Photos: John Davidson
Dr. Lisa Su wasn’t even a day into her new job as CEO of Advanced Micro Devices when she was faced with the first big challenge of her tenure.
It wasn’t about strategy. Having served as AMD’s senior vice president and general manager of global business units, Su saw ways to revive the increasingly moribund semiconductor maker, even though AMD had $2.2 billion in debt, had sold off its fabrication plants and was melting down into an also-ran maker of low-cost, commoditized processors.
Nor was it really about the technology. With undergraduate, master’s and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from MIT, as well as more than a decade working inside Texas Instruments and then IBM, she had a level of sophistication rivaled by few of her peers in the industry. Always identifying first as an engineer herself, she saw the untapped potential in her fellow AMD engineers.
Nor was it really even a question about leading a transformation of this scale and complexity. While a rising young star at IBM, Su had worked alongside legendary CEO Lou Gerstner as he taught the Big Blue elephant to dance again. She’d seen it—been part of it—before.
No, the challenge she faced that day back in October of 2014 was more mundane—but every bit as important. “What,” asked her comms chief Drew Prairie, “do you want to say to the employees?”
“And I’m, like, ‘Huh, I have to say something to the employees? What am I going to say?’” Su chuckles a decade later, looking over at Prairie as we talk in a conference room at AMD’s suburban Austin campus on a sweltering June-blue day. “We sat down and wrote my first letter to the employees.” In that note was the simple, three-priority blueprint for all that followed: refocus on building great products, rebuild deep customer relationships and “simplify everything that we do. Because I had the feeling that we were a small to mid-size company that was acting like a really large company. So part of the culture that I wanted to build was clarity, focus, ambitious, but also, we’ve got to move fast. We have to be agile. That’s our recipe for success.”
Over the next decade, Su and her team found that success as part of the most profound turnaround in the technology industry since Steve Jobs returned to Apple. Under Su’s leadership, AMD moved from industry also-ran and Nasdaq flatliner to the front of the pack, earning a blistering 46.3 percent average annual total shareholder return versus 13.3 percent for the S&P 500 and 23.5 percent for the benchmark PHLX Semiconductor Index over the same time. More important, Su, 54, staked a claim on the key tech markets of the future, from the chips that train large AI language models to the big-iron CPU projects that run the world’s most powerful and sophisticated computers. And she’s done it with a balanced portfolio rather than an all-in bet on a single play, like AI.
It is for this performance that our CEO of the Year Selection Committee named Lisa Su Chief Executive’s 2024 CEO of the Year. “Lisa Su’s leadership in transforming AMD into a global leader in innovation and technology is truly remarkable,” says Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Air Lines and Chief Executive’s 2023 CEO of the Year, who served on this year’s selection committee. “Just as impressive is the fact that she never forgets the people behind the technology—her employees and customers are always front and center. Her values-led approach is exactly the type of leadership we need as we move into an exciting and unprecedented future driven by AI innovation and emerging technology.”
Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, Chief Executive’s 2022 CEO of the Year and a member of this year’s selection committee, agrees: “Lisa is a pioneering CEO who has transformed AMD into one of the greatest companies of our generation.”
The AMD Su inherited from then-CEO Rory Read in 2014 was a sad, scared place. The company was born a renegade “second-sourcer” of electronic components in 1969. Cofounder Jerry Sanders built AMD over decades into one of the largest chip makers in the world, challenging industry-leader Intel on a host of fronts through the 1980s and 1990s. But by the time Su took over, a quarter of the staff had been fired, part of an ugly annual ritual. Server market share for the once-proud firm was just 2 percent. The Austin campus was sold off to help pay the bills (the company leased it back so they had a place to work).
“The person who runs my data center business is a guy named Forrest Norrod right now, and he was at Dell at the time,” says Su. “I remember going to see him, and he would say, ‘Look, Lisa, we love AMD, but I can’t trust what you say. We really want you to be successful, but we need to be able to count on you.’”
