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IGATE (IGTE): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

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

The Robot Will See You Now

Conferences

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

Dan Sheridan’s career journey at Brooks Running has been both a marathon and a sprint. In his years as COO, he led the organization through the pandemic and seismic shifts in the athletic apparel market. Now, as CEO, the race is on as he navigates increased competition, a new and turbulent geopolitical landscape for trade, and the evolving expectations of today’s workforce. Sheridan will share tales from his journey from COO to CEO, and his unique playbook for what is required to propel Brooks to the level of growth that he envisions, while protecting the brand that passionate runners worldwide have come to expect. 

SUCCESSION SPOTLIGHT: HOW TO PROPEL A FAN-FAVORITE BRAND INTO THE FUTURE 

So who here is a runner? How about a walker? There we go. You're in our addressable market. Well, we're gonna get, we're gonna get into that in a second. So Dan, thank you for joining us, uh, and giving me your time as both an interviewer and as a customer. You know I have a lot of points of view to share, um, but let's start with, uh, state of your business. Um, you had a very good 2024. There's also a big running boom going on. Can you just summarize really quickly for the audience where you want to take Brooks, which. is primarily known as a brand of running shoes for serious runners, and you've got some ambitions to expand the aperture. So just share that with us. Sure. Well, first off, thanks for having me and happy to be here. So if you don't know Brooks, we're a 110 year old company, the oldest American sporting goods company here in the US, and And we've been on a journey as a company over the probably the last 30 years to focus specifically on the sport of run and even more specifically performance run. So we focus on kind of the upper echelon in our category, higher price points and the like, and what we, what we've seen over that 30 year journey is it's all, all of our Our success is rooted first and foremost in the participation of health and wellness around the world, and you're probably seeing it in your communities. It is absolutely booming right now. I've been in the industry 27 years and never seen a running boom like we're seeing right now. Brooks sits right in the middle of that. We're the number one brand here in the US in performance run. And we are expanding globally and it really comes from an intense strategy that we kind of tag as sharp focus creates mass appeal. And so this pinnacle performance positioning has really opened us up. To anyone that moves, and that's why I say if you run, you walk, or you go to the gym, you're our customer. And so we've had incredible success. We've had about 15% compounded annual growth rate over a 24 year period. Um, rooted in that sharp focus, and we believe that we're kind of just getting started. We're 85% of our revenue comes out of the US, so the next chapter for us is global expansion and running's expanding globally right now. Yeah, and I think the the company overall is, which is part of Berkshire Hathaway, it's just north of $1 billion in sales, and you know some of your competitors are um. Uh, are a multiple of that, so obviously there, there's, there's some room for you, um, some of that involves international, some of that involves, uh, more lifestyle products, you know, New Balance should not have the monopoly on dad shoes, right? So, um, so I'll get back to that in a sec. So my, I guess my first question is, you know, you're primarily, um, until recently running shoes that are sold at running stores. Now you want to sell in more countries. You want to sell more products you want to sell more apparel, uh, and you have some designs on having more of your own well what what's in retail called direct to consumers, so your own website and more of your and some stores as well, that's gonna have implications on operations and you happen to be a former CEO, so you can tell us a little bit about uh how you're going to retool the company operationally for, you know, for so it can cast a much wider net and, and not get lost in it. Yeah, I mean, running is, um, it's unique in in this in this way. It's, it's a very local sport. Think about any sport, you have to either drive to a gym or a court or a or a field to go and do a certain ball or bats. For running, you step out of your house. And so we always think about how local running is around the world. We say that there's probably 10,000 communities around the world where running is, is, you know, um, having its day. And so what we try to do. I really build a multi-channel strategy and what that means is we want to assort our brand, sell our brand wherever the greatest retailers are that are focused on run, and that creates complexity at an operational level because we don't own the systems of these retailers. We don't own the distribution. networks, the transportation networks. So what we've had to do is build an operation that really taps in and has agility into all of these partners around the world, direct to consumers kind of our future in terms of developing that channel that will create complexity as well, but we've already done what I think is the hardest thing, which is servicing. Call it 10,000 retailers around the world through our operations network. So my new COO doesn't love it when I say that. The easy part's coming, but it truly is. And so we're trying to wire this thing where if runnings are sorted in a retail store, we want to be there and we want to service it in a really high service environment. So one of the things that's very difficult, I think people who are not in the consumer and retail space underestimate how difficult it is to Get into footwear or get into apparel, um. You know it's, it's, uh, all name names. I'm a reporter, but like Under Armour stumbled with its running shoes and you would think why, you know, they have all the resources there. You guys make very nice running clothes, um, but you're not a big player yet and so can you maybe just explain quickly to the audience why sometimes, you know, intuitively you think it shouldn't be so difficult for a company and yet it is difficult. Yeah, I mean the um. The biggest secret in building performance running footwear, specifically, I'll get to apparel in a second, is 500 people touch our products from the material vendor to when we put it in a box and ship it. To a, to a retailer. So just let that sit in. We, you know, we used to always talk about handcrafted Italian loafers. Handcrafted