The European edition of the Fortune 500, ranking companies by revenue.

Fortune 500 Europe

The first-ever European edition of the Fortune 500, ranking companies by revenue. 

F500 EUROPE 2023 ISS File: ISS Denmarks Global Cleaning Giant To Cut 100,000 Jobs

ISS ranks 327 with $10.9 billion in revenue (down 5.8%). The Denmark-headquartered diversified outsourcing services company has 351,053 employees and made a profit of $291 million (up 197.6%).

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ISS (ISSDY): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Marcia Dunn

The Associated Press

Astronauts from India, Poland, and Hungary blast off on a private SpaceX Falcon flight to the International Space Station

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Musk’s threat to decommission Dragon space capsule would leave NASA dependent on Russia to get to ISS

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SpaceX wins $843 million NASA contract to bring the International Space Station out of orbit when its lifespan ends in a few years

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SpaceX sends astronauts from Turkey, Sweden and Italy to the international space station on latest chartered flight

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Since its inception, the gaming industry has consistently led the charge in developing and embracing cutting-edge technologies. Now, with the rapid acceleration of AI, the global video game market is projected to grow by $111.7 billion over the next four years. We’ll dissect the next era of gaming and entertainment— from immersive AI-built worlds to smarter marketing and monetization—and what it means for creators, players and profits.

The Next Era Of Gaming

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The rise of AI is reshaping workplace dynamics, creating both opportunities and challenges for corporate leaders. This session provides practical frameworks from two operational experts. Cognizant will share its trusted playbook for building cultures where AI and humans exist in harmony. And, through their unique approach to talent development and organizational design, Zillow will share insights about empowering and upskilling their workforce with AI and digital collaboration. We’ll hear from both how AI tools further their mission of fostering innovation and collaboration across geographically distributed teams.

