At CES 2026, innovators from every corner of the globe show up to the most powerful tech event in the world. We'll rally together, imagining what's next. And we'll make it real. Solving the greatest challenges facing our world and proving that technology isn't just moving us forward. It's creating new possibilities. Here, AI isn't an idea. It's intelligence in motion. The innovators, the storytellers, and the game changers come together to redefine the landscape of content, creativity, and culture. Pioneers will push healthcare beyond what we ever thought possible. From connected roads to autonomous flight, from next-gen marine tech to innovations that feed the planet, this is what drives us forward. In the halls of CES, technology doesn't just compute, it collaborates. Quantum thinkers, cyber security leaders, fintech visionaries, and robotics engineers are rewriting the rules of enterprise itself. Because when the world's most determined minds come together, we don't just predict the future, we build it. This is where bold ideas meet a global force. Where industries converge, partnerships ignite, and breakthroughs take center stage. Innovation isn't a solo act. It's a shared pursuit. CES 2026. Innovators show up.
Please welcome the president of the Consumer Technology Association, Kinsey Vibrizio.
Welcome everyone. We are thrilled to have you here with us today. Here at CES, we spend a lot of time talking about what's next. But today is about something a little different. It's about how leaders are actually thinking through those changes in real time. And that's why we are excited to host a live interview taping of the All-In podcast. Yeah, you can clap. I love the All-In Podcast. I'm happy that they're here. A show known for candid, unfiltered conversations about technology, capital, and leadership. And for me personally, All-In has been an audio companion. I have been listening since day one, and it's been part of my weekly podcast lineup ever since the show started. The conversations don't just react to the news. They challenge assumptions and push listeners to think more critically about the forces shaping our world. To kick us off, here's a quick look at why AllIn has become such an essential listen.
The number one podcast in the world. Any lessons from your time in Washington DC? The government is basically unfixable. Job creation, transfer, displacement, etc. We are busier than ever. Predicting the economy is a really hard thing to do. I'm not letting you off the hook. Can you get it under control? Is there the will in Washington to allow you to do that? Well, the biggest thing I think is growth because we can grow our way out. What's the path forward, Mark Tucker? I think we've forgotten about entrepreneurs. I'm an angel investor, so I'm kind of biased, but I mean, I agree with you. Yeah, I think it's a billion dollar company. People know me for the Uber investment four $5 million valuation, but there's When do I flip that? Well, yeah, it's going to take a little more. Did you say it's Robin Hood? I'm an investor. Oh my god. So, yeah. So, I screwed up. It's a $6 billion company. You would have owned 20%. Yeah. And Vlad asked you to be on the board and you didn't do it. Exactly. So, good news, guys. Welcome back. Thank you. It's good to be home. Megan, people were down on the market, but you stuck with it. Compact actually started, you know, with the original luggable. When you started this, did they tell you you're an idiot? Yeah. But you did it anyway. Yeah. So, the last time I did this podcast, I think Jason was a huge to me because you can't the vice president here in DC. You have to be nice to me now, Jason. Oh, it's on. Not just our models, but all models tend to do better if you threaten them. If you threaten them like with physical violence. Yes. It's your favorite podcast. It's your podcasters favorite podcast. The All-In podcast.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your favorite bestie, Jason Calakanis. Besties are back. Let your winners ride. Thanks for coming out everybody. We're going to have a great full contact super hardcore discussion about the future specifically around AI which I think is the most important theme not only of CES 2026 as we've seen with all the incredible gadgets chips being launched self-driving but it's going to be the most important transformation of our lifetimes. I think everything we've seen over the last 30 years of technology from the PC revolution to cloud computing to the internet, mobile, all of that is going to be dwarfed in comparison to the impact that AI is going to have on society. If you're here at CES, you know that you're here for that reason. And we've got two amazing guests who are going to join us to have this debate. And additionally, I've brought my box, a box filled with all the ghosts and gadgets of Christmas past. And we're going to go through those at the end of our discussion. But here's a quick video of our guests who will be joining me today.
