Industry news

UK outsourcer and government contractor Capita said Friday that it has launched an investigation into an IT failure that resulted in staff being unable to access key systems, causing disruptions to services for local authorities and some businesses.

Capita employees have been unable to access their IT systems since the early hours of Friday, sparking fears of a possible cyberattack targeting the company.

With £6.5 billion worth of public sector contracts, Capita is among the UK government's largest suppliers.

Read more on Computing here.

International law firms including DLA Piper, Herbert Smith Freehills and Baker McKenzie are looking at opening offices in India after the country changed its rules to widen overseas access to a huge market.

The Bar Council of India announced in March that foreign legal firms would be allowed to set up in the country for the first time and advise clients on the international elements of mergers and acquisitions or appear as arbitrators, among other things.

Read more on Financial Times here.

Italy has become the first Western country to block generative AI chatbot ChatGPT. The Italian data-protection authority said there were privacy concerns relating to the model.

Last week OpenAI confirmed it has suffered a data breach caused by a bug in an open-source library which results in users being shown chat data belonging to others and also exposed payment-related information belonging to 1.2% of ChatGPT Plus subscribers.

Read more on TechMarketView here.

As of March 2023, DLA Piper’s Bucharest office recruits Alina Antonie as Counsel in the Competition team. In her new position, she will support the department’s growing efforts to assist clients in dealing with their legal needs, always adding a human touch.

Alina is a highly experienced competition lawyer, with over 20 years of experience in different industries, strong knowledge and understanding of various sectors.

Read more on Romanian Lawyers Week here.

Replit's Ghostwriter tool to be beefed up by Google's LLM tech

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has formed a partnership with Replit, an AI start-up, to assist developers in creating and modifying code through generative AI, a move that will help the search company compete with a similar product from Microsoft's GitHub and OpenAI.

Read more on Computing here.

Further consolidation in the outsourced customer management space with US headquartered Concentrix Corporation agreeing to acquire French-headquartered rival Webhelp.

The combined business is expected to have $9.8bn in revenue for FY 2023 on a pro forma basis and will be headed by Concentrix CEO Chris Caldwell.

Read more on TechMarketView here.

Three years since knowledge workers had to make an almost overnight pivot to remote working and their firms support the concept of hybrid work by implementing the essential technology to make it possible, research from Virgin Media O2 Business (VMO2B) has revealed that while UK companies have tolerated hybrid working, in many cases the tech has not allowed them to drive efficiency within their organisations.

One of the key findings was that three years after lockdowns began, organisations are still limited by old tech and poor digital skills, with almost a fifth (18%) feeling held back by limited digital skills or resistance to new tech

Read more on Computer Weekly here.

UK technology scaleups have generated $583bn in value since 2014, and could further quadruple in value by 2032 under the right conditions, according to final Tech Nation report.

It said that the value since 2014 was achieved through exits of some form – whether an acquisition, special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) or public listing – and that to return the same rate of value to the ecosystem, UK tech firms should be targeting exists of $2tn over the next decade.

Read more on Computer Weekly here.

Teleperformance, a global leader in outsourced digital integrated business services, today announced that it has already met its 2026 goal to reduce its carbon emissions per full-time employee1 by 49%. As result, the Company will set new aggressive carbon emissions targets later this year.

The Company reduced its carbon emissions 49% per full-time employee since 2019, including its most recent reductions of a 15% in 2021 and 9% in 2022

Read more on Businesswire here.

Google has started rolling out Bard, its answer to ChatGPT, to a limited number of users in the US and the UK.

In a blog post on Tuesday the company invited people to sign up to test out its generative AI chatbot, which for the moment is only available in the English language and to over 18s, in order to provide feedback to aid its development.

Read more on Computing here.