CREATING CULTURES WHERE BOTH AI AUTOMATION AND HUMAN TALENT THRIVE

Hey, hello again everyone. uh, so I wanna start off with, uh, an interesting fact I just found out. So my colleague Brainstorm editorial director Andrew Neska recently turned me on to an interesting study done by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who staffed a fake software company entirely with AI agents, and the results were not great. I'm sure you two might know about this, but the best performing agents. struggle to finish just 24% of the jobs assigned to it, so it's clear that we're a long way away from a world in which AI agents entirely take human jobs, uh, but that sets me up to ask you both, how are you preparing for a future where AI agents will be taking on more than ever before and how are you talking about it to your current workforces and June, let's start with you. Yeah, I mean, I'll start off by saying that, you know, while Chat GPT created this massive moment that machine learning is nothing new and at Zillow, this estimate actually was created 15 years ago using machine learning. We created the Zillow showcase product after years of research on computer vision and machine learning. So our employees are pretty familiar with AI as a tool. Now what's new is the generative AI and agentic AI capabilities. Um, and so what we've been doing to prepare, uh, folks is one, recognizing the moment, so making sure that we understand. Uh, to me it's very analogous to maybe the um the introduction of the iPhone and back when that happened, this was actually a pivotal moment for Zillow where we realized that we needed to change how we engineered our products and we went to this mobile first philosophy. If you could not build it on the phone, then you were not going to build it at all. um, so it became this expectation and sort of a cultural norm and we're trying to do the same thing right now with AI where. The idea is that you're going to use AI, um, it's coming, you're going to use it. It's not really a choice, and the question is which tools are you going to use and which problems are you going to solve, how are you going to adopt it. So we've been, um, we introduced something called AI days where employees will come and really showcase their products or that they built so product managers building prototypes and repli and engineers using cursor to to to write code. So, uh, employees really showing how. AI can augment their work and that takes a little bit of the focus away from replacing to augmenting and making humans more effective. That is helpful. And, before you say your answer, can you also just give us a brief overview of what cognizant is and does before you answer too? Yes, so I think Cognizant is a 360,000 people company where we collaborate with our customers in technology landscape, to put it simply. The business which I represent, um, in traditional terms is called BPO. I refuse to call it BPO and I'll give you, uh, I'll tell you why, uh, because if you look at these 93,000 people, we are known for deep industry vertical specific BPO. I have 4000 doctors, nurses, pharmacists amongst these 93,000 people. I have music composers, uh, and you have these AV rooms where they can go and record music. Um, similarly, we have, uh, uh, you know, geospatial specialist on our workforce. So that's our calling card if I may, and I would describe this business what used to be as human-led and human powered, and we are now pivoting to human-led and AI powered business in this space. See, the, the effort that went in that powered the system of action for our customers was human effort. Now, we will see a world where you will have a blend of human and AI agents working together. And that's why we would, uh, I mean, our business has done well, arguably in the last 5 years, 3 years we were the leading group in the, in the industry. Uh, going forward, we want to be the best in class AI powered BPO company on this planet. How many of you out here feel like your company has a clear AI strategy? OK, all right, a little less than half, I think that's what I figured. I'm curious from both of you what is the hardest pushback you faced from employees or leaders when trying to implement AI and how did you work to overcome that, June? Yeah, I mean, I think for Azilla what what I've seen is that the hardest um. The hardest block is actually inertia and it really is not that different than any new technology that we've asked people to adopt um I remember when we switched from Microsoft Office to the Google Cloud, um, you know, there's there's a learning curve there and there's inertia and I think in general people become, uh, you know, very familiar with certain ways of doing things and breaking habits is really hard and so in that sense getting people to. AI is actually nothing new. It's actually the same, you know, I think of it as a very similar to the problem we have when we're selling software where, um, you know, you can sell the software, but in order for clients to really adopt it, you have to point out the benefits and connect the dots maybe a little bit in an obvious way how it can help them um and then once you focus on the benefits of what AI can do for the humans, then the humans, the light bulb goes off and you'll see the early adopters, um, really take off. And then you'll see other people going, oh shoot, I should, I really need to catch up. And so we're right at that inflection point right now where a lot of the early adopters are doing great work with AI and the rest of the employee base is realizing, oh, I need to catch up. I feel like I need someone to give me an instruction on like, here is how you should do it and here is how it can help your life. Gesh, how do you, how do you figure that out at cognizance? I think I would like to reframe the question. It's not just people, even I'm scared. So when we think that others are resisting and I'm with it, I think that's a fundamentally in my view, a flawed approach that is fear, fear of uncertainty, fear of unknown, fear of ambiguity. In many ways this, this conference is helping me overcome fear because I'm listening to greatspective, great perspective, right? So, um. I, I believe senior leadership does not have monopoly on good ideas. So if we can involve them in our future, if they find their fingerprint in the painting that we are going to create of the future, uh, they get co-opted and it's not just your team members, it's