Ajay Banga: Depends what job you're talking about, but uh World Bank, definitely. The quality of people was amazing. They've lived everywhere. Their knowledge base is amazing. Uh they have taken their families from one difficult situation to another. So, the quality of people was amazing. The dysfunctionality of how the place worked was frightening. And so, when you brought together this quality of people with this 189 shareholders and 25 resident executive boards and 20 advisors each, that was a daunting task. And in all this, I was trying to make the place... Mine were I was trying to make it faster, better, and simpler. And trying to get the place be faster, better, and simpler when you have uh 400 advisors and 25 board members, all well-intentioned. Everybody is well-intentioned, but the combination is complicated.

Karin Rådström: Yeah, I was trying to remember. I mean, I started in Daimler Truck, not as the CEO, but I was running one of the divisions. So, I think um I was a bit nervous. So, I was running one of the biggest divisions. Uh I think my first was very simple. I moved from Sweden to Germany, so I thought I have to buy a lot of suits and people are going to be really dressed up. Uh but actually, they just been running this culture program. So, I came in really dressed up, but everyone else had started dressing down. Um so, I was totally overdressed. Uh so, that was my first culture shock. But then when the meeting started, then then it turned a little bit the other way. So, I was a little bit shocked just Yeah, I mean, I mentioned something like there were just 18 people to discuss very simple topics. So, just the amount of people and how complicated we were making everything.

Jesper Brodin: Well, I I think maybe the thing that was striking for me was meeting a lot of customers. And one customer lady in Japan told me that when I visited her home, said that basically, she liked IKEA and she was an old customer that of IKEA, but on a Tuesday night, she said, "When I put the kids to bed and I've done the dishes, I'm not going to go to IKEA. So, if you don't show up in my telephone, I'm going to choose somebody else." And that shook me. And what shook me secondly was that we had stopped listening to customers. And I think there was an intent and a drive within the company to stay away from unnecessary cost and so forth, but we hadn't really got a 360 of what happened in the world. I think the interesting thing was we were so used to be the disruptor, so we didn't see when disruption happened to ourselves. And that was an interesting moment.

Ajay Banga: It's always there's always a question as you know disruption is coming and I think everyone in this room is now going through this phase. Everyone we don't know exactly how AI will change a lot of businesses, but we know for certain that that it will. What you chose to do was to sort of confront it head-on and and rush into into it. Um doesn't culture often prevent you from doing that? So, I mean, we've spent most of the day about the positives of culture. But there is also a negative and that it can breed complacency because you are so comfortable in in the culture. That you have a strong culture and this is what drives you know, this is what has driven the institution to excellence for a long time. Is did you feel that?

Jesper Brodin: Massively. I think it was one of the themes during my years as CEO was this debate. So, I think what I learned now if I would describe it mathematically, I don't know why, but we tend to put the future and the past against each other in a linear way. At least I experienced that in IKEA. Strong culture means strong legacy, strong beliefs in how we have always done it. And of course, there comes a point where you start to shut down to the curiosity of what the future looks like, even if your value is curiosity. So, I think the the beauty is love the past, understand the past, and create the future, but not as a linear equation. And then you will be able to find I think the beauty in it. If you drop the the past, who you are, and all of that, of course, you will take enormous risks. But that that is easily But you had no talking to us an intellectual exercise, but you have to fight for it. You had moments. I know you've been you've been quoted in the FT as saying, "Sometimes you just have to go with your gut." Did I say that? You have. Yeah, I I have I have it. I can prove it. Yeah, but the thing is the the the the problem with the future versus the past is that the past has proof. But the future doesn't. So, therefore, you need to invest more than 50% of your energy in the future. You need to be prepared to make all sorts of mistakes in it. I like the conversation before about calculated mistakes. Can somebody get hurt? Can the company go uh beyond? But I think in I just had that in in IKEA even in IKEA being an entrepreneurship culture, I met so many people who said they were afraid of making mistakes. So, I invented this um go banana card, which is it was a sign of desperation I think from my side, but it's basically the card that gives you if you make a mistake and you're in trouble, I've already co-signed the mistake together with you. So, that gives you and I think I issued thousands of them. And the first one I issued to he came back and said, "I have made a mistake." I said, "That was fast. What did you do?" "I copied it to all my people in my association." 10,000 people. So, anyways.

