Owning the Tech Stack with David Gibbs, Former CEO of Yum! Brands

Episode Transcript

David Gibbs: One of the greatest attributes you can have as a leader is to be unreasonable. I mean it in the right way, but if you're not pushing your team, you're never going to get anything than a normal result. The way you achieve extraordinary things is set really high bars for yourself and your team and push to get there. And even if you fall a little short, you're still going to do way better than you would have if you just set reasonable targets.

Sarah Elk: David Gibbs has just stepped away from an astonishing 36 years of working at Yum!, the fast food corporation that encompasses KFC, Pizza Hut, Habit Burger and Grill, and Taco Bell.

Andrew Ng: Delicious food powered by technology. And whereas a lot of business leaders are talking about AI, David's one of the ones that has actually successfully taken this to scale and rolled out new customer experiences to huge numbers of franchises in a way that's driving real business growth.

Sarah Elk: I'm Sarah Elk.

Andrew Ng: I'm Andrew Ng.

Sarah Elk: And this is Winning with AI. Well, David, thank you so much for being here with us. We're so excited to have you after such a big life change.

David Gibbs: Great to spend time with both of you.

Sarah Elk: What does it feel like to have made such a significant change?

David Gibbs: It actually feels pretty natural. I mean, obviously I was at Yum! for 36 years and I certainly miss the day-to-day with all of my friends and my Yum! family. But at the same time, it's been nice to transition to a different part of my career and have a little more free time. And most importantly, to see Chris Turner, who's took over as Yum! CEO and the rest of the team that I handpicked and I've been cheering on for many years to see them thriving and doing so well. And that's been a fun part of this as well.

Sarah Elk: Yeah, what an incredible legacy. You oversaw one of the most operationally complex businesses in the world. When did you realize that technology and AI wasn't just interesting, but existentially important to Yum!'s future?

David Gibbs: Oh, honestly, I've always been intrigued by technology going back to my days as a little kid and college. I wanted to be a computer science major, but the school I went to didn't have that, so I was an applied math major and took as many computer science classes as I could. And so my fascination with technology goes way back. And it was sort of cool for me that the last chapter of my career was making a mark on a business through technology. But if you grow up in the young business like I did, you see the role that technology plays and how much of a difference maker it can be to consumers. And I've had experiences in the business going back to when I was running the Pizza Hut brand, for example, and I saw us suffer from not having control of our technology and not having the latest technology that I knew once I got into the more senior jobs like CFO and ultimately CEO, that that was going to be an area I was going to lean in on.

Sarah Elk: It's interesting because not every CEO is taking action. Everybody's talking about AI, but I do feel like there's a segment of CEOs that are on the sidelines that are in more of a wait and see mentality on maybe the next release of software is going to solve the problem differently and sort of waiting to get in the game. What advice would you have for CEOs that haven't been as transformational as you have on the need to get in the game?

David Gibbs: I wouldn't necessarily hold yourself to the standard of, you have to have a vision for what role technology is going to play in your business five and 10 years out that's very specific because as we all know, the world changes, what you think may happen in five years, probably it's going to be something slightly different. So to me, it was more about recognizing that technology is going to keep improving. It's going to have a bigger and bigger role in our business and we need to get started on it. So when we started this journey over 10 years ago, this was not an AI journey. This was just a basic technology journey to be a leader in the restaurant industry with basic technology.

Now, things have evolved as we built out a world-class team where we saw opportunities leaned in, things like our NVIDIA partnership. We didn't envision any of that or voice AI in the drive-through when we started this many years ago. But I think it's more about just having the confidence to know that the technology is going to have a huge impact on your business and you better get your team ready for that and leaning in and starting to build up capabilities and don't hold yourself to some standard where you have to have it all figured out.

Andrew Ng: So you've done a lot of projects at Yum!, and you mentioned voice AI, which is actually one of my favorites. A lot of publicity really changes the customer experience when you drive up to Taco Bell. You can use AI to help place the order. We'd love to hear the story behind that.

David Gibbs: Obviously, it's been something that's been out there for a number of years as a possibility, but everybody struggled to bring it to life. I'm really proud of the work our team has done. I think like on any technology project, if you hold yourself to 100% perfection standard, it'll never get off the ground. The technology we've developed works 80, 90% of the time. It's being adopted by our franchisees and rolled out. I think we're close to passing 700 stores or so now deploying the technology. And it's a great example of, I think, the way technology and humans are going to work together. It frees up our employees inside the store to do other tasks.

