Character.AI

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What if you could talk to Elon Musk? Or have a conversation with Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter? Character.AI lets users chat with everyone from billionaires and celebrities to historical and fictional characters. The online generative AI chatbot uses deep learning algorithms and large language models to engage the user in conversation the way the character it’s mimicking would in real life. Character.AI was founded in 2021 by ex-Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who serve as CEO and president of the startup, respectively. Earlier this year, it raised a $150 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $1 billion valuation. The startup is reportedly in talks to raise more VC funding at a <a class="waffle-rich-text-link" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-28/character-ai-in-early-talks-for-funding-at-more-than-5-billion-valuation">$5 billion valuation</a>, including from their former employer Google, per <a class="waffle-rich-text-link" href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-talks-invest-ai-startup-characterai-sources-2023-11-10/">Reuters</a>. Character.AI is free to use, but users can pay a $9 monthly subscription to skip the virtual queue to talk to characters. The company said its website attracted 100 million monthly visits in the first six months after its launch.

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AI has been core to the video game industry from the very beginning, as designers coded expansive worlds, responsive characters, and immersive experiences for millions of players. Now, how are today’s technologies—generative AI, agentic AI, virtual reality, and so on—changing how people make and play games? And can the design lessons of gaming, from its visual language to how users respond to incentives, be applied to other domains?

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OK, so AI has always been core to the video game industry. How are generative and agentic AI and other digital technologies like virtual production changing the way people make and play games, and can design lessons of gaming be applied to other domains? Our next three speakers are well equipped to answer that. We have Haiyan Zheng as a general. and partner gaming AI at Xbox, who's heading up science efforts for consumer facing AI experiences such as gaming co-pilot. She was formerly chief of staff to the CEO of Microsoft Gaming and senior director of innovation at Microsoft Research Cambridge, where she served as technical adviser to the lab director. We have Lee Shueman who created and developed successful platforms, products, and devices at Nintendo, Microsoft, and Xbox. His work on rare LTD's Connect sports franchise earned him two BAFTA awards, including Best Family Games. Now, as chief product officer at Effecta Education Group, he leads the vision and development of Effeta's AI-powered education system. And finally we have Betta Liu, who is the AI lead for Justice Mobile, Netty's Games, one of China's largest PC and mobile game developers. She oversees large scale AI systems for the sort of Justice title, enabling players to create short form animations reaching billions of views across platforms like TikTok. She's also worked across product design and design strategy, exploring how AI design, and players themselves can develop new forms of expression. Fortune Asia editor and avid video gamer Nick Gordon will moderate this discussion and audience members, please also find headsets on your tables for simultaneous translation for one of our speakers. Thank you. Hello everyone, I'm very, very excited for this conversation. We, we have some content we're going to put up on screen, so let's, let's show that now. But, but you know, Lee, I want to start with you. You know, you're from, you know, Effect Education group, but there is a reason why you are on our stage today at this gaming panel. Could you talk a bit more kind of about, about your path through the gaming industry and then eventually at at Effecta? Yeah, yeah, thanks, Nicholas and hello everybody. So my name is Lee, Lee Shinneman. Um, I'm what you probably call a vintage gamer. I've been in the games industry since the mid 90s. You'll see some of my games playing up on the, on the screen behind. So, you know, a long, a long time caring about how to get players to love what they're playing and you know, and the importance of great design that brings all of that together. So 25 years through a whole range of You know, different devices, different consoles. I had the good fortune to work with some fantastic teams over the years, and for those that know the British, the British awards, I got lucky and won a few BAFTAs. In fact, good timing for this game that that's playing now. And you know, especially over the years I've got to work with some of the most talented game designers in the world, including people like Miya Motosan and Nintendo. And a whole range of like lessons learned about how to make playful experiences, make engaging, and now how to bring that, you know, into the world of education, which is, you know, why I'm on the stage today. I'm seeing Star Fox adventures. I have a soft spot in my heart for that video game which I played as a big player of this as a young. as a as a teenager, um, but Hayan, I want, I want to turn to you because you're, you're in, you're at Xbox, working gaming at Xbox, but you also kind of have a broader scope than that and we have a video we're going to show that that should kind of tell us a little bit of kind of like all the work that you're doing. OK. All right, I'm gonna try and replicate this here. We're off to a great start. And what this board does is I can connect into it through these wires, these um tiny coin cell motors. Oh my God. It makes me forget that I have a trevor. I one of them for a long time. So Haiyan, you know, how does this story kind of then