CEOs of JetBlue, Warby Parker, IBM, and more share their vision for the future workplace

This year’s Semafor World Economy was a who’s who of business and politics, from the CEO of Cisco to a senator from Virginia and a representative from the Dubai Economic Development Corporation.

Several leaders spoke about their employees, AI in the workplace, and how corporate culture is shifting.

On recruiting. “I still do final-round interviews for everybody at corporate, all of our store managers, the leadership of our manufacturing facilities, the leadership of our CX teams, because I want them to know that we care. I’m looking for people who are proactive—do their values align with the company? And part of that is, ‘learn to grow’ is one of our core values.”—Neil Blumenthal, co-founder and CEO, Warby Parker

“What they [other airlines] haven’t matched are people. I continue to firmly believe that JetBlue has some of the best people, because we hire people who are actually customers. One of the things we look at when we’re hiring is volunteers and a proxy for customer service.”—Joanna Geraghty, CEO, JetBlue

“You assess on behavioral characteristics that are more intrinsic and more broad. Those are things like creativity, leadership, potential, raw problem solving ability, commerciality. So if you shift a little bit the way you think about your talent in your organization…you’re going to get folks who think about the problem set critically, and as things shift, they can adapt, and they can be the future leaders of your organization.”—Alexander DiLeonardo, chief people officer, Citadel

On AI’s influence in the workplace. “Most of the tasks that are done in HR are pretty menial. We eliminated hundreds of people that were doing [manual paperwork requests]. But we didn’t eliminate them from the firm. Now we have them out on campus recruiting, creating higher value for the organization.”—Gary Cohn, executive chairman, IBM

“We have leadership AI training, especially for leaders, because they need to lead the way. And then we have an AI Academy for all of our workforce because we don’t want them to be anxious about it.”—Steve Nelson, president, Aetna

On building a culture. “We used to have the big black tie affairs, and it was led from the top and what we found is that what works best is we go to the people that are passionate about some areas. We have somebody that really loves the (Pittsburgh) Penguins hockey, and so we partner with the Penguins, and this person takes the lead on that…it’s the people in the workforce that are making the difference.”—David Burritt, CEO, US Steel

“We just opened a new corporate headquarters in New York City, into Manhattan West, and it’s amazing, this new place with all this energy has just our people. I was trying to get them into the office. I no longer even have to try. We’re oversold. People are coming in. They want to be together, and we’re seeing some of those trends, just in business and society in general—human connectivity.”—Tim Walsh, CEO, KPMG