Almost $20 trillion in revenue—and a record-breaking $1.87 trillion in profits. Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive list of the biggest companies in America.

Fortune 500

The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

Providing electricity in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and the U.K., the energy company has over 10 million customers across its different regions of operation. But a March 2021 deal is likely to remake the company's geographic profile; in the deal, PPL agreed to sell its U.K. utility business to the British company National Grid, while buying National Grid's Rhode Island unit, The Narragansett Electric Co.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

F500-2020-408-PPL

The Allentown, Pa.-based utility provides power to some 10 million customers in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and the U.K.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2016 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

World's Most Admired Companies

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

Company Info

Industry

Industry Rank

Previous Industry Rank

Overall Score

Location

Website

Fortune 500 Rank

Fortune 500 Profile

Key Attributes Of Reputation

Innovation

People Management

Use of Corporate Assets

Social Responsibility

Quality of Management

Financial Soundness

Long-Term Investment Value

Quality of Products/Services

Global Competitiveness

Key Financials (last Fiscal Year)

Revenues ($M)

Profits ($M)

Assets ($M)

Total Stockholder Equity ($M)

Profit Ratios

Profit as % of Revenues

Profits as % of Assets

Profits as % of Stockholder Equity

Earnings Per Share (last Fiscal Year)

Earnings Per Share ($)

EPS % Change (from prior fiscal year)

EPS % Change (5 year annual rate)

EPS % Change (10 year annual rate)

Total Return

Total Return to Investors (last year)

Total Return to Investors (5 year, annualized)

Total Return to Investors (10 year, annualized)

Established in 1920, PPL is a U.S. energy company that provides electricity and natural gas to approximately 3.5 million customers, operating through three main segments: Kentucky Regulated, Pennsylvania Regulated, and Rhode Island Regulated. The company supplies electricity to customers in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Virginia, and Rhode Island, and delivers natural gas to customers in Kentucky and Rhode Island. PPL also generates electricity from power plants located in Kentucky.

Q3 2025

Q2 2025

Q1 2025

Q4 2024

PPL (PPL): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

legacy

Companies

PPL | Fortune

PPL (PPL): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Fortune Editors

Fortune 500 Power Moves: Which executives gained and lost power, Jan. 11–17, 2025

/2025/01/17/fortune-500-power-moves-jan-11-17/

Crate & Barrel is evolving from a home furnishings importer into a multi-hyphenate design, B2B and AI-assisted powerhouse, with plans on expanding its retail footprint while using new technology to change the way customers shop online. As geo-political shakeups in trade and supply chains challenge the businesses’ operations, CEO Janet Hayes says the company is focusing on offering high quality products to forge ahead.

Crate & Barrel Wants You To Know They Are Much More Than Crates & Barrels | Behind the Business

