yesterday's vote on gaza is a crucial step towards averting a humanitarian catastrophe. the resolution aims to increase the supplies of aid to the territory, but does not call for a ceasefire. for the first time in centuries, ukraine will celebrate christmas not on the 7th of january, but on the 25th of december. earlier this year, president zelensky signed into law a parliamentary bill that aimed to "abandon the russian heritage of imposing christmas celebrations" now on bbc news, talking business. hello, everybody. a very warm welcome to talking business weekly with me, aaron hazelhurst and a very special edition looking back at the last 12 months. spiralling prices, the rise of the robots, the end of fossil fuels, and the return to the office. oh, boy, it's been quite a year. we're going to hear from the policy makers, the big bosses, and the unlikely stories that made the year so tumultuous.

from the head of the imf and nasa to the side hustler making millions. how much money do you make doing this? so this past year, we did over $2 million. shut the front door. it's been a wild ride in business and work, so buckle up as we look back at 2023. wherever you joining me from around the world. once again, a big hello and a warm welcome to the show. you know, as the year began, europe, it was feeling lucky to have got through a relatively mild early winter. nevertheless, the russian invasion of ukraine and the impact it had on energy and food prices were certainly at the top of the agenda. the year to come in the west, well, it would be a dance between rising prices and wages and interest rates, which were just going up to keep a lid on everything else.

all these interlocking global forces meant i had one question for one of the most important people in globalfinance, the managing director of the international monetary fund. kristalina georgieva, a real pleasure, my friend, having you on this show. and kristalina, let's start with this, because you've recently said a third of the world is heading into recession this year. how deep do you think the recession could be? what we are looking into is a tough 2023. as you know, we are already experiencing labour market disruptions. when inflation cuts the spending power of people, sooner or later they demand higher wages and if they don't get it, they're on the street. and that kind of disruption we have to be prepared for. and if i have one message to policymakers today, it is,

"please look into the way you can protect the most vulnerable people, given that fiscal conditions are tight, and anticipate the impact of high interest rates on labour markets early". and it wasn't just war that was having an impact. the summer this year, boy, it was the hottest on record. extreme heat hit harvests all around the world. in india, a ban on selling much of the country's rice abroad was imposed. so what would that mean for prices for the rest of us? well, i spoke to the then boss of one of the world's biggest retailers, wal—mart international. do you think prices will inevitably start rising again? hi, aaron. listen, i think the world, the economy, this confliction of events that have happened between — whether the challenges in europe with ukraine — and everything that's been going on is putting real

pressure around the world on pricing forfood. what we're seeing in markets around the world is a two—year stack of inflation where we operate still running stubbornly at around a 20%—30% on that two year basis. we're seeing some moderation in, kind of, current prices, but it's not enough for people to really feel that in their pockets yet. so i think there's a lot still to play out in this space. we're doing our part very much — being thoughtful about where we source and how we source, making sure we've got surety of supply of everything that we've got. so the pressure on people's purses and wallets meant that some people were taking on extra jobs. a new phrase was being thrown around, especially among younger people trying to make ends meet. it's called the side hustle. it's taking on a second job or starting a business while working for someone else. one of the most successful was a young woman who posts online

videos and creates courses on how to use spreadsheets. 0k, kat. i don't ask many people this, but i've got you in front of me, i'm going to have to ask you. how much money do you make doing this? so this past year, we did over $2 million. shut the front door! no! ian, i've said it to you before, we're in the wrong job. the company made $2 million doing spreadsheet excel spreadsheet lessons, if you will. yeah. and it's really for me, it's not about the money though. like, i look at that number as a testament to how many people i got to help that year. right? so taking a look at it, like the bigger that number is, the more people were in the courses and the more people were elevating themselves at work every day, showing up, more confident, getting promotions and raises. and that's really the part that

lights me up and the, kind of, the business flows along with it. while miss excel�*s business was taking off, a new wave of technology was certainly capturing the business zeitgeist. in fact, if we look back at 2023, we might remember it as the year that artificial intelligence — yeah ai — went mainstream and the fear that machines would start to take ourjobs certainly started to become a reality. dean meadowcroft, a copywriter from northern england, was among the first to lose work to this new wave of generative ai. dean, i'mjust wondering, did you everfathom... did you ever think with the introduction of ai that you would be one of those people that it's always been touted, you know, "al's coming for your job," did you ever think it was going to be you? oddly enough, in a dark irony, i didn't quite at first. i thought there was a lot of doomsday prophesies online, and i thought, like everybody else, i'd seen everything from ai—generated novels and poems to ai—generated content.

