Welcome, everyone. I'm very excited to be with you today. My name is Julie Gilbert, and I'm the CEO and, of Full Throttle Growth and Capital.I'm also a board director and also coach, regularly many boards, as well as c suite professionals, public, private, and start up. So I'm very excited today to talk to you about what I believe, we are all sitting in the middle of the most imperative conversation, which is talking about AI as it relates to companies growth, as well as the impending quantum, that's coming upon us, which is the ability for technology to decrypt, encryptions that companies hold dear, automatically.

And as soon as companies do something to re encrypt it, Al Quantum can re re, decrypt that that, protection. So we're gonna jump right in. I'm very excited to be with you today. My first question for you is what is your why? My why started sixteen years ago in the AI space, when my, son's father, you see up in the upper left hand screen, had a sudden and unexpected, very severe stroke when my son was just two months old. So you see him there in the hospital after brain surgery with my son, and also the people who helped me, in the midst of all of this. At the time, I had a global consulting company building businesses all over the world, in fact, in five countries, five continents. And so you see my parents down below who I've since lost, also entrepreneurs and, my son's, paternal grandmother.

And in the midst of all of this, instead of, I guess, crumbling, because that's not we as strong women do, I had a pinpoint where I couldn't be with, with him every day, obviously, because I had a small baby and I had a big consulting business that I actually paused, to take care of both of them.

And so I asked myself, why are we still using the old analog phone more or less, the cell phone to call facilities and health care to get updates on those people we love, only to realize that, the current system that was in place was antiquated, and I needed to create the first ever encrypted communication platform enabling professionals, physicians, care providers of any type to communicate real time with parents and families.

And that is when I jumped into the AI space of not initially, but when I started revving around the business models in health care and education and ultimately, in the military, less relevant in this topic, although very relevant in the topic we're talking about today around AI and quantum, is I realized that I needed to innovate new business models.

And in that innovation, I realized we had enormous amount of data that if I could start to add agents and algorithms that would create real time value around insights that were real to other potential companies and customers, I could create a business model around that. And so my journey in AI started sixteen years ago. My question for you that we're gonna end on today, and I want you to be thinking about is what is your why today, as we walk through this. So what's the current situation? As I see it and I work in this space every single day, it's a fast Le Mans race. I love power sports and racing. I love driving fast cars, or it's a five alarm fire for companies and boards because AI is here. It's been here for a long time, and the companies that are not actively revving around it every single day, innovating new pieces of their value proposition, implementing it into their operations as well, are going to be left behind and frankly may already be left behind by incumbent AI pure AI companies that are coming in and innovating around the value proposition at a faster and more valuable rate.

So AI is now survival or growth mandate. Quantum risk around the decryption is happening faster than most leadership teams believe. The comp the competitive advantage for companies today is going to be speed and governance around that. The ability to to move very fast with competence, not with theory or academic, papers or write ups, but actual operator know how around AI, as well as, the impending quantum. And the winners will be those that combine speed, governance, and trust. So today, we're also gonna cover not only c suites, both public, private, startup, but also, boards and what boards need to be thinking about and actually acting on in this space. The question every board in c suite should be asking every day is, what about our value proposition as proprietary?

Is it the best option for our customers and by how much? Because if you no longer have a value propositions that that is proprietary or compelling to customers, the race may already be lost for you. You're gonna have a such a fast rev to try to catch up to companies that are rapidly ahead of you. If what you sell is available everywhere today in any, you know, physical presence or digital, you may be left behind already, and you should have been doing something about this a long time ago. If that's not the case and you have something very proprietary, you need to pick apart your value proposition and identify which pieces can you increase the value or speed or operational efficiency by implementing AI without destroying that complete customer user interface, or user experience.

The question that c suite boards and and, c suite boards and c suite should be asking is how do we grow faster using AI? How do we innovate ongoing on a compelling value proposition? How do we operate leaner? And And we're gonna talk about companies that are doing this very effectively today, and they are only gonna grow faster in terms of stock price and valuation and, benefits to their employee base. And, also, how do we derisk and protect our critical assets around cybersecurity, around the impending quantum? What are we doing to set up this so that we have a foundation with a mode around it that truly is secure? And here we go. Why do I believe this?

