Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.

Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don’t live in the polluted, processed environment that most of the rest of us share. They’ve been studying the feces of people like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost. 

But there is a major catch: we don’t know whether those in hunter-gatherer societies really do have “healthier” microbiomes—and if they do, whether the benefits could be shared with others. At the same time, members of the communities being studied are concerned about the risk of what’s called biopiracy—taking natural resources from poorer countries for the benefit of wealthier ones. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation

—by Eric Schmidt, formerly the CEO of Google, and current cofounder of philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures

The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history.

A strategic imperative

Generative AI’s ability to harness customer data in a highly sophisticated manner means enterprises are accelerating plans to invest in and leverage the technology’s capabilities. In a study titled “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI,” Corinium Intelligence and WNS Triange surveyed 100 global C-suite leaders and decision-makers specializing in AI, analytics, and data. Seventy-six percent of the respondents said that their organizations are already using or planning to use generative AI.

According to McKinsey, while generative AI will affect most business functions, “four of them will likely account for 75% of the total annual value it can deliver.” Among these are marketing and sales and customer operations. Yet, despite the technology’s benefits, many leaders are unsure about the right approach to take and mindful of the risks associated with large investments.

Mapping out a generative AI pathway

One of the first challenges organizations need to overcome is senior leadership alignment. “You need the necessary strategy; you need the ability to have the necessary buy-in of people,” says Ayer. “You need to make sure that you’ve got the right use case and business case for each one of them.” In other words, a clearly defined roadmap and precise business objectives are as crucial as understanding whether a process is amenable to the use of generative AI.

The implementation of a generative AI strategy can take time. According to Ayer, business leaders should maintain a realistic perspective on the duration required for formulating a strategy, conduct necessary training across various teams and functions, and identify the areas of value addition. And for any generative AI deployment to work seamlessly, the right data ecosystems must be in place.

Ayer cites WNS Triange’s collaboration with an insurer to create a claims process by leveraging generative AI. Thanks to the new technology, the insurer can immediately assess the severity of a vehicle’s damage from an accident and make a claims recommendation based on the unstructured data provided by the client. “Because this can be immediately assessed by a surveyor and they can reach a recommendation quickly, this instantly improves the insurer’s ability to satisfy their policyholders and reduce the claims processing time,” Ayer explains.

All that, however, would not be possible without data on past claims history, repair costs, transaction data, and other necessary data sets to extract clear value from generative AI analysis. “Be very clear about data sufficiency. Don’t jump into a program where eventually you realize you don’t have the necessary data,” Ayer says.

The benefits of third-party experience

Enterprises are increasingly aware that they must embrace generative AI, but knowing where to begin is another thing. “You start off wanting to make sure you don’t repeat mistakes other people have made,” says Ayer. An external provider can help organizations avoid those mistakes and leverage best practices and frameworks for testing and defining explainability and benchmarks for return on investment (ROI).

Using pre-built solutions by external partners can expedite time to market and increase a generative AI program’s value. These solutions can harness pre-built industry-specific generative AI platforms to accelerate deployment. “Generative AI programs can be extremely complicated,” Ayer points out. “There are a lot of infrastructure requirements, touch points with customers, and internal regulations. Organizations will also have to consider using pre-built solutions to accelerate speed to value. Third-party service providers bring the expertise of having an integrated approach to all these elements.”

There’s several standards that we’ve been focusing on in the Green Software Foundation, one’s called the SEI, which is a software carbon intensity specification. Again, to prove it as an ISO standard, you have to reach consensus through 196 countries. So then you get even more trust into a standard so you can use it. So standards really help to build up that trust, which organizations can use to help guide them in the directions to take. There’s a couple of other standards that are really coming up in the foundation that I think are quite interesting. One is called Real-Time Cloud. One of the challenges right now is, and again always comes back to measurement, it always always comes back to measurement. Right now measurement is very discreet, it happens oftentimes just a few times a year. Oftentimes when you get measurement data, it is very delayed. So one of the specs that’s been worked on right now is called Real-Time Cloud.

