05.12.23

Huawei aims to use its “4T” technologies to enable an energy landscape transition ‘from energy consumer to sustainable energy producer and enabler’

BY 3 MINUTE READ

Huawei has successfully held the Fusion Solar Forum 2023 at the sidelines of the Solar Show Africa 2023 in Johannesburg recently. Industry associations, sector organisations, industry leaders and experts gathered to share industry trends and insights and presented innovative solutions and best practices which will contribute to the development of the industry on the continent.

Leo Chen, President of Huawei Sub Saharan Africa, said that the quest for global carbon neutrality, energy security, and commercial value is driving the rapid development of a new international energy industry. The urgency of Africa’s own transition is being accelerated by power shortages and rising energy prices. Leo Chen indicated that in facing these challenges, Huawei as a leading ICT company, can be part of the solution. “With a heavy investment in R&D, we’ve developed the most comprehensive set of technologies in ICT, and this forms our unique advantage.”

He said that by integrating power electronic and digital technologies, Huawei’s ‘4T’ (WatT, HeaT, BatTery, and BiT) technologies, which refers to Huawei’s innovations in the field of power electronics, thermal management, power storage, and Cloud and AI, can enable the traditional solar energy industry to be more efficient and more intelligent.

“The application of our “4T” technologies, will also effectively accelerate Africa’s energy transition toward the direction of ‘4D’, which is Decarbonisation, Digitalisation, Decentralisation, and Democratisation,” he said. Huawei’s full-scenario smart PV solutions not only can provide solutions to utility-scale large plants, but also to energy storage facilities, commercial and industrial (C&I) rooftops, residential rooftops, data centres, and smart microgrids in rural areas. By doing this, more flexible energy generation solutions that are close to the point of use can be applied and the transmission and distribution setup can be minimised, thus saving costs and losses. Through this approach, power consumers can be transformed into power producers, which helps to achieve better power resilience for users and the whole society.

South Africa’s Minister in the Presidency responsible for Electricity Dr. Kgosientsho Ramokgopa gave a keynote address at the forum, and commended Huawei for the role it is playing in infrastructure development in Africa and in greening South Africa’s energy systems. “Huawei is bringing technological advancements and innovations that help us keep pace with the developed and industrialised countries in the global north,” he said.

He indicated that his role as the electricity minister involves working with the private sector, including Huawei, to address the power deficit issue and boost a digital and sustainable future for South Africa. He said, “The South African government is looking for blended financial facilities for the funding of alternative energy installations, making it more accessible to more people. At the same time, the government will also broaden the flow of participation by upskilling people in the technology of renewable energy systems.”

Chen Guoguang, President of Huawei Smart PV Product Line said that, with Huawei’s innovative solutions, it has achieved a very impressive carbon footprint globally. “By the end of 2022, Huawei Digital Power has helped our customers to offset 340 million tons of CO2 emissions, roughly the same as planting 470 million trees,” he said.

John van Zuylen, CEO of AFSIA (Africa Solar Industry Association), presented on the rapid adoption of solar technologies on the African continent, where almost every country now has some solar capacity. With power storage options becoming more accessible and more affordable, AFSIA predicts that Africa will soon outstrip other regions in its use of solar power supply. Huawei technologies currently powers 25% of the world’s PV capacity, and so the company is well positioned to play a growing role on the continent.

In her presentation, CEO of the SAPVIA (The South African Photovoltaic Industry Association), Dr Rethabile Melamu, stressed the need to skill young South Africans to participate and take full advantage of the huge opportunities in this industry. “Huawei’s skills development initiative is incredible and we are partnering with them to make sure we get more young people skilled and accredited for the sector,” she said.

In addition, industry players also shared their experiences. For example, Bui Power Plant in Ghana shared the latest insights into PV and energy storage trends in their organisations and how Huawei technologies are contributing to their success.

In conclusion, Leo Chen expressed Huawei’s commitment to Africa. He said, “Working with various partners, over the past two decades, Huawei has brought ubiquitous connectivity to Africa. In the next two decades, Huawei is aiming to bring ubiquitous green power to the continent.”

