BT has announced that the completion of its fibre roll-out, 5G rollout, adapting to new technologies like AI, plus general cost cutting are key reasons why it will be axing up to 55,000 jobs, primarily in the UK, by the end of the decade.

40 Per Cent Of The Workforce 

The massive 40 per cent cut in BT’s workforce will lead to a significantly reduced cost base by the end of the 2020s and, according to boss Philip Jansen, make the new BT Group “a leaner business with a brighter future.”

Drivers Of Job Cuts 

The main drivers and numbers of the job cuts are reported to be:

– The completion of the most labour-intensive stage of BT’s next-generation full-fibre and 5G network expansion, which will mean 15,000 job cuts as fewer engineers will be required.

– The digitising of BT’s business and the wider adoption of AI, e.g. for call handling and network diagnostics, which will result in the loss of 10,000 jobs.

– The above-mentioned changes leading to fewer maintenance staff being required, which will result in another 10,000 jobs being cut.

– Cuts in the number of contractors (mainly abroad) which will mean the loss of 30,000 jobs.

– General re-structuring and cost-cutting as part of a rolling programme, meaning a loss of 5,000 jobs.

Vodafone  

BT’s job cuts announcement follows Vodafone’s decision to cut 11,000 jobs (around 12 per cent of its 90,000 global workforce) over three years.

Unions Expected It

The Communications and Workers Union (CWU) said that the BT job cuts were no surprise due to the introduction of new technologies and the completion of infrastructure projects.

Share Value Affected 

BT’s profits had dropped 12 per cent to £1.7 billion for the year ending in April and the company’s shares also fell more than 7 per cent after the job cuts announcement. Analysts suggest that the job cut announcements may be aimed at convincing investors of the promised cost savings.

AI Opportunities

With ChatGPT’s massive impact on the business world, much has been made around the part it will play in replacing some of the BT jobs. BT’s Boss Philip Jansen admitted that he sees “huge opportunities” to use AI in the business, e.g. to improve customer service and that an AI tool like ChatGPT “gives us confidence we can go even further”. However, he also says that, although adapting to new technologies, he doesn’t want to make customers “feel like they are dealing with robots”. 

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

As the unions pointed out, job losses at BT were expected anyway due to the introduction of new technologies across BT and the completion of the fibre infrastructure replacing the copper old network (resulting in in less labour costs). The arrival and enormous impact of ChatGPT (and now Bard), CoPilot, and others, however, have brought with them the kind of automation that has long been thought could lead to job losses, which appears to be the case here for around 10,000 BT workers. This could now become a growing trend as other big companies start to bring the cost and time saving benefits of AI into more parts of their business. As many commentators have noted, however, AI can also create new opportunities and new types of jobs and we are still very much at the beginning of the journey with generative AI, and regulation is likely to be an important step in making sure that the rapid growth of AI usage is safe and beneficial.

£22 million of the UK government’s £91 million Green Heat Network Fund will be used to build a geothermal heating network that could provide low-cost heating for nearly 4,000 homes in Cornwall.

Drilling Near Truro 

The government-funded project by Geothermal Engineering Ltd (GEL), “The Langarth,” at Langarth Garden Village (near Truro), Cornwall, will involves drilling to a depth of more than 5,000 metres to extract heat from granite rocks. This heat will then be piped up to the surface to nearby homes.

The Benefits

The main benefits of the scheme are that is uses renewable heat from natural, sustainable resources, saving 5,000 tonnes per year of CO2, proving low-cost heat, and keeping the benefits of the heating scheme in the immediate area surrounding it.

Ryan Law, CEO of GEL, said about the project: “We use almost 50% of all energy in the UK for heating, yet most of this is currently gas. The potential of geothermal resources to produce renewable heat from our natural resources will play a large part of decarbonising this form of energy over the next decade. The great thing about a deep geothermal plant is that the heat will always benefit the immediate area surrounding it as it cannot be exported to a ‘grid.’ Langarth will be an excellent example of a local community directly benefiting from having a geothermal initiative nearby.”   

Progress 

The project, first envisioned in 2009 is still awaiting the design for a ‘Binary’ power plant (work due to start this year) although two directional wells have already been drilled; the production well to a depth of 5275m and the injection well to 2393m.

