The future of digital platforms
AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
5th June 2025
5th June 2025
An initiative by Launchworks & Co
Platforms and their ecosystems are now part of our daily lives. They are redefining the way we work, the way we learn, how we innovate and how we collaborate. As a community of platform leaders, how do we ensure that the full potential of these digital ecosystems is realised for all?
What is Platform Leaders?
Platform Leaders brings together entrepreneurs, policy makers, academics, investors and practitioners to exchange insights and best practices on the future of digital platforms and ecosystems. These communities don’t always talk to each other, yet are collectively building the platform economy. Platform Leaders provides strategic insights into key topics and allow experts to share complementary perspectives to shape the debate so that the potential of digital markets can be unlocked for all.
Agenda
Curious about how to build successful AI infrastructure? Want to know more about regulating in an exponential age? How can platforms help solve the healthcare crisis? Interested in the latest platform research insights and digital trends for 2025? These were the key topics addressed on 13 November 2024.
Transforming Healthcare with AI and Digital Platforms
Regulation in an Exponential age
Building the AI Infrastructure for Success
Ful Video - 13 November 2024
Watch the 13 November 2024 full video on the Future of Platforms and Artificial Intelligence which took place at Digital Catapult in Central London.
Building the AI Infrastructure for Success - 13 November 2024
Jennifer Schenker, Founder & Editor-in-Chief, The Innovator, Jakob Mökander, Director of Science & Technology Policy, Tony Blair Institute and Robert Smith, Director of Technology AI & Data Science, Digital Catapult, discuss what it takes to build a successful AI infrastructure.
Can Platforms and AI help solve the Healthcare Crisis - 13 November 2024
This panel, with Ruth Cousens, Co-Founder & CEO, THIS Labs, Charles Armitage, Co-Founder & CEO, Florence, Dr Mathilde Konczynski, Chief Medical Officer, MeditSimple and Laure Claire Reillier, Co-Founder & COO, Launchworks & Co, explores how platforms and AI help solve the healthcare crisis.
Platform Leaders 2024 Inaugural Academic Prize - 13 November 2024
Dr Joe Ploog presents key insights from the winning paper Rolling the Dice. He highlights the need for careful design to generate network effects.
Key Digital Trends for 2025
Benoit Reillier, Co-Founder & CEO Launchworks & Co, and co-author of Platform Strategy, presents his emerging trends for 2025.
Regulating in an exponential age - 13 November 2024
Verity Egerton-Doyle, Antitrust and Foreign Investment Partner, Linklaters, Matthew Braovac, Director at Digital Markets Unit, CMA and Oliver Bethell, Head of Competition, Regulatory Engagement & Advisory, Google, discuss regulation in an exponential age.
Rolling the Dice by Joe Ploog & Joost Rietveld - 13 November 2024
The inaugural 2024 Platform Leaders Academic Prize is being awarded to Prof. Joe Ploog and Prof. Joost Rietveld for their insightful paper "Rolling the Dice: Resolving Demand Uncertainty in Markets with Partial Network Effects". (Academy of Management Journal, 2024).
Below are confirmed speakers for 13 November 2024
Laure Claire Reillier
Laure Claire Reillier
Laure Claire Reillier is Co-founder and COO of Launchworks & Co, the leading experts for designing and scaling marketplaces & platforms. Formerly a senior exec at eBay Europe, she has 20 years’ experience in developing, managing and marketing products and services for digital, e-commerce, and platform companies. Laure Claire was appointed in 2019 as one of the 8 experts on digital platforms at the World Economic Forum. She is also the co-author of Platform Strategy: How to unlock the power of communities and networks to grow your business and Mission BlaBlaCar.
Oliver Bethell
Oliver Bethell
Oliver is Head of Competition, Regulatory Engagement & Advisory at Google where he leads a large multidisciplinary and cross functional team covering Policy, Legal, Economists, Product, Eng, Comms.
