Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. We're going to go ahead and get started as the last 2 people find their seats. But I'd like to welcome you to Shaping the Future of the Digital Economy. I want to extend a special welcome to our audience, thank you for coming so early this morning, as well as our panelists. And I'll introduce them in just a moment. Our discussion this morning will last for around 45 minutes, and will center on what the future of the digital economy looks like and where value will be created. If you are sharing on social media, we ask that you share with the #WEF20. And also as a heads-up, we will be doing audience questions at the end of the session. So if you'd like to ready your questions, you can have them ready for the end. So without further ado, I'll go ahead and introduce our panelists. Immediately to my left is Börje Ekholm, the CEO of Ericsson; then Keith Block, the co-CEO of Salesforce; Lauren Woodman, the CEO of NetHope; and Dan Schulman, the CEO of PayPal. Welcome to all of you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So if we go ahead and jump in, obviously, one of the things that defines technology is its ability to disrupt. So I thought we should talk a bit about some of the disruptions all of you are seeing in the industry. So I will start with you, Börje. In the last year or 2, what are some of the key disruptions that you've seen and felt at Ericsson?

What we're starting to see now and -- I'll shall start with the connectivity layer. Connectivity drives disruption by itself. And what we're starting to see now is actually disruption moving from more of consumer applications. So far, most people associate disruption with what has happened in the consumer space, whether it's the finance, whether it's the way you deliver streaming services, for example, or financial services for that matter. But we're now starting to see it move into the industrial space. And that is, I think, super exciting. So for example, we are building our new factory in Texas to manufacture 5G equipment for the U.S. market and the North American market. And we can supply all of the North American demand with only 100 employees in Texas. . So this is going to fundamentally change the way enterprises think about the manufacturing structure. We can manufacture much closer to customers and we can get much higher flexibility closer to customers. So I think, actually, we're at the brink of a completely new revolution that's going to happen driven by connectivity because now we see robots, for example, with battery-powered robots wirelessly connected that can do a lot of things. We use them in manufacturing, but you can see them in health care. You can see drones in a very different way. So I think we're just at the brink of this whole new opportunity for a lot of entrepreneurs.

Building on the observation that industry is being disrupted, obviously, Salesforce has been B2B from the beginning and has really been a big disruptor using cloud and now defines the industry standard in cloud. Do you think cloud will continue to be as disruptive moving forward? And if so, how? And what are some of the other disruptors that you see on a broad level?

Well, Marissa, I think that we're at an age, clearly, this Fourth Industrial Revolution. This concept was introduced here at the World Economic Forum back in 2016, and it feels like yesterday, but I believe that this is a play that will happen for many, many years. There are so many disruptive technologies, whether it's cloud or social and mobile technology, certainly you're familiar with that, and IoT and artificial intelligence and machine learning and quantum and edge computing. And these are technologies that are being created every single day. I mean we live in a world of disrupt or be disruptive. Innovation creates innovation. So I think this race has a long way to go in terms of cloud technologies and these other technologies that we're probably not even aware of today because there are new technologies being created every single day. So I think it's a very, very exciting time. And we find ourselves where -- in this age of digital transformation where people are embracing these technologies, just as you suggested. But that is not just digital transformation onto itself. There's also cultural transformation and organizational transformation and business model transformation, whether it's B2B or B2C. So it's an exciting time in our industry. I think it's an exciting time in every industry. And certainly, every CEO has an obligation to become that Chief Transformation Officer. So there's a lot going on. It's a good time.

And Dan, it seems like mobile has really revolutionized payments and has empowered a lot of new businesses and entrepreneurs. Venmo is an interesting and almost prescient acquisition. It came inside of Braintree, I think, back in 2013. When you were doing the Braintree acquisition, did you foresee the success of Venmo? And what do you think they did so well to have achieved the position they have?

Yes. I'm not sure that we saw all the success of Venmo when we first bought it. But I do think Venmo is emblematic of all the changes that are going in -- on in the financial services industry. I think we're going to see more change in the next 5 years than we've seen in the last 30. And we've seen quite a bit recently, Venmo being one example. I mean, I think all of the trends that were just mentioned, you've got ubiquitous computing going on right now. The computing fabric is continually expanding. 5G is opening up because of battery life and computing moving to the edge. IoT, so you're going to see much more data. Data spawns a lot of innovation for us. And then machine learning and AI is going to be built into every machine and every application. That's going to change how quickly we can do things, how much data we have. And then on top of that, what we really see is the physical world and the digital world blurring together. And you're seeing that happening in payments. You're seeing that happening across multiple industries right now. And then I think the final thing is we're all moving to become platform companies that really move from one adjacency to others, building on a common set of utilities and tool sets and data sets. And those platforms are redefining the way we think about industries, about economic models, business models. And very importantly, to what Keith was saying before, is these models and these platforms have economies of scale. But those economies of scale, if they're not done well, can lead to the seeds of destruction of them as well. And so trust and values are incredibly important in this world ahead. And so all of those things combining together do not just change, I think, the financial services industry, but all the world that we live in.

And Lauren, NetHope joins together nonprofits with technology innovators. What are some of the groundbreaking examples you've seen lately in terms of that collaboration?

Yes. Thank you for the question because it's interesting listening to my colleagues because the disruption that we see happening in the technology sector is also happening in the nonprofit sector and the work that we're doing in humanitarian response and in development. And it starts with connectivity. As we bring connectivity into underserved communities, the ability of those communities to engage, whether it's through financial inclusion, whether it's through access to services that are enabled by these platforms, that is fundamentally changing the way that we think about humanitarian response. It's changing the way that we think about development. And it's changing the way that we think in the nonprofit sector about our partnership with business and how we, working with the private sector, can support the greater development of understanding what works and what doesn't. And as we move into this world of stakeholder capitalism and we're all trying to think about how do we have a benefit for the world in which we all work and in which we live, that partnership becomes really important and becomes really critical as we think about that disruption of change in the business model and what we think our role is in it.

I want to move on now to how value is created from some of these disruptions. Dan talked a little bit about artificial intelligence. It's an area of great passion of mine. And I know Salesforce has been investing heavily in AI in terms of what type of value that could bring to you and to your customers. So can you tell us a little bit about Salesforce's investment in AI and what we can expect to see?

Well, look, AI is pervasive and everybody has their own definition of AI. If we took a survey of this audience, everybody would have a different opinion of what artificial intelligence means and what the future of AI is. We have our own AI initiative. It's called Einstein. And it's embedded in our platform and in a lot of the use cases around -- classic use cases for what we do around sales and productivity of somebody in the sales organization or productivity around service and providing a higher level of service, our next best recommendations and actions to delight a customer or which marketing campaigns makes sense. We even use Einstein internally to make predictions. Marc and I have our company meeting, and we sit around and we ask all the people who run our business what their forecasts are. And then we turn to Einstein and say, "Well, what's your forecast and what do we believe?" And the accuracy is amazing. But we're up to 10 --

Who do you trust, Keith?

I trust everybody. Trust is our #1 value in Salesforce. So it's all good. So far, so good. But we do over 10 billion predictions in Einstein every single day on behalf of our customers. And this is something that we see well beyond just what we do, but you see this in every industry. You see this in health care. You see this in financial services in terms of wealth management. You see it in telecommunications and media. So AI is certainly pervasive. It's everywhere. And we're learning things every single day from Einstein use cases, from our customers who are asking us to come up with different ideas around how to apply artificial intelligence in every walk of life, whether it's a B2C model or a B2B model. I do want to go back to one thing that we talked about earlier, which was the whole notion of this digital transformation because AI is certainly part of it. And one of the things that we see as we talk to other customers is that there is certainly, in this digital transformation era, there is the uplift of technology, embracing that technology. AI is certainly a classic one or cloud computing. But not leveraging the value of that technology and what it can do in terms of changing a business model is a common mistake. And one of the things that we always talk to our customers about is, "Don't just refresh the technology. Take advantage of what it gives you." And that's certainly one of the legs of digital transformation. The second one is the business model change. We have companies every day who are B2B classic companies who are trying to reinvent themselves to become B2C. You think about medical device manufacturers who want a direct relationship with the user of that technology. You have consumer packaged goods companies who are typically B2B who now want a direct relationship with that consumer as well. In AI use cases, they are astounding. So that business model transformation is certainly important. And then to your point, the ethical use of the technology. And AI is certainly a hotbed for that, that we all have to pay attention to. But as a CEO and executive who is bringing that technology into your organization, you have to think about the implications of that technology on your organization, on your workforce, on the ethical use, and you have to address that with the community if you believe in stakeholder theory, and certainly we do, and how your employees feel about it. So there's a lot of disruption and AI seems to be at the forefront of it. And we're embracing it at Salesforce.

In terms of that business model disruption change, Dan, I wanted to come to you because obviously in payments, transaction costs often go down. There's often a lot of pressure there. Where do you see some of the new opportunities for value creation in the payment space?

Yes. Well, there are a ton that are exploding right now. I would say, if I take one step back and then I'll give a specific example of places you can create value. I think as we increasingly all move towards being platform companies that are extending internal capabilities externally as well, so we -- then this idea of how do you partner with other platform companies to take the best of your value proposition, combine it with the best of somebody else's value proposition to add value to customer segments that neither of us could do alone, that's a very complicated, very difficult thing to do because most companies have a business model in which either they want their branded products to be preeminent or they want to own the customer completely. And I think we're actually going into a world where collaboration and people, understanding where they really are creating value and where somebody else is creating value, can come together and do things that we never could do before. For me, one of the ways that in financial services we're creating value is that -- it's probably not known that we're the third-largest lender of working capital to small businesses in the United States. And we do that in a way where we never look at a FICO score. We look at our own proprietary data. 70% of the billions upon billions of dollars that we give to small businesses in working capital loans are to the 10% of counties where 10 or more banks have closed branches. Typically, those are banking deserts. They're low or medium-income neighborhoods because banks need x amount of deposits for a branch to be profitable. And what we're able to do by using data and information is not only cut the time that it would take for somebody to apply for a loan from days to seconds, but we're able to provide that lending where nobody else will provide that lending. And where we do, which, by the way, is typically more to minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, their average sales go up by 22% versus the control group that goes up 1% to 2%. That's basically using data and information and scale to create value that you wouldn't have seen in the traditional world. And to me, those kinds of things where you can start to use data and information in ways that -- where your products and services actually become part and parcel of your ESG mission, as opposed to them being separate, I think are ways that we all need to start to think about how we offer products and services out into the market.

That's terrific. That's a great example. Earlier, we talked about how the fabric of computing and connectivity is changing. And obviously, at Ericsson, Börje, you've made a lot of investments around 5G. Can you tell us a little bit about where you see the value being created in 5G? I know there's a lot of different facets and opportunities there. But how do you see it?

5G is super exciting, we think, right? And it backs to the whole notion that connectivity is so critical for whatever we're going to do. If we talk about AI or if you talk about public cloud or if you talk about the edge and future computing, it's going to be driven by connectivity. So ultimately, we need to be able to connect everything. And now we sit with a technology that's uniquely appropriate for connecting everything. So 5G brings a couple of benefits. And actually there is a 5G network installed here, which gives a gigabit per second in speed and less than 10 milliseconds of latency.

How do people use it?

You just need to get a phone that has 5G setting, and this one has that. But Swisscom has put it in here. It's using our equipment, so we can probably present that, right? But it shows a bit of the capabilities. And we have industrial partnership with ABB, so we do a robot testing here, which is connected through a 5G network. And you can use a pad to write on just to test it, and it writes 700 meters away with no latency. . So you can start to see that benefit of that whole connectivity. And that's something we invest for. So 5G, in short, 10x higher speed, 10x lower latency and it's predictable latency, which is equally important. It allows you to have many more connections per cell site so you can have much denser sensor applications, for example. So again, think about the factory. You're going to have thousands of sensors in a factory that requires 5G to be able to connect. It's also better power management. So you get much longer battery life. So all in all, it provides so many benefits that's going to be a platform for innovation. That's what we think. You're going to see a lot of companies leveraging those capabilities and actually drive completely new business models. And I want to touch upon one thing that my fellow speakers also said is trust, I think, is going to be critical in this new world. So you're going to connect everything. So first of all, you need to trust your connectivity. But you need to trust the other side also, how are they going to use this data? So we, as companies, need to think much more about trust and how to build long-term trust and trust in our brand, in our company, for the general public. I think that's a big, big question for the future.

Lauren, in terms of a different type of connectivity, one of the things your business does is connect people. And in this increasingly connected world, I'm interested to learn your perspective of -- are you seeing that innovators and nonprofits are finding themselves without your platform? Or is it more -- happening more through your platform? And also any novel applications of technology that you've done at NetHope?

Yes. I mean, certainly, innovators and nonprofits find each other all the time. And they do so especially at the local level and at the national level. We work primarily with the largest of the humanitarian and development organizations around the world and with the large technology providers. And I think that's a place where there's a huge potential for scale, but where the challenges are really, really difficult. And to your point that it's not -- the technology is widely available. And frankly, the tech sector and the telecom sector have been incredibly generous in supporting nonprofits. But it's the change of culture and the way that we think about development and the co-creation of solutions with communities, which only happens when we can bring those local partners together with the underserved communities that we see. And I think one of the -- you asked about some of the innovative solutions. It is a combination of all the things that you hear my fellow panelists about. You see communities who are using, for example, alternative energy solutions to create mini-grids and communities that don't have electricity that are monitored by sensors, which are -- the data is tracked, which is tracked over time to provide insight into how you can better utilize these precious resources, which create micro business opportunities for women and places where there aren't those opportunities. And that value creation change that happens is really critically important. I would agree wholeheartedly that this question of trust becomes really important because no community wants to dive into something that may threaten where they -- they don't know where that data is going. So this whole ecosystem, I think, really becomes critically important when we think about how we use technology, not just because it's interesting or it's nifty, but how do we actually use it to not only create value but also benefit for the communities where we want to see it applied.

I think all of the panels have talked about the issue that trust is really important, in particular, partnerships and collaborations are really important. At NetHope, what do you -- who are your -- among your most important collaborators and partners?

Well, I mean, we work with all of our colleagues here, with Microsoft, with Facebook, with Google, all of our large tech partners, and then all of the large humanitarian and development organizations from Mercy Corps to the Nature Conservancy to Catholic Relief Services and everyone in between. I think the question, though, that we are all struggling with is in these questions of trust and ethics, we're starting to figure out what that means in this world. But what does it mean in a world where technology is not as ubiquitous as it has been? What does that mean when we want to apply AI to extract learnings about the impact of a given solution in a community and what the benefits might be when a good percentage of the population isn't represented in the data that is shaping those analytics and those outcomes? And so I think that the demand for an open conversation is -- continues to increase, especially as technology continues to be ubiquitous, as 5G rolls out around the world and more and more people are involved in that. That question of trust and transparency and predictability and ethics is one that I think is going to challenge all of us in the coming decade.

I do think -- Marissa, if I can jump in, that platform owners need to take responsibility for what rides on our platforms. And I think that's a little bit different than where we've been, but I -- and I think it's very hard and you're criticized for almost any action that you take. But I think, for instance, at PayPal, we have an acceptable use policy that nobody is allowed to use PayPal or Venmo to raise money if they advocate violence, hatred or racial intolerance. So violence is pretty easy because you can tell when somebody is going to threaten some bodily harm. We take down those groups. But hatred is much more difficult because the line between hatred and free speech is a difficult one to monitor. They don't teach that to you in school. We know you can't yell fire in a crowded theater, but that's pretty much where the end of it is. And we basically have taken down sites, KKK sites, Nazi sites. You would think those are pretty straightforward, but you'd be surprised that the amount of death threats we get when we do that kind of thing. There are other sites that we look at very carefully. And I think although it's difficult, we can't advocate the responsibility of monitoring what goes through and what goes on top of our platforms. And we can be criticized for that one way or another, and we usually are, but I don't think we can advocate our responsibility. And that's part of this trust that you need to have. You need to have a set of values that you live by and you apply consistently on your platform.

