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Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Editor, Emma Hinchliffe, and Editorial Director of Fortune Most Powerful Women, Ellie Austin, discuss the trends shaping the 2026 Most Powerful Women in Business list. From Jane Fraser becoming No.1 for the first time since she took over as Citi CEO five years ago, to the dominance of tech and finance executives, they explore how influence in business is expanding beyond the CEO title and reshaping the future of global power.

From Jane Fraser’s rise to No. 1 to AI’s financial power players: Inside the Fortune Most Powerful Women in Business 2026 list

The list is a really good barometer of the business landscape at large. It tells us where we are, it tells us which sectors are shaping the future of the country and the world, and this year it's tech and finance that really dominate. Today we're here to talk about the 14tune most powerful women in business list 2026. We have a new number one this year for the first time since 2024, Jane Fraser. Jane has been on the most powerful women list ever since she broke Wall Street's highest, hardest, Glass ceiling 5 years ago when she became the CEO of Citigroup. Ellie, we've both been working on this list for a long time. It's a huge project. How are you feeling now that it's out? I'm feeling exhausted because it is a huge piece of work to get across the line. It's a really long process when it comes to figuring out what this list is going to look like. This year's list features leaders from 94 companies and 34 Fortune. 500 companies and the leaders on the list represent a combined almost 12 million employees and around $7 trillion in annual revenue. It's kind of a big deal. When you look at the 100 women on this year's list, what's the most interesting trend you see? For me, a really interesting trend this year is the women from the AI industry. Now, generally speaking, the biggest AI companies are run by men. However, what the list shows is that pretty, Much all of the big AI companies that we're talking about day in and day out have CFOs who are women. I completely agree with you, and it's really remarkable. I mean, we're talking about Amy Hood at Microsoft, Susan Lee at Meta, Colette Cress at Nvidia. Women are in these hugely consequential finance positions where they are deciding the spending decisions that will control the outcome of their companies, this technology, and even like the US or global economy. We see significant. from other countries as well. Um, there's 9 women on the list from China, 6 women from France, 6 women from the UK. The top woman from Europe is Anna Botin of Santander, and the top woman from Asia is 10 Suhen, who runs DBS Group. To tell you a little bit more about the methodology, we rely on 12 month and 3 year financial results, as well as a combination of other factors like a woman's career trajectory, her company's innovation. Are they really at the forefront, at the cutting edge of Business today, we are really trying to make this list as global as possible, reflecting the full scope of power in business around the world. So Emma, some people might ask, why do we still need a most powerful women's list in 2026? I think when you look at the business world, yes, women have made so much progress, but there is still so far to go. Women only run between 10 and 11% of Fortune 500 companies. That stat is even smaller for the Global 500. And so highlighting. The women who are leading in the business world and who will be the leaders of tomorrow in the business world, it really has an impact on both telling the stories of these women and making sure that these women and others who will follow them continue to have opportunities to rise in their careers and influence the future of global business. We're a long way away from that, a long way, so more most powerful women lists to come. To see the full 14 Most Powerful Women in Businesses 2026, go to fortune.com.

As conversations around the four-day workweek gain momentum, employees are becoming more open about feeling overworked, and companies are being challenged to ensure their teams don’t burn out. As conversations around the four-day workweek gain momentum, employees are becoming more open about feeling overworked, and companies are exploring how best to support their teams. Many of the factors that contribute to overwork sit within leadership’s influence. This discussion will explore how leaders can rethink priorities and workloads and challenge the old rules of work to make productivity and well-being thrive.

Malissa Clark, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Director, Healthy Work Lab
James Reinhart, Co-Founder and CEO, Thredup
Moderator: Indrani Sen, Senior Features Editor, Fortune; Co-Chair, Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit 

Burnout is Breaking Work: Can a Four-Day Week Fix It?