From boardrooms to the White House and beyond, Mackenzie's influence in business is virtually unparalleled. It's one of the largest and most influential consulting firms in the world. Enterprise can move faster than any of us expected, which is good news because these problems aren't going to be the problems of the next generation. They're going to be the problems of our leadership generation. Making this system of government better on both efficiency and effectiveness is key for economic growth and for national defense. We also think that some of the private sector insights that we have brought to the public sector can drive innovation. Our next guest leads venture capital firm General Catalyst with 40 billion in assets under management as of midyear. Our aspirations in venture capital is to be the best seed firm in the world. The decisions we're making, the companies we're building are going to impact the world for centuries to come.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Bob Sternfelds and Hamont Tasia.
All right, gentlemen. Welcome. All right. Let's do it. Let's do it. So, we're here at CES 2026. It's really interesting to watch this conference get this new life breathed into it. We had this period during COVID when CES obviously had to take a pause and we were wondering in Silicon Valley, hey, is anybody going to show up at CES? Is it still relevant? Do people care? And now look at this. This is one of the largest ones ever and everybody's here. I saw Lisa from AMD, Jensen from Nvidia, Uber, Neuro, Whimo. The change is amazing. I think maybe to start you spent a career at McKenzie trying to accelerate change and in venture capital, you know, literally building these businesses from the seed stage on. How do you look at the pace of innovation and change in this past two years since Chat GPT was launched compared to the first 30 years of our careers were all of a certain Gen X age. Compare the last two or three years to the 30 before it.
Yeah. Well, first Jason, thanks and it's great to be up here with you guys and yeah, I would just say this week is amazing. I think there's over 150,000 folks here this week. And you talk about CES being back. I think CES is back and that's great, right? And with all of these things happening, I think there is such a premium on folks from different perspectives getting together because that's where new ideas are created. And my big hope and why we're here is when you mix and mingle with different folks, you come up with new things. And the world needs new things and what I love is you mentioned a lot of the tech leaders. What's exciting for this is I think everybody sees tech as part of the equation and so when I look at the folks here in CES, you see not only the technology leaders, the investors, but you see folks from almost every industry vertical that are here now because they know that technology doesn't sit on the side, it's central to everything we do. And I get to your question, look, I think we're moving at literally warp speed now. It's just night and day different. It's almost a BC A type of thing when you can see the change of pace. And I haven't met a CEO yet that isn't talking about how do I get my organization moving faster. It's quite frankly less about strategy. It's more about organizational speed.
Hey, how does this feel compared to our first, you know, couple of decades where companies would take two or three years to release a product and now companies are releasing products in two or three weeks, two or three months.
Yeah. So, look, the world has completely changed, right? We've often said this is peak ambiguity. You have massive geopolitical change. You have an incredible amount of change around every country trying to drive strategic autonomy in different industries and all those dynamics keep changing alliances the new world order everything and then underneath that our tool of implementation as technology that keeps changing right so what the technologies can build today versus what the LLM could do let's say two years ago or November 22 let's say when chat GBD came about is fundamentally different so what are you building towards as to what the world's going to look like so you can have enduring value and then what are you building with where the technologies you're using aren't going to obsoles and destroy your value proposition over time. It's just all kinds of change and so it's a really dynamic time and the other thing you will see is you know we invested in stripe in 2010 it became a hundred billion dollar company let's say 12 13 years later you look at anthropic which we're also investors and that goes from $60 billion last year to you know a couple hundred billion dollars so like and by the way with good economic progress these are not pie in the sky valuations they're based on actual growth of the business. Well, that goes back to your point, which is the compression of how fast value can create when code self-writes and access to distributions change. So, fundamentally, it's just really exciting and I think it's going to accelerate from here.
This was one of the statistics we would look at in venture capital. Hey, how long does it take this company to get to a hundred million in revenue? How long does it take to get to a billion in revenue? Unpack anthropic and that journey because this company's revenue and you have open AI obviously they're contemporary trending towards $20 billion in revenue a year. Where's Anthropic at? And what's the revenue mix? Where does the revenue come from?
