What’s next for marketing and platforms

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ALEX SCHULTZ: There are periods when society is like, oh my God, we need to clamp down on this. And there are periods when society’s like, oh my gosh, we need to open up. And so I actually think society moves, and so for platforms on which people actually have conversations, they need to move with society — they have to. My hope and dream is we become what Google managed and Apple managed and Microsoft managed as the industry transitioned. My nightmare is we do what Yahoo and eBay did, so we’ve got to make sure we’re one and not the other. And that’s on us as a leadership team.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Alex Schultz, Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Analytics at Meta. Alex joined Facebook back in 2007 and has been there for every shift along the way. Today we talk about the current inflection point that Meta is navigating, from AI convulsions to an evolving stance on free speech. Alex shares the existential stakes and opportunities ahead and what it’s like to work for Mark Zuckerberg as well as marketing lessons from his new book, “Click Here.” It’s a packed conversation, so let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

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I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Alex Schultz, Chief Marketing Officer, VP of Analytics at Meta and author of the new book, “Click Here: The Art and Science of Digital Marketing.” Alex, thanks for joining us.

SCHULTZ: Thank you very much for having me.

SAFIAN: I have to start by asking, you’re a digital media guy. Why did you write a book? I mean, books still matter in a digital media world?

SCHULTZ: I mean, books matter a hell of a lot. People read them digitally. I feel I’ve got more ebook sales than non-ebook sales now, and also I want it uploaded to the AI. I want to teach the AI.

SAFIAN: You’re just doing your part to feed the engine, huh?

SCHULTZ: Exactly, exactly.

Copy LinkHow Meta has withstood technological shifts

SAFIAN: You have been part of an incredible growth journey at Facebook and Meta. You started in 2007, and I remember that year vividly because I was at Fast Company; we put Mark Zuckerberg on the cover that year. I remember the company had 19 million users, which seemed substantial and now feels almost quaint. How different was the vision for the company back then to what it’s become today?

SCHULTZ: I mean, I think the thing that’s kind of crazy is in one way it’s very different. It was connecting the world online, was the core of it. In another way, I think the company’s, at the absolute core, still the same. It’s the future of human connection. Back then that was Web 2.0 and social media, and now we’re talking about AI and augmented reality and all of those things, but it’s still the thing that we do is we put people at the center of it rather than putting apps at the center of it or businesses at the center of it or information at the center of it. The thing we do is we’re the people-first company with all the good and bad that comes with putting people at the center of things.

SAFIAN: Yeah. Well, and you were core in renaming the company from Facebook to Meta, which sounds a little bit more technical, although I was also thinking that since then the heat of the tech discussion has moved from metaverse to AI. Do you ever wish you’d chosen a different name?

SCHULTZ: No, I feel really good about Meta, because Meta for me means beyond, it’s driving forward, it’s a 2,000-year-old word, or older actually. It’s a word that has always meant beyond in most languages where it’s there, and so that actually makes it a great word to talk about the future of technology. The second piece that actually makes me feel great is – the point of it was that we had something big to strive for in the distant future.

The point of it wasn’t that the metaverse was here, which is the funny thing about how everyone, it went far larger and better than we thought it was going to go, but our video was, in the future you will have augmented reality glasses with an AI assistant in your ear that projects things in front of your eye, and that was four years ago now, and of course we’ve launched augmented reality glasses with an AI assistant in your ear where you can see things in your field of view as of this week with Meta Connect when we’re talking, and meta I really do think is a timeless word that means beyond and means the future, and that’s why I think that it actually works across lots of different technologies and, we’ll see what’s next in a few years time. I wouldn’t be shocked that augmented reality comes around again as a big thing people are talking about in the next few years.

Copy LinkIs marketing art or science?

SAFIAN: Your book headline refers to the art and science of marketing. Meta is often thought of as being more on the science end, as the company’s sort of engineering driven because of Mark’s background. Do you personally think more like a technologist or a creative, does one come more naturally to you?

SCHULTZ: I mean, the thing I’d nudge you on slightly is the way we talk about creatives in marketing, it means people who push pixels, and I think you can be creative technologically. I sat in a room yesterday with one of our most senior engineers who was vibe coding and it’s clearly creative, it’s incredibly creative. So I would say yes, I see myself on the tech side more than the traditional pixel design creative side, but I would say the reason I’ve been successful here is because I found creative solutions to digital problems that look beyond just routine engineering. So yes, I’m more tech, but I think I’m creative tech.