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I'm going to start by just setting the table a little bit. AI is upending assumptions about how work is valued, what humans uniquely bring to the table. And what kinds of work can be automated or done by LLMs or agents. The bigger question may be whether customers cus sorry, whether companies are willing to redesign work itself, cutting low value tasks, redefining productivity, and making it safer for employers to say employees to say when the system isn't working. James, I'd love to start with you, particularly after the conversation that we just had. Um, I'd love to talk to you about the 4-day work week that that you've implemented at Thread Up. Uh, you started out with an experimental 4-day work week during the pandemic and then made it permanent. What nuts and bolts changes to Thread Up make in terms of meetings, decision making, staffing, manager behavior? To make this happen and what are the biggest changes that you've noticed since you implemented it? Sure, uh, it's great to be here. Yeah, we, we started the 4 day work week during the pandemic, um, and people were at home, and one of the things that I noticed thematically when people were at home is they were working all the time and people were very productive once they had control of their own schedules. Uh, collaboration was up, you know, Google Meet, we were able to track all the data, and we just started to see this explosion of, of productivity, frankly. And so when, and of course none of us go to our offices and so we had all this extra commute time and our right so there was a lot of more time in our day so then when people came back to work. Um, I just found that like wow, there was this explosion of of opportunity here. Why not just maintain the 4 day work week and, and so for us it was a it was a top level decision. It was not a we didn't take a poll, it was we're gonna do the 4 day work week because I've been sort of obsessed my whole life around organizational design and how do you get the most out of employees and the fundamental idea was that um we waste an enormous amount of time at work. An enormous amount and so I thought why not making the organization be prioritized more? Why not cut all the fat in the meetings? uh why not reduce the sort of meeting before the meeting um and so I just said look we're gonna, we're gonna try this experiment and everybody thought that was a great idea and since then we've been tracking productivity and stuff but I have seen just tremendous uh improvements in employee happiness. Uh, in an employee creativity, I think we're working on the hardest problems, uh, and I think people, uh, in our retention metrics are through the roof, yeah, and so we'll probably talk about that. But, but to me, like, uh, unlike Ryan, like we're, we're not going back. I actually think these days with the sort of the explosion in AI, I think the world is moving more rapidly, and I think we need our best employees and their most creative minds working really concentrated hours on the most important things. And Melissa, as an expert on this, you know, better than most, not all four-day work weeks are created equal. How should we think about the difference between compressing work and genuine genuinely reducing work and how do those models work differently? Yeah, that's a great question because I think a lot of people think 4 day work week, all right, let's just take 40 hours and cram it into 4 days. That is not the philosophy behind the 4 day week movement, uh, and it's not what you're doing, so it's literally shaving 8 hours off of your work week, so a 32 hour week, and so a compressed work week is taking those 40 hours and. You know, just smushing them 4 to 4 day work week is 32 hours. Another kind of myth about this is it doesn't have to be 4 days. Your model is 4 days, I think Monday through Thursday, right? And some pushback I hear is, well, we need people there every day of the week. We need somebody there. That's fine. You don't have to have everyone on the same schedule with a 4 day work week. People can choose different configurations that work for them. Someone could work 6.5 hours a day for 5 days because that works for them. They'd have to pick up their kids from school and it works better with their family. That's great. Uh, the bottom line with the 4 day work week is shaving those 8 hours off. I'd love for you. This is a question for James, but you may have thoughts also, Melissa, to speak directly to the leaders in this room. We have a lot of uh people and HR leaders in this room who might be interested in experimenting with the four-day work week or other changes in work structure, especially as we rethink everything in this era. Um, they're gonna probably face resistance, uh, and maybe the stance that like this might work for Thread Up, it's not gonna work in our company, it's not gonna work in our industry. Um, or a cultural unwillingness to challenge all assumptions about what productivity is. Um, what advice, I'd love to ask you, James, and then you, Melissa, what advice would you give to, to, to our audience here if that's the position that they're in? Um, you know, I, I think the thing to think about is, is the companies that you work at and the teams that you serve, are you ultimately going to win by The number of hours in like is this a truly an input scheme or is it that your teams are coming up with the best ideas, right? um, the most innovative products, uh the best uh engagement and and retention metrics and so I really think about like this idea that that thread. And I think a lot of companies, especially in the world of AI, are going to win by delivering superior workplaces and superior products. So I'm like a, like, and we've all been part of it. Think about the time when you were writing a paper in college, right, and you're like you're grinding at your computer and it's like days and days and days and then you're like. And there's a spark and you have a moment and in 30 minutes you've like you've nailed it, right? Think about like the number of moments that you can have where you have real sparks of innovation and creativity. That is what I'm optimizing for and so I think if you think about the the opportunities in your organizations to how can my employees do the most exceptional work of their lives, what would it take to do that. My guess is you wouldn't say show up at 9, leave at 55 days a week in a, in a, you know, in a desk environment and so that's, that's kind of what I would push people is where can you spark creativity, um, and then one small thing is just I'm a huge believer that rested employees and genuinely happy employees are way more creative. And so for me the idea of the 4 day work week is that when employees come back on Monday morning they're like they've gone on hikes, they've spent time with their kids and families, they've done stuff like they're ready to be the best version of themselves they're not going to spend the first like 4 hours of Monday getting back in the groove and reminding themselves why they still want to work here, right? So it's a real mindset shift. What, what would you arm people with when they're, when they're having this conversation, Melissa? Yeah, well, first of all, I wish more CEOs had your philosophy behind rest and creativity and productivity because you know one of the conversations