Where is the Submarine Driving Us?

I cannot come up with enough adjectives and superlatives to describe Italian Tech Week which took place in Torino Italy ending yesterday evening, however I will lead with one number: Thirteen Thousand Live participants.

More than double the number of participants chose to attend this year shattering the record of last year and setting huge expectations for 2024. Yet people alone are not enough: what actually happened and what was said?

Italian Tech Week takes place at the spectacular facilities of OGR, incubator to more than 190 companies and home to Techstars Transformative World Torino. If you want to understand where to invest in Italy VC, this is your first stop in the country without a doubt, and a must attend on the agenda of every investor coming to Europe.

Now what about AI? The excellent preparation in mathematics and engineering in Italy combined with a longstanding entrepreneurial culture set the stage for remarkable innovation and exciting technology firms. And where better to set this context than Torino, the original home and birthplace of FIAT.

"Where is the Submarine Driving us" asked Mario Rasetti, Chair at CentAI which is the Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence located right next door and affiliated with one of the largest banks in Europe whose gleaming skyscraper towers over the OGR: Intesa San Paolo.

Dr. Rasetti was not asking a trick question, and was rather referring to the explosion in data that we are now facing. As an example, in 2023 it took 8 months for humans to duplicate ALL the data in history on earth (120 ZB, estimate from Cisco) and with the 15 Billion IOT devices going online between now and 2024 this timeframe will shorten from 8 months to..... 8 Hours. The equivalent of all the data in the world will be replicated in 8 hours in 2024.

Meanwhile, while keeping everyone firmly grounded in reality and not overselling or hyping AI, from an information perspective Rasetti compared the evolution of technology today to the breakthrough of Gutenberg and the printing press- we are entering a revolutionary period of time and it has already started.

On to Caroline Yap at Google who focused on the Human Centricity of AI and delivered one of the best and most practical sessions of the entire event. Yap notes that a convergence of forces, diverse expectations, and breakthrough in technologies will change the way machines work for us.

One important point Caroline Yap noted was "Ensure you have a human in the loop to oversee the 1st use cases and provide oversight," and also emphasized some recent research her teams at Google have completed indicating "90% of all consumers are willing to pay more for a product with premium support." I do hope somewhere someone at a telecom or airline is reading this..... Happy 25th anniversary to Google by the way!

And next up it was standing room only as everyone packed in for Sam Altman. Yes, THE Sam Altman of OpenAI and CHATGPT fame. I am not going to sugarcoat my thinking here: this was the disappointment of the event.

Altman sounded far more like a politician running for election without a platform than someone wanting to provide true insight into the future of responsible AI. The usual cliches I hear from OpenAI executives centering around the themes of we will all work 2 days a week and displaced workers can "Find New things to do" were uninspiring and not answering the questions at hand.

The two best questions posed to Altman were completely dodged in response, and ignoring "Risks and Regulations" while swerving around Data Ownership "Economic Models can be developed where everyone benefits" are nonsense, and unfortunately went unchallenged by the moderator despite bursts of unbelief from the audience. As an example, nearly every non-answer supplied by Altman was responded to by the moderator from the Economists with simply "oh that makes sense." No, it doesn't...

James Anderson at Kinnevik AB together with Arjun Raman at Lingotto Investment Management (the €3 Billion Innovation fund started earlier this year by John Elkann) lead a productive discussion on questioning the financial models of the future, and wondering if VC is suitable to funding Machine Learning.

Importantly the audience discussed how Europe may be able to compete in Deep Tech moving forward, and ensure that "we don't regulate ourselves out of the industry before we even begin."

BARBARA CAPUTO, AI Hub Director & Rector’s Advisor on Artificial Intelligence at Politecnico di Torino challenged AI Intellectual Property responsibilities today with an analogy that raised a standing applause: "Private Property is a Cornerstone of Our Societies. I would like to know, Why what is illegal for me is Legal for an Algorithm?"

This underscored the need for an AI Code of Conduct, and a clear message to politicians that "AI as a Brute Force" is not the way societies want to move forward.

The Hardest AI Questions Business Leaders face

KARTHIK NARAIN, Group Chief Executive – Technology Accenture came in to the discussion with some eye opening numbers and the question "What is the Risk of Not Doing Anything?"

Eye opening as Narain noted that in a survey of the largest Accenture clients, 9 out of 10 C-Suite executives said there was not enough regulation, and that the executives were urgently looking for some guidelines from Government policy makers. When was the last time you heard 90% of business executives clamouring for regulation while governments are puzzlingly continue to sleep?

Two key takeaways from Narain:

1: You need your Strategy exercise to be flexible.

2: Experimentation with Tech has to be approached as a Constant Learning exercise.

Great to hear another C-Suite executive cheering for ABL: Always Be Learning!

A question from the audience to Narain was quite eye opening: "Will the Day come a company can ask an AI to decide who the next CEO will BE?"

The answer from Narain: "I certainly hope not."

The Headline live discussion of John Elkann, Exor, Stellantis, Ferrari, and Lingotto Investments together with Brian Chesky, Founder of AirBnB generated an enormous amount of interest.

The big takeaway from Elkann and Chesky?

Technology Alone is Not Enough.

Both stressed the importance of emotions, the importance of building technology holistically (Chesky: Build Software the way the beautiful architecture of Italy was built.)

Chesky emphasized: "Consumers make Decisions Based on Emotions."

and raised the question to everyone:

"Does your Company have a Soul?"

Chesky also returned to identity and the organization: "If I died, they wouldn't say Brian died, people would say the guy from Airbnb died" and connected this to loneliness and emphasized "When you are busy you need to be very intentional with your time."

Elkann also explained how the "Identity of the founder is alive" at Ferrari and asked "How do you make sure the company goes beyond you... this is what carries us forward."

Both Elkann and Chesky underlined the "Strong Sense of Purpose, Building Companies with Great People, and ensuring you are Not Robotic and open up vulnerability."

"People want to work with leaders with hearts," they closed with, and as my colleague and friend John Martini would say "An AI Could Never Fall in Love."

Where are the emotions, purpose, and building forward with great people emphasized in your #Strategy for the #Future ?