connect to your broader experience in gaming, in design? How does this all come together? Right, thanks, Nicholas. Uh, so I wanted to bring this video today, uh, because, you know, this is a project I worked on several years ago before I came back into gaming, uh, that it's very rare for Us to be witness to these acute moments where technology can have this really profound effect to elevate somebody's day to day, where we can just see it happen that someone just a mundane thing like Emma drawing a straight line that she couldn't do because of her Parkinson's disease, that technology could elevate that moment and make that. This, you know, amazing transformational point for her. And as I moved into gaming as well, it also reminds me of the power of gaming and play in that, you know, at Xbox we talk about that our mission is really to bring the joy and community of gaming to every single person on the planet. And if you think about games, games are really this creative expression embodied through high technology that is really meant to elevate somebody's day to day, bring them to that moment of flow to these kind of new experiences, and that's how I think about technology, that to elevate people's experiences. So we have an opportunity now to kind of dive in deep into one game in particular, Sword of justice, Beta, that's the game you're working on, and we're going to kind of walk through some of the things that you're working on with this massively multiplayer online video game. Hello Aaron, my name is Beta Liu. I'm the game AR designer from Sword of Justice. So what is justice? It's a flagship open world MMO we launched at 2023. Uh, right now we have millions of players. So AI is not only a tech buzzword, but also their companions and also their creation tools in our game. In justice, you could customize your own companion from appearance to voice to their background settings. It will remember all of the interactions and involve over time. It's not only just a quest giver, but also a really true relationship. And also we provide all kinds of high freedom tools for the players with AI assisted, for example, the motion capture and the face sculpting and archi architecture building. So, uh, literally the players are building all around the world in our game. And also we help build a 3D TikTok in our game just like the uh the video you could just swipe and also uh shoot with their own avatars in just a second. This has, this has had millions, bills of players or the Chinese TikTok. So the design philosophy for us is very simple. The first one is agency. The world will react to every choice and the creation the players made. And the second one is interdependence, which means that we use AI to connect players to make sure that they feel they are part of the community. And right now we are working towards our um our end, which is a digital Western world. We are trying to shift from exploring maps to exploring societies. It's a world where the drama is unscripted and the possibilities are infinite. So Lee, I want, I want to turn back to you. You know, you've made this jump now from gaming to education. You know, what are some lessons that you think you've learned from working in game design that you're now bringing to this new industry? Yeah, well, let's let's first take a look at the pain of education, I guess, and I'm sure many of you in room of sat in, maybe not in Victorian time classrooms, but classrooms don't haven't really changed that much for many, many hundreds of years. And when you see us going into online lessons or Zoom meetings and everything else that we do, this kind of set up of sitting there all in a row and listening to a teacher and not really engaging with with the with the learning material and really focused on the learning outcome. So to the next slide please, Nicholas. So then. You know, at at EF sector we really care about making sure the student achieves the learning outcome, and I think, you know, many, many educational services around the world attempt it, but I think a big part of this is how to unlock the skill of the teacher. So what you're seeing on the screen here is the teacher is in front of a green screen. We've taken all the key lessons from live streaming and video gaming and brought it into this unique experience where the teacher is front and center inside the content. We run about 5 million classes, online classes like this every year, and you know that amazing set of information and data that we're getting now which will come to my next section in a minute. But I think what you can see from here on screen is, is, you know how we're taking lessons like immersion. making sure the teacher has agency and is able to teach how they want, how the student is able to learn how they want some of these visual tricks, and what you're seeing now on screen is the next iteration of that as we move into a world of agentic AI teaching. Now, you know, I should preface this to say we're not here to remove the human out of the loop. That's not the intention at all, but a big part of the world that we deploy our platform and solution in the global South, there's a huge shortage of teachers, maybe about 5 or 6 million shortage of English teachers, 8 million STEM teachers. So where we, you know, we're operating today maybe in Brazil in All across Latin America we care about giving those students that real opportunity to transform their lives and if that means then bringing AI into the class in a unique way and blending all of these different gaming elements, then you know this, this is, this, this really ultimately is that future. Um, you're seeing some different, different aspects on screen. This one now is just more about role playing for some different, different target segments, maybe not, maybe not in school, but we've deployed now to 4 million students across Latin America. We have new pilots rolling out across the world and again, like I said, the goal here is to now put agentech AI into the