04.25.23

AI could be behind the next creative revolution in advertising

BY 6 MINUTE READ

Little more than a month after OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT went viral for its ability to write essays and poems, all in humanlike text, Ryan Reynolds did what he does best and played it for an advertising gag. In an ad for Mint Mobile, he asked ChatGPT to write a commercial in his voice, with a checklist of using a joke, a curse word, and letting people know about Mint’s holiday promotion. The result, in Reynolds’s IRL words, was “eerie” and “mildly terrifying.”

Although very funny and true to form, it also embodied a broader impression of how advertising embraces anything new with a predictably gimmick-led frivolity. Even this week, Hendrick’s Gin dropped a generative AI spoof called ChatG&T.

As with seemingly every creative industry (including journalism), the introduction of ChatGPT last fall kicked off within the advertising industry a larger conversation about whether large language models and generative AI were friend or foe. There are doomsayers who view it as a threat to their very livelihood—ads made by machines!—while others see a unique opportunity to become more effective creative partners for brands.

With AI hype continuing unabated and the ad world somewhat quiet, at least publicly, about what AI means for its future, I spoke to some of its leading experimenters and strategists to get a sense of whether AI is viewed as just a gimmick to riff off, an existential threat, or something else entirely.

Dickon Laws, Ogilvy’s global head of innovation, offers an instructive framework for the narrative arc around new technologies and how they’re adopted that serves as an effective mental model for how creative agencies should be approaching AI adoption. It starts, he says, with the Magpie Moment, when something new and shiny gets our attention. Then comes the Napster Moment, when we get super excited by the technology because it’s new—and maybe doing something a little bit illicit. Next comes the Cambridge Analytica Moment, the WTF moment when the tech gets abused, and legislation, regulation, and compliance enter the picture. Finally, there’s the Spotify Moment, when the technology is normalized and viewed mainly in terms of the benefit it provides.

“We’re going through that curve at the moment,” Laws says, “and we’ve got to protect our clients from being too caught up in the Magpie and Napster moments, to evade the Cambridge Analytica moment, and get to the Spotify moment with minimum brand risk.”

With the market for AI in marketing predicted to be more than $35 billion next year and some experts expecting that to exceed $100 billion before the end of this decade, the challenge to navigate without incident from Magpie to Spotify is profound. This applies not only to individual agencies but also to the entire advertising and marketing world. The current state of play is more encouraging than skeptics might expect of an industry that’s no longer considered at the leading edge of innovation and cultural cachet. But it’s also not as far past the dabbling and strategy stage as it should be given the speed at which AI adoption and capabilities are accelerating.

CHANGE, NOT DIE

AKQA, a WPP-owned global agency network that’s perhaps best known for its rise to global player from its digital shop roots in the early 2000s, has been playing around with creative uses for AI for a number of years. In 2019, the agency fed a neural network short descriptions and rules from roughly 400 different sports, then refined the results to create a whole new sport called Speedgate. More recently, as generative AI tools have entered the mainstream, it used them last summer to create work for Nike featuring Serena Williams.

In December, as AI mania took off in the wake of ChatGPT’s launch, the agency turned GoFundMe’s traditional year-end digital report into an art-inspired film called Help Changes Everything. It worked with the L.A.-based AI artist and director Paul Trillo to generate the campaign’s visuals, using a combination of OpenAI’s DALL-E and its rival image generator Stable Diffusion to do so.

AKQA founder and CEO Ajaz Ahmed says that the cost of the work was 65% less than if it had been done using conventional means. “A project like that just wouldn’t have been possible for GoFundMe prior to having access to these new tools,” he says. “And the speed in which we could have done a project like that would have taken a year or more, but it took a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost, because we’re employing the new tools.”

So for Ahmed, the rise of AI is a boon to his firm’s ability to serve a wider array of clients—and a broader spectrum of budgets—while delivering work that can be produced more quickly so as to hit the cultural zeitgeist.

