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The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated that the world’s 10 wealthiest people – a list dominated by U.S. tech billionaires, including Elon Musk – gained nearly $64 billion on November 6, the largest daily increase since the index began in 2012. The tech titans had multiple reasons for celebrating. Much of the gains for the top 10 was because of a surge in U.S. stocks after the election as investors anticipated a regulation-light policy platform.

The theory that regulation is bad for innovation has been taken up as a rallying cry by the tech sector both in and outside of Silicon Valley: if regulators are allowed to have their way, the argument goes, AI development will be hampered. So, for them, light regulation – or no regulation – is great news.

The argument against regulation as a hindrance to innovation is not new. What is new is Trump’s creation of the Department of Government Efficiency  (DOGE) to dismantle federal agencies. This week Trump announced that he has appointed two tech entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla and Space-X and one of the U.S. President-elect’s biggest campaign contributors, and Vivek Ramiswamy, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur, to lead DOGE.

Trump plans to appeal President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, according to his campaign platform and Musk and Ramaswamy could very well dismantle some of the regulatory agencies which have stepped in to fill that void, leaving no guardrails in place.

In an exclusive column for The Innovator Kay Firth-Butterfield, one of the world’s foremost experts on AI governance and until recently Head of Artificial Intelligence and a member of the Executive Committee at the World Economic Forum, and her co-author Rebecca Y. Gonzales, make the case for responsible regulation.

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Factories across the globe are losing between 3% and 20% of their revenue due to inefficient planning of their production processes. Phantasma Labs says it has developed software that helps manufacturing companies of all sizes efficiently plan and schedule their processes. Built on the foundations of Reinforcement Learning AI, the Berlin-based startup says its software generates production plans that are up to 30% better and created 100 times faster than traditional methods.

The uniqueness of the Berlin-based startup’s approach lies in its independence from Big Data, making its technology applicable to not just large corporates but SMEs and mid-caps. Think of it as a route to speeding up digitalization without a two-five year waiting period, says the company.

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