The Boxing Day sales were a damp squib for struggling high street retailers with the much smaller crowds blamed on a combination of bad weather and rival Black Friday discounts offered in November. Shoppers still started queueing before dawn outside shopping centres such as the Trafford Centre in Manchester and branches of high street chain Next. However, by closing time retail experts suggested visitor numbers were around 10% down on 2018. Retail analysts Springboard said the 9.8% drop was the biggest since 2010’s Boxing Day when the UK economy was at a virtual standstill. Diane Wehrle, its insights director, said the figure was very disappointing: “The drop is much bigger than anticipated, it seems like the steam was taken out of Christmas by Black Friday.”
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is ramping up its use of artificial intelligence and recruiting 80 AI specialists by the end of 2020 as it turns to cutting-edge computing to develop medicines of the future. However, the UK’s largest drugmaker by revenue is struggling to hire enough AI researchers and engineers from areas such as Silicon Valley and is looking to former employees in academia, the US Navy and the music industry to fill positions in the new team. They will be spread across London, Heidelberg, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Boston. The AI unit will be headquartered in San Francisco, with one GSK executive admitting competition for AI professionals is fierce. “In AI, we are scouring the planet for the best people. These folks are very rare to find. Competition is high and there aren’t a large number of them,” said Tony Wood, GSK’s senior vice-president of medicinal science and technology.