Still, she’d spent the past two years studying AMD in her SVP post after being recruited to the company from Freescale Semiconductor. To her, AMD wasn’t a sinking ship. She saw—because of her deep engineering expertise—opportunity.
“There were very few companies that were working on leading-edge technology, and that’s what I enjoyed. So, coming into the company at that time, I saw lots of great people, great heart. Our customers and partners were always rooting for us, but we just didn’t execute that well, and I thought that was something I could help with.”
She embarked on a radical refocusing of AMD, including a big bet on a revolutionary (read: then-experimental and untried) way of putting together processors from smaller “chiplets.” Prior to this approach, you made more powerful microprocessors by—short version here—making bigger and bigger microprocessors, a model that had become unsustainable. Su and her team decided to go for a more modular—and hopefully scalable—way of achieving the same goals by packaging chiplets together. AMD dubbed it their “Zen architecture.”
“The old AMD would’ve said, ‘Well, what’s Intel doing? Let me make sure that I’m doing what they’re doing,’” Su says. “This AMD said, ‘Let me do what I think is the right thing, and let’s bet on ourselves.’ If you look today, by the way, all of our competition is doing what we’re doing, which is chiplets.”
It was among many moves—now near-legendary in her industry—that she made along the way. One was choosing not to dive into furnishing chips for the expanding mobile device market when that seemed a contrarian—and perhaps even foolish—bet. Another was driving through a Texas ice storm to meet personally with the CEO of HP Enterprise to give him her word that they would be able to meet demand if HPE signed a major deal.
But the turnaround at AMD was really won with years of constant, small improvements while keeping focused on what Su believed to be the biggest opportunities in computing. Among those are AMD’s $49 billion all-stock acquisition of Xilinx, a leader of reprogrammable chips known as FPGAs, in 2022, and announced its intent to purchase data center designer ZT Systems for $4.9 billion, which will give AMD a valuable new beachhead into the exploding market for AI when the deal closes in 2025.
Ten years after becoming CEO, Su, a daughter of Taiwanese immigrants and raised in Queens, New York, now improbably leads at the crossroads of two of the most profound forces shaping the world: geopolitical (over the fate of Taiwan) and technological (the rise of artificial intelligence). The chip industry, long the underappreciated foundation of the computer revolution, is now recognized—thanks in large part to Covid-era shortages—as essential to modern life as oil, electricity and water.
It also remains fiercely competitive, where industry titans like AI-focused rival NVIDIA—run by Su’s cousin, Jensen Huang—can grab huge swaths of market share with cunning designs, and where product cycles are as lengthy and complex as drug development, and capital expenses rival those of offshore oil exploration. None of which appears to faze or tire Su.
Sitting in a nondescript conference room in Austin, a decade into her remarkable tenure, she still sees more road ahead than behind. And she seems genuinely excited to meet it.
“The advent of ChatGPT woke everyone up to, ‘Oh wow, this technology is something,’” she says. “And we’re still in the very early innings of it.” The following interview, conducted in June 2024, was edited for length and clarity.
What I saw was that we had a lot of the pieces, they just weren’t quite put together correctly. We were always trying to be somebody else. We were, “How do I compete in this area or that area?” We weren’t as focused as we needed to be. So, those first two years, I learned a ton about the company. I actually learned that at that time more than 9 percent of our revenue was in the PC market—and I learned, “Man, the PC market is actually a hard market.” But all the foundational pieces were there. We had to make some important strategic choices: What do we want to be best at? Our goal was to build the best high-performance computing technology.
You’re right, it was not the obvious strategy. However, we had a vision. I had a vision. The vision was: We’re not the cheaper guy either, right? That’s not a long-term, sustainable business strategy. You’re always going to be number two. So, we had to say, “What do we think we could be best at?” In our industry, there are also inflection points that are there, and what I saw was an opportunity. If you take a look at the five-year arc, not the two-year arc, Moore’s law was changing. The idea that you had to do manufacturing and design together actually was changing. How much you could get out of just manufacturing was also changing.
