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For the first time in the company's history, FedEx has surpassed UPS in market value. Handling roughly 18 million packages a day, FedEx is acutely aware of how tariffs and geopolitical tensions have disrupted the global supply chain. As it enters its AI era, the company is leveraging artificial intelligence to predict and address these obstacles head-on. In this episode, Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell sits down with FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam to discuss how AI is transforming logistics, how tariffs, geopolitical tensions, and shifting manufacturing hubs are reshaping global supply chains, and what's next for one of the world's largest transportation companies.

FedEx CEO on How AI Can Fix a $1.8 Trillion Global Supply Chain Problem

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Nils Pihl, founder and CEO of Auki Labs, is developing technology that lets robots navigate the physical world on their own—without human input or cloud-based maps. Together with Terri, the humanoid robot, he’ll demonstrate the posemesh protocol, a system that gives machines a shared, real-time understanding of their surroundings. It’s a step toward a future where robots can move through space with the awareness and coordination we expect from people.

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Hello, hello, good afternoon. Welcome back. Thank you, thank you. Welcome back, everyone. I hope you had a great lunch and even better conversations. I certainly enjoyed mine. To kick off our afternoon, we're going to start by exploring the next frontier of robotics. Oki Labs is developing tech to help robots navigate the physical world on their own without human input or maps. Here to demonstrate, please welcome Aki Labs founder and CEO Neils Peel and his co-presenter, Terry, the robot. All right, hello everyone. My name is Nils. This is Terry. Terry is a unitary robot made in Hangzhou, and today we are going to talk a little bit about how to make the physical world AI accessible, and that's not just about the ramp over there. It has a lot to do with machine perception. I believe that over the next 10 years or so, we are going to see civilization grow to over 100 billion productive participants, most of them AI. And as a result of this growth, I think we will see the world economy grow by something like 10X in the next 20 years. In fact, that may be conservative. Uh, I was born in 1986, let's say 20 years ago, and since then, the world economy has grown 10X. Uh, the world economy has grown 3x in the last 20 years or so, so you only have to believe that we will move about 3 times as fast as we have been to do a 10X in the next 10 years. And Behind the growth that we saw over the last 20 years was that software ate the white collar world. If you are a white collar worker today, you are definitely working on a computer, you're definitely working on a phone, you are definitely using software. Software is a big industry. But 70% of the world economy is still tied to physical space and physical locations, and I actually believe this is going to increase. So What happens next? I believe that faced with the realization that most of human productivity, but also the things that bother us in the world are still tied to physical locations, we can't say that the AI revolution has truly begun. Until Terry can get a better job than being an intern. So let's talk a little bit about what needs to happen for Terry to become productive. We must make the physical world accessible to artificial intelligence. Today, out of the box, Terry is blind. He has a camera, he has a liar, but he has no modality for understanding what he's looking at. He has no, you can't ask him to guide you to the bathroom or anything like this. And we believe that the future humanoid robot stack is going to be made up of 6 layers, and since I only have 7 minutes to go, we'll go through this very quickly. Number one, of course, which you've seen already is we need locomotion. Robots need to be able to walk around without falling over, and I can tell you that I'm going to need to help Terry down the stage today because locomotion is still early. But of course we also need manipulation today. Terry cannot open a can of Coke for you or iron your shirt or anything like this. There's a lot of work left to be done with manipulation, but even if Terry knew. How to manipulate things. You still couldn't ask him to, for example, empty all the trash cans here at the conference. To do that, he's going to need spatial semantic perception as well, not just the camera, but the ability to understand where things are and what things are, and he needs to be able to put that into the context of a map so that the second time you ask him to empty the trash cans, he remembers what the trash cans are and doesn't bounce around like a first generation Roomba. And even when he has a map, he's going to need positioning to understand where he is in relation to the map. A lot of people don't know this, but the GPS is a line of sight technology, so your GPS does not know you're sitting at that table, doesn't know you're in this room, it doesn't know you're on this floor. And then finally we're going to need some kind of applications layer to tie all of these things together. In 2021 at Aki, we realized that you could get a head start on the robotic stack by skipping. The tricky part of locomotion and manipulation. If you wear a pair of glasses. And you have an AI look through your glasses. Then you