People

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This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

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People (PPLI): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Andrew Nusca

GameStop makes an unsolicited $56 billion offer for eBay

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China evaluates sale of TikTok U.S. to Elon Musk, report says

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Audience research has always had a fundamental flaw: people lie. Memory fails, incentives distort, and social pressure bends what people say away from what they actually do. Jim Lanzone leads one of the internet's largest audience platforms. Ned Koh builds synthetic populations trained on real-world behavior rather than self-reported surveys. What changes your business when you can understand and segment audiences not by what they say, but by what they actually do?

Ned Koh, Co-Founder and President, Aaru
Jim Lanzone, Chief Executive Officer, Yahoo!
Kristin Stoller, Editorial Director, Fortune

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Conferences

The technology is rarely what derails an AI initiative. The people are. Dr. Deepika Chopra explores why COOs leading large-scale AI adoption need to understand the psychology of their teams—because resilience, problem solving, and trust aren't soft skills, they're execution variables. She'll share practical frameworks for building the human culture that make transformation actually stick. 

Deepika Chopra, Author, The Power of Real Optimism

The Psychology Behind Successful AI Rollouts

So I, I always start every talk regardless if it's at BCG or Google or Amex or at UPenn Health System or with oncology patients with one thing and I wasn't gonna do it here. I don't know why, but I decided right back there why should the people of the Fortune COO summit be denied this one simple thing and so if it's all right with you if I can ask you guys to just close your eyes. And take a collective deep breath together with me, so breathe in for 3. And then exhale for 3 counts. Something that I find interesting is that sometimes that is the only time that even myself or people will take a deep breath throughout the entire day and in the reality of it that's actually not OK you need to be deep breathing more but when I was invited to speak today I actually found myself thinking about something really interesting so we're spending this enormous amount of time talking about artificial intelligence. And not enough time talking about human beings, which we all are. Because every conversation about AI is ultimately a conversation about change, and change is primarily not a technological experience, it's a psychological one. And as a psychologist and a behavioral scientist myself, that's what really truly interests me. Not the technology itself, although it is very exciting and interesting, but what happens inside of people when the world around them changes rapidly. Because whether you're excited about AI or overwhelmed by it or skeptical of it or you are leading an organization through it, there's one thing that I think almost everyone shares right now and it's uncertainty. From a psychological perspective, uncertainty is very fascinating. So something about the brain is that human beings don't actually struggle with the hard things. We struggle with the unknown things. We can handle challenges, we can handle complexity, we can even handle adversity, and many people in this room, all of us have at some point. But what we struggle the most with is not knowing. And when uncertainty increases, the brain does something interesting, not because we are negative, but because the brain is interested in survival. And what it does is it starts to try to predict. And when it doesn't know what comes next, it starts to look for certainty, for control, for answers, and when we just can't find the answers, what the brain does is it starts to fill in the blanks. And unfortunately or fortunately it's just how the brain works, we start filling in the blanks with worst case scenario planning, and all of us have this in common again, it's not because we are negative, it's because our brain is doing what it's supposed to do, which is protect us. And it is designed for survival. Our brains are not designed for happiness or for growth, and that is something that was astounding to me when I learned it. So you can learn all the tools, you can read all the books, you can listen to all the podcasts, you can watch all the talks, but unless you feel a sense of safety, your brain will not hang on to that idea and notion of growth. And in the Power of real optimism, the book that I wrote, I wrote about how the brain is constantly actually searching for potential threats. That tendency has helped humans survive for thousands of years. But in periods like we are in now with rapid change, that sort of search can actually become a liability. So we're actually going to talk a little bit about what resistance is. So uncertainty and the idea of uncertainty activates the same systems in our brains that were designed to keep us safe. And what happens there, it activates that threat mode which is the amygdala. Our thinking narrows, our risk tolerance drops, our creativity goes down, and people become more attached to familiar ways. And what leaders often interpret in this moment as maybe resistance is something completely different sometimes. Uh, it's a very normal human response to uncertainty. It's not a capability problem, it's a psychological one. How many of you guys out there have rolled out a major change initiative in your organization and you believe that the message was crystal clear, but you're only to discover later that different teams interpreted what you had said that exact same message in completely different ways. Has that ever happened? Yeah. Well, when information is incomplete and people, they don't wanna leave blanks, our brain doesn't leave the blanks, they start filling them up like we just talked about and under uncertainty those interpretations often become more fear based, more reactive and more protective. So one of the most important leadership responsibilities during a transformation period is not managing the change. It's actually managing your team's interpretation. One of the central ideas that lies in my work on optimism is the idea that optimism is actually something that is very misunderstood. So whenever I'm speaking to a large audience of people, I always ask them what's the first word that comes to mind when you think of optimism? And oftentimes