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People walk past the New York Times building on October 14, 2019 in New York City.
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For about 16 months, the U.S. and U.K. news industries have predominantly operated out of people’s living rooms, home offices and bedrooms. Now, they’re deciding what post-pandemic life should look like for their employees.

Since the pandemic shutdowns in early 2020, reporters have adjusted techniques to break stories, shifting from in-person lunches and coffees to phone calls and zoom meetings. Editors and team leaders have managed remotely, relying on Slack, Microsoft Teams and content management systems for workflow and communication. Unlike many industries that have been crippled by the pandemic, newsrooms have adjusted and pumped out stories without much of a hitch.

That’s led to a quandary among newsroom executives and human resource leaders in charge of getting employees back to the office. How much flexibility should be given to employees who have demonstrated they can produce stories while not in the office? Do newsrooms want everyone back in the office? Is a hybrid approach more appropriate? Or should employees be given total flexibility to work from home whenever they want?

“For knowledge workers, there’s no putting this back in the box,” said Matt Martin, CEO and co-founder of Clockwise, a software company that has developed dynamic calendar assistant tools for office workers. “Full 100% in office, 40 hours a week, that’s out the window. I don’t see a world where it comes back.”

Newsroom leaders are beginning to make decisions based on internal employee surveys and conversations, but they’re not all making the same choices. The decisions companies make could have major implications for how future employees select between potential employers. They’ll also be an industry-wide test for whether more flexible work arrangements can be long lasting.

Among organizations with national scope, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, USA Today and Vox Media are all handling back to work plans differently, providing a natural science experiment for the future or journalism.

Get back to the office: The Bloomberg Way

Bloomberg LP is among the most aggressive organizations in getting its employees back to work. Bloomberg owns offices around the world, spending millions of dollars to decorate them with fish tanks, transparent walls, curved escalators and digital signs that show reporter headlines and real-time market movements. Bloomberg has journalists and analysts in more than 120 countries.

According to a Bloomberg spokesperson, the company’s post-pandemic goal is to recreate a pre-pandemic environment. Employees will come back to the office once they can safely do so.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg addresses the virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention, livestreamed online and viewed by laptop from the United Kingdom in the early hours of August 21, 2020, in London, United Kingdom.
David Cliff | NurPhoto | Getty Images

“As a firm, we remain committed to making our offices the safest environment for everyone to come together and collaborate,” Bloomberg LP founder and CEO Mike Bloomberg wrote to all employees in an internal February memo obtained by CNBC. “That way of working is central to who we are at Bloomberg, and the buzz in our buildings will resume and grow stronger each day into 2021. After all, it’s our people who make Bloomberg such a great place to work.”

Bloomberg noted that special circumstances based on family situations would be accommodated, but he also stressed workers should get vaccinated as soon as possible.

“As vaccines become available, we expect people to take advantage of the safety they provide and return to the office,” Bloomberg wrote.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Bloomberg’s approach is similar to Wall Street firms, which also are approaching post-pandemic life with a “back to before” vibe. Bloomberg LP makes the majority of its revenue from selling its proprietary software to financial institutions and is more a financial services company than a traditional media firm. Only some of Bloomberg’s employees are affiliated with the media side of the business.

“We want people back to work and my view is that sometime in September, October it will look just like it did before,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in May. “And everyone is going to be happy with it, and yes, the commute, you know people don’t like commuting, but so what.”

Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman echoed Dimon’s thoughts.

James Gorman, chief executive officer and chairman of Morgan Stanley, speaks during the International Economic Forum Of The Americas (IEFA) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on Wednesday June 12, 2019. Photographer: Christinne Muschi/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Bloomberg

“If you can go to a restaurant in New York City, you can come into the office,” Gorman said. “And we want you in the office.”

Still, bankers and Bloomberg employees may push for individual flexibility with their individual team leaders — especially if they see other co-workers better able to balance work and family life. Citigroup said in March it will build in more hybrid and remote working environments for employees that are equally or more productive from home.

Firms in industries that aren’t offering flexible work schedules will have to make that up with additional compensation or other perks to entice talent, Clockwork’s Martin said.

“Deviations from what’s going to become standardized will hurt the marketability of companies,” said Martin.

The Times’s, they are a-changin’ (somewhat)

The New York Times and The Financial Times are among the news organizations embracing change — to some degree.