could do what we call hybrid robotics, where we have human locomotion, you can have a worker that walks as well as me. You can have human manipulation. But you can still have AI perception, you can still have AI mapping, you can still have AI positioning, and you can still run AI applications. In fact, you can create AI co-pilots for physical work. And why wouldn't that be one of the stops on the way to the full AI revolution? Because today, did AI take all the engineering jobs or did AI become a fantastic co-pilot for engineers? And just 2 months ago, we closed our first multi-million dollar deal where we used this stack with just phones and glasses and soon also robots to help retailers understand what is happening in their physical environment. So for the first time ever they can capture an accurate digital twin using spatial computing and AI telling them where their products actually are so they can get better sales reporting, but it also helps them do AR navigation for the staff, reducing the walking distance by a whopping 40% for the people that pick up your online groceries, and they can also do AI and AR task management uh using the system. This is being rolled out into thousands of locations today, and later this year, together with our partner Mentra, who makes smart glasses, we will be releasing an AI co-pilot for physical labor, capable of detecting empty shelves, things that need to get done. So as the retail worker walks through, it turns out we don't replace. The retail worker, we replace the store manager. You get an AI co-pilot that helps you figure out what to do. And that same system is what will allow someone like Terry to understand where are the products and know what to build and where. So what comes after the GPS? Asia is a good place to talk about that. Uh, you need spatial semantic perception, meaning you need to understand where, where things are and what things are, you need to understand the difference between a bicycle and a stoplight. And this hit home for me when I was living in Beijing. Beijing is a big city. I lived there for 7 years. In fact, it's so big that there are more cars on the road in Beijing than there are people in Los Angeles. And if you do a quick back of the napkin calculation based on the average commute, you find that roughly the time it took to build the pyramids. Lost in Beijing traffic. Every single week. And now we might imagine that self-driving cars is going to solve this because cars are going to be coordinating with each other and we won't need red lights anymore, sure, if and only if. These robots, these cars, learn to describe space to each other and their own precise location and the precise location of things that they see. The GPS is never going to work for that because the GPS is a line of sight. This is New York, the biggest city in the West. New York has over 900 buildings taller than 100 m. Astonishing. Until you realize that Hong Kong, where I live, has over 4000 buildings taller than 100 m, and Hong Kong. It's just this little area down here. The rest of this is the Greater Bay Area. It's Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Dongguan. It's an area 2/3 the size of Greater LA but home to 87 million people. And more high-rise buildings than all of North America and all of Europe combined. So it's no wonder why Buddha, that so much machine perception work and GPS replacement work is happening here in Asia by the standards of this century. There are no big cities in the West. So what happens next? We believe that the most important work that civilization can undertake right now is to make the physical world accessible to AI so that we can as a first step, get AI co-pilots for all the physical labor that we wish we could do better and ultimately replace that drudgery with the help of companions like Terry that soon we'll be able to do these tasks autonomously once we've made the physical world accessible to AI. Thank you very much. Nils, that is just so impressive. Hi, Terry. Good to see you. I have just one question for you. You know, you were talking about the development of the robotic technologies and, you know, where we're at and where we're going. By when will Terry be able to bend it like Beckham? Uh, there's already, uh, robot soccer leagues happening sponsored by Booster Robotics. Um, it's not super exciting to watch yet. Terry, I tear you down the ramp in a second. It's like my grandma, you know, uh, needs a bit of help down the stairs, um, but yeah, it's already happening. Uh, robots fighting rings have already started happening. Uh, I think, uh, robot entertainment is, it's now. Yeah, I think I saw a Black Mirror episode about that. Thank you very much. Thank you.

As more and more business processes rely on AI, corporations have a role in ensuring complex systems and products are harmless. 
 
The AI and machine-learning systems that underwrite so much of businesses’ digital transformations today are designed to serve millions of customers, yet they are defined by a relatively small homogenous group. Even with the best of intentions, these individuals cannot readily pinpoint their own biases. While the biggest tech companies in the world are putting together fast-growing teams to tackle the ethical problems that arise from the widespread collection, analysis, and use of massive troves of data, there is growing awareness - and irrefutable evidence - that AI is learning moral choices and prejudices. Where do the greatest dangers lie, how should leaders think about them, can they be regulated away, and if so, by whom? 