Features

I would have never believed if someone said 5 years from now the company is going to grow over 55%. You're going to triple the bottom line. Long known for wedding registries and modern home decor, Crate and Barrel has grown into a $2.5 billion powerhouse. We've been Reinventing our retail fleet and really doubling down and investing now against a backdrop of tariff headwinds and supply chain volatility, the company is focused on new consumer touchpoints and delivering tech-driven speed under the leadership of CEO Janet Hayes. As the next generation buys fewer homes and online options multiply, how can Crate and Barrel win in the consumer wars? You can see this kind of iconic picture here of the crates and barrels and hence the name started to form. Somebody walked in and said, What's the name of the store? And they just kind of said, I think it's Crate and Barrel, and that's where the name came from. Crate and Barrel was founded in 1962 by Gordon and Carol Siegel as a way to bring Americans high quality home furnishings from around. The world. This is what we call our atrium, which I think is so beautiful. It has since expanded into a multi-hyphenate brand, offering design services, catering to kids, and curating gifts. The German retail company Auto Group bought a majority of Crate and Barrel in 1998. By 2011, Otto Group was Crate and Barrel's sole owner. Despite revenue losses for Otto Group this year, Crate and Barrel was a significant driver of the company's positive earnings. Janet Hayes took the helm in August of 2020, 1 of the most uncertain times in the company's history. In the five years since, they've dealt with three major crises a global pandemic, supply chain turbulence, and the current geopolitical pressures of tariffs. Each time we come out stronger, I would have never believed if someone said five years from now the company is going to grow over 55%. You're going to triple the bottom line. A key part of Hayes's strategy has been in diversifying the company's customer base, growing various streams of revenue while staying focused on Crate and Barrel's core brand identity. Can you walk me through each of your brands and give me a sense of which ones are your biggest revenue drivers? Uh, we'll start with the Crate and Barrel brand. That brand I think most know, and if you ask someone on the street, they'd. Probably pull up a really warm memory of oh I registered there it starts kind of at the beginning of that registry and has grown into quite a big brand and then there's CB2 which is going through in my opinion, a really beautiful evolution. It's much more kind of design focused than crate and barrel, meaning appealing to the trade. They don't have in-house design. They use designers around the world. Then there's Crate and Kids kind of fulfills a couple of rooms in the house that we weren't kidding and really has an aesthetic that matches the crate brand. We also have Hudson Grace, which is a really beautiful, entertaining, and gift brand. And then we are bringing up a couple of other new brands as we are talking, not allowed to be out yet. The company is now doubling down on these 3 pillars. Investing in new technologies, expanding its retail footprint, and broadening its customer base beyond the individual consumer. What will come up pretty big in the next couple of years is our B2B business and our franchise business expanding globally. Oh, tell me about those. So the B2B business one I'm really excited about, we're one of the few companies that can do a whole home or a whole restaurant or a whole hotel from our brands and deliver a really different aesthetic. When you start to put all the different brands together, when thinking about the retail home furnishing landscape, a lot of different players out there, of course, you know, you associate IKEA with like the affordable, accessible designs, restoration hardware, the luxury. What lane do you really want Crate and Barrel to own? We need to be known as beautiful quality, beautiful products, and reliable service, and I think that is how we will win. Oh, this is gorgeous. Yeah, so over the past few years we have been making a lot of evolutions to the brand in order to drive growth. Crate and Barrel is rethinking their retail strategy, including customer experiences like Shop and Shop, offering free in-house design services, and appealing to local markets. In the Chicago market, we love chili, we love football, we love beer, we're simple people. Obviously you're constantly seeing all this data from customers. Was there ever any insight from a customer about a specific product that really changed how you either designed it or imagined it in a store? An example I would give you is our. beds. What we heard is that there weren't enough choices. They want a custom fabric on the kids' bed too. We have a bed that we love and we brought it into a local factory and we're able to customize and put the whole custom wall against it so designers can pick from all of the fabrics that we just saw together in the design desk that came from a customer. In the next 5 years, Crate and Barrel plans to expand their retail footprint. 45 to 50 new stores will be popping up in new cities across the country. Tell me more about doubling down on the physical retail expansion. Why now? Why a time when other people are maybe shying away from it? We are in a really beautiful position of not being overs stored, but we also hadn't really dreamt of a new storm model. And in the last 5 years we have put a new storm model out into. The United States market. In fact, we just opened our 7th, and they are proving to be incredibly lucrative and efficient and giving great service and inspiration to the customer. What we did is reinvented the idea of it to be about 40% smaller, one floor, so you can really see the whole home when you walk into one floor, and the customers love it. But those ambitious plans for expansion will be happening against the backdrop of geopolitical changes which are setting up supply chain challenges once again. President Trump posted to Truth Social announcing a new round of tariff hikes targeting six additional countries. Hayes says she's well positioned, having laid the groundwork in her early days of leading the company during COVID. What it was like felt like day to day, hand to hand combat, but What we were doing was really preparing us for the future. How are you dealing with the current instability? Have tariffs affected you in the business at all? They have, I think most CEOs probably anticipated that there would be some geopolitical disruption as a new administration took place, but I think at the speed and the magnitude that it is happening with the tariffs, I don't think probably a lot. CEOs anticipated the company's workload. We've moved business back to the United States where applicable, and I'm happy with where we're moving, but it is not to be underestimated how difficult it has been. On day one that this tariff news came through. I called everyone together and said, do not make a fast move. Quality is our main objective. Crate and Barrel has also used AI to help tackle supply chain challenges. We are anticipating and executing embedding AI into the business across all of this new technology, so it will and is embedded into the supply chain now and we're already seeing efficiencies and gains and being able to coordinate orders faster and more complete for our customers. In 2023, you made this big new tech announcement. You walk me through what exactly that was and since then what you've implemented in terms of this new tech. It all started a little bit before 2023 when our growth, I said we found kind of some cracks in the foundation and so we pulled together an investment roadmap led by technology to deliver a new warehouse management system. labor management system, transportation management system. We had dreams of a new point of sale system in the stores that started to connect that data and then a website that desperately needed to be updated after years. In addition to the back-end systems, Hayes is implementing new consumer facing technology, giving a whole new meaning to online shopping. We have all different kinds of customers, and some of them are very tech savvy, don't want to go in the store, don't want to interact, but still might need help and want to shop in new and different ways. Hence the virtual store. Do you see a world on the consumer side in which a consumer could say design an entire home or a portion of their house? Using AI and never have to step foot in a store, or do you always think that we're going to need these physical spaces? I think we're going to need the physical spaces. If anything, we have to keep asking that same question to ourselves every day. What makes that physical space relevant for the customer in the future? As Hayes positions the brand for the next generation, it's her approach to both the physical and digital spaces that she hopes will set Crate and Barrel apart. Your youngest consumers Gen Z, Gen Alpha, these digital natives who I think sometimes flock to these more digital only brands, how do you plan to encapsulate this new generation of consumers who are so used to online first and, and do you have a plan for, for the next generation of Crate and Barrel users? We believe very. Much an online first and actually the large majority of our sales are online. We're very digitally dominant. I don't think that that generation wants things that are coming at them en masse. That's what they're telling us. So we've got to personalize not only their shopping experience but their marketing experience. We've got to pay attention to what they're doing in social channels and we will. We're going to develop much more. rich content if it's how to decorate, how to cook something, how to pull something together, we owe them more content than we're giving them right now and that will come. But I think at the end of the day it won't differentiate service. How they want to receive it and when they want to receive it is again something we need to listen to and anticipate and be ready to react to.

