PORTLAND, Ore. — At a conference in Portland on Tuesday dedicated to developing something called the Cascadia Innovation Corridor, Microsoft president and vice-chair Brad Smith was in town to deliver the keynote address. The concept of the corridor is to build greater cooperation between key institutions in the Pacific Northwest.
Smith agreed to sit down for a one-on-one interview with KGW's Laural Porter for a wide-ranging discussion centered around what he sees as Oregon's place in this regional hub for science and technology. He has been with Microsoft for 31 years, and the New York Times has called him a de facto ambassador for the tech industry at large.
On top of outlining the overall vision for the corridor, Smith talked about solving immediate problems, like the lack of affordable housing, while also working on the lofty goals of curing cancer using artificial intelligence and connecting world-class cancer research centers like the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle and BC Cancer in Vancouver, British Columbia.
The Cascadia Innovation Corridor
Tuesday's conference marks the seventh for the Cascadia Innovation Corridor, and Smith said he's been passionate about the idea since the very beginning. When it began, it was limited to just Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. That changed when leaders in Portland spoke up.
"It's really about building connections from Vancouver to Seattle to Portland and everywhere in between so that we can work more effectively together to create jobs, to drive innovation, to bring together work among our universities, to improve transportation and address climate," Smith said. "And I still remember when (Portland's voice) was heard and we said, 'You know, you're right. This is a corridor that absolutely connects to Portland, connects the people of this region with the region as a whole.'"
The goal is to have the corridor up and running by 2035, which Smith pointed out is only about 10 years away. As for who's funding it, he described it as a "classic private-public partnership."
"A lot of it has been fueled by people in the business community up and down this corridor. Nonprofits have been involved, and the state governments ... they've all been involved," Smith said. "And as time has gone by, I think what we've most discovered is that we have a lot more in common than any of us knew, and there's a lot more we can accomplish by working together.
"You come here, you look at the university here, you look at the important research in fields like health care, and then you look at what's happening in Seattle, what's happening in B.C., and you realize, 'Wow, we can even do more if we are connecting these folks' — and that's just one of the examples that we've learned from and have really pursued over the last 5 to 7 years."
Housing and high-speed rail
For many Oregonians, the most tangible goals of this conference are the ones related to infrastructure, namely badly needed growth in housing development and the potential for fast and climate-friendly transit.
"It's fascinating because it is such a common challenge. If you look at the 50 states in the United States, Washington is dead last in terms of having adequate affordable housing. Oregon is 49th out of 50, and then British Columbia is low across Canada," Smith said. "And so, you start by asking why.
"I think part of the reason is because these are beautiful places to live. People have moved, but we haven't kept pace. In all three places, we failed to zone and create more land for more multi-unit homes. We've failed to speed up permitting processes. We've really failed to find innovative financing that's needed to build lower-cost, more affordable housing. I think Gov. Kotek has really taken the lead here in Oregon. We're looking to the new governor in Washington state, Bob Ferguson, to, I hope, take some of the pages out of her playbook. There are more things we can do together and we can put technology to work."
While housing tends to feel like a local issue, Smith said, it's a problem that the Pacific Northwest faces in common. And the solutions, he thinks, might be accomplished in common.
"You see the problems we share and then you even see common solutions — like high-speed rail, that if we built it together would make it possible for people to, say, live farther away from a job," Smith added. "And that, too, would open the door to more affordable housing."
Microsoft has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to housing development in the Puget Sound. Despite that, Smith acknowledged, success has been slow to achieve.
"We put three-quarters of a billion dollars of the company's money into just helping to build more affordable housing — not for our employees, but for nurses and for police officers and teachers and the like — and we started this in 2019, so we've had five years of experience," Smith said.
Those efforts helped add 12,000 units of housing in the Puget Sound. It's a good start, Smith said, but not enough.
"It's less than what I hoped when we started five years ago, and I think fundamentally what we have found is money is critical, but money actually isn't the biggest bottleneck," he continued. "We need more land, we need the land of, say ... look at a strip mall or look at a big box retailer that might not even be open anymore — doesn't matter how much money you have if you don't have the land on which to build, you can't build more housing.
"Let's look at the kinds of space that is no longer being used the way it was 10 or 20 years ago, rezone that, then use the money to attract, say, lower-cost housing to that land, speed up permitting processes. That is, I think, the winning recipe. That is what we found; it's what we've learned. And I think it's what we all need to focus on following in terms of a plan for the future."
