7 leaders on the tech that will reshape our future

This transcript, generated from speech recognition technology, has been edited for web readers, condensed for clarity, and may differ slightly from the audio.

Jack Hidary, CEO, SandboxAQ: It's going to be a fascinating world of great benefit to humanity.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: Welcome to Meet the Leader, a podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's toughest challenges. In today's special compilation episode, we talk to CEOs and top academics driving the innovations that will change our futures.

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I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum, and this is Meet the Leader.

Igor Tulchinsky, Founder, Chairman and CEO, WorldQuant: You really can't predict some things, but you can bucket them into what can happen so that when it does happen, you simply act

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: We're not just at the cusp of a new year. There's more than just the transition to 2023 ahead. We are at a special turning point where new technologies will be reshaping how we save lives, how we relate to one another, and how we save the planet.

In this special compilation episode, we talk to a range of leaders on the forefront of building the technologies and applications that will change how we work, how we live and even how we do business. These interviews were recorded at the Annual Meeting in Davos, the Global Technology Governance Retreat in June in San Francisco, and even the Urban Transformation Summit in Detroit this fall.

These leaders will tell you how quantum sensing, the metaverse or even data will drive new shifts and how we can navigate those changes best.

George Oliver, CEO, Johnson Controls: You’ve got to be prepared to be decisive on how you align, and how do you motivate and communicate and adapt and then deploy and execute.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: We'll get started with the metaverse. Jeremy Bailenson is a Stanford professor who's been working on the metaverse for more than two decades. We’ll have Jeremy first level the playing field and explain the metaverse in his own words in this interview recorded at our Global Technology Governance Retreat in San Francisco.

Jeremy Bailenson, Professor, Stanford University: It's a very complicated term but we can boil it down to a simple definition which is: people, places and things. So there's a digital world, and in that world there need to be people. If I'm going to enter the world, I need to have an avatar. The avatar needs to look like me. When I move my hand, its hand needs to move just like I'm moving. So there's a lot of technology and a lot of communities that are building avatars so people can come together in an online world.

The next thing is places. There's a virtual world where you have to go. And that virtual world's got to be two things: consistent and persistent. Consistent means if you go there and there's a grid and I bought a plot of land and it's next to another person, it's got to stay that way. In other words, if I'm spending a lot of money, ‘cause I've got a plot of land that's next to Snoop Dogg that grid's got to stay the same way.

The next thing it's got to be is persistent. Even if I leave, the world's got to be there. And so the virtual worlds that are there, there's all sorts of real estate marketing going on right now, and there are many, many metaverses popping up that have got these grids. They've got to stay the same and they've got to always be there.

The final part of the metaverse is things. You have to have 3D objects or 2D objects, just digital assets. And those things tend to be verified on the blockchain using different types of crypto technology.

So in sum, the metaverse. Is people, places, and things in a consistent virtual world that doesn't change and is always there, even if you're not.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: Jeremy told us that the metaverse won't change our lives overnight, but there are some interesting capabilities that will help us collaborate virtually. Here's how that will take shape in the metaverse.

Jeremy Bailenson: Where the metaverse earns its keep is when you're doing collaborative tasks that are spatial. Oftentimes when we think about being spatial, we think about vision. Is a person here? Is a person to the right? And looking at them.

And if I walk up to you, you get a sense of my personal space. Or if we're working on a shared object together, that the spatial aspect matters.

And location: If there are 10 people in a room, if it's all in one audio channel, it's really hard to understand who's saying what and when. In particular, it's really hard to figure out speaking terms.

But when the audio is spatialized, if person A on the right says something and person B is talking at the same time on the left, you can help differentiate it simply by turning your head or leaning towards them. And the same cues we use in the real world to understand people, we get to use them in the metaverse as well.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: CP Gurnani is the CEO of Tech Mahindra, an India-based information technology services and consulting multinational serving customers in 95 countries. I'll let him explain why the metaverse will have a special role in transforming training, healthcare and business.

C P Gurnani, MD & CEO, Tech Mahindra: I think the first adopter always is gaming, but where I see much bigger and much faster adoption is healthcare, retail and education.

Three different aspects to it. Number one is nobody intimidates you, you are in your own pace. That original online versus offline education, versus now (dealing with an avatar, and in a virtual world) it only means is that I learn at my pace. I am aided by machine learning. I am aided by AI. And more important is that I am engaged in such a way that I am able to work without inhibition. I think that's the beauty of education and training in the metaverse.

