The Chairman of First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), the Middle East's largest bank with over $300 billion in assets, invited Matthew back to its annual leadership summit, where FAB leadership teams from around the world met virtually to explore the future and what it means for them. Matthew has worked with FAB for many years, from helping it launch the Middle East's first ETFs and thematic funds to its COP28 sessions.
Under the title The Second Half of the Chessboard, he asked the audience to think harder about the world being created and the world being left behind as we move towards a post car, post cow, post farm, post fossil fuel, post hacker and post software developer world. He also showed the shift from systems that analyse the past to systems that predict the future across new domains, with rising accuracy.
"The capability and performance leap between new generations of technology is so vast that increasingly we, as humans, are having problems understanding what they all mean for global business, culture, and society."Matthew Griffin, Virtual, April 2024
At the heart of the session was the chessboard itself: the point, already emerging today, where the leap in capability between generations of technology becomes so vast that people struggle to grasp what it means for business, culture and society, and so what the future could look like.
He finished by showing how technologies such as AI are reshaping how businesses are built and who, or what, builds them, and how leaders should think about competition and differentiation. Leaders from across wealth management and consumer banking used the summit to reaffirm their commitments to customers, responsible investing and the planet.
