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Bloomberg Tech Announcer
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News. Bloomberg Tech is live from coast to coast with Caroline Hyde in New York and Ed Ludlow in San Francisco.
Ed Ludlow
Welcome to a special edition of Bloomberg Tech live from the Bloomberg Tech event
Caroline Hyde
in San Francisco and leaders that from tech. They're from business and they are gathered here to discuss how they can navigate economic geopolitical uncertainty and of course multiply the opportunities in today's landscape.
Ed Ludlow
So we're going to talk about everything from robots to data center costs, the race to reach artificial general intelligence, and economic impact.
Caroline Hyde
But look, let's first of all talk about the markets because they're down today. Look, we're having our worst day on the NASDAQ 100 since mid May. We've lowered it down to the lowest level since the end of May. Look, we're under some pressure. We're bouncing off of our lows are off by 8, 10 of a percent. But there's some anxiety in there that perhaps the markets run up too far too fast, particularly in ships.
Ed Ludlow
Yeah. So this is a story about Broadcom and Broadcom's earnings. And basically they said that in the current period they will book $16 billion of sales in the custom silicon group. We're talking TPU's, we're talking ASICS. The street went into this with very high expectations. $17.2 billion. That's a big drop right, on Broadcom. The biggest drop, I think since January of 2025. So let's talk about it because, hey, right. We can have a big conversation, say Bloomberg Global Tech Executive editor Tom Giles. Right place, right time for having me.
Ali Ghodsi
Yeah.
Ed Ludlow
Thank you for being here. And later today you will have a conversation with Broadcom CEO Hock Tan.
Tom Giles
That's right. The man of the hour. The man whose results are moving global markets and not in the in the
Ed Ludlow
right way, the way he hopes probably,
Tom Giles
if you're, if you're a bull. Right. The point here is, as you said, there was an expectation for revenue forecast for the current quarter at about 17.2 billion. Come in at $16 billion. Still a pretty impressive number. Let's be fair. The demand is there. Nobody's worried about things dropping off a cliff. But if you this stock is priced for perfection. In the run up to these earnings, that company added $270 billion in market capitalization. That is just another reminder of how much people are anticipating and expecting this demand to continue. Chips are a very cyclical industry. I was on yesterday, last night we had cerebral CEO. Right now we're going to listen to him in a little bit. I asked him, you know, are basically are we in a bubble? People are concerned about the sustainability of this rally. People are concerned about the sustainability of demand. His point is we're in the opposite of a bubble. We cannot keep up with demand, particularly in the hardware space. And I think that that is the message that Hawk Tan is trying to bring across. We will definitely be asking him, did we miss something? Is there a nuance here? What do we need to know about your outlook going forward? Yeah, one thing that reading research this morning, including from Rosenblatt, my friends at Rosenblatt, we're talking about how now we have even greater visibility. He talked about how we have visibility into 2028 much further out than just three months ago. He said I didn't have that visibility. I have it now. And he's still sending bullish signs. So I think in the longer term, the market is going to be encouraged by that kind of visibility further and further out.
Caroline Hyde
And that's on the infrastructure playbook. And it's all because we're using generative AI so much more. Who are we using it through? The likes of Anthropic, the like of OpenAI, the likes of Grok AI. If you're looking over at Space X, these are companies that are about to go public. And we have the Anthropic leader here
Tom Giles
speaking as well, one of the co founders, Daniela Amadei. She's the president, the brother of the CEO. We're, excuse me, sister of the CEO. We're going to be asking her about what it's like to have just gone out with your, with your secret filing, your confidential filing. What do we have to look forward to with this, this ipo? One of the biggest ever.
Ed Ludlow
I just want to set the scene for the Bloomberg Tech audience that Anthropic literally filed confidentially for an IPO Monday. Am I getting that right? The world's been wise and illusion. Last night, Space X S1A, the amended filing, they priced the IPO $135 a share, seek to raise 75 billion, almost $1.8 trillion valuation, which we were right about, by the way. Musk tweeted that it was false. You remember, Tom, you edited the story.
Caroline Hyde
Let me just swipe that.
Ed Ludlow
Today's event is astonishing, right? It is astonishing that Daniela Amadei will be on stage, that we have investors here who are across the cap tables of all three companies. Anthropic, OpenAI, Space X. We're going to learn something. I mean, this is a difficult environment to try and cover.
Tom Giles
Yeah, I think one of the big questions right now is this horse race between OpenAI and Anthropic. And OpenAI had really captured the world's imagination for years since November, that fateful day, November 2022, seen as the leader, seen as the one to beat. In the last six months, roughly, we've seen Anthropic Ascend changed. We've seen them capturing people's imagination, whether it's through Mythos, their, their cybersecurity tool that everybody wants to get their hands on, that everybody is afraid of, but also wants to learn how to use and learn from. Right? They have, they got out ahead of OpenAI with the confidential filing and they have been sending the message to the world that we have captured the business market in a way that OpenAI has it now. I've talked to some people and they have said don't count OpenAI out. This is a horse race today. Anthropic is seen as ahead. Tomorrow it's going to be, you know, they're going to release a new version of chat GPT and it's going to maybe blow your mind and they're going to be seen as ascendant and it's this back and forth and we're going to see that play out in real time with two potentially back to back trillion dollar IPOs.
