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Employees say:"What I love most about RAMS is you get to bring your authentic self to work (of course applying skills to what relates to our job)—being hired for my life experience and paying it forward, with the support of a loving team, is top tier!"

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Employees say:"My supervisor and program director both have had at least a decade of experience working the job that I’m currently at, which demonstrates their knowledge and ability to support me professionally. They makes sure to communicate clear expectations and provide helpful reminders and guidance regarding our agenda and responsibilities at work. They also care that we are all doing OK personally and professionally during staff meetings."

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Fortune partnered with Great Place to Work to analyze survey feedback representing nearly 85,000 U.S. employees.

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Employees say:"RAMS is an incredibly nurturing workplace. People's strengths are assessed and opportunities are presented that will enhance a persons skillset and foster continued growth within the organization and field of social work and peer support. RAMS understands the importance of self care and a work life balance to help avoid burnout working in such an emotionally demanding and heavy working environment."

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A progress report from one of the founders of the world’s largest network of designers delivering social, environmental products and programs that advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Design for Good

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OK, welcome back, everyone. We're in the home stretch here. Um, Design for Good was established in 2022. It's an extraordinary non-profit alliance of leading designers and organizations dedicated to creating products and services that improve human life and address global challenges set out by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Here to give us a progress report. On design for good impact to date and the projects they've got in motion, their goals for the future, is co-founder and chair Ben Shepherd, and I want to give a special thanks to Ben because he's been a stalwart supporter of Brainstorm design over the years, helped us with lots of ideas and put us in touch with a great community of wonderful and talented designers. So Ben, take it away. Right, here we go team, back from the shortest ever coffee break, we're going to go straight into it. I'm going to take you back to 2015. In 2015, the United Nations launched the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 of the greatest challenges facing humanity, and their hope, their aspiration was that by 2030 we would largely have addressed those goals. Well, we're now 10 years later. We've only got 5 years left to go, and it feels like a relatively few time to ask ourselves the question, how are we doing? Spoiler alert, his answer is not very well. Let's have a look though at the exact data. So out of those 17 goals, 6 are in the most severe category of being going backwards. 11 are in the 2nd most severe category and at best stagnating. And none is marked as being on track. For those of you, I see a few of you have your camera phones out. If you want a particularly depressing photo, this is the one to take team. This is the one. If you want orange and red, this is, this is as good as it gets, and there is a reason why I'm bringing this up at a design conference. It would be fair to say we're designers, the design industry only makes up 1% of the total workforce. Surely this is a problem for government, for policies to solve, but if you look at the 231 KPIs that sit behind this, more than a third are directly impacted by the products, the buildings, the services that we in this room design. Indeed, I would argue that our impact as an industry is probably only second to that of government policy. So we have to ask ourselves the question, what can we do about it? What can we do? A group of organizations came together just as Clay mentioned a few years ago to ask exactly that question and to say with a sense of humility, can we try new ways of working, new approaches, new experiments to see whether particularly the corporate and private sectors can make a measurable and lasting impact on the sustainable development goals. And as of today, that alliance now comprises over 2000 designers, engineers, and researchers across 30 countries working on over 30 projects around the world. And the way that it works is that those designers give their time for free. They gave a minimum of 5 days per year. Most give far, far more than that. We put them into teams of 5 to 10. We partner them with charities, and they work together all the way from early concept through to execution and implementation to make sure that this actually leads to real world impact. Whilst it's still early days, we have found a set of guiding principles which is proving useful to make sure that the work we do is impactful. I'm going to share 5 of them with you. All of these will be in the category of what I would call diet and exercise. These are things that we know we should do, but often we don't, and each of these is something that we've seen from our own work has to be done if design companies and design agencies and design leaders are going to have real world impact. The first, perhaps slightly counterintuitively, is that we never start with design. We always start