AI in Strategy and Geopolitics at BCG Henderson Institute

In this episode of “TBR Talks,” Senior Director David Martinez shares his point of view on key topics covered by his BCG Henderson Institute team, particularly regarding geopolitics and artificial intelligence. The BCG Henderson Institute is an internal think tank at Boston Consulting Group.

David Zuluaga Martínez is a Senior Director at the Geopolitics & Society Lab, based in BCG’s Brooklyn office. Prior to his current role, David was a partner affiliated with BCG’s Public Sector practice. Previously, as an Alum Ambassador at the Tech & Biz Lab (2023-2024), he co-authored research on generative AI and, as an Alum Ambassador at the Strategy Lab (2021), on business resilience amid the COVID-19 pandemic and collective business action to address climate change. Since joining BCG in 2018, David has worked on strategy, operations and technology projects primarily for social impact and public sector organizations.

Episode highlights:

• Designing a research agenda

• The importance of feedback in the research process

• Go-to daily sources

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Edited by Haley Demers

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Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

AI in Strategy and Geopolitics at BCG Henderson Institute

TBR Talks Host Patrick Heffernan: Welcome to TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms, where we talk business model disruption in the broad technology ecosystem, from management consultancies to systems integrators, hyperscalers to independent software vendors, telecom operators to network and infrastructure vendors, and chip manufacturers to value-added resellers. We’ll be answering some of the key intelligence questions we’ve heard from executives and business unit leaders among the leading professional services, IT and telecom vendors.

I’m Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst, and today we’ll be talking about artificial intelligence, the research process, and philosophy and consulting with David Martinez, Senior Director at the BCG Henderson Institute’s Geopolitics and Society Lab.

From philosophy to BCG

David, thank you so much for coming on TBR Talks. I really appreciate it, and we’re kicking off season four, this is pretty exciting. We’ve been doing this for a while now. So, we’re so happy to have people from outside of TBR come in and give us their insights. And so, I’d love to, if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and about what you’re doing right now. We know you’re with BCG and you’re in the think tank part of BCG, which is fascinating to me. But just give us a little bit of your background and what you’re up to right now.

David Martinez, Senior Director at the BCG Henderson Institute’s Geopolitics and Society Lab: Of course, and Patrick, thank you for inviting me to the podcast. Very, very excited to be joining you today for this conversation. So, my background is in philosophy, so I have a bit of a heterodox non-business background in terms of my academic training. I have a PhD in political philosophy and joined BCG as a consultant once I left academia. I was until recently a partner at BCG’s public sector practice, working primarily with state and local clients in the US and have for a couple of years now been in a different role as a senior director at the BCG Henderson Institute. That is, as you mentioned, BCG’s think tank.

It’s a very different job compared to regular consulting work. It is not client facing in the same way. So, we don’t do projects for specific clients, but rather we spend our time thinking about and researching the topics that we think are decisive in shaping long-term strategic outlooks for companies. And in all fairness, for policymakers as well, for leaders in all walks of life. So, we do research on, you know, AI of course, technology, we do research on geopolitics, on, kind of, traditional strategy topics from a business perspective, uncertainty, resilience, optionality. Now we’re doing more work on demographics, for example, and the impact of demographic change in many, especially affluent societies. So, these are all topics that might feel a tad removed from the immediate exigencies of running a business, but precisely because they are slightly removed and nevertheless vital when you take on a sufficiently long-term perspective, someone’s going to think about them. And we think as a company that somebody within BCG has to think about them. That’s the role of the BCG Henderson Institute. That’s what I do specifically in the technology and geopolitics space.

Designing a research agenda

Patrick: That’s really fascinating. And I want to get back to the technology and geopolitics in a second, but one thing that you said at the beginning was how it’s topics and trends and issues that you think are most important. And so, we’re in market research here at TBR, so, we have the things that drive our research and a lot of it is tied to the earnings cycle. So, companies release their earnings, we’re all over it. If you’d like to release your earnings as BCG, I would certainly appreciate it, I know you can’t today, but maybe you will someday.

David: *laughs* Above my pay grade.

Patrick: *laughs* But that’s where we’re getting those- we look at the company’s activities, what they’re doing. And that drives how we think about, and what we go after in terms of our research. So, do you get any feedback from or any insights from companies themselves who are coming to you and saying, hey, can you take a look at this? Or maybe it’s BCG partners that are saying, this topic keeps coming up with my clients, what do you guys know about it? Are there other sources of inspiration for what you want to go after? Or is it more you guys sitting around and thinking about what are the most important topics today?