classroom, but there to support and sit alongside the teacher all the time. So high end, we take the slide down now, you know, I, I like going to turn to you. So what exactly are you doing specifically at Xbox in terms of kind of what you're doing with AI? Right, so, uh, you know, at Xbox we're really thinking about how to leverage AI to elevate the gaming experience, elevate that player experience, um, so one of the things we Launched recently is a gaming co-pilot. We launched this about 2 months ago on mobile and on PC, and the idea is that when you're playing a game, you can bring up a copilot and you can have a conversation while you're playing. You can, if you get stuck somewhere, you can ask questions and be like, hey, what's this boss? How do I, you know, what are some tips and trick tricks for getting past this boss? Um, you know, tell me about, I forgot what this mission was about. Tell me about the mission, and that might seem like super simple ideas, but it really, I think, um, brings to life gaming and what gaming is about because, you know, when, when a developer is making a game, they want the player to have that flow experience, to be um immersed in the game. As Lee said, to be really kind of deeply focused, but what happens is, you know, you get to a puzzle and you just can't solve it, and then you're like flipping to your browser, to your search engine, you're searching for stuff, you get on YouTube, you forget what you're doing, and then much later, maybe like a couple of weeks later, you come back to the game. So what we want to do is we want to make gaming even more fun, even more exciting through gaming co-pilot, and we're also thinking. About other AI features whether that's AI that sits on your device or AI that sits in the cloud that really highlights and makes special the gaming experiences you have with your friends. As someone who is constantly trying to look for the solution to a puzzle or a boss fight and not being able to find anything but a 3 hour long YouTube video. It can be tricky as a player, I can tell you, you know, but I want to go back to you. You know, given that you are working on designing and developing this video game, you know, beyond the AI conversation, what are some other lessons that you think can be learned about, you know, how to keep people engaged, how to make these games fun, how to keep them playing your game for a long period of time like MMOs are supposed to be? What are some lessons that that you've learned? Yeah, the first one would be, um, Will be the player agency and then the second one, I think it will be the social connection. Uh, for the player agency, we find out that uh the beauty and freedom is like the universal language across the scene. It's very essential to provide high freedom to for the players. Nowadays for younger players, the hardcore not only means combat, but also means the deep expression. The players will be willing to create and share what they created to Douyin, to Xiaohongshu, which will bring back a lot of traffic for the game. The second one is, um, social connection. We want to make the players will be needed in the game and um it will drive them back to the game in the long term. You know, Lee, I, I want to build on something that you sort of talked about as part again, lessons from the game industry to the rest of, to the rest of the industry, you know. Gamification, it is a buzzword. It's people talk about, oh, we have to gamify this. We have to give people scores. We have to turn this into a game, and that's how we engage people and I know from our, from our briefing chats that this is not a thing that you necessarily endorse. So, so, so what's the better way to think about about this idea of gamification and what should designers actually do? I mean, following on what what Betta just mentioned that that idea of player agency. is true in learning, you know, we, our platform is student driven, so by giving the student the ability to kind of drive that learning outcome as much as by themselves with that teacher there to facilitate, I think it's ultimately the like the core thing to lean in on. Um, you know, this idea of gamification has been around for many years. It tends to manifest itself as high scores, streaks, you know, all of these things that are that are meaningful for maybe certain social media products. But at the end of the day, like if you, if you're, if you're there to learn, you have to put in the time and then the effort. There's too much conversation. In around, you know, I can make learning faster. I can make learning easier, but really what you should be focused on is how to make learning more engaging, how to make learning learning more meaningful, and then from that point, take those elements to keep you in the learning experience, the same as keeping you in a gaming experience and finding ways to keep you motivated, motivated as a student. And you know, for everyone in here, we're all life lifelong learners, otherwise you know you guys wouldn't be here in this conference. So again, a lot of what we're talking about is how to maintain that ability to learn from, from the moment you start in school to the moment you're, you're, you know, it's. End of your days, but ultimately finding the ways to engage and bring all of these gaming elements that are really what gaming is about, which is like I said, that that giving the player control and agency and letting them take the lead and the fun that comes from that. Hi Anne, I want to go back to you and talk a bit more about kind of what Microsoft's doing with AI and gaming. I know there's this, there's the muse model, and I'm not going to remember everything that it can do, but there's, but, but you're experimenting with kind of these, these more expansive AI. AI possibilities, including for things like game preservation. I want you to talk a bit more about these other kind of more experimental things that you're trying to do. Um, well, earlier in the year in