Well, look, so Anthropic builds language models. It's got one of some of the best models out there. There's a couple of companies that are doing a good job of that. And then they've got cloud on top which is to me the essence of transforming the engineering department of the enterprise right and that's a killer application where everybody is now using these tools. So that business when we invested was doing about $880 million which was a 10x growth from the year before. 10x year over year. 10x growth the year before and then this last year they've announced they're growing another 10x or more. And so when you look at that and we invested at the $60 billion valuation assuming it's going to be like 3x growth from there because those are staggering numbers and it does 10x can't predict it but to see adoption is so fast and so you look at that and say so we ended up investing at you know a 8 9 10 billion kind of run rate business at 60 billion that's the cheapest deal that got done last year in venture capital on a financial basis. So, we just have to get our head around what does scale really mean and what you know are we in the business of creating what we used to think was like can we create decoorns now we're talking about can we create trillion dollar companies right I mean that's not a pie in the sky idea with anthropic and open AI and a couple others game changed scale of technology is fundamentally different in what it can do.
Bob what's behind this massive revenue ramp because you get to see all the incumbent businesses you get to see the elite businesses that are growing, you know, two or three times X each year. You also get to see the ones that are struggling and then you see these large numbers and 10x year over year growth. What's driving this in your mind? And is it sustainable? I mean, that's the other question.
Um, I hate to give you the classic consultant answer, but I you know, I do think it depends. And I think we're at a tipping point this year. And I'll tell you why. I think what's underpinning this 10x and 10x you know we work with most of the large enterprise in the world across all industry verticals and what we have seen is a huge uptake of leveraging these technologies like anthropic we're leveraging anthropic and so large enterprise is using technology at a scale and rate that they haven't before and if you look at IT spend as a percent of revenue etc all this stuff has gone up and I think that is propelling the 10x to 10x. The conundrum is, and it's been widely written about, realizing enterprise at scale value in non-technology companies is proving harder than people think.
Got it. So, in plain English, that means, hey, you've got a travel company. There's somebody deploying AI and you're watching what's happening at Tesla or Google, and they're getting these phenomenal results, but maybe that legacy business is having a harder time achieving those results. I'll make it even simpler. Typical non-tech CEO might say, 'Hey, Bob, do I listen to my CFO or my CIO right now?' Right? CFO is saying, 'We spent all this money. Why do we need to be the fast adopter? I'm not seeing the ROI yet. Can we pause?' CIO is saying, 'Are you freaking crazy? This is the moment that if we don't, we'll be disrupted.' We think, now I will say the shining part is I think there's a path where you bring those two together as allies. and you say, 'Yeah, but let's rethink this. Get out of pilot purgatory. Rethink the reorganization, all this stuff.' There is a path, but I think right now most CEOs are getting torn a bit between, 'Do I listen to my CFO or do I listen to my CIO?'
And I think this is a really good jump off point, Hamont, of your strategy at General Catalyst. You and I have known each other for a long time. You really a long time, decades, and you always prided yourself on being the great seed fund. We're gonna get to these companies when they're $10 million and 10 people and put that first check in. But then I saw this news item go by a month ago that you raised 9 billion and then I see you're buying companies. So, are you out of the seed business and now doing random acts of private equity? What's going on here? Explain to me the strategy and general catalyst.
How much time do we have? It's going to take some time. So, look, I would say we very much view ourselves as a venture capital firm at our core and a seed venture capital for our core because our true north from for the 25 years we've been around has been meeting founders where they are. And what that means is essentially help them navigate ambiguity in the past when they're sort of beginning and the business isn't clear all the way to figuring out how to scale in the complex markets that they go into. So everything we've done has been in that context of creating these catalysts, the flexible capital they need, the policy capabilities they need, the market access they need, and those set of relationships globally to actually build enduring companies. So that hasn't changed. So why did we go acquire a health system in Ohio? It was a nonprofit. We worked with the attorney general, converted it. And I say this by the way with a great sense of responsibility because that's a community of in Akron Ohio that we take care of. So that hospital has to continue operations in all the dimensions it takes care of with people. Well, we bought it to actually have a place where we can work with our founders and transform with AI create abundance and resilience for this health system so you can take care of the people a lot better. Okay. And if we did that then we can go do that for the other hundreds of systems across the country and be able to do that. So some of it is that's market access. It's very hard for healthcare startups to go deploy successfully at scale in these systems. We are going to go show how we're going to actually go on the ground. We're do with them and show the world how so it can transform the health system. The your other point about buying companies we look at that as there's a lot of workforce transformation happening. Bob and I talk a lot about this. I think work fundamentally in these companies is going to change. So if you're a call center in an emerging country today, the a declining asset value because you know it's going to be displaced with AI. So we look at that and say well but those are customers on the other side. If we bought that at a as a piece of the puzzle to work with an early stage founder to learn how to quickly accelerate adoption of AI into the call center space and serve these customers and scale a lot faster. The compressed value creation we're talking about that is a new playbook. So this is not about trying to be PE. This is about acquiring businesses in PE that actually have declining value but have important customers that need to be served and help them get to that AI transformation that Bob's talking about faster by getting our founders in there.
