Ivan Monteiro spent 32 years at Banco do Brasil, served as CEO of Petrobras, and worked at Credit Suisse and Nubank. Today he runs AXIA, which generates nearly a fifth of Brazil's electricity, and he opens this series in a conversation with Pedro Medicis (president of Tátil) and Olga Loffredi (PhD and global CEO of Vanto Group).

On artificial intelligence, Ivan's bet is that it gives time back to people so they can do the work only they can do, though none of that is possible unless the organization is ready for it. The parallel he draws is with electricity, the same one that gave rise to this series. Power reached the factory floor in 1890 and took thirty years to deliver its revolution, because the gains only appeared once someone redesigned the factory around it.

None of his answers about transformation are about the technology. When the conversation turns to how you get through a change like that, Ivan goes back to the bank twice. In the first, having learned that Banco do Brasil was about to buy thousands of self-service terminals, he gathered the tellers from the branches he oversaw and told them their profession was finished, adding that the bank would need specialists in pensions, risk, assets and credit, and that several paths were now opening up for them inside the company. In the second, he stood in front of one of his own bank's branches and did not recognize it, because the signage was poor and there were security bars across the front, at least until that moment. Ivan ordered them torn out and set off an internal fight. The bars were the façade, and they were also the bank's stance toward the people walking in. In both cases the equipment was the easy part. The hard part was rearranging the company around it and understanding what mattered for that to happen: people. "The higher I rose, the more I trusted people," Ivan says, inverting what he used to hear from his bosses, that the higher you go, the more you control.

This is the meeting point this series is looking for, where what a brand shows and how a company organizes itself become the same subject.