AI and the Road Ahead with Pete Buttigieg | Dreamforce 2025

Please welcome Kendall Collins and secretary Pete Buttigieg. Welcome, everyone. Are you fired up for day two of Dreamforce? Yeah, we had an amazing day one, an incredible keynote. Customers, governments, nonprofits from all over the world. And the keynote yesterday, the future of agents and humans working together. Just an incredible time touch on every industry. Let's transition to this conversation, which I'm so excited for. I'm honored to be here. And I'm just so grateful for the opportunity to talk with our next guest. He's a veteran, a mayor, secretary, a recovering management consultant. We're not done. We're not done. He's a sleepless dad. He's a world class leader. He speaks seven different languages fluently. And between us, we have just one Rhodes scholarship, which is unfortunate for me. Please welcome Secretary Buttigieg to Dreamforce.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Wow. Thanks very much.

We have so much to get into. But let me just ask you a question. Is there a job that you're not good at? Is there a job that you've just seen, You've seen it and you're like, no, that's not for me. I just can't do that.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I travel a lot, obviously. Worked in transportation. When I think about what is required of a gate agent, the level. Just the level of human and psychological discipline that is needed, I couldn't do it. And whenever I meet a university president, I always tell them I may have sought the American presidency, but I would never do a job as political as the one that you find yourself in. So, yeah, lots of jobs that are.

Not for me, that is a tough job. We want to talk about a lot of things this morning, but maybe just for some of the people here who don't know you really well, I thought it'd just be important to ground in who you are and where you came from. You grew up in a small town, South Bend, Indiana.

There we go.

Got some fans, a couple Notre Dame fans out there. There you go. And, you know, you're the son of a scholar, a teacher. You grow up around academia. You grew up around a lot of, you know, important ideas. But you also have this backdrop of a changing American town. And I guess I'm. I'm very curious. When you think back to your early life, is there a moment when you think about that life and that upbringing that just shaped you, how you see the world, how you see your role in it?

Well, one image that always stays with me is what it looked like out the window of the car when we were going to school. We're on the western edge of the Eastern time zone, so it's dark, just dawning at the time that you go to school for most of the school year. And as a kid, we'd go down Michigan street, right down to the south side of town, and on both sides of the road, but especially on this side, were acres of collapsing factories. They looked as if they'd been destroyed in a war. And that's because our city, which is known now as the home of Notre Dame, was actually known before as the home of Studebaker, which would have been among the Big Three, would be the Big Four, if Studebaker was still in business. They were that big of an automaker until the last car rolled off the line in 1963. And I grew up surrounded by the ghosts of this company that hadn't even been operating for 20 years before I was born, for 50 years before I became mayor. And yet it was the dominant experience of our city. And so I think that impressed on me, first of all, of course, the importance of the economy, the nature of economic dislocation and disruption, but also the challenge of looking forward and looking ahead to something new. So when I did run for mayor, I knew that we had to shed the nostalgia for this industrial heyday, still be true to our industrial tradition, but find an economy that would go forward. We didn't talk about growing our city. We showed up on a list of 10 dying cities the year I ran for mayor. And I was part of a generation of people who said, we're not going to. We're not going to accept that. We're going to change that. But I didn't go around saying we were going to make South Bend, Indiana, great again.

But then you ended up trying to do that, which is amazing, because there's no again.

We found a different kind of greatness by looking forward. And that was really what the experience of growing up in the industrial Midwest did for me.

You know, I've had a chance to read so many amazing interviews about you and with you, and, you know, you often speak about the importance of purpose and service. And we live in interesting times, I think you would agree. And it feels like maybe, you know, this value of service in the country, it's just. It's changed a little bit. Right. And was there a person in your life, when you think back, that really taught you about service, or was your model for sacrifice and some of these values? Is there somebody who's kind of the key person that you think about as an example?

Well, certainly my parents Taught me the importance of public things, shared things, civic things. They weren't politically connected. I don't think I ever met an elected official when I was growing up. But they were intensely politically and civically aware. And I think that was the beginning of it for me. But then some of the most important people who shaped my trajectory in service are actually people I barely knew. I was knocking on doors for a campaign in one of the poorest counties in Iowa in 2008 as a volunteer, and I noticed that door after door, I found myself talking to a young. I mean, they looked like kids to me. And I was in my mid-20s.

