The Futurum Group CEO breaks down how leaders are adapting to AI disruption and economic volatility.
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Show Notes:
In this Mission Matters episode, Adam Torres interviews Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group. Daniel shares insights from advising 100+ major tech CEOs and explores how AI, geopolitics, and data centers are converging to reshape the global economy—and what that means for business leaders today.
About Daniel Newman
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
About The Futurum Group
The Futurum Group is a family of companies with leading tech analysts offering insights + market research to the C-Suite. Every day, analysts, researchers, and advisors help business leaders from around the world anticipate tectonic shifts in their industries and leverage disruptive innovation to either gain or maintain a competitive advantage in their markets.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on be our Guest to apply. All right, so today I have Daniel Newman on the line. He’s CEO over at the Futurum Group.
Daniel, welcome to the show, Adam. Thanks for having me. So excited to have you here, Daniel. And for everybody listening, this interview is part of our Milken Global Conference coverage series, where we bring you the best of attendees and participants from the Milken Conference. And that’s held in the Global Milken Conference Beverly Hills, California.
And Daniel, just to get us kicked off here, I understand you participated in the conference and you were a speaker. Is that right? On a panel? Yeah, so it was actually first time. I’ve been a long time follower of the event. First. Hold on. First time. And you got to get on stage, man.
How does that happen? Who do you know? Oh, I will talk about that. I happen to know a few people I think. That’s awesome. We’re in this perfect confluence of AI and economies. And geopolitics and of course my specialty is technology and there’s a lot of interest in that right now, but it was a great.
Great conference. I mean, you know just such a good opportunity to hear at and it was such an important moment. It was when the tariff situation was peaking and seeing treasury Secretary Scott Besant and, and some great voices to bring some calm and some sensibility, a great event, and I look forward to speaking at it again.
I, I led a great conversation about the featured AI and data centers. That’s awesome. For those that couldn’t attend, let’s go a little bit further along those lines. So tell us a little bit more about the conversation you led. Yeah, so I was asked to host a, what was kind of an intimate boardroom session, and it was about.
35 to 40 capital allocators. So it was banks and hedge funds and investors in the room. And we were really having a conversation about sort of what was going to drive this massive wave. I think some people hear about this AI infrastructure investment. You hear numbers like. 300, $400 billion over the next year that’s gonna be spent to build the future.
You know, I call it the cities of the future for running these AI systems. And so it was really a perfect moment to kind of hear from those that are investing, those that were building. I had a panelist that was a CEO of a company that builds global data centers. And sort of bringing it together.
And, one of the great things that came outta that conversation, Adam, is it really reinvigorated my confidence that this technological wave. Really couldn’t, can’t be stopped even with some of the macro and geopolitical concerns we have right now. And of course since then we’ve had, beyond tariffs, we’ve had the bond market collapsing.
We’ve had mm-hmm. Potential wars in the Middle East and continued wars in Europe. But AI is such an important secular trend. There’s more dollars chasing opportunities than there are opportunities, and it was a really positive experience. And of course, the folks at Milken, such a great conference. So well organized, very secure, and of course lovely location.
Yeah. Great feedback. And switching it up a bit here, let’s, get into more of the topic. So managing. Change in the AI revolution area? , I mean, you’re at the forefront of this, especially with your work. What kind of obstacles are you seeing maybe that weren’t even, didn’t even exist, say as little as five years ago?
Like what kind of obstacles are you seeing? Well, you heard me talk about this incredible insatiable appetite to invest in ai. Well, five years ago, you know, AI was a thing 40 years ago, but it was sort of one of those things that was very much slow at first and then all at once. Mm-hmm. I mean, nobody had played with the chat GPT for some of us, we were still really figuring out how to optimize search.
Yeah. You know, we were using business applications like SAP and Oracle and Salesforce and all those things are still around, but the. Case that we are gonna see markets disrupted because of these generative AI and agent ai. Mm-hmm. They’re basically coming for every part of our industry, and it’s happening so quickly.
So, you know, , I have written seven books and you called that out earlier and I wrote a book called Future Proof and then I, my most recent book was called Human Machine. And what I focused on in these books was kind of. The speed of transformation that we are going through with each revolution. You know, whether it was the printing press, the radio, the television, the internet, and now ai.
And I mean, there was some in between there, but we used to have decades, you know, between these revolutions. And then we had years between these revolutions, and now I think what leaders are facing is it doesn’t feel like you have days every day you have a new model, something new coming out that’s like, is this existential to my business?
Do I have to run and do AI today? And it feels the pressure is incredible. Mm-hmm. And of course, this 24 by 7, 365 connected world that we live in, whether you’re a business owner or you’re an employee, there’s just this unbelievable pressure that you could never put down business, which makes it really hard to have balance in life.
It’s exciting as an entrepreneur. Mm-hmm. But , it’s difficult, you know, to find health and balance and family and all those other things. And I think a lot of that didn’t exist, You know, decades ago and even five years ago, you just see how much this is kind of creeping into our lives and it’s just pervasive.