“AI is changing the way agencies and clients work, and it’s not going to eliminate them,” Ahmed says. “We see the use of these tools as liberating and democratizing creativity, because it means that a lot of the routine tasks can now be done by machine, so we can put more of our effort into imagination and ideation rather than being swept up in elements of production that can be automated incredibly cost effectively.”

OKAY, COMPUTER

That desire to hand off the drudge work to AI is animating much of the industry.

Nilesh Ashra, founder and CEO of OK Tomorrow, a consultancy that creates content on new tech and cultural trends for brands and companies, sees the challenge facing creative marketers and ad agencies like so: Imagine they could make exactly what they’re making today, but with way less effort. What do they do with all that spare energy?

“If you’re a senior marketer today, and you see how distracting, chaotic, and confusing the creative advertising landscape is, and then you look at how hard talent retention and culture has been these last few years, there is going to be a future where we all have a very capable assistant,” says Ashra, who just so happens to have a bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence and spent the better part of a decade leading creative technology at Wieden+Kennedy.

“If that starts by lifting all the grunt work of administration and operational management,” he adds, “it should clear space for the most valuable product in our industry, which is original thinking.”

Similarly, Mike Creighton, director of experience innovation at the Stagwell-owned digital shop Instrument, which works with such brands as Nike, Salesforce, and Levi’s, says that after looking at how these tools can help with various administrative duties, the biggest unlock in how they think about AI isn’t how it can be used directly to create new work, but how it can help in the existing creative process.

Creighton sees generative AI like ChatGPT as an incredibly powerful, always-on creative assistant.

“It’s not about saying, ‘Write me some copy.’ It’s about, “Okay, I need to understand this concept better, how can I rephrase this thing so that my audience can understand it?’ All of a sudden, you’ve got this wonderful thing and you can tell it what you want it to be,” Creighton says.

Instrument teams use tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney to rapidly and efficiently create storyboards. “It’s a really quick way to communicate an idea because you’re using words you have, attributes in your head, you have feelings in your head, and it’s just such a great way to output that stuff,” he says. “That becomes a significant jumping-off point for additional creativity. That’s the real power of it. It’s not about the output right now. It’s . . . the creative process that makes this so special.”

IT’S BUSINESS TIME

The agencies that are truly working to integrate these tools across their organization are finding that it’s not just changing how their creative teams work, but how they’re working with other parts of the business. Ogilvy’s Laws says that there is now a more important role for the legal and commercial and compliance teams. The lack of regulation around AI and the ethics of how generative AI uses data means that legal teams who traditionally have served more of a support function within the agency now need to work much more closely with clients and creative teams so that they don’t walk into a minefield around what led an AI to produce a given image and who holds the rights to that source material.

Looking ahead, all the agency sources I spoke to were most excited about how they will soon be able to train these generative AI tools on proprietary data from their brand clients and their own body of work in order to create even more customized results.

“We can train it on Ogilvy’s own culture and philosophies about how we think about creativity,” Laws says. “Then our AI becomes a tool that clients and brands will buy into because actually it’s a differentiator for us rather than just being, ‘Oh, anybody could have plugged this into Midjourney.’ We’ve got to think about things in an independent way.”

While many in marketing and advertising see this as a transformational time for their industry that is progressing incredibly quickly, there is still trepidation in some circles as to how it should be used. Unlike the digital, mobile, or even social eras, when it was more about the platforms on which their work would appear, this new era cuts to how they function to create that work in the first place.

OK Tomorrow’s Ashra advises any agency or creative person to start experimenting now—or risk becoming the next Kodak or Blockbuster.

“This isn’t technology that you can easily explain how it works, and I think that’s a bit of a wall, but I would encourage anyone not to let the technology narrative drive your decision-making here,” he says. “If you’re making stuff, either at an organizational or a personal level, it’s really important to jump in. The barrier to entry is so comically low, you just have to press a button to get into it.

FastCompany

03.24.23

TikTok CEO vs US Congress: Inside the fight against TikTok

BY 3 MINUTE READ

Give Shou Zi Chew credit for one thing. During his testimony before House lawmakers Thursday, the TikTok CEO managed to do something no politician or pundit has been able to achieve in decades: Bridge the political gap.

