AI Research

AI’s biggest impact on your workforce is still to come – 3 ways to avoid getting left behind

Published

2 months ago

July 18, 2025

Mihaela Rosu/Getty Images

If you think AI has already irrevocably changed your role, think again. The full impact of AI on professional responsibilities will be felt in the months and years ahead.

That’s the opinion of Kirsty Roth, chief operations and technology officer at business information services specialist Thomson Reuters, who reflected on her firm’s recently released research into the use of AI in modern enterprises.

Also: Most AI projects are abandoned – 5 ways to ensure your data efforts succeed

The Future of Professionals Survey, which polled 2,275 professionals and C-level executives from more than 50 countries, found that 80% of respondents believe AI will have a high or even transformational impact on their work over the next five years. Almost two-fifths (38%) expect to see those changes in their organization this year.

“These are people in normal day jobs,” she said. “We’re not just talking about engineers or technologists. We’re talking about professionals in all lines of business who are already using AI.”

Roth reflected on the pace of change and suggested that AI adoption rates are much faster than in earlier digital transformation waves, such as those for e-commerce or cloud computing.

The survey found that more than half (55%) of professionals have either experienced significant changes in their work in the past year or anticipate major shifts in the coming year.

Also: 4 questions to ask yourself before betting on AI in your business – and why

However, Roth told ZDNET that these AI adoption rates are just the beginning, and professionals and their bosses should brace for further change.

“The impact will be huge,” she said. “What’s more, we haven’t seen the full effect yet. These are early days for AI.”

Roth, who is driving AI-enabled transformation in her own business, said business leaders should focus on three areas as they prepare for change.

Step 1: Make AI accessible

Roth said business leaders must ensure their staff can access the best possible tools depending on their area of work.

Thomson Reuters’ research suggests almost half (46%) of organizations have invested in new AI-powered technology within the past year, and 30% of professionals regularly use AI to start or edit their work.

Roth said companies that don’t explore which tools are right for a specific role won’t be able to reap the benefits of AI.

“Ensure everyone in your company has access to AI and is using it,” she said.

Also: AI agents will change work and society in internet-sized ways, says AWS VP

“Many people talk about the revenue or efficiency opportunities from emerging technology. I think the key thing to recognize is that professionals who aren’t using AI will quickly find themselves unable to do their work.”

Survey respondents who said their leaders were leading by example were 1.7 times more likely to see benefits from AI compared to those who said their leaders were not.

Roth said everyone in the organization must learn about AI’s uses and potential impact: “We all have a duty to stay on top of these changes, or we won’t be employed in the future.”

Step 2: Share best practices

While more than half (53%) of survey respondents said they believed their organization already experiences some benefits from AI, almost a third (30%) said their company is moving too slowly in AI adoption.

The research suggested that the pursuit of return on investment from AI must be a collaborative effort among leaders, professionals, and support staff.

Also: 4 ways to turn AI into your business advantage

“Find a good way to share best practices,” said Roth. “You typically find there are good, creative people in pockets of the company that come up with clever ways to use AI across more advanced use cases.”

However, she warned other business leaders that those smart ideas are useless if they’re locked away in confined areas. “Get those things shared and ensure people understand what’s working and what’s not.”

Step 3: Talk to your peers

Roth also encouraged business leaders and professionals to look beyond the firewall.

The research found that organizations with a visible AI strategy are almost four times more likely to benefit from AI than firms without significant adoption plans.

She said business and digital leaders who communicate with their industry peers about their AI strategy will gain valuable insights.

“I talk to my peers all the time in different types of companies as to what they’re doing and what’s working for them. You’ll get an awful lot of intelligence like that.”

Also: 5 entry-level tech jobs AI is already augmenting, according to Amazon

Roth said the good news is that her conversations with other CIOs suggest there is broad recognition of AI’s potential.

“They just need to ensure they’ve got leadership support to push their changes through, and a handful of the right people to help them think through what use cases are going to work and how to get the transformation underway.”

Tracking and tracing the benefits of AI

Thomson Reuters’ research suggests the benefits for companies that encourage, foster, and develop a burgeoning professional interest in AI are significant.

Survey respondents predicted that AI will save them five hours weekly or about 240 hours in the next year, for an average annual value of $19,000 per professional.

However, proving your organization is delivering these kinds of results isn’t straightforward.

Also: 5 ways to be great AI agent manager, according to business leaders

Roth said her experiences suggest many companies struggle to understand where people spend their workdays and how AI can help them save time.

That’s a problem when one of the oft-repeated claims about AI is that it helps people reduce the administrative burden and focus on so-called higher-value tasks.

