Jim Fish, CEO of waste management company WM, says the longer term of his industry will be succinctly summed up by an statement his teenage daughter made: None of her classmates aspired to be truck drivers.
“Our biggest challenge – and we use technology to overcome it – is work,” says Fish, who told the anecdote during a virtual session hosted by Assets in partnership with consulting firms BCG.
WM has passed through a fairly large transformation in recent times. It rebranded itself from Waste Management to WM to more closely align with sustainability efforts. Fish said the corporate has spent $3 billion in recent times to bolster WM’s recycling infrastructure while also expanding capability in markets where it did not have a powerful presence, like Texas, Tennessee and Florida.
But one big initiative WM is taking is to cut back the corporate’s workload. Finding employees to drive trucks and operate heavy equipment will be difficult — and really expensive, Fish says. The average salary for a garbage truck driver at WM is sort of $100,000, in line with Fish, and may rise to almost $200,000 in areas like San Francisco, where the associated fee of living is high.
As a result, WM is remodeling factories and using technologies that may reduce the variety of employees needed – for jobs that the longer term workforce doesn’t necessarily want anyway. WM says it just isn’t planning any job cuts, but expects to cut back staff over time through downsizing.
Fish was just certainly one of many CEOs who said throughout the virtual call that they’re continually interested by easy methods to transform their firms to remain ahead. As latest technologies like generative AI advance rapidly, firms across all industries are expected to extend productivity, redesign their operations and continually evaluate how they compare to their competitors.
But Sharon Marcil, managing director and senior partner at BCG, says many leaders also needs to control customer feedback. “If you lose sight of that, you can make changes, but not necessarily in the right direction,” she says.
Search for possibilities and solutions
The nonprofit Goodwill Industries International is increasingly facing competitors from for-profit firms. “We just have to raise the bar and compete against very well-funded corporate competitors,” Goodwill CEO Steve Preston said on the virtual meeting.
The nonprofit is targeted on each expanding brick-and-mortar locations and expanding the corporate’s online presence, creating an increasingly complex ecosystem to attach latest buyers and sellers of recycled goods, but in addition many latest opportunities to hunt growth.
Meanwhile, following a presentation at an investor day themed “Trusted for Transformation,” Aspen Technology CEO Antonio Pietri said the software company’s customers were on the lookout for solutions to assist them decarbonize and move away from fossil fuels for his or her energy supply.
“We then have to change in order to be uniquely positioned during the transformation,” says Pietri. The company’s workforce has increased because of this of a 11 billion dollar merger with Emerson Electric’s software units, a deal that was accomplished in 2022.
To help customers achieve their multi-year energy transition goals, Pietri said there’s a greater expectation for Aspen and others to think broadly concerning the use of AI to make engineering, physics, chemistry and arithmetic smarter and more predictable.
Transformation with AI
Many CEOs are on the identical page as Pietri and are heavily focused on AI initiatives. Earlier this 12 months, Docusign revealed an AI-powered Intelligence Agreement Management platform that gives customers with the flexibility to centralize all of their supplier contracts and use AI to trace which contracts are up for renewal and which can not meet an organization’s internal standards, in addition to providing insights into supplier performance over time.
“We’re already seeing tremendous growth in the first few months,” says Allan Thygesen, CEO of Docusign, concerning the offering launched in May.
AI can be a vital tool for making buildings more efficient, says Dave Regnery, CEO of Trane Technologies, which sells heating, air-con and ventilation systems. He points out that the typical business constructing can waste as much as 30% of the energy it uses. With that in mind, Trane has been using structured data to rethink constructing design for years. Generative AI also can help make sense of unstructured data, including multimedia content, emails, audio files and more.
“When you add unstructured data to that, there are real opportunities,” says Regnery.
And Steve Hasker, CEO of business services and news provider Thomson Reuters, says his intention is to make sure that the entire company’s employees use generative AI every day. He has integrated generative AI into the products Thomson Reuters sells to legal, tax and accounting clients, but adds that journalists have also embraced the technology.
Having witnessed other significant technological advances, including the introduction of the laptop computer, the cell phone, social media and cloud computing, Hasker believes the most recent wave of recent technological innovations can be probably the most impactful.
“Generative AI will be greater in terms of its disruptive power than any other,” says Hasker.