In this session we will explore how top executives can create a business framework where ethical innovation and data dignity comes first. We will also discuss if AI should be governed and what an artificial intelligence Bill of Rights might look like. 

Brainstorm A.I - Values and Value

In this session we will explore how top executives can create a business framework where ethical innovation and data dignity comes first. 

Values and Value

In this session we will explore how top executives can create a business framework where ethical innovation and data dignity comes first. We will also discuss if AI should be governed and what an artificial intelligence Bill of Rights might look like. 

Katharine Hayhoe is a leading climate scientist and a strong believer that the first defense against climate change is conversation and a heavy dose of optimism.  She will share her latest research and her thoughts on how businesses can lead the charge in bringing awareness and action to combat the effects of a changing global environment

How to Be a Climate Optimist

Katharine Hayhoe is a leading climate scientist

Katharine Hayhoe is a leading climate scientist and a strong believer that the first defense against climate change is conversation and a heavy dose of optimism.

Catherine, thank you so much for joining us. We just had a great chat in the green room. I hope we get to have the things that we we talked about there. Um so to start this, this is going to seem like an obvious question here. But I think it's really important for the framing of our conversation and that's how do you describe climate change? That is a very good question and I describe it using two words that were coined by the U. S. Military which may surprise you and those words are threat multiplier. Nine times out of 10. Climate change is not creating a new problem that has never existed before. Rather it is taking an existing challenge and amplifying magnifying or exacerbating it. And what we're seeing with hurricanes and typhoons this week is a classic example, hurricanes are normal and natural but what's not normal and not natural is to have them wrapped shooting Almost overnight from a tropical storm to a category five hurricane and dumping this much rain on people not just Ian which just hit Florida yesterday Fiona which went through Puerto Rico before going all the way up to Newfoundland but also typhoon Nauru which devastated an island in the Philippines and then hit Vietnam with hundreds of thousands of people having to be. So climate change is a threat multiplier which means that wherever we have weak spots wherever we have achilles heels, they could be in our um supply chains, they could be in our distribution network, they could be in you know manufacturing of certain items that we need. Those are the places nine times out of 10 where climate change will hit us hardest. So, okay, this all sounds very dire. Um, and how do we remain hopeful? How do we feel like there's actually something that we can do about this? So we don't just sort of curl up in a ball and say, okay, oh well, I guess it's gonna happen anyway. Well, here's the thing if we do, which were very tempted to of course when we see the headlines curl up into a ball, pull the covers back over our head and say, oh, it's gonna happen anyways, we'll just deal with it in that case, if we do that, the worst will happen. And I'm a scientist who studies what the future holds depending on our choices. And I can tell you that there is a world of difference between a future where we do everything, we can to cut our emissions as fast as we can to make the the drain bigger. So to big help nature take up the carbon from our atmosphere and put it back in the soil and ecosystems where we want it where we build resilience to the impacts of a changing climate. That is a world where our civilization, our economy, our society continues and can even possibly improve. There is the potential for a better future. But if we just say, oh, it's too big, we can't do anything that is a future where the entire future of our civilization as we know it is seriously under question whether we can maintain our transportation systems, our electricity or water systems, our economic systems in that future where we don't do anything and we just say, well whether when it comes, when it comes, there's a big question mark on that. Whether we're even able to do that or not, Okay, well you didn't make me feel better, but that's okay, but I can't I can't please please do that next. Yes. So, so, so often we think of climate action as a giant boulder that's sitting at the bottom of an impossibly steep cliff with only a few hands on it. Patagonia is there, Sir? David. Atten berg, you know, Greta thunberg, we feel like there's a few people trying to push that boulder up, but it's not budging even an inch. So if I had my hand, even our whole companies hand, it won't make a difference. But when we look around and we see all of the people, all of the organizations, all of the cities, all of the states and provinces and companies and businesses that are taking action, we realize that giant boulder is already at the top of the hill, it is already rolling down the hill in the right direction and it already has millions of hands on it and if we had our it will go faster. I work at the nature Conservancy of their chief scientists as well as at texas Tech University as a professor there. And one of the things that I'm most excited about that, that makes me most hopeful is when I see how companies are joining up with organizations