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LinkedIn Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Preston Fore

Not all degrees are a waste of time and money—these MBA programs are landing grads $150K+ jobs in tech and consulting

/2025/09/19/top-mba-business-schools-for-career-growth-according-to-linkedin-stanford-harvard-wharton-gen-z-six-figure-salaries/

Emma Burleigh

Gen Z grad sent out over 1,000 job applications—when he didn’t hear anything back, he carried a sign around Wall Street begging for a job instead

/2025/09/17/gen-z-graduate-unemployed-job-seeking-wall-street-poster-careers-linkedin-interviews/

Jessica Coacci

As AI makes it harder to land a job, OpenAI is building a platform to help you get one

/2025/09/05/ai-makes-it-harder-to-land-a-job-automation-openai-building-jobs-platform-to-help-you-get-one/

Nick Lichtenberg

Over half of professionals think AI trainings feel like a second job, LinkedIn survey finds

/2025/08/28/ai-training-reskilling-annoying-feels-like-second-job-linkedin/

While AI wipes out entry-level roles, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says it’s actually ‘the most exciting time to be starting out one’s career’

/2025/08/15/ai-wipes-out-entry-level-roles-openai-billionaire-ceo-sam-altman-says-most-exciting-time-to-be-starting-out-ones-career/

Gen Z grad sent out over 1,000 job applications—when he didn't hear anything back, he carried a sign around Wall Street begging for a job instead

https://fortune.com/2025/09/17/gen-z-graduate-unemployed-job-seeking-wall-street-poster-careers-linkedin-interviews/?itm_source=parsely-api

Orianna Rosa Royle

Gen Z grad landed LinkedIn job by applying to waitress at the conferences recruiters posted about, then handing out her résumé during breaks

https://fortune.com/2024/04/13/gen-z-landed-dream-job-waitressing-conferences-linkedin/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://fortune.com/2025/09/19/top-mba-business-schools-for-career-growth-according-to-linkedin-stanford-harvard-wharton-gen-z-six-figure-salaries/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://fortune.com/2025/09/05/ai-makes-it-harder-to-land-a-job-automation-openai-building-jobs-platform-to-help-you-get-one/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/ai-wipes-out-entry-level-roles-openai-billionaire-ceo-sam-altman-says-most-exciting-time-to-be-starting-out-ones-career/?itm_source=parsely-api

Top Google exec says AI will rival humans in just 5 years and predicts we’ll 'colonize the galaxy' in 2030—but he draws the line at robot nurses

https://fortune.com/2025/06/06/google-deepmind-ceo-demis-hassabis-ai-smarter-than-humans-space-colonization-robot-nurses/?itm_source=parsely-api

As degrees get branded worthless, LinkedIn’s just revealed the universities that give Gen Z the best shot at corner office jobs

https://fortune.com/2025/08/13/gen-z-useless-degrees-best-colleges-long-term-career-success-linkedin-list-princeton-duke-upenn-struggling-job-market/?itm_source=parsely-api

Dave Smith

'Sometimes the good guys don't win': Former Hulu VP mourns Disney's shuttering of the iconic streaming app

https://fortune.com/2025/08/12/hulu-vp-ben-smith-mourns-disney-app-shutdown-good-guys-dont-win/?itm_source=parsely-api

Sara Braun

Duolingo's CEO outlined his plan to become an 'AI-first' company. He didn’t expect the human backlash that followed

https://fortune.com/2025/06/09/duolingo-ceo-surprised-backlash-ai-first-company-announcement/?itm_source=parsely-api

Lily Mae Lazarus

Figma's 33-year-old cofounder is a former LinkedIn intern who launched the $68 billion Wall Street darling with $100k from Peter Thiel

https://fortune.com/2025/08/01/figma-ipo-cofounder-dylan-field-former-linkedin-intern-peter-thiel-fellowship/?itm_source=parsely-api

Have you ever had a busy day and said to yourself, “I wish there were two of me”? Delphi Cofounder and CEO Dara Ladjevardian has made that fantasy into a reality. Inspired by his desire to converse with his grandfather and benefit from his wisdom after a stroke, Ladjevardian set to work on creating code that captures and scales the mind of any individual. In this must-see session, he’ll explain his process and demo the technology’s practical use cases for corporate executives—ending with an interview with the digital twin of Fortune’s own Diane Brady. 

