The United Nations' digital agency says that operational carbon emissions for the world's top tech companies rose an average of 150 percent between 2020 and 2023 as investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and data centres drove up global electricity demand. Operational emissions for Amazon grew 182 percent in 2023 against 2020 levels, while emissions for Microsoft grew 155 percent, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta grew 145 percent, and Google parent company Alphabet grew 138 percent over the same period, according to the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The figures include the emissions directly created by the companies' operations as well as those from purchased energy consumption. They were included in a new report from ITU assessing the greenhouse gas emissions of the world's top 200 digital companies between 2020 and 2023. The UN agency linked the sharp uptick to recent breakthroughs in AI and the demand for digital services like cloud computing.

Digital can tiptoe into the business, in the easiest processes to change, or completely disrupt the business model and the entire organization. In the second case, effort and investment will be greater but radically improve the business. Here are the 5 benefits organizations gain from undertaking digital business change. The power encapsulated in the word "transformation" expresses the effort needed to change a company in depth. Indeed, making the most of digital innovations requires more than just installing automation software or making individual departments or processes digital.

The European Union's leading tech regulator has thrown her weight behind the British government's plans to press ahead with a digital tax despite threats from Donald Trump. Margrethe Vestager, the EU competition commissioner recently promoted to take charge of Europe's digital policy as well, said she was a "strong supporter" of national digital taxes in order to advance the chances of an international agreement. She said the EU would revive plans for a digital tax within a year if international efforts to find a solution failed. "I think it is very important that we keep up the momentum. Because of this very fundamental injustice that most people and businesses pay their taxes and they are competing with businesses who create value but do not pay taxes," she said in an interview with the Guardian and other European newspapers.

Mr. Nadella--Microsoft's third CEO after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer--soon dismantled the company's mobile-phone operations and began making cloud computing the heart of Microsoft's business. On his watch, revenues from its Azure cloud-computing business have surged and the company's share price has nearly tripled, allowing Microsoft to reclaim the title of the world's most valuable company late last year for the first time since 2003. The company said this week that Azure grew 76% in the just-ended quarter, though a chip-shortage curbed Microsoft's overall sales growth. Mr. Nadella has also made moves to change Microsoft's culture and make it a more vocal corporate citizen, especially as the tech industry faces greater government and public scrutiny. He and other Microsoft executives have been outspoken in their calls for the responsible use of artificial intelligence.

When it comes to cloud services and software-as-a-service (SaaS), we're all familiar with the usual players. During my recent conversation with Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, or the company's "chief magician," as his title used to read, he presented specific advice for CIOs during this period of digital transformation in change. You can catch part one of our conversation and watch the entire video, which was episode 278 of the CXOTalk series of conversations with the world's top innovators. View the video excerpt above and read Aaron's edited comments below for insightful thoughts directed toward chief information officers. The bottom line: Being adaptable is the key to maintaining CIO relevance to the business.

DAVOS: "Artificial intelligence and robots will kill many jobs." It's a depressingly blunt statement for anyone to make, but even more so as it is the prediction of Jack Ma, CEO of the Chinese online sales giant Alibaba. The rise of AI -- its huge potential and fears over its potentially negative consequences -- is just one of the big issues discussed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, along with breaches of personal data and fake news. But it is probably artificial intelligence and the ability of machines to not only interact with, but manipulate human beings that raises the most suspicion. Aware of growing governmental and public distrust, the giants of tech are trying to address the issues.

We all know that Google, Facebook and Amazon, are investing heavily in AI, with results widely reported. It's no surprise that businesses built around collecting and analysing data are leading the way in AI. Businesses built in the pre-digital age, based on physical products and infrastructure. Business that underpin transport and energy, or that develop new medicines or materials. How should these businesses take advantage of AI?

The digital economy has transformed the way we communicate with each other; the way we consume information, products, and services; the way we entertain ourselves. It's revolutionized seemingly non-digital industries--think of how different financial services, for instance, are today from what they were two decades ago--and investors expect it to soon transform others, which is why Tesla Motors is worth more than General Motors despite making a tiny fraction as many cars as GM makes and earning a tiny fraction of the revenue. This phenomenon explains why the so-called Big Five of the digital economy--Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook--have, at various points over the last year, been the five most valuable companies in the world. So you might say that the digital economy has lived up to the expectations people had for it 20 years ago, in the early days of the Web. In other important ways, however, its consequences have been smaller than you might think.