The Next Five

It’s a hot afternoon in July 2026. You’re at home, and the sun is beating down on your roof. Your solar panels are working overtime, generating more clean, free energy than your house can possibly use. In a perfect world, that excess power would be flowing back into the grid, charging your neighbour’s electric car or powering a local hospital.But you look at your smart meter and see a red warning light. The grid in your area is ‘congested.’ It’s full. Instead of that green energy being used, it’s being ‘curtailed’, essentially thrown away. Somewhere else, a gas-fired power station is being paid to fire up because your clean energy simply can't reach the people who need it. This is the grid gap.We have been building wind farms and solar parks at record speed over the last decade, but for all the good they bring, we are still trying to plug them into a nervous system designed for the 1950s and right now, it’s creaking under the weight.Joining, our host, Tom Parker is Ferrari Careto, CEO of E-Redes and Head of Global Networks Platform at EDP, Alice Delahunty, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at National Grid and Jean-Christophe Moureau, Senior Vice President of Operations at Schneider Electric.This episode was recorded on 22nd October, 2026Sources: FT Resources, IEA, European Commission, ACER, The Times, Ember.This content is paid for by EDP and is produced in partnership with the Financial Times' Commercial Department. The views and claims expressed are those of the guests alone and have not been independently verified by The Financial Times.

Hard to abate sectors; the heavy industries of steel, cement, chemicals plus transport, aviation and mining are responsible for nearly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Decarbonising heavy industry at scale is no longer just an environmental imperative; it is a massive economic advantage if you get it right and even worse if you fail to do so.For decades, the narrative surrounding these ‘hard-to-abate' sectors has been trapped in a paralysing triad of assumptions: that transforming the backbone of world industry is simply too risky to execute, too complex to engineer, and far too expensive to justify. And on paper, that cost argument seems real. Clean production alternatives still carry a severe green premium. Near-zero steel costs anywhere from 10 to 75 percent more to produce. Green cement? You’re looking at a 30 to 125 percent price increase.Joining host Tom Parker is Dino Otranto, CEO of Fortescue Metals, Axel Eggert, Director General of EUROFER, The European Steel Association and Bertrand Badré, Managing Partner and Founder of Blue like an Orange Sustainable Capital and former Managing Director and CFO at the World Bank. Sources: FT Resources, Carbon Tracker, IEA, McKinsey, EUROFERThis content is paid for by Fortescue and is produced in partnership with the Financial Times' Commercial Department. The views and claims expressed are those of the guests alone and have not been independently verified by The Financial Times.

Throughout history, statecraft was defined by borders, battlelines, and territory. In the 20th century, global power shifted to financial capital and energy reserves. Today, with the digital revolution well underway, does real authority now belong to those who control our data and code?And what does sovereignty now mean in a fast changing AI landscape? Back in the day it used to mean keeping data in a local server room. But today, frontier AI models are advancing at pace, some argue at a speed we can’t control and regulatory lines are being redrawn across the world to try and keep up.Governments and boardrooms now face a fundamental question: who’s controlling who? And what can we do about it?Joining host Tom Parker is Charlie Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO of Everpure, Sana Khareghani, Chief Strategy Officer at Era4, Professor of Practice in AI at King’s College London, AI Policy Lead for Responsible AI UK and Former Head of UK Government Office for Artificial Intelligence and Clare Schramm Fergus, Managing Director, Transaction Banking Technology Platforms, Lloyds Banking Group and Board Member of OpenUK.Sources: FT Resources, Wired, TAIDE, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, UK GOV Sovereign AI Fund, PoliticoThis content is paid for by Everpure and is produced in partnership with the Financial Times' Commercial Department. The views and claims expressed are those of the guests alone and have not been independently verified by The Financial Times.

