Habi

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CTW 2023-Habi

Colombian proptech unicorn Habi brings peace of mind to homeowners by simplifying the sometimes arcane and difficult process of valuing, buying, and selling a home in Colombia and Mexico. Lower- to middle-income homeowners in these countries tend to turn to their neighbors or doormen to deduce their home’s value, but that often leads to inaccurate estimates. In the past two years, Habi has helped 557,000 homeowners in Colombia and Mexico get free and accurate estimates of their home’s value in less than three minutes with its Habimetro tool. Habi offers the tool at no cost to customers to help aid transparency in often informal real estate markets in Colombia and Mexico. Habi makes money through other products such as Market Maker, through which it directly buys homes before remodeling them and putting them back on the market.

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A new map of global growth is emerging as real estate, advanced manufacturing, and technology come together to shape the cities of tomorrow. Across the Gulf and other emerging hubs, rising demand for luxury living, cross-border investment, and industrial transformation are redefining where and how cities grow. Hear insights from top leaders shaping this transformation as they explore how design, infrastructure, and sustainability are building the next generation of connected, competitive, and future-ready cities.

Building the Cities of Tomorrow

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Good afternoon everyone, um. It's great pleasure to, to be here and to, to welcome the ad on stage and, um, one of the most dynamic developers in the region around the world, um, for the super luxury, uh, real estate buyer, which, so you have your checkbooks ready to, to, to buy after this session, because this man is a great salesman. Among other people, he introduced, uh, Donald Trump to The the region and, and got him investing here and being a business partner. I wanted to, I mean, our theme today is building communities, the cities of tomorrow. And I suppose I'm, I'm gonna start with this question about the luxury and and how you build in a way that does build community rather than building just exclusive, disconnected places for For the super rich, how do you think about that challenge? You see, building comes from a demand as as opposed to what people think we don't want to just go and build and look for customers. We first identify. The demand. And once you've identified the demand, we have to service it. From the luxury segment. Yes, we see a lot of people demanding luxury products, especially in gateway cities. And we've seen a very nice trend in the last 4 to 5 years where people are looking for the limited editions of watches and cars and all the luxuries in life, and we said, why not do the limited edition of real estate for luxury real estate, which is the co-branded real estate. Obviously we co-brand with the companies that have a pedigree in interiors. They have a DNA in interiors. And at the same time, The core brand of luxury product is giving you a very good ROI because The demand is high and the supply is short. The brand is an aspirational brand, but for the luxury segment also, we always say we're giving you a lot of ROE. So ROI is a return on investment, ROE is a return on ego. Hm And so How do you do that in a way that is You know, helping to build a whole society out in the way that you're, you've done across the Gulf region. I mean, because luxury. And the super rich are essential, I think, in your view to building out a successful economy, a successful growth story. How, how do you make sure that those aren't little. Sort of enclaves that are separate from the rest, they actually drive the kind of vision that we're seeing here in Saudi Arabia. Yeah, but You come from the UK. Take Central London, for example. Central London is an area which is, which has evolved to be an area for the super rich, but at the same time it's an inclusive area. You have a social housing program. You have a lot of people who are servicing those super rich who are working in those areas are living in those social houses provided as part of the social housing program. It's very important when we think about these communities. You're not going to go and build a remote community and build walls around it. You have to put it in a place where it serves as an anchor. Because a luxury community in a city serves as an anchor for the city as the image of the city, and for example, we're seeing here in Riyadh, the evolution of an area called Daraya and Daraya Gate is one of the most important projects in the kingdom, and this project is serving to serve, yes. The rich and the super rich, but at the same time, it's inclusive. It's all, it also has a lot of developments around it for the people who are gonna work in that project and it has in it the entertainment aspect, the retail, the retail aspect and the cultural aspect. What makes you such a believer in, in the Gulf as a region for, you know, doing your kind of long-term real estate development projects that you're doing? You see, I've been working in the Gulf for 21 years, so we, we practice what we preach. We don't look at the, at the, at, at the Gulf as Riyadh and Jeddah or Doha. What is happening today in the GCC with an economy