GET READY TO MEET YOUR DIGITAL TWIN

Conferences

So, so he, who here has actually thought to themselves, I wish I could clone myself. Anyone, come on, we're all busy. You definitely multiple meetings. I wish, I always wish I had one. Well, now we're in a world where that's no longer a fantasy, and to introduce myself, my name is Darla Gevar, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Delphi, and we allow people to create a digital version of themselves to scale their impact and their time. And in this world where every person potentially has a digital mind, you can connect with a top expert in the world in any subject. You can potentially connect with your great grandparents and maybe your great grandkids can connect with you. But before I get into the implications of this world and how people are using this technology, let me tell you a bit about how I got here. In 2014, I was gifted a book called How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil, and you know Kurzweil? Legend. He was very much ahead of his time, but in this book, he says that one day if we had a technology that could serve as a pattern recognizer for language, you could recreate the human mind. I remember that six years later in 2021, I had started my first company. It was called Friday. It was a company that leveraged LOMs to allow you to buy anything with a text, and I was a solo founder at the time. And many of you guys know the first time you start a company it's very lonely and isolating. Everyone's telling you different advice. You don't know who to listen to, but at the time I was reading a book about my grandfather who was one of the most successful businessmen in Iran before the revolution. He had 30,000 employees at his peak, got put on the hit list by the Ayatollah, and he had to escape, and he came to this country with nothing and was able to rebuild his life back for our family. And he was a legend. He was someone that I really wanted to be able to get advice from and ask, what would you do in my situation? This wasn't a question that a book could answer, and he had had a stroke two years prior, so I couldn't ask him directly myself. But I did realize that these LLMs that I was using to build this first startup, they were pattern recognizers, pattern recognizers for language, and I could actually use them in the way Ray Kurzweil suggested to recreate my grandfather's mind. And that's exactly what I did. I created a digital version of him that I could talk to and ask for advice. And that startup got acquired, but that experience just got me really thinking about how we learn from other people and how you can read a book or watch a YouTube video or listen to a podcast, but most of the ways we access knowledge today are passive unless you have a lot of money or unless you can afford to be in a room like this, which most people don't have. And the problem is time. The most unique asset each one of us has is our mind, and up until now, the way you express your mind has a cap. You can only be in one place at one time. And since the beginning of time we've constantly innovated on ways to scale our mind whether it was cave paintings, to the printing press, to the radio. Traditional media allows us to reach millions of people, but it lacks the personalization of conversation, and that's why you hire teams. You try to train teams in your ways of thinking so that you can scale your knowledge in this interactive way, but it loses the essence of who you are. So the question that we had is, what if you could have a new source of media that combines the scalability of traditional media and the personalization of bidirectional conversation. And so we started Delphire. Delphi lets you create a digital version of your mind so that you can have that one on one experience across time zones, across geographic barriers, across languages so that your mind is uncapped. And to tell you a little bit how it works, you pretty much connect your data sources from your email, your social media, your notes, and we create this representation of your mind, and this isn't just where you work or who you know, but how you think about things because that's what makes you unique, your decision making process. That's really what you want to scale. And from there, people can chat with you, call you, and even FaceTime you, which we'll see in a little bit. And before I jump into the use cases, let me tell you a little bit of the, of the why now. Obviously, AI is now affordable. When I built the clone of my grandfather, it was 10,000 times more expensive and it just continues to get cheaper. Consumer demands for how they consume content is changing rapidly. TikTok and Reels lowering attention spans. Younger generations are not reading books as much. They're not going through courses. There's a desire for a more immediate gratification form of learning from someone else. And the last thing is we are currently in an abundance era, and what do I mean by that? The beginning of the internet was an abundance era, dot com era. You had so many dot-coms and Wikipedia pages and blogs, and the creator economy was actually a response