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The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Since ChatGPTs launch in 2022, it feels like artificial intelligence is finally going mainstream. From Fortune 500 board rooms to dinner tables, everyone is talking about AI, its applications, and its promise. With more than $500 billion flowing into AI infrastructure investments, many investors predict the AI wave is just gaining momentum. Those investors are right, AI still has a long way to go before it is truly ubiquitous. But more importantly, we have to tread carefully when we talk about AI going mainstream. The reality is that while many reading this article are already using AI in our daily lives, there are billions of people around the world who are a long way away from feeling AIs impacts and opportunities. So how do we truly change the world with AI? The opportunity isnt just about reach, but about the underlying data and infrastructure that will be needed to make AI a truly global technology revolution. Lessons from mobile phone adoption We can learn a lot about the promises and pitfalls of technology revolutions by looking to the past. Today, 70.5% of the worlds population uses a cellphone. Yet, its taken nearly 50 years for cellphones to gain worldwide adoption since the first mobile phone call was made in 1973 by Martin Cooper, a Motorola executive, using a prototype mobile phone. While mobile phone technology has improved significantly, with phones getting smaller and smarter over the years, the real power of mobile phones took hold with the cellular networks evolution. The 2G cellular network introduction in 2000 catapulted mobile phone usage forward and made it possible for companies like Apple to imagine the first iPhone, launched in 2007. Without significant investment and expansion in global cellular networksthe foundational infrastructure required to bring cell phone technology to every corner of the worldits possible that cell phones would never have gained popularity or market share. Biases and blind spots So, what hurdle does AI need to overcome to truly become a global technology? While many investors are looking towards power and chipsthe critical GPUs that allow AI to performthey are missing a much more important foundation: data. Large language models (LLMs)the backbone of todays AIare only as good as the data they are trained on. Unfortunately, data often comes with built-in biases and blind spots. Consider for a moment that many of the most popular LLMs have been built by U.S. companies and are trained on large, publicly available datasets using online sources like literature, news, social media, and Wikipedia. While expansive, this data is inherently influenced by Western cultural norms, political ideologies, and historical viewpoints. This is a problem if the AI product is meant to be used globally. Its a simple truth: Online data tends to reflect wealthier, tech-savvy populations that represent a very small percentage of the world population. As a result, the LLMs powering the most exciting AI are only relevant and working for English-speaking users with regular internet access, but are failing to account for the experiences and realities of the global majority. The path forward One solution is stronger AI governanceimplementing policies and procedures that actively mitigate biases in AI models and the underlying data they depend on. This has become a growing focus for policymakers and industry leaders alike, aiming to make training data more inclusive and models more reflective of diverse perspectives. Auditing systems for algorithmic fairness is one way to address this. However, relying on a handful of AI companies to self-regulate has its limitations. Arriving at an industry standard consensus can be difficult, policy adoption can be slow, and enforcement is often inconsistent. We need a broader approach. Another way forward is for companies to take matters into their own hands by pairing the depth of their own proprietary datasets and domain expertise with the breadth and processing power of existing AI models. By making a commitment to their own data management, companies across industries and regions present a huge opportunity to help improve and expand available data sets. Leveraging new, alternative sources of customer data is core to my company Talas thesis on reaching true global scaleand has enabled Tala to efficiently implement AI in its financial infrastructure. A truly global revolution One thing is clear: AI is here to stay, and its pace of development will only accelerate. But if we do not address its biases and blind spots now, we risk leaving billions of people out of the equation. There is hope that the AI industryfrom incumbents to disruptorswill recognize the global opportunity to implement AI. Companies must take proactive steps by adopting forward-thinking AI governance, while also leveraging proprietary data to fill in the gaps of the first generation of LLMs. The opportunity starts with global data and infrastructure. We are early enough in the lifecycle of AI to make sure we are building products to revolutionize the entire world, not just parts of it. Shivani Siroya is founder and CEO of Tala.