We find that our employees have greater satisfaction in their jobs when we roll out voice AI in the drive-through because instead of trying to take an order in the drive-through, serve a drink and collect cash, we've taken one of the tasks off of their plate and made it a little bit easier. But they're also there as a stop gap if the voice AI somehow gets caught up and can't complete an order, they just step right in and seamlessly take over the order and take it over the finish line. It gets a lot of press. Obviously, there's social media fun of sometimes when it doesn't work, but for the vast majority of the time, it works great and it's been a game changer for us and obviously we're rolling that out across our system.

Andrew Ng: So a lot of fast food restaurants have attempted some sort of voice AI and many of them candidly did not work. Why did yours work and what were the things that made a difference?

David Gibbs: One of the tenets that I think we settled on early on is we were going to have the best technology in the restaurant industry because it was going to be built by restaurant operators. Restaurant operators building technology for restaurant operators. We had the restaurant industry expertise. I think a lot of times if you take an off-the-shelf product that's designed for a more generic use, you're going to be less likely to be successful in your very specific use case. So everything we did was done with hundreds of years of restaurant experience as we designed the product, even though we had some third parties involved obviously in creating the product. I think that was a big factor in it. And then our willingness, we are the largest restaurant company in the world by unit count. We have enormous scale. We have reallocated a ton of G&A to technology and being able to make that kind of scale bet, very few people can do something like that.

Andrew Ng: Yeah. Actually, I like that. The willingness to allocate budget, just betting that the J-curve will eventually pay off, which clearly it seems to have done for you. I think that's a good model for more businesses to follow.

David Gibbs: Yeah. Sounds a little bit easier than it was actually to execute. If you think about it, we had to invest ahead of the curve on a lot of this stuff. So we're under pressure every quarter, every year to produce earnings growth year over year, and yet we had to plow back money that was being invested to create future growth down the road. I think the Yum! team, the leaders around the world did a great job because we were able to hold our G&A steady across the entire business, but what we did is reallocate from other parts of the business into technology. So that kept investors happy because they didn't see us taking on some additional costs. And at the same time, they knew we were creating something that was going to create long-term shareholder value.

One of the reasons we could do that is Yum! is a quite successful business. We're growing very fast. We build a new restaurant every other hour somewhere in the world. So even though our brands are 70 plus years old, we're definitely the classic definition of a high growth business. So that growth allowed us to keep growing while reallocating G&A and keeping this algorithm of ours that produces its X amount of profit every year flowing. In fact, we took the algorithm up during the journey. So remember, we had these headwinds from having to invest in technology, so I was very proud of the way we navigated all that.

Sarah Elk: David, I loved your comment about real operators sort of making it really work at the frontline. How did you approach testing and scaling? I once had a CFO tell me that the change management bar was no noise. And as you mentioned in the world of social media, that's almost an impossibility, particularly when you're changing the customer offering, which I think you are amazingly brave and bold enough to do. How did you think about testing and scaling?

David Gibbs: Well, one of the features of working in a business like ours is we have 61,000 or so restaurants, 60,000 of them are owned by franchisees. So you can't just tell a franchisee, "Hey, here's something new. It's unproven. Let's put it in your restaurant and see if it works." It keeps us honest, striving towards the highest bar of we've got to get this to work in their restaurants. They put their hard-earned money at risk to buy these restaurants and operate them, and they are not going to adopt the technology and pay for it if it doesn't meet their standards. So we had a natural governor in there as we've been working on these technologies.

Now, we had lots of franchisees to their credit raise their hand and say, "I want to be part of the test." The franchisees always make anything we're working on better because they bring that real restaurant operator perspective to the tools that we're trying to create. So it was just this give and take of, we've got this idea for an application, does anybody want to try it with us and help us develop it? But it always had to pass all these gates before it could get out into the broader use in the system, which frankly prevented us from making some catastrophic rollout before its time.

Sarah Elk: One of the aspects of that is that you owned your technology. I think that's different than what we've seen from others who have made choices to use software, but you went on an acquisition spree. Can you talk a little bit about that and why that was important to building out the platform?

David Gibbs: Yeah. Look, this whole journey on technology of really ramping up began when I came into the CFO role and Greg Creed and I, who was the CEO then talked about how we needed to be investing more in this area. It seems rather apparent that if you're in an industry like the restaurant industry, which is incredibly competitive, we're the scale player. If we were just going to go buy off the shelf software, we're immediately just leveling the playing field with everybody else. There's no reason to get a better experience at a Yum! restaurant than you would at a mom and pop restaurant that's buying the same software. So to me, it became obvious we needed to own the proprietary elements of the technology experience that would give us a competitive advantage versus everybody else in the industry. We didn't buy every aspect of it.