This is extraordinary, Bob, when you think about it. Just so the audience can put their head around this venture capitalist used to back founders to then be the barbarians at the gate to try to take on these big industries. Now these big industries in some cases are in significant decline, struggling and the venture capitalists are coming in and saying we'll just buy the castle, open the drawbridge. We're going to buy it so that we can take our startups and accelerate whether it's healthcare, financial services or customer support and outsourcing, business process outsourcing. And essentially we don't care about that business economically necessarily as much as we care about it for access to that customer base. Running McKenzie, this is a playbook that is like coming out of the future in a time capsule and saying we're going to just upend the entire ecosystem. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it's I just gave a talk at a university and was talking to some potential folks to join us and I said, 'Look, I'm jealous. I'm jealous of all of you because you have a lot more time to do what we do than I do. And you're doing it at a time where it's going to be a lot more exciting because if you just link this and hey, what I love is and effectively you're creating a new asset class, right? This is not private equity. This is about how do you transform incumbent entities into something different, right? Private equity typically optimizes an existing asset class at a certain scale. This is about transformation. So you think of large existing enterprise and I think you have a choice. You have a choice of transform or die. And so there's this wonderful moment and but because of some of the incumbent advantages, I wouldn't say that it's predetermined which way you're going to go. Right. You can actually do this quite quickly and I think you're showing the power of private capital and actually do this.
So we've chatted a lot about this right. So one of the things when you think about transforming a large enterprise what do you really need? You need a few pieces. One is you need data infrastructure that can ready you for the enterprise. You need the models adapted to you and then you actually need a new model for how the workforce is going to function because you have agents and humans and there's a massive change management exercise. So a lot of our partnership has been about figuring out okay what is that new model going to be to transform these businesses and what does that mean when you get on the ground you look at department by department take HR how do you drive transformation of healthcare and how you take care of your people that process is horrible today and we have a business called transparent that goes and essentially creates abundance in that regard which uses AI so you have direct access pigentically to all kinds of healthcare services take yourself and then be able that they be routed whether you need a surgery or you need to have cancer therapy or mental health and do it in a way that it's seamless cost effective and helps enterprises take control of your cost structure you need coding to fundamentally transform that's what anthropic does there are companies working on transforming the call centers there companies working on transforming your sales and marketing but then when you have these technologies in there how are the actual people going to do their work in concert with these agentic capabilities that is a whole new model and you know you guys are inventing I'll talk about that because there's a lot of innovation that needs to happen in that whole sort of workforce transformation that I think is ultimately where rubber's going to meet the road on how quickly teams embrace it customers embrace it and we can actually diffuse AI into these businesses.
And Bob you've had to deal with this internally at your organization what's the right size and what happens when a piece of technology takes a career and takes out the first five years what happens to an organization when you just basically gut the first five years of development. And this is why some people in the economy are looking at AI and they're scared and they're looking at AI and saying is this going to benefit me, my family, my kids who are graduating from school if this technology if and I think management consulting is the perfect place to look at it. Tell me honestly, the first couple of years you're training up one of these really smart kids to write up, you know, reports and do analysis that can be done with AI today perfectly, close to perfectly.
Yeah. Um, so I'll give you a couple stats first on us, then more general. 25 squared and 40,000 and 25,000. What do I mean by that? So, let's look at McKenzie as a bit of an incubator. The 25 squared is we're simultaneously doing two things at the same time. So we have client-facing folks which most of you in the audience would know and think about when you think about a Mackenzie consultant. We're growing that body at 25% next year. 25%. Unprecedented number of new hires because the work is changing. They're not doing the stuff that you talked about. We saved 1.5 million hours in search and synthesis last year, but we're dividending that to solve more complicated problems and do different things. You guys are probably sick of McKenzie charts out there. You know, we have agents that do this. They just gave you 2.5 million of them in the last six months. I want to get rid of charts. But the consultants are doing different things. We're adding 25% to that body. So, they're moving up the stack. They're moving up the stack and doing these more complicated problems. At the same time though about half our firm are non-client facing folks. We're down 25% in that group with 10% increase in output. And so simultaneously and I know this is hard also particularly for folks to get we're going to be adding and shrinking simultaneously with the two halves. And this has never happened in the history of the firm. Our model has always been synonymous that growth only occurs with total headcount growth. Now it's actually splitting. We can grow in this part, the client facing side, and we can shrink in this part and have aggregate growth in total. And that's a new paradigm and a new dynamic.
