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is meant to be about 1.1 million units of production in terms of export, 50% to the Middle East and Africa, and most of the rest is going to Central and South America.
We have helped create an ecosystem in the Indian automobile industry which is giving an opportunity to 250,000 livelihoods and progress through the more than $4.5 billion that we have invested in India.
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Some see heroes, others only egos. We see the era of billionaire athletes, a fad to some, the future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion dollar swings, the end of jobs, or the end of human struggle. We see the endless funds fueling the AI hype. While others follow the noise, we follow the money.
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It's time to stop looking backwards and accept that the global economy has changed fundamentally.
Security, sovereignty, and self-sufficiency are the new baselines.
Coercion and conflict are the new diplomacy.
Technology, resources, and capital are the new levers of power.
For better or for worse, that depends.
I want to look out the window.
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Trade is more challenging. Finance is filled with red flags. Growth is less predictable.
But change also spells opportunity.
It encourages new partnerships and stronger alliances, rewarding those who move quickly and punishing indecision.
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Welcome to the 2026 Bloomberg New Economy Forum.
Please welcome to the stage the Honorable Ginara Mando, former Secretary of Commerce of the United States.
Good afternoon. Good afternoon. It's wonderful to see everybody here. I want to first thank and acknowledge Mike, my dear friend Mike Bloomberg. I'm proud to call Mike a friend. We've been friends for a long time. I think he's an extraordinary leader, and he's also a fantastic friend, and I love how he can bring the whole community together — business leaders, government leaders from all over the world — as we try to solve the most challenging problems ahead of us.
It's fantastic for me to be in New Delhi. I love to be in India. We just came from listening to Prime Minister Modi and meeting with him. Modi is an extraordinary leader. I don't know how he maintains his schedule and the energy that he seems to have, his deep commitment to this country. His message to us was 'power to empower,' which is a message that I fear too few leaders in the world have right now, and so I want to thank the prime minister for his leadership. India is a place that understands scale and ambition.
So many people are working so hard to build a better country and a better life for themselves and for their families. And whenever I'm here, I'm overwhelmed by that sense of entrepreneurship and passion, creativity, and quite frankly, national pride that I always see and feel when I am in India. I guarantee you I'll leave India more optimistic than I arrived. And I'm an optimistic person. Now, all of that said, this is exciting and this calls for optimism, but I feel the world is more fragile today than it was a year ago when we gathered together in Singapore.
We have the war in Iran, which is continuing without an obvious end. And of course all of the ramifications of that: high energy prices, shipping lanes disrupted, supply chains disrupted, a sense of security that feels a bit more fragile. Of course, the multi-year conflict in Ukraine, which continues unabated.
And to me, all of this is a reminder that when we're living in an ever more interconnected world, conflict anywhere can quickly disrupt commerce and security everywhere.
And so that's again why we're gathered here today, to figure out how we can solve these issues.
The thing that I am spending a great deal of time on, and we all are, that I want to take a few minutes to talk about today is artificial intelligence.
AI is accelerating faster than any of us thought. In fact, even the developers of the technology seem to be saying it's going faster than they thought. And they tell us they're surprised by the pace.
By the way, as a testament to Prime Minister Modi's unbelievable capacity, I met him three years ago. I had a meeting with him in his home. My meeting with the prime minister was at 9:00 at night, and I was not the last meeting. We met for an hour. And in that meeting, we started to talk about AI, and he said to me, 'Secretary, let's not call AI artificial intelligence. Let's call it America India.' And the concept was that for AI to really thrive, we had to work together. Three years ago today, when I saw the prime minister, the first words out of his mouth were 'AI, America, India.' Now, I have been staffed by some of the best people, including Ted Dean who's back there, but that was all Modi. He's a marvel and an incredible, incredible leader.
But AI — we have these models, their capabilities are unbelievable. And by the way, I think we're still in the first inning of AI. That's to the upside and to the downside. We have models with capabilities that are so powerful, particularly in finding and exploiting weaknesses in software, that the developers of this technology are choosing to hold them back from public release and instead pacing the rate at which they share them with only a small number of trusted organizations.
We're seeing AI agents that can actually themselves plan, act, and operate with real autonomy. And of course, we've seen what happens when these agents behave in ways that weren't intended.
A year ago, when we were here, we were talking about rogue agents, but at that time, it was a thought experiment. It almost seemed impossible to believe. Today it's happening. Today it's happening. It's not a thought experiment. And so that means with AI we have a set of engineering challenges. But quite frankly, the thing that I am even more worried about are the governance challenges.
And we need to act on these governance challenges and setting up a governance framework with the same urgency and level of intensity that AI researchers are using to develop the technology.
I started by saying I'm an optimistic person. And I'm optimistic about AI. I'm deeply optimistic about AI. The other day I was with a woman whose child is a two-year-old with an incurable form of cancer and they're starting to see potential cures because of AI. So I am an optimist. The productivity enhancements are unbelievable.
But if we're not intentional about how we develop the technology, how we govern the technology, how we think about safety, then I worry.
So if you put all this together — wars in different countries, tariffs, energy shocks, a technology that's changing, a technology that's more powerful than anything we've seen before. By the way, a technology that's developing at a rate much faster than our governing institutions are able to move, which is a critical point. The tech is moving like this, at least in my country, government moves like this, and I think I could say in India too. In some ways there's bureaucracy everywhere. So it's a lot. We here, leaders in business, in government, in civil society, we're operating and leading in a very complicated picture.
I was the former secretary of commerce in the US and I tried to solve problems related to AI, to global competition, to trade, and I always said America was stronger when we worked with other countries. I thought government was stronger when we worked with business.
And so I have a single message for all of you today, which is that America needs to work with you. America wants to work with you, and the world needs all of us to work together.
Last year I opened this conference, I talked about re-industrialization, and my message then was that America first shouldn't mean America alone. And I still think that, you know, in the year since, our countries and our communities, in part because of this conference, we've started to work more closely together around supply chain coordination, around semiconductors, and that has to continue today.
My primary message is let's commit to work together as it relates to artificial intelligence. The reality is we'll all be safer and stronger and better able to harness the benefits of AI if we work together.
Isolation has always been a bad bet for prosperity. There have been political waves where isolation is popular in some ways. Sadly, we're in one of those waves now. But it's never been good for prosperity. In the age of AI, it's also a bad bet for safety and security. No single country, no single company, no single industry can manage this technology alone.
Here's the reality, and you know this, but it's scary to ponder. A model built in one place, it's used in another, it's trained on data from a third, it runs on chips that are designed in one place, made in another country, packaged in another country. And an agent that goes rogue in America doesn't know borders. It doesn't stay in America. A vulnerability found in the software of one country is a vulnerability for everyone.
So the reality is if each country writes its own rules, stays in our corners, comes up with our own safety standards, we'll have a patchwork of standards and we'll all be less safe. It might be easier — it's hard to collaborate — but it won't work.
So I want to offer three final points and offer a challenge to all of you, including myself. First, let's agree to come together on shared standards as it relates to AI. We're still in the early stages of AI. Governments, businesses, researchers — let's come up with common expectations for how the most powerful AI is developed, how it's used, how agents are monitored and controlled, and what's the protocol when something goes wrong.
By the way, it's possible. Some people say it's not possible. Well, I don't believe that — anything is possible if we decide to do it. We've done it with aviation. We've done it with financial services. We've done it for nuclear safety. When I was secretary, I created the AI safety office in the United States. We worked with the AI safety institutes across the world. Let's just resolve that we'll do it.
Our second challenge is to prepare our people. Satya Nadella, Indian CEO of Microsoft, great American company. He has said publicly, 'Why would Microsoft have a social license to operate if all we do is create a technology that puts Americans out of work?' And he's right. He's right.
In America, we've seen what happens when we move through an economic transition without planning it. The so-called China shock left millions of Americans out of work and it destabilized our country. I would argue it's the root of the divisive politics still destabilizing our country and the fuel firing the populism on the left and the right.
I'm not saying slow down AI. I'm not saying don't implement AI. I'm saying do it with an eye to the workers and make sure that no American worker, no Indian worker, no worker in any of our countries is left behind because of AI.
Let's make sure that we're committed to retraining and redeployment and appropriate safety nets and transition so that we can both be great at the AI research and live in a world where every person can see themselves in an AI job and in an AI economy.
And India, by the way, with an incredible workforce, a growing workforce, a young and entrepreneurial workforce, is going to be at the center of this story. Because here's the thing: a country that prepares its people best, I believe, will have a global advantage in how it uses AI.
And finally, to do all of this, we have to bring everyone to the table. Governments can't do it alone. Governments move too slowly. I've been in government for 15 years. Take it from me. We can't get it done alone. We're too slow. We don't always have the knowledge. We have to work with scientists, with universities, with civil society.
And to do it all, we have to reject isolation. You're all here. Some of you are from India. Some of you are from countries far and wide. The chairman of Hyundai is here, come here from Korea, a leader in AI and robotics and manufacturing. We were just gathered with Prime Minister Modi. There were CEOs from all over the world.
If we as a world are going to harness the benefits of this new technology, we just have to commit ourselves to putting in the hard work to come together and find solutions.
And I will tell you, despite what you may read in the paper, America is in it to win it with the rest of the world, and not to be an isolationist, but to work with India, to work across borders, and to work with business to make sure that we are collaborative and successful such that the technology can reach its full potential and is something that we shape together.
And I know that that's very much Prime Minister Modi's vision. He talked so eloquently about the capacity of AI to improve the growth and prosperity and productivity of this country and not to increase inequality here or anywhere else. And the secret to doing that is to come together to find these solutions.
