Navigating the Future of Search: A Conversation with Zack Kass

Explore the future of search. Conductor’s Chief Product Officer and OpenAI's former GTM head discuss AI's impact and how to adapt your search strategy.

AI is reshaping the digital landscape. That means businesses are facing a critical challenge; the old methods of reaching and engaging with customers are being upended, specifically in terms of search and content strategy.

To survive and thrive during transformations like this, you can’t expect to succeed on your own. Leaders need to adapt strategies based on fresh insights from seasoned search and AI experts to keep their brands at the forefront of innovation or risk getting forgotten.

Check out the transcript of a Q&A from our Digital Spring Summit between Wei Zheng, Chief Product Officer at Conductor, and Zack Kass, a distinguished futurist, AI thought leader, and former Head of GTM at OpenAI to get practical advice, and forward-thinking perspectives on how to build a resilient and authentic brand presence in the age of AI.

Wei Zheng, Conductor CPO: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today at the Spring Summit. My name is Wei Zhang, and I'm the Chief Product Officer at Conductor. Today, I'm joined by Zack Kass, a leading futurist, AI thought leader, and global business advisor. As the former Head of GTM at OpenAI, Zack brings over 15 years of experience in AI and has been instrumental in transforming AI research into practical business solutions.

Today, he advises Fortune 1000 companies like Coca-Cola, Morgan Stanley, and MGen. Welcome, Zack. We're very excited to have you here.

Zack Kass: Thanks so much for having me! Great to be here.

WZ: Today, we're going to talk a little bit about how AI is fundamentally changing the future of search and digital content and what strategic steps businesses must take now to thrive in this rapidly evolving landscape. So before I jump in with questions, I'd love for our audience to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found yourself in the AI and futurist space?

ZK: Sure. I grew up in Santa Barbara. I went to Berkeley and actually tried to make a go of it playing volleyball, and then ended up coming back to San Francisco during the global financial crisis and took the only job that I could find, which was an internship for a company called Crowdflower, which became Figure 8 and eventually sold to Appen. It was an early data labeling company for the purposes of machine training data.

So, I got my start in machine learning and then joined a company called Lil, which was a large language model provider and an early neural net manufacturer for machine translation. Then, I found my way to OpenAI. Today, I have moved back to Santa Barbara because I'm trying to practice what I preach and surround myself with a physical community, friends, and family.

So today, I run a consulting practice that supports Fortune 1000, 5000, and governments [as we continue to] imagine what comes next and figure out how to make sense of this technology. [From there] we started writing books and newsletters, and then eventually people started asking us general questions about the future [of AI], so now here we are.

WZ: Awesome. Yeah, I think our audience is going to get so many insights and help, especially from somebody who not only knows the fundamentals, but actually has practical hands-on knowledge working with other businesses. Literally every time I get on a call with a customer, they're always asking me about industry best practices and how other people are doing it. Not the theoretical, but just like the actual, practical things that they can do for their businesses. So I think I'm going to kick this off by talking about AI and search.

We're an SEO and organic search platform, so AI really has changed everything [for us]. And I felt like last year [showed] Google was experimenting with putting out AI Overviews in their search results. But now, even when I just walk around asking friends and family, everyone is using perplexity, ChatGPT, and a variety of other search or answer engines.

Could you help the audience understand a little bit about this transition, how urgently people should be thinking about this, and—as change is on their doorstep—is there something they should do differently?

ZK: So first, let's talk about why this is happening. Search is moving from the traditional place of search, right? 90% of traffic goes through Google, and then the rest gets distributed to Bing and some other browsers. That was sort of changing a little, but not much. You saw DuckDuckGo gaining some traction. You saw Bing gaining some traction. But for the most part, prior to ChatGPT, there was no evidence to suggest that search would fundamentally change on any reasonable time horizon, let alone enter this new experience.

Now, why is it changing? Well, what's happened pretty clearly is the rise of the natural language internet. What we are now seeing is that people can explore the world in a language that they are used to exploring the world in. And what I try to remind people is that we learned how to Google growing up.

[We had] to basically learn how to change our behavior to comply with that of a search engine, a vector search engine that is actually trying to trick us, right? Like Google is taking our search results and presenting a bunch of ads to us and saying, hey, why don't you click on one of these ads? And if you're not really good at Google—and my mom is actually one of these people—she's a very smart woman, she's a doctor who has just never been good at using the internet, and particularly Google.

