 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cue Weir in downtown San Francisco, Pier 48 at the GE Mines and Machines event. It's the fourth or fifth year they've been doing it. It's about 3,000 people, people all over the place. Beth Comstock kicked it out. Jeff Emel came on. Really, the who's who of GE senior executives running everything from oil and gas, transportation, healthcare, you name it, aviation, but really excited to be joined by David Bartlett, who we talked to about a year ago, I guess. At that point, you were CTO of aviation. Now you're doing a new thing called Current by GE. First off, welcome. Thank you. And what is Current by GE? You have yellow cards, not the blue GE logo. Yeah, the cards are the color of sunshine. Oh, there we go. I like it. Yeah, this is a new startup that GE launched that's really doubling down our efforts on distributed energy. So this is moving away from decentralized power to distributed or virtual power plants. So is it compete with kind of traditional distributed power? Does it work in conjunction with it? How does, which are kind of your go-to-market, because I saw on your website, Little Start, it'd be like a billion dollars in revenue already, so it's a pretty good start. Well, you know, it's a little startup in GE style, right? So they moved the solar renewable business to Current by GE. They moved the energy storage business to us. They moved the electrical vehicle charging business to us. And they moved from GE lighting the LED business to us. Why LED? Well, yeah, it saves energy and that's important as people move from incandescence and fluorescence to LED. But as they do that, our LED fixtures now contain a digital driver that has a CPU, that has storage, that can house any number of sensors. So it's really kind of the way we're digitalizing the environment in cities and buildings. And oh, by the way, this digitalization platform provides light. Right. And so your customers are still the utilities, the PG&E and those types of folks or no? No, no. So we're really helping. You're an alternative. Yeah, digitalizing the environment of cities. Okay. Of enterprises, so really the whole commercial and industrial space, we're helping with this new play. So you had a great article recently in CIO review talking about kind of the final five challenges for the industrial internet of things. And you had being more open, ending the platform wars, but number four out of five was security and privacy. You know, just a couple of weeks back, we had this big denial of service attack, really more on the consumer side than the industrial side. But as we distribute more of these sensors and there's more connected devices and there's more kind of a surface attack area from the security point of view, how are you guys dealing with that? What's kind of the reception on the customer side? Cause there's, you know, good side of the coin and then there's this kind of scary dark thing. Yeah. So I mean, the good news is GE has a long history in security. We've got big cyber security team, but what we're talking about here, Jeff, is bringing the IT world together with the OT world. And OT security is a little bit different than the IT cyber security. I'm talking about securing those IoT endpoints out in the field, SCADA systems, control systems. And in the case of what current's doing, the digital fixtures that are out there collecting data. So we've acquired companies like Rural Tech to help us do it, but we're just, again, doubling down our efforts, but it's not just about putting firewalls up and securing, it's also about how do you collect data? So just because we can collect it doesn't mean we should. For example, if we're using video and video analytics on an edge device, we can decide right on the edge what we want to do with it, act on it as an edge processor without going to the cloud and then discard the data after we act on it. So whether it's pedestrian safety or vehicle flow, but what we can keep is we can create at the edge metadata that represents the number of cars or trucks or people without really capturing that personal information about them. It's interesting, Beth Comstock in her opening talked about really organizing around process flows. It's a very, very different way to think about how you do things. And Jeff talked about really just efficiency, right? That's where we've seen a lot in the consumer side, efficiency, because cars sit a lot of times. Uber cars are moving. When you look at the opportunities within, as you just said, like the smart cities or I think the ways example from, yes, it was to help people save a little bit of time on their commute home, but now when you have this data, it opens up a whole new possibility of things with smart cities, smart traffic management that people never even really saw. It's amazing kind of transformational process once that's in their hands. No, that's right. And one of our mantras in current is we're open at the bottom and we're open at the top. So magic happens with a lot of our technology in the middle, but open at the bottom means we'll take data feeds from any device, not just GE devices. Open at the top means we're surfacing all that data through an API to application developers that bring incredible expertise to cities, to enterprises, to industry verticals like retail, that now having access to this additional data that we're pulling in from this environment are able to greatly improve the accuracy of their applications, the value that they're able to drive, even security. I remember last time we talked about, impressed me quite a bit, you're in aviation, everybody in those GE makes engines for airplanes, but you're really thought and focused on kind of the end to end experience from the time I leave my house until the time I arrive at my destination and really having kind of this open point of view about the entire process, not necessarily just the piece that you have traditionally taken care of, it's a very different strategy, a very different kind of go to marketing concern for the customer experience and the total experience. Right, and Jeff, that goes down to my definition of what makes an intelligent environment, what makes an intelligent city is not how many connections we have, how much data we're pulling. I mean, that's kind of the underpinning of it, but my definition really comes down to are we helping people be more efficient, more productive? Are they feeling safer? Are they able to do their work in a more productive manner? When we can start answering yes to those questions, then we can start saying yes, we are creating an intelligent city or environment. So