So I want to thank all of you for being here. I want to thank the prime minister and Mike Bloomberg for setting the tone of this event. I hope you find it to be inspiring. A little bit daunting, but inspiring. And I hope you leave the event a bit more committed to doing your part in finding the prosperity, but also the peace and safety and security that will come to all of us if we get AI correct together. So, thank you and have a great rest of the conference.
Please welcome to the stage the Honorable Christopher Waller, member of the board of governors of the United States Federal Reserve System, for a conversation with Bloomberg's CEA Mosen.
Good morning everyone. Thank you for being here. It's so exciting to be here with Governor Waller. We both flew in from Washington DC to have a chat with you all in pre-present. One thing I've noticed is that just like in Washington, if you walk around in Delhi, the big conversation is AI, which we're going to continue talking about.
Governor Waller, you have made a lot of comments in the last couple of years about the benefits of AI, including productivity boom, contributing to GDP growth, seeing living standards rise, and that's all talking about the United States. I'd love to hear from you how you see the impact of AI in our economy go into the rest of the world, especially emerging markets like India.
Yeah. I mean, the way I think about AI is first there are those who build the AI tools, the models, then there are those who supply all the inputs to build that — that would be data centers, chips, all that — and then third, that's the people who actually use the models.
Now clearly when it comes to building the models, the US is the dominant country, China's there as well. In terms of providing the inputs, a lot of that's Taiwan, South Korea producing the inputs. Data centers, they're all over the world, they're not just located in the US. And then of course the users are anybody that wants to use it for work.
Now there's a very high correlation between GDP per capita and AI use in people's work. So that's kind of one of the things that people, I think, I'm a little concerned about is it's not even across the world in terms of how AI is used, and that means it's going to have productivity differences if it's not actually used. So you'll see potentially widening gaps in GDP per capita because of this.
But I think it's an amazing technology. I really do think — I'm not a pessimist. I don't believe AI is going to be the end of the human race in the next two years or anything like that, but it is a tool. And even within the Federal Reserve, that's what I tell all of our employees: we're going to train you to do this because we want you to be more productive. If I was going to replace you with AI, I wouldn't waste one cent training you — it would be a waste of money. So it really is a tool that I expect all of our employees to use.
So that's kind of the basic global picture of how I think the whole AI world works. Europe, for example, doesn't produce much AI or inputs, but they're big users of it and it's already kind of widely spread throughout the business sector and community.
Let's talk about the payoffs. You say you're an optimist. You're not worried about, you know, the human race. When are we going to see some of these benefits — the productivity boom, the increase in our wages, inflation being reined in? Those things haven't really turned up for the everyday person, right?
And that's — it's often the case that when you have big technological changes, this is what economists know, is you don't typically see the productivity gains for years. A big part is firms have to figure out what am I using this for? How am I going to actually increase productivity? They're not really sure, and so there's a lot of trial and error and a lot of experimentation, but then you start realizing where it really does have its impact.
I mean, I'm telling you, if anybody does any coding, this stuff is amazing. I mean, it's just shocking how good it is. So in terms of coding, yeah, I mean, if you were a coder, your job is going to be fundamentally changed. It doesn't mean you're going to lose your job. It's just you're going to do a different job than what you were doing before. Things that you couldn't do because you were too busy doing basic coding, you're going to now expand what you're doing in terms of the production of your output.
So I think it's just going to be a while before firms start figuring out how to actually do this. And you may look, you may not see it in terms of — this is one of the measurement things I've thought about. Suppose I can do the same amount of work faster. So instead of five days, I get it done in three days. Maybe I take all that time and just go have more leisure. My output's not any higher per a given year. It's just I've got more time to consume my leisure and enjoy my life.
That still means it's still good for welfare even if you don't see a big increase in GDP per capita. So you either have to rethink: do we measure GDP or productivity per unit of time as opposed to, you know, quarterly — it's now down to like days. So you have to kind of think about that.
And then just in terms of productivity, there's a lot of things this technology is just going to make your life better even if it doesn't show up in your work productivity. I always like to point out Google Maps is an amazing invention. I don't use it to increase my productivity. It helps me get around in cities where I'm visiting and I don't get lost. That doesn't show up in the GDP numbers, but that makes my life a lot better. So I always try to tell people technology can just make your life better or it can actually increase productivity and how much output you produce.
One thing that's clear to measure is inflation. And right now the narrative in the United States and in other parts of the world is an affordability crisis. There is definitely an impulse that's coming from AI-related impacts on the economy in the short term. When do you see the AI hit to inflation dissipating in the US?
Yeah, I mean, the whole buildout — obviously if you're building out several trillion dollars of investment in AI and you have to buy all that stuff and your demand is perfectly inelastic, you'll pay whatever price. If you're one of the hyperscalers, you're going to bid up the price of all semiconductors of all type, and that's going to spill over to anybody else who uses those products.
And that's what we're starting to see in the US. We're starting to see AI having a spreading out of inflation because it's just increasing demand for everything else. Now down the road when this stuff is done and they've kind of built it out, that kind of demand pressure goes away, and then you hopefully will start seeing all the supply effects, which means we can produce more output faster and at a lower price.
So it's one of these two-stage things. Demand is going to be — especially the size of the investment. I mean, this is shocking how much is being spent on this compared to any other point in history. And so you're going to see these price pressures early on. How long are they going to last? It could last anywhere from two to three years given how much they've committed already to spend out in the future.
Now, if all that falls off, if suddenly there's a pullback or you can't meet this buildout, you can't do it, that'll put a check on prices. But the benefits on inflation down the road — they're down the road as far as I'm concerned. They're still a few years out.
A few years off. Is there any chance that the inflation that's stemming from the AI buildout could be embedded in the economy for a longer time?
Yeah. I mean, like I said, it's very specific what it is. It's not like a broad-based effect. It spills over into a smaller set of goods than other things. So, and we know that at some point this huge buildout and huge demand is going to — I won't say completely come to an end, but it's going to taper off a lot. And when that happens, we'll see the demand pressure come down.
But from what all the plans that I'm hearing from the hyperscalers, they're still planning on spending trillions of dollars over the next three years. So this demand pressure may still be there, and we have to just decide how we want to respond to that.
Well, let's talk about the AI buildout. There is still a lot of investment that's coming through. A lot of that corporate, a lot of that is being issued in corporate debt. We're seeing a lot of financing to help with the AI buildout, and of course that debt is sensitive to US treasuries, and we've seen yields skyrocket. Global yields are high. Can you talk through a little bit about what you see in US yields, whether that could be longer term, and how much of the global higher yield picture has to do with the narrative in the US and what's separate?
Yeah. I mean, everybody's suddenly paying attention to high yields, and when you look at it, it's not that yields have gone up because there's expected higher future inflation. That doesn't show up. Inflation expectations are well anchored. So all of the buildup is not coming from an inflation premium. That's not where it's coming from.
So it is a factor of real growth. If you have real growth and real productivity and these investments are going to pay off, you're willing to pay more in terms of your interest cost, and people know that and they'll ask for it. So real growth has an effect on these real yields.
Now on top of that, you have general fiscal concerns around the world. All governments are kind of sitting here in a — at least in the advanced countries — not such a great state, and we're seeing that in France right now. So some of this is just driving up yields in some countries that aren't necessarily related to the US or maybe some other countries.
And then the competition from AI is a serious, serious concern because even if the money flows into the US, so demand goes up, but there's inflows from abroad, then that kind of cancels out the price effect — that money is leaving some other country. Their yields are going to go up. So even if you have competition and no inflows in the US, yields are going to go up. If you have higher demand and yet there's inflows from other countries, you're going to see higher yields in those countries because the funds are no longer available for those countries to invest in.
But the AI build, I think, is definitely having an impact. I mean, if you look at Google issued, I think, a 40-year bond, and it was paying 100 basis points over US treasuries — where do you want to hold a 100 basis point premium for a Google bond that's probably going to pay off? It's not like they're going to probably default. So that is affecting the way people are looking at things.
So anyway, that's it. There's economists who say that we, the US at least, and maybe the rest of the world, is entering a phase of just higher yields and needs to adjust to it. Do you agree with that?
Well, I mean, like I said, if this is all because of higher growth, that's a good thing. I'd rather have higher growth and higher yields than low growth and low yields. And that seems like an obvious one to me.
What you get concerned about is if it's driven by inflation expectations, fiscal concerns, which I think is really a problem in France right now, could be in the US. People are starting to wake up to our fiscal situation is not that good. And then naturally bond holders are going to demand a higher yield to get them to buy that debt.
So if you're living with higher yields because of higher growth, to me that's a good thing. If you're living with higher yields because of greater fear of inflation, that is not a good outcome.
I want to ask you about the fiscal policy situation and how that affects your role and your work at the Fed. But first — when yields go up, they do tend to do the job a little bit of a rate hike in the picture that we have now. Do you think that that's enough, or is there more room for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates?
Yeah, so I've long argued that the 10-year rate is determined by global supply and demand. What I do — changing the overnight interest rate on deposits — that's not driving the 10-year yield much. And even if I do it, it's for some short period of time, not 10 years out. So I've always viewed the 10-year as being driven by global factors, global demand, also supply from the US Treasury, and it's not so much what I do.
So when yields go up, does that going to impact interest-sensitive sectors like housing and autos and other things? Yeah, of course it is. Does that tighten off demand for those products and put downward pressure on prices? It should. So it's not our intent to do it, but that's going to be one of the natural spillovers from this kind of surge in yields at the 10-year and higher.
So it's doing a little bit of the work for you.
It is doing some of the work.