Category:
E-Commerce
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. The economy is something of a rollercoaster and consumer behavior is shifting just as fast. From fluctuating costs to changing shopping habits, todays market represents a real opportunity to support transformation for brands. As trusted marketing partners, our role isnt to predict whats next but to help clients confidently navigate the complexity, adapt with agility, and stay closely attuned to what their customers need right now. The evolving climate requires media and marketing professionals to develop a deeper understanding of how macroeconomic forces directly impact their clients’ decision-making processes. For example, when tariffs increase for say, a tequila producer targeting the U.S. market, the ripple effects are immediate. Those costs must be accounted for, either through increased pricing, which affects consumer purchasing patterns, or adjusting allocations elsewhere, including ad and marketing budgets. It is imperative to maintain client-centricity. So how can we, as agency leaders, support clients during unpredictable economic times and show up as more strategic business partners? Stay informed Every business is dealing with unprecedented shifts in how people shop, plus inconsistency in the market and supply chain. Everything is moving faster, and agencies need to move with agility, forecasting marketing plans for clients in real time. Theres HUGE opportunity out there, but also high risks. Clients consistently tell us they value partners who adapt quickly to changing circumstances and who not only keep pace with the changing tides, but anticipate the shifts. Earlier this year, one of our retail clients faced potential sales losses when a major publication was ending print circulation in a key market. We responded with a proposal to shift advertising based on data insights that could potentially exceed the lost sales. The ability to respond to shifts in real time can provide a competitive edge in client service. Instead of resisting this uncertainty, embrace it. Stay informed and stay current in the newsready to adapt, innovate, and lead the conversation. While we cant control market fluctuations, we can control our response. Focus on human, not just machine While businesses race towards AI adoption and automation, its easy to get swept up in the speed and scale of technology. Its important to remember that while these tools offer insights and efficiency, they dont provide the creativity, intuition, and strategic thinking that only human connection and emotional intelligence can provide. At Havas, we show up with a mindful understanding of what our clients are going through on a day-to-day basis. The heart of our approach is a commitment to people-centricity. Professionals are seeking environments where they feel genuinely valued, where personal and professional growth are nurtured, and contributions recognized in meaningful ways. Creating a culture where employees feel heard, supported, and empowered is essential in this market. This same value extends to client partnerships; our strategy emphasizes human expertise and technological capabilities working in harmony. Technology and automation are a means to an end (not the end itself!). Clients want more diagnostic data tools and increased media data optimization so their reporting can be more accessible and actionable. However, these tools enhance but dont replace the creativity, intuition, and strategic thinking that forge meaningful connections. Our clients are real humans, looking at data points of real customers. This requires their agency partner to go beyond the numbers, partnering with real people at the helm to interpret customers needs with empathy and humility. As businesses face constant recalibration with every news alert, they need their partners to care about the things they care about. By gaining a deeper understanding of their unique challenges and daily nuances, we can offer better visualizations, data granularity, collaborative insights, and recommendations, ultimately turning numbers into stories, patterns into strategy, and clicks into brand affinity. Act in real time Speed is currency in today’s market. By staying informed and monitoring the market, youll be able to quickly recognize and respond to organic waves of market conversation. Success lies in agility. For one fashion client, this meant accelerating planning cycles from weeks to days to capitalize on a products viral moment, leading to increased budgets and stronger future campaigns. Because we spent the time building a trusted and collaborative partnership with this client, we understood their audiences, objectives, and goals. We established media and culture monitoring processes to better react in real time which allowed us to swiftly activate because of our shared understanding. Spot the trend and seize the momentum because in a world that moves fast, the brands that act in real time to consumers wants and needs gain consumer share. When wildfires hit Los Angeles earlier this year, the combination of global media attention, celebrity-driven social coverage, and AI-generated images of Hollywood in flames exacerbated the problem and led tourists to believe the cityand maybe even the statewas closed for business, sparking a wave of misinformation. For Visit California, a nonprofit 501(c) corporation with a mission to market the state as a premier travel destination, speed was essential to deliver a powerful message of hope, resilience, and community during the Oscars. We were able to produce a meaningful moment for our client in several weeks. Leveraging agency connections, the campaign coordinated a strategic integration with award season, providing an empowering message that California is open for business, rolling out the red carpet for visitors from around the world. Activating celebrity ambassadors, strategic media buys, and perfectly timed messaging helped negate misinformation and bolster the state’s tourism and the livelihoods of countless workers who depend on visitors. By staying informed about market conditions, not shying away from client pressures, demonstrating adaptability, and maintaining empathy, you can deliver better, stronger results for your clients. Tomorrows successful media agencies will embrace this and build meaningful partnerships that last longer than any economic turbulence. We only exist because our clients trust us. Understanding their business is our business and agile actions in times that are changing faster than ever before, is how we win together. Greg James is North America CEO of Havas Media Network.