She types a full sentence into Google and clicks every ad that shows up first because that's sort of like a natural reaction. And you have to learn how to, as a consumer, outsmart these engines to the extent you can. That changed as soon as we introduced a way that you could type a full sentence into an experience and get a natural language response.

People were super drawn to it because no one actually wants to walk around the world the way that they search Google. No one walks up to a stranger and says, “Best restaurant under ten dollars open now Chinese,” right? That's not how we live and interact, and ChatGPT, Perplexity, and these other experiences offer that.

As a result, people are quickly migrating to that because people want to use the Internet the way that they the way they interact in the world, and so we're already seeing about I think.

Plus, I think it's a material percentage of the traffic now. Last I looked, I mean, think it depends on who you ask, but it's about 10 to 15 % of all search queries are now moving through these platforms, ChatGPT or Perplexity in particular. And what's particularly interesting about these right now is they're not selling ads. So people feel like they can trust these platforms. I mean, obviously, there are other issues associated with that, but they're not worried about being misled in some specific way.

If you believe that a 10 and 15 percent movement in the market is material, and I do, then you should believe that it's here and you should do something about it. And then the question is what to do about it. Of course, you and I will discuss, but I think it is imperative that people at least now recognize that we are quickly moving towards a world with a natural language internet, and what that means [for people] exactly will change. And as soon as we think we figured it out, the agentic Internet will arrive.

But, unequivocally, it is here. There's a shift happening, and it's being driven by this, [due to its] optimal consumer behavior.

WZ: Yeah, I would agree with you. I do think that, just like you mentioned, maybe the search engine is not so much about the search engine, right? It's not that it's Bing or Google, but it's the format in which the content is being presented to you. You hit on this around ads and links. Shouldn't you just get the answer? So I completely agree with you. I think what is really changing is not which search engine.

And I love what you said about how it was kind of a little bit of a setup, right? It's like the natural intent of humans was to get answers when they put something into the search bar. It's not for the search engine to present a set of algorithms to you, but for you to get at the true natural intent of what you're looking for. So I also think that for businesses, there's a little bit of fear as well, right? Because they see [their website] traffic plummeting, right?

And the reason for that is that people are not clicking on the links as much. So there's a sense of panic, like, is this thing even still relevant? Should I still worry about search? Should I still worry about content? Are people even reading anything on my website anymore? So I do feel, 100%, that it’s here now, and what we've been recommending to our customers is that this isn't something that's gonna rapidly change in terms of all the things that you track tomorrow.

Like you said, it's still 10 to 15% of traffic, but it's definitely something you need to start thinking about to make sure content strategy and website strategy work well in the new age of AI search.

So, on the topic of AI being both a threat and a great opportunity for businesses. Search is really cool again, because of all the changes in technology, right? So you position a lot in your conversation that AI is a disruptor, but it could also be a solution to the very problem that it might have created. Can you talk a little bit about how that's the case for the search landscape and the problem that we're looking to solve for our customers?

ZK: So I think what we saw is that Amazon capitalized on a number of things. Obviously, the ban on instantaneous products, you know, the rapid decline in the cost of producing goods, is just the new internet of abundance and instantaneous gratification. But what it also capitalized on was that people got really tired of paginating.

People got really exhausted searching the Internet for 20 minutes just to find something that might be relevant to some reasonable request that they've made, because so much of the internet was designed quite honestly to distract them, to capture their attention, but not in their interest, in the interest of an advertiser. And that made earned media on the internet harder and harder because it meant, and you know this exceptionally well, that you had to start gaming your own websites to trick people into finding their way there.

Of course, no one sets out to do that. No one designs a web page to trick someone. But at the end of the day, you start doing a bunch of things on your website that are specifically designed to please Google's engines and not actually the user. That's bad, right? That's just not the internet we want to live in. And the dead internet theory proposes that basically, so much of the internet is just broken because we've over-engineered the process of discovery.

AI actually presents a really incredible solution to this, where we actually start to discover things much more easily, and people start to do a lot more and become more productive because they don't give up looking for the thing that they were trying to solve. Think about a trip that no one ever took because they couldn't figure out where they were supposed to go in a foreign country, or a product that someone didn't buy because that would have materially changed their life, or a class that someone didn't enroll in because they couldn't find reviews for it.

I think there's just a bunch of stuff that still doesn't happen today because of indecision and fear. One solution to this was the influencer economy, [where] we have all these people that we can trust on social media saying you should do these things. That has its own problems, but it sort of works.

