Trevor Milton, Jonathan Rothwell, Amazon Web Services discussed on Bloomberg Businessweek
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Flash. All right, Charlie, thank you and Charlie mentioned a jury in the niccolo founder, his fraud trial reaching a verdict. We're talking about Trevor Milton's criminal fraud trial reaching that verdict. Milton 40 is charged with two counts of securities fraud two counts of wire fraud for misleading investors about the electric truck companies prospects. Yeah, just once again, worth repeating Nikola founder Trevor Milton, guilty of defrauding investors. The jury has reached a verdict, and that is the verdict Carol. All right, so just wanted to give you an update. All right, you might remember back in late June, maybe maybe not red burn limited an analyst to Alex hassell noted that Amazon's cloud storage business was on course for 3 trillion in value almost triple what the whole company was worth at the time and the stock market. Global demand for cloud, we know continues to grow and that means demand two for workers in all aspects of that space. So with that in mind, Amazon Web Services work with the Gallup organization about the digital workspace. So we wanted to hear a little bit more about their findings. So with us on that is Jonathan Rothwell, he is principal economist at Gallup. He joins us on the phone from Washington, D.C., Scott barneson, is general manager of training at Amazon Web Services, and he is with us on the phone in Seattle. Guys, I want to talk about this collaboration and the findings, but before we do so, every leader that comes on our air right now, we've got to ask about the macro environment. Jonathan, you're the principal economist at Gallup. How would you describe today's macro environment in the biggest concerns? Well, I think the labor market continues to be strong and those reports have been great. So obviously inflation is what everybody's worried about at this point. And my view is that it was largely caused by at first excess spending in response to COVID-19. And then exacerbated by the crisis in Russia and Ukraine. Hopefully those things will start to wear off as the fed raises interest rates and we can have a smooth landing, but really that's just my best guess of where things are going at this point. Hey Scott, I want to bring you into this conversation, Scott Barnes, berenson, general manager of training at Amazon Web Services. I mean, this is something that you have to think about too when you're making decisions about hiring people when you're making decisions about expanding and growing your team. How are you thinking about the economy right now? Well, the thing is, none of us have the ability to predict the future. And so it's really right now about focusing on the areas where you're going to get a return on investment kind of minimizing unnecessary risk and what we see from our customers as well as frankly our own planning is having highly trained skilled workers. Is your best path to success through uncertainty, right? They're the ones building products, your customers care about finding opportunities to operate more efficiently. In short, helping your bottom line through kind of navigating these rocky times. Well, Scott, what are you hearing from customers right now or what's getting to you from customers Caroline, talk a lot about this with executives at big companies, how they're thinking about tech spend and how they're thinking about spending right now. What can you tell us about why you're hearing from them? Well, I think the last couple of years have really highlighted the fact that every company is now a digital company. And if they didn't recognize that before the pandemic, it all of a sudden was a new reality. And so those investments are really coming in the way in the form of how do we innovate faster in this market where our competitors are investing in digital skills and technology to get closer to customers, reduce time to market. And customers expect it, right? So I think that's front and center. How do we deliver near term customer value while maintaining that operational efficiency? And frankly, this isn't a trend that will reverse, right? If it's just accelerated through the pandemic and we see that carrying through going forward. All right, just want to mention, we're going to get back to our conversation in a moment, but just crossing and I'm seeing this on Twitter as well. Robert Murdoch exploring combining Fox corp and News Corp.. This is coming from Dow Jones. We're talking with Jonathan Rothwell, principal economist at Gallup, Scott Barnes and general manager of training at Amazon Web Services. So Jonathan, come on back into the conversation. Tell us what Scott and the team at AWS came to you and said, hey, listen, we want to find out more information when it comes to the cloud and the digital world and the kind of workers that are needed. Yeah, so it was a really ambitious project. We ended up serving 30,000 workers in 19 countries and those countries represent two thirds of global GDP. So largest economies in the world, India, China, UK, Germany, U.S., among them. And in addition, we interviewed 90 9000 hiring managers. People who oversee the hiring of digital workers as well as other workers throughout their organizations. And the core questions are what happens to companies when they adopt digital technologies. How does that affect their innovation, their productivity, the revenue growth? And what kinds of income premium do we see for workers who have digital skills and how does that vary across these markets? And what are the aggregative aggregate effects on GDP both at those country levels and then globally? And we were able to answer, I think in a pretty interesting and novel way, all of those questions in the report. Hey, Jonathan, I just want to stick with you for the last 30 seconds, then we're going to come back with you for more. What do you see as far as some of those numbers that you can share with us about the way that this type of technical knowledge can actually help increase GDP or help bridge a skills gap or knowledge gap in the country? Well, just to give you a flavor of some of the findings, we found that digital skills globally contribute $18.5 trillion. And the benefits to individual workers are quite large. We differentiated between