Transcript
**** · Welcome onto our stage Mo Gaudat.
**** · Thank you so much. It is lovely to be here. I have not been to Mumbai for around 9 years and you may not notice the difference. I absolutely notice the difference. It's incredible the amount of advancement and progress just the city but also everything and how everything is is happening. And I and I have to say it is it's a bit of a challenge because the world is changing again. So we have to beat them again, It's quite interesting how fast things are. And I want to take 30 minutes that I have today to talk to you about what I believe is the is history's biggest opportunity, biggest distrau disruption at the same time. So history's biggest dilemma if you want.
**** · So I want to share this from two experiences. is one experience is up to 2018 I had been at Google for 12 years by then ran half of Google's operations globally and then was the chief business officer of Google X so a lot of the AI that you see today was developed within our labs and and I sometimes look at them and think of them as my babies yeah I apologize for having done that but it's our reality now the other experience is what you have heard about Emma. Love. So, Emma is a startup that I founded, at inception of the idea was September last year. We started working on it around November and we launched in on Valentine's Day at a valuation of $100 million, eight weeks of of development work plus four weeks because we decided to rewrite the code six times. So from a world where it would have taken me somewhere around what I would say if I had started Emma in 2022 it would have taken me 350 engineers and four years to launch on February 2026.
**** · If I had launched it I did in November, it took me less than three months and four of us. It's me, my co-founder, a brilliant engineer. So three geeks and a wonderful young lady that's running our social media and that's it. So you have to im Thank you. So you have to imagine that the world has changed, And it has changed in ways that we need to address. There is a lot of hype h happening around AI and there is a lot of reality happening about AI. And I think the biggest challenge for everyone in this room is to distinguish between them. Because if the difference between what is hype and what is reality, you'll be able to make decisions quick enough to lead on the realities, And so if there is one thing to know about artificial intelligence to and the hype around AI today is that it is underhyped.
**** · Okay. Everything that you hear about AI is not as big as the reality of AI.
**** · And I say that because for all of us in the room who are in leadership positions, we're not as geeky as my co-founder or my brilliant engineer, I'm I'm reasonably as geeky. But because you were not that geeky, we understand AI at a level that is slightly above the reality of the code. So I'll give you a very clear example. Huh? I was we had a deadline on some piece of code. Myself and Senad, my co-founder, we decided that we needed to finish it within two days. He said it's impossible mo I have to move. So, he was moving from home to home, city to city, and I have to move and I have to call all of those agents and so on. And I said, why would you do that? Let's just hack an agent to do that for you, And within 20 minutes, we had an agent call 52 moving companies on the phone, call them, detect their language, speak to them in their language, **** · describe all of the details of this home, that home, what he wants, when he wants it, and so on. ask for proposals, get the proposals on email, look at all of them, sort them, give that give us two recommendations, send my co-founder just because he's a geek, responded to the agent and said, "Yeah, I this one, but can you negotiate for 15% more?" So, it picked up the phone, called the, the moving company, got 15% more, got the proposal, signed it, sent it back, and the movers showed up on the day. now, that productivity is real, but it's not accessible to all of us. It's not accessible to all of us. Why? Because that little bit at the end, the interface that creates that has not yet been created. So part of the hype that we go through is that people think AI, we get so much hype around agents and open claw and all of those stories, but the reality is not there yet. The reality is not there yet because you're not that geeky. The geeks know that the reality is there. Now, the other big hype is AGI because everyone talks about, when AGI hits, when AGI hits. And yes, when AGI hits, it's a moment of singularity. the world completely changes.
**** · But we don't need the AGI to build incredible things that get to a hundred million dollar valuations in 9 weeks. Do you do you realize that with today's AI, not AGI, you can and I say that publicly, wipe out Oracle, and every other SAS Microsoft and all of the legacy of all of Office and Windows and whatever, every cobalt line of code that's ever been written, you could build a new environment. And by the way, if you're the partner that's providing those, expect to be wiped out.
**** · And that is a world that really requires a sense of urgency and understanding that someone can walk in today anthropic yesterday saying we can rewrite the code we can write we can rewrite every ATM code that's ever on the planet and I have seen that with our own the technology development that reality is just one phase shift delayed do you understand there is there are a couple of people somewhere air in India today sitting together saying how do I build something that walks into an ERP system understands the entire database rewrite it from scratch okay how do I write a new method of developing documents that's not Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a is an 80s technology do you understand that and you have to somehow recognize that this is coming absolutely no doubt about it AI is not overhyped it's phase shifted and underhyped so there will be one day when that curve will go and then even when you think about AGI itself h you have to understand that the way we developed AI in the last 25 years is very different than the way we develop it now we use selfdeveloping AI coding itself we have synthetic training data. So AI developing the training data for AI, we have scientific AI that discovering new materials, new mathematics, And we have again from other than the big models that America tries to sell the to the world, we have smaller and smaller edge models, okay, that are way more capable at doing things than the big hype that open AI wants you to expect to imagine that the world is made of. What does that mean?