the size of the economy of Italy. Around $2 trillion. Now this region in terms of its dynamism, in terms of its infrastructure development, the evolution of its governance, the lifestyle, the speed and the stability has definitely one of the highest potential as areas to develop going forward. And just like Italy has at least 10 destination cities, we deserve in the Gulf to be looked at as one region with at least 10 destination cities from Riyadh to Jeddah, to Mecca, to Medina, to Dubai to Abu Dhabi to Doha. We should stop looking at it. This is Qatar competing with Dubai or Dubai competing with this. It's one region. And what you're seeing today, the general, the generalized tourist visa, the roads being built between the cities that the trains that are being that is connecting the cities, the massive investment in airlines and airports in these cities. This is creating a destination that if you're not investing in in the next 10 years. I don't know where you're putting your money, and this is a region, I mean, in Saudi Arabia is yet ready for investment by foreigners, you see, the law will take effect. In approximately 2 months, so January 1st, 2026, it's not a directive anymore, it's a law where Saudi has designated several projects to allow freehold foreign ownership, and if you invest 4 million riyals, you're also allowed to get a residency for life. And this is a very critical element coming into Saudi because we've seen it in other countries and we've seen the traction it brought to other countries, but once you do that in the biggest economy in the GCC, this is something different. This is why as a company we are investing 20 billion riyals just to bring in foreign buyers and foreign investors to the kingdom and Maybe I shouldn't say this, but we've tested it. So we've tested it twice, and we have to date 40 nationalities who invested with us in our projects in Riyadh and Jeddah, and this shows you even without the law coming into effect, people are interested to come and invest here as the innovators in a new destination. Now as you look around the world, I mean, your clients are looking at cities like London, they're looking at Miami, they're looking at New York as well as looking at the Gulf. How would you weigh up London, say, versus Riyadh or Jeddah at the moment? You see, we believe that the savvy investor today will look at 50% in the new economies and the most attractive new economies are the GCC and 50% in the old economies, and this is what we are advising our investors to do. And would you sort of be able to sell London after hearing the Chancellor this morning? You see, at 17% stamp duty, you're trying to tax us to death. So we're hoping this will be relaxed, but again, as a developer, such actions unfortunately will reduce the prices in the market, will help us to come in and wait for the reversal of ideas on taxing the wealthy to death to build again. Now you partner with a lot of other brands like we mentioned, you partnered with Lamborghini in Spain, you partnered with the Trump family in various ways. Why do you partner and how do you decide? Uh, who you partner with and and and and make those choices. You see, we, we, we are a new company. We are a company that is 4.5 years old. We've done a lot in 4.5 years, including listing on the London Stock Exchange and recently getting into the ESCC category. When you launch in a new city, you need awareness, you need credibility. You either can build this over 4 to 5 years, or you can shorten that period by bringing a brand to help you. And one of the main reasons we did co-branding was to gain awareness and credibility very quickly. Mm And a brand like Trump, that's, you know, that that that's so global. You're you're going to drag me into politics now. I can tell you that I started working with the Trump Organization in 2012, 4 years before any politics, and we went after the luxury, the opulence, the credibility, that big stage, that great customer service. This was the main attraction for the Trump brand. So what, um, if we look forward 10 years, um, Do you think, how, how will the, the different cities in the Gulf look compared to America or, or, or far East Asia in terms of having paid off as investments? You see, We have almost Perfect formula. You have the investments in infrastructure, and when I say infrastructure, people think roads and uh sewage. No, we're talking schools, universities, uh, AI technology. Airports, airlines, connectivity. And a very important part of that infrastructure where the GCC today wins over so many of those legacy economies, which is personal safety and security, and I'm sure you told me you've been here for a while, you can feel that you can put on your, your, your best stuff and just walk in the street and you're not afraid, you're not afraid to send your children to school or to university. So personal safety is very important part of that infrastructure. Then we have the governance, which includes the tax policies. Then you have the lifestyle that is being created here. Add to that I know you come from the UK, maybe you wouldn't like this. The stability and the swiftness of action. This is the perfect formula. We still need some maybe cryptocurrency legislation which will help also, but we have almost a perfect formula. Alright, well, thank you very much. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

