Newsletter
🟢 9 Strategic insights for 2025 - 8. The battle for the rails
Europe spent ten to fifteen years dreaming of startups while the next battle for tech supremacy was already waged elsewhere, on the new "rails" and critical infrastructure.
AI
Unlike crypto and the latest fads, artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be the most significant technology breakthrough since the Web. How do we know? Because it's already affecting you or your customers, and if you're not already preparing, your competitors certainly are. Here's what we think you should understand about it as it unfolds...
Weak Signals
Will AI win the Nobel for the U.S. from now on?
Back in September 2022, I was reporting on digital and AI: (...) this Friday, I'd suggest we get some fresh air and a dose of solid optimism about what digital can achieve. How? Remembering that artificial intelligence cracked one of the most complex problems of modern biology this year:
AI
State of AI with Google Notebook: will we escape the big enshittification?
I am not very much sharing all the AI tools I've been testing these last months, nor the ones I currently use. That being said, I found the latest Google tool, Notebook, quite illustrative of the current state of AI. Notebook is designed as a sort of mood
AI
Google doesn't know what's the point of its consumer AI tools
Imagine you're one of the most advanced companies worldwide on AI technology and, at the same time, one of the largest, richest businesses on the planet with near infinite money for marketing and running ad campaigns. What would you pick as the perfect consumer use case for your
AI
A clear memo for the EU: the US economic cold war is not only with China
A recent statement from Meta to Axios adds up to previous statements from companies like Apple regarding Europe: Meta plans to incorporate expansively the new version of its AI tools, which can reason across video, audio, images, and text (multimodal models), in a wide range of products, including smartphones and
AI
Apple Intelligence won't 'just work' because of better AI
I've probably had a growingly negative opinion about Apple these last years, but I'd be ready to bet that Apple Intelligence (Apple's rebranding of AI) will underwhelm. My core experience is that companies don't solve strategic positioning and a lack of innovation
AI
A fair point about implementing AI in your organization...
Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you're out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T. department runs, which you
AI
McDonald’s hits the brakes on AI Drive-Thru Orders
Since 2021, and in close partnership with Microsoft, McDonald’s has been testing AI chatbots for drive-thru orders in about 100 locations. They just decided to pause this large-scale test. Why? Well, despite trail-blazing advancements with this technology, the small percentage of errors in AI systems has outsized consequences when
AI
Apple and AI, what's going on?
Two days ago, Apple announced that it would integrate artificial intelligence deep into its mobile OS. They call it Apple Intelligence because, well, Apple has to be Apple. The headline is that Siri will get some IQ points back and will eventually act like what we expect from a standard
Hot Takes
AI killing the web might be the best opportunity of the last decades for branding
Last July, I was writing about the death of the web. I wasn't alone and it wasn't the first time someone would dare type these oh-so provocative words. The web is dead. Long live the internetThe web -- not to mention social-media apps -- has been
Newsletter
🟢 9 Strategic insights for 2025 - 3. It's all about geopolitics, dummy!
We pursue our exploration of the short-term shifts that will most certainly impact your innovation strategy within the next few years. This week we discuss geopolitics.
AI
🟢 9 Strategic insights for 2025 - 2. Robots might come in sooner than expected
The core insight We are all caught in the current AI hype, and justifiably so. ChatGPT and others already give us a taste of a future when any type of data, as complex and numerous as possible, will be transformed into a simple conversation with an artificial mind giving us