Other Similar Schemes 

Other similar Deep Geothermal Heat Networks in the UK include:

– The Goole Green Heat Network (£12 million of the government’s £91 million funding), which will (when operational in 2024) extract waste heat from a nearby manufacturing plant and pump it to residents and businesses in the area. The East Yorkshire project is intended enable nearby homes to ditch oil and gas in favour of cleaner, cheaper energy.

– The expansion of a heat network in East London to supply heating to 2 new developments in and around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The project will serve around 500 new homes and 250 non-domestic premises with low-cost heating.

The UK government says that it is currently funding 7 innovative projects with its Green Heat Network Fund.

What Does This Mean For Your Organisation? 

For organisations and businesses, the Cornwall geothermal heating network and similar projects offer numerous advantages. By transitioning to sustainable heating solutions, businesses can contribute to their environmental goals and reduce their carbon footprint. Additionally, low-cost heat provided by these networks can lead to significant cost savings for businesses in the long run, improving their bottom line.

Investing in sustainable energy solutions also enhances a business’s reputation and demonstrates its commitment to corporate social responsibility. Customers and stakeholders increasingly value sustainability and aligning with green initiatives can attract environmentally conscious consumers, boost brand image, and create a competitive edge in the market.

The development of the geothermal heating network in Cornwall and other similar projects funded by the UK government’s Green Heat Network Fund present compelling benefits for businesses, particularly in the energy industry. The utilisation of renewable heat from natural resources, the reduction in carbon emissions, and the localised nature of these schemes all contribute to a more sustainable and resilient future. Embracing these opportunities enables businesses and organisations to align with environmental goals, realise cost savings, enhance their reputation, and position themselves at the forefront of the transition to a greener economy.

02 June 1966 : Getting Off The Ground Isn’t Always Easy!

Chuck Yeager (famous for being the first to break the sound barrier) mentioned in his excellent autobiography that whilst he was training Neil Amstrong in high-altitude flying, he found him a little a bit cocky. In fairness, Neil did have a training crash at one point and was lucky to survive – these were very risky episodes indeed for these exceptional pilots and Chuck later acknowledged that Neil had one of the best engineering minds around, which was high praise indeed from him.

So how could NASA know this brave young man wouldn’t simply ‘drown in dust’ when landing on the moon and not be able to get back up?

57 years ago next week on June 2nd, 1966, the Surveyor I successfully landed on the moon’s surface. This soft-landing was a crucial step in preparation for the ambitious Apollo Program, whereby the Surveyor I spacecraft achieved what no other vehicle had accomplished before: a precise and successful landing on the moon on its first attempt. Its goal was to gather essential information about the moon’s surface, including its composition, texture and its load-bearing capacity – critical information for the Apollo missions.

The Surveyor Program comprised a series of missions designed to explore the moon. In total, NASA launched seven Surveyor spacecraft, each contributing vital information about the lunar surface. One of the key pieces of information was the depth of the dust on the moon’s surface, which indicated that an astronaut could in fact land on the moon safely.

NASA contracted the renowned Hughes Aircraft Company for the design and construction of the spacecraft. Hughes Aircraft Company, famous for its contributions during World War II in developing prototype aircraft, were instrumental in the successful design and execution of Surveyor I. As an aside, Theodore Maiman was an employee of Hughes Aircraft Company when he designed and fired the first ever laser (on May 16th 1960) and his technology subsequently helped measure the distance from earth to the moon with much more accuracy.

This story of Surveyor I – 57 years ago this week is a great example of how combining the expertise of two different organisations, NASA was able to achieve something that no one had ever done before.

If you’d like to protect your privacy and the privacy of your business in terms of what you share with ChatGPT, here’s how to delete your ChatGPT chat history:

– Sign-in to your ChatGPT account and click on the three dots next to your account name (at the foot of the chats).

– Click on the “Clear Conversations” link.

– Confirm the deletion by clicking on “Confirm clear conversations.”

Twitter has recently added a new encrypted messaging service to its repertoire, offering end-to-end encryption for all direct messages sent across its network. This privacy enhancement ensures that only the sender and receiver can view the content of their conversation, emphasising a renewed commitment to user confidentiality.

Interestingly, Elon Musk, Twitter’s CEO, has affirmed that these encrypted conversations are so secure that even he, under duress, could not gain access to users’ private exchanges even if he wanted to, by saying “… even if there was a gun to my head”. However, he has also urged a cautious approach, acknowledging that the feature is still in its early stages and may not yet be completely reliable.