The global entertainment and media market is on track to reach $3.5 trillion by 2029, even as audiences’ attention is splintered, viewing habits shift, and trust in traditional sources remains fragile. Media leaders are reinventing storytelling, distribution, and revenue models in an era defined by short-form video, generative AI, and subscriber-driven platforms. What does it take to earn lasting trust? How are new consumption patterns rewriting the rules for content and news? 

Audience, Trust, and the New Media Era

Transformative technologies like autonomous vehicles, electric air taxis, circular battery solutions, and AI-driven traffic systems are reshaping transportation worldwide. Global electric vehicle sales grew more than 25% last year, and billions of dollars are being invested in smart infrastructure and logistics. The shift to smarter, cleaner, and more efficient transport is accelerating. Leaders now face a pivotal question: How can they join, shape, and scale this transformation to unlock economic opportunity, cut emissions, and drive growth? 

Driving Toward the Next Generation of Mobility

Tony, we're so glad you're here. Thank you for joining us. My pleasure. Um, I recently took my first ride in an autonomous vehicle. It was in San Francisco, and it was thrilling. I felt like I was on a very safe amusement park ride, but it sort of left me thinking, what is the problem that the autonomous vehicle is designed to solve? For me it was just kind of fun. I, when I need to drive somewhere, I drive myself, but there are some real social purposes and social goals behind autonomous vehicles. For, from your point of view, why does the world need AV? OK, so. Uh, that question is quite straightforward. They think about why do we need washing machines? Uh, why do we need programmable switches. Before the invention of program switches, we have lots of job opportunities for human operators to plug two phone lines together, but now we can find it can done by computer or machine. Think about our civilization. It's just lots of things in can be. done by a human being or can be done by the by the animals like horses, cattles, and gradually replaced by the machine power. AI is the same thing, you know, nobody wants to drive for 12 hours, nobody wants to get stuck in the traffic. So what if a machine do it for you and they will never have any mistakes. I think that's the dream of most of the people and that's why. I found it right. That's why we worked so hard for more than 8 years to make this thing a reality. So that's the analogy is that the productivity of the time for all of these people who would otherwise be driving that's freed up for whatever they need, whether it's keeping up with their email or inventing the next AI so. And now you've been thinking about mobility. You've been involved in AI and computer engineering for a long time. We write 8 years old, but you're, you've been thinking about mobility for much longer. Is that correct? Yes, yes, you know, I was, I was majored in at that time image processing slash computer vision in 1990s and then in 2000 computer vision. I got a PhD in computer vision and then taught at the University of Missouri Columbia for more than. 10 years, and then, you know, all my career has been devoted to the development of so-called AI because for a while, you know, after 1950 or 1960s, AI become a taboo or very cold name and people like to use computer vision and then artificial neural network and then proper models, all kinds of related terms. And then after 2010, 2011, AI. Gain her popularity but all my life has been devoted to R&D in this area AI, yeah, in the kinds of headline grabbing innovations lately that we've seen with large language models, uh, does that benefit the autonomous vehicle field as well? Does that same kind of acceleration make the cars operate better? Yeah, for sure, because, uh, you know, people talk about this kind of large language model, but inherently. This is um based on now we more like, you know, the researchers more like college foundation model. So basic large, very large neural network model it can be used to model language, but you can basically can use to model all the knowledge, uh representing all the knowledge. Therefore, you know, uh, we develop our autonom driving systems leverage on a very rapid progress in large language model and the machine learning. I see. And now, so we've explained quite a bit, um. We write is now in I believe 30 cities in 11 countries. Is that correct? Uh, one of the countries that's coming to next is Saudi Arabia, in fact, right here to Riyadh, um. What you, you know, at this point you have experience working with governments in many, many places. What's, what kind of regulatory framework do you need for an autonomous vehicle company to thrive, you know, what kind