the question isn't just how efficient that flight is, but how efficient is the experience getting from point A to point B, from door step to door step, because that's what people have to do, moving from, let's say, their hotel to a place of business and actually doing productive work. Yeah, the flight itself is efficient, it's safe, but there's a lot on either end. You have to connect to it, that we've all been victims of. Yeah, unfortunately, that's kind of the hairy ragged edge generally is the stuff not in the middle. That's right. The other piece that you talked about in this article that you just published was really, and we've seen this time and time again, really things going from cost center to now really being a strategic business enabler, and energy consumption in this new world, suddenly now it's not just a cost center that we have to buy to power our factories, power our machines, power our vehicles, but now actually with the intelligence that can become a strategic advantage, and how companies are changing the way they look at energy consumption specifically, pretty interesting. It is interesting and if you think about what makes companies successful, what allows them to stay competitive as you move forward, and one of those things is being able to, first of all, be highly available, highly resilient. So one of the things we talked about that Kerns providing is the ability to build these virtual power plants. That means interruptions in grid services from utilities don't affect the business itself. They can continue to operate even when infrastructure around them starts to fail. That actually speaks to kind of some of the security concerns we talked about earlier too. So it's being more independent allows you to be more resilient. Also with ability to really monitor energy in a holistic manner, you're able to understand is everything operating together for the task that you want to accomplish in the business, whether it's manufacturing or service of customer in retail. So using and managing energy in this way drives better results, drives better yield, reduces scrap rate in the factory, et cetera. It's amazing just how much efficiency there still is to unwind. You think back to like the early 80s with the first kind of wave of ERP and the amount of efficiency that that used to unlock. I used to tease my buddy with a sensor. I'm like, there's no backstalk in the stores anymore because you guys are too efficient. But it really still a ton of opportunity, still a ton of efficiency to be ring out of the system. There is so much. And the great news is the technology's here. The great news is what G's invested in building this Predix platform so we can scale, so we can leverage all the industrial analytics so we can truly operate on the edge. You're right. From an industrial, from a commercial industrial point of view, there is so much opportunity. It's not a job to me. I'm like on a mission. I love about you. So final thing, you see a lot of stuff. There's a lot of cool toys here. Trains, planes, and automobiles are literally here at GE. Couple of just kind of fun things that you've seen recently that just tickled your fancy that maybe somebody wouldn't necessarily think of in this world. Oh my gosh, so we're driving the power requirements for this event from a GE asset that's located here. And we've created a whole digital twin, digital twin of that. As you first walk into the tech hall, you can see it. So digital twin allows you to understand past performance, allows you to better manage to the KPIs of the current state. But most importantly, how can you model for the future? How can you get more insight how to do things more efficiently? That's a really cool toy. And we also created a really cool toy in the current booth where you can actually, it's an interactive screen where you can drill down at any level in an intelligent environment, intelligent city to see what type of data is there being collected, what you can do with it, what some of the new possible use cases are. It really just kind of fires up your imagination. What is possible with this? It's really interesting because there's these two kind of visions of the future. It's something, there's this really bright future, yellow like the cards. And then some people focus on the dark, but the bright is so much more powerful, so much bigger than the dark that it's just amazing what's coming down the pike. No, I mean that's so true and a lot of people do focus on it. And look, there are a lot of challenges in the world. We both know that, but in many ways, technology got us into a lot of these challenging situations over the past 100 years. But the great news is there's technology today that can get us out of it. There's technology that can improve our efficiencies. I mean, when we launched this whole PREDICT initiative, we talked about the power of 1%. If we could just make a 1% difference in the use of jet fuel, what would that equal? $15 billion worth of, I mean, so applying this to across the different power, water, healthcare, aviation, all the areas we operate in, massive opportunity to reduce the carbon footprint, to improve sustainability in the way we do our processes. And that's just, that was our starting point, 1%. Of course, we've achieved much more than that, which is why I feel like it's a mission. I've seen it work. I've seen our ability to dramatically affect at scale. And so as more companies work with us on this ecosystem, and by the way, in current this week where we've got press release going out, we've had over 60 partners recently join us to take data from our APIs to drive this new type of value to create these efficiencies. That's when you really get excited because you see the momentum. Right, because all the smartest people aren't inside your four walls, right? That's another kind of open source ethos that GE has adopted to really take advantage of the data in ways that even you guys can never try. That's right, and I talked about it in the article. I think the future is all about openness, how we can collaborate together, how collaboration really is what amplifies innovation as we move forward. So the faster we can do that, the faster we can move, the faster we can fulfill our mission. All right, Dave, unfortunately we're out of time, but I can talk to you for days and days and days. There's so many things going through my head, but we'll let you go and really appreciate you stopping by. Congratulations on the new $1 billion. And that's not valuation, people. That's revenue, startup. Great to see you. Great to see you, Jeff. Pleasure, okay, thanks. Jeff Frick, here at GE, mind the machines.