At TIME100 Talks held Friday night in Miami, just a few miles from the breakneck vehicle speeds on display at the F1 Miami Grand Prix, business leaders gathered to discuss a different kind of rapid acceleration: the evolution of technology.
Sarah Mellon, IBM’s Chief Executive Officer and Head of Brand, spoke on a panel entitled “The Recharge Gap: Rethinking Recovery, Resilience and Readiness.” Kaylen McNamara, Chief Business Officer, VaynerX; Olivia Ramos, CEO of Deep Blocks, recently spoke about her experience with what host Nikhil Kumar (Editor-in-Chief of Time) recently described as the “breakneck pace of change” that companies across industries have to face. As AI tools become more widely used and specialized, many business leaders are looking to think quickly and creatively about how to best utilize this technology at nearly every level of their operations.
The 115-year-old technology company is no exception. “If IBM wasn’t ready for change, we wouldn’t be here anymore,” Mellon said. “Embracing technological change has allowed us to survive in an incredibly competitive environment.”
Mellon also talked about how she sees AI being particularly useful in humans’ daily work lives. “I’m not pessimistic about this,” she quipped. “I tell my team, ‘Identify the tasks that you’re not interested in and let the AI do them.’ [them]”
McNamara, from marketing and communications firm VaynerX, echoed the importance of “hands on” when it comes to new technology, especially from a leadership perspective. “I myself sometimes spend eight to 10 hours a week understanding the latest AI tools,” she said.
She’s also quick to offer similar advice to clients, even if they’re solely focused on social media strategy for now. “We ask them, ‘Have you been on TikTok this week? Do you understand what’s changing with LinkedIn’s B2B product?'” McNamara continued, “If you look under the hood of a lot of the innovation and change, I think there’s a lot of pattern recognition.”
For Ramos, leveraging advances in AI was probably always a no-brainer. Her company was built on AI. She explained that Deepblocks uses artificial intelligence to “digitize city zoning ordinances and other datasets to identify urban planning opportunities.” [real estate] investment. “The latest AI technology has enabled Ramos’ team to work “as effectively as possible” to digitize the more than 19,000 local governments in the United States. “We are constantly pivoting to improve the speed and growth of our business,” she said.
While AI in particular has gotten a lot of attention these days, there are other past and future technologies that are equally important to consider in your business operations. McNamara said VaynerX is tracking the growing interest in analog among Generation Alpha, or children born between 2010 and 2025. “We have a collectibles department because we think physical items are going to be important,” she said.
At Deepblocks, Ramos and his team use Wall Street’s trajectory to predict the future of industries. “We believe fractional trading in real estate will mimic what has happened in the stock market over the past 40 years. Real estate could be traded by automated systems,” she explained. “So we’re building the infrastructure for this type of transaction.”
Before the night was over, Mr. Kumar asked Mr. Mellon what would happen if IBM’s “big bet” on this particular technology failed.
“It’s always a possibility,” she said. “But I think the reason why companies that have been in business for over 100 years haven’t made it onto this stage is because most of them didn’t try, right?”