to help act on climate, protect biodiversity and invest in people and to examples that I really like the fact that we're working with um a beer company, you probably didn't see that one coming. And Hauser Bush to look at protecting water, which is very important, you need water to make beer, but we also need water on a changing climate to provide to local communities and to invest in the quality of that water which is um subject to pollution as well as also being contaminated from runoff, more severe storms. And then there's the example of walmart has teamed up with the Nature Conservancy for sustainable tuna production in the south pacific Okay, okay, so we are going back to the community which is phenomenal because those communities are in dire need of economic development and investment, but it has to be done the right way in a way that protects them from the impacts of climate change. So when I look around at, you know, churches that are divesting from fossil fuels, when I look around at universities and schools that are creating whole schools of climate and sustainability and going carbon free themselves. When I look at how governments are investing in nature like the like Belize and Gabon and the Barbados that just restructured their national debt And use all the interests they save to protect 30% of their ocean area. I mean that's a genius way to use the economy for good. And all of those examples give me hope. So you are a climate scientist in west texas. Um So I know this is something that you've thought a lot about, but how did this issue become so political? Right? It is one of the most divisive issues out there. How did that happen? Has it always been this way? It turns out it has not always been this way we've known since the 1800s that digging up and burning coal back then and oil and gas today produce heat trapping gasses that are building up in the atmosphere, wrapping an extra blanket around the planet, causing it to warm. And in the 1990s, when you asked in the us Republicans and Democrats, you know, how worried are you about global warming? You would get the same answer from both groups. So what happened in the last 30 years somehow the number that a thermometer gives us became a political issue. Why? Well, I studied this question because it occurred to me as well. In fact, I still remember the first time I taught a class at Texas Tech University now, lubbock texas is a very conservative city. It's officially the second most conservative city in the country after provo Utah and I'm speaking at Brigham Young University in two months. So the first time I spoke, I gave, I taught a class at texas tech. I gave a long talk on the geologic history of carbon in the earth, you know, history and the carbon cycle. And the last two minutes of talk, I talked about how humans are disrupting the carbon cycle by digging up and burning coal and gas and oil. And so afterwards I stopped hopefully. And I asked her questions and one young man in the middle put his hand up right away and I thought, oh, a question. He was paying attention. He stood up and he said, are you a democrat? And I was so shocked, I didn't know what to say. I said, no, I'm a Canadian. And then I started to realize why would they think I was a democrat. And what I realized is for a long time climate change was a future issue. It was something that scientists knew about. And scientists studied, even scientists that oil and gas companies and car companies and government scientists and research scientists. We all knew that this was gonna happen. But the chickens had not come home to roost. It wasn't until the 1990s that we started to see the heatwave, we started to see the floods. We started to see the stronger hurricanes and storms and when it became a now issue rather than a then issue, that means we have to do something about it. And when we have to do something about it, that's when it gets political very quickly. Because I'm very sorry to say that a number of companies, 90 companies are actually responsible for 70% of heat trapping gas emissions since the dawn of the industrial era. A number of companies, especially coal companies and some oil and gas companies decided it's gonna be a lot cheaper to just take a leaf from the tobacco industry's playbook and put money into questioning and dismissing science. Our scientists have been studying for decades already than it is to say that we need to change our business model. And there's a really interesting book and documentary called merchants of doubt that I highly recommend to you if you haven't seen it yet. That talks about how professional disinformation was you to muddy the waters on tobacco and smoking and lung cancer on flame returns and mattresses, which I have no idea about and on climate change. But the reality of course is hurricane does not knock on your door and say excuse me, Who did you vote for in the last election or what campaign did you donate to before it floods your home or your neighborhood or your facility or disrupt your supply chain. So we need to have discussions and even arguments over what the best solutions are because there is no best solution. There's a whole bunch of silver buckshot. There's no silver bullet. But we don't need to be having arguments over whether this is real and it matters because it does and everything we as human value is at risk. Catherine thank you so much for chatting with us and thank you so much for giving us a little bit of hope in all this, too. So thanks for the time.

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