February, our research partners in Microsoft Research, they published a paper in Nature, and this is the first kind of video game AI model publication in nature. And what they did was they took a video game, and then they trained an AI model. On all the telemetry, all the footage of that video game, so that the AI model could basically simulate a playable version of the game without the original game engine. So earlier you heard Rockwell Group talk about unreal engine and talk about um how you know, putting visualization into the engine. Well, imagine in the future an AI model encompasses all. All of that and can simulate the world, um, whether that be a game world or a hotel interior, and it is all inside the model. And I think that the real capability of that is that now the AI can allow you to express to prompt for what you really want to do with that world, for what you want to do in that space. So as an example, this publication was called the Muse Model in nature. Um, as an example, the research. Team, they discovered that the AI model could do certain things like you could cut cut out a character and you could drop it into as you're playing a game, you could just cut and paste a character into your level and suddenly the AI model sees the character that you've just cut and pasted out of 2D pixels and starts animating it and starts making it come alive. So immediately it changes what you could do with video games. And I think this really can spark imagination about what is the future of play. And I think the challenge is always we don't quite, we we need that imagination. We need everybody in this room and creators across the world to think about what new things that you could do with gaming through the use of AI and I think that will really help us drive this new capability. And these are new models. This is not GPT, this is not Gemini, this is a new kinds of models that models that we call world models. Um, and as part of this, you know, we had a discussion about game preservation and um it's kind of a side topic, but game preservation is really interesting, you know, we engage a lot in backwards compatibility, making sure that all of the games of past generations can be played on Xbox on future devices. At the same time, I know that, you know, I love. And I love Dig Doug, um, and Cubbert, but younger, but that's because I'm more into the retro, the nostalgia of it, right? But if I put my 10 year old daughter in front of Cubbert, um, or Dig Dug, she's going to get bored very easily. And what I've discovered is that, you know, there are, uh, game preservation platforms out there, something like Antstream. I think is a fantastic platform and what they've discovered is in order to introduce games to a new audience, they've had to take the essence of the game and create new experiences. So they take a game and they allow you to jump directly to the key point in the game that's the most fun, and you can play and you can compete with your friends. So it's not exactly preservation of the original game, it's Introducing the essence of that experience to to a new generation, and I think there is now capability for AI for AI to learn, um, the backward, back catalog of games and to be able to allow new generations to. Experience these games in new ways. So these are all still speculative, um, but this is some of the research that we are driving forward in order to open up new capabilities for, for games that, you know, also beta is working on as well. Well, I think with that kind of very expansive view of what AI is bringing to the gaming industry, what the gaming industry brings more broadly to design questions and other industries, I want to thank Le Haiyan, Beta. Thank you so much for talking us through this huge industry today. Please give him a round of applause. Thanks.

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MASTER CLASS: TAPPING INTO WHAT MAKES THE MOST EFFECTIVE COOs

Gullnaz BAIG, Executive Director, Angsana Council Evi FUELLE, Director, Global Policy, Credo AI Zee Kin YEONG, CEO, Singapore Academy of Law Moderator: Clay CHANDLER,  FORTUNE

Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024: In Search of A Governance Model that works

So this is a, a very rich and complicated topic just like the region itself. Um I want to start maybe if we could just thinking about the opportunities we heard earlier in the discussion about whether uh uh customized largest language models could be devised for Southeast Asia, that there were all kinds of commercial opportunities that would uh fall in line with that. And I'm wondering if the same logic applies to uh governance models. Um What if you have thoughts as to what the, what the advantages might be of being able to come up with some kind of common framework or maybe we can think about what that framework might be uh down the, down the road a bit. But, but just talk about why the region might have an incentive, whether it's commercial or otherwise to kind of band together. Do you want to take the first shot of that? Yeah, sure. Firstly, thank you for having me on this panel. I sit at a unique intersection being the director for and final Council. We sit pretty close to start out various tech companies being from the tech sector ourselves. But at the same time we engage quite regularly with various governments in the region. And I think what we see is in terms of ASEAN integrity. And there being a digital economy per se by 2030 we could be the third largest economy in the world. If we were one country, there is extensive business potential. But the challenges lie in the fact that it's actually very hard to go across border. So the ability for us to leverage on the true potential that is offered by Southeast Asia sometimes hampered by land of say, for example, simple things like business recognition across border, some issues around cross border data flow, cyber security standards. Um Just to introduce a few that I'm quite sure my co panelists will