Only For Twitter Blue

As of now, the availability of this encryption service is restricted to Twitter Blue subscribers and those with verified Twitter accounts. This limitation, along with the fact that only text and links can be shared – excluding media attachments – indicates the service is still undergoing fine-tuning before a full-scale rollout. Twitter’s own admission of not having perfected the encryption process further supports this notion.

The company has clarified that while the messages are encrypted, the metadata associated with them – such as recipient information, creation time, and linked content – are not. This raises potential issues around the vulnerability of conversations to malicious insiders or mandated legal interventions.

We-Chat Wannabe

Musk’s vision for Twitter since acquiring it in 2022 has been to transform it into a ‘super-app’, akin to China’s multifunctional WeChat platform. His recent tenure has already seen several significant changes, including the introduction of a subscription model and an overhaul of Twitter’s blue tick verification badges, designed to combat misinformation.

The decision to enhance the security of Twitter’s private messaging feature comes at a potentially contentious time in the UK, where the government’s Online Safety Bill is currently under scrutiny. The Bill seeks to impose stricter regulations on social media companies in a bid to protect children from online abuse. Critics, including other messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Signal, have raised concerns that the legislation could potentially undermine the integrity of end-to-end encryption, viewed as a vital tool by privacy advocates.

Could UK Online Safety Bill Scupper It?

The proposed Online Safety Bill in the UK is seen by some as enabling ‘routine, general, and indiscriminate surveillance’ of private conversations, according to an open letter penned by the leaders of several messaging services. In contrast, Meta’s Messenger platform employs encryption, albeit with certain exceptions, such as conversations in the Marketplace.

As the Online Safety Bill is applicable to all platforms, regardless of their specific design and operation, encrypted services such as Twitter’s would be subject to user-care obligations. This puts an onus on businesses to maintain public safety while implementing end-to-end encryption – a balancing act that the IT industry and the government are working together to achieve.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

For UK business owners, this development heralds an era of enhanced privacy on Twitter, which could boost confidence in using the platform for secure communications, possibly helping their PR at a time when they have had significant recent controversy.

However, it also brings into sharp focus the ongoing debate around balancing privacy and safety in the digital space, underscored by the scrutiny of the Online Safety Bill. It is clear that businesses, especially those relying on social media for communications, will need to keep abreast of these evolving regulations to ensure compliance and maintain the trust of their customers.

In this article, we look at 22 handy AI sites that could help save time, make life easier and boost your business.

1. Pictory – https://pictory.ai/ 

Pictory offers a way to automatically create short, sharable branded, sales videos from your long form content. No technical skills or software download are required; it can use AI to extract content from your Zoom, Teams, and webinar recordings, plus it automatically adds captions to your videos. It’s one of many new AI video generating tools.

2. Jasper – https://www.jasper.ai/

This business-focused language model says that it uses features from a cross-section of the best models and infuses them with recent search data, the user’s brand voice, and optimisation tools like SEO and grammar. Jasper can be used to generate text content (like ChatGPT – although much less powerful, it preceded ChatGPT on the market so we’ve included it here), plus it offers art generation, has a template library, language translation and more. It’s quite a comprehensive AI solution.

3. HitPaw – See Google Play Store

HitPaw is a one-click, AI-assisted image enhancer that can instantly make pictures less blurry, remove noise of pictures, and enlarge and upscale images without any quality loss. This sort of thing used to take a long time with programs like Photoshop.

4. Fireflies – https://fireflies.ai/

Fireflies uses AI to instantly produce transcripts of your meetings across several different video-conferencing apps, diallers, and audio files. It captures video and audio, generates the transcripts in minutes, integrates with apps like Google Meet, Zoom, Teams and more, and enables fast search, and analysis of voice conversations. It’s one of several new AI-enabled transcript tools that can save businesses a lot of time.

5. Acrolinx – https://www.acrolinx.com/

An AI-powered software platform that’s designed to improve the quality and effectiveness of enterprise (human and AI) content. It’s probably best for bigger companies and agencies and it’s used by some major players and offers a way to make any content published as effective as possible in terms of marketing. Quite an comprehensive product, it needs to be fully explored to be understood.

6. Beautiful AI – https://www.beautiful.ai/

This is an AI-powered tool to easily create high quality presentations. It has some impressive looking smart templates, plus the slides are automatically created and adapted as the user adds the content.

