WEF Panel - Technology for a More Resilient World

We are in a time of rapid tech growth—it's quite easy to see. From quantum computing to global 5G to the building blocks of the metaverse, the familiar?landscape of our daily lives is on the precipice?of massive change. Thankfully, the CEOs leading these pillars of innovation keep long-term stability in mind.?

I was lucky enough to moderate the WEF panel "Technology for a More Resilient World" with Julie Sweet , Cristiano R. Amon , Arvind Krishna , and Sunil Bharti Mittal at #davos2023 . To learn more about the?tech of the future and how they are planning for it, here is a transcript of our conversation. You can watch the video here . All I'll say is I'm excited for what's to come.

Photo credit: Flickr (link )

Transcript:

Nicholas Thompson: Okay. Welcome everybody, to the best panel in Davos, or at least the best panelists. I have Cristiano Amon, the CEO of Qualcomm. I have Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM. I have Julie Sweet—I have so many amazing CEOs here—the CEO of Accenture. And I have Sunil Bharti Mattel, the CEO of Bharti Enterprises.?

So we have the whole world here. We have all kinds of technology. We did a conversation with some of these folks in May, and it was great. We covered all kinds of technological changes. But think about what's happened since May, just in tech, right? We had total crypto meltdown. We've had the US-China chip split. We've had a lot of excitement on our favorite social media platform. There has been—and we've had the creation of one of the most transformative AI technologies I've ever seen.?

We've had all of this. Meanwhile, net-net, these guys stocks are probably the only stocks in tech that are up. So mazel tov to them.?

So, we've got a lot to talk about. I'm going to structure it a little bit so that we're going to start talking about people. Then we'll talk about technologies and what everybody's excited about. Then we'll talk a little bit about platforms, and then we'll talk about worlds and the future. Sound good? Great.?

Okay. Sunil will start with you. So last night I went to the PwC—sorry, Julie—but I went to the PwC Data Report, and they mentioned something amazing. They surveyed US CEOs, so you guys, and they're all miserable, and we're heading into depression and everything's terrible, and Indian CEOs, and they're pumped.?

So explain something about the energy of the people in India and the people in tech in India right now and where you are.?

Sunil Bharti Mittal: Well, I'm not surprised you picked up the palpable sort of excitement amongst the Indian leaders. India is certainly on a move. There's no question about it. And it's just not on the surface. It's really deep down into the country. Almost every segment of our economy is moving very well. Consumption is going up. When we look at the world, there's a lot of gloom and doom. But within that, if you look at India, it is really a strong point or a center of hope for the world. And very rarely you have a confluence of a great resolve and terrific opportunities.?

China Plus One has become really the norm in the world. Everybody's talking about being in India in addition to China, not necessarily in replacement of China. Europe Plus One has started to be talked about because Europe is definitely weak, and they feel India could become a very important part of the supply chain of the world. And then you have a very strong leadership which is absolutely determined to support business and grow. And there's the realization in the government, if we can have our business people succeed, there will be enough money for us to do the social programs which are also very very deep and wide. 1.4 billion people, 320 million people in the age group of 6 to 16 aspiring to come into the mainstream in the next ten years. We have a task cut out to do.?

But the good news is foreign direct investment is doubled from last year. International remittances by the Indian diaspora is huge, over $100 billion. So in every respect, I think there is a momentum. And if you don't seize this opportunity now, when will we ever do it??

We were having lunch with Georgieva Kristalina yesterday. She called out India specifically. They are the place which is likely to hold the hope. But within that, she spoke about India's digital vision, of India's digital stack, which is much talked about. And to my mind, that has greatly assisted us to overcome and mitigate the very, very important absence of hard infrastructure. So we've been able to sort of do our business without massive development of roadsports, airlines, railways, which are on an accelerated path. But for a country like India, it will take probably 10 or 15 years.?

NT: Wonderful. Well, it's good to start with, with a dose of optimism. Let's talk a little bit about people mostly in this country. So, Julie, you have 750,000 employees. You have more employees than the state of Vermont and ideally less stoned.?

I was listening to a podcast that you did the other day, or, the other day I was listening to a podcast that you did and you said something really interesting. You said when you interview people, you always ask them what they've learned recently. And actually, I was thinking about this when I was reading Sunil's biography. Sunil started in 1976 making bicycle parts, and he's turned that into getting 1.4 billion people online. So Julie would have hired him.?

Tell me why you asked that question and tell me about the answers you're getting now.?

