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Big technology companies are betting that a new wave of smaller, more precise AI models will be more effective when it comes to the needs of businesses in sectors like law, finance, and health care.

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LONDON — Increasingly many financial services firms are touting the benefits of artificial intelligence when it comes to boosting productivity and overall operational efficiency.

Despite bold statements, a lot of companies are failing to produce tangible results, according to Edward J Achtner, the head of generative AI for U.K. banking giant HSBC.

“Candidly, there’s a lot of success theater out there,” Achtner said on a panel at the CogX Global Leadership Summit alongside Ranil Boteju — a fellow AI leader at rival British bank Lloyds Banking Group — and Nathalie Oestmann, head of NV Ltd, an advisory firm for venture capital funds.

“We have to be very clinical in terms of what we choose to do, and where we choose to do it,” Achtner told attendees of the event, held at the Royal Albert Hall in London earlier this week.

Achtner outlined how the 150-year-old lending institution has embraced artificial intelligence since ChatGPT — the popular AI chatbot from Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI — burst onto the scene in November 2022.

The HSBC AI leader said that the bank has more than 550 use cases across its business lines and functions linked to AI — ranging from fighting money laundering and fraud using machine learning tools to supporting knowledge workers with newer generative AI systems.

One example he gave was a partnership that HSBC has in place with internet search titan Google on the use of AI technology anti-money laundering and fraud mitigation. That tie-up has been in place for several years, he said. The bank has also dipped its toes deeper into genAI tech much more recently.

Klarna to halve workforce with AI

“When it comes to generative artificial intelligence, we do need to clearly separate that” from other types of AI, Achtner said. “We do approach the underlying risk with respect to generative very differently because, while it represents incredible potential opportunity and productivity gains, it also represents a different type of risk.”

Achtner’s comments come as other figures in the financial services sector — particularly leaders at startup firms — have made bold statements about the level of overall efficiency gains and cost reductions they are seeing as a result of investments in AI.

Buy now, pay later firm Klarna says it has been taking advantage of AI to make up for loss of productivity resulting from declines in its workforce as employees move on from the company.

It is implementing a company-wide hiring freeze and has slashed overall employee headcount down to 3,800 from 5,000 — a roughly 24% workforce reduction — with the help of AI, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in August. He is looking to further reduce Klarna’s headcount to 2,000 staff members — without specifying a time for this target.

Klarna’s boss said the firm was lowering its overall headcount against the backdrop of AI’s potential to have “a dramatic impact” on jobs and society.

“I think politicians already today should consider whether there are other alternatives of how they could support people that may be effective,” he said at the time in an interview with the BBC. Siemiatkowski said it was “too simplistic” to say AI’s disruptive effects would be offset by the creation of new jobs thanks to AI.

Oestmann of NV Ltd, a London-based firm that offers advisory services for the C-suite of venture capital and private equity firms, directly touched on Klarna’s actions, saying headlines around such AI-driven workforce reductions are “not helpful.”

Klarna, she suggested, likely saw that AI “makes them a more valuable company” and was consequently incorporating the technology as part of plans to reduce its workforce anyway.

The result Klarna is seeing from AI “are very real,” a Klarna spokesperson told CNBC. “We publicize these results because we want to be honest and transparent about the impact genAI is having in the real world in companies today,” the spokesperson added.

“At the end of the day,” Oestmann added, as long as people are “trained appropriately” and banks and other financial services firm can “reinvent” themselves in the new AI era, “it will just help us to evolve.” She advised financial firms to pursue “continuous learning in everything that you do.”

“Make sure you are trying these tools out, make sure you are making this part of your everyday, make sure you are curious,” she added.

Boteju, chief data and analytics officer at Lloyds, pointed to three main use cases that the lender sees with respect to AI: automating back office functions like coding and engineering documentation, “human-in-the loop” uses like prompts for sales staff, and AI-generated responses to client queries.

Boteju stressed that Lloyds is “proceeding with caution” when it comes to exposing the bank’s customers to generative AI tools. “We want to get our guardrails in place before we actually start to scale those,” he added.

“Banks in particular have been using AI and machine learning for probably about 15 or 20 years,” Boteju said, signaling that machine learning, intelligent automation and chatbots are things traditional lenders have been “doing for a while.”