SAFIAN: And the solutions that you are finding or that you look for are not necessarily about the tech, they’re about something else?

SCHULTZ: The line between product and marketing when you’re a digital company is very blurred. What we’re doing is we’re trying to solve a user problem, and so that’s where the creativity comes from. There’s a user problem, what do I use to solve it? Is it just information? Is it actually a flow that can be optimized? They can’t find somethin,g and so I need to change the product so that thing is available and accessible to them. It really goes back to traditional marketing, the four Ps, right? Product, placement, pricing, and promotion. That actually works really well. When you think about a digital product and you think about marketing not just as an ad you bought on a billboard or on Google or on Meta, but you think about it as product-led growth of which ads is one thing you can do.

Copy LinkAI agents and the future of digital marketing

SAFIAN: Your book talks about how digital has dramatically impacted marketing and that AI will bring another wave of change. I mean, are we going to have AI agents marketing to other AI agents that will require different principles?

SCHULTZ: We will 100% have AI agents marketing to other AI agents. In my mind, marketing is just sales writ large. If we could all just have a one-on-one conversation with every customer with a great sales rep, that would be far better than doing some big brand advertising campaign. I think if you look at the discoverability of your products, I think if you look at explaining the value of your products, that’s going to be super important to agents, whether you think of it as search engine optimization going to AI or GEO, or you think about it as a sales thing where you’re trying to convince an agent to do a thing, brand is going to matter still because the agents will be doing things on behalf of consumers, and consumers will have preference and they will learn the preferences of each consumer. And so if you’re someone who likes Tide, they will by default pick Tide for you when they go and do the shopping for you.

It’s crazy where things are in the Valley now. I’m sitting with an AI agent open in meetings next to me all the time now, and I wasn’t there a year ago, and so are all my kind of peers who are execs out here. It’s crazy how much it’s… And I’m doing it not because I have to be doing it, because it’s making me better at my job. So yes, it’s going to happen, but still going to be pretty timeless, the principles of discoverability, brand preference and so on, we’re just going to have to convince an AI agent of it. Some of that will come from the consumer directing it, but some of it’s going to be built into SEO equivalents for AI and GEO.

SAFIAN: You mentioned SEO, like internet search. Is that still going to be a core tool?

SCHULTZ: I mean, this is a massive question for the industry because the whole industry is based on advertising, give or take. Google spends all this money on infrastructure and data centers and everything else, but in the end mostly they pay for it out of ads. We do the same, mostly paid for out of ads. Then guess who Nvidia is getting paid by? Actually, advertising funds a huge amount of the internet.

I don’t know is the honest answer. I think there’s two interesting independent questions. Question number one is do we move to a paradigm where people pay for search? It’s a historic unusual situation that you get a product like search for free. Typically you pay for products, so do people end up paying for search like they’re doing for ChatGPT, like they’re doing for Gemini Pro, et cetera? And if they pay, they won’t get ads that would be incredibly disruptive to the advertising industry. So that’s one.

And then the second key question is does Google win? Right now there’s pretty clear data that if you are a strong adopter of ChatGPT, your usage of Google goes down, but Google has counteracted that by saying, well, hey, if you use Gemini, your searches per searcher go up. And so when I look at it, it feels like what happened to us with TikTok, like people don’t understand. Meta, Facebook and Instagram in particular, five years ago was all content from people you follow, groups you’ve joined, people you’ve friended. Today, the majority of time spent on Facebook and Instagram is unconnected content that can only be shown to you because of these modern AI systems that have semantic understanding of content and of you. That same transition is happening right now in search. For us, it was pretty public what it did to our business, that transition. It is going to be fascinating to watch search go through that same transition.

Copy LinkThe cautionary tales of MapQuest and Stack Overflow

SAFIAN: One of the things for folks in the media business like me is that, yeah, those bots may scrape all my content as you’re talking about them scraping your book, but they’re not sending any traffic back, and I’m generating my revenue from that advertising, and what happens to all of that business, and no one really knows at this point.