of cooperation or uh or rule making. I think we really need policies and uh the most important thing is the the determination and the openness to autonomous driving from the political leaders or officials and of course this is a new thing and Uh, there's no perfect new thing, and, but now it's getting into a certain level of maturity that can be deployed in a large scale. I'm not saying we can supply a kind of transportation tool that is 100% safe, but we can provide something that maybe 10 times safer than human driver. Do you want to take it? If you want to take it, and then you have to generate a certain regulatory framework. One thing I want to say very a few good things about the Saudi government and also the UAE government. We plan to the in the in the Mid East to our big surprise, you know, the political leaders, local government officials, they are very open, very determined, very, uh, uh, take lots of responsibility to put all of all of this autonomous driving into reality and I think we write team team up with Uber will soon provide autonomous driving. Robo taxi in Riyadh and we will soon uh uh supply full driverless robo taxi in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Today if you go to Abu Dhabi, you can already hail Uber through auto driving vehicle, but with a safety driver, but maybe next month once we get the final approval, we will have full driverless operation just like what you have experienced in San Francisco. So truly driverless, no, not even the sort of comfort level of the person in the passenger seat could be there if something goes wrong. Is there um. An infrastructure element to this. I mean, I think of the fact that Riyadh and other cities in the kingdom have a lot of new construction, you know, up to date, top of the line broadband. Uh, but you also operate in cities like Barcelona where the infrastructure is, you know, many centuries old. Uh, are there, when there's, when the infrastructure is older, are there different kinds of challenges? Yeah, but definitely the infrastructure is old, it will cost extra challenges. But here I want to make up a point is like we've recently, I would say breathtaking progress of large language model and uh neural network. Previously, we probably need to rely a lot, a lot on the infrastructure, but now with the development of the AI technology, we start to depend less or less on the infrastructure, but still a good road, very good wireless connection is necessary. I'm very glad to see that Riad Abi Dubai, they all have very good infrastructure and um so I'm quite excited to Uh, fastly deployed, uh, auto driving vehicles in these cities in a very large scale. What are the um infrastructure is no longer a barrier to expansion, um, and I was actually surprised uh. To hear that it's relatively inexpensive, that the per unit cost of a driverless car is if, if you had asked me before our conversation how much it would be, I would have guessed a much higher number. But can you tell me the number you, yeah, I think currently the cost of for us to build our auto vehicle is a little bit above like $40,000 US dollars, $40,000 yeah, think about $40 40,000 dollars US dollars you can. You know, I got a Tesla Model X. It's much more expensive than, you know, in the US, much more expensive than 40,000. So, you know, leverage on the strong, very strong supply chain of electrical vehicles in China, right? You can get a lot of things, you know, very cost effective price. And so that's the price and the point I want to make is for technology, our product will just come and can give us very good experience. We should strive for better experience, for safety record, not for the low price. I got enough with this kind of lowered the price and flooding to the market. That's not good to anybody, but don't always try to win the competition by lower your price. I don't think that's a wise movement. I think Elon Musk recently said if just one of these things gets in a crash, we'll have national headlines for months. Um, I mean, there is that there's sort of the cultural issue statistically. Autonomous vehicles safety record has been very, very strong, but because there's still a novelty, it seems that if something does go wrong, the attention it attracts is outsized. If I crash my car into a fire hydrant, nobody cares except me. If it happens to an auto hominious vehicle, it's it's news. That always happens to the, to the invention to the new stuff, right? You know, if you just, just dig into the old news, old news old papers, right, like one airplane just invented by Wright Wright brothers, a crash of airplane will make to the headline anytime, even nobody got injured. So it's, it's, it's just like that. It's our human civilization history, but uh. Great things like uh as entrepreneurs, as inventors, we should be really