Posts

Group-Work-Meeting

Improving work meetings

/in /by

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.”

AI-Copyright

Copyright and AI

/in /by

It had to happen eventually.

Writers, artists and others are realising that they need to protect themselves as it has become clearer that AI uses multiple sources to find the information people are using for research.

The information collected by AI is not attributed so it is impossible to know where it has come from.

According to a BBC investigation: “The new wave of generative AI systems are trained on vast amounts of data – text, images, video, and audio files, all scraped from the internet. Content can be created within seconds of a simple text prompt.”

There has been a growing number of lawsuits about the issue, including one by Getty Images earlier this year.

There clearly needs to be more regulation of the issue and artists and writers in particular are campaigning for copyright laws to be updated to reflect the new environment created by AI.

According to the BBC:

“The EU appears to be taking the lead, with the EU AI Act proposing that AI tools will have to disclose any copyrighted material used to train their systems.

In the UK, a global summit on AI safety will take place this autumn.”

Mini-Budget

Will the mini budget help your business?

/in /by

There were several items in the mini budget that the Government claims will help businesses.

They include:

  • 45% higher rate of income tax abolished for England, Wales and Northern Ireland taxpayers
  • One single higher rate of income tax of 40% from April next year
  • Reverse recent rise in National Insurance (NI) from 6 November
  • Cancel UK-wide rise in corporation tax which was due to increase from 19% to 25% in April 2023
  • IR35 rules – the rules which govern off-payroll working – to be simplified
  • Annual investment allowance, the amount companies can invest tax free, remains at £1m indefinitely
  • New and start-up companies able to raise up to £250,000 under scheme giving tax relief to investors
  • Setting up investment zones with 38 local areas in England

It has been argued that most of these measures will help those at the top end of the economy, but the government expects the benefits to “trickle down” to the rest of the economy.

Only time will tell whether it will work.