At the Semafor World Economy summit, held during the high-level World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings, the “Future of Global Finance” took a decidedly Continental turn. While the morning headlines focused on U.S. inflation and Middle Eastern volatility, Andrea Orcel, CEO of UniCredit SpA, sat down with Thorold Barker to address the “Sandwich Question”: Does
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The Fragile Equilibrium: George Walker CEO at Neuberger Berman, Perspective on the Economy
The digital ticker at the bottom of my workspace doesn’t just track price action anymore; it tracks the wild whacky trends of geopolitics.
Listening to George Walker and Shelly Banjo discuss the state of play, I am struck by the paradox of our current era. We are living through a period of “Economic Antifragility,” where…
Architecting Life: Authoring the Future of Species with Dr. Adrian Woolfson
Many moons ago, in 2015 I began my talks/presentations and writings about exponential technology and how this could lead to a world of abundance. Examples I once referenced included devices with which you could communicate with dogs and whales, saving data to DNA, namely tree DNA; living to 125 and using lab grown organs like…
Navigating the Energy Shock: Ken Griffin of Citadel on Geopolitics and the American Brand
At the Semafor World Economy summit, held during the high-stakes World Bank & IMF Spring Meetings in Washington, D.C., the atmosphere was charged with a mix of fiscal caution and geopolitical anxiety. Ken Griffin, Founder and CEO of Citadel, took the stage for a candid discussion on “The Future of Global Finance.”
For a technologist…
The “And” Economy: Dubai’s Resilience in the Eye of the Geopolitical Storm
At the Semafor World Economy summit, held during the high-stakes World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings, a distinct narrative of resilience emerged from the Middle East. While the headlines of 2026 have been dominated by the kinetic escalation between the U.S. and Iran, H.E. Hadi Badri, CEO of the Dubai Economic Development Corporation, offered a…
The Backbone of the Agentic Economy: Building Intelligent Enterprises
At the Semafor World Economy summit, the “Building Intelligent Enterprises” session cut through the usual AI hype with a dose of pragmatic operational reality. While the morning sessions at the World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings focused on macro-fiscal policy, this panel, featuring Kunal Kapoor (CEO of Morningstar) and Woodsen Martin (CEO of OutSystems), zeroed…
The Cognitive Industrial Revolution: Reid Hoffman on Building Intelligent Enterprises
At the Semafor World Economy summit, held amidst the pivotal World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings, the conversation shifted from global fiscal policy to the silicon-fueled engine driving the next era of productivity. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock partner, and a central architect of the current AI boom, sat down to demystify the “AI strategy”…
The End of the App Era: How Agentic AI is Rebuilding the Smartphone with Div Garg
For over a decade, our digital lives have been lived in silos, opening one app to check a flight, another to pay a friend, and a third to send a message. But we are entering a new era where the ‘app’ as we know it is becoming invisible.
Today, I am joined by a true…
Anthropic’s Jack Clark, on The Architecture of Intelligence – When Models Break the Sandbox
At the recent Semafor World Economy summit, held against the backdrop of the World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings, the air was thick with a new kind of systemic risk. This wasn’t about subprime mortgages or sovereign debt; it was about Agentic AI, models that don’t just answer questions, but act on the world.
Jack…
The Agentic Evolution: Autonomous Finance is Here with Anant Kale
In my time as a technologist and futurist, I’ve seen plenty of disruptions. In the past that’s code for a slightly faster spreadsheet. But today, we are talking about a shift that feels less like a software update and more like a biological evolution of the enterprise.
We’ve moved past the era where AI was…
The Synthetic Mirror – Reclaiming Trust in the Age of the Dead Internet Through Cryptographic Proofs
For decades, we viewed the internet as the ultimate frontier of human connection, a vast, digital nervous system connecting billions of minds. We believed that more content meant more knowledge, and more connectivity meant more truth. But as we stand in 2026, the mirror has cracked. The “Dead Internet Theory,” once a fringe conspiracy whispered…
The Quantum Cryptographic Singularity: 2026’s “Checkmate” Moment
If you’ve spent the last decade in the blockchain space, you’ve likely been lulled into a comfortable sense of “Quantum Procrastination.” The prevailing wisdom was that a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC) was a “2040-something” problem, a massive engineering hurdle requiring tens of millions of physical qubits that felt more like science fiction than a…
The “Asterisk” of Optimism: Navigating the AI Economic Transition
The rapid ascent of generative AI has moved the conversation from Silicon Valley boardrooms to the halls of Congress with unprecedented speed. At the recent Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) AI+Education conference in Washington, D.C., Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) sat down with Jenilee Keefe Singer to provide a candid, technologist-adjacent perspective on how the U.S.…
Scaling Mastery: How Sal Khan is Architecting the Future of AI-Driven Education
The halls of the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) AI+Education conference in Washington, DC, were buzzing with a distinct mix of urgency and optimism. Nowhere was this more palpable than during the fireside chat with Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy. As a technologist, watching Khan’s evolution from producing simple YouTube math videos to…
Agentic AI in Action: How Simplifai is Disrupting the Insurance Industry with Artem Gonchakov
I’ve been discussing Agentic AI for some time now. It started off more in theory then it got very practical with a recent podcast about Agent platforms. Today we have a real example of Agentic AI in practice in the insurance industry. Artem leads a company that is proving the value of autonomous agents…
Preparing Every Student for an AI-Powered Future
The rapid onset of generative AI has left the American education system in a state of “reactive whiplash.” At the recent SCSP AI+Education conference in Washington, DC, a panel featuring Alex Kotran (CEO of AiEDU), Dr. Christina Grant (Executive Director at Harvard’s CEPR), and moderator Eva Doug explored a critical pivot: we must move past…