Our bet was, “Look, we’re going to do clean-sheet design.” We could have kept polishing something, but it wasn’t the right starting point. So let’s start from scratch with a new design. Let’s convince the board that it will take us probably five years and three generations to become best-in-class. We would show proof points along the way, so it wasn’t, like, “Trust me,” but it was, “This is how we’re going to rebuild a roadmap to leadership.” We took that plan, and we sold it to the leadership team. We sold it to the board, and then we sold it to our customers, and then we had to sell it to our shareholders. But the idea of working on something that is bleeding-edge, best in class, I mean, who doesn’t want to do that?
That’s right. By the way, you’re not going to keep everybody. Look, why did our leaders want to be on this sort of journey? Because it’s exactly that. You want to be ambitious. You want to build the best. You don’t want to build the second best. Getting in front of 8,000 engineers and saying, “Hey, our strategy is to be the second-best,” that’s hard. You say, “Look, we’re going to be ambitious. We’re going to make some bold bets. There are some things we’re not going to do.” One of the questions that my board asked me quite clearly was, “Look, maybe you should be in the low-power business. Build chips for mobile phones.” Everybody wanted a new tablet or a new phone.
I said, “No, no, no, we’re not those types of people. That’s not fundamentally what we’re going to be good at. We’re going to be good at building the biggest computers.” And at that point in time, we had less than 1 percent market share, so to say that we’re going to build the biggest computers was kind of a leap. But engineering-wise, we could see how we could do that. We could see all the pieces; it just would take time.
Great question. When I became COO, it became time to think through if I had the opportunity to be CEO, what that would look like. I realized we needed more systems talent; we’re a very heavy engineering company. So if I think about, “Yes, I’m an engineer,” my right-hand person is Mark Papermaster. He’s been on this journey with me as CTO. Then, we had to get some other leaders for our business, and I mentioned Forrest Norrod, who had a great background at Dell. He had been in the silicon business, and he also was a customer of ours, so he knew us from afar. Convincing him to join and run our data center business was one of my first things to do as COO and then CEO.
I was looking for people who really loved the challenge. If you were looking for the most stable job in the industry, AMD was not it. We were looking for someone who wanted to do something extraordinary. One of the things that we would say was, “Having less than 1 percent market share is actually a blessing, because, frankly, there are no expectations. Nobody expects that we’re going to be able to do this.” It allows you to take, let’s call it bolder risks and have a vision.
What we needed to do was make sure that we had the financial capability to go through that. Some people would say at that point in time that the company was not as financially sound as it should be. We had a good amount of debt, and we were losing a good amount of money in those early years. I had a great CFO as well, Devinder Kumar. Basically his job was to make sure that we had the time to do what we needed to do. That’s how we thought about it.
That’s right, play to win. We’re here, we went all-in on a very novel technology, the Zen architecture and what we call chiplets. It hadn’t been done in our industry, and I remember spending time with the technical team when they came to me with this recommendation, and I’m, like, “Okay. Why do we think this is going to work? It hasn’t been done before. There’s a reason it hasn’t been done before. Why do we think it’s going to work?”
We believed that because of Moore’s law slowing down, this was the time that going to chiplets would work, and we were going to try it. In the beginning, our competition said, “They’re gluing chips together,” and we’re like, “No, we’re not. We’re building chips in a smarter way because it’ll allow you to build bigger and bigger things.” So Zen 1 was very good. I think we surprised people. But even with Zen 1, we were still single-digit market share in the server business. But my plan to the board was always that we needed three generations, Zen 1, Zen 2 and Zen 3. By the time we’re Zen 3, we’re going to be the best in the industry, and that’s the exact plan we told the board.
As it turned out, we were probably a little bit ahead of our plan. So by the time we got to Zen 2, it was already, I would say, quite ahead in terms of leading.