Caroline Hyde
And we can play it out in real time with a member from Altimeter who's backing all three of these horses in terms of the venture capital space.
Tom Giles
Talk about hedging your bets.
Caroline Hyde
Well, we'll get at nice hedge behind us as we hedge our bets. Tom Giles, we so appreciate you being with us. Thanks for very much. And look it's his event that we're here at at the moment alongside Emily Chang. And look, stay with it because Bloomberg Tech later today has a Broadcom President CEOs who just talking about hock tank. What a time to be joining this Bloomberg Tech conference. But also coming up we've got the perfect person to be discussing some of those market valuations in the private space. The CEO of Databricks as is the private company is reaching sky high valuations. Is it also thinking of a mega tech IPO?
Paul Baggerwell
Yeah.
Ed Ludlow
If you're a CEO, you're reading the S4 once, right. And thinking what do I do? Could this be a sign of an AI bubble? Tom mentioned it. No. According to Cerebra CEO Andrew Feldman, he sat down with Tom last night.
Andrew Feldman
What is unusual about AI right now is the builders are so far behind the demand it's absurd. We have a backlog of more than $25 billion of demand that there are none of us, not us, not amd, not in video. They can keep up with the demand that your employees are driving. And that's sort of in a lot of ways the opposite of a bubble.
Caroline Hyde
Welcome back to our Bloomberg Tech special. And maybe no surprise to anyone own but an AI bubble compute needs, SAS apocalypse. Some of the key themes that will be debated here today at the Bloomberg Tech event. Our next guest, well you can talk about all of them is at the center. Ali Godsey is with us, the CEO and co founder of Databricks, one of the most valuable private companies that has yet to file confidentially.
Ed Ludlow
As far as we know we're going
Caroline Hyde
to hold back on IPO chat for a minute and ask you about whether you whether this moment of all of these Companies looking to access capital in the public markets. Is that an anxiety for you? Could there be oxygen sucked out the room in some ways to back some companies such as yourselves?
Ali Ghodsi
Well, we're private company, so private investors, they're soon not going to have all these companies to deploy their capital. And so there's going to be a lot of capital available in private markets. So, no, that's not going to be a problem at all for us.
Ed Ludlow
Ali, I'm really interested in what life's like for you right now as a CEO of company of databricks valuation, but also like, you know, I don't mean this sort of flippantly like, okay, great big private valuation, the company is growing incredibly fast. You know, revenue run rate, Caro set up at the top. Everything that's happening in software right now, what is it that you are dealing with most often? What is it that you are sort of, I don't know, waking up and going, okay, wow, this is, this is today.
Ali Ghodsi
Yeah. My view is that we're in a very special moment because I'm a contrarian. I believe we actually already have AGI, artificial general intelligence. Already arrived. We already have.
Ed Ludlow
What's your. What's your evidence?
Ali Ghodsi
I ask groups all the time, I ask this question, I ask, how many of you believe we have AGI? And roughly 10% of the audience usually raises their hand. Then ask, how many of you think that the AIs that you use, the frontier models, are smarter than most of the people you work with most of the time? And 90% of any crowd, I've done this like 20, 30 times, raise their hand. Okay, so it's already really plenty smart. We don't need AI to get some smarter. It just is lacking context. If you could capture all the context of all the conversations we're having and everything that's happening in the processes, data
Todd McKinnon
breaks, that's what exactly.
Ali Ghodsi
If you could feed that to the AI, they already could be extremely productive. But no one's really focused on that problem. Everybody's focused on superintelligence and can we like continue the scaling laws? And the problem is if we just could have that context, we would have huge breakthrough. So that's what database is on. Focused, focused on. You know, that's our only focus is how do we infuse that data context into this product we have called genie, which then can help answer and automate questions. I think this is the most important question that people should focus on right now.
Caroline Hyde
And we've got plenty new products like, as you're getting Ever higher valuations. You're backing it up with new offerings. I think about Lake Base. I think about some of the M and A that you've been doing in the market to beef up the product offerings. What's hitting home at the moment? What are the customers demanding of you?
Ali Ghodsi
Yeah, as you said, Lake Base is, you know, it's. Everyone wants these databases. People are not paying attention to databases. Everybody's paying attention to software, is being commoditized because I can produce software. But what they don't think about is that all software needs a database. It's a fact. You cannot have a piece of software and it's not using a database. And Lake Base is really, really, really tailoring to those agents. So, you know, for instance, product group uses like, base, and they're using. They put all their KPIs in it and that. That way the agents can actually start answering questions on all the KPIs that they have. Because, you know, everybody's using agents now.
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
Or are they?
Caroline Hyde
Is everyone using an agent now? Is adoption? Is productivity really?