Generative AI, on the other hand, is a more nascent technology, according to the Lloyds exec. The bank is increasingly thinking about how to scale that technology — but by “using the current frameworks and infrastructure we’ve got,” rather than by moving the needle significantly.

The banking sector 'is very conservative' around competition, says Bunq CEO

Boteju and Achtner’s comments tally with what other AI leaders of financial services have said previously. Speaking with CNBC last week, Bahadir Yilmaz, chief analytics officer of ING, said that AI is unlikely to be as disruptive as firms like Klarna are suggesting with their public messaging.

“We see the same potential that they’re seeing,” Yilmaz said in an interview in London. “It’s just the tone of communication is a bit different.” He added that ING is primarily using AI in its global contact centers and internally for software engineering.

“We don’t need to be seen as an AI-driven bank,” Yilmaz said, adding that, with many processes lenders won’t even need AI to solve certain problems. “It’s a really powerful tool. It’s very disruptive. But we don’t necessarily have to say we are putting it as a sauce on all the food.”

Johan Tjarnberg, CEO of Swedish online payments firm Trustly, told CNBC earlier this week that AI “will actually be one of the biggest technology levers in payments.” But even so, he noted that the firm is focusing more of the “basics of AI” than on transformative changes like AI-led customer service.

One area where Trustly is looking to improve customer experience with AI is subscriptions. The startup is working on an “intelligent charging mechanism” that would aim to figure out the best time for a bank to take payment from a subscription platform user, based on their historical financial activity.

Tjarnberg added that Trustly is seeing closer to 5-10% improved efficiency as a result of implementing AI within its organization.

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This startup is creating a global tech platform for recycled wood

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This startup is creating a global tech platform for recycled wood

Clean Start: This startup is finding new ways to recycle reclaimed wood

Each year 36 million trees fall due to decay, disease, natural disasters or clearing for new development. The vast majority of those trees are either burned, sent to a landfill or ground up for mulch, which wastes energy and causes carbon emissions. 

Now, new technology is being used to find, transport and recycle that wood and make it useful once again.

Cambium is a startup aiming to disrupt the wood recycling space. Its Baltimore-based researchers are working on new ways to track, treat and transfer old wood into the supply chain. It bills itself as the platform “where timber meets tech.”

“We make it really easy to source wood that would have otherwise been wasted and we build technology for the wood industry so that we can save material, create new local jobs and address climate change at scale,” said CEO Ben Christensen.

Every piece of Cambium’s “carbon smart” wood has a barcode. Scan it, and Cambium’s app will identify what the species is, when it was milled and what its grade is.

Cambium’s technology helps find, recycle and then deliver the wood across the United States and to parts of Canada. The company works with local tree care services, trucking companies and saw mills as well as companies like Amazon, CBRE, Gensler and Room and Board.

“We help truckers coordinate loads so they can actually move this material, and then we help sawmills source that material, track that material when they’re actually using it within their sawmill and then ultimately sell that material as well,” Christensen said.

Recycled wood at Cambium.

Van Applegate | CNBC

While there are local wood recyclers, no one else is addressing the supply chain on a national scale, said Christensen, adding that he expects to eventually go global. This potential is enticing to investors.

“For us, as a venture capitalist who is looking to invest in businesses that kind of can go to the moon and become billion dollar businesses, this meets all the criteria,” said Adrian Fenty, founding managing partner at MaC Venture Capital. 

Cambium is also backed by Volo Earth Ventures, NEA and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, among others. The startup has raised $28.5 million in total funding so far.

If it was possible to salvage all the discarded wood material in the U.S., humans could source about half of our total demand, Christensen said. 

Cambium doubled its sales last year, and Christensen said the big growth was on the software side. Its revenue comes from direct sales of wood to end users and from sales of software into the wood industry to facilitate moving, tracking and selling the recycled product.

“It’s critical for Silicon Valley investors, because we don’t want to invest in a wood company,” Fenty said. “We don’t want to invest in a construction company. We want to invest in a software company.”

Among the challenges ahead are the Trump administration’s tariffs on Canadian lumber, Christensen said. Those tariffs are expected to impact Cambium’s business, especially in the northeast region of the U.S.

“We’re moving material to sawmills that are 10 or 20 miles away across the border, and so obviously trade policy really impacts how that material moves,” Christensen said.

CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.