Yes. I completely agree with that. Look, at Salesforce, we're a values-based company. Trust is our #1 value. If you don't have trust, you have nothing, whether it's your personal life, whether it's your professional life, or it's community, you have to be -- organizations, public sector, private sectors, they have to evolve to values-based organizations and embrace this notion, attributed to Klaus Schwab, of stakeholders here with the modern organization, the modern corporation. Because with technology, it's so powerful that we don't even realize or comprehend today what tomorrow's technology will be or even how to embrace today's technology. That's why I go back to the notion of digital transformation. It's not just a tech refresh. It's not just a business model change, it's understanding the implications of what that technology means culturally on the community, in the community, with your employees. These are difficult topics because we're in unchartered waters, but we have to embrace them and we can't run away from them. We have to have that dialogue. We have to think about stakeholder theory and putting it into action. And the Business Roundtable -- I'm a member of the Business Roundtable, was super excited to sign that letter talking about the modern corporation and endorsing stakeholder theory because these are -- as leaders, these are the things that all of us have to consider. It's just a different world, and we have to have a beginner's mind as we think about the implications of technology.

Salesforce has always been a terrific collaborator with the community in the Bay Area and globally, and you've invested a ton in education.

Yes.

So one of the things that comes up when you think about value pools and partnerships is education. Can you talk a little bit about the work that you've done and why?

Yes. It's a -- we're a 20-year-old company founded by Marc and Parker Harris. And from day 1, we thought about giving back to the community and the importance of education and coming up with our 1-1-1 model, where 1% of our employees' time, so we pay for 7 days a year for people to give back to the community of their choice. Powering nonprofits and NGOs. We power with our technology. We give it away to over 40,000. We also have every executive who sponsors a public school because we value the importance of education. We give away hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure that we drive education. So we have a learning platform called Trailhead, which is open to everybody. And we support organizations, if you're familiar with them, that help those that follow a nontraditional path, organizations like PepUp Tech or Year Up. We're dealing with people who don't have access to technology. They don't have the same opportunity that we have. Just last week, I was with 30 members of Year Up, and their stories are absolutely amazing. I mean they follow the nontraditional path. They're not going to college. They've dropped out of school. They've lost a parent. They have to work. They've come to the United States. They don't speak English. I mean it's incredible. And we're proud to support and serve those organizations because of what they're doing in the community, and they're giving people the opportunity. And that's what technology should be. Technology should be the great equalizer around education. And this is something that we're very, very passionate about. On a more personal note, my wife and I funded a technology for -- a center for technology and society, which is really about the intersection of the public and private sector at Carnegie Mellon University. And the university brought together the City of Pittsburgh and Uber to provide access to an underserved section of Pittsburgh. Now every city has an underserved section of town. There are no jobs. There's very poor education. The services are not where they need it to be. But there was an experiment to provide an Uber voucher so that you could bring people to other parts of town where there were jobs. And over time, you could see the difference in the community. The participation in education went up, the crime rate went down, the health care went up and the economy went up. And this is again just applying public sector partnership, leveraging technology, driving education and what a difference it could make. So circling back to the importance of the corporation and stakeholder theory and the modern corporation and the investments we can all make as leaders in the community by leveraging technology, focusing on education, supporting not-for-profits, helping organizations like Year Up, I mean, we really can make a difference. And this is the world that we live in. And shame on us if we're not taking advantage and doing our part in participating and encouraging that sort of activity.

Börje, I want to come back to 5G. So 5G obviously needs adoption in order to become an everyday reality that's really experienced by people day to day. Who are some of the critical partners in that value chain?

Of course, we depend on the what we often boringly call the operators, right? They are actually the ones running the networks that provides the services. And I think here, we suffer globally actually from a couple of really big obstacles to roll out fast. So for example, we don't have aligned spectrum. The frequencies are actually the lifeblood of the industry. If you look here in Europe, about half of the European countries have allocated 5G spectrum. The U.S., I would say, lags a bit behind on allocating 5G spectrum. So it's -- we need to get that, otherwise, there's not going to be any 5G. The other part is simple permitting, just to get the permits to roll out the network, which we think is trivial, right? Because we take this for granted. But in most countries, it takes 2 years. So how will we see a fast adoption of a new technology when there are so many structural barriers? And I think here, we need to overcome those because it's back -- and I do believe that connectivity is critical for the economy, not only for the western world, but also for the underserved. So if you -- we did a study together with the Imperial College in London. Where you increase mobile broadband penetration by 10%, the economy grows about 1% faster. So there is an enormous value in doing this and there is also a big mistake of not doing it. So I think we in the -- if we can do something or ask for something, it's to get the political system to embrace what new technology can bring and help bring it faster.

Before I transition to the audience for questions, I want to spend a little bit of time talking about stakeholder capitalism. This is the 50th year of WEF. And this is -- stakeholder capitalism is something that's obviously been present in Klaus Schwab's vision from the very beginning. I want to talk about how stakeholder capitalism relates to technology. Is it something that's being adopted and broadly embraced the way that it should be? And also what some people see in terms of industry trends. So maybe, Lauren or Dan, if you want to jump in on what you see here.

Do you wanna go first?

Sure. Do I think it's being embraced? I think so. I think we have a much longer way to go, though. And I think at some level, we have done a good job at dipping our toe in the water. I think many companies, tech and otherwise, have worked closely with the nonprofit sector for a while, sometimes in partnership around projects, sometimes just to listen and understand what's happening in the communities in which they work. Many stakeholder groups are not represented by traditional nonprofits, but certainly they need to be engaged and -- but it has been relatively superficial and there is much more that we can do. We are grateful, I think, as a sector for what has happened to date. But a lot of times, it stopped short. And we are -- and I understand the pressures from a capitalist -- from a private sector business in needing to also meet shareholder demand, but I think we need to start having an open conversation. And I'm glad to see that, that conversation has begun around what does value actually mean that we're trying to return to the communities in which we work and the shareholders which are also part of that community. There's a lot more to be done. Those partnerships need to be deeper. They need to be longer. They need to be more robust. They need to be more two-way. But we've started down that path, and I hope we don't lose our way as we continue to push this narrative in the coming years.

I think it's ridiculous that the idea of profit and purpose work against each other. I actually think they work together.

Agreed. Agreed.

And this whole Milton Friedman, that was -- like that was not based on math. That was more of like a great sound bite and it worked for a long time. But the truth of the matter is that if you don't look at a multistakeholder world, you are suboptimizing what you can be as a company. Like from my perspective, and not everybody agrees with this, and people can debate, but we each have multiple constituencies we serve, whether they'd be our employees, our customers, for us, regulators, shareholders. To me, the #1 constituency that we have to serve is our employees. But far and away -- like, if you don't have passionate, engaged people who work with you, then you can never aspire to be a great company. You can have a great strategy, but if you don't have inspired, passionate employees who are financially secure, who feel financially healthy, then you can't ever hope to be a great company. And I really feel like this is becoming a huge issue, not just within companies, where, by the way, if we do that, we create competitive advantage. But our democracy -- I think my favorite quote on democracy is, "Democracy needs to be more than 2 wolves and 1 sheep voting on what to have for dinner," okay? And so like that means you have to rise above your own self-interest for democracy to be effective. But how can people rise above their own self-interest when this is the first generation ever where this generation growing up now does not think they'll be better off than their parents? And so that idea of hope, that idea -- and you start to turn against the system. And if we as business leaders are doing things like Keith is doing and others are doing to make sure that our employees feel financially secure, that they have financial health, that they are passionate about what they're doing, then we are suboptimizing for the medium and long term, and that's what I think we ought to be building as companies. And so I think we have an ethical and moral obligation to think much more broadly than this idea of shareholder maximization. We will maximize for shareholders if we look at a multistakeholder framework.

So I think Keith and Börje, you both want to jump in.

I could not have said it better myself. I often say this internally, where often the discussion comes back there about the shareholders. Let's focus on the other things that really matters. And whether you call it stakeholder capitalism, which I think is -- I actually don't like the term because for me, the multistakeholder have always been the case. If you run a company, you cannot prioritize the shareholders because if you do, you're going to make short-term decisions. And short-term decisions never build a strong company. We're 140 years. We've never focused on only the shareholder. You really need to think about the employees. Having great employees is the only way to have a great company. I'm convinced of that. And if you say that you have great employees, they will also do the right thing for the customer. So you kind of get that at the same time. Then you need to think about your society. You have a role in society to play. That's certainly part -- and we, as companies, we need to have that as part of our purpose as well. We need to help our society develop, whether it's education, like you do, whether it's other parts, but we need to play a role in the society. So calling it stakeholder capitalism, I think it's just sound values of running a company. And don't put a label on it. I think that's actually a bit -- the wrong way to think.

This is all about playing the long game, and it's really about thinking strategically in modern times. And the world has changed, whether people like it or not. We have to face that reality. And to me, this is a question of leadership. And the leadership can come from many places. It can take many forms. It could be our employees. It could be the community. It could be our partners that we do business with. It could be executives in this audience. But there's a -- to a certain extent, there's a calling out, there's a leadership crisis, just like people say there's a trust crisis, and there's a void that needs to be filled. I think sometimes people will say, "Well, the government needs to fill that void." Well, the world is very complicated. To expect the government to fill the void onto themselves, I don't think that's realistic, nor do I think it's realistic to expect the private sector to do it exclusively. There really has to be a handshake agreement between the public sector and the private sector to take on some of the challenges that we're facing here. I think we have to be very realistic about it. At the end of the day, it's not just about the shareholder results anymore. It is about your employees, it is about the community and the importance of taking care of that because it's demanded, it's expected, it's the right thing to do. And we see more leaders coming out now. And again, something I said earlier, Klaus Schwab had the vision decades ago to talk about stakeholder theory, and many companies who are values-based came forward. Salesforce was one of them. But now you have Larry Fink and his letter, which is powerful. People respect Larry. They see him as a leader. He has a broad impact on the world and the community. Brian Moynihan recently came out and really challenged all of us to think differently about the modern corporation. All of us have to do that. And resisting that is just a mistake on so many levels. So call it what you will, like the label, don't like the label, this is who we are. This is a leadership opportunity. It's a leadership moment for everybody, and we have to take that on for sure.

Okay. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and open the questions to the audience. We have some microphones. I see 2 hands here. I think we have time for maybe 2 questions. So if you could please -- we'll bring the microphones here. If you could stand and identify yourself, and try and keep your questions succinct, please.

Alex Wallace from Verizon Media. As technology moves so fast, we're still struggling with how to regulate and come up with a common platform for ethics around 4G. And I'm curious how you guys are -- I think WEF has a role here, but what is the global governing body going to be on technology and ethics and setting up what trust looks like globally?

Well, that's -- I'll try and address that. Of course, feel free to pipe in.

No, no. Keith, you can do this.

Great idea. Look, we are fractured today. Again, I think part of this is just an appreciation for technology and the implications of technology and the use cases of technology. We can't comprehend all these different use cases. Every day is a learning moment. And you have to applaud, for example, the European Union for coming up with GDPR. And hopefully, there will be a GDPR 2.0. My personal opinion, there's no question, there has to be some sort of regulation. I think citizens deserve it, consumers deserve it, corporations deserve it, governing bodies deserve it. In the United States, it would be terrific if we had a national data privacy law. Instead, we have data privacy by ZIP code, which is not a good outcome. So I think the World Economic Forum can certainly play a role in inspiring and bringing people together and organizations together to collaborate around global data privacy and ethical use. I think step 1 is to have the debate and raise the level of awareness whenever those issues are brought forth. But this is no small task. And we'll be talking about this for decades because technology will change, geopolitical circumstances will change, macroeconomics will play into it. But I think it starts with having this sort of platform to talk about these things.

I do think regulators and the private sector need to work together on this. But sometimes there are unintended consequences as well. I think at this point, if you look at a typical terms of acceptance, and people are reading this on a mobile phone right now and they are like 45 pages long because you're trying to talk about every single edge case and every single regulatory, and nobody reads them and they just check, "I Agree". And that does nobody any good in terms of protecting privacy, even though it's well-meaning. There almost needs to be kind of like what are the 3 things you're agreeing to on a mobile phone, and then you check like, we won't sell your data or whatever it may be. So I think there needs to be a coming together to be sure that we are thinking about what the future looks like. Regulators will play a very important role here, but we -- like I was saying before on other things, we should not abdicate our responsibility, waiting for regulators to create data privacy and data protections for consumers and for businesses.

Agreed.

And actually it's an interesting question from another dimension also. So when you think about integrity -- personal integrity, you value data differently also. So I wonder here if there is -- if we have still researching for the regulator to regulate this. But I wonder here, it probably comes back much more to an individual point of view going forward and the corporations, we'll call it the platform owners' point of view. And here, it may be that -- it can be a platform serving the same market but having different levels of privacy, for example. So it's not a regular -- I'm not sure it's a regulatory thought process. And that's why I wonder if we as -- we need to discuss this in many, many different forums and in many different situations. But I think we, as companies, we need to also decide on what do we think, what is the -- what do we believe is the right level for us to do. And then you kind of build your own compass along those values. And that's a very different world in the future than it's been in the past. So I think we have to, we as business owners and business leaders, we need to think much more about how do we approach the market, what do we offer. And there is where you build trust through your long-term actions and transparency.

And with that, we have to bring our discussion sadly to a close. I thought I would end up with some highlights that I really took from the discussion. Dan, I love your idea of working where that profit and purpose don't have to work against each other, and your example of the lending for small businesses is really inspiring. Lauren, I like the notion of the stakeholder capitalism needing to be embraced, but even being embraced at a much deeper level than we're seeing across technology today. And Keith, taking that tech refresh and doing more with it than just doing the refresh. And obviously, Salesforce is incredibly inspiring in terms of the value-based values of the company as well as the approach to partnership and trust. And Börje, I think we all want 5G, and we in particular want that phone here in Davos. So I'm sure that you'll be flocked after the session to understand how to access that. So thank you. [Break]

Innovating for impact. Hello, and good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to wish you a very warm welcome to this UpLink preview, Linking Up the Next Generation of Change-Makers. My name is Sarah Kelly. I'm a TV news anchor and a journalist. I host the main international news program at Deutsche Welle television in Berlin, and I'm really thrilled that I get to be here with all of you this afternoon for this session. So now over the next 45 minutes, we're going to be hearing a lot about UpLink. UpLink is a digital crowdsourcing platform aimed at accelerating progress toward the sustainable development goals. We'll be hearing from The World Economic Forum, which is hosting the platform. We'll be hearing from the foundational partners, Salesforce, Deloitte and Microsoft-LinkedIn. And we will be hearing from young global change-makers who are actually already involved in the platform, and they can really tell us from a firsthand perspective what it's been like for them. So first, though, without any further ado, we would like to hear a little bit more about the platform, and we have really the great honor and the great pleasure this afternoon of being welcomed here today by the Founder and the Executive Chairman of The World Economic Forum, Professor Klaus Schwab.

