Competing in the AI economy: An interview with MIT’s Andrew McAfee

Date: 04-04-2018
Source: www.mckinsey.com

Competing in the AI economy: An interview with MIT’s Andrew McAfee
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AI has arrived, but are companies ready for it? According to an MIT scientist, executives are underestimating the speed, scope, and scale of the disruption it will bring.

It’s not just some far-off dream anymore. The promises and practical applications of artificial intelligence (AI) are here. In this interview with Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and cofounder of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, he explains how AI, and machine learning in particular, is quickly disrupting companies’ economic models, strategy, culture, and even the very nature of how they are structured and run. But there are opportunities for companies that can answer the call—and meet the needs and wants of consumers. An edited transcript of McAfee’s remarks follows.

Today’s digital disruption: Overstated or underappreciated?
There are billions of people walking around with a supercomputer, by the standards of a generation ago, in their pocket. Those devices are connected to each other and to this thing that we call the Internet. And then, just within the past five or six years at most, all the promises made by the artificial-intelligence community have started to be delivered on.

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Why Didital Strategies Fail

Why-digital-strategies-fail

 

What AI can and can’t do (yet) for your business

By Michael Chui, James Manyika, and Mehdi Miremadi, McKinsey Analytics

Artificial intelligence is a moving target. Here’s how to take better aim.

Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be everywhere. We experience it at home and on our phones. Before we know it—if entrepreneurs and business innovators are to be believed—AI will be in just about every product and service we buy and use. In addition, its application to business problem solving is growing in leaps and bounds. And at the same time, concerns about AI’s implications are rising: we worry about the impact of AI-enabled automation on the workplace, employment, and society.

A reality sometimes lost amid both the fears and the headline triumphs, such as Alexa, Siri, and AlphaGo, is that the AI technologies themselves—namely, machine learning and its subset, deep learning—have plenty of limitations that will still require considerable effort to overcome. This is an article about those limitations, aimed at helping executives better understand what may be holding back their AI efforts. Along the way, we will also highlight promising advances that are poised to address some of the limitations and create a new wave of opportunities.

The whole report: What-AI-can-and-cant-do-yet-for-your-business(1)

Pakistan is home to the most frenetic education reforms in the world

Date: 08-01-2018
Source: The Economist

Reformers are trying to make up for generations of neglect

EVERY three months, Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab, gathers education officials around a large rectangular table. The biggest of Pakistan’s four provinces, larger in terms of population (110m) than all but 11 countries, Punjab is reforming its schools at a pace rarely seen anywhere in the world. In April 2016, as part of its latest scheme, private providers took over the running of 1,000 of the government’s primary schools. Today the number is 4,300. By the end of this year, Mr Sharif has decreed, it will be 10,000. The quarterly “stocktakes” are his chance to hear what progress is being made towards this and other targets—and whether the radical overhaul is having any effect.

For officials it can be a tough ride. Leaders of struggling districts are called to Lahore for what Allah Bakhsh Malik, Punjab’s education secretary, calls a “pep talk”. Asked what that entails, he responds: “Four words: F-I-R-E. It is survival of the fittest.” About 30% of district heads have been sacked for poor results in the past nine months, says Mr Malik. “We are working at Punjabi speed.”

The new engine of change: CEOs

McKinsey Quarterly, Dec. 2017

Perhaps the most unique aspect of this technology trend is that digital transformation is being driven from the top, personally mandated by the CEO. This is something new.

In the past 70 years of computing, the world advanced from the vacuum tube to the transistor to the semiconductor, from mainframe computing to minicomputing to personal computing to the Internet. Software evolved from bespoke custom programming to on-premises, packaged enterprise application software and then to software as a service (SaaS)—cloud-resident solutions. Among the fruits: increased productivity and profitability, a lower cost of operation, and economic growth.

I witnessed many of these tech-adoption cycles over the past 30 years. With the promise of performance improvements and productivity increases, such innovations were introduced to industry through the IT organization. Over months or years, and after multiple trials and evaluations, each gained the attention of the chief information officer, who was responsible for technology adoption. The CEO was periodically briefed on the cost and result.

Where is technology taking the economy?

This is a „must read“ for everybody who wants to understand the impact of technology on the economy and society. Very thoughtful! (hfk)

Date: 05-10-2017
Source: www.mckinsey.com By W. Brian Arthur

W. Brian Arthur is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a visiting researcher at the System Sciences Lab at PARC (a Xerox company).

