Video app during their remarks. This is about two hours. All right. Welcome back, everyone. If youre coming in, grab a seat because youre not going to want to miss this. I think everyone in this room you probably have friends who dont know so tell them to make sure they know about our [indiscernible] im pleased to announce the first details of our upcoming a. I. Plus summit. So last year we did two summits. One in june in washington, d. C. , here in this building, and one in San Francisco. And this year were going to do one, the first will be june 5 in new york. And then well be back in San Francisco on december 17. The reason these events matter, axios events are the ways that we continue our conversations with you, our audience, and news makers. It really does complement what were able to do each day. One of the things that i like is youre able to start a broad conversation, talk about the way things are going but then check back. Our next speaker wanted to come back to talk about how things are going. You may have seen him in the news for nona. I. Related issues. Please welcome Homeland Security secretarial han tkroe mayorkas secretary alejandro mayorkas. [applause] i caught that last quip. [laughter] so when weve talked a few times now about a. I. , but before this was all kind of theoretical, this week you announced pilot projects. Talk a little bit about why these projects what do you hope they prove, why did you start where youre starting . So the three pilot projects that we have commenced, the use of a. I. To assist in criminal investigations, to assist in the training of our refugee and asylum officers, and to assist local communities in developing mitigation plans with respect to natural disasters, were seeking to demonstrate how a. I. Can advance our mission and not just incrementally, but significantly. And depending on the outcome of these pilots, it will shape and educate us about how we can employ a. I. In a number of our domains. And one of the issues is figuring out, is the technology ready, is it private, is it secure . The other is having the talent to create it. I think tech workers are looking for jobs, so you might be doing ok. We have gotten 2000 responses, applications for positions for technology experts. One of the issues, you speak to this. One of the issues that you discussed at that engagement with people was, how do we close the divide, the financial divide , between what an individual, what an expert can achieve versus what one can earn with the government . The conversation with the government is very different than financial. There is the stability of earning with government, but im not exactly sure how one would monetarily quantify a sense of fulfillment. And impact peoples lives in a significant way. Lets say that things go really well, paint a picture of what your department could be doing better and differently a few years from now if it can really harness the power of the ai . Let me give you any example. We are using generative ai to simulate an interview of a refugee or asylum applicant. The reallife person will review the reallife officer and use generative ai to play the role of an applicant. We have trained that machine to simulate how an actual applicant response to questions to disclose private information, difficulty in disclosing experiences that are traumatic. I observed the demonstration. It is breathtaking. The machine has been trained by our officers, and their experience. We have that. We have it and will develop capabilities beyond the three pilots. We are using Artificial Intelligence at our border in our nonintrusive Inspection Technology to detect anomalies in commercial trucks and Passenger Vehicles to detect if an individual is being smuggled, if manufactured fentanyl is being smuggled. The domain is quite vast and diverse. We could not use ai if in fact we learn to use it responsibly, we understand what the implications are, civil rights liberties perspectives, and that is the key to what we are trying to do. Use it responsibly understanding its risks. Two of the things that i foresee, how do investigations modernize . We saw after 9 11, from a technology perspective, from what i recall, you could not search for two keywords. I understand theres a lot of possibility for how ai can monitor more, can draw connections that a human might miss. What is your biggest worry . How do you see it going wrong and making sure that you correct for that . The worst Case Scenario . Not the bad guy. Let me give you an example of connectivity. One of the other pilots is Homeland Security investigations, criminal Investigative Agency within immigration and customs enforcement. They investigate property theft, human smuggling, online child exploitation. There investigative reports are not collected in a database. Therefore one has an Investigative Team that has there investigative reports in los angeles, california. There is another Investigative Team investigating a different crime, presumably different people across the country, in new york or across the world in austria. All of those investigative reports in a data set, and all of a sudden what we think are separate and distinct organizations have a connectivity, because we can draw that linkage. That is incredibly powerful. What worries me about ai is it is adversarial use. Its potential for harm. That is one element. The other element is the fact that someone who seeks to do harm can use Artificial Intelligence and generative ai specifically to advance their nefarious mission. Are you seeing deliberate misinformation . The threat is a problem if you are surfing the web but also a pretty big problem for intelligence that is 99 ai nonsense. Some disinformation. Everyone is aware of the phenomenon of data poisoning where one seeks to poison the data set upon which the machine relies. We are seeing it in other areas. I think we spoke about this the last time that you and i engaged. The National Center for missing and exploited children. Using generative ai to fabricate images