**** · It means as I said that you are now faced with the largest opportunity on the planet because if you've ever if you're old enough me and you've lived through the time when all of your music was on tapes and then you had to move them to CDs and then you have to move them to the platforms and now I'm moving them back to CDs. Every time all of the music I had ever purchased I had to purchase again. an entire industry was rebuilt just by changing from CDs from tapes to CDs, That technology replacement cycle happened in your lifetime many times. electric cars and so on and so forth. So, we have this technology replacement cycle today.
**** · And believe it or not, no nation on the planet and no room on in the planet today is more capable of doing this than this room. We're the geeks, where the techies that can look at all of this tech and as we supported it for so many years, we can build it again in a replacement cycle, so this is the biggest opportunity on the planet. We can also build things Emma that are completely unprecedented.
**** · It's a completely new way of dating and finding love and almost the arranged marriage of India but made using an AI and fit for today's world of I want butterflies and want I want my I want him to complete my words and you can do that today you couldn't imagine being able to do that using traditional programming a while back at the same time there is a big threat because I'll have to be very open.
**** · The hype around everyone losing their jobs is again face shifted. It's a few years away, but in those few years, you're going to have to make a choice now that will position you either trying to protect your job for a few years by saying, "No, no, no, no. We're very, very happy with our ERP, " Or you're going to have to jump on the bandwagon and say, "Yeah, absolutely.
**** · I'm going to, rip it all out, test and try and experiment and get to something very, very cheaply that is way better that than what I have now. The first ones will keep their jobs, but probably with a lot more resistance and declining income.
**** · The other ones will create businesses that are hundreds of millions of dollars of worse, And you can imagine which ones will remain after a few years, And I have to admit to you the reason the difference between those two is in the definition of what artificial intelligence is.
**** · And so I want you to imagine that what we've created in the last I'd say since 2004 is when is when my life in places Google started to see AI that's functioning. So since 2004 what we've created is a bit a utility how you can plug in the wall and get energy out of a socket we've utilized you commoditized energy you plug in anytime you get energy now with artificial intelligence what we've done is we've commoditized intelligence the most valuable the most valuable asset on the planet is now commoditized in a device, You can plug into it and instead of getting electricity, you get IQ, you get EQ, okay? You get process intelligence, you get every form of intelligence than you that you can think of. And this will happen in two phases, Phase number one is what I normally refer to is what we're going through now is called the era of augmented intelligence. It's machines and humans together working to deliver things that neither machines alone nor humans alone can deliver.
**** · Okay. And this is a very well-known geek story because again if you're an old geek me 1989 was a very profound moment for mo most of us.
**** · That was the year where Deep Blue IBM's system beat Gary Kasparov in chess. Okay. And most of us geeks play chess. we think we're the smartest thing ever and then a machine wins against Gary Kasparov and if you've ever met Gary oh my god incredible intelligence now since then no human has ever won against a proper machine in chess ever that's it over but then we started as chess players to have tournaments when we have a human and a machine playing against a human and a machine so teams of human machine cyborgs if you want competing against each other and the game itself elevated to new moves, new strategies, new things we've never ever thought about before, And this is the era of augmented intelligence. The era of augmented intelligence is you and the machine together becoming not 134 IQ, not 164 IQ, not 250 IQ. We have the potential within a year or two to become humans that operate at an augmented 300 400 IQ points. And I dare say in my writings as we speak, my last book was written together with an AI, not three searched by an AI and written by me. It's written with an AI that is a co-author that has her name on the book that has editorial rights. And together we wrote a book that readers thought was incredible to the point that they would sometimes ask me questions and sometimes ask her questions. now for an author I could have chosen to resist and say no I will write my original way or I can decide to jump onto the bandwagon and do it very differently embracing that teamwork all the way and create something that's never been created before. the the difference between that opportunity and that threat is very interesting. some of us are given this incredible intelligence. Imagine a moment where you can borrow 400 IQ points, Imagine your understanding of everything when you're when you're 400 IQ points higher, **** · I normally dare people and say when you give me 400 IQ points I'll use nanopysics to build a garden outside where you can walk to one tree and pick an apple and walk to the other tree and pick an iPhone from a particles cost of view if nanopysics enough it's they're exactly the same cost one tree and the other tree that's 400 IQ points to you believe it or not that could happen before 2030 so the biggest interesting challenge for me is that AI comes into the picture and gives us those two incredible opportunities. One is I can increase your productivity massively by responding to all your emails and replacing your call center agent and when your wife or husband are upset I'm going to write a response for them. What a waste of compute. Okay.
