Four For Friday | Oct 18 2024
LF144 | Longevity employee benefits, corporate collective intelligence, Insuring nature-based assets, Accenture's Life Trends Report + Building AI apps in an hour
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!
[Note: Am at HLTH in Las Vegas this week - ping me if you’re there!]
Updating employee benefits for the age of longevity
A new awareness-raising, mission-driven collaborative (plus marketing tool) has been launched by new longevity startup Superpower - it’s called Founder Health.
It explicitly calls out what has seemed like a fact of life - startup founders who are looking to change the world often pay for it with their health due to excessive hours and stress, and the lack of any sense of balance. This is just as true, though more ironic, in the health tech sectors; those working to improve health for others generally have the least healthy lifestyles.
The lessons of Founder Health apply equally to corporates as well as startups, though probably less acute, as generally, corporates have stopped struggling to find a business model and should be less existentially fragile. However, smart employee benefits teams will be taking note (Editor: hopefully Japan Inc. notices this too).
The So What? Expect to see corporate benefits programs increasingly personalized and providing longevity features as the battle for talent continues
Building corporate collective intelligence
HBR article on ways that corporates can use AI to help build up their collective intelligence. It notes that often while people say they do augmentation, much of it involves automating lower level tasks, which can end up hollowing out the talent pool. It suggests a three phase model of:
Collective Memory: AI can enhance organizational learning by improving access to collective knowledge, supporting specialized skill development, and updating "who knows what" information. This can counter the potential drawbacks of automating entry-level jobs.
Collective Attention: AI can optimize group focus by streamlining communication, coordinating schedules, and enhancing awareness of team members' workloads. This improves resource allocation and reduces coordination costs, freeing up attention for creative tasks.
Collective Reasoning: AI can improve goal alignment by integrating diverse information, bridging communication gaps, and facilitating shared understanding of priorities. It enhances collective decision-making and helps groups develop shared values and goals.
The So What? Building such a collective brain is hard; needs new culture, risk tolerance, hard-to-find AI talent and cash.
Insurers role in nature based assets
Australian mission-driven innovator Pollination has released a report together with insurance broker Howden that discussed how insurance solutions can drive nature finance. It suggests four key ways:
Risk transfer to mobilise capital. It suggests adapting crop insurance solutions for transition finance for regenerative agriculture and scaling the use of nature-based debt instruments.
Protecting natural assets. It suggests using ‘parametric’ (i.e. algorithmic) products and new ‘resilience’ insurance.
Enabling trading in environmental markets. It suggests expanding insurance for carbon and other environmental markets.
Governance. It suggests investigating where traditional insurance incentivises nature and biodiversity loss.
The key here is a win-win - enabling substantial new investments in ecosystems to foster healthier environments. It especially calls out the elderly who are disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
The So What? Good perspective on tangible ways to address market failure, and could improve lives of people and planet.
Accenture’s Life Trends 2025
Weighty new report on consumer trends, that bring up the impact of new technologies on shifting behaviors. In particular it calls out the collective reluctance to trust in online properties as disinformation and fakery runs riot, as well as new stresses for parents attempting to manage their childrens’ media diet in a sea of social media sludge.
The So What? The chickens are coming home to roost for tech companies. They’ve been allowed a free rein and now people are pulling back,
Bonus - AI Tool of the Week
Fascinating video about how to use new no-code AI tools to build an app from scratch in an hour.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen