Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
All right, there's something we really want to get to and we've been looking forward to it, and this has to do with nuclear power, energy demand meeting the increased demand. Let me throw out some statistics.
Let's hear.
I'm Carol us. Demand for electricity will surge almost sixteen percent over the next five years, more than triple the estimate from one year ago, driven by new data centers and factories that are going to sec up power. This is according to the energy consulting group Grid Strategies.
Tim.
Yeah, this has been on top of your mind because you moderated this panel at the Nuclear Energy Institute's Financing Institute to talk all about that power demand and where the supply will come from and the role that nuclear energy is helping to meet that demand. You've kind of been like, not stop talking about nuclear power. It was really where were you ten years ago?
It was a really fun conversation. All Right, all right, I'm a little slow to the party.
You know.
What I'm saying is the tone has shifted so much just in the last decade.
It's remarkable, and really I would say a lot of momentum in the last year or year and a half, especially because of the AI demands with us from Washington, DC.
Is the president and CEO of ANYI.
It's the Nuclear Energy Institute is Maria korsnik Anyi by the way, the lobbying arm of the nuclear power industry.
Maria, thanks for your patience.
Newsflow does not stop, as you well know, including in your industry. What is the nuclear energy industry preparing for over the next few years and be as specific as you can, because I think time frame is important here.
Yeah.
Well, thank you Carol for having me, and again thank you for participating in our finance conference.
We just saw each other a few days ago in New York City. Let me just get right to your point.
Right in the next two years, we're expecting at least four grid scale applications for four different sites, a handful of microreactor applications, life sites with construction activities in flight, and two microreactor startups.
So when I say that.
Nuclear is moving, I just want you to feel that not only is the R and D which we were going to be very thankful to our national labs have brought a lot of different ideas to the marketplace, but you're actually now seeing it go into site applications and construction applications to get things moving.
What do you say, what would you say is the difference between the Biden administration's approach to nuclear energy versus the Trump administration's approach nuclear energy? How did things change in January?
So that's interesting.
You know, this is maybe one of the only things, but one of the very few things that gets bipartisan support. And interesting if you think about nuclear right and you say, hey, well it's very reliable. You know, it's clean, it's carbon free, it has jobs. You know, like there's enough in there to love on both sides of the aisle. On the Democrat side, you're going to get it more for the
carbon free aspect of it. On the Republican side, you're going to get it more for the energy security, national security, high reliability of the energy source.
And both sides love the jobs.
So talk to a little bit more about the build out, you know, you kick things off with, you know, things that are happening now. I feel like from the conversation and listening at the event last week that realistically, a lot of folks said, when we really think about nuclear energy, while the US is active, that it's still a very small portion of our electricity generation, right in terms of a power provider, that that build out might be eight to ten years away. You're in it, you're talking to
the players that are in it. What is the realistic timeframe that it is a substantial or more substantial part of a generation of power here in the United States.
So today nuclear is about twenty percent, just under twenty percent of the general and so I would say, you know, that's a significant portion. But to your point, let's talk about all of that demand. And you mentioned earlier the AI demand that's really getting into the marketplace.
But you know, it's not just AI, it's.
Also ensuring, manufacturing, it's also you know, the fact that you want to build out the clean energy supply that we have today. And so all of that together is really driving this demand much higher than what we had imagined even just a few years ago. The next few years, you're going to see ones and twos of things built, think pilot projects over.
The next few years.
And I think in the twenty thirties and the twenty forties, a very significant buildout. And I want to add it's not just a buildout in the United States. The conversation we're having about nuclear it's happening around the globe.
Well, and why is it so important?
Because yeah, that is something certainly that came up at your vent last week that you know, look at Europe, look at France, look at China, look at various nations in terms of their percentage of power generation being larger than what it is in the United States.
If the US.
Doesn't have a role in this area, what does that mean?
Yeah, so let's just try that on for size.
Who is interested in building a lot of commercial nuclear Russia and China, and they're not only interested in building it in their own country. Today right now Russia is building nuclear plants in ten other countries.
