📅 4-Day Work Week Works In The UK

📰 This Week In Business

• The owner of Britain’s Royal Mail is inclined to accept a fresh non-binding bid from Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky that values the company at £3.5 billion. (Bloomberg)

• Nadhim Zahawi has landed a new role as chair of Very Group, which owns Very and Littlewoods, just days after stepping down as Conservative MP. (The Independent)

• Taylor Swift's Eras Tour will boost UK spending by almost £1bn this year, with more than a million fans expected to spend an average of £848 on tickets, travel, accommodation and outfits to see the star perform live. (BBC)

• Apple has a product roadmap leaked online, suggesting AR glasses, foldable iPhones and OLED MacBooks are currently under development for a future release. (NewsBytes)

• US software giant Workday has announced plans to invest more than £550m in the UK over the next three years. (Yahoo Finance)

• UK fashion retailer Burberry’s profits have slumped by 40% in a year amid a wider slowdown in demand for luxury goods. (The Guardian)

• Spanish fashion retailer Mango has announced UK expansion with more than 20 new stores set to open throughout the UK in 2024. (Retail Gazette)

📅 UK 4-Day Work Week Trial, One Year On

In 2022, the UK held the biggest test of a 4-day workweek. The test lasted a year and had 61 organisations involved. Now, a year after the test ended, we want to know if the companies are still using the 4-day week or if they went back to the usual Monday-to-Friday schedule.

Four-Day Work Week Trial - One Year On:

• Continued Adoption: 89% of the 61 organizations involved in the 2022 trial have continued with the four-day work week, with 51% making it a permanent change.

• Positive Impact on Employees: Workers reported sustained improvements in physical and mental health, a better work-life balance, increased life satisfaction, and reduced work-related exhaustion.

• Business Benefits: Companies noticed positive changes including a decrease in staff turnover, improved recruitment, and enhanced staff well-being.

• Adaptive Work Practices: Successful adaptation to the four-day work week was achieved by modifying meeting norms, communication practices, and work prioritization.

The four-day work week is proving to be more than a temporary experiment in the UK, as companies continue to see substantial benefits from this model. This shift reflects broader changes in work dynamics, influenced by the pandemic-driven move to remote work and the public's increasing demand for better work-life balance. As the trend grows, the four-day workweek may become a standard, benefiting employees’ well-being and business productivity alike.

😏 OpenAI Announce GPT-4o & New Free Features

As shared by Reuters, OpenAI announced on Monday that they will release a new AI model called GPT-4o, bringing new capabilities to the renowned language model, demonstrated in a live stream event. This new tool sets a higher standard for interactive AI as the competition continues to heat up.

Key Features of GPT-4o:

• Realistic Voice Conversations: GPT-4o now lets users have real-time conversations with the AI using audio. This new feature is a big improvement from other audio technologies and feels very natural and conversational.

• GPT-4o Can See: During a live demonstration, OpenAI showcased how GPT-4o could assist a researcher in real time by talking them through a math problem visually presented on paper, using both voice and visual inputs. Another demonstration showed someone asking the AI if their outfit was suitable for a job interview.

• Enhanced User Accessibility: OpenAI has announced that GPT-4o will be available for free, has five times higher rate limits than the current version, and can generate responses twice as fast as its quickest previous model. This strategic move aims to broaden the model's user base and accessibility to AI.

• Web Browsing Feature: A significant addition for free users is the new "browse" feature, enabling the AI to pull up-to-date information directly from the web, thus broadening the scope of queries GPT-4o can handle effectively.

You can find more information about OpenAI's main model and watch real-life examples here.

🎸 Latest Apple Ad Causes Outrage - But Why?

Apple has announced the launch of their new thinnest and most powerful iPad Pro yet, but the ad to promote it has triggered a huge backlash online.

The ad called ‘Crush!‘ shows a giant hydraulic press crushing a pile of creative objects, including instruments, books, paint cans, sculptures and cameras.

Tim Cook shared the video on X, stating:

‘Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.’

But the commercial hasn’t gone down well, with responses flooding in criticising the company for its lack of respect for creative industries and creators being the foundation which the iPad was created from.

Angry replies included notable names from film, TV and music declaring the ad as ‘tone-deaf’.

If you haven’t seen the ad, here it is… let me know what you think.

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