Digital-Detox

Could a regular day of downtime make you more productive?

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Could a regular day of downtime make you more productive?

Many UK adults spend an average of five hours a day looking at screens, sometimes more if they are at work.

However, a new event, called the Offline Club carried out a a 24-hour digital detox.

One participant, aged 33, had calculated that between working behind a desk all day and coming home to watch TV and “doomscroll” on social media, he can spend up to 14 hours a day looking at a screen.

The Offline Club held its first in-person “digital detox hangout” in Amsterdam in February. In the months since, the company has already expanded into Paris, Dubai and London.

Ilya Kneppelhout, the co-founder of the Offline Club, said people have been surprised at how just a few hours offline “made them feel so much less stressed and more connected to themselves and to others”.

Would a day free of screens refresh you and make you more productive?

Group-Work-Meeting

Improving work meetings

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Improving work meetings

No-one denies that work meetings whether in person or online are sometimes necessary.

Elon Musk once said that “excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time”.

One global study has found that 72% of work meetings are ineffective.

Brain activity drops when in a Zoom meeting, according to Yale university research.

However, using AI has improved things somewhat.

It means transcribing the meeting for you, suggesting questions you might want to ask, summarising the meeting in point form, reminding you of who else is present.

It is argued that the use of AI will make meetings much more productive as people will be much netter informed before they attend, which should speed things up and focus them.

It is also speculated that AI can be used to moderate meetings and provide feedback.

Microsoft’s Ms Jaime Teevan is convinced that AI will help to improve meetings. “It can help people feel less overwhelmed, it can help them get started and check things off their list. And it can help spark ideas, seeing things in news ways and getting support there.”

Back to planet Earth?

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Back-to-planet-EarthBack to planet Earth?

There is a growing trend among businesses to leave cloud storage in favour of using locally based hardware data centres.

The reason is chiefly the cost largely because the storage space is rented from a cloud storage provider.

One US company quoted a boost in annual profits of £790,000 after leaving cloud-based storage.

But it is also about reliability: If a major data centre goes down, large parts of the web can go offline.

There may also be security concerns when using a cloud-based service which can be crucial to a company wanting to store sensitive information and protect it from competitors.

There is an initial outlay in buying the storage hardware, but if it is then shared with other businesses some of the costs can be recouped in rent.

It has been argued that using the cloud is faster, but that is only likely to be an issue for a huge multinational business.

The lesson is clear for smaller businesses; Do the research and find the most efficient, secure and cost-effective way to store your data.

Construction-Crane

Why doesn’t the construction industry make more use of technology?

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Building techniques have not changed much since the early 1900s.

The actual construction of buildings still relies heavily on manual labour.

However, there have been technological advances that the industry could benefit from.

Among them are 3D printing. It can be used for extruding concrete or other materials to build up the walls of a house.

However, 3D printing of homes tends to be expensive, to have extremely thick walls, and are hard to construct on anything other than an open, flat site.

Modular construction is another innovative technology where parts of the building are manufactured in a factory then transported to the site and lifted into place.

Neither option has really taken off according to the UK Home Builders Federation.

Problems with planning policy delays are apparently part of the problem.

Developers need a certain amount of confidence that they’ll be able to sell their houses quickly once complete, and often need to alter plans as a project continues as the market changes.

AI-Safety-Code

A voluntary AI safety code – is it enough?

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At least 16 companies have signed up to voluntary artificial intelligence safety standards introduced at the Bletchley Park summit.

They include companies from China and the UAE.

The signatories have committed to voluntarily “work toward” information sharing, “invest” in cybersecurity and “prioritise” research into societal risks.

However, the standards have faced criticism for lacking teeth due to their voluntary nature.

Speaking at a follow-up to the Bletchley Park event in Seoul, The UK’s technology secretary, Michelle Donovan, said the Seoul event “really does build on the work that we did at Bletchley”.

While it is good that there are now standards to be worked towards, Fran Bennett, the interim director of the Ada Lovelace Institute., has warned that while they remain voluntary  there is a risk that many companies will ignore them.

“It’s great to be thinking about safety and establishing norms, but now you need some teeth to it: you need regulation, and you need some institutions which are able to draw the line from the perspective of the people affected, not of the companies building the things, she said.”

There is no doubts that the launch of ChatGPT has stimulated what has been called an “arms Race” in AI.

“There are just not enough people who “understand how to make these systems, how to make them really perform, and how to solve some of the challenges going forward,” says Andrew Rogoyski, director of innovation at the Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI at the University of Surrey.

Data-Centres

The demand for data storage is increasing fast

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As museums and galleries among others collect ever more artefacts they need digital archives their ever-growing collection of pictures, audio and film.

Making digital copies of those historical sources is vital as the original copies degrade over time, and will, one day, be lost forever, according to Ian Crawford of the Imperial War Museum.

“When you’ve got the only copy, you want confidence that your storage system is reliable,” he says. “We’re now looking at objects themselves and scanning in 3D – that can generate very large files.”