And.

We'D get to talking and they'd say how they were getting ready to go to basic training, getting ready to basically getting ready to go to Iraq. I mean, that was one of those periods when we were sending so many people from mostly rural America and low income communities to Iraq and to some extent Afghanistan. And I started scratching my head thinking, I can count on one hand the number of people I knew at Harvard who wound up in the military. And then. And this entire town in south central Iowa is emptying out its youth into the military. And then I had that feeling that sometimes happens when you realize you might be part of the problem. And that was when I thought I just. This voice in my head said, why aren't you wearing your country's uniform? Which was the beginning of the process that led to me winding up as an officer in the Navy.

Well, thank you for your service. We're going to come back. I want a specific question I want to ask you about that. But one thing that also struck me about what you said is out of that class at Harvard, how many people ended up becoming mayor of a city? Probably not that many is my guess.

Well, you know, right across the bay here, San Jose, you got Matt Mahon, who I think was a year behind me, but a student president. So, yeah, it happens. But I will say not a lot of people then, even in political circles, and I was a politically active student, were talking about the local very much. One of the biggest epiphanies I had in public service was belatedly understanding the importance and the power of the local and that you could make such a difference there. Frankly, I think at a moment like this in our country, a lot of our salvation will come from the local. You have people solving problems, accountable for results, grounded in reality, because there's no alternative facts. If there's a hole in the road or an unsafe corner, the mayor doesn't get to Say, oh, no, there's no hole. That's the best road ever.

Yeah, the water fountain in my park for my kids. It doesn't work right.

And I would hear about that all the time. Yeah, Chastain would even hear about that. He. We'd only been dating for a few months and he was shopping, he was in the yogurt aisle at the grocery.

You have a whole aisle of yogurt?

Oh, yeah. We.

It's an amazing town. Dairy is very important, like this town.

And so he's. He's picking out his yogurt, he's opening that fridge door, you know, and as he's looking at the yogurt hold, holding open the door, he hears this tapping noise on the glass. And it's somebody on the other side of the glass door leading to the yogurt, trying to get his attention and saying, he closes the door. What's the matter? Am I in your way? Are you trying to get some yogurt? And the guy says, you tell your husband to stop screwing up our streets. And we weren't even engaged. Then he comes home, he's like, what have I gotten myself into? So it's like, it's immediate, it's real. But I also think to this day, I think in so many ways, it's the best job in government. The hardest, but the best, because you can actually see the results when you get it right. And there's some very impressive mayors, including. I'm very impressed with the mayor right here in San Francisco. You know, this city has any number of challenges, but, you know, numbers just came out this week saying that the city's on track to see its lowest homicide rate since the 1950s. And when you have results oriented mayors focusing on the basics, I think it's really important to have their back.

Yeah, I think Crime is down 30% in San Francisco in the last nine months, which is amazing. And we, I think everybody here can feel happier about that and supporting this mayor. And as you know, he champions public safety in such a great way. Maybe I'll transition. Ask you about something else. I'm curious. Did you take a Waymo here this morning? And have you taken a Waymo?

I. I did have. So when I was secretary, I had a Waymo experience that, as you might imagine, was rather scripted and curated and there are all these people around. And then I was back here earlier this year for a meeting and we just ordered one up and it was spooky. But it was extremely impressive too.

You know, for people who've lived here you know, been in the Bay area, it took 10 years really for self driving and for autonomous to become real. You know, we've been hearing about it. It's going to happen. You know, there were tests, there were things that didn't work. We've had to balance innovation with trust with safety. You know, and as technologists, a lot of us, we're iterating, we're trying to make these products better and go as fast as we can, but manage that trust at the same time. You know, you look at the global landscape and we see countries going really fast. You know, are they doing it safely? But the US needs to remain competitive. You know, we want to be the strongest in AI, but we want to balance trust and safety. How do you think about that balance?