serious enough, we should be brave enough to push forward for the new innovation because we live in the AI era, think about our offspring, our, our kids, if we can make this a reality, they will appreciate us. Is there also an environmental case to be made for uh for autonomous vehicles? Is is part of the case that eventually you just don't need as many vehicles and there's a leveling off of? Yeah, I think it's all depends. It's actually in order to, you need to have to collaborate with the municipal governments because, you know. Actually, there's one point I want to make, like how many cars can the city hold? It's not depends on the population, it depends on the road networks. OK. If you build 10 times more cars, they basically they just park in the parking lot, consume the resource. So if we have an efficient way to operate so that everybody can hail a car when they need it, that is the number of vehicles you need and actually that's very friendly to our environment, very efficient. Is there, uh, that makes me realize we rides products right now are all essentially, uh, for hire. There's robo buses, there's robo taxis, but there isn't say a robo minivan that I would buy to put in my own driveway. Is that part of the business model that you essentially. that you wouldn't be intending to produce these things for individual ownership. Oh, we won't. We actually, we, we will, we have already produced something that's very similar to FSD and we write uh produce advanced system actually currently. Uh, Tinao with Bosch, a European company, the number one tier one supplier in the automobile industry, we team up with Bosch has already supplied, uh, other system to Cherry, and also we, we supply other system to GAC and also we talk, talk with, we are in talk with several carEMs. I think people will need it, you know, if you have experience to drive these days. You know, it's just like using smartphones. Your old Nokia phone is good enough, durable enough, but once you switch to your smartphone, you'll never got back. Once you switch switch to FSD and you can enjoy the trip. So I, you know, many of my friends using Tesla, and they will never switch back. Given that that's possible, given that that adoption rate is as high as it is, what's the How widely does we need to be adopted? How how widely do AVs need to be adopted before the autonomous vehicle businesses are, are profitable? I mean we write, I know you, you're approaching it, but you're far from it. Uh, how, how big does the market penetration need to be before it's actually a profit making business? It's a very good question. It depends on the market, you know, if you, uh, you know, if you want to deploy your robo taxi in the market, where I have a rule, OK, I have a rule of thumb. So in any market. If the cost of taxi or car hailing service is like more than $1 per kilometer, that is a very good market. Today with the price of ride with the cost of ride we can already make profitable. Anything between 50 cents US dollar, I'm always talking about anything between 50 cents to $1 that's why you have to optimize a lot of things in order to make the whole business profitable. Anything below $50,000 it's very, very, very, very challenging. I see. But the cost of everything behind that, the construction of the vehicle and the and the AI stack itself, those are all steadily lowering. Yeah, that's a big deal. Do you have a, where do you think the industry will be five years from now, 2030? What is your vision 2030? 2030, I think all the major cities, um, you know, if they are open to auto driving, you will see like what you have seen in San Francisco today for all major cities will be like to be like that. And besides, I'm more excited about talk about within the 10 years frame, I think we can build the autonomous driving vehicle in L5, which is L5 level, which is autom driving vehicle will drive as good as human driver. I think that is just like the GPT moment these days, you know, GPT already can. Achieve a certain capability in the in the law set in a mathematic competition it's already parable to comparable to the top human player. I think L5 within 10 years, you will see um the driving capabilities on pair with the best human drivers. So L5 within 10 years comparable with the best human drivers. Uh, I love driving, but I really look forward to doing less of it. Tony, thank you so much for joining us. Such a pleasure. Thank you.

Rob Thomas has spent more than two decades at IBM, rising from consultant to SVP of software and chief commercial officer. In this conversation, he explains why real innovation starts close to the customer, why reading is a core leadership habit, and how IBM is shifting from “lightbulb” AI experiments to business-changing “motor” outcomes.

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