“What we’re discovering is that if you ask people, they aren’t very good at guessing how AI saves them time,” she said.

Roth said business leaders who ensure their workforce isn’t left behind as the AI transformation accelerates find ways to track and trace the benefits.

“You’ve got to make sure that usage is clear. A simple example is that when we started, we just said, ‘Are people using the tools?’ That was a high-level question,” she said.

“Now we are much more specific and ask, ‘Are people using tools every day? Are they a core part of the way they work? Are they using them for a certain amount of time in the day?’ Success is about having much more insight on how AI tools are used in someone’s day-to-day workflow versus just summarizing one meeting.”

Also: The AI complexity paradox: More productivity, more responsibilities

Roth gave an example from her own business. Engineers using AI to speed up their coding time exponentially have more time to focus on higher-value tasks, which she said include developing new ideas and business models.

“What we’re starting to see with our best engineers is that some of the simple things, like coding and testing, are being reduced significantly,” she said.

“Therefore, they’ve got more time to think about, ‘OK, what’s next? What do I want to build after this? And what does my customer want me to put in the product that’s coming next?’ Shifting their time allocation like that is a big benefit.”

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AI Research

The Energy Monster AI Is Creating

Published

5 hours ago

September 6, 2025

Irina Slav

We don’t really know how much energy artificial intelligence is consuming. There aren’t any laws currently on the books requiring AI companies to disclose their energy usage or environmental impact, and most firms therefore opt to keep that controversial information close to the vest. Plus, large language models are evolving all the time, increasing in both complexity and efficiency, complicating outside efforts to quantify the sector’s energy footprint. But while we don’t know exactly how much electricity data centers are eating up to power ever-increasing AI integration, we do know that it’s a whole lot.

“AI’s integration into almost everything from customer service calls to algorithmic “bosses” to warfare is fueling enormous demand,” the Washington Post recently reported. “Despite dramatic efficiency improvements, pouring those gains back into bigger, hungrier models powered by fossil fuels will create the energy monster we imagine.”

And that energy monster is weighing heavily on the minds of policymakers around the world. Global leaders are busily wringing their hands over the potentially disastrous impact AI could have on energy security, especially in countries like Ireland, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia, where planned data center development outpaces planned energy capacity.

In a rush to keep ahead of a critical energy shortage, public and private entities involved on both the tech and energy sides of the issue have been rushing to increase energy production capacities by any means. Countries are in a rush to build new power plants as well as to keep existing energy projects online beyond their planned closure dates. Many of these projects are fossil fuel plants, causing outcry that indiscriminate integration of artificial intelligence is undermining the decarbonization goals of nations and tech firms the world over.

“From the deserts of the United Arab Emirates to the outskirts of Ireland’s capital, the energy demands of AI applications and training running through these centres are driving the surge of investment into fossil fuels,” reports the Financial Times. Globally, more than 85 gas-powered facilities are currently being built to meet AI’s energy demand according to figures from Global Energy Monitor.

In the United States, the demand surge is leading to the resurrection of old coal plants. Coal has been in terminal decline for years now in the U.S., and a large number of defunct plants are scattered around the country with valuable infrastructure that could lend itself to a speedy new power plant hookup. Thanks to the AI revolution, many of these plants are now set to come back online as natural gas-fired plants. While gas is cleaner than coal, the coal-to-gas route may come at the expense of clean energy projects that could have otherwise used the infrastructure and coveted grid hookups of defunct coal-fired power plants.

“Our grid isn’t short on opportunity — it’s short on time,” Carson Kearl, Enverus senior analyst for energy and AI, recently told Fortune. “These grid interconnections are up for grabs for new power projects when these coal plants roll off. The No. 1 priority for Big Tech has changed to [speed] to energy, and this is the fastest way to go in a lot of cases,” Kearl continued.

Last year, Google stated that the company’s carbon emissions had skyrocketed by a whopping 48 percent over the last five years thanks to its AI integration. “AI-powered services involve considerably more computer power – and so electricity – than standard online activity, prompting a series of warnings about the technology’s environmental impact,” the BBC reported last summer. Google had previously pledged to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but the company now concedes that “as we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging.”