He was previously in private practice at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in Brussels before moving to Google’s in-house team in London in 2008.
Oliver is a graduate of Oxford University, BPP Law School and King's College. He is a member of the Bar of England and Wales.
Oliver was named Competition Individual of the Year, 2018 (Global Counsel Awards); Competition Individual of the Year, 2018 (European Counsel Awards); and Corporate Counsel of the Year, 2012 (Global Competition Review).
Jennifer Schenker
Jennifer Schenker
Jennifer L. Schenker, an award-winning journalist, has been covering the global tech industry from Europe since 1985, working full-time, at various points in her career for the Wall Street Journal Europe, Time Magazine, International Herald Tribune, Red Herring and BusinessWeek. After leaving BusinessWeek Schenker founded Informilo, a U.K.-based media company that published print magazines about the global tech sector. She is currently the founder and editor-in-chief of The Innovator, a global subscription newsletter about the digital transformation of business (www.innovator.news).
Jennifer was voted one of the 50 most inspiring women in technology in Europe in 2015 and 2016 and was named in Forbes 2018 list of 30 women leaders disrupting tech in France. She has been a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneers judge for 20 years. She lives in Paris and has dual U.S. and French citizenship.
Benoit Reillier
Benoit Reillier
Benoit Reillier specialises in strategy and corporate development for innovative high growth companies and platform businesses/ecosystems. He has been advising the boards and top management teams of many blue chip companies as well as regulators and Governments for more than 20 years. Prior to founding Launchworks Benoit was Director of Economics and Regulation at KPMG where he focused on Telecommunications, Media and Technology clients globally. Benoit is a guest lecturer in a number of top business and engineering schools and is in charge of the executive Platform Strategy module of the HEC Paris MBA. He is a graduate from IMT Business School in Paris and holds Master degrees in Management, Economics and Law. Benoit is also a graduate from Columbia University in New York and London Business School (MBA).
He is the co-author of Platform Strategy: How to unlock the power of communities and networks to grow your business and Mission BlaBlaCar.
Amanda Kamin
Amanda Kamin
A senior corporate reputation specialist with 20 years’ marketing and communications experience, Amanda Kamin is Chief Marketing Communications Officer for Digital Catapult. Having worked in international organisations (Motorola, Visa Europe and VisionFund) and within the UK public sector (Food From Britain) both in agency and in-house roles, she has broad experience across a range of markets and audiences. Amanda is skilled in multichannel oversight, leadership communications and quality content generation.
Amanda’s previous role in VisionFund International’s Senior Executive Team, gave her a deep understanding of the impact of funding for fledgling startups as she supported World Vision’s microfinance arm across 30 markets.
Amanda was also a Trustee of Community Risk Services in Lambeth, the UK’s first council-facilitated insurance offering to community groups and not-for-profits, and a Board Director of the Financial Inclusion Forum. Amanda is currently on the board of the Margaret Pyke Trust, a charity providing sexual health training to medical professionals in the UK and Africa; she is also the Director of the All Aboard Club charity, a not-for-profit that organises events for children with autism and ADHD.
Matthew Braovac
Matthew Braovac
Matthew is a Director in the Digital Markets Unit within the Competition and Markets Authority with particular responsibilities for the DMU’s relationships with other competition agencies and regulators, the operational readiness of the DMU for the UK’s planned pro-competition regime for digital markets and the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum which brings together the CMA with the ICO, FCA and Ofcom to work collaboratively to improve the coherence of the different regulatory regimes that impact digital markets and build capabilities across its member regulators.
Before joining the CMA, Matthew had a long career in the private sector leading legal, regulatory and public policy teams at Sky and Vodafone. Previously, Matthew trained and practiced as a competition lawyer at a leading City firm.
Robert Smith
Robert Smith
Robert Smith oversees the AI and machine learning team, supporting organisations working with Digital Catapult on how to ensure responsible and ethical development and deployment of AI-enabled products and services.
