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Why the future of work is agentic | Computer Weekly

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Why the future of work is agentic | Computer Weekly


While artificial intelligence (AI) was certainly the top topic of discussion during Forrester’s Technology & Innovation Summit, the conversation appears to have moved on. In preparation for the era of agentic AI, organisations are starting to consider where employees fit; where to use contractors and external service providers; and what tasks should be AI-enabled internally.

In a blog post to tie in with the event, Forrester research director Mark Moccia wrote about how a third of CIOs will adopt “gig worker protocols”, where IT teams comprise AI agents, gig workers and employees with multiple jobs.

In his keynote presentation at the Technology & Innovation Summit, Manuel Geitz, Forrester principal analyst, discussed how business and technology leaders should prepare for this shift. “You start by really understanding which expertise you need to drive your business model,” he told attendees.

For Geitz, IT leaders can get their organisations ready for workflows that may be split between internal staff, external contractors and AI agents by capturing the knowledge using structured data ontologies, to make expertise machine readable. He suggested delegates can then begin to experiment with business models that monetise this expertise on demand, eventually building a platform, where AI agents become the front line for knowledge delivery, supported by humans.

The idea of a gig economy using AI agents is something that appears to be gaining traction among industry commentators. In a recent conversation with Computer Weekly, Jessica Apotheker, managing director and chief marketing officer at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), discussed how the marketing function – which tends to draw on both external and internal expertise – could evolve with an agentic AI workflow. As an example, she discussed the content production workflow.

“There’s a tonne of external people working in the content work group,” she said. “There’s creative agencies, production agencies, localisation agencies. There’s internal people and local marketers, and there’s the tech people. All these people need to come together and reinvent.” 

According to Apotheker, this is because AI has the potential to change the content workflow process. IT and business decision-makers need to reconsider what parts of the process they want to own and what parts can be automated, or should be outsourced to a service provider who may well use AI and automation to complete the work: “What is the part of the workflow I think I need to strategically own and transform, and how will that connect with what I actually outsource or potentially automate myself?”

Putting a price on value

Research from BCG suggests organisations that are seeing significant business benefits from deploying AI tend to be AI-first, which means business leaders reconsider the role people have in a business process or workflow, where some aspects can and will be automated with AI.

“Think of an AI-first workflow,” said Apotheker. “You need to rethink what you make and what you buy. It is not obvious that your current make or buy strategy is the one that you need. You just want your contractor to do the automation on their piece of the workflow.”

In a recent podcast, Prem Ananthakrishnan, global software practice lead at Accenture, discussed how the use of AI and agentic AI in business processes is shifting how people think about software.

“There is a fundamental change from understanding that software cannot just be purchased as a tool, to thinking about software as a collaborator that’s driving an outcome for the business,” he said.

This is the next shift in software licensing, one that moves purchases of technological capabilities beyond consumption-based pricing. Mirroring the remarks of the Forrester analysts and BCG’s Apotheker, Ananthakrishnan said: “We still think of buying software as procuring a tool. We need to think about procuring a collaboration vehicle. In my view, IT buyers need to evolve from thinking about procurement to performance and design thinking. Don’t think about buying software anymore. Think about how you’re hiring digital teammates.”

Ananthakrishnan believes these digital teammates will be paid based on outcomes, using what he terms “value-based pricing”. 

This is a huge mindset shift, but business and IT leaders can start with something they already have a grasp of: business process outsourcing (BPO) – evaluating which parts of the process are strategic should remain in-house. In the conversations Apotheker has had with organisations that are considering an extreme makeover of their workflows and business processes, she said: “Either you take a BPO approach and fully outsource to somebody, hope that they will transform the process with AI and incentivise on outcomes, or you reshape the process internally.”

For now, Accenture’s Ananthakrishnan noted that token-based pricing and AI credits, which are often applied when purchasing AI-based services, are proxies for value. The more an AI service is used, the more tokens are needed and the more credits are consumed. He said these consumption-based pricing models provide a bridge to leading to an outcome-based pricing model where organisations hire AI agents to take on work.

Ananthakrishnan recommended that IT leaders start implementing business impact metrics, such as linking return on investment to an AI credit model. They might also consider a hybrid model priced on an upfront AI credit, where the supplier is paid a bonus if a certain outcome is achieved.

