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Day 3 of Semafor’s World Economy Summit got underway in Washington, DC Friday, featuring interviews with leading policymakers and CEOs discussing how artificial intelligence will transform businesses and empower consumers.

Semafor’s journalists are in conversation with newsmakers including Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Nasdaq chief Adena Friedman.

Views: AI and the Next Tech Revolution

Kumar Krishnamurthy

Technology Strategy Leader, PwC US

Bigger players have been acquiring AI startups “as a way of amplifying the innovation,” Krishnamurthy said. The trend makes him confident there will be more M&A: “It will break the deals winter we’ve been kind of going through to drive the change that we are looking at.”

Krishnamurthy said there can be tensions between keeping up with the pace of AI innovations while maintaining long-term corporate vision, “but they don’t need to be necessarily the paradox that we have thought about in the past,” he said.

Michael Intrator

CEO, CoreWeave

“No, I don’t feel vindicated,” Intrator said. “We took the company public for some very specific reasons and we are bringing a new business model to the market, and the validity of that model is being debated every day.” He said the vindication will come two to five years from now “when people understand what we’re doing… and value the company as they see fit.”

“I’ve never seen an experience where there was a severe dislocation with the interpretation of the financial market and the physical underlying infrastructure” until Deep Seek emerged, Intrator said. He said the “abject panic” in the markets revealed the extent to which the Chinese startup’s AI model “rattled the foundations of technology investment.”

Bob Frenzel

Chairman, President and CEO, Xcel Energy

“We didn’t wake up on April 2 or November 6 and think that we weren’t gonna be in some form of trade challenges,” Frenzel said. Most of Xcel’s equipment is domestically sourced, he said, but the company still has “some international exposure.”

The “largely Chinese-dominated” battery supply chain, however, is “relatively fluid and dynamic and can relocate itself predominantly outside of China,” Frenzel said. He specifically mentioned Southeast Asia and the US as possible locations, saying domestic production would be more feasible “if we had some tariff and trade certainty.”

The solar energy supply chain has “dramatically shifted” to these regions in recent years, Frenzel noted.

President Donald Trump’s executive orders on energy “recognize the fact that the country needs as much electricity as we can get right now,” said Frenzel, but he doesn’t expect coal to see a big resurgence.

Xcel itself uses 40 gigawatts of coal generation, but that will be retired over the next five years, he added, as the company needs nearly 400 gigawatts of new generation. Coal “just scratches the surface… for a short period of time until we can get the supply chains for either natural gas or wind or solar or storage ramped up to meet the demand that we see on the horizon,” he said.

Frenzel said wildfire-related lawsuits raise the cost of capital for companies. “We are hyper-focused on our cost of capital,” he said, and need “to mitigate risk as an industry.” Building resilient grid infrastructure to lower the risk requires public-private partnership, he said, including involvement of federal and state governments.

Glenn D. Fogel

CEO and President, Booking Holdings Inc.

While the travel industry globally is up since 2019, the number of people visiting the US is actually down, Fogel said. Having heard from customers that they are now hesitant to visit the US, he believes the brand of the US “has been tarnished.”

AI’s impact on the travel industry has been severe, said Fogel, citing data showing a “ 70% reduction in the number of human travel agents ” between 2000 and 2021. “That’s great for shareholders, it’s great for productivity, it’s great for the bottom line. But the question is, so what are those people doing now who used to be travel agents?” Fogel said.

As generative AI continues “accelerating” efficiencies, the resulting job elimination is “going to have incredible ramifications for our society,” he said. “I’m not sure how many people really recognize how fast this is happening.”

Adena Friedman

Chair and CEO, Nasdaq

Global investors won’t necessarily stop investing capital in US markets — but they’re looking for predictability and dividends, Friedman said. “They will go to where the returns are over time. “It’s a matter of just making sure that the US economy delivers those returns,” she said. She said investors are especially looking for “some level of predictability,” which is “what really drives the economy forward.”

Banks and financial regulators can deploy AI to spot criminal activity, Friedman said, calling the technology “a game changer for defense in addition to being, unfortunately, a game changer for the criminals.” She said Nasdaq uses its “very advanced” AI-enabled Verafin platform to detect criminals as well as automate its workflows.