An eminent computer scientist and widely respected leader in the field of evolutionary computation, Robert has over 30 years of experience working in academia, directly with industry, and as an entrepreneur himself. Robert is author of the acclaimed book Rage Inside The Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All.
Robert is Senior Research Fellow of the Computer Science Faculty at University College London (UCL), and a Founding Trustee of We and AI, an organisation dedicated to improving AI’s effects of society. Robert has also worked with companies across the private and public sectors in both the US and UK including the US Navy, Boeing, Airbus and BT.
Dr Charles Armitage
Dr Charles Armitage
Charles is a co-founder and CEO of Florence, a platform that supports healthcare organisations to build a flexible workforce. Florence was founded in 2017 and recently expanded beyond the UK into Europe and North America.
Before starting Florence, Charles was a doctor.
Laura McCracken
Laura McCracken
Laura McCracken is a FinTech and platform veteran with over 25 years of commerce and payments industry experience. She held senior positions at Facebook (Meta), Amazon, Citi, and American Express. Most recently, she was an MD at Accenture, leading the Social Commerce & Payments industry vertical globally.
She currently advises leadership teams of Fintech companies at Launchworks & Co on a wide range of strategic topics including social commerce, marketplace, payment and mobile wallet. She also serves on the board of The Payments Association (TPA) and is an Independent Non-Executive Director at Guavapay.
Having lived in London, Luxembourg, Singapore, New York and Los Angeles and worked across over 30 markets in North America, EMEA, Russia/CIS and Asia Pacific, Laura has a unique international network and views the world through a global lens.
She holds a BS in Accounting from Auburn University and MBA degrees from Columbia and London Business School.
Dr Mathilde Konczynski
Dr Mathilde Konczynski
Mathilde Konczynski is a doctor, healthcare entrepreneur and Chief Medical Officer at MeditSimple, with over 20 years of expertise in regulatory compliance, governance, and sustainable healthcare innovation.
Combining her dual background in osteopathy and medicine with a solid entrepreneurial foundation, she has founded and managed successful healthcare ventures like Body Spheres, an integrated musculoskeletal health clinic.
At MeditSimple, Mathilde works closely with interdisciplinary teams to ensure that regulatory and ethical standards are upheld while fostering sustainable practices across the organisation. She collaborates on the development of new healthcare solutions, guides compliance with evolving industry standards, and leads initiatives that align MeditSimple’s mission with the broader goals of ethical and sustainable healthcare. Her commitment to excellence and collaboration brings a unique blend of clinical, business, and regulatory insight to the evolving healthcare landscape.
Ruth Cousens
Ruth Cousens
With over 15 years of experience in leading and growing not-for-profit enterprises Ruth is the co-founder and CEO of THIS Labs, a University of Cambridge spin-out that enables successful improvement and innovation in health and care services by harnessing the insight and expertise of the people that use, deliver and influence those services.
At THIS Labs, Ruth leads a multidisciplinary team who collaborate with public, private, and third-sector partners to co-create and test innovative solutions for social impact, using their online platform, Thiscovery.
Ruth holds an MBA from Cranfield School of Management and degrees from Cambridge and Queen Mary, University of London.
Jakob Mökander
Jakob Mökander
Jakob is Director of Science & Technology Policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) and an International Fellow at Yale University’s Digital Ethics Center (DEC).
Jakob has published extensively in the fields of tech policy, AI governance, and AI auditing. His work has been featured in journals like Nature Machine Intelligence, Science and Engineering Ethics, and Minds and Machines.
Jakob holds a PhD from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). Prior to joining TBI, he was a visiting scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), and a research fellow at the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI).
Outside academia, Jakob has worked as a Specialist Consultant working within McKinsey & Company’s Risk and Resilience practice, as well as a Trade and Investment Advisor at the Embassy of Sweden in New Delhi, India.
