Chapter Three
Methodology
3.0 Introduction
In this study, we employ a discourse analysis to dissect key aspects of
communication techniques used by tech leaders to promote the use of AI
systems in contemporary societies, focusing on language and the ideological,
economic, and power dynamics factors that underline their communication.
Therefore, the study demonstrates the methodological framework to be
adopted to analyze the data that aid in achieving the study endeavors.
Regarding the type of data, the study utilizes transcripts of a penal where
tech leaders from various big tech companies participated to talk about the
future of artificial intelligence.
3.1 biographical information about the participants:
* Shou Zi Chew:
Chew was born on 1 January 1983 in Singapore. His father reportedly
worked in construction and his mother in bookkeeping. Upon graduating
from Hwa Chong Institution, Chew went on to serve National Service in
the Singapore Armed Forces. After graduating from University College London
in 2006, he stayed on in London to work as a banker for the Goldman Sachs
Group for two years before he joined Yuri Milner's venture capital firm DST
Global. At the Russian investment firm DST Global, Chew led investment
into [Link], Alibaba, and Xiaomi. He also led a team of early investors
in ByteDance in 2013.
In 2015, Chew joined Xiaomi as its chief financial officer. In 2019, he became
Xiaomi's foreign business president.[5]
In March 2021, Chew joined ByteDance as its chief financial officer. He
subsequently replaced TikTok CEO Kevin A. Mayer, who left the ByteDance
subsidiary after three months on the job.
In March 2023, Chew testified before the United States Congress regarding
the legislative effort to ban TikTok in the United States. Following the
testimony, then senator Marco Rubio requested the U.S. Department of
Justice investigate Chew for perjury. Chew testified again in January 2024,
during a United States Senate Judiciary Committee hearing regarding
legislation on child internet safety.
He was the honorary chairperson of the 2024 Met Gala as TikTok was the lead
sponsor of the event. Chew was recognized as one of the most impactful
Asians in 2024 by Gold House.
On 24 April 2024, President of the United States Joe Biden signed
a bill[24] that required TikTok be sold or face a ban in the US. However, after
the 2024 election and before any ban took effect, President Biden decided to
leave enforcement of the law in the hands of the incoming Trump
administration. This resulted in TikTok being temporarily disabled and
removed from app stores in the United States until 20 January 2025, when
President Donald Trump signed an executive order delaying the app's ban for
75 days, pending a possible sale of ownership. Chew was present at Trump's
inauguration.( Shou Zi Chew.(2025, March 26). In Wikipedia.
[Link]
* Ruth Porat:
Porat was born to a Jewish family in Sale, Cheshire, England, the
daughter of Dan and Frieda Porat. Her mother was born in Mandatory
Palestine, and her father fled Vienna on Kristallnacht and found his way to
Mandatory Palestine, enlisted in the British Army as a teenager [10] and later
fought in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.[11][12] Her father's testimony about
surviving the Holocaust was taken by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute.
[13] She has a brother, Marc Porat, who founded General Magic.[14]
Porat moved at a young age to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her
father was a research fellow in the physics department at Harvard University.
His visa was sponsored by John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. Senator.[15] A
byproduct of her father's research was ion implantation, which found
application in the development of the semiconductor.[16] Three years later,
her father relocated the family to Palo Alto, California, where he worked
at Stanford University's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for 26 years.
