Industry 4.0, or the digitization of the world’s manufacturing and logistics ecosystems, represents an incredible opportunity to profoundly reinvent very traditional organizations and processes. In this podcast Frederik Janssen, who is the director responsible for strategy an innovation for IT infrastructure at industrial giant Siemens, outlines how agility has become a way of life in his team, and how important digital transformation is to their future. As manufacturing moves from mass production to mass personalized, IT leaders need to also reimagine what they do, and how they do it.

The Life Insurance industry is a fascinating case study in the challenges, and the potential rewards of digital transformation. Traditional insurance carriers have been largely slow to transform themselves, with many policies hosted on a multitude of legacy platforms. But change is coming, in the form of new types of insurance companies, like Haven Life, a spin-off from MassMutual, which uses AI and machine learning to radically reimagine the customer experience. To learn more about this complex industry, I had coffee with Gautam Thakkar, who is the CEO of se2, a company that builds platforms for 21st century insurance carriers.

Artificial intelligence and automation are disrupting the business of law, leading to faster, more accurate decision making and improved access to justice. But what exactly will this mean for the future of lawyers, and law firms? To find out I spoke with Paul Greenwood, CIO at Clifford Chance - one of the top ten law firms in the world, and a member of the "Magic Circle" of leading British law firms. Some of the issues we discussed include the impact of algorithms on complex document analysis, whether AI tools trained against a firm's accumulated knowledge might also be a source of competitive advantage, and how companies might be able to automate strategic decision making in the future.

I first met the writer Molly Flatt in Bogota, Colombia a number of years ago, but to continue our discussion on the future of books and publishing, we arranged to meet in an equally interesting, although somewhat less exotic, bar in Fitzrovia, London. A prolific journalist and researcher into digital trends, Molly is the Associate Editor for FutureBook, Digital Editor for PHOENIX magazine and Associate Editor for the Memo, and writes regularly for publications such as the BBC and the Guardian. Her debut novel is entitled The Charmed Life of Alex Moore.

The new luxury consumer has never been more different. They're younger. They're more connected. They're more global, and more demanding of brands than at any time in history. With over 70 brands in their portfolio, LVMH is the world’s leading luxury conglomerate, and at the forefront of innovation when it comes to exploring what a digital luxury experience might entail in the future. To get a better understanding of how that might play out in the next few years, I caught up with Mohamed Marfouk, Global Operations Director of LVMH at their headquarters in Paris.