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Business leaders, policy makers and social organizations gathered in New York City this week to discuss, among other things, how corporates, startups, and new technology can move the needle on sustainable development.

Convening at the same time as the United Nations General Assembly, some 950 business leaders, policy makers and social organizations gathered in New York City for the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact Meetings to discuss everything from climate change and the energy transition to food security and the future of transportation.

The Impact Meetings were designed “to get stakeholders to work on concrete proposals and initiatives and move a bit more towards action,” Sarita Nayyar, Chief Operating Officer of the Forum’s U.S. operations and a member of the Forum’s management board, said in an interview with The Innovator. “

As part of its efforts the Forum is “really trying to create market demand for technology solutions to drive hard-to-abate sectors,” she says. Some 50 global innovators in the Forum’s UpLink program were invited to the meeting. The Forum aims to match these innovators with global companies to scale solutions tackling U.N. Sustainable Development Goals such as water shortages, climate change and cleaning up the oceans.

Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most relevant technology news impacting business.

A half a billion euros. That’s the amount of run-rate value creation that Societe Generale aims to generate from data and AI by 2025, Julien Molez, the Group Innovation Data & AI Leader, told a gathering of executives at the AI For Finance 2022 conference.

The potential for value creation for banks is one of the largest across industries, as AI can potentially unlock $1 trillion of incremental value annually, according to a McKinsey report.
The value is clear and the pressure to succeed is strong but getting there is difficult. Banks and large corporates in other sectors are all struggling to diffuse and scale artificial intelligence and reap the full benefits of the technology. Societe Generale’s journey gives some key insights into how traditional companies can begin to build effective AI strategies.

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Canvass AI, a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Innovators community, uses AI and low code/no code technology to help industrial engineers to build and scale AI across their operations to optimize processes, reduce waste, and cut their company’s CO2 emissions. Funded by Yamaha Motor Ventures and Alphabet’s Gradient Ventures, Canvass’s customers include corporates in the automotive, chemicals, energy, food and beverage, and metals and mining sectors globally.

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Size of the funding shortfall for the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals, which include tackling poverty, inequality, injustice and climate change, according to a landmark report by the Force for Good Initiative, collaborating with the United Nations and the finance industry, shared with Reuters. The goals are likely to be missed unless 10% of global economic output is directed to the U.N. targets every year to 2030, according to the report.

The U.N.'s SDGs set targets on everything from the environment to health and equality and have the support of all member states, yet the supply of finance from governments, investors, banks and companies to help meet them has consistently fallen short.

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