The best group of people that I like to have around me are the experts in the field. So Mark is always there with me, Forrest is always there with me, but we have some corporate fellows who are brilliant, and they spend time thinking about ideas. They’re not always right, by the way. We’ve had things fail as well, but they bring a set of ideas for what our roadmap should be. Our roadmap process is something that I, to this day, spend a lot of time on. We debate: “Hey, is that too aggressive? Is that too conservative?”
The magic in our business is you have to have the right amount of risk-reward, because you’re not always going to be right. There are some decisions where, boy, you know, that didn’t quite turn out the way I wanted, but you have to make enough right. Particularly on these larger decisions, we spend a lot of time debating among ourselves and then also ensuring that whatever we build has to be leadership. It’s back to that ambition aspect of it. We’re not building to be second-best. Now, it might take us a while. You can’t go from not-good to good immediately, but we’re not building to be second-best.
Yeah, we just have to spend triple-digit millions on most things. I’m a very data-driven person, so I like to understand the data. People will send me lots and lots of presentations of details, and I like to go through all that. But what I also like to do is to talk to the people who are doing the work. I like to believe that, as a leader, one of the things that is most important is always knowing and getting a broad spectrum of input. As much as I love my staff, they’re only one input. Talking directly to the engineers, talking directly to customers, sometimes talking with people in the labs. I love going into the labs and just saying, “Hey, how’s it going?” Because you don’t always hear everything sitting in your office, and that’s been very helpful for me.
I learn in every forum that I’m in. I learn in internal discussions just what’s going on. I learn talking to the guy in the lab. I spend a lot of time with our top customers. Some CEOs are like, “Well, I’m only going to talk to the CEO.” I think, “Are you kidding me? There’s so much information.” Of course, I love having relationships with my peer CEOs, but I love having relationships with the head of engineering or the head of sales and our customers, because I learn what is on their minds.
I learn a lot from reading. I read a lot about what people say about us. I don’t always like what they say. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t, but it gives me a perspective of how people are viewing our products. I’m often asking, “Hey, why are those people complaining about that?” We can always decide whether we’re going to fix that particular problem or not, but this real-time feedback is really important. I always come back and say, “Hey, this is what I did this week. I spent time with this CEO, and I was at this CIO forum, and I read this in blah, blah, blah. What are we doing about these things?” So, it’s a very active process of learning.
I have a standing staff meeting, one hour, every week. No matter where we are, no matter where I am, I try to hold onto that. It’s always on a Friday, and it’s an opportunity to communicate. When you’re running a global company like what we’re all running, it’s very easy to get out of sync. And in our business, we can’t be out of sync, so it is very informal from the standpoint of no slides, no nothing. We just talk. I spend the first 15 minutes talking about what’s on my mind, and then everyone goes around the room. It’s a roundtable conversation. That’s an important opportunity for me to stay connected to the staff and make sure that our priorities are always aligned, and that if something comes up, everybody knows that, “Hey, this is important to Lisa, so let’s make sure that it’s taken care of.”
Then, I actually spend a good amount of time still doing engineering reviews, roadmap reviews. Those are not necessarily weekly or anything. They might be a monthly type of thing, but I really like understanding directly from the people who are doing the work, “How is it going? What are you guys worried about?”
Maybe what makes it different as a Lisa Su meeting is: I love pre-reads. Not like, five days in advance or something. But give me a pre-read 24 hours in advance so that we know what the topics are and then we can focus the conversation on what the problem areas are and not just regular updates.
What we’ve done well is we do have a learning culture as a company. We instituted something called the Next 5 Percent, and I remember how this started. I was actually in Europe doing a town hall, and it was probably after a not-so-good quarter, and somebody asked me, “What do you want the company to be thinking about?” I said, “Look, what I want the company to be thinking about is, no matter what we do, we have to learn from it. There is a next 5 percent. Every situation that we’re in, we can make it at least 5 percent better. If we think about that, it helps us drive that learning culture.”