with the development organizations being the ones who set the briefs. We then allow the designers to refine and iterate the brief, but we never start with the designers. They're there to design with, not to design for, as we heard from Monica only yesterday. The second one is that we then build cross-functional and cross company teams. We even have teams with direct competitors like Nestle and General Mills and Pepsi working together for some of these particularly difficult systemic problems, you have to have these different companies working in the same team. The third one is on training. We invest a huge amount in training with the Royal College of Art. Everyone who goes through our program is given a formal academic qualification at the end of a year of working together, and the reason we put so much money and time into training. It's not only many of us weren't taught on how to design for vulnerable communities or ecosystems, but because when they then finish their projects, they go back into some of the largest companies on Earth, bringing those skills on how to design for sustainability into products and services that reach hundreds of millions of people. The 4th 1 is on law. Now I have to be careful here. I'm married to a lawyer, so I can't be too rude about lawyers, but on this particular topic, I do think that sometimes designers think of law and IP in particular as an afterthought. In the social impact space that does not work. You have to at the outset decide that the IP is going to be open source, worldwide, irrevocable, so that when you give it to a community they can actually use it and ideally make a profit. And then finally a zealous focus on implementation and measurement. Again, if I were to point the finger at us as the design industry, many of us in this room, myself included, have at some point in our careers led a hackathon or other activity which, whilst well intentioned, didn't lead to real world impact and therefore it's important that if we're going to do things we commit to measuring an execution, not just the fun bit at the beginning. Whilst it's still early days, we are starting to see early blossoms of impact coming from these approaches, and on the screen now you'll see examples of some of the impact numbers of the projects that we've been working on together. We don't have time to cover all of these today, but what we are going to do is cover 5 to give you a taste of the work we're doing and hopefully inspire your own social innovation efforts as well. The first one we're going to touch on is wealth. Now most of us in this room will take for granted access to clean water, but over half the world this year has faced some sort of water scarcity issue. And therefore we were lucky to partner with a charity called Biome in India to create the Million Wells app. It's now available on Android and iOS and it allows people in Bengaluru in India to access clean water and find where they can drink water which is safe for them and their families around where they live. It's a data source that didn't used to exist at all. There are now, since it launched a couple of months ago, already 1400 regular users using it to access safe water, and it's particularly exciting to see what biome the charity has planned for it. They're going to take this work, not only scale it to other cities, but also start using AI on the data set to work out how they can understand the water levels and give people the access that they need. We're going to jump onto another topic now, which is menstruation. Another depressing fact to share with you on this particular afternoon is that there are still large parts of the world where young women are missing as much a month of their school every single year because of stigma they have whilst they're on their periods. We partnered with a charity called Best Foo Forward Fund in Tanzania. And together with them we decided not to take Western trading materials and push them on to Tanzania, but instead we developed with the local communities personas, messages that were culturally sensitive to them. We took them to schools across the country. We trained young men and young women together on period positivity. And over the course of the pilot we've already been able to reach over 10,000 students. There are another thousands and thousands planned for next year, and this is where the IP gets interesting as we were working with the Foot Forward fund as we were hearing from them about their experiences, we got a call from neighboring Uganda and a charity who said, Can we take those materials and take them to Uganda? And because of our IP position, the answer was an emphatic yes. They could take those materials and start to train up another 2000 young people in Uganda. Our hope is within by 2030, hundreds of thousands will be reached across large parts of Africa. This is an exciting one to do an update on for those of you who are veterans of the Fortune brainstorm design, you will remember this project. It's a Cairns Lis nominated project, and the reason it exists is that today 2 billion people still lack access to basic hand washing. So we partnered with the Wash Foundation to create a product that was aimed at young children who maybe don't have the ability to wash their hands at home, but who we could teach to wash their hands in schools. And what we created together with the Wash Foundation was a very simple product. This is a product in the form of a flip book with no written words, so it transcends language which teaches young children on how to wash their hands in a fun and engaging way, something again that