I, I'll just have people shout it out, and most of the time without surprise it's this resounding like positivity being positive. And you know I think that it's, it's alarming sometimes for people that I, I'm someone that this is what I study. I'm known as the optimism doctor, which by the way I am not the most optimistic person, um, but that's for another, another day, another story. The good thing is that what I teach is that optimism is actually something that's learned it's a psychological skill, it's not a personality trait, so that's good news for me. Um, but I think what people oftentimes are looking for and they believe what optimism is, is this idea of certainty that everything, knowing that everything's gonna work out, but that's not optimism, that's certainty, and certainty is a luxury that I think very few leaders have right now or honestly very few humans have right now. Real optimism is actually something a bit different. Real optimism is the belief that even when things don't work out or we don't know exactly how they will work out or what comes next. We have the capacity to respond. To adapt, to learn, to shift, to figure it out. And that distinction really matters because adaptability is what we're talking about and adaptability is becoming, I believe, one of the most valuable skills of our time. Not just individually but for organizations, so I thought I would leave you guys with 3 practical ideas that you can take back to your teams. The first one is create clarity wherever you can. The brain handles difficult better than it handles ambiguity. So when people don't understand what's going on and something is unclear, they start to create stories and I know we all have done this in our own lives personally, but guess what, it shows up in an organization as well because we are human. And a lot of times the stories that we start creating to fill in those blanks are often worse than the reality. In periods of uncertainty, clarity becomes a form of leadership, not because you have all the answers, but because you're willing to communicate what you do know and what you don't know. And what matters most right now. People can tolerate uncertainty. We can learn that, but what we struggle oftentimes with is confusion and so clarity really matters. The second one is building adaptability again, not certainty. So I think one of the big mistakes I see when I'm working in the trenches with organizations is that. People I think leaders try to try their hardest to eliminate uncertainty altogether but really honestly we can't do that. So instead of asking how do we make people feel certain, I think a better question is how can we help people feel capable. Capable of learning, capable of adjusting, capable of pivoting, capable of responding because confidence doesn't really just come from certainty, it comes from the evidence that we have successfully adapted before and so optimism is so much more about resiliency we have all already every single person in this room has. Already persevered through your hardest days and your organization has persevered through their hardest days and so one of the things we know from a science based perspective is reminding ourselves of what we have persevered through and also historically what people have persevered through, especially in leadership in change in large technology shifts is very important. Adaptability starts with this idea that that we call cognitive flexibility, and that is the ability to generate more than one possible outcome, more than one possible solution, and there's an exercise that is my favorite exercise that I love to lead teams through, and I call it the three futures exercise. And so what it is is it's taking a current challenge that your team is facing and then asking everybody to write down three possible futures. The worst case scenario, which you will note, some people are really good at coming up with those first, and by the way, I'm one of those. And again I wouldn't try to squash the worst case scenario because oftentimes that that might be something we have to prepare for, but the key here is to not just stop there. Also to imagine and start to talk about what's the most likely scenario. So this is looking at the reality of the situation, and sometimes those two things can be the same. And then the third one, the best possible outcome. And so the key really here is, is to ask with all of those scenarios what would we do in each of the cases. And the goal really isn't the best prediction. The goal is the flexibility. And so even if someone believes or your team believes that the worst case scenario is actually the most likely outcome, that's not the point. The point is to try and have cognitive flexibility and come up with 3 different possibilities and hopefully more. And the third thing is not and we talked, I heard, um, one of the speakers a couple sessions ago talk about this too, but the third one is don't underestimate the role of meaning. One thing we often miss in sort of this conversation about AI is that people are sort of not just asking how will this change my work. When I go into teams and I'm I'm talking about this, a lot of times what I'm hearing is people are asking, will I still matter? Will my contribution matter? Where do I create value? And those are not technological questions as you'll see those are deeply human ones, because regardless of how much technology changes, people still want purpose, they still want meaning, they wanna know that their work still matters and that they have value. Those needs don't disappear. If anything, I think they're starting to become more important during this period of change. And maybe that's why I feel actually quite optimistic is not because the uncertainty is going away, it's not, and not because the change is starting to slow down, it's certainly not. I'm optimistic because I've spent my career studying humans and human beings are remarkably good at being adaptable. We learn, we evolve, we recover. We develop skills that we never imagined we'd need and we find meaning in new circumstances and we do it over and over again and so the organizations that thrive the most won't necessarily be the ones that have the most certainty or that are the most fast. They're gonna be the ones that remain curious, flexible, resilient, connected and engaged while things continue to evolve because ultimately this moment is not just testing our technology, it's actually testing our adaptability and adaptability begins with the belief that we can meet what's next we've done it before and that belief is what I call real optimism. Thank you.

