📹Sadiq Khan blocks Accenture from TFL contracts over diversity stance📹

TFL vetoed Accenture’s bid to work on a £50m TfL marketing campaign, saying the consultancy’s new stance on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) clashed with its own approach.

TfL said it plans to launch campaigns to “reach all of London’s diverse communities, particularly those from black and Asian minority heritage”.

The Telegraph reported, Accenture dropped its diversity policies this year after the US president banned companies with federal contracts from operating “illegal” DEI programmes. The consultant, which is the world’s biggest by revenue, is one of the US government’s federal contractors and won a five-year IT contract last year from the US Air Force worth $1.6bn (£1.3bn).

Accenture said cost-cutting initiatives led by Elon Musk’s "department of government efficiency" (Doge) were already negatively affecting its US sales and revenues. Shares in the company have lost more than 17pc of their value since the inauguration on Jan 20.

📹Over half📹

Over half of all facial recognition deployments last year took place in areas with higher numbers of Black residents

In Croydon, an area of London with one of the highest proportion Black people, 128,518 faces were scanned for just 133 arrests a rate of 0.001%

This means that over 125,000 people in Croydon were tracked by the police as The Voice puts it for "no reason at all."

nearly two-million people had their faces scanned, likely without even realising it, yet only 804 arrests were made – an arrest rate of just 0.04%.

Seemingly happy with that The Metropolitan Police is planning to install the UK’s first permanent live facial recognition (LFR) cameras in Croydon, continuing its pattern of deploying the technology in areas where the Black population is much higher than the London average.

👩🏾‍⚕️Same Symptoms, Different Care🏥

Researchers Mount Sinai Published online this week in Nature Medicine a study which tested nine large language models (LLMs) using 1,000 emergency department cases.

Each case was repeated with 32 different patient backgrounds, producing more than 1.7 million AI-generated medical recommendations. Although the medical details remained exactly the same, the models sometimes changed their recommendations based on demographic and socioeconomic factors. This affected decisions like triage level, diagnostic tests, treatment plans, and mental health assessments.

There was a tendency of some AI models to escalate care recommendations, particularly for mental health evaluations, based on patient demographics rather than medical necessity. In addition, high-income patients were more often recommended advanced diagnostic tests such as CT scans or MRI, while low-income patients were more frequently advised to undergo no further testing.

📉Tariff Turmoil📉 

In true “will-they-won’t-they” fashion, US administration kicked off the week with an apparent reprieve for Big Tech—exempting smartphones, chips, and laptops from sky-high tariffs (145% from China). Cue Apple, Nvidia, and Microsoft breathing a collective sigh of relief... for about 36 hours.

Because, of course, it didn’t last. By Sunday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had reverse uno-ed the announcement, casually dropping into a TV interview that these same tech products could still face semiconductor-related tariffs—coming, wait for it, “probably in a month or two.”🧾

(The Times, FT, Bloomberg)

The market responded how you’d expect: stocks soared, then tanked, then soared again. Apple rose 7%... then finished the day up just 2%. Nvidia dipped. Meta flinched. Investors reached for the antacids. And analysts? They’re probably calling it “the most confusing week since Liz Truss tried to do macroeconomics.”😅

Wall Street called the tariff exemptions “the best news possible.” Until it wasn’t.

Analysis across the financial markets all basically threw up their hands, warning that the “back-and-forth” is making it impossible for tech companies to plan supply chains, inventory—or, in some cases even exist

Interestingly this isn't Isn’t Just a Tech Problem🤖

Over in Times Square, even King Kong and Batman (the fancy dress versions that the guardian cited) are worried. Tourism is down, airlines are cutting flights, and international travel to the U.S. dropped 11.6% in March. China’s tourists, well for years they have barely been turning up but now folks from Canada and Mexico or even that random island with the penguins aren't exactly feeling welcomed🐧

The CEO of one of the US's biggest Airlines, Delta, bluntly said that “consumer confidence is falling,” and tourism experts are now forecasting a 9.4% drop in international arrivals, despite a weak dollar making America cheaper. Even the planes themselves are having problems if you ask Boeing and Airbus✈️
(The Guardian)

💡 So What?

If you ever needed a case study in why policy matters, this is it. Remember that slogan from yesteryear "Strong and stable", Well it isn't so funny now is it👀

The U.S. tech sector—the same one that bankrolls innovation, hires global talent, and underwrites your favourite AI startup—is now dancing to the tune of chaotic trade tweets and tariff whiplash.

