Dr Andrea Lagna, @andrealagna.bsky.social, an expert in Information Systems and Political Economy, believes we can create a future where AI-driven business success goes hand-in-hand with the responsible management of our resources. 🧵(2/6)

A special welcome to the inaugural cohort of MSc Digital Transformation students at Alliance Manchester Business School! 🎉 As Program Director, it’s a privilege to open this new chapter with talented students and colleagues. 🤗📚 #AMBS #OriginalThinkingApplied #DigitalTransformation #Sustainability

Please remember the difference between open weight and open source AI www.ft.com/content/4f77...

But we’ve now decided to start a new series of Q&A style interviews that we’ll run weekly on FTAV. The first one up is with Gappy Paleologo, Balyasny’s head of quant research. Hope you enjoy it! on.ft.com/4kFDw4H

Very proud to present a new paper out in Environment and Planning A. I look at how real estate actors re-framed Lisbon as a viable investment destination in the post-crisis era, which today means the city has some of the highest housing costs in Europe. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Thrilled to share that the Cambridge Global Handbook of Financial Infrastructure, co-edited with Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn and Barbara Brandl, has been published! You can find all chapters open access: doi.org/10.1017/9781...

@caseycrownhart.bsky.social and I spent months reporting together and found the common understanding of AI's energy appetite to be full of holes. As Big Tech aims to restructure our energy grids around the needs of AI, we dive as deep as one can go. www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1...

Great to present my paper “Theorizing the Sustainability Paradox of AI” with Sun Hye Lee at the Theorizing Data & AI workshop, VU Amsterdam. We study how firms strategize for sustainable AI. Join the convo and fantastic community: www.linkedin.com/groups/93605... #AI #Sustainability #DigitalStrategy

Looking forward to chairing a fantastic panel on “Fintech Policy for Productivity and Growth” at Innovate Finance UK Fintech Academic Network (UKFAN) Conference! Fintech policymaking plays a key role in unlocking innovation and supporting sustainable growth☀️ www.innovatefinance.com/events/uk-fi...

The financialization of the state continues

Great STS conference in Zurich ⬇️🤓 www.linkedin.com/posts/lengle...

Start-ups developing AI-powered apps have attracted $8.2bn of funding in 2024. Competition heats up in the app layer of the Generative AI stack.

Bond sell-off as a tool of financialized statecraft could be more effective than retaliation tariffs.

...and what about RenTech's Medallion Fund?!

I tried out an AI-generated podcast based on my paper Asset Manager Capitalism and the Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence, recently published open access in @ripejournal.bsky.social ...It turned out pretty cool—give it a listen 🎧 lagna.io/notebook/inv...

Academics and practitioners often forget that digital transformation is not an exogenous external force. We should ask how it is socially constructed; who benefits and who loses in the digital age.

This quote shows the centrality of data and AI strategy for investment giants rendering private markets legible: Preqin [...] will enable BlackRock to bring “clearer, more timely data” to the industry, making it “possible to index private markets just like we do now with the S&P 500”.

This is cool stuff. Acopia, from Melbourne 🌙 m.youtube.com/watch?v=9XRu...

Been working for some time on fintech policymaking with fantastic colleagues at AMBS and Telfer. Look forward to presenting at the Journal of Association for Information Systems (JAIS) workshop on Creating Policy Impact through Information Systems (IS) Research. #fintech #AI #blockchain #IS #policy

Excited to share that The Cambridge Global Handbook of Financial Infrastructure, co-edited with Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn and Barbara Brandl, is on its way! Expected publication date is May 2025. www.cambridge.org/core/books/c...

#tatemodern #electricdreams

My article Asset Manager Capitalism and the Political Economy of AI now has a home in Review of IPE—with volume and issue numbers! 🤓 If you're interested in exploring AI-driven market power and ways to democratize the age of AI, check it out and let’s connect! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The philosopher Carl Mitcham distinguishes between engineering and humanities approaches to tech philosophy. The first sees tech as an efficiency tool. The second asks whether a given tech is desirable and just. I'm leaving it there. Use it as you please to interpret AI, current affairs, etc.

Tired of the World Surf League CT and QS model. I'd like to see 5-10 top surfers on the most beautiful waves: Pipe, Teahupo'o, Cloudbreak, JBay

A 3-hour, 31-minute, and 23-second-long deep dive into LLMs by Andrej Karpathy. Just, WOW! www.youtube.com/watch?app=de...

Developing classes for a new course titled Organizing and Managing Change in the Digital Age. It's nice to go back to Orlikowski's duality of tech. A truly foundational statement.