actually customers. It is extremely important for us to co-opt our customers in the journey. Because what we create has to be relevant for our customers. So, uh, the methodology which I adopt is co-opting them. Rather than telling them what to do, and we also have an acronym, sorry, I mean, I, it's a short time, so but I'll, I'll share it with you. We discussed about sculpt the future, and each alphabet has uh S stands for strategy and structure. CU stands for culture and customer. L stands for leadership, P stands for people and process, and P stands for technology. And for a specific reason, P is last. Because there is so much chatter about technology, it, it literally dominates everything, but this is also about strategy, culture, structure, leadership, people, all of the above, and I think it is the biggest opportunity for me. Along with my team in 38 years of being in the industry, it's, I feel like a kid in a toy shop. Yeah, I think culture is so important, and I'm gonna come to the audience in just a second for questions, but I want to touch on culture, and I'm curious how AI has changed each of your cultures for better or for worse, um, in the past couple of months. Ganesh, I'll start with you. I think, um, as I said, if you want to co-opt them, we really need to build a culture of experimentation. Uh, and we need to have a tolerance for failure. Not failing our customers, but failing early internally because we are going to try things and there are things which will not work and uh and we really need to celebrate responsible failures as well. So culture is a tough thing, it's not easy to, to navigate. It's easy to speak about it on on the stage, but whether it gets practiced, whether it gets percolated down to to individuals, there will be subcultures. But ultimately, we are going to have a structure where it is not hierarchical so that the culture Uh, also permeates faster in the organization. It's a journey ahead. Are we there? No, we are not there yet, but we intend to be there. June, what's the most surprising way to change Zillow's culture? Um, I'm not sure if it's surprising, but a delightful way that it has changed our culture is that it's, um. You know, uh, it's really enhanced our culture of excellence, and we really, um, you know what AI does is it allows your top performers, uh, your most valuable employees to be more productive. I, you know, I'm not sure about the digital twin technology yet, but, but there is this idea of multiplying. There there's an idea that you can multiply yourself through AI, right? You can take AI to go and use it as a tool for communication, expression. One of the, um, you know, we, we moved to cloud HQ with COVID and stayed there, and one of the skills, sorry, Cloud HQ is basically fully remote work. So all of our employees are fully remote, and we had to relearn how to do a lot of things. One of the things that our employees really had to learn was moving from Um, slides with bullet points that you could voice over to actually being able to write documents so that you can communicate asynchronously with someone in a different time zone and we found that our employees were actually lacking in some of those writing skills. So what AI has been able to do is now, you know, everyone has this employee who has great. Ideas but struggles getting the words out and chat GPT can help them. They can write in bullet points and prompts and now they can write this beautifully worded document. So it's really kind of helped our best employees become better and really extended this culture of excellence that we have. We have time for one question. I see one here in front. Angel, Mike is coming to you. I have a question for you around um like enterprise optimization. So the idea of being able to like augment and get more performance out of individual people makes a ton of sense and I we're doing that quite well today, but when I'm thinking about like what would it look like to have like a, you know, kind of an order of magnitude optimization by with AI, how are you identifying those use cases? Do you feel like you've been able to do that already? And I think there's also so many companies that are starting to spin up with recommendations and offerings. Um, and we're trying to move fast. How are you making those decisions? Yeah, I think the key there, I mean, actually I'll go back to an example that's not even generated AI, the older machine learning, so we have this product called Zillow Showcase where just to describe it, a photographer goes into a home, takes some pictures, 3D home panoramas, and then it gets stitched together into a 3D home tour and an interactive floor plan. And the initial version of this required a lot of human intervention and was very expensive and was never going to be scalable. Traditional coding was not. Help us solve this problem, so the team leaned on AI and we were able to lower the cost of producing these interactive floor plans by something like 90%. So I think if you identify a problem and if you have AI experts in your organization who can look at a problem and say, oh, this is an area where traditional coding is going to fall short, but machine learning will get us an order of magnitude. That's where I would focus the AI efforts. And so a lot of what I try to do is Um, identify the problems where we want to direct the resources because I'm not the AI expert. I, I think there are two spectrum, if I may 1 is this whole concept of productivity. I, uh, and this belongs to our customers. I'll give you an example of Life Sciences customer, the regulatory compliance, what used to take 22 people, 6 months to do. Now 6 people are able to do it in 2 days. So that's the productivity and this is real, live and running. Uh, but the other spectrum, we carry the concept in order to personalize we need to do something, we need a critical mass or certain scale. I think with the advent of agent T KI and if we create micro agents, literally the atomic unit can be one, and you can hyperpersonalize for the unit of one. Without necessarily increasing the cost. So this is going to present tremendous opportunities for all of us to, uh, to capitalize on this ability of agent TKI going forward, and that's what I think would be exciting for all of us. I totally agree, and I wish we had time for more questions because you know I can ask them away, but thank you both for your time and thank you for the great questions.

