, but I wanted that building to be ready to provide shelter and we made sure our employees were about uh knew about it. That was super important for us. All right, any questions from the audience? Yes, right here in the front, and we have a microphone runner coming over to you right now, Ganesh, but can you introduce yourself as well, please? I was wondering, um, on the return to office, two aspects. One is majority of senior leaders are office natives. We grew up uh in the office. Um, second is, do you see any, uh, any patterns in the generational side of preference of working from home and working from office and gender side of, uh, working from home, from office, and geo. Side because differentges carry different cultures. So any thoughts on that? Great question. Those are great questions. I'm happy to dive in on what we're seeing. Um, what we, what we've, um, really emphasized is even though we are office centric and we want people to be in Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, we also, you know, want to treat our employees like the adults that they are and so from a flexibility standpoint we do find that people really value having that flexibility of managing their. Schedules, especially people that are caring for young children or for their parents and that's maybe where we see some of the generational differences is really more what's going on in their life outside of work and are we accommodating and supporting that um it's interesting for us geographically we actually see that some of our smaller offices people are in not just 3 days a week but 5 days a week or 4 or 5 days a week because they all sit on the same floor like the. Energy is much more like a startup and so thinking about how we foster that in our larger locations um but we also see that in Europe actually more of our employees sort of prefer to go in um and have the you know office experience and work um in the office and then keep home a little bit separate but it's a little bit different by location but our consistency is hey we want everybody in Monday Tuesday, Thursday those are our in-person collaboration days. Yeah, I mean, I'm an office native. You're, you're spot on, right? I'm in the office 5 days a week. I think my wife doesn't want me at home, um, any days of the week. She wants to make sure I take my work outside of the house, but, um, but look, I mean, the reality is we this year we're hiring 1500 analysts from campuses across the globe. The majority have said they have expressed, I wanna be in the office. I wanna learn from others. I wanna. Socialize with others, so we're taking that input as well. And what's the age breakdown there? Is it mostly younger people or I mean just college, college graduates first year students coming in. We just last week we launched our summer internship class, 1500 interns, and they are eager to get back to the office and really work in the office, and they've been pretty vocal about it, which is good, right? That we're an office culture, as I said before, um, but I think, um, again for us what's important we have an apprenticeship culture. So it is my job because I run as part of my portfolio facilities to make sure that I create an environment an environment where people can come in and learn, collaborate and socialize, and that make it worth their commute and being there. Yeah, great. I saw another question somewhere over here. 00 great. And we have from like right behind you there you go. I'm just curious if you have um different work schedules for different disciplines, so like your finance team versus your frontline team, do they have different schedules and how have you been able to navigate that both from a legal and sort of just overall culture perspective? So we don't, we, we have the same schedule across the farm, uh, in fact, one of the things that uh we're moving away from in operations is we had uh overnight shifts in India in particular supporting the US. Uh, I'm not a big fan of that, uh, because if you're working in the night shift, you're not really looking for a career. We're not giving people a career, um, so we're moving those roles to time zones that are just consistent with the day work, and I'm a big believer that again we have locations across the globe so we can better support all our global clients with a with um follow the some model but during the day hours and it's the same for everybody. Don't have different schedules either and and one thing specifically about picking the same days for all teams to come in and having consistent schedules is actually the research that we did not only for ourselves but for our customers really shows that the remote work breaks down cross functional teamwork um in particular so nuclear teams may feel very connected because those are the people they're able. Relationships with whether on Zoom or in the meetings and they spend all their time it's really the cross functional connections that start to break down and so having that consistency so people across functions whether that's sales and marketing or marketing and product and engineering or GNA and the customer facing teams are there working together we found is really critical not only for. Engagement but really for productivity and delivering results. Yeah, all right, thank you for the great questions and for proving my thesis that I think we could talk about return to office all day every day, which is good to know, but I want to end, uh, Anna Alejandro on just a quick one about AI which you mentioned earlier and so, um, in 45 seconds or less what is the top thing you're using AI to do in kind of your COO or HR function? And let's start with you. Oh, we're using it across all work flows across the sauna, and it really is, um, right now what AI is really good at is replacing tasks, not complete jobs, and so what we're systematically doing across every function is what are the tasks that AI can do so that people can spend their time more efficiently doing things that only people can do. So that's one of the big, you know, companywide initiatives. And then transforming sort of every role and the entire employee experience from hiring through performance management to rewards and recognitions to be AI first and forward. Alejandra, any unique things you're doing? Yeah, we, we have developed our own agentic platform and we've moved beyond pattern recognition and anomaly detection to autonomous processes and operations but beyond operations. So for us the key thing has been to democratize the access to our gente platform so every employee in the firm has access to it and then provide the resources to centralize the learning so people can learn on their own speed with their own cases, not theory, but their own use cases that they wanna try to automate and simplify with AI. Excellent. Well, thank you too so much for your insights. I appreciate it. Thank you, Chris.

For many forward-thinking organizations, combining the COO role with another C-suite position creates more responsive organizational structures. But does this new model create greater agility, or just more complexity? Hasbro COO/CFO Gina Goetter and Block COO/CFO Amrita Ahuja will share how they each leverage their cross-functional positions to drive innovation, efficiency, and productivity. With hybrid leadership roles on the rise, these executives will share insights into how the dual-role position impacts business performance in their respective industries, and what it takes to snag multiple seats at the C-Suite table.

BREAKING DOWN SILOS: HOW DUAL-ROLES ARE REDEFINING THE C-SUITE

Do you understand the exact behaviors and characteristics that impact your leadership and success as a COO? In this interactive session, we’ll explore a unique methodology that helps executives perceive and ultimately enhance their organizational influence. Attendees will leave with unprecedented insight into how their own leadership behaviors directly correlate with operational performance outcomes. With data from thousands of executives that have completed her organization’s proprietary assessment, Leadership Circle Global COO Amy Felix-Reese will share the scientifically-proven profile of what qualities make up the most (and the least) effective COOs, and why.

MASTER CLASS: TAPPING INTO WHAT MAKES THE MOST EFFECTIVE COOs

Now more than ever, COOs are utilizing AI to increase efficiency and streamline processes. In this interactive session, Cognizant’s CTO of artificial intelligence will demonstrate how multiple AI agents can collaborate together to enhance the decision-making process. Whether you’re just starting, or are more advanced in your AI journey, you’ll leave this session with a stronger understanding on how multi-agentic AI can help your organization stay agile, while providing valuable data for informed decision making.

SPECIAL AI SESSION: A BLUEPRINT FOR MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS

For sports franchises built on storied legacies, embracing innovation is a total game-changer— and Gillian Zucker is going long on reimagining the future of sports. We'll hear from this powerhouse president about the winning strategies for leveraging technology in sports  operations, including pioneering initiatives like the tech-enhanced fan journey at the Intuit Dome, home of the LA Clippers–two crown jewels in Steve Ballmer’s Halo portfolio. As stadiums evolve into dynamic, experience-driven destinations, this conversation will explore how v isionary leadership is shaping what comes next. 

