- N E W S I N C O N T E X T -

The announcement this week that BMW will start using humanoid robots in one of its U.S. plants could herald a new kind of coexistence and cooperation between humans and robots; an interrelationship that pundits say is critical to the future of manufacturing and how robots interact physically in our work spaces.

Since the 1960s cartoon The Jetsons aired people have dreamed of being able to ask a robot to clean their homes or make dinner. While robots can vacuum and cook, we are still sometime away from wide-spread use of humanoid robots in the home. But If pundits are right 2024 may well be the year humanoid robots become a part of everyday life. More people will start interacting with them on the factory floor, requiring major organizational change and the upskilling of the global workforce.

California-based AI robotics company Figure’s commercial deal with BMW involves deploying general purpose robots in automotive manufacturing environments. Figure is developing autonomous general purpose humanoid robots that are designed for initial deployment into the workforce to address jobs that are undesirable or unsafe, and to support supply chain and manufacturing on a global scale.

“Single-purpose robotics have saturated the commercial market for decades, but the potential of general purpose robotics is completely untapped.,” Figure Founder and CEO Brett Adcock said in a statement. Figure’s robots (pictured here) “will enable companies to increase productivity, reduce costs, and create a safer and more consistent environment,” he said

It is just the beginning. In a January 16 post on X (formerly known as Twitter) Midjourney founder Dave Holz said “ we should be expecting a billion humanoid robots on earth in the 2040s and a hundred billion (mostly alien) robots throughout the solar system in the 2060s.”

More than 45 countries will hold elections this year to determine who governs more than 50% of the world’s GDP. With the proliferation of new technologies like Generative AI and their use by cyber criminals becoming more widespread, safeguarding the integrity and fairness of the election process will be a top priority for cybersecurity professionals, says a new World Economic Forum report.. Geopolitical instability will also be top of mind as attacks against critical infrastructure and elements of supply chains, such as ships on the Red Sea, shift the risk landscape and threaten to have a macro impact.

These threats are not the only ones impacting the cybersecurity outlook in 2024. The increasingly stark divide between cyber resilient organizations and those that are less prepared has emerged as a key risk, says the report, which was compiled by the Forum, in collaboration with Accenture.

While large organizations have made gains in cyber resilience, small and medium sized businesses have shown a notable decline. “The healthy middle has shrunk from 67% in 2022 to around 36%,” Akshay Joshi, Head of Industry and Partnerships for the Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity, said in an interview during the Forum’s annual meeting in Davos January 15-19. “Those that do not have the resources to invest are feeling the pain even more than before.”

The drastic drop in cyber resilience of the small companies that form the backbone of many economies threatens the integrity of the entire cyber ecosystem, says the report. Indeed, 90% of cyber leaders who attended the Forum’s Annual Meeting on Cybersecurity believe that this inequity requires urgent action. Paying subscribers can click to read the full story.

- I N T E R V I E W O F T H E W E E K -

- S T A R T U P O F T H E W E E K -

Labguru has developed an “all-in-one” research-to- production software-as-a-service platform to help labs run by large corporates, research institutions, academia and startups be more productive. Its technology helps scientists design experiments and workflows, capture structured and unstructured data, manage projects, and share their work. Clients include global biopharma company GSK, Agilent, a chemical analysis, life sciences and diagnostics company, Cepheid, an American molecular diagnostics company, and Mayo Clinic. The company serves a wide variety of life sciences customers, including companies in the biotech, cosmetics, service lab and food sectors.

“Our out-of-the-box flexible platform, with its ease of use and self-service capacities, cutting-edge features and technologies, can easily become the technology infrastructure for any laboratory,” says CEO Ariel Yarnitsky. He describes Labguru’s platform as an operating system for the lab.

- N U M B E R O F T H E W E E K

Amount of money Publicis, the world largest advertising group by market value, said it plans to spend over the next three years to put AI technology at the core of its business. The Paris group, which owns advertising and market agencies around the globe, said that its AI strategy would allow all 100,000 of its staff to use consumer data for 2.3 billion profiles of people across the world, with “trillions of data points about content, media, and business performance." Publicis said that this would allow greater accuracy for media planning, buying and optimization, as well as personalized advertising at scale for brands owned by its clients. "In short, thanks to the shift to an Intelligent System company, everyone within Publicis will become a data analyst, an engineer, an intelligence partner, with all the information they need at their fingertips to supercharge client growth," the company said in a statement.