We have done safety worker training. We have done sports training. We have done higher learning, including metaverse and blockchain in the metaverse and the rate of adoption and the rate of engagement is far, far superior.

In retail, people are able to try out things. Today in India, online shopping means 30% returns. Our belief is if you do online shopping with me in the metaverse, I can reduce your returns, exchange of goods, by almost 70%. That means instead of 30%, it will boil down to maybe 8 or 9%. And that has an impact in commerce.

And similarly in education and learning, your adoption increases by almost 50 to 60%.

Today for Tech Mahindra, I have a rural education programme being run in the metaverse. So this evolution of Web 3.0, blockchain and metaverse is here to stay. Applications are endless. And remember, I'm talking of a country where the smartphone penetration is only 26%.

Meet The Leader / Linda Lacina: Justin Hotard is the executive vice president and general manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise steering the high performance and artificial intelligence business group there, and important to this episode, driving their work on super computers, some of the most powerful computers in the world. I'll let him first explain what those are.

Justin Hotard, Executive Vice President and general manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise: One way to imagine this is imagine if you had not one laptop, but 50,000 laptops all connected together, running one piece of software that needed all of those 50,000 laptops to run together at the same time.

And what's unique about a supercomputer is that we can't use traditional methods to cool and power it. So we tend to need very specialized systems that can take a lot of power and actually use water to cool them. And that's what makes them unique and that's what allows us to deliver incredible breakthroughs, like finding cures for diseases and solving questions around complex energy problems, and progressing material science, as an example.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: Supercomputers will be key to some of the tech we've already talked about in this episode, including the metaverse. I asked him about this and how it will power some of the big transformations we'll be seeing. Here's what he said.

Justin Hotard: These large computers, what they allow you to do is simulate very complex environments. And if you think about the metaverse, and you really imagine the future of immersive reality, there's so many dimensions that we take for granted. There's the physical movement, there's touch, there's pressure, there's temperature, there's smell. Let alone sound and audio and visual. That’s a very unique, complex problem to simulate. And what these computers will allow us to do is simulate that such that we can build software around it.

So when someone is in an immersive experience, they can feel the different sense of walking on carpet versus a wood floor. They can sense the difference in temperature of having the air conditioning on or not. And that's really critical when you think about creating a true immersive experience versus really what is augmented reality today.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: I also asked him to blue sky for me a potential application that could be made possible for the metaverse by supercomputers. Here's Justin.

Justin Hotard: One is giving people the experience, from an immersive perspective, of being in space.

The other would be teleporting somewhere and potentially having a meeting like this with everyone actually virtually attending, getting the experience of feeling like you're sitting just across the room from someone, yet we're all in different places.

If the experience is real and holistic. Any kind of physical training. You could think about a team sport practicing for your next competitor, and actually, rather than having someone simulate, poorly, the competitor, actually being in a virtual space and seeing that competitor's behaviour be simulated and having to respond.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: Quantum technologies will also play a key role in our futures. We talked to Jack Hidary, the CEO of SandboxAQ at our retreat in June in San Francisco, and he shared how quantum sensors could shape healthcare.

Jack Hidary, CEO, SandboxAQ: Quantum sensors are physical devices, along with software to pull the signal out of these devices that, for example, can sense the magnetic field around our heart. Our heart produces a very faint magnetic field and we can't really pick that up very easily with traditional sensors, but quantum sensors can do this.

In fact, we make these quantum sensors out of diamonds. Not diamonds from the ground, but diamonds that we create in a facility. And these are special diamonds that we can then detect things as faint as the magnetic field of the heart. And why is that helpful? Heart disease is the number one killer in many countries in the world. And so it's imperative that we have better diagnostic tools.

Quantum sensing will form a major modality of imaging and detecting heart health. So in a world where we have quantum technology scaled and pervasively adopted, it's going to be a fascinating world of great benefit to humanity.

First, let's talk about the medical side. Right now, medical imaging, medical diagnostics are typically things that we think about at large hospitals. You have to go to the hospital to get in a scanner, a large machine the size of a whole room, and scary and it makes lots of noise and things like that.