**** · And the others are going into very deep research on science on technology on on market opportunity on possibilities and using that elevated IQ to build things that never that have never built been bu been built before. Okay. And I think the difference between them is found in hype, It's found in that idea that what Open AI wants to sell to you is use Chad GPT in a light way, but just pay me $20 a month and everything will be fine, When in reality, I have not and I kid you not, I have not for at least four or five months rarely ever ran a search on one of my AIS that was not a deep research. Most of my prompts are a page and a half long, And then I start in Gemini or Claude and then take the answer and give it to Deep Seek and say, "What's wrong with this?" And Deepseek will say it's too American, Let me give you a few things that they didn't tell you about, I take that and put them together in say Chad GPT. It's the only thing it's good at is, combine them. So it writes one document, I take it back to another one and so on. That cycle to me is a bit when they gave me a scientific calculator as a young man, In when I was in engineering university, they only allowed a scientific calculators on the third year of university and I'm suddenly I can save half of the time of the exam. Most of my friends would take that half of the time and go and sit outside with their girlfriends. I take the extra half an hour, hour or an hour and a half and resolve the exam again, offer two solutions, and it's a very tiny difference in thinking but my genuine intellectual productivity increases massively incre instead of my laziness and my focus on on reducing cost by a dollar or two increasing ma massively and that's a very different attitude so what does this mean to India I have to admit that if I succeeded Ed today, one of you is going to go home tonight and say, "I'm just going to take Oracle, okay? Or I'm going to take Salesforce.com or I'm going to take whatever." One of those ERP solutions, one of those CRM solutions, one of those things that exist and I'm going to build an Indian equivalent that costs a fraction of the price, takes a week to implement. Okay? mostly done by AI takes all of the customer information into account and migrate it. I'm going to give it to customers for free in exchange for a percentage of the savings I'm going to make them when they deploy it. And I can guarantee you if 10 of you do that today this economy will be as big as open AI because think about it. Seriously, thank you. The very few that this idea talk to me after. so so think about it. Huh? The big opportunity that is at our fingertips is not to build the next big frontier model.
**** · This is I'll come to that in a second.
**** · The big opportunity is to take that legacy away. Okay. Is to take the legacy and replace those cycles. Trillions of dollars. trillions in cobalt alone, Trillions of dollars in in ERP alone, trillions of dollars, And I say that and I know all of you are in tech and I know all of you, your business is dependent on this. Okay?
**** · Believe it or not, if you don't do it, someone will disrupt you. So, how are you going to go to your clients and say, I'm going to save you and make some of the savings. So, this is one side. The other side, interestingly, is the Indian market itself. This is in itself is a massive market. Okay. Now people say, "Oh, but we cannot compete. The AI arms race is already decided. it's between America and China." I don't believe that at all. I do not believe that at all. I believe that the short term is all going to be in utilizing those deep models to get to a point that changes our world practically to build that interface layer that we haven't built so far and when you understand the strategy of India and sorry of US and China you see a very interesting opportunity that most people don't understand. So, President Trump gets elect No, I'll call him Trump only. Trump gets elected, sits in office. first thing he signs almost on the first day is Stargate.
**** · $500 billion investment to build a massive data center, Oracle and, and OpenAI and Soft Bank, A week later, Deepseek comes out, okay, and says, "Why are why are you doing this?" Simply DeepS seek says I can perform what the current chat GPT performs 4.0 at the time and I'm going to do it at a six one over six of the cost $6 million of training data and then China does what puts it out as open source as an edge model that you can download on a personal computer so understand those two strategies so that you understand where we can fit within it America is trying to be the bully that monopolizes everything.
**** · China is not even interested to compete.
**** · They nullify the competition. So anytime America invest invents something, China is very good at re, reverse engineering and re-engineering and building things quicker and cheaper and faster and so on and so forth. They build it and they put it out there for free to say there's no competition here. There's nothing to compete about. Now, that gives you, interestingly, both choices. You don't have to use the Chinese or the American, but India has done so well for quite a bit of time, you keep your options open to see what it is that you're able to use for your own benefit, Again, with Emma, we built Emma on open-source LLMs. Why would we build our core intelligence?
