Mike & Amit Talk Tech

Artificial intelligence has been talked about for decades, but over the last year, there has been a shift in the conversation.

The rise of ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI has led to a fierce debate. While some have heralded a new utopian world in which artificial intelligence fixes our problems, others have sounded the alarm, warning of a dystopian future ruled by machines. Global leaders, public intellectuals, and the heads of billion-dollar tech companies have staked a claim to both sides.

But is this moment really different from what's come before? Is generative AI truly disruptive? Or is this yet another tech fad?

Over several special episodes of Mike & Amit Talk Tech, our hosts will explore these questions and more. In today's episode, they cover the history of artificial intelligence, debate what it is and what it could be, and how today's particular brand of generative AI emerged.

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Michael Wade is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy and Director of the IMD Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. He also holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. An expert in digital transformation, he has published 10 books and more than 100 case studies, as well as articles on topics such as digital business transformation, innovation, strategy, and digital leadership.
 
Amit Joshi is a Professor of AI, Analytics, and Marketing Strategy. He specializes in helping organizations use artificial intelligence and develop their big data, analytics, and AI capabilities. An award-winning professor and researcher, he has extensive experience in AI and analytics-driven transformations in industries such as banking, fintech, retail, automotive, telecoms, and pharma.

Nuclear power was once associated with a brighter future. The technology to extract energy from uranium was scalable, efficient, and billed as a source of cheap, clean power for generations to come.

So why has the promise of an atomic age failed to materialize?

Today there are around 440 nuclear power generation stations around the world, accounting for only 10% of the total power that we consume. In many parts of the world coal remains king, and countries like Germany are even phasing out plants, despite facing an expensive and lengthy road to net zero.

On Talk Tech this week, Mike & Amit discuss the ups and downs of radioactive fuel, and why the promise of nuclear fusion powering each and every home has not come to pass.

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Michael Wade is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy and Director of the IMD Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. He also holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. An expert in digital transformation, he has published 10 books and more than 100 case studies, as well as articles on topics such as digital business transformation, innovation, strategy, and digital leadership. 

Amit Joshi is a Professor of AI, Analytics, and Marketing Strategy. He specializes in helping organizations use artificial intelligence and develop their big data, analytics, and AI capabilities. An award-winning professor and researcher, he has extensive experience in AI and analytics-driven transformations in industries such as banking, fintech, retail, automotive, telecoms, and pharma. 

Find out more about IMD at imd.org

Ten years ago, 3D printing was heralded as the answer to so many of life's problems.  

By now we were supposed to be using a 3D printer to print our food, our clothes, and even to build the house of our dreams. Some predicted that 3D printers would be as common as washing machines and that most middle-class households would be making their day-to-day essentials out of liquid silicone. 

The technology was even touted as a shortcut to making completely customizable artificial limbs at scale, and yet today, not only are these promises unfulfilled, but the global market for 3D printing sits at only around $15bn a year.  

Where did it go wrong? Was this technology simply over-hyped, beyond its realistic potential? Or is it too early to call time on 3D printing?  In episode 8 of Talk Tech, Professors Amit Joshi and Mike Wade discuss these questions and more.

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Michael Wade is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy and Director of the IMD Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. He also holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. An expert in digital transformation, he has published 10 books and more than 100 case studies, as well as articles on topics such as digital business transformation, innovation, strategy, and digital leadership. 

Amit Joshi is a Professor of AI, Analytics, and Marketing Strategy. He specializes in helping organizations use artificial intelligence and develop their big data, analytics, and AI capabilities. An award-winning professor and researcher, he has extensive experience of AI and analytics-driven transformations in industries such as banking, fintech, retail, automotive, telecoms, and pharma. 

Find out more about IMD at imd.org

From ChatGPT to Apple Vision Pro, the latest tech products garner a lot of hype. But while AI chatbots have the potential to change our relationship with the internet, and spatial computing could do the same to the world around us, these tech developments might also fizzle out. Hype does not always result in success in the long run.