We're still going to have some of those machines. But with quantum sensors, you can have very small form factor, very low power draw, very portable devices. They can give you really good resolution, both time resolution and in some cases, a spatial resolution about the body. And that means that in your own home, you could have a heart diagnostic machine. In your own home, you could have a little brain scanner as well. And so when these technologies are adopted, instead of having to go to the hospital all the time to get your heart scan, say, once or twice a year, you can have a device in your home that will tell you, without emitting anything from that device (there's just a passive device that's listening to the magnetic field of the heart), tell you how the heart is doing.

And that information will be uploaded via Bluetooth to your phone and from your phone to your clinician, to your doctor, to your clinic. And so this will be a very different world where we distribute medical technology out to the edge of the network. Out to your home, out to small clinics. And that means that we can democratize the access to medical equipment and information instead of having to be centralized where it is right now.

Many people in the world do not have access to expensive equipment such as MRI machines, expensive equipment such as advanced CAT and PET scanners. But now with quantum technology, once it's adopted and scaled, We can really get it out, on a decentralized basis, out to the edges of the network and really change medicine from the reactive medicine that we have today to more of a proactive medicine where we can see how the body is doing before we have a trauma or calamity.

So that's one area where our lives will change with this technology. We really hope to have medical diagnostics change the nature of medicine itself.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: Igor Tulchinsky is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of WorldQuant, a global quantitative asset management firm. I asked him about how he envisions the future of data - and how leaders can better strategize for the days and years ahead. Here's what he said.

Igor Tulchinsky, Founder, Chairman and CEO of WorldQuant: The amount of data that we will be producing in the next five years is bigger than the amount of data that's ever been produced until today. In 10 years it'll be even more so.

To make sense of all that data, it becomes impossible to do so unless you use machine learning, AI and algorithm type of technologies.

We see exponential growth and kind of an ‘expect the unexpected’ kind of era.

The growth will be across the board. You know, it started out in a few key industries. Quantitative finance is a natural place where it starts. But now it's into every area, healthcare, agriculture, retail, you name it. It’s going to permeate every area, as soon as people are culturally ready, the CEOs in the areas are culturally ready to assimilate this new way of thinking.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: What is maybe slowing some of these companies, some of these sectors into sort of adopting new technologies that could help them go through mounds of data or sort of embracing data in the first place?

Igor Tulchinsky: Well, it's just mindset. To use the new way of thinking, to use AI, to use predictions, you kind of have to build your company's strategy around that. Companies and not all industries are built like that. It requires a transformation and transformations take time.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: How can the future of prediction change workplaces or how leaders lead?

Igor Tulchinsky: Prediction and automation will make the workplace a more exciting place where people are doing more interesting things and the more mundane or repetitive actions have been automated. The leaders have to be more on the visionary side, providing images of where the company should go, of what could exist, and to put in place the culture and everything that's there.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: So less of a manager task master mindset and more of a leader, visionary mindset?

Igor Tulchinsky: I think so.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: Leaders who are interested in, sort of moving towards this, what capabilities should they be building either in their company and their sector? Are there particular technologies that you think that they should be embracing? Or what, what do you recommend that they do if they want to invest in the future of prediction?

Igor Tulchinsky: They should learn a bit about AI and data science. They should hire open data science departments within the firm. They should start analyzing their own data.

And also thinking about what external data is useful. And they should start thinking about how if they could predict certain things about the future that they could use it at least to kind of answer ‘what if’ type of questions.

The fit between humans and technologies is very symbiotic because AI and machine learning does things in a way that humans don't and humans do things in a way AI doesn't so it's a very complementary fit.

The way modern chess programs play chess is they make very bizarre moves by human standards that nevertheless work, but the best teams are the combinations of people and of the AI technology. So it's the same way. The AI is just a very powerful tool so people can use it to achieve exponential outcomes, really.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: What would you recommend leaders who are trying to look at maybe the next two, three years, where there could be a global recession. What advice would you have for leaders to navigate that?

Igor Tulchinsky: I think there is too much correlation between the viewpoints, right? Viewpoints right now fall into three or different categories, but they're not three or four different scenarios. And to really consider more scenarios is what makes planning possible. Because you really can't predict some things, but you can kind of bucket them into what can happen so that when it does happen, you simply act.