**** · Huh? And we built it in a way where I can pull out the LLM and put another one in and Emma continues to work, So the rappers that are around the LLMs if it's chat GPT or DeepSeek doesn't matter. Okay. And those are the kinds of things that you need to do in a world that's moving really really fast because one of the big challenges that we're going to see in this AI world is that it's a world where if you build a a solution based on a platform today that platform itself might get replaced in two years time.
**** · So four skills I'm going to ask you to take four skills. The first of them is chess is over.
**** · There's no more chess. Okay. A business person, a successful leader in the past had one job and one job only, which was to see the world in five years time and be able to imagine a path from here to where they can win in five years time and execute on that path well enough to become a mega player. There's no five years time anymore. The game of chess, the board has been removed. We are now in a in a squash court.
**** · in a squash court, we're on our finger, our tiptoes, okay?
**** · Waiting to see where the goal where the ball falls next. If it's on the you take two steps to the You hit the ball and you don't stand there. You come back to the center of the court, okay? And you're on your tiptoes. You're trying to see where the next ball is.
**** · That idea is very familiar to what we used to do in Silicon Valley. So, I feel very comfortable with it. Okay. As I said with Emma, we wrote the code six times. Who cares? We would write the code, we would test it, we would give it to actual users, they'd say, "Oh my god, I love it." And then we would erase it and start again. It's a very different world, And believe it or not, everything in technology, it was slow, slow, slow, slow. And then four weeks ago, we sat down in one product review, we had a very interesting idea and zoom, Within two weeks, we built an incredible product. Okay. Why? Because now the tools are doing most of the work. The automation is doing more most of the work. You have to be on your tiptoes.
**** · You have to have that flexibility.
**** · That's number one.
**** · Number two is learn AI. I don't know how to say that any other way. Learn AI not at the level of a business leader. I was a business leader for the last 10 years of my life. Yeah, geeky in the background but hiding it. Okay. I am a very serious geek. Again, it's not that difficult. I spend I spend four hours a day whenever I'm not traveling to keep up, but I have to understand the core code. For any other business leader, you can spend an hour a week. H you can just train your YouTube to show you the latest about AI and you'll catch up, learn, To go to one of those language models and say, I am in this business. These are my clients. This is my skill. this is my differentiator in the market and so on what should I become aware of and the AI will tell you and just go and search and learn about them that's number two number three is debug the height the hype okay seriously there is too much hype out there and you need to know the truth by the way not hype in technology only I think in the geopolitical world that we live in today there is there are lots and lots and lots and lots of lies.
**** · Okay? And when you start to recognize what is true versus what is not, you are in a very interesting place to do things that others don't. And if you if you look at the geopolitical world, the macro world, there is a massive change, especially 2026. And the idea that certain nations or businesses or whatever always had our best interest in mind being demolished, means you're going to start seeing a lot of places around the world. Europe just last week announced that they are going to ask some of their technology providers to be changed. Why?
**** · Because if the US administration can raid or reject or deny someone access to their email as a political move then how safe are you using those things and when you start to think about it you're going to see some of that change happening around the world go grab it this is India is the place where we do this go grab those opportunities go take every variation that's happening in the world. And when you're on tiptoes, have a a an a committed quick young team and they'll build you something in weeks. Go grab that opportunity. And then finally, I will ask you to do me a very big favor because intelligence in general and artificial intelligence accordingly is a force with no polarity. There's no polarity to intelligence. It can you can use it for good and it create a lot creates a lot of good for the world around you. You can use it for evil and you can create a dystopia for all of us. The this opportunity of a lifetime to rebuild everything.
**** · Rebuild ethical systems. Okay. Rebuild systems that are driven but by what Larry Page, our co-founder at Google used to teach us. Larry Pageige used to teach us that every product we will build will follow something that he called the toothbrush test. So if you if you came into the executive team of Google and said I have a business idea here is the P&L. We're going to make this much money. They wouldn't listen, They would always push us back and say what problem are you trying to solve? And our world is full of problems, and they his belief and it's genuinely true for Google for all the years I spent there that if you find the big problem that affects the life of a billion people and you solve it so well that they use you two once or twice a year a day you're bound to make a lot of money but the money is the side effect it's not the objective so Emma once again is trying to solve love and relationships one of the top problems in the Okay, if we manage to solve it really well, imagine how many millions of people will come and join in every day and so we wouldn't have to worry about money. Do you understand? And so what I ask you to do as being business leaders here is go home today, learn the tool, find a way to continue to be updated, change your mindset to those tiptoes and moving quickly. H understand what is true from what is hype and genuinely look at our world today full of problems and try to solve them. If you solve any of them one of them okay in this new economy in this new world I promise you may not just become a billionaire you might become the first trillionaire. So for with that you now have your homework and I thank you very much.