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28 Nov 2025

AI in shaping the future with Dominic Vergine

A thought-provoking look at how purpose-driven innovation and applied AI can accelerate real-world solutions to today’s most complex sustainability challenges.

 

Key takeaways

  • AI’s true value lies in solving complex, high-impact problems  -  from engineering efficiency to medical breakthroughs, not in hype-driven chatbots or data scraping.
  • Leadership judgment matters more than speed. The impact of AI depends on disciplined choices that link innovation to real-world value and ethics. 
  • Business models will evolve. Today’s energy-intensive, low-value uses are commercially unsustainable; economics will drive a shift toward targeted, high-value applications.
  • Policy incentives should be deployed to steer AI investment toward productive, sustainable innovation rather than speculation.
  • Education must evolve - as machines master information,  humans' advantage will be critical thinking, creativity, and moral reasoning.

 

Listen to the podcast

In this episode of podcast series, What Next?  Dominic Vergine, CEO and founder of Monumo gives his take on how AI can play a central role in advancing positive people and planet outcomes. However, the real impact of this technology depends not just on its capabilities but on how we decide to use it.

What Next? podcast series logo
What next? Leadership conversations for a better future

What next? Leadership conversations for a better future is a podcast series hosted by Marc Kahn, our Chief Strategy and Sustainability Officer, and Lindsay Hooper, CEO at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). Along with critical thinkers, innovators and leaders from across the globe, they discuss how markets can truly serve people and the planet, asking tough questions, challenging old assumptions, and opening space for new perspectives and solutions.

Dominic Vergine, Monumo CEO
Dominic Vergine, Monumo, CEO and founder

AI is the most powerful tool by some margin that humans have ever had. And we will use it badly, we will use it for good, and we will use it incompetently. The question is, where will the needle lie?

Chapter notes | Scroll to the areas that interest you

  • 00:00 – 01:41 | Setting the scene – AI and leadership in a changing world

    • AI as a defining force in business and policy - powerful but poorly understood.
    • Leadership challenge: cutting through hype to decide where AI genuinely advances value and sustainability.

  • 01:41 – 18:25 | Targeted applications and real-world impact of AI

    • Why the greatest breakthroughs will come from focused, domain-specific uses of AI rather than generic language tools.
    • Example: using AI to redesign electric motors and generators for major emissions cuts.
    • Energy and ethics: contrasting the high energy cost of large models with the efficiency gains from precision AI.

  • 18:25 – 31:57 | AI, society, and the economy – risks, regulation, and opportunity

    • How current AI business models are economically unsustainable and may collapse under their own energy costs.
    • Market disruption: why agile startups can outperform incumbents and why Asia is moving faster than Europe.
    • Jobs and just transition: parallels with past industrial revolutions and the need to manage displacement.
    • Policy levers: tax incentives and R&D support that steer AI toward productive, low-impact innovation.

  • 31:57 – 41:31 | The future of AI – sustainability, education, and leadership

    • How AI could help optimise competing sustainability goals by analysing complexity beyond human capability.
    • Re-imagining education for an AI age: teaching critical thinking, creativity, and ethical judgment over rote skills.
    • Leadership imperative: focus AI investment on solving material problems - energy, efficiency, design - rather than digital noise.

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    Focus and its related content is for informational purposes only. The opinions featured on the site are not to be considered as the opinions of Investec and do not constitute financial or other advice. The information presented is subject to completion, revision, verification and amendment.

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