Almost a year into his mayorship, Daniel Lurie is navigating the challenges and opportunities of keeping a leading tech hub on top. In this discussion, he'll talk about the transformative role of artificial intelligence in city governance, what role the tech community plays in the city's future, and how he plans to bring more business to the city by the bay.

Leading San Francisco: A Conversation with Mayor Daniel Lurie

Conferences

Thank you so much. Hey Daniel, how are you? I'm good. How are you? Good. So you're a year in, almost, not quite. January 11 months. Yes, sir. Are you tired? No, no, not at all. No, I don't. That, that doesn't enter into the vocabulary. Impressive. I think he's part robot, folks. OK, um. It's been an extraordinary year. Um, you have, I, I, I believe at this moment, last I checked, 7 71% approval rating. That's pretty good for anybody. That's pretty good for anybody who's a year into anything, I would say, um. And you avoided a Trump immigration standoff in this city. Um, you have dealt with a litany of civic issues. What are the biggest challenges you face in your opinion as the mayor of San Francisco? I think when we started, I think it was, um, making sure that San Franciscans knew that this city, uh, when we are at our best, is still the greatest city in the world and turning around sentiment, turning around that hope and that optimism, that was our big challenge. We had so many voices from outside of this city. Saying and defining who we were, that we forgot that we are the ones that are going to define San Francisco, and I think we've done a really good job of that. I think those that stayed and fought for our city, that didn't flee, that stayed and fought and invested deeply into our city have seen huge payoffs. I mean. Everything is rushing back in. I mean we've got retail rushing back in. We have people buying office space and buying hotels, and I think sentiment was the big challenge, and I think we've overcome that. At this time last year, 25% of San Franciscans felt like we were heading in the right direction. Today 62% of San Franciscans think we're heading in the right direction, and that's where we can now build from and now we have to execute. We've got to execute on public safety, which we are. Crime is down 30%. We've got to execute on the behavioral health crisis and getting people off the street and into the right kind of treatment beds and recovery beds. And then third priority, we have to strip away the red tape to help our small businesses, our restaurants. Our our galleries get up and running more easily and have a City Hall used to be kind of an opponent for our small businesses. We want to be a partner and we have changed that drastically as well, and we can go into that. But I think the biggest challenge was sentiment. We've gotten there and now we need to go execute, keep people safe, keep our streets clean, and, and create the conditions for success. Well, the sentiment thing is very interesting because you started off talking about everyone else's sentiment outside the city. But in fact it seems like the biggest nut to crack was San Franciscans' opinion of themselves. Absolutely you have to start. You, you got, you gotta love yourself before, um, anyone else is going to love you, uh, and this is now a mental health, yeah, we're gonna, well, we need a couch, um, and I think it's really important that San Francis, you know, we, we lost a little bit of our mojo, you know, we, we also took things for granted. Granted we took our restaurateurs, we took our entrepreneurs, we took our business community for granted we said we can just keep punishing you, we can keep being, you know, uh, a an opponent of yours and you're gonna stay well that didn't happen. People fled. Um, I wish they hadn't, but I understand, uh, to a degree why people felt like this the elected class in San Francisco took people for granted. Uh, from our artists to our restaurateurs to our entrepreneurs, and we're not gonna do that again. And so, uh, this is the greatest city in the world when we're at our best, and I think people are starting to see that again. Yeah, and you were born and raised here, so you really mean it, born, born and raised. So, so this being an artificial intelligence conference, I do have to ask where. Among these priorities that you had and please tell me if they've changed, by the way since you took office a year ago, what, how are you using technology to address them? Are there areas where. It's a lot easier or more difficult. These are big entrenched problems. Probably every major urban mayor has to contend with them. Yeah, I've been clear for now the last couple of years from the time I started my campaign till today, uh, with you here, public safety is my number one priority. Nothing else matters if you can't keep people safe. And so with crime down 30%, uh, citywide crime is down 40%. In Union Square in the financial district where we are right now here in San Francisco and why is that? Is more bodies on the street? I mean, what it's, it's we're still short staffed and the police, but we've, we're using technology, we're using drones as a first responder. We're using, uh, license plate readers called LPRs, uh, so that when something, uh, uh, an a criminal act is committed, we can get a drone up quickly. We can track people. Can do it safely so we don't have to have officers, uh, you know, flying through the streets because that is where accidents can happen and we are catching people now when they commit a crime. So we have, we just launched, uh, relaunched this thing called the Real Time Investigation Center called Arctic here in downtown San Francisco, uh, you know, think the television show 24 where we are. Really able to watch and see what's happening and keep the residents, the business owners, the small business, the retail shops safe, um, and so we're seeing a huge precipitous drop in crime. We are looking at the lowest homicide rate right now since the 1950s in San Francisco. Uh, we are an incredibly safe American city. We still have issues. We still need more officers out walking the beat, so we're going to continue to recruit officers. We have a 40% increase in people wanting to be SFPD now. More police doesn't solve all of our issues because we still have a behavioral health crisis on our streets, so we're trying to get people off the street and into the right kind of beds. But you know the Arctic is one example of technology being used. On all of our fleet of cars we're putting sensors on them to make sure that they're being used efficiently. We know where they are. Our homelessness response, we're managing what beds