Julie Sweet: Well, one thing I want to add though, to what Sunil said is that of those 750,000 people, we have about 300,000 people in India. And what I would say is that our people in India are a huge source of innovation. And some of the best work we do in platforms is in India. And I think coming out of the pandemic, the work the Indian government and the private sector, including the companies here, did to help build the infrastructure. And that has been really important.?

And it dovetails to the learning piece, which is all of my 750,000 people are required to pass eleven assessments on technology. Everyone, I don't care if you work in the mailroom, we still have those, or you're on the line. And that's because learning is a core part of Accenture, and I hold my top 500 leaders accountable. We call it TQ, and it's both a testimony to the importance of technology, but a testimony to the importance of learning.?

And in fact, one of my favorite leadership characteristics that we look for which is one of the reasons we ask that question is we say you need to lead with excellence, confidence, and humility. And humility is important because leaders who have humility are learners, and they form great teams. And when we ask that question, I actually don't care if you learned how to cook or if you learned how to repair your bicycle. What we care about is that you are curious and you've seen that we're going to talk today a lot about the new technologies and new ways of working, whether it's the Metaverse or AI. And in order for our people to make the journey and to actually reinvent what we're doing, you have to be willing to learn. And the great news is that all the research we show is that people want to learn, they want to become more digital.?

NT: And now that you've made it public that you ask that question in every interview, I mean, I guess everybody must get a Duolingo subscription right before they go in and talk to you. I think it's a marvelous question and a great part of the culture.?

Cristiano, let's talk a little bit about productivity because I think that's one of the great questions of our time, technology and tech, because tech should make us so much more productive, shouldn't it??

And I heard two stats in Davos that struck me. So one, I was meeting with economic analysts who was explaining a really scary drop in productivity in the United States. Second, was possibly an apocryphal stat, but amazing if true, which is that the prime time to watch Netflix used to be Friday at 7:00 and since the pandemic and still to now it's Wednesday at 2:00.?

Cristiano, tell me about what you've seen in the productivity trends and how your tech and all the amazing things you build can help turn it around.?

Cristiano Amon: Yes, thank you for the question. Look, I think technology right now, probably more than ever, especially when we talk about the current economic environment, we see that there is this desire of companies to digitally transform and use technology to become more efficient, to become more productive.?

I'll talk later about Netflix at 2:00 pm. Different issue.?

But, I do believe that we actually see right now an incredible demand for things to become more intelligent, to become more connected. The way I describe it is we had the pandemic and then all of a sudden everybody was at home and people started working from home, but then companies wanted to connect with all of their employees. They realized they also needed to connect to their assets.?

So we see an incredible trend of technology right now as intelligence. It's moving also from the data center to everything. And companies are seeing, as the digital transformation becomes a necessity, for their companies to be competitive in our future digital economy. And I think technology is going to have a huge role in increasing productivity. Now, you touched on a different people issue. I think we all, in different companies, in different ways, have been moved to this hybrid work environment.?

Like from our perspective when we look at the KPIs of anything: how we think about the time it takes to develop a chip, how we think about Invention Disclosures and all of this. We actually have seen KPIs improve. We're still like everybody else, trying to understand how do you have the best of both worlds? I think there's a lot of advantages from flexibility, but also advantages of people who work together and collaborate together. So I think companies are now adjusting.?

NT: So your overall productivity and innovation cycles have improved since the pandemic?

CA: During the years of 2020, 2021, we actually saw an acceleration of KPIs. We actually, for example, had more Invention Disclosures and patents during that period than a prior year.?

NT: But what about 2021 to 2022??

CA: It's still the same. I think our KPI is still improving. Having said that, I think companies are all trying to understand what the future of this hybrid work model will look like. And I think we're learning as we go.?

NT: And tell me, you probably based on what people are demanding, where you see growth in products. Tell me something that nobody in the audience knows about something that you're building now that will increase productivity in the future. Tell me something cool and mind blowing.?

CA: Look—

NT: … and how it’ll affect your earnings and should we short your stock or invest in it. No, seriously, tell me something great that you're working on.?

CA: So maybe what I'll do, I'll do a crescendo for you. Like I feel—we always think in terms of the evolution of computing platforms. So, if you started with personal computers, I think IBM is here and I think that was an integral part of that journey. If you look at personal computing, it became the computing platform, and that's been taken over by phones. Phones became the computing platform today. And I think we started to see right now, even when you think about the future of computing or personal computing, we started to see the conversions between mobile and PC. Those are becoming kind of one device. We see a lot of things coming from the mobile influencing how we think about PCs.?