There is plenty to consider as working practices adapt to include agentic AI – but irrespective of whether AI-enhanced work is achieved internally or via an external service provider, value-based pricing is coming, and people in IT leadership and procurement will need to assess how risk versus return changes when the product or service that is being procured is a probabilistic environment rather than a very deterministic environment.



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Paper industry could become more energy-efficient with a new measurement method

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Paper industry could become more energy-efficient with a new measurement method


Fossil consumption calculation process for use of fossil fuel in an integrated kraft pulp mill. Credit: Applied Energy (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2025.126685

The pulp and paper industry consumes large amounts of energy. But despite stricter EU requirements for efficiency improvements, there has been no way to measure and compare energy consumption between different companies in a fair way. In collaboration with the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, now present a solution that has great potential to be used throughout the EU.

“Even if this would contribute to increasing efficiency by one or a few percent only, this involves so much energy that it can make a huge difference,” says Kristina Nyström, Ph.D. student at the Department of Management and Engineering at Linköping University.

Globally, the pulp and paper industry accounts for 4% of energy used by the industrial sector. Through its Industrial Emissions Directive, the EU has set efficiency requirements for the industrial sector to reduce climate impact. An important tool for this is to make comparisons between factories within an industry—so-called benchmarking.

“But this has not been possible in the paper industry, because the mills have been so different that comparable results have not been achieved,” Kristina Nyström explains.

Therefore, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, assisted by Linköping University and Chalmers Industriteknik and in consultation with the paper industry, has developed a calculation method to enable comparisons. The method, which is presented in an article published in the journal Applied Energy, has great potential to be used throughout the EU, according to Olof Åkesson, former Swedish Environmental Protection Agency employee, who initiated the project.

The solution is to divide paper production into standardized processes such as actual pulp production, dissolution of purchased pulp, drying of pulp or paper production. These processes are common to enough mills for comparisons to be meaningful. In this way, companies can discover what in their processes works less efficiently compared to others, where improvements can be made and which actions would be most beneficial.

In addition, this method allows for more measures to be included in the energy efficiency efforts. One example is that companies are credited with the residual heat from manufacturing that is used in the surrounding community, such as the heating of homes or greenhouses.

Should this method gain ground, it could contribute to a changed approach to energy efficiency. At present, public agencies’ demands for energy audits often focus on details, which risks significant efficiency measures being overlooked.

“The benefit of making the pulp and paper industry more efficient is that this can reduce the use of fossil fuels and release , biofuels and electricity for other purposes,” says Åkesson.

With the involvement of researchers, public agencies and companies in the pulp and paper industry, chances are high that the method was designed in a way that is useful in practice. The collaboration between organizations can serve as a model for other industries wanting to develop their own measurement methods, according to Nyström.

Several companies that tested the measurement method have been positive, and it now needs to be spread and tested on a larger scale, the researchers say. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency is working to develop the model, now also in dialog with public agencies and the and in Finland.

More information:
Olof Åkesson et al, A calculation method enabling energy benchmarking in the pulp and paper industry: Adopting a methodology that bridge the research–policy implementation gap, Applied Energy (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2025.126685

Citation:
Paper industry could become more energy-efficient with a new measurement method (2025, October 16)
retrieved 16 October 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-10-paper-industry-energy-efficient-method.html

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Researchers chart path for investors to build a cleaner aviation industry

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Researchers chart path for investors to build a cleaner aviation industry


Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Cutting planet-warming pollution to near-zero will take more than inventing new clean technologies—it will require changing how the world invests in them. That’s especially true for industries like aviation, where developing and adopting greener solutions is risky and expensive, according to a University of California San Diego commentary piece in Science.

The paper calls for smarter ways of managing investment risk that could help speed up the shift toward cleaner air travel and other hard-to-decarbonize sectors.

“The aviation sector—a fast-growing source of greenhouse gases—illustrates the broader challenge of industrial decarbonization: too little investment in technologies that could yield the biggest climate benefits,” said the paper’s co-author David G. Victor, professor of innovation and at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy and co-director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative.

The piece outlines a new approach that could help guide a coalition of research and development (R&D) programs alongside investors and airlines seeking to deploy new technologies to curb from the .