CHANGING THE GAME: HOW TECHNOLOGY IS REVOLUTIONIZING SPORTS OPERATIONS

Hello, everyone. All right, so I am dying to know how many of you, uh, prefer to watch a sports game in person versus, uh, on your couch, on your TV. So, show of hands, who prefers it in person? OK, alright, uh, on your couch? All right, all right, it sounds like in person is, is the dominant way to go, which we have the expert here, Gillian, who you've been to over 100 stadiums, is that right, Gillian, in your research for Intuit Dome? Yeah, we just, uh, this past summer, opened the new Intuit Dome, the new home of the LA Clippers. In Los Angeles and as part of that process over the course of 7 years, I visited any facility that I possibly could, some of them sporting facilities, some of them other types of entertainment events. What do you think is the number one thing that makes someone want to come into a stadium versus stay at home, lay on the couch? I think we're in the experiential economy. It's so important to people now to have experiences where they can connect, and I think a lot of that just has to do with how much time we spend looking at our phones and engage with screens. And so when you have an opportunity to do something that sort of forces your head up and forces you to engage with those around you and it's something that's really enjoyable, you want more of it. Yeah, that makes sense now. I don't envy your position because. You have quite the intimidating boss, Clippers owner Steve Ballmer. Talk to me about how you got him to build into a dome, because didn't he come in with the idea that we already have a stadium. I'm buying this team because it's everything's done for me pretty much. Yes, very famously during my job interview with him, I had had some experience in building facilities and I began to tell him about that experience so that eventually. when he wanted to build a new facility for the Clippers, I would be ready to help him to do that, and he stopped me. He said, Stop, stop right there. We are never building a new arena. He's like, This is why I bought this team. It's the best part about the whole thing. I don't have to worry about this. We have somebody else. They manage all of this for us. We don't have to worry about the cleaning the place. We don't have to worry about the capital that's associated with it. This is, this is the best thing about this team. And then a few weeks went by and then maybe a couple more and at that point he said, you know, here's the thing that I didn't realize is you don't have your own home. We shared our arena with another NBA team. We also shared it with a hockey team and a lot of concerts. And so as a result of that there wasn't branding. There weren't the things that make it feel like it has a personality that's associated with your franchise. He was like, we lose home court advantage and we have to fix this. So let's go find a piece of property, and we did. Amazing story. Now you tell me that you've embedded data into every part of Intuit Dome, you know, from shaping staffing plans, from seat assignments, menus once famously overruling Steve Ballmer on a menu placement. Tell us about that and how you integrate this tech into your stadium. You know, I think everybody wishes that they could know everything about their customers. Like, imagine if you could know everything about your customers. And so when we started thinking about Intuit, when you think about a typical Uh, arena experience where you come to a concert or you come to a game, you come in and you may come with let's say 4 people and you have all 4 tickets on your phone. So we would know who you are, but we would not know who those other 3 people are because when you get to the gate, you just swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. So we essentially know 25% of the people who are coming in, and that's roughly true pretty much across the industry. So in our minds, we said, look, imagine if you could know everyone. So one of the things that we set out. In a dome was to make sure that people understood you have to have your own ticket on your own device when you come into the building, and that enables us to customize the experience. Well, we had to give people something in exchange for that friction that we gave them up front. And so what we said was that if you do that, you can put your phone in your pocket and you will never need it in this facility. It becomes your ticket, it becomes your wallet. It becomes your entry to clubs. It becomes your pass. It also you know, your reward system so we can reward you for behaviors during the game because we know who you are. Can you give me an example of that? Like what's the reward someone would get? Yeah, so one of the things that we have is this really amazing technology that we found that allows us to measure decibel levels down to a single seat. So when we first discovered the technology, it could do that down to about 25 seats, and we met the CEO and we said, Hey, could you get this down to a single seat in 2.5 years when we open? And he said, Yes, I can do it. And he did. And so that allows us to know how loudly each fan is cheering, and we can reward them for that behavior. So every game at the end of the game we actually reward the very loudest fan in the arena and we know exactly who they are and they win things like an autographed James Harden jersey and other fantastic things. And during the playoffs we utilized it. We had a pivotal game 6. We were playing it into a dome. It was must win against the Denver Nuggets and what we had learned through this information was not only who our loudest people were, That cheering's contagious that when you cheer you give the people around you permission to be loud as well. And so we invited the loudest fans and we had them bring a guest so that they can encourage that throughout the arena and help us with home court advantage. So interesting. So can you, you can tell in real time who is actually screaming the loudest. Yes, we can. We don't know what they're saying, but we do know how loud, right? That was my next question. And then how does that relate to, and I don't know if people have heard of the Wall, which is tell us what the wall is. And how that works with the tech you have and maybe you even have some props. I do. I have a couple of problems. So it's important to keep in mind that the whole idea of this building was was to create home court advantage but also to delight people, to bring them kind of more than they would expect, and Intuit Dome has a real personality. It's quite a unique place to see a game. So on one end of the arena is an architectural marvel. It's basically the steepest grandstand code allows, but it's also very comfortable. It has a lot of leg room. It starts in row 1, goes up to row 50. On 4500 people strong and we only let Clippers fans sit there. So you cannot sit there if you're wearing an opposing team jersey, if you're cheering for the other team, we kick you out. And in the middle of it is a standing supporter section that you have to basically audition to come to. But we've made those seats really, really affordable. It's $999 for a season ticket. The trick is your seat gets assigned when you show up. So if you show up early, you're going to sit down low, and if you show up late, we oversell it, so you might be standing and then they come to us and they ask us for all kinds of props. They come up with crazy ideas. I brought a couple of them. Our mascot is Chuck the Condor. Their job is to keep the opposing team from making their free throws. So the time when the opposing team is shooting, they do things like this, and we have this direction, pretty good, and they also all have these. This is our loud cup. This is actually intended to reduce lines at concessions. So bottomless drinks, you have your own cup on one side you sip, and on the other side you chair. Love that sound. OK, I'll come to the audience for a question in a second, but Gillian, I have to ask, you know, with all this, it seems like consumers are putting a lot of trust into you to safeguard their data, all these things, measuring their sounds. How do you ensure that their data is treated with respect and how do you alleviate concerns that people might have about it? were really worried about it, you know, I remember in the beginning how much research we did about this, and what we learned was when you go to people and you ask, how do you feel about facial recognition, they say adamantly opposed to it. I want to have nothing to do with it. And then we say, how do you feel about clear? And they're like, I love clear. And they're like, how do you feel about your iPhone and the ID that you use with your face to open your iPhone? People are like, it's amazing. So what we learned is that there are certain technologies that they really trust and so we went to them. We didn't have any we're a basketball team, we don't build tech. So we went to people who do do this who safeguard people's information that they're comfortable with and we utilize that. Any questions out here in the audience? OK, well, I have another and this is based on uh my own personal background and bias. So I feel like, you know, a lot of legacy sports fans, uh, my dad, a Mets season ticket holder being one of them since the 80s, are really resistant to new tech and, and to changes. They like the old school way it's done. How do you balance that need for tradition when you're dealing with sports also with new technology? Well, I think it's two things. Number one, it's entirely voluntary. So you don't want to do it, you're not comfortable with it, you don't have to. We have other. Mechanisms, but what we found was that a certain number of people would sign up for game face ID before the game, and then we would find that that number would increase by 15 to 20% by the time they left the arena. So what you really need to do is provide them with something that's so incredible, that's so advantageous to their experience that they say, I definitely want this, you know, our concept was, can we eliminate lines? Like, imagine going to a sporting event and not having to wait in line for your hot dog. Yes, it's possible. Come into a dome and you can experience it yourself. How? How do you do that? Well, in a lot of different ways. I mean, one through technology and secondly through architecture. So you know Steve spent so much time talking about the restrooms, and I remember we were saying, oh, we can use technology to kind of indicate where the shortest lines might be to send people to the right place, and he just denied that on its premise. He was like, no, you know this can be solved by just having more. So we did some pedestrian modeling. We had 50% of the people in a single section get up at the same time. Go to the restroom, go to a concession stand. Could we get them back in their seat before the end of the quarter break? And if we could, we had enough restrooms, and if we couldn't, then we kept adding more. So we have over 3100 different fixtures for people. So if you come into a dome, you're not waiting in line for the bathroom. You tell Madison Square Garden. because I'm constantly line again you have a lot of luxuries with a new facility that you don't necessarily have with one that's been very fair. Uh, what is the biggest tech investment that you've made that you don't think hasn't that hasn't paid off yet, I would say, or one that that really flopped that you're really excited about. Um, we have one that actually I'm really excited about, but I don't think it's, it's progressed to the level that we want, but we have a board that's in the facility that when you come in, it actually um specifically greets you. So when I look up at that board, it will say Hi Gillian, welcome to Intuit Dome. You're sitting in and it'll have my section row and seat number and it'll tell me where the. This concession stand is to my seat or it'll tell me something interesting about the game or concert that's coming up. If you were coming in and you were standing right next to me, you would see your name and your seat location, and over 100 people can look at that same board at the same time and all see something different. So it's pretty amazing and it is one of these, you know, we said we weren't going to have any tech for tech's sake in the building. Like we only wanted things that actually enhanced your experience, and this one what we found it does is it it it's exciting enough that it gets people to engage with our face ID so it's helped us to achieve, you know, more buy-in for that. But I think um at the same time at some point when um the detail on it gets better we'll be able to do much more with it and I'm looking forward to that day. One last call for questions. OK, I have one for you. All of this tech sounds really cool but also very expensive at the same time. So what metrics or KPIs do you use to measure the real return on investment for these types of innovations, both in terms of fan engagements and also growth of your business? Steve was pretty clear when we built the building. He, he wanted it to be this incredible experience for fans. I mean, it was built for. Basketball fans, um, but he also wanted to not be dumb about the investment and what he kept saying was like I look at index funds. I need to get the same return on the building as I get on index funds and anything that you can do within that ROI is good by me. So that was basically our metric as we looked at these things and there were a lot of different technologies that we saw that were very expensive that we had to pass on because we couldn't do that and deliver the kind of. ROI, but there were other things, and you know you have to be choosy. What are the things that are going to have the biggest impact? It's, I think it's interesting at the end of the day that some of the things that have had the biggest impact in that building are definitely not the most expensive. Interesting. All right, last question for you. You've kind of just alluded to this. What are some of the craziest tech pitches or ideas that you've gotten that either you didn't consider or or the ones that you did and now they're in there. Yeah, I mean, we had an awful lot around holograms, you know, so there were a lot of different companies that came to us that said they could make holograms of our players or different ways that people could interact with them, and those are wonderful, but they tend to be the kind of thing that people have that interaction once, but by the time they see it multiple times, it's something that people grow weary of. So we were always looking for technologies that would be things that would continue. like excite people. We found all sorts of interactive games that were really popular. I think the things that we try on our Halo boards, so we have this giant two-sided Halo scoreboard, the largest video screen of its kind in any indoor facility. It's a full acre of LED and with this board we're able to do a whole bunch of things like provide a lot of. Statistical information and other opportunities to entertain, but one of the things that we really wanted to do was figure out a way that players could kind of jump out at the board at the fans, and it almost feels like they can reach out and touch you. And so we spent a lot of time focused on that and we're finally able to achieve it midway through the season. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for your time, Elaine. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

