Fortune AI Weekly · Oct 6, 2026 · 34m · 17m saved
With Michelle Kwon, Chief Operating Officer at Runway · Amy Webb, Founder and CEO of Future Today Strategy Group
One Runway employee built an advertising agent in a few weeks. Michelle Kwon, the AI video company's chief operating officer, said it was central to adding 100 million dollars of annual recurring revenue in a few months.
Most large companies are not getting that kind of return. Amy Webb, who advises them, said many are pouring money into AI pilots with no strategy behind them and arguing with their own security teams.
"It's not about being AI native. It's about being flexible, and it is entirely possible for any company to be more flexible." — Amy Webb
Michelle Kwon, Chief Operating Officer at Runway, the New York company she said was the first to bring AI video generation to market, spoke on Fortune AI Weekly from Fortune's first AIQ Summit at the New York Stock Exchange. She shared the stage with Amy Webb, who started Future Today Strategy Group 21 years ago and builds quantitative models for companies on where new value and new risk will appear.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 34 minutes of audio, 17 minutes of reading.
Here are the 14 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
One Runway employee built an ad agent in a handful of weeks, and Kwon said it was central to an additional 100 million dollars of annual recurring revenue
Runway's ad output rose by more than 1,000% while acquisition costs stayed low
Runway's staff have built about 215 internal apps for one another since early this year
Webb said flexibility matters more than being "AI native", and that big companies are rarely flexible
Most companies use AI to cut costs, not to grow revenue, Webb said
One executive she knows went around his CTO and is set to spend a couple hundred million dollars on tokens
Webb expects data-cleanup and analysis vendors to struggle, because companies can now do that work themselves
Using AI is not a measure of productivity, Kwon said, and a pasted chatbot answer or a 100-slide deck wastes colleagues' time
An agent that misbehaves is usually bad code, not a conscious machine, Webb said, citing a loop of her own that emailed 1,000 people
The host's news roundup: leaked figures showed Anthropic losing $42 billion in a year, $34 billion of it an accounting charge
1. Runway's Research-Lab Roots
The host opened at the New York Stock Exchange, at Fortune's inaugural AIQ Summit for Fortune 500 executives. He put one question to the panel: if a business were rebuilt from scratch today with AI at its center, what would it look like?
Runway is a research lab and a product company
Kwon said three NYU graduates founded Runway about nine years ago, which is why it is based in New York.
"We have been a frontier research lab in the area of multimodal AI for the last nine years." — Michelle Kwon
"We were the first company to ever bring video generation to market, and we have the best-in-class researchers working across audio and visual, image, audio, video mainly, and then we have an incredible team that is taking that research and packaging it in a way that we can then partner and productionalize it for Fortune 100 companies, global 2000 organizations, hundreds of educational institutions, developers in 170 plus countries, and bring creativity, bring content creation at scale." — Michelle Kwon