dig into. Um So if we can get a framework together, there is this huge market out there for us and you do see some bigger markets in the region leaning towards protecting their own domestic market by putting up regulatory barriers. So that sometimes gets in the way of developing a regional framework. Really interesting. So and it's, it's an interesting, it's a, a big opportunity is a market, but it's also a big opportunity for from an investment standpoint. Like if you're a VC investor, the ability to be able to invest in a company, a company that operates across an entire region uh versus just in a single market uh is, is huge. And I I like your point about um you know, it, being the third largest economy, it's not only that, it's, it's large. If you think about it in an aggregate, it's also that it's got great demographics, most of the, uh, in individual economies in it and nearly all of them are right now growing at very respectable high growth rates compared to many of the other world's economies. So, if you think about that down the, down the road, it really, it, it kind of adds up you. What, what's your take on it? Yeah, if I could add to the comments you've already made, I think uh at Creta A I, we're working with enterprises that are highly regulated and they are global in scope and they're operating in these markets all over the world. So not only in this region but globally, they're looking for that commonality. How can they create a governance framework that is gonna stand the test of time? That is not a brittle uh market that only works in one jurisdiction or only satisfies particular risk uh requirements. So we're constantly looking for those elements of commonality. And I think that the benefit of that for businesses is building trust over time in different markets with different uh regulators. Uh but also having certainty with which they can operate and continue to operate in the long term. So I think we've seen a lot of commonality um even between things like the EU A I Act and the White House executive order on A I in terms of what the requirements are from enterprises, things like having comprehensive A I governance risk management systems, transparency reporting, some form of public notice impact assessments and A I registry. Things like this are, are sort of the common elements we're already seeing emerge. How about how about you? I know you work carefully with it. Yeah, so I personally have been working in this space of convergence for many years around data policies and A I and what what and the Academy of Law actually has a think tank, the Asian Business Law Institute that does work firmly in this space. I think it is utterly important for us to really take a step back and look at Southeast Asia as a whole, right? We need to understand the maturity of the economies and also the technology, right? And to I think majority of Southeast Asian nations are likely to be deployed and users of A I systems. Now, the good thing is that there is a fairly consistent set of principles around responsible A I, you can point to, for example, the OECD A I principles, right? As a set of principles. Now, how do you take a set of principles like this, bring it into Southeast Asia and achieve two goals? One to make it a lot easier for companies that are trying to bring products and services into Southeast Asia to very quickly localize the same products and make it a lot easier. The second is of course, how to assist companies in Southeast Asia to also adapt to that and grow out and expand beyond Southeast Asia. Uh We, we have actually a very, very useful platform ASEAN, right. And through ASEAN, it is possible to develop uh a, a governance framework for responsible A I modeled after and looking very much like the OECD princip and use that as a mapping standard so that as individual companies develop their own national frameworks, they're able to map into something like that. The ASEAN framework can be moderated, right, to suit the situation for ASEAN, which is largely deployments, right of, of A I system and also to, to adjust it such that it's a lot easier, the companies and the the the governments working in this space really interesting. I think there are several things there that uh have caught my ear. Um One is, you know ASEAN as a, as a framework for this, there have been, there's an ongoing discussion really about how ASEAN might uh kind of work together to come up with a common framework. Um How, how far along do you think that is? And is it uh is it, is it making progress? Where do, where do we stand right now? I mean, obviously, uh people think about the eu and they think of it as being fractious and always arguing and disagreeing and they haven't seen anything until they've seen Southeast Asia right, much more complex, diverse region and harder to, to come together. So where, where do we stand? I mean, I don't know how many of you here are technologist or from the sector, you know how fast technology develops and then you've worked and interacted with governments. I was from the public sector, um government, public sector don't move that quickly. And with A I particularly the break net speed at which different companies are racing to get ahead and get towards AGI governments are never gonna keep up, let alone a multilateral institution like Asian. So you need a framework but you also very quickly need to develop meaningful public, private partnerships. Um And that can help forward the goal. Um So, so that I'm going to pause back because I can talk and toy about this. No, that's really critical and it's interesting, I mean, Singapore story definitely uh underscores that, but either of you have kind of thoughts about how far along we are in terms of discussions about a framework. Well, so, so iiii I, I'm a glass half full kind of person, right? Yeah. So because I I look at it from the perspective is that from the perspective that number one ASEAN is not like the eu the way we are put together is very