And also I like to think about, for example, next generation PC. It's fascinating to watch that the number one use case on a PC right now is communications. It became a communication device. Video telephony is one of the key applications when you think of collaboration. But that will continue to evolve. So one of the things that we have been very passionate about, and I think you have to think in terms of a decade. It's not like tomorrow.?

You have today an incredible amount of processing power in your phone. It's the most connected device, but you're limited by the size of the screen. It's an artificial limitation. You see everybody just looking at the screen. So when you think about glasses and the ability to have things right in front of your eyes, even some very basic use cases as having a phone call. It's funny when you think about how people used to open their phone, make a phone call like this in the 4G era. Everybody’s texting now because of the pandemic. You put the phone in front of you for a video call. Tomorrow, you just have a holographic image rendered in front of your eyes.?

So we've been investing in virtual reality, augmented reality. That's a whole conversation about the metaverse. That's going to happen. So the technology trend is the merging of physical and digital spaces, have digital twins, have everything, enterprises, people. And how do you merge that together? I think that's going to be the next computing platform, and eventually it's going to be as big as phones. And we should think about that happening within the decade.?

NT: Well, so he's real. I can vouch for it. But not long from now, he'll be a hologram. That is amazing, fascinating. And you're working on it. So, it's likely to happen.?

Let me go to Arvind. One of my favorite things about Arvind, and anybody who came to our panel in May knows this is that he will answer anything and he has a theory on anything in technology. Right? You want to talk about synthetic biology on the blockchain? He's got a theory.?

So, Arvind, you mentioned that by 2025, quantum computing would be a competitive advantage for you. You said that in May. Are you still on that timeline? Are you going faster? Are you going slower? And what's it going to do??

Arvind Krishna: We're still on that timeline. So we're at 400 qubits today. That's on the cloud. You can go ahead and use it. By the way, a real quantum computer, not a simulation, not something virtual, a very real one.?

NT: Wait, 400 qubits??

AK: Yes.

NT: That's, that's a big deal.?

AK: 433 qubits today.?

NT: Okay.?

AK: Thousand qubits end of this year, and then multiply—

NT: Explain to the audience, don't explain all how quantum physics works because then we'll be here till tomorrow. But explain what a thousand qubits means.?

AK: Well, you can solve problems in material sciences. Imagine lithium hardwood for electric car batteries. Imagine fertilizers. There was a paper from China recently that said at 400 cubits, you could probably break today's encryption. I'm a little skeptical of the full validity of that paper, but okay, fine, 400. Maybe 1000.?

So that tells you that somewhere around 1000, you're beginning to see problems being solved that you just couldn't imagine getting solved on what I would call classical computers. Quantum is not going to replace classical. Just to be clear, you're not going to run your bank balance on a quantum computer because a quantum computer may give you a different answer each time. For some things, you likely want the same answer. But, the physical world, materials, chemistry, encryption, optimization problems is what I believe we'll see some of them getting solved in this time frame.?

So I'm still there. And the progress made is that now we have 400 plus real.?

NT: Wait. All right. So IBM is at 400 plus. You're heading to 1000. You also said that cracking all encryption requires 400 to 1000. So that leads to the obvious question, what will IBM do once it has cracked everybody here's passwords??

AK: We are very, very clear. So we have been out there for the last ten years. We have actually been working on quantum proof encryption. We have put it out as open source. We work with NIST in the United States who have four, what they call preliminary standards out there based on collaboration from us and from many, many other people in the industry. And I would strongly urge everybody that for the data you really, really care about, that if you encrypt it, put it on a tape, throw it away, and in ten years, you want it? Somebody might decrypt it? Go use quantum proof encryption now, because even stuff that you store will get broken, and if it's going to embarrass you, beware.?

NT: This may be a dumb question. I don't know. Let's say in my email I have two-factor authentication. So there's a password. Presumably the password is encrypted by Gmail through some multiplication of large prime numbers. So the quantum computer will be able to factor the large prime numbers. Will it be able to crack my two-factor??

AK: Yes.?

NT: Okay.?

AK: Because all of that is essentially based on encryption.?

NT: So the two-factor is just another set of multiplying large prime numbers??

AK: It's effectively just trying to get to the eventual key. That's all there is.?

NT: Even if it's like a physical two factor authentication because it's translating like, my biometrics into a number??

AK: No no no, because in the end, you have your actual email stored somewhere with encryption. All the rest is just a key to go unlock the actual encryption key.?