Well, I have some really good friends that are also in the space, and I'm gonna highlight one today, William Hartman, who's the vice chairman of CBRE, which is the largest commercial real estate company. And he has a quote here that if you have a chance to read it, I'm gonna synthesize it. But three years ago in New York City, and we're also gonna talk about San Francisco, AI tenants were nonexistent in the New York office market. Today, across fintech, AI legal, AI life sciences, r and d, and many others, there's a new class of occupier that's routinely taking a 100,000 square feet, not 5,000, not 10,000, a 100,000 square feet in one chomp, in terms of signing a three year, five year, ten year lease, at a pace and scale that's materially reshaping demand.

Rents that previously were low seventies per square foot are now more than a 120 for high quality space, driven by these companies' willingness to pay for talent, diversity, infrastructure, and location. Similar in San Francisco, we all know what has happened with real estate prices going back to COVID in San Francisco. It was approaching a 40% vacancy rate in 2025, or in a 20, 5% vacancy in 2025 and going from a 40% prior, has stabilized and is in the process of being saved by the AI industry with millions of square feet of leasing. And his quote here, I think, is very powerful. Markets don't expand this quickly without displacement. So these AI companies coming in, taking up a 100,000 square feet of space, that's not happening without them taking a bite out of some preexisting incumbent company that was providing probably the exact same value proposition, and they fell behind. So AI is relocating demand. And in play terms, somebody else's lunch is being eaten and being eaten at warp speed, and that's that's the point here.

Moving into the next three to five years, what are we looking at? AI native companies will scale faster than incumbents. We're seeing that already. Workforce models will fundamentally change. I'm gonna give you some examples of where that's already been in play, and they're seeing the benefits out of that. Boards will be held accountable for AI governance and cyber resilience. There's going to be increased, my guess is litigation on actual boards and board members in the public space and others where they're saying, why weren't you on this earlier? Why did you not diversify your matrix and get true AI and technology operators in the boardroom that have absolute competency around this as opposed to, you know, folks that kinda play around with AI or chat or whatever? That is not going to get you through this at all.

You're not able to ask the right questions if you're not working in the space every day, if you haven't been held accountable to a p and l that's large in operations in in the AI space. And lastly, quantum readiness will be the fiduciary responsibility and issue. How does this affect you right now? I had to put this in. Deepfakes and fraud, is happening every five minutes globally. Deepfake fraud incidents have increased more than 2000% in the last three years. Deep face, voice deep fake attacks have risen over 680 year over year in 2024, and humans correctly identify sophisticated deep fakes only about 24% of the time. So one out of four, we're able to identify if that's real or not real. And you see that in social media if you're out there. It's happening at a very rapid rate.

And when what you're seeing is actually only a tiny piece because what's happening behind the scenes in the dark around collecting information, collecting your your voice, your speech, and all of that is the real risk here. And so I wanted to mention this because do not click on any links that you are not aware of. Triple check, everything that you're you're looking at, even phone calls you don't recognize. They could be reaching out to you with a robo dial just to get an access to your voice when you answer the phone. Be very careful about those kinds of things. The decision leadership teams will make in the next twelve to to twenty four months will determine whether their workforce evolves or becomes obsolete, whether their company leads or disappears, and whether their customers can trust them.

And and also, frankly, stakeholders and and stockholders are going to be saying, you as leaders acted too slow. You have put us in a position from a company standpoint, from a valuation standpoint, and from a competitiveness standpoint that we cannot catch up. If you're just diving into AI now as a company, you had better get some help because you're gonna need it in terms of catching up and making sure that your value proposition is truly at as compelling as what your newly, new entrance into the space around competition may be. Beneath the reality is even a larger reality. For the first time, technology is not just transforming business models, what it's really transforming is trust itself. And I mentioned that early with deep fakes, but, in terms of trust on a whole, plethora and foundation level of how do customers look at your company? Is it something they see as compelling from a value proposition? And do they feel that their data is going to be secure?