many of us in this room take for granted because we weren't brought up in these environments. Well, we're in a brilliant position, but since we talked about the idea last time, it's become real. We've already taken it to 25,000 children. There are many more planned, and this is where it gets even more exciting. I can feel it's electric, isn't it? I won't let me stand by the edge of the stage to make it more exciting. The impact numbers are coming in. The Wash Foundation did a study. They looked at the children who used to be in these schools, fewer than 2 out of 5 used to be washing their hands. They gave them the flip book. They came back 6 months later to see did it make a lasting change, and now 90% of the children were washing their hands with this one single intervention, extraordinary work. The boo team is ever busy. They're now coming up with an app so that they can teach teachers on how to teach on this topic as well. And for those of you in the room who represent sustainability or work with your organizations on contributions, this is exactly the type of area where funding is needed. Another quarter of a million dollars would allow us to reach 600,000 children over the next couple of years, and for that group it would reduce the child mortality risk by as much as 50%. So this is one of the privileges of being at Fortune. I get to speak to other multinationals, other corporates. If you're in a position to help the Wash Foundation, please, please give. They're an extraordinary organization, and you can directly measure the number of children's lives saved through your charitable contributions. Now before we touched on the topic of wells, and here's another one on wells and pumps, but with a slightly different twist. So as before this was aimed at end users, this by contrast is a charity called Water Starters, and they're trying to help engineers, maintenance people to create a new job which is to fix the pumps, particularly here in Kenya where there are issues with access to water. And what this extraordinary team has done is put together not only an app but also a supply chain, a way of accessing parts and tools so that people can train themselves to become pump engineers, maintenance leaders, and to fix the pumps and equipment across Kenya for a profit. It creates a wonderful source of income for them and it creates access to clean water for the communities that they're helping. I'll stay quiet for just a moment, just so you can see some of the screenshots of the type of work that they've been working on together. All of this has now been launched as of this summer. The work has already started. The pumps are being fixed. 50,000 people have access to water now in December 2025 who did not have access to water in the summer, and by 2030, the estimate is that as many as 1.5 million people will have gained access to water because of this scheme. We have time for one more example which I hope will fill you with a sense of what can be done. This is not on water. This is on the topic of education. Now for many of us, when we think about education, we think about reading, writing, or arithmetic. This is a different topic. This is on misinformation. 96% of adults, let alone children, fail to systemically and systematically point out fake information online. We've been able to partner with a charity in a university in Scotland to create a new set of training materials aimed at young adults and adolescents to train them on fake information, on bad actors and people who may be trying to influence their behavior. It's fun, it's engaging, it's competitive, and it's designed to make sure these young people build up a skill set that many of us in this room were never trained on. It's already being prototyped and tested with schools. The response has been extraordinary. We will roll out to a larger pilot with 10,000 students over the next couple of years, and our hope again because of the IP is that millions of children will be able to benefit by taking that curriculum into their schools when the work is complete. We don't have time to talk about all of the other charities that we're working with, but I do want to acknowledge the extraordinary work they're doing. And for those of you in the room who are interested in the work, please do get in touch. There are two things that we can already offer you. The first one is that academy. For those of you who'd be interested in upskilling your own designers, we've decided to make much of the training that we do free and available for everyone. There are master classes that we've put out from the likes of Patty Moore, from Don Norman, from Maro Pacidi, who we heard from this morning, all available from your designers, and we hope you take the opportunity to take that world class curriculum and teach them about how to design the social impact. The second offer we have is that we are able now to expand our group from the originals as of September next year. We will finish next summer our work on quality education, and next September we will begin a 4 year focus on the dual goals of people and planet health. For those organizations who want to participate, please get in touch and we'll tell you how to do so. That beautifully to the second brings us to the end of our presentation. Every year we come back, every year we'll tell you what we've learned in design for good, but for the moment just allow me to say whether you joined Design for Good or whether you're working on your own social impact initiatives, a huge best of luck to you. We look forward to working together, and together we can design for good.

