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Nearly 80% of S&P 500 CEOs are promoted from within, most commonly from the COO post, according to a 2024 study by The Conference Board. Chipotle’s Scott Boatwright is part of this elite group: He ascended to the CEO position after seven years as COO, where he steered operations through transformative tech innovations like the “Autocado” (Chipotle’s high-tech solution to avocado cutting), built an innovative AI hiring platform, and fostered the people-first culture that Chipotle has become known for. In this fireside chat, Boatwright will unpack how the operational priorities that defined his COO tenure now serve as the foundation of his CEO strategy, with lots of lessons that every COO can dip into. 

SUCCESSION SPOTLIGHT: THE SECRET SAUCE THAT LANDED CHIPOTLE’S COO IN THE CEO SEAT

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Uh, a new feature that we are introducing at this year's COO summit is something called Succession Spotlight. It's all about COOs who become CEOs. And yeah, it's long been the case that there are CEOs who are very happy right where they are, but the, the data shows. That last year, almost half of all the new CEOs went to that job directly from being COO. Uh, it is the most common final step to becoming CEO. It is even more common than from CFO to CEO. So we have with us this week an all-star group of CEOs who used to be CEOOs, and they'll be telling us about their journeys. They'll also tell us about what they learned as a COO. It turned out to be really useful for them as CEOs, and that's what's next. A leader who has steered his organization through some truly transformative technology innovations and some other innovations. In a very tough business, please welcome the CEO of Chipotle, Scott Boatwright and Fortune's Kristen Staler. All right, so the last time that I saw Scott, he was a guest on our leadership next podcast in April, and honestly what I love talking about Scott to talking to you, Scott, is that I always get some interesting little tidbit. Uh, what I loved in April, he said you could expect to see breakfast tacos or burritos on the menu, and I think that went wild on our social media. So Scott, you have a lot of pressure now to say something just as good. Not anytime soon. Uh, hello everyone, happy to be here. This afternoon with you here in Scottsdale, it's not too hot. It will be much hotter next week, as I understand it. It will. It will. Now Scott, last time we spoke you said you want to open 7000 North American stores, and now since then Chipotle also announced that you're expanding into Mexico, which I think is really interesting. Can you talk to us about first what is the market for bringing Mexican food to Mexico and what are the operational challenges that you're facing to do that? The Mexicans are overwhelmingly excited to receive a Mexican concept. Um, I get that question often, and it's a fascinating one, and, and, um, some of our competitors have tried to enter the market, uh, with fits and starts and have failed to some measure. Uh, what gives me a lot of confidence in our ability to go into Mexico and be successful. Is that freshly prepared ingredients, wholesome nutritious ingredients is on trend in Mexico today, and it's how people want to eat, how they should be eating in my humble opinion, uh, so we have a lot of confidence between. Our group and as well as the Alsea group that the Chipotle Mexican girl concept will be wildly successful. So now I want to play a little game, Scott, with you, with you out here. I want to call this, uh, this tech AI trend game. So I'm going to listen. Some trends. Scott and everyone here, I want you to give a thumbs up if these are trends that you either use or want to use, and a thumbs down if you don't use them or don't want to use them, OK? So the first I'm going to say, uh, generative AI and hiring. Who wants to use it is using it. All right, lot of thumbs up. What about you? A thumbs up. I like the idea. I think it's a big one. Robotics and kitchens. Oh, we got a lot of thumbs up here. OK. All right. We, well, we, we refer to robotics as cobotics in our kitchens. We don't, we don't look to replace the human experience. We, we look to remove waste and expand or enhance the the team member experience. Interesting. I like that. OK, fully cashierless stores. Anyone do it? No. OK, we see a lot of thumbs down on that one. OK. All right. And my last one I have subscription restaurant models. Oh yeah, Scott, and I wanna say fandom around that idea no fan of that here. um, now, Scott, I know you have, uh, used AI and Tech a lot. You got the guac making tool, the avocado. You are using, uh, AI and you generate a hiring platform. Um, can you talk to us about this and also what is the future of using AI Chipotle? Is it some of these trends we talked about is something else? Yeah, I think the world is making a pretty quick pivot, and I'm sure everyone's talking about it, uh, probably at at this point around generative AI or agentic AI. I think AI has a place in in business today in all verticals across all industries. I think if more of it's not going to be really a strategic advantage for you. It's gonna be something that you can lean into and it'll be commoditized to the point where everyone will have access to it. Which is exciting. And so for you and your business thinking through how will I use AI to, as I said earlier, either remove waste or expand human capability in your business and thus reducing expenses in the business. So we have, we've, we've put AI in a couple of different places inside Chipotle Mexican Grill today, one of which is our on boarding hiring assistant Avocado, um, who brings in team members into our ecosystem. So we will double to about 200,000 team members this year. We employ 130,000 and turnover is probably a little below industry average. I feel really good about where we are, but we're growing at such an exponential rate. We will open a new Chipotle restaurant this year almost every 24 hours. And you think about the growth that's ahead of us in the Need for highly capable, purpose-driven, value oriented individuals is more critical today than it probably ever has been for the for our brand. And so Ava has reduced the time to hire by about 75%, which allows us to get quicker access to better talent. And anyone that's in my restaurant space today knows that when a high quality caliber individual walks into a restaurant, they are looking for an opportunity. And they will go to work for whichever brand gives them that opportunity. And oftentimes because of a protracted hiring process, we lose those individuals. This only not only helps us keep our restaurant staffed but ensures we have the best talent that's available in the industry. Is there anything you wouldn't use AI to do? Um, I can't say that today with a lot of confidence, Chris. I'm sorry. I know that we are looking at different ways whether it's AI driven. Um, camera systems in our restaurants to understand throughput, speed of service, order accuracy, and digital ringing, I think is a couple of another use case we're leaning into. We're also using AI in our loyalty system and so I think we're using a decisioning tool that is AI driven to target at-risk or lapse consumers within our funnel to ensure that we bring them on journeys that keep them transacting. With our brand and so the journey will go out to an at-risk user that hasn't transacted in 2 weeks with an offer, and that offer will escalate over a certain time period to get the consumer to transact, and that all happens behind the scenes and the offer is tailored to that individual based on their personalization and their usage of the brand over time. OK, now I want to come to the audience for a question in just a second, but first I want to ask you. Uh, we talked about, you know, last time your relationship with, um, former AAA CEO, now Starbucks CEO Brian Nichol. In