The New York Times will begin welcoming back maskless employees to company headquarters on 620 8th Avenue in Manhattan on Monday, July 12 if they submit proof of vaccination. Most employees will come back to the office the week after Labor Day (Sept. 6), with flexible one- or two-day-a-week returns throughout September, according to an internal memo from Chief Human Resources Officer and Executive Vice President Jacqueline Welch obtained by CNBC.

The New York Times will then change its “normal” routine to three days working in the office, two days working remotely. Employees who want to be in the office five days a week will be welcomed to do so. Those who want full-time at-home arrangements may not have that choice.

“While most employees will have much more flexibility in how they work, we expect that for most teams, full-time remote work will be the exception, rather than the norm,” Welch wrote in the memo.

The Financial Times is also instituting a hybrid approach, according to spokesperson Sophie Knight. The news organization hasn’t yet decided specifics around the remote-office balance.

“News is a fast-paced business and there is huge benefit in working together on site,” Knight said. “That said, we have mastered remote working in the past year and plan to build the lessons learned into a more flexible model.”

Gannett-USA Today headquarters building in McLean, Virginia.
Paul J. Richards | AFP | Getty Images

Gannett, which owns USA Today and many local newspapers, is planning to have employees return to the office in October. It’s considering different options for adding flexibility for employees and has opened about 200 of its 300 offices throughout the country so far. Dow Jones, which publishes The Wall Street Journal, hasn’t told employees specifics around its hybrid approach, but it plans to offer employees additional flexibility to work from home part-time, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to speak on the record because the details haven’t become public.

“A number of our offices around the world have begun a phased return to the workplace,” a Dow Jones spokesperson told CNBC. “Here in the States, we will have more to share with our colleagues in the coming weeks as we review input from our employees and put finishing touches on our plans.”

Digital media companies, such as Vox Media and Group Nine, which have long offered many employees the ability to work from home, are also adopting a hybrid approach. Vox Media began a phased reopening of its offices on July 6 at 10% capacity for vaccinated employees and plans to resume full office operations in September.

About two-thirds of all companies with predominantly knowledge workers are taking a hybrid approach, according to Kevin Delaney, co-founder of Charter, a media and services company focused on the future of work. Delaney was also a former journalist, working as a writer and editor for The Wall Street Journal before co-founding Quartz, a business news website. Google, Apple and Uber are among the large technology companies that have instituted specific hybrid policies allowing for a combination of in-office and remote days each week.

“It’s very clear that hybrid work is a really good scenario for both organizations and workers,” said Delaney. “On net, it’s a positive. But there are complications. The key is that organizations deal with those drawbacks and minimize the extent to which they’re detrimental.”

Proximity bias

Some news organizations have chosen all-remote options. Quartz CEO Zach Seward wrote a post earlier this month explaining what he’s learned from allowing workers to have the flexibility to shun the office completely.

Dennis Publishing, which owns a suite of publishing brands including “The Week,” “PC Pro,” and “Minecraft World,” has considered all-remote options for some of its employees, according to people familiar with the matter. But employees at “The Week” pushed back on the concept, arguing three days a week in the office would better serve the product and its employees, said the people. A Dennis spokesperson wasn’t immediately available to respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Going fully remote could eat away at company culture and may alienate future talent who want at least some office environment, said Martin. Still, it may be more equitable than hybrid environments, which could test facetime and proximity biases that have already been established to be real in workplaces, said Delaney.

Stanford professor Nick Bloom, who studies remote work, recommends that companies specifically choose certain days for remote work for fairness reasons. If everyone is at the office for the same amount of time, people won’t be penalized for failing to put in face time with bosses or missing work outings because they’re not available.

Proximity bias — the idea that workers get more raises and promotions by being close to bosses in the office — is unquestionably real through decades of research, Delaney said. Companies will have to conduct their own internal audits to ensure that hybrid standards don’t penalize workers that choose to spend some time away from the office, he said.

“Many leaders of companies that are baby boomers struggle to believe people can be productive if they’re not at the office,” said Delaney, noting that the largest Wall Street firms are run by men in their late 50s and 60s. “They need to make the shift to focus on outcomes instead of hours.”

Hybrid environments may also have adverse diversity effects. Surveys suggest women and people of color tend to want more out-of-office flexibility than Caucasian men, Delaney said.

Still, if companies remain attuned to these drawbacks, hybrid environments shouldn’t tilt back toward office-only situations with time, Delaney said.

