WW International

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WW International | Fortune

WW International (WTW): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Robotaxis are no longer a distant promise. In China, they are becoming part of daily urban life. As of early 2026, over 50 Chinese cities allow self-driving cars on public roads for testing; at least 10 permit commercial operations. Autonomous driving developer Pony AI has targeted to put 3,500 robotaxis on the road by the end of the year. The company’s cofounder and CEO, James Peng, has built his company around a practical premise: autonomous vehicles cannot wait for purpose-built smart cities; they must learn to operate safely and reliably on the roads cities already have. As Pony AI expands its operations in China and internationally, Peng will discuss what widespread autonomous mobility could mean for passengers, professional drivers, and the design of cities themselves. A central question is whether AI will make today’s urban infrastructure work differently, or whether truly autonomous cities will eventually require us to rethink existing urban systems altogether. 

Dr. James Peng, Founder and CEO , Pony.ai 
Nicholas Gordon, Editor, Asia, Fortune 

Intelligence in Motion: Mobility and Urban Futures

Conferences

Good morning everyone, and I wonder if we can have James up on screen. James, it's so great to have you here with today. I know you're very busy and so thank you for giving us this time today. You know, I, I wanna start this conversation with a confession and that confession is I absolutely hate driving. I hate driving a car. I hate dealing with traffic. I hate dealing with parking. So why don't you give us a timeline. Of how long we might be able to when we might be able to expect kind of robo taxis to be commercial, to be ubiquitous, to be widespread, kind of how long are we thinking before these robotaxis become more common. Hi, Nicholas. Hi, this is James. Uh, it's great to be here and uh There's a bit ico. So Uh, do I see a bit of echola? Uh, anyhow, the, uh, Uh, can, can we turn off the, uh, mic somewhere? I see, I, I hear the echo. But anyhow, let me just go, go ahead and start. So, uh, I mean, as you already described, there's already commercial usage of the robotaxi in, uh, certain cities. For example, in China, we have launched commercial robotaxi services in the four tier one cities in China, uh, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Shanghai, uh. And of course, our main focus for the next several years will be focusing on scaling and putting the vehicles to be ubiquitous, right? So, I think there there are several limiting factors. One is regulation, the other is the capital and the resource needed to manufacture the vehicles and put them into uh uh many different cities. And the third, of course, is building the customer consensus and the willingness to actually having the services. I think all those takes time, but what we have seen is that the flying wheel is already there. We have uh See, at least from our current operations, customers love them. Uh, we, on average, I think we have about 25 rides per vehicle per day. And, uh, so, so to answer your question, in short, I think it's a matter of, uh, getting more and more. Uh, vehicles manufactured and getting the regulation ready. I think the technology problem is pretty much already solved. So, so maybe, maybe look at another five years, you'll be able to see in, in most of the major cities. Around the world, you'll be able to have, uh, get, get you a regular, regular, uh, service, and you'll be able to hail in a robotaxi just like a normal taxi. And, and let's talk about some of those major cities in the world because I know you're, uh, you have this aggressive global expansion plan. You're in Zagreb, um, in Croatia. You have this new partnership with Uber for Europe and the Middle East. I think you also just expanded into South Korea. So how are you thinking about these, these global markets and what's your approach to, you know, entering a new city? Uh, when, when we considering, because our resources are limited, so when we considering a city to enter into, there are several factors we consider. One is It, it should be a city that relatively has a mature taxi service, right? It, it's the taxi fare is relatively high, so there will be potential demand. The second factor is on the regulatory front. The, uh, at least, even, even if there's no existing regulations to support robotaxi, there should be a pathway already exist, uh, to support it. And the third, of course, is have a strong local partnership. I think with all three factors to consider, that will be a candidate city that we will enter into. That's why we, we consider definitely currently Europe. Uh, Middle East, I think South Korea, Japan, uh, uh, Southeast Asia, that'll be our main focus for now. And you know, tell us more about these, about these partnerships. So when you're working with someone like Uber, what are you getting from them and what are your partners getting from you? Because think about it, it, even a regular taxi, let, let, let alone a robo taxi requires different partnerships, right? There's user acquisition, uh, Such as Uber. There's a vehicle manufacturer, and there's a driver. Besides that, there's also backend services, right, such as cleaning, servicing, charging, and all that. So you, you, you can think of Pony as providing a driver, a virtual driver that, that's safe, reliable, uh, consistent, and will make the driving a fun experience. But besides the driving itself, right, we, we want a trusted partner in the local markets that the local residents are already familiar with. For example, that like Uber as a global ride-hailing, uh, platform, uh, most of the people are familiar and trust. So, so essentially, our partnership with Uber is that Uber can provide uh a, a customer acquisition tool and also we work together to push the boundaries of the local regulation to support. Robotaxi. So, so I think the partnership is essential in our global expansion. So how do you think that You know, urban transit, urban planning might change as robo taxis become more common. You know, you might expect maybe, you know, on the negative side it could be that there are more cars on the road, fewer people take buses, take the subway. On the other hand, you know, automated driving may be safer than human drivers for a variety of reasons. There are kind of implications for labor and for jobs, but how do you see kind of this again this question of urban mobility changing as we have more robotaxis on the road? Uh, 000, I think the automated driving, such as robotaxi, it could be other forms of automated driving that actually will make, uh, mobility to be much more easily accessible. Uh, it could be that there's less usage of subways, but that