NT: Cool. That's awesome. Great. All right, fun times ahead in tech. Let's talk about ChatGPT, which is one of the coolest things that's happened in the last year. And so last night, it's kind of amazing that I even got an answer to this. I went into ChatGPT and I said, "What is the issue on which Cristiano Amon, Julie Sweet, Arvind Krishna, Sunil Mittal will disagree on the most?" And ChatGPT spat back an answer, and it said 5G. And it said, Sunil will be extremely enthusiastic and the other three will be a little bit indifferent and less enthusiastic. So, Sunil—

CA: Definitely wrong.

NT: Well since you're building all the infrastructure for it.?

JS: You're absolutely wrong.?

AK: You're completely wrong.

JS: You just proved—

NT: It hallucinates!

JS: —that there are lots of limitations with ChatGPT.?

NT: It's a very confident bullshitter. But Sunil, explain where you are with 5G in India, where you're taking it, and what you've seen with it.?

SBM: Well, 5G is upon us. As you know. We are rolling it out feverishly now in the country. Cristiano would be very happy because the heart of the 5G is based on what he produces, and he would like to have everybody hold a 5G device in their hand and use it extensively. And similarly, I would say Arvind puts a lot of envelope around that code that Cristiano puts in and puts it at work for all of us. And Julie will then advise what to do with the 5G. And I am the poor end of the chain who spends tens of billions of dollars for all the money that they can make. So I have a harder task on my hat.?

The fact is, currently the use cases on 5G are still limited. We want more work from Julie, more work from Arvind. Basically, what does it do? It can give you low latency, which has never been imagined before, and that really creates a lot of new use cases. Drone management, robotic surgery, autonomous vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. You can do a lot of things that you could have never imagined before. A country like India, you can't go and build hospitals in every village, but you can put a small pod out there and that can be linked back into Delhi, Bombay, wherever the case may be, or Chennai. And you could do, real time,most of the critical surgeries right in the village there with some training of some local paramedics.?

Autonomous cars probably is a long way away for a country like India. We first have to sort out our traffic with people behind it. So I don't know how fast that will happen, but we will track the world very closely. The second part is it gives you a very large capacity. The spectrum is very wide, and you can really have a lot of new applications.?

Where I think the most benefit will come out of 5G is the industrial application, and that is where we are most excited about. We have started to work with Bosch, we are working with Mahindra Auto, to ensure that we can make their life better, more efficient, more cost effective. And I think that's where the excitement will be and that's where people like us and Accenture or IBM go to market jointly, create solutions for all these companies and do what's required.?

In the meanwhile, people will get used to better speeds, high speeds, low latency for their regular devices as well. I mean, you can go back and live your moment of dial up days and you can never go back there. So similarly, when you get to 5G, it's very hard for you to go and work your normal routine affairs also on 4G. It's going to cost a lot of money to the entire telecom industry. Many players are here. Costs you a ton of money on spectrum. So we are looking at about four or five hundred billion dollars worth expense by the industry in the coming few years to convert the world into a 5G space.?

CA: Look, let me just say one thing because by the way, I share some new enthusiasm. I think the opportunity for 5G in India is very significant and I think there's now this broader understanding that 5G is critical infrastructure for the digital economy. Now, in addition to all those different use cases, and I think this opportunity industry, there is another capability of 5G that is different than the other Gs.?

5G will democratize computing power. So when you think about this very high speed, low latency, think about a connection between the cloud and your device as if they were the same computer. So what will happen is you have the ability to have computing power on demand running workloads on the cloud, and that's going to be very different. That allows basically every device that is 5G to have the ability to tap into as much computing power as you need and I think that's going to be very instrumental while we think about some of the new use cases.?

NT: Fascinating. Let's talk about ChatGPT for a minute. Are any of you integrating large language models, text-based chatbots into your business? I mean, we're trying it at The Atlantic, we're trying to figure out if you can create a chatbot that will be a guide to our archives.?

AK: Our answer is absolutely yes, but not based on ChatGPT.?

NT: Based on??

AK: Based on, large language models have been around for a few years. I mean, actually, you got to give credit to Google for coming up with the technology more than just Open AI, but it's also been technology that the large universities all over the world have been working on. And I would say that that answer of a large language model—whether you use the word foundation models, large language models, generated models—is going to be given, that is the technology and the reason for that is that it actually lowers the cost of AI. It allows you to have multiple models off of one base, and that gives you so much speed advantage that all of us are going to be chasing it down. It is already the default standard that we use in most of our applications across IBM, including those that we deploy for our clients.?

So, short answer on large language, I think it's beyond language. It's going to be a given "language" because code can be a form of language. Then you can go to what else can be a form of language. Legal documents, regulatory work, et cetera. All of that is going to be there. And an example that nobody thinks about is chemistry.

