Mark Abbott

We want to ride the wave, not fight the wave.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about where the world of work is going.

And then finally, I'm going to talk about how we're leveraging AI to help our clients ride the wave.

So that's the next 20 minutes.

So a little bit of background on me.

I started my career back in the 80s.

All right, so I'm an old dude.

And I started with a big bank, and they sent me down to Oklahoma City to work out bad oil and gas loans.

So real early in my career, I found out what happens when a company goes under and how it hurts lots of people.

Not just the investors, but the employees, the community, and even their vendors and their customers.

So it's not a good thing.

So I did really well at that, and I got to go anywhere I wanted to go in the bank, and I helped start a leveraged buyout finance business.

Started sitting on a bunch of boards, and I became fascinated with the art and science of building companies.

Helped build a company and a platform that was pretty successful.

Helped take the company public.

To this day, the company is over $50 billion, pretty well known in space.

And part of my journey was I loved data and collecting data and understanding why things are the way they are.

This takes us to the next thing because I like understanding things and why the way they are.

I ended up being on a bunch of boards and I actually got frustrated as a board member because I thought building a company is not this hard.

It's not that complicated, I should say.