Dive Brief:
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President-elect Donald Trump invited a number of technology industry leaders to a roundtable next week in New York, reports USA TODAY.
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The event may provide an opportunity for the tech industry, which largely ignored Trump leading up to the election, to mend fences with the new administration.
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Meanwhile, Trump announced last week his President’s Strategic and Policy Forum, a group that will advise the Trump on business issues as part of his plan to "bring back jobs" and "make America great again." The forum includes just one tech leader: Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM.
Dive Insight:
Few details about next week’s tech roundtable have been released. Peter Thiel, who has served as a personal advisor to Trump on tech issues during the campaign, was one of the names that appeared on the invitation asking tech leaders — including Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz — to join the Trump team in New York on December 14.
The roundtable may be a chance for a fresh start between Trump and tech leaders, who have been critical of many of Trump’s positions on issues such as immigration and encryption. The tech leaders also largely supported Hillary Clinton.
Some critics expressed surprise last week following Trump’s announcement of the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum. Technology now has an enormous impact on businesses of all kinds, yet Rometty was the sole tech leader assigned to the forum. The group will also include the CEOs from The Walt Disney Company, Wal-Mart and General Electric, among others.
Rometty has reached out to the incoming administration before, asking for cooperation. Last month she published an open letter to Trump with suggestions on how the President-elect and IBM can work together to "help achieve the aspiration you articulated and that can advance a national agenda in a time of profound change," including an emphasis on a "new collar" of jobs in the U.S.
