Here is a rundown of Cheddar News' top market stories of the day.
TECH LAYOFFS
Multiple outlets are reporting that Microsoft will begin a series of planned layoffs on Wednesday that could cut around 5 percent of its workforce, or 10,000 employees. CEO Satya Nadella warned the cuts were coming, and said the next couple of years were likely to be challenging, as the tech sector contracts after a decade plus of rapid growth. Amazon is also set to move ahead with plans to cut 6 percent of its 350,000 corporate employees.
ADOBE'S DATA DEBACLE
Adobe is facing backlash from customers who are concerned the software company is using personal images and video to train artificial intelligence models such as OpenAI’s Dall-E. Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky denied the accusations in an interview with Bloomberg, saying: "We have never, ever used anything in our storage to train a generative AI model."
UNITED AIRLINES EARNINGS
United Airlines' fourth quarter earnings beat Wall Street estimates on the heels of a rebound in travel demand. The company reported a 31 percent increase from the same period before the pandemic. The gains were made despite the airline flying 9 percent fewer trips and a litany of other challenges, from winter storms to labor shortages to supply chain disruptions.
UNIVERSITY BANS TIKTOK
The University of Texas at Austin is blocking access to TikTok on its Wi-Fi and wired networks. The move is a response to Gov. Greg Abbott's requirement that all state agencies delete the app from government-issued devices. The administration said it is also seeking to eliminate risks to information on the university's networks. University of Texas at Dallas and Texas A&M University System have since implemented similar restrictions.
The relatively robust March jobs report showed that despite the low unemployment rate, Black, Hispanic, and women job seekers are still having difficulty finding work. William M. Rodgers III, the vice president and director of the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis noted that participation rates in the labor force ticked up for minorities, adding to other positive signs of growth. He also spoke to Cheddar News to discuss further the jobs figures, the state of the labor market, and rising inflation.
April Fools’ Day is full of eye-rolling marketing ideas that sometimes make us chuckle, but mostly make us groan. Here’s a roundup of some of the notable products we won’t be seeing on shelves anytime soon.
Amit Bendov, the CEO and co-founder of Gong, a platform utilizing artificial intelligence to help sales and customer support teams, joined Cheddar News to talk about the tech company's innovative use of AI. Bendov pointed to an example of how the platform aided a client in selling point-of-sales software to restaurants. "Gong came up with a recommendation that when they called to introduce yourself to a new company, you should talk about the iPad before the application. That small change increased sales by 12 percent. It's a very simple change," he said. "The funny thing, Gong doesn't even know what an iPad is, what the application [is], or anything about their business. It just observed. But this is what the top 5 percent of people are doing that nobody else does. It's a very simple change to implement. Very hard to detect."
The Week's Top Stories is a guided tour through the biggest market stories of the week, from winning stocks to brutal dips to the facts and forecasts generating buzz on Wall Street.
Between Bells EP Conor White recaps some of the biggest stories of the week, while Baker Machado and Hena Doba test their knowledge, and maybe learn a thing or two. It's This Week in Trivia!
The social marketplace Poshmark recently revealed its survey on spring cleaning with tips on how decluttering might lead to cash. Steven Tristan Young, the company's chief marketing officer, joined Cheddar News to talk about the survey of its customers, especially how Millennials and Gen Z'ers are gravitating toward cleaning out their closets to reboot their wardrobes. "I think style and fashion and image is so important to this audience that this is probably one of the reasons why they're really thinking about this spring cleaning, and our hope is turning it into spring selling," he noted.