SCHULTZ: Well, yeah, and I think that comes to: the future’s here, it’s not evenly distributed yet. So if you look at what’s happened to Stack Overflow, right? Stack Overflow is the bleeding edge of this because engineers are the first people using Claude in particular, through Cursor or Lovable or whatever thing they’re using for their vibe coding. They are using that to replace going to Stack Overflow and searching for the solution. And so Stack Overflow appears to have been absolutely decimated by this.

How the rest of the content industry escapes that when normies go and do the same thing, I don’t know. You look at MapQuest. MapQuest used to live by Google search results where you search for a street, MapQuest link came up, you went to MapQuest. Now Google Maps shows up in the one box. The same thing is happening with the one box with Gemini now, it changes the entire paradigm.

SAFIAN: Yeah, no, I mean the disruption is enormous. I mean disruption in business models, disruption in the way we work. You’re talking about having an AI agent with you all the time and whether we need the same kinds of talent around us, right?

SCHULTZ: I had an amazing demonstration from this guy who rejoined us, Joel Pobar, who did a demonstration of him coding. And he’s not like a 20-something-year-old straight out of college AI vibe coding for his entire coding career. He has totally retooled, and he is a genius at this. So I don’t know if it’s who in terms of the talent or it’s like whether the people you have as the talent surrounding you choose to skill up on AI, you better learn the tool, just like we all learned mobile, just like we all learned internet, just like we all learned WordPress or word processors.

SAFIAN: I find that even the things that are referred to as vibe coding, you still have to learn how to use that tool and use that prompt. It’s not necessarily intuitively obvious to get you to the promised land.

SCHULTZ: I completely agree. I can’t do it yet. I can kind of vibe analyze, but not very well.

Copy LinkWhy Alex believes “incrementality is everything”

SAFIAN: One of the other themes of your book is that incrementality is everything, which is a little different than the sort of exponential feel of the time that we’re in right now. That’s not like small gains, it’s like big leaps one after the other. So what is it about incrementality that drew you to talk about it now?

SCHULTZ: Yeah, so the way that I’m using incrementality is proving that absent your efforts, something would not have happened. That’s what I’m talking about. Actually in the book, I say if you need a data scientist and a microscope to figure out if you had an impact, you didn’t have an impact. Let’s talk about AI again. Cool. You stick Meta AI everywhere in the app, which we’ve done, and people adopt it. In some cases people adopt it and they displace other behaviors on Facebook and Instagram. In some cases you show it to people and they’re like, “Meh, another button,” and they’re annoyed.

And if the net of the huge amounts of value beats out the, “Hm, another button, I don’t like buttons,” or whatever, you will end up seeing total growth in engagement with our services. And I can tell you for a fact we are seeing increases in usages of, for example, WhatsApp, because people are finding Meta AI useful and chatting back and forth with it in WhatsApp. That’s a really successful use case for us. But the rigor needs to be there. So we ask the question and we say, was it incrementally impactful, or have people just shifted things from one pocket to the other? So incremental doesn’t have to mean small, it just means it would’ve not happened if you hadn’t taken the action.

Copy LinkBalancing growth, responsibility, and societal expectations

SAFIAN: In some ways it’s been sort of a critique of social media and businesses like Meta, that we incrementally have gotten used to and accepted things like losing control of our privacy or navigating misinformation or mental health impacts. Do you worry at all about what’s been created through this incremental increased engagement and where we go from here?

SCHULTZ: I think you’re going to build new products and you’re going to find unintended consequences, and the question is how do you respond to those? And I personally think we’re responding in a very responsible way, otherwise I wouldn’t still be at the company after all of these years. Look at the tools we’ve released for people to control their children’s use of social media. There are huge numbers of them, from time limits, to being able to see every message they send, control every person that they follow or get followed by, making sure that parent has full engagement. I think it’s important to look at the data and actually try and separate where we’re in moral panic land and where there are real problems.

The children today, for example, who are now growing into their twenties and thirties, they understand how to control what social networks know about them. They know how to control their algorithm, they know how to feed stuff into it, they know how to use the settings. And so people who’ve grown up digitally native, they’re looking at us and saying, “Okay, boomer, you don’t understand your privacy. I actually know it and I’m doing it deliberately and I like slightly better ads for trainers.”

