7 Overview… To say the world is changing at unprecedented rates is an understatement. Rapid and transformative technology innovation / adoption represent key underpinnings of these changes. As does leadership evolution for the global powers. Google’s founding mission (1998) was to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ Alibaba’s founding mission (1999) was to ‘make it easy to do business anywhere.’ Facebook’s founding mission (2004) was ‘to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.’ Fast forward to today with the world’s organized, connected and accessible information being supercharged by artificial intelligence, accelerating computing power, and semi-borderless capital…all driving massive change. Sport provides a good analogy for AI’s constant improvements. As athletes continue to wow us and break records, their talent is increasingly enhanced by better data / inputs / training. The same is true for businesses, where computers are ingesting massive datasets to get smarter and more competitive. Breakthroughs in large models, cost-per-token declines, open-source proliferation and chip performance improvements are making new tech advances increasingly more powerful, accessible, and economically viable. OpenAI’s ChatGPT – based on user / usage / monetization metrics – is history’s biggest ‘overnight’ success (nine years post-founding). AI usage is surging among consumers, developers, enterprises and governments. And unlike the Internet 1.0 revolution – where technology started in the USA and steadily diffused globally – ChatGPT hit the world stage all at once, growing in most global regions simultaneously. Meanwhile, platform incumbents and emerging challengers are racing to build and deploy the next layers of AI infrastructure: agentic interfaces, enterprise copilots, real-world autonomous systems, and sovereign models. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, compute infrastructure, and global connectivity are fundamentally reshaping how work gets done, how capital is deployed, and how leadership is defined – across both companies and countries. At the same time, we have leadership evolution among the global powers, each of whom is challenging the other’s competitive and comparative advantage. We see the world’s most powerful countries revved up by varying degrees of economic / societal / territorial aspiration…