on the other hand, there could be much less usage of self-driven cars that in a, in a way, think about a lot of urban space. Uh, uh, uh, built for parking where the personal used cars are very less efficiently used, right? Most of the cars drive like 2 hours a day. So, so if there's robotaxi becomes more, more ubiquitous everywhere, then, then it can be, will save more parking space. Well, it can be that the, the mobility becomes much easily accessible. Then maybe, maybe the urban planning will be different because, because the mobility. If it becomes ubiquitous and everywhere, you, you, you may not need to live in the city center. So, so I think the implication is, uh, will, will be profound and probably still. Eventually we will change the whole urban planning and it changed the way of our life. And of course with with all new technologies I mean there's an element of kind of trust getting people used to the idea there's working with regulators there's convincing potential customers um I know China earlier this year briefly paused robotaxi rollouts because of you know incident involving one of your competitors. Um, but kind of what's your strategy for, you know, working with regulators to convince them of trust and safety, to encourage customers that it's totally fine that this car has no driver, don't worry about it, kind of what, what's your strategy for those kinds of stakeholder engagements? Yes, I, I think the most important one, of course, is by, by facts, by metrics. So, so we, we actually, uh, by working with the regulators, we show, we, we have all the, uh, data that we collected on the safety side, on the convenience side, on the impact to the, uh, local transportation network. So I, I think seeing is believing, right? Once we were able to present. All this statistical data to the, to the regulators and also to the passengers. Uh, we, we, we'll have a strong argument that it is a much safer technology. Of course, uh, magic is numbers is just one side. The other side is, is by convincing, by storytelling, and also by really putting more vehicles on the road. Providing a great service to the customers, I think, I think the, uh, a lot of cases our new customers actually come to our platform because the word of mouth. So I think, uh, uh, by building, uh, early adopters by building a really trusted cohort of users we'll be able to have that, that really, uh, uh, uh, snowball effect to have more and more people joining and trusting our services. You know, China's become really strong in this, in this space. I mean there's you, there, there are other kind of robotaxi startups, large companies getting involved too. Briefly, you know, why do you think China has shown itself to have kind of I I say surprising strength, maybe that's the wrong word, but, but, but why is China proved to be kind of surprisingly strong in this robotaxi space. Well, I think definitely there are several factors. One is, uh, the, uh, uh, government itself, uh, is very progressive. Say for example, in Pony's case, we were able to, uh, test and operate on the open roads, even, even 9 years ago, when, when the technology wasn't even as mature as what it is today. So that, Supportive regulation is definitely important. Second, of course, is because of the, uh, over the last 20-30 years, the whole ecosystem or the whole tech industry really accumulated a lot of the, uh, talents, components, a lot of the know-hows. So, so when we enter into the market, we were able to actually hire, uh, uh. Really strong candidate, uh, who's passionate and who's experienced. And, and also the whole ecosystem, right, when we need a lighter, when we need, uh, say, say a mechanical parts, we were able to find, uh, uh, uh, uh, around us. So, so I think all those, essentially it's, it's, it's like a whole system needs to be in place for this, especially for mobile taxi who's, I think, I think the key challenge is, it's such a complex system, it requires hardware, software talents. Regulation and everything else. I think uh China provides a good, uh, system to support this kind of innovation. Mhm. You know, I, I want to take the opportunity to ask kind of whether you've seen kind of customer behavior change after using robotaxis for a long time. I will tell you when I first rode in one, it was weird for about 5 minutes and then quickly became not weird. And in fact the ride was a lot smoother than than a human driven taxi, but you know there are, you know, people talk about oh people are hiring robo taxis to take phone calls. They're hiring them to, um, for kind of purposes that people maybe wouldn't have expected going as the sector was growing. So from your experience kind of as from running Pony AI, what are some kind of interesting customer behavior changes that you've seen as robotaxis start becoming more popular? Mm, I, I think certainly one thing we can see is the, the, the, the, there are certain big percentage of the customers become regular commuters, uh, once they, exactly as you described, the, uh, a lot of the new riders. Uh, 1st 5 minutes, they, they may be wandering around. They, they even take out their phones to take a video, but then after the first great experience, they, they start using the robotaxi as very regular. I think they're robotaxi compare with. Human driving taxi, they provide some unique experience, right? It's a private space. You feel a lot, uh, uh, safe, private, and, uh, also it's, it's consistent. I think that's an important part is you, you, as a if you get a human taxi, a human-driven taxi, you, you might get a good driver in one day, the next day might not be, right? So it's a consistent, it's always a clean environment. Uh, give, give you a specific example. For example, for, for the. For female riders at night, they feel a lot safer, uh, just because there's no driver. So, so it's, it's, uh, once it's at night, there's a lot, the, the female riders actually percentage is getting much higher. Um, uh, there, there's, uh, To just give you an example, but, but it's essentially, I think, uh, it will become a regular. I think the, the, the, uh, our riders are very diverse across different age groups, uh, different, uh, professions. So, so it's definitely not, not something, uh, unique just for the tech-savvy people to try. It becomes very, very, uh, general to the public. Well, as I said, I, I look forward to them being a lot more ubiquitous. Um, in the cities where I am. James, thank you so much for helping, for coming on the program today. We're very glad to have you. Yeah, thank you, thanks for having us and uh and uh who whoever goes, comes to our, our, the cities that we operate, definitely, definitely, uh, give it, give it a try. You can download Tony AI app. It's, it's through through App Store or you just use the WeChat, uh, mini program. You, you're gonna love it. All right.

