 Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, in the room and on live stream to the re-skilling the workforce for a digital future. On this very sunny day in Davos at the 48th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, I'm joined today by Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, Cheryl Martin, Managing Director and Head of Industries at the World Economic Forum, Mike Grégoire, CEO of CA Technologies, and last but not least, Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. Thank you for all for being here. So today we're launching a new initiative and Chuck, I would like you to know, let me know how this initiative got started and also why this focus on re-skilling. Well, first of all, thanks to everyone for being here and thanks to everybody who's watching online. This is something we're incredibly excited about. We've been working very hard for the last two years, lots of folks and I just do want to, although I can't call them all out, I would like to just recognize the team members that actually put this all together because we get to sit up here and take a lot of credit for it. I can assure you most of the work was done by somebody else, so thanks to all the team members who have done that. When we got together two years ago and I was asked if I would lead the IT Governors Council, it was just a moment where I said, you know, if we actually commit to doing something tangible, then I'm quite happy to do it. And so I think there was a lot of energy around trying to decide what we wanted to actually go after and what we wanted to do. And we all agreed that day and Mike and Bill were there that, you know, obviously we all know that technology is going to permeate every job on the planet in the future as well as technology will dislocate some jobs. And we feel like that not only do we have a responsibility but we have an opportunity to actually come together as a technology industry and create a platform where people can go and do a couple of things. Number one, they can actually assess themselves on the platform and determine where we think their capabilities lie. But perhaps the most impressive thing I believe is that all of the technology companies involved, some of us are competitors. And we all agreed that this was important enough that we would come, we would move above the competitive nature of our businesses. And we put a lot of our educational content together in one place. And for the technology companies, you have to understand, we view our content as really creating brand preference out in the marketplace. And when we go out and we educate students, we do it because it's the right thing to do, but we also know that they'll have a long-term loyalty to us. So for the technology industry to come together and actually decide that it was more important for us to create this platform and provide this opportunity, for me, was the most impressive part of what we've done. Now, this is just the beginning, and we have lots of great new ideas that Mike will talk about as I'm going to pass the reins to him tomorrow morning, but we're very excited about actually launching this and look forward to all the great things we're able to do on this platform in the future. Thanks, Chuck. Cheryl, as the representative of the forum on this panel, why did the forum get involved? What role do you see the forum playing in this new initiative? Thanks so much. You know, I think there's a number of aspects for the forum that are very, very exciting. I think the first one relates to the theme of the meeting, creating a shared future in a fractured world. Part of that is actually addressing how and why do different parts of the population feel empowered or disempowered by the fourth industrial revolution as one aspect of what helps creating, is helping to create a fractured world. And so to see an initiative arising from one of our industry communities, which is the grounding of much of our public-private cooperation upon which the forum believes we can commit it to changing the world, to see that come about is really heartening for us. I think, again, alluding back to last year's theme, responsive and responsible leadership, to see an industry that has faced a lot of opportunity by bringing technology forward, to create a lot of opportunity, but also have to grapple with some of the threats of that technology to see it come together, as Chuck said, in a very non-competitive way and say, this is about enabling people to really get their arms around how do they take action themselves, empowering people, empowering future employees. Because I think we all see that there's a lot of positiveness in this if we can do reskilling right. And I think thirdly, the forums had a long-term commitment to education, gender, and work. We have a whole system initiative and conversations around this. And just yesterday, actually published a whole report looking at a thousand different job types and how and why they can be changed and adapted based on reskilling. And so this skillset portal and its rollout today is simply what we see as the first step of a real escalation and onboarding of not just this industry, but many others and many other activities that we have happening across the forum to really enable people, companies, society to make a big difference. And so we are really, really excited to support this. And but, you know, it truly rests with the chairs of the governors who are so committed and have certainly played a huge role on Chuck's part. And then handing off successfully tomorrow with the baton to carry this important race forward. So, Mike, you're the IT governor's chairman. Usually when people speak about reskilling, it's about learning code. This isn't what it's about. What advice do you have for someone who's interested in developing or refocusing their skill? Well, you really have to think about lifelong learning for everybody, whether you are a coder, whether you're a designer, whether you're a business analyst, whether you're a network engineer, whether you aspire to be a sales professional. So if you take a look at the way the team built the portal under Chuck's leadership, it was never meant to be a point in time. You can start with a very simple skills