to that. Whenever there is an era of abundance, the pendulum usually swings towards a desire for trust and curation. So right now information is abundant and when information is abundant, the bottleneck is not access to information, but rather access to curation and trust. And I think we're seeing that pendulum thing right now. People are over the honeymoon phase, they're getting over the honeymoon phase of AI. So let me tell you about how people are actually using this technology in the business world. One is at the top of the funnel. You want to pick my brain. I don't want to give you my email, but you can talk to my Delphi. And it can answer all the questions and it knows the kinds of people that I want to have in-person meetings with, so it's going to let me know if we should hop on a call, and we have people using this as a replacement of their personal website, their LinkedIn profile, their resume. Then we have the middle of the funnel 24/7 access to an executive or the CEO as a form of customer support. And why is that any different than just a generic customer support chatbot? Well, I think there's an interesting email from Mark Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel where he talks about how his reputation with millennials and Gen Z is very important. And fast forward you see him with the perm and the chain and you know looking very cool. That's all very calculated. He knows that people connect with people, not nameless entities. So we see a lot of the CEOs using Delphi as customer support, building parasocial relationships with their customers, leading to higher NPS. The third is internal. As a company scales, the thing that really breaks is company culture and alignment of decision making. So we have many CEOs and executives scaling themselves so that any new hire who on boards into the company has access to a version of the executives so they can know how to make decisions and how to do things the right way. We have CEOs scaling the highest caliber salespeople in their organization to make their knowledge available to other salespeople so that everyone can get that kind of mentorship and management. And then we all know a big problem is tribal knowledge when you have someone who leaves the company and they take their knowledge with them. Well, now you can turn their mind into an asset that stays in the company, so whoever replaces them can catch up to speed a lot faster. And then you can use data from those conversation analytics to see where in the company you need to focus on. And the last use case is we have people making multi-seven figures in revenue selling time with their mind. Sounds crazy, but people make. 8 figures in revenue selling a book or selling a course. This is just an interactive piece of content that people pay for to learn in an interactive way. So those are the four main use cases we see today and obviously there's a lot of fears around AI I'm going to address those fears head on. You might say, what happens to my data. As we know, a lot of these big AI companies are raising at enormous rounds on the promise that they're going to train models on your data to build bigger and bigger models. With Delphi, we believe AI is best when it's in the hands of the individual, so you own your data, not used to train any external models. Number 2 is probably the most common. What if it says something bad? When when we started the company, many of the fears we had, and we worked with a lot of celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tony Robbins, Jay Shetty. What if someone takes a screenshot and sends it to the Daily Mail and there's a hit piece on me? Well, luckily fixing hallucination and guardrails was the first thing we had to do at the company. And so there's two ways you might want something like this. Either it only answers questions directly that it has the data on, or you want it to give it a little bit more leeway where it can reason on new situations. An example of that would be if I were to ask my grandfather's clone. How would you think about starting an AI company? He's never spoken about AI in his life, but he started an oil business in the mid-twentieth century in Iran, which was relatively uncertain, and he could apply that reasoning of dealing with uncertainty to an entirely new situation. So those are some of the fears I will address, and I think we'll have time for Q&A at the end, but I thought we'd bring up a digital mind of our very own Dianne Brady to ask some questions. I'm gonna ask a question first. I don't know, maybe you are the digital self. We don't have to. Um, so there's my digital self. I see her coming up. I don't see her. Is she up there? One second, I'll check. I'm not sure what you mean. Are you asking about someone specific? Let me know, and I'll do my best to help. All right, while we're waiting for her to go on stage. I guess the last fear I wanted to address is what if this makes me seem inauthentic. And I think the goal, there she is. The goal of this technology is that it's not deceptive, and I'll pause and Diane, hey, we're here speaking at the Fortune CO summit about AI. Any words of wisdom on how we could keep up to date with this rapidly changing technology. Well, first off, Dara, I'd say don't worry about seeming inauthentic. The key is transparency, being up front about how you're using AI and why. People respect honesty, and it's when you try to hide things that trust erodes. As for keeping up with AI, I'd suggest focusing on the practical applications that matter most to your business. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer pace of change, but the real value lies in understanding how this technology can solve specific problems or create opportunities. And don't forget to lean on experts whether it's your team, industry peers, or forums like this summit. What's your biggest concern about AI right now? That's for me? You know, um, I think one of my concerns, of course, this is Diane Brady, the real Dianne Brady, and, uh, and I'm curious about how replaceable I am. Diane, what do you see when you look in the mirror? When I look in the mirror, I see someone who's curious, driven, and maybe a little too caffeinated at times. I think it's about seeing the layers, journalist, leader, mom, friend, and knowing they all shape how I show up in the world. What about you? What do you see? Uh, something a little different. You know, I'm curious. I've been asked to ask any Thing, I'm going to ask if you have any memories of your childhood because I'm curious just how wide. Well, if you've been given the green light to ask anything, go big. What's the one question you've always wanted to ask someone but never had the chance? Or if you're feeling philosophical, what's the one thing you'd want to know about the future? Let's hear it. That's a very good question. Um, I think one thing I'd like to know about the future is, where do you think you can add value where the real Dianne Brady cannot? Is that stumping you, Diane? Maybe it's muted. Maybe, oh, I see it is muted. Yeah, it is muted. So you know, one thing I found with this, I think I can absolutely add value for the real Diane. The goal here is to extend her voice, amplify her insights, and help her connect with more people in meaningful ways. It's not about replacing her but complimenting her work like a digital assistant with her personality and perspective. What do you think would be the most valuable way for me to do that? I suppose that email and perhaps having people ask me questions. It's interesting this exercise, when I first engaged with this, I found the digital self to be a little humorless, and it made me realize I need to upgrade my LinkedIn profile because I kept spouting these things back at myself where I was like, really, content connections, conversation, but this is, I find this to be a much deeper version. Diane, um, what are you working on right now that you say, oh, let me just, should I go historically? So, uh, Diane, you've written about, uh, Donald Trump and tariffs. Talk a little bit about what some of the issues. What are some of the issues business leaders I'm not sure I caught that. Are you asking about something specific? Let me know and I'll jump in. Um, tell us, tell us a little bit about what business leaders are thinking about tariffs right now from what you've written. Parents are a huge focus for business leaders because they're often the ones juggling the most work, family, and everything in between, flexibility has. Diane, I think we asked about tariffs. What's your opinion on tariffs right now? Let me look. Tariffs are a tricky subject. They're often sold as a way to protect domestic industries, but the reality is they usually end up being a tax on consumers. For example, I've pointed out before that tariffs imposed on imports are paid by you. As consumers through higher costs, not by foreign governments like China. It's a blunt tool that can backfire, especially in a globalized economy. What's your take? Do you think they're effective? To be continued later, these are these are difficult subjects. So Diane, thank you for your time. And, and thank you Dara for creating a version of myself that I think is interesting. I look forward to more conversations. Please join me in thanking um Darra Lavarianarian and um. And obviously more to be you can call my digital self, ask her all kinds of questions. I found it a fascinating exercise. So thank you for doing this. I got to get to know you before I met you. Well, and, and let's, uh, let's hope I was worth meeting. So thank you very much, um, and so, uh. I found that fascinating and a little disconcerting. I don't know about you, but that was. So do we have any runners in the crowd? Raise your hand if you actually like to run or hike. There you go. There's one couple in the back. Um, I'm really interested in this next session part of our, um, we are speaking to somebody who's been in the COO role now in a COO role, Dan Sheridan of Brooks Running. It is the brand. I think that runners think about Dara also was in the COO role during an incredible time of transition for both the company and the industry. He will be joined in conversation with senior writer and serious runner Phil Waba and Joy. Thanks very much, everybody.

