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In this episode of 5 Minutes with Andy, Virtual, Inc. CEO Andy Freed reflects on key takeaways from the TED 2025 conference in Vancouver—where the theme of “humanity reimagined” sparked big questions about the future of AI, leadership, and what it means to be human.

Andy shares:

• Why imperfection may be humanity’s greatest strength in the face of artificial intelligence.
• How stories of resilience, progress, and courage can reframe how we lead through uncertainty.
• Why “actionable hope” stood out as the most important message of the week.

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Hi, and welcome to Five Minutes with Andy. My name is Andy Freed, and I'm the CEO of Virtual, Incorporated. For 25 years, we've been helping organizations that are forming, growing and changing as they make their mark on the world.

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Today, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about TED, not the movie. I love the movie. Love the bear. He's a heck of an actor. But nope. I want to talk about the TED conference.

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Every year, one of the highlights of my spring is going out to the TED conference, which has been held in Vancouver for the last few years. It's kind of like nerd camp. I see people I haven't seen in a while. We talk about all kinds of great topics.

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This year, the topic of TED was all about humanity reimagined. What's the role for humanity, in an age of AI and computers? It was a fascinating set of discussions. And I'll say, the first person came out and talked about AI having all kinds of promise and threats. Then another person did that, then another person after them.

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By the seventh or eighth person, I kind of understood, okay, AI has some opportunities for us and also some threats for us. And some of the threats were pretty real. One speaker talked about AI having a 10% possibility of, creating human extinction. That seems high. But that said, what I also took away from it was some of the promise.

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Now, I took that not just from the speakers about AI, but from other things that happened over the course of the conference. And I'd like to tell you a little bit about that.

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There was one speaker who came out and talked about his effort to clean up the ocean. Let me pause on that. It's one person's effort to clean all of the plastic out of the ocean. He's 30 years old and he thinks he can do it by 2040. And he's already making great progress. Loved that guy. Absolutely, I was just so impressed with the promise of that. There were some other speakers who just talked about extraordinary things, talked about opportunities to use new pharmaceuticals in ways that cured diseases, talked about the beauty of design, the person who helped redesign Notre-Dame Cathedral was there talking about the restoration after the fire.

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And there were also speakers, and several who I really enjoyed, who frankly didn't do well. They would be speaking, and they'd get something wrong. They'd have to start over. And at those moments, I also loved that the crowd was so supportive of them, and they'd come back and they’d deliver their message.

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And that was when it struck me what the role of humanity is. The role of humanity, and where we're heading on all of this is those opportunities for imperfections.

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AI can be a lot of things. AI can deliver a lot of great information for folks. But the thing is, AI's never going to be imperfect, the way that all of us are. The way that we all have different flaws. The way that we have all different things that make us perfect, because it's those imperfections that make us so perfect, as Robin Williams so aptly said in Good Will Hunting.

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So, that, combined with another piece, which is just actionable hope. When I see somebody talking about cleaning up the entire ocean by 2040, when I see people talking about diseases that we've eradicated, when I see people talking about the opportunity to turn gang members into peace activists, I recognize that there's a lot of hope and there's a lot of folks out there, and humanity is two things. It's imperfection, but it's also hope. And taken together, I think those things will harness all of the possibility of AI to be promise, and not peril. And I'm pretty excited about that. I'm pretty excited about where the future is going.

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Over the next few weeks, the folks from TED will start posting some of the speakers from the conference this past year, and I hope you have a chance to check them out.

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But while you're waiting for that, I also hope that you'll keep checking out this podcast. And if you've enjoyed this, make sure you like or subscribe and keep spending five minutes with me. I'm Andy Freed and thanks for joining me.