Today's travelers and consumers expect more and have more options than ever before. The companies winning their loyalty aren’t just keeping pace—they're making big operational bets and executing under pressure. The operational leaders of Southwest Airlines and MGM Resorts have both been inside major transformations: reinventing legacy systems and reimagining the guest experience end-to-end. They'll share what it takes to stay ahead of shifting consumer expectations and bring an entire organization along for the ride. 

Ayesha Molino, Chief Operating Officer, MGM Resorts International
Tony Roach, Executive Vice President and Chief Customer and Brand Officer, Southwest
Moderator: Ruth Umoh, C-Suite and Leadership Editor, Fortune; Co-Chair, Fortune COO Summit

The Bold Bets that are Reshaping Customer Experience Today

How they've been saving the best for last. Aisha and Tony, thank you so much for joining us here. We're happy to be here. All right, Aisha, let's start with the news, the big news that broke yesterday. Uh, Barry Diller's takeover bid for MGM at an $18 billion valuation, as you already know, he's essentially saying the market is undervaluing the company and there's more growth to unlock. So from your seat as COO, do you agree? Do you think the market has been underestimated in MGM? So. We did receive a takeover offer yesterday and our board of directors is now going to begin its work of doing its fiduciary responsibility in terms of maximizing shareholder value. And you know, from my perspective, the trick is really to make sure that we keep our 60,000 employees focused on what they need to do every single day, which is deliver the best guest service possible. And at our scale that is, you know, it is a big task to keep that kind of population focused, but I think our leaders are well positioned to do it and everyone is very zoned in on the task at hand. I'm gonna push. Do you agree with the sentiment? I'm not gonna comment on that. Fair enough. Uh, well, let me add this question, you know, because in his April letter to shareholders. Dillard did talk about MGM's combination of real world assets and digital growth opportunities. So as you think about reshaping the customer experience, which of these opportunities excite you the most right now? Oh, you know, uh, we are at MGM Resorts. We're in the business of delivering fun. It is fantastic, and that is something that we truly get to do every single day. And from my perspective as COO, that's where the magic lies, right? And so one of the things that I've been really focused on, especially in a business like ours which is all about delivering experience, is how do I get my leaders laser focused on that proposition, get them back on the floor, get them engaged with the customers, get them anticipating customer needs, and then ultimately differentiate, delivering a differentiated customer experience. We're going to dig into and. What that looks like in practice. Let me turn over to you, Tony, uh, at Southwest, which is also going through its own organizational shifts, certainly another period of transformation. The company announced recently you're now going to oversee not just brand and customer experience but also people leadership and development, fairly unusual combination you don't see all too often. What's the thinking behind putting the employee experience and the customer experience under one sole leader? Yeah it's it's, it's, it is complex in terms of how it is designed from an organization stand standpoint but the actual principle is simple we're trying to elevate the employee experience and their journey so that they can deliver the type of customer experience that our brand and our business essentially is counting on. And so as we've been making transformation, especially on the customer facing side we wanna elevate the transformation for our employees which is, you know, we have 80,000 employees who are the lead actors in everything that we're doing and so this new role just brings these together and essentially joins these two efforts in tandem, uh, so that we don't miss a beat. Southwest is in this period of reinvention. About two years ago, the company pivoted, uh, did away with assigned seating, or it announced it was gonna do it with assigned seat in July 2024. Um, also got rid of course corrected, uh, on its two free checked bags policy which was long known for. For, uh, and was really one of the most recognizable parts of the brand you're now in the process of doing the work actually on the ground doing the work. So what have you learned about leading and bringing customers along through a transformation, especially one where some customers were a little iffy about the changes that were coming to a company that they've known for for decades. Yeah sure if you guys haven't known we've been going through a few changes at Southwest. I don't know if everybody in the room has seen those, um, but it's been the talk of the industry and at the root of it you have to understand what led to the changes you know we are a brand that's been iconic, um. Uh, but we wanna be sustainable and so fundamentally we needed to change our business model so that we have the future to look forward to and so when you anchor into that you then go and pick and choose where you wanna change and our, our, our position on this is you have to change the ecosystem around. Uh, the heart, but you don't change the heart, meaning the heart being the people and the service that we provide. So we went from open seating to assigned seating in, in, in any industry that's like changing the engine in a car from an airline standpoint, um, because it's a revenue change in terms of what you sell, but it's also an operational change. I mean how you turn airplanes and how you seat them matters and so we did both of those at the same time. And I would say when you look at what's going well, both the revenue has, has been exceeding our expectations operation actually is running better than it was before and now you have customer and