- In today’s CEO Daily: Dispatches from the Most Powerful Women Summit
- The big leadership story: More than half of all U.S. work hours might be automated by 2035
- The markets: More frantic selling in Asia as chip stocks nosedive
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning from Santa Barbara, where we’re on Day 2 of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. We’re talking with leaders here about leadership, healthcare, geopolitics, media trends, trust, the next era of wealth—and of course AI. Here are a few highlights from conversations so far.
On AI: Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Google and Alphabet, brought a pragmatic optimism to a conversation dominated by guys who don’t get out much. Porat represents one of the biggest players in the AI race and told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell that Alphabet will spend about $200 billion this year to build out capacity and even more in 2027, saying “we do see this as an opportunity that extends for quite some time.”
But Porat, who’s No. 11 on this year’s Fortune Most Powerful Women list, is more Main Street than Silicon Valley when it comes to AI’s impact. One reason may be that she came to Google in 2015 from Wall Street, bringing rigor, transparency, and discipline to a company that had moved beyond search and advertising into sprawling bets on robots, autonomous vehicles, solar-powered drones, wearables, and a bunch of other stuff.
She talked about investing in skilled trades, energy capacity, and trust around AI. As she told the MPW audience: “If we don’t collectively fortify the downside risk (of AI), we will not have the opportunity to capture the upside.”
On wealth: About $124 trillion in wealth is set to be passed down by 2048, with much of that money going to women, from both their partners and their parents. I spoke with three leaders about how those trends are shaping philanthropy, investing, entrepreneurship, and overall spending.
Yet, as Deloitte U.S. federal health sector leader Beth Meagher pointed out, the opportunities from this shift risk getting lost amid our focus on frontier models and geopolitics. “This shift is something that I think we have a tremendous opportunity to lead from the front of,” she said.
Morgan Stanley managing director Seema Hingorani sees the opportunity, too. She created a nonprofit called Girls Who Invest to get more women in the industry; Morgan Stanley also has an incubator for women starting tech businesses.
Carmen James Randolph, CEO of the Women’s Foundation of the South, is working with a new generation of philanthropists who want their dollars to solve tangible problems, like improving maternal healthcare in areas where doctors and clinics are scarce.
On leadership: Women have outpaced men in getting college and graduate degrees since the mid-1990s. While they lag in some STEM subjects, what holds many back is not skills but opportunity, desire, and other factors. As my colleague Claire Zillman discussed with a group of leaders yesterday, the rate of women being promoted into senior executive roles is slowing down.
Some of the challenges are personal. As Hayden Brown, president and CEO of freelance marketplace platform Upwork, told Zillman: “I grew up in the most pro-women household, and yet it took our board chair, probably 10 years ago, to say to me, ‘You should be a CEO.’ And I was like, ‘Really?’”
Other challenges are not unique to women. Centene CEO Sarah London talked to Sheryl Estrada about how unsettling it can be to lead a major health insurer these days. Her work on increasing access to care and investing in affordable housing can get drowned out by anger that can sometimes make CEOs a public target.
What keeps her inspired are the opportunities. “I came to Centene because I actually fundamentally believed that healthcare was at a much-needed inflection point relative to technology advancement and digitization,” she said. “I wanted to be a part of that.” She feels the opportunities are poised to grow.
Join us via the livestream for more conversations from the front lines today. Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
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