performance footwear is real. Um, it takes intention, it takes process, and, and one of the reasons there's so many hands in that. over the years labor was so cheap that you could, you could have that many people doing that. But what has happened over the time is that Southeast Asia has become the hub to build the best running shoes in the world. And so we've been able to tap into that. We have partners in Asia for 25 years now that are just fantastic. making performance running gear. We're on a journey in apparel. Um, you know the difference between footwear and apparel is if you're a runner, the footwear purchase is a considered purchase. You, you go through a fit cycle, you know exactly what you want, and every detail matters. In apparel, it's more of an emotional purchase that that brand on your. on your your sleeve or your pocket is an expression of yourself in some ways and so it's less of a considered purchase. It's also more commoditized. You can go to just about any retailer and get pretty good performance products. So we're on a journey there. We've got incredible products and apparel. It'll be the next chapter for Brooks. So you, um, just like, uh, uh, Scott from Chipotle before, uh, who was on stage before was the COO before becoming the CEO. You did the same, uh, trajectory. I think one of the things, you know, I covered retail for a very long time. I think there was a fad about 10 years ago as retailers and consumer brands really were worried about Amazon and our e-commerce isn't, uh, uh, infrastructure isn't isn't up to snuff. So there was a lot of CEOs who suddenly became CEOs in retail land. Whereas there used to be, you know, the, the merchants, the product people, you know, the people have that intuition. How what I'm getting at is what advice can you give to the prospective future CEOs here who are CEOs, uh, make sure that they have both sides of their brains, you know, the operational left side and the more intuitive that you might need in the consumer facing, um, you know, it's, it's, uh, you need both, right? Yeah, um, I use this, this saying with my team that, uh, head above the clouds, feet in the mud. And what I mean by that is, you know, at a COO level or a CEO level, you're, you're always focused on what we call horizon 2, kind of 3 years out. I think my job as CEO is if we, if we stumble in 3 years, that's on the CEO. And so I'm always trying to keep my head above the clouds and yet still base myself in reality and and securing the short term, which is, which is feet in the mud and And that transition from COO to CEO, you get, you get less of your feet dirty at times, and, and you're really trying to see above the clouds, you know, I had good advice from Berkshire Hathaway over the years and And when I moved into this role, one of the best advice I got was to understand your biases as you move into new roles, specifically in the CEO role. I grew up at Brooks 27 years there, had many different roles, so I have a lot of biases in what I think I know about each function. And as a CEO, I think you have to hold balance and equity in your frameworks and mental models so that you don't lean on maybe past experiences from 34 years ago that this is how I did it when I was in that role. So it's a, it's an understanding your biases and then really thinking long term as you as you move into the CEO role. So runners are intensely fanatically loyal to specific models and brands and shoes. Um, you know, when you guys discontinued, one of your models a few years ago, I went into mourning and um I think you called us. I, I called Jim Webber, your predecessor. Uh, I did not win, but anyway, um, how do you get customers, especially runners, this is on their feet. This is everybody's thinking. If I had, uh, that shoe prevents me from getting injuries, how do you get people who might be, you know, in love with Hoka and on and, uh, New Balance to give you guys, you know, they all know that Brooks are great shoes, and I also know AI is a great, like how do you get people to give you guys a try when people are so fiercely loyal? Yeah, I think you know over the years in our industry it was really hard to get people to switch brands. I think that's changed in the last 5 to 6 years for a lot of reasons. One, there's a lot of parity in product. There just is. There's a lot of great product out there. I often say that choosing a running shoes is a bit like choosing your favorite wine. Everyone has a different year, a different vintage, and they, they, they kind of go back to that and they try and find it. And so right now we're in a unique, unique era where there's great product from everyone. So then what is the value prop for the consumer? And you know there's a lot of detail on fit e ride and consistency in product season after season. We update our product every 12 months and so we've been able over a 20 plus year period. To be very consistent in our fit. And so if you love that varietal of the glycerin that Phil wears, that you're going to get that fit every single time, and that comes from long term manufacturing relationships, comes from sweating the details on fit feel ride, you know, on a marathon mile 22 really matters if your shoe is going to work, and we spend every day. Trying to figure that out for the runners, so consistency in our industry is the most important thing, and innovation can't disrupt that consistency. So innovation is moving really fast in materials and mid souls and the like, and you know we've been able to keep innovation coming without, you know, really impacting the consistency of our fit, fuel and ride. OK, so a quick final question for you. I mentioned Jim Webber, uh, whom you succeeded last year. Uh, he was there for more than 20 years. Basically, he saved Brooks, um, and it was on the verge of bankruptcy. I did, I forget. How, what, what do you want to do for Brooks? Yeah. Well, what I was super lucky at Brooks. I studied under Jim Webber, who was the modern day founder of this strategy and as Phil said, really set us on a path for growth. You know, our next version is expanding this brand around the world. As I said, 85% of our revenue comes out of the US. We're mostly footwear, and we have now permission to expand this brand. What's happening and running right now is super interesting. Participation rates around the world are skyrocketing. I was in China two weeks ago. The stat that we were told was there were 40 marathons in 2020. There's 450 marathons in China. So this brand is just getting started and it'll be expansion mode for us. All right, well, on that note, go for a run tomorrow at 5 in the morning when it's 70 and stay healthy. So join me in thanking Dan for being with us today. Thank you.