people sentiment that typically trails those. And so what you see is doing now is really turning our attention to post-transformation. It's about the transformation of the brand and the culture, um, and I think when you look ahead that remaining piece I think really puts us in a position for the next 50 years to be. Uh, just as beloved as we were in the 1st 50, let me follow up with you before I turn to you, Ayesha. There's what I call this like corporate dead zone where a company is no longer cheap enough to be a budget retailer, but they're not seen as elite enough yet to compete with the legacy first class experiences. So how are you defining Southwest's unique version of premium, uh, so you don't get trapped in this forgotten middle. Yeah, and travel is occasion based, especially the airline, and so there's enough occasions to meet, uh, different needs. And so when you think about the Southwest product, it's always been middle basically middle class to lower class in terms of what we've been adding and all we're doing is widening in the aperture to be able to add more premium into the mix doesn't mean we're trying to be Delta because we don't think we need to be Delta to be successful, but when you look at how people travel. Travel, you may have a different product that you prefer by the occasion, and we think that we can add some more premium into the mix that will serve those needs and be accretive to a kind of the base business that we've been, uh, that we've created over time. Aha, you have a similar balance and act that you're navigating. I mean, MGM owns a massive portfolio of hotels on the Vegas Strip, and especially as consumers are more cost conscious travelers, they're scrutinizing the cost of a Vegas. Yet they still expect more luxury, more personalization, more entertainment, more convenience. How are you thinking about delivering value for price sensitive guests without also diluting this premium brand and and alienating some of those luxury customers you have? Yeah, absolutely. Differentiation such as we have in our portfolio creates complexity but also opportunity, and we had to really redefine what value means in the context of our portfolio. And that redefinition is what? So at a property like Bellagio, um, it really means, again, an ultra luxury customer experience that is personalized and unparalleled for Luxor and Excalibur, which were, which are two of our more value. Oriented resorts. We actually launched an all-inclusive earlier this year. It's a package we're very proud of, and it includes room, resort fee, parking, 3 meals a day for 2 people, including alcoholic beverage, show tickets, roller coaster rides, so really the entirety of the Vegas experience at one fixed price. And we understood, we heard loud and clear last year from our customers that they felt like they weren't getting that value proposition from Vegas anymore, particularly at our core properties. So we, we listened, we heard it, and we changed. Following up with you, you know, guests don't think in terms of hotels and restaurants and rewards apps and loyalty programs. They think about whether this trip felt effortless. Um, so how do you design an experience that feels seamless across so many different touch points from beginning to end? Just think about the full customer journey. Yeah, it's a real challenge, you know, the customer journey, of course, begins when the customer starts actually searching for their destination, searching for their trip, right? And so it's from that point on that we really think. About how we make the customer journey as smooth and frictionless as possible. So that's everything from looking at our marketing to redesigning and reevaluating our booking flows, to once the customer lands at the airport, we work very closely, Tony and I were just talking about this, with our airport authority to make sure that facilitation of passenger traffic through our airports and on our roads is smooth and seamless. Every part of it has to be considered when they enter the property, and the all-inclusive was A great example of this, you know, we are a massive company that is not designed to be an all inclusive. We had to reverse engineer that and at the back end stitch every piece of that together to really create a product that to the customer felt like that, felt seamless and was technologically enabled, but we really went through every piece of it as a customer would to make sure that we could deliver on that promise. Of course deployment of standard technology like mobile check-in, kiosk, check-in, check out. Um, but also enhancing the in-room experience in terms of making sure that In-im requests that go to our housekeeping team, for example, are delivered faster and that service can be delivered smoother and quicker as well. So you just have to look at every part of it but walk, walk it as a consumer would. So it definitely has become more complex. Yeah. Similar question for you, Tony. Southwest has also said the customer journey extends far beyond the flight itself. So as you also look at that entire journey, where are you most focused right now and what tells you where you need to invest in the future? It customers clearly tell you where you need to invest because you're looking at where behavior is changing. You can also look at what makes or makes the trip in terms of retention and growth and so we, we follow that very closely, um, and for us it's similar to ISIS. I mean you customers travel and there's a lot of time in between travel where they're considering traveling again and so for us the journey is that entire ecosystem. Um, so the way that we prioritize though how to make sure we're getting the seams correctly is really where the commercial side of the business has to partner with the operational side because that's usually where the seams are broken. It's something we are selling that the operation has to deliver and we created a team that that that is their sole job is to create a joint commercial and ops team. And they pick those experiences