we have around AI is, OK, we're using it to shave off time from all these tasks that kind of build up throughout the day. OK, so you've shaved off 10 minutes. What are you going to do with that 10 minutes? And to your point, the research shows that the most effective thing to do with that 10 minutes is engage in a rest and recovery activity. This could be as simple as walking around the building or just turning off your cell phone and just sitting and relaxing and deep breathing, and that has been shown to link to greater productivity, greater creativity. I mean, I know myself when I write. The best ideas sometimes come to me when I'm on my walk or the shower. It's not when I'm, you know, working on this thing for 6 hours in a row. Um, so I'm just curious how many companies or people in their companies out here do have a 4 day work week formally? Raise your hand if you have a 4 day work week. Any companies that are, is there one handbag? Uh, she works for me. Oh, look, so this is so depressing, right? But the, the science is so clear. Like the science is so clear on the, on the sleep, on happiness, on walking for creativity. Like it's amazing that we're so willing to trust science on so many things, many things, and yet on this particular thing, like, nope, nope, nope, yeah, head in sand, yeah, so for my book Never Not Working, I interviewed one of the co-founders of the 4 day week global movement. I'm not affiliated with them at all, but I'm a huge fan. And so they've conducted very psychometrically sound research studies that show over these trials of implementing the 4 day work week all of the well-being metrics were going up, uh, burnout was going down, turnover was going down, but companies always care about the bottom line, and this is the most exciting part revenue went up in the majority of these companies and it's sustained over time. And one of the most interesting pieces of data from the recent study that I read about was that 90, so this isn't the most interesting, but 96% of employees said they wanted to continue, OK, but 15% said they would not go back to a 5 day work week for any amount of money. Wow, that I thought was shocking. So in that scenario that you set up actually that the, the CEO says, well, you know, with AI we're gonna be able to, to do, you know, 20% more or we're gonna be able to do the same amount with 20% fewer people. Um, what questions would you ask, uh, about, about how they're thinking about that? I mean Look, there's no question that AI is going to make us more productive. Like, I think the the, the science is clear on that too, right? I think it'll ultimately be how are we leveraging these tools in ways where generative AI is doing stuff when we sleep, right? So to me right now, and I bet for many of you. Like the AI leverage you're getting is how you're interacting in a prompt-based world with chat GPT or cloud, right? You're not actually like, have you, you've not actually come up the other side of the J curve where, where cloud is working for you at night, right? Right. And, um, and I'll give you an example of this is a really simple one which is if you've not used Google's Notebook LM, so who is, has anybody used Google's Notebook LM? OK, there's a feature in there which I'm sure those of you raise your interviews, which is the creation of the podcast. Where you feed it a bunch of data and then these really exciting hosts talk about your idea, right? Um, that is an example where like you, you set a prompt right you feed it a bunch of information and you come back and sometimes it takes 30 minutes, sometimes it takes 1 hour, yeah, that's like the smallest example of this right where you're you're. Going to do something else for an hour while it's producing this podcast for you. Extrapolate that out to large data sets, right, to redesigns of work systems to how your, um, your workforce deployment across 10,000 people might look, those are actually the problems where AI is going to actually have great leaps forward, and I think to get and to nail that you're going to need the most exceptional employees in the world. And those exceptional employees are gonna work wanna work at Thread Up 4 days a week. And so you're going to be competing right against companies like mine for these exceptional people and you're going to lose and so to me, like I, I mean I'm joking, I'm sure you will win, but others will lose, right? But like I think that so to me and I think that's the question, right, is how are you going to compete in a world where the very best people are going to find the leverage in AI, right, um, right, and I think a lot of companies are very shortsighted with thinking about, um. You know their workforce and going pedal to the metal all the time and sure there might be a burst of productivity but we're human and uh eventually we are going to fatigue and at the extreme burn out and guess what that's gonna be costly not just for the individual and their health and their family. But to the company, uh, there was a large scale meta-analysis, for example, that found that for every $1 put towards wellness programs, the company saved $3 in healthcare costs. So I think just thinking about and I hate bringing up these metrics that shouldn't be the end goal, the ultimate criterion in my opinion should be employee well-being. It shouldn't be profit, um, but I know companies like to talk about profit, so I'm giving them data. Um, and then the other thing I think to point out just big picture, uh, and that I would challenge people to think about is why are we still stuck on a 40 hour work week as some of you know this was implemented by Henry Ford, uh, you know, and we're still here and it's funny you can look at anecdotes from a century ago, people predicting that we would be working 15 hours a week now and taking 2 months of vacation. Uh, French, very French, and why are we still here? And with every technological revolution there are these predictions, and can we please for the love of God implement those predictions and at least shave off a day. Right, and people are making those predictions now, of course, about AI, including Elon Musk famously saying, you know, basically we'll, we'll just all have butlers, AI butlers and to work 120 hours a week, right? So if you're imagining this idealized workplace 10 years from now, AI is deeply embedded, uh, maybe we are all working 4 day work weeks. What would you hope is different about how leaders are thinking about people's time? And their capacity at work. I would say that I hope that leaders could start focusing on rewarding working smarter and not working longer. I think we continually talk about wellbeing and the idea of. Rest and recovery as hindering productivity, but as your examples point out and a lot of other data, it actually helps productivity. So it's a false dichotomy, and I think we really need to stop pitting the two against each other. They work together very well actually. Yeah, I mean, I, to me like I, I really do think it's going to, it comes down to the war for talent. Like I really do believe that. I mean that, that, you know, the, the 10x employee, like there are people in all of our companies that they're just exceptional, right? They're, they're so much better than other people at our companies. And so when I think about the, the folks at Thread up that are exceptional, um, the 4 day