NT: Chemistry, that sounds great.?

AK: So in chemistry, I mean the materials world is a $7 trillion industry I think, and a lot of it is wet lab based. But the ability to go do this using AI and models and generative is going to be massive before we even get to quantum.

JS: And it goes right back to industrial as well. I mean, we've been working on this for some time. The power of ChatGPT is that it is bringing to life what we've been talking to clients about for some time, which is that once you actually have mammoth amounts of data, both internal and external, if the data is good, then you can do amazing things with it. And so we love what's going on right now with everyone talking about it, because in many cases, people have been doubters about why you need to have really clean data, connect to external data, use these then foundational models on specific use cases. A lot is going to be in digital manufacturing, in agriculture and sort of industrial use cases, and it reminds everyone you have to get the data right.?

So you got the wrong answer for ChatGPT. So all those high school students out there who are trying to use ChatGPT for their exams, just beware you might get the wrong answer.?

NT: My kid wrote a pretty awesome paper with it. He's a freshman at high school. I got to say—high grades. Anyway, keep going.?

JS: Yes, but it's only as good as the data, right??

NT: That's true.?

NT: Can you make chips with it??

CA: Yeah. One of the things we see happening with us, one of the largest areas of silicon growth is neural processor units. We actually have the ability to run large language models at the edge device. And we think that's going to be a lot of the processing that you're going to do, even in your phone, is going to be AI processing.?

NT: So let me ask a question about the evolution of AI, which I think maybe all of you might have an answer on. I was at Barry's Piano Bar the other night, the sort of the techies gathering, and got into a long conversation about AI with a bunch of people. One of the theories that came out of it was that AI evolved in a series of S's.?

So you have machine learning, you have deep learning, you have gans, and then you have large language models. And each of these advances makes a big splash and then it levels off and then it improves. Well, what happens is that you have different models of AI that make a splash kind of every year. And so if you believe that, then right now the proper thing, if you're trying to think about the future of AI is not to infinitely extrapolate on large language models, but just to try to identify what is next.?

Is that a fair way to talk about the evolution of AI??

AK: I believe absolutely, because you mentioned the four that have already been adopted. But then you can get into neurosymbolic, you can get into how do you include knowledge inside AI, which it's today not—it's just blindly looking at data. All of these are yet to come, and I believe they will come. I mean, the word that is often talked about is neurosymbolic or reasoning, and we are far away from that in any of these four.?

So will all of these be worked on? Absolutely.?

NT: I'm glad you say that.

JS: I look at it—something different, though, Nick, is that that's the right answer in terms of the actual technology advancements, but then it's only that it needs to be put to use at scale. And what you see with technology a lot is it's gradual and then sudden. We're still in the gradual phase right now, and a big part of it is not the capabilities of the technology. But going back to your first topic, the people.?

And so when we think about the use cases we were just talking about, whether it's with chips and being at the edge or 5G, the biggest issue is not the technology. It's that in the factory, every factory is run by a general manager. They're not thought about as platforms. It's very hard to do the change management and you're still convincing people that you need to use not just your data, but other data. Right??

And so while that's an interesting way to think about the technology, the focus has to be, which is a big part of what we do, is how do you get the adoption? And that's what we're working on in many of these cases. When you think about the big megatrends, whether it's metaverse or cloud or AI, it's adoption.?

NT: So how do you get—OK, so you go into lots of meetings with lots of your customers and partners. You're probably doing some in Davos and you say, hey, this incredible thing is happening, it's going to get even faster. And they look and they say, “A: cool, and B: does that mean I'm going to be displaced?” Right? So how do you make people not afraid of this future??

JS: Well, first of all, the labor shortage today has changed that calculus a great deal. So we're working on the supply chain right now and lots of supply chain disruption, but one of the biggest issues is the lack of talent, supply chain talent, to handle those disruptions. And so a big driver of the use of the technology is, of course, being able to predict and understand your supply chains, but it's also the ability to automate more and not have to find as many supply chain experts in a world of shortage. And so the calculus around the talent gaps is also changing how people are thinking about the investment and the adoption.?

NT: Sunil, do you agree with that??

SBM: Yeah, I would say certainly we may be at the moment underestimating what's in store for us through AI. And while we can make fun, sometimes the answers come pretty crazy from ChatGPT, but it's getting very very powerful. It's really getting there. And as Julie rightly said, you always see these things moving gradually, and then suddenly it takes over.?

Will it displace people? Is there a genuine fear about it? I think we have had so many technological evolutions and every time this debate has come, will we have people displaced? Will we lose jobs? Especially for countries like India or continents like Africa, where there's a young and very large population which needs to be employed, this does become a question mark. Will they be replaced??