David: Yes, to all of those.

Patrick: Okay.

David: So we source our topics and frankly the questions, rather, that we want to explore from yes, clients. Yes, also partners, folks at BCG who talk to numerous companies and business leaders and start noticing patterns around, not necessarily what people might be thinking about, but also what perhaps they’re not thinking about, which is just as important, and that I think ties to the third source of guidance, if you will, in designing a research agenda, which I would describe as sort of the intuition around what people aren’t thinking about and either should or will soon have to.

So, the challenge that we’ve set for ourselves is to be simultaneously responsive to the concerns that are already there in the business community amongst business leaders, but also to be able to anticipate some others. And I’ll give you an example. The topic of resilience is now everywhere, right? Everyone thinks about it. Everyone’s very mindful of it, very aware of it. I surely don’t need to mention COVID as a particular catalyst of interest, but we were doing work on that for a few years before COVID happened. Already thinking about, and this is particularly the work, for example, out of our strategy lab, thinking about how environmental systems or ecosystems rather in biology are resilient. What are the structural features of resilient ecosystems and through biological analogies, trying to understand what makes for a resilient enterprise and analyzing the value creation potential. So that’s just an example, but it goes to show that it’s a combination. It’s sourcing what people are already interested in and thinking about and in need of answers to, but also what might lie ahead.

The importance of feedback in the research process

Patrick: Okay. That’s fascinating. And I was going to go to geopolitics, but you’ve sort of teed up another question that I had, and that’s around feedback. So, I’m sure you got feedback from folks within BCG and outside of BCG, BCG’s clients, about the way that you were approaching resilience when it went from something you were thinking about to something that suddenly everybody was thinking about. But within the- and so I think of us, TBR, as an intelligence firm more than anything else, and as intelligence advisors, and part of the intelligence cycle is that feedback. You have to know what people are saying and thinking about the research you put in front of them in order to get better at your research. So has there been, maybe it was with resilience, maybe it’s with something else, where there’s been a sort of piece of feedback that you’ve gotten that has sort of changed the way you think about the way you do your work, or was just so fantastic that you said, hey, I’m the best at this, or made you question whether or not you should be even doing it at all? I mean, have you had that experience where the feedback is sort of that exceptional?

David: Of all sorts. Yes, of all sorts, actually. And it makes for a very fruitful dialectical process. I would add that it’s very important for us to also go beyond the business world in pursuit of that kind of feedback. So, one thing we’ve been doing for a number of years, for example, is this convening we call the Meeting of Minds, where we invite numerous leading scholars, but also senior policy makers and maybe journalists, and also business leaders to talk about a big societal topic. And part of the point or part of the purpose is to ensure we’re not too wedded or too anchored to narratives or concerns that might be idiosyncratic to the business world, and that would benefit from that dialogue and that exchange beyond the business world. So, I would just add that those other layers, those other spaces for conversation, are very important to the work we do as well.

Patrick: That’s phenomenal. So, you’ve got a really sort of structured way to keep yourself grounded so that you’re not wandering off into, you know, woods that don’t matter to people in the business space.

David: Yes. And the way we do this very tactically is when we start pursuing a research project, we always do an academic literature review and also a business thought leadership literature review. We need to know what’s being said, what has been said, what hasn’t, to really understand what are the prevailing narratives or beliefs or conceptions, what are the competing perspectives on a given topic. And I think we also benefit, this is true of consulting generally, but it is particularly true of the research environment at the Henderson Institute. We benefit from the combination of deep expertise and potent analytical abilities of our generalist consultants, who may not be subject matter experts, but precisely because they’re not, they can sometimes help us ask what seem to be the simplest questions. And perhaps at first, they might come across as, you know, silly questions to raise, but they get at fundamental issue. So that combination of deep expertise, business world inside, perspectives from outside the business world, and analytical horsepower that is not sort of encumbered by the baggage that sometimes come along with expertise, the combination of all of those, I think, makes for a very rich research working style for the group.

Patrick: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And the baggage that sometimes comes along with expertise, I think is a beautiful diplomatic way to say what you’re really trying to say is which sometimes people think too much.