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.

AI can analyze data, make predictions, and automate processes—but it can’t empathize, inspire, or build trust. As automation supplements what we need our IQ to do, a premium is being placed on human-centric leadership and EQ as a key differentiator for businesses. The old paradigm of work has been upended by the pandemic, AI and innovation, and the new era of work requires an updated leadership playbook. Hear from two prominent experts–a key voice on economic opportunity and a leader integrating people and digital technology–about the new leadership competencies that will determine success and failure in the workplace.

Disrupt Yourself or Be Disrupted: The New Leadership Playbook

Welcome. So I'm gonna also start with a show of hands. Um, how many of you use AI tools in your daily work in the workplace? Wow. Wow, yeah. Almost everyone. How many of you worry that you may be replaced at some point by an AI agent? Not too many. That's good to hear. I mean, I would say I probably, as a, as a journalist I'd raise my hand for that one. we're on the brink of what some have called the agentic era, which I know from the cocktail hour yesterday, a lot of people are thinking about in this room. Both our panelists have thought really long and hard about how we humans can live and work with AI agents. Tracy Franklin made news late last year when she was promoted from running human resources at Moderna to a new and groundbreaking role. Chief people and digital technology officer, which means that she's now managing the needs of a 5000 person organization as well as 3000 customized GPTs which are tailored versions of chat GPT designed to facilitate specific tasks at Moderna and Anish Rahman. is the chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn and by his own account has had a squiggly line career from being a CNN correspondent to writing speeches for President Barack Obama to his current role at LinkedIn where his focus is on shaping the global conversation around the historic changes reshaping work. Um, I'm gonna be opening this up to questions. I know from the conversations yesterday, you have plenty of questions on this topic, so put your hand up and a mic will come over to you. Um, I'd love to start with you, Tracy, um. Really a nuts and bolts question, uh, with these 3000 custom GPTs, how do you determine what tasks are appropriate for a human and what tasks for a GPT? I wonder if you could give us an example. Yeah, sure, um, it's a great question, so thank you and hi, excited to be here. Um, for a couple of years now we have been thinking about work, so not necessarily workforce planning with humans and not necessarily. Just technology planning it's what's the actual flow of work that happens in an organization and what's required to accomplish that to have the biggest impact and so we've mapped those flows of workout across the company so whether that's within a function or cross functionally and then we say how best should we get this done? Is it a normal system robotics, AI, human and then how do you integrate it all. And so the purpose of my role is really bringing together talent strategy and tech strategy to build that integrated way of doing work um and so it's case by case basis I think one of the exciting things that we are working on is our individualized cancer therapies and that's a whole new way of building um our organization and so it's we don't have time to get into it now but it's a pretty cool example of how we've combined all of that. Um, and Anish, you published in a New York Times op ed came out literally this morning, which is great timing, uh, about the challenge of facing the Wall Street Journal, right? She was. Uh, the challenges facing people at the bottom rung of the career ladders, um, you said that to fix entry level work we'll have to reimagine it entirely, which is something that I know Tracy, you're also thinking about. Um, could you elaborate a little bit on what you meant by that? How do we reimagine that and, and specifically how do the people in this, what role do the people in this room, people in in the HR departments have in, in that reimagining? The most important role. I mean, first, thank you for having us. Congratulations to fortune. This is an amazing collection of people. I often think of this line from one of the great movement builders that there's only one conversation that this group of people can have in this room at this moment. Let's find it and I'd encourage us all to really lean into that prospect because we are at the beginning of a moment of big history of big change when it comes to the world of work. I'm convinced it's going to be the biggest disruption. To work in human history and so the point of the op ed was really people are starting to get that, but I don't think people understand how fully in this moment of change, uh, we are where people were starting to get that urgency most was around entry level work. I think it's the. Intuitive for people that the tasks that we've traditionally assigned to entry level work are are the most disrupted, if not imminently disruptible by AI tools, but the most important part of the piece, and I'd encourage you all to read it, but I leave you with this as a group, is that for a while now as we thought about this moment of big disruption, we have been going to technologists to ask them what's coming and technologists should be asked what's coming with AI. But technologists are not trained or skilled at answering the question of what's happening to humans at work. That is not what they know best, and we haven't done a good enough job going to all of you, going to neuroscientists, going to organizational psychologists, going to economic anthropologists to say what has been true for humans at work because it hasn't been a great story to date. And then what's possible for humans at work if we change the story of work from not being about technology at work but humans at work. And so the piece really pushes us to not just say entry level work is either gone or persisting in old math ways, it's how do