and i looked at it and i was like, "yeah, i understand that you can generate a few ideas from it, but in terms of the actual meat of content and trying to accomplish things, it just wasn't there". so most of the discussions we had were about, "yeah, it's not quite there yet. i can't see anybody fully embracing this because it's not quite there". and that is pretty much egg on my face for that because within a matter of a few months it was obviously something that people had fully taken hold of and embraced. across the board in marketing as well, notjust my experience. a lot of freelancers i know have mentioned losing some really key contacts they've developed over the years because a lot of people can look at al and just go, "well, it's simpler and it's quicker". and obviously in terms of quality, i'd like to think people do care about that. i certainly take great pride in everything i write, i'd like to think my colleagues do the same, and i hope companies don't sacrifice that quality for the expense of that speed. but the view from those running businesses, it's quite different. so martin sorrell, he built the world's biggest advertising and marketing company,

wpp, before moving on to a new digital marketing venture called sa capital. i'm just wondering, in advertising, your business, what are some of the positives as you see them? well, just very briefly, i think there are five big positives. the first is we're going to see an improvement in productivity on copyrighting and visualisation. so basically, we'll be able to produce copy and ads far faster — two weeks down to two days. secondly, we're going to be able to personalise even more effectively. we're able to do that already, but it's going to be super productive. instead of producing 1.5 million assets for a campaign, potentially we could produce multi—million assets for a campaign. thirdly, media planning and buying, i think is going to be revolutionised. you won't no longer need 10,000 people around the world with the media planning and buying network. you'll be able to do it algorithmically. fourthly, we're going to be able to use al to improve our processes, our daily process, make it

much more productive. and finally, what i think is the most important positive is that we'll be able to democratize information inside companies. they'll become much flatter, much more effective and efficient because knowledge will be able to be disseminated around the company, much — almost human bots. humans will be able to access information much more effectively. it's notjust legitimate business, though, that's using this tech to make money. fraudsters, oh, they have been quick to spot the possibilities of ai. 0ne mother told the american senate about receiving a phone call from her daughter telling her she'd been kidnapped and needed to pay a ransom. they required me to get in a van with a bag over my head with $50,000 in cash to be transported to my daughter. if i didn't have all the money, then we were both going to be dead. she soon realised it was a fake, so i wanted to find outjust how easy it was to use someone�*s voice to fake a call.

well, it can take as little as 10 minutes to clone a voice from social media, posted videos. the tools are free, they're easy to use, and hackers are even using their own tools that are on the dark web that don't have the watermarking or the guardrails that are trying to prevent this kind of misuse. and i know my producer asked you to look at my social media to see what you could do. hi, honey. i'm here in paris, and my wallet and phone was stolen, and i'm calling from a borrowed phone. i need to have some money sent to me immediately. i'm going to send you my french colleague's paypal information. rachel, thank you very much. i love you, and i'll call you later. wow. i mean, that's pretty scary. that's pretty scary stuff. i mean, that was my voice. yeah. we live in a post—real society, aaron. yes, absolutely. it's your voice. and if you call your mother with that voice, it'll fool your mother. but ai, look, it's notjust about taking ourjobs or getting rich orfraud. according to some, it's got huge

