Business Lab

If you drive in the United States, chances are you can’t remember the last time you bought a paper map, printed out a digital map, or even stopped to ask for directions. Thanks to GPS and the mobile mapping apps on our smartphones and their real-time routing advice, navigation is a solved problem. But in developing or fast-growing parts of the world: not so much. If you live in a place like Doha,...

For the past several years, economists and government leaders have regularly sounded alarms about the dangers of big tech monopolies. On her 2020 campaign website, for example, Senator Elizabeth Warren said “ big tech companies have too much power, too much power over our economy, our society, our democracy." In the months since the election, politicians on both the left and right have expressed c...

Executives need to clearly communicate risks but also bring context to data. Tech talk is out: speaking the same language will win the day. It’s drilled into the heads of board directors and the C-suite by scary data-breach headlines, lawyers, lawsuits, and risk managers: cybersecurity is high-risk. It’s got to be on the list of a company’s top priorities. But how many directors get lost in the te...

During the past few months, Microsoft Exchange servers have been like chum in a shark-feeding frenzy . Threat actors have attacked critical zero-day flaws in the email software: an unrelenting cyber campaign that the US government has described as “ widespread domestic and international exploitation ” that could affect hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Gaining visibility into an issue lik...

In a recent survey, “2021 Thriving in an AI World,” KPMG found that across every industry—manufacturing to technology to retail—the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing year over year. Part of the reason is digital transformation is moving faster, which helps companies start to move exponentially faster. But, as Cliff Justice, US leader for enterprise innovation at KPMG posits, “...

There’s nothing new about conspiracy theories, disinformation, and untruths in politics. What is new is how quickly malicious actors can spread disinformation when the world is tightly connected across social networks and internet news sites. We can give up on the problem and rely on the platforms themselves to fact-check stories or posts and screen out disinformation—or we can build new tools to...

The digital revolution is here, but not everyone is benefiting equitably from it. And as Silicon Valley’s ethos of “move fast and break things” spreads around the world, now is the time to pause and consider who is being left out and how we can better distribute the benefits of our new data economy. “Data is the main resource of a new digital economy,” says IT for Change director Parminder Singh....

Tim O’Reilly, the “Oracle of Silicon Valley,” wants to shift the conversation about data value to focus on the harm that tech giants are inflicting against us with our own data. It’s “time to wake up and do a better job,” says publisher Tim O’Reilly—from getting serious about climate change to building a better data economy. And the way a better data economy is built is through data commons—or dat...

A solar-powered autonomous drone scans for forest fires. A surgeon first operates on a digital heart before she picks up a scalpel. A global community bands together to print personal protection equipment to fight a pandemic. “The future is now,” says Frederic Vacher, head of innovation at Dassault Systèmes. And all of this is possible with cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and a virt...

Some people might not associate the word “trust” with artificial intelligence (AI). Stefan Jockusch is not one of them. Vice president of strategy at Siemens Digital Industries Software, Jockusch says trusting an algorithm powering an AI application is a matter of statistics. This podcast episode was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not produced by MIT...

2020 has created more than a brave new world. It’s a world of opportunity rapidly pressuring organizations of all sizes to rapidly adopt technology to not just survive, but to thrive. And Andrew Dugan, chief technology officer at Lumen Technologies, sees proof in the company’s own customer base, where “those organizations fared the best throughout covid were the ones that were prepared with their...

Ask Stefan Jockusch about what a factory might look like in 10 or 20 years, and the answer might leave you at a crossroads between fascination and bewilderment. Jockusch is vice president for strategy at Siemens Digital Industries Software, which develops applications that simulates the conception, design, and manufacture of products such as a cell phone or a smart watch. His vision of a smart fac...

[Sponsored] AI advancements today are pointing to improvements everywhere you look. But it’s a confluence of technologies—cloud, 5G wireless, smart devices, and more—that will usher in the greatest results, predicts Dell Technologies’ John Roese. If you need a reason to feel good about the direction technology is going, look up Dell’s CTO John Roese on Twitter. The handle he composed back in 2006...

