Cutting through with KSIB - newsletter 4

Welcome to the fourth issue of Cutting through with KSIB, a short monthly newsletter summarising key insights that I and the team at KSIB have learned in the past month. 

This month I would like to share some of the insights I learned from attending the World Summit AI event in Amsterdam recently. Over 5000 people attended this conference and a number of AI topics and practical use cases were discussed.

If you enjoy our insights, please forward the newsletter to others and ask them to subscribe. Please feel free to email, DM on LinkedIn or text me with ideas or feedback – including anything you think we should explore further. 

Regards

Kristin Stubbins

Our topics this month: 

1. How Silicon Valley is shaping the world 
2. Sustainability and AI are not mutually exclusive
3. Accelerating AI adoption is a human issue

If you’d prefer to listen to understand the topics covered in this month’s newsletter, listen to our podcast.

① How Silicon Valley is shaping the world

This is a huge focus for the Europeans who, frankly, seemed justifiably nervous about the extent of control that the US exerts in this world. I have certainly become more reflective about this as the AI ecosystem seems to increasingly become circular with co-investment and influence. There must be opportunities for Australia to find its areas of focus to ensure that we at least play an influencing role in this global AI revolution. The stakes are high.

Quote from one entrepreneur at the conference:

“one US company is bigger than the Greek market for my software, so why would I invest is Greece?”

This certainly focuses the mind. What would he say about Australia? I think we need to shape and drive the answer to that in our local AI ecosystem.

At KSIB we are working with large corporates to help implement agentic solutions. This includes managing the risks associated with use cases and considering transformational workforce issues. We are also seeing that there is a huge opportunity to step back and consider what should be eliminated in core processes BEFORE AI solutions are implemented. We have been working with a number of terrific Australian AI start up enterprises in this work and I will seek to profile some of these organisations in our upcoming podcasts and newsletters. I know that Australia can play an important innovation role if we embrace some of these exciting new companies and entrepreneurs.

② Sustainability and AI are not mutually exclusive

I was recently asked to speak on AI at a corporate event and was asked a question about how we combat sustainability issues. My answer focused on incentives and measurement – experience would tell us that, if humans see an issue as important and are motivated to solve the problem – innovation ensues.

At World Summit AI, numerous examples of “putting sustainability at the core” of AI solutions, including data centre issues, were discussed. Sustainability is obviously “core” in Amsterdam and the mantra is embedded everywhere around the city.

AI is now also on this path. In concert with sustainability objectives, sustainable AI will become embedded in Europe. Representatives from the City of Amsterdam talked about the city strategy – sustainability objectives and AI objectives sitting side by side. Examples of new data centre cooling mechanisms were discussed along with various other sustainability initiatives. When sustainability is prioritised – solutions are found.

My hope is that here in Australia we follow Europe’s lead on this.