We don't own a cloud storage business. We just pay for that because that's a commodity and there's no advantage to owning that. But for some of the technology that we think really gives us an advantage in the industry, we wanted to own that. And that strategy has worked out quite well. We also had a real advantage in that when you're in 157 countries and you've got the talented team we have around the world and you're working with different local vendors on implementing different technologies and trying things, you actually can get a glimpse into what really works and what doesn't. So we would buy small companies in far away places because we had a real experience in seeing their technology work. That was another area of competitive advantage that we leaned in on that very few people could even find the companies that we bought, let alone get the benefits from scaling them.

Andrew Ng: And how do you govern that?

Sarah Elk: It makes it sound so easy, right?

Andrew Ng: Yeah. And I feel like my team at AI Aspire, we see it, was sent a list of about 300 project ideas by one company, and we're just sorting through how do you even manage 300 projects. But for you, I think the scale is even vastly greater across multiple nations, multiple brands. How do you govern all this?

David Gibbs: Yeah. And really, if you think about our business, 157 countries, we tend to run a decentralized model. I've always believed in not trying to make every decision in the corporate office that empowering your teams in the field. That's how you get great talent. That's how you adapt your business to the local tastes of the local customers. So we run a decentralized model, and then on top of that, we have this further complication of our stores are run by franchisees who don't work for the company. They have to do very few things that we ask them to do. We have to convince them. We had a lot of barriers to getting stuff done, but at the end of the day, I think everybody in our system around the world recognized that in the restaurant industry, technology was going to be a game changer and a differentiator between the winners and the losers. So there was a common spirit of we've got to lean into this area, making the individual decisions about which companies to buy, which technologies to roll out.

Sarah Elk: You also make that sound so easy, David. I will say that from having had lots of conversations with other CEOs that might be in the middle of this platform journey, they're in the first part where it feels like you're taking control away from business divisions and you're centralizing technology and coming through this standardization or platformization process. Surely you must have navigated some sort of tension internally to get to the other side of that, to then operate more decentralized again from a platform standpoint. How did you think about that?

David Gibbs: Yeah. Look, if I look back upon the last few years and what surprised me, it was politically harder and culturally harder to align the entire company on let's have the best technology in the restaurant industry, most efficient, lowest cost for our franchise partners. That was harder than I thought. I thought that would become self-evident and everybody would jump on board, not the case. I wouldn't want to use the word easy, but creating the technology probably wasn't as difficult as I thought. And that's only because we assembled a world-class team and we invested the G&A behind them. But the harder part was what you said. You go to each of the brands and you say, "Okay, we're going to create now one efficient centralized technology organization, which means you're going to have to give up some of your resources to the center to improve the efficiency and speed to market for all of us."

And those weren't easy conversations. And certainly we had some folks that were hard to get on the bus, but for the most part, incredibly proud about how we brought the entire organization together. Now, we did a lot of specific things to do that. We were one of their first companies to roll out Copilot and we created an internal AI academy and we hired two Harvard Business School professors to literally do 20 hours of training for each of our top 250 leaders. All of those things sort of helped create common language about how we referred to things and common shortcuts about what we were trying to get done and went into the overall equation of just landing the idea that we can pivot from being a traditional restaurant company to being a modern restaurant company with contemporary and class leading technology.

Sarah Elk: David, you mentioned the NVIDIA partnership. What role has that played and how did that come about?

David Gibbs: Very proud of the NVIDIA partnership. A couple of years ago, I was talking to our chief technology officer and we decided we'd just go play a visit out to them and talk to them about what they were doing and see if there's any common areas we should be working together. And it was one of those meetings where, to be honest, it was a little bit of indifference when we first walked in the room, but then when we started to explain our capabilities, the people that we had on the team and the investments that we were making, they immediately saw that there was a really big opportunity for us to work together. So by working directly with NVIDIA, we're sort of cutting out the middleman in a lot of cases and we're able to work with them to develop technology that works with their software and their hardware better by working directly with them. But I think that partnership is only going to grow over time. And I know they've even referenced it on their earnings call, so I know that they're proud of the work that we're doing together.

Sarah Elk: That's great. You mentioned the technology part may be easier than the change management part. How would you think about the different aspects of what it took to drive the transformation at Yum!? As you reflect back on the journey, are there things that you would do differently? Is there advice that you would give other CEOs on how to navigate what some of those challenges may have been?