Tapping into boots on the ground for geopolitical questions

I want to get to geopolitics, but I want to come at it in an angle, a very specific angle. You, your firm, BCG, has people all over the world. You’ve got incredibly brilliant consultants who are day-to-day working in different countries with different kinds of clients. When it comes to tackling geopolitical issues, how often do you sort of tap into or directly tap into the people that you have, that have their feet on the ground that are living in a particular country and in a particular environment? Let me give you a very specific use case of what I’m thinking about, sort of framing this up. So, if one of your questions or one of the topics you’re looking at is sort of the economic implications of political turmoil in France, you’ve got, I don’t know, 15,000 people or so working in France. You know, you got 15,000 French people that you can directly tap into and say, hey, what’s it feel like right now? What do you think is going on? Do you ever use BCG itself as a source of primary intelligence for geopolitical questions?

David: Absolutely, we’ll be remiss not to. I think part of what we are very mindful of is that the credibility that the Henderson Institute has in offering a perspective is in large measure a function of its proximity to the front lines of business activity and strategic decision making. And that we know through our staff, through our colleagues who are doing work on the ground with clients. So, we do it. I think we have to do it. We always do it. And it helps us sort of navigate sensitive topics also in a way that is very strictly grounded in facts and analysis. Because for any firm, there are questions that are challenging in terms of developing a perspective and putting it out there. Geopolitics, of course, is particularly sensitive in many cases, but what we do is always fact-based and we endeavor to develop points of view that are analytically robust. We can do that because we can rely on the distributed knowledge of BCG as an organization and because we have very clear principles for the kind of quality in the research output that we commit to.

Patrick: That’s fascinating. A lot of your peers do not do that. I’ve spent time speaking with folks that are in a similar position to you and in a similar kind of firm that have that global capability. They have those boots on the ground in many countries, and they don’t really tap into that as well as you guys do. So, it’s fascinating to me.

Research questions we want to answer

I want to ask a little bit about the challenge that we always have when it comes to research, and that’s you sort of, you can’t please everybody. You put out a piece of research and somebody tells you, “you didn’t go deep enough.” And then this, you know, the same piece of research generates the, “you missed the bigger picture here.” So I want you to sort of take, I was literally, I’m not- don’t literally take your headphones off, but take your mind back, just step back for a second and think to yourself, okay, give me six months to just research anything I want to research in the world. What’s that? What’s David’s six months, I’m looking at anything I want to kind of project? What would you go do?

David: Well, I think right now, a very important question in our minds is how the roles of the corporations and governments are changing in the economy and how some of the traditional boundaries of strategy, as in, well, you think about your strategy in a competitive environment is primarily responsive to business factors, how that is changing. Because what is a business factor that you ought to take into account, is actually an expanding set. I think that’s an important, kind of a foundational question for how companies think of a strategy for the foreseeable future, given the current geopolitical trajectory of the world, which I recognize is a hopelessly vague statement, but I think you know what I mean.

AI research questions

Patrick: I understand exactly what you mean. Yeah. And then I will say we can’t have this conversation without talking about AI at some point. So is there an AI sort of trend or issue that you look at and think, okay, if I had, six months is probably too long with AI because it’ll change. But if there’s some, is there a top of mind issue for you right now that’s sort of gnawing at you that you really wish you could spend more time diving into with respect to AI?

David: Yes. And I think I’m not alone in suspecting that one of the big unanswered questions is how should we think about adoption for generative AI technologies in particular? There’s a lot of noise and a lot of uncertainty around this, and it matters because it shapes how we form expectations for, say, productivity effects or cost reduction or revenue enhancing effects for businesses. And at what point should you expect to see some macroeconomic indicators of AI making a difference? All of this has to do fundamentally with the extent of adoption of this technology by businesses on the ground. We know those processes too historically have been slow, much slower than people usually expect. How much faster the process might be with GenAI, which builds, of course, on top of the internet, which makes the distribution of new technologies, new digital technologies much faster. Nobody really knows. But I think the specific question that really fascinates me is how could we better understand the extensive versus the intensive margins of adoption? If you ask companies in binary fashion, do you use GenAI or do you not? You’re going to get the overwhelming majority saying yes. But what does that mean?

Patrick: Right.

David: If you pay for a Copilot subscription that nobody uses, does that count as adoption? Really, in the interesting sense, how do we even get our heads around that intensive margin and its structure, I think is a very, very important and puzzling question that many big economists are thinking about that I am not comfortably qualified to explore, but that I wish I could devote more time to, because I think it’s very important.