that often get broken on that handoff, and their job is to try to fix it and remove friction out of that. You were telling me earlier that Southwest is in this era where it's going back to its roots and it has to make its brand very clear. What is the new Southwest? Similar question, what is the new MGM? Well, the new Southwest is the old Southwest. Um, back to your roots, when you look at, people used to, people fell in love with Southwest because we, it was fun. It was fun to fly. The service was great. Before we gave away two free bags. People loved Southwest for the flight attendants and, you know, we had a sense of humor and our, our ads were. etc. and we think that there's a lot of history that actually is the bones of where we have to be back again. So in this, in many cases the the revitalization of what actually created the love we have a heart at the bottom on the bottom of our airplane is that's very rare and so we think that is actually the secret to the future and so you'll see a revitalization of that. So some of the or changes you talked about at the beginning is if we're gonna market that we gotta deliver that. My job is to try to marry those two things together. And very similar for MGM, you know, I think, especially what we're seeing from our customers today is that what they value is a place where they can come and feel special. At our scale, that can be hard to deliver, but our focus is really, really on that. I mean, I said this earlier, but we have spent an extreme, extremely significant amount of time thinking about how we get our leadership teams, refocused on our customers and our employees and not sitting in their offices on teams calls, right? How do we free up the time and how do we create the intention to engage and make sure that when we talk about what our customer wants, we're actually going out there and talking to our customer. Millions of them walk through our doors every single day, and we have this incredible opportunity to get that immediate feedback and that's really so much of where our focus today is, which is much how the industry operated 30 years ago. Much of that customer's feedback, as you already alluded to, is certainly in person meeting with the customer. I meet with those who are coming to your various properties, but both of your organizations also sit on a treasure trove of customer data and feedback. How do you go about turning that information into action, into meaningful improvements? Give some examples. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like most companies in our industry, we obviously use NPS as a really meaningful indicator of how we're doing, and it provides a lot of empirical data on really key issues about the customer experience and we utilize all. That to engage both in terms of big picture sort of policy and procedural shifts, but also direct engagement with the customer. And so that's a really, really meaningful data pool. Ultimately that will tell one part of the story, but it really is our customers who directly give us the narrative, right? And you need to, in my experience, we need to marry the both of those in order to really compellingly understand how we need to change, especially when we're talking about major shifts in the operating business. very similar, it, you know, NPS data is certainly there. AI allows you to listen to all channels now. I try not to listen to Reddit because it's just inherently negative. We can see everything, and the thing is you see it very quickly. What do you do about it is actually how you prioritize what actually is mattering the most. Our employees adding them into that mix typically leads to the actual solution when we launch. Assigned seating on day one we knew we were not boarding the airplane correctly. People did not like the boarding groups. They hated them. And so we almost the first 2nd day we started working on changes. We're on iteration number 7 now until we get it perfect and that's just a matter of you take feedback, you use the right people and the experts to solve solutions, and you need a mentality in the organization that that's OK. Any questions from the audience? If you have a question, raise your hand. We'll bring a mic over to you. Any questions please remain a few minutes. Let's end with this. Um, if you could leave this audience of fellow operating chiefs with one principle for leading customer centered transformation at scale, what would it be? Perhaps Tony, we start with you. Say, would you repeat the question please? Uh, if you could leave this audience of CEOOs with one principle for leading customer centered transformation at scale, what would that be? Yeah, I think, I mean, for our business and, and very similar probably to yours is the outcome of the experience we want is only what we enable our people to do, and, uh, we can design as much as we want on paper, um, but it's a matter of equipment and empowering our people to be able to do it with clear expectations, the right infrastructure, so they're incentivized to continue to do it. Uh, and then the motivation to give them something to believe in. Please closing salvo. Yeah, absolutely. You know, for us, what we've realized that with our scale and our number of frontline employees, we have to keep it very, very simple, and the core foundation of our operating business is that our employees have to be empowered to say yes. They, at our scale, things go wrong, they go wrong every single day. We know that. We can't always prevent that, but we can 100% influence how we recover from it. And to make sure that that is really the operating foundation that's distilled. Throughout the organization, whether you've been there 30 years or a day is really the core of what we focus on. Yeah, well, both of you are certainly correct in that everyone's always thinking about their next trip. I certainly am itching for my next trip. Uh, Tony, Ayesha, thank you for a thoughtful discussion on leading transformation while still keeping customers at the center. Very much appreciated.