Agentic systems are now fully embedded with workflows, making decisions, flagging risks, and 	acting autonomously at scale. So the question keeping COOs up at night isn't whether to automate. It's something harder: when do you trust the machine, and when do you take back the wheel?  This session will examine real examples of organizations navigating this balance with intention: where they've deployed agentic systems, what they've learned about when to trust the machine and when to pull back. Hear what works, what doesn't, and how to build operating models where human judgment and AI capability harmonize to unlock true competitive advantage. 

Sarah Franklin, Chief Executive Officer, Lattice
Francine Katsoudas, EVP and Chief People, Policy and Purpose Officer, Cisco
Moderator: Kristin Stoller, Editorial Director, Fortune; Co-Chair, Fortune COO Summit

Human in the Loop: When to Trust the Machine

So who here in this room has, um, had to pull back an AI system after giving it more autonomy than you thought it could handle? Only want to, OK, alright, we got some people, so we're gonna be talking today about where a human really matters, where a human should be in the loop. You know, most people, Fran and Sarah, when they talk to me, say it's obvious firing requires a human decision in the loop, especially. We're talking HR, but I think that's the easy answer. Is there anywhere else, um, that you two have found a less obvious one, maybe, one that maybe you've piloted letting an agent take over and then had to think, you know what, no, this should actually be a human. And Fran, let's start with you. Oh gosh, um, yes, so it was about 3 years ago we piloted having an agent review communication between 2 employees and the communication had gone south. And what the agent was very quickly able to do was just to look at, hey, you keep asking the same question over and over and you're showing frustration when the question comes in and it was interesting because it showed us the capability. But at the end of the day we believe that's a conversation that a leader needs to have. And so there can be insights that you decide not to scale, but that was a great test for us a few years ago. It was an aha of what was possible. That's a really good one, Sarah. Um, yeah, I'd say anything that really does need the judgment of a human and especially when you're connecting with other humans. So you take a general thing like with marketing. And it's been very common to say just have the AI write the emails, write the social posts, write the SEO, everything, and uh when you do that you get an initial bump, but it, it tailors down because the AI tends to go towards the average so. And, that's where we've seen that it's, it's maybe you have an initial bump because of activity, but then the judgment of what's really resonant and understanding human nuance is not as, as easy to decide. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Conversely, is there a time where an AI agent uncovered something that you thought no human could ever, ever do? And Fran, we'll go back to you. There have been so many things where we see possibility and potential uh from a Cisco perspective right now we're refactoring millions and millions of lines of code in a time frame that candidly you wouldn't have thought was possible and so I, I think it's amazing for us to see those types of examples. And then on the flip side I would say that um we're about to launch an AI coach for every employee. And I think understanding that there are a lot of different use cases that we're gonna learn from, we're gonna see how it works, we're gonna make it tailored to each role and so I think there's great surprises on both sides, yeah, and, and Sarah, what about you, Alais? I mean, that's what our product does, which has been super empowering and I'm very proud of the impact it has on employees, um, from coaching to performance to really giving true workforce in. Intelligence so that you understand and you're putting in AI into the workforce and it can help you understand better what is happening in the nuance of the conversations and like one on ones for example or in weekly updates and just giving you more eyes and ears and deeply understanding what's happening in the organization because just the systems of record telling you what your revenue is or what your costs are don't tell you truly what's working but. Conversations that you can have and the updates that employees are sharing has been too hard to get the important nuggets um from before but now you can so so you have that workforce intelligence, uh, which is very powerful um in the in the world today. Yeah, absolutely. So Francisco just reported record earnings thanks to AI which was incredible congratulations, but I know, you know, also in the news is that. They also announced 4000 layoffs, um, as part of an AI-led restructuring and I'm hoping, you know, as the chief people officer, how do you ask, you know, the remaining workforce to both lean into AI in this exciting new time but also deal with the realities that yes we are doing layoffs and yes this might replace you. It's, it's really hard as you all know, and we had a very candid conversation with our employees because we know that roles are gonna continue to evolve and we know that there are places within the company where we're gonna invest quite a bit from a resource perspective and we may not at any given time have the the skills or the people to focus in those new areas. I think for us the ability to get in front of and to have assumptions around how work is changing. Is part of the contract that we have with our employees and so something that I want is from a transparency perspective to be able to say hey these roles are the ones where we anticipate the biggest change and now here's the training that we need you to get into right away. What we have found is that when we've had previous restructurings together with the training that we provide but also using recruiting internally