Financial Mindset

A senior vice president at Okta approved a gratuity that was $18 over the company’s threshold on a $2,000 dinner. The auditing system flagged it, a person wrote it up, an email was sent, his assistant processed it. It landed on the COO’s desk — routed there from the board. “I’m paying somebody to audit that expense report,” Okta President and COO Eric Kelleher said at a BCG-hosted breakfast roundtable at the Fortune COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona. “I’m paying somebody to flag that, and I’m paying somebody to write up an email and send to me, and I’m paying my assistant to receive the email and process it.” He let that hang in the air. “That’s waste.” Of course, we all know exactly why that process exists: someone built it and kept it that way. That person is almost certainly still in the building, certain it’s the right way to do things, defending the inefficient structure that everyon...

Geoffrey Hinton almost didn’t believe he’d won the Nobel Prize. When the committee called in 2024, the 77-year-old computer scientist ran a quick calculation in his head. What are the odds, he asked himself, that a theoretical psychologist hiding in computer science gets the Nobel Prize in physics? “Well, maybe one in two million,” he told the crowd at the Sana AI Summit in New York last week. Then again: what are the odds you dream about winning it? “Maybe one in two million … So that means it’s a million times more likely it’s a dream than reality.” The audience laughed. Hinton wasn’t done. For several days after the announcement, he said, he half-expected to wake up. The one thing that consoled him: “If it was a dream, I would wake up, and that nightmare about Trump being president wouldn’t be true.” A beat. The audience laughed as Hinton added, “I’d give it up for that.” ...

Eric Kelleher has a problem that no amount of AI can solve for him. The President and COO of Okta has agents on his team. He’s named them—Leo, Sloan, Hank, Walker—and they show up in business reviews alongside his human staff. He’s personally booked a flight to Bangalore and spent the entire trip standing up an open-source agent on a separate machine, a deliberate act of immersion he then assigned to every member of his leadership team. “That flight to me was transformative in how I recognized what the capabilities of this technology are,” he told a roomful of top operations executives at the COO Summit this week. And yet, he added, the hardest part isn’t the technology. It’s the managers. “We have trained every manager in the world to think about one thing and that is: what’s their headcount,” Kelleher said. “Our managers have spent decades learning how to think about headcounts and payroll.” The shift he...