Whenever Jason returned from the Summit, his team thought he'd lost his mind.
So one year, he stopped explaining and brought them with him.
In 2016 Jason English came back from the Abundance Summit and they thought he’d finally gone too far.
He'd returned to South Africa talking about AI, robotics, augmented reality, autonomous systems, digital twins, and how all of it was about to reshape their companies. To Jason, someone had just opened a window into the next decade. But to his colleagues, it sounded like science fiction.
"At the beginning, my chairman honestly thought I was crazy," he says. "I'd come back from A360, and he and my colleagues thought, here we go again. Jason's come back from America with another crazy idea."
Jason runs CG Tech, a group of industrial, engineering, energy, and construction businesses across the Middle East, Africa, the UK, US and Asia, the unglamorous, asset-heavy, people-intensive companies that build the physical world. Not the obvious place to import exponential thinking. Which is exactly why he wanted to.
For years, Jason carried the ideas home alone, and kept hitting the same wall. Eventually, he realized the problem wasn't the ideas. It was that he was the only one who'd been in the room.
So he started by bringing his chairman and business partner to the Summit with him. That changed everything, and now all his colleagues thought they were both crazy.
"Then I brought along several of our company CEOs and partners and they finally understood," he says. "It wasn't just my chairman and me coming back with another crazy idea. They were in the room. They heard the speakers. They saw the technology. They started to understand why we were pushing so hard."
The conversations inside the business shifted. CEOs who'd been focused on operational problems started asking different ones: How will AI change our businesses and workflows? How do we train our people differently? How do we turn physical businesses into technology-enabled platforms?
"When your leadership team experiences A360 together, it gives you a common language," Jason says. "You're no longer trying to convince people the future is coming. They can see it. Then the conversation becomes: what are we going to do about it?"
That's the shift Jason came to the Summit to find, not just for himself, but for all his colleagues and business partners.
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We believe that abundance is our destiny.
You've proven you can create value. Your track record speaks for itself: the deals closed, the teams inspired, the shareholders rewarded.
Today, you're motivated to transform that success into global significance. To deploy your accumulated capabilities (your capital, your network, your hard-won expertise) toward solving challenges that matter at civilizational scale.
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