[17][18] At SLAC he developed a spark chamber spectrometer used in the
discovery of subatomic particles for which SLAC Director Burton Richter was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976.[19][20] He worked closely
with Nobel Prize-laureate Melvin Schwartz and Stanley Wojcicki, father of
Porat's future colleague Susan Wojcicki.[21][22]
Porat holds a B.A. in economics and international relations from Stanford
University, a [Link]. in industrial relations from the London School of
Economics, and a M.B.A. with distinction from the Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania.[23]
Porat began her career at Morgan Stanley in 1987 and left in 1993 to
follow Morgan Stanley president Robert F. Greenhill to Smith Barney[24] and
returned to Morgan Stanley in 1996. Before becoming CFO, she served as
vice chairman of investment banking from September 2003 to December
2009 and the global head of the Financial Institutions Group from September
2006 to December 2009. She was previously co-head of technology
investment banking and worked for Morgan Stanley in London.[9] While a
banker at Morgan Stanley, she was credited with creating the European debt
financing that saved Amazon from collapse during the dot-com melt down in
2000.[25][26] Her financial partner during the Dot-com bubble was Mary
Meeker, the godmother to Porat's three children.[24] In a
2014, Politico published an articled titled "Porat: The Most Powerful Woman
On Wall Street".[27]
During the financial crisis, Porat led the Morgan Stanley team advising
the United States Department of the Treasury regarding Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank with respect
to AIG.[28][29] In May 2011, she presented to the Bretton Woods Committee
hosted by the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., on post-crisis
reform and financial legislation, and to the World Economic Forum in Davos in
2013 on "trust" levels within and of the financial sector.[30][31][32]
In 2013, it was reported that President Barack Obama would nominate Porat
as the next Deputy Secretary of the Treasury.[33] However, it was reported
later by Bloomberg News and The New York Times that Porat had contacted
White House officials to withdraw her name from consideration because of
improving conditions at Morgan Stanley and the acrimonious confirmation
process inflicted upon then Treasury Secretary-nominee Jack Lew.[34][35]
Porat's career was analyzed in the McKinsey & Company study "How
Remarkable Women Lead".[36] She was named "Best Financial Institutions
CFO" in a poll conducted by Institutional Investor for its "2014 All-America
Executive Team".[37]
On March 24, 2015, it was announced that Porat would join Google as its
new CFO as of May 26, 2015.[3] Bloomberg Business reported that her hiring
deal amounted to $70 million.[38] She has been credited with boosting
Google's share price by reorganizing the company and imposing financial
discipline.[39] For the "2018 All America Executive Team", she was named
"Best Internet CFO" by Institutional Investor.[40] Porat spoke at
the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Dana Point, California, on
October 19, 2016, in her capacity as CFO of Alphabet Inc. and Google.
[41] At Google, in addition to Finance, Porat also has Business Operations,
Real Estate and Work Place Services reporting to her. She was paid $50
million in 2020,[42] $47 million in 2018, and $39 million in 2016.[43]
In July 2023, Porat was promoted to the newly created role of president
and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google starting from September
1, 2023. Her responsibilities include overseeing the company's "Other Bets"
ventures, its private equity portfolios, and its investments in real estate,
infrastructure and data centers.[44]
She is a member of the Board of Directors of Stanford
University Management Company,[45] the university's endowment, the
Board of Trustees of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center,[46] the Board
of Directors of The Council on Foreign Relations,[9] the Board of Directors
of Bloomberg Philanthropies,[47] and the Board of Directors of The
Blackstone Group.[48] She previously served on the Board of Trustees
of Stanford University,[49] the Borrowing Advisory Committee of the United
States Treasury,[50] and the Board of Trustees of the Economic Club of New
York.[51] She is a member of the Advisory Council of the Hutchins Center on
Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution,[52] and the Economic
Strategy Group at the Aspen Institute.[53]
Porat supported Hillary Clinton for president in 2008 and 2016, hosting
fundraisers for her at the Dakota in New York City.[54]
In 2011, Porat expressed her support for increased taxes on the wealthy and
declared on the topic of significant spending decreases that "we cannot cut
our way to greatness".[55]
In March 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie named Porat as co-chair of
"The Partnership for San Francisco" alongside Laurene Powell Jobs. ( Ruth
Porat.( 2025, April 29). In Wikipedia. [Link]
* Eric Schmidt:
Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman
and former computer engineer who was the chief executive officer
of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's executive chairman from
2011 to 2015.[1] He also was the executive chairman of parent
company Alphabet Inc.[2][3][4] from 2015 to 2017,[1] and technical advisor
at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020.[5] Since 2025, he has been the CEO
of Relativity Space, an aerospace manufacturing company.[6] As of 2025,
he's the world's 54th wealthiest person according to Bloomberg Billionaires
Index with an estimated net worth of US$32.4 billion.[7]
As an intern at Bell Labs, Schmidt in 1975 was co-author of Lex,[8][9][10] a
software program to generate lexical analysers for the Unix computer
operating system. In 1983, he joined Sun Microsystems and worked in various
roles. From 1997 to 2001, he was chief executive officer (CEO) of Novell.
[11] Schmidt has been on various other boards in academia and industry,
including the boards of trustees for Carnegie Mellon University,[12] Apple,
[13] Princeton University,[14] and the Mayo Clinic.[15] He also owns a
minority stake in the Washington Commanders of the National Football
League (NFL).
