In order to avoid monopolisation of business, in the US, they invoke the anti-trust law. Justice Department of the US filed a case against Google almost two years ago alleging anti-competitive tactics to maintain its dominant position in online search. Google has denied the allegations and the case is in progress.

The Justice Department has been conducting a long-time investigation into allegations that Google abuses its role as a broker and auctioneer of digital advertisements, and gains business at the cost of its rivals. The department is preparing a law suit alleging Google’s ad-tech practices are anti-competitive.

Google has been engaging constructively with the regulators to address their concerns. Google has offered concessions, and has proposed splitting part of its business that auctions and places ads on websites and apps into a separate company under the Alphabet Umbrella. It is doubtful whether any offer short of asset sales would satisfy the regulators. The regulators have signaled deep structural changes in ad-tech business, rather than cosmetic changes in business practices.

In the European Union, Google faces another ad tech investigation. There its offer is to settle an allegation of anti-competitive conduct related to YouTube. As part of this offer, Google would permit the competitors to sell ads directly on video service. At present, the buying of ads on YouTube is only through Google’s ad buying tools.

myTVS will launch its connected car platform or super app called myTVS Life360. It will allow the customers to use a range of services like maintenance, diagnostics, roadside assistance, accessories, payments, insurance and so on.

There is a personalised travel map for accessing the myTVS network fuel stations, nearest police stations, hospitals etc.

It operates under KI Mobility Solutions.

There is a three year subscription costing Rs. 4999.00. It will be connected to a personalised device device provided by myTVS.

They are in talks with used car platforms for tie-ups. They have tied up with insurance companies. The customers will be given tips on predictive maintenance.

AI plays a vital role in understanding patterns which could result in identifying business insights. However, doing this at the level of a cloud is not enough. In the new scenario, where billions of divices are connected, the computing must be done and data processed on the device itself. If the data is on the cloud and is to be accessed from there, there will be a delayed response. This delay is called latency. It could be in milliseconds, but even that is detrimental in some cases, say a car being driven on the streets or a remote surgery being performed.

Edge computing assisted by AI plays a vital role here. It processes information on the device itself or on a platform closest to the application. Effectively it is at the edge of the networks. Cloud computing is remote and is deep inside the network.

IoT is expanding market. Edge AI computing enables billions of such devices to process information and manage outcomes. It reduces latency. With the advent of 5G, the connectivity of the devices will go up further, and the need for edge AI computing will be more too.

Existing 4G pipes can be used for 5G. There is no big addition to the capacity of the network. Through dynamic spectrum sharing, the existing spectrum can be split between 4G and 5G. Both the existing 4G users and new 5G users can be served simultaneously. However, the speed and latency of the network is incrementally better than that of 4G.

If 3 to 6 GHz frequency is range is used for 5G, there is capacity improvement. There is also improvement in average data rates — 100 to 900 Mbps. If millimetre wave bands (above 24 GHz) are used, the signal remains uninterrupted and the users can enjoy the speed of above 1Gbps. It increases the capacity massively. That is suitable for sports stadia, concerts, VR streaming, smart factories, smart agriculture, remote healthcare, IoT and autonomous cars.

The Union Bank of India launched its metaverse virtual lounge on July 8, 2022. It amounts to a visit to the bank without actually visiting the bank. You visit the bank as a digital avatar. The bank lounge has a variety of banking services. At present, the Bank will provide only informative services. The customers can get details about social security, loans and other banking products. The service is available on both the desktop and through virtual reality (VR) headsets.

Union Bank of India has joined the league of international banks such as JP Morgan Chase, HSBC and Kookmin (South Korea), which already have strided into the metaverse.

A digital service provider firm Kiya.ai has launched in first metaverse banking platform. It has generated interest both in the public and private sector banks as well as NBFCs.

Kiyaverse and Union Bank’s metaverse work on similar lines — VR and digital avatars.

Union Bank will not take this to banking transactions as yet. There are security and regulatory aspects here. The present version is in a nascent stage. There are issues of ownership of data, security, inclusion, diversity and risk management. Banking is built on trust. Metaverse in future will have to take care of all these aspects. Banks will require manpower well-versed in metaverse skills — 3D artists, game designers, platform experts, blockchain experts.