we make entry level work better, not just for entry level workers, but for the companies they join. Each generation brings its own unique skills and expertise to a culture of innovation entry level workers, young grads, they're natives on technology and these new tools, and they are all the research of revolution shows people are most absolutist, you know, in their twenties, they're gonna push back. They're gonna ask why are we doing it this way? Why don't we do it this other way and that's. Exactly the kind of culture that people need um and that all then ends with all of you. I mean the the unit of change for all this is gonna be work and the people that are most in control of that are all of you and so whatever we can all do to help all of you lead all of us um really as a species into this new world of work, that's what I'm signed up for. And you're already doing that yourself, both of you, um, I wanna, if it's all right, get a little bit personal here. You both talked about using AI agents in your own work lives as sometimes even as a personal coach or kind of a therapist to get you through your workdays or to multiply your capabilities, and I'd love to ask you both to share a little bit about how you on kind of the course of your days how AI has helped you personally. I don't know if you do you want I can so so I use it a lot um but the thing that's been most helpful for me as um someone who is really interested in getting the most out of human potential, um, is I do a lot with our executive team obviously I'm the CHRO in in addition to running technology for the company um and we have a lot of personality tests that we've used in the organization and so I've created profiles in a GPT um of our executive committee and I. Have scenarios of when two people are are maybe at conflict or when I have to go in with an opinion um or a recommendation and how might the the group react to my recommendation or if I'm having a really bad day and I need to understand myself and why I'm triggering I actually have a completely interactive coach, therapist, you know, and, and teammate, um, for me that I use all the time. It's been like my favorite thing so if anyone is interested in it, feel free to ping me up. Happy to talk about it. Can I just, I just wanna dig in a little bit further. Are you actually kind of like modeling conversations and there's like conflict happening 100% and you're kind of like, what are the how you can build the profiles of people we use Hogan. I've uploaded all their Hogans and I've said, you know, here's the situation, um, how are these two people gonna react or this is what happened? Why did these two people react this way and how best can I help coach the reconciliation and I will tell you like. I think I'm pretty good with people, uh, but it gives me an advantage that I didn't have before because I don't fully understand someone's, you know, innate human personality response like the, like the GPT allows me to do. That is fascinating. Yeah, there's, you know, there's so much that we lose in terms of the human to human because of cultural disconnects. It's most explicit in terms of language and literally being in different countries, but it exists across functional know-how. My wife just texted me this morning. She's an academic dermatologist at UCSF. She does research on um on. Disease that disproportionately affects women, people of color. She's going to talk to the chief technology officer to think about all this, but she doesn't know the ways of speaking and thinking of a chief technology officer, so she just said this tool that she's using really helped her get ready. Um, I will say for all of you, I've, I've lived experience on every bit of the story, um, that I am telling. When you asked earlier who's worried that, you know, AI is going to replace them early on as someone who writes a lot and at various moments has written for a living. I was like, oh, it's gonna replace me at this core skill set that people call on me for because a lot of, you know, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, my value add was like help us write this help us think about this. Hey, so it's coming for that. So instead of the like hunker down fears like, well, let me engage with it. Let me see how good it is. So a lot of the early days was like, can I keep pace with me? Can I keep pace with it? Where does it plateau, where do I push forward? So whatever your core skill set is that you feel like is most vulnerable to disruption, you use the tools and get a sense of it. But now as I look back, it has become integral to my writing. It helps me sharpen lines, sharpen thoughts, speed up execution of content. Um, I just, we talked about in the past month or so, step changed my work. I mean, I'm now doing weeks of work and hours and as I try to understand it, it was a kind of um existential experience as it happened. Uh, Mary Kate's in the room, she knows I was like, I don't know what's happening, but something's happening. I think a lot of it is um I've invested in the tools for a bit now so I give them a ton of context on who I am, how I think, what I what I'm curious about. They help educate me on the history of work, history of our species, like all these big concepts I'm trying to wrestle through, um, and I've gotten more project based. I mean, all work is gonna become project based. We are gonna look at a beyond caller beyond function work sooner than you think. sales and marketing won't exist as they are, but might not even exist as separate functions. And all of that is because there's a thing we need to do and there are different roles for AI to do and humans to do and AI helps humans do different things with other humans and human review becomes part of the workflow, um, but I've invested in these tools and so when you say you invested, you've invested time in training them and so one way to think about it is we all talk about the large language models, but what's coming with AI are the small language models and that shorthand for that is agents, but the small language model just means the tools I use. Have a really good data set on