But enter A.I., and I think what's really exciting right now is this idea that people are able to accomplish a lot more on the internet with much higher degrees of satisfaction, thanks to a lot of what Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini’s response is providing them. It gives them the tools to then go explore further, which is often what people want with an initial search result.

Where it probably presents the most opportunity is actually in reinvesting or rewarding those who have invested in the highest quality content because it's capable now of doing an exceptional amount of indexing and finding lots of stuff that can be buried very, very deep and making sense of all of it using recency bias, attention bias, confirmation bias, all of these things that allow it to properly weight things instead of just traditional SEO algorithm.

So when you're doing something particularly niche, especially on purpose-built search tools like Perplexity, you can get some very niche results that seem very tailored to you. Also, content that someone clearly didn’t design for SEO, that's sort of buried on the internet, can now be surfaced because of AI. This should all swing the pendulum back to people who have high-quality content that's not perfectly designed. Now the double-edged sword here is, as soon as everyone figures this out, there's gonna be a new SEO, so to speak.

One of the things that we're gonna see, I think, pretty soon is the redesign of the internet, and we're gonna probably quickly go from an internet that's designed for us to browse with our eyes to an internet that's designed to be indexed by one of these models with the information being presented to us.

WZ: Yeah, I think SEO sometimes does feel like a little bit of a cat-and-mouse game, right? You're trying to create content, right now, the AI search engines are presenting the answers without a lot of distractions to the user, and giving them the best possible answer, and the search queries are getting super, super long-tail.

You can have a whole conversation with the search engine, right? But I do think people will probably assume that a search engine hasn't figured out a business model. They haven't figured out what the reward is. We talk about the reward, but what is the reward [for businesses] right now? What does that look like?

ZK: They're getting close. Perplexity is on to something. We are not far from a future with value-based outcomes.

WZ: Yeah, what do you think that looks like?

ZK: Close, in this case, means that we have a line of sight to it. We are seeing industries already move in this direction, and I think search could easily arrive there, where both parties, the market itself, rewards the broker in a fair and equitable way, where everyone feels like they can participate, versus just the advertiser paying for our attention.

Obviously, the subscription model, I think, solves a lot. If everyone pays for a subscription to Perplexity or ChatGPT, or Gemini, then inevitably we will get less engineered results because there will be a business model, and people can afford to just surface anything without worrying about what they click on.

Today, Google needs you to click on the ad. That's how Google runs. But I do think that there’s a future that you're starting to see in other service industries like legal services, accounting, and tax, where people say: “Listen, how much is this thing worth to you?” It's easy [for them] to price things out like: “How much to do your taxes or how much to do this.”

You just do that, and you pay a fee for it. So you could imagine a future where someone says, "Look, we’ll connect you with the best product or service, and then we will charge you this much and we will charge them that much."

The brokerage itself captures the value, and you're starting again. For example, law firms are figuring out how to say, "We’ll charge you this much for this service." This would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago because value-based pricing was really hard because the easiest denomination was a dollar. It was a unit of time.

WZ: Yeah, I also think that the internet just simply didn't work that way. I felt like, as early as the internet existed, when you and I signed up for a Gmail account or anything we use, the expectation is it's free. It's always free. Nobody paid for anything on the internet, right?

ZK: Well, we didn't know how we were paying.

WZ: We didn't know how we were paying. You’re right. But the foundation of the internet wasn't set up for a fair exchange of value, so ads became the de facto way of doing that.

[Which is] unfortunate because I actually do think that most people want to spend their time optimizing content and wisdom from their brands instead of worrying about how to hack the SEO algorithm to rank higher on the engine. So, I think one of the most exciting areas for Conductor is that we think the most valuable thing you could be doing right now is to double down on your content strategy and create really, really authentic and high-quality content.

But there is a concern about AI generating content. Everybody knows that AI can generate content, but that content [usually] sounds AI-ish, or this sounds like an AI piece of content. So, how should businesses balance this notion of automating for efficiency and productivity with authenticity and having content that speaks to the voice of the brand? How do you make sure the content is quality in this agentic and automated world that AI is pushing us into?

ZK: Well, some of this is self-serving, because it's the world I want us to live in. And some of this, I think, is evidence-based. It's the world that I'm seeing work best. People want authenticity more than ever. What millennials have done for the influencer economy is already starting to chip away. You're seeing Gen Z and Gen Alpha basically say, These are effectively brands now.

