News
- Logitech report finds not even a third of companies involve IT/AV teams at the early stages
- Failed audio and dropped connections are costing workers time
- Businesses should use tech downtime as a productivity metric
Logitech's latest Workplace Experience study has claimed technology teams are often brought into projects far too late, after important decisions about offices and meeting spaces have already been made, and it's leading to suboptimal tech and friction that could be impacting worker productivity.
In the UK, for example, fewer than one in three (31%) workplaces involve their IT and Audio-Visual (AV) teams before space planning begins.
It means that tech decision-makers are then having to piece together hardware in a room that's already being designed, rather than being able to integrate the smartest solutions from the ground up.
IT teams should be involved in office planning, Logitech saysWith hybrid working now commonplace, Logitech's data found that failed audio and dropped connections alone caused a median productivity loss of 12.2 minutes per person per poor meeting.
Despite poor IT team involvement, most business leaders agree that a strong workplace experience has a direct link with productivity (86%) and collaboration (90%).
However, upgrading tech and involving more teams from the get-go isn't quite so straightforward. Only half (56%) feel confident that have the right ROI data to justify workplace experience investments, with only 29% treating it as a core business strategy today.
Logitech's solution focuses firsts and foremost on aligning teams more closely. The report calls for greater collaboration between IT, HR and Real Estate earlier on in projects. By itself, planning rooms as a well-coordinated team could reduce long-term costs associated with upgrading legacy and unsuitable hardware.
But to further help with ROI justification, the study also introduces tech downtime as a metric, with impacted productivity serving as sufficient proof that office spaces need to perform better.
Work as you know it will be a relic of the past.
You wake up, pour a coffee and join a call. The first ten minutes are spent talking about why a colleague typed 1524 units in cell B4 of your shared spreadsheet. It should be 1759 units, obviously.
In the afternoon, you complete your third rewrite of an offer for a new prospect. You get a message just as you finish it. The scope has changed. Again.
This is a normal day for most knowledge workers. In five years, this type of day will seem archaic, and as strange as it sounds, we’ll probably miss it.
We’ve been here before after farming gave way to factory work, and then that turned into the knowledge work most of us do today. New tools automated the old jobs, and the nature of work changed with them. AI agents are doing the same to desk jobs.
Brilliant and useless at the same timeWe recently worked out how to turn AI from a just question-and-answer machine into something that does actual work. Coding is a clean example. Two years ago, AI coding was mostly defined by autocomplete and small scripts. Today, engineers at Anthropic report AI now writes up to 90% of their code, with some no longer coding by hand at all.
So why do hallucinations and basic errors still happen? Every few weeks a new example makes the rounds: a model can’t count how many Rs are in strawberry; another insists you walk to the car wash because it is only 50 meters away (stepping through the suds, sprayers and rollers doesn’t seem like a great idea). The labs patch each one and a fresh embarrassment turns up the next day.
AI researcher Andrej Karpathy calls this jagged intelligence. Models crack extremely complex problems and then trip over something a child would get right. The lesson is that you can’t tell in advance which you’ll get.
In other words, you can’t extract a human from the process, drop in an agent and assume the output is fine.
What to hand overWhat an agent can be trusted with hinges on two questions. What does a mistake cost, and what does checking it cost?
Error cost is the damage when the model gets it wrong. A hallucinated citation in a court filing is expensive, i.e. fines and reputational damage. A rough draft of a meeting summary not so much.
On the other hand, verification cost is how easy it is to check if what the agent produced is right. Mathematics sits at the inexpensive end of the spectrum, since proofs can be checked programmatically whereas a business strategy sits at the highest end, as you need deep expertise to properly evaluate it.
Gauge your tasks against those two questions. The higher a task scores on either, the more human verification, oversight and expertise is needed.
One point to keep in mind here is that what we see as one task can often involve several. Customer service, for example, might look like one task, but there is a big difference between routine first-level interactions, which have lower verification costs and clear escalation paths, and more complex second and third-level interactions, where the cost of errors and verification is much higher.
Klarna found this out very publicly, going hard with automation then hiring people back once quality dropped. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski's conclusion was that customers need to know a human is always there if they want one.
Why partial automation makes people more valuableATMs spread through banking in the 1970s, and there are now more than 400,000 of them in the US alone. The obvious prediction was fewer bank tellers. Instead, the number of tellers went up, and so did their wages.