In 2008, during his tenure as Google's chairman, Schmidt campaigned
for Barack Obama,[16] and subsequently became a member of
Obama's President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.[17] In
the meantime, Schmidt had left Google, and founded philanthropic
venture Schmidt Futures, in 2017. Under his tenure, Schmidt Futures
provided the compensation for two science-office employees in the Office of
Science and Technology Policy. Schmidt became the first chair of the
U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence in 2018, while
keeping shares of Alphabet stock, worth over $5.3 billion in 2019.[18] In
October 2021, Schmidt founded the Special Competitive Studies
Project (SCSP) and has since served as its chairman.[19] Schmidt had a major
influence on the Biden administration's science policy after 2021, especially
shaping policies on AI.[20][21]
Schmidt was born in Falls Church, Virginia, later moving to Blacksburg,
Virginia.[4][22] He is one of three sons of Eleanor, who had a master's degree
in psychology, and Wilson Emerson Schmidt, a professor of international
economics at Virginia Tech and Johns Hopkins University, who worked at
the U.S. Treasury Department during the Nixon Administration.[4]
[22] Schmidt spent part of his childhood in Italy as a result of his father's
work and has stated that it had changed his outlook.[23]
Schmidt graduated from Yorktown High School in the Yorktown neighborhood
of Arlington County, Virginia, in 1972, after earning eight varsity letter awards
in long-distance running.[24][25] He attended Princeton University, starting
as an architecture major and switching to electrical engineering, earning a
Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree in 1976.[26][27]
From 1976 to 1980, Schmidt resided at the International House Berkeley,
where he met his future wife, Wendy Boyle. In 1979, at the University of
California, Berkeley, Schmidt earned an EECS M.S. degree for designing and
implementing a network (Berknet) linking the campus computer center with
the CS and EECS departments.[28] There, he also earned a PhD degree in
1982 in EECS; Computer Engineering, with a dissertation about the problems
of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these
problems.
Early in his career, Schmidt held a series of technical positions
with IT companies including Byzromotti Design, Bell Labs (in research and
development),[22] Zilog, and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
During his summers at Bell Labs, he and Mike Lesk wrote Lex,[26][8] a
program used in compiler construction that generates lexical-
analyzers from regular-expression descriptions.
In 1983, Schmidt joined Sun Microsystems as its first software manager.
[22] He rose to become director of software engineering, vice president and
general manager of the software products division, vice president of the
general systems group, and president of Sun Technology Enterprises.[30]
During his time at Sun, he was the target of two notable April Fool's
Day pranks.[31][32][33] In the first, his office was taken apart and rebuilt on
a platform in the middle of a pond, complete with a working phone and
workstation on the corporate Ethernet network. The next year, a
working Volkswagen Beetle was taken apart and re-assembled in his office.
In April 1997, Schmidt became the CEO and chairman of the board
of Novell. He presided over a period of decline at Novell where its IPX
protocol was being replaced by open TCP/IP products, while at the same time
Microsoft was shipping free TCP/IP stacks in Windows 95, making Novell much
less profitable. In 2001, he departed after the acquisition of Cambridge
Technology Partners.[11]
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed Schmidt.
Impressed by him,[34] they recruited Schmidt to run their company in 2001
under the guidance of venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz.
In March 2001, Schmidt joined Google's board of directors as chair, and
became the company's CEO in August 2001. At Google, Schmidt shared
responsibility for Google's daily operations with founders Page and Brin. Prior
to the Google initial public offering, Schmidt had responsibilities typically
assigned to the CEO of a public company and focused on the management of
the vice presidents and the sales organization.[35] According to Google,
Schmidt's job responsibilities included "building the corporate infrastructure
needed to maintain Google's rapid growth as a company and on ensuring
that quality remains high while the product development cycle times are kept
to a minimum."[36]
Schmidt as executive chair of Google, speaking with Nik Gowing
Upon being hired at Google, Eric Schmidt was paid a salary of $250,000 and
an annual performance bonus. He was granted 14,331,703 shares of Class B
common stock at $0.30 per share and 426,892 shares of Series C preferred
stock at purchase price of $2.34.[37]
In 2004, Schmidt and the Google founders agreed to a base salary of
US$1 (which continued through 2010) with other compensation of $557,465
in 2006,[38] $508,763 in 2008, and $243,661 in 2009. He did not receive any
additional stock or options in 2009 or 2010.[39][40] Most of his compensation
was for "personal security" and charters of private aircraft.[40]
In 2007, PC World ranked Schmidt as the first on its list of the 50 most
important people on the Web, along with Google co-founders Page and Brin.