At a time when trust in institutions is under pressure, one of the most important challenges an executive faces is how to shape the culture of an organization and practice leadership with a human-centered approach. This critical task of aligning the forces of governance, culture, and leadership is the foundation of Dov Seidman’s work at The HOW Institute. Drawing from his research on the dimensions of our “human operating system,” Seidman will share practical strategies for COOs to lead as the architects of their organizations by declaring humanity as "job one."

MASTER CLASS: IMPLEMENTING A PLAYBOOK FOR HUMAN-CENTERED LEADERSHIP

Dan Sheridan’s career journey at Brooks Running has been both a marathon and a sprint. In his years as COO, he led the organization through the pandemic and seismic shifts in the athletic apparel market. Now, as CEO, the race is on as he navigates increased competition, a new and turbulent geopolitical landscape for trade, and the evolving expectations of today’s workforce. Sheridan will share tales from his journey from COO to CEO, and his unique playbook for what is required to propel Brooks to the level of growth that he envisions, while protecting the brand that passionate runners worldwide have come to expect. 

SUCCESSION SPOTLIGHT: HOW TO PROPEL A FAN-FAVORITE BRAND INTO THE FUTURE 

So who here is a runner? How about a walker? There we go. You're in our addressable market. Well, we're gonna get, we're gonna get into that in a second. So Dan, thank you for joining us, uh, and giving me your time as both an interviewer and as a customer. You know I have a lot of points of view to share, um, but let's start with, uh, state of your business. Um, you had a very good 2024. There's also a big running boom going on. Can you just summarize really quickly for the audience where you want to take Brooks, which. is primarily known as a brand of running shoes for serious runners, and you've got some ambitions to expand the aperture. So just share that with us. Sure. Well, first off, thanks for having me and happy to be here. So if you don't know Brooks, we're a 110 year old company, the oldest American sporting goods company here in the US, and And we've been on a journey as a company over the probably the last 30 years to focus specifically on the sport of run and even more specifically performance run. So we focus on kind of the upper echelon in our category, higher price points and the like, and what we, what we've seen over that 30 year journey is it's all, all of our Our success is rooted first and foremost in the participation of health and wellness around the world, and you're probably seeing it in your communities. It is absolutely booming right now. I've been in the industry 27 years and never seen a running boom like we're seeing right now. Brooks sits right in the middle of that. We're the number one brand here in the US in performance run. And we are expanding globally and it really comes from an intense strategy that we kind of tag as sharp focus creates mass appeal. And so this pinnacle performance positioning has really opened us up. To anyone that moves, and that's why I say if you run, you walk, or you go to the gym, you're our customer. And so we've had incredible success. We've had about 15% compounded annual growth rate over a 24 year period. Um, rooted in that sharp focus, and we believe that we're kind of just getting started. We're 85% of our revenue comes out of the US, so the next chapter for us is global expansion and running's expanding globally right now. Yeah, and I think the the company overall is, which is part of Berkshire Hathaway, it's just north of $1 billion in sales, and you know some of your competitors are um. Uh, are a multiple of that, so obviously there, there's, there's some room for you, um, some of that involves international, some of that involves, uh, more lifestyle products, you know, New Balance should not have the monopoly on dad shoes, right? So, um, so I'll get back to that in a sec. So my, I guess my first question is, you know, you're primarily, um, until recently running shoes that are sold at running stores. Now you want to sell in more countries. You want to sell more products you want to sell more apparel, uh, and you have some designs on having more of your own well what what's in retail called direct to consumers, so your own website and more of your and some stores as well, that's gonna have implications on operations and you happen to be a former CEO, so you can tell us a little bit about uh how you're going to retool the company operationally for, you know, for so it can cast a much wider net and, and not get lost in it. Yeah, I mean, running is, um, it's unique in in this in this way. It's, it's a very local sport. Think about any sport, you have to either drive to a gym or a court or a or a field to go and do a certain ball or bats. For running, you step out of your house. And so we always think about how local running is around the world. We say that there's probably 10,000 communities around the world where running is, is, you know, um, having its day. And so what we try to do. I really build a multi-channel strategy and what that means is we want to assort our brand, sell our brand wherever the greatest retailers are that are focused on run, and that creates complexity at an operational level because we don't own the systems of these retailers. We don't own the distribution. networks, the transportation networks. So what we've had to do is build an operation that really taps in and has agility into all of these partners around the world, direct to consumers kind of our future in terms of developing that channel that will create complexity as well, but we've already done what I think is the hardest thing, which is servicing. Call it 10,000 retailers around the world through our operations network. So my new COO doesn't love it when I say that. The easy part's coming, but it truly is. And so we're trying to wire this thing where if runnings are sorted in a retail store, we want to be there and we want to service it in a really high service environment. So one of the things that's very difficult, I think people who are not in the consumer and retail space underestimate how difficult it is to Get into footwear or get into apparel, um. You know it's, it's, uh, all name names. I'm a reporter, but like Under Armour stumbled with its running shoes and you would think why, you know, they have all the resources there. You guys make very nice running clothes, um, but you're not a big player yet and so can you maybe just explain quickly to the audience why sometimes, you know, intuitively you think it shouldn't be so difficult for a company and yet it is difficult. Yeah, I mean the um. The biggest secret in building performance running footwear, specifically, I'll get to apparel in a second, is 500 people touch our products from the material vendor to when we put it in a box and ship it. To a, to a retailer. So just let that sit in. We, you know, we used to always talk about handcrafted Italian loafers. Handcrafted performance footwear is real. Um, it takes intention, it takes process, and, and one of the reasons there's so many hands in that. over the years labor was so cheap that you could, you could have that many people doing that. But what has happened over the time is that Southeast Asia has become the hub to build the best running shoes in the world. And so we've been able to tap into that. We have partners in Asia for 25 years now that are just fantastic. making performance running gear. We're on a journey in apparel. Um, you know the difference between footwear and apparel is if you're a runner, the footwear purchase is a considered purchase. You, you go through a fit cycle, you know exactly what you want, and every detail matters. In apparel, it's more of an emotional purchase that that brand on your. on your your sleeve or your pocket is an expression of yourself in some ways and so it's less of a considered purchase. It's also more commoditized. You can go to just about any retailer and get pretty good performance products. So we're on a journey there. We've got incredible products and apparel. It'll be the next chapter for Brooks. So you, um, just like, uh, uh, Scott from Chipotle before, uh, who was on stage before was the COO before becoming the CEO. You did the same, uh, trajectory. I think one of the things, you know, I covered retail for a very long time. I think there was a fad about 10 years ago as retailers and consumer brands really were worried about Amazon and our e-commerce isn't, uh, uh, infrastructure isn't isn't up to snuff. So there was a lot of CEOs who suddenly became CEOs in retail land. Whereas there used to be, you know, the, the merchants, the product people, you know, the people have that intuition. How what I'm getting at is what advice can you give to the prospective future CEOs here who are CEOs, uh, make sure that they have both sides of their brains, you know, the operational left side and the more intuitive that you might need in the consumer facing, um, you know, it's, it's, uh, you need both, right? Yeah, um, I use this, this saying with my team that, uh, head above the clouds, feet in the mud. And what I mean by that is, you know, at a COO level or a CEO level, you're, you're always focused on what we call horizon 2, kind of 3 years out. I think my job as CEO is if we, if we stumble in 3 years, that's on the CEO. And so I'm always trying to keep my head above the clouds and yet still base myself in reality and and securing the short term, which is, which is feet in the mud and And that transition from COO to CEO, you get, you get less of your feet dirty at times, and, and you're really trying to see above the clouds, you know, I had good advice from Berkshire Hathaway over the years and And when I moved into this role, one of the best advice I got was to understand your biases as you move into new roles, specifically in the CEO role. I grew up at Brooks 27 years there, had many different roles, so I have a lot of biases in what I think I know about each function. And as a CEO, I think you have to hold balance and equity in your frameworks and mental models so that you don't lean on maybe past experiences from 34 years ago that this is how I did it when I was in that role. So it's a, it's an understanding your biases and then really thinking long term as you as you move into the CEO role. So runners are intensely fanatically loyal to specific models and brands and shoes. Um, you know, when you guys discontinued, one of your models a few years ago, I went into mourning and um I think you called us. I, I called Jim Webber, your predecessor. Uh, I did not win, but anyway, um, how do you get customers, especially runners, this is on their feet. This is everybody's thinking. If I had, uh, that shoe prevents me from getting injuries, how do you get people who might be, you know, in love with Hoka and on and, uh, New Balance to give you guys, you know, they all know that Brooks are great shoes, and I also know AI is a great, like how do you get people to give you guys a try when people are so fiercely loyal? Yeah, I think you know over the years in our industry it was really hard to get people to switch brands. I think that's changed in the last 5 to 6 years for a lot of reasons. One, there's a lot of parity in product. There just is. There's a lot of great product out there. I often say that choosing a running shoes is a bit like choosing your favorite wine. Everyone has a different year, a different vintage, and they, they, they kind of go back to that and they try and find it. And so right now we're in a unique, unique era where there's great product from everyone. So then what is the value prop for the consumer? And you know there's a lot of detail on fit e ride and consistency in product season after season. We update our product every 12 months and so we've been able over a 20 plus year period. To be very consistent in our fit. And so if you love that varietal of the glycerin that Phil wears, that you're going to get that fit every single time, and that comes from long term manufacturing relationships, comes from sweating the details on fit feel ride, you know, on a marathon mile 22 really matters if your shoe is going to work, and we spend every day. Trying to figure that out for the runners, so consistency in our industry is the most important thing, and innovation can't disrupt that consistency. So innovation is moving really fast in materials and mid souls and the like, and you know we've been able to keep innovation coming without, you know, really impacting the consistency of our fit, fuel and ride. OK, so a quick final question for you. I mentioned Jim Webber, uh, whom you succeeded last year. Uh, he was there for more than 20 years. Basically, he saved Brooks, um, and it was on the verge of bankruptcy. I did, I forget. How, what, what do you want to do for Brooks? Yeah. Well, what I was super lucky at Brooks. I studied under Jim Webber, who was the modern day founder of this strategy and as Phil said, really set us on a path for growth. You know, our next version is expanding this brand around the world. As I said, 85% of our revenue comes out of the US. We're mostly footwear, and we have now permission to expand this brand. What's happening and running right now is super interesting. Participation rates around the world are skyrocketing. I was in China two weeks ago. The stat that we were told was there were 40 marathons in 2020. There's 450 marathons in China. So this brand is just getting started and it'll be expansion mode for us. All right, well, on that note, go for a run tomorrow at 5 in the morning when it's 70 and stay healthy. So join me in thanking Dan for being with us today. Thank you.

