Fortune 500 Titans and Disruptors of Industry

AI is rewriting the rules of business — and Accenture CEO Julie Sweet says reinvention is the only way Fortune 500s will survive. In the debut episode of Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry, Sweet sits down with Fortune’s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell to reveal how she’s nearly doubled Accenture’s value, grown its workforce to 770,000, and kept the company thriving through disruption.

Julie Sweet’s Path From Lawyer to Leading 770,000 People

Leadership

AI Playbook

AI coding agents are transforming software development, but are human programmers still necessary? Fortune's AI editor Jeremy Kahn breaks down what "vibe coding" really means, why companies are racing to adopt coding agents, and the hidden risks of AI-generated code. From technical debt to slopsquatting, we’ll explore what the future looks like for software programming – and whether humans will play a role. 

Are Programmers Obsolete? | Fortune AI Playbook

Tech

You might have been hearing a lot about AI coding assistance and how this might mean that programmers' jobs are going away. So what's really going on here? I'm Jeremy Kahn, your AI expert at Fortune. I'm here to help cut through some of the hype around AI and to answer your questions. So what are coding agents? Coding agents are AI models that can write computer code. You just tell them in English what you want the computer program to do, and it handles all the coding. Vibe coding involves somebody who is not a programmer just telling an AI model they want to build an app or a website. Site and the AI model does all the programming for them. The adoption of coding agents is happening very fast. Companies like Google are saying that a lot of the code they put out is now written by these coding agents and even more traditional companies, banks like JPMorgan, a lot of their code is also being written by coding agents too. So why does this matter? Number 1, it's redefining the role of the developer. Software programmers no longer have to worry about writing individual lines of code. Instead, their job is more about setting high level features and functions and then supervising and checking what the AI does. Number 2, coding agents lower the technical barrier to entry. Now anybody can write code. You don't have to work for the IT department. Number 3, AI agents can accumulate A lot of technical debt. Technical debt means when a company's legacy computer systems or IT systems cause it problems in the future. With these AI coding agents, they often write code that on the surface looks great, but it can be riddled with cybersecurity vulnerabilities and actually be brittle. Number 4, don't trust AI to remember everything. AI models suffer from a phenomenon called hallucinations. That's when AI models make up. erroneous information in the context of coding assistants, that hallucination can take the form of made up libraries or unit tests. These coding assistants sometimes make up those libraries or they go to libraries that they shouldn't go to, and that's led to this phenomenon called slob squatting. Slob squatting is when you have a bad actor who goes out and registers a library that they think an AI agent might visit, but instead of putting good code in that. Library. They put malware there. The coding agent goes and grabs the malware and imports it back into the network. Back to the original question are software programmers obsolete? Well, autonomous software development is pretty much here today. Engineers at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic say they've gone months without handwriting any code. They just supervise what the AI coding agents do. So what does this mean for people in other professions? Well, there are some people I think that the same kind of automation is coming for every knowledge worker's job in the next 12 to 18 months, but I think that's going to take a lot longer than that. In most other jobs, there aren't something equivalent to unit tests in software where you can automatically tell if the code is good or not. In most other professions, telling whether the work product is good or not requires subjective judgment and a lot of experience, and AI models aren't yet good at that.

Next to Lead featuring Fortune editor Ruth Umoh is a weekly vodcast series featuring a new generation of Fortune 500 leaders. Each week we talk to today’s most prominent C-suite executives who are shaping the future of business. Episodes will reveal what drives these executives, their vision for the future, and how to succeed in today’s hyper competitive landscape.

Next to Lead

ServiceNow president and CFO Gina Mastantuono grew up determined never to rely on anyone. Her first career move was cautious after a friend told her accounting was “recession proof.” A series of smart and calculated leaps turned that safe start into a rapid climb.

Today Mastantuono is paid to take big swings and deliver results. Under her financial leadership ServiceNow entered the Fortune 500 in 2023 and has remained on the list ever since.

For the first episode of Next to Lead Fortune executive editor Ruth Umoh explores how Mastantuono built a career that spans industries and continents from auditing at Ernst & Young to CFO roles at tech giant Ingram Micro and now ServiceNow. She explains how to recognize the right moment to switch industries, why technical expertise remains critical in the C-suite, and what rising leaders should know about seizing their next big opportunity.

ServiceNow’s CFO Gina Mastantuono on Taking Leaps, Building Teams, and Betting on AI

Term Sheet

Welcome to the Term Sheet podcast! In this new series, Allie Garfinkle adapts her newsletter in audio and video format, diving deeper into the latest news and insights on private equity, venture capital and startups. This weekly show will expand on the elements that made the newsletter an essential subscription for investors, with industry leaders guests and a roundup of the biggest funding news.