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AI that can match humans at any task will be here in five to 10 years, Google DeepMind CEO says

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AI that can match humans at any task will be here in five to 10 years, Google DeepMind CEO says

Google DeepMind co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis speaks during the Mobile World Congress, the telecom industry’s biggest annual gathering, in Barcelona, Spain, Feb. 26, 2024.

Pau Barrena | Afp | Getty Images

LONDON — Artificial intelligence that can match humans at any task is still some way off — but it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a reality, according to the CEO of Google DeepMind.

Speaking at a briefing in DeepMind’s London offices on Monday, Demis Hassabis said that he thinks artificial general intelligence (AGI) — which is as smart or smarter than humans — will start to emerge in the next five or 10 years.

“I think today’s systems, they’re very passive, but there’s still a lot of things they can’t do. But I think over the next five to 10 years, a lot of those capabilities will start coming to the fore and we’ll start moving towards what we call artificial general intelligence,” Hassabis said.

Hassabis defined AGI as “a system that’s able to exhibit all the complicated capabilities that humans can.”

“We’re not quite there yet. These systems are very impressive at certain things. But there are other things they can’t do yet, and we’ve still got quite a lot of research work to go before that,” Hassabis said.

Hassabis isn’t alone in suggesting that it’ll take a while for AGI to appear. Last year, the CEO of Chinese tech giant Baidu Robin Li said he sees AGI is “more than 10 years away,” pushing back on excitable predictions from some of his peers about this breakthrough taking place in a much shorter timeframe.

Some time to go yet

Hassabis’ forecast pushes the timeline to reach AGI some way back compared to what his industry peers have been sketching out.

Dario Amodei, CEO of AI startup Anthropic, told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January that he sees a form of AI that’s “better than almost all humans at almost all tasks” emerging in the “next two or three years.”

Watch CNBC's full interview with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei

What’s needed to reach AGI?

Hassabis said that the main challenge with achieving artificial general intelligence is getting today’s AI systems to a point of understanding context from the real world.

Big Tech hunts for AGI at any cost

While it’s been possible to develop systems that can break down problems and complete tasks autonomously in the realm of games — such as the complex strategy board game Go — bringing such a technology into the real world is proving harder.

“The question is, how fast can we generalize the planning ideas and agentic kind of behaviors, planning and reasoning, and then generalize that over to working in the real world, on top of things like world models — models that are able to understand the world around us,” Hassabis said.”

“And I think we’ve made good progress with the world models over the last couple of years,” he added. “So now the question is, what’s the best way to combine that with these planning algorithms?”

Hassabis and Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud computing division, said that so-called “multi-agent” AI systems are a technological advancement that’s gaining a lot of traction behind the scenes.

Hassabis said lots of work is being done to get to this stage. One example he referred to is DeepMind’s work getting AI agents to figure out how to play the popular strategy game “Starcraft.”

“We’ve done a lot of work on that with things like Starcraft game in the past, where you have a society of agents, or a league of agents, and they could be competing, they could be cooperating,” DeepMind’s chief said.

“When you think about agent to agent communication, that’s what we’re also doing to allow an agent to express itself … What are your skills? What kind of tools do you use?” Kurian said.

“Those are all elements that you need to be able to ask an agent a question, and then once you have that interface, then other agents can communicate with it,” he added.

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Telcos race to transition from ‘dumb pipes’ to tech players with help from AI

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Telcos race to transition from 'dumb pipes' to tech players with help from AI

Ryu Young-sang, CEO of South Korean telecoms giant SK Telecom, told CNBC that AI is helping telecoms firms improve efficiency in their networks.

Manaure Quintero | Afp | Getty Images

BARCELONA — Global telecommunications firms are talking up advances in key technologies like artificial intelligence as they look to transition away from being perceived as the “dumb pipes” behind the internet.

At the Mobile World Congress technology conference in Barcelona, CEOs of multiple telecoms companies described how they’re piling money into new technological innovations, including AI, next-generation 5G and 6G networks, satellite internet and even smart cities.

Makoto Takahashi, president and CEO of Japanese telecom giant KDDI, detailed plans to build a smart city dubbed Takanawa Gateway City in Tokyo, as well as roll out direct-to-cell satellite internet connectivity in partnership with Elon Musk’s Starlink venture.

Ralph Mupita, the CEO of Africa’s largest mobile network operator MTN, also took to the stage to share how the company has made significant strides toward becoming a company that offers both wireless connectivity and fintech services such as payments, e-commerce, insurance, lending and remittances.