Thank you very much, Sarah. I should tell you a little bit history why The Forum has taken this initiative. The World Economic Forum has concluded with the United Nations, a major strategic cooperation, agreement. And when we signed this agreement together with Secretary-General Guterres and Deputy Secretary Amina Mohammed, we discussed how could The Forum best contribute to the objectives of the global sustainability, the goals which the UN has set to be reached by 2030? And there are so many different initiatives related to sustainable development goals. And The Forum itself, of course, has a number of chosen initiatives going on. But what is missing are 2 things. The first one is we should have those initiatives, not just coming from enlightened business leaders are sitting here in the room or from governments, we have to engage people. And people, particularly start-ups, young people who now, to a certain extent, are on the streets to protest, that they have ideas, and we have to give them some means to translate their concerns into action, to translate their concerns into action. Now we cannot invite everybody to Davos. But today, we are living in the age of the fourth industrial revolution and we have to think of digital tools. And the idea was created, why not to have a digital platform available, which would really allow people engagement. And by the way, the name UpLink means linking the people up to the objectives of the sustainable development goals. So I approached some of the partners of The World Economic Forum, and I'm so grateful that I found open ears, and the enthusiasm and the commitment really to contribute to make such a platform happen. And Marc, I think you were the first one encouraging us, and Punit Renjen and I remember when we talked about it in summer, you provided full commitment. And then, of course, Allen Blue, you brought LinkedIn-Microsoft onboard. So bringing those people together under the leadership of my colleague, Dominic, we were able to develop a first platform, which we will, in some way, inaugurate today. So for The Forum, it's very important, I would say, nearly historical moment. If you define The Forum as a multistakeholder platform, we have everybody onboard. But what we do not have onboard yet is the power of people. And with UpLink, we are confident that we can reinforce with many good ideas what we are doing here, advance our different initiatives. And first, we were thinking for quite some time what would be the first area where we could show the power of such a digital instrument and -- of such a digital platform. And we said oceans because it is the Ocean summit of the UN coming up this year. And also, we knew we have to integrate, and I'm very happy with the young generation, we have to integrate the young generation as much as possible. And you will hear from some of our change-makers how they play already a very important role in making sure that UpLink will be a great success. So thank you all for coming here for this very important moment. Thank you, particularly our partners. And I think we have started maybe here, a very important and interesting journey, with quite some consequences for the world because if I would summarize again what UpLink is, UpLink is a digital platform to integrate, accelerate and aggregate the goodwill, the innovative spirit, the entrepreneurship of all people behind the SDGs. Thank you, Sarah.

Thank you very much, Professor Schwab. From concerns into action, the power of the people, we've heard now what UpLink is. Do we want to know what it looks like? Yes. We actually have a great treat now. We're going to be joined by an engineer from Microsoft who has been involved in the platform. She's also a Global Shaper from the Casablanca Hub. So please, with any further ado, join me in welcoming to the stage, Fatima Azzahra El Azzouzi.

Thank you, Sarah. So from the early stages of UpLink when it was just an idea, I was involved in co-designing it actually with a group of Global Shapers. And also, in the past few months, I was part of the development process of UpLink, bringing in my technical perspective as an engineer at Microsoft, but also the lens of inclusion. This is an area that I work on as part of the Global Shapers community. And the goal here is to make sure that UpLink from the beginning is inclusive of the people we tend to forget about and who are usually overlooked. So this is really important. So we have Melati with us here today. And kids might be people who bring projects that really advance the SDG. So she was a kid, 12-year-old kid, when she had the idea of banning plastic bags in Indonesia. And last year, the ban was actually implemented. So in the same way, maybe the next coming innovation would come from maybe a person from Venezuela, who doesn't have a high school diploma. Do we think about that person? Or from a woman with a disability in Morocco. Or from a Syrian refugee in Lebanon. So the goal here is we want these people to be members of the UpLink community from day 1. And I'm really delighted to share with you -- to take you today through a preview of what UpLink looks like -- will look like, actually, next month when it is launched as a pilot to the public. So we can start the video. And I will start with the home page. So from the home page, you can already have clear call to action where you can take an action from the beginning. And we have the topics, so it's organized by topics. And as you see, Professor Schwab mentioned Ocean, SDG #14, and we have here the UN Special Envoy for the ocean with us. So that would be our example. And you have a lot of content, including actually articles from The Forum's Strategic Intelligence platform. So curated articles as well as what are the challenges that people have submitted in relation to a topic. So you can choose a topic that speaks to you. Let's take Oceans. So under each topic, we have a number of challenges. So we see here 2 challenges that you can actually take action on and contribute on. So we have some supporting material that you can use, that's related to that challenge. So let's delve in, into a specific challenge on the Ocean. So under each challenge, we have a number of issues. So those issues are issues that you can tackle by bringing your own contribution. So you can contribute to the platform by submitting your ideas and your ideas are then reviewed and curated by The Forum's expert network. And the best contributions are highlighted. We see here Badr, who's an entrepreneur with us today. So his project is highlighted and him as a contributor as well. So let's look at what a contribution page looks like in UpLink. So this is an example of a contribution page of Badr's project. So this answers questions like what issues are we addressing? And how can we scale up this project? So any information that you can have that's supporting this solution. So what can you do actually as a user when you use UpLink? You can click on the Take Action button, which allows you to contribute in 2 ways, either sharing your perspective or ideas or something conceptual about this challenge. Or if you have a ready solution or you have a start-up that you founded, you can submit it as well. You can make your contribution public or you can keep it private until it's reviewed by the experts. So we submit this, we hope that the experts are going to approve this and take it to the next level. So what's next? How do we actually make impact? So impact is made around action groups. An action group is just a number of people who get around the same challenge, and they connect and they work together to advance it. So you see here that the community can connect and interact with each other to advance this project. So we hope that you will all be UpLink users very soon. So it's very easy to do. You can -- all you need is an e-mail address or a phone number. And if you are a LinkedIn user, it makes it easy for you and makes it faster for you to get down to work because it pulls your content. So you have here Melati's example, she's a LinkedIn user, and her data is pulled from LinkedIn. So she is ready from here to start engaging and taking action. So UpLink is for anyone. Anyone can join UpLink. And I look forward to using it to advance the cause that -- one of the causes that matters to me, which is investments in mental health. I encourage you all to do this for the causes that are closest to your heart. And please don't forget that the inclusion message I shared at the beginning, let's not forget to invite the underrepresented people to join the community from the beginning. Thank you.

Thank you so much to Fatima. UpLink would not be possible without partnerships. And we're going to be hearing now from the foundational partners. We're going to begin with Salesforce. We are joined by Marc Benioff. He is the Chairman and the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Salesforce and a member of the Board of Trustees at the World Economic Forum. Marc, thank you.

All right. Well, thank you very much. I don't need the step, I think, that's right here. How's everybody doing? Klaus, I want to just thank you so much for The World Economic Forum, and I want to congratulate you on the 50th year. You have shown us the power of stakeholder capitalism with your vision, that we must be about all stakeholders and not about just shareholders. We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to you. And I am fully convinced after attending even just this first day of the conference as well as the other programs that I have been through now that capitalism, as certainly I knew it, that I have been trained on, went to school on, is dead. That there is a new capitalism, a stakeholder capitalism, exactly as you've described it, a more fair, more sustainable, more equitable capitalism. So thank you, Klaus, for giving us this tremendous gift. Thank you very much. And really, that's why I am so excited about UpLink. Klaus and I have been working on the Fourth Industrial Revolution Centers for quite a few years now. We have them all over the world. I like to call them the franchisees of The World Economic Forum because they're our outposts where our members come to brainstorm and convene and understand all the technology that's happening. But what happens in these centers, and there's one very close to my home in The Presidio, in San Francisco, they are very much not workshops, but they are do shops. They are the world's greatest experts who are coming together to show us where the world is going. And we're able to create policy, new ideas. We transform -- whether they're corporations or governments, it's been phenomenal. But the thing that has been most inspiring about the Fourth Industrial Revolution Centers is the youth, to see these incredible Global Shapers and young leaders come in and see the power of the technology, but then say, "I can do something with this to improve the state of the world." The very mission of this organization: to improve the state of the world. And to see Fourth Industrial Revolution technology, coupled with the use to do that, well, that's inspiring because that really opens the next door for Klaus' vision, which is UpLink. Why UpLink is so important is because when we look at these key global issues like oceans, for example, of course, these are tremendous imperatives that we have to get our minds around, but there are key stakeholders all over the world that can be united through this digital technology platform. And you can -- saw it in the technology, you understood it when Klaus was saying what the initial vision is, but to see it come together is so powerful. So I'm so excited to see this continuation [ past ] just what the Fourth industrial Revolution Centers have become, to see this digital convenient platform, to address these key issues, like oceans, or like we heard today in Klaus' opening remarks, we now have a program, 1 trillion trees, 1t.org, where we are going to convene on a global basis, corporations, governments, nonprofits to focus on planting 1 trillion trees and reducing or eliminating 2 -- over 200 gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere. As we know, carbon, of course, on the planet and the universe is actually a constant. It's humans who are moving the carbon around, and we have the ability to extract that carbon directly out of the atmosphere through the 1 Trillion Tree initiative, and it's something that I also expect to see rapidly emerge on UpLink. So Klaus, thank you for guiding us forward and for showing us this tremendous vision. We're very grateful. Thank you.

Thank you very much to Marc for that. We're going to hear next from another foundational partner, and that is Deloitte. We're essentially going to hear how UpLink aligns with the core values of Deloitte. So please, without any further ado, join me in welcoming to the stage, we have Punit Renjen, Global Chief Executive Officer of Deloitte. I wanted to get that correctly. I hope I did.

Thank you. And Marc, I need this. I wasn't born with your good looks and your height. I want to start by echoing what Marc said.

[ Flattery will get you everywhere ], Punit.

Klaus, thank you. Thank you for the World Economic Forum. Congratulations on 50 years. And thank you for this great team. Dominic and the entire team here have done a great job on this. I represent Deloitte, and Deloitte believes passionately that business has a dual role in society, it has to be a force of good. And we exhibit that every day with 300,000 professionals going to work to try and make a positive impact for the clients that they serve and for the communities that they live and work in. 300,000 individuals that contribute their skills every day, whether it is making a commitment to try and take 50 million people out of poverty or work on initiatives like UpLink. We believe that this is not only the right business thing to do. It is the right thing to do, and it has been a key part of our DNA and our core values. But one thing that we've learned is that despite our size, despite our passion, we cannot do this alone. And some of the issues that Professor Klaus has raised and that Marc talked about, we believe that we need to collaborate with entities like the WEF, like Salesforce, LinkedIn-Microsoft to try and address these issues, issues like climate, like income and equality, like poverty. That's why we've collaborated with the WEF for the last 20 years. And when Professor Klaus called me over the summer and said, "Marc is going to work with us on UpLink, would you sign up?" I said, "Yes, absolutely." For the last number of months, we've been working with Salesforce, with Microsoft-LinkedIn and with WEF, contributing our deep technical skills because we believe that UpLink has the potential to try and get that community together to address some of these issues that are so critically important for us to address, not only for this generation but for the next generation. So we're very excited to be part of this. Thank you for giving us this opportunity, and we're all in.

Thank you so much, Punit, for that. And I mentioned that there were 3 foundational partners. We're actually going to be hearing from the third with our closing remarks today. So we have Allen Blue here from LinkedIn, and he will give our closing remarks a little bit later in the program. But first, Marc mentioned that one of the biggest inspirations to him was really hearing from the young people. So we're going to do that now. I'm going to go over to this side of the stage, because we are going to have a conversation now with people who are really on the front lines when it comes to LinkedIn. So Melati Wijsen is joining us. Melati, please come up to the stage. Melati is the first UpLink ambassador. She also happens to be an activist herself. She has 2 organizations, not just 1. One is called Bye Bye Plastic Bags and the other one is called YOUTHTOPIA, and I know you're going to tell us all about that and how you're using the UpLink platform in just a few moments. But first, I want to welcome onto the stage Badr Idrissi also joining us. Badr is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ATLAN Space in Morocco, you're going to tell us what that is. He's also an entrepreneur involved in the development phase of the platform. We saw you a little bit earlier, in fact, as part of that presentation. So we got to see a little bit of your work already.

And Melati, I mentioned that you are the first UpLink ambassador. So perhaps, we can start to talk about why this platform means so much, especially for your generation. And then we'll hear a little bit more about how it's playing out. So why is this so important for you?

Well, I think something that really resonated with me was that UpLink wanted to include the younger generation. And I kept getting asked the question of, "Well, why is it important to include the younger generation?" And for that, I was kind of thinking, well, where do I start? Young people are fresh. We have bright, new ideas, and we're willing and ready to be part of the decisions that are being made today. But also, in the time that we're living in, especially right now with all of the issues happening and the challenges that we're facing in today's time, young people, the unique aspect that we have is that we don't look at it as a burden, but more as an opportunity. And I think that this digital platform will allow us to be taken -- well, have our contributions and have our ideas be taken seriously and really connect it with a wealth of knowledge of traditional business leaders, innovators, investors and really have this space where young people can feel like they are being heard.

Badr, would you say you're being taken seriously? I mean, your UpLink's first registered entrepreneur, you've had experience with the platform. First of all, how did you come to get involved and even find out about UpLink? And how has it been playing out so far?

Yes. So we were -- we discovered UpLink through our membership in Katapult Ocean. Katapult Ocean is an impact accelerator that has a deep focus on the ocean. And they're also one of the founding accelerator partners of UpLink. So we were introduced to the projects by Katapult Ocean and we started discovering the platform as a test user during the deployment and development phase. And it was really interesting for us to discover that one of the main focuses for the platform for the moment is the ocean, a challenge that we are currently addressing with our solution. And one of the road blockers for sustainability of the ocean is illegal fishing. And we believe that with our technology, we're able to support government to fight illegal fishing by helping them understand what's happening on very large marine areas. For that, we developed artificial intelligence that allows drones to be fully autonomous and monitor very large marine areas. So it's really about taking action and doing something. And so during the review, we filled the form for UpLink and the reviewing -- during the reviewing process, our technology was identified as a high potential innovation solution. So we were invited to join the group of drone technology for good. And we were very happy with that.

And Melati, to Badr's point, perhaps you can also tell us -- because I mentioned that you have 2 organizations yourself, Bye Bye Plastic Bags, YOUTHTOPIA. Given Badr's experience and what you've seen playing out so far, how do you envision that you might engage with the platform?

So one of the things that has happened for me in my last 7 years being a frontline activist with Bye Bye Plastic Bags and then actually achieving a change within regulation back home in Bali, I kept getting the same question of young people all around the world, "How can we do what you do?" And this is where YOUTHTOPIA, our new project, really comes in to help empower young people through a peer-to-peer education problem. And with UpLink as an inaugural ambassador, was something that I really am excited about is to get into this space with UpLink through a youth partnership on seeing how we can really curate this space more for the young people.

And you mentioned that they can do what you do. The way that they can do what Melati does is actually -- and I'm sure you guys have seen this slide sort of to the left of us here, there's a link on the bottom, uplink.weforum.org. So if you do have expertise, that is how you can submit things and share them. So that is indeed actionable. Badr, I'm curious how you feel. I mean we saw the foundational partners speaking a little bit earlier. We saw how important this was as a vision for the Founder and the Executive Chairman of The World Economic Forum. I mean there's really clearly robust support for this platform. I mean how does that make you feel as an entrepreneur engaging with it?

So it's really interesting for us because we're facing a lot of issues. Being a start-up that is trying to have an impact is really challenging. Accessing funding, accessing government is really challenging. And we believe that UpLink can provide us with the expertise, such as Jim Leape here, and experts such as Jim Leape and expertise to really scale the technology and scale geographically. And what's really interesting, by saying scale the technology and geographically is that UpLink is not only about the ocean, it also address different SDGs. And our technology being flagged as high-potential innovation with the group for drones technology for good, we're able to address other SDGs, such as deforestation, providing humanitarian support, distressed population, illegal mining and so on.

Melati, you're the first ambassador, as we mentioned. I mean what's so exciting about that for you? And I mean what are you planning? What are you going to do?

I mean I'm really -- I'm so honored as well, but also just to see how this is really opening a path for more young people like myself. And something that -- the question that you asked about seeing all the partners behind UpLink and just this enthusiasm that was coming, it really actually reflects the younger generation very well. And it's exciting, it's refreshing to see because we need a space like this that is able to connect the dots. And I think that, that is what UpLink is doing, is creating this digital platform where all of the knowledge and -- is accessible to people and suddenly, solutions seem so much more closer to our fingertips.

Badr, you mentioned your initiatives with illegal fishing, for example. Okay, let's take it beyond that now. How is UpLink potentially enabling you to take your technology, your initiative, what you're doing beyond that?

