TotalEnergies to Sell 50% Stake in Polish Biogas Unit to HitecVision
TotalEnergies SE agreed to sell a 50% stake in its Polish biogas production business to Norwegian investment firm HitecVision AS as part of the oil major's strategy to boost return on its renewables investments.
The planned stake sale in Polska Grupa Biogazowa at an enterprise value of €190 million ($214 million) is subject to government and regulatory approval, TotalEnergies said in a statement on Wednesday. Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the French firm was working on the sale of interests in its Polish and French renewable gas.
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Forbes
35 minutes ago
- Forbes
13 Big Hunches On AI And Consultants
The Scream', 1893. The Scream is one of four versions painted by Edward Munch in 1893. The ghostly, ... More agonised figure against the background of a red sunset is one of the most well known images in the world of art - a symbol of despair and alienation. From the Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo. Artist Edvard Munch. (Photo by Art Media/The) Nathaniel Whittemore has some thoughts about consulting in the AI era. For those who might not know, Whittemore is the intrepid host of AI Daily Brief, a podcast I tend to pay attention to as we move through a profound technological shift that has most of us looking for answers. In a rare episode of the podcast where he acknowledged being on the road, Whittemore went through his own LinkedIn post about consulting companies, to glean some predictions and insights (13 of them) on how these firms will work as AI continues to take hold. Chunks of legal and accounting work, he suggested, will get sent to AI (that's #1) calling them 'total bye-byes.' Consulting, he said, will 'distill' things into a targeted set of realities around AI. He described a kind of musical chairs (that's #2) where companies will move into other market areas, big firms to mid-market, etc. as the change happens. As for the displacement of humans, Whittemore spoke to a demand for external validation that, he suggested, will keep the HITL (human in the loop) in play. Enterprises will divide into two categories, either slicing headcount, or use a 'flexible roster' of partners, consultants and fellow travelers. 'Personally, I'm pretty inclined towards smaller, more liberal organizations powered by a flexible roster of partners and consultants,' he said, 'because I think it aligns also with people's (takes) on their professional services, figuring out how far they can take it with AI.' Then there's Whittemore's theorization of new products and new lines of business, as well as 'new practices' (that's #4 on the list, read the list for the others.) His caveat: these predictions are 'ridiculously generic' and nobody really knows what the future holds. 'I think the way that this plays out is going to be pretty enterprise by enterprise,' he said. In the second half of the podcast, he suggested that business people are going to be 'Jerry Macguiring,' where they start to have a different picture of enterprise value. He talked about small teams of consultants managing large swarming agents as a 'default model' and suggested that 'pricing experiments' are going to become common. Buyers, he concluded, are going to prioritize intangibles. Here's another of Whittemore's points: people want to work with people who they like working with, or, in the parlance of his list, 'j𝘂𝗱𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁, 𝘁𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗘𝗤𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗹𝘀𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗺𝗼𝗮𝘁𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁𝘀.' (That's #10). More from Whittemore: the value of prototyping, a prediction of companies operating in what he called 'iteration-land,' and an advantage to parties who can build frameworks for the AI future. 'Continuous iteration requires data measurement, analytics, and systems,' he said, 'to make sense of it all: I think these are table stakes aspects of engagements, now that consultants and professional services firms just have to build in an understanding and an expectation of how they're going to measure their impact.' There's a lot of insight here, and if you want to go back and read the whole thing over again, I wouldn't blame you. Whittemore goes over a lot of his analysis at lightning speed. But you do see certain things crop up time and time again – The idea that rapid change is going to shake out in certain ways, and that companies and people need to pivot as our AI revolution keeps heating up. Check it out.
Bloomberg
an hour ago
- Bloomberg
China and US Continue Trade Talks in London
Trade talks between the US and China got underway this afternoon in London. The Trump administration is signaling a willingness to remove restrictions on exports imposed as part of its global trade war in exchange for assurances that China is easing limits on rare earth shipments. The meeting is expected to extend into the UK evening and might spill into Tuesday. The first round of negotiations since the teams met a month ago is aimed at restoring confidence that both are living up to commitments made in Geneva, where a temporary truce was reached. That deal was seen as largely benefiting Beijing. Kevin Hassett, head of the White House's National Economic Council, appeared to indicate the US is willing to offer more concessions, though he added it would stop short of including the most sophisticated artificial intelligence chips made by Nvidia as part of any deal.