assessment, try to get an understanding for what is your technical literacy. But right now we have eight different subject matters on the portal, but there's going to be literally hundreds over time. You can move away from coding altogether and really try to understand what are your business skills. Just because you have business skills, you're going to need those business skills in a technical environment. There's a session in there on sales. How would you try to engage with customers? What are the best practices for engaging with customers? How do you move and nurture a lead? These are all skills that I think an entry level person into tech that wanted to be a sales professional are going to get an opportunity to play with. Now once again, the way that the portal was built, it's a modern portal. It has a consumer look and feel. It's easy to navigate. You don't have to go through and understand a complicated manual and it's really been extensible. So as we get more content and we bring more companies that are working to solve this problem, I think you're going to see this as a great place for content. Coupled with that, we plan to post all of our jobs. Once again, you know, there's a lot of open jobs at Cisco right now. I'm sure there's a lot of open jobs at SAP, but when you look at the CAA, putting one out to that portal could become the hub for technical job creation. Wonderful. So Bill, you're known as the internal optimist. But this isn't really an optimistic situation. Do you still maintain that optimism given the upcoming challenges and the issues that are faced by many in today's workplace? Well, you know, optimism is one of the only free stimulus left in the world. And I don't see any reason not to take it and run with it. So I'm sticking to that optimistic view. And there are some reasons where we really should be very optimistic. If you think about this economy right now, we're in the midst of a customer driven growth revolution. I mean, there's never been opportunities in the entire world like there are today. The consumers on the move, they're in multiple channels. Data has become the new steel by which you can build new business models on the fly. And you can reach customers in all parts of the world, even if you're a small business without a lot of funding. So if we use digital and we embrace this change and this automation, it can be a real help to job creation. As an example, Gartner said there would be 2.9 trillion U.S. dollars in economic value created in AI alone by 2021. So this is a big, big market. Now I want to thank Chuck for his leadership. I knew how much it meant to him to get behind this cause. And that's why we took our head of corporate social responsibility and basically dedicated her to the world economic forum and Chuck's cause because we knew it was that important. And he's been a role model CEO. I think this year he'll train a couple of million people with online computer courses and other methodologies. We'll do the same. And I know Mike extremely well as a very, very fine CEO and a passionate leader. And you know Chuck couldn't be passing the baton on to a better guy and a better leader. So we're proud to do our part. You know, one of the things I really wanted to mention about this idea of collaboration in a fractured world, here you are seeing this collaboration and this trust. I mean, we know that our purpose is much bigger than ourselves and just our own companies. And we know we cannot do everything for everybody. So to have one reskilling portal where millions and millions of people that we would have never reached on our own can be reached is pretty profound. So I think this idea of teamwork and trust is really at a new level here. And I'm very proud to have been a small part of it. And I know my dear colleagues at SAP feel the same way. I do want to make a little bit of a commercial announcement to the young people. You know, if you take a country like India, for example, you know, there's 800 million people between the ages of 18 and 36. So you have these young people all over the world that are looking for opportunities. And I think, you know, this is a small step at least to reaching out and saying, you know, get engaged. And I think you bring up great points on the curriculum. You know, not everyone is going to code software. Not everyone is going to be a software, a sales representative. You know, some people are going to be managers and educators and thinkers. And some people are going to be retooled and get entirely new careers. Well, the curriculum allows for that. And there's a place for everybody because the best part of you is you. And I think we're, you know, trying to role model the importance of each individual and their skill set having a place in the new economy. On those passionate words, I'm going to open up the floor for a few questions. The gentleman in the front, please state your name and the organization you're from. Hey, Steve Clemens with The Atlantic. After President Trump was elected, Klaus Schwab said that one of the things he wanted to do was take business leaders who are involved in the World Economic Forum and try and look at things like job creation, look at what could be done to sort of respond to President Trump's claim that, you know, America was doing poorly, badly, wasn't doing this. And, you know, I had written kind of a tongue in cheek piece that industrial policy was coming to America through the World Economic Forum. So I'm interested in whether the meetings that Schwab had talked about ever happened and whether your project was linked to those at all because he did have a big reaction to it at that time. Yeah, I've never had a conversation about it, so it wasn't linked to it at all. I personally think that, you know, I said this in the panel I was on this morning. I think that in this world and in this fractured world we live in, that the business community, and even particularly the tech community, maybe that's just because that's where I live, has an opportunity and a responsibility to actually work on some of these more important issues. And I think they extend beyond issues that are directly connected to technology. I think the skills initiative that we're driving here, and I appreciate the kind