The modern e-commerce machine never sleeps—and neither do the operators running it. Managing a global shopping platform today means juggling AI integration, cybersecurity threats, partnerships, and more—all while satisfying customers' increasingly high standards for the speed of commerce. The decisions COOs make cascade across millions of transactions. Adrienne Down Coulson, COO of Rakuten International, and Tom Maguire, Head of Operations at Instacart, will get candid about how they architect resilient operations, make high-stakes decisions at scale, and build the foundation to fulfill what consumers want. 

Adrienne Down Coulson, Chief Operating Officer, Rakuten International
Tom Maguire, Vice President, Head of Operations, Instacart
Moderator: Kristin Stoller, Editorial Director, Fortune; Co-Chair, Fortune COO Summit

It's An Add to Cart World: Operating the Modern Ecommerce Machine

Adrian, Tom, thank you so much for being here with me. Thank you for having me. So I wanna start with a, a, uh, bit of a, a big question so you can take a second to think, but what is something that you used to believe about running an e-commerce operation or a global operation that AI has just completely changed your mind about and changed the way you think? I need whoever wants to answer first. I, I'm, I'm happy to go first. Go ahead, Adrian. We have talked so much about AI and we're gonna keep doing it. Yeah, we hold on to your hat, um, so I think. You know, for me, um, I have been thinking a lot about this idea of like deep organizational real transformational change as opposed to these pockets of small bits of improvements and efficiency that we all see in our organizations, um, and I think the thing that really stands out to me is the role of the C-suite. That and that's not something I think I had really thought about before. We've lived for what decades, I don't know how long with the operating system that we have today at the C-suite level and it was built in a time for a for a different time in a time that required a different pace of change, a different pace of business, and, uh, and our leader. have spent, we all in this room have spent decades our entire careers building, I think, uh, you know, a career based on deep subject matter expertise in our functional areas and that is not what this moment requires, right? AI doesn't discriminate between one function and another and one silo and another it's across the organization horizontal. And uh and so I think that's what this moment calls for is an executive in a C-suite that is structured a little bit differently. Those are hard questions to ask ourselves, I think, um, but structured differently and, uh, and, and requires a sort of, I think, cross enterprise judgment and opportunity to think across the enterprise that we haven't all trained ourselves to do. Yeah, structure is definitely one we've talked about a lot these past 24 hours, Tom, is there. Anything from you as well. I, I, I love that. I think for what I've observed most recently is AI is only so powerful as the context around it. As an operations individual and and and proprietor, I think one of the biggest things I've been encouraging my team to do is not only look at AI as the abstraction, you know, as a layer of looking at averages of pulling up the data, it's also about understanding what's happening in the real world. Um, this is an old operations philosophy around walking the Gembba. I'm sure many of you are, are familiar with that, but it is a, it is a principle that, that we hold true in, in my function, and what it means is being in the real place, right, the place of value. And so we encourage all of our teams to be shopping all the time, acting as Instacart shoppers, placing real orders. We listen or take real. Customer shopper, retailer calls um just to understand not only what the data is telling us but living that real world because it's only so powerful as if you're actually playing in that sandbox every day. Makes sense. Now I wanna talk about some of those real world examples we love a use case here we love an example. Adrian, let's start with you. What is the problem that you are most obsessed with solving right now that has just been. Grinding your gears and you cannot fully solve it and how are you working to do that? Yeah, I think it does go back to that idea of all of those, all of our silos and where they bump up against each other and where they sort of blend at the seams, um. I, I can give you one example of something that one of our business units did in the last few months that I think really got at solving some of that problem, not maybe necessarily enterprise-wide, but, um, but definitely impacted multiple parts of the organization. So Racketton has like more than 70 businesses around the world in many different industries, but the one that most people in the US know the best is a cashback shopping. Platform that we call you thank you a lot of cash back over here so we call it Rackets and Rewards internally and that team built a conversational agent called Annelise that sits it lives in Slack and sits on top of all of our data sources across all of our 17 million customers and members and, uh, and that landscape across that organization was super fragmented not just from. Tool set perspective but also from an organizational structure perspective so we had a business intelligence team inside marketing we had analysts inside engineering we had analysts inside commercial we had them in finance and they all had a different idea of the source of you know their their one single truth and maybe that's maybe that's something you guys can relate to too but super fragmented. And it required each of the leaders of those teams to actually come together and redesign a different experience. So now we have every single employee in the company can go to the Slack channel and ask a question. We can somebody could ask like Instacart is on our platform. So if you see, um, sales trends moving in a different direction for this week year over year, and you could wonder why. Now you can ask that question instead of sort of getting in a queue with an. Analyst and waiting for them to write custom code and coming back to you with a back and forth and that used to take weeks. Now it takes 20 seconds so it's that that um efficiency you get but you also are getting that like cross department kind of, um, collaboration and redesign of how work actually gets done and how the service gets delivered to employees. Makes