Patrick: It’s fascinating. And it’s super important for the companies that we look at, because that adoption and that expansive adoption and deep adoption is what’s going to drive their business. They are dependent on their enterprise customers actually adopting and then using AI. So, the answers that you’ve discovered are going to be important to businesses going forward.

Philosophical technology questions

I do have a question now that you’ve raised in my head that I know that you’re qualified to answer because you’re a philosopher. And the reason I need a philosopher to answer, I’ve never asked a philosopher this question before, but we talk about it all the time. So, we look at at businesses and technology and a sort of saying that we have around here is that the technology always works, the people are always the problem. So, from your perspective, that’s kind of a philosophical thing to say, you know what, it’s the people that are always the problem. When you think about AI and adoption, when you think about the changes that technology is bringing geopolitically, but also then at the enterprise level, are people always going to be the problem? Is this just going to persist?

David: Probably. And I might, I think in the same spirit, I might restate the view a little bit differently. Whether the technology has a problem or not is a function of the interests that human users have. Pieces of technology do not per se themselves carry their purpose with them, as it were. They’re instruments. And that for which they are an instrument is not set by the technology itself. It’s set by the people who use the technology. So, whether the technology fails or doesn’t fail is logically downstream from the interests of human users that that technology is intended to serve. So, I might, if you will, I would put it even further up the intellectual change ahead of the tech.

Patrick: I was putting them side by side, but you’re right. They need to be a little higher up. One more philosophy question, I promise, and then we’ll move on. But I have to know, because you mentioned this in the introduction and explaining your background, and then you said you worked with a lot of public sector, state and local clients. Having been in public sector myself, I was federal government, US federal government, for a long time, and surprising as this may be to some out there, I’ve actually been elected to local town government. So, I’m actually back in government at the very local level. I have never run across a philosopher consultant in my entire time in government. Were you the only one? Are you BCG’s only philosopher consultant?

David: No, no, no, no. There are a few more. And a friend who has since left BCG was actually a theologian. So that might have been even more interesting. It’s funny because I think the place that AI now has in so many conversations has sparked a certain interest in what are one way or another profoundly philosophical questions. So, it’s been a fun time to be a philosopher in consulting, thinking about technology topics, because even when people say, well, I’m only interested in the pragmatic business side of things, you know, have a chat with them. You’re always a few questions away from “are they conscious or not” and stuff like that. So, it’s been fun to be in this type of role with that sort of background. So, not too many of us, but also maybe more than you suspect.

Patrick: So, the WhatsApp group for philosopher consultants is bigger than I thought it might be.

David: *laughs* Yes.

Patrick: Fair enough.

Go-to daily sources

I do want to ask one question that came to mind when I was sort of thinking about this discussion we’re going to have. Because you’re in research and because of your role now with BCG, when I started with Deloitte, one of the pieces of advice I got, and it was in intelligence, and it was, look, you need to know what your boss’s boss’s boss is reading every day. You don’t want to bring to them something they already read in the paper. And so, I think about that all the time. Like for our readers, for the people that are looking at my analysis, I want to make sure I’m bringing them something- I want to know what they get every day. So, in order to do that, I need to ask people all the time, so what do you read every day? So, what are your go-to sources, both for maybe news and sort of current stuff, but then also your maybe longer-term analytical thought pieces, kind of sources, other than, of course, the stuff you and your colleagues are already writing yourselves.

David: Yes, yes, yes. I mean, you make an excellent point. I don’t think the role of a think tank like ours is to be a news aggregator. There are enough good ones out there. I think the role is to help distill the narratives that make sense of the relentless succession of news with which business leaders and leaders in other spaces too are bombarded on a daily basis. So, I think that’s right. It’s very sound advice that you got. And for me, I try to make sure because so much happens every day. I try to make sure that yes, I read the FT and I read the Wall Street Journal and look at the Times. I have a handful of newsletters, some that are more politics oriented, some that are more technology oriented. I try to balance perspectives. So, there are certain temperaments that come with these newsletters and aggregators and kind of light touch commentators. And it’s good to balance them out a little bit and have some optimists, some skeptics on a variety of questions.