Ali Ghodsi
Yeah. Okay, so that depends. So back to that context question. If we could just get the data to the agents. People are using agents, but they're not using it in its full potential. Maybe we've, like, tapped into 1% of it because it's not like autonomous agents are running around, you know, working together, collaborating with humans. And, you know, so that's not happening yet. Why is that? Because they don't have the context. So you have to infuse that context into them. So giving you another example, Novo Nordisk, you know, they make Ozempic, you know, big customer that actually leverages genie. And they're able to infuse a lot of the. All the trials that they run. They infuse it to the eyes. And now you can ask questions from the AIs about, you know, how's that obesity study going? And they were able to shorten the time it takes to understand these studies using GENIE and agents from, you know, weeks down to a few minutes. So it is happening. But we're just at.
Ed Ludlow
The case study is real. Right. And I'm not questioning whether it is, but that then Jensen Han's equation of more compute, more tokens, more revenues, it means that that puts them on a trajectory to more profitability. Right. To many people, it's really simple. The other thing that Jensen outlined at the beginning of this week. Computer. Yes. Was that it's complete nonsense that software is in trouble, because his thesis is that the agents themselves become the ultimate users of that software. I've been finding that concept very hard to understand. You probably are in a place where you can evaluate it early on.
Ali Ghodsi
Yeah. So I think Johnson is spot on
Todd McKinnon
with both of those.
Ali Ghodsi
You know, we actually did the calculation, we think in the next nine months. But let's say you round one year or two years, we're going to have more software being written than in all history of mankind. You know, no matter how you back into it, this kind of checks out. Okay. With so much software being written, there's going to be so much demand for all the other things. There's a big ecosystem around software. We happen to do lake space, which is a database. And you know, we're seeing huge amount in these databases. But there are other ones around software. So yes, it's. This is just continuing.
Caroline Hyde
And therefore I go back to how we started this conversation. As you keep on scaling, as you keep driving innovation, do you need more private capital? Would you look to go for public capital at this moment?
Ali Ghodsi
Yeah, I mean, we are always interested and we're always talking to investors. And, you know, I'm sure we're going to do more of that. We will also be a public company, I just think.
Ed Ludlow
But why also, why like, if the private markets will keep going with you, what's your impetus for going?
Ali Ghodsi
Yeah, because, you know, at our scale, you know, I think we raised $20 billion at these scales. We're almost trying to create a market transaction mechanism for our employees, which, you know, it's 10,000 right now, but if you take all of them, the prior employees, it's probably 14,000 or so. You know, so there is a thing that can do that. It's called the public markets. So I just think this is a terrible year for, you know, to go
Ed Ludlow
public because there's so much happening super quickly. How closely did you read the Space Access one? And how closely will you track an anthropic IPO to evaluate the future market that you want to go into?
Ali Ghodsi
Yeah, look, we're not really trying to time the market. We're trying to really win the market in the long run. That's really our focus on. I did not go through this one
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
filing word by word, other things to do.
Ed Ludlow
Yeah, Ali goes the CEO databricks, a busy guy. Back on Bloomberg Tech. Thank you very much. We're live from the Bloomberg Tech event where one of the biggest questions facing investors, but also founders alike, is what comes next? IPO market, the AI boom, how it's reshaping technology's landscape. Joining us Right now is a Paul Baggerwell partner at Ultimate Capital. Ultimate. Let me just set the scene right. So I also also understand the context view of the world we're in right now is crazy Anthropic just filed confidentially, ultimately led that round. I get that there's a limit to what you can say about that, but you're also on the cap table of open air Space X. This isn't also about IPOs in isolation. Alphabet came out and upsized an $84 billion now equity offering. So actually my question is to you right now is what is the capital market telling you about the state of the world? Is that a good place to start?
Paul Baggerwell
Like that's a great place to start. Thank you for having me at Caroline. It's lovely to be here. You know, I think at the highest level, I think you nailed it. It's like we has gone from being a technology product cycle to one of the largest capital formation cycles. Right on one side you've got the picks and shovels. You know, this is the compute, memory, optics, networking. You go down the list, they are selling these products to, to, to, let's call them the miners. These are the labs. Google just raised $84 billion opening historic raise 122 billion in Tropic, of course. And you know, you look at the same week, Nvidia just announced an $80 billion stock buyback program. SK Hynix, same thing, $8 billion of stock retired with more dividends coming.
Ed Ludlow
Those are like sort of contradictions in the function of the market they're operating.
Paul Baggerwell
Is it, it's. And that's the line that I wanted to highlight. On one side you've got the folks who are helping you scale. These are receiving the CapEx, the others who are spending the CapEx and, and I think that's the line that's the biggest mental model I want to leave the folks with, which is, as you look at these businesses, are you on the side of receiving the capex, which would be the compute layer, the energy layer, the memory layer, the networking layer, or are you on the side of spending? And I think that's, that's the biggest divide in right now.
Caroline Hyde
But at the moment we have seen rocket ship when it comes to infrastructure and those who've been receiving all the capital expenditure and then people just so desirous to help fund those that are going to be out there and raising it. Whether it be OpenAI, whether it be Space X, whether it be anthropic, whether it be Google, Alphabet. Is there enough room for all of these large language models, there's always been this argument there'll be components monetized. When you're sat thinking about being in rocket and space X and at the same time Open Air and anthropic.