As CEOs, they maximise shareholder value and are expected to make a company successful. As CEOs, they have certain responsibities. Let us spell out some areas of their responsibilities.

Direction setting: They steer the ship of business in the direction of achieving the goals set. A CEO articulates the goals and vision of the company. The growth areas are identified. It may be necessary to diversify or to acquire some businesses. It should be followed strategically. Long term goals are broken down into short-term plans. All this is done strategically to make most of the resources available.

Alignment of organisation to Objectives and Strategies: As CEOs, they should find a fit between the organisation and its objectives. There could be impediments here which must be overcome. There are occasions where organisation’s culture does require change. At the same time, the organisation design is reset. Some new verticals may be created, whereas some old verticals are hived off. There are shocks to the entrenched structures and mindset. It may be necessary to hire fresh talent. The existing manpower must be reskilled.

Identification of Leaders: A CEO draws a plan but it is executed by the leaders in the organisation — the senior management and middle management. A CEO may have preference for people with certain backgrounds. However, to execute the new plan, there must be a mix of the new and old manpower. There has to be a balance between internal and external staff.

Board Engagement: As CEOs, they have to engage with the Board of Directors (BoD). The Board has members from diverse backgrounds. There are fixed number of Board meetings. The composition of the Board matters. The Board members have issues and questions. A CEO must respond to them. There could be conflict-like situations. These must be handled with maturity. Board meetings have discussions and deliberations. CEOs have to take the Board members along. They have their independent views.

Stakeholder Connection: There are various stakeholders — shareholders, clients or customers, employees, regulators, government, pressure groups. CEOs have to connect with these effectively. As CEOs they must not be obsessed with the day-to-day functioning of the company, but must spare time for the stakeholders. After formulating the strategy, the nitty-gritty of implementation is left to the leaders. CEOs have to deal with the Board and the stakeholders. CEOs must learn the art of delegation to become the true ambassadors of the company.

India may experience the limited backhaul spectrum while introducing 5G. The telecom operator that wins 5G spectrum is to be assigned two bands of 250 MHz of E-band spectrum, i.e. 70-80 GHz. However, there are 10 GHz available or 20 times 500 MHz. 5G requires large backhaul capacity.

In other countries, they allow the usage of 10GHz at minimal cost. It creates flexible capacity for much higher throughput. In India, it seems, we are restricting capacity. Limiting wireless backhaul or pricing it high restricts 5G. Without extensive wireless backhaul, access spectrum from auctions cannot be fully utilised because there is limited direct fibre connectivity.

The word bot is derived from robot and refers to an internet bot. Essentially, it is a computer programme that serves as an agent for a user or any other programme or it simulates human activity.

Bots are known to perform certain tasks automatically without specific instructions from the human beings. Most of these tasks are repetitive. Bots do them fast. On the whole bots are useful, but there bad bots too who introduce malware in our system.

Bots communicate among themselves, using instant messaging or internet relay chat.

Bots, being software, are based on algorithms which assist them to carry out assigned tasks, say conversing with a human being or gathering content from other websites. Bots which converse and interact with humans are called chatbots.

Rule-based bots ask the individual to select pre-defined prompts. An independently intelligent chatbot uses ML to learn from human inputs and scans key words to trigger interaction. AI-assisted chatbots are a combination of rule-based bots and independent intelligent bots. They also use pattern matching , natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation tools.

Spam Bots

These bots are fake accounts or inauthentic accounts on social media. Some of these are automated and some are operated by human beings. social media get rid of these everyday. Twitter removes over a million spam accounts everyday. It locks millions of suspected spam accounts. Instagram too has announced bots policy in 2020. There is rigorous verification and stricter monitoring.

To be transparent, Twitter asks them to be labelled as bots. These accounts are useful to gather relevant information, say a stock quote.

