India Wright | Head of Business Development, TBA US
TBA US had the privilege of helping deliver Greater Together Los Angeles: the largest-ever UK Government trade mission to the United States.
Two days. 50,000 square feet transformed: a main plenary stage, breakout sessions, intimate meeting spaces, spanning business, government, culture, technology, sport, media and innovation. Leaders from both sides of the Atlantic in one room.
As Head of Business Development at TBA, I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes thought leadership programming actually work. What makes a room lean in and What makes a conversation land beyond the four walls it happens in.
Greater Together LA answered that question in real time.
The calibre of the room was extraordinary.
WPP. Bank of America. Airbnb. YouTube. Bloomberg. PwC. The NFL. The Premier League. And many more. Leaders who don’t just sit at the top of their industries but shape them.
Hosted by Sir Lucian Grainge and Sir Jony Ive. A room that only happens when the moment is big enough to demand it.
Business. Sport. Finance. Culture. Technology. Media. Every chair filled with someone who has built something, led something, changed something.
That’s the room Greater Together Los Angeles created. That’s the conversation TBA US helped make possible.
And here’s what every single conversation had in common: regardless of industry, regardless of geography, regardless of whether the lens was commercial, creative or governmental:
AI.
Not as a buzzword. Not as a slide in a deck. As the unavoidable question sitting underneath every conversation about the future of their respective sectors.
What struck me most wasn’t the confidence in the room. It was the honesty.
WPP and Bank of America spoke to the power of building their own AI tools and IP – WPP Open and Bank of America’s Erica – not waiting for the market, but investing to own the advantage and scale it.
Music and entertainment executive Simon Fuller spoke to the generational divide. Younger generations aren’t debating AI. They’re approaching it as utility. Part of daily life. Already embedded.
And Marco Amitrano, Managing Director at PwC, landed the question that stayed with me longest:
If some get too far ahead now, will the rest ever be able to catch up?
Because here’s what’s different about AI versus every other technological leap we’ve lived through. The internet. The mobile phone. If you wanted to catch up, eventually you could. That assumption no longer holds. And nobody in that room — some of the most data-driven, commercially sharp, creatively brilliant minds across two continents — could say with confidence that it will.
Different sectors. Different entry points. Different stakes.
But every single one arrived at the same place:
We are all speculating. The outcomes are unknown. The only honest answer is that we simply do not know where this goes.
And that collective admission, in that room, from those people, was the most compelling thought leadership moment I’ve witnessed in years.
Because the best thought leadership doesn’t perform confidence it doesn’t have. It creates the conditions for honest, rigorous, uncomfortable conversations. It brings together a diversity of sectors, perspectives and lived experience and lets the friction do the work.
That’s what Greater Together LA did across two days on that stage.
Proud of the TBA US team for helping build the room. Even prouder of what happened inside it.
