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How is technology changing companies? And what’s the relationship between the company board, CEO and other leaders managing change surrounding those technologies?
Those are just some of the questions that were tackled by Verizon CEO Dan Schulman during our Board of Directors Council Summit in Palm Beach, Fla., on Tuesday. In an interview with WSJ Leadership Institute President Alan Murray, Schulman weighed in on a series of topics, including leading during tremendous change in the AI age, organizational adoption strategies and why companies need a full reboot—themes that should ring familiar to finance chiefs.
👀 Watch: Verizon CEO Dan Schulman: ‘We’ll Hit AGI in the Next 2–4 Years’
On how he defines “AGI,” or artificial general intelligence:
“Machines being able to do everything we do better than we do. That's basically how I define it. So I think it's just hard to imagine. The models are just getting better and better and better and better, faster and faster.”
On the pace of change:
“This is a time for all of us that is unprecedented,” said Schulman, who also serves as a board member of Verizon, Cisco, Lazard and the Cleveland Clinic. “I've never seen technology change as fast as it is right now. I think there are basically three concurrent waves that are about to crash down,” including AI.
“Unless you're really in the AI community, it's hard to imagine how fast that is happening. The models are basically doing a step function improvement every two months.”
“It's my informed view that we hit AGI in the next two to four years, and I think it's more toward the sooner side than latter.”
The second massive wave is quantum computing, and Schulman sees the third wave as humanoid robots.
On organizational adoption of emerging tech:
“I think that's the biggest issue actually, [which] will be culturally how do we in organizations adapt to the change, and can we adapt to the change? And I think that's our job as directors and CEOs, to really push hard on that.”
“I see some CEOs embracing it. I see others not.”
On why companies need a full reboot to adapt to technology:
“I truly do believe like all of our companies need full reboots because we're going to go into a world of change right now, and we're going to have new competition coming who are not afraid to utilize the technologies.”
“It costs fractions of what it used to to start companies. You'll have companies with 100 people that will be doing multiple billions of dollars of revenues easily, easily. So I think from my perspective, what I meant by that is culturally the organization needs to become less bureaucratic and needs to be more nimble. It needs to be more agile. It needs to be way more scrappy.”
📖 Further reading
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