me and I've given them all thoughts, all questions, all of this stuff. So now the small language model that is me means these tools just started like like at a quick pace started getting even better at the projects I assigned it, right? I'd love to actually put this question out. How, how many people in this room are are using AI agents in this way in your kind of daily work lives? And I count projects within AI tools as a pseudo agent, so that might get people, right, yeah, for some, um, I mean this, I'd love to hear any questions you will have about this, uh, at any point, so please put your hand up, um, if you have questions. Is, is there a hand up? Yeah, there's one over there. Hi, thank you. Yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts from an ethical standpoint of, uh, Gen AI because at the end of the day, as you both have referenced, we are humans, we are the ones that are. Giving the input to these agents, so whether it's from a legal standpoint or just human societal standpoint, um, what are your thoughts? Well, first, let's all start with how broken work is and that we don't want to preserve the status quo and I can get into all that, but let's not try and protect old. I think there's a lot of brokenness that we want to unwind, including bias that is embedded in our labor market currently and it's failure to match talent and opportunity well. Um, I think this is a key question, but a lot of companies then stall out when legal gets involved to really contemplate these key questions around tools. Uh, Eyolic just did a post on this. You got to push through that and develop a framework. Some of the data. You've got to keep in house you're gonna have to build your tools other data you wanna get, um, where I think about the ethical implications first of all it's about who has access to these tools more than the tools themselves and are we thinking about the global South, um, entry level workers, people from marginalized communities who are often left behind and least thought of in terms of accessing these tools that could help them right now and then I think there are, you know, questions about who has the data. And I think at an individual organizational societal level, we have to think about it. I've wrestled through, I'm giving it a lot of data, how do I feel about that? We all will have different thoughts on that, um, but that's part of what we have to wrestle through. I think you've done it well, yeah, and I think we have another question. Uh, Byron from Opportunity at Work. Um, my question is about, well, I guess we had a 2 by 2 in the earlier session. Maybe it's a 2 by 2, but from an organizational standpoint and then from an individual standpoint on one dimension, but then on the dimension of how things are today and how you optimize them versus how people grow and develop. So for example, you might have a set of preferences today. And you might be very I might be very good at understanding that and optimizing for that. But you might also have a growth trajectory that you want to be on as a person and how do you, how do you manage the tools so that you're helping people become who they want to be and from an organizational standpoint that you're not just evaluating people on, oh, you're an entry level person. Well, sure you are, but what will you be in 2 years, 5 years, whatever. So how do you balance those things growth versus individual optimization. Yeah I think um for me in addition to what I was saying around really looking at what work needs to get done, um, it's a constant what the the cultural attribute that we really focus on is curiosity um and someone's ability to learn can they learn and can they solve problems and so I think that's the thing that we instill we always have before, um, this movement uh it's part of our culture and so for us. Uh, we don't look at roles of static at all. Um, it's a constant evolution and so we always say like your job's not your job description, um, and that is absolutely true moving forward no matter what company you work in, um, and so I think that that's, that's one way I think about that. Yeah, and first of all I just want to thank Byron for the work he's done over years now to really try and fix the most fundamental flaw of the labor market, which is it's non-transparent and overly reliant on pedigree signals. I think Byron, I think about it in two ways. one right now I'm trying to shore up the defense of the species by saying there are unique human capabilities that are universal to all humans curiosity, compassion, creativity, courage, communication that are going to be core to how companies innovate and how people build careers. The agentic era opens up a new level of that which is individualized work. So my answer to you on the 2x2 is they merge with this idea the world of work that's coming is about the idea that nobody beats you at being you. And that means no matter what your lived and learned experience is or isn't, you have a unique. This to you as a human that if we can help you figure out how to turn that into the curiosity that drives you, the expertise that drives you so that you are innovating more at work as an employee or as work as an entrepreneur around your unique core self, that's when I think we not only get every individual to shed the baggage of the knowledge economy and this outsourced. Sense of identity to the job title they got her in the degree they got her in the big name employer they worked out or not, to an internal definition of self around skills and curiosities that they can affirmatively put on the table around their work and my God, imagine what happens. It's not the robots that are coming into the humans. I mean if we unleash, nobody beats you at being you. For a woman in rural India for a kid in the slums in Brazil, as much as for anyone in rural America or across all the communities we work with here, just think of the human ingenuity and innovation that's gonna get unleashed on a broader set of challenges than I think our economy has tackled and businesses have tackled today. It's a great note to end them. Thank you so much JC thank you.