and placement externally. We've been able to place 75% of the people that are impacted. And so just imagine if that became 85% or 90%. It would make people feel a lot less worried because they know they're going to land and so it's what we're working through today, but it's tough. What do you think it'll take to get to that to that 85 to that 90? I think, uh, clarity on how roles are changing. So right now Cisco leads, uh, an AI consortium. We work with about 8 other tech companies. We're sharing all of our data together and it's something that's available. We're sharing all of our training as well. We're using that to start to say how are the skills shifting for a cybersecurity analyst. And if people understand how that's changing, I think it'll allow them to prepare. And then I think you're just gonna have to invest as companies in helping your people land well. Yeah, that makes sense. So I wanna talk about Lattice a little bit. Um, so a few years ago, for, for those in the audience who don't know, when Lattice tried to give AI agents employee records a few years back, there was huge backlash. You got a lot of hate for it, but now so many people are, are bragging about it, doing the exact same thing. Um, how does it feel now? Do you think it's, it's just kind of come full circle, and why weren't people willing to accept it back then and, and now they are? It was something that, uh, so yes, it was hard and especially because the reason why we did this was because we saw this moment coming we saw that people were going to be taking headcount dollars and wondering if they should spend it on technology. It's a very hard place to be in and something that needs to be done, a decision made with, uh, a lot of transparency, accountability, and responsible use of the AI. So it was, um. It was early, but it doesn't mean that I'm happy to say I was right. I'm actually sad that I was right because it means that we are where we're at, where we have all these questions, so much uncertainty, and we need to focus on how we make people successful and how we help people in AI work together, um, as you're saying, which is incredible at Cisco, like how you're investing in skills, how you can invest in skills and not just severance, how you. Bring people into the future of people AI because people aren't tokens. Token usage is not a proxy for performance. It's far more nuanced than that. If you ask somebody at a company who sends the most emails, you wouldn't say they're the most productive person. And so this was the thing was that we have processes in place for humans in the workplace, how we on board them, how we train them, how we, uh, manage them and and grade their performance. We should do the same for AI. We were chatting earlier about your home. Uh, we all have homes that we, if some person knocks on the door, you don't just let any person into your home, talk to your children, eat your food, sleep in your bed. You ask them who they are, why they're there, you know them, and it's the same thing with our work. We don't just let any AI in. We need to have clear guidelines and clear guardrails around what happens when you bring AI into a company. Yeah, I love that metaphor. I'm going to turn to the audience in just a second for questions, but first I want to ask you both about something I'm really sick of hearing. About which is any time I talk to, you know, CHRO about AI they're telling me, well, you know, we're using AI to free up our humans, uh, for more meaningful work, and I'm like, but what does that mean? Who decides what is, is meaningful? Who is the judge of, of meaning, uh, Fran, how are you looking at that at, at Cisco? Oh, it's, it's, uh, a great question because I think more and more leaders have to have a much better sense of what is valuable, especially as it relates to work flow and uh in the past, you know, leaders were guided to just let your team go delegate the work, check in and see how they're doing and I think what's happened is over the years there's quite some distance between leaders and workflow. And I think in order for us to make those decisions and to understand the value in a process you have to be close enough to the work and so as an example of something that I'm doing at Cisco is I'm talking to my leaders about becoming more of a player coach specifically as it relates to workflow and processes and guiding them to say what three workflows are. Most interested in and and what is the work that you're doing to ensure the value is there because I, I think you're right. I think if we all define value in a different way we're not gonna get the results that we want. Absolutely. Is there anything to add? it's an easy question because Lattice's mission is to make work meaningful and for the past decade that's what we've been, uh, focused on and it comes down to as a Human deeply understanding not just what you're doing but why, what is the reason that you are there and how does it connect to the greater purpose and the greater, um, objective of a company? And when you can connect those two things, not just in work, it's in anything you do, it's so important that as a human we understand why we're doing what we're doing, otherwise there is no meaning that you feel in it. And so that is why when you speak of processes, a process that is deeply broken in, uh, corporations is the performance management process. It is cyclical. It is once, maybe twice a year you check in, and as you were sharing, oftentimes there's drift. You set up your OKRs at the beginning of the year, then 6 months in, priorities have changed. Focus has, has changed, not that that's bad, it's that the performance process hasn't kept up with the business. And that's our focus is making that real time and in the flow of work so that you can find meaning and that you don't have this drift because a process didn't keep up with the reality of the business. Makes sense. Any questions? Anyone out here? See one here up front, and we have a microphone right coming