To understand why that is, we need to look at concepts that just never lived up to expectations, and quantum computing is a giant among them. In 2019 this was heralded as a possible game changer; a technology that would make super-computers obsolete and bring us the answers to the knottiest questions of the universe in an instant.

Four years on that future hasn't materialized, and Amit Joshi thinks it will be another 10 to 15 years until it does. In conversation with Mike Wade, he discusses why quantum computing now faces an engineering problem, and what the future holds for lightspeed processing power. 

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Michael Wade is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy and Director of the IMD Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. He also holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. An expert in digital transformation, he has published 10 books and more than 100 case studies, as well as articles on topics such as digital business transformation, innovation, strategy, and digital leadership. 

Amit Joshi is a Professor of AI, Analytics, and Marketing Strategy. He specializes in helping organizations use artificial intelligence and develop their big data, analytics, and AI capabilities. An award-winning professor and researcher, he has extensive experience of AI and analytics-driven transformations in industries such as banking, fintech, retail, automotive, telecoms, and pharma. 

Find out more about IMD at imd.org

We're used to tech companies making big promises. A future filled with driverless cars, virtual realities to live in, and ever-more impressive gadgets. But what will these achievements amount to in a world ravaged by climate disasters?

In the last decade, the global conversation has been dominated by two mega-trends: digitization and sustainability. Mike Wade says that there have been surprisingly few intersections between these worlds because of the ephemeral nature of tech, and the physical nature of sustainability issues. But that's changing.

Increasingly, digital giants are being questioned about their energy consumption. But while the data centers of Cupertino and Menlo Park consume colossal amounts of power, Amit Joshi argues that's just one side of the story. Tech is helping people all over the world cut their consumption by giving them access to knowledge and resources at the touch of a button.

But can killer apps really help us to make enough climate-friendly decisions? And will cutting-edge hardware enable us to meet our carbon targets? Or is "sustainable tech" a contradiction in terms?

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Michael Wade is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy and Director of the IMD Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. He also holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. An expert in digital transformation, he has published 10 books and more than 100 case studies, as well as articles on topics such as digital business transformation, innovation, strategy, and digital leadership. 

Amit Joshi is a Professor of AI, Analytics, and Marketing Strategy. He specializes in helping organizations use artificial intelligence and develop their big data, analytics, and AI capabilities. An award-winning professor and researcher, he has extensive experience of AI and analytics-driven transformations in industries such as banking, fintech, retail, automotive, telecoms, and pharma. 

Companies like Waymo and Tesla are throwing the kitchen sink at autonomous vehicles. Every year from 2015 to 2021, Elon Musk predicted that we would have fully self-driving cars within 12 months. He's been proven wrong over and over again. 

With hundreds of billions of dollars being sunk into the technology, it's a wonder to some that we are still using steering wheels and gear shifts to get us from A to B. Off our highways, however, the story is a little different. On farms and in mines, on railways and in the skies, many vehicles are now almost completely autonomous. So why can't we make the leap onto the open road? 

In Episode 5 of Mike & Amit Talk Tech, Professor Mike Wade explains why we're in an "autonomous driving winter", while AI authority Amit Joshi, tells us why the last stage of self-driving development will require a lot more investment. 

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Michael Wade is Professor of Innovation and Strategy and Director of the IMD Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. He also holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. An expert in digital transformation, he has published 10 books and more than 100 case studies, as well as articles on topics such as digital business transformation, innovation, strategy, and digital leadership. 

Amit Joshi is Professor of AI, Analytics, and Marketing Strategy. He specializes in helping organizations use artificial intelligence and develop their big data, analytics, and AI capabilities. An award-winning professor and researcher, he has extensive experience of AI and analytics-driven transformations in industries such as banking, fintech, retail, automotive, telecoms, and pharma. 

In 1965, the American engineer Gordon Moore came up with a novel idea: that the number of semiconductors that you could fit on a silicon chip would double exponentially. It was an idea that seemed revolutionary, perhaps even a little foolhardy. But it turned out to be true.