sense great examples, Tom, you got one for me. Yeah, I think you know one of the, the toughest sort of challenges we have is the element of how the physical world plays in the digital world. Some of the most difficult operational problems now are that at that intersection where, you know, we are living in both places. We're living in, in you're on your phone ordering uh a real order whether you're ordering, you know, a birthday cake for your, your kid's birthday or you're ordering a Christmas tree around Christmas time. You're living in that digital world, but the reality is the. Operational complexity underneath that is one of our hardest challenges because AI at currently is, is, uh, raising the bar. It's making it, uh, customers have a set of expectations around speed around uh getting personalization even better and and stronger and so for us a huge focus of my role is making sure that the customer doesn't see that operational complex that real world. Complexity even in times of sort of acute severe issues you can take something like weather. Um, it's no secret that our demand spikes in weather moments, uh, hopefully with no weather moments currently, uh, in, in the Scottsdale era, although like actually a high heat is a real thing for us like when people are in like right now people will stock up when it's cooler in the morning. Um, but what we have to do is make sure that we're building the orchestration behind that, navigating, helping shoppers navigate in the store, you know, we're right now we've been working through deploying different solutions for shoppers around, making sure they can make the right decision points in the store. Dozens of times during a normal shop they're having to make decisions around your order, whether it is an out of stock replacement. We have to use, we use AI, uh, different systems in order to surface to that chopper what the best replacement will be. And it's not just the thing next to it in the aisle. It is using your personalized what you really want in order to give it to them. And that's a way more complex problem that it seems at the surface and going layer by layer is a is a huge focus for us. That makes sense. I'm going to turn to the room in just a second for a question, so please raise your hand if you have one. Someone will bring a mic over to you, but Tom, follow up question for you, because one of the things I've been, you know, interested about from the Instacart perspective is you've really been experimenting with AI in a lot of different ways. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, and you're, you talk about that a lot. I know the most recent news is Instacart is now available in cloud, um, allowing customers to build a grocery cart right from the conversation. Very cool new tech. Last year, another. Instacart experiment with um AI pricing experience with it with dynamic pricing of grocery retailers didn't go as well as planned. Can you talk about what you've learned from, you know, past experiments that you've brought into this, this next wave of experimenting with AI? Yeah, thank you for the question. On, on the latter part, I just want to, uh, clarify one point. Instacart actually doesn't set prices, retailers set prices. So, um, just want to clarify that that piece. On, you know what things go well, I will say a lot of things I think we've all experienced the things that don't go well, right? It's like, oh my gosh, we're pushing for an adoption of a tool but actually haven't sold to our teams that actually that there's a real reason why that adoption is important. It's not just using the tool, it's about actually deploying it in a, in, in a way that's effective for the internal teams. I think the thing that has worked really well on the operational side has been. Um, things that are net new versus only trying to solve for efficiency, I think we all can focus on how do we make things faster, how do we use less resource time to do something, but the things that are net new are really the game changers for us. And while I have a ton of examples, one real world. Example is we, um, you know, we have service hours for our operations, our live operations, you know, we're doing millions of orders a day. Something is going to go wrong. Law, law of large numbers, there's going to be something wrong with millions of orders a day. And so we have live operations in the background and making sure things happen. And we needed to make sure that we're actually extending the ability of those teams. It wasn't about being more efficient. It was actually growing the pie as we call it, and the teams launched that, the teams that were closest to the problem, those live operations teams who are junior team members who are like, how do I solve this? And the reason why. Worked was because they were the closest to the problem. They also had pride in doing it. It wasn't something someone told them to do. They said, I want to do this. I want to make it so that my function can do more versus I want to do, do things more efficiently necessarily. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Any questions from the room? Sarah. Over here, we have a mic running its way to you. Hey, uh, Sarah Walker, CEO at Slack. I wanna pick on something you talked about at the beginning around the C-suite role is changing and kind of reimagining. We talk a lot about how we're reimagining our team's workflow. I would love to hear a little bit of how you're reimagining kind of the makeup of your C-suite and how you run the business. If any examples or how you're tackling it and approaching it, yeah, so, um, I'll admit there's no solve yet. I have ideas and I'm thinking about it a lot. I have in my role. I have the opportunity to, I oversee multiple business units, so I get the opportunity to kind of work in and around different C-suites. And uh and I it's so fascinating to see how watch how decisions get made where they get stalled where decisions have to get like relitigated and and I think a lot of that connects to trust so I think you know if I think about what's the C-suite. What's missing I think is that enterprise view that enterprise judgment and one of the previous sessions today there's a lot of talk about how COOs are maybe particularly well positioned for that because we already do have that enterprise view in a way that's different maybe than some of the others around the table and I'm not necessarily saying that that's the case, um, but it, it's an observation that is