-: 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.