“Despite all the chaos in global geopolitics and climate policies these days, there are large and growing pools of capital willing to take risks on clean ,” Victor said. “What’s been missing is a framework to guide that capital to the riskiest but most transformative investments.”

He added that investors and research managers tend to focus on familiar, lower-risk projects like next-generation jet engines or recycled-fuel pathways.

“But getting aviation and other hard-to-abate sectors to near-zero emissions means taking on bigger risks with technologies and new lines of business that will be highly disruptive to the existing industry. Investors and airlines need to find smarter ways to encourage and manage these disruptive investments,” Victor said.

In the article, Victor and co-authors call for a more realistic framework to guide both and private .

They propose a tool called an Aviation Sustainability Index (ASI)—a quantitative method to assess how different technologies or investments could help decouple emissions from growth in air travel.

The approach is designed to help investors distinguish between projects that only modestly improve efficiency and those that could significantly transform the sector’s climate impact.

The authors note that while roughly $1 trillion is expected to flow into aviation over the next decade, most of that money will simply make aircraft slightly more efficient. Few investors, they argue, have clear incentives to back the kind of breakthrough technologies—such as hydrogen propulsion, advanced aircraft designs, or large-scale sustainable fuel systems—that could substantially reduce emissions.

“Cleaner flight is possible, but it requires changing how we think about both risk and return,” Victor said. “We need new institutions, incentives, and partnerships that reward innovation, not just incrementalism.”

The commentary, written by a multinational team of scholars, also highlights a broader lesson for : global decarbonization goals such as “net zero by 2050” sound bold and ambitious. But when it becomes clear that they can’t be met, these goals make it harder to focus on the practical steps needed today to drive change in real-world markets.

Ultimately, the paper argues for action that begins now. By developing better tools to evaluate climate-friendly investments and by rewarding companies willing to take calculated risks on breakthrough technologies, governments, and industry leaders can accelerate real progress toward decarbonization.

The paper was co-authored by Thomas Conlon of University College Dublin, Philipp Goedeking of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (Germany) and Andreas W. Schäfer of University College London.

More information:
David G. Victor et al, Mobilizing capital and technology for a clean aviation industry, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adu2458. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu2458

Citation:
Researchers chart path for investors to build a cleaner aviation industry (2025, October 16)
retrieved 16 October 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-10-path-investors-cleaner-aviation-industry.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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Niantic’s Peridot, the Augmented Reality Alien Dog, Is Now a Talking Tour Guide

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Niantic’s Peridot, the Augmented Reality Alien Dog, Is Now a Talking Tour Guide


Imagine you’re walking your dog. It interacts with the world around you—sniffing some things, relieving itself on others. You walk down the Embarcadero in San Francisco on a bright sunny day, and you see the Ferry Building in the distance as you look out into the bay. Your dog turns to you, looks you in the eye, and says, “Did you know this waterfront was blocked by piers and a freeway for 100 years?”

OK now imagine your dog looks like an alien and only you can see it. That’s the vision for a new capability created for the Niantic Labs AR experience Peridot.

Niantic, also the developer of the worldwide AR behemoth Pokémon Go, hopes to build out its vision of extending the metaverse into the real world by giving people the means to augment the space around them with digital artifacts. Peridot is a mobile game that lets users customize and interact with their own little Dots—dog-sized digital companions that appear on your phone’s screen and can look like they’re interacting with the world objects in the view of your camera lens. They’re very cute, and yes, they look a lot like Pokémon. Now, they can talk.

Peridot started as a mobile game in 2022, then got infused with generative AI features. The game has since moved into the hands of Niantic Spatial, a startup created in April that aims to turn geospatial data into an accessible playground for its AR ambitions. Now called Peridot Beyond, it has been enabled in Snap’s Spectacles.

Hume AI, a startup running a large language model that aims to make chatbots seem more empathetic, is now partnering with Niantic Spatial to bring a voice to the Dots on Snap’s Spectacles. The move was initially announced in September, but now it’s ready for the public and will be demonstrated at Snap’s Lens Fest developer event this week.

Snap’s latest Spectacles, its augmented reality smart glasses.

Courtesy of Snap



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