[41]
In its 2011 'World's Billionaires' list, Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 136th-
richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $7 billion.[42]
On January 20, 2011, Google announced that Schmidt would step down as
the CEO of Google but would take new title as executive chairman of the
company and act as an adviser to co-founders Page and Brin.[43] Google
gave him a $100 million equity award in 2011 when he stepped down as CEO.
[44] On April 4, 2011, Page replaced Schmidt as the CEO.[45]
On December 21, 2017, Schmidt announced he would be stepping down as
the executive chairman of Alphabet.[46][47] Schmidt stated that
"Larry, Sergey, Sundar and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet's
evolution for this transition."[48]
In February 2020, Schmidt left his post as technical advisor of Alphabet after
19 years with the company.[49]
In March 2016, it was announced that Schmidt would chair a new
advisory board for the Department of Defense,[50] titled the Defense
Innovation Advisory Board.[51] The advisory board serves as a forum
connecting mainstays in the technology sector with those in the Pentagon.
[52]
To avoid potential conflicts of interest within the role, where Schmidt retained
his role as technical adviser to Alphabet, and where Google's bidding for the
multi-million dollar Pentagon cloud contract, the Joint Enterprise Defense
Infrastructure, or JEDI, was ongoing: Schmidt screened emails and other
communications, stating, "'There’s a rule: I'm not allowed to be briefed' about
Google or Alphabet business as it relates to the Defense Department".[53] He
exited the position November 2020.[54]
From 2019 to 2021, Schmidt co-chaired the National Security Commission on
Artificial Intelligence with Robert O. Work.[55][56][57]
While working at Google, Schmidt was involved in activities[58] that later
became the subject of the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation case that
resulted in a settlement of $415 million paid by Adobe, Apple, Google
and Intel to employees. In one incident, after receiving a complaint
from Steve Jobs of Apple, Schmidt sent an email to Google's HR department
saying; "I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a
direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is
happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let
me know as soon as you can. Thanks Eric".[59] Schmidt's email led to a
recruiter for Google being "terminated within the hour" for not having
adhered to the illegal scheme. Under Schmidt, there was a "Do Not Call list"
of companies Google would avoid recruiting from.[60] According to a court
filing, another email exchange shows Google's human resources director
asking Schmidt about sharing its no-cold-call agreements with competitors.
Schmidt responded that he preferred it be shared "verbally, since I don't want
to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?"[58][61]. (Eric
Schmidt. ( 2025, April 29). In Wikipedia.
[Link]
3.2 Objective of the study
This study aims to analyze the different persuasive techniques that
are utilized by tech leaders to promote AI systems and convince people to
trust and use them, identifying the persuasive tactics used in the process.
Additionally, it seeks to uncover the various techniques that tech leaders use
to address ethical issues that might lead users to stop using their AI systems
and ensure users that their privacy is protected and that their AI systems do
not demonstrate any kind of bias related to any issue.
These goals will be achieved by answering the following questions:
What are the persuasive techniques that tech leaders use to promote AI
systems?
How do tech leaders address the ethical issues surrounding AI systems?
3.3 Design of The Study
The source of data that will be used in the study is a panel that is
titled “The Future of AI: Leaders from TikTok, Google & More Weigh In”. This
panel has brought together very significant and influential tech leaders to
discuss the future of artificial intelligence and the role that it will play in a
variety of domains. The panel was Moderated by Peter, and involved leaders
like Shou Chew (TikTok), Ruth Porat (Alphabet), Eric Schmidt (Schmidt
Sciences), and others, who explored the transformative impact of AI on fields
such as healthcare, education, and logistics. This panel is accessible on
YouTube, posted on Nov 6, 2024, and Recorded on Oct 29th, 2024
3.4 Framework of Panel
The panel discussion “The Future of AI: Leaders from TikTok,
Google & More Weigh In” followed the traditional framework of a panel,
allowing more engaging and structured way of exploring the topic that is
covered. The moderator Peter Diamandis started with an introduction in
which he shot light in the urgency and the significant impact of AI on
today’s world. Each panelist had the floor to give a opening thoughts that
mirror his organization’s stance on AI. The moderator organized the
discussion, allowing for more dynamic interactions where each panelist
had the opportunity to elaborate on AI’s capabilities and address the
ethical concerns that surround it. One of the most important sections in
panel discussion is the involvement of the audience. In this panel, the
audience participated in the discussion by asking questions to the
panelist, making the discussion more interactive and inclusive. The
session ended with final reflections from the speakers on AI, emphasizing
the need for responsible innovation. This format ensures smooth and
interactive flow of discussion, offering insightful perspectives on AI and
enriching the content regarding it.