We used to see influencers as the guy and gal next door that we can relate to. No one sees most influencers that way anymore. They are so manufactured and manicured in the same way that most brands are, and even in some cases, to a greater degree, that we don't actually have an authentic view into their lives.

You're starting to see these, and by the way, I don't use a lot of social media, so I'm mostly regurgitating what I've been told or observed on an evidence basis, but you're starting to see these younger influencers basically take on a much more authentic approach. Now, how much of that is real versus not? [That’s] hard to know, but I do think that there is exceptional new value to being authentic. And [by that] I mean actually saying things that don't necessarily appeal to everyone, right? Building an experience that appeals in many cases to a very specific set of the market or says things that not everyone agrees with.

What most AI content is designed to do is actually to just sound very good. It's palatable. There's something very agreeable about a lot of just AI-generated content, and what I stress to people is that your value is no longer in your raw intelligence. That's on an individual basis and a collective basis. We are [taking the limits off] intelligence, and we should stop pretending that we are going to be differentiated on how smart we are.

We're gonna be differentiated on how we make each other feel. The world is becoming, in fact, somehow more humanistic, not less, because of AI. I believe in this very, very much. We will differentiate on these sorts of interactions. And you and I are sitting here, not because we know more about this stuff, but because we're willing to talk about it in interesting ways, and our tone and intonation somehow have now become even more important than anything else. This is something people have to start considering at the individual and company levels. Being an expert on a thing is no longer that interesting, but making someone feel a certain way is.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Phil Knight unpacked, in Shoe Dog, [that] there's a lot to be said for taking a thing that someone thinks they know very well and actually just repositioning it in a very authentic, unique way and not trying to appeal to everyone. Not trying to say the thing that can rank the highest, not trying to say just the SEO garbage thing that [surfaces on SERPs], like the seven ways to impress your boss. That stuff is just not gonna get clicked on anymore because no one cares about it. We stopped caring about it a while ago; it just lives on the internet. I think that is a big opportunity.

WZ: Yeah, it's so interesting. It's almost like the opposite of what you would think, right? People think AI is making everything less personalized and feeling more generic. But I think in order to stand out in this world, or where everybody can easily generate content, you actually have to have a more authentic voice than ever before.

ZK: On an individual and collective basis, for sure.

WZ: One of the things we advise our customers [to do is use] the capability in our platform that does content optimization and content generation using AI, and often people ask me, How can I do this at scale? I don't want to generate one piece of content. I want to do 100 pieces of content. Every item in my product catalog should have generated a piece of content that does XYZ.”

We actually have this capability. Our platform is completely API enabled. We can allow you to generate as many pieces of content as you like.

But one of the things I always ask people is, How do you know it's good? How do you know? Because AI can hallucinate, AI can do things that are not 100% accurate, right? So I always tell customers they need a human in the loop. Human in the loop is essentially our practice of saying, whenever you're doing something with AI, we want to inject some ability for humans to give feedback or to learn from the things that it has generated.

You need to have a threshold for measuring quality of some sort. Something that I think everybody needs to be aware of is that we have to have a quality standard for the content that's being generated from AI. But there should be a mechanism to build a workflow that takes that into consideration and then injects the right human steps to make sure that the content is authentic, is speaking the brand voice, and is answering the question that people are looking for in search.

I know that we alluded to this a little bit. The agentic future, right? This is… I don't think I can exit any sort of conference or any conversation about AI today without someone saying the word agentic or agent at least once. Usually it's 100 times. So you've spoken about an agentic world where maybe websites are not even the primary way that people get information, and maybe search is moving beyond people searching for answers on web pages.

What do you think this agentic future, or the agentic search world, will look like? What does that mean? And why should businesses care about that now? I know that's a bit more in the future, but what does that mean for you?

ZK: Well, why anyone should care about it now is that it's pretty rad. It's like you should care about it in the same way you should care about, you know, space travel, right? Like, are you going to go on the rocket anytime soon? Probably not. Is it really cool, such that you should take an interest in it? Yes.

Can you extrapolate, given what we're doing today, that we will go to the Andromeda Galaxy at some point? Yes. And that alone, I think, is what we need more of in this world, the sense of wonderment that we seem to have lost.

But I think the obvious reason that anyone should care about agency today is that if you live in marketing and content, it is already starting to have an impact. You're seeing this early evidence to basically show that the way new search is working is that it's taking information from web pages and presenting it in a UI for the consumer to make sense of, not on your site, right?