Venture Global Representative
Yeah.
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
Should you be.
Paul Baggerwell
You know, I think there's this narrative of companies doing a binary thing. Or you're the consumer AI company, or you're the enterprise AI company, you're the space AI company. I think, I think the reality is a lot more multifaceted. Right. Let's take OpenAI for example. I think the product, the company's mission is getting AI to the market holistically across consumer. You've got just under a billion users on chat GPT on enterprise. They've now got 5 million Codex users that is doing really well. And then a long, you know, long tail of other bets with hardware, with robotics, with obviously the frontier enterprise offering Space X which is, you know, the two largest markets on the planet space. And so I think the selling you. And now they're selling Compute Elon Web services.
Ed Ludlow
Ask you about that. You know, there's so many directions we could go. But the space business of launching Starlink 2 trillion in the tab. Get it? Enterprise AI, you've kind of answered that. But stealthily in there they are becoming a hyperscaler, right? Think about the anthropic arrangement that they're almost hedging by saying in the interim, we're really good at building datacenter.
Paul Baggerwell
Well, I think, I think I would say it's the Switzerland, right? It's a Switzerland approach. You know, for a long time, the
Ed Ludlow
first person to say that to me
Paul Baggerwell
this, for the, for the longest time we were holding our breath for hey, that you did this deal with Cursor. And the big question was, well, a lot of courser revenues come from the great anthropic models. Then they got anthropic on the platform. Then obviously they're building their own models. And so I think of the XAI business as the Switzerland business. We're now selling compute. We will sell models, we'll have a coding product, we'll have other products down the line and consumer etc. And again, it's a, it's a holistic approach and that's why the TAM is so large.
Caroline Hyde
Look, we love in the media and more broadly to be putting anthropic and open air in some race against each other. But you have as a private market investor, any pause that maybe there isn't going to be the demand for this wall of public offerings, then in many ways it could be liquidity to your, your ultimate look.
Paul Baggerwell
I think for the longest time we've had a large part of the market waiting, finding ways to get access to the biggest super super cycle in AI right now. And I think that that moment has arrived. IPOs are cyclical as we know. You know, the last big cycle was four or five years ago in 2021. And based on everything we know, there's a lot of demand for these products as they go out in terms of the demand for the capabilities. Look, I think in December last year we crossed a level of capability with coding models in Opus 4 or 5 that has pushed it to the next frontier on consumer as everybody's already experienced and then yet to be proven as robotics manufacturing the hardware device that OpenAI is working on and others. So a lot more to come and I think more participation is better for us.
Ed Ludlow
You are, you're teaching at Stanford and you've kindly invited me to come and check out a class and I will. One of the questions that you pose in a series of like guest speakers, right? You know, everyone in industry and your fellow investors on the cap table. You ask them like, what's one idea you're long, one idea you're short. I explain that. But why do you think that's a useful mechanism for understanding the world?
Paul Baggerwell
Well, I like to hold the speakers to do what they say. I'm going to ask them the question next year and have a scorecard of of what happened to their long short picks. It's my favorite game to play with founders. I learn a lot as founders pick their most optimistic idea, their most bearish idea and I'll give you the theme. You know, the theme in this class was more than half of the speakers were long. The let's call them the fix and shovel providers. Compute most common theme. Energy was the second most common theme. That is ultimately the bottleneck at scale. The most common theme on the short side was was folks were not innovating. Incumbents were not innovating. You know, it's a fun time and good to bring.
Caroline Hyde
Are you short on what are you not looking at in a startup space as you're thinking about a wall of liquidity coming to Altimeter, what would you not like to invest in very quickly?
Paul Baggerwell
Well, I'm an optimist by trade, by profession, in my blood, so I'm very optimistic on a lot of things going on. I think the simple mental model that I have is if there's a business that gets hurt by the Scaling laws. That's one of the scaling laws. Scaling laws are if you provide more compute, more resources, more data, more algorithms, intelligence goes higher. If you're a business that is hurt by this empirical observation that intelligence is going to go up, that's a tough place to be because we believe intelligence is going to go up.
Caroline Hyde
A lot of we can speak to you for hours. It's so great to have you here at Bloomberg Tech, a board of agarwal of forces of ultimate capital. Fascinating conversation.
Ed Ludlow
Welcome back to a special edition of Bloomberg Tech. We're live from the Bloomberg Tech event in San Francisco. I'm Ed Ludlow. That's Caroline Hyde.
Caroline Hyde
I'm here. It's beautiful. But look what's not beautiful is the market a little bit today. Let's take a look at Today's big number, $300 billion and that is roughly how much market value we've just lost. A broadcast of. The shares plunged today following the company's earnings release last night. That we were covering it live for us last night and it was a sharp drop and it comes as the company's chip sales. The forecast just missed Wall Street's really lofty expectations while not raising long term revenue targets either. The stock fell by as much as you can see. Well off by 14% were down as much as 15% set the worst day since January 2025. But Tan, he's speaking at this event later.