fact, the last time we talked you were just, I caught you after a gym session with him, is that right? You catch me yet again. We were in the gym this morning. Oh my gosh, one of us. To the gym this morning and I promise you it wasn't the CEO, former CEO of Chipotle. That's OK. If you had to come here. That's OK. So I'm curious, Scott, was your goal to always succeed Brian and become CEO or how were you thinking about it? You know, I've always had on my goals card. I'm an old school operator guy and you know, I had goals cards since I was probably in my mid-20s, but it's always been one of my lifelong goals to get to the CEO opportunity to lead a brand. And all my car was specific was a Fortune 500 public publicly traded company. And so I had a lot of opportunities that I passed over throughout the years because I just didn't feel like those were the right opportunities for me at that time based on what I wanted to accomplish, my family's needs, which is critically important to me, and where I wanted to take my career long term. And so when Brian decided to take the opportunity at Starbucks, I got the opportunity to step into the role here at Chipotle Mexican Grill, which is really a dream come true for me to really work on a brand that I have such passion and commitment to. How do you think you're different from him in terms of leadership, in terms of personality? What do you guys do differently? Yeah, if you, if, if I could bring you back, BCG did a piece of work about 6 or 8 months ago that talked about the modern company's chief executive officer and how it's different today than it has been historically. Three things that they called out in the, in the piece of work where a CEO today has to manage a great business, has to manage a great stock, and I'll talk about that in a minute. I'm often misunderstood when I make that statement. And lastly was drive organizational legacy, not individual legacy, but organizational legacy and Um, Brian and I made a great tag team because I was, I was effectively running the business and so I think I ran a pretty good business and I know that Brian really managed a great stock. And when I say manage the stock, we're not talking about managing numbers. It's really about selling the story to the investment community about where we're going, what we're working on, and how we'll lead the company and what the growth story really is, and that obviously supports the multiple over time. And then lastly drive organizational legacy. What you know what is going to be my mark on this business as I take it through its next phase of growth in the coming years. And so that said, one of the things that I had to learn stepping into the role, going from the person pulling the levers, turning the knobs every day to generate an outcome to someone that is now working to manage a great stock and drive legacy is just a completely different job. Absolutely. Any questions out here. So you went up front and if you could state your uh name and title and company too, that'd be great. Thank you. My name is Bokashima. I'm a CEO of CoreLogic, uh, a financial services company. Uh, my question was more around, um, you, you're leading a great transformation not only from a growth aspect stored every 24 hours, international expansion. Then you spoke about AI as well. Can you talk to us about your change management? Like how do you take your organization through that change management as well, especially your existing staff. Yeah, probably one of the hardest things that you'll do, and I'll give you a little context first. So in 2023, if I'm getting my years correctly, I pushed the organization to the point with regard to change management, new processes, new protocols. That year we launched a new LMS. We launched a new scheduling tool, AI-driven scheduling tool. We launched 3 LTOs. We put two new ideas into into concept testing. We launched digital Hasset to improve food safety, and I tell you all this to tell you I pushed the organization too hard too fast, and I began to see operational performance start to slow down or start to wobble a bit on how we deliver the experience from restaurant to restaurant, and I knew I'd asked too much of the organization. And hadn't thoughtfully considered the change management necessary to get those ideas into into operational execution and do them with excellence. And so in 2024 rolled around, I don't know if many of you remember, I said we're going to do two things, we're going to do two things well. We're gonna have exceptional people and exceptional food, full stop. We didn't do anything else. I said no new ideas, no new processes, no new changes. We will do nothing. If we do nothing this year, we will land this year with exceptional people in our restaurants, exceptional people hired, staffed at model, and being developed to take on the roles necessary to support our growth and an exceptional culinary full stop. Customers come to Chipotle for the food. It's not because of the buildings or the bright smi smiling faces on the people in the restaurant. It's about the food. And 2024 was an exceptional year for our great brand. And so I think removing complexity, keeping it simple is critical, especially at scale, and I've always, you know, something that's, you know, a hallmark of my career has been around this idea that simplicity scales, complexity doesn't. Just keep it simple. Good advice. Any others see one here. Hi there, uh, Geron Smith, the CEO of Marshfield Associates. We're a value investor based in DC. Um, question for you about competition. Um, how much time do you spend looking at what others are doing in fast casual? Does that influence you at all or do you stay focused on Chipotle Mexican Grill? And that was my next question. That's a great one. Thank you. It's a, it's a tough one. I'll tell you it's just kind of funny. I think it's funny. You be the judge. When I was the chief operating officer, I spent a lot of time looking at SportsCenter. As a chief executive officer, I spent almost all of my time looking at CNBC trying to understand what's going on in the macros, what's happening with the consumer, what's happening with the global economic uncertainty. I spent a lot of time looking at competition across verticals and thinking through how other businesses. Or approaching consumer, the consumer today to drive transactions, um, and I probably spend, if I had to tie a number to it, 15-20% of my on on duty time really just looking at that level of analysis and trying to understand where we are. And Scott, I think we have time just for one more question. So I'm gonna ask you, looking back on your time as as CEO, is there something that no amount of preparation asCO could have prepared you for for CA CEO that you wish that you knew now? Yeah, I'll tell you it, I don't think there's really anything that there's no, there certainly aren't any leadership programs that you will learn that you haven't learned already if you have accomplished, uh, or, or gotten to the level of COO in your business. What you will not have exposure to in that role is board management and understanding board management relationship and how to navigate that successfully to get done what you need to get done in the business and leverage your board as advisors as they should be to the business. As a first time CEO, your board is going to be more hands on. Um, then they should be and trying to figure out how to navigate that relationship, build confidence, build trust, so that you can get them on the sideline, use them for advice and counsel, and their nose in and hands out. Probably #1. Number 2 is going to be this idea of understanding the investor community at large, how you navigate the complexity of the investor community, and how you support sharing the narrative and becoming chief storyteller for your brand, because that's effectively what you're going to be doing. Great advice. Well, thank you so much, Scott. I appreciate it.