So I think there’s an interesting balance here, and I passionately believe personalized advertising isn’t sacrificing your privacy. I passionately believe personalized advertising gives people better experiences, it grows the economy, it pays taxes, it provides jobs. It’s a really good boon for society and just because people say, hey, it’s surveillance capitalism, you show me what a European person has been protected from versus a U.S. person by the bad regulations they’ve passed on privacy, you show me that, because I can show you the growth they’ve lost, I can show you the jobs they’ve lost, I can show you the economic detriment they have, and I think that actually matters to people’s wellbeing when the state of Mississippi, the poorest state in the United States, is richer than the United Kingdom.

SAFIAN: Alex is referring to studies of GDP per capita that put Mississippi ahead of the UK. Of course, advertising isn’t the only thing that impacts that. Still, Alex’s passion for his craft and for Meta is striking. So are there downsides to Meta’s business model? What does free speech mean in today’s world, and what sorts of conversations does he have with Mark Zuckerberg about all of this? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, Meta’s Alex Schultz talked about how AI is revolutionizing digital marketing and putting Silicon Valley businesses at a crossroads. Now we talk about Meta’s definition of free speech, how the brand of Mark Zuckerberg intersects with the brand of Meta, and what people misunderstand about the CMO role — plus the existential questions that Meta is facing right now. Let’s jump back in. 

Copy LinkHow Meta navigates free speech

You say in the book that growth is good but not growth at all costs. I’m curious, how do you draw that line? I mean there are people who feel like Meta prizes growth over everything.

SCHULTZ: Well, it all depends whose podcast I’m on, right? It is really interesting. So the liberal elite ask that question. The conservative elite typically says, “Actually Meta is too parochial. Meta censors too much. Meta takes down too much stuff. Meta hasn’t prioritized growth at all costs. Meta has bent the knee to left liberal thinking, and because it has done so, it has actually over-censored and harmed conversations.” If you’d have asked me a decade ago, I’d have said, I have sympathy for the “please censor more,” like actually too much stuff is there. If you asked me today, I actually have a little more sympathy on the, “wow, you guys have gone a long way, you need to make less mistakes, you’re taking down too much stuff.” So we fixed a bunch of things which yeah, were wrong and we said were wrong and we needed to improve, but I actually think we went too far personally, and it harmed the conversation, and we can debate that at length.

So the first thing is you listen to both sides, you get input from civil society across the spectrum, try not to be biased, although obviously any decision that’s centrist pisses off both sides, which is really unfortunate. And then try and make action on it. Secondly, you work with researchers. You’ll see in the wake of the 2016 election, we released huge amounts of data to researchers for the 2020 election, including allowing them to do experiments in our product to answer the question society had. I think the answers were somewhat disappointing for a lot of people on the scale of impact, but we did get real research done. So one, partner with civil society, respond; two, partner with research and actually get data on what’s going on, and then iterate based on those inputs. And I think that’s the best you can do.

SAFIAN: It is super hard to define free speech in every context. What you’re sort of saying is you have to adjust, incrementally perhaps, with each new wave as you learn more from different places. You can’t just have, this is Meta’s set-in-stone definition of this, that it has to keep moving?

SCHULTZ: Well, and civil society moves as well. There are periods when society is like, “Oh my God, we need to clamp down on this.” And there are periods when society’s like, “Oh my gosh, we need to open up.” And so I actually think society moves and so platforms on which people actually have conversations, they need to move with society, they have to. And I think some people go and say, “Oh, Mark is so transactional,” or this, that, and the other. And I personally sit in a lot of meetings with him, and I think he is genuinely in best faith trying to find the right balance on a subject where the opinions of society are moving over time.

SAFIAN: Yeah, no, I mean I was thinking about the blow-up over Jimmy Kimmel’s comments, and on the one hand, maybe there would be a point where that wouldn’t have created the response it did. On the other hand, you sure would’ve had a point where someone who was doing a late night comedy show wouldn’t even bring up those topics. Right? Civil society does transition into lots of different places.

SCHULTZ: Yeah. And I think that’s fine, and we’re a platform for speech, and we reflect that, and it’s a really hard place to be in. I personally believe the people I work with are well-meaning and trying to do the best job they possibly can. Some people don’t, and that’s fine. And I think that’s just the debate you’re going to have, but I’m not sitting here going, wow, there’s a bunch of people with horns on their heads. I mean, I filed mine off for the interview, but.

