The question the survey did not ask
Lloyds asked 1,200 UK businesses whether AI had created new jobs and 54 per cent said yes. It did not ask whether anything went the other way, which is the number every owner actually wants.
- 01
More than half of UK firms say AI has created jobs for them
The Business Barometer research published on 18 August covers 1,200 UK businesses and reports that 54 per cent say AI has created new roles inside the organisation, 61 per cent are now using the technology, and 58 per cent intend to spend more on it over the next year, mostly on training the staff they already have. It is the first UK-wide survey to put a majority behind the job creation claim rather than the job loss one. What it does not record is whether those same firms cut anything elsewhere in the same period, so the net figure stays unknown.
Lloyds Banking Group - 02
A majority of Americans under 30 are now more worried about AI than excited by it
Pew surveyed US adults between 22 and 28 June and published on 18 August. Across all ages, 52 per cent say they are more concerned than excited about AI in daily life, up from 37 per cent when the question was first asked in 2021, while only 9 per cent land on the excited side. The sharpest movement is among adults under 30, where 55 per cent now sit on the concerned side, the first time that group has crossed a majority.
Pew Research Center - 03
Microsoft says a maximum-severity Entra ID flaw was being exploited
CVE-2026-69836 carries a CVSS score of 10.0 and allowed remote code execution against Microsoft's cloud identity service with no account and no user action required. Microsoft disclosed on 21 August that it had been exploited in the wild and that the fix was applied to its own infrastructure, so there is nothing for customers to patch. It has not said who was behind it, when the attacks started, how many tenants were touched or what was done afterwards, which is the part worth remembering the next time somebody tells you the cloud removes your exposure.
Microsoft Security Response Center - 04
Researchers made Copilot describe its own undocumented back door
Varonis Threat Labs chained three flaws in the consumer version of Microsoft Copilot into a one-click attack, tracked as CVE-2026-24301: a hidden URL parameter that ran an attacker's prompt the moment a page loaded, a route that pulled data out of connected accounts such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and OneDrive, and a poisoned summary that wrote the attacker's instructions into Copilot's long-term memory, where they survived password changes and device re-enrolment. They found the hidden parameter by repeatedly asking Copilot to explain why its own prompts would not auto-run until it told them. Reported in December 2025, patched on 18 August 2026, with no evidence of anyone else having used it.
Varonis - 05
ChatGPT starts showing ads in 31 more European countries on Monday
OpenAI confirmed on 19 August that ads reach 31 European markets from 24 August, its widest advertising rollout yet. They appear only for people on the free tier and the cheap Go plan, so anyone paying for Plus, Business or Enterprise sees none. The UK has had them since earlier this summer, and buying them still means going through OpenAI's sales team or an agency partner rather than a self-service dashboard.
OpenAI - 06
Apple Music will put a visible Made With AI label on tracks
Apple told music industry partners by email on 20 August that songs flagged as materially generated using AI will carry a label users can see, arriving later this year with no firmer date. The flagging itself is not new: Apple introduced AI Transparency Tags in March, but they stayed in the back end and it is the labels and distributors, not Apple, who decide what counts as material use. So the label tells you what a supplier declared, not what Apple detected.
Billboard - 07
Google gives publishers a two-line button for getting picked as a preferred source
Google's documentation was updated on 20 August with an embeddable button that lets a reader mark your site as a preferred source without leaving the page. Sites marked that way surface more often in Top Stories and carry a visible badge when cited in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Google says readers are roughly twice as likely to click through to a source they have chosen. It works at domain and subdomain level only, so a company blog sitting in a subfolder cannot be selected on its own.
Google Search Central
Fifty-four per cent of 1,200 UK businesses told Lloyds that AI has created new jobs for them. That is a genuinely useful finding and it is also an incomplete one, because nobody asked the second half of the question. A firm that hires an AI specialist and quietly stops replacing two admin leavers appears in that 54 per cent as a job creator. The survey has no field for what did not get backfilled, and the press release does not claim one, so what we have is a count of additions with no matching count of subtractions. Read the Pew numbers next to it and the gap explains itself: more than half of American adults, and a majority of the under thirties, are now more concerned than excited, and they are not going to be talked out of that by a statistic that only measures the good direction.
For a firm of a dozen people the honest version of this is simpler and less exciting than either side wants. Nobody I know in construction has hired a person because of AI, and nobody has sacked one either. What has actually shifted is where the hours go. Quotes come back the same day instead of Sunday night. The variation that used to be argued about from memory now gets found in thirty seconds because the messages are searchable. From direct experience in construction I can tell you that this is the whole gain, and it does not show up as a job created or a job lost, which is exactly why the surveys keep missing it. The firms getting value out of this are not the ones with an AI role on the org chart. They are the ones who noticed which two hours a week were being wasted and removed them.
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