words, but I'm going to tell you it was a big effort across a whole bunch of companies. So there are three of us up here who are fortunate enough to represent it, but there were a lot of companies involved. I think we have 10 that are part of the initial, and I guarantee it's going to grow quickly. But I think we have to come together and also leverage our ability to innovate, to attack other problems in the world, in the U.S. and Silicon Valley, things like homelessness and affordable housing and hunger, and there's a whole lot of issues out there that not only do we need to care about, I think we have the ability to leverage the innovation that we actually deliver on a day-to-day basis and actually go attack some of these issues. So that's unrelated to this, but it's sort of in the same vein with us, and I think that more of my colleagues, more of us feel that way than not, to be honest with you. And so I'm really honored to be up here today. To pile onto that, the thing we do have in tech is we're great at content and delivering content economically. And when you think about this particular problem, pretty much every country is trying to digitize their citizens, and this platform is not tied to any borders. You can log onto this platform, whether you're in India, you can be in Luxembourg, you can be in Kansas, and you're going to have access to this content. The other thing, we're seeing a lot of governments, and this is also something that I think we do very well with the tech community and the WEF is the public-private partnership. You know, the Department of Labor in the U.S. has labor centers all across the country. You know, getting this portal into the hands of people that are looking for jobs in these regional centers, there's almost $30 billion being applied with the E.U. on reskilling across all of its countries. There's a whole bunch of programs. I think this portal can be leading and showing people how they can quickly and easily start getting into the game of digital transformation. The portal is going up today, right? I think that's right. Yeah. Just wanted to ask if the portal is up. Yeah. I just want to give you one example of this is something that Cisco's learned from in the past is we have a program called Network Academies, which a lot of that content is being put into this program, and we're currently training to build point 2.1 million students around the world. Just to give you an example of what we think is possible, we took that program into prisons in Italy a couple of years ago. We had one really amazing graduate who took a tremendous number of cybersecurity courses, and I believe he was incarcerated for six or eight years, and he's now a cybersecurity specialist working for a company out of prison in Italy. I think that if we can accomplish that, then there's a tremendous amount of progress that we can make around the world. Anyone would like to ask another question? Yes? Please, the woman in the front. Just a simple question. How is the portal called? What's it called? Yeah, it's called. That's a good question. It's called skill net. Skill set. Thank you. I leave the marketing to other people. She has one more. She has another. How many people do you expect to attract? Could you come back a bit more on the genesis of the idea, specifically how you met, give us a timeline of when you decided to come up with this idea first? Yeah, so it started in Davos two years ago, and it was basically when I became the chairman, which Mike is going to become tomorrow, that's a two-year commitment. When we had our meeting in Davos, we just had a roundtable discussion amongst the members and said we all agreed we wanted to do something that resulted in taking action, and then we went through a list of probably five or six different things that we could go after, and we all agreed that this was the one that we could come together as an industry and probably have the most impact. And then we all took some of our most aggressive execution resources in our companies, and they're pretty relentless, and then they worked with some great partners at WEF, and just, you know, once we told them what we wanted to do and we had periodic check-ins with them, they just made it happen, and it's pretty impressive. So just for the audience that's online, how many people do you intend to attract? Mike, since this is your goal, I'll let you answer the question. Well, if Chuck can do two million and Bill can do two million, and we have the whole world to go after, I gotta think it's a bigger number than that, so we're gonna do our best to educate as many as we possibly can. Second row? Yeah, this is Lee Wei from Saishin from Beijing. In the tech world, it's actually not a very fractious world. It's actually a same monopolistic or oligopolistic world. Given the huge automation, especially in China, but also these tech giants, huge investment in intangible assets, do you think these kind of voluntary kind of effort by your companies will be enough to tackle this challenge posed by technology as well as these big techs? Does regulation have to come in to help your effort at a certain stage, and what would that be? Yeah, I'd just give you my thoughts on it. This is one of those really virtuous endeavors where you have powerful companies volunteering to help the world run better and to improve people's lives. You remember one thing about this world we're in right now? Machines can't dream, but people do. And there's a lot of people that are uninitiated in this modern economy, in this digital economy. And now's a chance to initiate them in this economy. And I don't think you need a regulatory environment to help us reach people who are uninitiated because free will is not an illusion. It's a human right. And everybody can get on this skill set now and really focus on their commitment to getting better and improving their skills and going to the next level. I would like to also say I think we're in an era where it's not just about augmented reality and artificial intelligence. It's really about augmented humanity. And I would like to think about this much more as a human exercise than an IT exercise or a motive to gain competitive advantage. On the contrary, this is about sharing and exposing all of our