So going beyond illegal fishing is really about visibility. So understanding what government problem are, what are the challenges that are faced by those governments. And we believe that UpLink is really building connections to understand what's happening and also get the resources to resolve those issues. It's not only us but it's a partnership that we are building through UpLink to provide solutions to really critical issues that humanity is facing today.

Okay. I mentioned that we're all going to have the opportunity here to be engaged. And in fact, we want to hear from all of you because we know that there's so much expertise in the audience. There's really a breadth and a depth of expertise. I saw all of you who signed up. So I can indeed affirm that. So if you have a comment or perhaps even a question, we would love to hear from you. The floor is open, just raise your hand. And if you could just give your affiliation and a little bit about your work before you speak, that would be greatly appreciated. Right here in the front.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. My name is Maren Hjorth Bauer, I'm the CEO of Katapult Ocean and we're very proud to have worked closely with the WEF team on UpLink in the past half year. As Badr mentioned, we invest in and support ocean tech start-ups, and we've built a global ecosystem. And to work with UpLink here, it's a fantastic way for us to really expand that ecosystem and connect decision-makers, potential customers, potential philanthropists and investors with these impact start-ups. So I encourage other incubators, accelerators, also investors and people with competency to contribute to this platform.

Fantastic. Thank you so much. I saw another hand go up right next to you.

Thank you. My name is Alicia Bárcena. I want to greet, of course, Ambassador Thomson. We are establishing a very interesting SDG gateway in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is obviously, Spanish and English. I wonder how can we connect? You see what I mean? So that whatever we are doing, which is what countries are doing, what UN agencies are doing, what NGOs are doing, what everybody is doing around SDGs, I would love to see if we can link because this could link to another language, which is Spanish and to a very large community, we're talking about 680 million people. Thank you.

Thank you so much. We just heard actually that we have Ambassador Peter Thomson here in the audience. He is the UN Special Envoy for the Oceans. So we would love to hear more from you.

Yes. Look, I'm so impressed with what we're seeing here. I was considering ways of getting myself cloned because this message about what's going on in the ocean, one man can't do it. I'm in 2 countries every week, have been for the last 3 years. But this is the answer. I don't need to be cloned. All those things, which I'm talking to people about in countries, can be done through UpLink now. I'm really excited about this. Look, I'll ask a question to the curators maybe. If you look at the oceans' problems, they basically fall into 3 or 5 areas: marine pollution, fisheries; the physical nature of the ocean; certification; warming; deoxygenation. And there are communities which are interested just in those areas, because that's what they tend to specialize in, the fisheries community, for example, we're hearing about now. How are you going to curate those so that if I'm just interested in marine pollution, do I get into a kind of family here of others who are just interested in marine pollution somehow? Thanks.

Thank you. Do we -- Dominic, would you like to respond to that?

Well, maybe our colleague from Salesforce can. Claudio, you've been looking at this issue of communities.

Claudio Crivelli from Salesforce. So to answer your question, yes. So the -- behind the scene, we are going to create that community of expert, so subject matter experts, issue expert like Jim Leape, for instance, or other people related to the Friends of Ocean Action or Benioff Ocean Foundation to curate all the ideas, start-up that come up according to the roadblock that will be published.

Great. We're going to hear from Jim Leape now, one of the leading scientists on the oceans from Stanford.

First of all, I think we should hold onto the cloning option, just saying. So I'm at Stanford, I direct the Center for Ocean Solutions there and been involved with The Forum and all these things. I just want to say, congratulations to The Forum and to the founders; and then particularly to Fatima and Melati and Badr for bringing this to life. I mean it's amazing. And so as someone who spends all his time in oceans, look, I'll just say 2 things. I mean one is, there has never been a greater opportunity for innovation with all the data and technology coming to us now about what's happening in the oceans and what we're doing to them. And there's also, of course, never been a more urgent need for that. And it's hard to imagine better hands to put that in than these hands. So for me, as an old guy, that's super exciting. But -- and so one thing just as a question. I mean I'd be really curious, both of you guys think ambitiously, right, about making change in the world. And you've talked about expertise. You've talked about visibility coming from this platform. But how -- what do you need from the platform? How do you see taking these great ideas that you have to the kind of scale that you dream of?

Maybe Badr, you can start because you're actually using it?

Yes. So actually, there are a lot of initiatives all over the world. And those initiatives, some of them are really, really interesting. But they don't have access to expert resources. They don't have this visibility. And I strongly believe that such a platform can really enable them to scale because those initiatives will be vetted by curators, experts. So once a really interesting idea is popping up, they will have the necessary monitoring, coaching, follow-up, expertise, access to decision-makers and so on, that would allow them to have a real global impact because what we've been seeing lately is that there were a lot of initiatives going on, and this is a problem that we're actually facing. There are a lot of initiatives, but they're small. So the model today is that there's a lot of money going to NGOs to do pilots but there is no follow-up on scaling on those pilots because those NGOs doesn't have the mechanism to follow up on those pilots. And this is the whole difference between being for-profit and nonprofit organization. Being for-profit means that it's in your DNA to scale up, to go beyond the first pilot and scale and be profitable. And this is the big difference that I see in UpLink. So enabling those ideas, those projects, those journeys to scale, once they prove that they're really interesting.

Melati, what would you like to see? What do you need?

Well, I think you were really spot on in exactly explaining that communication channel, once it's vetted and having that entire process, where we are then connected to either action groups or specific experts that can actually help all of these ideas turn into a reality.

Okay. Great. Anyone else? The floor is open.

I'm Areije from Al Waha Venture Capital Fund of Funds from Bahrain. And I think from our perspective, as an investor, especially into venture, I think one area that I think UpLink will definitely help support is building that kind of awareness that projects that actually do tackle the SDGs can actually still be profitable, and venture capitalists can actually put their money into this. We've seen a huge interest in impact investors. But a lot of the time, they can't find like-minded people. They struggle to find people that actually believe that an impact project will actually make money and bring back money to their investors, especially if they run venture funds. And I think UpLink will help build awareness, connect investors with other like-minded investors and be able to find people such as Badr and yourself to be able to do this.

We have time for just one more comment if somebody has one. Oh, no. I saw 2. Okay, we're going to get both of them in. So back there.

Hi Melati, I'm Uni Lubis from IDN Times from Indonesia. I'm really proud about your work and your colleague in Global Shapers. My question is -- or probably not a question, what do you need to make sure that UpLink get more and more engagement in Indonesia? As the first global ambassador, what do you need? Because I came from the media, I think the media should support this initiative [indiscernible].

Definitely. I mean off the top of my head, and I'm going off-script here, but I think definitely, Indonesia is an incredible platform, even being one of the youngest nations. The network that we've built with YOUTHTOPIA and Bye Bye Plastic Bags over the year, probably a launching ceremony where we can get a couple of key players involved and actively using UpLink. I mean talk about the tech start-ups in Indonesia, the innovators and entrepreneurs that we have within our country, just introducing this in a really proper way to our nation.

Fantastic. There's one more quick comment, and then we have to move on.

I'll try to be very quick. I'm very happy to have seen the presentation of what we have in UpLink, I congratulate everybody. In continuation of what my colleague just said, to succeed this platform, it could be maybe a successful story for our -- for everybody else to save the planet because I think what we need here, it is just the engagement of the decision-makers here. In the age of the platform companies, this platform can be the platform where we find the solutions and the implementation. So I would love to see the governments around here using this and maybe the [ copying ] in their countries to using in the next level for their exclusive governance in wider societies. Thank you very much. So it's a great example. We should very -- do everything to succeed this because it is like the future for our societies.

That sounds like a call to action. Yes, I think we can move on to our closing remarks.

I'll do the following way. I'm challenging everybody to work this, to identify the solutions that provide actions and advocate to make it more and more and more every day in every places. That's it.

Thank you so much.

Let's see what it will be.

Thank you so much. We have time just now for our closing comments, and we're going to go over to Allen Blue, who is -- who's -- yes, Allen, it's you. Good. He is, of course, Co-Founder and Vice President of Products at LinkedIn, and he's just going to give us some closing remarks. He's one of the foundational partners that we mentioned earlier. So Allen, we look forward to hearing what you have to say.

Thank you. So thank you very much for having us, and including us in the development of UpLink. So I hope you can see -- you can all see me. So I think one of the things which we have learned at LinkedIn for many years, and we've known it for a long time, is that networks are actually fundamental to our success. So almost everyone in this room would be able to say, "I know a time when a person reached out to me or a person was available to help me reach my goals, whatever they may have actually been." At LinkedIn, we have noticed that some people have these strong networks, this set of resources they can call upon, and some people do not. We call it the network gap. And that network gap is something which prevents people who are otherwise tremendous contributors from finding a path to be successful. When we saw it, we tried to do something about it. So we began to reach out to the members on LinkedIn who've identified themselves as people who would like to mentor others. And we have millions of these people on LinkedIn. And we connected them, on an -- sort of on a by-hand basis with some of the people who needed networks. And they had the most amazing time. These mentors got together with these individuals, spent time; maybe just had coffee with them or invited them over to the office and almost all of them ended that process by sharing some resources, some network, some connection with that young person, typically a young person, who they had worked with. This is what UpLink promises. UpLink promises a similar mechanism. In this case, connecting with and providing resources, connections, funding, ideas, knowledge to a group of entrepreneurs who are attempting to attack some of the most important crises and opportunities that we face as a planet. So this announcement today is not simply, here it is. But it's also a challenge to all of us. All of us need to reach out and find one of these entrepreneurs, I only ask for one, who you think is doing something interesting that you want to find out more about. Reach out to that person, use the platform to locate that entrepreneur who's working on, as they said, a cause you care about. At LinkedIn, we call this the Plus One Pledge. But at UpLink everyone who is here attending this conference, watching this live stream, should find just one person who they can help. Because, together, we have more than enough resources to make these entrepreneurs successful. So with that, thank you very much, again, for including us. And to the team here at The Forum and at Deloitte and at Salesforce for building it and making it a reality.

And if you do have those resources that Allen just mentioned, you can actually very conveniently, go to the address over there, which is uplink.weforum.org. Just a quick note before we go is that tomorrow, there are actually 3 UpLink sessions. So if you are interested in this, you can feel free to attend them. They're all in the Ice Village. There's one on food systems, on sustainable cities and on education. So thank you so much from the foundational partners. Thank you so much to the forum, and thank you so much for the Global Shapers here on the stage. And thank you so much to all of you for your contributions. [Break]

Good evening. We have a very interesting panel discussion now, a very important panel discussion, because one of the key elements of this Annual Meeting of this 50th Anniversary is to take up again and to promote the notion of Stakeholder Capitalism. But of course, there are a number of issues related to stakeholder capitalism, which we want to discuss this evening. And I'm very pleased to have a very powerful panel. I'm not going necessarily in the seating order, but I welcome Jim Hagemann Snabe. He's the Chairman of Siemens and of Maersk. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum. Feike Sijbesma, also a member of the Board. He is Chief Executive and Chairman of the Managing Board of Royal DSM. Then we have Marc Benioff, Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer of Salesforce, member of the Board of the World Economic Forum. Brian Moynihan, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Bank of America and Chair of the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum. And Ginni Rometty, Chairman, and President and Chief Executive Officer of IBM, also a member of the International Business Council. And Ginni, I would like to use this opportunity to express a special thanks to you. Because coming here to the 50th anniversary, I was looking again at our program, which we had when we had the first meeting in '71. And actually, your company is the first member of the forum and was represented already at the first meeting by one of its leading executives. And thank you.

Thank you.

For 50 years of loyalty. Highly appreciated.

You're welcome, Klaus. Thank you. Congratulations to you.

Now let me start with Brian. We -- you had -- this afternoon, we had our meeting of the International Business Council, which you are chairing. And what is the outcome? You discussed very much how we can create a credible ESG system around the -- around stakeholder capitalism.

So I think, Klaus, the -- we had a session with the community of chair first this morning and then with the International Business Council. They're really talking about 2 topics, which -- the simplest way to think about it, and one is about what have we been doing to help make progress in SGDs, and that's the lighthouse projects, which are examples of what the companies have done under your leadership for the last 50 years to drive change. And the second is metrics to measure what we're going to do in the future. So what are we going to do in the future as companies to continue to drive stakeholder capitalism? And I think the idea here was to develop actual metrics that we could get the companies to agree to, meaning the operating companies, the investors who invest in us to agree to and the owners who give them the assets to invest. So a pension fund giving assets to an asset manager who then gives an asset to an operator and get a set of metrics we can all agree to that are defining what stakeholder capitalism is and importantly, progress on it. And so the 100-or-so CEOs were there and 100-or-so companies represented. A group of us have been working on this. We are now pushing it forward to syndicate it through the entire population for people to sign on. The context is 50 years ago, as Klaus referenced, the -- 50-plus years ago, the concept of stakeholder capitalism, leading to 2017, the International Business Council and most of the members signing the compact, then leading to the next step, which was the things like the BRT and the purpose of the corporation, what is it? And on top of that, the IDC saying that we have to make progress on the SDGs because if we don't, charity can't solve these problems. Governments can't solve these problems alone. It will take the money from companies to generate the $6 trillion in investment to get the SDGs implemented. And the way companies are going to do that is by changing their operations, and the way society will measure them is by metrics. And so this virtuous circle of operations, to metrics, to investors, to owners and back to the metrics will allow us to demonstrate what stakeholder capitalism is, effectively. And the group was very enthusiastic. And we've used the top 4 accounting firms to help us drive it to have the integrity and auditability, and we'll push it through to the next summer's meeting.

So Brian, it was the beginning of a process. When do you feel we have generally accepted comprehensive measurement system in place?

Well, the goal is to do it between now and August. We started last -- we started somewhat before last August but really got into it last August in earnest with your team from the WEF, helping them drive through the industry. And I think -- so the engagement -- hopefully, by the time we meet in Geneva in the wonderful location at the WEF headquarters, we'll have a -- they agree to a set of metrics. And that way, we can start publishing them as part of our annual reporting by the next subsequent year in 2021.

And we will present it and try to integrate everybody on the occasion of the next annual meeting at Davos.

And so that would be the arc to do it. And then thereafter, people can report. And I think, simply, this gives life to how to measure a company's progress towards serving all stakeholders, doing a great job for its customers and clients and teammates and shareholders and doing a great job for society, and it's that aim that's critical.

So we move relatively fast because it's a complicated matter. May I just ask the other panelists, the sense of urgency, why is it necessary?

Well, maybe I can add a comment there. I think it's key. I mean we are very good at measuring shareholder value, and we've done that for many, many years. And as CEOs and Chairman, we think that is an important role. Now if we want to go to stakeholder capitalism, we do need to make sure that we can measure the value we create for all stakeholders. And there are so many measurements out there. So I'm very excited about the effort that Brian and the team has been doing. It nails it down to 22 measurements that everyone could implement. And I can say as the Chairman of Siemens, we have committed to engage in this project, help out, make sure that these metrics are relevant. And we're even putting our remuneration system for the CEO and the executive team on an ESG base, so stakeholder management and its core.

And to add to Jim, we should not only measure, of course, the different things on sustainability, but it is clear that we are not adding enough value in the area of sustainability. If we look what's happening to the oceans, if we look what happened to the climate, if we look what happened to our scale for raw materials, it's clear that we need to measure, but it's also clear that the measurements will show that we're not doing enough yet.

Ginni, we are living now in a very -- I'm sorry.

That's part of bringing the investment rate up to the need to actually get the SDGs implemented is if we all commit to these commitments, it will require more investment by Marc's company, by Jim's company, by Ginni's company, and that's how we get there. That creates the urgency, the amount of commitment we make. Right now, it's just about 1/3 of what we need.

