Metta

🎙️At TechTides Belfast last week, our co-founder Gabriela Matic gave a keynote titled “The Last Human Skill in the Age of AI.”

Her argument: we haven’t just outsourced tasks to AI, we’ve systematically outsourced the discomfort of not-knowing itself. And that discomfort is exactly the condition that produces original thinking.

Gabi walked through real examples of moments where curiosity dies in organisations, and what the research actually says about how AI is reshaping human reasoning.

Stay tuned for the full blog!

What would it take for Northern Ireland to become one of the UK’s fastest-moving innovation ecosystems?

Our co-founder Wil Benton tackled that question on the “Bridging the Gaps” panel at TechTides Belfast last week, alongside leaders from Day1.vc, Innovation City Belfast, and PorterShed.

The takeaway: NI has the research, talent, and institutional assets, what’s missing is the commercialisation layer that turns knowledge into scalable companies, and the patient, long-term investment (public and private) to back it.

The case for Belfast itself? Agility. It’s compact, multi-point, and easy to navigate, assets other cities take years to coordinate across multiple authorities and universities. That should make it one of the easiest places in the UK to start and scale.

Stay tuned for the full blog to learn more!

We’re bringing together businesses, community organisations, creatives, campaigners, policymakers, and citizens for an honest conversation about climate action — and we’d love for you to be in the room.

Together with Climate KIC and B Lab, we’re hosting Bursting the Climate Bubble as part of London Climate Action Week, an interactive session and networking event exploring how broader, braver, and more inclusive coalitions can drive real impact in our communities.

Expect facilitated networking designed to spark unexpected connections, honest discussions, light catering, and good company.

🗓 Tuesday 23 June, 5:00–6:30pm BST
📍 City of London Club, 19 Old Broad Street, London EC2N 1DS
🎟 Free — link in bio

Our Head of Communications & Sustainability .hernandez, will be there on the day, feel free to connect with her for more details!

Who in your network should be in this room? Tag them below 👇

“How hard can it be?” - the sentence behind some of his biggest breakthroughs, and some of his biggest failures.

In this episode, Dirk Ploss, digital pioneer and Associate Director, Early Innovation at Beiersdorf, joins Innovation Brief co-hosts Wil Benton and Gabi Matic to talk about what innovation really looks like when you’re building before anyone else has written the rules, and what three decades at the frontier of digital transformation actually teaches you.

Dirk has spent his career operating just a few years ahead of the curve: from helping transform one of Germany’s largest retailers from mail order to e-commerce, to running entrepreneurship and early innovation programmes inside one of the world’s most recognisable FMCG companies. He’s founded startups, watched two of them fail, and kept going anyway.

According to Dirk, here’s what most innovation frameworks get wrong - transformation isn’t just technical or commercial, the hardest layer is always emotional. Getting people to believe the future will be better than the past. That’s the work nobody puts in the slide deck.

He’s equally clear-eyed about how to actually get things done, something he’s now turning into a book built around a deceptively simple idea: not every task deserves your full attention, and knowing the difference is the skill most of us never develop.

🔗 Listen to the full conversation with Dirk Ploss - link in bio

Here’s a number worth sitting with. Over the past 30 years, tool capabilities in industrial engineering have increased a thousandfold. Outcomes? Up just 30%.

In the latest episode of the Innovation Brief, we sit down with Pina Schlombs, Sustainability Lead and Senior Thought Leader on Industrial AI at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Drawing on nearly a decade of building the sustainability and industrial AI domain at Siemens (and earlier experience at Volkswagen) Pina shares what real transformation looks like inside complex organisations.

We explore why most companies are still optimising a status quo that’s running out of road, and the tougher question leaders rarely ask: if we started from scratch today, what would we build? The conversation dives into how Siemens embedded sustainability into core workflows, where AI truly adds value by navigating complex trade-offs in real time, and why thinking beyond costs to include impact and trajectory is critical for better decisions.

From the importance of a strong digital backbone to the role of culture in shifting from playing not to lose to playing to win, this episode unpacks what it really takes to scale meaningful change, and what’s coming next as AI begins to better understand the physical world.

🎧 Listen to the episode and read the blog: https://open.substack.com/pub/innovationbrief/p/culture-code-and-climate-ai-industry?r=2eddu3&utm_medium=ios

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The Innovation Brief podcast is for the people building, funding, and governing innovation - inside corporates, governments, and ecosystems across the globe.

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The Innovation Brief is produced by Metta, an innovation consultancy specialising in research, programme design and delivery, and ecosystem building worldwide.

Learn more: https://www.metta.partners