isn't just beautiful, it's guaranteed for life. when it's time to give your bath new life, it just fits. go to bath.com to book your free consultation. experience better rest for less and shop the president's day event at the living spaces sleep center. save up to $500 on select tempur-pedic mattress and adjustable base sets, and save up to $700 on select purple mattress and adjustable base sets. even get the beauty rest. breezeway bay queen mattress for 4.95. pay no interest for 24 months on. select purchases with your good credit and enjoy free shipping as soon as next day. don't miss the president's day event only at the living spaces sleep center. living space. meteorologist rob mayeda moving the bay y area forward. this we, san francisco sees a burst of new back to the office workers. we'll talk with envoy ceo, who has an eye on the return to work data and the secrets of innovation at microsoft. that's this week on press here. good

morning everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. there have really been three distinct periods at microsoft the early days of windows and office, where microsoft was such a powerhouse. the justice department got involved, and then a period of kind of not much. they created the zune. if you can't remember the zune, it's okay. how about the windows phone now a resurgence, the stock up 880% in the last ten years or so. azure, xbox, activision, and of course ai. our first guest today is microsoft's ai innovations director, dean carignan. he is the author of a new book, the insider's guide to the innovation at microsoft. it comes out on tuesday. dean, good morning. let me start with did you write your book using ai? did it help at all? it's a great question and timely. i would say we used a little bit o of ai asa writing coach. every word that's

in the book was written by me or a coauthor or both of us. there were periods where we were a bit blocked, and we would use a copilot to sort of as a sounding board or to get some ideas. but i don't think we're at the point where i should be writing books yet. so. okay, written book with some coaching from an ai. fair enough. i found the same thing that it. it doesn't do the work for me, but it gets me to thinng about the next step. you've compared the era that we're in where ai is starting to kind of seep into the american consciousness as, as to the.com boom. exactly. yeah. i think we're in this period of rapid change where there's an underlying technology. what we at microsoft like to call a general purpose technology that enables innovation in a number of areas. and as we've seen historically, not only in the internet boom, but even going back to the industrial revolution, you get this rapid succession of change that really

flows all across society. and part of our motivation for writing the book was that we realized every company, every institution, and really every person is going to have to rethink the way they operate and do things and get work done. and so we looked at that and we said, well, what better place than microsoft to study how that happens? here's a company that's existed for 50 years, has reinvented itself multiple times. and so we also had the front row seat by virtue of working in microsoft. and we said, let's write a book that is informed by microsoft but can actually teach anyone, whether they're in a large company, a small company, a school, a nonprofit government, how to be more innovative and how to learn from. give me an example of that. i mean, are there innovative best practices that are consistent, whether we're taing at microsoft about, you know, windows ai, video games that apply to everyone? yeah,

i'll give you one of my favorite practices. and this one is very it's very specific to the business world. but one of the things that our xbox team had done was they were in their early phases. they were looking at where they had had innovative wins and innovative failures. and one of the things they realized was that the failures were when they were too focused on the technology and not focused enough on the user and the user needs. so what came out of this organization at xbox was this idea that whenever we've got a new idea, we're going to run it through three criteria that we call b, x and t. b is there a business rationale? is there a good business to be made with this idea? x, which is short for experience, is what is the user going to experience? how are we going to instantiate this innovation, and how is it going to deliver value to the users. and then t is the technology. how do we deliver this from an engineering and a

technological perspective? without that framework in an engineering company you're all t and you will overshoot on t and you'll build great tech that maybe people don't want or don't need or don't value. so this simple three letter framework really helps you to keep those three things in balance, and is a lens that you can put on any new initiative that you're going into. and then i want to you mentioned bing in your book. you know, people don't bing things. they google them. so bing bing is a runner up. but you say there's some value in being a ruer up. absolutely. yeah. we wrote an entire case study on bing for a couple of reasons. one is that although bing is not dominant in terms of market share, it has become this incredible hub of innovation within the company. and part of the way it does that is it's given a charter to compete against google with fewer resources and a much smaller budget. and one of the things we

found in our research is that constraints breed creativity. and when you're constrained in terms of resources or time or money, you get very creative. necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. and so bing as one example, they transitioned into deep learning, which is the heart of generative ai. about five years before almost anyone else in the industry did, not necessarily because it was the preferred route that the industry was going in, but it was new, it was emergent, and with limited resources, you could actually get ahead in that area. it's interesting you bring up constraints because i want to ask you, with the time we have left, is presumably you wrote your book before the trump presidency, or you write really, really fast, one of the two. so president trump has removed some of the guardrails, the constraints set in place by the biden administration on ai. mr. trump says it's a barrier. you know, one man's guardrail is