The job search landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation, with online platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor reshaping a multibillion-dollar industry. As these giants adapt to new competitors and evolving expectations, they're turning to AI to revolutionize job seeking with "personal talent agents." But will the rapidly evolving tech be a good or bad thing for job seekers? 

Inside the $11 Billion Job Recruiting Business

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The job search landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation, with online platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor reshaping a multibillion-dollar industry.

How we search for jobs has transformed drastically over the last two decades. Platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor are among the key players in online recruitment. These companies have reshaped their industry, carving out an $11 billion market projected to grow to $41 billion by 2032. And in a survey of 1000 job seekers, 40% of respondents credit job search engines to securing an interview. 35% say company websites are the way to go, and 34% say word of mouth networking is the best. way to nail down an interview. But today, the industry is more than just listing a job or networking to find one. The rise of AI and evolving expectations from both employers and employees are driving hiring companies to new levels of innovation. But just how are these companies adapting with new competitors coming to the market, and how will AI play a role in our future job searches? Indeed is one of the key players in an increasingly competitive market. It's owned by Recruit Holdings, a Japanese employment agency with a market capitalization of $75 billion. That's larger than some of Japan's biggest named companies like Honda Motor and Nintendo. Indeed flexes as the number one job site in the world with over 350 million unique visitors every month in 2023, and it intends to stay that way. Leading the effort is Chris Hyams, CEO of Indeed, who joined the company in 2010 as vice president of product. Hyams credits the company's job-first approach for building trust in its 20-year history. We exist only to help people get jobs and I believe the most important factor in influencing how a company makes decisions about their products and their services is how they make money. That's because Indeed gives employers the option to sponsor a job listing with prices starting at $5 a day or $150 a month. We only make money when we are helping an employer and a job. Or connect, which means that all of the data that we collect from job seekers is used only to help them better match for the best opportunities possible. They're going to find the opportunities they're looking for, and they won't be finding themselves reached out for irrelevant things or targeted for advertising. That's not why they came to the site in the first place. In deer is a hiring space with other sites like LinkedIn, which offers not only a constantly updating job board, but also a space to network with other career focused professionals. But Hiam says this comes with a cost. If you look at other businesses like LinkedIn, an amazing company, we have a huge amount of respect for them. A portion of the revenue comes from employment. They also make a huge amount of money from advertising and from sales and Other things. And so as a person who comes onto the site, are you being targeted just for employment opportunities or for a whole host of other things? But adding social media into the mix of hiring has been massively successful for LinkedIn. In the 2024 fiscal year, LinkedIn reported revenues exceeding $16.37 billion up from almost $15 billion in the previous year. The platform boasts over a billion members in 200 countries and regions and has also ranked 116th on America's most innovative companies by fortune. LinkedIn's revenue streams include a significant contribution from advertising, which generated $5.9 billion in 2022. Meanwhile, its premium membership surpassed $1.7 billion as of March 2024. Glassdoor, also acquired by Recruit Holdings, has built a reputation for services that encourage transparency in the job market. Christian Sutherland Wong, CEO of the job site, emphasizes that Glassdoor's platform allows people to hold employers accountable, particularly around pay transparency, a critical issue in today's labor market, and at the end of the day, it's. that's going to be the ultimate solve for a lot of pay inequity that we see in the US and around the world. The platform's option to be anonymous has made it a popular outlet for employees to be honest about their employers, and the anonymity has built trust and help prospective employees understand what really goes on behind the scenes at companies. As of 2024, Glassdoor reports. 63 million unique monthly visitors and hosts more than 212 million reviews, salary details, and workplace insights. The value of Glasso's platform is that we have trust with the people who use it, and so we put in a ton of processes and a ton of investment in making sure that people can trust the platform. Without that trust, we can't exist, so we take it really, really seriously. Despite their progress, these companies, like many others in various industries have also faced layoffs. In 2024, LinkedIn reportedly laid off about 200 employees from its engineering and customer support teams. In May, Indeed laid off around 1000 employees, representing about 8% of its workforce. Artificial intelligence has also become a focal point for job sites looking to utilize technology to improve efficiency. Rere Holding is investing heavily in AI. The company's leaders tout this as a new era in hiring that will provide users with a personal talent agent powered by generative AI. I see what AI can do is effectively take this kind of very white glove experience and make it available for the masses. An agents could be on your side to take you through your job seeking journey and make it a much smoother and more powerful experience for you as a job seeker. For Indeed, this approach to AI is also at the core of their strategy. If you think about how a talent agent works for athletes and for musicians, that is someone who understands everything about. You about the market and who works tirelessly on your behalf. This is one of the things that generative AI can actually bring. We have the first versions of this that we are going to be releasing in the coming months, and we see a real future where every single person will have a champion just for them that is helping and working tirelessly to connect them to the best opportunities. As the hiring landscape evolves, platforms like Indeed, LinkedIn and Glassdoor aim to connect people with opportunities in smarter and more efficient ways. AI is set to play a pivotal role in transforming job seeking, promising agent-like chatbots to improve the experience for users. But the question remains Will AI be a force that better connects humans to jobs, or will it diminish the number of humans needed in the workforce?

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