“It would be a mistake for organizations to treat this as a moment in time where they’re unwillingly being dragged into offering hybrid work,” Delaney said. “Hybrid work setups are the configuration that suit our modern knowledge workers much better than how we operated previously.”

Disclosure: NBCUniversal, CNBC’s parent company, is an investor in Vox Media.

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As Microsoft turns 50, Nadella sees future success built on ability to ‘win the new’

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As Microsoft turns 50, Nadella sees future success built on ability to 'win the new'

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during the Microsoft Build conference at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on May 21, 2024.

Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images

A half-century ago, childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft from a strip mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Five decades and almost $3 trillion later, the company celebrates its 50th birthday on Friday from its sprawling campus in Redmond, Washington.

Now the second most valuable publicly traded company in the world, Microsoft has only had three CEOs in its history, and all of them are in attendance for the monumental event. One is current CEO Satya Nadella. The other two are Gates and Steve Ballmer, both among the 11 richest people in the world due to their Microsoft fortunes.

While Microsoft has mostly been on the ascent of late, with Nadella turning the company into a major power player in cloud computing and artificial intelligence, the birthday party lands at an awkward moment.

The company’s stock price has dropped for four consecutive months for the first time since 2009 and just suffered its steepest quarterly drop in three years. That was all before President Donald Trump’s announcement this week of sweeping tariffs, which sent the Nasdaq tumbling on Thursday and Microsoft down another 2.4%.

Cloud computing has been Microsoft’s main source of new revenue since Nadella took over from Ballmer as CEO in 2014. But the Azure cloud reported disappointing revenue in the latest quarter, a miss that finance chief Amy Hood attributed in January to power and space shortages and a sales posture that focused too much on AI. Hood said revenue growth in the current quarter will fall to 10% from 17% a year earlier

Nadella said management is refining sales incentives to maximize revenue from traditional workloads, while positioning the company to benefit from the ongoing AI boom.

“You would rather win the new than just protect the past,” Nadella told analysts on a conference call.

The past remains healthy. Microsoft still generates around one-fifth of its roughly $262 billion in annual revenue from productivity software, mostly from commercial clients. Windows makes up around 10% of sales.

Meanwhile, the company has used its massive cash pile to orchestrate its three largest acquisitions on record in a little over eight years, snapping up LinkedIn in late 2016, Nuance Communications in 2022 and Activision Blizzard in 2023, for a combined $121 billion.

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“Microsoft has figured out how to stay ahead of the curve, and 50 years later, this is a company that can still be on the forefront of technology innovation,” said Soma Somasegar, a former Microsoft executive who now invests in startups at venture firm Madrona. “That’s a commendable place for the company to be in.”

When Somasegar gave up his corporate vice president position at Microsoft in 2015, the company was fresh off a $7.6 billion write-down from Ballmer’s ill-timed purchase of Nokia’s devices and services business.

Microsoft is now in a historic phase of investment. The company has built a $13.8 billion stake in OpenAI and last year spent almost $76 billion on capital expenditures and finance leases, up 83% from a year prior, partly to enable the use of AI models in the Azure cloud. In January, Nadella said Microsoft has $13 billion in annualized AI revenue, more even than OpenAI, which just closed a financing round valuing the company at $300 billion.

Microsoft’s spending spree has constrained free cash flow growth. Guggenheim analysts wrote in a note after the company’s earnings report in January, “You just have to believe in the future.” 

Of the 35 Microsoft analysts tracked by FactSet, 32 recommend buying the stock, which has appreciated tenfold since Nadella became CEO. Azure has become a fearsome threat to Amazon Web Services, which pioneered the cloud market in the 2000s, and startups as well as enterprises are flocking to its cloud technology.

Winston Weinberg, CEO of legal AI startup Harvey, uses OpenAI models through Azure. Weinberg lauded Nadella’s focus on customers of all sizes.

“Satya has literally responded to emails within 15 minutes of us having a technical problem, and he’ll route it to the right person,” Weinberg said.

Still, technology is moving at an increasingly rapid pace and Microsoft’s ability to stay on top is far from guaranteed. Industry experts highlighted four key issues the company has to address as it pushes into its next half-century.

Microsoft didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Regulation

There’s some optimism that the Trump administration and a new head of the Federal Trade Commission will open up the door to the kinds of deal-making that proved very challenging during Joe Biden’s presidency, when Lina Khan headed the FTC.

