Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of U.K. and Ireland at Salesforce, speaking during the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, California, on Sept. 17, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
LONDON — The UK chief executive of Salesforce wants the Labor government to regulate artificial intelligence — but says it’s important that policymakers don’t tar all technology companies developing AI systems with the same brush.
Speaking to CNBC in London, Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of UK and Ireland at Salesforce, said the American enterprise software giant takes all legislation “seriously.” However, she added that any British proposals aimed at regulating AI should be “proportional and tailored.”
Bahrololoumi noted that there’s a difference between companies developing consumer-facing AI tools — like OpenAI — and firms like Salesforce making enterprise AI systems. She said consumer-facing AI systems, such as ChatGPT , face fewer restrictions than enterprise-grade products, which have to meet higher privacy standards and comply with corporate guidelines.
“What we look for is targeted, proportional, and tailored legislation,” Bahrololoumi told CNBC on Wednesday.
“There’s definitely a difference between those organizations that are operating with consumer facing technology and consumer tech, and those that are enterprise tech. And we each have different roles in the ecosystem, [but] we’re a B2B organization,” she said.
A spokesperson for the UK’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said that planned AI rules would be “highly targeted to the handful of companies developing the most powerful AI models,” rather than applying “blanket rules on the use of AI. “
That indicates that the rules might not apply to companies like Salesforce, which don’t make their own foundational models like OpenAI.
“We recognize the power of AI to kickstart growth and improve productivity and are absolutely committed to supporting the development of our AI sector, particularly as we speed up the adoption of the technology across our economy,” the DSIT spokesperson added.
Data security
Salesforce has been heavily touting the ethics and safety considerations embedded in its Agentforce AI technology platform, which allows enterprise organizations to spin up their own AI “agents” — essentially, autonomous digital workers that carry out tasks for different functions, like sales, service or marketing.
For example, one feature called “zero retention” means no customer data can ever be stored outside of Salesforce. As a result, generative AI prompts and outputs aren’t stored in Salesforce’s large language models — the programs that form the bedrock of today’s genAI chatbots, like ChatGPT.
With consumer AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude or Meta’s AI assistant, it’s unclear what data is being used to train them or where that data gets stored, according to Bahrololoumi.
“To train these models you need so much data,” she told CNBC. “And so, with something like ChatGPT and these consumer models, you don’t know what it’s using.”
Even Microsoft’s Copilot, which is marketed at enterprise customers, comes with heightened risks, Bahrololoumi said, citing a Gartner report calling out the tech giant’s AI personal assistant over the security risks it poses to organizations.
OpenAI and Microsoft were not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
AI concerns ‘apply at all levels’
Bola Rotibi, chief of enterprise research at analyst firm CCS Insight, told CNBC that, while enterprise-focused AI suppliers are “more cognizant of enterprise-level requirements” around security and data privacy, it would be wrong to assume regulations wouldn’t scrutinize both consumer and business-facing firms.
“All the concerns around things like consent, privacy, transparency, data sovereignty apply at all levels no matter if it is consumer or enterprise as such details are governed by regulations such as GDPR,” Rotibi told CNBC via email. GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation, became law in the UK in 2018.
However, Rotibi said that regulators may feel “more confident” in AI compliance measures adopted by enterprise application providers like Salesforce, “because they understand what it means to deliver enterprise-level solutions and management support.”
“A more nuanced review process is likely for the AI services from widely deployed enterprise solution providers like Salesforce,” she added.
Bahrololoumi spoke to CNBC at Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour in London, an event designed to promote the use of the company’s new “agentic” AI technology by partners and customers.
Her remarks come after U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour refrained from introducing an AI bill in the King’s Speech, which is written by the government to outline its priorities for the coming months. The government at the time said it plans to establish “appropriate legislation” for AI, without offering further details.
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.
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.”
Other tech leaders see AGI arriving even sooner. Cisco’s Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel thinks there’s a chance we could see an example of AGI emerge as soon as this year. “There’s three major phases” to AI, Patel told CNBC in an interview at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona earlier this month.
“There’s the basic AI that we’re all experience right now. Then there is artificial general intelligence, where the cognitive capabilities meet those of humans. Then there’s what they call superintelligence,” Patel said.
“I think you will see meaningful evidence of AGI being in play in 2025. We’re not talking about years away,” he added. “I think superintelligence is, at best, a few years out.”
Artificial super intelligence, or ASI, is expected to arrive after AGI and surpass human intelligence. However, “no one really knows” when such a breakthrough will happen, Hassabis said Monday.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“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.
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.”