We're seeing this in venture. You and I were around for the days where you'd give a team $3 million and they would come back in 18 months having spent it on data centers and building a team of 20 people, 30 people, and then we'd see the first version of the product 18 months later. And then the three billion now. Yeah, it's insane just how much more is getting done with less. And so do we worry about society and our industry's ability to communicate to society this change? Because if you were to tell an average business executive 10 years ago, prepare to hire 25% more people on this side of the business and cut 25% on this side of the business. In the same 18 month period, their head would explode. Exactly. What? Why? How come? It doesn't make any sense. And then young people are graduating and they're sending out a 100, 200 resumes, getting no job offers. We were sitting here 10 years ago. Every graduate from a decent school was like, I have an Uber, a Coinbase, and a Google offer. Which one should I take for 150K? And those offers just aren't there. So, how do we communicate better as an industry? And then what's the advice to young people coming into the workforce?
Yeah, look, every company in I'll just say Silicon Valley, but broadly in the tech industry, in the startup industry, what was it? Essentially, it looks like a C corp with a bunch of engineers. But in the world where code self-writes, what is that next level innovation? What are these companies actually going to do? I think that's ultimately the transition we're going through in what does innovation actually mean. It's going to be less about being able to write code fat. It's much more going to be about systemically how do we adopt this into the world and capabilities to your point about ambiguity in the opening because we don't know about the capabilities of these technologies or the how the world is shaping up. There's a lot of ambiguity. So to me the companies that do really well and the way we guide the founders a lot of it is become iterative constantly change constantly move forward as opposed to what used to be before was become precise find this narrow edge create your growth loop and go build a company. Now it's like constantly iterate and in order to have the customers give you the license to iterate comes down to trust and relationships. So founders that are very good at engaging with customers, building trusting relationships and say, 'Hey, we're going to go figure this out together. We know how to leverage this technology, but we don't really know how where it leads and what's what the possibilities are.' Well, we co-create. And so the advice I always give is it's all about radical collaboration. In this next phase, we got to figure this out together where different stakeholders that all touch a system are figuring out what this means to them and then what it means in terms of an overall optimization and the transformation that we can do with it.
You know, one maybe exciting part to this because I think you know, you framed it as you're a graduate and you how do you get into the workforce and is it getting tougher and we did a little bit of work that said what kind of skills are folks going to need in an AI infused world, right? From an employer's point of view, less the startup, but you're more an at-scale enterprise. What can the models not do? And so therefore, what skills will humans play? And the work isn't done but came back with three key ideas. What can the models not do? Aspire, set the right aspiration. Do you go to low earth orbit? Do you go to the moon? Do you go to Mars? That's a uniquely human capability. So how do you look for the skills about aspiring and getting others to believe in the aspiration? So leadership and goal setting. Human judgment, right? And we've seen a lot around in this room eval. But there's no right and wrong in these models. And so how do you set the right parameters? The architecture based on firm values, based on societal norms, whatever. How do you build the skills to set what the right parameters are? And then finally, true creativity, right? The models are inference models. The next most likely step, how do you think about orthogonal stuff? And so some of the work we've been doing with large enterprises, if you believe in some of that, it can take you back to challenging some of your assumptions on where you look for talent. It actually means that where you went to school matters a lot less. And so, do you start looking for raw intrinsics? Can you widen the base? Can you actually look at, let's take a tech background, not which university you graduated from, but what does your GitHub profile look like? Let's actually get to the content. And could that actually start meaning that a wider set of people can enter the workforce with different pathways?