are available in real time. We're doing a better job. We're rerouting calls, 311 calls, streamlining it using and. With the help of AI and AI agents, and, and so, uh, but we're in the early innings of that, as I know, of course, many people in this room are too. So let's talk about the tech community. You mentioned downtown. That's a big priority for you. You, you, you, you said in previous interviews that, you know, unlocking downtown is unlocking the whole city, right? And so goes downtown, so goes the whole city. So. You know, the tech community has a, shall we say a lot of opinions, yes, uh, about San Francisco and in particular the downtown experience you've been trying to work with them as you said just just earlier a few minutes ago, um, trying to bring them in as open arms, trying to bring them in as partners, um. Opinion sentiment is still divided, right? Some people still talk about SF as it was. Some people still see it as the tech capital, the beacon on the hill. What are you doing to continue to work with them? You're deploying all this technology for your own needs and your citizens' needs, but what are you doing for the tech community to bring them back to downtown, to have them to, to, to make San Francisco what people think it is? Well, first, we are. Working with the community, we work with the business community, we work with the tech community, the tourism community, we want anyone that is home based here, and that is a lot of incredible AI companies that are here, we want them back in the office, and we don't actually have to have this discussion about whether or not it's 3 or 4 days a week in the office when you talk about some of our major companies anthropic, OAI, they're like. 3 or 4 we're in the office 7 days a week and so we're getting people back in the office because we're creating the conditions that people want to come back downtown. Clean and safe streets. I know I sound like a broken record, but my job as the mayor of San Francisco is not to tell people to be in the office 5 days a week. It's to create the conditions so people want to be in the office. So Muni, our public transit, is running efficiently and safely and is clean. Our streets feel safe for people to walk down. You go to Union Square now and it is bustling. A year ago it was not, uh, and so, uh, we, we want their input. We've started something called the Partnership for San Francisco modeled after what New York City started in the 1970s when they were going through a real rough. Time there we launched that there's 35 business leaders, not by the way, not just tech, but tech is engaged and involved, but we have tourism leaders, we have, you know, Visa, we got the San Francisco Giants, we got Ripple, we got, you know, all the companies around the table, and we want to hear their voice. And yes, everybody in San Francisco, it's not just uh tech that has opinions. 840,000 of us all have our own opinions. And I welcome that and that's what makes us such a unique and and great city indeed, um, I wanna come to the audience for a question in a in a minute, but I, I wanna ask you about, so we are both California residents, you and I, um, there have been a flurry of AI laws principally at the state level going on about all that sort of thing. I can't help but imagine that you feel like you're in it whether you are or not as the mayor. Of San Francisco, what's your thought on where the state needs to be in terms of AI policy? Should it be pushing aggressively, you know, we're seeing a fragmentation across the United States in terms of what the states want to do. I mean, listen, I was elected to take care of San Francisco and San Franciscans, and yes, the companies are here. I have not weighed. In on AI policy as of yet, I do think that if you do something that is just focused on San Francisco, we've seen it companies can move to 2 miles away in South San Francisco. They can move to Brisbane. So I'm always a believer in making sure that we have regulations and guardrails in place for this incredible technology that The companies here are unleashing. I think any time you do something that's just city specific or maybe even state specific, you get into a territory where you drive people to other locations, so. Um, not that we shouldn't be leading, uh, not only with the technology but also with, uh, regulations, but I would love to probably see a more, uh, broad based approach, uh, uh, from, you know, our electeds in, in, in the federal government, but, uh, I think we should be always pushing, and I think that's what they're doing in Sacrament pushing pushing. All right, let's go to the audience for a question. Oh look, they're timid after lunch. All right, I've got another one for you, sir. So, oh there's a lot of people we talk a lot about this, yeah, now we, now we can see all of you with the lights up. All right, great, um, you, we talked about the citizens, um, we talked about the tech community. I wanna come back to the citizens. How are you using technology to actually elevate. The non-tech community, the rest of this city, which you, you know, of, of which you're also an elected official representative, um, are there things that can be done? Yes, you talked a little bit about like homelessness and getting folks off the street, but I'm, I'm also thinking about upskilling and. Just elevating the entire city instead of just 11 thing that is around permitting, uh, right now we have a great and good looking permitting office where you can come, you know, to get, you know, your business license and, and, and, and to open a new restaurant and you, but you, you, you, you get in line and you start realizing you gotta fill out, uh, paper forms using. Pen and paper and you go to the fire department at one window and you fill out one form and then you go to planning at another window and then you go to the Department of Public Health at another. I mean those days have to be over um we have we're we're streamlining that we want you to fill out one form on a tablet or on a computer and it goes to all eight departments that oversee, you know, approval process that's right uh and so we've created something called Permit SF. We had a 100 day sprint. We had a 200 day sprint actually later this week we're unveiling some, uh, new. easements around a 300 day sprint just making things easier for the residents, for the small business owners if you want to put new stairs in your backyard or if you want to just redo windows, we have to make things easier for the residents of the city. That's what. Technology is meant to do. It's meant to make our lives easier. We are still living in, in an age where we are not fully