best practices so everyone can benefit from them. From the forum's perspective, I think this bigger, broader look at education gender, the future of work, allows us to be very helpful to these efforts as well. And certainly some of the coalition building in different countries around the world, some of the efforts that we already have significant engagement in countries can be really helpful in either translating for local groups into how they might choose to use things like the portals, increasing awareness, right? Because there's obviously social media. There's a lot of different ways we could reach out. But in some places, the way we should reach out most closely is into the very local community through the way that they're choosing to leverage their own resources, educate people, build their cities and other pieces. And so from our part, and I think the forum as a platform, sees that it's this broad public-private partnership taking place in many different ways, leveraging both the macro of this type of platform and some of the micro-efforts and really, really being able to reach very huge numbers of people and hopefully very quickly as this revolution continues to take hold and make people's lives better. Sure. Steve Clemens again. I loved your story of the convict and hiring them. Jim McKelvie of LaunchCode, who has worked a lot, one of the co-founders of Square and others has worked a lot in taking people who've been trained but not trained well enough in coding perhaps and turning them out. And he found he was having problems getting them hired because these were people that had had some sort of speed bump or problem in their profile. He actually called Cisco and I remember telling the story about John Chambers and saying, you know, your HR department is just too risk-averse. And then John turned around and began hiring. So you may know this story. And I'm interested in, to what degree, you may skill people, you may find that portal, but you have rigidities in large companies in HR departments that may not be where, you know, in the same wave. You, you are all expressing. So I'm interesting to what degree you're setting patterns, frames, benchmarks for HR departments that have been avoiding the kind of people that Chuck just talked about. I think it's a good point that we have one thing working in our favor. We have 500,000 open jobs in the US. We have 600,000 open IT jobs in Europe. We don't have good data on Latin America or Asia, but I would imagine that the openings compared to the qualified people has got to be, have great disparity. So a free market is going to push these people into those opportunities. Secondly, if you're going to get certified in some of the technologies that we have, these are the technologies that the biggest companies in the world are looking for. These are the kinds of skills that we need. We put this in place for our own companies and we've opened it up to the whole world. So these are skills that we know we need. These are skills that we know we would hire for. So I think you've got a couple of things working, you know, a little bit of wind in your back on this particular problem, on this particular space. Yeah, we're actually, this is Cisco, but it'll extend into this program. We're in refugee camps. I mean, we're extending this kind of capability. So I think that the more this becomes a public, publicly known. And I think to Mike's point, the supply and demand issue on the talent side is going to actually make, you know, take a lot of that stuff off the table. So on that note, is there any addition? I was just going to say, you know, I keep going back to the young people because if you look at youth unemployment, whether it's in the Middle East, Europe, North America, even in Asia, I mean, it's unbelievable how many people are uninitiated in the workplace. Countries now are changing their business model based on their natural resource and they're actually partnering with private companies like ours and others to basically mentor, train and get young people ready for the workforce. So I think if you look at something like this and we were to initiate, let's say millions of young people into this program and they were to be certified if you want to put some rules on this and you were to align that certification with the HR systems or the HR people of our companies which we're certainly willing and of course able to do, I think you bring up a great point, Steve, like how many more people could we feed into the pipeline, whether they're reformed because they serve their time or they're uninitiated because they haven't had a skill match with a job opportunity or they just don't know where the jobs are. You know, one of the big things in this workforce, the fastest growing employment opportunity in the world is temporary labor. It's really interesting. Last year we put three million people in temporary jobs through a business network called FieldGlass and I had mentioned that obviously to Chuck and Mike and members of the WEF as a way to essentially have a rules-based network where people could come in and not only get full-time jobs if that's what's available but get contract jobs maybe six month or 12 month contract jobs because those jobs are growing at nearly 60% on a year-over-year basis in almost every geography around the world. So I think we need to just initiate people not only in the portal but initiate them into the process of either a contingent job where it's based on temporary contracts or full-time and that's something that you bring up a good point. We should, you know, align it with the HR systems and make sure we're going out of our way to get new people in the system. Thank you. First, before I close this press conference, I'd like to encourage you and invite you to check out thisskillset.org webpage. My colleague in the back of the room will be there also and be able to show you how the portal works if you have any questions about that. And then I would like to thank my panelists for a very interesting and dynamic conversation about reskilling and the potential future that we have in front of us. And then I would like to thank all of you in the room and online for joining us. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.