Dr. Ariel Ekblaw

Founder and CEO, Aurelia Institute

Today the space economy has “a thriving commercial ecosystem,” Ekblaw said. “The cost to get to space in the last 15 years has dropped dramatically, she said, noting that with SpaceX the costs are “like FedEx — if you can ship something around the world, you can ship it to space.

Now “ambition [is] what we need the government’s help with,” she said. “What we want to now see is, how can we do large-scale infrastructure in-orbit for the public good?” Achieving “that scale of ambition” calls for public-private partnerships,” she said.

: “When we cut science funding at this scale, there are really massive impacts to aviation,” Ekblaw said. However, she continued, “I’m optimistic that [NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman] is going to be able to find a way to negotiate within the constraints that he’s gonna be put under and be able to find a way to protect some of that funding.”

Ali Osman

Chief Investment Officer, Artificial Intelligence, MGX

MGX plans to invest $8-$10 billion a year in artificial intelligence infrastructure and companies, particularly in the US, Osman said. “We remain optimistic that the technology will revolutionize the way we create value in the economy, and the United States continues to be at the bleeding edge of this technology.”

While MGX hasn’t disclosed the overall size of its fund — estimates put it at $100 billion — Osman said the firm will invest between $1 billion and $2 billion per deal. He said MGX is taking a 5-10 year view and is “deploying capital in order to support that build-out growth.”

“The demand is still very high,” he said. Global installations are still expected to be around 60 gigawatts, he said, but he thinks that capacity needs to grow to 200 or 300 gigawatts over the next handful of years.

Salil Parekh

CEO, Infosys

There needs to be a clear way to demonstrate benefit at scale across the company,” Parekh said. “Most of these companies are built from acquisitions and so there are various components to these companies, not a uniform set of structures that allow AI to be deployed. Companies need a strong data infrastructure, and most companies don’t have that.”

Dara Khosrowshahi

CEO, Uber

These cars have to be close to 10 times safer than human-driven cars, Khosrowshahi said. He said that while pedestrian behavior is likely to be erratic in cities like New York, “AIs now are acting in much more human ways. You will see autonomous drivers who drive more and more like a super safe human.”

“I don’t think that there will be a winner-take-all,” he said, noting the industry tops $1 trillion. “There’ll be plenty of room in the industry. We’d love to work with them.” Khosrowshahi said he owns a Tesla himself and called its self-driving ability “delightful,” but added that he has “to take over every once in a while.”

Tariffs that are supposed to protect domestic companies, can actually reduce competition, and therefore innovation, Khosrowshahi said. “Sometimes that protection removes the need for vicious competition,” he said. “If the tariff policy results in companies who have it easier and rest on their laurels, no, it’s not gonna work.”

Khosrowshahi said the Federal Trade Commission’s recent lawsuit against the company related to its Uber One service , was a “head-scratcher.” The FTC alleged the subscription platform charged consumers without their consent and made it difficult to cancel. “We make it incredibly easy to sign up for Uber One,” Khosrowshahi said. “The value is enormous. The renewal rates are over 90%. It’s a great product.”

He said Uber is “recession-resistant,” because its revenues and expenses both fluctuate based on GDP. “In a weaker economy, if there is more unemployment, the cost of Uber will come down because to some extent, the cost of labor comes down,” he said.

The Semafor View

Artificial general intelligence seems imminent, with increasingly capable robots coming along for the ride, but it remains unclear how increasingly powerful computers will impact the world’s knowledge workers. The billions of dollars companies are pouring into AI have not paid off, yet.

Read more in The Semafor View ->

A SPONSOR MESSAGE

The View From

Time and again, technology has reshaped how we live and work, from electricity and automation to the internet and mobile. But Generative AI isn’t just another shift — it’s a seismic technology transformation unfolding faster than ever. For businesses across all sectors, it’s gone from experimental to fundamental.

At Booking Holdings, we’re moving just as fast to harness this technology across our global brands. Beyond improving efficiency, we’re reimagining how we serve customers and empower our teams to advance our mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. Decades of working with technology and data provide a natural advantage, but we must continue to look beyond the horizon to remain at the forefront of innovation.

As a world leader in digital travel technology, we know that the velocity of innovation demands adaptability, agility, and a continuous need to challenge the status quo. Thriving in the AI era means continuously investing, learning, and collaborating across the industry to unlock new opportunities for the benefit of all. Now is the time to forge the future, together.