utilizing what is right here in our backyard. So we, we are through Permit SF trying to make life easier for the residents of San Francisco. Yeah, I mean, it takes a special person to get excited about. We've got a good looking permit office, you know, um, and, and but we might have those folks here in the room. So, so, uh, as a homeowner, of course I thank you for that. Um, you actually, let's talk about Permit SF just a little bit more. So you, you, you were embroiled in a little bit of a scandal earlier this year around the selection of the technology for that initiative, um, YouGov, I think it was, or OpenGov, excuse me, OpenGov, um, and, and you were criticized because, you know, folks thought that it was not the best tool available, the, the, the selection of that technology was not. Not it and they were, uh, my understanding is your family has ties to that software or something like that, um. It's past you now, but what did you learn from that experience? Uh, well, listen, um, I don't have ties to it, um, but, but let's, let's be clear, uh, when you want to change a system, a legacy system where you have 8 different components to something and you want to streamline and you want to. You know, make life easier for 840,000 people, but change is happening in a really large bureaucracy. You're going to get pushback, and I get it. I understand people are scared of change. I, I am not scared of change. I am not scared to push the envelope and to make sure that we do what's right and make sure that we have more efficiency, more effective government for the people of San Francisco, and there's always going to be pushback when you, when you do that. I think if you come back a year from now and you ask me how has this implementation gone that that'll be the test we're in the midst of of overhauling this there's going to be pushback. I get it that's cool, um, but, uh, it'll, I, I want people to test me on whether or not the the software works and makes people's lives easier, and we're not there yet, but we'll get there, right? I, I believe this is the first time a robot has ever crashed the stage. What's going on at. Brainstorm, um, high germanium. I'm not sure what to say right now. Ah. Could you hold this for me? Yes sir. Thank you. I get to see what questions are coming up next. Very funny, germanium. Thank you. You can keep it. Thank you very much. All right. So let's, let's wrap it in. Come have a seat. Um, the, the, Let's talk about the red tape a little bit. Um. They're so cute, aren't they? Oh yeah, yeah, cool. I didn't know they could parallel park either. Fantastic, um. There you go, um, the, the red, uh, uh, tape of, of, of San Francisco is well known. It is also hardly unique to San Francisco. My hometown of Philadelphia also deals with this problem. My, my residence in, in Long Beach, California, same deal. Like every, a city of, of significant size has bureaucracy. To contend with SFS is particularly well known. You, you have commissions, commissions all over the place. Yes, all over so many commissions, 150 commissions. It's about almost triple what Los Angeles has, and they have 10x the population. A lot more people, right? So is. Artificial intelligence or just technology a way to solve that, or is it simply the way to govern? It absolutely need it can be helpful, uh, to us. I, I, you know, it should not displace people. It should help the people of our city, the workers at, at City Hall and all of our departments deliver more effective services for the people of San Francisco. should free up our employees to do better work for the 840,000 residents and you know sometimes technology works incredibly well and sometimes it doesn't and and and so we've got to be thoughtful about how we implement new, new, new things and I know that's what. The private sector is always looking at and we at the government sector, we tend to be slow to change. I'm going to push forward because what we have been doing in San Francisco in terms of delivery has not always been the most efficient or effective, and we're going to try to lean in on it and use technology. Uh, it's right here, so let's test it out. Fair to say move fast and break stuff a little bit for I, I don't think we should be breaking things, uh, uh, in government, um, but we should absolutely use tools that are well, uh, you know, well regarded, uh, um, that have been tested, um, always with safety, always with, uh, uh, that in mind and regulations and guardrails, but, but, um, I absolutely think we have some amazing. Innovators and entrepreneurs and companies here in San Francisco, we should be using the products. So final question, um, you're almost 1 year in. I asked you backstage if you felt like you were just going, going, going, and, and you, um, and if you ever got tired, and you said no just as you did at the top of this conversation, and then you said I've got 3 years left. It's a ticking clock for you. What are your priorities for the next 3? I think, um, I, I wanna leave San Francisco, uh, in a place where people around the world are like, oh my God, I have to go visit San Francisco. You know, we're, we're here. I know we're at an AI conference, but our number one industry is not technology, it's tourism, uh, and we have been the envy of the world for generations and, you know, hundreds of years now. Like we got away from that, uh, for a few years. We took it for granted as the elected class in the city. Like I'd never been in politics before. I was never, you know, I came from, uh, another field and, and, and people, you know, I think there was probably 4 or 5 people that thought I had a shot at winning and, uh, and so what I, how many were the family, yeah, probably 4 or 5, yeah, and, and so I think, um, what we are trying to create. Is is once again, uh, San Francisco being a world class city that is the envy of the world, and I think we're closer to that than most people realize considering where we were, you know, a year or two ago. Uh, this city is a city on the rise. Uh, we have. We are the innovative ecosystem of the world. That's why this conference is here and and and we also have the most incredible arts and culture scene. We have the greatest restaurants, I believe, on the planet here. Just great a great creative class and we happen to have some pretty unbelievable AI companies here as well so we have it all, uh, we just have to go tell the, tell that San Francisco story to the world and I hope everybody out there is paying attention and come see us here in San Francisco. There you go, Mayor Laurie. Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much. So may I thank you very much. Thank you.

