The Long View: 2025 Highlights

“The Angle” Music

Cold OPEN(S)

“If you don't build a great team, if you don't treat them with great care and respect, I'm not sure success is in your future.” Larry Culp, Chairman and CEO, GE Aerospace

“…every year you're the CEO, you'll have fewer and fewer people wanting to tell you what's actually happening and what's really going on. And you need to build different ears and listening skills…” Jane Fraser, CEO, Citi

“I don't think any one company, any one country even, can do what we're doing.” Sarah Friar, CFO, OpenAI

Eric Veiel

Welcome to our special highlight’s episode of “The Angle from T. Rowe Price”. I’m Eric Veiel, head of global investments and chief investment officer. Just a reminder that outside of the U.S., this podcast is for investment professionals only.

Over the past year, we’ve had the privilege of speaking with some of the world’s most influential company leaders—visionaries who are shaping the future of a diverse set of industries, from technology to financial services, from healthcare to industrials.

We’ve just heard a few of their voices—insights that underscore the challenges and possibilities of our rapidly changing world.

In this episode, we’re bringing you the very best moments from some of those discussions. We’ll explore how today’s leaders are building strong teams, fostering cultures of trust, and navigating the uncharted territory of AI.

Let’s begin with the foundation of every great organization: leadership.

Here are two leaders: Larry Culp, CEO of GE Aerospace, and Jane Fraser, CEO of Citi

Eric Veiel

You've obviously spent a lot of time as a leader. You've taught courses on leadership. You were kind enough to write the foreword for my colleague Sébastien Page's book, The Psychology of Leadership. What are the one or two bedrock principles that you try to live by as a leader and instill in that next generation of your team?

Larry Culp, Chairman and CEO, GE Aerospace

Ultimately, business, in my experience, is a team sport. It’s a team game. You win or lose as a function of who is around you, right? Who you work for, who you work with, who works for you. And if you don't build a great team, if you don't treat them with great care and respect, I'm not sure success is in your future.

So what I like to do is find leaders, large and small, who know it's all about the team, who may be successful, but want to be better and to find success ultimately in the eye of the customer. When we put those people together, good things usually follow.

Eric Veiel

What's the thing about being a CEO that people who are not in the role would have a hard time appreciating?

Jane Fraser, CEO, Citi

The amount of stakeholder management on your day. I had, I had underappreciated how much of your time is spent doing that. We often talk of the board. Well, there's no such thing as the board. It is, you know, 12, 13 highly talented individuals all with opinions, but there's not one. So, that, that, getting the most from your board requires a lot of one-on-one interactions and other pieces as well to help you. You've got your investors, you've got your clients, you've got your employees, different activist groups, things like that. So a huge amount of the time is for the CEO, to be, in front of that group.

And then the other piece is; there's a lot of decisions that come down to you. The direction the, you know, if you're going to go a particular piece, it, it is down to the CEO. And you can get input from others, but everyone else tends to have, to, not be as objective. When you're the CEO, you're very objective around the pieces. You're really thinking the whole institution. You don't have a vested interest to a particular business, or a particular group. You see the whole picture and, it's one of, its one of the great joys of the job because you're very empowered. But you realize that, yeah, a lot of it is up to you.

Eric Veiel

Of course, strong leadership isn’t just about setting direction or building high-performing teams. In a year marked by rapid change and unexpected challenges, the ability to adapt—and to help your organization bounce back from setbacks—has become an essential quality for any leader.

Our guests shared how they’ve learned to steer through adversity, recalibrate quickly, and foster a culture where teams can thrive in the face of disruption.

Here’s Gary Guthart, CEO of Intuitive Surgical, and Dave Ricks, Chair and CEO of Eli Lilly.

Eric Veiel

So as you've evolved this business model, it's apparent that the, the percentage of revenue that you've gotten from the traditional sort of sale of the machine to all these other services has changed, and it's become a less cyclical business now, to some extent for you, less and more service generated. There's always some transition that goes on with that. And I was actually looking back through the notes of our, of our analyst to who you got to me with earlier today, who's been with the firm for a really long time. I think you might find this interesting. He said back in April of 2014. So, I'm guessing this is when you went from XI or were launching that version “I surgeon transition has been and continues to be incredibly turbulent. However, recent diligence on its new robot launch supports my expectation that will be a highly successful growth expansion phase that will drive material positive inflections and organic revenue, EPS and free cash flow growth.” So as he's thinking about that from the investment perspective, I'm sure you are living this day to day as a leader. Share with us you know how you kind of got through some of that harder transition period when you had some business turbulence like that?