of Children Online and pick them as exploited when they may not be real children, whereas they may be real children and the images fabricated to display and exploitation that did not occur. That sends investigators on an errant mission and pernicious. We talked about the technology. Your job more broadly, technology can help with some of these things. Estimate credibility those credibility determinations to technology . They require judgments, they require the ability to discern facial features and other credibilitys or lack of it. I would be reticent to turn that over to a machine. When you look at your overall job, and you have had a fair bit of criticism i know, i know. What would you do differently at the border if you could change everything . What would you like to see the policy be . Is it a money issue . Is it a policy change . People talk all the time about problems. I am curious, what is a problem and what would your solutions be . The way that you pose the question would call upon me to make some fundamental points. You have to understand that there are more than 80 million displaced people in the world today. What causes individuals to leave their home countries . I would actually frame it more poignantly. What causes a parent, a loving devoted parent, to send a child alone in the hands of the smuggler to traverse multiple countries only to reach the southern border of the United States, which is dangerous terrain . That is a reflection of the human condition and what people in different parts of the world are suffering. That, when you speak of what i would like to see, i would like to see that tackled. Lets talk about the immediate situation at the border. We have a solution at our fingertips. Does it secure all the challenges . Of course not, but a Bipartisan Group of senators reached a very significant compromise. It would advance for the first time in decades. Our work in addressing the regular migration that reaches our borders in a way that we havent since 1996. It would resource our department. We are a preliminarily financially starved department. You have a couple of months of funding so you dont have to close the door. It is a cause for a sign of relief that we make it for another day. We are terribly, terribly underfunded. This gets complicated, but a quick snapshot. When one applies for asylum at our border, one must meet an initial screening threshold of credible fear. It is purposefully low so that we dont errantly send someone back to their place of persecution. It depends on demographics, but generally speaking 75 of the people who claim credible fear meet the initial threshold. The determination is a higher bar, 20 to 25 . That is quite a disparity. The time in between that initial screening is seven plus years. What happens . People are able to work, they get work authorization. Many have u. S. Citizen children. They attend our places of worship, schools, integrate into communities. It becomes difficult 7, 8, 9 years later to go into the community, apprehend a family, and remove them. It explains in part why we have 11. 5 million undocumented people in the United States. The legislation, Bipartisan Legislation would fund us to reduce that time, that seven years, to as little as under 90 days. What happens is attending migrants risk calculation, do i spend my life savings . Do i place my life and the life of my little ones in the hands of smugglers . Only to be returned to my home country within 90 days . The risk calculus changes. It changes the entire dynamic of the regular migration. We have that. We have it. We have the funding. 19 billion. There are 3 million cases approximately in the Immigration Court case backlog. Let of that could use all today through executive action what of that could use all today through executive action . By administrative action we cannot fund our department. That was 19 billion for our department for 100 Immigration Judges for the department of state to work in the International Arena with other countries. Remarkable that something that delivers so much success is being sacrificed so that the problem can be used. Something that you said a moment ago, you mentioned what is actually going through the mind of a family who leaves the country. A lot of members talk about we should make it harder for people to reach our shores. When we talk about a parent sending a child by themselves with the smuggler, we would have to make america a pretty bad place to live for the things that prompted them to do that would keep them from taking that risk . So, the parent calculates relative harms. It is not a question that a parent asks in the abstract. I cannot send my daughter to walk to school because of fear of what she will suffer on that walk. It is in comparison to that that a parent sends a daughter. When we speak of making it more difficult, of course there is the effort to address the root cause of why people make that journey. That is at the root. What we need other countries to do is a regional challenge that requires a regional solution. We need other countries to enforce their laws of humanitarian relief and enforce their enforcement protocols at their respective borders. I would love to talk about this more. I know there is more to talk about now that we have technology and immigration. We hope to catch up at a future event. Me too. Thank you, very much. Next, another view from the top segment with nicholas johnson. Good afternoon. The second half of an excellent afternoon. Thank you for tuning in online. Thanks to our partners who have made today possible and todays conversation. Welcome to whats next. Thank you for being here. What starts a big picture . I want to talk about the history and their view of capitalism and how that fits into the companys aspirations. Im happy to testify, good afternoon, everybody. For those of you who dont know the International Food and beverage foundation, think about our company as a different kind of food and beverage company. I mean it is a company that believes performance