How does a company founded in 1908 survive the breakneck speed of the 21st century? For Shilpan Amin, General Motors’ global chief procurement and supply chain officer, the answer has been forged through crisis leadership and quiet reinvention over nearly three decades inside one of America’s auto giants. He joins Fortune’s Ruth Umoh to reflect on how mentorship accelerated his career, what it takes to move with speed inside a massive organization, and why supply chain risk is one of the few things that still keeps him up at night.

How America’s oldest automaker is tackling tariffs, electrification, and AI | Next to Lead 

Leadership

AI has been core to the video game industry from the very beginning, as designers coded expansive worlds, responsive characters, and immersive experiences for millions of players. Now, how are today’s technologies—generative AI, agentic AI, virtual reality, and so on—changing how people make and play games? And can the design lessons of gaming, from its visual language to how users respond to incentives, be applied to other domains?

Let the Games Begin

OK, so AI has always been core to the video game industry. How are generative and agentic AI and other digital technologies like virtual production changing the way people make and play games, and can design lessons of gaming be applied to other domains? Our next three speakers are well equipped to answer that. We have Haiyan Zheng as a general. and partner gaming AI at Xbox, who's heading up science efforts for consumer facing AI experiences such as gaming co-pilot. She was formerly chief of staff to the CEO of Microsoft Gaming and senior director of innovation at Microsoft Research Cambridge, where she served as technical adviser to the lab director. We have Lee Shueman who created and developed successful platforms, products, and devices at Nintendo, Microsoft, and Xbox. His work on rare LTD's Connect sports franchise earned him two BAFTA awards, including Best Family Games. Now, as chief product officer at Effecta Education Group, he leads the vision and development of Effeta's AI-powered education system. And finally we have Betta Liu, who is the AI lead for Justice Mobile, Netty's Games, one of China's largest PC and mobile game developers. She oversees large scale AI systems for the sort of Justice title, enabling players to create short form animations reaching billions of views across platforms like TikTok. She's also worked across product design and design strategy, exploring how AI design, and players themselves can develop new forms of expression. Fortune Asia editor and avid video gamer Nick Gordon will moderate this discussion and audience members, please also find headsets on your tables for simultaneous translation for one of our speakers. Thank you. Hello everyone, I'm very, very excited for this conversation. We, we have some content we're going to put up on screen, so let's, let's show that now. But, but you know, Lee, I want to start with you. You know, you're from, you know, Effect Education group, but there is a reason why you are on our stage today at this gaming panel. Could you talk a bit more kind of about, about your path through the gaming industry and then eventually at at Effecta? Yeah, yeah, thanks, Nicholas and hello everybody. So my name is Lee, Lee Shinneman. Um, I'm what you probably call a vintage gamer. I've been in the games industry since the mid 90s. You'll see some of my games playing up on the, on the screen behind. So, you know, a long, a long time caring about how to get players to love what they're playing and you know, and the importance of great design that brings all of that together. So 25 years through a whole range of You know, different devices, different consoles. I had the good fortune to work with some fantastic teams over the years, and for those that know the British, the British awards, I got lucky and won a few BAFTAs. In fact, good timing for this game that that's playing now. And you know, especially over the years I've got to work with some of the most talented game designers in the world, including people like Miya Motosan and Nintendo. And a whole range of like lessons learned about how to make playful experiences, make engaging, and now how to bring that, you know, into the world of education, which is, you know, why I'm on the stage today. I'm seeing Star Fox adventures. I have a soft spot in my heart for that video game which I played as a big player of this as a young. as a as a teenager, um, but Hayan, I want, I want to turn to you because you're, you're in, you're at Xbox, working gaming at Xbox, but you also kind of have a broader scope than that and we have a video we're going to show that that should kind of tell us a little bit of kind of like all the work that you're doing. OK. All right, I'm gonna try and replicate this here. We're off to a great start. And what this board does is I can connect into it through these wires, these um tiny coin cell motors. Oh my God. It makes me forget that I have a trevor. I one of them for a long time. So Haiyan, you know, how does this story kind of then connect to your broader experience in gaming, in design? How does this all come together? Right, thanks, Nicholas. Uh, so I wanted to bring this video today, uh, because, you know, this is a project I worked on several years ago before I came back into gaming, uh, that it's very rare for Us to be witness to these acute moments where technology can have this really profound effect to elevate somebody's day to day, where we can just see it happen that someone just a mundane thing like Emma drawing a straight line that she couldn't do because of her Parkinson's disease, that technology could elevate that moment and make that. This, you know, amazing transformational point for her. And as I moved into gaming as well, it also reminds me of the power of gaming and play in that, you know, at Xbox we talk about that our mission is really to bring the joy and community of gaming to every single person on the planet. And if you think about games, games are really this creative expression embodied through high technology that is really meant to elevate somebody's day to day, bring them to that moment of flow to these kind of new experiences, and that's how I think about technology, that to elevate people's experiences. So we have an opportunity now to kind of dive in deep into one game in particular, Sword of justice, Beta, that's the game you're working on, and we're going to kind of walk through some of the things that you're working on with this massively multiplayer online video game. Hello Aaron, my name is Beta Liu. I'm the game AR designer from Sword of Justice. So what is justice? It's a flagship open world MMO we launched at 2023. Uh, right now we have millions of players. So AI is not only a tech buzzword, but also their companions and also their creation tools in our game. In justice, you could customize your own companion from appearance to voice to their