Four For Friday | November 22, 2024
LF149 | Longevity Hubs book, Gen AI in the Enterprise, systems tools for philanthropists, AI for pet care + Linklater AI toolkit
Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week. Enjoy!
I published a book (chapter…)!
Joe Coughlin, head of MIT’s Age Lab, asked me back in 2022 to contribute a chapter of his next book - Longevity Hubs, and it’s just now hit the shelves.
It explores the idea that we need to innovate our regions as ecosystems, not just our tech, in order to adequately address the challenges and opportunities of our changing demographics.
It gives a world tour of longevity hubs, including those in Brazil, UK, USA, Israel and Japan (that one authored by fellow Substacker, Berkeley lecturer and innovation savant, Jon Metzler).
My chapter was slightly different - about a distributed, digital approach (i.e. Aging2.0).
If a region were to emerge as such a disproportionate hotspot, that area and its home nation might better weather some of the challenges posed by population aging, while at the same time providing a cash injection into the local economy thanks to aging markets domestic and foreign. Longevity Hubs explores strategies adopted by different areas' government and industry leaders to promote such activity; who different regions' target markets are; and how local, older adults may affect (and be affected by) innovation in their area.
This is my second book chapter - the first was profiles of Amazon and Google for the book Growth Champions. Both were a lot of work, and a lot of fun.
The So What: If this book can help shift the debate away from hero-tech to hero-places, it’ll have been worth the effort.
The State of Generative AI
Menlo Ventures’ new report on Generative AI in the enterprise showed that spending by corporates rose 6x this year to $14bn and 72% of decision makers expect greater roll out next year, though more than a third are unclear about how gen AI will be implemented in their organization.
Gen AI is being seen across multiple sectors, with vertical approaches rather than horizontal platforms taking off in healthcare, legal and finance in particular:
The primary justification in choosing to implement was “quantifiable ROI”:
Primary use cases were code co-pilots, support chat bots, enterprise search / retrieval and meeting summaries. The graph below also shows this is used across the departments, not just by IT:
The So What? 2024 was the year that gen AI went from experimental to mainstream among many corporates.
Tools for philanthropy
Reinassaince Philanthropy has published a set of playbooks that should be required reading for philanthropists looking to make a difference at scale. They offer a “pattern language for high-impact, counterfactual philanthropic giving”.
Topics include the ‘common task method’, prize competitions and market shaping - basically frameworks and toolkits that enable distributed actors to coordinate and drive mission-driven change at scale.
The So What? A useful set of frameworks that help givers think more systemically about their impact.
AI tools for petcare
AI has a bright future in pet care - an industry set to be worth $500 billion by 2030. Some examples of new tech for your furry friends:
ORo - in case you and your animal companion need a robot companion…
Smart collars (e.g. PetPace) monitor vital signs such as stress and sleep.
Smart litterboxes (e.g. Purina's Petivity) uses AI to monitor cats' bathroom habits.
Biometric scans of animals' noses (e.g. PetNow claims 99.9% accuracy)
The So What? A rich seam of overlap between pet longevity and human longevity, with similar issues around companionship & loneliness, personalisation and data (though fewer privacy concerns with pet data!)
Bonus - AI Report of the Week
UK law firm Linklaters’ toolkit for developing ‘ethical, safe and lawful’ AI. This is a good primer for organizations looking to deploy AI, and covers topics such as ownership vs. collaboration, data issues, safe and ethical use of AI, and liability. They have a handy checklist format:
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen