Tech for Good

Shortly I will be joining several hundreds of my Atos colleagues in Madrid for our annual expert convention. I am excited this year to be given the job of hosting a panel session on ‘Technology for Good’ together with Atos experts, partners and start-ups.

This session is particularly timely! Recently Atos CEO, Thierry Breton blogged about Atos's raison d'être, explaining that the “era of move fast and breaking things” is now over. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) or automation, have the potential to deeply transform our societies. And this can have positive effects but on the other end, potential inequalities may arise.

The Atos Scientific Community describes this as ‘Digital Dilemmas’ in its latest thought leadership report:  the tensions between the capabilities of technology and the ethical boundaries of whether we should implement them. The question of ‘Could we?’ do something with digital must now be tempered with that of ‘Should we?’ A responsible and human-centric approach to anticipating the impact of technology innovation is key to businesses’ success as stated in the report.

The round-table gives us an opportunity to explore how to address topics that impact our society such as energy and resource consumption, age and disability, and what this means in terms of corporate social responsibility. Energy efficiency, and accessibility fall into the category of technical implementations that ‘we should’ and during the sessions we will discuss examples where Atos and its partners are already active and explore further initiatives.

Technology allows us to deliver a cleaner, more efficient, more equitable world but we need to consciously design it to be so. I hope to be able to energize the community of experts and partners gathered in Madrid to increase their awareness on their responsibility to consider the potential impact of the technologies they design and implement, upon our society.

Stay tuned with my next blog where I’ll share more insights from these sessions!