What’s worse? The industry’s favourite playbook (i.e. “just wait it out”) may no longer apply. When your go-to growth markets are being tariffed into submission, and your supply chain is a diplomatic chess piece—resilience and agility aren't buzzwords anymore. They’re survival skills.

We’ll say it louder: Founders, policymakers, and investors can’t afford to be passive observers as it appears Trade wars don’t care about your Series B.

🤖Break up season🤖

The FTC is back on its “break them up” era—and Meta’s the first one back on the chopping block. This week, Zuckerberg’s empire heads to court in a landmark case that could force it to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, in what’s being described as an “existential threat.” Which, in big tech-speak, means: someone’s finally calling out the shopping spree that defined early Big Tech domination according to Reuters🔪

So how did we get there😲

• Instagram: Snatched up for $1B in 2012. Now makes up more than half of Meta’s U.S. ad revenue.📇

• WhatsApp: Bought for $19B in 2014. Still doesn’t make Meta that much money, but powers its hopes for global business messaging dominance📲

The FTC says Meta bought the apps to kill competition. Meta says, “But look at TikTok! Look at Apple!” 

Zuck’s expected to testify, and yes, there’s something deeply ironic about a company built on connecting people possibly being forced to split itself apart😲

💡 So What?

 Whether or not Meta gets forced into a post-breakup identity crisis, the real question is will the current administration see anything that challenges the dominance of big tech as good?

🧠 ChatGPT Now Remembers Everything. Yes, Even That Message You Deleted🧠

OpenAI has quietly handed ChatGPT a memory upgrade, and spoiler alert: it now remembers past conversations—even the ones you didn’t ask it to. Welcome to the era of AI that doesn’t just finish your sentences, it remembers your vibe, your startup idea, and probably your favourite oat milk brand🧋

This isn’t the polite little chatbot you met in 2022. This version is persistent, personalised, and passive-aggressively organised. It’ll recall what you said last week about your business goals and casually remind you of them later like a digital accountability partner— potentially without asking first.

Also: while the memory rollout is happening globally, it’s not coming to the UK, EU, or anywhere GDPR might come knocking, which tells you everything you need to know about how it really works🙃

In other news: ChatGPT is now pulling in close to a billion active users weekly, according to Sam Altman. That’s more than TikTok, more than Instagram... and possibly more than your startup pitch decks total impressions you anxious founders🤣. 

It’s not just students or hobbyists. Everyone from travel agents to startup founders to very confused executives are now building, searching, and outsourcing their thinking to a bot. It’s giving “default interface for the internet,” and honestly? It might be that now. Have your expectation of what comes back from a query or search bar changed?

💡 So What?

If ChatGPT is racking up nearly a billion users a week and now remembers what you say, that’s not just a cute upgrade—it’s a warning shot across Google’s entire business model.

We’re watching the early signs of search getting unbundled in real time. Why sift through ten blue links when you can ask ChatGPT (who remembers your vibe, your deadlines, and your usual tone) and get a straight answer, tailored just for you?

For Google, this isn’t just competition—it’s disruption at the foundation. People aren’t just using AI for essays anymore—they’re using it for travel plans, career coaching, business strategy, and customer support. And with long-term memory in the mix, ChatGPT’s becoming less like a tool, and more like a personalised operating system for the internet.

📈 The tools behind the tech📉

📦Product📦

• Free and open source, simple, and intuitive database design editor, data-modeler, and SQL generator

• A Full-Stack AI App Builder in Your Browser - Google firebase

📏Design📏 

• Past present and future of UI design

• Dithering in colour

👩🏿‍💻Code👩🏿‍💻

• Why companies don't fix bugs
• Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age: Leveraging Experience for Better Results (13 minute read)

🏢The business behind the tech🏢

• Ten rules for negotiating a job offer
• Building an enterprise culture

An editorial shout out to Samara

Following last week's discussion on economic pressures and the looming reality of increased supply chain costs – potentially squeezing corporate profits or driving up prices and dampening sales – this week, we're spotlighting a company offering a tech-driven solution and one of our partners: Samsara.

Samsara has built a platform powered by 14 trillion data points specifically designed to improve the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of operations that power the global economy.

As a result, their tech is able to leverage real-time insights to identify inefficiencies, predict potential disruptions, and gain visibility across complex operations, and what does that do? Lower costs. In an environment where everyone is counting their pennies, Samsara's tech offers organisations a platform to protect their bottom line and mitigate increased prices for consumers.