Ed Ludlow
Yeah. And you know he is going to try and give something longer term. But this was about incredibly high expectations of what's happening in the infrastructure buildout cycle. Let's get to the software space. Octa delivered a very strong start to the year by beating first quarter expectations last week, but then raised its full year guidance basically across the board board. Joining us to discuss basically a platform shift that's happening but also emerging threats from AI is Optic CEO co founder Todd McKinnon. You know, it was so interesting because you know, at the end of the day numbers are numbers and you had the confidence to, to raise on the outlook. There must be a reason why, you know, earlier in the show we're talking with databricks and Ali Godsee about how real is is, is the deployment of agents. You must know the answer to that.
Todd McKinnon
Okta was founded in the shift to cloud computing. And this new shift we're in the shift to AI and AI agents is bigger than anything since the Internet, possibly bigger. And so what Okta is benefiting from is all this change and all this technological evolution makes identity even more important than ever. All these applications, all these services, and then you layer on top of that a new product cycle for Okta. The new product cycle is Okta for agents. So we have a product that is the identity layer, the connectivity for all these agents in the enterprise. It's a powerful combination that's driving the business on all fronts.
Caroline Hyde
What makes your offering unique, different from other peers that are out there? Many want to be. The governance rules, the protection layer.
Todd McKinnon
For this, I think it may surprise you, but it's the focus we're focusing on the connections, the connections between AI agents and all the databases and data sources and applications they need to be most effective. And that connectivity, that is very important to the functionality of the agents, but it's also something that's very risky from a security perspective. The more you connect to your agents, the more risk of information leaking, the agent going rogue and you having to shut it down quickly. So that connectivity. And we have a blueprint for the industry to how to connect those agents securely. And that's really resonating with customers.
Ed Ludlow
Earlier this week, somebody called Jensen Huang went on stage and in front of a camera and said that the narrative around software is complete nonsense. And he made the argument that for legacy software, agents will become the end users and there are more agents than people in the world. And your stock, like everyone else's in your space, went absolutely bananas. Be honest with me, Todd. Is that helpful to have gentleman weigh in like that, or would you just wish he did?
Todd McKinnon
Well, if you, if you zoom out and look what's happening. I mentioned earlier the transition to the cloud 15 years ago. The transition to AI is similar in that every layer of the stack is being reimagined and reinvented, from the hardware layer to the infrastructure layer, to the platform layer, to the development tool layer, to the application layer. And so every vendor has an important priority to make sure they reinvent themselves with these agent capabilities and these capabilities of automation. But this one is actually different. There's a new layer on top of all this. And this new layer, which is not hasn't happened in previous generations of technology change, there's a new layer, and that's the layer of digital work. It's a whole new category, a whole new opportunity that everyone's going after in addition to reinventing themselves in their own business. And that's. I talked about this. Two pronged drivers of our business, we have the reinvention and the reprioritization of identity. And this new layer for automated digital work, which are Octave for AI agents, is powering and playing right into what
Caroline Hyde
does it mean for your own workforce, for your own human capital? Are you, you needing as much of it?
Paul Baggerwell
I think they have.
Todd McKinnon
They have to be more effective and more productive and the tools are there to do that. Whether it's clogged code or whether it's the latest marketing tool or support tool. They have to be more effective and they have to deliver value.
Caroline Hyde
Keep the same amount of people working.
Todd McKinnon
Well, this is where I disagree with a lot of people. I think in five years OCTA is going to have far more software engineers that we have now.
Ed Ludlow
And you want them to be ending, you want them to be generating tokens.
Todd McKinnon
And that's because it's a little bit of a trick answer. Because the reason we'll have more is not because they won't be more efficient. It's because there's just so much more capability to build. There's so much demand for software and there's so much power of the automation. We're very excited about this.
Ed Ludlow
The Bloomberg tech audience is in industry. It is sophisticated, but lots of people. This is so abstract still. The thing that I always get frustrated with with an agent is that I just want it to act.
Todd McKinnon
Yeah.
Ed Ludlow
So if you take this as a random case study, but like my flight gets canceled, I have to phone a human still even within Bloomberg, try and get that resolved. But there is a world that you're pitching where they have access to my credit card, the flight information. It just happened.
Todd McKinnon
These are the connections. I'm talking about the connections, the data that has to be secured.
Ed Ludlow
What is the, what is the barrier in the world right now? You know, corporate America, companies around the planet that just is preventing this just happening.
Todd McKinnon
The barrier is people think about models and we herald model advancements. The reality is, is that the models are at a capability now far surpassing our ability to simply connect the systems together and get practical agentic applications built. But that's great because there's a lot of smart people in the world working on connecting them and we're focused on making sure they're connected securely. And that's why the future is very.
Ed Ludlow
That's what I meant though. Like are we worried about how secure that. That that potential transaction is or not?
Todd McKinnon
We have to be always worried about security. You're connecting sensitive data and automating it in new ways. And there's always risk in that. And that's why I think our solutions are resonating so much. This is practical focus on. We want things to be more automated. We want these agents to have more capability, they need more data. How do we pragmatically do that in a secure and manageable way? And that's what Octaver agents does.