to you. Yeah, um, thank you both. Sarah Buckler, Chief operating officer of 50,000 ft. I'm wondering, and I think the two of you are uniquely positioned to talk about trust in the age of AI. Um, particularly trust with all of our employees as we are asking them to do things that intrinsically as tribal people feel like they're going to take something away from us. How are you thinking about trust in this moment and what are you implementing to build trust? Um, I'll start by sharing that, um, I spent 15+ years of my corporate world at Salesforce and, uh, worked directly for Mark Benioff and Brett Taylor, and what was deeply rooted in me is you build trust through transparency and I will say it as a CEO, um, I have, uh, biweekly all hands. They're pretty organic and I share. Very openly how we're doing, uh, what we're doing with AI, taking our EPD organization through a transformation to becoming builders, what that means for their careers and having very candid conversations and that transparency. Has been monumental at building trust. It doesn't mean employees always like what we have to say, um, you know, just like my kid doesn't always like to eat her broccoli, but, um, it's important that I share with her why eating vegetables is important and it's, it's very similar just. Your employees trust you when they can trust what you're saying is true and that you will be there when you have questions, but I would just say the short version is just transparency. It's interesting because something that we saw about 9 months ago was that On the teams where they were using AI very effectively, um, trust started to drop within the team and so what that taught us is that we just have to invest so much more and I agree with Sarah. I, I think it's really all about transparency and I think that we have to share with our people what we know, what we don't know, some of the assumptions that we're making, the risks that we believe in, and then you marry that trust with values, um, that you consistently. Um, lean on as you navigate, but I think more and more as you go through change, trust is harder. Any other questions? Mhm. Hi, uh, Erin Fenton with GNG Insurance. I was curious on your perspective on, uh, using AI within culture and driving culture. Uh, we hear a lot about increasing revenue or driving efficiencies and cost savings, and I know Cisco and other companies are best place to work are really. Well known for their culture, are there any tangible examples you can use how you've used AI to improve the employee experience or enhance that culture? I think you mentioned individual coaching, uh, agents, but what other tangible examples could we potentially learn from, you know, from your guys' great culture? That's a great one. Yeah, so I'll, I'll share too. I, I think you were right to, to hit on the learning side, and I think more and more AI can help us customize learning to our, uh, employees based off of where they wanna go and the job that they're in and then the perception that we have around change. I think that's easy. The other thing that we've been doing for so long, which has been so helpful, is you can use the technology to really get the sentiment of your teams and uh when we're in all hands meeting, uh, it's so much more important that I hit the hard hard question or that I acknowledge the sentiment that is coming through from technology and so we're analyzing chat. As the meeting is going on after the meeting and those insights allow me not to have rose colored glasses in some cases I have to hit exactly what I'm seeing. Those are things that are important, but I would absolutely say that I think we have to continue to build use cases around culture. I, I think it's there, yeah, I, I + 100 I guess I would say, um, you know, we have also built the tools for the individual. Coaching the agent that can join your one on ones that can help you not just understand what's going on but can practice with you. Maybe it's a difficult conversation maybe you overspoke somebody and people were afraid to share that information with you. What's interesting is that we've seen, um, they're having AI in a way can help us be more human because we don't feel so judged by the AI if it gives us feedback. And the other thing I would say is that, uh, yes, AI being having more eyes and ears, as we said earlier, it really helps people feel like wow, like she understood this or they listened to that because you can now and so it having it in your culture and then also employees knowing that you're investing in skills, not just. You, you want to give them the AI skills because you care about their careers. Maybe they are going to have a career with you for many years. Maybe they're going to shift to another place. But having that loyalty and then feel like, you know what, I worked at Lattice, and Lattice is where I got that groundswell of opportunity because I learned the skills. They feel like you're investing in them and they deeply care about that. And one quick last question for you both. If you could redesign one thing about your organization today to be ready for AI as a true colleague, does maybe in the next 10 years, what, what would you wanna focus on and, and why 30 seconds or less? I know that's a quick one, Fran. OK, quickly, I would not look at AI as a colleague and so that I, I would say, and it's so funny because I had this debate with one of my peers. I just don't think we should look at it that way. I think we should look at AI and agents as part of the workflow but not a colleague, and I think the sooner we land that, the more confident our people will be. I love that answer, Sarah. Um, what I would say is that I would actually have people do more in-person bonding than just AI. I would do more touch grass and then more activities, more softball. Yeah, I, I would. I think AI is everywhere and I think that it will never replace that human connection. I love it. Well, thank you both so much for your insights. Thank you all for the question.