So, you're seeing this massive drop-off in a lot of these famous blogs. I mean, there are a few of them, and you're seeing much less traffic to the blog itself and not necessarily less attribution on some of the links, which suggests that people are still seeing the content, they're just not going to the site to get it. That's just the beginning. The natural evolution [of that] is a world where that content is actually not even present in a UI. It then goes to another place, which then goes to another place, and then an agent does something with it.

So, instead of someone saying, Show me some options for this thing, a human says, Hey, can you book this thing? And the reservation just gets made, because the machine can make sense of the internet.

That inevitability, and I say inevitability carefully, but I really do think it is one at this point, lends itself to this idea that the future web is not one where we browse. It's just probably not a place where our eyeballs go, and our attention becomes something that's harder to trade on because our attention is spent less on the actual internet itself, and more on figuring out how we solve for a given problem.

I think early, early evidence basically says that agents are going to be far more powerful than we thought at communicating with each other. So, this idea of your agent and my agent coordinating a calendar event and a dinner reservation is not just imminent, it's here. The multi-agent worlds are already sort of presented, so I do think that people need to start coming to terms with the fact that the physical website that they love so much may not be the thing. The content itself will be.

Reorganizing the web so that you’re presenting the contents to the agent versus the content to the human is going to be critical, and I think what we're going to see—and early evidence supports this—that many sites are actually going to start building sort of like a copy. Andre Carpathy actually talked about this recently. He said, Look, the internet should just be a single tech. Every webpage should just be a single text file because that's how the LLMs want to search these things.

So, there's a good argument to be made that everyone should start building this agentic copy of their site that is much easier to index and browse, but is not intended for anyone to actually look at.

WZ: I read a proposal someone suggested an LLM.txt standard kind of sitemap, where it was a markdown version of your website that AI would just ingest. It's only for the purpose of the content extraction, not for the purposes of presentation or UI click-throughs. I totally think that I, you know, I wouldn't say I'm as much a futurist, maybe as you, but I'm positive and feeling optimistic, I should say, about the future for AI.

I think a lot of people think of their website as the sole place where people come and find them. But regardless, that's still going to be the medium in which people interact to get information. The net content, the actual wisdom that you're expressing through the website, is still going to be super important, and that's the area that we are trying to double down our investment efforts on to help customers create really authentic and high-quality content.

Whether that's going to be served up on the website one day or seeing some other medium, that I think would be super interesting. But I think it is a little bit further out than some of the things that you're talking about.

ZK: In fairness, probably, but again, like most of these things, they happen slowly and then suddenly.

I think one thing that we can take for granted now is that AI is capable of producing images and videos so effectively that we sort of look at the internet very differently now. That happened very suddenly. It was not long ago that I showed someone DALL-E for the first time and had this religious experience almost.

I mean, you think, we update very quickly to what machines are capable of. And we are nothing if not adaptable creatures, which is, I think, something profoundly incredible about humans. But it does present this big challenge to businesses because we sort of gravitate to the lowest-pressure zones, and so as soon as agents are capable of booking people's reservations at hotels or restaurants, they're gonna do it and websites are going to wake up one day and be like, Where'd our traffic go?

WZ: Yeah, it's happening even now. I think, honestly, the speed that this is going to move, I think, comes down to the last X percent, right? When we think about agentic, it's like a happy path. Everyone can envision it. When you're on the happy path, everybody says, Yup, this makes sense. Looks awesome. That's what all the demos are for. Everybody gets super excited, but it's like the last 1%, 5%, 10%, depending on what it is, there's a margin of error, and in that margin of error, how can you resolve the complexities and guardrail all the things?

ZK: What is the first and last thing you would use an agent for?

WZ: Yeah, that's a good question. I think booking an appointment is something I would absolutely do; it doesn't feel high-stakes enough where, if it didn't do the right thing [it’s a big deal].

But when you think about some other things that you want content or other things to help you with the tolerance for error, and [suddenly] whoops, it's not good, and those are the deltas that are going to have to get worked out, but I totally agree with you. I don't know if it's going to come only once. I think it's going to be gradual.

The kinds of things that are very trivial, like booking calls. And I use Google Assistant today to book restaurant reservations without going to the restaurant’s website or touching it.

ZK: Okay, so, given that, my challenge to you and your customers, and I think this is a thing that you're in a unique position to help them with, is how high stakes is your business? Are you selling services that people are gonna say, I have to call this place, I have to talk to somebody who works here? Or do you live in a world where people are like, yeah, it's okay, I mean, you just described it, where the stakes are lower, it's okay.

