Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger views the challenges his company and the globe face as opportunities for improving everyone's quality of life, driven by what he describes as four superpowers: artificial intelligence (AI), pervasive connectivity, ubiquitous compute, and cloud to edge infrastructure.

"If you're not applying AI to every one of your business processes, you're falling behind," Gelsinger said during his Intel VisiON keynote address.

He sees an explosion of AI use cases across all industries, including health care, retail, energy monitoring, customer interactions, and more. "We have to make sure that humans take advantage of AI" while also prioritizing "better and ethical" AI, he noted.

Universal, or "pervasive connectivity" represents the everyone and everything being connected. This allows customers to gather, store, write, access, and analyze data regardless of device or location. This level of connectivity is essential in creating an improved quality of life, Gelsinger said.

Another driver of a better future is the superpower Gelsinger calls ubiquitous compute. "Everything has become a computer," he said — essentially any device we touch. "Literally compute is now how we experience the world."

But in the background of all that compute power is what Gelsinger calls "ubiquitous" cloud to edge infrastructure. This allows for high perfomance computing to be immediately available, "and with the unlimited reach of the intelligent edge, we can have low latency, high bandwidth, [and] real-time inference capabilities anywhere we want them," he explained, citing tangible results like the visual experience of streaming services, cloud gaming, and visual workloads.

Although each of Gelsinger's four superpowers stand on their own, "they reinforce and they amplify [that] the more conductivity, the more data, the more services — as they come together, they're accelerating and driving" the world forward, he said.

With that in mind, Intel is moving at a "torrid pace," Gelsinger said. "When you think about torrid, it's a word about speed and energy and heat. But in the Intel context, we're also applying a vector of that energy for setting a direction into the future."

Gelsinger said he believes the world is at a strategic inflection point, and Intel is well-positioned to chip away at its ever-growing challenges.