background settings. It will remember all of the interactions and involve over time. It's not only just a quest giver, but also a really true relationship. And also we provide all kinds of high freedom tools for the players with AI assisted, for example, the motion capture and the face sculpting and archi architecture building. So, uh, literally the players are building all around the world in our game. And also we help build a 3D TikTok in our game just like the uh the video you could just swipe and also uh shoot with their own avatars in just a second. This has, this has had millions, bills of players or the Chinese TikTok. So the design philosophy for us is very simple. The first one is agency. The world will react to every choice and the creation the players made. And the second one is interdependence, which means that we use AI to connect players to make sure that they feel they are part of the community. And right now we are working towards our um our end, which is a digital Western world. We are trying to shift from exploring maps to exploring societies. It's a world where the drama is unscripted and the possibilities are infinite. So Lee, I want, I want to turn back to you. You know, you've made this jump now from gaming to education. You know, what are some lessons that you think you've learned from working in game design that you're now bringing to this new industry? Yeah, well, let's let's first take a look at the pain of education, I guess, and I'm sure many of you in room of sat in, maybe not in Victorian time classrooms, but classrooms don't haven't really changed that much for many, many hundreds of years. And when you see us going into online lessons or Zoom meetings and everything else that we do, this kind of set up of sitting there all in a row and listening to a teacher and not really engaging with with the with the learning material and really focused on the learning outcome. So to the next slide please, Nicholas. So then. You know, at at EF sector we really care about making sure the student achieves the learning outcome, and I think, you know, many, many educational services around the world attempt it, but I think a big part of this is how to unlock the skill of the teacher. So what you're seeing on the screen here is the teacher is in front of a green screen. We've taken all the key lessons from live streaming and video gaming and brought it into this unique experience where the teacher is front and center inside the content. We run about 5 million classes, online classes like this every year, and you know that amazing set of information and data that we're getting now which will come to my next section in a minute. But I think what you can see from here on screen is, is, you know how we're taking lessons like immersion. making sure the teacher has agency and is able to teach how they want, how the student is able to learn how they want some of these visual tricks, and what you're seeing now on screen is the next iteration of that as we move into a world of agentic AI teaching. Now, you know, I should preface this to say we're not here to remove the human out of the loop. That's not the intention at all, but a big part of the world that we deploy our platform and solution in the global South, there's a huge shortage of teachers, maybe about 5 or 6 million shortage of English teachers, 8 million STEM teachers. So where we, you know, we're operating today maybe in Brazil in All across Latin America we care about giving those students that real opportunity to transform their lives and if that means then bringing AI into the class in a unique way and blending all of these different gaming elements, then you know this, this is, this, this really ultimately is that future. Um, you're seeing some different, different aspects on screen. This one now is just more about role playing for some different, different target segments, maybe not, maybe not in school, but we've deployed now to 4 million students across Latin America. We have new pilots rolling out across the world and again, like I said, the goal here is to now put agentech AI into the classroom, but there to support and sit alongside the teacher all the time. So high end, we take the slide down now, you know, I, I like going to turn to you. So what exactly are you doing specifically at Xbox in terms of kind of what you're doing with AI? Right, so, uh, you know, at Xbox we're really thinking about how to leverage AI to elevate the gaming experience, elevate that player experience, um, so one of the things we Launched recently is a gaming co-pilot. We launched this about 2 months ago on mobile and on PC, and the idea is that when you're playing a game, you can bring up a copilot and you can have a conversation while you're playing. You can, if you get stuck somewhere, you can ask questions and be like, hey, what's this boss? How do I, you know, what are some tips and trick tricks for getting past this boss? Um, you know, tell me about, I forgot what this mission was about. Tell me about the mission, and that might seem like super simple ideas, but it really, I think, um, brings to life gaming and what gaming is about because, you know, when, when a developer is making a game, they want the player to have that flow experience, to be um immersed in the game. As Lee said, to be really kind of deeply focused, but what happens is, you know, you get to a puzzle and you just can't solve it, and then you're like flipping to your browser, to your search engine, you're searching for stuff, you get on YouTube, you forget what you're doing, and then much later, maybe like a couple of weeks later, you come back to the game. So what we want to do is we want to make gaming even more fun, even more exciting through gaming co-pilot, and we're also thinking. About other AI features whether that's AI that sits on your device or AI that sits in the cloud that really highlights and makes special the gaming experiences you have with your friends. As someone who is constantly trying to look for the solution to a puzzle or a boss fight and not being able to find anything but a 3 hour long YouTube video. It can be tricky as a player, I can tell you, you know, but I want to go back to you. You know, given that you are working on designing and developing this video game, you know, beyond the AI conversation, what are some other lessons that you think can be learned about, you know, how to keep people engaged, how to make these games fun, how to keep them playing your game for a long period of time like MMOs are supposed to be? What are some lessons that that you've learned? Yeah, the first one would be, um, Will be the player agency and then the second one, I think it will be the social connection. Uh, for the player agency, we find out that uh the beauty and freedom is like the universal language across the scene. It's very essential to provide high freedom to for the players. Nowadays for younger players, the hardcore not only means combat, but also