😏A business case😏

The Mayor’s Workforce Integration Network reckons that if Black and racially minoritised Londoners had the same chances of getting jobs and progressing into high-paid roles as their White peers, the city would unlock £17.4bn a year in extra wages and add nearly 300,000 people into work. Not over a decade. Every single year. Somewhere between “moral argument” and “how are you still ignoring this?”, basically 💸

The numbers get worse the closer you look. London alone accounts for 53% of the UK’s entire ethnic employment participation gap, meaning half the national problem is happening inside the M25. Closing that gap would mean 113,000 more Black Londoners in work, with most of the gains driven by women who currently face the double tax of racism and sexism in hiring and progression. The government keeps talking about hitting an 80% employment rate – this report quietly says that target is mathematically impossible unless you deal with race properly 🧮

Then there’s the progression trap. Even when Black and racially minoritised workers hold the same qualifications, they’re still far less likely to land in managerial, professional or skilled trade roles and far more likely to be funnelled into low-paid admin, customer service and clerical jobs. And just to add insult to injury, those same roles are also the ones most likely to be automated out of existence by AI. So while policy wonks are busy saying “reskill”, the data is screaming “your inequality pipeline is about to become an unemployment crisis” 🤖

The report politely calls this the “progression gap”, but let’s translate: London is training talent it refuses to promote, then acting surprised when productivity stalls. Closing the progression gap alone would shift another £6.3bn a year into Black and racially minoritised households – money that would ripple straight through London’s economy instead of sitting in yet another executive bonus pool 🏦

What makes this particularly bleak is that none of the fixes are radical. Mandatory ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting, employer data audits, sector-wide action, devolved skills funding, and actual accountability for who gets hired, retained and promoted. The GLA itself has already moved minority representation from 24% in 2018 to 39% in 2025 – proof that this isn’t theoretical, it’s just inconvenient for organisations that like saying “we can’t find the talent” while standing knee-deep in it 🧱

So what?
London’s diversity gap isn’t a social problem with an economic side effect – it’s an economic failure with a PR strategy. £17.4bn a year is what inequality is costing the capital, and every time a board says “we’re working on it” without changing hiring or progression structures, they’re effectively choosing lower growth. Inclusion isn’t charity; it’s the productivity strategy nobody wants to budget for 📉

Read more:
Mayor of London – Bridging the Gap: The Economic Case for Workforce Diversity in London
https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/communities-and-social-justice/workforce-integration-network-win/bridging-gap

📆 Grok📆

This week the UK finally did the bare minimum it should have done months ago: it switched on a law that makes creating non-consensual, intimate images illegal — not just sharing them. And yes, that move is directly because Elon Musk’s Grok AI turned X into a mass-scale nudification machine for women and girls. 🧨

Let’s be clear about what triggered this. Independent analysis found Grok was generating thousands of undressed images per hour — not per day — on X. Women arguing with a chatbot in the replies of their own posts, MPs being targeted for speaking out, and AI being used not as “free speech” but as a harassment engine. This wasn’t a loophole. It was an operating model.

So the government has now:
– Brought into force the offence that criminalises creating non-consensual intimate images
– Made it a priority offence under the Online Safety Act
– Announced plans to outlaw nudification apps entirely
– Backed Ofcom to use its full powers, including fines or blocking X in the UK if it doesn’t comply

All good. Necessary. Long overdue.

But here’s the uncomfortable bit: none of this is new. The law passed last year. Campaigners warned this would happen. The harm was obvious. And yet enforcement only arrived once the scale became embarrassing, international, and impossible to ignore. ⚠️

We’re also being asked to accept a familiar framing: that this is about “a few bad actors misusing a tool”. It isn’t. When a platform integrates an AI system that predictably produces abuse at industrial scale — and only restricts it after public outrage — that’s a governance failure, not misuse. 🧠

This is why the “free speech” panic from some corners rings hollow. No one is banning opinions. The state is stepping in because women and children were being sexually violated by default settings, weak safeguards, and a platform that prioritised speed over safety. That’s not censorship — that’s regulation doing its actual job.