This week, Allie interviews Will Hurd, Chief Strategy Officer at CHAOS Industries. Together they discuss Will's background as a CIA officer, and a new era for defense, tech and DoD partnerships. Also in this episode: Figma's IPO and the deal of week: Ramp.

Figma IPO: What Investors Need to Know, and Understanding Defense Tech

The Crypto Playbook

Bitcoin is the cornerstone of the crypto industry thanks to its impeccable pedigree and bulletproof security. That’s been true ever since the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto published his vision for Bitcoin in 2008, but its role has changed over time. On the inaugural episode of Crypto Playbook, Jack Mallers, the renowned “Bitcoin maxi” helps break down its journey from an outlaw currency to $2 trillion Wall Street behemoth.

Bitcoin then and now

Fortune_Crypto

The incredible evolution of the original cryptocurrency

Leadership Next

She's the sixth managing partner in the firm's 100-year history.

Leadership Next: Edward Jones Managing Partner, Penny Pennington

Leadership Next: Edward Jones' Penny Pennington

I want to take this one off line because I need your advice. Welcome to Leadership next podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm alan Murray and I'm Ellen McGirt. So what do you tell clients about how they should be thinking about crypto? Well, when we start from our investment philosophy, our investment philosophy is rooted in quality diversification and a long term orientation now could crypto be a part of each of those characterizations? Sure. So investing in those things is likely going to be a part of the investment portfolio um for clients some today and more going forward. However, we do not believe that speculation is a part of serious long term financial planning and there is part of the crypto market right now. That is pure speculation. We love investing in enduring companies that are governed and managed well that think about their the full panoply of their stakeholders. Good companies have been doing that for a long, long time. So we're we're proponents of that. We asked people to invest in that and that's how we see the endurance and the success of our company as well. You didn't put a lot of your clients into Gamestop when it was. Sorry, I guess so. Were 100 years old with the same name on the door. You don't get to be that without constantly listening and learning. I am simply a product of of that focus of that ethos of that culture and we've also built our leadership development around that at important points in time. We're very ex explicitly say what we mean by leadership. We took the opportunity to do that over the last couple of years and what characterizes good leadership for our company in the world that we live in today is to first be purpose driven. Next be human centered and third be courageous are we on the verge? Are we uh you know, a few quarters away from the next recession? Alan, we don't believe that the next recession is coming in 2022, and we don't believe that it's coming as a result of inflation or the Federal Reserve's response to inflation. We believe that the fundamentals in the economy right now are still fairly strong, so we don't believe that that recession is imminent. However, the business cycle is still out there and and investors need to have um pro appropriately tempered expectations right now and be getting good advice. Here's the plug, be getting good advice about where some of the right rotations are right now.

Office Upgrades

IBM wants to redefine the future of computing. And inside this ultra-cold, high-tech lab, it’s betting everything on a technology that doesn’t just push the limits of physics—it rewrites them. Welcome to IBM’s Quantum Lab: where the world’s oldest tech company is making its boldest bet yet.


Behind IBM’s Boldest Bet: The Quantum Test Lab

Inside IBM's ultra cold quantum lab, that is colder than outer space. 

Energy

 Inside an ultra-cold lab, IBM is racing to build the future of quantum computing. Fortune got an inside look. 

Inside an ultra-cold lab, IBM is racing to build the future of computing. By betting big on quantum, the company hopes to solve problems classical machines never could.