work week is a big part of like why they want to work there, but I'm asking myself what are the conditions that I can put in place to find more of those exceptional people. And I think about the 4 day work week is just one input in that, right? There's lots of things that go into it, but I do think that especially in a world of AI, like I think it's the war of talent that's gonna be, that's going to be more, um, more profound than anything. Can I just piggyback off of that? So we, you know, a star athlete, a star athlete is not working every day of the week at their craft. The star employees, the same kind of thing athletes build. Rest and recovery into their routine. It actually is part of why they're amazing. And so why don't we think of our top talent like that and you know it helps with retention. It also helps with recruitment. We talked in this conference about Gen Z and what they want out of work, so I think many benefits. I love that you've talked about both attracting that talent but also allowing that those talented people to do their best work. I feel really proud of the work that they're doing. What in one sentence, uh, and, and we really only have time for one sentence. Um, what's one rule of work that you think leaders need to retire if they want productivity and well-being to coexist as, as Melissa said. I would say Stop thinking you can just say you're going to implement something great like the 4 day work week or unlimited PTO or whatever the buzz thing is then just start acting in a way that your culture is supportive of having more of a balance, and culture is determined by the worst behavior that is tolerated. So if you are letting those behaviors slide, even if you have these policies that will become your culture. Yeah, and I just think that I would emphasize how much, how much time we waste at work and how much unproductive time we spend in our lives. And if we really focused on being more productive and more deliberate with how we spend our time, I think we'd all be like a lot happier both in our personal lives, but I think for for companies in their in their professional lives. So to me it's about how we manage our time. Thank you so much, both of you for this great conversation, everyone for, for your attention. Thank you.

When we picture the future, what informs our vision? A futurist argues that literature and entertainment exert an overwhelming influence on how we think about what’s next. How can governments, companies, and brands learn from this insight? How can Sci-Fi world-building inspire or distort the way we design policies and products?

Prototyping the Future

Many of our visions of the future with a capital F are inspired or influenced by stories and literature and entertainment. Our next speaker spent much of her youth immersed in science fiction. Starting as a creative director, she made a career in Hollywood, which included futurist consultancy for Disney and Marvel, Black Panther, Wakanda Forever. And advisory work for other media companies such as the BBC, DreamWorks, Universal, as well as other Fortune 500 firms. Now the resident futurist at Nike, Monica Belska, will explore how governments, companies, and brands can apply sci-fi world building techniques to prototype our future and shape the world we want to inhabit. Please welcome Monica to the stage. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to join y'all here today. So we will be speaking how we could be utilizing techniques of sci-fi world building to shape real world impacts. But before we go to the depth of it, I have to share a disclaimer that all views of my own and should not be used to extrapolate future strategies of the companies that I work with or for. So, the real value of IPs such as Avatar and Black Panther is not merely in the narratives on the screen. It is in the universes they have created Pandora and Wakanda. Desire to belong and even more so to feel inspired to participate in a vision of the future creates loyalty and engagement that almost nothing outside of entertainment fandom has achieved. Story world design is a design framework I have been developing, inspired by the world building techniques of sci-fi entertainment, repurposed for real world challenges and opportunities. It is a to prototype compelling future vision and consistent future strategy to flow out of it that is applicable again for the real world challenges for the brands and governments and hopefully to shape better impacts. So now the reason why I wanted to move away from the term world building within sci-fi to story world design. Because world building, when applied to the real world, evokes projects such as Chandigarh or Brasilia. A genius architect descending upon the land and shaping everything in this very much top-down vision. Now story world design goes beyond that by taking into account the organic processes through which cities grow, encompassing the diverse communities, but also another great inspiration for me has been gardening, right? When you garden. It's not just about that first grand act of engineering. It's about adapting to the land because not all seeds grow in the same way and not everything that you first considered to be a weed is a weed. And so in this way, successful story world design sets the foundation for cohesive narratives, heroes, spaces, platforms, and experiences and This success is not just measured by external engagement and the hype that it could create. It is also how do you communicate the future vision that you are creating, not just putting out products, right, but every product creating new opportunities in the world to the stakeholders of the brand and for the government to their own leaders. And it's not just about being reactive, but really proactive in how you shape the future. So sci-fi serves as a lot of inspiration for us. But we have this misconception that it predicts the future. More than anything, it prototypes, sometimes misdirecting us to think that something is futuristic, when really it is not. Many a time it has actually closed down our imagination. To what actually is interesting. And so much of today's misperceptions about the future have in fact been shaped by sci-fi bias, and it has rendered ground fertile for misinformation and especially a lot of misconceptions around science. We think of AI development leading to consciousness as some kind of natural fact, when really it is a sci-fi fantasy, not proven by science. We think that Mars colonialism is a real thing and it is a frontier of rocket engineering rather than biology. And in a way sci-fi is to blame for it. So if we acknowledge that it is those that control the fantasy. Control the future. How we would like them, us to wield that fantasy. Dystopia is one of the two most popular ways to think about the future. But the issue with that is that it's not any more caution tale. Regurgitation of doom and gloom has become A reason to disengage. If we believe that the future is doomed and there's nothing we can do about it, well, then we do nothing about it, but also possibly worse. It becomes a product roadmap because there will always be those that will want to make money, not just as the world burns but also by setting the world on fire and so utopias are oppositioned as the answer to dystopianism, but historically they have been deeply homogenous and exclusionary. In a way, if disabled or elderly people still exist? Is it even utopia? And what does it take? What kind of ends justify the means? Right? So it's not really a binary, it's two reverse sides of the same coin. Every historical utopia. Has been somebody else's dystopia and today's techno utopian propositions are not really that different. Famous venture capitalists such as Marc Andreessen I unironically quotes. Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, who was an author of Futurist manifesto, but also of fascist manifesto and an ideologue of Mussolini. So it's not that. We should not be critical, as again, Mark Andresen identifies tech ethicists and tech criticists as the enemies of progress in his techno optimist manifesto. I believe that to think that what we currently have is not the best thing that we can have is actually the most optimistic approach. So when we acknowledge the power of fiction, future fiction specifically. When we try to apply that world design strategy to real world challenges, what are the traps we shouldn't fall into? And so, the first trap is really nostalgia. It's trying to return to the past rather than learn from it. Our capacity for memory, for remembering our past, did not evolve to remember the past, but really to make better future decisions. But in a way, we cannot succumb to technos solutionism, techno fetishism, or dare I say, even technocultism. In this battle today between scientists and Tedros, we must prioritize science, technology, is actually a material manifestation and outflow of scientific research. Without that fundamental science. Innovation stops happening. So always take the side of a scientists that are telling you inconvenient truths. Now, I find a very interesting real world example of these two different story world designs. Taken by the government, are the Project 2025 versus Made in China 2025. One tries to escape material reality, the other leans into it. And the emerging common point between religious extremists in the Western world and many of its cultists is that they both believe in the fantasy oft times coming. Bought brought by religious rapture or AI god slash demon, A nerd rapture. The most striking difference for me between what the most powerful people in America versus China pronounced about the future is that in the former they want to escape the body in favor of matrix mind uploading. They want to escape the earth in favor of Mars colonialism and in the other, it's about leaning in this contextual reality of the land. With the millennial lineage before and after, and I think it's so important to lean into that reality as inconvenient as it is and sure ecological civilization might seem like a distant dream. But surely it is more realistic than Mars as the plan B. Now, over the long term control of delusional voices, Can really save us from that social fracturing. The answer to that is finding a way to awaken our genuine scientific curiosity and reinforce information literacy. The change we need is not going to happen overnight, but we start with identifying our shared yes visions and informed hope is key in that. Informed hope is not doing something because it's easy. But because I we understand the scope of the challenges and we embrace this amazing opportunity to learn. So what if the future could be everything we hope for. But not what we were told to expect. Narratives are not really enough anymore. There were beautiful narratives put out with the great reset of 15 Minute City. And what happened? These think tank manifestos got. Misinterpreted. And became a fodder to conspiracies that flooded YouTube. So putting out words, putting out manifestos, putting out narratives is not enough. We need to bring people into that world that we say we are designing or making policy to words. We need to flesh it out visually sensorially. And so we could really be learning from the best techniques of cier world building to design future scenarios and world prototypes beyond these finite visions of utopia and dystopia and find insights in the edges that we have overlooked. And could the future actually be? What we hope for. But so very different to what sci-fi conditioned us to be, to believe. Maybe it's not about the flying cars. As replacement of the Uber for the uber rich, but about rewilding city skies. Now, that does not mean that we should be Luddite and abandon technological research or scientific developments. It's about thinking how these technologies, these innovations serve real utilities. There will be plenty need for flying cars for emergency services, disaster leave, etc. etc. etc. So my proposition for the practical guides beyond utopianism and dystopianism is protopia. Now protopia differently than utopia and dystopia is more of a process than a destination. And instead of being this vague middle ground between the two, it is imagination beyond it, understanding status quo. But not resigning to it. It is meant to be expanded and questioned. It is not a better future built through magical tech, but upon evolved values assisted by the bleeding edge scientific research and technological development. And could we try and imagine this path to a future that is not merely sustainable but actually regenerative. Sustainability is not exciting for the people, right? It just feels like ah. Another Lecture I need to, to listen through, right? But when we propose something that is regenerative, that offers new way of doing things, when we lean into the embodiment, rather than disembodiment. We might find something joyful to strive for and joy and imagination is where it all begins. So this is a bit of a cheat sheet, the six principles that are not meant to be considered as some kind of hierarchical mahos pyramid of needs, but really, As interlinked circles to be thought of as together plurality. What if instead of tolerance we fostered curiosity into dependence? What if we acknowledge that the real strength is not in not needing others but about weaving these resilient systems, regeneration, what if we moved past. User centric, human centric into life centered design and recognize how biology is not this kind of strain which should transcend but infinite source for inspiration. Creative forcing. What if we assume that Creativity is the beginning of a solution to all problems. Sensory embodiment, again, recognizing how future doesn't happen to technology because technology, but to our bodies and to our bodies and spiritual fulfillment, right? Because in the absence of that, conspiracies and cultism rises. So I know I threw a lot of big ideas at you, but I hope that protopian story world design could become this cheat sheet whenever you approach any project that you're working on. Not specifically something that requires immediate foresight practice because none of us in this room. Is doing technology or marketing or business. With every action, no matter how big or small, we are shaping the future. But the future also gets shaped by our apathy. So this is an opportunity to get curious, to learn, to disentangle ourselves from a sci-fi biases we've been conditioned to, but also see the power of creatives and imagers. that have inspired us. That have inspired some of the world's most powerful people to design towards a particular future. And maybe we need new inspiration. Maybe all of us need to become future story world designers. Thank you.