and purpose are hardwired codependent. If you think about our company, if you go back in the history of our company, you go back 50 years and one of the founding leaders of our company 50 years ago made quite a foundational speech, at the time a groundbreaking speech, talking about the idea that the company had a dual mission. Economic mission, serious about the business, but equally a societal mission. This dual project was the core of the foundation of the business. I head the foundational belief in the company was important. Our mission is pretty bold, food to as many people as possible. That manifests in the company in two forms. One is what we sell which is fundamentally good food and beverage. Biggest plantbased company in the world, in north america. Big beverage, big coffee, big specialized nutrition business. Equally important how we do it matters to us. We want to of course have a good business, but we want to use our business as a force for good. How we run the business and how that manifests is important to us. Food is governance. That hardwired some really important a point on that. My experience has been relatively small and newer corporations. To hear something as old and as large as yours i think it is putting your money where your mouth is. Literally built as a corporation we have to do it like that . Exactly. 80 of the news and the company globally, including north america. A century of government structure that requires a certain amount of accountability and transparency on our economic and societal measures. It essentially pushes the business to run business the right way. Sort of the ultimate expression of capitalism. You are correct, it is not typically associated with big businesses, but we are big corp. Certified. It has an important impact on our business. Fiscally, drives a certain amount of accountability and transparency in the business. Beyond that it is something that we believe is a competitive advantage. Increasingly with our consumers it is highly, highly relevant. The third part which is under advertised is what it does for our people. A tight labor market, which we are in, with engagement matters. This is a real pride point for our people, a real pride point. The last thing is it is not a static thing because every three years you renew. It pushes the business to evolve and change and be better. One example is methane. We are a big dairy business. Part of that is methane. We have really ambitious targets to be better. We committed to reducing the methane admissions from our dairy supply chain by 30 by 2030. I can tell you that its not easy. We dont know what mechanism we are going to use, but its pushing us to innovate. Innovate at a really fundamental level on the farm. Farm management practices, farmer partnerships, everything down to how we feed cow. We are experiencing with seaweed as a food additive that can fundamentally reduce that is the first time that cows and seaweed has been used in a sentence. We talk about sustainability goals and aspirations. The more that we can bring that into the real world is useful. There is nothing more real than what you feed your cows. There is a number of experiments that weve run as a business to push ourselves to be better. One is Food Additives and how that interacts with our farm supply. We have a partnership with cornell university, which is a storied Academic Institution for research, and we are experimenting. The piece we are pushing more in our business is partnership to go after some of these bigger goals. If you think about our business and how we sell we are fundamentally a partnership business. We sell through retailers. A lot of that is public and private. A few examples. The infant formula crisis in this country, that was the infant formula crisis in the United States, we were proud to partner with the white house for formula and bring in 2 Million Units of infant formula from the European Business into the u. S. We are increasingly pushing our partnership as a model. We were really proud in the last 18 months to partner with the white house on the conference for Hunger Health and nutrition. North of a 20 million pledged to increase research, collect improvement, and as recently as last week yogurt was approved as fundamentally a category that we can claim around positive impact on type 2 diabetes. Increasingly expanding the model of this performance that fundamentally we think of as the future of business. Nutrition. This is an interesting time for this line of work with advances around weight loss. From your vantage point, what is next . It is stunning that it has taken us that long to talk about glp1, but thanks for asking about it. Food and beverages, it is an incredibly dynamic moment. I would say that the way that we think about the future is broadly in two time frames. One is what we call, what are the big macro trends with the consumer today that we can address. Our yogurt business, for example. Gut health, highprotein, low in sugar. You would agree big macro trends in food that we can address. That we can serve through our brains, which is good for society and good for our business. It is no surprise that when we serve those needs business performance. You are looking to wear those two things intersect . Yes. Before we get the hook here, we mentioned backstage at the secret labs around the world to develop cool things. Tele school stuff tell us cool stuff that is coming on the horizon. We do have the labs. We have one in colorado, one in shanghai, one across europe. The research and Development People are incredibly talented. Maybe two that i can let you in on that may be available upstairs for those of you who would like to try it. Back to the notion of trends, snacking. Snacking and food and beverage in the United States for sure is a trend on the move. We have the capability and have launched a range of products that have yogurt and food prepackaged. I ate the entire thing. Not just because you are a sponsor. The coo the cacao and nuts, and you have a snack to g