But regulatory uncertainty remains.

It’s not a new risk for Microsoft. In 1995, the company paid a $46 million breakup fee to tax software maker Intuit after the Justice Department filed suit to block the proposed deal. Years later, the DOJ got Microsoft to revamp some of its practices after a landmark antitrust case.

Microsoft pushed through its largest acquisition ever, the $75 billion purchase of video game publisher Activision, during Biden’s term. But only after a protracted legal battle with the FTC.

At the very end of Biden’s time in office, the FTC opened an antitrust investigation on Microsoft. That probe is ongoing, Bloomberg reported in March.

Nadella has cultivated a relationship with Trump. In January, the two reportedly met for lunch at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, alongside Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

President Donald Trump shakes hands with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during an American Technology Council roundtable at the White House in Washington on June 19, 2017.

Nicholas Kamm | AFP | Getty Images

The U.S. isn’t the only concern. The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority said in January that an independent inquiry found that “Microsoft is using its strong position in software to make it harder for AWS and Google to compete effectively for cloud customers that wish to use Microsoft software on the cloud.”

Microsoft last year committed to unbundling Teams from Microsoft 365 productivity software subscriptions globally to address concerns from the European Union’s executive arm, the European Commission.

Noncore markets

Fairly early in Microsoft’s history the company became the world’s largest software maker. And in cloud, Microsoft is the biggest challenger to AWS. Most of the company’s revenue comes from corporations, schools and governments.

But Microsoft is in other markets where its position is weaker. Those include video games, laptops and search advertising.

Mary Jo Foley, editor in chief at advisory group Directions on Microsoft, said the company may be better off focusing on what it does best, rather than continuing to offer Xbox consoles and Surface tablets.

“Microsoft is not good at anything in the consumer space (with the possible exception of gaming),” wrote Foley, who has covered the company on and off since 1984. “You’re wasting time and money on trying to figure it out. Microsoft is an enterprise company — and that is more than OK.”

It’s unlikely Microsoft will back away from games, particularly after the Activision deal. Nearly $12 billion of Microsoft’s $69.6 billion in fourth-quarter revenue came from gaming, search and news advertising, and consumer subscriptions to the Microsoft 365 productivity bundle. That doesn’t include sales of devices, Windows licenses or advertising on LinkedIn.

“As a company, Microsoft’s all-in on gaming,” Nadella said in 2021 in an appearance alongside gaming unit head Phil Spencer. “We believe we can play a leading role in democratizing gaming and defining that future of interactive entertainment, quite frankly, at scale.”

AI pressure

Microsoft has an unquestionably strong position in AI today, thanks in no small part to its early alliance with OpenAI. Microsoft has added the startup’s AI models to Windows, Excel, Bing and other products.

The breakout has been GitHub Copilot, which generates source code and answers developers’ questions. GitHub reached $2 billion in annualized revenue last year, with Copilot accounting for more than 40% of sales growth for the business. Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, right, speaks as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman looks on during the OpenAI DevDay event in San Francisco on Nov. 6, 2023.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

But speedy deployment in AI can be worrisome.

The company is “not providing the underpinnings needed to deploy AI properly, in terms of security and governance — all because they care more about being ‘first,'” Foley wrote. Microsoft also hasn’t been great at helping customers understand the return on investment, she wrote.

AI-ready Copilot+ PCs, which Microsoft introduced last year, aren’t gaining much traction. The company had to delay the release of the Recall search feature to prevent data breaches. And the Copilot assistant subscription, at $30 a month for customers of the Microsoft 365 productivity suite, hasn’t become pervasive in the business world.

“Copilot was really their chance to take the lead,” said Jason Wong, an analyst at technology industry researcher Gartner. “But increasingly, what it’s seeming like is Copilot is just an add-on and not like a net-new thing to drive AI.”

Innovation

At 50, the biggest question facing Microsoft is whether it can still build impressive technology on its own. Products like the Surface and HoloLens augmented reality headset generated buzz, but they hit the market years ago.

Teams was a novel addition to its software bundle, though the app’s success came during the Covid pandemic after the explosive growth in products like Zoom and Slack, which Salesforce acquired. And Microsoft is still researching quantum computing.

In AI, Microsoft’s best bet so far was its investment in OpenAI. Somasegar said Microsoft is in prime position to be a big player in the market.