Ginni, we are living in a new age, the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And actually, you are one of the pioneers, IBM, of this age. Now since -- so with new technologies bring new challenges like platform companies and so on and so on, how does the Fourth Industry Revolution actually affect stakeholder capitalism? Does it make it easier or more difficult? If you look at data and all those...

I think for some companies, it's going to make it more difficult. And for others, it will rely on the values they've held for a long time. And the reason I say that is in some ways, you'd say, would the Fourth Industrial Revolution change what we do? In some ways, you'd say no, because when it comes to long-term and managing for the long-term and shareholder value, you'd say, why, I've always put an and between every constituent. I do think there's a difference though with the Fourth Industrial Revolution and that it changes the nature of what we do. And I would boil it down to one word, and that's trust. And in fact, in many ways, I think this is going to be a decade of trust. And if you think about the technology, as you mentioned way back when we started all of this, even in the beginnings of AI, you could see the world would compete on data, and there would be good uses and bad uses of data. And then you would say to yourself, okay, if people -- if this era is going to thrive, people have to trust the technology. But one more thing. They have to trust that the era will be inclusive for them as well. And so I think this industrial revolution and everything about it bases itself in data, and it calls the question then of trust, at an individual level, about the data, at a company level, at a nation level. And then does everyone feel the future is better or worse in this era? And that leads you to change things if you focus on that point.

So was the suggestion made that actually it should not be ESG, it should be ESGD? With data playing such an important role, data responsibility should be emphasized.

Well, look, I think, for all of us -- and Brian had 4 categories today as he went through on the metrics. One of them was around principles in governance. And I think everybody could say -- Klaus, I go back when you had me out here 4, 5 years ago together, we introduced our -- I shouldn't say introduced, but we wrote them down, our principles about data and data management years ago around this to be clear that people knew that technology should augment man, that the data belonged to the owner. You had to be transparent, no bias, et cetera. So some of the things Brian is calling out to be measured on, you should be audited against those things if you believe them. The other big pillar you have is around people. And so if I can just kind of digress 1 second. I do think this era means 100% of jobs will change. We've been doing work with MIT in looking at how do job roles change. And you can already see tasks are moving to high end and low end, and some people will call that hollowing out the middle, and so it does call for massive retraining. And so I would just add, if I can, on this point to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the biggest thing that I think it requires is a change in paradigm around skills. For one, it's moving so quickly. You have to value skills, not just degrees. You have to have new education models and then new pathways to get people retrained and back into the workforce. So maybe we'll talk more about those programs, but those are very concrete actions that have to be taken.

But what is the responsibility of a company like yours to act upon those necessities?

Okay. This is very -- this is where I think there's this intersection between business and what is good for the shareholder, what's good for me, what's good for the community, because if this -- it is not good for anyone if people do not find the digital era to be an inclusive era where they see a better future for themselves. No one is going to buy new technologies. No one's going to want to go down these roads. If the world becomes more have and have not, that is a horrible thing, I believe, both -- and so therefore, for us, I also need great employees. And so that's part of my job. And I think because of the speed, I make this technology, I should usher it safely into the world. Part of ushering safely means, I have to help the world prepare for it and society prepare, and that means skills. And that's a public-private partnership. I mean, I was just sharing with the IDC earlier today, one of the ones we've been passionate about for 7 years was everyone can't have a college degree. So could you work with high schools around the world and turn them into -- with the community college or an apprenticeship, as others would call it, a vocational school, a 6-year technology degree, a high school and an associate degree. To make a long story short, 7 years later, 600 companies, 150,000 kids coming through, and they've got 2 degrees, they're employable, and the results show. So I would report on these metrics. Last year, 15%, 1-5% of my hiring in the United States was these kids. And they're great employees, by the way, and they go back and get more education. And so I -- but if we don't all participate, it's too much for government, and the speed it's moving at is too fast, and you've got to build trust in this era.

Any comment on this issue of skills and the need for public-private cooperation?

I'll just relate it back to the -- in the metrics, the people metric requires you to declare how you're handling this question, the Fourth Industrial Revolution. So Ginni mentioned it, but this is the alignment of these issues that my other colleagues will talk about and the fact that we can then commit to society, will make progress here.

Now Feike, there is quite some interrelationship between one issue we discussed with great urgency here, which is the environmental challenge, which we have and the stakeholder capitalism. Do you see any interconnection? Or does it provide a special sense of urgency?

Right. Thanks, Klaus. And congratulations with 50 years' stakeholder model. But after 50 years' stakeholder model, we still need to discuss this area of sustainability. And then I ask myself the question, are we all serving our economic model? Or did we develop the economic model, which is serving mankind? And I think the economy effort started in a very simple, sustainable model with barter-trade. One specializes in this, the other specializes in this, and they exchange goods. And later on, we made the economic model more complicated with money and gold and, et cetera. And maybe somewhere we derailed a little bit that result making money is a real goal of the economy, where the real goal is to live happily here altogether. And if we see how much problems we create with the oceans, with our climate, with our scale for raw materials, we are somewhere derailing. And it is just good business sense as well to take care of your environment because nobody will remain successful in a world that falls apart, society, environmentally. So I think we can develop the products as businesses. We can develop the innovations to address the issues on climate. And that means also that we need to take bigger steps. We need to be more clear as businesses what is our derivative of the various goals, so-called science-based targets, to set our emission targets, maybe to put a price on carbon, also internally in companies, at least to disclosure the climate-related financial risks we are taking, all kinds of things, which the 3 of us put in the letter to all the participants of The Forum. And I think there's many, many things is there, which you can do as business to step up, in order also to guarantee your own business model. So I would like to say, dare to think long-term. Dare to address the SDGs. Dare to take care of all the different stakeholders on the long run. Otherwise, you will not remain successful.

Brian, do you think that the environmental concerns have been sufficiently -- I ask a provocative question, sufficiently integrated into the scheme, which we have now as a base?

I think if you look -- 1 of the 4 pillars is earth, and it has all the SDGs around environment. The clean water sanitation, the oceans or life below water and the words they use, [ planet ], et cetera. So they're all in there. The metrics we're using are really geared at showing how companies are managing their scope: one, scope to emissions; when they're going to be carbon free by. And the letter that you wrote with Feike and I asked people to make that commitment. About 20-odd percent of the -- 25% or so of the companies have already made a commitment. So I think they're sufficiently detailed that they'll give measurements and then, frankly, that they're relative measurements. So one of the things will happen within an industry. If my company is doing x and another company is doing better than x, they'll be a natural competition to make sure I'm competitive, which will then cause me to do more. We at Bank of America carbon neutral now. We have a $300 billion environmental program. I think as people learn more about that -- we just created a new markets committee with [ Anne Finucane ] and Tom Montag to lead -- help drive their business case. As people hear more about that, you're going to see more people do it, even smaller-sized banks, et cetera.

Yes. Brian, we have -- under your leadership, the Business Council developed this framework. I think we should distribute this framework to everybody here and to integrate now everybody into this, let's say, yes, mobilization of all businesses. Any comment?

Well, it is not only for us companies, but it is also for those who invest in us, asset managers or behind them, asset owners. They also find it very difficult to see which company is now really sustainable and which company not. There are more than 650 different metrics out there to determine who is sustainable. Now nobody understands out of 650 different metrics whose are really sustainable and how you compare companies. It's -- for us, company is important. Each of our investors is important. It is for society at large important. And that is what Brian and -- together with the IDC, tried to do in the past months and in the coming months to converge that to a much more clearer set. This is sustainable. This is not sustainable. This is the way you measure. And I think that transparency, Klaus, fits 100% with the stakeholder model.

So we start here a true revolution?

We do.

Yes. Now Jim, you as the Chairman of Siemens, you had just to make some difficult decisions. And even when you [ entrust ] to the stakeholder concept, you cannot avoid that, at certain moments, you have to take the decision in one way or another way and to find the right balance. What is your experience and your advice?

Yes. So you're right. We had a pretty challenging situation recently, and it was challenging in many ways. It was emotional because of the, let's say, lack of facts in the conversation around it, and it was super complex. So with the social media and the spread of information that we have today, you suddenly find yourself in a very defensive moment when, actually, in your core, you feel pretty proud of where the company is and where it's going. I mean the factual situation, which makes me proud of Siemens is that Siemens was one of the first industrial players who actually committed to CO2 neutrality. We did that in 2015. So that's 5 years ago and said, by '30, we'll be neutral. And by '20, this is this year, we'll have a 50% reduction of CO2 compared to '14. So very committed to that. We changed our philosophy as well to say, well, being stakeholder-oriented and planet-oriented, it's not about how you spend your money, how you -- we make business, we make a profit. And then how much of this profit will we do [ therefore ]? We actually turn it around and say it's about how we make our money. And fact is that, today, 44% of the total revenue of Siemens, which is a, what, EUR 82 billion company, is associated with solutions that help our customers run their business in a more sustainable way. And so with that in mind, you feel proud about where the company is. And then suddenly, you find yourself in a communication crisis because we had committed to deliver a signaling system to a train, and the train moves coal from a coal mine. And you look at that, you feel you're pretty far away from the bad doing, but we had committed to this project. And suddenly, if you follow then the media and the headlines, the headline says Siemens is building coal mines, which is not factually true. And -- but it's really hard to deal with that situation. And you got to make some choices. Are we still going to deliver that system? It's not a big contract. We want to value commitments to customers. For me, this case shows that, first of all, there is an urgency on this, where your permission to play as a company, even though you feel you're doing the right things, can be taken away from you instantly in a place where you didn't expect it. And secondly, I believe that we are right now at the tipping point where the scrutiny around projects that are not relevant for that future, a fossil-free future, will be dramatically increasing. The climate change is not some topic we can talk about. It's about real action. And you've got to realize that as a company, and you've got to take real action. The issue is not the commitment to the future that you want to bring your company to but the transition to get there. You don't get there in one day. We have 15 years when we started this. Now we have 10 left. We are doing fine. But we need to basically reinvent the company, go from solutions that were fossil-based to renewable-based. You've got to reskill the company. You've got to restructure the company, get out of certain businesses so that you can invest in others. And you do need to reposition the company because, otherwise, you suddenly find yourself in the wrong headline even though you are doing the right thing. So as a Chairman, for me, it's about not getting distracted by this because you've got to do the right things. But if anything, you need to talk more about it, and you need to accelerate your efforts. Otherwise, any little project, even though you feel you are far away from the wrongdoing, can distract you and reduce your ability to become what you have intended to be.

Ginni, you were very much nodding your head.

Yes.

Do you have your own experience, and can you tell me about it?

Yes. I do. And I mean, it's had to do with whether or not we take on certain projects, as an example. There is much discussion about different technologies and how they're used. And I think that those have to be values-based decisions. But what's changed is how much you have to talk about it so that people understand why you take these decisions. And I think it's even what surrounded this whole dialogue around the purpose of a corporation, that there's been things that are written very binary about the topic. And this isn't a binary topic. And if you manage for the long term, you do have an and between all of these words, yet people want to polarize this. So when any one of us do things for our community, our employees, our clients, the countries, everywhere within which we live, our partners, I always feel they give us license to operate. That is where our license to operate comes from. So that communication that Jim was talking about, a, it is both important to have it, but it's also because it is good for your business. This is not an altruistic thing that you are doing in and of itself. And I think you can't, in this day and age, explain that enough or give the rationale. I mean, when I say I do -- when people will say, "Well, this is charity or foundation work." I say, "No, it's not." I mean, skills is not charity and foundation work. And if -- living in a democracy that people think they have a better future is not charity work because they are your employees and your customers. So that's why I was really understanding and agreeing with this point that I think it's just so important to both position everything right and connect those dots, right? Because it's a virtuous circle, but you got to get it moving.

Brian?

And -- so the -- one of the setups that we did with the groups today was to talk about the $6 trillion, and the charity is $800 billion a year. A government -- the biggest government in the United States has $1 billion -- $1 trillion deficit and has only a $4 trillion budget. So this work can't be charity. It's what Jim said. It is retooling your business system to have the outcome. Otherwise, we're going to fail because we have $800 billion a year and we have $6 trillion of demand, and it's not going to come close. And that's if you took all the money in all the charity in the world that only went to these items. There's the arts and a lot of other things, which are not -- are also included. So this idea, what Jim is saying is we're saying operate your whole expense base, your whole customer base, your whole supply chain, and over time, transition to [ producing these ] results is a much more sustainable, sustainable process.

Marc, I will ask you in a moment a very sensitive question. But before, coming back to you, Ginni. If you want to judge the behavior of a company, you have to execute principles. Now you have to have the principles. And now you are a leader in -- one of the foremost leaders in artificial intelligence. And so our new technologies, where we haven't succeeded yet to create an ethical framework around, how do you deal with those issues?

Yes. Look, I -- this is a topic that we took up many years ago. First, principles always start with yourself before you try to put them on other people. And to this day, we've written ethical principles for AI. So within my own company, it starts with -- because I build this stuff, the belief that it's there to augment what you and I do and make us better. That does matter, where you start from and how you start building these things. And then the part that you must be transparent, and you must be sure it's rid of bias, and it has to be explainable. So once you start laying out what your principles are for this and then audit yourself to them. So I think there are some pretty simple things we do and many people can do. Things like, do not hide your AI. You should know when you're interacting with it versus some -- versus just a system. There are things like, you should check it for bias. I mean, we've built products that actually can -- it doesn't matter who built your AI. It can tell you if it has bias. And an important sort of footnote, like, what is bias? Because the actual act of concluding bias is bias. You've had some set of values that you've determined, this is good and this is bad. And so that's culturally different. It varies in many places. So what our tools really look for are just patterns. And then you have to put them against the values. It's a values question, not a technology question, right? And so you would -- don't hide it. Test it all the time. I think when it comes to regulation and a framework to deal with AI, you should deal with how it's used, not try to [ knot the ] technology and regulate it itself. It takes precision regulation. And then above that, if I'm a company, we have an AI Ethics Officer. I think you guys do, too, as our -- I mean, I think many of us do now. So then we've worked with all countries around the world. Europe has come out with one. OECD's got one. A number of these have been built that, I think, have been built quite sensibly in partnership with business and industry and academia to give them input because there is always going to be this balance between innovation and whether it be privacy or security or any other path you go down. And in these early stages, you really do want to both watch its use, also regulate it based on risk and be sure you're transparent. So that, I think, is an incredibly important thing. And it isn't just something a government does. Every company has to do it for themself.

Marc, you have been a proponent and a fabulous partner in promoting the stakeholder concept. Thank you because you are a role model. But you went even one step further, and what you did is actually to speak out on social issues in a very strong way. So you took a position, for example, in addressing poverty in your community in San Francisco. You even were involved in a voting dispute and, of course, your support for LGBTQ rights. Now my question is should a business lead not only apply or submit himself to the ESG standards but even go one step further and speak out on political issues?