My whole view is, many of the jobs, existing jobs and skills will be replaced, but they will be compensated by many more areas of new discoveries of jobs and work which will come and surprise us. So I remain hopeful. But we must start to at least now think about a life where AI is going to play a very fundamental role in our daily routine, our daily lives, and of course, much more meaningful into areas like material sciences, chemicals, biochemicals, human life issues. That's going to be a very very profound area to work on.?

NT: So there's an extremely important question there because I believe that premise, right, which is that it will displace a lot of jobs, but increase total net jobs and be net good. But you displace a large class of people and say people who are in their 50s or 60s, it's very hard for them to get back on their feet. Right? We talk about the United States with truck drivers, right? If you have self driving trucks, right, what happens with truck drivers? It's one of the top employers of males in America. Like what happens??

Where do you worry about the displacement? Right? So not, again, overall that more people will be displaced than jobs are created, but where there are particular areas where there will be displacement, where society is going to have to think about it.?

AK: I think you should worry more about the rote, clerical, white collar jobs than about the physical. Because if you talk about truck drivers, in the end there's a lot of lifting in and out which is not going to get replaced if you ever are in an urban area. But rote, clerical, white collar jobs will get replaced, a large number of them.?

So the question is, what else do you create to replace those? And so I think that actually those are where you have to focus. And now when you begin to look upon it, well, the number of people over 65, I look at the US, was 15, 18%, now going to be 30%. What about home health care? If you go look at when farm workers got displaced, fast food service and restaurants came in to step in to offer those jobs instead. You begin to get a service economy.?

So the question is, what else do societies want? What else do economies want? And that is where those jobs are going to go.?

JS: We spend a lot of time thinking about the solution to this. The reality is countries have different demographics, right? Japan is very different in terms of how they're thinking about labor because of their shortages, than, say, in India with their demographics. But there is a common solution and that is focusing on skills. And if we as companies and as governments focus on skills instead of jobs and roles. And you use the AI, which I think by the way, things like ChatGPT are going to be fantastic for education. And you focus on how you then upskill and if you understand what people's skills are. We have algorithms for our 740,000 people that we can run to say who can we upskill for some hot new area? Because everybody is client facing, we have an inventory of their skills and then we know how to reskill them.?

And so we believe the future for companies, or—how do you thrive in the next decade? You access, you become a creator of talent, you unlock that talent. But for governments and schools, focusing on skills is how you're going to be able to take those workers and reskill them. And you kind of couple that with the excitement around digital literacy and the fact that those same clerical workers are using digital in their everyday life. And I think you've got real positive momentum for a solution.?

NT: So if I can pass your eleven tests, I'll be in pretty good shape, and have a good try at being skilled??

JS: You will. You'll be in pretty good shape.?

NT: Nice. I'm going to start studying.?

Cristiano, let's talk briefly about cars and where they're going. You were just at CES, you made a big splash. Everybody was talking about what you're building for cars. What do you think is exciting about the future vehicles that people in the room here don't know??

CA: Look, we are actually super excited about the transformation happening at the automotive industry. And the way to think about it, the most simplistic form, right? Every car company right now, the questions are asked is are you electrifying and are you becoming digital? And the digital is actually really the most exciting part. The car is really becoming a connected computer on wheels.?

A couple of things that you see a big transformation in the car: First, you connect the car to the cloud. When the car is connected to the cloud 100% of the time, a lot of things change. You can think about a car as a distribution of content and services, from television to streaming of gaming, to the ability to have intelligent transportation. As you look at all of the different cars connecting the network and how do they interact into the roads. You look at the ability to have a number of different services. As you transform the digital experience of the car.

Actually, I like to tell the story because that's how we got into the automotive business and it's been a very successful story for Qualcomm. In a short period of time, we're working with virtually all car companies. People will buy a little holder, put their phone, and they’re driving with their phone on the dashboard, and that tells you that their information is relevant for them. That was not available in the car. They need to put their phone in there.?

So you see now a huge transformation of what the digital cockpit experience is, and you start to see things you didn't see before. You have all those screens, you're connected to the cloud. So at CES we announced, for example, a partnership with Salesforce integrating the Snapdragon digital cockpit because the car companies now have the direct relationship with their customers. It used to be done at the dealership, but now you're in constant communication with the car company.?

Why not do CRM from those screens of the car. We talk about, for example, I know it sounds crazy, but we talk about working in the office, working from home. What is it working in the car? Companies are now thinking about how their collaboration experiences can be provided in a way that is relevant for you or you're driving??