potential to help humanity reach long—term goals for the benefit of everyone. if we can use ai for social impact, for social good, for making knowledge available to everybody, for giving trusted information, for solving real world challenges that face us today, i would be very happy, but we can only do this if it uses ai in a safe way, if we build the ai in a trusted way, and if we can get this regulation right globally. just briefly, do you think that's going to happen? do you think we will get... mankind? i mean, you know, as humans, will we get it right? because a lot of times we get things wrong. i think we have a lot of global support at this point. and there is a lot of awareness around what this technology is about to do for humanity. i think we have to do this safe. if you safeguard against some of the challenges where we might not be able to get it right completely. and this is where

regulation comes in. i also think, i fundamentally believe, aaron, that we have the one area where we need the most work we haven't done yet is skills and new job creation. there will be a lot of new opportunities that this technology brings just the way the digital era did. and i would encourage policymakers, global leaders, business leaders to take an active, well—thought through, proactive approach to skills development and new, newjob creation. whether policymakers get ai right or not, it's going to be a big story in 202a. now, the eu, it'sjust announced it's sweeping proposed laws. and we're certainly going to be keeping an eye on how the rest of the world follows suit. so, as 2023 rolled to its end, leaders from around the world, they gathered in dubai for the united nations summit on climate change, of course, known as cop 28. and they signalled for the first time that the world officially needs to move on from fossil fuels which are warming the planet.

so my next guest, well, he had a unique viewpoint on the earth's climate emergency as an astronaut and who's now the big boss of nasa. you get a whole different perspective. you can see with the naked eye how we're messing it up. cutting down the rainforest in the upper amazon. you can see all of that from space. i didn't see racial division and i didn't see religious division. i didn't see political division. i saw that we're all in this together as citizens of planet earth. it changes your perspective. back on earth, it was a return journey that was changing the way many of us work. the much contested return to the office. bosses, they were asking workers to go back for much of the week, including that icon of working from home, zoom. you've gone back to the office.

you've been asking your workers who live within a 50—mile radius to come back to the office. why have you done that? i think it's two—fold. so first of all, we are building a platform which is really for hybrid work. so if we want to be able to position that in the market, then we need to experience it ourselves. and i think it's good for people to be together and to cooperate and to collaborate. and there's only so much you can do on a zoom meeting. we want people to come to the office two days a week. and in the beginning it was a bit challenging because people were like, "why"? to your point, "why do i need to come into the office"? and i think in many cases it's actually going really well where people are seeing added value coming to the office. because what you don't want is you don't want to send people into the office and then let them do exactly the same things that they could be doing at home.

while bosses wanted people back under their noses, the popularity of remote work, boy, it remains strong. so how will these two views work out? what i think is going to happen is ultimately we're going to move towards something like a four—day work week. i think we're kind of already on our way there. and i think that what's really sitting behind the desire by workers for flexibility for remote work or hybrid work is really autonomy. and i think employers need to find a way to offer that autonomy in whatever fashion appeals to their talent. we see incredible popularity in remote work. just remote alone is getting four times the number of applications as the number ofjobs that are on our platform. so it's incredibly popular amongstjob applicants. flexible working was also a subject in one of our programmes which got the biggest reaction from you. it was about menopause in the workplace. it's a controversial subject

because it takes in both, well, sexism and ageism. the government here in the uk appointed its first employment menopause champion to ask if, well, menopause could be a reason there are so few female bosses at the top of industry. the average age of a woman going into menopause is 51. so it's almost a perfect storm that you're probably going into the most important role of your career at that very moment when you're starting to experience perimenopause or menopause. and overlay that with we're having children arguably later in life, so you're probably still looking after children, you could be looking after ageing parents, if you put all that together and then you look at the psychological impact of menopause, which is often the the key trigger for a woman in a leadership role, feeling that they need to step away or step down, it's little wonder that there are less and less women

in leadership roles. so then, helen, what would be the best advice to teams and colleagues who are working alongside someone going through the symptoms? so i think the first thing is around education. so really understanding what it is, what the symptoms can be, what the experience can be like. and the second piece of it is around the allyship piece. so, often in a working environment, there is little that people can do to support you. if you've got to come into the office, you've got to come into the office. sometimes it's about the understanding that that could be a really challenging experience for somebody. so there are practical aspects to it. there are things that employers can do to support women, reasonable adjustments. but often it's just about being heard, being understood. and it wasn't only women who were calling for more diversity and inclusion. in 2007, lord john brown