As the operational backbone of an organization, the strategic ascension of COO to CEO can be one of the most powerful succession strategies in corporate leadership. A COOs comprehensive strategic perspective, cross-functional relationships, and battle-tested decision-making capabilities create the unique foundation for a seamless executive transition and powerful leadership. This session explores the critical elements of CEO succession planning that transform operational leaders into visionary CEOs.  

THE ROAD TO THE CORNER OFFICE: HOW TO SUCCEED IN SUCCESSION

Hello, good afternoon. Um, so the COO role is still the most common last stop on the way to the C-suite. I think a recent, recent data showed that 57% of new S&P 1500 CEOs were promoted from the COO world. So I just wanna check in with the audience here. How many people here are interested in making that transition? Yeah, show of hands. OK, great. That's um. And I want to talk a little bit later about like what questions people should ask themselves to find out if they are if that's something that they see for themselves, but I want to start by just asking maybe um Steven, I know that you're advising C-suite executives all the time that you've written a book about COOs riding shotguns. If you were to draw a Venn diagram of the COO job and the CEO job, what traits would sort of land in the middle, overlap and what's outside? Uh, a couple of things to get us going. Hi everybody, it's, it's great to be here. I, I think, um, a mistake many people make is when you've become CEO and you're the #2 inside the company, you think that you know how to do the CEO job and it's absolutely not true. There's no flight simulator for the CEO job. It is a different job. You can do every job inside the company and you haven't been the CEO. And I think what's really, really important is the COO is not a permanent position in most companies, so it's, it creates an artificial org chart and it creates often artificial direct reports in order to achieve an outcome whether it's project based or succession based where the CEO role obviously is permanent. The the big difference for me from going from COO or CFO or one of the sort of C-suite positions to the CEO is the CEO job is a staff job. And I know a lot of people like are sinking in their chairs when I say that, but ultimately to be CEO you have to be good at staff work. And you know, when you look at sort of private and public companies, I think on the private side there's definitely more COO plus if you will, in the CEO job, but if you're the CEO of a public company, you have to do staff work and you have to do it really well. You have to do it at the top end, whether it's corporate finance, shareholders dealing with activists, um, maintaining your license to operate now as a company through governments, regulators, the changing macro. COO job is generally down and in as it's defined most commonly. And so if you think about the, the big differentiation between the two roles, it's win in the business of today. COO, build the business of tomorrow, CEO. And you have to walk the tightrope together in order to deliver the full enterprise outcome when in the business of today and build the business of tomorrow, and that takes different skill sets often. He talked about Howard up here just a few minutes ago from Ancestry, and he was talking about the shift in terms of now he's all about building the business of tomorrow growth in the context that he described. Just a couple of other things that are really different in the CEO job. Number one is you're in the last office. In every other job inside the company, you're not in the last office. You have the last office to go into and what you get really good at is winning. You go in, they need to buy something, sell something, hire somebody, do something. You're really, really good at winning. When you're the CEO and you reside in the last office, nobody's good enough. So what you need to be in the business of now is hypothesis testing, triangulating information. And getting to next best. All I know is if you're the CEO, there is the next best answer. It's across what what time frame. And a lot of people who are really great at operations. You know, tactical short term drive outcomes, deliver the business of today, have developed this winning version of making decisions operationally down inside the company, and they have higher pattern recognition. The CEO job, everybody else does the easy stuff. So when you sit in the last office, you have to triangulate information, you have to deal with non-linear events. You're often formulating a point of view on behalf of the company. There's sometimes not a right or wrong answer, and you got to sort of weave and figure out in the gray area, how to deliver an outcome and have conviction around the outcome. And a lot of people who are used to the touch and feel of outcomes in the in the operational side of the company are really uncomfortable in the gray nonlinear side of the company. That's a great overview. Thank you so much. And and at Russell Reynolds, you're advising CEOs and COOs and boards, and so I wonder if you have anything to add to that, but also, is there anything about like right now this political moment and this moment in technology and you helped build the AI. Um, business in your company, so I'd love to hear what, what you would add. Yeah, happy to and thank you all for having us here. Um, if we just take a moment and, and look around about, uh, on all the conversation we've had since this morning, um, what, what was just mentioned around the uncertainty we're living through, um, between geopolitical and tech technological change that we're going through. Um, the expectation from the CEO is to have all the answers at the end of the day, like have the, the answer that we're gonna go forward with, and whether they got the answers to the use their team or have the answer by themselves, but the expectation is that they will have an answer. And so the and that's changing as you see the technology shifting and exponentially changing and becoming accessible, their expectation from the CEO tends to be seems to be changing and so how we assess CEOs. Um, it used to be a lot more around, um, system thinking, which is that over the last 10 years, system thinking around agility, around drive, um, as well as, um, social awareness. Um, what we're seeing now is 3 things. One is self-knowledge. What can and can I not do? I've been very clear in terms of where do I need help, because today your demands, you're expected to all of a sudden AI is not a tech topic, it's a CEO topic. Everything is becoming a CEO topic. So how do you shift your priorities and adjust for that? Secondly, your values, uh, your value system and aspirations need to be more clear than ever. Everything you're doing is very nuanced. Um, do you, do you take it and use more AI? What does that mean for your workforce, you know, what does that mean for your shareholders? Um, how much are you gonna invest in reskilling? Um, are you gonna cut costs all of these elements require you to have a moral compass that's gonna be very clear for you in terms of how you're going to, um, navigate through this. And the last thing is around legacy. Legacy was mentioned earlier by Scott. Um, today you can you can you're holding the wheel, you've got all of this pressure coming to you, all these advances that you can take, take, uh, forward and, and leverage. You're either gonna hold it tight and keep going straight or you're gonna make a turn, but you're expected to make a shift and, and that's a lot of pressure if you, if you don't have this inner, uh, want to have a legacy. You're gonna be stuck frozen in that moment. So we're seeing a constant shift. We've seen that over the years, but right now it feels like more than ever. So helpful. I'd love to hear a couple of stories of COOs that, um, you know, they found like just the perfect project or the perfect thing to do to sort of demonstrate that they were ready for that next role. And any derailment stories that you can think of like what is a common issue that sort of sends a COO off the path no longer in line for that for the corner office, um, would you like to start? Sure, uh, first derailment story, um, you know, when you're a COO, um, you're not the CEO and you need to be crystal clear on that. And if you start to move into and get out of sync with your CEO, it generally doesn't end well for you. And so in the context of um almost full derailment uh a COO um um really referenced himself as the heir apparent inside the company and then mistakenly referenced themselves as the heir apparent in the boardroom, um, which led to um emergency board meeting and a decision whether to get rid of them. And the board they need to be talked off the ledge because no as boards you want, you, you're the #2, you're the first among equals, but you're not the CEO and they want the ultimate decision to choose their next CEO and not have you thinking and it sort of gets the arrogance and hubris in the process, so. Being very careful there and number 2 quickly is if you don't get the blueprint right with your CEO, it's very important like the COO role is bespoke and it's customized. Everybody in this room would have a customized version of it within the context of their company if it's not a permanent COO. And what's really important is where there is a blueprint is how to synchronize and reduce friction. Uh with your CEO and the number one way you derail and the organization will test the organizational design structure to in the box every single minute of every day, and what they try to do is get the back door open and what they do is they go to you as COO and say make a decision, and then they try to take that decision to the CEO, assuming they want a different decision or slightly different, and see if the CEO will bite. And as soon as they bite, they they erode the entire construct of the CEO COO relationship, and generally that goes really poorly for the COO. So the blueprint and synchronization with your CEO and the consistency of that over time is really important. When it gets out of sync, generally the COO loses. OK, great. And so, um, I, I give a slightly different story in the sense that, um, where, where the succession doesn't go well because the CEO has a change of heart. Um, and this is where you need clear alignment, uh, you know, at the board level, um, and you can't have mixed messaging. Um, we've seen situations where one of the board members becomes a sympathizer and all of a sudden the timeline, although it's been declared internally well known in terms of when it's gonna happen. Um, you know, all of a sudden starts to shift and then you're sending mixed messages to your succession candidates and then your, you know, CEOO resigns who was going to be the CEO and, you know, the rest of the board is annoyed and it's a disaster, right? And so having clarity, um, in terms of the, the timeline and, um, how it's expected to play out is crucial for all parties involved. This is great, such great food for thought here and tips. Um, I'd like to ask the audience if they have anything that they would like to ask these two experts about the CEO to CEO transition. Do you have any questions? Um, while people are thinking, I'll ask you if anybody is sort of on the fence about whether or not they do want to make that move, what are the questions they should be asking themselves? Well I'll go back to what Courtney said, uh, that I think is really important is she talked in the on the construct of Blackstone their investment thesis which shapes the role, right? There's content that drops out of their investment thesis, and she said long term value in a short period of time, but it matters for every single time you think about. CEO role. What's the shape of the company in the future, right shape in the future, and how do you align to that shape in the future and hopefully if you distill your own investment thesis for the company in a 12 to 24 to 36 month period of time, the Venn diagram of your experiences and capability overlays with the investment thesis and the shape. Of the company in the future, it matters where you're in the public or private markets, and it matters for you to be successful. Probability of you being successful if your Venn diagram and motivation and passion for the organization looking forward and the skills and experiences that are required, um, chances of you hitting the ground running go way, way up. Thank you. um, and Fawad, um, any last thoughts when we're talking about public and private companies? Um, is, is there something that's very different when you're looking at that, that move, um. Um, the, the fundamental expectation of the CEO are quite similar in terms of what we look for, um, in terms of what makes them successful. It is a timeline. It, it's this very singular focus on value and how value is created. Um, and this concept of, um, treating your board members as stakeholders versus partners in terms of how they help you navigate it's just a very different mindset and certain individuals are going to be more geared towards that private partnership versus others that are gonna be more focused on, you know, working in a public environment. OK, so helpful. Thank you so much. Um, I, I do want to, you know, we did talk a lot about boards and developing relationships with the boards. Any quick tips in our last minute here about how to really do that, um, practical level? Two things, um, board members really care about. They care about what their peers think about them inside the board. Right, so most people don't think of it this way. So when you go into the boardroom and you've done your homework and you've got the answer to every single question and I ask you a question as a board member and you answer it lightning fast, it signals that I just asked you a stupid question and now I look poorly in front of my peers on the board and I care deeply about what my peers think about me on the board. So feel the question. It's an interesting point. I hadn't thought about that before. This is an important topic. Here's my initial thinking. Field the question. I don't care how stupid you think the question is. Mind, feel it. And number 2, don't tell them everything you know. They're asking you a question. Answer the question. If there needs to be a supplementary question, somebody else will ask it or they'll ask a second question, because if you double down on your knowledge, of course you did your homework because you have good intent, but you tell them everything you know on the topic after you answered it quickly, you've doubled down on it was a stupid question and now that you're really making them look stupid in front of their peers and that, you know, they may not get you this board meeting, but they will get you. Thank you so much. This is really enlightening. Thank you, thank you.

Courtney della Cava came into private equity powerhouse Blackstone with a vision to make the CEO hiring process in their 250 portfolio companies less of an art and more of a science. Learn how she’s helped to reimagine traditional executive search methodologies and develop a unique framework that identifies tomorrow’s leaders through a rigorous process. She’ll be joined by one of those leaders, Howard Hochhauser, a CFO/COO turned CEO that helped grow his genealogy company Ancestry to more than $1 billion in revenue. The pair will share their unique perspectives and strategies for identifying and developing high-potential talent in today's rapidly changing technological landscape, and what it takes to stay on top.