Caroline Hyde
And so this talk of SaaS apocalypse,
Todd McKinnon
I think it's completely overblown. It's completely overblown. I think there will be SaaS companies that don't embed these capabilities in their offerings. Just like in the revolution and the move to the cloud, there were companies that were left behind and came became legacy vendors and result bought up by Oracle. That'll happen too. But there will also be many vendors that make the transition and thrive in the future.
Caroline Hyde
And thus far you're proving it to CEO co founder Tom McKinnon. It's great to have you here much at Bloomberg Tech, the live event in San Francisco. And coming up we have the personification of the San Francisco economy. We've got the San Francisco Fed president Mary Daly joining us live. We're going to discuss economic impact on the people, on the productivity, the risks that are getting perhaps over looked. Guardrails may be needed. This is Bloomberg Tech. We are live from the Bloomberg Tech event in the heart of San Francisco. And Ed, look, the debate is rich around ase economic disruption. Is it growing more intense? Some see the technology that could unlock enormous gains, productivity and growth, but others that they one of disruption, of unintended consequences. And we want to try and understand the sort of messy middle of all of this with Mary Daly, president of Federal Reserve bank of San Francisco. Mary Daly, Extraordinary. The data that you now have to lean upon, trying to understand what's factual fiction, what's utopia, what's what, sensationalism. Who do you go to for your data on whether productivity is working?
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
I go to the businesses who are using the technology because you can always encounter enthusiast enthusiasts are doomsayers. But it's really the people in the middle, as you said, who are using that technology thinking about it and I've seen tremendous interest in it last year and now I am seeing tremendous investment in IT thinking about how do they train their workforces to be AI ready, how do they think about what I can do not just in the back office but in the front of house of operations. And we're seeing this in small businesses, medium and large, in global companies and more regional ones and importantly in everything from agriculture to machining and building things to services. And I think that's really the place. We haven't seen widespread productivity gains yet. The ROI is still to be developed but I'm definitely seeing the enthusiasm and it's picked up tremendously in the last year.
Ed Ludlow
We haven't seen the productivity gains yet. You know, you're being very clear on that as you, you remember I asked you over and over again for an hour, please show me the productivity gains. But in the economic data, whichever set of data you want to look at, do you see an impact from a negative or positive?
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
It's really hard to take. We have had productivity growth that's been outside of the historical norm, and I think that's a positive for the US Economy. Everyone wants to say that's AI. What I think of it is as sure, it's possible that businesses are looking for cost savings and they hire fewer workers and they do just as much because they're using, you know, an LLM assistant to help. But we just haven't heard from businesses that they're seeing transformative, ongoing productivity gains yet. And they want to always underscore yet. And so then I said, well, what's the time frame? And they said, next year, year after. Because what we know is it isn't just about getting a model and using it for things or an agent. It's about transforming your business processes so that you really take advantage of things. We don't even think about today what can be done differently that will transform the economy. So you can definitely find a single business or sectors who are using it and seeing the gains. But we haven't seen that across the economy going forward. But I'm pretty bullish. I see the possibility companies, and I'm hearing more and more that people are seeing early rewards and really recognizing that next year is the litmus test.
Caroline Hyde
Bullish is an interesting turn of phrase today, putting aside the slight dip in the market, the exuberance that we have seen in financial markets to want to back these companies. And we're about to get more public companies coming, more liquidity, more, more money. Is that in and of itself a financial stability issue? Are you worried about the markets rioting
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
so high you remember, you know, who's, who's doing most of this investment? The Mag7 who's who's really there. This is actually something they can do and fund and their enthusiasm is real, they see what's possible. But I don't think that we should think, oh, there's financial stability concerns just because the market's gone up. It could go up or down as it has in the past, but a financial stage stability issue would mean it spread to the banks, it's spread to consumers or businesses right now, I'm not Seeing evidence of that. We keep our eye on it for absolute sure. But what I am seeing is that companies other than the technology enthusiasts, companies outside of technology, are using AI to think about how to do their business better in real ways. I mean, I was just meeting with some machine make machines for a living, that's what they do. And they're thinking about how do I scan in 50 years of plans of these machines I've built for companies and then use those plans and the model to generate innovative new ideas of things I can sell that will be faster, better, cheaper than things I've sold before. We toured a robotics company that builds things that help manufacturers do better in terms of shipping and distribution. These are real things that do have a capacity to change the economy. So I'm not. That's why. That's the underlying part of my bullish. It has less to do about the investments that tech companies are making and more about the investments that everyday regular companies that make things and provide services, the things they're doing.
Ed Ludlow
President Daley, Inflation is still the biggest risk. And you know, that's. Those are not my words. We heard it, you know, all week long, the Bloomberg Credit forum, for example. One of the things that you and I have discussed in the past is, is the massive capex commitment build out of datacenter in conjunction with a bottleneck in some core areas like memory inflationary or is it disinflationary? You know, that's the thesis that like a utility of PG would argue disinflationary because the big guys are buying in aggregate. I still don't understand where we are with that.