And then all the way to safety. And I think when we talk about autonomous driving, yes, you're going to have at some point fully autonomous cars, robotaxi. But I think the big opportunity is actually to think about a zero crash with assisted driving. I think ADAS, an assisted driving, even with the driver behind the wheel, it should be part of every car, no different than ABS and airbags. I think that it also has the ability besides safety to make the whole traffic more efficient.?

So, bottom line, exciting time for the auto industry, massive technology transformation.?

NT: I'm very excited because when I'm scrolling Instagram when I'm driving, it's so much better now in your connected car because I used to have to reach to my phone and click the like button. No.?

Let me ask you about self driving quickly.?

CA: Yes?

NT: There are lots of hypotheses on when it's going to come. So one, it's going to come once we finally are able to afford LiDAR on the cars because LiDAR works better than cameras. Two, it's going to come when the roads are much better mapped and communicate with the cars. Three, it's really only going to come when you have people remotely who can operate the cars and take over if they get into trouble. Four, it's just going to come on our current path.?

What do you think??

CA: Look, you, you have to think about phases. For example, right now, we're a big believer that you're going to see a much larger scale of even a level three or three plus highway autopilot for assisted driving before you have fully autonomous driving. Fully autonomous driving, you started to see a law for lower speed delivery vehicles. It's a different type of vehicle for delivery. That's going to happen. You can see—you started to see that already in campus and eventually you're going to get to fully autonomous.?

But it's really going to take time, especially because when you're talking about safety of people,?

humans make mistakes, but enterprises cannot make mistakes. Right? So then you think about you can get for autonomous driving fully autonomous. There's a path for you to get to zero to 95%, but then extra 5% takes time and a lot of precision. So it's going to happen, but it's going to go through those phases.?

NT: All right, let's talk about a few other big things. Julie, let's talk about the Metaverse for a second. You onboard all of your employees. You start giving them their tests in the Metaverse. Is the Metaverse evolving the way you hoped, and is it going as fast as you expected it to??

JS: It's going faster than we expected, actually. And that is because it's really tapping into human need, and it's creating something new. And by human need is what we've discovered is that when you are immersing yourself in an experience together, you've learned better, but also you can do things faster.?

So those of you who went to the global collaboration village that we created here with Microsoft and the World Economic Forum and many partners, that was created entirely in the Metaverse, like it is the Metaverse, and we created it, so we did it much faster. No one ever got on a plane. They worked together.?

So when you think about when you were a kid and you would go to be dragged to the museum because the teacher knows that if you're in front of a painting, you actually would engage in it differently than if you're trying to look at it on a screen. It answers a human need, and it's creating something that doesn't exist.?

It's what we were talking about earlier, the virtual and the physical worlds coming together is actually net new value. And so we actually estimate there'll be a trillion dollars of revenue influenced by the Metaverse by 2025. And it, I think, fundamentally comes down to its net new value, and it answers a human need.?

NT: I went to that demonstration, and it was very cool. And then I got out, and I learned two facts. One is that everybody had been there, and they thought it was very cool, and no one had thrown up. So it was a big success so far.?

Sunil, can we talk about geopolitics for a second? How much has India benefited from the tech tensions between the US and China??

SBM: Well, you know, I would say generally on the manufacturing side, India has been trying very hard to become a manufacturing base, especially in the electronic field, the digital parts, and we import 750 billion dollars worth of electronic parts. So that is an opportunity which we missed several decades back, and it seemed that we will not see during our lifetime.?

This particular issue has forced India to sort of become ready and put out subsidies and programs which have never been seen before. And we're talking about tens of billions of dollars. Semiconductor has become a huge rallying point between the US and the UK and the entire court,? I would say. India is now committed to spend very large amounts of money. We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in the next 5, 10 years to finally attract the semiconductor base into India, which we could never build over the last several decades.?

So I would say India is benefiting, definitely, because the US wants a lot of things to be shifted from China to India. "Trusted nations, trusted sources, trusted products" is becoming the mantra. We have been using Chinese equipment in part of our network. That's all being replaced. 100%. Benefit is going to the Western world at the moment and bit to Korea through Samsung, but that is also giving India an opportunity to develop its own 4G stack.?

NT: Wait, do you use Huawei technology in your??

SBM: I have about 20% of our network is between Huawei and Zeti, not in the core, but in the radio side, which is all being replaced now. 5G is zero and a bit of 2G, which is still subsisting, and 4G, which I would say by end of next year will be down to zero.?