Radiology is the modern version. AI tools now read some scans better than people do. Radiology departments aren’t sitting idle, however. Open positions can’t be filled and demand has never been higher.
Nobel-winning economist Michael Kremer’s O-Ring theory describes how modern knowledge work is multiplicative rather than additive. In other words, one faulty step drops the value of the whole output to zero.
In automation, a single weak link sinks the whole output, unless a human catches it. That makes the remaining humans more valuable rather than less; they're now gatekeeping a far larger volume of higher-quality work. Demand only falls when the whole chain automates, and as long as jaggedness and hallucination are with us, that's tough to picture.
The focus effectAutomation frees up time, and where that time goes decides whether any of this pays off. If it’s spent well, it goes to the bottleneck tasks, like building relationships with a potential client, understanding what a client really needs and making judgement calls, it can improve the quality of the finished work and raise the bar for what gets automated next.
But to make this happen, leaders have to identify what agents can do, actively hand them over and then restructure processes so people can move to this higher value work rather than babysitting the machine.
Five years from nowPicture this: a dozen agents running in parallel, drafting offers, qualifying leads, clearing support tickets. The tedious and repetitive work is gone. Your cognitive load is higher because you’re having to mentally juggle all these tasks, giving feedback, while making sure nothing slips through the cracks.
Protect your mental bandwidth, keep the agents working for you rather than the other way round and spend what you get back on the things only you can do.
Otherwise, we’ll look back in a few years and wish we could argue about cell B4 again.
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- Disney has denied that ad-free tiers on Disney+ will start showing ads during movies and shows
- Last weekend, reports emerged that ad breaks would become commonplace for all fans
- Some users closed their accounts over the incorrect claims
Disney+ fans have been left angered — and then confused — after incorrect reports suggested they'd be subjected to ads even if they were subscribed to one of its ad-free experiences.
Last weekend (September 19/20), images were shared on the ResetEra forums and other social media platforms that showed an updated Subscriber Agreement for European users.
One screenshot of the revised document appeared to indicate that even those subscribed to the more ad-free expensive tiers — i.e., Standard and Premium — might soon see "promotional content, sponsorship, and advertisements before/after playback of Content and in channels, live/as-live, special events, and any third-party services content".
Soon: No more escaping ads on Disney+! https://t.co/ouAhn2xsF2September 21, 2026
Understandably, it didn't take long for users to lash out at Disney over the supposed change. As fan fury gained traction online, numerous outlets picked up on the story and ran with it, too, further fueling subscriber indignation.
However, it turns out that everyone had jumped the gun. In a statement shared with German language website anime2you.de, Disney said the rumors weren't accurate, and clarified that ad-free subscribers wouldn't start to see traditional ad breaks while watching movies and TV shows. Furthermore, a moderator post on the Disney+ Reddit page confirmed Disney's stance, adding that "nothing" has changed for Standard and Premium customers.
Responding to a request for comment from TechRadar, Disney reaffirmed that Standard and Premium users wouldn't be shown during movies and TV shows.
Before publishing this story, TechRadar also investigated whether ads had been added to the Standard and Premium experience. And, while trailers and other promotional materials appear before and after a movie or TV show begins (NB: Disney+ has done this for a while now), we confirmed that ads do not interrupt your viewing experience on these plans.
A minor inconvenience, or a big blow?Comment from r/entertainmentSo, why the confusion? As explained in the aforementioned Reddit thread, Disney — and other corporations, for that matter — occasionally make changes to their terms of service agreements. These tweaks are made to make things clearer for anyone who reads such documents — and, by proxy, reduce the legal risk posed to major companies.
The irony, of course, is that, by updating its user agreement, Disney didn't make things easier to understand, because this online maelstrom wouldn't have happened if it had.
Comment from r/entertainmentAs much as the House of Mouse has tried to limit the damage created by this, the episode has further eroded trust with small sections of its fanbase and, as the above Reddit posts exemplify, even led to some viewers canceling their Disney+ subscription.
Admittedly, those that have unsubscribed over this will be a mere drop in the ocean of the streamer's 100 million+ user base. Nonetheless, it's done a small but seemingly significant amount of damage to the reputation of Disney+. We'll see if it takes a further hit if, in October, the entertainment giant announces the inevitable yearly price hike to Disney+ and Hulu that's been a staple of the industry for the last few years.
