Futuresinfocus

The guest for this discussion is a very rare mix as the offspring of an Eritrean revolutionary who received political asylum in the United States, a former appointee inside President Obama’s administration, a self-admitted recovering financial services lawyer and a technologist who is now a Principal Program Manager in Microsoft’s Mixed Reality & Artificial Intelligence engineering group. This experience (it’s way more than a product) is at the forefront of bringing AI and combined digital and physical worlds together. Nate Yohannes’ discussion with us is not only about HoloLens or the embedded technologies behind AI but, the art of balancing financial returns while addressing the wider social issues of how we drive AI to be unquestionably beneficial to all of mankind.Basically, how do we democratize AI to the hands of everybody on the planet to empower their potential to achieve more and discover the unknown. 

If 20% of the land of the agricultural land went to regenerative model we would stop new carbon creation. Nothing in all our choices has such a dramatic effect.Current farming now is very mono crop driven. Same crops, many years on the same land using fertilizers to boost mass production. In many cases experts are telling us that this is turning our land into barren, highly eroding land. In some areas there is a belief that there may only be 60 harvests or less available on some of this land. With over 30 soccer fields of agricultural land being lost every minute on a global basis. Big Ag is not responding yet, but consumers are driving changes in ways than ever before. This may be the best start place for where consumers can radically change the shape of things we buy, consume and produce. The CEO of Milkadamia has a unique and incredibly insightful view about what is evolving (with real speed) how we think, design and act as powerful consumers to change the food systems in the world

House buying and selling is a pain in the butt. It’s an archaic industry when all around us is highly personalized digital experiences where we can make complex decisions in a few seconds with an array of data, recommendations and visual prompts. Today’s guest wants to totally up end this behemoth of an industry for the consumer so that it can feel like Amazon but be fair and painless. After all it is the number one purchase each of us might ever make. 

The idea of no code programing is so exciting because code is the epicenter of the digital age. Most of us are not equipped or even skilled to do this but we will live more and more in a code -based world. Lego let people play at building and imagining everything from spaces-hips to cars and even Lego football games. Imagine a world where code could be as easy and accessible as Lego and what we could with this in healthcare, automotive and even government segments.This model is going to change the very nature of how we think about software and development costs. Chris’s example of how old industries like the legal industry has grabbed this to become more of a technology-based platform.

By 2029 we will still have a similar feel to aviation, but the technologies that support it all from 5G in the sky and AI in the cockpit will be common. Self-flying planes and helicopters for short distances with no pilots and more than likely just one pilot on major transatlantic routes with AI in the co-pilot's seat will be common. Our guest today Craig Picken is rare in that as a pilot he has done over 2,000 hours in US Military jets. He has sold billions of dollars in value in aircraft and is an industry commentator and visionary. We are going to see a fascinating convergence of technologies, ideas, consumer trends, and new transportation possibilities that will help re-shape aviation changes around us. Imagine looking out of an office block and seeing tens of self-piloting heli jets taking people from a building or even the road to a downtown destination.

Clusters of innovation have become a modern magic for cities and countries looking to bring together the best ideas, the best places to work and also be able to generate a magic for investors. The US. The UK, India, France, Israel, Africa and China are living examples of one of the fathers of this idea in practice. Joel Marcus is the Executive Chairman of Alexandria who kicked off the cluster process with Michael Porters cluster model for the bio tech industry on the east and the west coasts based. Porter’s model is based on four key variables: [1] the best centers of knowledge, [2] their closeness to great education centers, [3] a depth of relevant human capital and [4] deep risk capital capabilities. 

Tom Siebel is one of the fathers of the software industry in silicon-valley with Siebel software and now as chairman of C3.ai. Having made a CRM a reality for sales and marketing nearly 20 years ago he now is looking to make AI a practical reality for driving digital transformation success in the next decade. His new book, Digital Transformation, Survive and thrive in an Era of Mass Extinction is a direct call to action for leaders looking to plot a successful pathway through these potentially complex waters.

The promise that AI offers is both clearly understood but also vastly misrepresented. AI is not the man behind the curtain according to our guest today, Kymberly Storin, the VP of Marketing for IBM’s cognitive systems group. She believes that the inherent complexity of AI means we can’t just buy into the idea and expect extraordinary results to occur. In fact, if AI is to be the great aid to society it also needs to represent all the components of society too, gender, age, ethnicity, etc. Otherwise it will try and use precepts from our past to try build solutions for a vastly different set of futures by 2030. If AI is going to be the future for corporations, government and consumers by 2030, then getting it to work cannot be an act of random chance but it needs a clear architecture for design, thinking and delivery that means success is not an act of random chance.Our guest today sits at the heart of many of the current best practices in real world AI deployments so she can walk us through why

This is part two of our interview with Sarah Fay. Context is going to be a critical conversation in ten years’ time. Your personal data, the value of that date to you and others will matter in millions of different ways. This means we need to be aware of how and what the value will look like as personal becomes both digital and physical. Context will be everything. If Cambridge Analytics taught us one thing is that there is magic (good and dark) that comes from seeing deep meaning in new combinations of data to show feelings and openness. It can be used for good or evil, but it is going to be used. Personal data will be at least a trillion-dollar annual industry (bigger than 150+ of each of the world’s economies).Personal data awareness is vital for the future, our futures. What personal data is going to mean going forward as we cross this chasm, ten years from now for everyone (protection and getting in on the action and getting payback from it) is going to be something we each have to think about.

Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer founders of Thinkers 50 the definitive database and award for the best thinking and thinkers in the world talk to us about the future of break through thinking. This is the first of series of these podcasts about the top fifty Thinkers in the 2019 list as well as interviews directly with a number of these people about their ideas and how they are being applied to the developing world around us.

Context is going to be a critical conversation in ten years’ time. Your personal data, the value of that date to you and others will matter in millions of different ways. This means we need to be aware of how and what the value will look like as personal becomes both digital and physical. Context will be everything. If Cambridge Analytics taught us one thing is that there is magic (good and dark) that comes from seeing deep meaning in new combinations of data to show feelings and openness. It can be used for good or evil, but it is going to be used. Personal data will be at least a trillion-dollar annual industry (bigger than 150+ of each of the world’s economies).Personal data awareness is vital for the future, our futures. What personal data is going to mean going forward as we cross this chasm, ten years from now for everyone (protection and getting in on the action and getting payback from it) is going to be something we each have to think about.

Everything needs to change in the way that we design and build bras. Ideas like rear hooks, underwire and clearly articulated pain and discomfort from compression bras have been a consistent design failure. They do not last long, yet the materials used in them have very long biological breakdown periods. There are some exciting ideas around printed inks, sensors and new printed materials. The industry argues that the challenge is that women choose the wrong size. Yet the reality appears to be around different design and medical issues.Our expert talks with us about how women do not want to wear their mothers’ bra design. Our expert believes that this a wicked problem worth solving.

This is part two of our conversation with Melanie Matheu. We talk to the CEO of a company that is looking to laser print human organs. Put the incredible or technologies aside this could give us all a second, third, fourth or fifth act in life. It will radically evolve the healthcare industry, what we monitor, how the focus of Dr’s radically change and much, much, more.

In this two-part podcast we talk to the CEO of a company that is looking to laser print human organs. Put the incredible or technologies aside this could give us all a second, third, fourth or fifth act in life. It will radically evolve the healthcare industry, what we monitor, how the focus of Dr’s radically change and much, much, more.

This is part two of a two part interview. It is sometimes easier to see what the future can look and feel like through the eyes of a huge product portfolio that most of us touch and use every day. Our guest today is the Chief Product Officer for AT&T business, so he gets to see hundreds and thousands of possible ways the portfolio of products and services are changing people’s livesEnjoy both part one and part two of this interview with a wide range of areas that should help you shape not just what your network needs to be built to do, but how we should be thinking about new versions of the cloud by 2029.

This is part one of a two part interview. It is sometimes easier to see what the future can look and feel like through the eyes of a huge product portfolio that most of us touch and use every day. Our guest today is the Chief Product Officer for AT&T business, so he gets to see hundreds and thousands of possible ways the portfolio of products and services are changing people’s livesEnjoy both part one and part two of this interview with a wide range of areas that should help you shape not just what your network needs to be built to do, but how we should be thinking about new versions of the cloud by 2029.

The world of food (what we eat, how we produce it, what it all means) is in a more rapid state of transformation than maybe in the preceding three hundred plus years. This sounds dramatic, but our guest today Miyoko Schinner, the CEO of Miyoko’s Creamery, a non-dairy cheese and vegan butter company is as much at the forefront of a movement to vegan eating as companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger. Her design of the company with its’ compassion first philosophy may well be an example of what common forms of leadership should look like ten years from now as we increasingly recognize that what we make and sell and how we produce it has consequences far beyond traditional thinking. The two-part podcast talks about what we should expect on our food store shelves in ten years (or even less) time. We talk about the moral and ethical imperatives that are increasingly connecting all parts of the food eco-systems together and we talk about how food giants now are responding far more rapidly than we might

In a culture obsessed with youthful excellence from spelling bees to sport, music and entertainment Rich Karlgaard’s latest book Late Bloomers puts a brake on the traditional assumptions that lie behind that obsession. We are impatient in a way that might be damaging our society and future leaders need to be smarter about understanding the underlying values late bloomers bring with them for complex problem solving.

This is the second episode of a two part interview. Every single one of us has some sort of Campbell Soup story because the brand has at some point been there for us as children through our adult lives. In a complex FMCG business the soup business is not what it has been for the preceding 100 plus years. How we grow the ingredients, handle packaging and tin, make the product, distribute and position it are radically changing. A stalwart like soup becomes a great illustrator of the challenges all product-based companies face in an increasingly extremely personalized consumer world with a greater focus on not just the product but the whole production and environmental factors behind it.

This is part one of a two part interview. Every single one of us has some sort of Campbell Soup story because the brand has at some point been there for us as children through our adult lives. In a complex FMCG business the soup business is not what it has been for the preceding 100 plus years. How we grow the ingredients, handle packaging and tin, make the product, distribute and position it are radically changing. A stalwart like soup becomes a great illustrator of the challenges all product-based companies face in an increasingly extremely personalized consumer world with a greater focus on not just the product but the whole production and environmental factors behind it. Stay tuned next week for part two of this interview.