David Gibbs: First, I would say this is a never ending journey. I want to make it clear. We're not done with the journey. We're done with chapter one. Chapter one was, let's buy or build our own technology stack that is proprietary and works better than anything else in the industry. We think we've done that, and then let's start rolling it out. That's chapter one. Chapter two is let's refine that. Let's start leaning... There's all sorts of areas we haven't even touched yet that we know have tons of potential. Let's roll it out to every restaurant in our system and maybe beyond and really get the benefits of what we've built. So this journey is just like any other challenge that any CEO faces. When you're at the top of the organization, it's a little bit lonely. You have to be convicted in where you want to take everything. You want to listen, you want to get feedback, but at the end of the day, something like this requires leadership leading in and making sure that the organization understands you're not going back.

Andrew Ng: And David, one thing you were early to is leaning into build, on the build versus buy decision, but we have to work with vendors. I'd love to hear more about how you approach that. I know you've had some great experiences with vendors, some mixed experiences of vendors, but when you decided not to build, but instead work with a vendor, what were your principles and then how did that work out well?

David Gibbs: One of my early experiences on technology was our e-commerce capability cutting off during the Super Bowl one year. And when I asked the team what happened, we were working with a small third party, great group of people, but it's 20 people managing millions of orders on a Super Bowl Sunday. I asked them, "What happened? Why did it cut off for five minutes?" And apparently somebody, legend has it, somebody tripped over a cord and disconnected it. So I filed that away and I said, "Okay, we don't want to be dependent on any system or any third party that can possibly bring our system down that isn't up to the scale of the business that we have." So that was where I started leaning in towards let's start to develop our own technology so that we had control of it. But obviously, as I mentioned earlier, we have a mix of building our own, buying when it's appropriate, and then working with third parties.

Even the stuff that we build our own sometimes is supported by third parties within the technology stack. But if you think about the restaurant industry, there are 15 to 20 different support systems that you need to run a restaurant, e-commerce, a point of sale system, a back of house system, inventory management, on and on and on. If you have 15 or 20 different companies, if it's all outsourced and all 15 or 20 of them are trying to run your restaurant, you're invariably going to run into situations where the systems can't talk to each other and things get slowed down. So that's what we've tried to do at Yum! is to build a seamless stack of technology that we have enough control over so that it all talks to each other. And if you want to make a change overnight, the next morning, we know it'll work in all of those systems without creating any flaws.

Andrew Ng: And does this change over time? One thing that became really apparent in the AI world just in the last year or so is the cost of building is falling precipitously because AI can write software. So the cost of writing software is really falling every month. But you had a very long tenure at Yum!. So did your inclination to build versus buy change over these decades?

David Gibbs: I started the journey thinking buy, because I had had some bad experience with build. I think that's probably common for most leaders that have dealt with technology over the years. 10, 20 years ago, it was hard to build, hard to get stuff to work. That has changed and the build option is becoming a better and better option. I think the best example we have of that, there's some story in our system where we hired like a high school intern and they developed an application that as part of our tech stack that saved us a fortune that we were paying to a third party and they did it during their three-week experience with us as a high school intern. So I do think it's easier to build now. And certainly, you have AI assistance in coding and building. So I imagine we're entering an era where building is going to become more and more attractive to companies like Yum!. But when you see something that's working, if you can get it at a reasonable cost, that's a pretty good shortcut to get up and running.

Andrew Ng: And that as you said something remarkable, not just about building, but about your organizational culture that a high school intern can write game changing software.

David Gibbs: Well, it obviously makes for a great story and I think it speaks to Yum!'s culture. One of the things that I'm very passionate about is to have a risk taking culture to take appropriate risks. But when you're successful as we've been, really the enemy is complacency. The enemy is, let's hire big companies, do things in big ways, let's not take any risks versus let's let a high school intern try to solve this problem, see what they come back with. And lo and behold, they had a great solution. So there's a lot wrapped up in that little anecdote and a lot of it is cultural.

Andrew Ng: And how do you do that?

Sarah Elk: Particularly in the moment that we're in, I think a lot of companies are really wanting what you have created. Did that innovative risk-taking culture exist when you started at Yum!? How did that come about?

David Gibbs: To some degree, it's in our DNA, because I mean, you don't build brands like we have, Taco Bell's 70 plus year old brand, but it feels like it was born yesterday and so relevant to today's consumer. You don't build brands like that without taking risks and without bringing in people that are risk-takers. I mean, the reason our brands are still relevant today is because we're constantly reinventing them.