Copy LinkMeta’s CMO on the company’s stance around diversity

SAFIAN: I appreciate that. I wanted to ask you about the sort of attacks on certain diversity policies. I mean, you are an out gay man who is outspoken about it and proud about it. Do you find any of the sort of, I don’t know, pushback against words like diversity or whatever disheartening, or do you feel like that sort of went too far? I don’t know whether this is something you talk to Mark Zuckerberg about or not.

SCHULTZ: Well, it’s certainly not something I’m going to sit on a podcast and say what my conversations with Mark are about it. On a personal level, I think there are places where you can actually go too far and cause backlash against diverse communities by overstepping. I think in some places the world did. As I said, I think we went too far, that we were harming the conversation by getting in the conversation. Internally, I really believe in the LGBT community. We actually just had a gay person of color become our head of AI with Alex Wang very publicly. We’ve had a bunch of very successful women, senior leaders, the general counsel is a woman now, the CFO is a woman now. In my case, I have had majority female direct reports for the last five years. And so I think there’s actually a lot of success of diverse people, and I think some things went too far, and there is understandable backlash, and I think a balance has to be struck, but it’s not really the subject of a book on online marketing.

Copy LinkCoordinating the brands of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta

SAFIAN: Yes. As a marketing leader at Meta, you have to navigate between the Meta brand and Mark’s brand, which of course washes over the Meta brand. When Mark says something, does something, are you trying to adjust and explain? How coordinated and aligned are those two brands, or is Zuck one thing and Meta another?

SCHULTZ: Honestly, that’s a super interesting question. We are quite coordinated and aligned as people. I mean, I’ve been on his senior leadership team, his staff for a decade now. I think our current head of comms, David Ginsberg, and me as the CMO, we are pretty aligned with Mark. I always say we’re like a symptom of the change of direction, we’re not the cause. And so Mark has been very direct to his followers, direct to the world about what he’s doing and has been face to camera and been out there and communicating directly.

And I think that’s a really good thing. We have a good idea of who he is, where he’s going. We have a good idea of the brand principles of the company. In the end, in a founder-led company, they come from the founder. And so every time you try and fight the founder, you’re not really going to succeed in a founder-led company. But I wouldn’t describe it as a tight coordination. We understand each other pretty well, and so we are coordinated, and it is important that they’re linked. So I hope that’s a satisfying answer.

Copy LinkThe hardest part of being CMO

SAFIAN: So you’ve said that the hardest part of being CMO is that everyone thinks they can do it better. There is certainly a lot of turnover among CMOs at different times. Why is that? Why does everyone think they can do it better?

SCHULTZ: I just came out of a board meeting where I had this experience. A room full of people I really, really like and respect, and I’m like, “But you all think you can do my job. So sad.” No, I mean marketing, I think two things are true. One, the field is presented to you. The nature of marketing is people will see marketing and so they will be able to have an opinion of it. Whereas a lot of other fields, you just don’t see it. The second thing is, people don’t treat marketing as if it is a profession with professional skills in the same way as when I come and say, “Hey, I got a real master’s in quantum physics and it’s from Cambridge.” That carries a lot of respect. When I say I’m a Chief Marketing Officer, people are like, “Oh, you do pretty pictures.” You know what I mean? It’s a little bit of a lack of understanding.

And so that then jumps to, okay, I see it all the time. I don’t particularly think it’s some technical discipline where there’s a big gap, therefore I think I know how I can do it. And then people have ideas, and they think they can share them, and they’re good ideas. I think one corollary is there’s lots of ways to do marketing right. I think there’s probably infinite ways to market Facebook or Instagram effectively, but what you need to do is you need to actually choose one so that you can actually build brand equity. So perhaps the last point would be there are a lot of ways to do it right, and that also makes it very hard to stay on one correct way.

SAFIAN: And if there are a lot of ways to do it right, is that the art part of marketing versus the science? Or is there science that, analytics that tells you which one of those choices to make? Or is it more that like no, you’re making the choice for some reason of, I don’t know, instinct, and then you’re applying the science to making sure you execute it the right way?

SCHULTZ: There’s a certain part that is an art of describing what the brand should stand for that comes from working with your colleagues. So for Instagram, essentially we need to work with Adam Mosseri and Mark so that they truly believe the thing we say, and what we say is Instagram is for everyday creativity that connects you. WhatsApp is for private conversations that allow intimacy. There are certain things, that’s a real art to get to that line, and it isn’t something you can test your way into, it has to be a truth that’s true to the company.