One of the things you said which I really resonates is around creativity
Because when we were going to college, it was all about learning how to solve problems really well. But now in a world where we have this technology that can solve problems for us, it really is about asking the right questions. It's like going back to the Socratic dialogue. It is about creativity and who can imagine best what the world's going to look like and then leverage these technologies to shape the world towards that. To your point about vision and teaching our kids, I get this question a lot about how I want my kids growing up. It's about learning how to ask the right questions versus solving hard problems. It's a very different mindset, and it is about curiosity and being like kids again. It is about challenging your curiosity. Can we actually rethink our pedagogy in a way that we can develop this next generation to be more than just factoring polynomials in seventh grade, which is what our system looks like today.
Yeah. The advice I've been giving to young people is there's nobody coming for you. There is no training program. You have to make that for yourself. Do not go in through the front door with a resume. Just email the CEO of the company and redesign their landing page and say, 'These are the three things that I think could be better and I saw you speak on this podcast. I think your company's incredible. I would love to come work there and I did this spec work.' Now, people are like, 'Why should I do free work to get a job to prove you actually have a skill that is meaningful?' You're not going to be able to get into a training program. So many folks now in corporate America, especially the people who are onboarding, are just like hiring somebody and training them is going to take longer than building an agent. I can build an agent. Young people coming into the workforce I have to train are annoying. Setting up an agent who just does the work is easy. That's the game on the field right now that people don't want to talk about. Which means to stand out, you're going to have to show drive. You're going to have to show passion. And what college is doing that? What college is teaching that? What course is that?
We look, I think there's a massive gap in resilience.
Resilience because what you've got under that is you're going to get knocked down.
The question is, do you get back up?
And how do you get back up? I think the educational system today doesn't necessarily build institutional or individual capability in resilience. If we could wave a magic wand, just to go off on a complete tangent here, what should the education system look like in 2026? Because you're buying businesses. You have one in healthcare. That's one of the three hardest businesses to make change in historically. The other two here in America that have the most regulation, are the most expensive, and are the hardest, and that Americans are suffering under the most are housing and education. Those are the three big ones. When I run for president, that's going to be my platform. I'm going to solve those three. But go ahead and solve education for us right now. And are you going to buy a college next?
Basically buying businesses that make no money. Is that where we're going?
No. The businesses that are the most...
Yeah. But the ones that need to endure for the longest. Actually, that's the way I look at it. So here's the thing about education. This idea that we spend 22 years learning and then we spend 40 years working is a broken idea. If the learning of technology and the development of technology is going to be so dynamic, what about going from a four-year college to a lifelong college, which is actually your relationship with learning as a lifelong skilling and reskilling outcome experience? We've talked about this before as well. There are some innovative college presidents that are thinking about that. First of all, better business, better lifetime value if you're a college and you actually have a client or a student for perpetuity versus paying you for four years. And much more useful for us to be able to go and have that capability and constantly learn what these technologies are doing and how the workforce is evolving and how to stay ahead in terms of where the opportunity is. So learning has to become much more fluid, and we need to become a community of lifelong learners as we adapt to a world where AI is diffusing through us over the years.
And I would just add, I'm with you on this. The system built close to 700 years ago was designed around a high fixed cost of libraries and professors to take you out for a finite period of time to learn and then effectively you're set off into the workforce. If you start to think about the half-life of skills getting shorter and shorter, we've done some work at our global institute that said for an employer, the return on investment that you give an employee in terms of skills has shrunk by about half over the last 30 years. It used to be about seven years return, it's less than four years, about 3.6 years now return, and that's only getting shorter as things change. So if you believe that, I think you start to pivot to: are we teaching people to continue to learn new things as opposed to master a particular subject? Do you have that ability? One of the things we've now indexed on, and I mentioned this, 40,000 and 25,000, that is the number of humans we have and the number of personalized agents we have as of last week in McKenzie. I think we'll be at parity before the end of this year. So you're literally deploying agents that can do a full 360-degree trusted job function.
Where is it working really well and where is it not working well?
It works when you have a specific domain area where value can be created. So for us, that's in structured problem solving, search and synthesis, and more effective communication. But where I was going with this, the skill is: are you skilling people to actually become superhuman by leveraging agents?
Right. That becomes a skill, and I don't think we're actually equipping that right now. It's a bit more random or sometimes excluded in the classroom as opposed to embracing it and figuring out how to take advantage of it.
