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Chart: Vetting Alphabet’s $4 Billion in “Other Bets”

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Chart: Vetting Alphabet's $4 Billion in Other Bets

Chart: Vetting Alphabet’s $4 Billion in “Other Bets”

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

Regardless of whether the policy remains in place today, one of Google’s most famous management philosophies has been the “20% rule”. Legend goes that especially in Google’s earlier days, employees were encouraged to spend 20% of their time working on new initiatives that could potentially benefit Google outside of their regular workflows, teams, and projects. This meant there was time to explore new ideas or to challenge existing status quos within the organization.

It’s a seemingly arbitrary and systematic way to spur innovation, but it has worked well over the years. The 20% rule has apparently led to new products such as Gmail, Google News, and AdSense, which are all important aspects of Google’s business today.

It should not be surprising then, that Google’s parent company Alphabet also takes a systematic approach to innovating outside of its core search business. By making ambitious “Other Bets” and keeping investors up-to-date with their own segment on the company’s financial statements, Alphabet shows both commitment and discipline in finding its next multi-billion dollar game-changer.

“Other Bets”

In 2016, Alphabet was a cash machine. The company raked in $19.5 billion of profit off of a whopping $87.4 billion of revenue.

The only challenge? If you do the math, 99% of that revenue comes from Google, which currently dominates digital advertising with a 41% share of the entire market.

Wisely, the company does not want to put all of its eggs in one basket – and it spends about 7% of its annual operating costs on facilitating “Other Bets”. Here is what else Alphabet is up to:

Google Fiber
Google Fiber aims to provide internet at super speeds across the United States. Rollout has been costly though and only nine locations have been launched since 2010.

Calico Labs
Calico Labs is made up of elite scientists with $1.5 billion worth of funding to research the causes of aging and how to expand the human life span.

Nest
Founded by two former Apple engineers, Nest produces smart-home technology such as sensor-driven, Wi-Fi-enabled thermostats.

Verily
Verily’s mission is to reinvent healthcare using groundbreaking technology and data, such as a glucose-sensing smart contact lens for diabetics.

GV
GV, formerly known as Google Ventures, is Alphabet’s venture capital investment arm, making strategic investments in startup companies in fields such as life sciences, agriculture, and robotics, to name a few.

CapitalG
CapitalG makes investments that are “return-driven”, focusing on growth stage companies, such as Stripe, Airbnb and SurveyMonkey.

X
X uses breakthrough technology as a radical solution to big problems. Its most famous projects are its self-driving car and Google Glass.

Which “Other Bets” are Paying Off?

“Other Bets” generated $809 million in revenue in 2016, which is a 82% increase over 2015. This revenue came mostly from Nest, Fiber, and Verily.

Nest, which aims to dominate the smart home of tomorrow, was acquired for $3.2 billion in 2014. And while it does generate revenue for Alphabet, it has been viewed mostly as a disappointment even from the company’s perspective.

Verily is Alphabet’s business in life sciences, and is apparently profitable already. The unit partners with pharmaceutical companies to make money, and it will also eventually move forward with human clinical trials on its smart contact lens product.

Lastly, Fiber has been rolled out in nine cities across the United States to provide ultra-fast broadband speeds for internet and television. In recent news, Fiber has laid off employees, while halting many further expansion plans.

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Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI

We visualized the results of an analysis by the World Economic Forum, which uncovered the jobs most impacted by AI.

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Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI tools haven’t been around for very long, but they’re expected to have far-reaching impacts on the way people do their jobs. With this in mind, researchers have already begun studying the potential impacts of this transformative technology.

In this graphic, we’ve visualized the results of a World Economic Forum report, which estimated how different job departments will be exposed to AI disruption.

Data and Methodology

To identify the job departments most impacted by AI, researchers assessed over 19,000 occupational tasks (e.g. reading documents) to determine if they relied on language. If a task was deemed language-based, it was then determined how much human involvement was needed to complete that task.

With this analysis, researchers were then able to estimate how AI would impact different occupational groups.

DepartmentLarge impact (%)Small impact (%)No impact (%)
IT73261
Finance70219
Customer Sales671617
Operations651817
HR57412
Marketing56413
Legal46504
Supply Chain431839

In our graphic, large impact refers to tasks that will be fully automated or significantly altered by AI technologies. Small impact refers to tasks that have a lesser potential for disruption.

Where AI will make the biggest impact

Jobs in information technology (IT) and finance have the highest share of tasks expected to be largely impacted by AI.

Within IT, tasks that are expected to be automated include software quality assurance and customer support. On the finance side, researchers believe that AI could be significantly useful for bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing.

Still interested in AI? Check out this graphic which ranked the most commonly used AI tools in 2023.

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