ABSTRACT
Before Google, search engines struggled to build sustainable business models around the activity of their users. This allows new business models to emerge and rewrites many of the rules of competition. The rise of digital platforms and the business models that have emerged from them will dominate many commercial sectors in the 2020s. As recent research from Stanford University has shown, between 2017 and 2019 the time required to train a large image classification system fell from 3 hours to 88 seconds. A recent investigation by The New York Times demonstrated how easy it was to access the movements of millions of mobile phone users around the US via a digital marketing company that quietly sells this data on to interested parties. A growing global population, dwindling natural resources and climate change demand that the private and public sectors work together to ensure the survival of humanity.