Harvard Business Review
an hour ago
- Harvard Business Review
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Customer experience is undergoing a paradigm shift. Consumers no longer want one-way communications with little interaction. Now, they want to engage with businesses and brands as they do with their families and friends. They want to have a conversation. As a result, organizations must offer more conversational experiences. But how can they do this? When a retailer offers a chatbot to communicate with customers and solve their queries, or when a bank sends an SMS for two-factor authentication before allowing a customer into their account, it is likely that a communications platform as a service (CPaaS) is behind it. Because customer experience determines success, organizations need to communicate with their customers on the right channel at the right time. CPaaS enables organizations to digitize and personalize such customer experiences. In this interview, Silvio Kutić, CEO of global communications platform Infobip, discusses why he started the company and describes his route to success, the trends changing customer experiences, and what these trends mean for businesses and brands. In 2001 and 2002, I started a project with friends in Vodnjan, Croatia, called the Virtual Municipality. It had many elements of today's social networks, enabling locals to communicate with local institutions, associations, clubs, and schools via SMS and email. People could see when their football team was playing, or what was happening in town on a specific date. After that project failed, I launched My Net, a company designed to offer a system based on content management, geographic information, and mobile communications, based on the Microsoft and Linux platforms and using open standards to ensure usability and upgradeability. This project also failed. In November 2003, I launched the first version of Infobip with Izabel Jelenić, my co-founder, as a communications API platform. We went through two versions before starting Infobip Version 3 in 2006, with a modest loan of around €25,000 from my parents. We bootstrapped the company and took no external investment until five years ago. In 2020, we raised $300 million from One Equity Partners, achieving a billion-dollar valuation and becoming Croatia's first unicorn. It sounds counterintuitive, but failure is often the key to success. I tried two versions of Infobip before launching the third version, which has grown into the global business it is today. We carry this attitude into everything we do. We learn by doing. Having launched my first project when I was still a student, and then launching this version of Infobip without management experience, I effectively started my internship as the CEO of Infobip. I've learned how to lead the company from a handful of employees and clients to more than 3,400 employees across 75 countries and working with organizations like Meta and Uber. What trends are changing customer experiences and communications? The world is going conversational. There are demographic shifts to messaging: 90% of Gen Z would rather text than call. In addition, rich messaging channels that offer more engaging and memorable experiences are enabling all-in-one applications. Consumers no longer want to download and open multiple apps to communicate with a brand or solve an issue. They want to use the channel they already use with their family and friends. As a result, customer experiences are shifting to rich business messaging. Last, generative AI is helping deliver more personalized communications while reducing operational costs for organizations. So two-way conversational experiences are rapidly becoming the norm for customer communications. By creating a richer and more proactive experiences, we expect to see two-way conversations scale hugely across the customer journey, whether for marketing, sales, or support. Such experiences help break down barriers and enable brands to build understanding and engagement. With AI and generative AI, innovative brands can provide a friction-free and intelligent customer experience that retains a human feel. Such conversational AI offers a winning blend of efficiency, personalization, and scalability, making it an asset for businesses and brands across sectors. By using it, firms can boost customer experiences and gain a competitive edge. Organizations see a four-fold increase in conversion rates from two-way conversations and report a 30% decrease in customer support costs from implementing conversational AI. That's why we've invested in conversational AI through our AI Hub and RCS Business Messaging Solution to deliver a more visionary service. Delivering such innovation for customers means staying nimble. At Infobip, we are organized in small cross-functional teams that stay close to customers to innovate in the sectors in which we operate. For instance, throughout much of 2023, we were working on generative AI projects before and as the buzz around the technology picked up. We expect agentic AI, or a collection of intelligent automated agents, to help deliver advanced customer journeys. As a result, we are actively integrating generative AI and agentic AI into our platform and evolving our approach to help organizations transform digitally in many business sectors, such as retail and eCommerce, finance, telecommunications, healthcare, logistics and transportation, and many more.