One of Asia’s leading insurers has made a bold bet: that the future of its business lies not just in covering illness, but in helping its policy holders live “healthier, longer, better lives.” To that end, it is weaving data, AI, and behavioral science into everyday life — turning fitness tracking, preventive care, and personalized health nudges into core services. Is the strategy working? Can an insurer truly influence customers’ daily behavior? And is this innovative model as good for business as it is for well-being?

Live Long and Prosper: How Insurers are Using Data, Technology, and Behavioral Science to Extend "Healthspans" - and Deepen Relationships with Customers

Welcome back everyone. Please come in and take your seats. Uh, we'll start our afternoon session. Our next session explores a quiet revolution in insurance where data, AI, and behavioral science are not only assessing risk but can actively shape daily habits. From movement and sleep to preventive care, this new model is being deployed by one of Asia's leading insurers, and it raises important questions. Can an insurer influence behavior at scale? And do healthy customers really lead healthier lead to healthier returns? To give us some answers, I'm pleased to welcome Stuart A. Spencer, Group chief marketing officer of AIA Group. Stuart, please. Let's put you in. Thank you, Stuart, for being with us. Pleasure. It's a real treat to have Stuart. Um, AIA is one of the most extraordinary and innovative insurance companies that I've ever, uh, studied, and, uh, Stewart has been right at the center of of this grand project that they have undertaken, um. How many people here are familiar with the with the AIA theme? I see it all the time on the sides of buses in Hong Kong, but maybe Stuart, you could start off by telling us what it is. So Clay, first of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here at AIA. Our purpose is healthier, longer, and better lives. It's not per se a theme, it's not a bumper sticker, it is not a slogan, it is not a tagline. It fundamentally serves as our north star as an organization. It guides the decisions we make. It guides how we operate, how we think, what we do, how we allocate capital, and fundamentally underpins the strategic priorities that we define as an enterprise. The reason that our purpose is healthy, longer better lives is that we are the largest pan-Asian life and health insurer. Operating in 18 markets across this part of the world with 40 million customers and you can appreciate. We want our customers, given the business that we're in life and health, to live healthier, longer and better lives, and what we heard this morning is that this part of the world is experiencing unprecedented levels of socioeconomic and even political transformation, an incredible backdrop of rising incomes and lifting hundreds and hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, raising living standards, and so on. But behind that in a way, success, that veneer masks the fact that we have a massive proliferation of noncommunicable lifestyle diseases, and if I can, let me in a way to socialize and contextualize all of this for all of you. Um, lifestyle diseases that are non-communicable, that are essentially brought upon by our own behavior or potentially poor behavior, bring on ailments, hazards such as diabetes, heart attack, stroke, cancer, hypertension, chronic lung disease, and these are triggered by choices that we make choices about how we or we do not exercise or lack of exercise, poor diet. Excessive alcohol, smoking, um, stress, pollution, all of this serves to create a a fairly dangerous cocktail. And what we see is that today across Asia, even here in Malaysia, close to 70%. Of all disease diagnoses represent lifestyle disease. 70%, 70% in other nations it's even higher, 80%. Australia close to 90%. So in a way we say that Asia is getting wealthier but not healthier. We call it affluenza. And you can appreciate, therefore, that for us it's a crisis in many levels it's a public health catastrophe. We see super high levels of childhood obesity, and this is not a criticism and just an observation, the 10:30 break that we had here. I looked at the offerings and it was Deep fried and wok fried and the glucose content of those shake those cakes and pandan, I said to myself, this is the quintessential reason why we have the situation that we have that that has the capacity, the propensity clay to undermine, sabotage, derail, and torpedo all this incredible infrastructure. Transformation and the pace of economic development that we spent this morning discussing behind all of that, you have the human piece and you can't work well if you're unwell and Hence our focus to cultivate, enable, realize healthy and longer, better lives has both a community as well as commercial dimension that is unassailable. Tell me a little bit about how AIA came to this, you know, the journey of how it came to this this focus, because, um, you know, I look at other insurers, particularly in Asia, you don't typically think of insurers. As as being concerned about lifestyle lifestyle coaches they're looking at lifestyle statistics and odds and you know, calculating their premiums accordingly, but it's really unusual that you are hands on getting involved trying to shape people's behaviors. Well, we went IPO in 2010 when we disengaged from AIG, our former parent, and at that time we billed ourselves as the real life company. Which some of you may remember. And when I rejoined the company in 2017, I examined that because I felt that we were saying something about ourselves. We weren't really discussing our customers. And we found that there was a play on words. People misunderstood what we were talking about. We were trying to infer that life has its share of ups and downs, but AIA understands that the good and bad we'll always be there with you for you with a real life company. We understand real life. But unfortunately or fortunately, many people misunderstood it as are saying that we were the only real life insurance company. All the others were fake. So I realized that we were just not only were we not expressing what we actually do, we