Inside IBM’s Quantum Lab: Building the AI of the Future

So this is the inside of one of our Heron characterization systems. It's the largest quantum processor that's available for people to use out there. Welcome to IBM's Quantum Lab, where one of the world's oldest tech companies is making its boldest bet yet. We see ourselves as always having a dual mission in research. One is to be Organic growth engine of the company and that the second mission in IBM research is to invent the future of computing at IBM, that future is being molded inside this ultra cold high-tech lab. It's making a big bet on a technology that turns the strangest laws of quantum physics into raw computing power. IBM's Yorktown Heights campus was designed in the early 1960s and was one of the final projects of the visionary architect Eero Saarinen, known for futuristic designs that captured the spirit of technological advancement like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport. Nestled inside the building, this quantum computing lab is more than an experiment in physics. It's an experiment in corporate reinvention. Welcome to our quantum characterization and test lab. Typically what we do here is a lot of the pre-testing and checking of our quantum chips. What you hear are actually our quantum computing test systems that you're looking at right here. It's kind of noisy. That's the sound of these refrigeration systems that we have. It's actually a compressor that basically takes our quantum chips and cool them down to 100 times colder than outer space. What we're looking at here are a couple of our quantum processor chips. So that one chip in there has 1000 qubits on it. Unlike the binary ones and zeros of classical computers, quantum machines use qubits, able to represent many states at once. That lets them solve problems too complex for today's most powerful supercomputers. While other tech giants race to own the cloud or dominate large language models, IBM is carving out a different future, one where quantum and AI converge to tackle the world's. Most complex challenges. IBM is obviously making some really big bets in AI and quantum. It feels like you're all in, but so much of that comes from where we're sitting right now at the IBM research lab. You're right, in so many ways there's like this thread of connectivity from the past to the future, and sort of IBM research is at the fulcrum of that thread across IBM's history. For decades, IBM was the titan of business tech. The company was known for popularizing the punch card and the magnetic stripe credit card. They built towering mainframe computers and its early Watson AI became famous for winning Jeopardy. Since 1961 when we've had this building, this has been like the mother ship. Now IBM research the mothership, yeah, IBM Research is global. We have labs across the globe, but this is the mothership because this is where we actually have our AI systems, our quantum system too. It inspires our clients, it inspires our partners, and certainly inspires our employees. IBM was the titan of business tech until it wasn't. Caught between the rise of big cloud and the boom of consumer software, IBM slowly faded from relevance. Yet under CEO Arvind Krishna, that story is changing. He spun off the company's slower moving divisions, doubled down on artificial intelligence, and revived a moonshot that's been decades in the making, quantum computing. This is our think lab. There's a quantum computer here. There's an AI supercomputer here and there's classiccompute all throughout. There's our Z system. So this is really where uh this vision of the future of computing bits, neurons, and qubits all come together in one place. A good way to think about it really is that nature and everything that we experience around us, it really obeys the laws of quantum mechanics, but we don't really experience that. We don't really, you know, per se care, but underlying is it entirely very rich mathematics. That when it's leveraged to compute, you can do things entirely different from what you can do with your classical computers that rely on bits, zeros and ones, for example. So the desktop on your desktop, your phone, right, even the most powerful GPUs out there, they're still using zeros and ones. But when you have a quantum computer, you're using a much richer mathematical representation. It changes the rules for how you can actually process information. From the outside, I feel like for a lot of people, AI, maybe people are starting to wrap their minds around how this fits into my daily life into my daily work. Quantum feels so much farther away than that, and yet it's being so hyped right now. We have always thought about it in sort of three stages. We've said those. Quantum utility, quantum advantage, and then we'll talk about full fall tolerant computing. We said there was quantum utility already in 2023 where you're able to show that a combination of quantum and classical computing is you can do things that you couldn't do classically even by simulation. So I mean, so this is actually the inside of one of our refrigeration systems, OK? You see a lot of cabling and a lot of wiring. I'll get my colleagues to open it up for you to see the inside of it. When people say, Oh, this is hype, this is never really going to happen for real, you say what? Well, we have proof points. This is where we work with our global set of partners. It's not just us seeing anymore, right? So our most recent demonstration is with our partners Rean in Japan. Combining our quantum computer with the Fugaku supercomputer. So this is not all abstract. Here is data. He is an experiment. Here is what you would have done classically. Here is quantum and classical working together. I think demystification is a, actually having systems people can work with. 2, working with an ecosystem of partners. I think we have a worldwide network of over 250 partners. IBM knows the stakes. Quantum computing is far from changing anything tech in your hands right now, but its impact could reshape global industries. And if IBM is right, it won't just compete with today's tech giants, it will leapfrog them. But if it's wrong, this lab becomes another cautionary tale of corporate overreach. So here we're looking at. This is all going to grow in miniature form, miniature form, right? I think, but it's good sense to show the concept of modularity, right, where you know you have your classical sort of compute clusters, you have your cryogenic infrastructure where the quantum processors sit, and then there's classical electronics around it, but we really designed this in a way that is that has this opportunity to scale and you know we really have a vision of building this out. IBM's CEO is betting that deep tech is still worth the risk, and Wall Street agrees the company's shares reached a record high in June, driven by the company's announcement of a roadmap to build the world's first large scale fault tolerant quantum computer by 2029. Already IBM is bringing in partners from research labs to Fortune 500s, eager to be early adopters of what could become the most transformative computing shift since the microchip. Kids today, they might not think of IBM. When they think AI they think open AI they think Google, they think anthropic. Does that concern you or do you see IBM just having a different path? Companies with a consumer business have a natural opportunity to have their technology in the hands of consumers, and that gives them a natural path too. Visibility and awareness, but I think we're very, very comfortable honestly as a company and including the research division that we are an enterprise focused company, but that doesn't change the fact that we are really moving the needle on the future of computing. It's just we need different parts for that awareness to drive it. We have learned, especially in AI predictions beyond 35 years. Yes, I could tell you anything you wanted, and, and so, so acknowledging the uncertainty of that, we believe that our combination of AI and hybrid cloud allows us to tap into the biggest market. So success is being the absolute leader in enterprise AI.