NT: Arvind, is this going to work? Is India going to become a chip powerhouse??

AK: I believe that what Sunil explained is going to happen. Look, if you look where investment is going to go, you need two things. You need the skills, you need labor, and you need energy. So in all these things we're describing, energy is not a real factor. It's going to be about skills, and it's going to be about a desire.?

What I've seen in the movement in the last two years has been more than in the previous 20. The permissioning, the standing up, the subsidies, the attraction of putting together collaborative parties. And it's far beyond chips. If you think about iPhone manufacturing, if you think about beginning with, you want to begin to integrate and manufacture, then you want to begin to design, then you want to begin to do the eventual semiconductors. By the way, a lot of semiconductor design, chips are designed in India already, whether for us or for other people. So now you're just down to building that last factory, which requires a level of investment and a level of warranty collaboration. But from what I've seen in the governments in both countries in the US and in India, that will to do it over the last two years is significantly higher than in the past. So I think I'm very optimistic about the next five years and how this is going to play out.?

NT: All right, well, we have four and a half minutes left. So when we did this in May, we ended with a question about what is something that will profoundly affect the world of our grandchildren that most people here aren't thinking about? So I'd like to ask each of you that and tell me something that you think you're building or working on or maybe even that you aren't building or working on. If there are no volunteers, I will go with Cristiano.?

CA: All right, well, thank you very much. So, look, especially for a company like Qualcomm that has been involved in every generation of wireless and we look at what happened with the transformation in our society created by wireless technologies. If you look at the smartphone as the largest development platform created by mankind, I think the future is very bright because of technology, because we are building, really a global interconnected society. It makes distances much smaller. The world is a much smaller place right now than it used to be before, and I think that trend will continue. We expect, as technology continues to evolve, I think we're going to basically continue to see more tools to enhance the human potential and continue to build this global interconnect.?

NT: Will our grandchildren still use these things all the time, or will they have been replaced by glasses, IoT, other stuff??

CA: I think you're going to have your phone. Eventually, you're going to have companion glasses that go along your phone, and then you're just going to have the glasses.?

NT: Because the car is an interesting metaphor where the use of the phone has kind of disappeared. Right?And it's possible that eventually you'll have technology here. You have technology here. Will we actually need to carry this darn thing??

CA: Yes, there's this huge potential, and that's what actually drives a lot of the diversification of our company and the expansion to all the other industries. The technology that you find today in your phone, you can simply think about this future where every other device could have the same technology. It's going to be intelligent, it's going to be connected, and then we're going to be providing information for you in real time.?

NT: All right, Arvind, craziest thing we haven't talked about yet.?

AK: The impact of quantum on energy and food. If you think about it, bacteria, algae, various other things in nature are incredibly efficient at how they leverage and produce energy in food. Quantum is going to unlock those and make that available to the entire population.?

NT: Because quantum is particularly good at mapping nature?

AK: Quantum is essentially nature. So quantum computers work literally in trying to replicate quantum physics and quantum mechanics. That is how chemistry works. That is how nature works. That's how proteins work. It's going to take us a while, but I believe that unlocking those mysteries, then unlocks massive potential for us.?

NT: All right, that's optimistic. We're starting with optimism. We're ending with optimism. Well, maybe we'll see. Julie might get dystopic. Julie, what's interesting for you right now??

JS: I'm going to take a different tactic. Business school curriculum is being rewritten right now, so we just put out a report this morning that says 8% of companies have become reinventors where they truly understand technology and are reinventing every part of their enterprise, and they will do so continuously. That will profoundly change. It's creating new performance frontiers for industries and that will profoundly change the life of our grandchildren.?

NT: Wow. Sunil?

SBM: Well, I see our grandchildren being in a very different world. We will see democratizing of massive amount of available products and services that are currently available to the elite or the wealthy. That will get democratized sitting like this in a metaverse. You will have probably a few million people joined from the world, experience this what we are experiencing here today. On the health care side, again, they will sort of look back and wonder why our forefathers couldn't live that much longer that we are living and they couldn't deal with those diseases that were there at that time. So you're going to see benefit of technology really getting down into the people's lives on a daily basis, and they will live a very different life.?

NT: What would the average lifespan of our grandchildren be? Let's say right now it averages after 75 across the countries we live in. What will it be for our grandchildren??

SBM: I mean, people talk about children who are being born today in Western Europe will get to live to 120 years. So, can we say that that in emerging worlds we will get to see at least 100 plus.?

NT: Amazing. All right. Thank you so much. That was a wonderful panel. Cristiano, Arvind, Julie, Sunil, thank you so much.?