weren't articulating a commitment to our customers in any way. And we were being misunderstood and the clincher was our CEO at the time when I told our CEO at the time that 40% of the people that we researched misattributed that to Great Eastern, one of our competitors. He was like, OK, enough's enough. So we undertook a fairly detailed and lengthy process of introspection of self-examination, of trying to understand. How we were perceived truly peel the onion to determine what business we are really in, and ultimately what is the good we want to do for society, what is the difference that we want to make? What is the legacy we want to leave behind as an enterprise? Um, we were in business for over 100 years and we said, OK, what do we, what do we actually, what do people think we do? And it was clear with our launch of AIA Vitality and a recognition that we need to drive behavioral change that our purpose truly was about enabling healthier, longer, and better lives and in my capacity I have to prove it. I have to make it tangible. I have to make it unassailable and abundantly clear, and that's what we spend our time. Conveying, doing, creating in the marketplace. A real challenge to try to communicate that message, that purpose across 18 radically different markets. It's less challenging than you think because what underpins all of this is really as you opened up the shift that we've made from being a traditional you die we pay life insurer, purely transactional, not relational. To an insurer that understands we need to cultivate, deepen and strengthen lifetime relationships, lifelong relationships, not transactional relationships, because we're in the people business. We sell long term products and it is absolutely imperative. Let me repeat, absolutely imperative that if you are in this business. With the backdrop of lifestyle disease, this inexorable proliferation of lifestyle disease, what are you going to do? Are you going to sit on the sidelines and hope for the best, hope that your actuaries price the products properly and that your actuarial curves, your mortality, morbidity will ultimately turn out the way you want, or do you take a stand, or do you become actively engaged and positively affirmatively intrusive? In the lives of your customers and shape behavior. If you are in our industry today, And you are not actively trying to get your customers to live healthier, longer, and better lives and be more a behavioral change catalyst than you are purely an underwriter, then you are absolutely missing a trick, that's fascinating. a little bit about how you engage and the sort of things that you do to influence behavior. So, we do a lot of marketing and we have a brand ecosystem that tries to make us fundamentally synonymous with healthy longer, better lives. You want people to think that AIA are the healthy and longer, Better lives people, but our principal platform is AIA Vitality. AIA Vitality is a science-backed, wellness-based application. That is very simple in its design and very clear in its purpose. Know your health, improve your health, get rewarded. We know and we understand behavioral economics. We know people need rewards. They need incentives because there's this incredible knowing, doing gap. We all have it. I knew I needed to stop drinking, but I didn't do anything about it until my headaches were unbearable. So people know that about their health. People want our research is clear. People want to be healthier. They want a tool. They want a helping hand. They want, they want guidance. They want advice. They want affirmation, and they don't want to feel intimidated about embarking on a health care journey. So how does how does vitality work? I mean, just walk through it. I can pull it out, but I'm not. It is very rewarding and it is very structured, so you determine the type of um activity, physical activity you want to do and you track. I've got, I've got my wearable. I've I've got two watches. People ask me all the time, why do I have two watches, I have two wrists, but this is, this is for uh. And this is for recognition of hard work, right? And so the program is very simple. It is purely digital and we continue to invest to make user journeys easier, more intuitive, more personalized, more customized. So Clay has clay's vitality. I have my vitality, and the thinking behind it really is that. We want to try and better democratize our underwriting, our pricing, and our risk because the clay of today is not the clay of 30 years ago. You may have taken out a life insurance policy when you started a family 30 years ago, but You change as a risk. You evolve as a human being, and your risk profile parameters change as well. So it's by no means static, and what vitality does, it rewards people for taking better care of themselves. So your premiums are adjusted based on your year over year engagement in the program. So if you hit your vitality points target, we will reward you by reducing your premiums. If you take better care of yourself, why should you pay and subsidize the people in the risk pool who don't take care of themselves? So we're rewarding you and we're acknowledging your great behavior and it's Going right into your pocketbook, you're paying us less and in so doing we create this virtuous circle of what we call shared value better for clay, it's better for AIA, and it's better for society. When we look at the Asia Pacific cost of the disease burden, it is, it is beyond the $1 trillion right? So the impact on productivity is. Extreme not only financially but also for society as well. And you take the, you take that and then you take the massive protection gap that we have across Asia. The insurance that people have versus the insurance people need is also estimated about $0.5 trillion and this is in the backdrop of 2030. 