Aurelia Butler

The downturn was sharpest in consumer services – where large employers will bear the brunt of a 25 billion pound ($32 billion) rise in payroll taxes – but the mood at business and professional services companies soured too, the CBI said.On Monday Reeves told the CBI’s annual conference that she would not raise taxes in the same way again, after the CBI’s chief executive said businesses had been caught off guard by the scale of the tax rises.Thursday’s survey showed that optimism among consumer services businesses sank to its lowest since August 2022 at -55 in November, down from -19 in August, while among business and professional services sentiment fell to -29 from +9.The index represents the difference between the percentages of businesses which say they are more optimistic and those who are more pessimistic.”Falling sentiment, weaker hiring intentions and firming cost pressures are all at least a partial response to the forthcoming rise in employer National Insurance Contributions,” CBI Deputy Chief Economist Alpesh Paleja said.Business and professional services firms said their profitability had fallen by the most since August 2020 and all types of services firm said they would invest less.British business investment is low by international standards and this is widely seen as one cause of Britain’s lower economic productivity than its major peers.The gloom in the CBI survey has also been reflected in other surveys. Last week the S&P Global purchasing managers’ index pointed to economic contraction for the first time in 13 months.The CBI survey was based on responses from 441 firms collected between Oct. 29 and Nov. 14.($1 = 0.7898 pounds) More

The response came after some users pointed out on social media that the company requires users to opt-out of its “connected experiences” feature, which they argued was used to train AI models.”These claims are untrue. Microsoft does not use customer data from Microsoft 365 consumer and commercial applications to train foundational large language models,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Reuters. The spokesperson added that the “connected experiences” enables features such as co-authoring and cloud storage, and has no connection to how the company trains its large language models.The conversations on social media indicate that people remain concerned about their data being used to train AI models without permission. More

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