Season 3: Episode 6 - Human in the Lead - Rethinking AI, Teams and the Consulting Model

i mean i don't want to give any spoilers but my perspective is i'll be retired on a beach somewhere in five years that's that's i don't know if that ruins the whole debate but you know that's no not really i can't believe i can't believe that'll be the case all right that's great sounds like a packed agenda let's let's get into it so um i'm going to kick us off on news this week right so you have to take this with a pinch of salt because i'm starting this sentence with Writing on his Truth Social platform, Trump said, so you already know that this might not be truth, as it were, despite the nature of the platform, but that he is going to impose – he's vowed, as he often does, to impose 100% import tax – on any European country that introduces a digital services tax on American technology giants.

So what does this mean? This means that if we use Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, any of those kind of guys, and we impose a digital services tax on them, which, by the way, we already do, Sophie, I don't know if you know this, but Britain has a 2% digital services tax on major search engines and social media platforms and online marketplaces that have global revenues exceeding $500 million.

And in the UK, 25 million.

So they're significant businesses.

Would I say they can afford it? Well, I'm not sure I'd cast that expression, but they are companies that nonetheless are making literally a buck as opposed to a pound sterling out of the UK.

So we slapped 2% digital services tax on them.

France does, I think France does 3%, I want to say, and Italy and Spain, all somewhere around 3%.

So this is not an uncommon thing.

It's been there for a while, but Donald Trump suddenly said, presumably in an attempt to keep up profits on those share prices on those companies.

has said anybody who does this across Europe are going to get 100% tariff on any and all goods.

So not digital goods, any and all goods, right? So you could say, so as technology leaders, why are we interested in this? And I thought this was interesting from a couple of angles.

One is that sort of as technology leaders means we could make different choices in terms of the technology we buy.

you know, maybe let's not buy American, right? We could make different choices in terms of providing social media platforms, digital platforms, e-commerce marketplaces, whatever, to UK and European citizens that are not American.

So we could all as technology leaders go, well, sod America, then we'll build a whole ecosystem ourselves, right? So that feels like something, you know, to avoid us all having 100%, you know, tariff on all of the imports to the rest of America.

So, That could be something that feels like it's a nice thing to give back to the nation as technology leaders.

But also, it sort of plays to this conversation we were having a little while back about digital sovereignty, right? Not just data sovereignty, but everything digital sovereignty.

We know that the French government, you know, made a mandate that they were going to get off of all of Microsoft technology and all American technology inside the government, not necessarily across the nation.

So, yeah, I think, you know, this keeps raising its head, Sophie, and I just keep thinking...

There's somebody beavering away building a social media platform that wasn't built in America, right, that we can all use.

Somebody building an enterprise software suite that wasn't built in America that we can all use, you know, something.

Maybe us technology leaders need to start thinking about what we're buying a little bit more to help the country out.

Yeah, that's my kind of, I

just felt like, come on, let's stop being held to ransom by these guys.

Let's do something about it.

What do you think?