“To me, it’s been 2½ years since ChatGPT showed up, and we are not even at the Uber and Airbnb moment,” Somasegar said. “There is a tremendous amount of value creation that needs to happen in AI. Microsoft as much as everybody else is thinking, ‘What does that mean? How do we get there?'”

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AI could affect 40% of jobs and widen inequality between nations, UN warns

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AI could affect 40% of jobs and widen inequality between nations, UN warns

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence is projected to reach $4.8 trillion in market value by 2033, but the technology’s benefits remain highly concentrated, according to the U.N. Trade and Development agency.

In a report released on Thursday, UNCTAD said the AI market cap would roughly equate to the size of Germany’s economy, with the technology offering productivity gains and driving digital transformation. 

However, the agency also raised concerns about automation and job displacement, warning that AI could affect 40% of jobs worldwide. On top of that, AI is not inherently inclusive, meaning the economic gains from the tech remain “highly concentrated,” the report added. 

“The benefits of AI-driven automation often favour capital over labour, which could widen inequality and reduce the competitive advantage of low-cost labour in developing economies,” it said. 

The potential for AI to cause unemployment and inequality is a long-standing concern, with the IMF making similar warnings over a year ago. In January, The World Economic Forum released findings that as many as 41% of employers were planning on downsizing their staff in areas where AI could replicate them.  

However, the UNCTAD report also highlights inequalities between nations, with U.N. data showing that 40% of global corporate research and development spending in AI is concentrated among just 100 firms, mainly those in the U.S. and China. 

Furthermore, it notes that leading tech giants, such as Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft — companies that stand to benefit from the AI boom — have a market value that rivals the gross domestic product of the entire African continent. 

This AI dominance at national and corporate levels threatens to widen those technological divides, leaving many nations at risk of lagging behind, UNCTAD said. It noted that 118 countries — mostly in the Global South — are absent from major AI governance discussions. 

UN recommendations 

But AI is not just about job replacement, the report said, noting that it can also “create new industries and and empower workers” — provided there is adequate investment in reskilling and upskilling.

But in order for developing nations not to fall behind, they must “have a seat at the table” when it comes to AI regulation and ethical frameworks, it said.

In its report, UNCTAD makes a number of recommendations to the international community for driving inclusive growth. They include an AI public disclosure mechanism, shared AI infrastructure, the use of open-source AI models and initiatives to share AI knowledge and resources. 

Open-source generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution.

“AI can be a catalyst for progress, innovation, and shared prosperity – but only if countries actively shape its trajectory,” the report concludes. 

“Strategic investments, inclusive governance, and international cooperation are key to ensuring that AI benefits all, rather than reinforcing existing divides.”

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Nvidia positioned to weather Trump tariffs, chip demand ‘off the charts,’ says Altimeter’s Gerstner

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Nvidia positioned to weather Trump tariffs, chip demand 'off the charts,' says Altimeter's Gerstner

Altimeter CEO Brad Gerstner is buying Nvidia

Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner said Thursday that he’s moving out of the “bomb shelter” with Nvidia and into a position of safety, expecting that the chipmaker is positioned to withstand President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs.

“The growth and the demand for GPUs is off the charts,” he told CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime Report,” referring to Nvidia’s graphics processing units that are powering the artificial intelligence boom. He said investors just need to listen to commentary from OpenAI, Google and Elon Musk.

President Trump announced an expansive and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy in a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday. The plan established a 10% baseline tariff, though many countries like China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to steeper rates. The announcement sent stocks tumbling on Thursday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq down more than 5%, headed for its worst day since 2022.

The big reason Nvidia may be better positioned to withstand Trump’s tariff hikes is because semiconductors are on the list of exceptions, which Gerstner called a “wise exception” due to the importance of AI.

Nvidia’s business has exploded since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, and annual revenue has more than doubled in each of the past two fiscal years. After a massive rally, Nvidia’s stock price has dropped by more than 20% this year and was down almost 7% on Thursday.

Gerstner is concerned about the potential of a recession due to the tariffs, but is relatively bullish on Nvidia, and said the “negative impact from tariffs will be much less than in other areas.”

He said it’s key for the U.S. to stay competitive in AI. And while the company’s chips are designed domestically, they’re manufactured in Taiwan “because they can’t be fabricated in the U.S.” Higher tariffs would punish companies like Meta and Microsoft, he said.

“We’re in a global race in AI,” Gerstner said. “We can’t hamper our ability to win that race.”

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