16/06/2025

BIZ & FINANCE MONDAY | JUNE 16, 2025

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AFP announces cost-saving plan due to revenue shortfall PARIS: AFP news agency’s chief executive Fabrice Fries last week announced plans to save €12 to €14 million (RM58 to RM68 million) by the end of 2026 due to declining revenues. Speaking in a video available to staff online, Fries said the agency would launch an immediate cost-savings plan to cut around €2 million by the end of 2025. “But it’s really 2026 we need to prepare for, and here the bar will be much higher. We estimate that we will need to find between €10 and €12 million in savings,” he said. “Of course, this is bad news, but AFP is resilient.” AFP, one of the world’s biggest news agencies, which employs 2,600 staff worldwide, has been affected by several factors that have weighed on its financial performance. Fears about a global recession had led many clients to enter “wait-and-see mode” and either delay investment decisions or reduce their budgets, Fries said. Funding cuts from the US government under President Donald Trump have also hit AFP clients, meaning “some have been forced to abruptly cancel their subscriptions”, he added. Social network giant Facebook has also terminated its fact-checking programme in the United States, for which AFP was an important paid partner. “Thirdly, we have overestimated our ability to get Big Tech to recognise and pay for our intellectual property,” Fries said. “We have to face up to the fact that the changing political situation in the US means that tech companies are not feeling any pressure to respect copyright.” The media industry as a whole is also contending with further declines in advertising revenues and the advent of artificial intelligence. AFP’s boss did not specify whether the group would resort to job cuts to achieve its savings target, but he said “we have to question everything without taboos”. The agency’s trade unions issued a statement vowing to “mobilise in defence of jobs and working conditions that allow AFP to continue its mission of producing quality journalism”. They said they would “set out to meet with lawmakers and raise public awareness so that the world’s largest non-Anglo Saxon news agency does not begin a mortal decline” just after celebrating its 80th anniversary. In 2024, AFP posted a net profit of €200,000 on revenues of €326.4 million. After seven years of growth, AFP’s revenues are set to fall this year to around €8 million less than forecast in the budget, Fries said. Alongside its commercial income, the agency also receives funding from the French state, which amounted to €118.9 million in 2024. AFP is one of the world’s three major general news agencies, alongside America-based Associated Press and Canadian-owned Reuters. It produces news stories, photos, videos and graphics for media companies around the world in six languages. It has a unique status in France that protects its independence, being neither a public company, nor a private entity. Its clients, including the French state, are represented on its board of directors. – AFP

Big tech on a quest for ideal AI device

internet. “You can’t push it all out in the cloud,” Blanchard said, citing concerns about reliability, security, cost, and harm to the environment due to energy demand. “There is not enough energy in the world to do this, so we need to find local solutions,” he added. Howard expects a fierce battle over what will be the must-have personal device for AI, since the number of things someone is willing to wear is limited and “people can feel overwhelmed.” A new piece of hardware devoted to AI is not the obvious solution, but OpenAI has the funding and the talent to deliver, according to Julien Codorniou, a partner at venture capital firm 20VC and a former Facebook executive. OpenAI recently hired former Facebook executive and Instacart chief Fidji Simo as head of applications, and her job will be to help answer the hardware question. Voice is expected by many to be a primary way people command AI. Google chief Sundar Pichai has long expressed a vision of “ambient computing” in which technology blends invisibly into the world, waiting to be called upon. “There’s no longer any reason to type or touch if you can speak instead,” Blanchard said. “Generative AI wants to be increasingly human” so spoken dialogues with the technology “make sense”, he added. However, smartphones are too embedded in people’s lives to be snubbed any time soon, said Wood. – AFP

The AI Pin marketed by startup Humane to incredible buzz was priced at $699 (RM2,967). Now, Meta and OpenAI are making “big bets” on AI-infused hardware, according to CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood. OpenAI made a multi-billion-dollar deal to bring Ive’s startup into the fold. Google announced early this year it is working on mixed-reality glasses with AI smarts, while Amazon continues to ramp up Alexa digital assistant capabilities in its Echo speakers and displays. Apple is being cautious embracing generative AI, slowly integrating it into iPhones even as rivals race ahead with the technology. Plans to soup up its Siri chatbot with generative AI have been indefinitely delayed. The quest for creating an AI interface that people love “is something Apple should have jumped on a long time ago”, said Futurum research director Olivier Blanchard. Blanchard envisions some kind of hub that lets users tap into AI, most likely by speaking to it and without being connected to the

o Transformational new gizmo needed to connect to unimaginable technology, says designer behind iPhone

NEW ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has enlisted the legendary designer behind the iPhone to create an irresistible gadget for using generative artificial intelligence. The ability to engage digital assistants as easily as speaking with friends is being built into eyewear, speakers, computers and smartphones, but some argue that the Age of AI calls for a transformational new gizmo. “The products that we’re using to deliver and connect us to unimaginable technology are decades old,” former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive said when his alliance with OpenAI was announced. “It’s just common sense to at least think, surely there’s something beyond these legacy products.” Sharing no details, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said that a prototype Ive shared with him “is YORK:

the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.” According to several US media outlets, the device will not have a screen, nor will it be worn like a watch or broach. Kyle Li, a professor at The New School, said that since AI is not yet integrated into people’s lives, there is room for a new product tailored to its use. The type of device will not be as important as whether the AI innovators like OpenAI make “pro-human” choices when building the software that will power them, said Rob Howard of consulting firm Innovating with AI The industry is well aware of the spectacular failure of the AI Pin, a square gadget worn like a badge packed with AI features but gone from the market less than a year after its debut in 2024 due to a dearth of buyers.

BT Group logo displayed on BT Tower in London. – REUTERSPIC

BT CEO expects AI to deepen job cuts, FT reports LONDON: BT Group chief executive Allison Kirkby said advances in artificial intelligence could deepen significant job cuts under way at the British telecoms company, the Financial Times reported yesterday. Britain’s biggest broadband and mobile provider had said in 2023 that it would cut as many as 55,000 jobs, including contractors, by 2030. Its CEO at the time, Philip Jansen, said the company would rely on a much smaller workforce and significantly reduced cost base by the end of the 2020s.

price and if that persisted, BT “would absolutely have to look at options”. In an e-mailed response to Reuters, BT said that Openreach is not something the company is actively looking at right now. BT said last month that strong demand for fibre broadband and more than £900 million of cost savings had helped to shore up its full-year earnings and boost cash flow. Resilience at Openreach offset declines in revenue and profit at its business and consumer units, where legacy voice services continued to wane and handset sales fell. – Reuters

Kirkby told the newspaper that BT’s plans to cull more than 40,000 jobs and strip out £3 billion (RM17 billion) of costs by the end of the decade “did not reflect the full potential of AI”. “Depending on what we learn from AI ... there may be an opportunity for BT to be even smaller by the end of the decade,” the FT quoted her as saying.

Kirkby, who took over from Jansen a year ago, has also opened the door to a possible future spin-off of Openreach, the company’s network infrastructure business, the FT said. Kirkby said she did not feel the value of Openreach was reflected in the company’s share