Public leadership today demands vision, trust, and the ability to navigate change and complexity on a global scale. Around the world, women in public service are at the forefront of this shift, reshaping what leadership looks like and redefining how policy and diplomacy can drive prosperity. This panel convenes distinguished public leaders to explore the transformative role of women in politics and diplomacy, and how their leadership is building bridges across sectors, restoring public confidence, and crafting inclusive policies that meet the needs of our time.

Leadership: Women in Public Service

In 2024, Istanbul, New York City, and London were among the world’s most congested cities, with drivers in each likely to spend more than 100 hours in traffic over the course of a year. What if there were a more efficient way to navigate urban areas that was also cost-effective and sustainable? FlyNow Aviation, an Austrian startup, is hoping to make this dream a reality with its autopiloted “eCopters” designed for short-distance travel. Learn how the company is prioritizing safety, sustainability, and affordability alongside the innovation and risk-taking required to transform travel as we know it.

The Future of Travel Takes Flight

So now let's look at the future. I love this one, the future of personal transportation. Many of us own electric vehicles. Of course I don't here in Saudi Arabia, no, but if they become ubiquitous on the streets of some cities that we no longer think twice about them. So what's next is looking at maybe electric. Helicopters. So it's not such a crazy thought. It's called the ecopter, and it transports cargo and passengers in densely populated cities, and it's fly now. The Austrian company behind the vehicle has an ambitious goal of transporting some of the hundreds of people expected to visit Riyadh for the upcoming. Expo 2030. I would of course expect this Riyadh to be a first mover on technologies like this. I'm very excited to see what it is. First, we are going to have a video and then we are going to hear from the co-founder and chief operating officer of Fly Now, Yvonne Winter. Thanks very much, and you'll see a short clip first. Thank you. Riyadh, a dynamic city with over 8 million people. In about 10 million cars. Urban growth brings new challenges worldwide, congestion, delays, and pressure on infrastructure. But what if the next step is not on the ground, but in the air? Aligned with Saudi Vision 2030, Fly Now is developing a new generation of sustainable, quiet, and efficient air vehicles built for cities like Riyadh and made for everyone. Integrated into Salam Earth Air transport system and ready to start cargo applications in 2027. Mobility reimagined from above. Hello together, great pleasure to be here. It's so amazing and we are on the edge of an entire transformation, not only in mobility, because 25 years ago in one of my first speeches, it was at the congress in Germany. And I came there as a speaker and I watched and I was not only the only female speaker, I was the only female participant, so 250 men and now over 200 women. This is such a joy, and this is happening in Saudi Arabia. I can't believe so really a great applause to Saudi Arabia and to this transformation. I'm so happy. So the future is here and um as mentioned a full transformation is happening in mobility and uh recently in one of the panelists at the EV show two weeks ago, our panelist um made an intro and said 5th Avenue 1900, he showed a picture all over horse carriages, one car. 13 years later on the 5th Avenue. A second picture all over cars, only one horse carriage. So that shows how fast the transformation is taking place and everyone says, OK, air taxi, this will take a long time and then only a few will be able to fly. No, we focus on an ecopter that is affordable and available for the broad public. So the price is. Approximately 1.4 million Saudi rial in comparison to all the large competitors, they are way above 40 million. So imagine you can buy more than 30 ecopters for the price of I don't take any names, but other large competitors. So um what we focus on, we want to bring this technology for 2030 for the Expo and have it flying here as an air taxi, and the road map to get there is obviously in minor steps because you have to imagine that we have to build an entire ecosystem. We are flying automatically in predefined route, meaning we are dependent on a new air traffic management system. Where deports a new digital and physical infrastructure and therefore uh the way to get there is a bit of a challenge. You have to imagine it's a complete