The Innovator's Radar newsletter enables you to stay on top of the latest business innovations. Enjoy this week's edition.
Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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Volkswagen Group’s announcement this week that is opening a specialized AI Lab to act as a globally networked competence center and incubator comes as no real surprise. Large companies across all sectors are struggling with how to best integrate AI into their businesses and keep up with the pace of change.
In 2023, business leaders faced an all-time-high rate of change and a majority expect change to accelerate further in 2024, according to Accenture’s Pulse of Change: 2024 Index, which identifies and ranks six factors of change affecting businesses—Technology, Talent, Economic, Geopolitical, Climate and Consumer & Social—using a range of key business indicators, such as labor productivity and IT spending.
The Index indicator analysis found that overall, across all six factors, the rate of change has risen steadily since 2019 :183% over the past four years and 33% in the past year alone. The C-suite survey reveals that a striking 88% anticipate an even faster rate of change in 2024. The No. 1 cause of business change in 2023? Technology. However, nearly half (47%) of more than 3,400 C-suite leaders surveyed say they are not fully prepared for the accelerating rate of technological change. Only 27% claim their organizations are ready to scale up generative AI; 44% say it will take more than six months to do so and take advantage of the potential benefits. In the case of Volkswagen Group, the objective of the AI Lab is to rapidly develop digital prototypes and transfer them to the Group brands for implementation. Tapping into the AI ecosystem to leverage the power of AI for specific use cases “is a smart move, however creating a specialized outside vehicle to speed up AI developments has its pros and cons”, Dr. Carsten Linz, the CEO of bluegain, a technology and professional service firm that helps leaders to transform established companies, and a member of the World Economic Forum's Expert Network on Digital Economy and New Leadership, said in an interview with The Innovator.
Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business. |
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| Just before Christmas in what was described as a "world-first" HSBC, one of the largest banking and financial services organizations, used quantum protection for AI-powered foreign exchange trading. The trial involved safeguarding a €30 million trading scenario from euros to U.S. Dollars. “By investing and experimenting in quantum technologies now HSBC is not just preparing for the future; we’re shaping it,” Colin Bell, CEO of HSBC Bank and HSBC Europe, said in a statement. HSBC is one of a number of banks helping pioneer tech solutions that combine AI and quantum or AQ for short. Shoring up cybersecurity is a key reason, but it is not the only one. Combining the two technologies can improve business outcomes across a broad spectrum of industries from financial services and healthcare to aerospace and manufacturing, say industry experts. Using AQ now can also be a hedge against the day that fault-tolerant quantum computers become a reality. Since quantum computing is a step-change technology with substantial barriers to adoption industry pundits say early movers will seize a large share of the total value, while those who have not prepared may not be able to catch up and could see their businesses wiped out overnight. That prospect is so worrying that a new acronym cropped up during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos in January, says Clement Jeanjean, a Paris-based senior director at SandboxAQ, a company spun out from Google parent Alphabet that delivers AQ solutions that run on today’s classical computing platforms. “Instead of FOMO [Fear of Missing Out] people were talking about FOBO: Fear of Becoming Obsolete,” he says. “There is a race to make sure that historical incumbents in industry verticals are not put out of business overnight.” |
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Who: Ingvild Næss has three key roles at Schibsted, a Nordic company that includes media, online marketplaces and technology ventures. She is CIO, responsible for driving the transformation of Schibsted's IT operations, CEO of Schibsted Enterprise Technology. and additionally serves as the company’s Chief Privacy and Data Trends Officer, leading a team of privacy lawyers. Næss, who is widely recognized as having played a pivotal role in shaping Schibsted's digital agenda, vision, and operational model, was named female media leader of the year in Norway 2023. She chairs the Norwegian Media Businesses Association's data and privacy committee and is a member of the Norwegian government's privacy commission.
Topic: The planned split between Schibsted’s media and marketplace businesses, the company’s data strategy, and the challenges of scaling AI.
Quote: "What has been really key to making progress is that we have established an extensive governance structure that involves CXOs from all key business areas. When the group makes a decision it actually happens because due to our structure it is not possible to hide or delay and this has been critical for our ability to make progress."
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MCi Carbon, a young Australian company, captures emissions from global industries, like steel, cement, fertilizers, and mining, and uses it to create new products and materials. The approach – which combines carbon capture storage and carbon utilization - mixes captured CO2 with a mineral feedstock, usually a mineral waste such as steel slag, mine tailings or raw quarried materials, to produce carbonates and silicates that can be used as direct inputs to a range of new low carbon construction and building materials, chemicals, cements, concretes and even household consumer products.
The idea is to convert harmful CO2 emissions into a profit center. “We are providing an opportunity for the world’s hard-to-abate sectors to not only decarbonize but also create new business models around their waste materials,” says Sophia Hamblin Wang, the company’s Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer. |
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Amount AI startups raised globally across 2,500 equity rounds in 2023, according to CB Insight's State of AI report, which was released on Feb. 1. Although down 10% year-over-year AI funding fell far less than broader venture funding. With $31 billion raised, the US accounted for 73% of the global AI funding total last year. Funding for AI slipped 29% in Europe in 2023 and was down by a whopping 61% in Asia, the report says.
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