Jesper Brodin: So I massively I think um I think it's uh maybe in ways that we don't fundamentally understand today. Also it's incredibly interesting. It's one of those topics that in our conversations we like to draw some sort of average, but in AI I think the the opportunities are amazing. Um quality, efficiencies, what not. But the risks from from a human perspective I don't think we have fully embraced yet. So but it gives us an opportunity I think to maybe go a bit deeper in ourselves also as leaders and and as humans to reflect on what is truth, what is what is the value of something that is human led and human created and those questions. But I think the the thing that IKEA and I did was um So I belong to the first generation of parents I think that thought we gave our kids a telephone, but it was something a little bit more powerful. Um today we we in our family we are okay except my wife. She's not listening. So she's the only one we have to help sometimes with the addiction to uh social media and what not. Um the promise of making us connected in social media came with an incredible depth of uh loneliness and mental damage. And I think personally I think after listening to people who know much more than I do about AI, the risks with AI might be much much uh higher than so. So therefore I think we need to work faster on catching up to the negative side how it's going to impact us.

Ajay Banga: I will say if I could just zoom back for a second my clients are the emerging markets not the developed world I'll speak from that perspective. The AI we all talk about in the developed world is large language models and and the like. That requires four things computing power lots of it electricity and a heck of a lot of it data lots of it kept in its simplest form with privacy and the more data you have the more predicted the model is and fourth people who know how to do all this. The emerging markets don't have these four. I you know computing power electrification data and people who know how to do this are not exactly what the strength is of a developing country and so to me they could get left behind if that's the only thing we think about. And so what we're talking about to the emerging markets is actually the use of AI to create applications for a illiterate woman farmer to be able to use a phone and look at the backside of a leaf and say I don't know what that disease is but that insecticide from my cooperative for 25 rupees will kill it. Or a nurse in a primary health center in a village in Egypt gets somebody coming in and says I have a rash and they can go to their doctor who's remote and figure out whether it's eczema or something more serious and needs an appointment and so on. So I think the use of AI AI apps which is kind of what we're all playing with is actually quite interesting for the future of what I deliver. I think it's getting stuck in LLM being the only model is going to be hard and then the last part I'd say is LLM assumes that the global flow of data is seamless. I would tell you indeed to be very careful thinking about how quickly how long before governments start thinking of data as a national security asset. When that starts happening just yesterday we've all realized that energy is a national security policy. We kind of didn't know that it feels till 1 month ago. But now we're all thinking that way in the same way I believe data of your citizens will become something that'll be a fairly complex national security topic. So I'm not fully sure that I know that I can predict which way this AI development will go. I think right now it just feels only one way big box centers lots of data stuff getting turned out stuff coming out the other side and it'll replace you in your job. I think that narrative is a broken narrative but that's me.

Jesper Brodin: Well I'm going to pass on the advice I got from my mother when I was in that age. What am I going to do with my life and she said look for what you're good at look what you love to do and if you find both you will be happy she said. So now the advice is yours. That goes for elderly people as well so it's true.

Karin Rådström: Yeah I completely agree. I think do the things that you're passionate about and I would also say something I would have needed to hear maybe when I was 20 just believe in yourself you know. Ultimately you can do much more than what you might think. So who says you're not going to change the world you know. That's in your head so just go for it. One truck at a time yes. One truck at a time.

Ajay Banga: I think life is 50% luck. The other 50% is what you do with the luck when it comes your way. Most people don't seize their luck when it comes their way. If you're not willing to take a risk you're going to be left on that platform and the train will leave and you'll be waving goodbye to your luck. So you have to learn how to take risks. Take them play with them embrace them embrace your passions be optimistic number one two and three it will all be fine. It'll all be fine. Most of the time.