THE CEO MAKER: HOW BLACKSTONE TRANSFORMED EXECUTIVE SEARCH TO DRIVE VALUE

Have you ever had a busy day and said to yourself, “I wish there were two of me”? Delphi Cofounder and CEO Dara Ladjevardian has made that fantasy into a reality. Inspired by his desire to converse with his grandfather and benefit from his wisdom after a stroke, Ladjevardian set to work on creating code that captures and scales the mind of any individual. In this must-see session, he’ll explain his process and demo the technology’s practical use cases for corporate executives—ending with an interview with the digital twin of Fortune’s own Diane Brady. 

GET READY TO MEET YOUR DIGITAL TWIN

So, so he, who here has actually thought to themselves, I wish I could clone myself. Anyone, come on, we're all busy. You definitely multiple meetings. I wish, I always wish I had one. Well, now we're in a world where that's no longer a fantasy, and to introduce myself, my name is Darla Gevar, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Delphi, and we allow people to create a digital version of themselves to scale their impact and their time. And in this world where every person potentially has a digital mind, you can connect with a top expert in the world in any subject. You can potentially connect with your great grandparents and maybe your great grandkids can connect with you. But before I get into the implications of this world and how people are using this technology, let me tell you a bit about how I got here. In 2014, I was gifted a book called How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil, and you know Kurzweil? Legend. He was very much ahead of his time, but in this book, he says that one day if we had a technology that could serve as a pattern recognizer for language, you could recreate the human mind. I remember that six years later in 2021, I had started my first company. It was called Friday. It was a company that leveraged LOMs to allow you to buy anything with a text, and I was a solo founder at the time. And many of you guys know the first time you start a company it's very lonely and isolating. Everyone's telling you different advice. You don't know who to listen to, but at the time I was reading a book about my grandfather who was one of the most successful businessmen in Iran before the revolution. He had 30,000 employees at his peak, got put on the hit list by the Ayatollah, and he had to escape, and he came to this country with nothing and was able to rebuild his life back for our family. And he was a legend. He was someone that I really wanted to be able to get advice from and ask, what would you do in my situation? This wasn't a question that a book could answer, and he had had a stroke two years prior, so I couldn't ask him directly myself. But I did realize that these LLMs that I was using to build this first startup, they were pattern recognizers, pattern recognizers for language, and I could actually use them in the way Ray Kurzweil suggested to recreate my grandfather's mind. And that's exactly what I did. I created a digital version of him that I could talk to and ask for advice. And that startup got acquired, but that experience just got me really thinking about how we learn from other people and how you can read a book or watch a YouTube video or listen to a podcast, but most of the ways we access knowledge today are passive unless you have a lot of money or unless you can afford to be in a room like this, which most people don't have. And the problem is time. The most unique asset each one of us has is our mind, and up until now, the way you express your mind has a cap. You can only be in one place at one time. And since the beginning of time we've constantly innovated on ways to scale our mind whether it was cave paintings, to the printing press, to the radio. Traditional media allows us to reach millions of people, but it lacks the personalization of conversation, and that's why you hire teams. You try to train teams in your ways of thinking so that you can scale your knowledge in this interactive way, but it loses the essence of who you are. So the question that we had is, what if you could have a new source of media that combines the scalability of traditional media and the personalization of bidirectional conversation. And so we started Delphire. Delphi lets you create a digital version of your mind so that you can have that one on one experience across time zones, across geographic barriers, across languages so that your mind is uncapped. And to tell you a little bit how it works, you pretty much connect your data sources from your email, your social media, your notes, and we create this representation of your mind, and this isn't just where you work or who you know, but how you think about things because that's what makes you unique, your decision making process. That's really what you want to scale. And from there, people can chat with you, call you, and even FaceTime you, which we'll see in a little bit. And before I jump into the use cases, let me tell you a little bit of the, of the why now. Obviously, AI is now affordable. When I built the clone of my grandfather, it was 10,000 times more expensive and it just continues to get cheaper. Consumer demands for how they consume content is changing rapidly. TikTok and Reels lowering attention spans. Younger generations are not reading books as much. They're not going through courses. There's a desire for a more immediate gratification form of learning from someone else. And the last thing is we are currently in an abundance era, and what do I mean by that? The beginning of the internet was an abundance era, dot com era. You had so many dot-coms and Wikipedia pages and blogs, and the creator economy was actually a response to that. Whenever there is an era of abundance, the pendulum usually swings towards a desire for trust and curation. So right now information is abundant and when information is abundant, the bottleneck is not access to information, but rather access to curation and trust. And I think we're seeing that pendulum thing right now. People are over the honeymoon phase, they're getting over the honeymoon phase of AI. So let me tell you about how people are actually using this technology in the business world. One is at the top of the funnel. You want to pick my brain. I don't want to give you my email, but you can talk to my Delphi. And it can answer all the questions and it knows the kinds of people that I want to have in-person meetings with, so it's going to let me know if we should hop on a call, and we have people using this as a replacement of their personal website, their LinkedIn profile, their resume. Then we have the middle of the funnel 24/7 access to an executive or the CEO as a form of customer support. And why is that any different than just a generic customer support chatbot? Well, I think there's an interesting email from Mark Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel where he talks about how his reputation with millennials and Gen Z is very important. And fast forward you see him with the perm and the chain and you know looking very cool. That's all very calculated. He knows that people connect with people, not nameless entities. So we see a lot of the CEOs using Delphi as customer support, building parasocial relationships with their customers, leading to higher NPS. The third is internal. As a company scales, the thing that really breaks is company culture and alignment of decision making. So we have many CEOs and executives scaling themselves so that any new hire who on boards into the company has access to a version of the executives so they can know how to make decisions and how to do things the right way. We have CEOs scaling the highest caliber salespeople in their organization to make their knowledge available to other salespeople so that everyone can get that kind of mentorship and management. And then we all know a big problem is tribal knowledge when you have someone who leaves the company and they take