Let's get back to the debt problem, which is global, highest levels since World War II. In France, we're seeing that investors are now realizing that maybe there's a ceiling for how much debt France can issue. US debt, US treasuries are quite different. They are seen as a safe haven in times of turmoil and risk. The US has an exorbitant privilege. Do you see that privilege running out?
Yeah, I'd say there's a lot of academic research coming out in the US that that safety-liquidity premium on US treasuries is gone. It's gone.
So that was always the following: people would pay more for a US Treasury because it's safe, liquid, easy to trade compared to other government debt potentially. So that higher price they're willing to pay means a lower yield on that debt. But if you no longer feel like it's a safe asset or it's not really the best thing to hold, then that premium goes away. People won't pay that higher price.
And that academic research is saying that in the last couple years that has disappeared. That's another reason your rates are going to go up if you lose that convenience shield. And it's not a trivial sum. It could be like 50 to 70 basis points.
You know, we've seen emerging markets have managed their deficits a little bit better than a lot of Western countries, advanced economies. And again, just remarking on France — investors, bond vigilantes, showing that there is a line. How do you think that would be demonstrated in the US, that there is finally a ceiling that's been reached?
Well, you'll see that sign from, like I said, from the bond markets. So if the bond markets are now worried that this debt is not as safe as they think it is, or they've always thought it was, they'll pay a lower price to hold it and therefore a higher yield.
So you'll start seeing it when yields start creeping up. It doesn't have to be a crisis. I mean, sometimes it's a crisis, but otherwise it's just the yields go up. It's kind of what you're seeing in France. The yields have just gone up, but they're still able to issue it. You're just having to pay a much higher yield to get people to take it.
So that would be it. I think you would see if you started seeing problems with auctions where demand is not showing up to buy it, and that's a problem. If you were afraid that, you know, one way to get rid of your debt is just inflate it away in real terms, then you get this inflation premium that suddenly now gets built up. That would be the most common way that fiscal policy would spill over into rates, if they just think it's going to be inflationary, and that's going to push up yields, and so I got to have a higher yield to accept that debt.
So, you know, auctions, bond yields creeping up, chatter about the fiscal deficits now taking course. We're not seeing a lot of that in the US per se, but like I said, France, man, things just kind of suddenly exploded on them.
Yeah, the US treasuries have seen good auctions. In August, there was one that was the best auction in 20 years, I think. What this does bring to light is the conversation around fiscal dominance and the independence of central banks. We're seeing some comments, again back to France, that the central bank there is under pressure. How do you think that the world's central bankers, who are facing these kinds of fiscal policy issues and spilling into their monetary policy work — how do you think that Chinese wall is holding up?
Well, we always have to take fiscal policy into account and how it's impacting the economy — not the government financing, but just how it spills over and affects the economy. So we always have to say, you know, if you do this bill, a tax bill or a spending bill, what's it going to do to consumption, investment? And then, you know, then we have to adjust based on what's going on in the real economy.
Fiscal dominance is when you start having to do monetary policy to help the government finance. That's where you have to really come worry about it. And so far, at least for the US, we're not in that situation. Maybe France is getting closer. Like, how are you going to get out of this mess except by printing money? The only problem with the French is they don't print their own money. The ECB does.
But in the US, I'll give you an example. After the Second World War, the debt-to-GDP ratio in the US during the Second World War went up over 100%. The two years after the war ended, inflation was so high it eroded away 40% of that debt in real terms. It was the massive — it was the biggest form of erosion in the real value of government debt we've ever seen in the US.
Now, no, it didn't collapse the US. It didn't create a lot of issues. It did lead to a Fed-Treasury accord to kind of keep the Fed out of this kind of financing world. But yeah, I'll just stop there.
Well, I'm sure all of the senior executives in the room hear questions and concerns from people in the companies and in the economy about job security when AI is coming into force. You are an optimist about how AI is going to affect daily lives. But speaking of jobs, I do have to ask if you feel that your job is safe, because you are not facing a threat from AI taking over your role as a member of the Fed's rate-setting committee, but there is someone in the White House who is unhappy with how the FOMC board is operating, saying that it's being difficult in lowering interest rates, giving the new chair, Kevin Morris, a hard time. Do you feel your job is safe?
As far as I know — I mean, as far as AI, yeah, you could create a whole AI FOMC. I know some academic researchers at Stanford have done this. They've mimicked each one of us through our speeches and all of our statements and created their own AI agent. So there's a Chris Waller AI agent in this model where they set interest rates. I don't know how well it works, but I found it just fascinating that you could do that.
In terms of other things, yeah, I mean, I think there is a threat to Fed independence by the administration. So far it hasn't really succeeded. I think our institutions have made it clear that they don't necessarily want this to happen. I'm hoping that that continues.
And then the ultimate protector is just the bond market. I mean, if bond markets are worried you're going to create a high inflation environment, those interest rates are not going to go down. They're going to go way up. And so there's good reasons that you want to have an independent central bank. And it has worked very well for 40 years in almost all the countries that have done it. I just think it's a mistake to even think about going away from it.
So it's the bond market that's helping protect the members of the board of governors like you. And who else? Congress?
Well, Congress and the courts. I mean, our institutions are designed to, you know, they have their protections in terms of how they do this. We've seen that several times in the courts in the last year. The bond market's so obsessed with AI, I don't know. They're looking, they don't even pay attention, it seems like half the time. But I have faith in the US institutions between Congress and the courts that they will make sure that we don't lose our independence and that the president of the United States doesn't set monetary policy.
Well, that is optimistic. Let's end on that note because you see AI keeping the rest of our jobs safe and your job is also safe. Guests, please join me in thanking Governor Waller.
Please welcome to the stage Alan Ebis, CEO of Africa 50, and Shrimati Nirmala Sithar Raman, Union Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs for the Republic of India, for a conversation with Bloomberg's Husinda Amen.
Good afternoon. There seems to be a paradox in global capital flows. If you take a look at FDI — and of course FDI is not the only measure of capital — but if you take a look at FDI, it seems to be gravitating towards developed markets, surging 40% last year. The flows into emerging markets dropped 2% after stagnating several years before. And that is happening despite the fact that emerging economies represent the engine of future growth.
So even though these economies represent the next wave of opportunity, they are failing to attract the capital needed to fully unlock the value. So why is this happening and how do you fix it? And of course our speakers today sit at the intersection of global flows.
Minister Sith Raman, thank you so much for joining us. Let's start with you. If you take a look at India, India has bucked the trend. You saw record FDI in 2025-2026, up 18%. What policy frameworks or measures have been implemented to de-risk the Indian market to international investors?
Well, I think most of the sectors in which we were drawing capital have been freed of very many regulations which had prevailed earlier. There were ceilings for investment, what we call as caps. They have been removed.
In the meanwhile, I think over the last seven or eight years, or even 10 years, ease of doing business had guided us, and several regulatory steps too were eased out. So the laws were made simpler, regulations were made transparent and consultative, and even more importantly, I think the human resource necessary for these sort of scaling-up activities have been strengthened. And finally, the Indian economy becoming digitized has really opened up the markets.
So India and its middle class, with its purchasing power, has provided the confidence that you can manufacture here for the domestic market and manufacture here for exporting as well.
So I'm just wondering though, even as we talk about capital gravitating towards India, India is also seeing an exit of capital. In fact, about 50% of the capital has been an exit via profit repatriation, disinvestment. Why is India finding it challenging to retain that capital?
You're very right in observing that flight of capital after booking profits has been happening. To retain these capital which are going out is not a unilateral thing that I can do.
If I understand from experts who have been talking to me — I was in Singapore in the last three days, have met up with a lot of investors. They agree that capital is moving towards the United States and moving towards AI, and that to the frontier AI. So the hyperscalers are attracting a lot more money from all over the world. It's not just India.
Although it doesn't help me to say it's happening elsewhere also, I need to have capital being here. But if the attraction is towards AI and attraction is only towards the United States, I think we are missing out on one thing. And I would say this, and I've said this even to people who met me: frontier AI is very attractive, very potentially highly rewarding, but there are AI activities also where, particularly in India, we are helping companies to adopt AI — AI that will be suitable for their productivity gains, AI that is necessary for, which I've heard from many other countries as well, AI which is required for transitioning into an AI mode itself.
So I was glad to hear our prime minister this morning speak about 'we need power to empower,' and therefore AI of this sort also requires capital. And it is on this platform of AI required for adaptation and productivity gains that I would love to have capital staying here.
Before I pick up on the reallocation of capital and AI, Alan, I'll bring you into the conversation. Africa 50, it's deployed something like 15 billion dollars over the last 10 years across 30 of your shareholder countries. What's attracted patient long-term capital and what hasn't?
Yeah, I said 9 billion dollars. I would love to deploy more, but close enough.
So look, first of all, we have challenges. I won't spend too much time on this, but I want to spend time on the opportunities. So Africa today, we have the natural resources and the clean energy that is needed to power the AI economy, the electric economy. We have, you know, 70% of the cobalt production is in Africa, you name it — manganese, copper — and we have the growing population, large population, but we are not sufficiently well organized.
So what we are doing now in Africa is organize ourselves first of all to create a single market, just like India, to have 1.5, 1.6 billion consumers to come in. But we also need to demonstrate a track record of investments that are producing returns and that also have scale.
At Africa 50, what has given us confidence is the ability to spot those right investments, to invest for impact and profit, and we have done it. Now what we still need to do, and we're learning somewhat from what India has done, is to have opportunities at scale, and that we are doing. What we are trying to do now is to have a portfolio of investments in platforms that will be able to offer scale to investors.
