Lifeboat Foundation

A large proportion of CEOs from a diverse cross-section of Fortune 500 companies believe artificial intelligence might destroy humanity — even as business leaders lean into the gold rush around the tech.

In survey results shared with CNN, 42 percent of CEOs from 119 companies surveyed by Yale University think that AI could, within the next five to ten years, quite literally destroy our species.

While the names of specific CEOs who share that belief were not made public, CNN notes that the consortium surveyed during Yale’s CEO Summit event this week contained a wide array of leaders from companies including Zoom, Coca-Cola and Walmart.

Those well-established conventional IT systems, however, can no longer be taken for granted. Companies are accelerating their digital transformation efforts, automating, optimizing, and reinventing their business processes. The pace of change continues to accelerate: Deloitte reports, for example, that 58% of organizations have stepped up their modernization plans due to the covid-19 pandemic.

Many ERP apps are now being moved to public cloud services, such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, while others are being replaced with SaaS-based alternatives, including Salesforce and Workday. The previously monolithic ERP platform is being deconstructed.

Enterprises now find themselves with a mixed-bag, hybrid cloud environment: some legacy core applications remain on premises, while new applications are cloud native and run in containers or as microservices.

There is tremendous apprehension about the potential of generative AI—technologies that can create new content such as text, images, and video—to replace people in many jobs. But one of the biggest opportunities generative AI offers is to augment human creativity and overcome the challenges of democratizing innovation.

In the past two decades, companies have used crowdsourcing and idea competitions to involve outsiders in the innovation process. But many businesses have struggled to capitalize on these contributions. They’ve lacked an efficient way to evaluate the ideas, for instance, or to synthesize different ideas.

Generative AI can help over­come those challenges, the authors say. It can supplement the creativity of employees and customers and help them produce and identify novel ideas—and improve the quality of raw ideas. Specifically, companies can use generative AI to promote divergent thinking, challenge expertise bias, assist in idea evaluation, support idea refinement, and facilitate collaboration among users.

In large organizations, complexity can lead to less efficient processes and projects that aren’t aligned with business strategy. A modern business management tool can help enterprise architects, leaders and relevant stakeholders gain control and ensure efforts are prioritized and anchored correctly. Cutting projects that aren’t business critical or growth enablers might be the right thing to do, even if the ideas they’re based upon are great. As a result, freeing up time and saving costs can empower the organization to onboard new projects faster and leverage AI and its possibilities before its competitors do.

How can technology leaders best leverage AI to benefit their companies and their customers? Here at Ardoq, we’ve focused on a few key areas that all technology leaders could benefit from.

1. Allow for and encourage continuous innovation. This includes always evaluating the type of technology your business is based on. If your organization is already based on modern technology and has a data-driven approach, you can be more agile when it comes to adopting and leveraging AI. AI will create disruptions as well as open up new opportunities. This is an opportunity for leaders to create momentum and embrace an iterative approach that will help their people feel that they’re staying ahead of the curve.

In short, data-driven solutions themselves are only part of the overall approach. It is the effective integration of this fast-evolving technology into existing workflows and processes that leads to successful business outcomes.

The first step to integrating AI is identifying places and processes where it can help increase efficiency or accuracy. Businesses should step back and identify their pain points, creating a list of processes that are slow, tedious, cumbersome or suffering from a lack of staff. They should also analyze where additional data or information could help make better decisions.

In the pharma industry, data-driven AI solutions have been widely adopted in sales and marketing processes. For example, by analyzing patient and physician data, electronic medical records and demographic information, AI algorithms can identify trends, patterns and insights that help sales representatives tailor their messaging and presentations to specific HCPs.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the weekend called for enhanced collaboration between the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence development. Without mentioning the fact that his company’s products like ChatGPT are not available in China, he argued that China should be a major player in ensuring the safety of global AI development and rollout.

“With the emergence of the increasingly powerful AI systems, the stakes for global cooperation have never been higher,” he said in the keynote address for a conference hosted by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, sounding more like someone leading an advocacy group on responsible tech than what he is: the CEO of a company responsible for shepherding that emergence.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s Sam Altman Makes Global Call For AI Regulation—And Includes China” »

3. Discuss the impact of the metaverse and revise your strategy. Make sure your managers evaluate the usefulness of metaverse tools in business processes. This will help you decide whether to keep using certain solutions or switch to others. Note that it’s okay to change your KPIs on the go based on how the metaverse impacts your team’s productivity, job satisfaction, issue resolution and so on.

With trendy technologies like the metaverse, it’s important to determine the real benefits you can get and ensure they’re worth the cost. Keep in mind that metaverse platforms are not the holy grail.

All in all, project management is still 90% about communication with clients and employees. It’s best to stay focused on keeping this communication efficient. While being open to adopting new technologies like the metaverse, you should treat them as additional tools rather than making them a priority for your PMs.

The transition to renewable energy, critical for the world’s future, is limited today by energy storage and transmission challenges. Beaming solar power from space is an elegant solution that […] promises a remarkable payoff for humanity: a world powered by uninterruptible renewable energy.

The California Institute of Technology reports the first successful beaming of solar energy from space down to a receiver on the ground, via the MAPLE instrument on its SSPD-1 spacecraft.

Continue reading “First ever beaming of orbital solar power” »

In the digital age, SaaS businesses have started embracing transformative technologies, such as Artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing. According to a research firm, the market for artificial intelligence (AI) is nearly 100 billion USD, which is expected to grow twentyfold by 2030, up to almost 2 trillion USD.

Although AI promises revolutionary advancements and cloud computing enables efficient storage and processing of massive amounts of data, their rapid adoption also raises concerns about cybersecurity. In 2021, the global cost of cybercrime was estimated to be $6 trillion.