Mm-hmm. Now, in, I mean, in your work, you’re working with top CEOs and so you have a unique vantage point and you’re in different rooms, whether this, the Milken one that you just mentioned a moment ago where you led a discussion or just in your day-to-day work, like what’s keeping the CEOs of the world up at night?
Like what’s their current state of mind? The work we do at, at rum, it’s such a great gig. I I talk to, you know, anywhere from a hundred to 150 you know, large cap and mid cap technology CEOs every quarter. So I have the chance to really understand, I. What’s going on in these companies?
And of course they’re always juggling kind of the news cycle, meaning what’s the thing of the moment? You know, in the beginning of the year you know, , I talked, we talked about Milken I was in Davos same thing. And there was so much positivity. The election had happened, and of course, know there’s a lot of, various sides of opinion about president Trump, but the overall business.
Business or, collective. All really thought there would be a lot of deregulation. There’d be a lot of opportunity for m and a. We’d see more IPOs. There was a lot of enthusiasm maybe is the right word. Mm-hmm. And it was funny ’cause everything, it was like getting smashed by a freight train.
In April on Liberation Day. Mm-hmm. And so you see how that cycle, like everyone’s coming into it, everyone’s ready to make these big investments and adopt ai. They were gonna build this efficiency machine. They were gonna go out and acquire companies and they were gonna, take their companies public and they were gonna do all kinds of partnerships and global expansion.
And then, the tariffs came. And a little bit like what we talked about in just your last question about kind of what, what, what we’re facing. We haven’t faced years ago. This cycle of how quickly things can happen is, this next thing came and it was like it stopped business in its tracks.
Nobody knew what was gonna happen. They didn’t know, if they were gonna have to completely rebuild their supply chains. They didn’t know if they were gonna have to start thinking about cutting workforce to reduce expenses. And so there was so much uncertainty that CEOs were really sort of paused and that was something I hadn’t seen even in, you know, the last several years.
Even during COVID, it was about as bad as that kind of moment when we started shutting down because of what was going on. Yeah. What was most amazing about it, Adam, and maybe the most encouraging and positive part of this story is in less than two weeks, these same CEOs were really starting to find their bearings.
That’s how fast information proliferates, that’s how fast they were able to start sort of seeing the pattern, the sort of, you know you know, I call it the escalate deescalate strategy of this administration, how they would say we’re gonna do a thousand percent tariffs, and then it’s like no tariffs, and it was 500%.
And then everybody in the end kind of started to come to realize like. We’re probably gonna end up somewhere, but President Trump doesn’t want to stop the economy. And you started to see more positivity. Now, even today, as we have this conversation, there’s still some uncertainty about what’s gonna happen.
Mm-hmm. But these CEOs, just like I’m dealing with, are finding more and more that A, they have to be able to juggle kind of this constant news cycle. Yeah. Every day sort of lever up and lever down as to whether or not things are gonna go crazy and something’s gonna get tweeted that. Changes the whole economic direction.
Yeah. Um, But at the same time, like I think we sort of find balance and chaos and that’s one thing that CEOs do incredibly well. It’s the contextual shifting. It’s the ability to bounce from ups and downs, highs and lows, certainty and uncertainty. And then being able to steady or ship, whether you’re running a 50,000 person company or you know, you’re a five person organization.
And because of ai nowadays you can still be a billion dollar company or more. Either way. Yeah. And I mean, is there, in terms of the CEOs, ’cause you’re talking to, I mean, you know, six to eight fortune 100 CEOs on a weekly basis, so that, that’s a sign, that’s a significant access point. Is there, in all of this that you mentioned, is there, are there some silver linings like in the views or like some, some benefits here?
Well, I mean, first of all, it’s just. For, I mean, these are some of the most intelligent and thoughtful people on the course I. Generally speaking these CEOs are incredibly optimistic and despite the fact that, again, they’re dealing with this kind of wave of, you know, certainty and uncertainty I think anyone that’s ever been through, like I always say, you know, real leadership, real relationships, they tend to be born in the trenches.
And so most great CEOs have risen up. It’s never been a straight, it’s never been a straight line. You know, , it’s been a lot of those kind of peaks and valleys. They’ve seen economic turmoil. You know, if you’ve been in the business world for less than a couple of decades, you’ve seen the internet boom and bust.
You saw nine 11, you saw 2008 and the housing collapse. You know, we had some serious slowdowns in the next decade. It was a little bit of a lost decade, if you remember, for the markets and the SP. Mm-hmm. And then of course we had COVID we’ve had the chaos of elections. We’ve had, shutdown stay at home from work, which also had all kinds of policy changes, you know, how companies were running.
We went through kind of this period of time of different social norms. And again, some seemed like they were great for developing some, some growth as human beings. Some, you know, we’ve seen it reverted to the mean from the last five years. Certain policies around sustainability and diversity.
You’ve seen companies walk some of them back, but as CEOs, you’ve been through every one of these. Yeah. Gyration. Yeah, sure. Mm-hmm. And you survived. And many of them, you know, have seen their earnings grow. They’ve seen their companies grow. Mm-hmm. They’ve individually grown. And so they’ve kind of, you know like William Wallace, like bra farts, you know, they’re standing at the end with, they’re stored in the air.