another man's barrier, right? how shoulde be thinking about this? you know, writ large. i mean, companies in general, as far as ai and any constraints put upon them. yeah. again, a great question. we wrote an entire chapter entitled responsible innovation because we think this is so important and we are moving into an era where innovation will move faster, but we have to make sure it moves safely. so one of the things that has helped us at microsoft, and certainly in my work, is we talk about featurizing safety or featurizing responsibility. and what that means is thinking about it not as a compliance requirement, but as an implicit aspect of what you're the tool you're building that users and customers want. and so when you bring it into this mindset that this is something that's valuable to the users, you don't end up with the kind of trade offs that you might when you're thinking about it as just something you have to do or to

be compliant. the other thing when you think about safety and responsibility as a feature, you do what we call as shifting left. you bring it into the early phases of a project so it can be built in just like any other capability at the design and planning phase, as opposed to being kind of bolted on at the end, which doesn't work very well as we've seen. i want to ask you one last question, and that is you got i think it's funny. guy kawasaki created a blurb for your book. i mean, he's a long time apple evangelist, right. who for many years, i think, saw microsoft as the big brother in the apple commercial. i mean, it's like coca-cola, you know, endorsing pepsi. how did you pull that off? you know, it's funny. we cold emailed him. it was as with many of our endorsers, we went out and we emailed him. we told him a little bit about the book. i think what has helped us in outreach like that is our mission, which is we want to help every company and person to

become more innovative with the book, and we're giving all of the proceeds to stem charities because we want to cultivate the next generation of innovators. and i think, if nothing else, probably that mission resonated with him. fair enough. well, i appreciate you being with us, dean koenig, and i wish you the best of luck. he is the author of, or coauthor, i should say, of a new book, the insider's guide to innovation at microsoft. we'll be back in just a minute. need to sell your home fast? worried about the hassle? fix ups, listings, showings and surprise fees. they'll take too long and cost stress, but you don't have to deal with any of that. let us help you sell your home quickly and easily. john buys bay area houses, provides an all cash offer for your home in minutes. we buy as is, no repairs, no fees, and you close on your timeline. just call 510462 6000 or find us online. bay area houses sell yr house the easy way. i know you want to

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welcome back to press here. the federal government and boeing and amazon and a bunch of other companies have told their employees to get back to the office full time. salesforce wants you there four days a week. apple and meta and others say three days will do. nationwide insurance says two is just fine. but my favorite example is tesla. elon musk says employees who don't show up a minimum of 40 hours a week for five days will have assumed to have resigned. now that's the minimum. envoy ceo larry gadea has a good picture as to how well those choices are working, and to what degree those employees are actually following the rules. because his company provides software to other companies, that allows him to get a look at some of that data. larry, i want to start with you are the ceo. what are your policies at envoy as far as getting back to the office? yeah, yeah, no. and thanks for having me. yeah, it's really

interesting to see the policies going around. but basically what we're seeing is companies that were like doing one day are going to two, 2 to 3. we power thousands of companies now as they kind of think this through. and obviously it's more about like the space management and it's about how do we get employees to like kind of get to know each other and like know where they sit and all that. so yeah, it's. larry, numbers are ramping up. larry. fair is fair. what is the envoy's policy? yeah, our policy is basically three days in office right now, and we have multiple offices, and people do it and they go together. i would love three days. i think that's a perfect a perfect compromise. now your data shows 27% increase in san francisco businesses moving back into the office. i want to ask, you know how other cities compare, but first explain to me how you're getting that data in the first place. yeah. so it basically these companies have different ways of seeing it. sometimes you'll have like a mobile app where you're picking a room or a desk. sometimes like you're badging into the systems that you have throughout your

different buildings. sometimes it'll be like through, just like walking in and telng somebody, and they just want to aggregate all this amongst all the different systems, and that's where we can help, where it's like it's a lot less manual work, and we try to pull it in from all the different sources to make it easy for everyone. and that's where you're getting it from, right? is you are the people who, when i go to, say, a venture capital firm and i fill out the ipad, that may be you behind that. yeah, yeah. so that's on a visitor side. and visitors as well count towards the occupancy of a building. sometimes they want to assign them desks and rooms and that kind of stuff. but for an employee that's going in, we will auto detect them through the different ways like the badge access system, like if they were to use their mobile app to do something. so it's just kind of centralizes everything. all right. well, how does san francisco compare to other, other places, other regions? yeah, san francisco is really interesting. it's kind of it's got two basically extremes. you have the ai small startups, which are basically in like five, maybe six days a week. and