It's almost like we need to train people to go from being part of the orchestra to everybody being the conductor and everybody having their own orchestra of agents working for them. I always looked to startups because they're resource constrained. I was at a dinner in Singapore and I had a dozen founders there. I said, 'Has anybody hired anybody in the last 60 days?' They all raised their hands. Then I said, 'How many of you have an HR person who wrote the job description?' Nobody raised their hand. I said, 'How many of you typed into an LLM, write a job description for this?' All 12 hands go up. So now the entire blocking and tackling of HR has been writing the job description and sorting through the resumes. So then I asked the next question: how did you sort through the resumes coming in? And they said half of them had built agents to sort through the resumes and stack rank them using AI. I was like, 'Whoa, holy cow.' This is like the typing pool, the mail room. For those of you under 40, we had a room called the typing pool, then one called the mail room where packages came in. All those went away. That floor of the building got redeployed. I think that's what we're going to see. The HR department, the legal department all getting compressed.
It's already happening. As we think about our own transformation in our business, we basically say every department needs to have AI teammates now. Are those AI teammates like the co-pilot or pilot? Can you fully empower them to do stuff, or are they giving you efficiency? That depends on how well the technology works, how complex the problem is, how severe the problem is. In healthcare, for example, if it's life and death decisions, you want humans making those today because that technology isn't as reliable. So having a framework that says every one of your departments is going to have these AI agents, if you're not doing that, then you're not preparing yourself for this next phase. That's a lot of what you're seeing. You're already going to be one to one. That's an enormous ratio. But the problem I think Jason alluded to earlier is there's all this potential, but folks aren't thinking through the dynamic implications in their enterprise model versus the static. The static might be, 'Hey, there's all these departments. I can apply this. I'll radically shrink it. I'll reduce the number of layers in an organization. I may slow hiring on the inbound.' To your point, the dynamic is, 'Okay, but what does your company look like in five years time?'
And what I also often ask a CEO is, 'Okay, you're doing all this stuff. What's the pathway to your job?'
How does somebody get to your job in the org of the future? You had a pathway. It's not going to be that same pathway, but if you don't hire inbound folks, you can't continually laterally bring in a CEO.
It's literally like taking the bottom four rungs off the ladder to save money today.
Yeah. And then everybody's jumping up trying to get in the organization. It's like, 'Well, we don't have a path there.' You're going to have to be really thoughtful about making that investment. It feels like the first two years of AI were about cutting jobs, and we really need to think about, 'Hey, it's not just about efficiency, it's about opportunity.'
What's that other 25%? That's what I think we got to lean into.
Let's take a little diversion here before I open my box.
My box here of all the great CES innovations over the last 20 years. Physical AI. We've been talking very cerebrally about what's happening in enterprises, what's happening in software, but self-driving is probably the theme. I would dub 2026 CES as self-driving CES. I will dub 2027 as robotics, humanoid robotics specifically. We're starting to see people showing off all these incredible robots here, but I think consumers will be experiencing them in 2027. Consumers are experiencing this year self-driving. Nuro and Lucid have an incredible product. Zoox has been here obviously. Elon's doing great things with Roboaxi. It feels like he's closing in on a solution and getting very close. Waymo obviously is leading the pack. But then you also have Pony AI. This is a global race. What will the world look like in 2026 in terms of self-driving? And then any second and third order impacts of those, and then do the same for robotics.
If you go around the world today, you go to Europe, you go to the Middle East, there is a focus on interesting luxury products. There's a market for it. BYD and a lot of these Chinese companies are actually penetrating deeply everywhere. These companies have all the features and functionality and they're really low cost. So one thing is that the dynamic of the auto industry, European auto makers are all very dejected because they don't know how they're going to compete with the Chinese industry. The US has innovation in self-driving, which allows you to say the next generation of winning automotive companies will take advantage of this platform shift. The US has the technology, but it doesn't have the manufacturing capabilities to actually make it as cost-effectively as a Chinese maker is going to be. So it's not easy to figure out how the world order on automotive is going to reshift around the world. Part of the physical AI and the use of AI in manufacturing is to figure out how to design and manufacture next generation products right here in the US in a way that mimics the cost advantages of China, so that our innovation can then carry the day for us to be the global leaders yet again in this next phase. We have a company rebuilding manufacturing that's focusing on this, for example. There's a lot of focus that needs to be on that because if it's self-driving and it's not cost effective, some of us will buy it, but it's never going to be a mainstream product because cost has a reserve price that really shifts the demand patterns around automotive. We should talk about that. But we got to get the AI right and we got to get the manufacturing cost right as well.