One last thing that we are also doing is to have credible African institutions that can partner with global institutions to deliver projects at scale. One such example, I was talking to the minister earlier: Africa 50 partnered with Power Grid of India. We will be building a number of transmission projects across Africa at large scale, and in so doing, attracting more investment. I have a lot more to say, but...
But the thing is, what is Africa's proposition? Everybody's trying to attract capital towards AI.
Well, that's a good point. What is our proposition? Look, once again, we have the resources that the new economy needs. I mean, we have 70% of cobalt. Nobody can have a cell phone or any electronic device without the stuff that we have.
But what we're going to do increasingly is to say we are not selling those stuff anymore without local transformation. And that's where the investment will come through. Today we capture only 2% of the value of what we have. It's finished. It's not going to happen anymore. We are organizing ourselves to make sure that we have a seat at the table and making sure that investments are coming in to manufacture on the ground.
And this is the value proposition. We have 60% of the best solar resources in the world. We're going to have to make sure that folks are coming in, use solar, gas to produce on the ground and then sell to the global market. That's how we're going to increase investments.
Minister, where should capital be headed — towards Indian AI? Some are suggesting that, you know what, it's not just going to be about China and the US. It's going to be India as the third alternative.
That is true at so many different levels. It is not just AI, but it's also the semiconductors. The mission that we've launched for India semiconductor is seeing such an interest among investors as well, and the semiconductor chips and the design of such chips, also testing and, you know, packaging. So India has moved rapidly into areas which are going to enable AI also.
Equally, a friend from Africa has been talking about transmission...
Lines. I think energy sufficiency is a major issue for most countries. AI requires a lot of power. Our data centers—India has received a lot of investment for data centers. We need power, and that sustainable green power. So we have attracted capital in all these areas: semiconductor chip manufacturing, the transmission lines, setting up renewable energy, these are areas—green hydrogen, green ammonia, and of course I'll come down to electric vehicles. And so the attracting capital now is in most of such areas which are feeding into others.
Some though suggest that perhaps India's semiconductor ambitions are unrealistic. I mean, they say the fab business is the most complex, the most expensive on earth, and India's own ambitions are not realistic at all. What's your counter to that?
That's absolutely not right. India spent some time—I remember at least two, three years ago—a conscious call was taken: are we going to be in this race of going more nano than the ones which are on the top of the list, or are we also looking at chips which are relevant for running your day-to-day businesses, whether it's your, you know, refrigerators, your cars, or your mechanisms, internet of things in the house and so on? There is going to be possibility of production for these chips as well. So India has taken a realistic call that whilst we'll also want to perfect and get into finer and finer nano chips, we'll also be producing less finer ones which are still required for majority of the economy to run, not just in India but even in advanced economies.
One of the challenges investors say about investing in emerging markets is actually volatility, and we're seeing that a lot in the sub-Saharan countries. In fact, people have lost a lot of returns. How do you counter that argument? I mean, how do you convince pension funds to bear the risk, bring the capital to the African nations?
Well, first of all, they should have invested alongside us because we've made money. But the issue is real. FX volatility is a real issue, and we are actually organizing ourselves today in Africa around the NAFA, the new African financial architecture for development led by the African Development Bank. We want to offer a political risk instrument, political risk mitigation instrument, to try to manage some of those risks that the investors are not able to take. But at the end of the day, governments have to have policies that are managing the macroeconomy well. I mean, we have examples—you know, India—that's how you have to do to attract capital at scale. Those political risk mitigation instruments are just transition mechanisms. But here's the thing though: as we also in Africa, we have to mobilize a lot more domestic capital. We have $4 trillion of assets under management by African investors in Africa. So I think what we need to do is to mobilize a lot more as we try to attract global capital, because if we have local capital go first or go together with others, I think that would drive additional capital. Finally, I insist on that there's a consensus today in Africa, from the top leaders to the people on the street, that we need to make sure that there is a lot more transformation in Africa for the stuff that we have that the world needs. The world needs resources. There is a race for resources, natural resources. A lot of that has to be transformed in Africa, and that's a consensus, and that it would drive investment. And we African institutions, we're Africa 50 institution, we will co-invest, but we need to attract more capital to invest, to co-invest with us.
And Minister, and of course the Indian rupee has been making headlines, hovering close to record lows. We had the RBI implementing some of the most aggressive measures to provide support, still hovering at about 97. That seems to be the line in the sand. How do you view the weakness in the currency? Because obviously that has led to the exit of capital, especially in the equity market.
That's true. Rupee has reached a low, and RBI is making a lot of efforts through their regulatory powers to make sure that rupee stays stable. They are not trying to fix the rupee. They are trying to stop the volatility, and for that there is a lot of effort from RBI's side. The latest one was also a set of measures taken two days ago, and as a result you saw the rupee sort of holding on and probably appreciating in value 1% or something. So these efforts from RBI, I understand, will continue—not to, as I said, fix the rupee. We would appreciate if rupee finds its own level. But the related question to that was because of this depreciation in rupee, there's a lot of flow of capital out of the country, and that is one of the reasons why probably even there's a second thought about should we be here, although every other factor is favorable. I'm sure there are efforts which the RBI would take further to make sure that rupee doesn't become too volatile.
What's behind the weakness? We heard from the Prime Minister just this morning talking about how fundamentals are strong. Is the rupee representing the fundamentals of the country? What's fair value? How are you assessing the rupee level?
Yes, that's a difficult question to answer. I would have thought because your fundamentals are fine, and also because your foreign exchange reserves have been very sound, I think the depreciation of the rupee as it's happening over the last couple of years, one and a half years, I would think is very significant, and measures are being taken. But very many different factors add to it. I would believe most of it are because of the challenges outside. Within the country, we are making sure that we keep the macroeconomic fundamentals sound. Fiscal discipline is something which is very, very close to the Prime Minister's heart. He's maintained fiscal prudence even as a Chief Minister. Post that, when after becoming Prime Minister, he's been very keen on not affecting the welfare spending, not affecting education, health spending, but yet to be very prudent, and we've kept that line all through. And therefore, fiscal discipline is not going to be a matter which should worry investors. But as regards rupee and as regards the way it is reacting to the ups and downs, it comes with the dollar.
Yes, that's where the challenge is, and we'll be attending to it.
In my conversation with the likes of Kaushik Basu, he's talked about how, you know, he's looking to see the removal of capital gains tax, for instance, and the streamlining of taxes before he'll consider pumping money into India. How would you respond to that? Is it something you might consider?
We are very close to the budget, and the preparation for the budget has started, and it may not be the best time for me to say what I will or what I will not consider. So I'll tread cautiously on that. But of course, the long-term capital gains tax is something on which a lot of people have been commenting, both investors within India and also those who meet me occasionally outside. In India, I think it's also a question of transaction tax that we have in the securities market. So there was a time when people had to be told—at least ministers commented—saying both are running parallel and it's not right, we should have only one of them, and so on. So this debate on tax in the market, debate on the transactional securities, transaction tax, and also the question of treating all asset classes similarly has been a very well discussed topic. Two years ago we had brought all asset classes similarly, and people thought I'm increasing the tax. I wasn't increasing the tax. I was bringing all of them to be at par with one another, so that an investor is not speculating as to which one gives him greater leverage. So these are things on which there's a lot of debate. So it's healthy to have this debate, and I will be keenly hearing them.
Alain, I promise I'm not ignoring you.
Come back into the conversation. You've lamented before that when it comes to Africa, there seems to be a lack of bankable projects. Is it getting better, and how do you get there?
No, it's getting better. It's getting better. But it's a combination of many things. First of all, it always has to start with that to create the policy environment to make things more attractive to investors. So that has to—we have to continue to work on that. That the private sponsors of projects, including folks like Africa 50, we have to spend a lot more resources in the early stage, the project preparation, the project development, to create bankable structures at scale to be able to attract more capital. And this is work in progress. I do believe that even multilateral development banks should spend a bit more time putting money or resources for project development to project preparation. Why are they doing that? We, Africa 50, we're doing this in Africa. So we are scaling up. It's work in progress. It's not fast enough at this point. But look, I think what is really giving me hope is the African Continental Free Trade Area. We're going to have a market of 1.6 billion people, younger people, the folks that consume. And that is the opportunity that investors should see. And in partnership with institutions like Africa 50, we can invest and make impact and profit.
As you said, it takes time. African projects typically take seven to 10 years to be bankable. How do you compress that?
Wait, wait, wait. Those are the projects that are not done—they are not done with us, Africa 50. Our average—actually, you're right. If you look at the statistics, it takes about five to seven years for an infrastructure project to be developed to financial close. The average for Africa 50 is 2.5 years. We have a project development fund. In fact, we have many projects because you need to fast-track these things, and most of the time it's regulations, honestly. So we are trying to push for regulatory certainty and then execution certainty as well. So the best way to do this thing is to partner with institutions on the ground that will help fast-track. If foreign investors go alone, it's a bit more complicated. Hopefully one day we'll be like India, where they can go alone and everything will be fine. But in the meantime, partner with companies that are on the ground, and then you'll be rewarded.
Minister, how do you turn India's, I guess, priority infrastructure projects into investable assets? Because I know when it comes to private capital in particular, India's attracting a lot of that.