But who Are Samsara? well its a scale up turned big dwag. 22bn Market cap, Offices across 10 countries and 3,500 + number of employees

Now why is this of interest, well for us techies, Samsara presents an interesting opportunity: to actually apply cutting-edge technologies to solve critical real-world economic challenges. Ultimately its safe tech, (Yep we'll coin the term).

We've done some great work with the Samsara team over the years so genuinely recommend checking out, 1 the pics of those moments (Yes get the FOMO) and 2 some of their open roles: https://www.samsara.com/company/careers/roles?locations=Remote+-+UK&locations=London,+UK&gh_src=676b3d5d1us

Roles at ARM

Staff Firmware Engineer
Arm Neoverse is the foundation for the next era of digital infrastructure. This role provides an outstanding opportunity to develop and contribute to the success of Arm Neoverse CSS based solutions.

Edge AI Ecosystem Lead
Arm has revolutionised multiple industries and is now defining the future of AI on edge computing. The IoT Line of Business is rapidly moving inference from being a cloud centric compute, to a distributed local computing experience with all the benefits of reduced latency, privacy and cost this change will deliver.

AI System Architect
This is an opportunity for an experienced application developer to have broader impact, significantly influencing an AI platform that is used by billions of people every day, in every major cloud and the vast majority of smartphones.

Community Coordinator (12 Month FTC)This role will support the Software Communities organisation. The ideal candidate will bring strong detail oriented, execution and organisational skills to help drive the impact of Arm in the Software community.
Deskside Support EngineerThe deskside engineering team is responsible for all support requests that cannot be fulfilled by our service desk or remote support teams, from new user device orientation to support of sophisticated desktop issues. This includes covering our Cambridge Office Tech Hub on a rota basis.

🎓Our latest partnership🎓

Colorintech is excited to announce its new partnership with the Government Digital Service (GDS), the leaders of the Government Digital and Data profession in the UK government. GDS plays a vital role in transforming public services, setting digital strategy, and ensuring services are user-centred, efficient, and accessible to all. 

This partnership aligns with the UK government’s Blueprint for Modern Digital Government, which sets out a vision for a more connected, innovative, and resilient digital public sector. By working together, Colortech and GDS will focus on building a diverse and highly skilled digital workforce, ensuring that government services are shaped by talent that reflects the communities they serve.

Roles to check out

• Ministry of Defence: SEO Defence Business Services (DBS) - Senior Technical Architect

• Department for Energy Security & Net Zero: G7 Senior Salesforce Developer
• Department for Education: G6 Lead Technical Architect

🙌🏾Our next event for founders🙌🏾

On April 24th, Colorintech is hosting a founders focused event all about investment insights with Atomico, where experts will answer questions like:

• What are the different types of investment available, and what are the key trends?

• What should founders planning a raise be preparing for (including understanding investor/investee relationships)?

• Is investment even the right choice or is there another way?

AND we'll have dedicated time for Q&A with our outstanding speakers:

• Gina Farra - Founder of Glaize

• Joe Kinvi - Founder of Borderless

• Demi Ariyo - Founder of Lendoe

• Rita Cherradi - Investor at Sie Ventures

This event is a great opportunity for founders who are fundraising or are considering fundraising in the near future, particularly at pre-seed to seed stage.

Check out the key details below: 

Date: 24th April

Time: 18:30 - 21:30

Where: Atomico - London Offices

Sign Up Link: https://lu.ma/investment-insights

👀The Future of AI Safety, Privacy and Inclusion👀

A quick reminder about our upcoming live event - The Future of AI Safety, Privacy and Inclusion is happening next week (April 22).

Hear about our Inclusive AI framework and join our expert panelists from Unilever, Fusion Collective, Salesforce and Faculty.ai as they share how organisations are evolving in the AI-era and discuss the new trends shaping AI safety, privacy and inclusion.

👀Ada Hackathon👀

Date:
Friday 2nd May 2025 from 9:00 am check in, 10:00 am start to 5:30 pm end
‍
Location:
Central London near Tottenham Court Road Station
‍
Applications open:
Monday 14th April to Friday 25th April

Ada Ventures is investing £100,000 in the winning team

Apply here

😃What we are consuming😃

🔨Sledgehammer-wielding Musk critics

❤️People are falling in love with AI companions