AI is transforming the nature of work faster than our institutions can adapt. As demand surges for data fluency, machine collaboration, and digital literacy, education systems and corporate training programs are struggling to keep pace. So, who’s responsible for closing the skills gap—governments, employers, or individuals themselves? And how do we ensure that the AI era doesn’t deepen inequality for those already at risk of being left behind?

The Skills Mismatch

As AI becomes embedded in day-to-day business operations, how can companies scale AI for real-world impact across industries—from e-commerce and retail to health and manufacturing? What are the strategic, technical, and ethical challenges of AI adoption, and how can companies move beyond pilot programs to achieve real results and gain an edge over the competition?

Lunch Session: Scaling AI for Real World Impact

The Middle East has some of the highest youth employment rates globally, while nearly 60% of the population is under the age of 30. As a result, expanding education programs  and supercharging job creation is critical for the strength of the region's economies. A  playbook for how the public and private sector can work together to solve for these  challenges and unlock the region’s full potential.  

Unlocking Potential: Workforces For The Future

The Middle East has some of the highest youth employment rates in the world. Nearly 60% of its population is under 30. Uh, with us to share what it takes to build an engaged workforce across generations is managing director and senior partner with Boston Consulting Group Leila Ho. Thank you for having me here. Uh, we live in a region that is packed with potential. More than half of the population is less than 35 years old. When we talk about the future of work, we're often hearing things like job job displacement automation anxiety. AI is going to take over our future roles. But what if we flip the narrative? What if instead of thinking about what we stand to lose, we talk about what we have the power to build? What if this, this is our opportunity to instead of trying to prepare the workforce to be ready for the future, to actually uh give them the confidence to build and shape the future. What we need to do is to ensure that we um that we help the youth achieve their full potential. When we look at the future of work, we see that there's industries that are shaping very quickly, reshaping new industries, industries that are that are disappearing, and in our BCG report titled The Next 50 Years of Work, we we identified some of those future sectors. And Alright So what you see here is regenerative industries. I'm gonna mention a few of those, regenerative industries. So these are industries which are going to reshape whether it is in manufacturing, in the urban infrastructure, in construction, in in agriculture and fishery, they would be completely reshaped using new material, using different processes to ensure that you're not just protecting the environment or protecting the economy or social society from harm, but actually regenerating nature, regenerating the economy, regenerating society. Another sector that is going to be very high on the agenda is the care-based economies, so the human to human interaction, the human to human contact, taking care of children, uh, the senior citizens, people of people of vulnerable groups, but also community at large, mental health and well-being of community at large. Um, we also see everything to do with play and creativity-based sectors, so which blend entertainment with learning, care, and art, including e-sports that are happening in the metaverse. When you think of all of this, you can see that there's so much labor abundance. We talk about labor scarcity and the worry about labor scarcity, but there's an infinity of possibility of what could be shaping the world in the future. And there's many more of these sectors that are going to grow, many more that are going to be shaped in the next few years, and it's our job to prepare our youth to be able to shape these sectors, to be the early adopters, to be the early adopters of the emerging skills. So when we think about these skills, what are these skills? So in the in the same report that I mentioned, we look at some of the key skills that are going to be emerging in the future, um. One of the first ones is existential capabilities. What we mean by that is the ability to have a mindfulness, emotional self-regulation, physical regulation, optimism, decisiveness, and as for all of you parents out there, I can tell you this is probably the these these are probably the most important skills that you can impart your kids in terms of role modeling in front of them. This is what's going to make them able to shape the future. Bionic skills and by bionic skills, we don't mean the ability to code because AI agents are going to be already coding for us. Bionic skills is the confidence to be able to command AI to command technology and robotics. Creativity, so imagination, expression, all of this will be critical in the world of the future for people to be able to contribute to solving. Uh, our biggest challenges again, human to human community and community skills, the communication skills and the influencing skills, the negotiation skills to ensure, to ensure that we can achieve collaborative problem solving together and solve our biggest challenges. And of course entrepreneurial mindset you've heard this, but every one of our youth should should have the courage to build ventures to create new opportunities and to create new jobs. And as we know, these skills are changing constantly. So what you see as a skill, so this is from the uh latest World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report and what this says is the from from today's skills that are identified as important for the future, 40. of them will be completely obsolete in 5 years' time, and that shelf life gets shorter and shorter as time goes by. For the Mina region, the situation is more urgent. 46% of the skills that you see today as important will be completely outdated in 5 years' time. And when we think about Saudi and we interviewed employee employers in Saudi, what they said is over 70% said we need tech literacy now in our youth. We need, we need tech literacy, we need them to know how to work with AI. We need them to know how to work with big data, and we're still far from achieving that. So what is our role? what is our role? At a very high level is two things. One is we need to completely reform our education systems, and the second one is we need to really embrace a lifelong learning mindset. In terms of our education system. I'm not going to go into detail, but just to say we're really still very much stuck in the past, whether it is what we teach the curriculum, or whether it is the approach in which we teach, everything needs to change so that we can. Move away from the passive learning approach that we that we follow to an approach that focuses on critical thinking, collaboration, real world problem solving. We need to prioritize tech literacy even in the earliest of ages. We need our children, our young children to be playing with robots, to be experimenting with AI, to be learning in the metaverse all the while, of course, while protecting them from social media. And we need to shift the mindset in terms of lifelong learning. We need our youth to understand that they will be lifelong learners. They need to embrace that. They need to have the courage to know that every couple of years, all the time, they just need to be learning new skills to be to be able to continue to be relevant and to be able to embrace the future. But we can't do this alone. What we need is we need to see uh No. We can't do this alone. What we need is we need private sector, public sector, and third sector to come together. We need them to come together to identify the future skills and then identify, develop the right education programs whether within school walls, within university walls, or outside of those walls to be able to teach those skills. At scale we need to invest in mentorship. We need to invest in mentorship because we need our children and our youth to have a risk to have a risk taking approach to be able to build new ventures, to be able to go into new industries, and we need to fund and design upskilling and reskilling. programs this is critical in strategic sectors if we need to move forward, we need to create innovation ecosystems where youth-led solutions can be developed in emerging fields and only through this collaboration and shared leadership across all three sectors will we be able to scale opportunities. There's many examples of this in Singapore or in the private sector like AI Alliance, but as a closing remark, what I would like to say is we need much more of these. We need them tailored to our region. We need it with our youth at the center. A population is energetic. It is ambitious. It is. Digitally native, imagine the possibility if every young person was either building a venture or solving one of our toughest problems like water scarcity, where would the world be? And so what we need to do is to ensure that we provide them the space, the skills, and the tools to reach their full potential. Thank you.

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