Gary Guthart, CEO, Intuitive Surgical

Every time you bring in a new system or a new technology, there's a period of evaluation, sometimes waiting, sometimes measured adoption, and that can put a wave through our business. And those waves are what you're talking about here in the analyst discussion is how does that wave go? And what I'd say is the amplitude of the waves can be hard to predict sometimes, but the shape of the wave is very predictable. And so we try to do that. We try to condition our customer. Here's what's coming. We try to condition our shareholder base, here's what the wave is coming, and then we'll pass our way through it.

Eric Veiel

Another area that that Lilly has been, you know, on the forefront is Alzheimer's disease, and that's, obviously something that affects lots and lots of people. And either directly or indirectly, maybe talk a little bit, I mean, there was so many different tries at treating this disease, where you all are on your journey for, for treatment on that.

Dave Ricks, Chair and CEO, Eli Lilly

Yeah, we've been studying and had a, had a really focused effort on Alzheimer's for basically 30 years at Lilly. And I've personally sat in the readouts of like five or six failed studies. But, you know, sometimes you fail and you learn, and sometimes you fail, and it just wasn't a good idea. Here, we always looked at and say, actually we learned something here, let's make an adjustment, either in the types of people that we're treating, because it turns out that we thought was Alzheimer's and dementia were interchangeable. They're not.

The biggest challenge we have is the health system's not well set up to treat Alzheimer's, but we're working on this. And every day we see more and more people treated for Alzheimer's, which is a great outcome. We also have a big study, which is underway and hopefully in the next two years we get the result using the same medication for prevention of Alzheimer's.

While strong leadership is essential within any organization, it’s just one part of a much larger story. To truly understand the forces shaping the future, we need to look at how industries are evolving—often in dramatic and unexpected ways.

Across our conversations, leaders described sector-specific disruptions and innovations that are changing the landscape:

• From the pharmaceutical and healthcare sector, Dave Ricks at Eli Lilly shared how new treatments and biotech breakthroughs are poised to fundamentally alter human health and longevity.
• In artificial intelligence and technology, Sarah Friar at OpenAI revealed how advances in AI and computing are creating entirely new possibilities for businesses and society.
• While in energy, Darren Woods of ExxonMobil spoke about the evolution of the energy industry and adapting to changing global energy demand.

Let’s hear how these leaders are navigating—and shaping—the transformation of their respective sectors.

Eric Veiel

So, Lilly is on the verge of becoming the first trillion-dollar market cap, in value, pharmaceutical company. Exciting. Maybe, let's start with, where you think the company is going over the course of the next, call it two to three years. The things that you're most focused on as you look forward.

Dave Ricks, Chair and CEO, Eli Lilly

Sure. Well, yeah, we have a full agenda right now. I think we're excited and lucky to be participating in, I think probably one of the more important innovation cycles in pharmaceutical history, actually. Every few decades, there's a kind of breakthrough that actually shifts the curve of human disease because it's fundamental. And here with chronic disease, I think we're really discovering that obesity management can have profound effects on human health at the individual level for sure. We can talk about those anecdotes when we do our studies. But more importantly, like at a population level. If we can deploy these medicines broadly, we probably could really reduce the rates of diabetes, heart disease, even, even, prolong life.

Eric Veiel

So, let's talk a little bit about where you are. It's, you're in such a unique seat, right? As you mentioned, ten-year-old company. You're the CFO. And normally, if you're maybe the CFO of a ten-year-old company, you've got a little bit of capital to play around with. You are deploying capital at such an amazing pace. Maybe just update us a little bit because it's changing in real time. A big announcement today out of Korea as well. And in terms of further the announcement, just how you're thinking about capital deployments and sort of where you are in the announcements that you've done so far.

Sarah Friar, CFO, OpenAI

Yeah, let me back up for a second and say, just first of all, we're building a backbone for a new era. In the same way that you built the railways, you built the electricity pylons that lit up cities and towns and ultimately rural populations, building the internet. So, we firmly believe we're at the beginning of that new era, and as we bring on this age of intelligence, right, we started with in the beginning with ChatGPT, kind of more of a chat bot, moving to reasoning. So, the big breakthrough of last year was the reinforcement learning that happens in a post training world. To this year, really a world of agents and starting to see agents that can do really long, we call them long horizon tasks for you. So, you can ask an agent to code. It can go off and code for three, five, seven, 12 hours, by itself, to create code that you will push to production. For a kind of non-coder, it could go off and shop for me. So, we're just starting to kind of scratch the surface of how this will change our lives. And we think it will take a vast amount of compute. So that's the backbone.

At the same time, we're building a strong company that can have fundamentally sound business. So, 700 million weekly active users. We've never seen a company grow at this pace ever. And with a goal to clearly be able to finance a lot of our future today with free cash flow, always the best way to fund a business to do it. I don't think any one company, any one country, even, can do what we're doing. It's kind of a space race. And so that's why you see us right now really trying to make the ecosystem rise with us.