And that, and that sort of strength, I think begets more strength and it creates mm-hmm. You know, really, really good leadership and you know, I learned so much from these people. And of course we all have up and down days and so. But I mean, overall, you know, most of these people that I’m talking to are leading organizations with tens, if not hundreds of thousands of employees.
Mm-hmm. And every day they get up and they find a way to navigate through the chaos and lead their companies with a steady hand. Mm-hmm. And there’s so much to learn from that. And of course, there’s so much to learn from all of their failures. All of their adversity is they really do tend to collectively treat it as lessons learned that delivers growth in what they do.
And again, they’re not perfect. These are not, are not super humans. They are normal people. They get up like you and me, they put their socks on and their pants on a leg at a time, but they really do. I. Display some just tremendous character traits and I’m just so blessed to be in, that they listen to me and that they, they, he advice from me and , I learned so much from them.
Now, you as you mentioned earlier, seven books under your belt now, so I’m gonna call that a content catalog or a library of books. , What fuels your creativity here , in writing the books and, putting out this content? It all, you know, without going too far into histrionics, it really started with , my very first book and maybe I’ll kind of hit the beginning and the end.
My first one was called the Millennial, CEO. So I’m a very old millennial, born in the early eighties. And I became CEO for the first time when I was in my late twenties. And I was running a company with a few hundred employees. You know, that I was brought in. It was a really complex company.
It had five families that owned it. There was no controlling ownership and they brought me in and it was just one of the most incredibly difficult jobs I ever did. And I started blogging about my experience and it ended up becoming a, a really popular blog called Millennial, CEO, and it ended up getting an opportunity to write a book about it.
And so , it kind of got me into this whole, you know, sort of journaling almost, which my journaling instead of journaling, you know, without sort of a real purpose and direction, it actually, , my career sort of became this creative office. Off the ramp to write. And then as I started to move from more writing about leadership to writing about technology, my two passions, the books sort of evolved to, to books that really looked at digital transformation, AI in the future.
And so I. As a, you know, CEO of a company that provides, , market research data intelligence and media to the technology industry. The books are really a way to put an exclamation point on all the research and all the CEOs and all the access that I have creates a little bit of a future vision for what the world looks like.
So I wrote the book Human Machine over five years ago, along with my co-author, Olivier Blanchard, and, you know, we wrote the book Human Machine, when people weren’t even talking about human machines. That’s awesome. We saw this coming together and this fusion of, of technology and, and people and autonomy.
And, a lot of the purpose of the book was to really provide a certain calming effect that, hey, yes, there, there will be robots. There will be cars that drive themselves. There will be tools, technologies, and applications that do the work, the mundane work we do today, and write code for us and write articles.
And heck, at some point it probably will start to read our mind because that’s just how much data it has to better understand us. But at the same time, there’s been this really. Prolific growth that we’ve had as a society with each industrial revolution has come. Growth, productivity, growth. Mm-hmm. Job growth, human expansion and capacity of our individual contributions to society.
Yeah. And so it’s, it’s a great off ramp. I mean, I do a lot of shorter form. I write a lot of shorter content. I love to be on social media. And I haven’t written a book since the end of the last decade. So I’m, I’m probably due for one. Adam. I’m at the same time. I’m, Hey man. What? You’re getting lazy on a I’m getting lazy.
Come on man. I’m running. What’s going? I, uh. rum is the amalgamation of more than seven companies. You’re busy working with all these CEOs. You ain’t got time for the book. I I’m working. But you know, the book in the end, the manifesto, whatever it ends up being. Yeah. You know it’ll be very interesting when I can really sit down again and I’m hoping I, I’m 44 0 a doubt on that.
I’m absolutely certain it will be. That’s amazing. And I gotta, you know, do my part to light that fire. No, yeah. No, I appreciate that. I’m gonna start writing. Nights and you, you heard now mission matters audience. See, we’re making things happen in the pod and. Oh, Daniel man, I, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and learning more about you, your work, and also your viewpoints and what’s going on.
I think it’s very helpful , for me as a learner and then for my audience as well. That being said, if somebody’s listening or watching this and if they wanna learn more about the future room group or , your books or anything else you’re working on, how do people connect? How do they follow up?
Very easy. If you wanna learn more about Futurum Group it’s, it’s www.futurumfuturumgroup.com. And then of course I am prolific on, on X Twitter, whatever you want to call it. I really don’t leave any, any mystery as to what I’m thinking. So if you like tech markets. Economics and a little, a little bit of sarcasm.
Join me there. It’s at Daniel Newman UV at the end. So Daniel, N-E-W-M-A-N uv have a lot of fun there. So that’s two great ways to get to know me and, and say hi. I, I am an introvert. I don’t necessarily like small talk, but I love big ideas, so feel free to say hi. Awesome. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put some links in the show notes so you can just click on ’em and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration that helps you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Daniel May, I appreciate you coming on the show today. Thanks for having me.
