The Six Five team discusses Davos 2024.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Davos 2024, man, I got to tell you, I was making fun of you at the beginning, but then I started to see all these meetings with important people and kind of the quality of the videos that you were cranking out there, and I’m like, “I think I need to go next year.” So tell us about it. What is it-
Daniel Newman: First of all, I just want to point out, I absolutely crushed it. I was fantastic all week. No, but, there’s kind of this dueling priorities that goes on with Davos. And there’s the irony and there’s the comical tweets that are shared of the lines of private jets that arrive so that a bunch of the world’s diplomats, leaders, CEOs, can all get together and talk about how others can lower their carbon emissions. And the irony is not lost on me, but it’s also one of the most important platforms on an annual basis for people to come together and talk about the things that really matter. And getting people that steer the world, whether that’s policymakers, whether that’s elected officials, whether that’s top CEOs, agencies, and having the chance to hear from so many at one time doesn’t happen often.
And so getting all these folks on the ground in one place and having the chance to sit down and meet, it was a great experience. Now, total noob, first time there, was joined by our comms chief, Nati Katz, who kind of handled my arrangement. There’s lots of different levels of access. I had the least of the legitimate access. So I was definitely a first timer, but had some really terrific opportunities to talk to so many people and run into so many people, run down the street, walk in past Paul Ryan. I ran past John Carey. I ran past… Just kind of everywhere you go. I was in line waiting to get into one of the hotels and ran into Christian Klein, SAP CEO, just kind of standing there waiting in the same line as I was, which was great, a chance to catch up. And this was kind of everywhere. So the first thing is it’s just an absolute incredible density of high profile people, both professional, and policy, and government and bringing them all together.
And it’s also in terms of the density of meetings. I had 40 in five days. I had 40 in-person get together, did about a dozen different sit-downs, videos. Had a great conversation with IBM CEO, Arvind Krishna, sat down with Tom Siebel, sat down with Gary Steele with Splunk all on video, sat down with a 28-year veteran of Checkpoint, one of the leaders of the World Economic Forum cybersecurity policy, Dorit Dor from Israel.
So very diverse set of people. Hung out with our buddy, Matt Zelinsky. Great to see Matt, always sporting a great suit. Traveled 5,500 miles to hang out with someone that lives 10 minutes down the street from me. But then like I said, it was every day. And then there was so many more get togethers. The Qualcomm nightcap was an absolute banger. We had the top heads of state. You walk in Mark Benioff, 6’8″ standing to your left, and then you had the CEO of Erickson on your right. You had Enrique Lores, HP CEO, and then Christiano. You had the owner of Manchester United in the room, one of the world’s biggest Premier League clubs. And this is just kind of what it was.
So what was the theme of the event though, okay? Now that I’m done mentioning all the important people. And by the way, this is just a tag. You walk on, it was everywhere. That was just kind of what it was. But the theme this year was surprisingly, sustainability… No, I’m just kidding. The theme was AI. So what are we talking about this year? The talk of the town of course, was AI. And it was about trust in AI. It was about responsibility in AI. It was about how do we implement safely, securely, meaningfully, and economically viably AI for government, for business, for security, for privacy. And that was the focal point.
Now, there were other topics that stayed in. And I said sustainability, this is still an in vogue topic of concern, but it was secondary. And that’s the thing is every year, there’s kind of a core topic and a secondary and third. And this year, really the central focus. You walk up and down the promenade, AI, you walk throughout Congress, AI. It was AI everywhere, front and center, no surprise. But the conversations that were going on were much bigger. It was all about how do we implement it, how do we secure it? How do we build global technology leadership? How do we protect it from being misused and put into the wrong hands? And that was such a great discussion point.
Pat, next year, I’m absolutely going to go back. I hope you’ll come with me. We got to bring The Six Five and put it on the ground. And I’ll say it’s a mix. It’s a good event to do some video, but it’s also just a tremendous event for having the chance to sit down and talk, and have really meaningful and important conversations about the things that are influencing our world. And Pat, we are right in the center of it. Whether it’s silicon, supply chain, AI, this is where it happens. This is where it’s talked about.
I was a bit of a skeptic, not as skeptical as you, so I still got on the plane. But next year, I think you’re going to have to come with me. So we’ll have to load up our private jet, the new Falcon 10X that we bought with 16 seats. We got to bring our whole delegates. It’s like when I saw Eric Schmidt walking down the street, I was standing there. Eric Schmidt from Google, he had about a 28-person delegation following him, all carrying boards and talking, and eared and wired in. But great time. Check out some of my videos I documented. I’ll have more videos publishing over the next few days. Some great content, great interactions, great conversations worth doing.
Patrick Moorhead: So I had a question for you. Does everybody bring their own photographer with them? Does everybody have an entourage? Because what I noticed is in some of your pictures, is you were having what looked like intimate conversations, but professional photos. But everybody had them, right? I saw a lot of the CEOs that we interact with had taking pictures as well.
Daniel Newman: I had an entourage. I’m just kidding. I wanted to document it, the experience. And obviously, we’re doing video, so had the chance. There were a lot of camera crews. There was a lot of people with camera crews. There was a lot of camera crews at every event taking photos. It wasn’t everyone though, Pat, but there was a lot of hand waving, guilty in this case. But for me, like I said, with what I do, it was really important for us to be able to capture these interactions. So it was a good investment. But yeah, there was no shortage of crews running down the street and people like me walking and talking on camera about what’s going on. I don’t think there’s a more densely attended event of high influence people in a year at this scale. Meaning, there’s like the Sun Valley kind of conferences and stuff, but this is unique.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. I have absolutely nothing to add because I didn’t attend Davos.
Daniel Newman: Well, the news documented it pretty well for me. It was a little bit more about just sharing the experience, which again, for my link, I shared some video on Twitter where you can kind of see the action behind the scenes.
Patrick Moorhead: Well, I felt like there was a… What’s the right way to put this? Less dreaming and bad commentary at this Davos than at the prior ones. Right? Like an energy policy that absolutely makes no sense for anybody. Right? It seemed more thoughtful discussion and I feel like most of the tech executives spent most of their time talking about AI, and which I think that that could have been valuable. And sometimes meeting face-to-face with these CEOs like we do, you get some sort of a deeper idea or sense of where they’re coming from.
So yeah, maybe I’ll go next year, Dan.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