Well, I think it starts with that sense of responsibility. What is it that's at stake? And I do think that especially in a tech culture that maybe began by working on things that on their face seemed lower stakes. How to send pictures to friends of yours. Now I think there's a process of digesting just how high the stakes are on the things that that tech is doing and has done, whether we're talking about social media. Turns out sending pictures to your friends is a leads to something that has the capability to hack or break or shape our very psychology and our politics. And it's not just a trivial thing. All the way through to more obvious safety concerns like the possibility of printing a virus with AI or the idea that newer technology could undermine nuclear deterrence. I mean, heavy, heavy stuff. But I think the key is to maintain an entrepreneurial spirit which requires taking all kinds of risks, but understanding the difference between a risk to the success of the enterprise and a risk to society or humanity. So move fast and break things means one thing. If the things you're breaking are inside your own company or the things you're breaking are a competitor's business model versus if the things you're breaking are a community. And we have got to think. Look, let me come back to my roots in the industrial Midwest. I was there in the 90s and 2000s when a wave of trade and automation, but mostly automation, changed the face of our economy. And the message that was sent to our part of the country was don't worry about your slice of the pie because everything's going to get bigger. Rising tide, nothing to worry about. And the pie did get bigger, but not everybody benefited. The result was a generation later you see populist political movements whose message basically is, I'm going to get you a bigger slice of a smaller pie and it resonates. So I think we should learn from that. As AI promises threatens to deliver the kinds of disruptions that actually make what happened to my part of the country in the 90s look small and do it to white collar workers whose identities are even more wrapped up in their profession than many blue collar workers. But let's come a bit more narrowly into the automated vehicle use case because I think this is really instructive too.

When would you put your. When would you put your kids in a waymo. You feel good about that?

Here's the thing. We are already at the point, in my view where they are safer than human drivers. We've actually crossed that point. And I know that's a weird thing to absorb, but think about this. I spent the most important thing I did as Secretary of Transportation was safety. Aviation safety is what got most of the headlines. You remember that plug door blew out of the Alaska Airlines plane. Somebody could have gotten hurt. And so we reconsidered our entire regulatory framework in order to maintain a record that at the end when I left, we had had 4 billion passenger implayments and 0 commercial airline crash fatalities. Right? That was the standard on cars. 100 to 150 people die every single day. That's enough to fill a 737 every day. 40,000 a year. Which means that if automated vehicles were out on the road everywhere and killed 20,000 people a year, that would be a cutting in half of the fatality rate in this country. It would be considered a safety triumph statistically. And yet public acceptance would never allow that to happen. So it's a really good example of the difference between the capability of a technology and the path to adoption. I chaired a task force of Mayors in 2015 on automation at a time when it was confidently predicted that the widespread use of automated vehicles was seven years away. Seven years later, what was I doing regulating the early inception of automated vehicles at the U.S. department of Transportation? As they told us it would be about seven years away. It was seven years away for more than 10 years.

It's always seven years away.

And yet the tech is there, right? You can see it. I mean, it takes a little more for it to pencil out. I assume they won't be Jaguars when they're kind of rolled out on a broader basis. But the tech is there. The question. And by the way, the most confounding thing for the technology of these vehicles is dealing with the human beings that are on the road. If it was all AVs, we'd be there to be able to be super easy.

Right?

So this is where I think we can extrapolate that to a lot of other use cases for AI. This is where it gets interesting and messy. But there is a responsibility for policy to set those guardrails. So there is some level of trust and some level of confidence. And my message when I was at DOT to the automated vehicle companies was we will be a conservative regulator, not because we don't believe in your technology, but because we do. And I actually think we have an affirmative responsibility to help this get deployed and adopted. And that will only happen if public acceptance is healthy. And that in turn will only happen if you meet a ridiculously high standard.

Well said. Trust is our number one value. And we spend a lot of time thinking about how to ensure the guardrails are there, make AI trusted. Humans and AI working together is really important. You've spoken a lot about, you know, making sure that there's the dignity, right. For professional workers, there's a dignity as we embrace AI. Like maybe tell us a little bit more about that and how you think about. Obviously, it's changing every aspect of our lives, not just our transportation. You know, I'm sure you're using it individually. You know, my daughter used it to do an online website and store that could sell flowers. She's nine years old. Right. So it's touching every part of our lives. Like, how do you think about that? And you know, this, this commentary you've had around the dignity of the worker.