“You have unified Republicans and Democrats and if only for a day, we’re actually unified because we have serious concerns,” Texas Rep. August Pfluger, a Republican, told the social media executive, underlining the grave concerns both parties expressed during his nearly five-hour-long-appearance before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Chew was hammered throughout the day, as politicians peppered him with an exhaustive line of questioning on everything from user privacy to national security. The interrogation comes as the government weighs a possible ban on the company.

If you weren’t able to keep up with the testimony, here are a few highlights.

THE TONE WAS SET EARLY ON

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State, a Republican, was the first to question Chew and asked him almost immediately to state “with 100% certainty” that the Chinese government couldn’t use the app as a surveillance tool on American citizens or manipulate the content they see. Chew replied that firewalls keep U.S. user data from “all unwanted foreign access” and “free from any manipulation from any government.”

Rodgers wasn’t satisfied.

“If you can’t say it 100% certain, I take that as a ‘no,’” she said.

Other panel members were just as skeptical. New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, a Democrat, told Chew, “I still believe that the Beijing communist government will still control and have the ability to influence what you do.”

CHINA’S SUPPORT COULDN’T HAVE COME AT A WORSE TIME

While one of Chew’s goals was to demonstrate that China has no influence on TikTok, that effort was undercut by a statement from the country’s government right before his testimony started that it would firmly oppose a sale of the company. Several representatives brought that up during their questioning.

“The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] believes they have the final say over your company,” Rep. Rodgers said. “I have zero confidence in your assertion that ByteDance and TikTok are not beholden to the CCP.”

TIKTOK VERSUS FACEBOOK

While Mark Zuckerberg was likely happy with the attention placed on his biggest social media rival, Chew wasn’t about to let Meta escape criticism. Asked if he would be willing to divest TikTok from Chinese ownership, he batted that idea down, pointing out one of U.S.-based Facebook’s biggest black eye—the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

A THREAT TO COMMITTEE CHAIR CATHY RODGERS

Florida Rep. Kat Cammack, a Republican, caught Chew off guard by showcasing a TikTok video that showed a video of a gun being cocked and appeared to threaten Rep. Rodgers, naming her in a hashtag and giving the date of today’s hearing. That post, she said, had been on the platform for more than a month.

“This video has been up for 41 days. It is a direct threat to the chairwoman of this committee, the people in this room, and yet it still remains on the platform,” she said. “And you expect us to believe that you are capable of maintaining the data security, privacy, and security of 150 million Americans, where you can’t even protect the people in this room?”

After a break, the video was immediately removed.

ZHANG YIMING REMAINED AS MYSTERIOUS AS EVER

The ByteDance cofounder lost his CEO title during China’s tech crackdown in 2021, but is said to still be involved with the decision-making at TikTok’s parent company. But there were virtually no mentions of him during Thursday’s back-and-forth.

He came up at the end of the day, but only briefly—a surprising absence, given the little officials seem to know about the power structure at the company.

CHEW SEEMINGLY FAILED TO CALM TENSIONS

Despite his best efforts, Chew did not manage to ease lawmakers’ fears about the social media app.

Delaware Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Democrat, seemed to speak for the committee when she told him, “I learned that you have personalized data, advertising for kids as young as 13. And we’ve heard until Project Texas is supposedly stood up, engineers in China still have access to personal data. . . . I think that really summarizes why you see so much bipartisan consensus and concerns about your company. And I imagine that it’s not going away anytime soon.”

After the hearing wrapped up, Senators Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat, and John Thune of South Dakota, a Republican, confirmed that Chew’s testimony hadn’t cooled the situation down at all, issuing a joint statement saying, “Under PRC law, all Chinese companies, including TikTok, whose parent company is based in Beijing, are ultimately required to do the bidding of Chinese intelligence services, should they be called to do so. Nothing we heard from Mr. Chew today assuaged those concerns.”

By Chris Morris

FastCompany