September will prove to be a pivotal month as the intersection between business, politics and society meet not once, not twice, but thrice, over three independent but polarising topics.
Whether it directly impacts your strategies or it’s just a good need-to-know for your next leadership meeting, here are three evolving news stories for every C-suite executive to know.
Technology leaders and Washington convene on AI regulations
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, will meet technology leaders on September 13 for the first of several meetings for lawmakers to hear from AI experts. Leaders reported to be in attendance include Elon Musk of Tesla, Sundar Pichai of Google—and its former CEO Eric Schmidt—Sam Altman of OpenAI, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Jensen Huang, the chief executive of chip maker Nvidia.
These will be “AI insight forums”, closed-door listening sessions for lawmakers as they try to devise regulations for AI and adjacent technologies.
Driving the urgency of these sessions is not just the potential impact of AI, but the speed at which other regions are tackling regulations. For comparison, Europe is already expected to enact an AI law that would curtail facial recognition technology and force companies like OpenAI to disclose sources of data for their technology. The US is falling behind.
Business leaders want government action over asylum seekers
New York City is experiencing more than 100,000 arrivals of asylum seekers from the southern US border. Some of the city’s (and the country’s) most well-known business leaders are intervening in a fight over who’s responsible.
More than 120 executives—including Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Larry Fink of BlackRock and Jane Fraser of Citigroup—wrote to President Biden and congressional leaders this week urging Washington “to fulfil New York State’s request for federal assistance”.
The high-profile letter may surprise some observers not clued up on the crisis. Mayor Eric Adams said the crisis could cost the city $12 billion over three years; NYC is, of course, not the only city to reckon with the politics of asylum, the humanity of refuge and the reality of infrastructure.
What this letter highlights is that the migrant crisis has become a business issue.
Arm’s re-listing butts investors and startups, with China-US relations
British chip designer Arm is relisting on the stock exchange (NYC). Its owner, SoftBank, may well be hoping to recoup its multiple losses as it weathers the global technology market downturn—so are private start-ups and investors.
Start-ups are facing a stale market for IPOs and any evidence of a rebound will be welcome. VC investors, on the other hand, want another hot market so they can cash out of their investments and recycle their cash into new companies.
All three may be disappointed; they may then point the finger at China: Arm generates 24 percent of its revenue in China and does not fully control its local business there. Investors will likely be wary of that in today’s protectionist environment.
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