it's just like, there is no there is no, like you're doing 60 hour weeks. and then there's the rest of the company. and the rest of the companies are definitely more on the like, hey, let's have more hybrid, let's work from home more. and but we're seeing they are ramping up their numbers and they're they're from recommend from suggested to recommended to mandatory. so we're we're absolutely seeing those companies are just trying to be their best. like they're trying to show hey we care about you guys. and we are thoughtful of this. but at the same time, they really wanting to see teams really solve their problems as fast as possible and have those uncomfortable discussions to solve the business problems. and it changes. as you mentioned by industry, i mean, obviously software can be a bit more remote. i mentioned nationwide insurance. you know, a lot of those people can be remote as well. a lot of customer service can be remote. when i call up hertz, i'm 90% sure that person is at home. it depends on the industry. yeah, it really does. tech obviously is just a little

bit more like you're on a computer all the time, but there's a lot of companies that will have like their their financial office but or their legal office. but then they'll also have other ones like a warehouse or any kind of packaging or any kind of factories. and those ones, obviously people are going to be back there. and for them, it's actually more about making it easier for the employees there to not have to like, clock in and clock out. it's more automated. you just walk in and it knows you're there. you don't have to have a time card or that kind of thing. so like it really, our products are used very flexibly amongst these different types of companies. but yeah, san francisco just being so much tech, obviously we're seeing a lot more of that kind of traffic. all right. well with this auto detecting of employees between 3 to 5 days, what seems to be working for your clients? what is where's the sweet spot. yeah. it's all about being clear with your with your team and your company. it's really tough when a company just kind of. hey, we all got to come back. maybe you should consider

it like those kinds of statements like the suggested strongly recommended like companies just need to be clear. they need to say, hey guys, listen, this is our culture. we want to be in person. we want to solve the hard problems. we want to optimize for business performance right now because our business needs it. we need to be in and they need to be unapologetic about it. the problem is that companies, these middle grounds are causing so much confusion for the employees. and they kind of like they sign on thinking this company is going to be hybrid. but then then people are like, no, no, no, we're going to want to be in. and it's like a middle ground that's transitioning. and the clearer companies are, the more just adherence there is to the policies, and the more people will actually be okay with it. if it's this middle ground, you just get all this bad ill will that just happens internally. and you can see it in the numbers. companies that are very clear on their policy and state mandated, mandated. they are going to have way better adherence than, than the ones that aren't. and they don't change their policies nearly as much. i think it's just easier. yeah. when your boss is very straightforward and instead of i

suggest or whatnot, it's like, yeah, what are we doing? okay. so, you know, every it seems like every silicon valley startup ceo has a has a great back story. and if you if you don't mind, i want to take these last couple of minutes to talk about yours. you grew up in as a small boy in romania, and i am told you made the world's biggest pikachu pikachu picture website when you were 12. what? i mean, we'll throw up a picture of pikachu for those who of course are not familiar, right? but what? what did that accomplish? what was what was what was 12 year old larry trying to do? i just got to find out how you guys find out about this stuff, but it's no. hey, call that my 1990 9.com startup. and i was like 11 or 12 years old, really into computers. really wanted to get something out there, obviously as a kid. and for what it's worth, pokemon and pikachu are really in today too. but it's basically it's a fun website. that's how i got

started with, with a lot of internet stuff. obviously, as i grew up and stuff, i got way more into like the more technology ended up at google at a pretty young age and just learned so much around there and end up starting this eventually. well, let's let's explore that a bit to google at 17. pretty young age. yeah. yeah. no it was a little wild. i the people that were pretty good stuff too. but it's just like as a kid you're in this dream job. everybody around you is just insanely smart and you're just trying your absolute best to not just like everyone knows i'm a fraud. like, hopefully like you're just thinking that the whole time. the imposter syndrome is insane at that company. i wonder when that goes away, because sometimes, you know, even as an adult, you think that. what was the biggest challenge? i mean, you know, a movie script, you know, a kid at 17 or. well, you wouldn't even know who doogie howser is. but you know, the doogie howser at that at at google. you know, you can't go out for drinks, i suppose is one thing.ut what was the biggest challenge of being a 17 year old

working at google? i mean, look, specifically about being 17. yeah. yeah. i mean, first of all, yes, they did actually put me aside and said, hey, listen, we have beer and stuff in the fridge that is not for you. it will be one day, but not for you today. so it is that kind of stuff. but it's also kind of like, i don't know, i was really excited about everything that i was working on. one of the nice parts about people early careers, they love doing everything. and what was was kind of interesting is people didn't really know what to give me as work because they would think that, oh yeah, nobody really wants to work on the bug fix, and no one really wants to do the documentation. and then i'd be like, no, no, no, guys, i'm serious. i actually, that sounds exciting. i can make it look good. i can make it work really well. so it was it was kind of fun. and it's. yeah, it lasted for like four years too. so that was that was a lot of big lots of stuff to work on. try to lots of different projects. really enjoyed my time there. okay. so i just one last follow up question and that is for years you turned 21 and you