But it is not only museums that are facing the need for more storage space.

Businesses are buying more space for back-up data, hospitals need somewhere to store records, government needs a place to stash increasing amounts of information.

LTO (Linear Tape Open) is one form of storage that can pack a lot into a small space and one tape can hold the same amount of data as almost 300 standard smartphones.

A London company has also been experimenting with data storage that uses lasers to burn tiny holograms into a light-sensitive polymer. It can handle temperatures from -14C to 160C.

Magnetic tape needs to be kept between 16C and 25C and needs replacing every 1 years.

The ability of AI to trawl through vast amounts of data has made keeping that data even more important – there could be something valuable lurking there. That has so far been missed.

AI-Chip

Can AI remove the burden of tedious parts of accountancy?

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According to some one of the most tedious parts of the job is analysis of financial data, summarising documents, creating content, drafting documentation, advanced searching, analytics and insight and knowledge management.

“When you look at some of the tasks that auditors were doing – some of the boring, mundane tasks around churning data and manipulating it into a format where you can then actually do something valuable with it – that’s where artificial intelligence can play a really big part,” says Matthew Campbell, audit chief technology officer for KPMG UK.

According to a KPMG survey four in 10 senior audit professionals expect that the increased efficiency that AI can bring will lead to a reduction in the size of auditing teams.

This will mean that a junior accountant’s role is likely to change more towards systems management – overseeing AI powered software and databases – and relationship management, and away from the traditional reconciliations and ledgers work.

This will mean refocusing their training.

But the profession has had its problems, among them KPMG, fined £1.5m for failings in its 2019 audit of advertising agency M&C Saatchi.

The UK’s accountancy regulator, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), carried out 19 investigations,  in the 2022-2023 financial year, slapping fines of £40.5 million on auditing firms and their clients for audit failings.

But greater use of AI may help with that.

AI is particularly good at spotting anomalies in vast amounts of data, making it useful when examining what may amount to billions of transactions by a client.

Recruitment-Fraud

Recruitment fraud

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Recruitment fraud affects not only job applicants, it can also impact your business.

A particular target as reported by the BBC has been LinkedIn although it is not by any means the only victim.

Primarily targeted at applicants it offered what turned out to be fake job interviews.

The scams work by firstly posting a job then requesting the job seeker click on a link to another website, where they require you to download something and log in and give personal details.

“Another frequent scam is to ask “successful” job applicants to hand over money upfront, with a promise that they’ll be paid back – commonly known as an advance fee scam.”

However, the report says: “LinkedIn says that 99.3% of detected spam and scams are caught by its automated defences, and that 99.6% of detected fake accounts are blocked before members even report them.”

It has introduced a series of new safety features. These include: “About this profile”, which shows when a profile was created and last updated, along with whether the member has a verified a phone number or work email associated with their account.

While obviously jobseekers are advised to be wary of scams, businesses too should be alert to the possibility.

Technological-Revolution

Has the technological revolution improved productivity?

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Despite the hype there is apparently very little evidence of improved productivity, according to the BBC.

“Between 1974 and 2008 the UK’s productivity – the amount of output you get per worker – grew at an annual rate of 2.3%. But between 2008 and 2020 the rate of productivity growth collapsed to around 0.5% per annum.”

One of the explanations is that people are getting side tracked into messaging friends on Whatsapp, watching videos on YouTube, arguing angrily on Twitter rather than concentrating on work.

But there are other explanations, one being that we are “not measuring the impact of technology properly. The second is that economic revolutions tend to be rather slow-burning affairs”.

One professor at the University of Cambridge argues that data isn’t collected in ways that would help with understanding and measuring productivity.

She gives the example of a business that has dispensed with in-house technical staff and moved to outsourcing and therefore on paper this business looks smaller.

Other academics argue that when we look back to previous industrial revolutions we telescope the time their innovations took to have an effect.

The conclusion is “The technology is seemingly not the problem, and in some respects it is not the solution either. High productivity growth will come only to those that learn how to use it best.”

You can read the full article here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66233654

AI-and-Your-Business

AI and your business

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Job posts mentioning AI or generative AI have, globally, more than doubled in the past two years, according to a report by LinkedIn.

However, AI skills may be in demand but the supply of those AI capable is still lagging.

According to Ngaire Moyes, UK country manager at LinkedIn, AI can “help remove the drudgery from day-to-day work, improve productivity and free-up time for more strategic and creative work”.

This could be crucial to smaller businesses.

Nevertheless, there are drawbacks to AI, not least that AI needs to be personalised to be effective.

It is also important to be aware of the risk of legal and security breaches.

As one HR expert at the Cranfield Institute puts it: “AI systems are only as good as the data that they are based on”.

So while AI may well be a crucial tool for business in the future, proper training is going to be essential.

To improve AI skills you can experiment with many of the free versions of the tools available online.

Look for online courses in AI, but ensure they are tailored to your requirements.

Above all, managers and employers need to be clear about why they want to use AI. It is not only about efficiency but about improving things in a way that benefits the humans in your business.