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Wayfair thrived during the pandemic, scaling to over 30 million products and rising to #217 on the Fortune 500. But after a post-COVID slump, it’s rethinking its strategy. In 2024, the company opened its first large-format retail store and rolled out new AI tools to reimagine how people shop for their homes. Here’s how Wayfair is betting on technology and in-person retail to power its next chapter in a crowded home-goods market.


How Wayfair’s Betting on AI to Future Proof its $12B Empire 

Wayfair is betting big on AI and physical retail to reconnect with shopper

Tech

Wayfair thrived during the pandemic, scaling to over 30 million products and rising to #217 on the Fortune 500. But after a post-COVID slump, it’s rethinking its strategy

How Wayfair Built a $12 Billion Home Retail Empire 

Wayfair built its multi-billion dollar business by selling home goods online, eventually scaling to more than 30 million products. Today, it's the largest online home goods retailer in the United States, but after a pandemic boom in sales, growth slumped, and so did the company's stock price. Now Wayfair is pivoting. In 2024, it stepped into physical retail with its first large format store. At the same time, it's betting on AI to streamline operations and reimagine how shoppers discover furniture. So we've been using the sort of text to image generation capability to generate an AI to be able to showcase a whole bunch of different images that our customers can then react to and say, oh, I like this. Here's how Wayfair built a $12 billion home goods empire. And how it's using AI and big box retail to fuel its next chapter. Founded in 2002 as a network of niche furniture sites, Wayfair evolved into a sprawling online marketplace. It now offers over 30 million products from around 20,000 suppliers. It also runs a lineup of lifestyle and luxury brands. The main basic difference between Wayfair and some of its other home furnishing competitors is that it is a marketplace platform, so they don't own any of their inventory. Everything is just forward position. on their site so that consumers can use it from the many vendors that they work with. Unlike many of its competitors, Wayfair doesn't manufacture or own its inventory. Instead, it connects shoppers with third party suppliers. This dropship business model allowed Wayfair to scale quickly, offering an enormous product catalog while keeping fixed costs low. Having these relationships with some of these smaller vendors is really unique in that it's a More visible way for the vendors to reach a much broader total addressable market. It helps elevate the business of small vendors while it also helps provide more choices to consumers for Wayfair. During the pandemic, that model helped the company thrive. Sales surged by 45% in 2020 as consumers redecorated during lockdowns. The next year, Wayfair shot up the Fortune 500 rankings, climbing more than 100. 30 spots to land at number 217. When we look back at COVID, that clearly accelerated e-commerce adoption across a number of categories, things like grocery and furniture. We saw the share price really rise to around $350 a share, but post-pandemic demand cooled as interest rates climbed and inflation pinched household budgets. Spending on big ticket furniture slowed. Wayfair's stock lost over 80% of its. between 2021 and early 2023, investors realized things are going to reopen. People are traveling. They're eating at restaurants again, and it wasn't idiosyncratic to Wayfair. It was across the industry, right? All of the peers really saw that phenomenon. Major home retailers like Bed Bath and Beyond filed for bankruptcy in 2023, shuttering hundreds of stores around the country. Despite declining sales post pandemic, Wayfair was. A to weather the market volatility. You know, if you look at somebody like Bed Bath and Beyond, there were liquidity issues. Interestingly, despite the fact that really Wayfair isn't generating a whole lot of profitability, the way that the capital structure works is that they don't really need that same sort of liquidity. But as the online home retail market has become more crowded, Wayfair is looking for ways to improve its e-commerce model and its customer experience. So we've been applying AI for quite some time, probably over a decade. The more recent advancements are allowing us to take that to yet another level. Fiona Tan is Wayfair's chief technology officer. Over the last few years, she has helped lead the company's investments in AI. It's a category where it's hard for our customers sometimes to describe what they're looking for. And then sometimes they don't really even know what they're looking for, so we've been using the sort of text to image generation capability to generate a AI to be able to showcase, you know, a whole bunch of different images that our customers can then react to and say, oh, I like this. I didn't know, I don't know what it's called, but it speaks to me. In 