Imagine it’s 2006, not 2026. You’re an automobile factory manager, looking at combustion engine vehicles moving through the assembly line. A sight that has been seen since the Model T Ford, a century earlier.Today, you’re still watching legacy internal combustion engines roll off one side but high-voltage battery packs drop into electric chassis on the other. Electric vehicles could account for just over a quarter of global new car sales this year and as much as half of light vehicles sold worldwide by 2035. 5 years ago, it was just 9%.Across the industry, the ground is shifting under automakers' feet. Yet the rumbling is being felt much more in some countries than others. The map of ICE (Internal Combustion Engine), EV and autonomous dominance is being rewritten.Joining host Tom Parker is Niall Healy, Chief Operating Officer at Trade Nation, Marc Palmer, Head of Strategy & Insights at Autotrader and Professor Peter Wells, Professor of Business and Sustainability, Centre for Automotive Industry Research, Cardiff Business School.This episode was recorded on 23rd September 2026.Sources: FT Resources, IEA, Bloomberg NEF, SQ Magazine, CPCA, ITA, Mercedes Benz, Road to AutonomyThis content is paid for by Trade Nation and is produced in partnership with the Financial Times' Commercial Department. The views and claims expressed are those of the guests alone and have not been independently verified by The Financial Times.

Supply and demand. The foundational backbone of market economies. And we’re in the AI era, where demand and supply is being rewritten. Behind this AI revolution, sits a monumental physical buildout and energy demand. Globally, data centre power consumption will double by 2030 toward 945 terawatt-hours, consuming more power than the entire nation of Japan.In some regions the strain is already visible: data centres accounted for more than a fifth of Ireland's national electricity consumption in 2022 and predicted to reach nearly a third this year. Stateside, in 2023, when less powerful models existed, roughly a quarter of electricity use in the US state of Virginia was sucked up by data centres. And yet, McKinsey estimates that there will still be $7tn in global data-centre infrastructure investment by 2030.Then come the Hyperscalers, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle who are expected to spend around $670bn on AI-related capital expenditure this year alone, and nearly $800bn next year. The nine largest AI companies have collectively forecast $4.1tn in capital expenditure through to 2030, a trillion dollars more than the total 2025 Capex of all US non-financial companies combined.So looking at systems being rewritten, are we witnessing the greatest industrial re-tooling in human history, or is it all too much to handle?Joining host Tom Parker is Matthew Wright, Chief Strategy Officer at Trade Nation, Walter Pasquarelli, Researcher at Cambridge University and OECD advisor, and Bernard Marr, Author and Futurist.This episode was recorded on 16th September 2026.Sources: FT Resources, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, OECD, TTMS, IEA, Hungyichen, SIAThis content is paid for by Trade Nation and is produced in partnership with the Financial Times' Commercial Department. The views and claims expressed are those of the guests alone and have not been independently verified by The Financial Times.

It’s Q3 2026, the systems that form the global economy are currently being rewritten by the digitally led, fourth industrial revolution and the geopolitical repositioning of power. You’re an investment banker, a portfolio manager or a retail investor looking at trading screens flash red and green. There’s a hive of activity. But what to make of it.The indicators continue to flash, but the signals are conflicting. On one side sits the bull case: real AI driven corporate revenue, strong earnings, record stock prices and the unprecedented cash flow of the Hyperscalers. On the other side sits the bear case: historically concentrated index valuations, an ever widening gap between monetisation and infrastructure spending, and an increasingly fragile global debt landscape.It leaves you, as well as other investors, economists, and central banks asking some big questions: Are we witnessing a durable, tech-driven productivity shift? A once in multiple generation opportunity to transform individual, corporate and societal wealth? Are we re-writing the whole world economy? Or are we sitting giddy and foolishly riding a teflon-coated bubble that will soon burst?Our host Tom Parker is joined by Jon Noble, CEO of Trade Nation, Russ Mould, Investment Director at AJ Bell and Karen Ward, Chief Market Strategist for EMEA at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. This episode was recorded on the 22nd of September 2026.Sources: FT Resources, Harding Loevner, RBC Wealth Management, Slick Charts, Yahoo Finance, Macrotrends, OECD, AI Weekly, IMF, CNBC, IIF.This content is paid for by Trade Nation and is produced in partnership with the Financial Times' Commercial Department. The views and claims expressed are those of the guests alone and have not been independently verified by The Financial Times.