Well, for one thing, I think we need to take on board both the material and the, what I might call spiritual or belonging aspects of what's at stake. So the material is a little more straightfor, which is not to say easy. I'm haunted by a thought experiment that came to me right about that time 10 years ago when we were working on automation in the Conference of Mayors, where I imagined a machine that could do more and more things. Picture like the Replicator from Star Trek. You can basically make everything. And the more sophisticated the machine gets, the fewer people you need to work it, until one day all you really need is just one guy to push a button and the machine can do everything else. Where that leaves you is the wages that that worker can command, according to economic theory, fall towards zero. And all that actually matters is who owns the machine. Now, if we come out of the thought experiment, what is the machine? It's the intellectual property, it's the software, it's the physical plant, the computer, all of Those things add up into these firms. Right, that are doing this. And I think there is a question of how some of that ownership gets shared in a broader way. Some kind of dividend that might come to the American people, for example, which I think is fair game, given that we, the American taxpayer, kind of sort of invented the Internet and that these models trained on our data. Right. So there's an economic conversation that we need to have that respects the dignity of the role that humans played in creating this technology. But, of course, the model that you described is more convincing than the thought experiment I described, where it's really a collaboration. What's happening is this machinery, so to speak, is amplifying or morphing or changing what humans set out to do, which means, at the end of the day, what matters most is what is it that humans set out to do? What is the thing that the machine is making us more productive at doing? And societally, we have become, I think, less oriented around the deeper purpose of what it is we seek to do. And now is a really important time to focus on the question of purpose. And purpose will be different for everybody. It's supposed to be different for everybody. And for some, it will be business and enterprise, and for some, it will have to do with faith or family or community or country or scholarship and ideas. Whatever it is for you, we need to make sure that the role of technology is to enhance and not obstruct your ability to pursue that kind of purpose, whether it's by providing a service or whether it's by getting things out of the way.

I'm going to change gears a little bit, but play off what you just mentioned about purpose. You have a really. You possess a really unique ability to connect across a lot of different types of people, diverse backgrounds, diverse affiliations, both sides of the aisle. We once here at Salesforce, we had a legendary board member, Colin Powell, General Colin Powell, and it was just an honor to work with him. I once had a chance to ask him this question that I'm going to ask you, which is, how do you do it? Like, how do you work across all these different groups and bring people together? You have a lot of business leaders here. People here need to build consensus. They need to drive things forward. They deal with a diversity of opinions inside their own organizations, their own team, sometimes inside their own families. We all deal with diversity of opinions, but somehow you bring people together across these. Is there a practical lesson or practical anecdote of how you've done this and brought people together?

Well, it might Be helpful for me to share what I try to do mentally every time I go on Fox News.

Yeah. Give us your meditation.

This is a very unexpected specialty, by the way of mine. Not something I thought I would be doing a whole lot of when I first showed up on the national stage. But, you know, and it's the same if I'm on with, like, Joe Kernan on CNNBC or, you know, any number of hosts of a certain type. That sounded more pregnant than I meant it to. But, you know, what I do is in the back of my head, I imagine that I'm talking to the guy at the end of the bar in South Bend, Indiana, which I literally, very often did if I was mayor and wanted to have a beer, who had wildly different politics than I did, and most importantly of all, who I actually liked. That's the thing, is that we so often encounter people who have wildly different politics or values, who are, of course, good people. And unfortunately, the facelessness of our Internet Personas often decouples us from that. You have only the aggravating thing about somebody and none of the. The endearing things about somebody, when actually anybody who's been in a relationship knows that the aggravating and the endearing are all marbled together in all of us. Our best and worst qualities, you know, they get somehow centrifugally separated out by our Internet avatars. But of course, it's all just one thing. We're all just one person, or there's not good and bad people out there. We're all people who can have good and bad things called out of us. And I think the job of leadership is to try to call more often to the best things about us than the worst. Yes.

I couldn't agree more. And it feels like maybe because of phones and social media and technology, is that getting harder. There was this book years ago I read called Bowling Alone. I don't know if you read this book. Amazing book about sociology. And there being fewer bowling alleys, you know, and bowling alleys, amazingly, are a place that, you know, brought people together of, you know, different religions and different political parties and different socioeconomic backgrounds and, you know, connecting with people at a bowling alley or in a church or in your neighborhood or in the yogurt aisle. I mean, this is meaningful. And how do we do more of that? What is a practical way that we should be doing more of that?