Sarah Elk: I want to come back to the notion of building driving competitive advantage. I would've said in the past, maybe people might've said for fast food supply chain is sort of the competitive advantage moat. How do you think about competitive advantage for restaurant or fast food businesses going forward and the role that technology might play?

David Gibbs: The reality is whatever we have a competitive advantage on today, that gap will be closed. It's just the nature of technology. If we've got some technology that nobody else has, that will eventually get developed by others and it'll be ubiquitous. So it's a never ending game. If whatever we have is better than the competition, you can be sure they'll have something similar down the road and we've got to keep upping our game. That is the mentality I try to instill in everybody at Yum!. And that's why I think it's more important to have that mindset than it is to just have a finish line.

Andrew Ng: And coming back to what Sarah was asking, is the brand the moat? I feel like you built a sustaining franchise, and despite brilliant people, great leadership and all that, what is the moat? Is it the brand?

David Gibbs: The moat is a great word. And I actually use that word a lot in talking to our team about making sure we were building moats around everything we do so that we get an advantage that somebody else can't replicate. But there's no one thing. It's everything. You want your brand to be unique, nobody else to have anything like it. You want the experience in your store to be unique. Nobody else has anything like it. You want your food to be unique. In our industry, when you have a brand like Taco Bell, the entire menu of Taco Bell, basically almost nobody else sells any of those products anywhere else in the restaurant industry. Nobody else sells a Chalupa, Gordita. Those are unique to our brands. That's the greatest example of a brand with a huge moat around it in terms of what we serve and how customers think about the brand as a forever young brand. But moat is such a great word, Andrew. We are in the moat building business. In most businesses, you are. If you're not building a moat around what you got, then you're just the same as everybody else.

Andrew Ng: No, frankly, talking to you makes me want to go eat at a nearby Taco Bell and KFC.

Sarah Elk: Chalupa is for everyone.

David Gibbs: We welcome your business and I'm sure we have a store nearby.

Sarah Elk: I guess when you look back, David, are there any particular moments that stand out? CEOs that take on big, bold challenges, I feel like at least somewhere in there, there's a moment where you think to yourself, "Am I crazy for doing this?" Did you have any moments that caught your breath or that are memorable to you?

David Gibbs: In terms of moments that stand out in my mind, within 60 days of me taking over as CEO, we faced an existential crisis. You may remember early in the pandemic, sales were getting clobbered in restaurants, nobody was leaving their house. That changed over time and people realized, okay, I can get delivery and drive through and Yum! would be a great place to go to. But there were certainly moments when our existence was being challenged. So that certainly stands out. If I think back about the decisions we've made and successes and failures, everybody asks me that question all the time, "What advice do you have?" My best advice is move quicker. Whatever things that I delayed, wanted to build more consensus, wanted to reexamine the issue, get more perspective. If I knew it was the right direction to go, I probably should have moved quicker to do that, whether that be putting the right people in charge or whether it be leaning in on technology.

We did have a moment in 2019 where a group of us was in a restaurant at an offsite meeting and we were debating how much we wanted to lean in on technology. And we all talk about this moment in retrospect all the time. And we had decided that we were going to move a whole big pile of money into investing and expanding the number of people we have in tech. And I remember the trepidation that we all had about, okay, if this doesn't work, we're making a big bet because we've spent over a billion dollars on technology over the last few years building up what we have today. But even then, I think we all knew in our heart that this was going to work and that we didn't have a choice.

Andrew Ng: And clearly that sake of investment in technology worked out. I'm trying to think, could there have been an alternative universe where you would look back and say, "Boy, we really overinvested in technology." I find that they don't hear CEOs really saying that. We go and talk to CEOs, they do underinvest in things, but rarely have I heard people say, "Boy, we plowed a billion dollars into technology and I wish I hadn't." I'm sure it happens, but...

David Gibbs: No, I mean, now, could you spend the money more efficiently perhaps? Yeah, I'm sure there are elements along the journey that we could have done better. I'm not the technical expert on that. I deferred to my technical team on all that. They made all of those calls where they would bring forward the recommendations where we needed to build or buy and where we could rely on third parties.

Andrew Ng: I'm going to respectfully push back on that. I know you keep on saying this humble stuff [inaudible 00:27:10] all acknowledge a business leader, not an engineer these days, but I've also heard you tell me about how the team told you it'll take three weeks and you said, no, it can't take three weeks. And I think your ability to have some technical assessment to push back on the team to drive faster timelines, I think that actually made a difference.