We have a national infrastructure pipeline which was launched sometime late 2019, and that is an open, publicly available portal into which all the provinces, the states, add their own projects. They are at one go available for any investor to have a look at it, and this is only growing. As I said, at the time of the launch it was projects worth about two trillion that we launched. Now I understand it has grown and it's crossed over 4.5 trillion. So these are projects belonging to various different sectors. So by sector you could search, by province you could search, it's all available there, and I understand a lot of investors have benefited by this pipeline which is available. Other than that, we have created for long-term patient capital an institution called National Bank for Infrastructure and Development, NABFID, which is taking up on patient capital for high-risk projects and long-term projects. You also have a semi-sovereign fund kind of a fund which is called the National Infrastructure Investment Fund, into which government has put in stake, and they raise funds, and they have also been setting up funds for real estate development or infrastructure development, separate funds. They recently closed a fund, and very successfully at that. So such institutions have helped us mobilize funds, particularly for such infrastructure projects. And you see, in the last 10 years, every sector which required building up, whether it is roads, ports, airports, or internet—what do you call—cable connectivity, digital connectivity, India has done immensely well in the last 10 years, and people have noticed the change, and this momentum will continue. And we want the infrastructure in India, in every sense, really be boosted well and be up to date.
We talk about attracting patient capital. Reality is that capital isn't patient, and also capital is always looking at how to divest that risk. When you take a look at the risk, who should be bearing what? I mean, in terms of the private sector, in terms of the government.
Yeah. Well, look, I think it's reasonably standard because if you don't do it that way, capital won't come to you. Look, capital, private capital doesn't want to take the macro risk, government-related risk. Government should basically take the risk that they're best able to manage, and private sector will take operational risk, financial risk, etc. But I think what has happened in India, and we're trying to see how we can do it on the continent of Africa, whereby we have the structure, the regulation certainty, such that a lot more infrastructure is funded with private capital, with government money, government capital just there to catalyze, to support just the few things that the government needs to do, but then the private sector will come in. We are doing that, but we still have a few things to manage so that we can scale up.
Actually, private sector has moved today in India. We had a phase where after 2013-14, private capital had really borne the brunt of bad asset management, also couldn't repay their loans taken from banks. So there was a bad time when we called it as, you know, balance sheet problems. Banks' balance sheets suffered. Corporates' balance sheets suffered because of asset mismanagement. I think taking up a strong reform road, we cleared up all the mess in the banks, and as a result banks have come out, and they've come out very healthily. This phase, many Indian private sector companies also cleaned up their balance sheets, cleared up their debt. In fact, have now quite a few cash piles sitting. There are times I've taunted them by saying you're earning passive income by keeping this money elsewhere or earning out of it rather than investing and increasing capacities. We came up with a concessional tax regime for them in 2019. Ours was for corporate tax the best of rates available, and then COVID came, uncertainties afterwards. But today I can say with confidence that private capital is moving in. India's domestic private capital is moving in, and it's also attracting private capital from elsewhere because they're moving in to invest in sectors like renewable energy, in chip and chip design. Also a lot is moving in in biosimilars, medical pharma area, generic drug manufacturing, and also setting up of MRO centers because India is ordering aircrafts. Somebody gave me a rough estimate: between now and 2030, we are likely to get a new aircraft every week. That is the extent to which India is placed. India meaning India's civil aviation sector, private airlines have all placed orders for new aircrafts to come because India's civil aviation is growing at about 16%, while the growth in global civil aviation is far lesser. So the prospects for civil aviation's growth is here, and therefore investments are happening. So these are the sectors in which private sector is showing interest, and they're moving into these areas. They may be their core activity areas, or they may be new into that, but these are areas which are attracting private capital.
On that optimistic note, we have to wrap up the discussion. Minister, Alain, we thank you so much for your time today.
Please welcome to the stage Waleed Al-Muharib, deputy group CEO of Mubadala Investment Company; Uday Kotak, founder and director of Kotak Mahindra Bank; and Surendra Rosha, co-CEO of Asia and the Middle East at HSBC, for a conversation with Bloomberg's Stephanie Flanders.
Would you like some water? You got...
The world repriced. Well, that's, you know, a fancy investor word for the world's got more expensive. And of course we all know that in the most basic way when we're filling up a tank of gas, when we want to buy some food, we certainly know in this environment and in this community that that most important price, the price of money, has gone up in the last few years and doesn't look like going down anytime soon. And I would say that geopolitics, some of the buffering of trade wars and geopolitical shocks that we discussed this morning, they also raise the cost of doing business in a more diffuse way. You have to spend more time investing it in—you invest more time in understanding a situation on the ground. You can't assume that a given country, let alone the world, is going to continue to dance to America's tune, or any that we might even not know the words to whatever tune America's playing. In that environment, it seems sort of scary. We have lots of panels thinking about the risks, but I would say there's also in that higher cost of money, it shows there's more competition. There's more good places to put investment than maybe there was 10 or 20 years ago when money was just flowing into safe treasury assets. And the more expensive it is, the more important that it's invested wisely. And that puts an emphasis on sort of sound investment choices and people who can think long term, look around, see around corners. And we have three men here who in their different ways are absolutely focused on that, pushing resources, helping people locate, put resources into the highest return investments, whether it's at Kotak Mahindra or Mubadala or HSBC. So let's get into it. Waleed, let me start with you. You know, it's very much the core mission of Mubadala to be thinking long term about where the world is going and invest wisely. You know, how does this repriced environment affect the way you're thinking about choices, and how can places like India be winning out in that tougher competition?
Well, first, thank you for the question and thank you for having us over here. It's so nice to see so many partners and familiar faces here in India. I think the question of repricing really is symptomatic of something, and the way we think it is symptomatic of a few things. You mentioned geopolitical events, you mentioned inflation, you mentioned price shocks, but really for us it's also about fragmentation. So when I think about fragmentation, what does that mean? It's really what globalization, the old paradigm, has devolved into. And so for us, I think that's an inescapable force that in many ways has to be priced into our thinking as we think about how we're going to allocate, where we're going to invest, and how we're going to develop long-term partnerships. So what are examples of that? Supply chain disruptions certainly, I think, moves towards the increased fragmentation that I was talking about, but technology is another piece of that as well, because you're starting to see a world where not only do you have haves and have-nots, but you have a world where technology is being developed very rapidly among places like the United States and China, and then you have some fast followers that are either using that technology or trying to develop as best they can. So how do you navigate in a world where that is the new normal? A couple of observations, if I may. First, I think that world, that world of increased fragmentation, is here to stay. We don't view it as a kind of short-term blip. I think, frankly, it is the new normal, at least for the next 5, 10, maybe even 15 years, which is, you know, the extent of the horizon with which we can view the world. And so when you're faced with that, you really want to look for partners and investment destinations that I think in many ways are embodied by India as an example. Number one, extremely favorable demographics. Number two, I think a world-class ability to adopt technology quickly, right? That's borne out in the data. Number three, coupled with a massive infrastructure push which you can see, and underpinned by deep markets that are obviously undergoing increased reform over time. So if you have those fundamentals, and if you, like us, do not invest either in a momentum sort of way or try and time the markets, then I think you'll do quite well. And so for us, it is no surprise that India is not only an increasingly important destination for our capital, but one that we believe in long term.
Surendra, I mean, we had quite a positive take on India's role, as you'd expect, in the AI revolution from Nandan Nilekani this morning. Do you think, I mean, realistically, what role is India going to play, and how this fragmentation—is there a risk that India just gets caught in the middle? I mean, the country has been able to broaden its relationships and avoid a very tough choice between US and China in other respects. But is that now much harder when it comes to the technological stack?
I think it is somewhat harder, but I think there's also a great element of muscle memory, if I could call it that, that India has for negotiating between different power structures or poles of power. So I take quite a lot of comfort from that, the country has a history of managing that. I think the thing that really excites me is the application of technology, a bit to what Waleed alluded to earlier, which is around the fact that the country has a track record of taking technology, adapting to it, and using it to scale. We've seen this in the last 12 to 15 years with the payments, with the impact of digital commerce into businesses and how it can scale up, whether they are clients of ours or our own business in India. We today have roughly about 48,000 people working for us in India. It's our largest employee base. There's a lot more work coming here than before in terms of value, and that's being driven by the ability of people to adapt this technology and use it to work. So I certainly see that in our client base as well.
I recollect a quote by Scott Bessent, US Treasury Secretary, in June '26, and I think it's very applicable to India and many other countries, especially of scale. He said three things. One, a nation which does not produce what it needs is not secure. Therefore, India's strategy is to produce what it needs. Two, a nation which depends on adversaries for its critical inputs is not sovereign. We must add significant ability to produce things and critical inputs and not be dependent on adversaries. And third, a nation which depends on consumption alone has limitations to progress. India is focused on all these three: to produce what it needs, to reduce its dependence on critical inputs from adversaries, and three, double up on manufacturing, research, and innovation at scale and speed. And in a world where we're going to see a lot more friction because of fragmentation, as you said, you're going to have a situation where it's going to be very critical for nation states to move away from a one world to a world which is clearly fragmented, and each country, especially the larger countries, will have to get much more sovereign.
Well, I mean, at Bloomberg we pay a lot of attention to what Scott Bessent says, and an awful lot of what he said this year has not panned out. So I hope the application of his strategy to India will turn out to be a little bit more successful than some of his predictions around the US economy. But Waleed, and I would probably ask all of you this: we've spoken about India and indeed any country in this environment having to broaden its relationships, and the risk of, you know, you don't want to be reliant on one supplier for anything, whether it's energy or security. How is the region—the perception is the region is looking for a broader range of friends now, and perhaps rethinking the amount it sort of stakes on the US in that context. Would that be right? Is that something you feel when you're thinking about investing?