interesting but I think regardless each person around the table I think. We need to start building that muscle and uh and then I think what connects to that is this sort of missing piece around trust and because when trust is thin at that table you get uh you know it's maybe for a couple of reasons is it around competence like you don't trust that the person across the table from you is able to do the job and deliver like like they promised or is it around, you know, intent. Do they really have the interests of the organization in mind over their own and, and what's going on behind the scenes? And when that happens, you get the whole, all the gears start to, uh, slow down, right? And we can't move at the speed that's required. And you get that kind of backchanneling, you get the redecision. And so on, so I'm observing that and thinking about, uh, it, you know, it takes like a serious amount of introspection, right? And it's uncomfortable like when I think about my own role and how I think for me as a COO I have been an absorber of friction. And that's removing it from the other people around the table, but it doesn't get rid of it. It doesn't fix it. And so that's one of the observations I've made about myself anyway and maybe what might need to change. It takes, I think, some courage from all of us to really be that introspective about it. Can I ask a follow up on that? And Tom, I'd, I'd love your take on it too, because Adrian, I know you've talked about, um, reinvent. Mention exhaustion is what you, you've called it and my colleague Nick Lichtenberg last night was telling us about the conversation at his table about, you know, what would you do if you could do anything right now? And the answer was we can't because we're so exhausted from, from all the other things in our daily life. But you know, how do you audit, you know, the organization's capacity for change when everyone is just so bogged down with everything. That they're already doing, how do you reinvent in that scenario and Tommy you can answer this too. Yeah, I think it's, um, one of the things that I've been trying to sort of formulate, it's imperfect right now is the concept of not focusing on iteration but actually focusing on full transformation. It's, you know, we have worked to, you know, quickly iterate on things to solve them. So to your point, like. There's only so many things we can solve in a day, but how do we skip to the end? How do we, instead of encouraging our teams to do one or two steps, let's actually just do all the steps, and I know they can be daunting to your point on the exhaustion piece, but actually it gets way more inspiring. I found for teams to say, Oh, I'm not moving that metric 1 point, I'm moving it 40, and I think, and I will, it will get, I will get that there over time, but I, I think that sort of transformation versus iteration mentality has helped a little bit. Yeah, Adrian, any, any additional thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean we, we talked a little bit about COVID earlier in one of the earlier sessions. I think the same leaders who are being tasked with this reinvention and total transformation today are the same ones in this room and the same ones that led companies through massive restructurings multiple over the last several years, COVID-19. Um, all the geopolitical stress and strife, all of the stress and challenges around DEI, like the list goes on, right, and not a lot of time in between to breathe or since then, so I agree, complete exhaustion, um, and, uh, and I think what the moment calls for and how you audit really starts at the top. It's that introspection. I think that, you know, the companies that win at the end of the day. They're not going to be those that picked one technology over another or smart with those decisions, but really the ones that made the hard calls at that leadership level. Makes sense. And, and, in our last minute together, I'd like to ask you both, yesterday we talked a lot about whether AI should be a colleague. There seems to be a lot of debate about it, and I would love both of your take, you know, 5 years, 10 years in the future, how do you each foresee AI and humans working in tandem or not at each of your companies? Tom, oh, it's a great question. I wish I had like a, a really sharp answer. I think the, the way I think about it now is it's going to be an augment to humans because we for Instacart, uh, food is personal and everyone sort of has their own personal journey with food and so that's what we believe and we will always have this sort of human connection with the AI sort of element elevating that and make it better. Yeah, excellent answer, Adrian. OK, so I think a lot about the back office functions because I've spent the last several years pulling together a centralized set of services across multiple business units, so everything you could imagine all the HR, IT, security, facilities, um, legal, finance, all those things are one central organization now, and I think that that set of services is gonna look completely different in 5 years. And I don't necessarily think that's about displacing jobs, but I do. I'm seeing a little bit of that now like we're, where we're not backfilling for some things as we have natural attrition, but I think the jobs will be different, and it goes back to that idea of kind of those silos across the central services as they bump up against. To each other and those scenes start to blend and we will reinvent work flows across all of those things um I have if you have time for one example I know 20 seconds or less OK no OK we'll we'll ask her after we'll ask her at the lunch because she is going to lunch but Adrian, Tom, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your stories.

In 2016, Philip Morris International announced a bold new mission: to deliver a “smoke-free future.” Its U.S. division—Philip Morris U.S.—is now leading that charge with a portfolio of smoke-free products, including the widely known nicotine pouch brand ZYN. Yet globally, Philip Morris International continues to sell cigarettes, fueling the very addiction it says it aims to eliminate.
In this episode, Ruth Umoh sits down with Seth Kaufman, chief commercial officer of Philip Morris U.S., to discuss what success looks like for a company trying to move consumers away from cigarettes, the ethical tensions embedded in its business model, and whether a truly smoke-free future is possible.

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