Then how you express that line, I think there’s an art in the ideas for how you express it. And the science then comes in where you start employing research to actually ask some people, okay, well we’re going to say this. Does it convince you of this thing? And there’s a dangerous point there where science can kill an idea, but there’s also a dangerous point there where people can be like, no, this is a creative idea. You can’t crush it with science. And that’s where you start hitting the balance of the art and the science. So it moves from very art, in my opinion, to much more scientific as you go sort of deeper and deeper into the process.

SAFIAN: And the hard part of being a CMO, I mean, people hear quantum physics and they think, “Oh, that’s hard.” They don’t necessarily think marketing is hard in the same way.

SCHULTZ: Well, it’s certainly harder than a master’s in quantum physics. I think it’s probably easier than being at the cutting edge of quantum physics research. That would probably be my summary of that. The hard thing about it is it’s very probabilistic. There’s no one right answer. And then the thing that’s different to quantum physics, because quantum physics is very probabilistic, the difference with marketing is then there’s a lot of human emotion in it. There’s a lot of taste, and there’s a lot of human feeling in it.

And I think the human feelings that I think are difficult are actually the feelings inside the company, not outside. Outside, you can actually quantify once you’ve run an ad to a million people and not run it to another million people, you can quantify what they did. Inside the company, it’s like, was that a good enough idea? I have five other ideas. When do you actually cut it off and just do the thing? When do you stick with a creative concept for multiple years versus change all the time? That’s the bit that makes it the hardest, is the human feelings and interaction inside the company.

Copy LinkWhy human creativity will define our AI-powered future

SAFIAN: It is so fascinating that in a world where we are increasingly technological and sophisticated and data and all of that, that so much comes down to human and emotional responses to things, right?

SCHULTZ: Yeah. And I actually think that may be amplified by AI because if AI is pushing us up to the creative levels, in whatever industry, like whether you’re a lawyer coming up with the creative way to argue something in court, or you are a designer coming up with the perfect set of sneakers, a lot of stuff is going to be taken away by AI that helps you elevate yourself to the higher order questions and the higher order creativity of whatever your field is. And at that point, you will be having humans having debates about the right thing to ask the AI to do because the AI is so capable. I actually think human creativity, human ingenuity is going to be the big delta over the next 5, 10 years. But if everyone knows how to use AI equally, the people who are most creative about using it, they’re going to be the ones that have the edge.

Copy LinkWhat’s at stake for Meta right now?

SAFIAN: So what’s at stake for Meta right now as AI reshuffles the marketing world and everything else?

SCHULTZ: Oh, I mean, there’s huge upside available to us. If the changes we wondered about, the questions go the right way on search, that’s pretty awesome for us. And then I think there are existential questions for us too. There’s an interesting question about who grabs the most out of the really competitive market with us and TikTok and YouTube and whatever. And then someone’s going to come along and build an AI-first content consumption experience. You’ve got Creator.ai out there, you’ve got what we tried to with the Meta AI app. We have announced working with Midjourney to make images better. You see creators on Instagram and TikTok uploading AI-first stuff. At some point someone’s going to create a version of that app that is the next TikTok or Snapchat or whatever, or Instagram, and that will be something we have to compete with.

So I think there’s huge upside. There’s places where it’s really contested ground and then there’s huge risks, which by the way could also be a huge upside if we execute well. My hope and dream is we become what Google managed and Apple managed and Microsoft managed as the industry transitioned. My nightmare is we do what Yahoo and eBay did. So we’ve got to make sure we’re one and not the other, and that’s on us as a leadership team.

SAFIAN: Alex, this has been great. Thanks so much for doing it.

SCHULTZ: Yeah, thank you for having me.

SAFIAN: Alex is surely an adept marketer. He’s been able to help Meta get us to click here, as the title of his book puts it, by tapping into both data and emotion. But he’s also a committed believer in tech’s potential and impact, arguing very well that incremental improvements can help address any unintended consequences.

I hope Alex is right, especially as the AI age unfolds, we won’t be able to market our way out of every trouble spot. So we’ll need to be vigilant. Where does responsibility ultimately land? Where do tech businesses and especially hyperscalers like Meta fit into what Alex calls civil society? These questions are yet to be answered. The tension between growth and consequences, it’s part of what makes this moment in tech so fascinating and so consequential. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.