Types of Bots

Apart from chatbots and spam bots, there are social bots or opinion bots ,shopbots, knowbots to collect knowledge, spiders and crawlers to access websites and gather content for indexes in search engines, web scraping scrawlers, monitoring bots and transactional bots.

Bot Management

Bot management software helps organisation to manage the bots, and protect against malicious bots. It allows us to select some bots and block some other bots. Suspect bot traffic is driven away. There is IP rate limiting which restricts the number of same address requests. There are CAPTCHAS to distinguish between bots and humans.

Bots and Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is affected by bots and fake accounts. The issue is whether the influencer has the real followers or bots as followers. It is difficult to determine this, but there are tools like Upfluence, Neontools, Social Blade and Not Just Analytics which help to understand the relationship between an influencer and the audience.

There are impersonator accounts. Most of these accounts mimic real-life influencers. It is difficult to identify them.

There is a way to identify an expert from frauds — look for a blue tick that comes after verification. It makes us avoid impersonators.

Bots for Nefarious Purposes

Bots have been used for nefarious purposes, e.g. Russians spam as Americans in 2016 Presidential Election in the US to divide the voters. They also try to persuade people to send cryptos to online wallets for winning prizes where none exist. Span bots are used to attack celebrities and public persona to create hostile and toxic environment.

Uses

Bots are used as customer service agents. They are used in messanger apps. They are used to search music tracks and scheduling. They survey customer experience.

Malicious bots are used for denial-of-service by burdening servers. Spam bots are used to post promotional content. They do hacking by distributing malware.

AI advances are mind-blowing. AI has now the capability to convert text-to-image. AI generates a unique image from just one simple line of text. It is a very good translation tool for making visual images. It does this by recognising patterns. If we write a sentence ‘A rose plant wearing a hat and goggles’, we can get that image. If AI can create an image from a line of text, in future it can make a video and a whole movie. There are text-to-image AI systems called DALE-2 from Open AI and Imagen from, Google. The building blocks for AI to start making videos and movies already exist. There is Google’s chatbot called LaMDA that indulges in free-flowing conversations on a variety of topics. Then there are advancements in natural language generation (NLG). Together both these can write scripts. These scripts can be subjected to text-to-image, and you get an AI movie; say in next 2-5 years.

A Google’s engineer called LaMDA a sentient which is aware of its existence and is able to perceive things. There is Google-owned firm DeepMind. Its general AI model is called Gato. Most AI systems are trained to perform one task, whereas Gato does 600 tasks. Gato was trained to execute each of these 600 tasks but if it is confronted with a new challenge, it would not be able to use its learning from the 600 tasks to analyse and solve logically that new problem.

AI engines can now generate their own simulated data for different scenarios, e.g. detecting violence on streams in real-time. Here it is difficult to obtain data, but with new image-video generation, it will not be necessary for engineers to interfere to get the data for training as AI will generate its own training data. It can train another AI model for various purposes.

AI is a double-edged sword. Human beings are prone to amoral activities. Text-to-image capability or AI-created content will have a profound effect on the society. Already, we have issues of fakes and deep-fakes. In future, the problem will be more serious.

Being digital assets, NFTs could be a piece of art, a JPG image, memes, or GIF to music, videos and video game collectibles. NFTs are traded in cryptos.

NFTs could be risky investments. You should be cautious and careful. Avoid clicking on any link in the name of NFTs. It could be hoax. You have to buy from legitimate market places — OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, Rarible and Foundation. You have to enlist the NFTs on legitimate market places.

You have to buy from verified sellers. Most of them have a blue tick against their name.

Please do not share the key to the private wallet of yours. Always have strong passwords for crypto wallets and NFT accounts. Have a burner wallet that limits the funds to be assigned to a single wallet. This reduces the risk.

An app that claims to be an NFT market place must not be downloaded without deliberation. You have to double-check.

Some common NFT frauds are — NFTs being counterfeit where a duplicate is passed off as original, phishing to get access to private data and siphon off your digital assets, wash trading to a seller who also becomes a buyer to inflate the price of an asset and rug pull in which social media puts the asset on a high pedestal and later pulls out the support to crash the price of the asset.