"The most damaging consequence of the contemporary financial system is not simply recurrent financial crises, but a widening social divide between the haves and have-nots." Such an amazing book by Lin and Neely. Check it out. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Going back to the good old financialization debate, do you like this definition I always had in mind but never used? "Financialization is the increasing role of market-based, risk-oriented finance in human activities and the environment." Feel free to suggest edits 😊

The battle for AI compute is being fought on chips suitable for the inference phase (e.g., when chatgpt gives you an answer). But, there's a catch not explained in the article: models like chatgpt need constant fine-tuning, so the line between training and inference is blurry.

CoreWeave: founded in 2017 as a crypto farm, pivoted to AI-focused neocloud service in 2019, borrows lots of money from investment giants secured against a Nvidia GPUs, benefits from preferential access to Nvidia's GPUs and the latter's diversification strategy away from big tech cloud systems.

Although the material properties of tech are common to everyone, tech affordances are not. We should qualify that few organizations have enough power to get exclusive tech deals (e.g., on datasets)

Humans and AI both have the power to act, but their intentions couldn’t be more different phenomenologically. Leonardi (2011: 151) explores this in the Flex Routines/Tech paper, and it feels more relevant than ever in our AI-driven world. How do you see this playing out in today’s tech landscape?

Working on a paper about affordance actualization—fascinating literature. What are your favorite papers or key debates in this space? Let’s exchange ideas.

Hated. Adored. Never ignored. Glory Man Utd! 🇾🇪Beware the impact of badly done #LBO. Might soon be the future of Liverpool too. on.ft.com/43pGwMq

The hidden cost of AI and Big Tech’s data center boom? A staggering $5.4bn hit to US public health. As data infrastructure grows, so does pollution—and the burden falls on communities. Time for firms and policymakers to focus squarely on #sustainableAI. [screenshot from FT article]

New MSc programme in Digital Transformation at Alliance Manchester Business School! 🚀 Check out this article from The Guardian reviewing what makes it unique. I had the privilege of leading its development. I'd love to hear your thoughts. www.theguardian.com/next-generat...

Nella mia intervista per @mm-repubblica-bot.bsky.social parlo di #EuroStack, il piano per l’indipendenza tecnologica europea: terre rare, chip e Intelligenza Artificiale. L’Europa ha bisogno di una infrastruttura digitale comune, alternativa ai monopoli dei tecno oligarchi. www.euro-stack.info

In 2014, I wrote an essay on the rise of "algorithmic regulation" / "lean start-up" imaginary in government circles. In it, I argued that Silicon Valley's recipe for government efficiency would - at best - yield the "Singaporization" of liberal democracy. But there were much worse options.🧵 below

Blackstone is ready to invest more in data center infrastructure as alternative asset, although AI compute may decrease following DeepSeek's innovation. on.ft.com/4gqNeVj

Let's be clear: DeepSeek like Meta's Llama do not meet the definition of open source AI. Sharing the model weights/architecture is different than sharing the training data, which are the true source of competitive advantage—hence, hardly ever shared. theodi.org/news-and-eve...

Amen www.404media.co/openai-furio...

"Predominantly young men with broadly libertarian, right-leaning views are now in control of some of the most mainstream media platforms, with basically no internal or external oversight" on.ft.com/40MrNJV

Denis Law, one of the greatest football players the world has ever seen and will ever see #ManUtd www.manutd.com/en/videos/de...

Good way to map the generative AI stack. Particularly interesting the focus on 'agentic orchestration layer' with software frameworks like LangChain and crewAI. www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/is...

Great to hear Amorim emphasizing the importance of players' leadership. Go United! www.reuters.com/sports/socce...

Good point: Generative AI must achieve around $600B in revenue to justify the huge investments in GPUs and data centers. This creates challenges for investing at the foundation model level (e.g. GPT) due to high costs and unclear profitability. www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-...

Manchester United has a big leadership problem. The team needs a modern-day Cantona who moulds "youngsters into footballers rather than social media influencers." onefootball.com/editorial/40...

Important editorial by Pan et al. in the Journal of Strategic Information Systems addressing the big question of AI strategy. This is quite a set of research questions regarding how and when data and AI create business value. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

'Had the early AI community paid any attention to John Dewey and his work on “embodied intelligence,” many false leads might have been avoided.' Fantastic piece by Evgeny Morozov on the AI we deserve. See also responses by Brian Eno, Terry Winograd, and others. www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-ai...