And why is that.
Well, it wasn't too long ago where we saw Russia turn off the gas supply to Europe. So I would tell you there's a geopolitical strategy on some countries that would like to control other countries energy supply, and why should we fall for that? So we have fantastic technology, we have the ability to really help our allies and in that way, we protect them from this kind of behavior.
And you know, it would be sad to see this replicated in ten to twenty years we look back and say, oh, why do they have the power over commercial nuclear industry? Why do they have the power over all of these different countries. We shouldn't let ourselves get there. So from a national security perspective, from an energy security perspective, the United States needs to lead in commercial nuclear power.
I think if you think about what happened over the last ten to fifteen years, there may have been some concern about nuclear stemming from the earthquake in Japan and what happened in the wake of Fukushima here in the US three Mile Island, and then of course Chernobyl back in the nineteen eighties. What would you say to somebody who's watching right now, who's listening right now, and says, you know what, I'm still not convinced this is a safe alternative.
So I've been in the commercial nuclear industry for forty years. I'm a nuclear engineer. I visited Fukushima after the accident. I talked to the operators that were there. We brought all of the chief nuclear officers from Japan to the United States to meet with the chief nuclear officers here, very very intimate with exactly what went on there, and I can tell you with all assurances that the United States absolutely would.
Not have a Fukushima style accident.
I would also tell you, and I was just in a japan roundtable conversation earlier today, that the Japanese are restarting their plants and the Japanese are talking about building new nuclear plants. So the country that was most connected to that particular situation has also reassessed and value that nuclear can bring to them and their reliable energy and
clean energy supply. I have worked at our nuclear plants and I would not hesitate to live next to any of the nuclear plants in the United States.
They are very very safe technology.
One thing though, I do want to ask you, though, you know.
The other thing is that it's complicated, and you know it comes up, you know, Maria, anytime we talk about nuclear energy. First of all, I do think about clientlimate change and the natural disasters, and so the placement of nuclear plants, whether it makes it more trickier in terms of whether or not they'll be resilient to climate change disasters. The other thing is nuclear waste. It feels like we still have not figured out a really long term solution
to that. How do we think about that, because it hasn't really evolved in figuring that one out.
So I would tell you from a nuclear waste perspective, it is safely stored wherever it is today. What you're mentioning is we haven't figured out a single place for us all to put our current used fuel in. And that's true. Other countries have. I just went to Finland last year. They opened up their deep geologic repository. We are more than capable of figuring this out. It's not a scientific problem. We have to just figure out where we would like to cite this and do so and
do so safely. The other thing I would add is that I think very much in our future there's likely go to be reprocessing. Today we don't reprocess. I think tomorrow we will. And the thing that we call waste today it's a future resource, and it's going to be a fantastic opportunity to take that future resource and get more use out of it and then store what ultimately we don't need, and it'll be a small fraction of what we have today.
It's interesting to hear that because we've had so many years to decide on and find a solution for this. But literally nobody wants this in their backyard. They don't want it at Yucka Mountain, they don't want it in other parts where if we can't find a place to put it, where do we put it?
Well, actually, I think we're really going to change the equation. You know, your grandkids and their grandkids, they're going to look at this very differently. They're going to look at it as the resource that it is. I can tell you I know because I already have members that have businesses that are interested to my words, mind this use fuel.
There's things in this use fuel that they would like to get.
I would like to get because they're coming up with a probe that's going to go in outer space.
So they're going to put a probe.
And it's going to go deep down into the ocean, and there's things in this fuel that would be helpful to them. And if you think about space and us going other places, whether going to the Moon or we're going to Mars again, there's things in this that that can be helpful. There's companies that have already formed around trying to do the reprocessing equation, if you will, coming
up with new ways to do that. We have a company that's part of any I today that is interested in inventing a new reactor.
They're well on their way.