was the boss of the oil giant bp. but newspaper revelations about his relationship with a man ultimately led to him leaving his role. so i sat down and i asked him why he hadn't been more open. john, let's start with this, because you weren'tjust reticent not to reveal your sexuality, you fought very hard to to keep it out of the public. why did you do that? well, it was a long time ago. i was outed in 2007, and i obviously was in the closet for the whole of my life up until then, which was getting on for 60 years. i did it because of my background. my mother, who was a holocaust survivor, always told me, "never tell anyone a secret because they will always use it against you. and never be an identifiable member of a minority

because when the going gets tough, the majority always hurt the minority". and from her experience, and actually from my observation, she wasn't wrong. so that was one reason. and the other reason was just the atmosphere at the time. i think there was an awful lot of anti—gayjokes. there was a lot of anti—gay sentiment. certainly things were changing. this wasn't even... i was going to say, we're talking 2007, so it doesn't feel that long ago. but it felt quite lonely in business, i have to say. at the top. there weren't — i couldn't identify, i think i could identify probably nobody at the time who was an out gay ceo. possibly one. yeah, but there were no role models and there was no sense that there was any form of companionship, if you will, in the professional classes

that i was involved in. looking back at it now, do you regret it? do you either regret not coming out earlier, or do you regret that you were forced to come out? well, i don't actually have any regrets. i mean, because i always looked forward. again, something i always believe in that you look forward rather than backwards. but yes, would it have been better to have been out? of course, it would. if the circumstances were right and if i could have done it, i probably should have done it. but, you know, when you're in the closet and you're convinced that everyone around you is hostile to one of your particular aspects of your life, a very important, deep aspect of your life, you persuade yourself that you need to stay in the closet and secret, and if you came out, the world would collapse around you. of course, that actually didn't happen because the world had changed over the time i was in the closet

and i'd forgotten. i didn't see that it changed. i thought it was the same. and my last interview to look back on is also about inclusion in the workplace. and even though i shouldn't have favourites, it's quite possibly one of my favourites. we were looking at the issue of including more neurodiverse people, those with conditions like adhd or autism into the workforce. and so i spoke to lars backstrom, a data analyst with the company autozone, which has a majority of its staff with autism. lars backstrom, a real pleasure having you on the show. and lars, let me start with this, because you weren't diagnosed until you were something like 51 years old. how did you come to realise that you are autistic? i had always felt alienated. i had always wondered why things, especially social things, they were easy for other people, but appeared so difficult for me.

but i never really suspected it. it was actually my wife. one day she was web surfing as she came across an article about autism in adults in 2013. and she thought, started thinking, "well, that does very much look like my husband". lars, i'm going to do something i never, never usually do. isabel, your wife, she's next to you, isn't she? yeah. can i have a quick word with her? well, yes, by all means. come on in, isabel. would you like to sit in my chair? yes. yeah. hi, isabel. hello. hello, isabel. lovely to have you and to see you. thank you. let me just ask you this. so you were doing this internet search and then you sort of put the pieces together. but isabel, did you have any thoughts prior to finding that

online site that maybe last, there was something different about lars? i had always known that there was something different about lars, but i couldn't quite put my finger on it. when we first started dating, i used to think that my boyfriend was quirky. but, you know, ithought, well, there are lots of people that are quirky out there and maybe i, myself, quirky. but as the years went by, i started to really realise that there was something different. and so when i came across that article, i was actually shocked to see that most of what they were talking about fitted with the behaviour that lars had been showing throughout the years. lars, what would you say to other neurodivergent people about going into the workplace? i think we have to remember that a lot of autistic people come into the work force or attempt to get into the work force carrying with them traumas from earlier in life. so one advice is if you suspect

you have autism, get a formal diagnosis. because then, yeah you get, you know... and you will have the law on your side when you apply for work and you work. and be persistent. it's too easy to give up. seen too many fellow autistic people giving up. and it's very depressing because, well, failure hurts. but it's just... be persistent and accept every failure as a learning opportunity and ask for help. i have noticed that there are people that are prepared to take advantage of us. that is all too true. but there are also very many kind people that are able and willing, sometimes even quite eager to help.