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E-Commerce
Erin McGuire spent years cultivating fruits and vegetables like onions, peppers and tomatoes as a scientist and later director of a lab at the University of California-Davis. She collaborated with hundreds of people to breed drought-resistant varieties, develop new ways to cool fresh produce and find ways to make more money for small farmers at home and overseas. Then the funding stopped. Her lab, and by extension many of its overseas partners, were backed financially by the United States Agency for International Development, which Trump’s administration has been dismantling for the past several weeks. Just before it was time to collect data that had been two years in the making, her team received a stop work order. She had to lay off her whole team. Soon she was laid off, too. Its really just been devastating, she said. I dont know how you come back from this. The U.S. needs more publicly funded research and development on agriculture to offset the effects of climate change, according to a paper out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month. But instead the U.S. has been investing less. United States Department of Agriculture data shows that as of 2019, the U.S. spent about a third less on agricultural research than its peak in 2002, a difference of about $2 billion. The recent pauses and freezes to funding for research on climate change and international development are only adding to the drop. Its a serious issue for farmers who depend on new innovations to keep their businesses afloat, the next generation of scientists and eventually for consumers who buy food. If scientists have reliable backing, they can keep improving crop varieties to better withstand perilous weather conditions like droughts or floods, find new uses for existing crop species, figure out how to protect workers, develop new technology to aid in planting and harvesting or create more effective ways of fighting pests. They can also investigate agricultures potential role in fighting climate change. This is terrible news for the U.S. agricultural sector, said Cornell associate professor Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, the lead author of the paper. Trump administration hastens funding cuts As the Trump administration pauses and shutters research programs funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, USDA and other agencies, Ortiz-Bobea and other experts have seen field trials stopped, postdoctoral positions eliminated and a looming gap forming between the reality of climate change and the tools farmers have to deal with it. The EPA declined to comment, and the USDA and USAID did not respond to Associated Press queries. Ortiz-Bobea and his team quantified overall U.S. agricultural productivity, estimated how much it would be slowed by climate change in coming years and calculated how much money would need to be invested in research and development to counteract that slowdown. Think of it like riding a bike into a headwind, Ortiz-Bobea said. To maintain the same speed, you have to pedal harder; in this case, R&D can be that extra push. Some countries are heading that direction. China spends almost twice as much as the U.S. on agricultural research, and has increased its research investments by five times since 2000, wrote Omanjana Goswami, a scientist with the Food and Environment team at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in an email. Spending cutbacks have also shuttered agricultural research across almost all of the Feed the Future Innovation Labs, of which McGuire’s was one. Those 17 labs across 13 universities focused on food security, technical agriculture research, policy and various aspects of climate change. The stop-work orders at those labs not only disappointed researchers, but made useless much of their work. There are many, many millions of dollars of expenditure that will generate nothing now because the work couldnt be finished, said David Tschirley, a professor who had been directing another one of those programs, the Innovation Lab for Food Security Policy Research, Capacity and Influence at Michigan State University, since 2019. Finding new funding for agricultural research Some researchers hope that other sources of funding can fill the gaps: Thats where private sector could really step up, said Swati Hegde, a scientist in the Food, Land, and Water Program at the World Resources Institute. From an agricultural point of view, climate change is really scary, with larger and larger regions exposed to temperatures above healthy growing conditions for many crops, said Bill Anderson, CEO of Bayer, a multinational biotechnology and pharmaceutical company that invested nearly $3 billion in agricultural research and development last year. But private companies have their own constraints on R&D investment, and he said Bayer can’t invest as much as it would like in that area. I dont think that private industry can replicate” how federal funding typically supports early stage, speculative science, he said, because the economics don’t really work. He added that industry tends to be better suited to back ideas that have already been validated. Goswami, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, also expressed concerns that private research funding isn’t as trackable and transparent as public funding. And others said even sizeable investments from companies don’t give anywhere near enough money to match government funding. Researchers, farmers and consumers feel the fallout The full impact may not be apparent for many years, and the damage won’t easily be repaired. Experts think it will be a blow in other countries where climate change is already decimating yields, driving hunger and conflict. I really worry that if we dont really look at the global food situation, we will have a disaster, said David Zilberman, a professor at UC Berkeley who won a Wolf Prize in 2019 for his work on agriculture. But even domestically, experts say one thing is almost certain: this will mean even higher prices at the grocery store now and in the future. More people on the Earth, you need more productivity to prevent food prices going crazy, said Tom Hertel, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. Even if nothing changes right away, he thinks 10 years from now, 20 years from now, our yield growth will surely be stunted by cuts to research on agricultural productivity. Many scientists said the wound isnt just professional but personal. People are very demoralized, especially younger researchers who dont have tenure and want to work on international food research, said Zilberman. Now those dreams are on hold for many. In carefully tended research plots, weeds begin to grow. Melina Walling, Associated Press The Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find APs standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Category:
E-Commerce
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