different. So we can't expect the cohesiveness, cohesiveness of eu in terms of policy making. Second, imagine if we didn't have ASEAN, right? So while there's a lot that can be said for moving faster for this kind of organization of Association of nations. This is the speed that everyone's comfortable with. It's better than not having something. But I would say um for A I governance is probably is likely to take the same kind of pathway that ASEAN took for data protection. Just imagine back in 2016, the ASEAN Ministers for Tele Telecommunications adopted a set of data protection principles for ASEAN progressively over the years, they built out the data management framework model contractual clauses to assist in the cross border transfer of personal data. It takes time, but we've concerted efforts, uh things can be developed. Now, these are still voluntary frameworks. They are not binding on the government, but at least they exist and once they exist and it's put out by an organization like ASEAN, there is a bit of impetus to say let's make use of them and let's try to be coherent. I can imagine that for A I, the same path might be taken as well. I think the first step has already been taken. The uh the the responsible A I framework has been, has been set out, right? So I think we can expect more of this down the road, but a lot of work still needs to be done by us in the room, right? As business owners to, to really reinforce that message as we are talking to policymakers and governments to say that look ASEAN put up something, right? Can we just make sure that when you introduce national policies be as coherent as possible? Right? Use it as a mapping standard because it helps businesses make sure that their internal compliance program is easy to manage. It makes it a lot easier to deploy products and services across Southeast Asia. So I don't claim to be an expert on, on kind of the ASEAN discussions about this, But I was struck to notice that there was a kind of big delegation of folks from the Eu who trooped to Southeast Asia last year and tried to persuade everyone to, you know, let's link up, let's have a common standard for, for both our markets, not just one market and to adopt our kind of uh GDPR uh framework and then it'll be easier for companies and it makes a lot of sense, but the response was not very enthusiastic from Southeast Asia. And surprisingly, what the Southeast Asian said is actually, we're very suspicious of over regulation because we're afraid that we're going to miss out on some of some of the benefits of, of innovation and these technologies will pass us by. Um So should we be discouraged by that or in a way, can we be encouraged by it? If we think that at least in that regard, all these countries seem to have sort of a common outlook, there seemed to be something resembling a consensus on that, do you have any thoughts about that? Um, I'll jump in but I would love to hear from my colleague here too. Um, we, we're sort of a mix a hybrid region. Right. We're very diverse. Um, we, we love each other yet. At the same time, we're always looking over our shoulder and wondering what our neighbors are doing. Um, so our model has always tended to be a hybrid of both regulate when we need to regulate or we want to regulate and regulation tend to come fast and quick here. We always need to keep a sense of the pulse. Um But at the same time, we like to keep an ecosystem, eh that's open to innovation, to test things out. And we like that because what you see happening in the eu is regulation comes up pretty quickly and to a certain extent it stifles innovation. So how do you do this balance? And I like what's happening in Thailand, I like what's happening in Singapore where governments are reaching out and thinking about how do I partner up with the private sector to think about meaningful applications of A I and I agree with my panels here in Southeast Asia, we're at the stage of application, not necessarily building up the technology from ground up per se. So governments really need to think about what makes sense for my country and to ensure that the infrastructure available in the country supports the application. So, for example, in Thailand, Thailand 4.0 for example, looks at industry application of A I and you know how they're gunning for a lot of investments in Thailand and making use of A I to automate certain technology, certain part of their manufacturing is putting them ahead of the game. Yeah, Thailand is kind of streets ahead of almost everyone in the region in terms of adopting solar. Yeah, but also in terms of data centers, for example, like Malaysia is gunning for tier three data centers to make sure that cyber security integrity, electricity availability supports the ecosystem. And similarly, in Singapore, we lifted our moratorium in late 2023 but plays very high standards for the next generation of data centers that's opening up. So really government's role here is to partner up with private sector and to ensure that the ecosystem supports innovation and development of enterprise. So I want to dig a little more deeply into that because I, I think there's there's a lot to unpack there. But uh do you have a thought about it? I I think just building on what you were talking about uh clay with the campaign for from the eu to sort of um do something similar around A I here in the region as they did prior to GDPR, I think that uh where enterprises are, are trying to do something different is looking beyond concepts like being a good steward of the data and thinking about how A I systems interact with each other and the unique risks related to A I. And for that reason, there's a little bit different approach taken to the regulatory aspect. So the EU has the ability to be united in its enforcement of the EU A I act, which I think is a big differentiating factor for why they're, you've got to have a much more kind of consensus approach here. Just, just one little agenda for that trade mission