Well, Klaus, I mean just listening to this panel and being here at the conference and recent events, certainly, I would tell you, and I would certainly tell the business leaders here that capitalism, as we have known it, is dead. And this obsession that we have with maximizing profits for shareholders alone has led to incredible inequality and a planetary emergency. We all owe a debt of gratitude to you, Klaus. You have shown us the way forward. And Klaus is right. For 50 years, we have seen -- he has called for a new capitalism, a stakeholder capitalism. A more fair, a more just, a more equitable, a more sustainable way of doing business that values all stakeholders as well as all shareholders. And I know, Klaus, you are right because Salesforce and -- through your mentorship is living proof that stakeholder capitalism works. Now you know we've had a phenomenal return for our shareholders. $165 billion in market capitalization, 4,000% return since we went public in 2004. But Klaus, we've also had a very good return for our stakeholders. $310 million in grants so far to worthy causes. Our employees have volunteered 4.5 million hours to their local communities. 45,000 nonprofits and NGOs, including the World Economic Forum, use our product for free. And that's about $1 billion of our software a year as well. And it's why, Klaus, I so strongly believe that when we serve all stakeholders, business is the greatest platform for change. And the great news is, and I believe that you can see it here, that stakeholder capitalism is finally hitting a tipping point. In the U.S., the Business Roundtable has stated now the purpose of a corporation includes a fundamental commitment to all stakeholders, not just its shareholders, that choosing between the 2 is a false choice. And this Davos Manifesto 2020 that you have written says that the purpose of a company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is to create a value for all its stakeholders. So taking that all into my heart when you say does it mean then that I have to fight for my employees? Yes. So if they're being discriminated against and if they're LGBTQ employees, yes, we will fight for them. Does it mean that I have to fight for our customers? Of course. Or even our local stakeholders in our community like our homeless. Yes, every CEO has a responsibility to think about all stakeholders. And yes, as you've seen aggressively at this conference, the planet is a key stakeholder. We are in a planetary emergency. That is why I commend you, Klaus, for 1t.org, calling for the planting of 1 trillion trees to sequester over 200 gigatons of carbon and calling on the governments that have spoken here, the businesses that have spoken here, the NGOs that have spoken here, to take immediate action to one, yes, be net-zero. Reduce your emission. But 2, also, we need to sequester the carbon that has been transferred from the grounds and from the oceans and from the trees into the atmosphere. So anyway, I want to thank you, Klaus, for leading us to this vision of stakeholder capitalism that we are today. And you certainly deserve a tremendous commendation for 50 years of this vision.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Marc. We are coming to an end of the session. Would you -- I have the feeling we are here at a funeral. It's the funeral of shareholder capitalism, and it's the birth of stakeholder capitalism. Now to conclude this panel discussion, what would be your advice now to the audience? I mean, I'm sure there are still people who are skeptical about this transformation. What is your message to people who are skeptical and still have question marks in their mind? Jim, do you want to start? Or?

Sure. Sure. I can do that. So for me, as a business leader, I had an epiphany in 2008 when I went on a trip to India and met some of the poorest people on the planet and some of the richest people on the planet the same day. And I almost resigned and said, "I'm going to spend time to do something good for the world." And I realized a few hours later that if I stayed in business and I could leverage the vehicle of business, then probably I would have a significantly more impact than I would just have as Jim Hagemann Snabe. Who cares about me? At the time, I was with SAP, and we began a process of trying to redirect the company towards a stakeholder orientation, that led not only to a doubling of the value of the company but actually, an excitement inside the company about what this company could do. I am seeing the same now with Siemens. I see the same with AP Moller-Maersk. So in my mind, we often underestimate the power that business can have. You ask, should we be political? No, I don't think so. We should influence policies to create frameworks that align better the stakeholders. But it is not our duty to be political. I think we need to have opinions. And most of all, we need to leverage the global reach of our companies, the integration that we have with employees and in the societies in which we operate and demonstrate action because that's what business is really good at. And I hope that everyone will sign the Manifest. I certainly will, because I also think it's completely unfair that one CEO is asked to take responsibility for some other CEO who's not getting it done. And therefore, my plea is to everyone, sign it, and then do something. Be a force because business can be. Thank you.

Marc? Do you want...

Well, Klaus, I think that there's been some comments made about corporate cultures. But I think that we realized that a corporate culture alone will not be enough to meet the urgency and scale of today's global challenges. We need new resources. The wealthiest among us, people like me and so many of us here, we need to pay higher taxes. That's a word that has not been used yet on the panel. And I'm pleased that your Davos Manifesto, Klaus, recognizes that companies need to pay higher taxes and pay their fair share. And one example of that is how we're addressing this at Salesforce in San Francisco, where we radically supported a new tax on our largest companies to address our homelessness crisis because the homeless are stakeholders, as I mentioned. But you asked, what should we be doing now as business leaders? And I would tell my fellow business leaders here that none of these challenges are going away. We need to rise to this moment of urgency. We need to act now. If you're attending this conference, you need to commit to stakeholder capitalism. If you are attending this conference, you need to commit to being net-zero. If you're attending this conference, you need to help to protect the oceans. If you're attending this conference, you need to commit to help planting 1 trillion trees. Every single one of us is a platform for change. This is a time of action, not words. We are at that point of urgency with our planet. And that's why I wrote the book Trailblazer, because I believe that my business, and really all of us, are tremendous platforms for change and that we must act today.

Thank you. Brian?

So the question -- a skeptic might say, can you do both? Can you really deliver for all the constituencies? Can you deliver for your customers? Can you deliver for your employees? Can you deliver for your shareholders and deliver for society? And we've looked back and back-tested this in a lot of ways in our research. Just pure matter. The BRT -- firms that signed the BRT have outperformed their industry. If you -- our research team has proven that if you don't follow good ESG principles, you could look back. And if you were an investor, if you did invest in those companies that have performed poorly, you've missed 90% of bankruptcies. Our research team has declared the next decade, 1 of the 10 trends is moral capitalism, and that's where the investor money is going to flow. So if you're thinking about you can produce a profit for your shareholder and not address your owners and not address your employees, you're going to have a problem. But I'd flip it around and be more optimistic. You can do both. Our company has been able to, across the decade I've been CEO, generate tremendous shareholder return, earn record earnings, $2.5 billion of charity, $50 billion of community development, going to complete a $125 billion-plus of environmental financings. And you can do it while we're making money. These are all business propositions. So I think the skeptics say, you can't do both. You can. Now let's go out and do it.

Feike?

Well, I hope it's not a funeral, although it's always good to bury the things we don't need anymore. But I hope it's more a birth, a birth of taking care, like Marc was saying, of all the different stakeholders. Globalization brought prosperity for billions of people for many countries but not for all countries and not for all people in all countries, including the planet being one of those stakeholders of globalization. And I think what we should do, my advice, I am deeply convinced that you can serve all stakeholders, that you can serve the planet, that you can serve society and create profits. However, not always on the short term. Not. So what should we do? We should resist the temptation of being seduced to deliver value only on the short term, and it is sometimes tempting to do that. But we should resist that temptation and go for the long term. And if you go for the long term, I'm convinced that you can combine value creation in an economic sense, together with societal value and ecological value. And that is what we CEOs, what we businesses, need to do.

Ginni, you have the last word.

Yes. Well, that's a tough position. I think everyone has done a great job, and I'm always humble about advice because I need more advice than I probably give. So I think the only thing I would add to this conversation then is IBM's in its second century. So I think this is living proof that if you do honor all stakeholders, as I said earlier, it is your license to operate. And one thing I had to think hard though in this new era, I'll end where -- Klaus, your first question to me was on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And there is something different though here now. And I think the world is bifurcating between what I called -- simply talking to my workforce 7, 8 years ago to the team, I said, "The world was bifurcating into good tech and bad tech." And I think you have to decide what are those you are. And if you're good tech, what does that really mean? And I don't mean "technology company." I mean good tech or bad tech and how you're going to use it. And for us, we made a decision that it would be about things like everything we did would build trust. It would be to prepare society and their skills. We would be the industry's role model for diversity and inclusion and honor the planet. And that's what that means. And my own -- I would end on that advice to just decide what that means for you to be on the good side of history.

Thank you all the panelists. And you see why we feel that this annual meeting and the Manifesto 2020 should really be a turning point from one thinking to a new thinking. And you have seen with the panelists as the passion reaches behind because we are dealing here not with a theoretical issue. I think we are dealing here with an issue which will determine the survival of the free enterprise system of democracy if we take it in a broader context. So let's take up the challenge. And please thank the panel. [Break]

Okay. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to those of you who are in Davos for the 2020 annual meeting and those of you who are watching on live stream or through other channels. My name is Dominic Waughray. I'm a member of the Managing Board here at the World Economic Forum, and it's my delight and privilege to welcome you to this discussion, which is a briefing about a major initiative that has been launched here at Davos called the Trillion Trees platform or 1t.org. 1t.org exists to serve the global community of actors committed to contributing to the goal of growing, restoring and conserving 1 trillion trees worldwide by 2030. It's a very, very important initiative in the broader issue of tackling climate change, the climate emergency that we face. We know we have to deal with the industry transition, the energy and urban transition, transforming our financial system, but we also know that nature-based solutions, particularly the restoration of nature, is a key part of this jigsaw. And that is exactly what 1t.org is going to tackle.

We have a fabulous panel lined up to provide some thoughts and inspiration from this. I don't think we could have brought together such a spectacular group of people. And so it's my absolute delight to, first of all, introduce you to Ivan Duque, who is the President of Columbia. Mr. President, the importance of the restoration, conservation agenda in the battle to tackle climate change, 1t.org and your viewpoints from a Colombian perspective.

First of all, thank you so much. It is a great pleasure for me to be here again in the World Economic Forum. I want to express my gratitude to all the distinguished members of this panel to participate and to lead this important initiative on One Trillion Trees. Let me just first say that the biggest challenge of our time is climate change. And we will not be successful facing climate change until we do not defeat deforestation around the globe. And Colombia sees this initiative as a very important milestone. We consider that if we make the whole world conscious about reforestation and about planting and protecting the ecosystems, we can really make a big change. Colombia has 50% of the world's páramos. Colombia has 35% of its territory as Amazonic land, and we have 50% of our territory in tropical jungle. But we have seen deforestation taking place a long time, and we want to make a difference with a big goal. We want to plant 180 million trees by August 2022. Since we began our administration, we've gotten to plant something close to 24.7 million trees. This year, we expect to get 60 million more and reach this target by 2022. We want to call local governments and the whole environmental agencies at the local level to lead this initiative. So we consider that our contribution to the One Trillion Trees initiative is based on this goal, and we want the whole Colombian society to embrace this goal. And last but not least, we have decided to build better institutions to fight deforestation. We created the National Council against deforestation last year, and we also launched the Artemis Campaign, a campaign that is aimed to fight the criminals who are destroying the Amazonic land or who are having an illegal trade of wood. And we believe that if we combine the efforts of planting and generating a social conscience for reforestation and if we fight the criminality that is surrounding many different ecosystems in the world, we will be more effective. So I see this initiative as a very important one. I am very glad that the World Economic Forum has taken a lead. And I also want to express that having private sector leaders such as you, Marc, having a lot of leadership and promoting public-private partnerships is very important. So we embrace our cause to participate in the initiative. And yes, we believe that by 2022, with 180 million trees planted in Colombia, we'll be a substantial leader, regionally speaking, so that this initiative can accomplish its goal by 2030. Thank you so much.

Very good.

Thank you, Mr. President. That's a very, very compelling case that's been made out for the restoration, conservation and growing of the tree target towards 1t.org. You mentioned the private sector. Marc Benioff, CEO, Chairman, salesforce.com, why would companies be interested and involved in this? It sounds like this should be something for NGOs and governments, not companies.

Well, we are certainly at a time of planetary emergency. We realize that our planet is getting warmer, and we need to find ways and solutions that we are going to all become, number one, carbon net-zero and reduce emissions; and number two, we have to sequester or eliminate the carbon that has been emitted into the atmosphere. Human beings are very good at moving carbon around. And we can see what we've done. We've moved it from the ground and into the atmosphere, from the ocean to the atmosphere and from the trees into the atmosphere. And we need to get a big eye on our forests so that we can use them to sequester this carbon. I want to just start by telling you a story, which is we were in the San Francisco climate conference. And Jane Goodall was there. And we were telling her all the good work that the World Economic Forum and Dominic, and Doug McCauley who's here with the University of California, Santa Barbara, are doing with the oceans. And she said, "Well, it's very nice what you're doing for the oceans. But what are you doing for the forests?" And I didn't have an answer. I didn't know what to say. And I had it in my mind, though, that it was a loop, that I was -- needed to have something to say. And then I want to give thanks to Al Gore, who's not here but is a critical part of this, because at our World Economic Forum trustee meeting in August in Geneva, he was there talking about the incredible research done at ETH University right here in Zürich by Tom Crowther. Tom, would you just stand up and be recognized? Tom did the incredible work for the Trillion Tree vision. His team is doing extraordinary things and took artificial intelligence and low-hanging satellites and other Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies and is showing us where these trillion trees are going and also the amount of carbon that they can sequester and the mathematical models and environmental models. And the research was then published in many scientific journals including Scientific American, Science and others. And Al Gore said, "Have you seen this research from Tom Crowther?" And I say, "No, I haven't." He's like, "About the forest." And I said, "Well, I'm actually thinking about the forest because I was just with Jane." And then basically that same day, Doug McCauley e-mailed me and said, "Well, have you seen Tom Crowther's research?" And I said, "No, I haven't. But Al Gore just mentioned it." And when I said it, I said, "What, 1 trillion trees will sequester more than 200 gigatons of carbon? We have to get on this right now. Who's working on this?" And I was very fortunate to have a great relationship with Dominic. And I said, "Dominic, what about the World Economic Forum?" And I just want to thank Klaus Schwab, who then fully embraced this idea. And we really have this now underway with a full team that's going to be staffed in Geneva working this, working with governments. Thank you, President Duque for your outstanding leadership. Also, I would like to thank President Trump who has also committed to participate in the One Trillion Tree campaign. And I expect the United States to commit to between 50 billion and 100 billion trees. So that research is being done by the Department of the Interior right now. And I expect that to get finalized hopefully in the next few months and moving ahead there. I really want to thank the World Economic Forum because I don't think there is another organization on the planet that actually could take this research that coincidentally was done just a couple of miles from here and start to execute this and to be able to convene the world leaders. It's -- this is such an important time. We are at a moment in history where all of us need to think about what does the future look like. And I know that planting 1 trillion trees sounds daunting. But there used to be 6 trillion trees on earth. Now there is 3 trillion. So we should be able to get another 1 trillion back. Well, I'd like 2 trillion. I guess I want them all back, Tom. How about all 6 trillion? That would have a huge impact on our environment. And we've already seen interest from 200 to 300 companies just in 24 hours to join our 1t.org program, and Dominic can talk about that. You can get more research and understand what we're doing at 1t.org. And who's against the trees? I mean the tree -- everyone is for the trees. The trees are a bipartisan issue. Everybody's pro-tree. I haven't met any anti-tree people yet. So that's very good. So Jane, you've done a great job. And every one of us can join this movement. And every one of us can make a commitment to plant trees, whether it's individually or organizationally, whether it's a government, whether it's a nonprofit, an NGO, whether it is a business. Salesforce is committing to planting 100 million trees over the next 10 years. That's our opening entrée into this. I hope it will be much, much larger. And I think it's also a great example of stakeholder capitalism, which is something that we're promoting here at the World Economic Forum's 50th anniversary, the idea that businesses have to be more than just their shareholders. They must be about all stakeholders, including their employees, their customers, partners, their local communities, their schools and certainly the planet. And our forests and our environment is a key stakeholder for every business, so we all have to be thinking about this. So thank you for having me, and I'm so excited for this initiative.

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Marc Benioff. Now the other interesting thing about this, of course, is people have been mobilizing communities and indigenous groups and local societies engaged in these sorts of areas. So there's an enormous potential to draw together into the 1t.org platform, an enormous amount of experience at the indigenous peoples and the community level. And if I'd like to, I could turn to Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, who's the President of the Association for Indigenous Women from the People's Republic of Chad. So almost from the other side of the coin here. We heard from major government leaders and major international corporations this effort to restore, conserve and grow 1 trillion trees by the end of the decade. Is that something that is impactful and interesting from the communities and indigenous peoples that you work with? And how is that?