The assassination of a Fortune 500 CEO last year was a stark reminder of what enterprise risk managers have long understood: the threats facing organizations today are no longer siloed. Data systems face AI-driven attacks. Supply chains fracture along geopolitical lines. Executives become targets for violence. The COO often sits at the center, responsible for protecting people, operations, and continuity across a threat landscape that keeps expanding. Risk advisory firm leaders Jacob Silverman, CEO of Kroll, and Sid Kosaraju, president of Crisis24, bring decades of expertise in elite enterprise risk management and executive protection at a time when these challenges are more critical than ever. In this session, hear how they assess dangers, make critical recommendations, and build organizations resilient enough to survive whatever is thrown their way. 

Sid Kosaraju, President, Crisis24
Jacob Silverman, Chief Executive Officer, Kroll
Moderator: Ruth Umoh, C-Suite and Leadership Editor, Fortune; Co-Chair, Fortune COO Summit

How COOs Manage Risk When Threats Multiply

Good afternoon everyone. Welcome, welcome to my esteemed panelists. Let's kick things off with a quick show of hands. How many of you believe you're operating in a more volatile environment today than you were 5, 10 years ago? Please raise your hand. That's a sizable share. I'd say that's the majority of attendees in this room. Sid, Jake, are they in fact accurate? Is this a more volatile movement than we've seen in years past, or this is the risks are more visible, faster move? What are your thoughts? Uh, thank you for having us here. Uh, we, we definitely feel from our perspective that it's a, it's a more risky environment out there than it ever has been before. Uh, the global environment is different. The geopolitical situation is different. The business climate's different and I also feel we've been talking a lot about AI and the rise of AI, a lot of benefits that come with it, but there is a segment of the population that feels disenfranchised and disintermediated by it, and that's leading to frustration and to events that I don't think I would have foreseen. Um, 5-10 years ago where there's actually been violence that's come from it and all of these things are, I think, um, leading to a more complicated environment than we've ever been in before. Jake, what are your thoughts? I would completely agree. The term that I use, and I try not to use acronyms too often, is VUCA. I don't know if people are familiar with that term. Anyone know the term VUCA? You got two of them, VU, uh, the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. You got it. Um, it's just a great way of framing the concept that none of us have a clue what's gonna happen tomorrow, next week, next year, um, and I use this term for our own professionals and for our clients to basically frame the idea that you have to be prepared to operate in what I call a VUCA world. And the world feels a lot more VUCA now because it is more in large part because of the themes that that Sid commented on, uh, the, the connectivity of the world. We are completely interconnected on a, on an hourly if not minutely news cycle, and the ability for threat actors to take advantage of that cadence combined with technology makes it a much more VUCA environment. So both of your points, I think one of the biggest. Challenges right now is that every threat feels so urgent cyber security, executive safety, AI misuse, geopolitical exposure, uh, supply chain fragility everything feels mission critical all at once. How are the sophisticated organizations you're working with distinguishing between what is simply noise and what is the true existential risk for the company? Part of the reality of operating in a VUCA environment is is to understand that there is a lot of noise, but you can't let your guard down. You have to figure out a way to sift through the noise and the only other acronym that I'll use is is TEV. A lot of people. Think of that as total enterprise value, so protecting your equity value. I think about it as training ecosystem vigilance and security is an ecosystem. It's an interconnected organism. You have your, your, your host organization and all of the third parties and stakeholders that are connected to it and the key in my opinion with regard to protecting and making the house as resilient as possible is training. Recognizing that interconnectivity that it is an ecosystem and remaining vigilant, so you have to be able to understand that there's noise and sift through it so let me turn to you, uh, as you already alluded to, we've seen a real escalation and threats targeted. Uh, senior executives, CEOs, we saw with Tim Altman recently, obviously United, um, Healthcare just a few years ago seeing it certainly on the political stage and multiple times. How are boards and executive teams thinking differently about executive protection today compared to even a few years ago? What's changed? Uh, it's a great question. I think they clearly are taking it more seriously. Um, I think one thing that we've seen taking place more is usually it's either under the, the, um, auspices of the chief risk officer or the chief operating officer, but they are, um, business resiliency teams or a team that has been put together and they look at enterprise. resilience as something they do every day and it's, it's always on intelligence in terms of feeding geopolitical and what previously used to be head of state grade security intelligence information that's continuously coming into the business resiliency team and they're sifting through that trying to find the signal from the noise um and actually feeding that information real time to the C-suite to the board members. I mean this is interesting they'll have devices where real time they're getting. Intel assessments that are coming from around the world from teams usually their partners because it's tough for any one corporation to staff this but former three letter agency CIA FBI type grade of intelligence analysts that are feeding this intelligence to them and to their executive protection teams so that they can handle as Jake was saying before, we don't know what's coming our way, but when you have this infrastructure through a business resiliency team you're better apt to not just. React but to know the structures in advance such that you're not losing time between uh understanding and responding. Please go ahead. I would just add that it's not the act of protection does not stop when people leave the office. Um, it extends into their personal lives, their family lives. One of the biggest points of vulnerability is not the executive, um, you know, him or herself, but their family members, their use of phones, their interaction with social media, particularly kids, um, and threat actors will exploit all of these vulnerabilities in someone's ecosystem, to use that term again. If I could just make a point, Jake