We are creating an intelligence that is external to humans and housed in the virtual economy. This is bringing us into a new economic era—a distributive one—where different rules apply.

A year ago in Oslo Airport I checked in to an SAS flight. One airline kiosk issued a boarding pass, another punched out a luggage tag, then a computer screen showed me how to attach it and another where I should set the luggage on a conveyor. I encountered no single human being. The incident wasn’t important but it left me feeling oddly that I was out of human care, that something in our world had shifted.

Studie: Computer übernehmen bis zu 30 Prozent der Banker-Arbeit

Experten sind sich aber nicht einig, wie sich die Technologisierung im Bankenbereich auf die Mitarbeiterzahlenauswirken werde.

 25.07.2017 um 10:04, diepresse.com

Neue Technologien dürften bei den Investmentbanken Einzug halten und vielen der traditionellen Angestellten rund ein Drittel ihrer derzeitigen Arbeit abnehmen. Das geht aus einer Studie von McKinsey & Co. hervor. Der Wandel, der an der Wall Street bereits zu Sorgen über einen Verlust von Stellen führt, wird demnach möglicherweise nur ein paar Jahre benötigen.

Kognitive Technologien – also Programme oder Maschinen, die Aufgaben ausüben, bei denen einst das menschliche Gehirn unerlässlich war – sind inzwischen billig genug, damit Banken sie breit in Bereichen wie etwa dem Handel einsetzen können. Automatisierte Prozesse werden laut McKinsey „Kapazitäten freisetzen“ und es Mitarbeitern ermöglichen, sich auf Aufgaben mit höherem Wert zu konzentrieren. Dadurch würden unter anderem neue Ideen entstehen. 

Find Out If a Robot Will Take Your Job

Date: 20-04-2017
Source: TIME

At a community college in upstate New York, 12 cafeteria workers recently learned that they will lose their jobs — and be replaced by self-serve machines. It’s an issue that has played out in communities across the country, as robots get better and better at doing jobs — from taking fast food orders to mining coal — that once belonged to humans.

Is your job next? The answer to that question is complicated, according to a report by management consultant McKinsey, but most workers don’t need to worry. Experts found that less than 5% of jobs can be completely replaced by technology, though nearly every job involves tasks that robots could learn to do.
Enter your occupation below to see how much of your work may someday be done by machines.

Jobs with predictable activities in structured environments are the easiest to replicate with robots, a process known as automation. McKinsey estimates that 51% of all job-related activities in the U.S. economy fit this description, largely in manufacturing, food service and retail trade sectors.

Technology Will Help—And Hurt—Bank Results, Studies Say

Date: 19-01-2017
Source: The Wall Street Journal

Fees, consumer banking and lending could drop by more than 10% in the U.S. by 2020, but new tech is also a way to avoid future profit collapses

One new study argues that up to $45 billion of bank profits could be wiped out by 2020 thanks to encroaching automation.

Some banks may be turning big profits this quarter. But they will have to spend a lot of money in a gamble to stay profitable as technology encroaches, according to new set of studies.

McKinsey & Co., in a report this week, argues that up to $45 billion of bank profits could be wiped out by 2020 thanks to encroaching automation, ranging from electronic trading to mobile banking.

Wie McKinsey an der Flüchtlingskrise verdient

28.10.2016 | 18:03 |  (DiePresse.com)

Das Beratungsunternehmen hat einem Medienbericht zufolge mehr als 20 Millionen Euro vom deutschen Staat kassiert.

Für seine Beratungsleistung in der Flüchtlingskrise hat das Unternehmen McKinsey laut einem „Spiegel“-Bericht mehr als 20 Millionen Euro von Deutschland erhalten.

• Seit Herbst 2015 kassierte das Beratungsunternehmen 15,5 Millionen Euro für Aufträge des Bundesamts für Migration und Flüchtlinge (Bamf), wie der „Spiegel“ am Freitag unter Berufung auf die Behörde berichtete.
• Hinzu kommen nach Angaben der Bundesagentur für Arbeit (BA) 4,96 Millionen Euro für die Unterstützung eines gemeinsamen Arbeitsstabs von Bamf und BA.