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
It's a timing issue in my judgment that, you know, in the beginning, of course, when companies want to invest in big construction projects, a lot of electricity demand, then the companies that are providing those things or areas that are providing those things are going to see competition for the limited amount of services they have. But what they're building creates the infrastructure. The data centers create the infrastructure. Or if the big guys come in, as you just said said, and help with electrical plants that help with electricity generation that eventually can help with the prices of those things. Not here and now, but you just have to think about the timing. And one of the things is really important in policymaking is that we not assume we know, we actually look for the evidence of what are we seeing in prices today, what are we seeing in what is the forecast of prices tomorrow and then how do we think about policy? So right now I'm focusing on, focused on, you know, other Energy prices, oil prices and food prices are driving up inflation. What we do know that down the road these things could maybe compete for services and costs and raise costs, but we haven't seen real evidence that that's the limiting factor. The limiting factor seems it's hard to get generators, it's hard to get the infrastructure equipment you need. And so you see the big tech companies thinking about solutions they can provide for themselves.
Caroline Hyde
The inflationary data must be fascinating here in San Francisco. When I think about all these companies potentially going public, what that means for the employee base, what that means for your house price and the ability to be able to buy yet more real estate here, what it means for the cost of labor as well. Is there an inflationary pressure that you're seeing here in San Francisco?
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
I've lived through. So I moved to San Francisco in 1996 and then we had the dot com. And I know what it feels like to not be able to rent a place that's affordable because the people who are making many more orders of magnitude and I was, you know, in a position where that's manageable, but it's, that's what's happening is people feel like they're getting crowded out because other things are happening. But that's more about the supply of housing than it is about the demand for housing. We want people to come and invest in this community. We want the city to thrive, we want regional activity to thrive and employment to grow. But as you said, you know, the, with the more interest people have in living in a place, if you have limited supply of housing, then you're going to have a run up. So I, those are the things that, not the Fed, but other policymakers, other federal policies makers and local policymakers like the mayor are working on. But it looks very, you know, you'd see the elements of 1996 already here where there's productivity growth, there's enthusiasm, etc. But is it a bubble?
Caroline Hyde
Is there a risk that we're in that same.
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
You know, the dot com was very different than the AI boom. And so I just want to, you know, there's a lot there that's already being put into businesses and it's very pervasive. It's not just the dot com. So I, I don't jump to the conclusion that if it has similarities to the 90s, it's going to be the 90s.
Ed Ludlow
I may present that you, you went out and did some of the most important work in that era of how the advent of the Internet would change the economy look. So you've kind of established where we sit right now. Inflation continues to rise. How likely or unlikely would that make a rate cut in 2026? How do you tie the two together from this juncture onward?
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
You know, I think one of the questions I get asked regularly is what are the. What's the path for the rates going forward?
Tom Giles
Yeah.
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
And the answer I give, because this is how I really think we have to think about it, is we just don't know how the economy is going to play out. We have, as we've been talking about, this tremendous possibility with AI, but we have the same time, the war in Iran, that is with an uncertain end, which is pushed oil prices up, and fertilizer prices, which have filtered into food prices. And right now those are fairly contained. And if you look at the futures market for oil, it's $80 a barrel by the end of the year. But, you know, we have to think about that. And so right now, policy is in a good place. We are prepared to respond either way, whatever the economy brings. But I think giving more forward guidance about what's possible could be misguided in the end because we just have to wait for the economy to evolve. Everybody wants to resolve the uncertainty today, but I think that's a mistake because it will close off our mind about what we really have to look at, the inflation risk possibility, but also the possibility really the war ends, oil prices come back down, and we're back to the underlying dynamics with some of the positives of AI we've been talking about.
Caroline Hyde
Can I ask you about the labor market as well? Because you've tried to bring this transparency of how you're thinking about things with your blog, for example, and one of the really interesting ones that I was reading and captured my attention was the idea that we've got zero labor growth now. Immigration's changed the way in which demographics change. Are you feeling like we've seen some improvement, some, some resilience in the labour market and will that hold?
Ed Ludlow
Has it firmed?
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
Yeah, you know, I think it's too early to say firmed. I think we're, you know, there's always statistical error, so you can bounce around from month to month. But if you, you know, I was one of the people who, policymakers who were a little worried about the labor market at the end of last year was very supportive of the cuts that we took to stabilize conditions there. And so relative to that point, I think this is, we've really stabilized. And I'm starting to see businesses feel A little more cautiously optimistic, which will feed through to hiring. But they're not being, you know, they're not just running out to hire people. They are being cautious. Right. I can get an agent. They're interrogating how much I can do for them before they hire. And, you know, regularly we talk to our businesses and they say, we don't want to hire a bunch of people, find out I can do certain things. And we did a different set of skills. So we want to wait, we want to be patient on our hiring and make sure we're not over hiring. Because, you know, if you're, if you ever go through a period of time where a business has to lay workers off, it's a painful experience for workers and for them. And so they just don't want to get overly confident only to find out they have to make adjustments. So that caution will be with us for a bit.
Ed Ludlow
We are live on Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg Radio. We're in San Francisco and we're at the Bloomberg Tech event and we're speaking with San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly. Reset a little bit. But if I may, it's the first opportunity we've had to ask you, have you spoken to Chairman Walsh about how he sees the Fed evolving, about changes to the institution and if you may fold in the context of your district, San Francisco Fed? Yes, much more than that. And your role going forward?