2025, Wayfair debuted a generative AI platform called Muse. The tool allows shoppers to curate AI generated home designs in certain styles. From there, the platform will recommend Wayfair products that fit the look. And then you can even tailor it a little bit more and just say, OK, well I like this, but I prefer green chairs instead of beige, and as you interact with muse, it'll generate you another image based on what you're saying. As the customers are inspired and engaged more with us, we're able to discern better what the intent and what their style preferences are, maybe what the budget preferences are, and then it allows us. And then recommend products for them. Waver says that level of personalization may help reduce return rates by giving customers more confidence in their purchases because the customers are more confident of the products that they buy or they've been able to get more information about it, ideally what you also see is there are fewer returns, right, because you're able to help them make um more. Informed decisions. Behind the scenes, Wayfair's legal, HR, and finance teams are also using AI to process data faster and streamline operations. For example, our legal teams using it to be able to look at, you know, user reviews to look for items that may have caused any kind of injury, and then you'll have examples in the technology department. Our accounting and finance team is also leveraging it. So it's really across the enterprise. While AI is helping to streamline Wayfair's digital operations, the company is also testing a more traditional strategy opening physical stores. In May 2024, Wayfair opened its first large format retail store in Wilma, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. The 150,000. A square foot store features showrooms, interior design services, and a cafe. Instead of spending marketing dollars on digital spend, you're spending your marketing dollars on physical spend. While competitors like William Sonoma benefit from built-in visibility through their retail locations, Wayfair has had to rely more heavily on advertising. every, every home. In 2024, they spent about 12% of their net revenue on advertising, while competitors like William Sonoma spent about 7% and Restoration Hardware only spent 4%. Wayfair leans into advertising a little bit more because it's hard to remain visible when you're an e-commerce only retailer, right? And so, You know, reminding consumers that you exist isn't free. Wayfair's new store location sits strategically along a major commuter highway. Since the opening of the store, Wayfair says sales in Illinois have jumped around 15%. Based on early results, Wayfair plans to open two more large format stores, one in Atlanta, Georgia and another in Yonkers, New York. Still, when it comes to home goods, Wayfair operates in a competitive and fragmented landscape. While the company holds the top spot for largest online home goods retailer in the US, it's only by a small margin, very fragmented, very hard to have a competitive advantage. We think Wayfair is one of a number of competitors that are really struggling. To avoid discounting and reinvent themselves in different ways to remain relevant to consumers. Big box retailers like Walmart, Target, and IKEA all sell home goods with the added advantage of physical stores, tight logistics, and brand familiarity. Other high-end home goods companies like RH and Pottery Barn offer in-person shopping that build a more luxury customer experience. It's a lot easier to be top of mind when you are a pottery barn in a mall or a RH that has a freestanding store and a restaurant, and it's an experience, but we. moves into brick and mortar stores and AI are helping to close that gap. So one of the capabilities again of AI and also generative AI is our ability to understand, have a deeper understanding of the products that we sell, discerning the color, the size, dimensions. Some of it's in the product details, sometimes there may be errors and it can also augment and enrich the information. That we get from our suppliers, so we're doing a lot in the customer experience. I do think AI will help young people sort of get their head around how they want to plan their smaller spaces, but also, you know, the accessible price points that is that Wayfair offers also helps bring those consumers in, and I think that a lot of that is their their main consumer.

Agentic AI is coming for the world’s knowledge workers—accountants, lawyers, consultants, and customer service teams alike. From boardrooms to BPOs, this session explores how generative and task-based AI are reshaping professional workflows, global outsourcing models, and entire industries. Is this the dawn of a productivity revolution—or a workforce in transition? 

White Collar Wake-Up: Productivity and the Professional Reckoning

Conferences

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.

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.

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