Cultivating a world-class workforce is key to advancing national competitiveness in today’s global landscape. How is Saudi Arabia expanding access and opportunity for women and young people? What bold strategies are being deployed to transform its education system into an engine of innovation and opportunity – and attract more visitors and business leaders to the Kingdom? We’ll hear from two of the most accomplished women in Saudi government about the tools, policies, and long-term vision required to unlock talent and balance rapid growth with cultural preservation and global perceptions. 

Vision in Action

Take a moment to point out the centerpiece medallion here which on stage it was designed and made by the design department at Eat University in Jeddah. So I want to recognize that's something I've found beautiful and transfixed the whole time I've been up here. So thank you for that. Our next conversation is one that's very close to my heart about how do you build a world class workforce to advance national competitiveness. I know that's been a priority here. In the kingdom it's something we think about all the time, of course, in the US and the rest of the world and how is Saudi Arabia meeting this moment expanding opportunities for women, but also for young people? It's something that came up earlier today with us to discuss this is Her Highness Princess Haifa bint Mohammed Al Saud, Vice Minister of Tourism for Saudi Arabia. I know her as somebody who's played an instrumental role in opening up this country to tourism. And also Her Excellency Professor Elna Elisa, the Vice Minister of Education for Saudi Arabia. So I'd like to invite my two distinguished guests to join me here on stage. Your Highness, Your Excellency, can I point out back in the green room, it was very clear to me you both know each other very well. Is that fair to say? How did you meet? I'll let you tell the story. If I tell it, I'll tell parts I'm not supposed to say, so I'm always on script. We met on the plane to Davos in 2020 just before you met on the plane you didn't meet in Riyadh, never met before on the plane and we didn't stop talking the whole trip through. OK, well that's, that's, that's a good. I love that. OK, let me start. Your highest, let's set the landscape right now as to where are we in terms of the progress that the kingdom has made. I know we're talking about workforce, but obviously more broadly as well in terms of opening up the kingdom and is the talent keeping up, but give us a sense of the landscape as you see it. I mean, absolutely, and thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me, and it's it's such an honor to be, to be here with all of you today. I can't tell you how exciting it is having Fortunes International Women's Summit in Riyadh, a concept that maybe 7 years ago people would have been like, What's that really a women's summit in Saudi Arabia. But yeah, today very, very proud that we're at the forefront of such things and very honored to be here with Her Excellency Dr. Inna Eissa. We are, we have become very good friends since then. Um, uh. I think if we want, we want to just take a step back and talk about the transformation that has that this kingdom has witnessed and we're still undergoing, I mean we're still today just at a milestone from Vision 2030. We've been through a lot. We can both tell you we've had so many sleepless nights, but it's all worth it when you when you're doing this. For your country when you're doing this for your people, for your children, um for your parents, people think that we're just doing it for the future generations. We're doing it for all generations, and we can see them taking part in it. Where we were before, I'll just give you an anecdote of what it looked like. My kids used to have friends from all over the world, and they used to always be invited to go visit them in their countries. And they'd always ask me the question, Why can't I invite my friends to see my country because I am very proud of who I am. We have so much to show the world, to tell the world. And look, this conversation started 6 years ago. Today when we look at where we are, we've had over our tourist numbers already. We've surpassed our 2030 target of 100 million visits. That includes domestic and international. Inbound last year alone, over 30 million people visited us from outside the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I mean, I was one of them, so. I love it. My kids invited their friends and so again, the story just from that lens and what we can do today and what we're able to do today at the participation in the workforce we talked about capabilities. We're talking about today women's participation in this sector, in the tourism sector has increased by 72% just since opening up our doors in 2019. So it's not just about. New frontiers and new sectors that are being opened, entertainment, sports, culture, none of this was there. I mean, uh, when, when I started I fenced and, and there was nothing for me to do in fencing. I could, I could never participate officially and properly. And today I, when I started working with the fencing Federation, there were no women. Today there are over 200 women in the fencing Federation alone, one of which is my daughter. So it's just to, it's just to tell you it's not just about tourism. Tourism is a platform. It's a platform in which we can open up our doors. We can get to share who we are and what we are with the world, and they get to see it because tourists, tourists are natural agents of good, so they travel to connect. To meet the like-minded, to share experiences. So today where we are versus where we were, we've made long, long strides. True, and you create a lot of brand ambassadors. I know you've done that here. A lot of people who are here for the first time seeing where you are and where you're going is very powerful. Let me move, Your Excellency. Give us your sense of the landscape from where you sit and the priorities. Where are we today in the kingdom with regard to Workforce development