Next week, I will be joining the cast of a Hollywood blockbuster. No, not the latest Marvel or James Bond movie (I’m not good enough to compete with Aaron Taylor for the role of 007).
I’m leading a panel at the Invo8rs conference in Los Angeles focused on how to lead corporate ventures in the age of artificial intelligence.
There is a gold rush. Companies everywhere are racing to implement AI and especially large language models. Eager to get ahead of the curve. No one wants to repeat the story of the dot-com era, when many corporations lost out to emerging digital natives.
That’s why it’s so important to stop and think about what it takes to be successful. That’s what we’ll be doing on Wednesday, April 10.Th at 5pm PST. I will be accompanied by an extraordinary cast.
Yuki Matsuoka is a corporate officer of Panasonic. She is a former startup CEO, founding team member at Nest, founder of Google X, and technology guru with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon, in addition to a decade of teaching at MIT. Now, Yoky leads PanasonicWELL, the company’s exploration business based in Silicon Valley.
Yusuf Jamal is a technology executive responsible for leading multi-billion dollar business units at firms such as Skyworks, Western Digital, and Analog Devices. What sets Yusuf apart, apart from his dry wit and dedication to leading people, is that he is a serial corporate explorer. Wherever he goes, his teams create new innovations that win awards and break the mold of the semiconductor industry.
Balaji Bondeli He is a former management consultant at Deloitte. A decade ago, he was tired of the travel advice lifestyle and envisioned a completely new way of providing professional services using a crowd of experts. Today, the business he built, Deloitte Pixel, has a multi-billion dollar impact on Deloitte’s P&L.
These three leaders are among the most accomplished and experienced leaders I could imagine gathering to tackle the question: What does it take to build a new corporate venture in the age of artificial intelligence? Even with extraordinary levels of investment in AI, leading radical innovation from within existing corporations is not easy. The pressure to deliver short-term business results outweighs efforts to build for the future.
The problem with the gold rush is that corporations want short-term results to burnish their innovation credentials. The corporate explorer’s struggle is to meet this expectation with integrity. We all know that today, people are being asked to do the impossible with AI, when most of us still don’t know what it is capable of.
Some of us have been here before. The late 1990s saw similar activity in the search for Internet-based innovation. A big lesson is that the fundamentals of innovation don’t change just because a transformative technology exists. Customers still only pay to solve problems that matter to them. Corporations still invest heavily in business ideas before they truly understand the opportunity. Leaders are likely to pull back from large investments in taking innovation to scale.
I look forward to asking these questions and more in front of my A-list cast in Hollywood. I hope to see some of you there.