Eric Lamarre: “One of the core questions CEOs have is: “Is this worth it? How long is it going to take?” We analyzed 20 of what I would call the best of the best companies that have executed tech and AI transformations very well. Three numbers stood out. First, they achieve about a 20 percent EBITDA uplift on average from their AI-focused efforts. And that value typically comes from two or three areas at most. There’s an extreme focus on the economic leverage points. Second, one to two years to pay back. In some instances, like Freeport, it was well below a year. On average, though, it takes one to two years before you’re in the green and then you can continue to innovate…And third, for every dollar invested, they got about three dollars of EBITDA. You don’t often see returns like that. Why do they get those returns? Because they focus on the economic leverage points, places in the business model where even a small improvement through AI drives massive value.”
WSJ (Acquired) on Ferrari: “On the surface, this strategy of scarcity and tantalizing exclusivity seems remarkably similar to the classic playbook of other storied luxury brands, as if Ferrari’s cars are just Hermès bags and Rolex watches on four wheels. But Ferrari has something that Hermès and Rolex could never cultivate: hordes of screaming fans who worship the brand from the time they can say vroom-vroom…Despite selling a grand total of 330,000 cars over the course of its entire history, Ferrari boasts more than 400 million fans around the world. And no company has a higher ratio of people who know about its products to people who actually own those products. Far from cheapening the brand, Ferrari’s rabid base of superfans only enhances the brand’s appeal to clients who can afford to pay millions of dollars for a car they will rarely drive.”
FT: “Asia’s technology sector is undergoing a shift. The era dominated by consumer apps, from ecommerce marketplaces to ride-hailing platforms, has been giving way to a wave of start-ups focused on applying AI to established industries. Many of the fastest growing companies in the Asia-Pacific region are emerging from this shift.”
NYTimes: “In just six months, a team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine designed a personalized therapy that could correct the single misspelled letter in KJ’s DNA using a gene editing technology known as CRISPR. To get the therapy inside KJ’s cells, doctors relied on the same kind of mRNA technology that powered the Covid-19 vaccines…Recent advances in mRNA science and CRISPR gene editing mean that the approach that helped KJ could be used for other children. The technology can be reprogrammed for different diseases by inputting a short stretch of genetic code that tells the molecular machinery exactly where to make its correction. Build the system once, and you can redirect it to a new disease by changing that one piece.”