Today, all modern technology, from autonomous cars to smartphones, is built on this massive increase in processing power. As the co-founder of the chipmaker Intel, Moore laid the foundations for much of the technology we know and rely on.

Moore died earlier this year at the age of 94, and in episode 4 of Mike and Amit Talk Tech, these two award-winning professors, discuss his legacy and the chicken-and-egg question of tech. Did Moore predict the future? Or was his prediction the key to unlocking it?

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Michael Wade is Professor of Innovation and Strategy and Director of the IMD Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. He also holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. An expert in digital transformation, he has published 10 books and more than 100 case studies, as well as articles on topics such as digital business transformation, innovation, strategy, and digital leadership.

Amit Joshi is Professor of AI, Analytics, and Marketing Strategy. He specializes in helping organizations use artificial intelligence and develop their big data, analytics, and AI capabilities. An award-winning professor and researcher, he has extensive experience of AI and analytics-driven transformations in industries such as banking, fintech, retail, automotive, telecoms, and pharma.

To find out more about IMD, go to imd.org

"The Metaverse" is a term that defies easy definition. Even before you start to outline its features, you first have to ask if it's the metaverse, a metaverse, or if it's metaverses (plural) you're discussing.

But regardless of how you define it, The Metaverse is creating waves in the tech sector. Several companies have put it at the center of their growth strategies – and, in the case of Facebook, even changed their name to include it. 

But what are the building blocks of a Metaverse? If it's simply a collection of digital spaces, how is it different from a 3D film? And do you even need a VR headset to get there?

Michael Wade says what makes the Metaverse is immersion and participation, and Amit Joshi agrees, saying you can't have one without the other. In episode three of Mike and Amit Talk Tech, these two award-winning professors ask how the Metaverse is developing, how much time we'll spend using it, and whether companies will need a 'Metaverse strategy' to compete in tomorrow's economy.

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Michael Wade is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy and Director of the IMD Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. He also holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. An expert in digital transformation, he has published 10 books and more than 100 case studies as well as articles on topics such as digital business transformation, innovation, strategy, and digital leadership.

Amit Joshi is a Professor of AI, Analytics, and Marketing Strategy. He specializes in helping organizations use artificial intelligence and develop their big data, analytics, and AI capabilities. An award-winning professor and researcher, he has extensive experience of AI and analytics-driven transformations in industries such as banking, fintech, retail, automotive, telecoms, and pharma.

In a short update special Mike and Amit discuss a letter signed by Elon Musk & other tech leaders, demanding AI research.

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Michael Wade is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy and Director of the IMD Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. He also holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. An expert in digital transformation, he has published 10 books and more than 100 case studies as well as articles on topics such as digital business transformation, innovation, strategy, and digital leadership.

One of the biggest topics among the Technorati today is Web 3.0. For many, this came out of the blue. How many even realized that there was a Web 2.0? 

Proponents of Web 3.0 say that soon, users will have full control of their online persona and be able to connect with friends, purchase products and services, and consume content without having to rely on large commercial platforms. Based on a set of principles and backed up with new, creative technologies, it promises to democratize the internet and liberate online users from the clutches of over-controlling digital giants. 

It will, in short, put power back into the hands of people. But is that a realistic prospect? 

In episode two of Mike and Amit Talk Tech, these two award-winning professors ask whether Web 3.0 will live up to the hype; or whether it's a pipe dream.

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Michael Wade is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy and Director of the IMD Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. He also holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. An expert in digital transformation, he has published 10 books and more than 100 case studies as well as articles on topics such as digital business transformation, innovation, strategy, and digital leadership.

Amit Joshi is a Professor of AI, Analytics, and Marketing Strategy. He specializes in helping organizations use artificial intelligence and develop their big data, analytics, and AI capabilities. An award-winning professor and researcher, he has extensive experience of AI and analytics-driven transformations in industries such as banking, fintech, retail, automotive, telecoms, and pharma.