you mentioned, right? So while they came and as you mentioned, they wanted to no evangelized GDPR, there wasn't any pick up, right? But what came out of that, what came out of that was actually a joint effort between the European Commission, right, and ASEAN. And they came together and they did a mapping of the standard contractual clauses and model contractual clauses that came out of ASEAN standard contractual clauses that came out of eu because they recognize that trade needs to carry on between these two regions. So let's have some effort to try and match and make it a lot easier for businesses. So while there's a recognition that maybe some of these policies are not entirely suitable, but there is a recognition that trade needs to flow, data needs to flow. And is that kind of spirit I think that we need to encourage and I want to leave some time to take some questions from the floor. If anybody's got burning queries, put your hand up and wave at us and we'll, we'll recognize you. Um You mentioned the sort of things that uh many of these, these Southeast Asian nations have in common in terms of what they're looking for is a regulatory framework. But of course, there are individual, you know, specific issues that relate to A I that often kind of put them at odds against each other. Uh Data centers is one, you know, as soon as the moratorium happened in Singapore, uh all the operators rushed across to Johor instead of, you know, in Indonesia started putting up data centers there until there were more data centers across the border than they were here. And then the government went. Hm, maybe this is not what we want. So that's a kind of a friend of his example. The other one that's fascinating to me and I don't know, maybe none of you want to comment on this, but I spend a little bit of time looking in the Philippines and the Philippines is very ambivalent about, about A I because of the job uh uh implications, right? You've got a very big uh population of people who are employed, working at these call centers. And that's probably going to be one of the first places where companies are going to figure out that they can roll out uh you know, interactive chat bots with generative A I. And so they're much less enthusiastic about how, how do you see that is that, are there similar tensions in other, other economies as well? And are those insurmountable or there's a, there's a really good research piece done by Trisha Linkedin where, where they kind of did a study on the extent to which A I was gonna disrupt the employment of an individual or this place or augment or it's completely non applicable? Right. And this study was done on Indonesia. So for the bulk of the population A I would augment has the potential to augment. So what government, since this panel is about government and governance, what governments need to start thinking about is how do I support my workforce in thinking about how to effectively leverage A I? And similarly, for enterprises, we actually did a research on A I and the BPO sector in the Philippines. And yes, there's a potential for massive displacement of the workforce. And so it's about how quickly can they go further up in the, in the packing order of sale sets, right. Um So, so it's a challenge, what you do see happening in Southeast Asia is still in that stage where we're figuring out adoption of A I. So we've got a bit of breathing space here for governments to think about how to effectively manage this. I think even beyond the comments you made, um thinking about how A I can supplement the existing workforce or better enable people to do even more beyond what they are currently doing. Um and the integral part of that is designing A I in a responsible and trustworthy way. If an enterprise is able to accurately see who is using A I as a company and how using it, they can actually maximize the benefits of things like turn of A I understanding and sharing prompts amongst employees. So that, you know, this is how my enterprise is using it. This is what's working for my employees. This is what's not working and putting your own guard rails around it, I think is a really important part to it, augmenting the workforce as opposed to replacing. So a lot of this is it creates communication challenges and responsibilities, not just for companies, employers but also for for our government to say, oh look, this is going to be net positive for all of us. There are going to be some winners and losers. But trust us, we're going to do what we can to try to adjust and adjudicate that get people the skills they need. Yeah, that's hard. That's hard to do. Well, I'm going to just add to say that. Well, I can't speak for Philippines and call center. I am quite involved in Singapore and legal sector and legal sector is one of those that expected, expected to be disrupted by especially generative A I. But I think it all falls on us wherever we are to actually take the bull by the horns, right? So the Academy of Law has articulated a four pronged approach to this. Number one, we actually need to just grapple with this and find ways to teach our lawyers, not only to use A I, but also to teach them differently. Because A I tools are going to make their way into tools that will help them become more productive and tools that their clients are going to use. We need to work with solution providers to get A I solutions into the market so that they are using it, right? And of course for us, right, we also want to make sure that the lawyers learn how to do things like pro engineering, right? And of course our own products and services, we need to also use A I to enhance our feature set. So it's really up to us where we are seated to try and get something done, right? And not just wait for the disruption to happen, but let's try and get ahead of that. Sounds like some, some thorny challenges that is unfortunately all the time that we have. But please join me in thanking our panelists for a really fascinating discussion.