And do they trust that you're going to be competitive for a longer term so that they don't have to look at switching costs and and that sort of thing, as they move? But trust is gonna become the biggest, discussion. I anticipate that's going to be a big discussion, and boardrooms as well as c suites, as well as, a lot of, conversations around think tanks and other things. So let's talk about some real companies. Microsoft, Nvidia, JPMorgan Chase, Amazon. We're gonna talk about them in a bit in terms of their stock price and where it's at today. Palantir and IBM. You see they're all embedding and have embed embed embedding AI across their enterprises in a variety of different, realities.

JPMorgan Chase for fraud, Microsoft around workflow, Palantir around decision systems. IBM is getting an early entry around quantum positioning. Some more, private companies that you may or may not be aware of, OpenAI, of course, you've all heard of, Anthropic, Andurall around the defense systems and then ScaleAI around infrastructure and human in the loop systems. Let's talk about reality. Starbucks. Starbucks has been going through a turnaround. They have implemented AI driven personalization, predictive engagement. Now they're doing all of this while they are reinforcing and and really getting clear on what makes them unique in the market of coffee and other, beverages in the retail market. So they're not just doing AI. They're also reinforcing and reinventing what makes them special like the barista, like the personal interaction between the barista and and me when I come in, them knowing who I am, them knowing what I may want, suggesting things based on the fact that I've, been in there before and ordered similar things before.

So tailoring offers based on behavior and location, creating loyalty, engagement, and spending frequency based on AI driven insights around Julie and what she wants and what she likes. And their stock price has risen more than 40% in the last year. Netflix, similar recommendation engines and AI directly influencing lifetime customer value. Now they're not just implementing AI. They're increasing their content. They're increasing the selection of different things you can watch. They're honing in on if I watch all things about archaeology, which I do, they're suggesting other ideas for me in terms of what I might wanna watch. Now that is just increasing engagement. As you increase engagement, you have the ability not to to decrease dramatically, churn. And, also, you know, if they raise prices, I'm not as likely to, go somewhere else or cancel my subscription.

And their stock price is up 19% less than a year. Another one I wanted to mention, ServiceNow and one of my good friends who's also an AI entrepreneur, Brett Hurt, his company was just acquired by ServiceNow not long ago. And today's article literally today's article is the stock is up. ServiceNow price target raise as AI growth strategy gains strength. So they're embedding AI copilots into enterprise workflows and expanding wallet share without expanding headcount proportionately. The strategic shift, the fastest growing companies are no longer those with the largest physical footprint. They are the organizations that compound intelligence and put it into action faster than competitors. I'm gonna stop there.

The fastest growing companies are no longer those with the largest physical footprint. And you can think about that in retail. You can also think about that in terms of distribution centers, in terms of inventory pulls, and and all of the the pieces that make, the whole supply chain get to customers in an efficient way. And we're gonna talk about some examples around that. But these are the organizations that compound intelligence faster than competitors. Let's talk about that. Operational optimization, critical leadership point. The organizations that win will not simply reduce costs. Amazon, you may think that's what they're doing, but let's look at what's really going on. The stock has risen 35% in less than a year, and it's due to a major integration of AI. AI driven warehouse robotics, root optimization, predictive logistics, and reducing operational friction. Walmart, huge retailer, which some may say, oh, retail is having trouble. Not Walmart. But you know what?

Walmart's been on the AI journey for a long time, and they've been innovating both on growth and on operational execution and creating lean operations. And their stock has risen 42% in less than a year. The market is rewarding that innovation, that risk taking, that placing of bets. And for the companies that haven't been doing that, all they've been doing is cutting costs. They're gonna be in a world of hurt if they aren't already, and the stock price is just gonna see a decline because stakeholders know that they don't have a plan to win. Or they're so far behind, it's unlikely that they're going to win anytime soon. And so what has Walmart been doing? A bunch of things. But a couple that I wanted to mention was the AI forecasting to improve inventory management, to take cost out of holding costs of any kind, and also the the actual logistics around that and reducing waste and increased availability.