Or as soon as your agent starts, as soon as you start outsourcing purchase preferences to your agent, you say, Look, I need a nice pair of running shoes, don't really trouble me with which ones you get me.

When that happens, and I don't think it's that far away, companies that have insisted that they are a high-stakes purchase may quickly find out that they’re not, or more importantly, that the agent's preferences are better optimized than the human's, right? Even if it is high stakes, like I hate getting a bad massage. It feels like I'm wasting a bunch of time. So I consider that a high-stakes decision that I make online, relative to other decisions I make online. But it turns out that the agent may actually be better at finding me a great masseuse. So that may be something I say, look, go find me a great masseuse.

WZ: I think it all depends on the use cases and the intent of what users are looking to do. But I do think it's super interesting to think about, if we do get to that endpoint that you described, which is information on the internet primarily serving wisdom into these highly intelligent systems that can help us get things done. In that world, what should brands be doing to make sure that wisdom gets there? How to best express that wisdom, how to best make sure that it's the truth that you’re trying to express?

Okay, I would love to talk to you forever, but I think we are coming close to time here. I think I wanted to close off by asking you, since you advise businesses on what they should be thinking about in the age of AI. Right now, a lot of people are looking for help. It's a super, super, rapidly evolving landscape. So, if enterprises are looking for assistance, what should they be looking for in a strategic partner? What should they be looking for to get that help? And how do you think that this assistance or relationship can transform the results for them?

ZK: Well, yeah, I think this particular answer probably deserves longer than I'll give it. But I think there are two things that any business needs to solve for when they're trying to decide what to do next. The first is to figure out: Are they running towards something, or are they running away from something? And I think a lot of businesses right now are approaching AI with a sense of fear. If we don't do this thing, there will be some existential crisis, so there's this mad dash and rush. to buy lots of tools and to hire lots of people and to do things because if we don't, then we'll die, right? This is one of these natural responses.

In that world, what ends up happening is you see businesses often not solving the most important thing, but solving sort of everything else because it's the everything else that's easy. And you just sort of like, stick AI everywhere and let's build a better company, right?

That's not a great approach for obvious reasons. It never works this way. The challenge is actually one of the things we do in the firm, which is actually showing up and helping businesses truly imagine a better world. This is core to my job, painting a picture of a future where the company and its constituents live in a much better world. Because a lot of the things that are hard or bad or broken today are not, and that is sort of a requisite to actually adopting this technology, or frankly, going through any massive change effectively.

Parents know this, right? When you're moving to a new city, how do you message it to your children? Do you talk about how you'll come back to the current city sometimes, you'll still see your old friends, or do you talk about the opportunity that awaits you? We are emotional creatures, and we want to know that we're moving towards something really amazing.

Businesses that are willing to explore the possibilities in a very optimistic, hopeful way inspire their people to do it. And when their people do it, they feel like they're on the right side of history. They feel like they're adopting something that isn't presenting this catastrophic consequence to humans, but actually presenting a world where we will materially lower the cost of goods and services by automating a bunch of things and improving accessibility for a bunch of people who can't have stuff.

That is actually my battle cry. That is my principal challenge to most companies. Because without knowing any specific companies, it's sort of hard to provide tactical guidance. But I really do challenge people to move towards something with a sense of hope and wonderment. I mentioned this earlier. And from there, it's like, can you imagine your business? Every CEO sort of has this expression: My business is great except. And they go to bed every night sort of knowing that the except has been there forever, so they don't lose sleep over it.

It's this big asterisk about their company that every company has had, basically, except Google, I suppose. There were no asterisks to search. Now there is. But I do think you get a chance now as a CEO to say, what if that awful thing, what if that terrible asterisks hanging over a company that's like, but four goes away? What happens in the world, where you actually, magically sort of reimagine the thing that sort of [hinders] your company today. Companies will do this, and the individuals will do this, and they will start to collectively improve their jobs in meaningful ways and their constituents' lives.

WZ: Yeah, I think that's really, really great advice, and I think ideally, find partners that believe in the same things as you do, like looking towards a more optimistic future.

Zack, thank you so much for joining us today. I learned a lot through talking with you. I really enjoyed our discussion, and I'm sure our audience viewers have too. So again, thank you for your time and have a great rest of the summit.

ZK: Likewise, thanks, Wei. Thanks for having me. See you soon.

[This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.]