It’s trying to ask the question, is it possible? Is it possible to get data that is real-time? Oftentimes when you want to react and change behaviors, you need real-time data. If you want data so that when somebody does something, they know instantly the impact of that action so they can make adjustments instantly. If they’re having to wait three months, that behavior change might not happen. Real-time [data] is oftentimes at log aheads with regulations because oftentimes you have to get your data audited and auditing data that’s real-time is very, very challenging. So one of the questions we’re trying to ask is, is it possible to have data which is real-time, which then over the course of a year, you can imagine it just aggregates up over the course of a year. Can that aggregation then provide enough trust so that an auditor can then say, actually, we now trust this information and we will allow that to be used in regulatory reporting.

That’s something that we’re very excited about because you really need real-time data to drive behavior change. If there’s anything we really need to do is to drive that behavior change, we need to drive behavior change so people actually invest their time on making software more energy efficient, more hardware efficient, or more carbon aware. So that’s some of the ways where standards are really helping in this space.

Laurel: I think it’s really helpful to talk about standards and how they are so ingrained with software development in general because there are so many misconceptions about sustainability. So what are some of the other misconceptions that people kind of get stuck on, maybe that even calling it green, right? Are there philosophies or strategies that you can caution against or you try to advocate for?

Asim: So as a couple of things I talk about, so one of the things I talk about is it does take everybody, I mean, I remember very early on when I was talking in this space, oftentimes a conversation went, oh, don’t bother talking to that person or don’t talk to this sector of developers, don’t talk to that type of developers. Only talk to these people, these people who have the most influence to make the kind of changes to make software greener. But it really takes a cultural change. This is what’s very important, really takes a cultural change inside an organization. It takes everybody. You can’t really talk to one slice of the developer ecosystem. You need to talk to everybody. Every single developer or engineer inside an organization really needs to take this on board. So that’s one of the things I say is that you have to speak to every single person. You cannot just speak to one set of people and exclude another set of people.

Another challenge that I often see is that people, when they talk about this space, one of the misconceptions they talk about is they rank where effort should be spent in terms of the carbon slice of the pie that it is responsible for and I’ll talk about this in general. But really how you should be focusing is you should be focusing not on the slice of the pie, but on the ability to decarbonize that slice of the pie. That’s why green software is so interesting and that’s why it’s such a great place to spend effort and time. It might not be, I mean it is, depending on which academic paper you look at, it can be between 2 to 4% of global emissions. So some people might say, well, that’s not really worth spending the time in.

But my argument is actually the ability for us to decarbonize that 2 to 4% is far easier than our ability to decarbonize other sectors like airlines or concrete or these other sectors. We know what we need to do oftentimes in the software space, we know the choices. There doesn’t need to be new technology made, there just needs to be decisions made to prioritize this work. That’s something I think is very, very important. We should rank everything in terms of our ability to decarbonize the ease of decarbonization and then work on the topmost item first down, rather than just looking at things in just terms of tons of carbon, which I think leads to wrong decision making.

Laurel: Well, I think you’re laying out a really good argument because green initiatives, they can be daunting, especially for large enterprises looking to meet those decarbonization thresholds within the next decade. For those companies that are making the investment into this, how should they begin? Where are the fundamental things just to be aware of when you’re starting this journey?

Asim: So the first step is, I would say training. What we’re describing here in terms of, especially in terms of the green software space, it’s a very new movement. It’s a very new field of computing. So a lot of the terms that I talk about are just not well understood and a lot of the reasons for those terms are not well understood as well. So the number one thing I always say is you need to focus on training. There’s loads of training out there. The Green Software Foundation’s got some training, learn.GreenSoftware.Foundation, it’s just two hours, it’s free. We send that over to anybody who’s starting in this space just to understand the language, the terminology, just to get everybody on the same page. That is usually a very good start. Now in terms of how do you motivate inside, I think about this a lot.

If you’re the lead of an organization and you want to make a change, how do you actually make that change? I’m a big, big believer in trusting your team, trusting your people. If you give engineers a problem, they will find a solution to that problem. But what they oftentimes need is permission, a thumbs up from leadership that this is a priority. So that’s why it’s very important for organizations to be very public about their commitments, make public commitments. Same way Intel has made public commitments. Be very vocal as a leader inside your organization and be very clear that this is a priority for you, that you will listen to people and to teams who bring you solutions in this space.