and perhaps be yourself. it's very, very difficult... difficult to ask of an autistic people, since it's very difficult to know yourself. but at least don't try to be someone who you are not which is called masking, which is very common among autistic people. the simplest advice is just do your best. that's all anyone can ask of you. as long as you do your best. well, that's it for our look back on 2023. i hope you enjoyed it. and of course, we can carry on the conversation on x, which funnily enough began the year being called twitter. x me, i'll x you back. you can get me a bbc aaron. from me and all the talking business team, we wish you a happy and healthy 202a. i'll see you soon. bye bye.

hello. it is a fairly unsettled spell of weather in store in the run—up to christmas. the next few days are looking relatively mild and cloudy. today, we've had some snow across parts of scotland. that's going to turn back to rain gradually. it's looking fairly damp in the west, brightest towards the east. but here's this band of cloud — you can see on the satellite image and that's been producing the rain and the hill snow that we've seen across scotland over the past few hours. increasingly that is turning to sleet and then back to rain in the northeast as we head through into the afternoon. so, some really heavy rain for the west of scotland, could be some flooding. meanwhile, further west, we're looking at quite a lot of clouds, some outbreaks of rain, brightest in the east, but temperatures 12 to 13 for most of us, but only about 3 to 6 across the north east of scotland into this evening. and tonight, that frontal system slips further south across england and wales, some patchy rain, breezy conditions continue.

squally showers roll in across the north west of the uk, but it's turning really mild. in fact, temperatures on the rise overnight, 13 degrees for most of us to kick off your christmas eve. so, yes, it is looking mild. the orange colours with us, that mild air mass. but we've got a lot of isobars. low pressure sits to the north of the uk for christmas eve. so it's going to be a windy spell of weather. gusts could reach 50 to 70 miles an hour, especially towards the western isles and the north west of scotland, also towards the east of the pennines. some gusty winds. but blustery wherever you are. some outbreaks of rain for many areas, brighter skies towards the north, but plenty of heavy showers. temperatures for most of us, 13 to 15 — could be one of the mildest christmas eves on record. now, as we move through into the big day itself, christmas day, the first area of low pressure exits towards the east. but we've still got another developing area of low pressure towards the atlantic. so it's going to bring some rain through central and southern parts of england and wales. heavy showers further north, perhaps a bit of snow, perhaps a white christmas just on top of the cairngorms, for instance.

but for most of us, reasonably mild, particularly in the south, 13 or 1a degrees, we're looking at colder air holding on across the north of scotland. that's where we could see a little bit of snow through the day. now, into boxing day, low pressure clears away, at least for a time. so a ridge of higher pressure in charge into boxing day. so it is looking like a drier, brighter day for most of us. still the odd wintry shower, i think, across the far north of scotland. but the winds will be easing and the sun should make a reappearance for most of us. a bit of rain into the far southwest later on. it is looking drier, but also a little bit colder on christmas day. bye— bye. you're watching bbc news. a day of national mourning is being held in the czech republic after thursday's mass shooting at a prague university. these are live images from the university.

flags on official buildings are being flown at half mast and a minute's silence will be observed at midday. 1a people were shot dead at charles university by a student who then killed himself. 0ur correspondent bethany belljoins us live from prague. the people of the city and people across the country are preparing to hold a minute of silence to pay their respects to those who died in their respects to those who died in the shootings at prague university, the shootings at prague university, the charles university on thursday when the 24—year—old gunman ran through the building apparently shooting at random. people here are deeply shocked that something like this could have happened, there is a real sense of sadness, mel colony and real unhappiness this has happened. gb melancholy

preponderance bell rings. bell tolls.