talent, etc. Thanks, Dan. Welcome everyone. I'm so happy and delighted to be here and um, on record, usually I have slides. I'm the academic at heart. I have numbers and I have pictures of real women and I, you know, I say I'm not going to participate without slides and they said, Yes, sure, we'll have your slides, but then just 2 minutes with Diane and Haifa, I was convinced just to sit here and tell a story. So thank you all a great storyteller, and I really enjoy being here and the energy I have with the, you know, with a room full of women reminds me of my job that I left two weeks ago where I worked in in women's only university, the largest women's university, Princess Noura Abdel Rahman, and if you really want to know more about Vision 2030, I advise you to go visit Noora because it's a clear manifestation of what we're living today. Uh, let me tell you something about prevision and post vision. So I've had my PhD since 2004. I'm a dinosaur in education, but I'm also a second generation PhD holder woman. Early education in Saudi Arabia for women started in 1951, early 1960s we started uh higher education for women, but there weren't really many milestones for women prior to 2016. Before 2016, we were OK and very happy to be doing half twice as much to achieve half to work half as hard to achieve half as much post 2016. the vision of course explicitly states the willingness to tap into the female potential and enable them to take a lead in the transformation of the country. So what happened since we launched, to be honest, I can't comprehend what we are living today. We surpassed, just like Princess Haifa has mentioned, we surpassed all expectations. So unemployment dropped from 35% to less than 30%. Employment rate increased to above 35%. In the ICT sector where women usually are misrepresented or underrepresented, the jump was from. 7 to 35% new sectors open open for women. Women in sport was nonexistent for before 2016. I had the picture of the first football team. Do you play on the we have a fencer. Well, I won't disclose this on stage, but just because my kids will penalize me for saying it out loud. But um, so yes, Hanan just mentioned about our first female astronaut going into a space mission. It's booming everywhere. The political willpower and the intention that we have to support us moving forward is really keeping the momentum. Before vision, we used to say focus breeds excellence. Post vision we say trust breeds trust in ourselves, in our teams, trust in our superior, trust in our government, trust in our future, and that's how we keep on. I love that. I think that's very powerful. And, and I think that that I mean I'd love to talk about this in this large workforce one of the places in the world where of course very young workforce you mentioned earlier the um perceptions of, of Saudi Arabia, people coming. How do you feel about that right now in terms of the perceptions of the kingdom and you mentioned attracting a lot of visitors? What would you like to change to attract even more? I mean, uh. First of all, the perception issue is real and it's live and it's still ongoing today and, and one of the first perceptions uh that that I've heard a lot, the misconceptions was that women can't. I think this room proves otherwise. I don't need to say much on that. My fellow panelists, the people who were here before me that spoke over the course of the past two days, we're clearly way beyond the concept of women can't, and women did in Saudi Arabia. It's not can they or can't they? They have, so again, women can't is still unfortunately a very real misconception that's happening abroad. Actually on that subject, specifically, many people were saying that, um, but you're trying to attract tourists, and I said yes. They said female tourists and I said yes, and they said, is it safe for a woman to travel on her own. Actually, Saudi Arabia, Medina specifically was ranked for 3 years in the row, the most safest city in the world for female travelers, for solo female travelers. How's New York? No, I'm kidding. That's where I'm from. Never mind, never mind. I could all that index. But but again, it's just to show you I've traveled alone. I've traveled with female friends. I mean, I'm not going to go and sell something that I haven't done myself. It's easy for me to come and say I'm selling this destination because I'm from this destination and it's who I am, but I've tested it all. I've traveled alone. I've traveled with my kids alone. I've traveled with. With female friends and I, I, I never faced any of the issues that I face in many other countries. So again, is it safe? I think it's the global indices that have nothing to do with me indicate that it's one of the most safest destinations. The second thing that people say is, yeah, but what months in the year should we come because, you know, you're all desert. And I'm like, well, we have a 1800 kilometer coastline that says otherwise, and it's on the Red Sea and it's preserved and it's untouched and it's sustainable and it's one of the only places remaining on Earth that has the most vibrant, colorful coral reefs that have been untouched. You're making me want to go to the Red Sea. Very good at your job. I love that. And now first we didn't have hardware to match that that natural offering. Today we have resorts in the Red Sea. Today we have airports in the Red Sea. Today we have so many different types of offerings in the Red Sea. So it's no longer a concept of activating. It's active, it's live, it's there, and I advise everyone to go and visit. And I think the third part was, sorry, on that part of you're just desert, we, I remember in 2019 I met with my European counterparts. And we were talking about the landscape of Saudi Arabia, and I said, you know, one day you're going to come skiing in Saudi Arabia, and they all laughed and here we are hosting the Olympic Winter World Cup in 2027. So again, this is the place you get things done. I sense to get, you know, I want to, I'm going to Your Excellency, talk about the workforce technology. One of the Things I definitely know about Saudi Arabia is that this is a place that very much is becoming a hub of innovation, technology, AI. There have been conversations of that being both a net good, of course, new tools and something that's disruptive, especially to young people in terms of that on-ramp to careers. What are, what are you seeing as the priorities to engage the workforce to give them the tools they need. To be that workforce of the future, especially having come from an educational institution into this role, of course legislation plays a great role, and I think the the previous panel have tackled that. But human capital development is quite relevant. Saudi Arabia has a very unique perspective, unique experience in the number of women in STEM education. The global average is 35%. In Saudi Arabia, we have over 570. 