could have the beer and that's when you left. yeah, yeah, i went to twitter. at the time. they had even more beer. so that was that was exciting. twitter at 40 people was there was there was beer and everything outgoing there. oh man. i you know, i'm at nbc. no beer. all right. well, larry, i appreciate you. i appreciate you being with us this morning. thank you for putting up with those questions. envoy ceo larry gadea, thank you for being with us. and press here. we'll be back in just a minute. when our clean, shiny truck arrives at your house, it's a sign of a new beginning. one 800 got junk is a full service junk removal. when your home feels clean and happy, the people inside feel clean and happy too. we make junk disappear. all you have to do is point. you can rest easy at mancini sleep world during our presidents day sale, where you can save up to $1,200 on top brands like stearns and foster. avocado and beautyrest black with tempur-pedic mattresses starting at $27 a month and queen mattresses from 197. plus,

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here, one of the companies with the most experience in ai is not in medicine or in search. it's a company that will help you end your gym membership or get out of a parking ticket. do not pay has been using ai since the days of ibm's watson. in fact, doot pay will argue on your behalf using its ai with customer service. i on the other end, the chat bots deployed to keep you and your money from going away. ceo josh browder is a friend of the program. he's fresh back from paris and the ai summit there, the same one attended by sam altman and vice president jd vance, and i asked him to stop by. give us a short debrief. let me start with, you know, josh, it sounds a bit a bit like the americans were were bullying their way a bit through the summit. the us and the uk said they wouldn't sign that agreement with other countries. what do you think about that? i think that's a great idea. the energy among entrepreneurs is

electric that the us and the uk, instead of making these vague commitments around ai safety, are actually focused on innovation. and that's what really it will take for the good guys to have the best ai, because it's unsurprising that companies like china sign this commitment, but because they want to slow down other countries, perhaps. i think it's i think you're right. i mean, if we compare it to the early days of the space race, you know, we just figured out how to build a rocket at all. let's be careful about how many, you know, safety guidelines and rules that we're going to put around space exploration before we're barely getting off the ground. exactly. and just to put this into context, to deploy a leading ai model today, it's 200 times cheaper than a year ago. so a lot of things we use in our business, it's now 200 times cheaper. and then with deep seat coming out, even in the past month, it's got 20 times cheaper and 200 times cheaper than a year ago. and this has led to an explosion of things that are possible today that weren't even

popossible aear ago, because maybe they were too expensive or took too long to complete. it's a very exciting time. jd vance was saying, we need to foster the creation of ai technology instead of strangle it. i was speaking to an ai expert earlier in this show from microsoft, and we were talking about how there there are guardrails and there's speed bumps. and depending on who you are, it's either a guardrail or a speed bump. that's right. and one interesting thing i noticed in paris is i've never seen the government embrace a new technology so much. i've been running my business for almost ten years now, but i went to an event with the french foreign minister, and he announced a huge partnership to build ai data centers in france. i met lots of different governments from around the world, including even places like kenya, and it seems like this time is different, where the government is actually embracing and investing in new technology rather than trying to capture it. in the past, government and

technology have kind of been enemies, but in this era, i think a lot of people are recognizing, even in countries like france, that they have to invest in it to be part of the future. sam altman was there. notably, elon musk was not. but sam had a speech in which he pointed out how quickly i was growing and the importance of all nations to be fostering that kind of talent within. yes, exactly. and it'll be interesting to see what happens with elon's bid for openai. a lot of people are saying that's just to kind of slow them down and we'll see what happens. it's like a tv show. it is very much like a tv show. the back and forth. so, you know, it's been it's been a while since i've been to europe. what's the overall tone in a place like that? i mean, the conference where you have so many different countries with americans. i'm sure you got some questions. so a lot of there's this big misconception that the most important companies are built in america, and that's largely

true. but there are a lot of important companies being built in europe. mistral, which is like a openai competitor, which powers a lot of ai phone calls, fluid stack, which a lot of companies around the world, including facebook, used to train their ai models, are all european countries. so you can't really ignore europe in terms of us investment in europe. if the company is really good, us investors will still invest. it's just a bit harder to build those type of companies, but they do exist. all right. my last question for you, josh, is do you learn any french in your brief trip? i actually learned french in high school. i grew up in the uk. it was a bit rusty, so i preferred to speak in english. d'accord. well a bientot umpah umpah. okay. all right, josh browder, merci beaucoup. he is the ceo of ai using do not pay. i appreciate you being with us this morning.

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