B&M ousts finance chief as it warns again on profits after £7m accounts error
The discount retailer B&M has ousted its finance chief after reporting a £7m accounts blunder that will cut its annual earnings – its second profit warning within two weeks,The company told investors it looking for a successor to Mike Schmidt, who is stepping down as chief financial officer, after the accounting error,The company, which sells things ranging from DIY, electricals and garden products to toys, pet food and everyday essentials, discovered that £7m of overseas freight costs were not “correctly recognised in cost of goods sold,” after an update to its operating system earlier this year,This means that adjusted profits for the year to March 2026 are now expected to be between £470m and £520m, down from its previous estimate of between £510m and £560m,For the first half, B&M expects profits of £191m, down from £198m.
Shares in the FTSE 250-listed company slumped by nearly 18% in early trading.They have lost nearly 50% of their value this year.The retailer said Schmidt will remain with the group until a replacement is found.The system issue at the centre of the problem has since been fixed, it said.B&M will commission an external review, and will provide a further update when it releases first-half results on 13 November.
One of Britain’s biggest discount retailers, it has been struggling and warned on profits earlier in October.It announced a “back to basics” plan under its new chief executive, Tjeerd Jegen, who took the helm in June.It expects UK sales at stores open for at least a year to either fall, or rise in low single digits, this year.Jegen said in early October that the company had cut prices and was working to refocus its ranges, improve on-shelf availability and “bring back excitement to our stores”.Sign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningafter newsletter promotionB&M also issued a profit warning in February, and in June blamed sliding sales on more cautious consumer spending, particularly among lower-income shoppers who are its main customers.
In a short statement on Monday, B&M said: “The board wishes Mike well for the future.”B&M, founded in 1978, became one of Britain’s most successful retailers during the pandemic, when it was still run by the Arora brothers, Simon and Bobby.They acquired the business from Phildrew Investments in late 2004 when it was an ailing regional chain of 21 stores, and built it into a retail empire in the UK and France.It listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2014.The company has 1,270 stores, mostly in the UK under the B&M, Heron Foods and B&M Express brands.
The figure also includes 140 B&M shops in France.
Inside San Francisco’s new AI school: is this the future of US education?
In the world’s tech innovation epicenter, an “AI-powered” private school has made headlines for unabashedly embracing the technology.Alpha School San Francisco, which opened its doors to K-8 students this fall, is the newest outpost of a network of 14 nationwide private schools. Its learning model entails just two hours of focused academic work per day, during which the school says students can learn twice as fast as their counterparts in traditional schools – with the help of artificial intelligence.AI, Alpha says, is central to the school’s learning philosophy, brand and impact on students.Alpha is not alone in its efforts to incorporate AI into the classroom
The platform exposing exactly how much copyrighted art is used by AI tools
Ask Google’s AI video tool to create a film of a time-travelling doctor who flies around in a blue British phone booth and the result, unsurprisingly, resembles Doctor Who.And if you ask OpenAI’s technology to do the same, a similar thing happens. What’s wrong with that, you may think?The answer could be one of the biggest issues AI chiefs face as their era-defining technology becomes ever more ubiquitous in our lives.Google and OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence is supposed to be just that – generative, meaning it develops novel answers to our questions. Ask it for a time-travelling doctor, you get one that their systems have created
Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?
From brain-rotting videos to AI creep, every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently …Step into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a little closer. Glass cabinets display prototypes of weird and wonderful creations, from tiny desktop robots to a surrealist sculpture created by an AI model prompted to design a tea set made from body parts. In the lobby, an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. Five floors up, research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people’s brain states
Parents will be able to block Meta bots from talking to their children under new safeguards
Parents will be able to block their children’s interactions with Meta’s AI character chatbots, as the tech company addresses concerns over inappropriate conversations.The social media company is adding new safeguards to its “teen accounts”, which are a default setting for under-18 users, by letting parents turn off their children’s chats with AI characters. These chatbots, which are created by users, are available on Facebook, Instagram and the Meta AI app.Parents will also be able to block specific AI characters if they don’t want to stop their children from interacting with chatbots altogether. They will also get “insights” into the topics their children are chatting about with AI characters, which Meta said would allow them to have “thoughtful” conversations with their children about AI interactions
AI chatbots are hurting children, Australian education minister warns as anti-bullying plan announced
A disturbing new trend of AI chatbots bullying children and even encouraging them to take their own lives has the Australian government very concerned.Speaking to media on Saturday, the federal education minister, Jason Clare, said artificial intelligence was “supercharging” bullying.“AI chatbots are now bullying kids. It’s not kids bullying kids, it’s AI bullying kids, humiliating them, hurting them, telling them they’re losers … telling them to kill themselves. I can’t think of anything more terrifying than that,” Clare said
UK MPs warn of repeat of 2024 riots unless online misinformation is tackled
Failures to properly tackle online misinformation mean it is “only a matter of time” before viral content triggers a repeat of the 2024 summer riots, MPs have warned.Chi Onwurah, the chair of the Commons science and technology select committee, said ministers seemed complacent about the threat and this was putting the public at risk.The committee said it was disappointed in the government’s response to its recent report warning social media companies’ business models contributed to disturbances after the Southport murders.Replying to the committee’s findings, the government rejected a call for legislation tackling generative artificial intelligence platforms and said it would not intervene directly in the online advertising market, which MPs claimed helped incentivise the creation of harmful material after the attack.Onwurah said the government agreed with most of its conclusions but had stopped short of backing its recommendations for action
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