The AI economy and the workforce
And innovation might be able to help with the housing problem, Smith said. A huge barrier is simply the backlog of permit applications for cities like Portland. There's a need for those permits, but artificial intelligence might be able to speed the process of approving them.
"Permitting is too slow. And it's true not only for housing, it's true for, say, somebody who is constructing a wind turbine in Europe. It takes one year to build the wind turbine. It takes three years to get the permit approved to build it," Smith said. "So, you realize that we basically have processes that have not kept pace with the needs of modern-day society.
"AI can be used to speed up many aspects of the process, to analyze a permitting application, to compare it to, say, the specification in the building code, to help the people who work in permitting offices to analyze it more quickly and then interact with the people that they should be having time to interact with, but they don't have time today because the backlog is so steep."
Smith largely handwaved away concerns about AI eliminating jobs, saying that jobs will instead shift to working with AI, like in the permitting example, or training others to work with it.
"You think about jobs that are, I don't think, ever gonna be displaced. I certainly hope they won't ... but think about the job of a teacher today, in terms of having to prepare a lesson plan. With AI, they could take a lesson plan and turn it into a PowerPoint presentation in about 60 seconds and then get ready for the next day of class," Smith said. "If it's a math quiz, you know, a human just is checking every answer. AI can do that.
"So, a lot of what we're finding is that AI is a tool that if deployed well can help people do better what they most love to do. Most teachers that I have met did not choose teaching because they wanted to grade exams or prepare lesson plans. They wanted to spend time with kids. And if AI can help them spend more of their time with kids, that to me is one of the great kinds of use cases we can pursue."
Smith compared it to when he worked at a law firm almost 40 years ago and became the first person in the office to use a personal computer. There was a learning curve, he said, but it became a vital tool that helped with his work — and now, it's the standard.
"To sort of learn anew how to use AI in our lives, that's one of the things we're focused on at Microsoft, and I think employers are going to want to and are going to need to invest a little bit more in not just making AI available to their employees, but helping people learn how to use them," Smith said. "The good news, in my view, it's actually fun. It's not that hard. People do need some training — increasingly, it'll be available online, and as you experiment with it, you realize that you can pursue your curiosity."
Cancer research and making connections
The AI boom connects with another big priority for the corridor: cutting-edge medical research. Smith sees the cancer centers in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver sharing notes and using AI to make rapid advancements.
"It should vastly accelerate our ability to make even more progress in treating and curing cancer, and if we do this well and we take advantage of our connections with each other — Portland, Seattle, Vancouver — we should play a role in leading the world, and I think that that's our future," Smith said. "That's why I am excited about what I see when I come to a conference like this."
That's where the light rail Smith mentioned earlier comes in. It would help connect the corridor in a very concrete way. It's been a dream for a long time, but Smith suggested that it's coming closer to a reality.
"I think for this region it is a dream that is now being pursued with a real plan that I hope and believe will become our reality," Smith said. "The first thing I often think we should think about is ... look, the rest of the world can do this: they have great airports, they have great ports, they have great roads and they have high-speed rail. We can do it, too.
"I think it started as a vision in the last decade. It started with some initial feasibility funding. Four institutions put $250,000 into it each — the legislatures of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Microsoft Corporation," Smith said. "That's how we got it going, but it's now got backing from Washington, D.C. in terms of the infrastructure bill. We will see funding out of the Department of Transportation. There is much more advanced planning."
Discussions about where, exactly, a high-speed rail line would go — not to mention how it would be funded — will be happening in the next few years, Smith said.
"But look, the future I think we should all pursue is one where somebody can get on a train in Portland and get off the train in Seattle in less than an hour, even after two or three stops ... imagine what that does for people that people can work in one place, live in another, people can go to business in the other place. People can go to a sporting event. There will be basketball fans that will come to Portland. There are baseball fans that will go to Seattle. It can connect us in ways that are just not feasible today.
"Everyone I know who lives in Seattle enjoys coming to Portland. What they don't enjoy is the traffic and vice versa, exactly, especially when you have the uncertainty, 'Well, this could be a three-hour drive or maybe it's going to be a six-hour drive. I don't know. I won't know until it's over.' We can change all of that, and I believe we have the pieces coming together. We have the support from Washington, D.C. We have the support from Gov. Kotek and other leaders up and down this corridor. I think we just have to resolve (that) we can do this, and we're committed to making it happen."