The European Business Review

Q Thank you for meeting with us today, Mr Lefebvre! It's a great honour to speak with you. ChangeNOW has grown rapidly over the past few years and has become a platform for showcasing innovative solutions for sustainability challenges. Can you tell us a little of the story of its foundation and your original vision for the company? A I always wanted to be an entrepreneur who would have a positive impact. But the fact was that I did not know where to start, how to meet my peers or investors. There was no clear place in the world where the people who wanted to develop solutions for a better world meet and find support. I wanted to change that, because in 2015 I was convinced that it was time to do…

For years we have known that working is an essential component of one's life. After all the years you've spent preparing for work, can you imagine life without it? Given the powerful set of disruptive forces occurring in the world today, what will work look like in the future? What will it mean? What will transform? What will stay the same? How will our working and nonworking time and activities be related—both in the fabric of our individual lives and of society? The answers to these questions are provided in our forthcoming book on the Future of Work (hereafter FOW). The book uses data, science, creative speculation, imagination, core values, and reflective processes to guide the learner to discover the FOW. We use this approach to provoke people to open up…

Generative AI is increasingly prominent in the consumerisation of artificial intelligence. Currently popularized by services such as ChatGPT1, Stable Diffusion2, DALL-E3, and others, generative AI are computer services that can use existing content like text, audio files, or images to create new plausible content. These text-to-text and text-toimage AI services are improving at a very fast rate, while newly emerging ones from Make-aVideo4can generate videos from a text prompt and Phenaki5 can generate video from a still image and a prompt. Even more exciting, Nvidia's Magix3D6 can be used to create 3D models from text descriptions. Underlying the promise and excitement of the business applications of generative AI is its generativity. Paraphrasing one of the more popular definitions7, generativity is a technology's capacity to enable innovation by large, varied, and uncoordinated…

ChatGPT has revolutionised the field of conversational artificial intelligence (AI). Beyond its ability to generate effective human-like responses, the breakthrough has been to integrate big data (large language) models with deep reinforcement learning techniques enhanced by human feedback (RLHF).1 That is, reinforcement learning is an AI technique whereby the agents in the model learn from their actions through rewards and penalties in function of good/bad actions—but in the case of Open AI's Chat GPT and also other high profile AI applications like DeepMind's Sparrow),2 rewards are specifically provided by a set of human interventions, allowing machines to grasp elements of decision-making distinctly embedded in human experience. This part of feedback, even if proven to be effective, may however be subject to biases if human interventions tend to cater to certain preferences.…

Robots are better at everything. Apparently, as they are taking jobs away. Hence, they are better drivers, they register our groceries in the supermarket, and they collect and analyse our data (Thomas, 2020). Radiologists are made redundant, so are document review lawyers, as well as cashiers. Soon we will be left with employees with zero economic value (Autor, 2015). Watson will educate our children, while Google will drive us around, and we will soon be redundant as robots will live our lives for us (Colvin, 2014). These statements probably sound familiar. Before analysing the need and work of robots and their take-over, we should differentiate between automation and augmentation and define each term. Based on Merriam-Webster, automation is the “automatically controlled operation of an apparatus, process, or system by mechanical or…

Worried about a crisis? You might think it's coming if you add in the Ukrainian war, inflation, a remnant COVID-19 pandemic, and burgeoning private debt. But in reality, there is also a bright picture to contrast with this bleak outlook in that the war may soon be over, China has reopened its economy, and inflation is levelling off slightly in some parts of the world. Rather than spending too much time guessing at the next crisis, its size, nature, and timing, business leaders should instead teach their organisations to become resilient. In analysing the numbers from numerous crises, including research conducted in cooperation with Accenture Research at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have discovered three important elements for leaders to take notice of. The first is that resilience, or the…