“The telco business has served us well. It has iterated since. But the future is really about the future of platforms,” Mupita said in his keynote talk, adding the company has invested aggressively into other areas such as media streaming and financial services.

From ‘dumb pipes’ to ‘techcos’

Some lingo that has gathered steam in the telco industry for the last couple of years is the phrase “techco,” a portmanteau of the words “telco” and “tech.”

Watch CNBC's full interview with Deutsche Telekom CEO: 'Europe has to wake up'

The term refers to the idea of a telco firm that operates more like a tech company — one that invests in cutting-edge technology and offers digital services to consumers to help them make money from the significant capital expenditures they’ve allocated to upgrading their wireless networks.

For two decades, tech giants such as Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Netflix have flourished in a world where content can be delivered directly to people’s devices, consumers can communicate seamlessly with one another, and data can be stored or streamed online without having to own cumbersome infrastructure — all thanks to innovations like the internet, smartphones and the cloud.

However, these innovations have disrupted telecom firms’ business models, to the point where they’re now often perceived as legacy players that are only there to lay down the cables and other network infrastructure that enable internet connectivity.

It’s a dilemma that’s earned telco brands the pejorative term “dumb pipes.”

“I remember early in the industry, even before mobile internet when SMS used to be the killer app,” Hatem Dowidar, CEO of UAE state-owned telecom company e&, said in a keynote speech at MWC. “We used to make messaging revenue. We used to make voice revenue.”

“All this over the years got disrupted by over-the-top players, to the point that today, a lot of telcos around the world are reduced to being a pipe of packets just getting data across the networks,” Dowidar added. “And competition is not staying still. They have the scale, they have the investment to go and disrupt even further.”

Telcos embrace AI

Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SK Telecom, told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal that the South Korean telecoms giant has looked to AI technology to help it improve the efficiency of its wireless network — something that was consistently on display at numerous telco operators’ booths at MWC.

Watch CNBC's full interview with Orange CEO Christel Heydemann

“For telcos, there are two aspects of AI. One is as a user, the other is as a supplier,” said Young-sang. “As a user, you are a telco business, you can improve your network efficiency, marketing and customer service by using the AI technology. You can improve your own operations.”

“The other aspect is, AI can be a growth engine, a new business opportunity for telcos,” he added. Data centers, the facilities that offer computing capacity needed to run generative AI applications like ChatGPT, are another key area where telcos like SK Telecom can play a key role, Young-sang said.

In the Western world, the race to build data centers is one that’s been mostly dominated by cloud computing giants — or “hyperscalers” — such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. However, SK Telecom is aggressively expanding AI-ready data centers of its own globally, according to the firm’s CEO.

Can telcos catch up on tech?

For many telecom industry analysts, chatter about telcos seeking to transform themselves into tech players isn’t entirely new — companies in the industry have long been aware their relevance in communications and media has been dwindling.

Kester Mann, director of consumer and connectivity at market research firm CCS Insight, told CNBC that while he’s not a great fan of the “techco” term, it’s something the industry continues to focus on and has gathered pace in the context of the AI boom.

“AI can influence so many areas … and obviously that does play to that trend around telco to techco and operators positioning themselves more than just a connectivity provider,” Mann said.

Imperative that Western world leads on AI, says Bret Taylor

So-called “autonomous networks,” or networks that can be managed and fixed with limited human oversight, is an area that’s quickly gaining traction in the industry, according to Nik Willetts, CEO of telco industry association TM Forum.

“Autonomous Networks is a movement we see moving from theory to reality incredibly quickly, thanks to advancements in AI combined with a new level of ambition and industry-wide action,” Willetts said.

This tech “can unlock a step-change in operating and capital efficiency, improving EBITDA and free cashflows, as well as unlocking new revenue opportunities and much-needed improvements in customer experience,” he added.

Jeetu Patel, chief product officer of IT networking giant Cisco, said he sees telcos playing a vital role as AI drives up demand for network traffic and bandwidth.

“The reality is this: the network bandwidth appetite is going to increase exponentially with AI,” Patel told CNBC. “Today, 100% of our workforce is human. Tomorrow, you will have that being augmented by AI agents, robots, humanoids, a lot of edge devices.”

“These agents are going to be more chatty and they’re going to require more network traffic and bandwidth,” he added. “I think service providers have a significant role to play. In my mind, the opportunity is not gone for them.”

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