The Camden company making waves in Uzbekistan
Automation, Easter eggs and conglomerate stuff.
Hello,
If you weren’t at the Global Government Forum’s Innovation conference this week then quite frankly, where were you? It made Davos look like a sort of twee literary festival. Who’d want to be up a Swiss mountain when you can be striding around London’s room of requirement, ExCel? One minute it’s a triathlon track, the next it’s a field hospital.
I like conferences, I think if an alien studied humanity at alien university, they could write a good thesis on them. It’s the weird combination of being completely formulaic but niche at the same time. Everyone is basically doing the same thing at every conference but the topic could be anything from oil exploration software to the future of Beanie Babies.
Anyway, this one was about the future of government and what it needs to do to pull its socks up. My main takeaways were:
The departmental model is a big problem - aside from the normal challenges of massive hierarchical organisations, having competing P&Ls and interests makes it very hard to do anything collaboratively. On top of that, each central function within a department essentially has a monopoly on delivering finance, HR, procurement, and IT. If the government wants to achieve its missions and capitalise on technology, the right incentives need to be put in place and the leadership need to draw on all corners of the public and private sectors. Not just the organisations for which they are accountable.
AI is being adopted faster than you think - I must admit I was expecting the approach to AI to still be pretty contemplative, but clear use cases are being addressed in several different departments. The size of the opportunity is enormous, so it stands to reason that if even 25% of this is achieved in the medium term, the impact on public service and the cost of running government will be huge.
AI is not the solution to everything - it feels like we are at a tipping point where the cost of automation is going to plummet, so lots of digital processes can be optimised relatively cheaply. This will be seen as low-hanging fruit, and hella investment will be pumped into it. The challenge is that many of the ways the public sector interfaces with citizens are very physical. Roads, schools, prisons, and hospitals all require real people and real stuff to make them better. They all need to be invested in.
Two days of trying to square the pace of technological change with 19th-century organisations left me needing to lie down for a bit. I had a pizza and thought about conferences instead.
Confer soon,
Hugo
Chief Conference Inspector
The Business of Stuff
The Stuff
Sky is the latest company to embrace the rise of the machines 🤖 - the media company is planning to close three call centres as people generally prefer using chat functionality until they get really cross and frustrated. This could result in a 7% decrease in Sky’s workforce and is part of a much wider trend in customer support.
The price of Easter eggs has risen by 50% 🪺 - inflation has hit choccy harder than most foodstuffs, at least in part thanks to unusually warm weather, which has driven down global production of cocoa. Confectionery companies have tackled this either by raising their prices or making their eggs smaller. If you are being eggstra careful to save at the moment, you could nip out to the shop on Easter morning.
Japan is the second-largest recorded music market in the world 🇯🇵 - despite this, it is only 24% of the US market. Japan is looking to capitalise on the global success of K-pop (which they claim is based on 80s Japanese pop), with their own brand of ‘J-pop’. Organisations like The Japan Culture and Entertainment Industry Promotion Association (catchy) and Toyata have been arranging showcases in the US in a bid to grow audiences.
A design firm from Camden is doing sterling work in Central Asia ✏️ - Cross Works won a bid to design a massive new section of Tashkent, hurrah for global procurement. Ground has been broken on the project and the Department for Busienss and Trade is helping Cross Works to set up meeting with some other -stans.
CK Hutchinson is planning to spin off its telecoms businesses 📞 - the Hong Kong conglomerate is considering listing it in London and is expected to be valued at between £13-19bn. The group will only be able to make any significant progress on this once the Vodafone-Three merger has gone through (they own Three), which is expected to happen in April. Alongside this, they’re selling off some assets near the Panama Canal to Blackrock, which the Chinese government aren’t too happy about.
BBC decides against plan to have adverts on podcasts 💰 - BBC Studios has been looking at different ways to raise additional revenue, one of which was advertising on platforms like Spotify. There has been a fair bit of backlash from its competitors who feel like the Beeb has an unfair advantage, given the licence fee, claiming it would be ‘disastrous’ for the podcasting industry.
Blackstone has got itself a stake in some UK airports ✈️ - they love owning bits of this and bits of that, these private equity companies and most recently have got their paws on a minority stake in AGS Airports, which owns Aberdeen, Glasgow and Southampton. They handle 11 million passengers a year across the three airports which is expected to grow as travel demand continues to increase post-pandemic.
Elon Musk has bought X from himself 🤝 - xAI has bought X in an all-stock deal for $45 billion as Musk looks to consolidate “data, models, compute, distribution and talent”. The long-term intention seems to be to build an ‘everything app’ which we can just plug our brains into and enter the singularity. Potentially an alright way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but all pretty Black Mirror.
OpenAI’s new image generator is pretty bonkers 🖼️ - previously, it didn’t really get language, so just churned out shapes that looked a bit like letters but didn’t make any sense. The image generator which uses 4o and was released this week, is pretty wild, to the point they are having to limit usage as it’s so popular.
Søstrene Grene is hoping to revive the UK high-street 🛍️ - the Danish homeware maker has opened a store in London, not a stone’s throw from their Swedish competitor Ikea. Commercial property rental prices have fallen dramatically from the pandemic which means foreign companies that didn’t consider the UK a viable place to launch, are now revisiting it as a place to expand. Brits are loving it as all they’ve had for the past five years is Poundland and Ladbrokes.
Quote of the week
“I got 21 seconds to flow
I got 21 seconds to go
'Cause if you like me lemme know
Let me in da studio
I got 21 seconds before I got to go” - So Solid Crew