Sovereignty, by definition, is being updated. Sovereignty 2.0. Under geopolitical tensions, supply chain dependencies and competing regional regulations, the discussion around digital sovereignty is shaping where you're allowed to build, what models you’re allowed to train on, and who's allowed to see the results. Competing lines are being drawn. On one side there are those calling for the democratisation of AI and opening the global doors to innovation. On another is a fragmented map of regional regulations, like the strict mandates of the EU AI Act. Bubbling underneath is the geopolitical chess match, primarily between the US and China, turning data, frontier models and the infrastructure behind them into a matter of national security.All of this offers up some big questions for governments and businesses. One no bigger than this: Can global enterprise innovation really survive in a world of digital borders?Joining host Tom Parker is Stéphane Israël, Managing Director of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud and Digital Sovereignty at AWS, alongside Ali Ustun, Senior Partner from McKinsey’s Middle East Office and co-leader of their global Data and AI Foundations Service Line and Dr. Catherine di Lorenzo, Partner at A&O Shearman. Sources: FT Resources, McKinsey, NASAThis content is paid for by AWS and is produced in partnership with the Financial Times' Commercial Department. The views and claims expressed are those of the guests alone and have not been independently verified by The Financial Times.

We’re at the start of Q3 2026. Every day that passes, individuals, managers, executives and boards are crunching their internal numbers. They’re working out if the millions of dollars spent on cutting edge agentic AI deployment over the previous 2 years is showing signs of meaningful ROI. If figures from the first half of 2025 were anything to go on, the juice was not worth the squeeze. MIT’s Gen AI Divide Report 2025 showed that ninety-five percent of generative AI projects in H1 last year failed to deliver demonstrable ROI. Ninety-five percent. But, what happened to that remaining five percent? What secret engine were those elite organisations running that the rest of the market is completely missed? Is it really a gap in technical horsepower? Did they structure innovation better? Manage risk more competently? Or did they grant their teams the power to experiment more freely than the rest?Joining host Tom Parker is Steve Tarcza, Director of AI & Developer Acceleration for Stores at Amazon, alongside Jim Rowan, US Head of AI at Deloitte and Seth Fox, Chief Technology Officer at S&P Global.Sources: FT Resources, MITThis content is paid for by AWS and is produced in partnership with the Financial Times' Commercial Department. The views and claims expressed are those of the guests alone and have not been independently verified by The Financial Times.

Thirty years ago, the role of the CFO was vastly different. While they still looked ahead to build budgets, they acted more like historians, studying the past performance to manage the books, taxes and audits, but largely kept out of board level email chains. Today, most CFOs at the top of their game barely recognise the environment they started their careers in. They are now less a historian and more a fortune teller, sitting firmly at the right hand of the CEO and guiding big strategic discussions . AI’s predictive modelling and big data crunching makes wearing the co-pilot hat for a CFO that much more comfortable as they help navigate their companies through global risks and critical business wide decisions.Joining the host,Tom Parker, to discuss the role of the CFO in an AI future is Patrick Villanova, CFO at BlackLine, Olya Brase, EVP of Finance Optimisation and Governance at Highgate and Gina Gutzeit, Senior Managing Director and Global Leader of the Office of the CFO Solutions practice at FTI Consulting.Sources: FT Resources, Deloitte, Bain & Co, Founders Forum Group, HouseblendThis content is paid for by Blackline and is produced in partnership with the Financial Times' Commercial Department. The views and claims expressed are those of the guests alone and have not been independently verified by The Financial Times.