No, I think there's a massive coming down the cost curve on this. I'm with you, Jason. I think we're going to see literally over the next 12 to 24 months a massive transformation. I think the race is afoot between a western stack and a Chinese stack on this, and then the rest of the world will be interesting as a battleground to see where that plays out. You and I were talking a little bit about this. I think that is a massive trend. I think a larger trend will be the trend to robotics, not just for human interaction but in manufacturing. When you think about the challenges that the western world faces, take the US. I was talking to the CEO of one of the large contract manufacturers, and she has 50,000 job openings right now for US manufacturing jobs in America that she can't fill. Our demographics aren't getting better on this front. Germany is even worse. Korea is another level. I think the only way that you build resilient supply chains at the cost point that you're talking about is robotics at the heart. This race is wide open. Korea leads the way in robots per 10,000 right now. Germany and China are tied at second, and the US is a distant third. So there's a real race. You talked about the autonomy thing. I would actually jump to the robotics thing and wonder how do I...
One of the issues in robotics is that when you build the LLMs, you could dump them in the cloud, experiment with something called ChatGPT, and it becomes pervasive. If you have good robotics models, what's next? You don't have a hardware capability that's like an API infrastructure that diffuses those models fast. So there's a lot that needs to get built. I actually think robotics will be slower than people think in terms of really taking hold. But it's essential to go lead in that if you're going to lead in manufacturing and therefore have that core advantage to play up the stack in industries like automotive. There's no other way to do it.
Yeah. I don't want to name drop, but I went two Sundays ago to Tesla with Elon and I visited the Optimus lab. There were a large number of people working on a Sunday at 10 a.m. I saw Optimus 3. I can tell you now, nobody will remember that Tesla ever made a car. They will only remember the Optimus, and he is going to make a billion of those. It is going to be the most transformative technology product ever made in the history of humanity. Because what LLMs are going to enable those products to do is understand the world and then do things in the world that we don't want to do. I believe it'll be a one-to-one ratio of humans to Optimus. I think he's already won, but I don't want to speak out of school. But I do have a box. We go to the box. I have a box. These are all really interesting technologies that we all got to see. How many people owned one of these? Michael Douglas made this famous. Remember Wall Street on the beach making trades? There was an amazing AT&T 'You Will' commercial. This was one of them: 'You'll be able to work remote from the beach.' What is the equivalent of this today? What do you think we're going to look back on this year and laugh at in 30 years? This is something from the 80s, so I guess this is 30 years ago. What are we going to look at that we're all enamored with today that we'll kind of get a laugh out of?
Well, I'll tell you. By the way, I love it. It says 'California Mobile Phone' on this. That was like the brand associated. Two memories come to mind for me on this one. First was envy, because when I started, only the most senior people could get one of these and I couldn't. I wanted one.
$4 a minute? What was it, three or four dollars a minute?
And the battery lasted about 30 minutes.
Exactly. Some new associate doesn't get one of these.
Did you have your first mobile phone?
Too young for that? You're such a liar. You had the StarTac like me.
But the second memory, and this was made infamous, was one of the great failures that we had. We did a project for AT&T in the mid-80s that said these things were never going to take off. Cell phones were going to really get going. So you can put it on the...
I don't know why you burned me with this one. Something today, to answer your question, think about a lot of the eyeglass innovation that's happening. This was with your ears. The innovation we're trying to do with the eyes on how to intelligently navigate. I think there are so many attempts that have not worked in the last one here or something. There we go.
It's a really good segue because here's the Google Glass.
Now, as ridiculous as I look right now, and I can hear the cameras taking my picture, and you will not be spared because you'll be wearing them as well. I remember when Larry and Sergey started walking around with these. In fact, Larry, I was at a party and he came on the dance floor with these, and I said, 'Larry, take those off. All the girls are going to stop dancing if you keep walking around with them.' But if you think about this product, why did they stop making this? They should have kept iterating.
This was AR before AR. You see right through it.