And let’s not miss the bigger signal: this is the first real stress test of the UK’s Online Safety Act against a major global platform that doesn’t particularly care about UK norms, politics, or regulators. Ofcom now has to prove it can move fast, act decisively, and hold power to account — not just write guidance and wait politely. ⏱️

Because if the lesson tech companies take from this is “push until public outrage forces a rollback”, we’re going to keep replaying this cycle with every new model, every new feature, every new harm vector.

AI doesn’t get a free pass just because it’s novel. And platforms don’t get to outsource abuse to an algorithm and call it innovation. 🚫🤖

So what?
This isn’t just about Grok or X. It’s about whether we’re willing to set hard boundaries now — or wait until the next tool scales harm faster than regulators can react. The law is finally live. The question is whether enforcement will be too.

If you want a shorter punch-down version, an Instagram carousel cut, or a spicier opener, say the word.

Read more:
Guardian (Politics live): https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2026/jan/12/grok-x-nudification-technology-online-safety-labour-reform-tories-lib-dems-uk-politics-latest-news-updates
Guardian (Tech): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/12/ofcom-investigating-x-outcry-sexualised-ai-images-grok-elon-musk
BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq845glnvl1o
Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-07/musk-s-grok-ai-generated-thousands-of-undressed-images-per-hour-on-x

Siri and Google 👓

Apple has finally admitted what half the industry has been whispering for a year: Siri couldn’t be fixed in-house fast enough, so it’s outsourcing the brain. From later this year, Apple will use Google’s Gemini models and cloud infrastructure to power a more personalised Siri, with both companies claiming Gemini provides the “most capable foundation” for Apple’s future AI experiences – which is corporate speak for we tried, it didn’t work, and now we’re borrowing the competition’s homework 📱

This isn’t some light integration either. The deal is multi-year, gives Apple access to Gemini models and Google’s cloud, and is meant to underpin the long-promised Apple Intelligence features like actions-on-your-behalf and personal context awareness, the same upgrade Apple quietly delayed last March after admitting it was taking “longer than we thought” – understatement of the decade 🕰️

Behind the scenes it’s probably been messy. Bloomberg reports Apple reshuffled its AI leadership, pushing out long-time AI chief John Giannandrea and handing the reins to Vision Pro boss Mike Rockwell, while also exploring deals with OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity before settling on Google. This is what an internal AI crisis looks like when you wrap it in brushed aluminium and say “private cloud compute” enough times 💥

The irony is delicious: Google, the company Apple positions as the privacy-compromising ad giant, is now literally powering the intelligence inside the world’s most expensive smartphones. Apple insists everything will still run “on device” where possible, but the foundation is Gemini, which means Cupertino is now dependent on Mountain View for the core layer of its next consumer platform shift 🤝

But some analysts are calling this a masterstroke rather than a retreat. Instead of burning tens of billions chasing what is rapidly becoming a commoditised model layer, Apple is side-stepping the AI arms race entirely. As one sharp take put it: Apple didn’t “fail” at AI – it refused to become over-exposed to the same capital-intensive bloodbath that’s already haunting the rest of Big Tech, while still shipping something that works for its users 😅

So what?
This is Apple conceding that AI has become a platform race it can’t win alone. When the world’s most cash-rich tech company chooses a rival’s model to save its flagship assistant, it tells you the gap between “AI narrative” and “AI reality” is still massive – and that the next decade of consumer tech might be less about ecosystems and more about who actually owns the models under the hood 🚨

Read more:
The Verge – Apple picks Google’s Gemini AI for its big Siri upgrade
https://www.theverge.com/news/860521/apple-siri-google-gemini-ai-personalization

🎮 Can't complete the game?🎮

Sony has quietly patented something that sounds like every backseat gamer you’ve ever hated — an AI “ghost” that steps in and literally plays parts of your PlayStation game when you get stuck, demonstrating button combos, solving puzzles, chatting to you in-game, or just clearing the section entirely so you can carry on pretending you did it yourself 🎮

According to the resurfaced patent, the ghost would appear as an overlay version of your own character and switch between modes like Story, Combat, Exploration and Full Game, meaning you could outsource anything from one annoying fight to the whole experience — accessibility feature or digital cheat code, depending on your moral alignment 🧠

Sony says this is about reducing the friction that causes players to rage-quit or trawl YouTube for walkthroughs, positioning the ghost as an evolution of PS5’s Game Help, trained on existing gameplay footage so it already “knows” what to do in each scenario, which is either smart UX design or the end of personal achievement as we know it 🪦