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

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AI Research

Who is Shawn Shen? The Cambridge alumnus and ex-Meta scientist offering $2M to poach AI researchers

Published

5 hours ago

September 6, 2025

Apeksha Tanwar

Shawn Shen, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Memories.ai, has made headlines for offering compensation packages worth up to $2 million to attract researchers from top technology companies. In a recent interview with Business Insider, Shen explained that many scientists are leaving Meta, the parent company of Facebook, due to constant reorganisations and shifting priorities.“Meta is constantly doing reorganizations. Your manager and your goals can change every few months. For some researchers, it can be really frustrating and feel like a waste of time,” Shen told Business Insider, adding that this is a key reason why researchers are seeking roles at startups. He also cited Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s philosophy that “the biggest risk is not taking any risks” as a motivation for his own move into entrepreneurship.With Memories.ai, a company developing AI capable of understanding and remembering visual data, Shen is aiming to build a niche team of elite researchers. His company has already recruited Chi-Hao Wu, a former Meta research scientist, as Chief AI Officer, and is in talks with other researchers from Meta’s Superintelligence Lab as well as Google DeepMind.

From full scholarships to Cambridge classrooms

Shen’s academic journey is rooted in engineering, supported consistently by merit-based scholarships. He studied at Dulwich College from 2013 to 2016 on a full scholarship, completing his A-Level qualifications.He then pursued higher education at the University of Cambridge, where he was awarded full scholarships throughout. Shen earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Engineering (2016–2019), followed by a Master of Engineering (MEng) at Trinity College (2019–2020). He later continued at Cambridge as a Meta PhD Fellow, completing his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Engineering between 2020 and 2023.

Early career: Internships in finance and research

Alongside his academic pursuits, Shen gained early experience through internships and analyst roles in finance. He worked as a Quantitative Research Summer Analyst at Killik & Co in London (2017) and as an Investment Banking Summer Analyst at Morgan Stanley in Shanghai (2018).Shen also interned as a Research Scientist at the Computational and Biological Learning Lab at the University of Cambridge (2019), building the foundations for his transition into advanced AI research.

From Meta’s Reality Labs to academia

After completing his PhD, Shen joined Meta (Reality Labs Research) in Redmond, Washington, as a Research Scientist (2022–2024). His time at Meta exposed him to cutting-edge work in generative AI, but also to the frustrations of frequent corporate restructuring. This experience eventually drove him toward building his own company.In April 2024, Shen began his academic career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Bristol, before launching Memories.ai in October 2024.

Betting on talent with $2M offers

Explaining his company’s aggressive hiring packages, Shen told Business Insider: “It’s because of the talent war that was started by Mark Zuckerberg. I used to work at Meta, and I speak with my former colleagues often about this. When I heard about their compensation packages, I was shocked — it’s really in the tens of millions range. But it shows that in this age, AI researchers who make the best models and stand at the frontier of technology are really worth this amount of money.”Shen noted that Memories.ai is looking to recruit three to five researchers in the next six months, followed by up to ten more within a year. The company is prioritising individuals willing to take a mix of equity and cash, with Shen emphasising that these recruits would be treated as founding members rather than employees.By betting heavily on talent, Shen believes Memories.ai will be in a strong position to secure additional funding and establish itself in the competitive AI landscape.His bold $2 million offers may raise eyebrows, but they also underline a larger truth: in today’s technology race, the fiercest competition is not for customers or capital, it’s for talent.

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JUPITER: Europe’s First Exascale Supercomputer Powers AI and Climate Research | Ukraine news

Published

5 hours ago

September 6, 2025

Межа

The Jupiter supercomputer at the Jülich Research Centre, Germany, September 5, 2025.
Getty Images/INA FASSBENDER/AFP

As reported by the European Commission’s press service

At the Jülich Research Center in Germany, on September 5, the ceremonial opening of the supercomputer JUPITER took place – the first in Europe to surpass the exaflop performance threshold. The system is capable of performing more than one quintillion operations per second, according to the European Commission’s press service.

According to the EU, JUPITER runs entirely on renewable energy sources and features advanced cooling and heat disposal systems. It also topped the Green500 global energy-efficiency ranking.

The supercomputer is located on a site covering more than 2,300 square meters and comprises about 50 modular containers. It is currently the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the world.

JUPITER is capable of running high-resolution climate and meteorological models with kilometer-scale resolution, which allows more accurate forecasts of extreme events – from heat waves to floods.

Role in the European AI ecosystem and industrial developments

In addition, the system will form the backbone of the future European AI factory JAIF, which will train large language models and other generative technologies.

The investment in JUPITER amounts to about 500 million euros – a joint project of the EU and Germany under the EuroHPC programme. This is part of a broader strategy to build a network of AI gigafactories that will provide industry and science with the capabilities to develop new models and technologies.

It is expected that the deployment of JUPITER will strengthen European research-industrial initiatives and enhance the EU’s competitiveness on the global stage in the field of artificial intelligence and scientific developments.

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