But for me, what’s most important is to always make time to read deep research. I have tremendous respect for academics who do very serious, very rigorous, slow work that seldom hits the CEO’s desk but that can be profoundly illuminating. And I think oftentimes the role for think tanks like the Henderson Institute is to help mediate between those two universes. You’ve got lots of noise when all you’re doing is reading the news. You have lots of depth, but a little bit of disconnect from the urgencies of the day when you’re only reading academic literature, someone has to help see how those tie together and what might be the narratives that unify them or the questions that shine a light in both directions. So, it’s very important for me to always make time to read papers. So, I mean, I’ll give you a very concrete example. I read everything David Autor writes. He’s one of the great labor economists at MIT. He’s done amazing stuff on AI. And a lot of my thinking on labor economics of AI has to do with what I’ve learned through his work under long brilliant papers. And so, it’s just important to make sure, as we all know, that there’s time for what’s important, not only what’s urgent, and I think of huge chunks of academic research out there as falling in precisely the category of the important.

The impact of the Henderson Institute’s work

Patrick: I love the way you framed it, because you didn’t say that you read academic papers. You said that you make time for that deep reading. And I think that’s the thing that I think I know I’m guilty of, and I think a lot of us are, is that you just don’t make time for that. I do make time to read the hard copy of the New York Times every day. I think I’m the last print edition subscriber of the New York Times in America, but I do get it on my doorstep every day. So, I know that I have to have it or else my day isn’t complete. I want to bring the conversation back to something that you said at the very, very beginning, which is that you’re not client facing. And yet it seems like throughout this conversation, there have been multiple times when you’ve talked about the way that your research is directly presented to or absorbed by and influenced by BCG’s clients. So, do you think there’s- do you feel like you have a solid measurable, maybe not measurable, but an important impact on the way that your clients actually think about the world?

David: I certainly hope so. *laughs* So, when I say my role is not client facing is perhaps in the insider sense that I’m not part of a project that is executed on behalf of a specific client. Doesn’t mean that I don’t talk to clients, on the contrary, because I’m not in any one project that is committed to a specific client. I get to talk to lots of them at the same time about questions that are of common interest and concern. But yes, the work we do goes straight to clients, just as to your earlier question, clients themselves are a critical north star in designing a research agenda. They’re also, in a certain sense, the terminus ad quem of what we do. The whole point is that we do develop and help shape the way senior executives think about their broader context and their business and the questions and strategy that they’re grappling with, for sure.

Patrick: Fantastic. You are, by the way, the first guest that we’ve had in our four seasons to use the word dialectical and also to drop a Latin phrase into our discussion. So, I didn’t miss it.

David: *laughs* That makes me a professional snob, I suppose.

Patrick: *laughs*

Human skills in the age of AI

All right, so I have one last question before we wrap up. And this has been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate the time that we’ve spent together. I’ve been thinking about this a lot because AI, when we talk about AI, the first question that comes up outside of the confines of TBR and outside of the confines of the technology space, but when I talk about it with my friends, when I talk about with people outside of this little insulated world, it’s all about what jobs are going to get taken away by AI. And you mentioned the labor economists at MIT and all that. So, I think about how to counter that sort of narrative. And part of it is, well, there are some skills that will never be replaced by AI. So, when you think about that, you think, all right, well, what would be a skill that I would want to master? And maybe it’s playing the bass guitar, maybe it’s speaking 4 languages, maybe it’s the ability to turn yourself invisible. I mean, what is, and if you could think, you know, David, what’s the skill? Give yourself time to master a skill that’s sort of, maybe AI proof is part of it, but more importantly, it’s like something you would really want to have. What’s that skill?

David: This is going to sound very abstract to you, but I think sense-making is something we won’t, for the foreseeable future, be able to or want to delegate. And this relates to your earlier question as well, you know, is it the technology’s fault or is it the human’s fault? And when I was saying that humans set the ends for which they use technologies as instruments. The reason why I think that’s a very important fact to keep in mind is that technology helps us solve problems. It doesn’t actually define the problems. What counts as a problem worth solving is on us. And I don’t mean that as a burden. I mean that as, you know, it’s a wonderful thing and it’s as it should be. And so, when I say sense-making, I mean defining that for which the technology is useful, that for which it is not, that for we want to use it, that for which we won’t want to use it. Now, there’s a side of the response that, you know, just could turn to, you know, almost cause disease and phenomena of that sort. Whereas, you know, whereby we know that whichever distinctively human skills are not mastered by AI will thereby become more valuable, more economic bottlenecks command a greater share of spend in the economy. That’s all true, but I think the more fundamental question is, does it make sense to think of AI as a technology that sets its own ends in terms of problems to be solved in the economy? I don’t think so, because I don’t think degrees of autonomy for the execution of tasks really get to the point of saying, well, this is a task worth executing in the first place. I think that will remain strictly and a profoundly important human activity for as long as I can project out my sketchy vision of the future.