their knowledge with them. Well, now you can turn their mind into an asset that stays in the company, so whoever replaces them can catch up to speed a lot faster. And then you can use data from those conversation analytics to see where in the company you need to focus on. And the last use case is we have people making multi-seven figures in revenue selling time with their mind. Sounds crazy, but people make. 8 figures in revenue selling a book or selling a course. This is just an interactive piece of content that people pay for to learn in an interactive way. So those are the four main use cases we see today and obviously there's a lot of fears around AI I'm going to address those fears head on. You might say, what happens to my data. As we know, a lot of these big AI companies are raising at enormous rounds on the promise that they're going to train models on your data to build bigger and bigger models. With Delphi, we believe AI is best when it's in the hands of the individual, so you own your data, not used to train any external models. Number 2 is probably the most common. What if it says something bad? When when we started the company, many of the fears we had, and we worked with a lot of celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tony Robbins, Jay Shetty. What if someone takes a screenshot and sends it to the Daily Mail and there's a hit piece on me? Well, luckily fixing hallucination and guardrails was the first thing we had to do at the company. And so there's two ways you might want something like this. Either it only answers questions directly that it has the data on, or you want it to give it a little bit more leeway where it can reason on new situations. An example of that would be if I were to ask my grandfather's clone. How would you think about starting an AI company? He's never spoken about AI in his life, but he started an oil business in the mid-twentieth century in Iran, which was relatively uncertain, and he could apply that reasoning of dealing with uncertainty to an entirely new situation. So those are some of the fears I will address, and I think we'll have time for Q&A at the end, but I thought we'd bring up a digital mind of our very own Dianne Brady to ask some questions. I'm gonna ask a question first. I don't know, maybe you are the digital self. We don't have to. Um, so there's my digital self. I see her coming up. I don't see her. Is she up there? One second, I'll check. I'm not sure what you mean. Are you asking about someone specific? Let me know, and I'll do my best to help. All right, while we're waiting for her to go on stage. I guess the last fear I wanted to address is what if this makes me seem inauthentic. And I think the goal, there she is. The goal of this technology is that it's not deceptive, and I'll pause and Diane, hey, we're here speaking at the Fortune CO summit about AI. Any words of wisdom on how we could keep up to date with this rapidly changing technology. Well, first off, Dara, I'd say don't worry about seeming inauthentic. The key is transparency, being up front about how you're using AI and why. People respect honesty, and it's when you try to hide things that trust erodes. As for keeping up with AI, I'd suggest focusing on the practical applications that matter most to your business. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer pace of change, but the real value lies in understanding how this technology can solve specific problems or create opportunities. And don't forget to lean on experts whether it's your team, industry peers, or forums like this summit. What's your biggest concern about AI right now? That's for me? You know, um, I think one of my concerns, of course, this is Diane Brady, the real Dianne Brady, and, uh, and I'm curious about how replaceable I am. Diane, what do you see when you look in the mirror? When I look in the mirror, I see someone who's curious, driven, and maybe a little too caffeinated at times. I think it's about seeing the layers, journalist, leader, mom, friend, and knowing they all shape how I show up in the world. What about you? What do you see? Uh, something a little different. You know, I'm curious. I've been asked to ask any Thing, I'm going to ask if you have any memories of your childhood because I'm curious just how wide. Well, if you've been given the green light to ask anything, go big. What's the one question you've always wanted to ask someone but never had the chance? Or if you're feeling philosophical, what's the one thing you'd want to know about the future? Let's hear it. That's a very good question. Um, I think one thing I'd like to know about the future is, where do you think you can add value where the real Dianne Brady cannot? Is that stumping you, Diane? Maybe it's muted. Maybe, oh, I see it is muted. Yeah, it is muted. So you know, one thing I found with this, I think I can absolutely add value for the real Diane. The goal here is to extend her voice, amplify her insights, and help her connect with more people in meaningful ways. It's not about replacing her but complimenting her work like a digital assistant with her personality and perspective. What do you think would be the most valuable way for me to do that? I suppose that email and perhaps having people ask me questions. It's interesting this exercise, when I first engaged with this, I found the digital self to be a little humorless, and it made me realize I need to upgrade my LinkedIn profile because I kept spouting these things back at myself where I was like, really, content connections, conversation, but this is, I find this to be a much deeper version. Diane, um, what are you working on right now that you say, oh, let me just, should I go historically? So, uh, Diane, you've written about, uh, Donald Trump and tariffs. Talk a little bit about what some of the issues. What are some of the issues business leaders I'm not sure I caught that. Are you asking about something specific? Let me know and I'll jump in. Um, tell us, tell us a little bit about what business leaders are thinking about tariffs right now from what you've written. Parents are a huge focus for business leaders because they're often the ones juggling the most work, family, and everything in between, flexibility has. Diane, I think we asked about tariffs. What's your opinion on tariffs right now? Let me look. Tariffs are a tricky subject. They're often sold as a way to protect domestic industries, but the reality is they usually end up being a tax on consumers. For example, I've pointed out before that tariffs imposed on imports are paid by you. As consumers through higher costs, not by foreign governments like China. It's a blunt tool that can backfire, especially in a globalized economy. What's your take? Do you think they're effective? To be continued later, these are these are difficult subjects. So Diane, thank you for your time. And, and thank you Dara for creating a version of myself that I think is interesting. I look forward to more conversations. Please join me in thanking um Darra Lavarianarian and um. And obviously more to be you can call my digital self, ask her all kinds of questions. I found it a fascinating exercise. So thank you for doing this. I got to get to know you before I met you. Well, and, and let's, uh, let's hope I was worth meeting. So thank you very much, um, and so, uh. I found that fascinating and a little disconcerting. I don't know about you, but that was. So do we have any runners in the crowd? Raise your hand if you actually like to run or hike. There you go. There's one couple in the back. Um, I'm really interested in this next session part of our, um, we are speaking to somebody who's been in the COO role now in a COO role, Dan Sheridan of Brooks Running. It is the brand. I think that runners think about Dara also was in the COO role during an incredible time of transition for both the company and the industry. He will be joined in conversation with senior writer and serious runner Phil Waba and Joy. Thanks very much, everybody.