So I think fragmentation comes from also kind of an inherent idea, which is that, you know, what you're going to have is you're going to have centers of gravity, multipoles, right, around which these large fragments will form, right? And it's not that they are static or that they are permanent in any way, but I think what's important to note is that for different areas of comparative advantage, you will have different relationships and different fragments, right? And so what's key for us is because this idea is born, as Uday was saying, out of this idea of resilience—even though we didn't use this word—but resilience is really the idea that you were talking about. And so if you take resilience together with fragmentation, the one thing that you come back with is that you need to understand that partnerships are what are going to dictate success, at least in our view, from an investment perspective. And if you believe that, then it's important to have the right partnerships, both at the country level but also within the country level, you know, as you look at different sectors and different areas. And that has been the way that we have operated and deployed capital for the last 20 years, where we've recognized that it's not about being in one camp or another camp, but it's important to invest in all places you see opportunity in a world where you have different countries with different strengths and different comparative advantages. India, going back to India, has many, not least of which is its population and the size of its market and its ability to scale technologies and the applications thereof. By the way, when you think about resilience, infrastructure is one of the most important pillars of resilience, and India has a massive buildout program that I think will not only benefit the country and the population, but benefit us as investors as well as we look for opportunity to partner in win-win ways.
But Surendra, I mean, the competition is still pretty tough for those dollars, and we are seeing that. India—I said this morning, you know, India is not at the center of this big AI loop, the big sums of money that are flowing around the global economy. India is still struggling at the margins to attract that.
It's a fair point, but I think what's also happening right now is you're thinking about how do I get diversification into my investment set. Which markets, which economies, which sectors are going to provide me with that? And I think that's where the appeal of a market like India, to the points that Waleed made in its strengths, is important. I just want to go back to the point about resilience, and I look at this from a customer standpoint and the customers we cover. You know, it's been—we were talking about supply chain resilience five years ago. It's now about not just supply but also the demand side of the equation. And increasingly, more and more CEOs, when they talk to us, it's really about helping them build that resilience across the chain. So it's in my supply chain, but also open up new markets for me and build that resilience. We think that's really going to be the key to success of businesses over the next few years, or of countries, you know, how do you present yourself as a resilient market for investment?
But I mean, we have seen, Uday, we've seen, you know, throughout this period—and maybe we shouldn't be worried, maybe it doesn't matter. I mean, I think India has growth on its side, as we've talked about, the size of the market. We've talked about the digital engagement of the population and many of the reforms that the Prime Minister has been pushing through, and yet the currency's been weakening for eight years, and that sort of short-term calculation that investors are making seems to be consistently negative. How can the government—how should and shouldn't the government be responding to that, or should we not care that the rupee has been depreciating?
My personal view is we should let the rupee find its own level, and over time the true strength of the economy will play out. One of the reasons why India is where it is is because we've had very significant portfolio investments, and the stock of portfolio investments was high, and there was this crazy concentration where what mattered in the world was not more than 10 stocks, and therefore all the money went in there. So as a result of which, India saw less of a problem on current account and more on portfolio account, which was just chasing these 7 to 10 stocks worldwide. We believe at some point of time that party and return on that capital will be looked at by investors, and therefore this is a transition phase. And at the same time, India has to consider this as an important signal that we need to do a lot more to be competitive, efficient, self-reliant, and stronger in our research and innovation.
If the preceding speaker had said something like, well, they believe the currency should find its level, that would have definitely been a sell signal. But many would also say that a government that puts restrictions on people's ability to exchange the currency and even to move out of the currency provide another sell signal for investors. Do you think it's a constructive thing to do?
Now, my view is a practitioner has the ability of speaking what is going to be effective in markets, and if markets do not know that there is a level the policymaker is trying to justify, the markets will be guessing, and you want to keep the markets guessing.
That is another Scott Bessent quote which I think maybe will stand the test of time more. Okay. If we were talking about the global—if we were talking about the economic impacts of the last year, we would talk about the Hormuz Strait, we would talk about how much that has put in question the flow of energy to many economies and certainly imposed burdens on governments around the world. And yet, we've managed to get this far without talking about the broader, longer-term impact of that for the region, for the relationships here. So, Waleed, I mean, if you're looking beyond this short-term situation in Hormuz and even the attacks that we're seeing in Saudi and elsewhere, how has the calculus changed? I mean, how is UAE going to bounce back from this crisis, and how has it changed the way it looks at the world?
So in one very fundamental way, it's not changing its view of the world, and that is we are still deploying capital. We're still looking for the best risk-reward globally, and we're still doing so through partnership and through the long-term, I think, search for sustainable returns over time. And so that's very much the same. One of the very positive things that I think has happened as a result of the recent events has been a massive infrastructure review that has happened inside the country. And here I'm not just talking about, you know, the oil and gas infrastructure, but it's also our port infrastructure, our logistics corridors, so on and so forth. And that in many ways is a good thing and will be very beneficial over time and will spur its own form of growth. It's also important to realize that that will also spur FDI into the country as it creates a lot of investment opportunity. And so from our perspective, you know, I think we're navigating a difficult time. As you know, we live in a rough neighborhood. And I think for us, it's about staying the course, telling our story, looking for opportunity, and continuing to deploy wisely.
That sounds a little bit like you're saying that there'll be a greater domestic deployment just inevitably from doing that kind of investment.
So it may be at a national level, but certainly as a firm, as Mubadala, you know, we're about 25% focused inside the UAE. That percentage will remain for us as a firm, but other entities are more inward-looking.
And with the higher—I mean, are you concerned about—I want to move on to another topic, but I also was just interested in how your calculus has changed. I mean, there are a range of external pressures on your foreign investments, and we've talked about just the higher cost of capital, greater competition. Does that mean—and you forgive me for asking—but when you have something like the Man City ruling, do you think that's going to discourage—if you think about the UK has been a very big recipient of investment from the UAE and from Abu Dhabi. Do you think that's going to change as a result of this?
I think that's its own separate process. And so we have been and continue to deploy in the United Kingdom. And what goes into our calculus for where we deploy are partnerships, risk-reward, and what makes sense over time. And so we are continuing to deploy.
It doesn't just discourage you in a more general way from the UK?
No, I mean, what discourages you from the UK, you know, are things like, you know, if you don't see, you know, a change in the lack of rule of law, for example, if you see the lack of a level playing field, if you see changes along those very fundamental pillars of any economy, that's what changes your view of the world. But unless you have something like that, then, you know, again, you can't react to short-term movements. If you do, then chances are you will time things incorrectly.
Fair enough. That's always the mantra of all investors. Surendra, the other thing that I know that you focused on, and we see it in the numbers, and Tom, the chief economist, was talking about the global imbalances this morning. We know a lot of the money's going into AI, but we have seen this ferocious return of the Chinese export engine, and indeed exports played a larger role in growth. It was responsible for half of China's growth last year, which is the highest this century. A lot of countries who thought they had a growth strategy, a development strategy for the long term, that they were going to move up the value chain, are finding that every step of the value chain is now occupied by China, and it doesn't show any great desire to move off those sectors. Does that affect—I mean, how should we think about India's growth path and that of its partners? Is China just sort of closing the door on some of those strategies?
No, I think—I don't think China's closing the door on the strategies. It's just competitive, and, you know, competition is going to be there irrespective of whether it's China or some other economy that comes in to compete in a sector. I think the pathway for that opens up for India revolves around the fact about everybody looking at resilience now, and I go back to that word because it's important, because economic decisions, unlike perhaps before the pandemic, which were driven by efficiency in the context of lowest cost to deliver, is now about consistency, and resilience becomes an important part of that. And that's where India comes in. And if you look at the manufacturing of electronics and some of the steps taken in advanced manufacturing in India over the last five, six years, the numbers are encouraging. We see that in our book. We are seeing many of our global customers start to open up here, and I think it goes back to some of the strengths that were referenced in terms of deep capital markets, talent availability, as well as the domestic market. I think it's certainly my sense it's a lot easier for India. It might be a lot more difficult for a few other markets to compete where they don't necessarily have the inherent strengths that perhaps India has.
Do you—I mean, are you seeing that in sort of in the short term? I mean, I would record we had an episode of my excellent podcast, Stephanomics, a couple of years ago where we actually—my colleague was trying to go to a toy store and trying to find a non-Chinese-made toy, and the claim—the argument was, which is true then, that Prime Minister Modi had not been successful in his efforts to supplant China. But I'm told that now you can go to a toy shop and there's a lot of—we've basically—India has massively reduced its reliance.
I think India, of course, is refocusing significantly on manufacturing. That's one. Second, my view is if you can't beat them, join them. And we need to be open, and I think we're seeing early signs of that in India where Indian companies are partnering with the Chinese companies for Make in India, and the Chinese companies are open. You've seen a couple of examples of that, which is SAIC through MG, the car. You've seen it in the case of Haier. Therefore, if there are joint ventures between the Chinese and the Indian companies for manufacturing in India, the game China played with the US many years ago, that could be a path forward for India, and India has to keep its optionality open. Historically, India has looked too much west for investment. But with the challenges particularly from the United States and overall a more transactional approach to investment, time has come for India to keep all its options open.
But China has shown itself to be very determined to hold on to strategic industries, and actually, to your point on the joint ventures, you often find that the key technologies have been held back. So do you think there is enough mutual trust for those—for a long-term relationship?
I think in a world where tariffs are a weapon, Chinese strategics may be more open to actually come and invest in a local domestic situation.
There's a last sort of area that I wanted to touch on because I was thinking of it in the first session, and John Gray mentioned—he said 20, 30 years from now, technology will be what we talk about. But I guess the natural follow-on to that is what the countries that do well in this environment are the countries that bring their population the advantages of that technology, have a way to deploy it successfully. And that, it seems to me, depends an awful lot on your kind of institutional framework, your social cohesion, whether people feel like they have a part to play in an economy. So I don't—I mean, Waleed, when you're thinking about investing, when you're thinking about whether a country can really adopt AI in an effective way and be a high-return investment, how much do you think about those kind of broader foundations for a society?
