INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Ahead of VivaTech, 50 tech CEOs came to Paris to have lunch with French President Emmanuel Macron
Then, they all worked together on &tech for good&
The event was all about leveraging tech around three topics — education, labor and diversity.
At the end of the day, French Prime Minister
Édouard Philippe invited everyone for a speech in Matignon
It wasn&t a groundbreaking speech as Macron is also speaking at VivaTech tomorrow morning
&We&re trying to pivot France,& Philippe said.
With great power comes great responsibility Édouard Philippe
Maurice
Lévy, the former CEO of Publicis, one of the two companies behind VivaTech with Les Échos, first introduced the event, as well as Eric
McKinsey worked on the data that was used to start those discussions
So let see what they talked about.
&As McKinsey showed, there no question that technology overall is a net creator of job and GDP
It a positive force,& Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said
&At the same time, AI and automation, while driving the economy and productivity, […] will lead to large groups being disadvantaged.&
He
then listed a few important points to make sure that nobody is going to be left behind, such as coaching and mentorship programs.
&This is
not just the government job but it is also the job of private companies,& Khosrowshahi added.
He wanted to remain hopeful and it felt a bit
&It easy to see the lost of jobs because of automation
But it much more difficult to dream about the possibilities of the future,& he said
In other words, don&t worry about the on-demand economy, don&t worry about self-driving cars.
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty was in charge of the
discussions around education
&We also had a lot of engineers and pragmatic people there
And we ended up with five recommendations,& she said.
It sounds like these recommendations would be really favorable for IBM and other tech
So here are these recommendations:
Focus and segment this problem
Focus on the quarter of the population the most at risk.
Align the skills that businesses need with the education system (hard skills and
soft skills).
There should be an open partnership with governments to reposition vocational education, learn by doing, foster internships,
apprenticeships, simulations and redirect tax to incentivize.
Work with teachers to pilot, get hard evidence and then scale.
Retraining
employees is the responsibility of all employers.
Finally, SAP CEO Bill McDermott talked about diversity
&As we looked at the facts, there are 33 percent more revenue, more profit for companies that got the memo on companies more inclusive and
more diverse,& he said.
Culture, gender and geography were the main themes
But they also talked about differently able people
SAP will make an announcement around autism in France.
&Dara, Ginni and Bill, thank you for your introduction, that was brilliant, in
English and concise,& French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe said.
He then listed three ideas that sum up his thinking about the tech
industry.
&I truly believe in freedom, in that fundamental ability that you need to be able to take good decisions and bad decisions,& he
The second idea is the consequence of that first one.
&With great power comes great responsibility
I think a modern philosopher called Peter Parker said that for the first time
And I really think it true.&
&While you don&t have to regulate on everything, when something isn&t regulated, it possible that it gets out
And when it comes to the digital revolution and the data revolution, that freedom needs some boundaries
You know that Europe worked on some regulation — GDPR
What looked like regulation against innovation now appears as desirable and useful,& he said.
He then indirectly called out Facebook for its
&Some of you, and I believe it the case of Microsoft, decided to enforce GDPR everywhere
And I encourage everyone to do the same.&
The fact that 50 CEOs came to Paris is interesting by itself
It a sign that tech companies want to have an open discussion with governments
They want to make sure that regulation is favorable
On the other end, governments want to make sure that tech innovations aren&t going to divide society.
But it just starting.
Some companies
announced a few things in Paris
Uber expanded its accident insurance to contractors across Europe, when they&re working and also when they&re not on the road
IBM plans to hire 1,800 people in France
Deliveroo is going to invest $117 million (€100 million) over the next few years.
Let see if Macron has more to say tomorrow.
Here the
full list of tech CEOs in Paris for the Tech for Good Summit:
Kevin Sneader, CEO, Mckinsey
Audrey Azoulay, Director, UNESCO
Mark Zuckerberg,
Founder and CEO, Facebook
John Kerry, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Foundation
Satya Nadella , CEO, Microsoft
Pierre Louette, CEO, Les Echos
Tony
Elumelu, President, United Bank for Africa
Maurice Lévy, Co-Founder, Viva Technology
Charlotte Hogg, CEO, Europe Visa
Jean-Paul Agon, CEO,
L&Oréal
Tristan Harris, Executive Director, Center for Human technology
Alexandre Dayon, CEO, Salesforce
Brian Krzanich, CEO,
Intel
Mitchell Baker, President, Mozilla Foundation
Yves Meignié, CEO, Vinci Energies
Gilles Pelisson, CEO, TF1
Bill McDermott, CEO,
SAP
Young Sohn, CEO, Samsung
Gillian Tans, CEO, Booking.com
Niklas Zennstrom, Founder and CEO, Atomico
Will Shu, CEO, Deliveroo
Sunil Bharti
Mittal, President, Bharti enterprises
Joe Schoendorf, Partner, Accel
Nick Bostrom, Director, Future of Humanity Institute
Julie Ranty,
Director, VivaTech
Eric Leandri, CEO, Qwant
Olivier Brandicourt, CEO, Sanofi
Mo Ibrahim, President, Mo Ibrahim Foundation
Yossi Vardi,
Entrepreneur
Philippe Wahl, CEO, Groupe La Poste
Pierre Nanterme, CEO, Accenture
Tom Enders, CEO, Airbus
Tim Hwang, Director, Harvard-MIT
Ethics Governance of AI Initiative
Octave Klaba, Founder and CEO, OVH
Ginni Rometty, CEO, IBM
Pierre Dubuc, CEO, OpenClassrooms
Isabelle
Kocher, CEO, Engie
Sy Lau, CEO, Tencent
Xavier Niel, Founder, Iliad/Free
Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikimedia Foundation
Jean-Laurent Bonnafé,
CEO, BNP Paribas
Angela Ahrendts, Vice President Retail, Apple
Frédéric Mazella, Co-Founder and President, BlaBlaCar
Stewart Butterfield,
CEO, Slack
Alex Karp, CEO, Palantir
Guillaume Pepy, CEO, SNCF
Jacquelline Fuller, President, Google.org
Stéphane Richard, CEO, Orange
Clare
Akamanzi, CEO, Rwanda Development Board
Paul Hermelin, CEO, CapGemini
Eric Hazan, Senior Partner, McKinsey
Ludovic Le Moan, Co-Founder and
CEO, Sigfox
Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber
Catherine Guillouard, CEO, RATP
Tim Collins, CEO, Ripplewood
Bernard Liautaud, Partner,
Balderton
Alain Roumilhac, CEO, Manpower Group France
Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO, Rakuten
John Collison, Co-Founder and CEO, Stripe
Maxime
Baffert, Director, VivaTech
Thomas Buberl, CEO, Axa