Nearly 80% of S&P 500 CEOs are promoted from within, most commonly from the COO post, according to a 2024 study by The Conference Board. Chipotle’s Scott Boatwright is part of this elite group: He ascended to the CEO position after seven years as COO, where he steered operations through transformative tech innovations like the “Autocado” (Chipotle’s high-tech solution to avocado cutting), built an innovative AI hiring platform, and fostered the people-first culture that Chipotle has become known for. In this fireside chat, Boatwright will unpack how the operational priorities that defined his COO tenure now serve as the foundation of his CEO strategy, with lots of lessons that every COO can dip into. 

SUCCESSION SPOTLIGHT: THE SECRET SAUCE THAT LANDED CHIPOTLE’S COO IN THE CEO SEAT

Uh, a new feature that we are introducing at this year's COO summit is something called Succession Spotlight. It's all about COOs who become CEOs. And yeah, it's long been the case that there are CEOs who are very happy right where they are, but the, the data shows. That last year, almost half of all the new CEOs went to that job directly from being COO. Uh, it is the most common final step to becoming CEO. It is even more common than from CFO to CEO. So we have with us this week an all-star group of CEOs who used to be CEOOs, and they'll be telling us about their journeys. They'll also tell us about what they learned as a COO. It turned out to be really useful for them as CEOs, and that's what's next. A leader who has steered his organization through some truly transformative technology innovations and some other innovations. In a very tough business, please welcome the CEO of Chipotle, Scott Boatwright and Fortune's Kristen Staler. All right, so the last time that I saw Scott, he was a guest on our leadership next podcast in April, and honestly what I love talking about Scott to talking to you, Scott, is that I always get some interesting little tidbit. Uh, what I loved in April, he said you could expect to see breakfast tacos or burritos on the menu, and I think that went wild on our social media. So Scott, you have a lot of pressure now to say something just as good. Not anytime soon. Uh, hello everyone, happy to be here. This afternoon with you here in Scottsdale, it's not too hot. It will be much hotter next week, as I understand it. It will. It will. Now Scott, last time we spoke you said you want to open 7000 North American stores, and now since then Chipotle also announced that you're expanding into Mexico, which I think is really interesting. Can you talk to us about first what is the market for bringing Mexican food to Mexico and what are the operational challenges that you're facing to do that? The Mexicans are overwhelmingly excited to receive a Mexican concept. Um, I get that question often, and it's a fascinating one, and, and, um, some of our competitors have tried to enter the market, uh, with fits and starts and have failed to some measure. Uh, what gives me a lot of confidence in our ability to go into Mexico and be successful. Is that freshly prepared ingredients, wholesome nutritious ingredients is on trend in Mexico today, and it's how people want to eat, how they should be eating in my humble opinion, uh, so we have a lot of confidence between. Our group and as well as the Alsea group that the Chipotle Mexican girl concept will be wildly successful. So now I want to play a little game, Scott, with you, with you out here. I want to call this, uh, this tech AI trend game. So I'm going to listen. Some trends. Scott and everyone here, I want you to give a thumbs up if these are trends that you either use or want to use, and a thumbs down if you don't use them or don't want to use them, OK? So the first I'm going to say, uh, generative AI and hiring. Who wants to use it is using it. All right, lot of thumbs up. What about you? A thumbs up. I like the idea. I think it's a big one. Robotics and kitchens. Oh, we got a lot of thumbs up here. OK. All right. We, well, we, we refer to robotics as cobotics in our kitchens. We don't, we don't look to replace the human experience. We, we look to remove waste and expand or enhance the the team member experience. Interesting. I like that. OK, fully cashierless stores. Anyone do it? No. OK, we see a lot of thumbs down on that one. OK. All right. And my last one I have subscription restaurant models. Oh yeah, Scott, and I wanna say fandom around that idea no fan of that here. um, now, Scott, I know you have, uh, used AI and Tech a lot. You got the guac making tool, the avocado. You are using, uh, AI and you generate a hiring platform. Um, can you talk to us about this and also what is the future of using AI Chipotle? Is it some of these trends we talked about is something else? Yeah, I think the world is making a pretty quick pivot, and I'm sure everyone's talking about it, uh, probably at at this point around generative AI or agentic AI. I think AI has a place in in business today in all verticals across all industries. I think if more of it's not going to be really a strategic advantage for you. It's gonna be something that you can lean into and it'll be commoditized to the point where everyone will have access to it. Which is exciting. And so for you and your business thinking through how will I use AI to, as I said earlier, either remove waste or expand human capability in your business and thus reducing expenses in the business. So we have, we've, we've put AI in a couple of different places inside Chipotle Mexican Grill today, one of which is our on boarding hiring assistant Avocado, um, who brings in team members into our ecosystem. So we will double to about 200,000 team members this year. We employ 130,000 and turnover is probably a little below industry average. I feel really good about where we are, but we're growing at such an exponential rate. We will open a new Chipotle restaurant this year almost every 24 hours. And you think about the growth that's ahead of us in the Need for highly capable, purpose-driven, value oriented individuals is more critical today than it probably ever has been for the for our brand. And so Ava has reduced the time to hire by about 75%, which allows us to get quicker access to better talent. And anyone that's in my restaurant space today knows that when a high quality caliber individual walks into a restaurant, they are looking for an opportunity. And they will go to work for whichever brand gives them that opportunity. And oftentimes because of a protracted hiring process, we lose those individuals. This only not only helps us keep our restaurant staffed but ensures we have the best talent that's available in the industry. Is there anything you wouldn't use AI to do? Um, I can't say that today with a lot of confidence, Chris. I'm sorry. I know that we are looking at different ways whether it's AI driven. Um, camera systems in our restaurants to understand throughput, speed of service, order accuracy, and digital ringing, I think is a couple of another use case we're leaning into. We're also using AI in our loyalty system and so I think we're using a decisioning tool that is AI driven to target at-risk or lapse consumers within our funnel to ensure that we bring them on journeys that keep them transacting. With our brand and so the journey will go out to an at-risk user that hasn't transacted in 2 weeks with an offer, and that offer will escalate over a certain time period to get the consumer to transact, and that all happens behind the scenes and the offer is tailored to that individual based on their personalization and their usage of the brand over time. OK, now I want to come to the audience for a question in just a second, but first I want to ask you. Uh, we talked about, you know, last time your relationship with, um, former AAA CEO, now Starbucks CEO Brian Nichol. In fact, the last time we talked you were just, I caught you after a gym session with him, is that right? You