Fred Humphries, Corporate VP of US Government Affairs, Microsoft

I am Fred Humphries, corporate vice president of US Government Affairs for Microsoft. I am the ambassador to the White House, the Executive Branch, to Capitol Hill, to the state and local levels, to many capitols and representing Microsoft and serving as an ambassador to talk about and advocate for technology. Today there is so many information technology issues and it's important to educate. I'm very fortunate to work for a company like Microsoft that I think has great values, awesome technology, neat solutions and with our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. It's about empowerment, it's about enablement. And so to go to Capitol Hill and talk to both Democrats and Republicans about what technology can do is just interesting. For many who are like users but need some more education on privacy, security, cloud, the future of technology, why science, technology and engineering and math is important. What are the skills that you need is something that people find important, interesting and helpful. Let's take today, a busy week would look like, we're a multinational company that serves people from all over the world is making sure that our technology can be used. It's a big ecosystem, as they say, IT ecosystem. We're trying to make sure that we can get a license to do business with Huawei and Exception. And so today, just getting up this morning on October 10th, figuring out like okay, we met the guidelines, we submitted the application and today we're spending checking on what's the status of our license? It varies. Tomorrow, it could be focusing on making sure that we're focused on cybersecurity norms throughout the world. Trying to get other countries to agree on certain norms and standards when it comes to cybersecurity. Tomorrow it could be focusing on California where they have a privacy initiative that's gonna be put on the ballot. That's what makes my job interesting and exciting. It's with new technologies, new public policy issues, not just here in the US but globally. Just in the past couple weeks, I was in San Francisco, I was in Seattle, I was in New York and then D.C. so yes, a lot of travel and then some international travel from time to time but mostly US 'cause I lead our US government affairs.