57% of enrollment in STEM are women. We have more graduates from ICT schools, females than males. So we have, we're also reaching not just only parity but also power. A lot of the 24% at the moment, leaders in the digital sector are females. Now these numbers speak for themselves. It tells you how organically this this force is developing. This unique experience in Saudi Arabia has led to the establishment of the first Apple Developer Academy in Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. It attracts 25 nationalities from around the world. We not only cater for our students locally, we have a platform called Studying KSA where we have. A number of academic offerings from short courses to prolonged programs, and we want to really invite students from all over the world and one of the best experiences I had in my career and I attribute this to Doctoral Latifa Freyan. We had a trip to England. We were visiting a number of universities, and she said, Newcastle, we should take our girls to play a game in Newcastle. And that's exactly what we did. Our soccer team from Noura University, they played the game in Newcastle together with the Vice Chancellor of Newcastle. We watched the game and then the Newcastle team came to Saudi Arabia and played the game. So that's, I won't say, OK, good point. You're very I think it's a very international talent pool here as well. I've seen for hospitality as well. Actually, I wanted to comment on that. There's a project that we worked on together. It's we, we basically created the Rial School for Travel and hospitality. It's going to be the largest, it is the largest school for travel and hospitality in the world, and we, we opened a temporary campus in Princess Noura University. And this is one of the projects that we worked very closely on together that was actually endorsed by international organizations and the campus is set to eventually move to Ga, which is going to be the largest entertainment city in the world, in order to talk. About the future types of talent that are going to be needed when you're talking about entertainment, sports, hospitality, travel, the future of aviation, what that looks like, and have real practices on ground. And this was actually one of the projects that we worked on and and. There was a very funny incident that happened. I don't know how much of that I can say, but I'm going to wing it and say a few minutes and 36 seconds. It's about how how politically correct it is to say, but I'm going to go ahead and say it anyway. So the incident that took place was um. We had a very se international figure that was coming to open up the the campus, the temporary campus, and it was myself and Her Excellency that were supposed to be there to greet her, obviously we were supposed to be there before, and what happened is that figure arrived early. I was there. He was there and I called her and I said, listen, and this is where please women supporting women is so important, please, please. I'm stuck in traffic. I called her. I said, Listen, he's almost there. I'm stuck in traffic. We all know what real traffic looks like. I'm stuck in traffic. Help, help me. Can you please go greet this this very senior international figure? She did. She winged it. She invited him for coffee. She took him around the campus, and it was like it was part of the design. So women supporting women. I love that. That's how things get done. I know we only have a minute left. I want to get. Each of you a chance, very few words. What milestone would you like to see us hit in 10 years? I'm going to start with you. You. You know, I want a global engagement with the entities working in Saudi Arabia on the ecosystem of women empowerment. We have, we monitor the progress through the National Observatory for Women. You're all invited to, you know, to collaborate. We assess the future of doing studies and research through Sara Suderi Center for Women's Studies. We celebrate women's success through an annual prize under the patronage of the king himself, Noura University. sorry, Princess Noura Prize for Women's excellence, and we develop talent and we support women and we build, we build networks to support women through the leadership center. So I urge everyone to connect with these entities and really have. I love that. And of course in about 35 seconds, what would you want to convey in terms of the milestone you'd like to see us hit? I just, you're all here. You're in Saudi Arabia. Please visit Saudi Arabia. Please go around. See, see what magazines are not going to tell you, what TV is not going to tell you, what media is not going to tell you. Meet a local. Wait, I'm the media here. No, I'm kidding. I'm going to tell everybody. Meet the locals. We're all here. I'm happy to be somebody's tour guide while you're here. I'm sure I'm volunteering you as Tribune. I'm sure is happy to be somebody's tour guide. Please, since you're here, just take the time, go around, see this beautiful, this beautiful, beautiful city, meet these beautiful people, and create your own impression. All right, I love that. Thank you, Your Highness, Your Excellency. Thank you so much. What a joy to talk to two people who get such joy from each other. You go off, I believe.