Well, I think it's an important question. I mean, AI adoption, I think at a national level, I think in many ways, especially if you're talking about the government—government adoption, I think starts with leadership. So I think that's the first point. Look at our example as the UAE. We have an app through which you interact with the government. So there is no need for me to go anywhere or meet with any kind of government body for anything from looking at my health records to having an addition made at my house from a renovation perspective. And so because all those elements have been digitized, because I can speak to the app in one of eight different languages and tell it, listen, I want to do this, or I need a new birth certificate, or pull up my images from this particular procedure, or how is my pension doing, or can I contribute to this. So that in itself acts as an engine, but of course that's not enough because what you want to make sure is you want to make sure that, you know, AI pervades all different elements of life. When I look at our firm and I look at internal adoption of AI and technology, we'll use that as an example. You know, we've been on a two or three-year transformation that again required a huge amount of leadership and executive sponsorship, but now allows us to have an AI-driven board member and investment committee member that sits with us in the room that we can speak to and that gives us real insight. When we first started, it would function as a—what's it called? Her name is Maya.
So she has a reassuring voice and she judges.
But is she as sycophantic as ChatGPT?
Does she say—that says that's a fantastic idea when you know if you could only develop it further?
Well, the reason why she's not sycophantic is because we also have the red team, blue team. So what that means is we have different instances try and disprove one another. And so when you do that, you can actually get real insight from a particular investment.
The kind of integrated health data and the things that Waleed is talking about. I mean, Britain has struggled with that. I think a lot of European countries would struggle with that. I think, frankly, today in America we would struggle with that because the level of trust in the underlying tech infrastructure and the tech companies is not there. How would you—I mean, obviously India has got used to big data in a way that other countries haven't. But do you think the trust will still be there to do these kind of things?
I think as long as the data has reasonable sovereignty, Indians trust it. For example, the entire Aadhaar, which was spearheaded by Nandan, there's trust in the data there. Therefore, Indians, as long as they are comfortable that the omnipresent government is in charge and control of that data, in general Indians are comfortable.
I would extend that to the wider Asian context. It is true. I think we see a lot more openness to adoption of technology where there is sovereign oversight.
So if I was going to play this conversation and then think, well, if there was someone here representing the US, is the US doing the right things to build the foundations for that kind of effective long-term investment? We know it's where all the money is going now, but will we still be saying that in 10 years' time?
I think the big question for me from the US point of view is where does the line of private profit versus public good play?
Look, I'd say I think I would look at it from a return standpoint. At what point do some of these investments start to make a return that is in line with investor expectations? And I think that's where the big question mark for me is.
Would you say that there's a higher—or at least would you expect to have a long-term reduced allocation to the US?
Look, at the end of the day, I still think that today the United States still has the best risk-reward of any other place or any other large economy globally speaking. That's why 42% of our capital is there. And I feel comfortable saying that at least for the short to medium term, it will remain the case.
But you talked about the long term before. You didn't say long term just then.
Well, because it's hard for me to predict for any individual country where they're going to be in the next 15 or 20 years. But all signs today tell me that yes, there is going to be technological leadership. It is still a robust economy. And I think productivity will still outweigh many other things.
Well, I think we'll probably have maybe a range of views on the long-term investment case for some of these things, but thank you very much to all three of you. It was great.
Please welcome to the stage John Romeo, managing partner and CEO at the Oliver Wyman Forum.
Thank you. Thank you. The first hint came in 2016 when Lee Sedol, the renowned Go champion, faced off against Google DeepMind's AlphaGo. Now, Go had been played for thousands of years before this, but the history of the game changed in an instant when AlphaGo played move 37. The commentators at first thought it was a mistake. No professional player would have dared make that move. But in the end, it turned out to be a stroke of brilliance. It helped AlphaGo win the game and overturned centuries of conventional wisdom. I think a lot about move 37 today because AI is often framed as just the next chapter in a familiar technology story, going from the computer to the internet to the smartphone and now AI. AI started by giving us answers, but now we're beginning to give it authority. And so something more fundamental is happening. And I'm not certain that our companies, our countries, our regulators are ready for that. Now, today, everyone is watching one race. They're watching the race for intelligence. You have the frontier labs. You have US and China. You have hundreds of billions of dollars getting poured into chips, into models, into data centers. But I think we're paying too much attention to that race because there are two other races that I think...
could be just as consequential. The race for adaptation and the race for control. Consider adaptation, right? As AI becomes more powerful and more accessible, the advantage shifts from the model to everything that surrounds the model: your data, your workflows, your operations, your processes.
And now we're seeing it right now. We're seeing pilots everywhere. Everyone's experimenting with AI. You see it all across the organization, except perhaps in the bottom line, where it remains scarce. And it's because AI creates time. It creates capacity, but it doesn't automatically create value. The companies that are realizing that value are actually reimagining their workflows. More often than not, though, it's just pushing the bottleneck from one place to another.
Sorry, hang on a second. Our new Oliver Wyman forum research shows that only 8% of organizations actually have a standard for what happens to that AI-saved time. An insurance claim can be processed in seconds. But if that insurance claim then sits in a queue for three days waiting for approval, you've just made one step spectacularly efficient, you haven't transformed a company. The faster the machine gets, the more visible the rest of the organization becomes. Because a million automated processes don't create a transformed company.
The companies that are creating value are changing how they operate. And as AI becomes much more capable, the question shifts from what can AI do to what are we prepared to let it do? Give an agent your data, a budget, a mandate, and permission to act, and you've created an economic actor. When the travel agent that chooses an airline is no longer a human, then the battle that we fought for human attention shifts to a battle for machine permission. And power follows permission. And that brings me to the third race, the race for control. Tim Berners-Lee made a suggestion to me recently, a wonderfully pragmatic suggestion. He said, 'Give AI agents license plates.' So if an agent does harm, we know whose it was, who is accountable, what it was allowed to do, and who can stop it. Identity, permission, accountability, revocability, right? It's the basis of that.
Yuval Noah Harari made a similar observation recently. He said, 'People lie and they cheat. It's why we created courts. It's why we created contracts, auditors, regulators. Civilization works not because we trust everyone, but because we've learned to cooperate with those that we can't necessarily completely trust.' And the same is true for AI. We need institutions that don't focus on making machines that we can blindly trust, but institutions that focus on allowing us to work with machines that explicitly we don't trust.
The paradox is increasing. We're going to need machines that supervise machines. It doesn't mean the humans aren't there. The humans have to go up a level because the better we get at setting the boundaries and ensuring that revocability, then the more confidence we can have to delegate to the machines.
So it's a machine-speed oversight, but it's ultimately a human accountability, and it's the same challenge for countries. In India, our research shows huge demand for building the national capability on AI, but equally demand to ensure access to the world's best models. Now, that's not a contradiction. It's a new definition, I think, of sovereignty that focuses on emphasizing permission and preserving choice rather than eliminating dependence. We don't need every country to regulate AI identically. We just need interoperable accountability.
But there's a danger in everything that I've just said, that it makes us sound like spectators, like the only choice that we really have is how quickly we adapt. And indeed, many, many employees feel that way. 68% of employees say they'd take a pay cut for a guarantee that AI would never replace them. But we're not spectators. Technology has a direction because people give it one. Companies decide what machines can do. The government sets the rules. But ultimately, society has to have a voice in what this extraordinary technology is for. We know that humans are better at developing power than we are at necessarily developing the wisdom to use it. The prime minister talked about that this morning. And so this is an important design moment, which brings me back to move 37. In Go, we celebrated a machine making a move that humans had never conceived of, right? We want AI to do that. We want to celebrate that. We want AI to discover new medicines, to create new materials, to find solutions to problems we can't solve ourselves.
But what happens when move 37 comes to a financial market, to a payment system, to a military decision? The machines may be better at playing the game than we are, but it doesn't mean that we have to step away from that. We have a responsibility to write the rules for the games and indeed to determine which games the machines are even allowed to play. AI is going to have agency, but ultimately so are we. And the future of AI is not something that we should just sit back and let happen to us. We can't be passive. This is sort of a moment to take that control because we have a responsibility to choose that. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Nubar Afeyan, co-founder and chairman of Moderna and founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering; Laya Ibrahim, Chief AI Readiness Officer at Google DeepMind; and Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, founder and executive chairperson of Biocon, for a conversation with Bloomberg's Francine Lacqua.
It's very good music. Hi everyone. I have the best job in the world because I have three wonderful leaders to try and understand what they believe will change, what is still holding us back, and who will benefit from this next era of discovery. It brings together three perspectives: Nubar on creating new companies and scientific platforms, Laya on building AI capabilities for science, and Kiran on biotechnology, drug development, and bringing innovation to patients. So thank you all for joining us. Nubar, let me start off with you. What do you think, in your wildest dreams, AI will help us discover that we can't even imagine yet? We can't imagine, but you can.
It's a tricky question because I think the answer is everything. So, in other words, I think how we discover everything in the future will be fundamentally different and it will not be limited by human imagination. In nature, nothing is discovered through human imagination. It just exists. And now we're going to be able to do that in multiples of what humans have been able to do. And it's an exciting but also scary prospect.
Laya, do you think AI is accelerating science or actually just fundamentally changing it?
I think it's helping us understand the world in a way that we never imagined. As Nubar said, much like a microscope of being able to go very narrow and deep, or a telescope to go out wide. And I do think that maybe the limitation is our ability to ask creative questions, to be bold enough and have the courage to ask.
What do you think is the next AI breakthrough?