Eric Veiel

So one of the, you know, major projects that you guys have is in Guyana, and our analyst Priyal was out there. And the images that I've seen, the description that she gives is an amazing amount of just material and a huge; the scope of that is huge. If we think 20 years into the future, do you envision the industry starting projects like that new, or do you think we've moved to, to a different technology or a different way of powering our world?

Darren Woods, Chairman and CEO, ExxonMobil

No, I think, I think you're going to continue to need, you know, oil and gas. Even as you project out to 2050, and even if you take very aggressive assumptions about a transition or an evolution where you move more, you know, more electrification and moving more nuclear, the timescale to make the change, and the size of what needs to change means that you're going to continue to need oil and gas. And it will probably be providing, you know, still around 50% of the world's energy mix, even out in 2050, even with aggressive assumptions about that, just because the system is so large that to change it. And if you go back in time, there's been no energy transition that's happened quickly.

The bigger challenge, even with that, the size and the time it's going to take is the affordability issue. And I think it's easy for many of us and, you know, very developed nations, very prosperous nations to talk about making a change and paying for that. You know, there are 4 billion people around the planet that are living in absolute energy poverty that I think, desperately, strive for and frankly deserve a much higher standard of living, which will require more energy.

There are economies around the world that have, the need to to grow and the potential to significantly grow. That's going to require more energy. And so, we can look at some of the more developed nations who can start to make progress and pay for that. But there's a whole chunk of the world, and it's a big one that’s still very early on that curve, and they're going to need to come up and they're going to need affordable, reliable energy, and today we don't have good options other than the system that we have.

Eric Veiel

As we’ve seen, entire industries are evolving in response to new demands and global challenges. Driving much of this transformation is the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence—companies across sectors are now leveraging AI, not just to boost efficiency, but to fundamentally reshape how they innovate, serve clients, and compete in the marketplace.

However, others also highlighted the necessity of human oversight and governance to caution against “black box” decision-making.

First, we hear from Larry Culp, Chairman and CEO of GE Aerospace, followed by Jane Fraser, CEO of Citi, and then, Sarah Friar, CFO at OpenAI.

Eric Veiel

So there's a lot to be excited about in the advances happening in technology across the whole world. It would be remiss of me not to ask you about how you think artificial intelligence might play into that next generation, either on the defense side or on the commercial side, or both. How are you all thinking about it, and what does that look like for your company?

Larry Culp, Chairman and CEO, GE Aerospace

Well, we spent a good bit of time on this conversation just yesterday, in fact, with our leadership team. I think, like many companies, we're still exploring where the use models are that are going to have the greatest impact. If you think about what we do day in, day out, with the airlines, we support the performance of the engine, their use of the engine, the maintenance and service lifecycles around those fleets. We have a lot of data. We do what we think is a good job at putting that data to use as we support the airlines. But what we're finding with AI, we're able to be quicker, we're able to be smarter with the use of that data in support of the airlines. And we believe we're just scratching the surface in that regard.

By the same token, there isn't a scientific or technical discipline that doesn't end up utilized in some fashion in a jet engine. So a lot of the computational modeling that we do, a good bit of the design work that we do, we think will be enabled, will be accelerated, through the use of AI. Again, even there, I think we're, we're scratching the surface. But given this is as high-tech an industrial business as any I've ever seen, it's a quite natural fit that we'd be pushing the edge of computational capabilities, of digital capabilities, like AI, in pretty much all that we do, be it in servicing today's fleets or designing tomorrow's.

Eric Veiel

AI is obviously going to affect all of us in many, many ways, all of our companies. As you're thinking about it from an internal perspective, executing an AI plan or a strategy across Citi, how are you thinking about that and what's the plan?

Jane Fraser, CEO, Citi

So we've got, we basically have three different types of efforts going on. One is where we have a whole set of tools that is available for the whole firm. I have 180,000 employees at the moment who have access to what we call stylus, which then is a based off a one of the big, large language models, and it will do summarization.

We had our strategy offsite for our board last week. The first draft of the accompanying memos to the documentation was written by AI. We had to go in, fix a number of errors, bits and pieces, and then they were submitted. These are just little examples of the bottom, of helping people do their job better and more easily. That goes into the second bucket where we have use-cases that we are then driving firm wide or in individual businesses or functions. If you have a thousand flowers blooming, you're likely to have a thousand flowers dead. So you choose which are the ones that you go, okay, these are the ones that are worth, from a shareholder perspective, pursuing, or regulatory, or client. And then you drive them at scale through the firm. So those are the top-down use cases, some of which may have bubbled up from the bottom-up ideas of our teams.

Then we come to agentic. And we use, we've been using Devon on agentic. It’s game, it's I think will be game changing. What it is enabling us to do in coding because it then acts upon, it's not only giving you information, but it then acts. That is, I can see how that's really going to happen fast and change a lot of banking. And that's the area that I think we all of us feel like we're just scratching the surface of what that can do and will do. Really changing workflows, models, and how work gets done. It's exciting and it's scary.

So I think it will be very disruptive for a lot of jobs in the next three years. But I also think there's going to be new ones that are going to be coming through. So, the talent doesn't need to be as afraid in the larger organizations where we'll train and get them redeployed, as opposed to others where you won't have the same advantages because it is going to be very disruptive, and we've all got to think about, we've got to reimagine. Everything that we do is changing.

Eric Veiel

One of the questions I wanted to ask you is are there any use cases, or any scenarios that we just should not use AI for?

Sarah Friar, CFO, OpenAI

Gosh, that is a good question. I've never been asked it quite that way.

Eric Veiel

Better questions, better outcomes. T. Rowe Price.

Sarah Friar, CFO, OpenAI

I think. Good job. In terms of like what not to use it for it. I, I think we generally feel like AI has applicability across really anything that humans touch. However, that doesn't mean to say we don't want to have guardrails around things. So, safety is a really important criteria for us as we build models, test models, put models out into the world. We had a lot of debate around our most recent decision around open source, for example. And we typically look at CBRN. So cyber, radiological, nuclear and bio risks. And we score our models across those four criteria. And so, we will absolutely hold back models where we think they are not, where there's more risk or danger being injected into the system. Bio is the one I would say further along because it's harder to do things, for example, in nuclear because you got a own like weapons grade plutonium or whatever. The other area that we look a lot at risk is just the, to how the models interacting with a human. So, for example, we did pull back one of our models, I think at 4.5, ChatGPT 4.5 or in that zone, because it was very sycophantic. So, it's different sort of risk entirely. But it was absolutely causing people to get more and more engaged because it was telling you lots of nice things like that.

So, we just want to be really mindful of when we want to slow people down. Or maybe insert something, if we can see that a behavior is beginning to unfold. People are using ChatGPT for a lot of medical reasons, for a lot of very personal reasons, more so than maybe any technology ever before. People will talk to ChatGPT about relationship problems or, I want to get a divorce. Should I get, I mean, things that you will not even share with another human. And so, to your point, like, should ChatGPT be deployed everywhere? It's a very good question, right? If it helps someone really think through a tough problem that they cannot share elsewhere, I think that's only a good thing. But I think we need to be very careful that in that moment where a human needs to be pop back into the loop, maybe a therapist or a doctor or someone talking to a teenager, that we are also allowing for avenues for that to happen. And we we rolled out more parental controls this week actually for exactly that reason.

Eric Veiel

But let’s leave the final word on AI to Jensen Huang, the Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, the company at the heart of the AI revolution.

Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, NVIDIA

You know, I think at the highest level, we have reinvented the single most important instrument of society called the computer for the first time in 60 years. Everything about how you programed the computer, how you build a computer, and how you operate the computer fundamentally revolutionized. And so in a lot of ways, we've taken one of the largest industries in the world, and we reset it, as a reset, which is, the economic opportunity, the technology opportunity, the innovation opportunity, that we're at the epicenter of.

Eric Veiel

That’s a great way to end. If you want to listen to any of the interviews in full, please go to wherever you get your podcasts.

Again, I'm Eric Veiel. Thank you to all my guests, and of course thank you to you for listening to The Angle. We look forward to your company on future episodes in 2026, and wish you all a very happy new year.

The Angle. Better questions, better insights.

Only from T. Rowe Price.

Disclaimer

This podcast episode was recorded in December of 2025 and is for general information and educational purposes only. Outside the United States, it is for investment professional use only.  It is not intended to be used by persons in jurisdictions which prohibit or restrict distribution of the material herein.

This podcast does not give advice or recommendations of any nature; or constitute an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security in any jurisdiction. Prospective investors should seek independent legal, financial, and tax advice before making any investment decision. Past performance is not a guarantee or a reliable indicator of future results. All investments are subject to risk, including the possible loss of principal.

Discussions relating to specific securities are informational only, and are not recommendations, and may or may not have been held in any T. Rowe Price portfolio. Any forward-looking statements are for discussion purposes only and are never guaranteed. There should be no assumption that the securities were or will be profitable. T. Rowe Price is not affiliated with, or a subsidiary of, any company discussed.

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This podcast is copyright by T. Rowe Price, 2025.

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