It's vitally important, and it's something I think about a lot in the community where I now live in rural Michigan, where there are A lot of overlapping circles of belonging. Did I hear one cheer for Northern Michigan somewhere? All right, good.

Go Wolverines.

No comment. So, you know, if I'm going to the 4H Fair where our nephew and niece are raising a pig and a lamb, and I see so many people from so many different walks of life, I see a chance that it's some overlap. I guess the question I would put to myself and all of us is think about your circles of belonging that you're part of and ask yourself how many of them are concentric versus overlapping? By concentric, I mean these circles that are sorted, that are stacked on top of each other. So if I have the people you, maybe your educational institution you went to and what you majored in and your zip code and where you worship, I could probably guess your politics because they all tend to stack on top of each other. We have other affiliations like sports, loyalty or sometimes, but not always, the community, the neighborhood we live in sometimes, but not always, our workplace, that pull us across those circles of belonging so that they overlap, so that we have to encounter each other. So you don't know the person, certainly the church that I belong to. I don't know if the person in the next pew is with me or not politically, and I'm not supposed to. The military exquisitely does this. I mean, when I got into a vehicle getting ready to go outside the wire in Afghanistan, nobody getting in the vehicle with me cared if I was going home to a girlfriend or a boyfriend or if I was a Democrat or Republican. They want to know if I'd looked at the intel reports where the IEDs were. Can we trust each other with our lives? The circle of belonging there was as big as the flag on our shoulders. All we had in common was we were American, and that was enough to trust each other with our lives. You shouldn't have to go to war to have that kind of experience. That's why I'm a big fan of the service that goes on here in California. I believe in public service more generally, and I believe all of us can create those kinds of patterns of belonging.

I think we have time. Just maybe one last moment, which is. You've spoken about optimism as a strategic choice. We can wake up every morning and we have to make that choice. You're a father now of two twins. Congratulations. You look great.

It's because I'm doing a four city tour. It's dramatically more restful than your sleep.

Vacation here at Dreamforce with us is going well, I hope you know. But when you think about your kids and where this is all going. Maybe talk a little bit about optimism as a strategy. What are you most optimistic about when you think about this next decade ahead for them and for everybody here who's a parent who wants hope for the future, what's ahead for us, and what are you most excited about?

Well, I hope and expect that my kids will experience the 22nd century, and I think a lot about what it's going to look like. I think a lot about the middle of this century when I am getting set for retirement, and they are early but underway in their professional lives. And I know that by then they'll be asking me, like, papa, what were you doing back in the 2000s? Because it looks like it was a pretty odd, screwy, dark, scary time, Right? And I want to make sure I have a good answer. I hear from a lot of people who are asking for sources of hope so that they can have the propulsion to take action. One of the wisest things I've ever heard said about hope, Roberto Unger, a Brazilian thinker, said this, that hope is the consequence of action more than its cause. And so I ask myself every day, what are the actions I could take that would generate the kind of hope and motivation and energy to do the things that'll give me a good answer by the time my kids are asking me about the 2020s? Or to put it another way, I had a friend who observed that the upheaval of the moment we're living in might be just a sort of karmic revenge for anyone in my generation who told our parents that we were jealous of them living in the 60s because it looked really cool when I was a teenager. And I must have said it one too many times until my mom sat me down and said, piers, that was terrible. It was hard. People I cared about were getting assassinated. My classmates were being sent to war. It was a terrifying time. We didn't know that it would unfold the way that it did and lead to the comparatively comfortable time you're growing up in. And so I guess another way to frame it in terms of how I get propulsion optimism is I think we live in times that are so bad that they will one day be romanticized by future generations if we manage to do the right thing and make something of them so that we can be proud of the 2000 and twenties. That's my propulsion.

We're grateful. We're so grateful for you being here, for being part of Dreamforce. We're grateful for your service. We're grateful for your commitment. We're grateful for your optimism. We're grateful for your stories that bring us together. So thank you.

Please.

Thank you. Secretary Buttigieg, thanks very much.

Thank you. It.