Patrick: That’s fantastic. We were just today, I was talking with one of my colleagues about exactly what you just described, which is the way we were coming at it was, why is AI being applied to solve some problems and not other problems? And we thought about many of the use cases that AI is being put to now that are such low stakes. And maybe it’s because they are low stakes that more are being applied there. When there are other use cases that are much more higher stakes that AI seems to be ignoring, or the people who are developing AI solutions seem to be ignoring.

David: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s right. And add a layer that it’s not just about what’s technologically feasible or possible. I think it’s easy to mistake that which is technologically possible for that which will happen or should happen. And technology may be able to do many things. And for a whole host of reasons in specific contexts, you might decide, again, with good sense, that it shouldn’t be used for that purpose. Right? A piece of technology for example, may not have the requisite type of accountability that a certain type of service ought to have in a certain conception of your value proposition. And so that means that whether a GPT could do what person A or B is doing is kind of not the real question in that kind of case, it’s, well, GPT is not the sort of entity that can be held to account. And that possibility of accountability is essential to the valuable proposition in this instance. And so, the person being there serves a valuable purpose, an important one, independently of whether kind of a neutral description of the task would lend itself to automation. I just think that that sometimes obscures more than it illuminates when you think about the application of technology in real life cases in all sorts of contexts.

Patrick: And as soon as you bring up accountability, accountability by definition includes some sort of legal structure that can hold someone accountable. And right now, you cannot sue a robot. You cannot sue a bot. You need to have a person. So, until that, until we flip that switch, which maybe we- maybe we shouldn’t, you know.

David: *laughs* But it’s not just legal. It’s not just legal, Patrick. Think about just interpersonal dynamics in, I’ll speak, but what I know, the professional services environment. When you’re working with a client, the role of trust, the role of conversation, the importance of being able to persuade someone and being persuaded in turn, these are all, they might seem soft and fluffy components of the value proposition. Sure, that’s because we often don’t have to spell them out because there has been no alternative to the human delivery of, you know, the insight, the strategy and whatnot. But once you have a non-human alternative for the delivery of exactly that content, you start realizing that there were these other features that are just as important to the full package, to the whole value proposition, that are not nearly as easily replaceable, and that’s not a function of technological capabilities. It’s a function of the kind of entity that a piece of technology is, namely, not a human. And that alone becomes significant.

Patrick: Right.

David: So even before you get to the law, it’s already, I think, a very relevant factor in many contexts, certainly in the services space of the economy.

Patrick: 100% agree, and I think part of why we both agree is because we are in the services sector of the economy, so we need that to be true.

David: *laughs*

Patrick: Sometimes what you think is true is what you need to be true, so.

David: Hopefully we’re both true and beneficiaries of the truth, but not because there’s a causal link between those two.

Final thoughts

Patrick: Right, And I’m not going to ask whether or not philosophy is pursuit of the truth, but I will ask you, just last thing, is there anything that you want to let people know they should go check out and read, anything you want to call out, stuff that you published recently? Like where can someone go after they listen to this to get more of your insights?

David: Yes, of course. I mean, anyone who’s interested in the type of work I’ve been describing across a variety of topics, it would be great for you to check out bcghendersoninstitute.com or bcg.com, either of those, and you’ll find lots of the research we produce. A lot of my work over the last few months has been about the geopolitics of technology and AI in particular, and thinking about how AI changes the way we think about power relations in the global stage and what can we expect. And it’s a very, very relevant topic, of course, at the moment, and one where, if anyone cares to share their feedback, I’d very much welcome it.

Patrick: Well, as a former diplomat who now, for some reason, spends all this time talking about technology, I’ll read it and I’ll give you some feedback because believe me, I’ve got thoughts when it comes to geopolitics. I’ve got thoughts.

David: I look forward- I look forward to that, Patrick.

Patrick: David, thank you so much for coming on this podcast. This has absolutely been fantastic, and I really appreciate your time.

David: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Patrick: Tune in next week for another episode of TBR Talks. 

Don’t forget to send us your key intelligence questions on business strategy, ecosystems, and management consulting through the form in the show notes below. Visit tbri.com to learn how we help tech companies, large and small, answer these questions with the research, data, and analysis my guests bring to this conversation every week. 

Once again, I’m your host, Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst at TBR. Thanks for joining us and see you next week.

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