I would say number one, focus on the human workforce because these type of situations are very stressful for people. Number two: break the future down into a number of scenarios and plan for each scenario. Number three: use technology, push towards technology and try to integrate prediction into the business strategy, so that it can be useful.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: Barbara Humpton is the CEO of the Siemens Corporation, a company creating infrastructure solutions like autonomous trains and smart buildings. Siemens also has a role in reshaping manufacturing, and she shared with me at the Urban Transformation Summit in Detroit how it could be transformed - what that transformation looks like. Here's what she had to say.

Barbara Humpton, CEO, Siemens Corporation: What a lot of people don't understand is that first of all, manufacturing is no longer dark, dirty, and dangerous. Manufacturing actually happens in spaces that feel much more like just a tech centre. And we're using these modern tools available to us now - the digital tools, as I say - that have that have really become part of our everyday life are entering the manufacturing side as well. So the best thing about it is every single person working in a manufacturing environment is more productive. They're probably safer too, through the use of technology.

And one of the reasons this is important, as we on the one hand try to counteract the global supply chain disruptions, we know we need manufacturing closer to the point of use.

But the great news is that with automation, we can actually make people so much more productive that we no longer have to think about low-cost countries and outsourcing because of labour costs. Actually, the labour part of it is a smaller segment of the overall cost of production, and we can do far more of it.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: I also asked her how this would shape the labour force. Here's how she responded.

Barbara Humpton: I'm thinking of it actually as a differently skilled way because high, low - who's to say. We've got veterans of manufacturing in our organization who are highly, highly skilled, but they're beginning now to use the new digital tools of manufacturing.

And so what we're finding is multi-generational teams are a great way to go. You know, just one way that we are teaching young and old is by putting them together. But I've also just had the opportunity to visit LIFT, the manufacturing institute right here in Detroit. And what I saw there was, first for our own Siemens operations, we have a group of engineers who've come through a program we call Genesis, where they're exposed to what the technology is capable of. They come through the programme and then are employed by Siemens as engineers. And they're building a brand new line within the manufacturing institute that will be a showcase for others to come through and learn.

Now, in that same location, we saw spaces for apprentices to learn welding or CNC machines --all the classic tools of manufacturing.

And then what I understand is they're bringing through busloads of students so that they're giving kids a chance to see that manufacturing can be a really cool future career. So you know, what I would tell you, Linda, is that this is really an opportunity where we start young and are just introducing people to what manufacturing could be, but we can take people at any stage of their career and introduce them to what's possible today.

It's important for us to make sure that we have the workforce of the future. It's great to think that, oh yeah, everybody can go work for a tech industry. The world is data driven. But honestly, you still need to, cross rivers on bridges. You still need to take shelter in buildings. Who is going to make the things that we need in the future? I think getting people interested and getting them to see the potential of purpose-driven careers in manufacturing is key.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: Change is the only constant. And knowing the disruption ahead, I also asked George Oliver, the CEO of Johnson Controls, how leaders can prepare their teams for uncertainty. Here's George at the Annual Meeting last May in Davos.

George Oliver, CEO, Johnson Controls: I think for me, I've been through many cycles of learning, and what you try to do is when you learn and you make a mistake or maybe you weren't quick to make a decision, or maybe you were late and then you -- the next experience, you're more agile, you're more confident in the decisions you make.

And so I think with these cycles we've been through. In the last couple of years, it has enabled us to be able to build leadership because you have to be collaborative. There has to be empathy. I mean, it's requiring the full set of leadership skills. Most important, it's requiring speed. And so speed is an output of depth and knowledge and the ability to be able to work together and be able to be decisive and then ultimately be able to, as quickly as you can, adapt to the current environment and that environment's going to change.

And you’ve got be prepared to be decisive in how you align, and how do you motivate and communicate and adapt. And then deploy and execute.

Meet the Leader / Linda Lacina: That was the tech that will shape our future. Thanks so much to all the leaders who talked to me this year, and thanks so much to you for listening.

A transcript of this episode and my colleague’s episodes, Radio Davos and the Book Club Podcast is available at wef.ch/podcasts. If you like this episode, check out episode 64 of Meet the Leader, one that digs into the innovative mindsets and tech that could truly tackle climate change.

This episode of Meet The Leader was presented and produced by me with Juan Toran as studio engineer for interviews recorded at Davos and Jere Johannsen as editor and Gareth Nolan driving studio production. That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina with the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.