Welcome to the HBRidea cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison Beard.

For the next few Thursdays, we're bringing you a series of interviews with some of the world's leading tech CEOs and founders to hear their perspectives on artificial intelligence and other top-of-mind issues.

Today, we'll listen to a conversation that Tony Towns Whitley, CEO of SAIC, had with HBR editor-in-chief Audi Ignatius during our recent virtual Future of Business Conference.

SAIC is a company with more than $7 billion in annual revenue and 24,000 employees.

It provides engineering, digital, AI, and mission support to defense,

space, intelligence, and civilian customers. Tony took the helm about a year ago, after Stintz

as a senior executive at Microsoft, CGI Federal, and UNICE. She also serves on five boards, both

corporate and nonprofit, and is a former US Peace Corps volunteer,

so she has some useful insight on how organizations of all types can work together on our biggest

challenges. In answering questions from Adi in the audience, she shares her thoughts on leading

effective strategic transformation, upskilling employees, and guarding against AI bias.

Here's that discussion.

So let's dive in.

Talk about how as an incoming leader, you know, you're able to figure out

what needs to change and what levers you have to try to bring about that change. A couple things

are very clear. SAC was first. It was a first in its market to have an employee owned operating model

to really to operate in the world of STEM

before STEM was cool.

And that was the history.

Then I started to look at the data,

the more current data relative to SAIC having gone a bit flat

in its growth cycle,

...