Microsoft’s chief privacy officer—and a former commissioner for the U.S.  government agency responsible for protecting online privacy—discusses AI  regulation, how digital safety and tech uniquely impact the lives of women and  children, and the role her company is playing in the global adoption of responsible AI. 

Training AI to Play By The Rules

Hello everybody. OK, so Julie, what are the whole uh range of other things that you do? Lots and lots of things. So privacy, responsible AI, digital safety data governance, it's sort of the whole suite of sounds super, super easy. It's really easy, yeah, yeah, great. OK, so, um, let's let's get into it, uh, lots of very hefty topics, um, I know you recently you're, you're always attending policy, privacy, um. Conferences, but there was one in Venice you were at recently in DC um what what's top of mind at these events right now? So what's fascinating in terms of what's going on right now is there seems to be a consensus that is developing among global regulators, not just in Europe, not just in the United States, but in Asia and elsewhere, which is regulation is deeply important and it's the same. Time regulators need to make sure that there will be innovation. So there's a lot of discussion right now about how do we ensure that we are enabling innovation while protecting fundamental rights and also how do we make sure that startups and small and medium enterprises can navigate the regulatory space? We've heard a lot earlier in Conference about how difficult it can be for those kinds of entities. So regulators are looking at simplification. They're looking at harmonizing across all of these different domains, and they're really looking to drive and enable innovation, and that's actually quite refreshing seeing that now. You've been on both sides, right? Also, you've spent some time on the government side, yes, which do you like better? No, I'm just joking. I um yes, yes, yeah, sure, that's a good answer. um OK, let's uh talk about safety. You spend a lot of time thinking again from from both perspectives from your previous, um, you know, previous career as well, um, as your current one about safety when it comes to AI and and technology more broadly, uh, when it comes to kids, yeah. Do you, what do you think about most? What's most critical, and I'm curious to hear also from the point of view of the corporate side of of your role today. What is companies, uh, you know, role versus the government. Sure, so governments around the world are really focused on kids right now in a way that we haven't actually seen in quite some time. Um, so and the focus is really around social media and the impact on kids, and you're seeing globally outside of the United States the adoption of laws that companies really do need to pay attention to and are paying attention to. And the reason why I say outside of the United States is there's this little thing, the First Amendment, that sort of has. Tied up some of the laws that are that the governments are trying to adopt that said, from a company perspective, what we need to make sure is that we provide parents, moms, dads with the tools so that they can help their kids navigate this space and also can protect their kids from whatever content they're able to control. It's a challenging space because at the same time you want to enable kids to learn about a digital technology. You want them to engage because this is their future digital technology. So there's a balance that needs to be struck, and I think that a lot of jurisdictions are doing that and a lot of governments, so a lot of governments are doing. that and companies are really trying to enable that kind of balance. So if you go back a ways I know you brought up social media and some of the risks and concerns there but um we saw regulators um trying to to catch up when it came to social media, when it came to mobile to those technological transformations. Do you feel like with the advent of AI, um, there's a little bit more of a preemptive thought being given to some of the potential issues? There was absolutely and I'd say, you know, particularly around the EU AI Act and some other very immersive comprehensive laws dealing with AI, the governments were saying, look, we missed the boat on social media, so we need to get out in front. We need to regulate. And I think there's now a recognition that there's a need to take an examination, really take a step back. This is by governments that are saying let's make sure that these laws can be implemented by companies across the spectrum. We want to enable startups. We want to enable innovation, and so I think that that is what is starting this initiative that you're seeing around what I talked about before. Simplification, harmonization, so it isn't so complicated going from privacy to responsible AI to digital safety. Let's bring them together in a way that will work a little bit better for the small and medium enterprises, but it did begin, I think you're right, when governments thought, gee, I think we missed the boat on social media. Do, do you feel like the um this kind of these opposing forces, um, because on the one hand. Obviously there's this AI arms race, um, you can't slow down progress. I know there was in in the US this sort of movement to like take a six month pause on AI progress which is not gonna happen um but you know on the one hand you have that right? you've got. At this this push to keep advancing and um and and there is this race going on on the other hand so many potential issues that are being thought through um how do you thread that needle like these are opposing forces. What are the different approaches to making sure that on the company level by the way that you can move forward, that you're not falling behind and at the same time you're being thoughtful? Yeah, I think that that's really important, especially for companies. I think it's really important that you know even before you. Start looking at regulations and whether and how you're going to comply to really create principles that that you as a company stand for. So at Microsoft, and I don't, we're not the only ones, but we were very early. You're a big one. We're a big one. We're big. Anybody heard of Microsoft in here? We