What tech leaders fear (in their own words)

The Milken Institute Global Conference gathered top players in business, technology, and politics at a chaotic moment for the global business ecosystem. POLITICO’s Tyler Katzenberger cornered some big names in industry and government to ask them the question on everyone’s mind: What’s the biggest threat to the future for tech?

• Michael Kratsios, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy: The biggest threat is complacency... The reality is that everyone in the innovation ecosystem—from universities to industry to the government—all have a very important role to play in driving innovation forward. 
• Judy Faulkner, CEO and founder of health-data giant Epic Systems: What I’m hearing from our customers is that private equity is very scary, because what private equity does is it buys them, then gets rid of all sorts of things that private equity thinks is too expensive, leaving them as just a husk. Then it sells these companies and makes a profit, but they’re then in too terrible shape to do good health care.
• Ryan Hagemann, IBM’s global lead for AI policy: I’m not sure I would quite frame this as a threat, but a big concern of ours … is a lack of some sort of harmonized framework or approach to governing AI domestically in the United States.