I mean Walmart's also using their data to create significant growth and engagement on the top line as well. The reality, the quantum reality. So switching a little bit from AI into quantum and again quantum is a real risk. It's any time it's going to happen. There's a tremendous amount there's a race in quantum right now, and you may know the the China, quantum race, The US quantum race of how do we protect our critical assets both in a national security space, but also from a company space, because quantum computing is has the ability to decrypt as fast as the other side can encrypt and re and rewash and re rinse and repeat.

So the ability to break current encryption standards, reshaping cybersecurity, accelerating drug discovery, and revolutionaries optimization problems, and really redefine the national and economic security. Some quantum forerunners that are in the space doing really impressive and really important work, of course, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and ion q and Righetti, which you may not be as familiar with, but I wanted to definitely mention. Bad actors. They're not just sitting around, similar to what we talked about on deep fakes. So the immediate risk is they are harvesting data now to decrypt later. So they're pulling in the stack only to act on it later. They've been collecting encrypted sensitive data today to decrypt it once quantum capability matures. The areas that we're talking about here is everything we personally hold dear, financial records, IP and trade secrets, health care data, government contracts, m and a information, and the list is long. But this is enough to keep me up at night, and a lot of other people on how do we get ahead of that and how are we creating solutions to multiple solutions and multiple layering as well as embedding a true under the the foundation security, both cyber and other to prevent this kind of decryption.

Board responsibilities. Board should now expect AI transparency, dashboards at every single board meeting. You should see on the agenda AI as a topic, and you should be looking at the dashboards. The dashboards need to be complete. They need to include the customer component. They need to include the operational component. They need to include an entire section on value proposition. Where are we at in that, and what are our risks, around AI from a competitive standpoint? How could someone come in and basically unseat us as the the best company in this space or the second best company in this space? And this needs to be a discussion in every board meeting.

And it needs to have the board needs to have true board members that are operators in this space, not just, those that have advised on it periodically or been consultants in it, not going to work. In addition, enterprise AI risk framework. So what is it what are the areas of the organization that are at risk? To what degree? What are we doing to prevent anything bad from happening? Quantum preparedness reporting, cyber resilience metrics. So many boards today have cyber, and usually it's once, a year that there's a cyber review and and the team comes in with a third party to report on any breaches that have happened and and that were under the radar enough that we didn't have to, actually act on them in a significant way from a board standpoint.

But to, really review this, it should be in this packet and reviewed on a on a every single board meeting perspective. And then, of course, talent readiness assessments. In terms of the c suite, where are the succession plans? How deep are they in AI? And that's not just the the technology people. It needs to be the business folks. They need to understand this. They need to be competent, and they need to be ready to roll and innovating on it on a daily basis around keeping the company at the tip of the spear of competitiveness. Final thoughts. This has been a whirlwind. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope it's given you a few things to think about, and hopefully act on. There's a lot more where this came from that I didn't have time to present, but would be happy to share with you on a one on one call, additional things around c suites and what each of the different roles should be looking at around AI as well as quantum, as well as, truly what a board, evaluation should look like.

But the defining companies in the next decade will not simply be the ones that adopt AI. You see a lot of that going on. Every company is doing something, but they will be the organizations that combine intelligence with trust, with governance, and resilience at scale. Intelligence, trust, governance, and resilience at scale. And my challenge to all of you is you're all extremely talented, very competent. Don't let it be the case that some tragedy or medical emergency in your family forces you into the space like me. Let it be you that's driving and leading this to ensure that you're on the tip of the spear, setting the company, its stakeholders, and yourself up for success versus cleaning up the mess in the corporate graveyard with all of those others who thought they had time. And with that, Julie Gilbert, Full Throttle Growth and Capital, a total pleasure being with you today, and I hope you enjoy the conference.

Look forward to linking up with you. Bye bye.