David Gibbs: It's funny that you say that. I sort of jokingly, sort of serious, say one of the greatest attributes you can have as a leader is to be unreasonable. I mean it in the right way, but if you're not pushing your team to go beyond what a normal result would be, then you're never going to get anything than a normal result. The way you achieve extraordinary things is set really high bars for yourself and your team and push to get there. And even if you fall a little short, you're still going to do way better than you would have if you just set reasonable targets.

Andrew Ng: Actually, that's a great point. I think especially in this era with AI, frankly, no one really knows what's going to happen. And so it's a huge matter of judgment, how ambitious you want to be versus how timid you want to be. And I think the leaders that are a little bit more ambitious or maybe a lot more ambitious in this fog of war and teams with ambitious leaders will go further.

David Gibbs: Yeah. Look, obviously there's this trend towards things moving faster and faster, change happening faster and faster enabled by technology. That means you need a different kind of leader. The kind of leader that worked in the '50s when you could plan out four years in advance with certainty is not going to work in today. And so as we've always thought about hiring at Yum!, we're looking for people that embrace change, get excited by change, see the possibilities and aren't stuck in let's do things the way we've always done them.

Sarah Elk: It is interesting though, because I do think CEOs who know how software is built, and certainly, David, you mentioned having built software in college, maybe poker software, you'll have to remind me.

David Gibbs: I went to school in Baltimore, so we would go to Atlantic City and play Blackjack. So we taught ourselves how to count cards. So my senior thesis in college was to create a computer simulation of card counting in the eight deck blackjack game versus a two deck blackjack game. That was a fun application of my technology background.

Andrew Ng: Yeah, kind of this interesting analogy. Oh, by the way, I suck at blackjack and suck at poker, but that's just me. But I find it fascinating because there's some CEOs that will look at the project and say, "You know what? I think this project has a 30% chance of working. Let's do it." And then there are also CEOs, so only when they say, "I think this is a 90% chance of working. Let's do it." And I find that that skill at weighing the upside and the downside risk to place a whole bunch of bets, each of which has a 30% chance of working. It takes a unique style of leadership to go there and suffer a lot of failures, but then take the massive earnings from the wins when some of the bets really deliver.

David Gibbs: Well, one way to think about that in our business at least is we try a lot of new products and they don't all make it out of test. But one of the things I've learned over the years is you put something in test that doesn't work, but it gives you an insight to develop another product that does work. Those failures can be quite valuable. And I think it's really the same thing on technology. We've certainly tried some things that haven't worked, but they've informed our thinking on other aspects of our technology stack and made it better. And my guess is we'll go back to some of those things down the road as we get more and more capability.

Andrew Ng: When a team member says, "The CEO thinks this is a 30% chance of working." Is that a negative statement or amazing? It could actually have a 30% chance of working that hopefully we can test to your point at low cost. I find that that type of culture, it really lets the business do a lot more.

David Gibbs: Well, you think about the flip side of that. Would any of us want to work at a company where you know if you fail at something, if you take a risk and it fails, you're out, you're going to lose your job, you're going to get punished, you're going to get demoted? I mean, think about how crippling that would be, stifling everybody's creativity. You've got to create an environment where people are willing to push the envelope, come up with new ideas, won't feel chastised and fit like a failure if something doesn't work, will feel energized by the learnings they get from something not working and then apply it to the next great assignment that comes their way.

Sarah Elk: It's really impressive that you've been able to do that, not just across platform and some of the operational aspects, but even the customer offering and doing that at scale for millions of transactions across multiple brands. It's an amazing story. David, it was so nice to have you. Thank you so much for spending time with us.

Andrew Ng: Thank you.

David Gibbs: I enjoyed it so much. Thank you, Andrew and Sarah. It was fun to be with you.

Sarah Elk: Andrew, that was a great conversation. What I'm really thinking about in terms of takeaways is the power of a CEO with high digital acumen and David's software background and the impact that had on his ability to set bold goals and really push the team.

Andrew Ng: I think that actually summarizes it. In this era of uncertainty, leadership matters and that leader that pushes ahead will make a big difference.

Sarah Elk: And he took a partnership and build perspective, and I think a unique build perspective on how to create competitive advantage through his team.

Andrew Ng: Thank you so much, David, for the great conversation.

Sarah Elk: And we'll be back soon with more episodes of Winning with AI.