Well, it's definitely going to be very different to what we're doing today because right now, you know, biology is a very empirical science and I think AI will enable us to do it very differently. It'll allow us to connect very unrelated dots. So I'm looking at developing and innovating new medicines that are not about targeting single targets. You know, it's not those single-targeting drugs, but I really believe that you're going to be able to, with a combination of understanding biology and leveraging AI, you're going to be able to basically holistically look at networks, signaling channels, and neural circuits. And I think that's the way you're going to develop new drugs, you know, multi-specific, multi-faceted drugs.
But Nubar, is there something that actually remains, you know, intrinsically human in scientific discovery?
Well, maybe I'll reframe it in this way. So, I know that we're at an era where we're trying to put the human back into life and existence because it's being challenged by this other life form that we've created, at least thinking form. I do think that how it is to be human is going to change in the scientific fields in the following way. I think we're today obsessing over machine intelligence. We can call it superintelligence, AI, whatever. But I just call it machine intelligence because it's a machine form of intelligence, such as it is. Then we have human intelligence. But I think what we have failed to realize is that there's another form of intelligence surrounding us, which is nature's forms of intelligence. Every living cell, every cell that processes information, is also a form of intelligence. I think once we realize that, we're going to realize that what biology has been, which is humans trying to understand nature's intelligence, is now being supplemented by humans trying to understand machine intelligence. And we're not going to be good at either one, in my view. And we're going to have to figure out how to use machine intelligence to better understand nature's intelligence, whether that's the immune system, whether that's viruses. I mean, people often debate with me how I could say that a virus is intelligent. Well, a virus that could take down most of the immune system on the planet through a pandemic, if that's not intelligent, then our bodies must be pretty weak. The fact is, it's much more intelligent than viruses on computers that today we're in awe of. So, I do think that humans are going to have to make room for understanding but also harnessing machine intelligence to better understand nature's intelligence, and why not potentially vice versa.
But does it mean that there could be a discovery that we can't explain at some point?
There already are tons of discoveries that we can't explain. It's called the modern pharmaceutical industry. Probably more than half the drugs we don't actually understand how they work. We can give one version of how they might work. But most of the drugs we don't actually have any mechanistic understanding of. But through rigorous testing, through controlled experiments, we could show that it's more efficacious than it's harmful. And so that's regulated and it's approved. So I don't think human understanding, by the way, I don't understand how my iPhone does most of the things it does. Doesn't stop me from using it. I just don't think this human conceit that anything we don't understand we should be afraid of. That's a new phenomenon. We've been coexisting with things we don't understand for a very long time.
Laya, how do you see this? And actually, if you look at DeepMind, I mean, this is a lot of the work that you and Demis had started.
Yes. And actually, as Nubar was speaking, I was thinking about AlphaFold as an example of a 50-year grand challenge and our advanced AI system, AlphaFold. Now we have it available to millions of researchers worldwide, as simple as a map search, to be able to look up and understand how the prediction of a protein, a 3D structure, which is remarkable because it tells us the basic building block of life and if it misfolds, what that might mean. And we've been able to work with researchers like in Spain and taking one medication and applying it to Chagas disease, an FDA-approved medication that impacts 8 million people worldwide. Something that as a human we hadn't thought of, but to ask the questions that helped us make that correlation between vaccines. So I think the opportunity here is not only in the discovery of new things but also how we can apply other ones. In fact, there's 180,000 researchers right here in India working on problems that India is facing and advancing other types of work in understanding diseases and the medications that go alongside them.
What are you seeing, Kiran? I mean, what does it mean for Biocon? So are you expecting to, how does it change your company in the next five years?
Yeah. So of course, I think drug innovation is going to accelerate, but I also hope that affordability or delivering affordable access will also accelerate because you are shortening the timelines of, you know, lab to market. Having said that, I think whilst we are all focusing right now on the discovery process, which is certainly going to accelerate and get abbreviated, the next challenge is how do you abbreviate the more expensive part of drug innovation, which is clinical trials. And that's where I again think that AI can play a big role in helping us think through what do we want to glean and gather from clinical data that allows us to, you know, predict that it is safe and efficacious. And I think those are the kind of things that can really compress timelines and deliver these patients faster to, I mean, medicines faster to patients. So to me, that's the excitement of AI and that's what we are looking at as a company, saying how do we look at, you know, AI to really not just abbreviate but to also look at the affordability part for countries like India.
And I do want to come back to the speed of it, but actually to the affordability, do you think AI will make the medicine just cheaper?
No, as I mentioned, I think it's a question of time is money. And if you can compress that time, there is of course going to be a cost element to the use of AI itself, but hopefully the overall benefit will be that you can get medicines to patients cheaper and faster. That's my...
Yeah. No, I mean, to that point, you know, you can have a drug discovery that's faster, but when do, again, you know, the treatment of the patient gets faster?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of components to that that AI is helping and will help a lot. I think the hardest thing will be to do what is out there these days in terms of speculation, which is simulating clinical trials and avoiding them altogether. I think that requires an understanding of human biology and physiology that I'm afraid we're quite far from. Albeit, you know, I think that we've certainly modeled digitally lots of complex systems, but I think most people who don't work in biology and medicine don't understand just how complex these systems are. I assume our colleagues at DeepMind who worked on physics problems and biology problems learned what Schrödinger learned 80 years ago, which is that biology is not just physics, and as you go up in scale, the complexity of the problem goes exponentially high. And in fact, the folding problem is probably among the most kind of deterministic parts of biology. Everything else, through interaction effects, gets very complex. So, long way of saying, I think there's going to be shorter-term wins. So, for example, which patient do you want to include in a trial? Can you train through their electronic medical records and find a subset that are going to be more responsive? Not just based on diagnostics, but just based on their molecular profiles. In cancer, I'll give you another example. There's a lot of interest in screening to find early cancer. The problem is those tests create 10 times more false positives than they do true positives. What are you going to do with those people? If you put them into the diagnostic system, it'll drive cost through the roof. Can you use AI to better triage and massively reduce the number of false positives? Those are things that I think as we start taking care of it, it'll start impacting clinical care, and over time we could imagine more shortened trials, clearer endpoints. These are all things we're working on. But I don't think this notion of a digital twin of a human that we use for testing is something that we should be looking for too soon.
But what you're talking about, what kind of timeline are we talking about? Like four, five years that the bottlenecks kind of unwind?
I think the impact's being felt now, and it's kind of hard to say in what sequence, but what I was talking about is this massive disruption in dramatically shortening clinical trials. I wish it, I've been doing this for 39 years. There's nothing that would address the cost of new medicines as much as the clinical regulatory complexity and time. But I think that may be kind of a step too far to represent to society and then disappoint people on. I mean, there's already enough with AI that's causing disappointment and fear that I think going out and saying we're going to cure cancer, as some of the frontier lab people are saying as though it's a proximal goal, it's really difficult to put that out there and then realize that five years from now, you're still curing. I mean, we've been curing cancer for 70 years. The joke in the biotech industry is that if mice had a cancer problem, we would have solved it completely because we've cured every which type of mouse cancer. Humans turn out to be dramatically different than mice in their physiology. So we have to be more humble. Let me say one other thing. I would say what AI has taught us in the last few years, the new versions of AI, generative AI, is that we now know there's more we don't know than we thought there was. In other words, as a fraction of what there is to be known, we now have gone backwards because we now know that it's accessible, if only we could make measurements. So I think that the fight between the unknown and the known is going to stay interesting for a while. And that means I think as humans we have to be pretty humble in the way we go about doing it.
Laya, how do you look at this?
Yes, it deserves some applause. Why not? I'll go back to what I said at the beginning. I think it gets back to us just asking better questions. Asking questions that maybe we didn't have access to before. Or as Kiran mentioned, like we can take now an interdisciplinary approach like in the past where maybe we went really deep, of being able to look at patterns that may have been inaccessible. One of the things I've actually, you know, I've been in India for the past week and one of the areas I've been really excited to learn about, how we've been collaborating here locally and some of the local innovation is around the area of agriculture. So if I can shift maybe from the human side for a moment, we're working with an organization called ICRISAT that's based in Hyderabad, and one of the biggest challenges that we have is that sorghum, which 500 million people rely on as a food source or to feed livestock, has only really been studied in the West, the Western varietals, not the indigenous ones here. So one of the challenges that being faced in India is like how do we actually accelerate the understanding around the crop genetics and how to breed it. So we're now working with crop breeders to look at sorghum or jowar, which I have learned my word this week, to be able to map all the genes and make that freely available so the innovation can happen on the side of that. Now, as mentioned by my colleagues, there's a lot of work that needs to happen that follows that. But if we can have the breakthrough and get the inputs from the crop breeders, the inputs from the farmers up front and accelerate, take a decade's worth of time and start to crunch that together. Like imagine what this could mean for a more drought-resistant crop, something that can handle better diseases. And this is actually quite personal to me because my mom actually did sorghum research in Africa over 20 years ago and they got the World Food Prize for one of the first breakthroughs in drought-resistant sorghum. But Africa and India are still facing so many challenges and it's really amazing to see now this what might be possible with some of the opportunities of applying AI into areas that have traditionally been underrepresented and understudied. And I imagine the speed of adoption in that space is going to be lightning years faster than anything in...
Yeah, I mean, we're hopeful. And in fact, what we're doing is that's just on the seed side. We're already working with farmers in a platform, an AI-powered platform called Anthroki, with 600,000 farmers right here in India about providing AI-based insights to the farmers that are relevant for the plot of land that they have. And what's been amazing about that is through the 600,000 together, we've worked in a very collaborative way, including with state governments, on trying to increase the accuracy and performance of this in an open platform and have already exported it to nearly a dozen countries across Asia, including Japan and Vietnam.
Kiran, could AI actually make personalized medicine accessible to everyone?