Artificial intelligence is fast becoming the new infrastructure of power — not just economically, but geopolitically. As global competition over AI systems intensifies, a new model of sovereign AI collaboration is emerging among middle powers. This opening session brings together the Prime Ministers of Malaysia and Vietnam, along with the Group CEO of the UAE’s G42, to explore how ASEAN, the Gulf can move beyond zero-sum rivalry and toward shared AI development, data trust frameworks, and inclusive digital infrastructure.  
Can the ASEAN–GCC corridor help define a third way in global AI governance? What investments, safeguards, and institutional frameworks are required to ensure that AI enhances sovereignty without deepening division? And what role can strategic companies like G42, backed by state vision but operating at global scale, play in aligning commercial success with geopolitical responsibility? This conversation will set the agenda for a forum focused on inclusion, resilience, and technological alignment across the emerging powers of the 21st century.

The Intelligence Grid: Building Bridges Through Sovereign AI Collaboration

Hosted by ROSHN Group  
Around the world, significant strides have been made to increase the number of women in corporate leadership positions. In the U.S., women make up 29% of C-Suite level roles and hold approximately 30% of board seats. And here in Saudi Arabia, nearly 10% of board positions are held by women, a new reality made possible by the Kingdom’s ambitious Vision 2030 strategy and other significant government-led reforms. Even with such progress, untapped opportunities remain in industries where women have traditionally been underrepresented – from construction and engineering to technology and energy. In this special lunch program, we’ll explore the strategies needed to advance women into C-suite positions, create more inclusive workplaces, foster untapped talent, and create a path to parity – not just progress – for women at all levels of business.
Panelists:
Dr. Maryam Ali Ficociello, Group Chief Governance Officer, Red Sea Global
Giovanna Carnevali,	 Executive Director, Master Planning, ROSHN Group
Dr. Saeeda Jaffar, Senior Vice President and Group Country Manager – GCC, Visa
Jena Ladhani, Chief Executive Officer, Global Workplace Solutions, KSA, CBRE
Renée McGowan, Chief Executive Officer, India, Middle East, and Africa, Marsh McLennan
Moderator: Michal Lev-Ram, Contributing Editor, Fortune

WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP LUNCH PROGRAM: ADVANCING WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE

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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