3.4 Rationale:
The rationale behind exploring the language and the
communication strategies of tech leaders is to gain deep understanding of
how tech leaders use language to promote the use of AI systems, and the
role they play in shaping the public perception on artificial intelligence.
Moreover, The exploration of language and communication strategies can
provide valuable insights into how this influential tech leaders tackle the
ethical challenges that AI systems face, leading to a concise
comprehension of how these tech leaders persuade the public to adopt AI
systems regardless of the ethical concerns that evolve around it.
By conducting this analysis of language and communication, the
study offers significant insights that can be used by the users, developers,
and policymakers who aim at understanding the approach used by tech
companies to establish trust between AI systems and the public, aiding in
futuristic regulation on AI and beneficial use of it.
3.5 Methods of Analysis:
This study is a Discourse analysis that employs a qualitative
research method that is used in virous disciplines such as linguistics,
sociology, and anthropology. It seeks to drill down on the use of language
and its implications in terms of culture, politics, and ideology. It relies on a
systematic exploration of the written and spoken language utilized in a
variety of texts such as interviews, movies, music, and more, allowing
researchers to identify the underlying patterns, functionalities, subtexts,
and implications. This need to decode messages that underline
communication has led to the emergence of different approaches such as
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Conversation Analysis (CA), Interactional
Sociolinguistics, Narrative Analysis, Discursive Psychology, and Multimodal
Discourse Analysis. (Gillian Rose,2016), offering a scientific and systematic
way to understand the use of language and communication strategies.
3.5.1 the persuasion theory:
Aristotle’s Appeals, Ethos, Pathos, and Logos , assists in examining
how tech leaders use communication to influence others’ perception on
artificial intelligence adoption.
Logos: refers to a rhetorical mode that depends on rationality and reason. It
is used to establish credibility with the audience, employing logical
argumentations, facts, data, or statistics. This seeks to persuade the
audience to accept, embrace, or support something.
Pathos: refers to a rhetorical appeal to emotion. It is when the speaker aims
to invoke emotion, such as fear, happiness, hope, or empathy to convince the
audience.
Ethos: refers to a rhetorical mode that relies on establishing credibility and
authority. When the speaker uses Ethos, he wants to demonstrate
trustworthiness, expertise and moral values so that he can persuade his
audience.
3.5.2 conversation analysis method:
Conversation analysis (CA) is a framework for studying the structures
and processes of interaction in conversational and institutional talk.
Practitioners draw on audio and video recordings of naturally occurring
interaction as well as on detailed transcripts that capture both verbal and
nonverbal features, to produce empirical analyses of different levels of the
organization of talk. These include such phenomena as the production of
social action, sequence organization, preference organization, turn-taking,
and turn design. The framework allows for a data-driven account of
interaction that is grounded in the participants' own displayed interpretations
of the moment-by-moment unfolding of the talk. (Joshua Raclaw.2015)
3.5.3Framing theory:
Framing theory is a theory developed by Goffman that posits that the
way by which a piece of information is presented or framed influences how
the audience decode and respond to it. The theory seeks to uncover how
different factors influence the perception of the public and the meaning they
extract from the messages.
Framing theory, in the context of AI discourse, will serve us to analyze the
frames that the tech leaders use to shape the public perceptions on artificial
intelligence, focusing on innovation, ethical responsibility, the necessity of AI,
and the economic benefits while attempting to justify the risks that AI can
cause regarding bias, privacy, and misuse. By examining these frames, we
can have a deep understanding of how AI is positioned as a necessary and
revolutionary tool.
3.6 Conclusion:
In summary, the section has introduced the design of the study, the
Rationale behind conducting this study, the method that is used in the
analysis of communication and the use of language by the tech leaders, the
framework of the text that will be analyzed, the goals of the study, and some
information of the participants of the panel. This introduction is to set the
stage for a comprehensive analysis of tech leader’s speech and
communication tactics used in promoting AI systems.