means the deep expression. The players will be willing to create and share what they created to Douyin, to Xiaohongshu, which will bring back a lot of traffic for the game. The second one is, um, social connection. We want to make the players will be needed in the game and um it will drive them back to the game in the long term. You know, Lee, I, I want to build on something that you sort of talked about as part again, lessons from the game industry to the rest of, to the rest of the industry, you know. Gamification, it is a buzzword. It's people talk about, oh, we have to gamify this. We have to give people scores. We have to turn this into a game, and that's how we engage people and I know from our, from our briefing chats that this is not a thing that you necessarily endorse. So, so, so what's the better way to think about about this idea of gamification and what should designers actually do? I mean, following on what what Betta just mentioned that that idea of player agency. is true in learning, you know, we, our platform is student driven, so by giving the student the ability to kind of drive that learning outcome as much as by themselves with that teacher there to facilitate, I think it's ultimately the like the core thing to lean in on. Um, you know, this idea of gamification has been around for many years. It tends to manifest itself as high scores, streaks, you know, all of these things that are that are meaningful for maybe certain social media products. But at the end of the day, like if you, if you're, if you're there to learn, you have to put in the time and then the effort. There's too much conversation. In around, you know, I can make learning faster. I can make learning easier, but really what you should be focused on is how to make learning more engaging, how to make learning learning more meaningful, and then from that point, take those elements to keep you in the learning experience, the same as keeping you in a gaming experience and finding ways to keep you motivated, motivated as a student. And you know, for everyone in here, we're all life lifelong learners, otherwise you know you guys wouldn't be here in this conference. So again, a lot of what we're talking about is how to maintain that ability to learn from, from the moment you start in school to the moment you're, you're, you know, it's. End of your days, but ultimately finding the ways to engage and bring all of these gaming elements that are really what gaming is about, which is like I said, that that giving the player control and agency and letting them take the lead and the fun that comes from that. Hi Anne, I want to go back to you and talk a bit more about kind of what Microsoft's doing with AI and gaming. I know there's this, there's the muse model, and I'm not going to remember everything that it can do, but there's, but, but you're experimenting with kind of these, these more expansive AI. AI possibilities, including for things like game preservation. I want you to talk a bit more about these other kind of more experimental things that you're trying to do. Um, well, earlier in the year in February, our research partners in Microsoft Research, they published a paper in Nature, and this is the first kind of video game AI model publication in nature. And what they did was they took a video game, and then they trained an AI model. On all the telemetry, all the footage of that video game, so that the AI model could basically simulate a playable version of the game without the original game engine. So earlier you heard Rockwell Group talk about unreal engine and talk about um how you know, putting visualization into the engine. Well, imagine in the future an AI model encompasses all. All of that and can simulate the world, um, whether that be a game world or a hotel interior, and it is all inside the model. And I think that the real capability of that is that now the AI can allow you to express to prompt for what you really want to do with that world, for what you want to do in that space. So as an example, this publication was called the Muse Model in nature. Um, as an example, the research. Team, they discovered that the AI model could do certain things like you could cut cut out a character and you could drop it into as you're playing a game, you could just cut and paste a character into your level and suddenly the AI model sees the character that you've just cut and pasted out of 2D pixels and starts animating it and starts making it come alive. So immediately it changes what you could do with video games. And I think this really can spark imagination about what is the future of play. And I think the challenge is always we don't quite, we we need that imagination. We need everybody in this room and creators across the world to think about what new things that you could do with gaming through the use of AI and I think that will really help us drive this new capability. And these are new models. This is not GPT, this is not Gemini, this is a new kinds of models that models that we call world models. Um, and as part of this, you know, we had a discussion about game preservation and um it's kind of a side topic, but game preservation is really interesting, you know, we engage a lot in backwards compatibility, making sure that all of the games of past generations can be played on Xbox on future devices. At the same time, I know that, you know, I love. And I love Dig Doug, um, and Cubbert, but younger, but that's because I'm more into the retro, the nostalgia of it, right? But if I put my 10 year old daughter in front of Cubbert, um, or Dig Dug, she's going to get bored very easily. And what I've discovered is that, you know, there are, uh, game preservation platforms out there, something like Antstream. I think is a fantastic platform and what they've discovered is in order to introduce games to a new audience, they've had to take the essence of the game and create new experiences. So they take a game and they allow you to jump directly to the key point in the game that's the most fun, and you can play and you can compete with your friends. So it's not exactly preservation of the original game, it's Introducing the essence of that experience to to a new generation, and I think there is now capability for AI for AI to learn, um, the backward, back catalog of games and to be able to allow new generations to. Experience these games in new ways. So these are all still speculative, um, but this is some of the research that we are driving forward in order to open up new capabilities for, for games that, you know, also beta is working on as well. Well, I think with that kind of very expansive view of what AI is bringing to the gaming industry, what the gaming industry brings more broadly to design questions and other industries, I want to thank Le Haiyan, Beta. Thank you so much for talking us through this huge industry today. Please give him a round of applause. Thanks.

PPL

PPL in Coins2Day Rankings

PPL stock chart

Videos