[Sponsored] The coronavirus pandemic has led to enhanced collaboration, spurred innovation, and increased the use of digital technologies. Telehealth enables doctors to safely connect with patients virtually and to monitor them remotely, whether in different cities or just down the hall. And smarter and smaller medical devices are producing better outcomes for patients—a disruption is sensed, like...

[Sponsored] As technology rapidly develops, the number of security and privacy concerns will only continue to grow. In this episode, we look at how companies can build cybersecurity into their business strategies—instead of scrambling to respond when a breach happens. Even with danger lurking around the corner, today’s guest, cybersecurity expert Ann Cavoukian, argues that companies are turning a...

[Sponsored] In this episode, we look at the need to secure the internet of things, physical workspaces, and the products companies make. From planes to children’s toys to oil rigs, more connected devices are vulnerable to attack than ever before. Ken Munro is an internet-of things security researcher, penetration tester, and writer with two decades of experience in the security industry. He is als...

[Sponsored] As the new year (and new decade) begins, one thing is certain: cybersecurity will continue to have an increasing impact on business, for better or worse. In this episode, we hear from Stephanie Balaouras, a cybersecurity expert who has spoken to thousands of customers over her 15 years at Forrester Research. She is the vice president and group director of security and risk research, as...

[Sponsored] From 1999 to 2012, Marissa Mayer was one of the most public faces at Google, where she helped to build the company’s core search and advertising platforms. From 2012 to 2017 she steered Yahoo! through its final years as an independent business. In other words, she’s spent a long time at the center of the Silicon Valley whirlwind.  In this special episode, Business Lab host Elizabeth Br...

[Sponsored] The development of cyber security is interwoven with the evolution of the hacker community. Keren Elazari, cyber security analyst and senior researcher at the Tel Aviv University Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center, educated the world in her 2014 TED talk on the importance of cultivating friendly hackers for the protection of the internet. Today, she researches the most pressing cy...

[Sponsored] In this episode: How the development of cybersecurity arose and how that history created a world rife with invasions. Chris Wysopal, CTO and cofounder of Veracode, sat in the first row for the advent of cyber defense. In fact, as the Vulnerability Researcher at the seminal hacker think tank the L0pht, he has worked for decades to demand more secure technology from influential tech comp...

[Sponsored] The rise in ransomware incidents; hacking attacks and data breaches have become a scary reality for organizations and individuals worldwide. Increasingly, the issue of cyber security and what organizations need to do to better protect their people and their systems now sit at the top of the priority list for business leaders. In this episode, Martin Giles, the San Francisco Bureau Chie...

[Sponsored] In this episode: Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates talks with Gideon Lichfield, MIT Technology Review’s Editor-in-Chief, about the magazine’s new list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies, which Gates curated. The magazine has been publishing its list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies (formerly 10 Emerging Technologies) annually since 2001 as a way to highlight the recent advance...

[Sponsored] In this episode: Emotion-tracking AI is starting to help machines recognize our moods. Are we ready? Personal assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or Google Home can parse our spoken words and (sometimes) respond appropriately, but they can’t gauge how we’re feeling—in part because they can’t see our faces. But in the emerging field of “emotion-tracking AI,” companies are studying the...

[Sponsored] In this episode: Why there will never be another “AI winter,” and what IBM and MIT are doing together to ensure that. More times than almost any other field of innovation, artificial intelligence has weathered recurring cycles of overinflated hope, followed by disappointment, pessimism, and funding cutbacks. But Sophie Vandebroek, IBM’s vice president of emerging technology partnership...

[Sponsored] In this episode: Why researchers at the year’s biggest AI conference focused on how to keep human bias out of computer algorithms. Both the progress and the hype around cutting-edge machine learning techniques were on vivid display at the December 2018 NeurIPS Conference in Montreal, Quebec, says Will Knight, MIT Technology Review’s senior editor for artificial intelligence. One big qu...