60% of the global middle class will be here in Asia, and we've learned post pandemic. That people recognize the need for private health care more than ever. People suffered through the democratization of the devastation of the pandemic and recognized that sickness, illness is inevitable, and for younger people death may be distant. But sickness is inevitable, and so we see a surge in demand for private health care, and we are the largest pan-Asian provider of medical insurance today. And how can you measure this in outcomes? Is it working? How can you tell? Yeah, so we're maniacal about measurement, as you can appreciate, and we've undertaken longitudinal research since the inception of AIA Vitality across all the markets in which we operate. And we want to track what is the impact that this program is truly having on mortality and morbidity and ultimately longevity because that is the business that we're in. So we track key, I would say biometric KPIs. We track BMI, we track HbA1C, we track LDL, we track blood pressure, of course we measure heart rate. We have millions and millions of workouts every day, and what we've learned is. There's absolutely a pixie dust vitality effect that takes place. Our vitality customers claim less. They recommend us more on MPS. They buy more from us in terms of upsell, cross-sell, and we've seen great outcomes in both mortality and morbidity extension. So we have clinical improvements and we have commercial improvements. And on the clinical side we've seen real reductions in HbA1c. I'm an example. I'm a living proof. My HbA1c was dangerously high. I'm Vitality Platinum now. My HbA1C has come way down. So we've seen, we've got. measure health from unhealthy to healthy across BMI, HbA1C, LDL, etc. and we see sustained improvement based on the degree of engagement in the program. So you're measuring this partly through wearables, but also presumably through actual visits to healthcare providers work. So in the Know your health, improve your health, get rewarded, it's critical that people do what we call a vitality health check because the idea is to shift the paradigm. Completely away from diagnosis, treatment, and rehab to prediction, prevention, early detection, early intervention, guys, we don't want our customers to get cancer. We want our customers to discover that they may have a propensity for cancer early on. So we're trying to shift that focus completely to prevention, and vitality is the quintessential, as I said, science-backed platform that's ultimately designed to drive prediction and prevention. So how much do recent advances in both kind of wearable kind of hardware gadget technology and AI, you know, large language incredible. I mean, the amount of information we now possess about our customers and how that can feed into how we communicate, what we offer, how we guide their journeys, and you know we've been talking all morning about AI. Um, you know, we have enterprise-wide work that's underway to optimize the impact of AI, not that we become AIA per se, but that we are intelligent in our in our usage and given our healthcare business, given Vitality Vitality have just come out with Vitality AI, which I saw a demo the other day which is really fantastic, which is super intuitive. And it will help engage even more customers in a much more personalized way, and that's what people want today. Show me, you know me. You want, you want to believe that I understand you, that I know you, I understand your needs, I can anticipate your needs, and that I value you as a customer. All of this is being fed in to hyper personalize what we know about you so that our communications with you and our engagement with you makes you feel like you're understood and you're valued. And that's crucial. How much does it help to kind of bring customers together in this effort? I, you know, think of, uh, in Hong Kong, uh, you know, the, the Hong Kong I, the big Ferris wheel, has the AIA brand of it and it has this amazing vitality center underneath it. Tell us about that and how that works and and why you. So look, I mean, we are determined to give back to the community if if our purpose is to enable healthier, longer, better lives, then we're we want everybody, people who aren't our customers who will never be our customers, we have an effort called AIA 1 billion. We, we are committing to engage a billion people, uh, to live a healthier, longer life and, and take a positive action that improves their health by 2030 and we are at 500 and something million now mid mid-decade. So our effort is to is to drive social change. Our effort is to have social impact, guys, we are throwing everything in the kitchen sink to get people to recognize how important it is to be healthier and to do our part as the leader of our of the life insurance industry. To be heavyweight on influence and to trigger and catalyze those those moments that people rethink healthy, believe that they can be healthier, and then take active steps to become healthier, and that is an incredible thing to be able to catalyze. It's a remarkable thing, you know, we were talking earlier this morning with Dr. Kass about this idea of technology converging, but what I hear from you is that there's this conversion. Conversion of uh technology, data, uh uh you know uh hardware, but also understanding of human behavior, uh, and, and, uh, kind of a unique cultural awareness. I mean I cannot think of any other insurer that serves 18, you know, markets as radically different. Music. Look, it's about clarity. It's about courage, and ultimately it's about humanity. No chatbot, no robot, no website, um, no, you know, anime, um, Avatar is going to replace a caring, feeling, smart AIA agent who provides incredible advice sitting across the kitchen table looking. You in the eye and making sure that we are giving you a blanket of love, care and protection. It's never going to change, but what we will have are tools that enable that conversation to be even more enriching, even more personalized, even more productive. It's extraordinary. I mean, you must have an incredible cross-functional team to be able to deliver all those things. I'm blessed. Well, that's all the time we have. This has been a fascinating conversation, a unique, uh, company, uh, embarked on a unique, uh, uh, mission, uh, with a, with a very laudatory goal. Stuart, thank you so much for sharing your insights. Thank you for having me. Thank you. OK, take care, buddy. Bye bye.

Influence & Co.

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