Lip-Bu Tan has spent his career reinventing giants. An accomplished executive with more than 20 years of leadership experience, he has been recognized with the 2022 Robert N. Noyce Award, the Semiconductor Industry Association’s highest honor, and was named one of Forbes’ Top 50 Venture Capitalists.
Now in his latest role as the CEO of Intel, Tan faces a challenge: steering one of America’s most storied technology companies through the era of artificial intelligence.
In a conversation with Columbia Business School Dean Costis Maglaras, the David and Lyn Silfen Professor of Business, Tan spoke candidly about the demands of leadership, the pace of innovation, and the mindset required to keep an iconic company relevant in a world defined by constant change.
During their discussion, hosted by CBS’ Distinguished Speaker Series and the AI in Business Initiative, Tan shared lessons drawn from decades spent leading at the intersection of technology, venture capital, and global business. His message was clear: in the AI age, reinvention isn’t optional — it’s a means of survival.
Reclaiming Relevance
When Tan assumed leadership of Intel in March 2025, he faced a company that, in his words, had “missed all the big waves.” He described Intel as once iconic but slowed by layers of bureaucracy and complacency.
Tan explained that his decision to take the role was driven by a belief in Intel’s enduring importance—not only to the technology sector but to the global economy and national security. He viewed the company’s challenges as a chance to restore relevance through renewed curiosity, speed, and purpose. One of his first steps was to flatten the organization, reducing layers of management to restore accountability and agility. He emphasized the need to reorient Intel’s culture around listening, especially to engineers and customers, rather than protecting legacy hierarchies.
That cultural reset, he noted, was essential to rekindling innovation. Rather than viewing AI as a threat to human ingenuity, Tan sees it as a force that could amplify learning and creativity, if organizations have the courage to evolve.
Leading by Listening
Tan returned to one recurring theme throughout the conversation: humility. He described his leadership style as grounded in listening and learning from others. “When you are humble,” he said, “everybody wants to be a teacher.”
He recounted how, during his tenure as CEO at Cadence Design Systems Inc., he spent evenings learning from his engineers—studying digital flow, analog design, and verification—to understand their challenges firsthand. At Intel, he has adopted the same approach, engaging directly with engineering teams to uncover operational gaps and design inefficiencies.
"I don't have the ego. So when I came on board, I went down 6, 7, 8 layers to talk to the engineers to understand the issues,” Tan said.
His philosophy of learning through humility extended beyond internal culture to customer relationships. Tan described meeting with customers to solicit candid feedback—even when that feedback was uncomfortable. He shared a story about asking a major client to grade Cadence’s products, only to receive a report card full of failing marks. Instead of retreating, he used the critique to drive a decade-long transformation that ultimately rebuilt trust and performance.
Calculated Risk
Tan often framed his decisions in terms of calculated risk—a principle he attributed to an MIT professor’s advice early in his career. That mindset, he noted, has guided him from venture investing to corporate turnarounds.
At Intel, calculated risk now defines the company’s approach to AI and semiconductor design. Tan discussed how the AI revolution was reshaping computing architectures, pushing the industry beyond traditional CPUs toward what he called the “XPU era”—a convergence of CPUs, GPUs, and specialized processors optimized for power efficiency and AI workloads.
He also spoke about the importance of fostering partnerships and open ecosystems. Despite fierce industry competition, Tan had built collaborations with leaders such as Nvidia to accelerate innovation. His willingness to partner with rivals reflected his conviction that AI’s future would depend on collaboration as much as competition.
Tan’s commitment to risk-balanced innovation extended to Intel’s Foundry business as well. While some investors had suggested divesting manufacturing operations, Tan reaffirmed their strategic value for national resilience and technological sovereignty. His approach: transform Intel’s foundries from a closed, insular model into a customer-oriented service business that mirrored the agility of top global competitors. That shift, he argued, would help position Intel at the center of the world’s AI supply chain.
Preparing for Tomorrow
As the conversation turned to the future, Tan reflected on the broader responsibilities of leadership in an AI-driven world. He spoke of recruiting and developing talent, describing how he personally courted top engineers to rebuild Intel’s technical bench. He acknowledged that rejuvenating a legacy company required personal commitment and emotional investment.
Tan also connected AI innovation to broader societal goals, from sustainable computing to medical breakthroughs. He cited his interest, from his venture capitalist work, in using AI to advance cancer treatment, neuroscience, and mental health research, highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration between business and academia.
Tan’s message to leaders was clear: stay curious, stay humble, and take calculated risks. Reinvention, in his view, begins not with technology, but with mindset.