President Trump has unveiled his latest plan to combat concerns around AI by appointing a new "czar" to oversee the technology, and also establish an "AI force" to help enforce this.
However there's just one problem - as anyone who actually pays attention to the technology industry news cycle will be well aware of, Salesforce recently revealed its latest interface platform for AI.
Its name...AIforce.
Which AIforce is best AIforce?Unveiled at its recent Dreamforce 2026 event, AIforce was the headline announcement for the company, promising no less than a new way of interfacing with the data and AI together to help unlock productivity and efficiency in the workplace like never before.
Described by Salesforce CEO and Chair Marc Benioff as "really the most exciting thing I've ever seen for Salesforce," AIforce was a huge presence at the show, one of the biggest technology conferences on the calendar, with posters and displays splashed around the venue.
The problem is, no-one seems to have told President Trump.
Let's be honest, the man is hardly a master of coming up with good names for anything ("Space Force"/"Big Beautiful Bill"/"Gulf of America") - and is currently seeking out views on an alternative name for the concept of Artificial Intelligence itself.
In a typically rambling post on his Truth Social site, the President noted that his administration “will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!”
He also linked the idea of the AI Force to his creation of the Space Force, which he claimed was a “tremendous SUCCESS.”
The President gave no further details about the AI Force, such as when it might be announced or launched, nor who he had in mind to lead it. Luckily for all of us know, Trump has insisted that “Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!” for the position of AI Czar.
Mr Benioff - maybe it's time to give the President a call and avoid a copyright issue?
- Acer's CEO claims RAM supply is still "quite large"
- Jason Chen does acknowledge that PC prices will rise in Q4, though, by up to 20% on average
- However, those prices will fall by mid-2027, the CEO predicts, asserting that: "It's impossible for the shortage to last until 2030!"
Not everyone is being totally downbeat about the RAM crisis, with Acer's CEO stating that he's hopeful that PC prices will drop from the middle of 2027, even if price rises are on the cards for the rest of this year.
VideoCardz higlighted a (translated) report from Taiwan's Economic Daily News that shares the most recent thoughts of Jason Chen, chief executive of Acer, on the RAM crisis.
Chen asserts that there isn't much of a DDR4 and DDR5 memory shortage at present, and that the "supply is quite large" for this RAM — we must bear in mind there may be some nuances lost in translation there — and also that there isn't much shortage of processors either.
The CEO does acknowledge that the prices of components are currently "fluctuating" at a high level, and that PC prices will continue to climb in the fourth quarter of 2026, with an average price rise of between 5% to 20%.
However, the good news, according to Chen, is that he believes PC prices should drop from mid-2027, and with more chip production coming online — especially in China — the memory shortage won't last for the rest of the decade.
Chen is pretty firm on that one, claiming that, "It's impossible for the shortage to last until 2030!"
Analysis: new hope for some stability?(Image credit: Unsplash / Liam Briese)As to whether there isn't much of a RAM shortage currently, almost everyone else begs to differ on that — although I accept that Chen's meaning may be altered in translation somewhat here, as noted, and perhaps the gist is that supply isn't as bad as some in the industry would have you believe.
Whatever the case, Chen is clearly sounding a more optimistic note than most. There have certainly been some analysts and prominent industry figures who are suggesting that the RAM crisis will indeed last until 2030, and those are the people who Chen is clearly directing that last comment at. The CEO does appear to be talking more about the Chinese market than the global picture here, though, and we should also bear that in mind.
Still, it's a relief to hear some more positive thinking on the RAM crisis, although there's one point that everyone can agree on: namely that prices are going to rise over the rest of 2026 and into 2027. Even Chen's predicted fall in PC pricing isn't forecast to come about until the middle of next year, and so for the time being, it's clear enough that we're stuck with rising prices.
The cost of RAM in particular has been soaring of late — against all odds, as it was already exorbitantly high — and GPUs are now being subject to some worrying price hikes (the top-end in particular is getting ridiculous), with more to come I expect. It's not pretty out there for consumers, and nothing is going to get better for some time — the question for me right now is: how much worse might things become?
I hope Chen's more positive noises here are indicative of at least some stabilizing around high pricing for PCs and components alike.