Thank you very much. For indigenous peoples, forest trees is not only like a ton of tree or leaves. It's our home. It's our food. It's our medicine. It's our life. It is our knowledge. It is our school. So when we hear about the initiative of restoring the forest ecosystem, planting 1 trillion of trees, we are the first one who are very excited about it. Because we think, finally, the solution is coming into the tables, and that's what we are expecting. We cannot wait for that for 2050. It's starting now and that's what we want. But the initiative must include several things. One of them is how indigenous peoples and people who are living in forest can be the partners and the first stakeholders who can restore this forest. For us, it's not just planting a tree, as I said. It's all the ecosystem who live with it. It's the beast who can sit in each tree. It's the flowers of the trees that can be eaten by the insect. And it's not the shell only, but it is the value of these trees as ecological and spiritual way to give us back our identity that we are losing because of the climate change. So respecting the rights of indigenous peoples, recognizing the land rights, who can help the indigenous communities to rebuild the forest that they have in a different landscape, Africa, Asia, Latin America, but all the world's spaces. And also using not only the technology. We know that technology is very important. It can fasten the solutions. But we do have the most fast solution who make the proof for the centuries, the indigenous people's traditional knowledge. And I saw one example in Colombia, Mr. President, who was very excellent last year in the Tropical Forest Alliance 2020. I went to visit indigenous communities from my colleague who are here in the room, [ Carol ]. So they have the primary forest, where they create a corridor to the planting forest, where the species can navigate between the primary and the secondary, who can restore the ecosystem with all the way that we want. They have them on nursery, where they know the indigenous species to get replant. So that's the project we want. And if we go it in the way of indigenous peoples and we involve them, we are going to have not only tree planting, but life and livelihood of the peoples, the socials and then the living in harmony with the nature who can be restored. It's from the women, from the children, but from the next 7 generation that we are looking on it. So this project, we want. We really welcome it, and we're looking forward to work with the private sectors, with the companies, with the governments who are engaged, as Colombia here, but all African government, all Latin American, even Siberia, who is also burning. So don't forget the other forests. We have the 3 tropical forests, but we have also the secondary forests in Savanna, in Sahel, where we can mitigate the conflict between communities that's fighting just to get access to the resources. So it will be a big movement of this decade, and we are really can't wait to see the impact that it can change in our life. Thank you.

Thank you so much. So the implications of this is far more than planting a tree. If you think about the kind of spiritual, the cultural identity and relationship between people and the land and our changing climate. That movement issue is a very, very interesting one that was just mentioned there, the movements that will be required to mobilize so many people from so many different parts of the world to take this on. And that's why we're delighted to have Sadhguru with us, who's the founder of the Isha Foundation. And you, sir, have been able to establish mass movements perhaps by referring to trees as almost the lungs of people and such, I understand. Can you tell us about how you've managed to create such movements from your perspective?

Good morning, everyone. Well, it's exciting to see that the world is beginning to think in terms of trees because without putting soil under shade -- at least 50% to 60% of the planet soil should go under shade, without that, there is no ecosystem recovery. It will not happen. So 1 trillion trees is not going to do that, but definitely, it's an inspiring number to go for. But we also need to understand we never plant trees. We either plant seeds or saplings. Before we call it a tree, it will take 6 to 10 years. That's when it becomes a tree. . So the 6 to 10 years, as the President pointed out and battling the criminals, well, in a certain country, you can call them criminals, but in the rest of the world, they're successful businesses. So the timber that's sold around the planet is largely illegal, but many nations buy it and things are happening about it. So timber is a lucrative item. So when it is so, it is very important that it becomes an economic process for the people. So this is what we have done in Southern India, where right now there's a project to involve family and farmers to grow timber in their lands as part of agroforestry, which includes other crops in between. It is tree cultivation with crops. And crops come out much better. The nutritional values are better. The soil recovers. The water [ tables ] come up. And overall, there is a long-term crop on the land. One of the major challenges right now in India, for us, is it is estimated in the next 10 years, 220 million people will migrate to cities. No city in the country is geared to handle that kind of population. In the rest of the world, it is estimated 1.6 billion people will migrate. But one simple way to stop this, before we do many other things which need to be done, is when farmers have long-term crops on their land, they are not going to go away anywhere because there is investment standing there and growing by the day. Money is growing on the land. They are not going to go away. So it's extremely important that, as you're doing it in wastelands and lands that need to be recovered, it's very important, agricultural lands must get back trees. And this will make a huge difference because in the last 25 years, in many parts of the world, the nutritional value of the foods that we eat has come down by 40%. If this has to be recovered, trees have to come back on the farm. And only if there are long-term crops, there is an assurance people who are living on the land will continue to live on the land and not end up in a city slum somewhere. So like how we got people into this? Well, when I saw that people had no connection with the tree and trees are gone long time ago and tree is just a word in people's minds, so I got -- I trained a few thousand people to demonstrate this to millions of people across South India. We made people sit with their eyes closed, made them breathe and set up a certain process where your exhalation is trees' inhalation, trees' exhalation is your inhalation. Once they felt this, you can't stop them planting trees because 1/2 of your breathing apparatus is hanging out there on the tree. Once people felt this, you just can't stop it. So this connect is very needed because it will take 15, 20 years to get a tree to a reasonable size. But in one afternoon, it can be cut and taken away. And don't be assured that you're going to stop it with police or security or this or that because it's too lucrative. You're not going to stop it. Like you're not able to stop drugs on the planet, you will not be able to stop timber trade because anyway, they will go. So people need timber. Timber needs to become an agricultural produce. We should stop looking at timber as forest produce. Forests on the planet have reached a point where it cannot take any more exploitation. We have used it sufficiently, but it cannot take any more exploitation. Timber has to become an agricultural produce. Do we have land to do this? We definitely have. 51 million square kilometers of land is under agricultural tilling right now. And out of this, 40 million square kilometers are used for raising animals or their food. If we push right now super athletes on the planet, you have Tom Brady, Lionel Messi, Virat Kohli, all people who have 100 million following, they have all turned vegetarian. This is a good time. If we push back meat consumption by 50%, you will have 20 million square kilometers of agricultural land. Why agricultural land is important is the rate of survival will be much better when it's on the private land. Our rate of survival is over 90% simply because it's on private land. The individual farmer is taking care of it and it is his commerce. He's not seeing it as saving the planet. We never talk to the farmer about saving the planet. It is just there to enhance its economic condition, this is being done. And that's the best way to do it. If we do not marry economy and ecology, economy will win hands down.

Sadhguru, that's an excellent way to [ end on ] to marry the ecology and the economy. So this is again the complexity, the interest in the space. Dr. Jane Goodall, who absolutely needs no introduction, you've been listening to this. And why, to close this out, does the 1t.org initiative, which is a fundamental piece of the jigsaw to tackle climate change alongside the industry transition, the energy transition, the financial transition. Tell us why this is an important and interesting initiative for you and the things that you would like to see it do over the course of its lifetime.

Okay. How many minutes do I have?

You've got a couple of minutes to close it out.

A couple of minutes?

As much as you want.

Couple of minutes, and there's time for the call. As much as you want.

Well. Okay. So it's obviously very fascinating for me to be here to listen to all the speakers on this panel. And thank you, Marc, for acknowledging that I helped to bring you around to my beloved trees. So I've always loved trees. The reason I left the chimpanzee research at Gombe was when I realized that right across Africa, forests were disappearing and chimp numbers were dropping. And when I flew over my tiny Gombe National Park, it had been part of the great equatorial forest belt. But when I looked down in 1990, it was a tiny island surrounded by completely bare hills. And this is when it hit me. If we don't work with the people who are cutting down the trees even on the steep slopes because they're desperate to grow food for their families, then we'll never be able to even try and save the chimpanzees. So my involvement has been through a program called Take Care or TACARE. And it's been so successful that we worked with 104 villages throughout the whole chimpanzee range in Tanzania. And it's a very holistic program, working with water management programs and women and girls' education and all of this. So now the people have understood that saving the forest is also saving their own future. So right at the beginning, as I was working on all of this and trying to raise money for it, I realized that all of this is absolutely wasted unless new generations grow up understanding some of the problems that we have brought about upon ourselves with the climate crisis. So I began a program called Roots and Shoots, which began with 12 high school students in Tanzania. It's now in about 60 countries, including India and including Colombia, and it's got members in kindergarten, university, everything in between. One of the very first projects we did was tree nurseries, it was planting trees. And the reason I think that this Trillion Tree project is so exciting, people say to me all the time, "What can I do? What's one thing I can do?" You can plant a tree. And whether you plant the tree in your own backyard or whether you pay to have trees planted in Tanzania or if it's urban or rural, it's something you can do. And now I find with all of this amazing technology that's out there, which I don't begin to understand, but you can actually identify individual trees. So I might change the way that animal behavior science was conducted by giving chimpanzees names. I was absolutely castigated by the scientific community. I should have given them numbers. Well, what about naming trees? If you have a tree named for you? So our Roots and Shoots program just last year planted about 5 million trees around the world, and that's with very little support. If we had more money coming in, we could plant many more. 5.5 million of Roots and Shoots has guaranteed that this year alone. So yes, the Trillion Tree project is exciting because everybody can get involved. And whether it's communities on the ground that is so important, businesses, politicians, political leaders, children, everybody. And if we have a tree in our name, we want that tree to live. And so yes, I think the Trillion Tree project is absolutely fantastic, and I congratulate everybody working on it. And yes.

Thank you so much, Dr. Jane Goodall. Now 1t.org is the platform. The mobilization will begin. You go there and you can express your interest. I'm sure there are a few questions here. We are quite pressed for time, so what we're going to do is going to begin to take the room next door where most of the panelists can stay for a few minutes and take some questions. Some of the panelists have to stay here, obviously, for -- and some people have got very pressed schedules. But if you want to ask some questions, some of the panelists will go there because we're going to have to move this one out to get another very important press briefing in. But to close, in terms of the platform, there's 1t.org to plant, restore and conserve those 1 trillion trees. And thank you so much, everyone, from this panel.

Can I have 30 seconds?

30 seconds for -- 20 seconds. Go ahead.

As a part of Cauvery Calling, right now, with family and farmers, we are committed to plant 4 -- I mean, 2.42 billion trees in 1 river basin, sequestering about 12 trillion liters of water. This could be done in various river basins to revive rivers also. In India alone, with -- in collaboration with Trillion Trees, very easily, we can scale this up to 50 billion to 60 billion trees across the country in river basins, all on private lands. This is important that it's on private lands because the survival rate is over 90%. Thank you very much.

There we go. I encourage more of that. So thank you very much. Just give us a round of applause for our panelists. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Dominic.

Thank you. [Break]

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Adrian Monck from the World Economic Forum. Welcome to this press conference on the Reskilling Revolution: Better Skills for a Billion People by 2030. So almost as twice as many jobs can be created than lost by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. You'll have heard in the press conference that just preceded us about the climate change challenge we face. Here we also face a job's challenge. If we were to meet that other part of the theme of this annual meeting, which is about cohesion -- social cohesion, giving people opportunities. So this press conference is going to explore that and really lay out some quite exciting ways in which we can tackle that issue. I'm delighted to be joined by Saadia Zahidi, who leads the forum's work on this panel; by Ivanka Trump, who's here as co-Chair of the American Policy Advisory -- Workforce Advisory Board; by Marc Benioff, the Chairman and co-Chief Executive of Salesforce; by Peter Hummelgaard, the Minister of Employment from Denmark; and by His Excellency, Dr. Ahmad Belhoul, Minister of Education from the United Arab Emirates. We're hearing from each of our panelists, so I'm hoping that we get through on Swiss time to get some questions in at the end. I'm going to start by asking Saadia to just lay out for us this reskilling revolution, what she's hoping this project can achieve skilling up 1 billion people by 2030. Saadia?

Thank you, Adrian. As you just mentioned, one of the major aspects of work that we're looking at, at this meeting is, how do we build more social cohesion, how do we...

Sorry. Can we just get your microphone up? I'm sorry. Because we...

How do we build more social cohesion? How do we ensure that people have pathways to social mobility? One of the most important ways to do that is to ensure that people have the right education, the right skills and the right jobs. And that is what this initiative is all about. Over the last years, we've been doing quite a bit of research on the Fourth Industrial Revolution on the future of jobs. And it's become very clear that we're not necessarily looking at a negative future in terms of jobs, but what we are looking at is a major shift in terms of the set of skills within each job and the types of jobs that will exist in the future. Whether that is in the care economy or the education sector or the IT sector, there are a number of growing roles. And in fact, please do take a look at the Jobs of Tomorrow, which also comes out today. However, what we need is a Reskilling Revolution if we want to help people get there. And this initiative, the Reskilling Revolution, will be aimed towards getting 1 billion people better education, better skills and better jobs. The reason for creating a platform and the reason for doing this at the World Economic Forum is to provide better metrics, better coordination between various policy experiments, better coordination between various business initiatives and ensuring that there are new accelerated delivery mechanisms that I hope will get us there far before 2030. In order to do that, we've been working the number of different countries over the last year, in particular, on the closing the skills gap accelerators. And I'm excited that here at this meeting, we will be making more announcements of countries that will be adopting this approach. India, Oman, the Russian Federation, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Brazil are all joining. And in the case of the United Arab Emirates, we're very pleased that they're [ reporting ] the entire Reskilling Revolution initiative. In addition to that, a number of countries that have been running some of the most innovative experiments will be joining this set of work. So France's Mon Compte Formation will be a part of this initiative as well as, of course, the work that is happening in the United States, which we'll hear more about later. We've also set up a number of industry accelerators. So the aerospace industry, advanced manufacturing, aviation, travel and tourism, consumer, financial services, media entertainment and information and metals and mining will all be part of this. And finally, there are a number of businesses that have made a very large set of pledges. What I'm pleased to report is, this is not just the starting point. We already have commitments that will reach 0.25 billion of the 1 billion that we're trying to reach overall. So I hope this is the beginning of a movement, and we will be able to get to surpass even the target that we've set. Thank you, Adrian.

Thanks, Saadia. Ivanka, can I turn to you and just ask you for your vision on the future of work and how this project really bridges the gap between public and private sectors?

Well, thank you. And it's a pleasure to be here and to really affirm the United States' commitment to this joint effort, the Reskilling Revolution. And it's something that we have been deeply focused on in the United States, making sure that our booming economy works for all Americans, and that nobody is left behind or forgotten. So we are believers, and you heard the President's speech yesterday, it was highly optimistic about what is in store in the future, we believe, in innovation. We don't want to bridle or harness that. But with innovation comes opportunity, new industries that are being created that never existed before. Look at the growth in cloud computing. Marc knows this as well as anyone. He was an original signer of our pledge, committing to reskilling 1 million people over the next 5 years. So we thank you for that, Marc. But there are industries that are being created that require new skills, and there are industries that are being disrupted. And then there are industries that are continuing, but the people working in those jobs today are going to require new skills to do their same job tomorrow. So we are taking a holistic approach to this at the United States government and look forward to this convening and opportunity to learn from each other. We've certainly learned on the apprenticeship front. There are great examples here in Switzerland. In Germany, one of my first foreign trips was to Berlin, where I toured Siemens, one of the world-class examples of on-the-job training and apprenticeship. So there's much we can learn from each other. America is trying to harness the interest of business and shared goal of ensuring that the next generation of American student and the current generation of worker has the skills they need to succeed in the jobs of today and tomorrow. That's why we created our Pledge to America's Workers, which has become, at this point, really a full-blown movement with over 400 companies signing the pledge to reskill close to 15 million American students and workers. And that's 15 million lives impacted, 15 million families impacted and opportunities created. And it really is an incredible experience. I've toured much of the country, visited close to every state looking at these type of programs. And the question about the synergies between the private sector and the public sector, and it's critical. Industry knows what jobs they are going to be creating and what jobs they are going to be displacing. They know far ahead of the government which investments they're making in productivity, which will cause a ripple effect within their workforce. At the same time, corporations more than ever feel a sense of civic obligation. And what better place to start than within your own family, within your own company? And we think that, that is very important. So we're catalyzing a lot of action. We're also working, as a government, to create a national workforce strategy for the first time ever, combining 14 federal agencies to come up with a blueprint, not just for rethinking education, K through 12. But how do we prioritize 0 to 5, which has been under-invested in? And then also, post '22, which very little federal and state funding goes towards except if it's really advanced degrees. So how do we start to think about education and learning as a lifelong pursuit not compartmentalized to a very short period of time in the arc of one's life? So the national workforce strategy aims to answer some of these questions. Separately, we've put together a council -- an advisory council that has helped informed our work. And we have representatives from state and local governments represented. We have academia represented. We have some of the great entrepreneurs and innovators and largest employers in America all lending their expertise. And we assign them with a very specific and tactical mission, which was not to come to us with a report or ideas that were redundant of that, which we were already doing, but a defined set of deliverables that they were in a unique position to execute on. The first thing we asked this advisory council to do was develop a national ad campaign in partnership with us and the ad counsel. But it's private sector-funded, private sector-driven to disbunk -- to really debunk myths around certain types of industries. You look at manufacturing in America, there's 500,000 vacant manufacturing jobs, and yet there's really no robust pipeline of feeder into it. So people need to know about the jobs that exist today and be informed of the pathways that exist to fill them. In the IT space, Marc knows this well, the number of job vacancies [ they have ], but many of them don't require a 4-year college degree. So creating this national brand campaign, which was unveiled by Ginni Rometty and Tim Cook, who are on our council today, is very important. And I'll bang through the next 3.

