Catching up with… Larry Williams

We pull together everything that is related to technology and innovation into one place. Everything as far as corporations, our startup community, private equity capital to help drive new companies, our workforce, academia, technical colleges – all of this comes together to create an ecosystem that really helps drive our economy. From an economic development point of view, everything that’s been driving Georgia today has been driven by technology. Everything we’re doing is about creating connections for people to advance their careers, to build their businesses. When we have a connected ecosystem, we are able to collaborate and make great things happen.

How has the tech sector changed since 1999, when TAG began?

The acceleration of the growth in all of industry including technology has been phenomenal over the past 25 years. If you go back 25 years, we were using modems to dial up. I don’t think that the iPhone was on the market yet. All of this has accelerated as this mobility drive has put little computers in our hands.

Where is technology going next?

Think about the automation that’s happening, whether it be in software driven by quantum computing, which is the backbone that allows for artificial intelligence, all the way up to robotics and being able to use automated systems in manufacturing, as we’re seeing with our automobile industry, as well as our battery industry that’s happening here. What this is going to do is drive new opportunities. It’s going to drive new ways of doing business and create other businesses and great ideas.

There are a lot of great possibilities in healthcare, being able to utilize certain technologies that can drill down and diagnose things sooner. If we can get more information at the cellular level about a potential risk of cancer and be able to treat it immediately, that will really improve people’s lives. And that’s what a lot of the technology is doing.

In the last 25 years, Georgia has become known as the fintech capital of the U.S. How did that happen?

Seventy percent of all debit, credit and reward card transactions are processed through Georgia through great brands like Global Payments, Fiserv, Deluxe. What’s important is, we didn’t just stand up and say we were going to be a fintech capital. We are the fintech capital because we’ve been part of every iteration of the innovation. We go back to check processing, and that enabled us to have smart people who thought about ‘How can we automate this system?’ As that ingenuity came out, we built an industry around that.

What other subsectors of technology have been important in Georgia?

We are one of the world leaders in cybersecurity. We were working with the Department of Defense and our universities here, really thinking about what it means to secure systems even before we were calling it cybersecurity. That enabled us to create great companies like ISS [Internet Security Systems] that became part of IBM. It’s still located here. Secureworks, which became part of Dell, is still headquartered here in Georgia.

Supply chain: We’ve always been a logistics hub – the airport, Savannah and the ports, the great interstate system that we have. That all makes us an epicenter for supply chain, and it’s all being automated. Technology is the backbone for all of it.

One more example of where we’re leading and will continue to lead is quantum computing, which is the backbone for artificial intelligence. With Georgia Tech and other assets that we have, we’ve got people that not only are driving artificial intelligence, but we have more people that are learning how to use artificial intelligence as a tool. We have more graduates from Georgia Tech that are utilizing AI in professional ways than any other university in the nation. That is phenomenal, because the people who know how to utilize the tools of the future are the people who are going to be driving the next generation of innovation and ingenuity.