is so right. I mean, they, the point of least resistance sometimes is the families, and, uh, I, I will just use myself as a personal example. Um, one of the areas that, uh, is, is looked at from a, a weakness or, um, a threat perspective is the cyber lens. And the first thing I had done when I joined the organization two years ago is I said run a cyber assessment, let me know kind of what my threat levels are, and I found that, I mean I was, I was happy. I seemed to be pretty well protected, but I have 3 children. My 12-year-old daughter doesn't even own a smart device, and the report showed that they, the threat actors, and this was friendlies, right, ethical hackers on our team that were able to pinpoint in 2-hour increments where my daughter was every day. Because they could get into the school website, they could get into the, the tennis, uh, club website and pinpoint and usually what happens is the, the threat actors are going to target the children. They're going to target the elderly parents and, um, you know, sorry to say here right in this state of Arizona we had the, the Guthrie incident. I mean these are things that are increasingly people are looking at is it's not just the principal, it's the family as Jake mentioned that you have to protect against and I think corporations are going to that point where they're protecting the C-suite, the, the, the executives and the families because they know where the threats are. Yeah, let me ask you this. If you're advising, let's say a smaller mid-sized company, they don't have a Fortune 100 security budget, what's the minimum viable level of preparedness every company should have? The MVP, oh, that's my last acronym, you know, for, for, for any business, uh, it was a very difficult question to answer, but it starts with understanding what type of culture are you as a business because you could be the, if you're a business who is Focused on protecting every element of your infrastructure with uh with physical infrastructure and cyber infrastructure um you know that that reflects the culture of your business you're closed off um if you're a company often entrepreneurial companies who are eager to be open. Um, you have to make some sacrifices in terms of freedom, so the MVP of, of any businesses' security profile really depends on what type of company you're prepared to be. There's a trade-off, a very important trade-off that every company has to assess between, uh, freedom and security. And finding where you fall on that balance is something initially that every company no matter how large or small, have to assess. I just had one quick add to that. I think that's absolutely right. I would also say, um, Jake and I were together with a group of board of directors earlier in the year. And it was interesting, um, we, we saw some public, um, publicly published data where in 2023, if you can believe this, the top 100, um, publicly listed companies by revenue size, their average spend on security for their, uh, C-suite. Was under $100,000 a year. That's the medium. In the last two years, you can imagine the orders of magnitude it's increased, but to Ruth, to your point, what we've seen, the easiest things to do, and it doesn't take millions of dollars, but it's enabling secure transportation. You'd be surprised, it's not very much more than an Uber, but when you have directors and you have executives that are taking Ubers or just transportation where you don't know who's driving you and what, what the protocol is if something happens. Uh, secure transportation number one I would say is a minimum. I would say also on the cyber side, I mean you'd be surprised C-suite and sometimes even board members using personal emails to transact company business back and forth, specifically board of directors, get them all on company email, and then I would say that the next thing is just that always on intelligence. It's not very expensive to get this intelligence service by partners, you know, where they will be feeding this to your company, so you're just smarter about what risks you're facing. There's, there's no shortage of now 24/7 social media monitoring, reputation monitoring, all of the above. What I, I would just add to what Sid said, and he's absolutely right, that the, the minimum sort of act of engaging in security as a company comes back to culture, to a certain extent budget is training, training. And vigilance around the idea that security is part of sort of the cultural mindset of of your business so you know the weakest link is always a person. Let's talk about the weakest link moving beyond the physical threats to digital threats. AI is obviously making deception cheaper, faster, certainly more convincing when you're. Employees, when your customers, even when your fellow PR executives can no longer assume that even an email is real, what has to change operationally inside companies? You're talking about training. What, what, what more? Let's get a little bit more granular. I can't tell you how many times Jake Silverman asks for billing information at Kroll. OK, it probably happens every day. Uh, and now with, with, uh, the ability to do real, you know, deep fakes with AI, uh, it's all that the more dangerous, uh, there, there's technology that can root it out, and there's a whole level of, of, of literally filtering out deep fakes and phishing that happens in your firewall, but the last line of defense is always a person, so I can't emphasize enough. You know how to recognize the tells of the rudimentary fishing, uh, exercise or a more complex one, and my people are texting me or teasing me or or WhatsApping me all the time. Hey Jake, I know this isn't you, but I wanted you to know. Training, yeah, I think that's a great point. I would add to the training. Um, what we have seen that's been effectively utilized is companies will always say if you see something suspicious, you know, put in a phone call, and the CEO will even, uh, the office of the CEO will take those phone calls, and it's almost like you change your password every month. There's a password, and when you're having that phone call, there's a password and you say password. Uh, jinx and then you know it's, it's authenticated and that conversation is real and it can verify if the email was secure or not, but these are things where you're just simple things but you, you use and it really can. Can really protect a lot. Yeah, uh, I wanna throw another question at you, Jake, before I do, just a quick heads up for the audience. We will be turned in to take questions from you. So please, please consider some questions. We have mic runners in the audience. I think that the interesting paradox here is that while AI certainly is increasing the risk environment, it may also give leaders better tools to also detect the crisis. So how are you hearing from COOs about how they should think about using AI to anticipate, um, operational threats well in advance? Any