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Both Google and Open AI launched new enterprise Generative AI products this week and Walmart announced a program that will give its roughly 50,000 non-store employees access to a generative AI app trained on corporate information, an indication of how quickly the new technology is being embraced by business. Walmart's generative AI feature is part of the company's broader "Me@Campus" app for employees and will work on both computers and smartphones.
“The significance of this launch goes above and beyond the basic benefits of GenAI, like productivity gains,” Donna Morris, Walmart’s Chief People Officer and Cheryl Ainoa, Executive Vice President, New Business and Emerging Technology, wrote in a co-authored LinkedIn blog post. “ We believe the key to unlocking transformation lies in the creativity and innovation of our associates. Ideally, this technology will free them from monotonous, repetitive tasks, allowing more time and focus for improving the customer/member experience. Just picture the scale of what we can accomplish by putting a simple, easy-to-use GenAI tool in the hands of tens of thousands of associates, versus limiting the use of GenAI to just a few. “
Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business.

Foresight, a set of approaches that help explore, imagine and anticipate the future in an open but structured way, can help identify and explore challenges and opportunities emerging from multiple signals and drivers of change shaping the future. It is also critical to inform decisions and act as a trigger for developing strategic options in a context full of unknowns. Indeed, a peer reviewed academic study found that firms that practice foresight had a 33% higher profitability and a 200% higher market capitalization growth when compared with the sample average.

Yet research also shows that 75% of organizations are not prepared for the pace of change in and around their industry. Many organizations wind up asking themselves why they backed trends that were not sustainable and did not anticipate events like the COVID pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

The signals of disruption may be there but for humans to pay attention to, and connect the dots between possible interactions and repercussions across hundreds of different topic areas can be overwhelming and easily lead to neglect or denial. Conducting this kind of systemic horizon scanning is next to impossible without the filtering ability, throughput, and analytical powers of AI, says Stephan Mergenthaler, the World Economic Forum's head of strategic intelligence and a member of the Forum's executive committee. That's why the Forum is now applying advanced technologies to its strategic intelligence arm, which was first established in 2017.

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Private AI detects, redacts and replaces over 50 types of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in text, PDFs, images, videos, documents, transcripts, Large Language Models, ChatGPT and more. The privacy layer it provides aims to allow companies to protect their customer data, unlock insights, and comply with global privacy regulations like Europe’s GDPR data protection law and the U.S.’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ( HIPAA). Customers include startups as well as Fortune 500 firms.

The Canadian startup is a 2023 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and in August was named one of five “Cool Vendors in Privacy, 2023” by research and consulting firm Gartner. Private AI was also named one of research firm CB Insights most promising AI startups in 2022.

“Our AI-powered solution allows companies to safely unlock the value of the data they collect while enhancing compliance with current regulations,” says CEO Patricia Thaine ,a computer science PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto and a Vector Institute alumna doing research on privacy-preserving natural language processing, with a focus on applied cryptography. “Our goal is to make the world a more private place.”

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The financial benefits that AI/machine learning and generative AI could generate by the end of this decade for the top 212 North American public retail and restaurant companies, with Walmart and Amazon alone accounting for $580 billion, or 38.5% of the total, according to a new study by the IHL Group, a global research and advisory firm for the retail and hospitality industries. The group's Retail AI Readiness Index provides an AI readiness score comparison along with financial impact projections for individual companies, in areas including sales growth, gross margin improvement and sales/general administrative cost improvements.