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
Sure, absolutely. So, you know, I think what we really want, when any new chair comes in and what we want from all of our leaders of Federal Reserve banks and all of our governors, is that you're thinking constantly about how can the Fed be better? How can it better serve the American people? How can we do our work more efficiently, more effectively and more resiliently? You know, ultimately everything we talk about is, is put between two bookings, hands. We are fiduciary stewards of public trust, which means we better have services that people can depend on and we better work hard to achieve our goals. And we're fiduciary stewards of public funds, which is, we are very careful about how we spend taxpayer dollars. So with those two things in mind, you know, I mentioned I joined the Fed back in the 90s, so I joined the Fed in the 90s. And we had check processing. Remember checks? We had check processing. I start to write loads everywhere, everywhere in the everywhere. We had a location, we had people who process checks. But then check demand started to fall, and so we consolidated those activities into a few locations. And that level of modernizing, constantly thinking about how can you do better is what I see now.
Ed Ludlow
So what is the chair's equivalent of that?
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
Well, he just joined, so I'm going to give him the right time. He has to announced that he's talked about making sure he's holding on to that tradition and he comes in with a lot of ideas. But you know what I've heard him say again and again, which I really appreciate because all he's the fifth chair I've worked with. All of the chairs I've worked with have the same basic compass. It is to do our best work for the American people and work with all the individuals who are earnestly doing their work in the Fed to do it well. And I see that in Chair Wash,
Caroline Hyde
that earnest work within the Fed. How much of that is being modernized to use adopt AI. How hard or easy is it at this moment when you're such a regulated institution in and of yourself?
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
Well, we're careful, like all regulated institutions and importantly like all businesses. Businesses. You know, when I talk to businesses, the last thing they want to do is take huge risks that destroy their shareholders, the value of their company. The same is true for us good fiduciary stewards of public trust and good fiduciary stewards of public funds, which means we're always driving to adopt new technology to do our work more efficiently. But we recognize we have to do that safely. You know, people want to know they get get their money when they need it. They want to know that the banks are well supervised. They want to know that monetary policy is not made by machines. It's made by people making judgments not only about models and rules, but also so about the lived experiences of people across our country.
Ed Ludlow
Very quickly, before the show ends, what are you seeing in credit? That's a big story for us in how data centers are financed. For some it's very worrying.
Bloomberg Tech Announcer
Well, you know, we're, we're watching that carefully. I watch that carefully. What we do see is that there's a lot of, there's those companies investing a lot of their own resources in those. So it's something to keep our eye on. But at this point, you know, again, if you stack rank, the things that are worrying today, I'd say getting inflation back to target, getting Americans the relief they deserve that we've been working on for quite a while. That's my number one priority.
Ed Ludlow
San Francisco Fed President Mary Daddy, you've been very generous to your time and we always cover such a broad spectrum of topics. Really grateful to have you here with us in San Francisco at the Bloomberg Tech event.
Caroline Hyde
Yeah. What an event it has been. What an event it continues to be.
Ed Ludlow
Just getting started.
Caroline Hyde
That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech, the TV show. Yeah, but you've got to stay tuned. The rest of Bloomberg Tech event today has some phenomenal conversations coming up. I'm lucky enough to be speaking again with the Fed San Francisco Fed chair of course, Mary Daly. But look at the lineup. Look what we've got coming up.
Ed Ludlow
Yeah, and I'm going to be speaking to Trey Stevens, partner at Founders Fund, chairman of Andreal. But Founders Fund is, is a high single digit percent stakeholder of SpaceX. And don't forget SpaceX's IPO pricing June 11th. Yeah, that's a big deal. Recap the show. A lot of really great conversations on the podcast. You guys know where it's at online, Spotify, Iheart and Apple and all the Bloomberg platforms as well. Stay tuned. This is Bloomberg Tech.
Hosts: Caroline Hyde (NY) & Ed Ludlow (SF)
Theme: Navigating the AI Boom’s Market, Economic, and Technological Impact – Live from the Bloomberg Tech Event, San Francisco
This special edition of Bloomberg Tech takes listeners inside the 2026 Bloomberg Tech Event in San Francisco, where technology and business leaders discuss strategies for navigating economic and geopolitical uncertainty amid a rapid AI-driven transformation. The hosts facilitate dynamic conversations with industry executives, venture capitalists, and policymakers about the market's changing landscape, public and private capital, artificial general intelligence (AGI), infrastructure investment, and the tangible economic and societal effects of AI.
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This Bloomberg Tech special captures the pulse of the tech sector at a critical moment: AI is reshaping everything from private company valuations to energy, infrastructure investment, and workforce strategy. The episode balances exuberant forecasts (with claims of AGI’s practical arrival) with sober reminders from the Federal Reserve that mass productivity gains are yet to materialize. As the AI “supercycle” creates both sky-high IPOs and new economic dilemmas, leaders urge caution, context, and long-term thinking. Whether navigating choppy markets or building the future, all agree: the real AI transformation is only just beginning.