So we would celebrate. We would ask, “What’s your next 5 percent?” Because, I mean, everyone thinks that they’re working 100 percent. They are working 100 percent, no doubt, but I believe great leaders get 120 percent out of their teams. Some of that comes from focus, some of that comes from heart, some of that comes from just plain doing things more efficiently. This idea of the Next 5 Percent, for me, was, “Let’s make sure we’re doing lessons learned after every major project.” No matter how good it was, it can always be better.
Now, we’re in a rhythm where everyone feels it’s normal for us to talk about, “What’s our next 5 percent? How do we improve upon the last thing that we did?” Even when things go really well, we’ve learned something, and we do it regularly, whether it’s a product, a marketing program, a comms event or a customer roundtable. How could we just make that a little bit better the next time we do it? That’s an important aspect of our culture that I believe we’ve gotten ingrained in the culture.
I was lucky I spent the majority of my early career at IBM, and I was there for 13, 14 years. I do believe that leaders are trained. They’re not born. I was trained. I went through first-level management school, second-level management school, director school, VP school, and that left an impression upon me, because I felt like the company was investing in me through each of these junctures. In every two-day class that you attended, it’s not like every minute was perfect or useful, but you definitely picked up nuggets.
When I came to AMD, and it’s not just AMD, frankly, it’s many other smaller firms that don’t necessarily have an ingrained talent system, there just wasn’t that. Actually, it was the opposite. Leaders wanted to hold onto their best people. Nobody wanted their best person to go somewhere else. What had really helped me at IBM is that every two years I did a different job, so I got a lot of experience that way. So here, we implemented a process where we would review talent with my staff basically every month. The purpose of the talent review was, “Hey, who are our top people? Who’s potentially ready for another role? What are the other roles that are really important roles?”
My thought process is, “Look, put your best people in your toughest and most important problems, and if they succeed, then wonderful. They’ve learned a lot, and we’ve now grown a new leader.” That’s how I felt I had those opportunities. That’s a fairly active process for us. I review any of the larger director or vice president jobs with my staff on a monthly basis. And then, for the women, particularly women in engineering, there are just not enough. As you go through the pipeline, they get fewer and fewer.
So we have a new managers class. We have a new directors class. We’ve recently put together something [for] advancing women in tech, where we’re developing these women such that they have better opportunities.
At the end of the day, it has to be the right person so we’re not putting people in places where they’re not successful, because that’s not helpful. But you have to take some risk on people, and you have to give talented folks really tough jobs and let them succeed. Most of the time, they will, with enough help.
We do—in every organization. In every one of our major organizations, we run an organizational HR map, and we say, “Hey, these are the important roles. These are important people. Let’s make sure that the important people are in the important roles.” And then we’re very active on, “Who are the successors, and how do we develop successors?” All that being said though, you never have enough talent. I don’t want to make it sound like everything is perfect, but I would say that it’s an active conversation.
What I have learned is that the more direct you can make the feedback, the better it is. The major lessons that I’ve learned are when I’ve screwed up the most. When someone is actually good enough to actually tell me when I’ve screwed up, that’s when you learn, and so that’s what I try to practice. I say “try to practice” because nobody really wants feedback. Feedback is always kind of painful.
Feedback is a gift, but nobody really wants it. That was, like, my first 360. I’m like, “Seriously? This is what people said? I mean, really?” But then, once you get rid of that little sting, you’re like, “You know what? What have I learned from this?” So, having leaders recognize that perception is reality helps just make small adjustments. And some are better at it than others. Some people do take feedback, some people don’t take feedback. The best people really take feedback well.
Well, I have to say that it’s really quite amazing that it’s now recognized that semiconductors in chips are so essential to everything that we do. Certainly pre-pandemic, five-plus years ago, I was in semiconductors so I thought they were important, but if you had the casual conversation with even very senior leaders, they would say, “Chips? Who cares what’s underneath?” So, I do think that we are in a very essential place right now, which is great. My comment is, these technology arcs are usually not one, two or three years, they’re usually five to 10 years, if not more. This AI opportunity is perhaps the largest inflection that I’ve seen in my career.
