The Innovator's Radar newsletter enables you to stay on top of the latest business innovations. Enjoy this week's edition.
Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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While the hype around the consumer metaverse has receded, the convergence of digital twins and three rapidly evolving fields – spatial computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and Web3 and blockchain - is propelling the next phase of the industrial revolution, says a new World Economic Forum report.
“The industrial metaverse impacts the entire value chain, driving productivity and
growth, opening avenues for diverse revenue streams, solving real-world problems digitally, and driving greater efficiency,” says the “Navigating The Industrial Metaverse, A Blueprint For Innovations” report. It analyzes over 600 spatial experiences and Web3 initiatives executed by 100 of the largest companies across 10 industries, including industrial manufacturing, automotive, cities and urban infrastructure, energy, and healthcare.
While recent announcements from Sony and Siemens at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), discussions at the Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos and the launch of the Apple Vision Pro have revived interest in the consumer metaverse, real-life applications are still nascent, notes the report.
The industrial metaverse is more advanced. Take the example of digital twins, which are created by collecting and integrating various data sources from computer-aided design (CAD) data, sensors, simulations, and other sources to create real-time digital counterparts. These are the core building block of the industrial metaverse. In advanced industries, almost 75% of companies have already adopted digital-twin technologies that have achieved at least medium levels of complexity, says the Forum report, which was prepared in collaboration with Accenture.
And it is only the beginning. “The industrial metaverse will not just help us fix things when they break, it will be a place where engineers, workers, anybody, can experiment and test improvements,” Roland Busch, Chief Executive Officer of Siemens, is quoted as saying in the report. “AI bots will tour digital twins 24/7 on their own and come up with innovative ideas to make things better.”
Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business. |
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| This is the first of a planned series of exclusive columns that Kay-Firth Butterfield, one of the world’s foremost experts on AI governance and founder and CEO of Good Tech Advisory, is writing for The Innovator. Until recently she was Head of Artificial Intelligence and a member of the Executive Committee at the World Economic Forum. In February she won The Time100 Impact Award for her work on responsible AI governance. Firth-Butterfield is a barrister, former judge and professor, technologist and entrepreneur and vice-Chair of The IEEE Initiatve for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems. She was part of the group which met at Asilomar to create the Asilomar AI Ethical Principles, is a member of the Polaris Council for the Government Accountability Office (USA), and a member of the Advisory Board for UNESCO International Research Centre on AI, ADI and AI4All.
Read on to get her take on the benefits and risks of new technologies impacting retail.
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Who: Charlie Tan is Chief Executive Officer at the Global Impact Coalition (GIC), a spin-off from the World Economic Forum founded by some of the world’s largest petrochemical companies. It focuses on the development of Net-Zero business models and unlocking the technologies and finance that will enable them.
Topic: Why industry collaboration is key to achieving sustainability goals.
Quote: "The CEOs asked themselves ‘as we go on this journey towards Net Zero do we need to go it alone or can we go together? It turns out, we can, and must, go together. "
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| Copprint, a Jerusalem-based startup, says its patented low-cost conductive copper ink makes circuit board manufacturing greener, helping end users of its products, which include retailers who use tens of billions of RFID tags a year, as well as electronics manufacturers and solar panel makers, to become more sustainable. Strategic investors include Henkel, a German conglomerate, which specializes in adhesives, laundry and home care and beauty products., American IT company HP, and Tatsuta, a Japanese electric wire and cable company. Co-founders Dr. Michael Grouchko, a chemist who specializes in conductive nano-metal inks, and Dr Ofer Shochet, an expert in 3D printing with more than 30 years of experience as a high-tech start-up entrepreneur, say they have cracked a problem that has stumped academia and industry for more than a 100 years: making copper ink. Copper is more abundant and far cheaper than silver. The challenge is oxidation prevents copper ink conductivity. Copprint says the process it developed - called rapid low temp sintering - leads to no oxidation or corrosion, is highly conductive and low cost. What’s more “we are providing improved sustainability,” says Shochet. |
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| Percentage of 300 business leaders surveyed by MIT Technology Review Insights and Australia-based telecoms company Telstra who said they had scaled the use of Generative AI. While most leaders were optimistic about AI’s potential and expected to widen its usage, currently even the early adopters of this technology have deployed it for limited business areas. “There is a misconception about how easy it is to run mature, enterprise-ready, generative AI,” Stela Solar, Inaugural Director at Australia’s National Artificial Intelligence Centre said in the survey report. Scaling Generative AI requires companies to improve data quality and capability, privacy measures, AI skilling, and implement organization-wide safe and responsible AI governance. Other elements, like app design, connection to data and business processes and corporate policies, also need to be factored in.
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