Shoaib Makani, Founder and CEO of Motive: “We use contract manufacturers across Asia. These tariffs are not, paradoxically, high enough for us to nearshore. You’d have to get to 50%-plus for it to make sense for us to move our supply chains to North America. Even if we were at that threshold, we don’t have the manufacturing capacity to bring the vast majority of electronics here.”
Jennifer Ives, Vice President, Artificial Intelligence, Partnership for Public Service: “We’ve seen such a bringing together of industry and public sector leaders to figure out how to approach this. There really isn’t enough thoughtful conversation around regulation and guardrails … I hear, on one side, regulate, regulate and, on the other, deregulate. There is a happy medium.”
John W. Mitchell, President and CEO, Global Electronics Association: “Companies need consistency to make plans and move forward. They’re moving to other countries because they’ll give us a 10-year plan and they’ll follow it. We have a government in this country that changes every four years and they tend to undo everything that happened the previous four years. That’s not a very reliable environment in which to build.”
Ben Van Roo, Cofounder and CEO, Legion Intelligence: “The government isn’t thinking enough about digital agents. In the not-so-distant future, digital agents will be doing intelligence gathering, offensive-defensive cyber … Do we have 5,000 agents working on your behalf?”
Peter Wilczynski, Chief Product Officer, Maxar Intelligence: “The more complicated the system is, the more the actual constraint is labor and really well-trained human capital. It’s not just robots printing out big physical objects … When you look at the cost of a satellite or complex system, it’s denominated in dollars but most of the cost is in labor hours.”
Landon Mossburg, CEO, Peak Energy: “There’s a mentality that AI is the future and, as long as we win on that, we’re going to win. You look at Deep Seek and at how fast China is progressing. It seems quite easy to either steal parts of that technology or reengineer it yourself. On the flip side, how fast are we catching up on manufacturing polysilicon or solar panels or batteries or robots or drones? Who’s going to manufacture more drones? Is it going to be us? I doubt it.”