The reason is that we now have a technology that everyone should be able to use. We’ve made generative AI so easy that you can actually talk to your computer, and your computer will give you intelligence back. That’s the thing that’s changed over the past 18 months.
One of my large internal priorities is, how do I apply AI through everything that we do at AMD? Now, I build chips for AI. I’d like to sell lots of chips for AI, but I’m also a big user of AI because I believe AI can fundamentally build chips faster, build chips more reliably, build chips at lower cost and at higher quality.
Because it’s not done yet. If this were 10 years later, we could say, “Hey, here you go. This is what you need to do, step one, two, three, four, five.” But today, we’re still in the infancy. In the infancy, there is a lot of trial and error. We’re probably running 150 pilots across the company. In any given function there’s, “How do you use AI to accelerate software development? How do you use AI to accelerate test plants? How do you use AI to help you track quality issues?” Every one of these has a different proof of concept, and so it does require tone from the top, which is change management.
Here, it does get a little tricky because people are like, “Well, does that mean you don’t need so many engineers anymore?” My comment is, “No, actually.” One of the things I view as important is it’s not that we don’t need so many engineers. It’s like, I want to build more products. So if I could cut my time to market by six months, or if I could reduce the number of engineers that I need for a given product by 30 percent, then I can build 30 percent more products. There’s a lot in terms of marketing, sales and other things, too. So yeah, it is a transformation that all of us need to go through as CEOs.
That’s right. We have leaders who are leading various aspects of it. They actually report to me in terms of they give me progress reports of, “What are we doing in hardware? What are we doing in software? Which pilots are approved to go into production? Which pilots have we not?” We’re doing a fairly rigorous return on investment. By implementing this AI, how many resources are we going to save, or how much time are we going to save? Very simply, if we can save, whatever, an hour a day or two hours a day of an engineer’s time, that’s huge once you multiply it by the number of things that people have to do.
The way I think about it is, AMD has been investing in AI for many, many years. This is not a new thing. We didn’t just decide 18 months ago we were going to invest in AI. It was, the strategy was actually very clear that our first job was general purpose computing, and that’s what we did with the Zen architecture.
Then, we also believe that you need different types of computing for all the jobs or workloads that there are in the world, and so you need CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs. That was our acquisition of Xilinx. I’ve always believed that you need all of these components, and our investments in this area have really accelerated as AI has become such a bigger platform. My conversation about AI is: We’re still in the early innings. There is no one size fits all when it comes to computing. Depending on what you’re trying to do, you’re going to need different technology.
I believe we have all the pieces, and I also believe that we have a strategy around working deeply with our partners and customers to accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish. We are an enabler of the largest tech companies in the world. If you think about our deep partnerships with Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Amazon or Salesforce, or all of these folks, they all require bleeding-edge technology, and they don’t all need the same thing. Having the ability to really drive that forefront and also do it in a very collaborative way is one of our strengths.
I love it because I learn so much from every customer interaction. The way I like to say it is, “Look, if you’re going to trust me or trust AMD with your most important projects, then I’d like you to know there’s a face behind the company.” So for our largest customers, I want you to trust me. I want you to be betting your business on AMD technology. So yeah, I do spend a lot of time with our largest customers, and part of it is also laying out a vision for what to expect from us. In that particular conversation with Antonio [Neri] at HP, I was telling him that: “I’m going to be stopping my old roadmap because it’s not good enough, and I’m building a new roadmap. Please trust me. It will take me a few years, but this is the right thing to do.”
Antonio, to his credit, at the time said, “Okay, Lisa, I trust you. I will support this if you deliver on your commitments.” So, to me, my word is everything. If I’m going to commit to doing something, I am going to get it done, and we’re going to make sure that all the resources are behind that. That’s the role of the CEO. When someone is making a very large decision and they’re taking a risk on you, you need to be there and make sure that they know that there’s a person. It’s on me, and if I can’t get it done, I will tell you.