They already want to use the used fuel as part of their fuel, so they are interested very much in taking used fuel and changing it to something that they can use. So I just want you to feel that the whole conversation around this thing that we call waste is very much changing. Is it going to change tomorrow, No, but you can see that it's evolving and that ultimately we're going to find sort of the best set for this. France reprocesses today. For example, Canada, just north of us,
they've just landed on a long term repository. So again, I guess I just have confidence in US as a country that we're going to figure that out.
All right, We're going to leave it on that note. Listen.
So great to get some time for you with you, and it was really wonderful to be a part of your event. As Tim mentioned, I've been talking about it kind of NonStop in terms of the conversations. Maria Bwell Maria Korsenik. She's president and chief executive officer of ANYI. It's the Nuclear Energy Institute joining us on this Wednesday from DC.
We're talking about the increased energy usage that we've seen a lot of that has to do with AI. Check out all the news about AI just in the last couple of days, Carol. Lots of headlines. Apple rolling out this five hundred and fifty nine dollars iPhone five hundred and ninety nine dollars excuse me, iPhone sixteen eight with an AI bid for growth. Microsoft unveiling AI tools that can create video game scenes that would normally have to
be programmed and animated by a human. It's a model using data collected from Xbox gamers and their controllers.
There's so much going on, and don't forget this comes after the big news earlier this week we talked about this. Mira Muradi, the former chief CTO over an Open Ai, launching a new AI startup. And then you had open ai co founder Ilias a Skiv raising more than a billion dollars for his startup at evaluation of over thirty billion dollars.
Okay, lots of money going into this and g two. Patel is on top of all of it. He's Executive VP and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, where he's charged with making sure that Cisco's portfolio works in the world of AI. He joins us from Silicon Valley G two. Where do you see Silica see Cisco's place in this new world of AI?
You know the way that we think about this. First LYE Carolynton, thank you for having me on the show. And you know, if you look at the way that the world is evolving right now, it's it's moving really fast. But if you look back at the gold Rush, think about Cisco's position over here is we're going to provide the infrastructure and the safety and security guard rail so that organizations can actually use AI scalably in the market.
And if you think about a common sentiment that you have right now in the market, and we've done a study to actually prove this as well, there's an overwhelming majority of companies where the CEOs are very excited about the possibilities of AI, but virtually all of them feel very underprepared. In fact, the study that we did, we found that ninety seven percent of the CEOs that actually we're pushing AI projects that we're really excited about it.
Only one point seven percent of them felt fully prepared, and I totally get it. I mean, this is a
it's a very fast moving market. People have to kind of think differently, and so that's an area where we feel like, you know, having preparedness and infrastructure, making sure that safety and security don't become impediments for the adoption of AI, and having the skills gat get really addressed are the three big challenges that most organizations have that we at Cisco want to try to go out and help our customers.
With see two.
One thing I think about is, you know, there's the idea of move fast, break things, get it. There's also well, wait a minute, we want to see where the dust settles when it comes to AI a little bit because we're at this point two more than two years in of just the euphoria and the build and the spend, and now we want to see, Okay, what do we get for our money?
Is there a little bit.
Maybe of that going on that there are executives, especially if smaller mid sized companies, are saying we got to kind of hold off until we really understand how do we monetize this.
Yeh. So if you take a step back and broadly, like if we like to take a look at what's happening in the market, there's only two kinds of companies that are going to exist in the market. There's a first kind, which is going to get highly dexterous with the use of AI, and the second which is going to be you know, struggling for relevance. Now, if you look at the great ones, majority of them are getting
slowed down because of a few very foundational reasons. The first one is, you know, safety and security gets to be a big concern, especially for large regulated organizations. They want to make sure that they tread carefully on that front. And as you have things like deep seak and you know, the cost of models gets to be lower and lower, and the cost curve goes down precipitously, you're going to
have more and more models that are out there. And these models, by definition are unpredictable, and we've found that it's pretty easy to jail break these models, and so that safety security concern is a real one. The second area is that people just aren't quite equipped for going out and making sure that the infrastructure is ready for AI. And then third one is this notion of skills, And if you think about skills, I personally believe that staying on the sidelines is not going to help you go
up the learning curve. So you have to jump in. You have to jump in the frame and make sure that you're starting to take some projects and learn from those projects and have these practical experiences as a company so that you get a better feel, a better intuition of what's happening in AI and what it's going to take to succeed. But just staying on the sidelines, I think is a really bad strategy that's going to let others get ahead of you and you'll be left behind.