Verity Egerton-Doyle
Verity Egerton-Doyle
Verity is a partner in Linklaters’ London Antitrust & Foreign Investment Group and co-head of the UK technology sector team and Co-Head of Games and Interactive Entertainment.
Verity has over a decade of experience across advisory, investigatory and transactional aspects of competition law in the EU and the UK, including on vertical and abuse of dominance issues. She is particularly familiar with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, having spent time on secondment to the CMA’s mergers group, during which she sat on the CMA’s Mergers Intelligence Committee.
Verity is recognised as a leading commentator on competition and regulatory issues in the tech sector and on forthcoming platform regulation regimes.
2:00PM – 2:30PM
GUEST REGISTRATION
In-person guest registration and networking at Digital Catapult.
2:30PM – 2:40PM
WELCOME TALK
Start of the online webinar and the in-person conference.
Platform Leaders introduction by the master of ceremony and Digital Catapult.
2:40PM – 3:00PM
KEY DIGITAL TRENDS FOR 2025
In this keynote, Platform Leaders co-chair and Launchworks & Co CEO Benoit Reillier will present his key digital trends for 2025.
3:00PM – 3:40PM
BUILDING THE AI INFRASTRUCTURE FOR SUCCESS
We all marvel at the latest chatbots and their impressive outputs. Yet, beyond the early experimentations, many organizations need to build robust AI infrastructures and capabilities. A range of cloud providers are investing massively to provide scalable solutions to corporates and help them harness the power of the latest AI models.
Who are the key AI infrastructure players? How will firms access scalable AI capabilities in the future? How can firms leverage their cloud services to embed AI into their workflows? What will be built in house or outsourced?
This session will provide unique insights into the AI ecosystem and how firms can access leading edge capabilities now and in the future.
3:40PM – 4:20PM
REGULATING IN AN EXPONENTIAL AGE
The rapid development of generative AI technologies is transforming our world, from the voice assistants in our homes to the AI-powered software in our devices. Traditionally, innovation has been met with light-touch regulations focused primarily on safety. However, the exponential growth of AI is now drawing the close attention of regulators and competition authorities. Europe's proactive regulatory measures, including the DMA, DSA, and AI Act, are already reshaping the landscape. Meanwhile, the US and UK are pursuing different regulatory paths, setting the stage for divergent consumer experiences—from self-driving cars to AI services—with significant economic implications. This panel will explore how regulators can keep pace with accelerating technological change. It will tackle the delicate balance between fostering innovation and ensuring adequate regulation.
When will these regulatory differences manifest in tangible product changes, and what will be their broader economic and political impacts? How can the UK navigate these challenges to carve out an optimal regulatory approach? And how can Europe enhance its competitiveness in this new era?
Join us for a deep dive into the complex intersection of innovation, regulation, and global competitiveness in the age of exponential technological advancement.
4:20PM – 4:50PM
COFFEE BREAK
4:50PM – 5:30PM
HOW CAN DIGITAL PLATFORMS AND AI SOLVE THE HEALTHCARE CRISIS?
As populations age and healthcare resources become increasingly stretched, the need for efficient and effective healthcare delivery has never been more urgent. Digital platforms and AI technologies offer innovative solutions to connect patients with healthcare professionals, streamline care, and improve patient outcomes. This panel will explore how new business models, such as healthcare platforms, and advanced technologies, like AI, can help alleviate the healthcare crisis, optimize resource allocation, and transform the patient experience.
5:30PM – 5:45PM
INSIGHTS FROM PLATFORM RESEARCH
Each year, Platform Leaders awards a prize to an academic paper that demonstrates exceptional relevance and practical applications to the business world. Join us to discover this year’s Platform Leaders Academic Prize winners!
The winners will present their research, discussing its business implications, alongside a specially commissioned illustrated video produced by Launchworks & Co.
5:45PM – 6:00PM
CONFERENCE WRAP UP
Closing remarks from master of ceremony and conference co-chairs.
