Who Asked You?

Hi, it's Dror Globerman here with Skip Intro, on innovation, technology, and you. This week:

1. Even the bank is hunting for creativity and curiosity.
2. Learn AI from a tractor: the questions that lead to your next business.
3. Sam Altman has sent us a new digital worker. Tried it yet?
4. Who wasn't invited to Trump's AI party? You and me.
5. Throwback to a reunion with the 90' geeks.

"What's the most important quality in a banker today?"

"Curiosity," replies Andrea Tognetti, Executive Vice President, People & Culture at UniCredit Bank Romania, one of the largest banks in the country.

I couldn't resist. "Does anyone here," I asked an audience of businesspeople, managers and bankers at the ImpactSee conference in Bucharest, "remember seeing 'curiosity and creativity' in the job requirements for their role?"

So the penny is dropping even where the big money sits, among the heavyweights running serious organisations. With every passing day, those "heavyweights" sound more and more like multidisciplinary artists from Shoreditch. They talk about imagination, creativity, breaking old habits, and treating experiments and failures as a natural part of management and of life. That's where the opportunities lie, and that's where the risks are.

So let's run with that.

Those green tractors stopped being just a big engine hitched to a plough a long time ago. Manufacturer John Deere loaded them with cameras and AI and turned them into mobile data-collection stations. John Deere gathers everything (what's growing, how much of it, and where in the world) and sells that information to farmers and to traders on the financial markets. Now its cameras can also tell exactly which plant needs spraying and which doesn't, and the company charges farmers for the areas that went unsprayed and the money they saved. All of it powered by AI.

Ahead of the conference in Bucharest, I put together a whole range of examples like this: radical business creativity, made possible by AI, that turned into an entirely new business engine. It's happening in every field: agriculture, furniture, aviation, energy, and also waste, food and medicine.

Click for the full talk from ImpactSee 2026 in Bucharest

Your creativity, too, can take flight and carry more meaning than ever before. So how do you find the right path?

Here are a few questions anyone can ask themselves:

• Who else might pay for the data our work produces?
• What value is hiding in the materials we already have?
• What could we keep improving for the customer after the sale, and offer as an ongoing service?
• What other problem could we solve for customers who already trust us?
• Which customer outcome could we measure, and charge for on a recurring basis?

The full talk, just 11 minutes long, is waiting for you here, and the slides are here.

And an important credit: the story I opened with was inspired by an idea from the one and only Omri Marcus.

Sam Altman takes the stage and unveils the next big thing: Dots, a personal agent that lives inside the chat.

This isn't just another chatbot that waits for a question and then answers it. Think of it more as a "digital worker" you can hand ongoing responsibility to. Every Dot has its own computer and browser in the cloud, so it can keep researching, gathering information, drafting a document, following up on a task or working with connected apps, even when we're away from the screen and our own computer is switched off.

The novelty isn't only that it can write or summarise. It can take on a big goal, say "track what customers are saying about the product, find the problems that keep coming up and send me a weekly update", and carry out a sequence of steps over time, without needing a reminder each time. It's still supposed to stop and ask for permission before sensitive actions, but the idea is to move from AI that answers questions to AI that takes on tasks and actually moves them forward.

The moment I switched it on, it rummaged through my inbox, quickly found a few urgent tasks I'd forgotten about, and set off to deal with them.

Remember when Trump raged and screamed, "We will never again touch the AI of the radical-left lunatics at Anthropic"? Well, he didn't scream out loud, but he did hammer the caps lock on his Truth Social keyboard. That was only six months ago.

Two weeks ago, when Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk warned that the pace of development needs to be halted before we lose control of AI, Trump flew into a rage, called it a deranged conspiracy and declared that all that's needed is a strong president "with a high IQ like mine!"

And then, this week, he calmed down, sat in a room with all the big bosses, and out came a self-regulation agreement for the major AI companies. They will police themselves across several layers to make sure AI doesn't go off the rails. Legislation, enforcement, criminal liability? Let's not get carried away. Yes, really: the fox is guarding its own henhouse.

And that isn't even what worries me most. The people striking deals here are company bosses and the President of the United States, all of them with very large vested interests. None of them represents me, the ordinary non-American citizen. I have no seat and no voice at the table where the decisions are made, even though this AI affects my personal life just as much. If it makes mistakes, discriminates, gets hacked or runs amok in ways that touch my life, nothing those honourable gentlemen agreed over in America will protect me.

So we had better get used to it: the consequences of AI, and how it is regulated, have become a burning economic and political issue. And unlike other powerful technologies, this one could one day wipe out a billion people, as Bill Gates puts it. What worries me just as much is its potential to wreck democracy, liberalism and capitalism long before that.

"So how do you get on this internet thing, and what's actually on it?"

In 1994, that was the burning question, and the man asking it on television was Eyal Kitzis, host of the much-missed "Zombit" on Israel's Educational Television. In 2018, when Educational Television closed down, I invited the Zombit legends (Kitzis, Gal Nadivi and Sharon Teicher) to a festive and very funny reunion of semi-geeks on the 100th episode of Next (also no longer with us). Today it's even funnier (in Hebrew).