Opening Remarks (Gene Kim)

I'm so delighted that we are here today. This is the first Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit Connect. This is a one-half-day event with worldwide watch parties.

So why are we here? From the beginning, we know that winning organizations can do extraordinary things, more than any single individual could ever do alone. And these organizations somehow fully liberate people's full creativity and problem-solving capabilities. That is in direct opposition to those organizations that somehow constrain, or even extinguish entirely, the full creativity and problem-solving capabilities of people within them. Winning organizations have this magic that really unleashes this dynamic.

About this conference series, this is our twenty-third conference. Over the last decade, we've had over 1,600 talks from over 2,000 technology leaders, with over 650 enterprises represented. Now, they span almost every industry vertical. It's not just the banks and insurance companies; it is public administration, it's manufacturing. One of the things that I'm so proud of is that, over that last decade, we have almost every industry vertical represented.

Over the last decade, the hallmark of this conference has been that it's primarily dominated by experience reports. This is technology leaders sharing stories about how they solved business problems. They describe what industry they compete in, what problem they were setting out to solve, where they fit in in the org chart, where they started and why, what tools and techniques they used, and what outcomes resulted and problems still remain.

We've also had expert talks from virtually every domain that is important for technology leaders to get from here to there. And so we're now adding a third type of session, which is Q&A sessions. We did this a year and a half ago in the GeneCon experiment, and so we're capturing the best-of and lessons learned from that. Here we're inviting the most popular sessions from the ETLS conference in Las Vegas in August, and inviting them here.

There's one other thing that we are doing again, which is doing watch parties. Equal Experts is hosting watch parties around the globe. And I love these because they capture the pinnacle of a vibrant and important third place, where it's separate from work and home. Virtual conferences can be great, but often your work colleagues treat it as just another day. You're being pinged on email, on Slack, on Teams, and it's distracting you from what you want to be doing, which is learning and hanging around with your like-minded peers.

This is a single-track conference. We're all seeing the same thing, and I'm just so delighted that Equal Experts hosted these watch parties earlier this year. We are replicating that, and we'll be doing three of those over the next three quarters.

Let me share with you the exciting day that we have today. We have the opening remarks, which I'll be soon concluding. First up, we will have Idan Gazit from GitHub Next talking about the design explorations around coding assistance. We'll have Steve Yegge share about the journey and the death of the junior developer, and what we've learned around chat-oriented programming.

I'm so excited that Dr. Matt Beane will be presenting. He's the author of The Skill Code. I met him when he saw posts of Death of the Junior Developer and said, I have been studying this phenomenon of the novice optional problem for over the last decade. He'll be teaching us about how automation is often making novices optional, and why this is so important for technology leaders to be aware of, especially when you talk about generating the next generation of senior developers.

And then Paige Bailey, GenAI developer relations lead at Google, will be back talking about the achievements of the Gemini team within the Google enterprise.

And then we'll take a break. After that forty-five-minute break, Dr. Joe Davis, global chief economist at Vanguard, will be talking about what labor economists do, why economists are so interested in generative AI, and how it can move productivity and shape some of the most important economic forces in our economy.

Jason Yip gave this amazing presentation of the work that he's doing at Grainger. We'll be doing a Q&A session with him, as well as Clare Hawthorne, Senior Director of Engineering and Product Operations at Oscar Health.

So we have an amazing program for you today. Right on time, we are.