um green field, the technology is in development, the infrastructure is not there, the market is not there yet, the customers are not there. Um, so it takes a huge collaboration between a lot of different companies in this field, on one hand and the government and the regulatory bodies on the other hand. So when I went here, I, I came into the kingdom 2.5 years ago, um, through a destination deep tech program in Chaos King Abdullah University, and I'm deeply grateful for this opportunity. To come into this amazing country which I now consider my home, and I moved here. We have a company here. We set up their production here in the kingdom and as well the implementation. So we start this year with a pilot project in King Abdullah University because they recently came up with a sandbox together with the Ministry of Transportation. And there we will evaluate everything and have the operations and the integration and then step by step have the first cargo applications, fly 1 million cargo before we sit the passenger in and then um have an implementation as an air taxi service. I recently looked in CET GDP grade to, um, and asked CE GDP how many Uber drivers and Karim drivers does Riyadh have? And the answer was 335,000 plus the taxi and private drivers, so it's around 500,000 drivers operating in Riyadh. So imagine when you would take 5% and take it into the air, how much pilots you would need to do that. So what are the prerequisites to unlock the potential of how the Chinese call it the low altitude economy? There are some prerequisites. First of all, you have to have an air vehicle that is affordable and available for the broad public and that you can produce on a large scale. Otherwise it doesn't make sense because then you cannot create an impact. Then it has to be silent. It has to be sustainable. It has to be due to our opinion without the pilot because pilots don't grow on trees and um. Then of course um the economics and the operability uh has to be there. So, um, we strongly believe that this is the next step in mobility. Why? Because we observed that the automotive industry currently is in struggle, in struggle because of the congestion, no one wants to drive anymore because of the cost of ownership is constantly rising. And other things like electrification and with electricification it comes the cost of ownership on one hand and on the other hand, uh, the missing charging infrastructure. So there are a lot of troubles that the automotive industry is facing and we believe that the next step is into the third dimension. And when you now look at all the most developed countries, industry nations in the world, they all have a strong automotive industry. Why? Because with the automotive industry, um, there comes a lot of downstream value creation, a lot of jobs, uh, tier one suppliers, um, uh, chemical industry and so forth. So I deeply believe that the country who leads the development in 3D mobility will be the most powerful industry nation in the future. And in order to unlock that, they have to have an OEM manufacturer that is capable to produce on a large scale with a very limited price and on the other hand have an air traffic management system that allows a ubiquit implementation into the low airspace in a highly automated, safe, and scalable manner. So imagine we are here in Riyadh and we want to have um from a mall we want to start small drones with a medicine, we want to start um a cargo helicopter delivering a washing machine, for instance, and we want to have a toy flying a passenger. So we have three different types of vehicles and we need to coordinate them very in a very safe manner. But as well very uh organized with AI of course this is necessary because we have to have a um transition um one air traffic controller so far when we talk about aviation can handle 10 planes simultaneously. When we have thousands of different vehicles in a confined airspace, this is of course not possible. So we have to get into the next step and come up with a very automated and scalable system. So this is the first impression into how we envision the future, and we hope that we can all collaborate together and bring this into the world and what I always say, what it takes is collaboration, collaboration, collaboration and not putting fences and not fighting each other. Because we are now on a transformation to a new era in how we are um collaborating together, how we interact with each other and uh how mobility is defined and how the world is defined with all these developments in AI and in new technologies.

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