 SUSIE GHARIB: David, thank you so much for joining us. Your company, PGIM, is part of Prudential Financial, the huge insurance company. But many people don't know much about it. So tell us a little bit about what PGIM does. DAVID HUNT: PGIM is the 10th largest asset manager in the world. We manage $1.4 trillion, that's with a T, assets. And we do it across all of the major asset classes. In addition to public fixed income and public equities, we also are the second largest real estate investor in the world. And we have a very large private credit business. In fact, we're the third largest alternative player in the world. So we have a really broad scale of asset classes. In addition, we play very much as a global asset manager. We operate more than 30 offices across 16 countries, and we operate our business very much to serve both institutional and retail customers right around the globe. SUSIE GHARIB: Well, during the pandemic these past six months, you've been writing and talking a lot about the importance of stakeholder capitalism. And you say that one of the silver linings during this dark time is that many companies are stepping up and addressing the interests of their employees, and their customers, their communities that they serve, not just their shareholders. What are some of the changes that you can see? DAVID HUNT: Well, I think one of the really encouraging changes has been the level of investment and care that people have taken with their employees. I think you've seen company CEOs right across America, and indeed, in Europe as well, making sure that through this, their employees are well taken care of, that they have the tools that they need. They've stepped up in a fairly big way on education and helping people get settled in to work from home. And that investment in employee, they haven't viewed as an expense, but they've viewed that as a sign of future productivity in their employees. And I think that's very promising indeed. SUSIE GHARIB: So what else has surprised you as you look back at what some of these companies have been doing these past few months? DAVID HUNT: I've been really pleased to see the level of giving back into local communities that's happened. If I just take Prudential as an example, we've always been a major player in Newark, which has been our hometown for 140 years. But really with the pandemic, we have stepped up in a very big way from everything from contributing masks and protective equipment to actually upping our funding of a lot of minority owned and other businesses in the area. And many other companies have done the same. And I think it's been very heartwarming to see the care that people have taken in their communities. SUSIE GHARIB: Well, I was interested to learn that well before coronavirus hit, PGIM had already been supporting the communities that it serves. How did this all come about? Was this something that evolved naturally or was it intentional, something that you made happen? DAVID HUNT: I think it's been very intentional. It's a very important part of the character and culture of Prudential and of PGIM. The notion of service and the notion of giving back and that we really are here as part of a larger social fabric is very much how we think of ourselves. And so this is not new, but I would say that it's caused us to step up our level of engagement. And I think that that's been very positive. SUSIE GHARIB: Well, actually it seems that there is an expectation these days from employees and also from the public for business leaders to speak up and address social issues. Do you think that the job of CEO has changed? Do you have a moral responsibility to address these social issues? DAVID HUNT: Susie, I'm really glad you raised that, because I think that the expectation has changed. If I look at many of our clients, and many of them are big public pension plans, corporate plans, they're very interested in what our stance is on issues of diversity, issues around climate change, issues around governance. They're very interested in how we employ ESG technology to evaluate investments. And I think that this is a journey that they've been on for a while. But I think it's taken an enormous step forward now with the pandemic. And I expect that will continue. And personally, I welcome that. I think that that will lead to companies that have a broader set of stakeholders in how they actually govern themselves. SUSIE GHARIB: One of these days, the pandemic will come to an end. What's your prediction about the business community's commitment to being a good corporate citizen? Is this a short-term thing or a long-term commitment? DAVID HUNT: So I really do believe, I mean, again, we invest in companies for the long term. And companies that really do have a purpose and companies that do serve a broad range of stakeholders, in general, do better for their shareholders over the long term. And so I believe more and more companies will discover that through this pandemic. And I am very optimistic that the changes we've seen more recently will actually become part of the new normal as we come back out of this pandemic. SUSIE GHARIB: David, looking ahead, let's say two to three years from now, what meaningful changes would you like to see when it comes to the topics that we've been talking about? DAVID HUNT: So I think that the recent focus by many CEOs on social equality has been really, really important. And I have been very pleased to see the broad range of CEOs speaking out very openly and very publicly on taking an anti-racist stance. For ourselves, I'll just give you one specific example. We have for a long time had a very productive emerging managers program, where we invest in small asset managers that are largely minority owned. And these are very talented people who have very good investment track records but aren't getting large enough really to be on an institutional platform. And we work with them in kind of an accelerator fashion to get them to the point where they can get access. And, of course, when we invest in them, that provides a bit of a halo effect as well. And we've been really pleased at the success we've had in helping build more minority firms in asset management, which we desperately need. SUSIE GHARIB: David, that is impressive. And on top of that, it's a good example of your leadership during the nearly 10 years that you've been the CEO of PGIM. And I'm sure that during that time, you really haven't faced a leadership challenge like this global pandemic crisis. In what ways would you say that this crisis has changed or evolved the way you lead the company? DAVID HUNT: I think that the requirement on leaders in this last six months has been very different than normal. So often, we focus on strategic thinking, on some of the harder skills that we're all brought up to believe are critical for CEOs. But I would have said that in the last six months, motivation, empathy, compassion, and resiliency are probably much more. And if I think about how I'm spending my time, it's really with our employees and with our clients listening, making sure that I understand what they're going through, and providing as much support as I can to people who are in, no question, very unusual and difficult circumstances. 

David Hunt says the notion of service and giving back is part of the character and culture of the company.

PGIM CEO: Our business operates as part of a "larger social fabric"

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David Hunt says giving back is part of the company culture.

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