That's a great segue into Marc, yes.

Yes. The next one is just data transparency. We need to do a better job of connecting workers with job vacancies and people based on the skills they have rather than the degrees they hold with the jobs that are available, modernizing recruitment and hiring practice. Marc and I have spoken extensively about this, how our traditional forums that require you to list your credentials and preclude many people who have the skills, but maybe they were formerly incarcerated. Or maybe they have the skills but don't have the credential. So not eliminating people from that pool. And then lastly, just getting the private sector to increase their investment in this training of their workforce and think about it in a rigorous, disciplined way.

Thank you. Marc, you're an employer of 35,000 people.

50,000.

50,000 now at Salesforce.

Thank you.

And that's great. You've put on an extra 15,000 in the time I checked my figures. Can you tell us...

I'm actually one step ahead of you.

Keep it going.

Can you tell us how business can get behind this and really make a difference?

I sure can. Between the last press conference that we were just at talking about 1 trillion trees and this press conference and the other events that I have been to now here over the last couple of days, I'll just tell you that capitalism, as we know it, is dead. This obsession that we have had with maximizing profits for shareholders alone has led to incredible inequality and a planetary emergency, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to Klaus Schwab and his team for showing us this incredible way forward. And Klaus Schwab is right. Now for 50 years, he's been calling for a new capitalism, a stakeholder capitalism, a more fair, equal, sustainable way of doing business that values all stakeholders as well as shareholders. And I know Klaus is right because Salesforce is living proof that, that stakeholder capital [ isn't worth ]. We've had a phenomenal shareholder return, 4,000%, since we went public, but we've had a phenomenal stakeholder return as well by delivering hundreds of millions of dollars of grants, by providing training to key parts of the workforce, by running 40,000 nonprofits for free on our service, including the World Economic Forum. And it's why I so strongly believe that when all stakeholders are included, that business becomes this great platform for change. And let me say, because we're here at this panel that one of these key stakeholders is the global workforce to make sure that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is bringing along everyone, we need the education and skills to succeed. And that's why I'm so excited about this Reskilling Revolution to bring the jobs and skills to 1 billion people. No one government or sector can solve a challenge as big as this. We need a true multistakeholder approach, I think, very well represented by this panel. And I want to thank you, Ivanka, especially you for your leadership on the White House Pledge to America's Workers and the passion that you have brought to it to reignite the American workforce. Thank you for doing that for all of us. And Salesforce signed this pledge and will give more than 1 million Americans the skills they need to earn Salesforce credentials and top jobs in our ecosystem over the next 5 years. But I also want to thank you, Saadia, and Saadia for your work and your research at the World Economic Forum for so many years now in Geneva showing that if we don't move faster, it will take 100 years before men and women are paid equally for equal work. Your equality report has been transformational for me and our ecosystem. What you have shown is that what is happening with equal pay is unacceptable. And that's why Salesforce has now spent more than $10 million to ensure equal pay, and we conduct annual audits now to make sure that men and women are paid equally for equal work. Now we need to make sure that everyone has a path to the future. That's why what we are doing at Salesforce since our founding 21 years ago, we've given more than $100 million in grants to education and workforce development organizations as well as our local public schools. Every company can adopt their local public school. It's one of the reasons why, here in Davos now, for so many years, we have Davos codes, where at -- in our Salesforce facilities here, we're training the local children on the key skills they need to enter the workforce. It's so important to us. It's also why I'm so excited about Trailhead, our online learning and reskilling platform, which is helping nearly 2 million learners, gain resume, [ wear ] these skills. And it's open to everyone in the next 5 years, and we're looking to get 10 million learners on that platform. And these people are incredible trailblazers. They're so inspiring to me. Well, I just want to finally challenge all of my business leaders because, as we all know, because we've done so many panels up here, Adrian, with the Fourth Industrial Revolution now over so many years, we need to rise to this moment of urgency. We need to act now. If you are attending this conference, you need to commit to job training. If you're attending this conference, you need to commit to reskilling. If you're attending this conference, you also need to commit to our 1 Trillion Tree Initiative, like Ivanka has done in the U.S. government. So thank you again, Ivanka, for that. And that is what we mean by stakeholder capitalism: serving all stakeholders, including the workforce. And that's how business can be the greatest platform of change. Thank you, Adrian.

Thank you, Marc. And Peter, as Employment Minister in Denmark, obviously, jobs must be right at the top of your agenda. What is the role of government here in this initiative?

Well, first of all, I would like to thank the World Economic Forum for this initiative and for all partners taking a share in making this pledge. I think that Marc Benioff is completely correct when he says that capitalism, as we know it, is dead or at least it has to be in the sense that more and more people, thankfully, are recognizing that the threats from growing inequality from a weakened social contract is actually also threatening not only our democracies, but also the very foundation of our market economy. So I think this pledge is the right way to go on that approach because we need to make sure that people in this world has jobs. And not only has jobs, also has jobs that are well paid, where working conditions is good. And that's why we need to invest more in reskilling. And just to give you a couple of examples from Denmark. One example is that most of you, I think, would know is LEGO, the company, LEGO, who produces the LEGO brick. Most of our kids play with LEGO bricks all around the world. It's a little plastic brick. It can basically be produced all over the world. Nevertheless, much of it is still produced in Denmark, although cheaper, could be produced in other parts of the world. And that's because the LEGO is investing in their workforce, so that the workforce continuously provides in bettering the production, in making sure that the LEGO brick and what can be built from it is more perfected, is more innovative and so forth. And if we need to make sure that we have jobs for people in the future, we need to make sure that we have a society that is based on a strong social contract, strong social cohesion. Then we also need to invest in our workforce in upskilling, in reskilling and in the general education. That's why we support this pledge.

Peter, thank you. Ahmad, from your perspective, you're not just Minister for Higher Education, you also have advanced skills in your ministerial portfolio. How do you see this Reskilling Revolution playing out in the policy sphere? And how will your country get behind it?

Sure. Thank you, Adrian. So first of all, I'd like to thank the World Economic Forum for stepping up in reskilling and making this thing broader. So now we have a revolution reskilling, which includes education. So reskilling is important for existing workforce. It's very difficult for somebody to become unemployed. But unemployed due to economic conditions can be resolved. And we've seen policies, like in the U.S., now at the lowest unemployment rates, so we can go back into employment. However, when you're unemployed because of a skill mismatch, that's a whole different game. So not to undermine the efforts of reskilling, but I think we also want to be conscious of not producing students today that will be unemployed citizens in the future. So I commend you again to include education as part of the reskilling platform. And you might ask, what are we doing here at United Arab Emirates? We're still tackling education, basic education. It's no secret that our scores are one of the lowest. Globally, Africa and the Middle East score lower in TIMSS and PISA. UAE is improving, with 35 in TIMSS and 48 in PISA. But I'm here because we want to make reskilling inclusive. Reskilling somebody -- [ a student ], has a high academic attainment is fairly easier than somebody in Africa or the Middle East who has -- who comes with a lower foundational base. So our pledge here is a pledge -- it's a global pledge, but is one that's more inclusive, that will also include other countries within the region. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you to all our panelists. We have a little window for questions. If I could just get a sense of the room for who has a question, and if you could give us your name and your organization. If we can just take the 2 hands at the front, please. And if it's a question that we can address to all our panelists on this.

My name's [ Tao Xia ] from Phoenix TV, Hong Kong. Can I ask a question to Ivanka? Actually, the training scheme sounds very exciting. I want to know. So will the many -- the Chinese overseas students have the equal opportunity to apply this kind of training when they graduate from the U.S. university and college with qualification certificate in the future?

That's a great question. Can I just take the gentleman there?

I have a question for Ms. Trump. You mentioned at CES the interoperable learning record. You didn't mention many details but. I was wondering if you could share a little bit if there's any work been done on that and how it compares with President Obama's electronic health records. And then to Mr. Benioff, the statement that capitalism is dead is a pretty controversial statement, especially with protesters outside holding signs saying eat the rich. What would you say to the man who dressed up as Ronald McDonald, who instead of wanting to reskill wants to maybe violently cause wealth redistribution?

So just taking the first question first. I want to bring all our panelists in and give all of them opportunity to comment. How portable that question related to Chinese students, but how portable are these skills going to be for people when they are reskilled? Are they going to have the opportunities to work in countries around the world? Or are these kind of skills stay in-country? Maybe start at the end. Peter, what's your vision on that? Do you think we're going to be reskilling people to stay in domestic economies? Or are these skills going to be things that eventually, in the years to come, we can take with us and move around with?

No. I think that in Denmark, for example, we already are reskilling and upskilling our workforce, so that they can take those skills with them to any economy around the world. And thankfully, also, there's a big demand for, especially not only Danish industry technicians, but engineers and so forth. We also have a high demand for foreign engineers in Denmark, but I think we have to skill and reskill our workforce so that they can take any jobs around the world. However, one of the main challenges we have in Denmark is that we still -- although we invest a lot in reskilling and upskilling, we still have a lot of challenges to making sure that many of our workers in the workforce, who don't have any skills, who have ended their basic school around seventh grade or ninth grade or something like that, that they actually, in their current jobs, see that in order to maintain their jobs at the current positions, they need to reskill. So we need to find a way to crack the code on how we motivate workers already in the workforce to actually get upskilled.

Ivanka?

I agree with that completely. I think fundamentally, whether it's domestically or internationally, we have to think about skills-based learning as opposed to purely credentials. In the United States, and this ties into the question about the interoperable learning records, there are over 700,000 different forms of credentials and badges and, of course, degrees, traditional and otherwise. So how do we piece these together and say, well, this is the credential, but these are the underlying skills? Employers care about the skills. So now we are in a much more nimble time where we can leverage technology and we can harness big data to better match the employer and the vacant job with the qualified applicant, who may have otherwise been overlooked. So I think there's enormous potential. You mentioned interoperable learning records, and this administration has continued some really great work on that front to really open up the data and allow the private sector to come in and innovate on top of that. We've seen this, and I see Monica from Treasury -- at the Treasury department opening up IRS data in a safe, secure way, allowed for the creation of TurboTax. The weather through NOAA, [ you ] -- and Commerce, you see all of our weather apps. So we think we can do the same with student data and worker data. And we are -- have a really robust working group. And Marc's part of it. That's a subsection of our Advisory Board. We have 2 of the folks on the Advisory Board who are leading the section. And then we've brought in companies like Salesforce and like Workday, credentialing engines, to help think us about this in a more holistic way, so we can take all of these different pieces and patch it together because that's the future. If I have a skill and I'm in a community, why aren't -- even if I have a job, why aren't I being pushed information about job vacancies that match the skill sets that I have? And that's not happening for blue collar workers in a robust way and in a way that lives up to the potential of what technology today can facilitate. So we've got multiple pilots that we're about to launch. And the private sector's really helping us build this because building things isn't what we do, but we -- at the federal government, but we can convene. And one person I just want to acknowledge, Gianni Infantino, who joined us. They know nothing about reskilling in football, right? It's...

You're right.

The skills are just -- it's so high. But we appreciate your commitment to this issue, and I appreciate you're being here. You've been a great friend. So thank you, Gianni.

Just want to catch briefly up with Ahmad and Marc. Ahmad, how -- UAE is a kind of global hub for talent. How important is it that with the reskilling that takes place, we also ensure that people can move around and take their skills with them?

So there's the element of social mobility, where it can improve your social status, but also geographic mobility. The -- I've always been asked this question. The United Arab Emirates is a net importer of talent. So we have foreign workers constituting about 85% of our population. And the simple question is, why bother? A company at the end of the day could import talent that's ready today. So we did our research, and we found that even from a pure financial sense, it's actually cheaper and more efficient for companies to retrain their existing employees. And let alone the financial incentives, maintaining that culture of that company is vitally important. So I think on one hand, yes, we do import talent, but we want to reskill that talent. Reskilling includes things like social and cultural awareness. It includes things like tech literacy. So even with that, I think globally, work-interconnected community, somebody with the right technical skills could work remotely. So that opens up another way of mobility, not physical mobility, but job mobility in the digital space.

And Marc, have you -- is your declaration kind of outflanking people who say that capitalism is outdated because you're declaring it dead?

Well, I've been coming to the World Economic Forum for 18 years, and I'll tell you why I love it. It's because business is the greatest platform for change, but we can only do it through multistakeholder dialogue. You have to include everyone. Even at our recent [ Dreamforce ] Conference, we allowed protesters to speak at our main keynote for 30 seconds. Everybody's voice has to be included. This is one planet, one humanity. Certainly, when we look at something like the 1 Trillion Tree initiative, we can only do that if we bring everybody in. Activists have to be included. Spiritual leaders have to be included. Government leaders have to be included. Business leaders have to be included. Native people leaders have to be included. And if we try to divide ourselves, then we will never achieve our goals. We can only achieve our goals when we unite ourselves and when we come together as one because that is who we truly are.

I've broken the Swiss rule of timing, but I do want to give one final word to Saadia Zahidi, who's helped bring this initiative together from the forum side. Saadia?

Sure. I'll just say a couple of words. Skills are the main currency of the labor market. And I think you've just heard from every single panelist that we need to make that labor market and the education system work better together by focusing on skills. That's how we're going to get there. And we have to ensure that not only is there a broader base of skills, but that we're able to specialize, create agility in that system. And that's what this initiative will really try to do. All of the experiments that are happening in different countries, we need to learn from that much, much faster. And that's what the Reskilling Revolution platform is dedicated to. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, just a very quick word from you, Ivanka, if you wanted to come in?

Well, I was just going to add that on an optimistic end note, I do think when you look at the freedom agenda that's been put in place in the United States, pro-growth policies that are unleashing the potential and the innovation within our business community and the private sector, we're seeing, as evidenced by the recent Gini coefficient results, that income inequality is actually decreasing in America. And it's decreasing for the first time in decades because more people are working and wages are rising. And that should make us all very optimistic about the future. So while it is our job and our obligation to have foresight about where disruption is going to happen, some disruption can be very positive. Today, in the United States of America, we have the lowest rate of unemployment for disabled Americans in the history of our country. In part, because employers are working with disabled Americans to create opportunities for them, but also new technologies are being leveraged to enable them to do work that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to do. I've been on many a factory floor and seen robotic arms and how that's assisting women in doing other work that otherwise they would have been precluded from doing. Actually, and you were talking, Marc, about gender quality, and I'm so grateful for your passionate real tangible commitment to this topic. In 2019, we just learned that women surpassed, for the first time, the percentage of people in the American labor market exceeding men. But amazingly, in 2019, of all the new jobs secured in our economy, roughly 1.5 million, 72%, that's the 1.5 million, went to women. So women are thriving. And I do think there is an opportunity to think about this through the positive lens as we also prepare for the changes that our economies are being faced with.

Thank you. Thanks to all our panelists. And I know we're going to vacate for the next press conference. I look forward to seeing you at that one. Thank you very much.