One thing we'd love to hear from folks in your position who are interacting with customers each and every day is try to get an understanding of where demand is, who's buying, what house spend is. When it comes to it, what can you tell us about the environment right now.
So there's no shortage of demand signal on AI right now. In fact, what's happening is there's a lot of money in from different parts of it that are going into AI. And then the question becomes, what are the use cases where AI is being used really well. So if you think about some of the really highly adopted use cases right now in large companies, software coding and software development, in twenty twenty five, you will actually be able to have, you know, a meaningful amount of your code for a
mid level engineer that'll actually be done by AI. And so that's an area that's going to be hugely you know growing. The second area that we've seen a fair amount of movement and momentum on is this notion of a contact center agent. Each one of us, Carol and Tim, we all probably will spend about four to six weeks of our lifetimes on hold waiting for some agent when you call a company and they need to make sure that they actually solve your problem. That's an enormous waste
of time for humanity at large. And I think there's going to be ninety to ninety five percent of these calls will be addressed with a voice agent that is going to be an AI agent, where you it'll sound just like waiting.
Whatever, literally literally still waiting for that to happen.
One that actually works and is I don't know, like I do feel like we've all gone through automated.
Systems representative, representative, exactly representative, That's how I do.
That's exactly right. So is it really going to be a very different experience.
Well, I think one of the challenges that we've had if you think about, you know, calling an agent, and when you have something that's an automated agent, the reason it sounds so frustrating is it sounds like a robot and you can't interrupt it. It doesn't understand tonality, it doesn't understand expression, doesn't understand the emotion that the customer might be feeling. And so what you're now starting to see happen is these voice agents are getting so sophisticated
that you can interrupt it its speed. It speaks at the speed that a human would be able to speak. You can redirect it, you can throw curveballs. It'll understand you your tone if you're frustrated. It's not going to ask you, you know, silly questions when you're frustrated about things that are like how's the weather, how are you feeling? Because that's not what the customer might might want to talk about. So those kind of dynamics will fundamentally change
the take, create and adoption of this. So in the next two years, I assert that it'll probably be about eighty to eighty five percent of the inbound calls that come in will be able to be handled by an AI agent, and the ones that aren't handled by an AI agent, the AI agent will be smart enough to hand it off to a human agent with all the contexts, so you don't have to repeat your account number again, and you don't have to go out and you know, kind of restate your problem just the way that we
actually feel right now. And that's what gets the frustration levels high. And I'm really hopeful about that that entire category. So that's the second category where you're seeing a fair amount of momentum, and then there's there's many more use cases and automated workflows that you'll start to just see get more and more proliferated throughout the entire corporate landscape.
Well don't judge MET two, but I just started really playing with chat GPT and I came in and I was like kind of blown away.
I came in one morning. I'm like, Tim, you've got to start playing what you're saying you.
Soon you're gonna be paying two hundred bucks a month. For the agent future. I see it.
Everything's a monthly faith.
I don't know if you folks have tried out this operator. It is unbelievable what it can do.
Because what's dollars a month version?
Right?
Yeah, it's it's the two hundred dollars a month version. And by the way, the interesting part is they're losing money on the two hundred dollars a month, which tells you the amount of impact and the amount of adoption rate. That is most people think it's bad. I think it's a really good sign for e because there's no shortage of people wanting to use this. They're solving a real problem.
So you can, literally, Carol, tell this agent, Hey, I want to go out for a movie with my spouse tonight and I want to make sure that I can have dinner. Can you go find me a dinner reservation and I'll just do it for you.
Yeah, listen, come back soon. I really would like to continue this conversation with you.
Really enjoyed it.
G Two Patel, executive vice president and chief product officer over at Cisco, joining us from Silicon Valley