signals? Uh, it's definitely being used and, um, we're not, I'm not saying this to tout our own horn or anything like that, but we partner with Palantir, we work with their, um, their foundry technology, and we have an AI solution which with our, our clients they can leverage, but in essence, um, some of our team members who used to be with CIA who used to write the presidential daily brief for the president of the United States, they bring that to this AI platform and in essence what it does is every day it delivers to the CEO of the corporation. Um, the equivalent of a presidential Daily Brief and it pulls all the relevant items where that CEO's people are around the world, where his facilities or her facilities are, where their vendors are, where their supply chain weaknesses or strengths are and all that information goes in and every day the CEO is getting that report so they know, oh boy, Strait of Hormuz is closed today. I better start sourcing my goods. Supply chain out of Bangladesh or somewhere else, but that's the level of intelligence that corporations are now taking it to, and AI is fueling that which is pretty amazing. It's also, uh, really helping to drive workflows. We have at Kroll a workflow solution around security remediation and leaving an audit trail, uh, called Resolver, and our Resolver product is. Is AI enabled AI power to really ingest lots of the information that Sid is referring to to make the risk managers, uh, life that much more efficient and accurate in terms of really running a remediation with regard to a security breach. Accuracy is key. Uh, any questions from the audience, please raise your hand and someone with the mic will come over to you. Any questions? Anyone? Alright, let's keep going. Uh, even just a few years ago, I feel that many companies treated geopolitics kind of as background context. Uh, today it obviously directly affects operations, pricing, sourcing, shipping routes, case in point, uh, Strait of Hormuz, as you just noted, how can COOs practically stress test their organizations around these kinds of scenarios? What are you seeing that works? Well, I think first, and this will sound, I don't mean to sound patronizing to anyone, but everyone has to know what's going on in the world, and it used to be if you're in a business in a particular lane that what's happening in, uh, in an election in Hungary or in a geopolitical, uh, interaction in Southeast Asia might not matter to one's business if you're in Omaha. The truth is because of the interconnectivity you have to know what's happening in geopolitics and in politics that might be in far flung parts of the world because it will have a ripple effect and it will have a security implication there is no question about that because when there is uncertainty geopolitically threat actors emerge not just there but elsewhere around the world. Yeah, I would, I would echo that completely, and I would also say that um when, when we think about this, the world is so interconnected and these threats and these risks are interconnected. There's not, there's no silos anymore. And so when you have something that is a a physical threat, it usually is linked to a supply chain threat which is linked to uh a business threat and linked to a cyber threat, and they all come together at you at one time. I would say we found is that COOs, C-suite that are really on the front end of the curve on this, they're really linking three concepts. They're saying, OK, we need to have a strong business resiliency function within the company and not to say we have to do it all. They'll work with partners too. Um, but then beyond that they look to having a strong crisis response function and many times that's not internal so that is if there is a need recently in the Middle East for evacuations and we need to get people out. I mean we recently worked with a uh a large technology company, um, and helped them evacuate 2000 people out of the UAE. When the Iran crisis started, but I mean no one company can do that, so you need to have partners who can do this. So I would say business resiliency linked with a crisis response capability either internal or external, and that all ties at the other side of the spectrum with strategy, which is what we're talking about strategically what's happening geopolitically, how does that inform my business resiliency strategy and my plan. And then also having almost like a racy chart knowing when this happens this person's responsible and this is what's going to happen all laid out in advance because it's too late once the emergency happens to figure this out. It's also really critical in this VUCA world in this geopolitically uncertain world to understand the different forms and archetypes of threat actors. Um, it's not just, you know, often times in, in, in the corporate world you think that there's criminal actors who are seeking financial gain. Now there's ideologues and we've seen tragic consequences of, of that. There are political actors and then of course there are internal actors and some of the biggest threats, uh. Purposeful or inadvertent come from within the walls of all of our organizations and we have to be able to be unfortunately very focused on that as well. Jake, not only do you have an affinity for acronyms, you also have an affinity for metaphors. Use the term gray rhino, those visible but underappreciated threats. What do you think those are these days? Well, I just referred to one, you, you have to understand the threat actors that are in front of you sometimes they're inside your house. Um, and you know we talked about Black Swan being a once in a lifetime event. The gray rhino is staring you right in the face and can really run you over, and you're staring in that person's or in that theme's face every day. So sometimes it's the innocuous little things, the little tells, um, the, the, the slight vulnerabilities in your organization or the untrained person who can cause catastrophic impact. You seen any gray rhinos? Not too many to say. Well, listen here, if we're having this conversation 3 years from now, what do you think will have changed most dramatically about how companies think about operational resilience? I would say first and foremost it's not an afterthought it's gonna be front and center because in the in the environment we're in, I mean we all hope for the world to become like it was and more peaceful than what it is today, but the reality of the matter is every day it just seems like it's more uncertain than the last and I. I think um these elements we've been talking about will become more of a focus as opposed to, oh my gosh I, I'll get I'll be ready for it when it when it happens. I completely agree. In 3 years' time, VUCA will be a board level term that everybody will get t-shirts exactly Sid Jake, thank you so much for an insightful conversation. This was great. Thank you.

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