All of this lands in an industry already saturated with AI: Unity says 62% of studios now use it somewhere in development, GDC surveys show a third of devs actively using it, and Tokyo Games Show data suggests over half of Japanese game companies are already on the bandwagon — meaning your future gaming memories may be co-authored by a large language model that’s better at parrying than you are 🤖

So what?
This is the first time a platform holder has seriously flirted with automating play itself, not just making games but doing them for you. It’s framed as accessibility, but it also quietly asks whether effort is still part of entertainment in a world where even your victories can be AI-generated — and whether “I finished Elden Ring” is about to become the gaming equivalent of “I watched it on 1.5x speed” 🧩

Read more:
Eurogamer – Sony has patented an AI gaming ghost that will play PlayStation games for you when you get stuck
https://www.eurogamer.net/sony-has-patented-an-ai-gaming-ghost-that-will-play-playstation-games-for-you-when-you-get-stuck

📈 The tools behind the tech📉

📦Product📦

• Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

📏Design📏 

• Time's new roman
• Video game museum
• Public sans 

👩🏿‍💻Code👩🏿‍💻

🏢The business behind the tech🏢

• Creators Say Spotify Pays Up to Twice as Much as YouTube for Video Podcasts
• AWS in 2026

🙌Resource launch🙌

We are ecstatic to share that our 2025 International Women's Day Resource is now officially published on the Colorintech website. This resource is designed to empower you with practical steps for personal and professional growth , encouraging you to celebrate your wins and embrace the power of your network. Take some time out of your week to check out our IWD resource and start charting your next steps for advancement!

Also, if you missed the IWD Resource Launch webinar or want to re-watch, the full recording of our "Accelerate Action" webinar is now available! You can hear directly from our phenomenal speakers and resource contributors:

• @MelissaBlokland (Founder at ZERANOVA)

• @ElisabethEweka (Founder at ENGRL & Principal Digital Consultant at Hoare Lea)

• @AjoaAkuamoah (Programme Delivery Lead at the Department for Science Innovation and Technology)

• @MoniqueCampbell (Strategic Account Executive at Salsify)

 They discuss the strategies and personal courage required to navigate unique paths to success. Their insights are the perfect complement to the actionable steps and words of wisdom laid out in the IWD Resource.

Click below to access both the Resource and the Webinar Recording:

[ACCESS RESOURCE & WATCH RECORDING]

We’d like to give a huge thank you to our webinar panelists and every individual behind the scenes who poured their expertise and time into making the 2025 International Women's Day Resource and its launch event a massive success.

👉GLA in London wants your input

Black On The Square Community Advisory Group Have you attended a Mayor of London event that takes place at well-known venues across London, or been at any of the free community events which takes place regularly on Trafalgar Square? Do you dream of being part of these world class events, or wondered how you could get involved?   Expression of Interest applications are now open to join our popular Black On The Square 2026/27 event, as part of the new Community Advisory Group (CAG). A two-year commitment is required. We’re looking for passionate individuals who can bring lived experiences, insight and creativity, to help shape meaningful, authentic and representative programming. If you care about amplifying Black culture in London and want to play an active role in supporting our events, we’d love to hear from you. Black On The Square CAG expression of interest form ---

UNESCO Day for Remembering the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Abolition Community Advisory Group Have you attended a Mayor of London event that takes place at well-known venues across London, or been at any of the free community events which takes place regularly on Trafalgar Square? Do you dream of being part of these world class events, or wondered how you could get involved?   Expression of Interest applications are now open to join our UNESCO Day for Remembering the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Abolition 2026/7 as part of the new Community Advisory Group (CAG). A two-year commitment is required. We’re looking for passionate individuals who have a deep interest, knowledge, insight and creativity, to help shape meaningful, authentic, historical and representative programming. If you care about amplifying Black history and culture in London and want to play an active role in supporting this event, we’d love to hear from you. UNESCO Day CAG expression of interest form

😃What we are consuming😃

💅DoNotNotify

😮Lottery every second

😎How Google got its Groove back

💸xAI Burns Almost $8 Billion in 9 months

😎Meta pauses ray bans outside of USA

🏦Alphabet exceeds Apple's valuation