7. TinyWow – https://tinywow.com/

This site seems have it all and offers a handy toolbox which you can keep coming back to as their list of features just gets bigger and bigger. From text generation to image/videos manipulation and file manipulation, it’s difficult to overstate how handy this resource is and – incredibly – you can use most of it for free without needing to pay for the premium services.

8. 1-Click Summarizer (See google Play Store)

The 1-Click Summarizer and web toolbar by (Skim AI), is available as a Chrome extension and offers a fast and easy way to process and summarise news, research, and useful PDFs. For example, if you’re looking at a news article or long PDF online it will summarise all the main points with one click (a real time-saver).

9. Timehero – https://www.timehero.com/

TimeHero is personal project and task management software that connects to your Gmail and other project management software and automatically generates tasks based on due dates and other details. A fast and useful project and time management tool.

10. Warmest AI – https://www.warmest.ai/

Warmest AI makes replying to emails super easy and fast. When you receive an email, it works out how you would answer an email (based on previous emails you’ve sent) and puts that in a draft ready to simply be approved by you and sent.

11. Zenefits – https://www.zenefits.com/

Zenefits offers an AI-powered way to streamline your workflow by automatically connecting HR, Benefits, Payroll and Scheduling, together in one complete HR management platform.

12. Textio – https://textio.com/

Textio offers a way for businesses to always use the right language in job ads and more. It’s a tool that eliminates bias in job posts, sourcing mail, and employer brand content and helps managers to identify and remove biased, ineffective feedback, enabling equitable employee development opportunities.

13. DomainWheel – https://domainwheel.com/

This is an AI-powered (free) tool for simply generating domain name suggestions for your website. You just need to enter a keyword or phrase and DomainWheel will instantly provide domain name ideas. It’s no surprise that you can also register them there.

14. Grammarly – https://www.grammarly.com/

This is a highly popular, AI-powered digital writing assistant that helps you write well-structured content that’s free of plagiarism, and it eliminates grammar errors. It runs in the background on most platforms.

15. Gong – https://www.gong.io/

Gong offers a fast and intelligent way for businesses to understand and analyse sales conversations and customer interactions to increase revenue efficiency and improve decision-making. It says it can turn “bottom performers into A-players”.

16. Brandmark.io – https://brandmark.io/

This AI tool helps you generate brand logos. You can try out assorted designs and even upload the logo and see how it ranks on several measures.

17. Talk To Books – https://books.google.com/talktobooks/

Talk To Books is an interesting (and slightly leftfield) Google creativity tool which allows you to browse passages from books using experimental AI, explore ideas and discover books by getting quotes that respond to your queries.

18. Deep Nostalgia – https://www.myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia

This tool is quite unique in that it offers a way to animate the faces of family members from their old photos. Take a look, you’ll be surprised.

19. Magic Eraser – https://magicstudio.com/magiceraser

This AI tool offers a fast, online way to remove unwanted objects from a photo. Just upload the photo, mark the area you want removed, the AI tool will remove it, and you can download the updated version of the photo.

20. Home Styler – https://www.homestyler.com/

If you need to create a floor plan, this (free to try) online interior design platform lets you do it in 3D and says it is “An easy and timesaving online interior design tool for both professionals and amateurs”.

21. OutGrow – https://outgrow.co/

“Boost Your Marketing With Quizzes, Calculators And Forms” as they say on their website. Makes adding clever, engaging ‘stuff’ like these a breeze.

22. TypingMind – https://www.typingmind.com/

Despite its awesome power, the user-interface for ChatGPT is still pretty terrible. This handy resource means you can do so much more with ChatGPT with just a few keystrokes.

There are hundreds of AI sites appearing all over the place – this is just a small selection. We’ll be revisiting this list soon.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

AI has been around for a long time yet because interest the generative AI tool ChatGPT has been so intense since it was released just a few month ago, there has been a resurgence in the interest around AI overall. There are lots of other useful, innovative, timesaving, and value-adding AI based tools out there to boost your business or personal life and this list is just a smattering of ones that you may not have heard about.

AI can now help with so many different aspects of businesses to help improve efficiency and create competitive advantages. Trying out just a few of the options highlighted in this article, or others found in your own searches could help you to discover a new tool that could quickly and easily boost your business and this entire field of AI is exploding so scheduling regular reviews will be essential.