Good morning.
Andrew Nusca here, editorial director of Brainstorm, Fortune’s innovation-obsessed community and event series. We just wrapped up our annual Brainstorm Tech summit in Park City, Utah, and Diane asked me to share what’s on the minds of the CEOs we met there. Here were some of the common threads:
Artificial intelligence, for one. Though the threats of AI have been long discussed, there was less pessimistic FUD—fear, uncertainty, doubt—and more optimistic food for thought about the ways AI's capabilities could be put to use. Could it save us time from drudgery at work? Yes. Could it generate trillions of dollars in value? Certainly. Could it create unimaginable new products? Definitely. Could it displace knowledge workers? It's complicated.
Regulation. The topic came up quite a bit on the stage for companies subject to that sort of thing, including finance firms and health organizations. Behind the scenes, though, there were fewer complaints about the regulation itself and more about how it slowed down innovation and clouded visibility. (And maybe a tinge of feeling like the whole thing has become a partisan issue.) The perils of progress.
Politics. Rare indeed were conversations about the recent attempted assassination of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, a topic perhaps too complex for even AI to fully digest. The exception? The naming of Donald Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance. While investor Ben Harburg and policy advisor Jacob Helberg debated the finer points of U.S.-China policy onstage, attendees offstage discussed onetime venture capitalist Vance, whose time in San Francisco endeared him to some libertarian techies—principally those who weren't women or LGBTQIA+.
The economy. There were plenty of investors interspersed with the technologists and Fortune 500 executives at Brainstorm, and most of them seemed relieved that the turmoil of our recent economy separated the smart money from the dumb. A difficult economic environment? Bad. Losing out to lemmings? Worse. Brainstorm Tech features discussion about an array of topics and this year's retreat featured dozens of CEOs from companies like Agility Robotics, Astrolab, Betterment, Biolinq, Entrata, Grindr, Interpublic Group, Lucid Motors, Pattern, Ripple, Robinhood, Runway, Somnee, Wiz, and Zoom. Catch up on what happened here.
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Andrew Nusca
andrew.nusca@fortune.com