Like I said, relationships are important at every level, but when you’re making large bets, especially in an industry as concentrated as ours, I like being the chief salesperson. It’s super fun. Now, that being the case, we have a lot of great salespeople, but it is fun. It’s fun because you can see projects from the beginning to the end, and at the end you gain so much respect, right? So one of the things I’m most proud of is, back in the older days, like in the 2014, 2015 days when we were starting, I got a lot of, “Okay, well, let’s see what you can do.” They were not quite sold. Let’s put it that way. Today, if you look at where we are, we absolutely have a seat at all of the important tables, and we are a trusted partner. That’s where I wanted it to be.
I’ve had an executive coach through my career at different points in time. There’s tremendous value in getting feedback, and particularly these 360 processes. My first 360 that I did here at AMD, I don’t know, maybe 50 people were interviewed, and it was, like, 60 pages. It was super extensive, but the net of it was I learned something about perception.
When I started, I perhaps took for granted that people knew what my intentions were, and I was much, much more focused on just the business itself. Over time, what I’ve learned is that actually people really need me to be more explicit about what my priorities are. How do I think about things, why am I thinking about the business in this way? It’s been interesting because you actually see, “Wow, I guess it wasn’t so obvious what Lisa was thinking.” That’s one of the larger pieces of feedback—people actually want to know what you’re thinking. I thought I was very clear. But one needs to be much more explicit, and communication is probably where I’ve spent the most time in terms of reaching all of the various audiences. You need a slightly tailored voice for each audience.
It was. It was right in 2000, and there were a lot of interesting decisions, thoughts. I learned so much from that experience. From Lou in particular, what I remember the most—because, I was five years out of school, so I was not thinking about being CEO material, I was just having the opportunity to learn—is how externally focused he was. I’ve really taken that into my thinking. Many companies can get very, very internally focused. When you realize that, hey, there’s a whole world out there—that whole 360 of input that includes internal stakeholders, media, customers, partners, that whole sphere of influence, it was really eye-opening to me, spending time with Lou. His desire to directly understand the technology I thought was also very interesting. He was not a technologist at all, so part of my job was to… teach is not the right word but expose him to different technology things.
If you think about where technology is today, it is really part of every part of our life, right? Whether you’re at work, at home, in your car, you see technology everywhere. I’m hopeful for a day when technology actually improves our quality of life and the quality of our business in a far more substantial way than it does today, and that’s what I think artificial intelligence can do. It can make each one of us smarter. It can make each one of our businesses better. It could help us answer questions that today are not clear.
My favorite examples are the ones in healthcare, because healthcare is something very personal to all of us. I observe how medicine works today, and because I’m such an engineer, I think, “There’s still too much art in this.” If we can use the combination of the largest supercomputers in the world, which we do build, that really drive drug discovery, medical discovery, and use artificial intelligence to help us analyze all of the personal data out there and prolong people’s lives, help people who are suffering, that’s a pretty wonderful use of technology. I view that as only one aspect of it, if you think about all of these other things that you can do in terms of running better, more productive businesses.
I don’t worry about the replacing humans thing. I believe that the right use of technology will make the best employees, the best leaders, so much better.
It’s interesting. Some people liked it, some people didn’t. In that first year, we actually lost a number of senior executives. They weren’t sure that they were ready for the journey that we were going to be on. But then we got the people who were ready. Whenever there’s a CEO transition, whether it’s a good transition or a bad transition doesn’t matter. Whenever there’s a CEO transition, it causes everybody in the company to reassess, “Am I in, or am I not in?”
Some people weren’t in because what I laid out was, “This will take a long time, guys. Buckle up. This ain’t a one- or two-year journey. This is a five-year journey, but it’s a wonderful journey.” For those who stayed, I think they did the best work of their lives, and that’s something that we can all be super proud of.
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