Love her or hate her, here’s a great chat with one of the most intriguing executives in our industry from tech.fortune.cnn.com

FORTUNE — Ahead of her keynote at her company’s inaugural Simple@Work conference in New York City, Xerox (XRX) chief executive Ursula Burns sat down with Fortune senior editor Andrew Nusca for a wide-ranging discussion on the motivation of overpopulation, popular perception of Xerox, and her biggest business challenge for 2014. Below are her words, edited and condensed for clarity.

We have 7 billion people in the world. We got from 5 to 7 billion faster than anyone thought. The most aggressive estimates would have had us at 7 billion people by 2017. So we’re there — we passed by it. The reason why is because things are getting better, even though you don’t necessarily see it. We have higher food safety. We have more dispersed energy. Health care is prolonging lives. War is not killing as many people as it did in the past. We’re living longer. More people are being born all over the world.

For all of my roles at Xerox, I’ve had to travel around the world. One of the things that has always struck me, even to this day, is how, everywhere you go, there are probably 10 times more cars on the road than the road can handle. You go to Mumbai, you go to Delhi, you go anywhere, and you say to yourself, “Come on now.” New York City, Mexico City, Paris. Think about that.

Today, everybody that has one of these mobile devices, and while people don’t know it, it has to be powered by something. Where does it come from? We now have seven-and-a-half billion people. They need water that’s potable. They need education — we don’t have enough teachers, or the right kind of teachers, and we don’t have them in the rural areas. To address everything that you need with more and more people, we can’t just do more and more of what we did before. It’s just not going to be possible. You run out of space. You run out of patience. You run out of everything. So what you have to do is inject scalability, efficiency, and cost savings. So how do you create platforms that can help many people? How do you drive efficiency in a system? How do you drive cost out of a system? And how do you allow people who need things to actually not have to create them all themselves?

This is a big thing. It’s really a big deal. We’re creating a whole bunch of opportunity and future, but we’re not necessarily creating the infrastructure to house it all efficiently and effectively. One of the things Xerox can help do — and we’re not the people who do it all — but we can allow more goodness to be spread around the world easily. And that’s what, fundamentally, our business is about.

Click here to read the rest of the article on Tech.Fortune.CNN.com