catch me yet again. We were in the gym this morning. Oh my gosh, one of us. To the gym this morning and I promise you it wasn't the CEO, former CEO of Chipotle. That's OK. If you had to come here. That's OK. So I'm curious, Scott, was your goal to always succeed Brian and become CEO or how were you thinking about it? You know, I've always had on my goals card. I'm an old school operator guy and you know, I had goals cards since I was probably in my mid-20s, but it's always been one of my lifelong goals to get to the CEO opportunity to lead a brand. And all my car was specific was a Fortune 500 public publicly traded company. And so I had a lot of opportunities that I passed over throughout the years because I just didn't feel like those were the right opportunities for me at that time based on what I wanted to accomplish, my family's needs, which is critically important to me, and where I wanted to take my career long term. And so when Brian decided to take the opportunity at Starbucks, I got the opportunity to step into the role here at Chipotle Mexican Grill, which is really a dream come true for me to really work on a brand that I have such passion and commitment to. How do you think you're different from him in terms of leadership, in terms of personality? What do you guys do differently? Yeah, if you, if, if I could bring you back, BCG did a piece of work about 6 or 8 months ago that talked about the modern company's chief executive officer and how it's different today than it has been historically. Three things that they called out in the, in the piece of work where a CEO today has to manage a great business, has to manage a great stock, and I'll talk about that in a minute. I'm often misunderstood when I make that statement. And lastly was drive organizational legacy, not individual legacy, but organizational legacy and Um, Brian and I made a great tag team because I was, I was effectively running the business and so I think I ran a pretty good business and I know that Brian really managed a great stock. And when I say manage the stock, we're not talking about managing numbers. It's really about selling the story to the investment community about where we're going, what we're working on, and how we'll lead the company and what the growth story really is, and that obviously supports the multiple over time. And then lastly drive organizational legacy. What you know what is going to be my mark on this business as I take it through its next phase of growth in the coming years. And so that said, one of the things that I had to learn stepping into the role, going from the person pulling the levers, turning the knobs every day to generate an outcome to someone that is now working to manage a great stock and drive legacy is just a completely different job. Absolutely. Any questions out here. So you went up front and if you could state your uh name and title and company too, that'd be great. Thank you. My name is Bokashima. I'm a CEO of CoreLogic, uh, a financial services company. Uh, my question was more around, um, you, you're leading a great transformation not only from a growth aspect stored every 24 hours, international expansion. Then you spoke about AI as well. Can you talk to us about your change management? Like how do you take your organization through that change management as well, especially your existing staff. Yeah, probably one of the hardest things that you'll do, and I'll give you a little context first. So in 2023, if I'm getting my years correctly, I pushed the organization to the point with regard to change management, new processes, new protocols. That year we launched a new LMS. We launched a new scheduling tool, AI-driven scheduling tool. We launched 3 LTOs. We put two new ideas into into concept testing. We launched digital Hasset to improve food safety, and I tell you all this to tell you I pushed the organization too hard too fast, and I began to see operational performance start to slow down or start to wobble a bit on how we deliver the experience from restaurant to restaurant, and I knew I'd asked too much of the organization. And hadn't thoughtfully considered the change management necessary to get those ideas into into operational execution and do them with excellence. And so in 2024 rolled around, I don't know if many of you remember, I said we're going to do two things, we're going to do two things well. We're gonna have exceptional people and exceptional food, full stop. We didn't do anything else. I said no new ideas, no new processes, no new changes. We will do nothing. If we do nothing this year, we will land this year with exceptional people in our restaurants, exceptional people hired, staffed at model, and being developed to take on the roles necessary to support our growth and an exceptional culinary full stop. Customers come to Chipotle for the food. It's not because of the buildings or the bright smi smiling faces on the people in the restaurant. It's about the food. And 2024 was an exceptional year for our great brand. And so I think removing complexity, keeping it simple is critical, especially at scale, and I've always, you know, something that's, you know, a hallmark of my career has been around this idea that simplicity scales, complexity doesn't. Just keep it simple. Good advice. Any others see one here. Hi there, uh, Geron Smith, the CEO of Marshfield Associates. We're a value investor based in DC. Um, question for you about competition. Um, how much time do you spend looking at what others are doing in fast casual? Does that influence you at all or do you stay focused on Chipotle Mexican Grill? And that was my next question. That's a great one. Thank you. It's a, it's a tough one. I'll tell you it's just kind of funny. I think it's funny. You be the judge. When I was the chief operating officer, I spent a lot of time looking at SportsCenter. As a chief executive officer, I spent almost all of my time looking at CNBC trying to understand what's going on in the macros, what's happening with the consumer, what's happening with the global economic uncertainty. I spent a lot of time looking at competition across verticals and thinking through how other businesses. Or approaching consumer, the consumer today to drive transactions, um, and I probably spend, if I had to tie a number to it, 15-20% of my on on duty time really just looking at that level of analysis and trying to understand where we are. And Scott, I think we have time just for one more question. So I'm gonna ask you, looking back on your time as as CEO, is there something that no amount of preparation asCO could have prepared you for for CA CEO that you wish that you knew now? Yeah, I'll tell you it, I don't think there's really anything that there's no, there certainly aren't any leadership programs that you will learn that you haven't learned already if you have accomplished, uh, or, or gotten to the level of COO in your business. What you will not have exposure to in that role is board management and understanding board management relationship and how to navigate that successfully to get done what you need to get done in the business and leverage your board as advisors as they should be to the business. As a first time CEO, your board is going to be more hands on. Um, then they should be and trying to figure out how to navigate that relationship, build confidence, build trust, so that you can get them on the sideline, use them for advice and counsel, and their nose in and hands out. Probably #1. Number 2 is going to be this idea of understanding the investor community at large, how you navigate the complexity of the investor community, and how you support sharing the narrative and becoming chief storyteller for your brand, because that's effectively what you're going to be doing. Great advice. Well, thank you so much, Scott. I appreciate it.

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.

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