are, we are big and because we're big and because we provide so much infrastructure to the governments and companies around the world, we really take these responsibilities pretty seriously and so what we had to do early early on before any AI laws were adopted, we created internal standards and that's where you as a company can say. Are we living up to our north star? What is our north star when it comes to making sure that we're trusted and we're trustworthy in terms of the AI that we're providing? And so we had a standard. We developed teams that would test against that standard. The standard included things like ensuring privacy, ensuring security. Security ensuring safety and fairness and making sure that the AI was inclusive, especially when it comes to accessibility issues. So those are pretty big requirements and we had teams that would make sure that we were abiding by that. We tested it was a very robust internal system. And we also published our standards so people could see it, so transparency was a big part of this too, and I think that that's the kind of responsibility that a company like Microsoft owes to our customers, which are also some very big companies and small and medium enterprises and startups, and what we also owe to our public sector customers as well. By the way, are you, are you surprised by the pace of Adoption. I mean, OpenAI's chat GPT, which Microsoft has a stake in, amassed 100 million users, subscribers within two months of its launch, fastest growing app ever. Did that surprise you? You've seen these other, you know, you've been a part of these other technological transformations. I have been. So when I was a commissioner of the US Federal Trade Commission, which, which was my last government role. Um, we used to see a lot of tech technological advances, and we felt like we were always behind. Now the pace of innovation is just accelerated. What used to take years to get out now takes months, and you know, regulators are trying to keep up. They're doing, you know, not a bad job in my view. And what we're seeing in companies. It is just to go to a point you made earlier, a real desire to be ahead, to be leaders, and also to make sure that it is safe and trusted, and that is a big job right now. But it is, but yes, things are moving incredibly quickly. Um, I wanna ask you also about the role of AI in productivity and in the impact, uh, to the workforce, um, and we talked a little bit about that yesterday as well and some of the opportunities, um, there's also uh a potential downside, right? There's a lot of concerns about what it does to jobs, um, you know, I think, I think we talk about it. A lot of like the superpower for employees which it absolutely can be. Can you talk a little bit about just how you look at the impact on the job force, the workforce, you know, both internally and externally, and how does that factor into how you think about the growth? Yeah, I think it's, it's really important to Understand that like here at this conference we have amazing people, amazing women who have been able to do incredible things with AI that I you know, listening to all of these panels I've just been blown away, um, that's a technical term for like really it's been awesome, um, and. At the same time I think it's important to think about the suite of of what's going to be happening particularly to women in the workforce as we go forward and that doesn't necessarily involve this cohort of women but sort of all women so what we are gonna. See is there jobs that are going to be augmented by AI they're going to be improved, you know, medical jobs of people who are in medicine, people who are in research, people who are doing pharmaceuticals, even the financial community. AI generative AI is just going to help them zoom ahead. There are those kinds of jobs we can think of as AI augmenting those roles, and then there are going to be jobs that are going to be disrupted. And you know that's going to be creative. We are, we know about that from what's what's happening in Hollywood. um we are also going to see that in administrative roles. We will see that in some sort of analytic roles, but not all of them. And as it turns out, so, uh, LinkedIn published some data and it got it out on International Women's Day. It turns out that women are going to be more impacted because they are, they take more and aspire to more of the jobs that will be disrupted than augmented and so what that means is it's really important for governments. And for companies to focus on how we can help women now get ready for that so that they just don't lose their jobs and then like they've got no place to go. So what does that mean? It means that we heard a lot about skilling uh over the last couple of days we absolutely need to focus on women in particular who are gonna need skilling and the jobs that that will be disrupted to help them get to that next level. There's also other things that companies can do, I think, to help with this in addition to skilling, and I should just note really quickly, Microsoft has already trained and skilled for AI about 100,000 people in Saudi and millions in just here, just here in Saudi Arabia, millions around the world, and by the end of this year we will hit about 160,000 in Saudi Arabia. Yeah, yeah, it's a big, but it's our responsibility, right? This is something that we can really help with and we partner with the government, we partner with our customers. It's really important to do skilling, but the other thing that companies can do super quick is you can, they can focus on their culture inside their companies to really drive AI training and all of that, and they can change the way they look at new new candidates for jobs. Think about the skills that people have, not their past experience. If you focus on skills, what you'll do is you'll increase by 13% the number of women that are considered for jobs globally. Well, um, Julie, I feel like we only scratched the surface, but as we said, really hefty topics, hopefully you'll be back, and it will be me interviewing you and not a bot or a humanoid, you know, robot so it will definitely be you, but thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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