Our sideways look at the week in IT — tall tales, real facts, strong opinions, and one genuinely serious point about your business at the end of every piece. That bit we're not joking about.
There is a particular kind of surprise that arrives in a brown envelope — quiet, administrative, final. Your Microsoft 365 renewal is going to be that envelope. From 1 July 2026, Copilot is in the box, the price has moved, and the only question left is whether you find out before or after you sign.
There is a cupboard at the back of almost every office in the country. It contains a router, a network switch, possibly a small server, definitely a tangle of cables nobody has touched since 2019 — and, right now, it is being slowly cooked. The Met Office has just recorded Britain's eighth day above 34°C this year. Your comms cupboard does not know this. It just knows it's very warm in there.
There is a moment in every episode of Thunderbirds when the Tracy brothers are scrambling into their machines while some poor soul is already halfway down a mineshaft. The UN's new scientific panel on AI published its preliminary report last week, and it has that exact energy. The question for Yorkshire businesses is whether you are in the cockpit or the mineshaft.
There is a moment, well known to anyone who has ever bought a bread maker, when the appliance migrates from the worktop to the back of a high shelf without anyone officially deciding anything. Microsoft has just cut 4,800 jobs and launched a 6,000-person unit to help you use its AI tools properly — and that sequence tells you everything you need to know about the state of AI rollouts.
My uncle Derek once bought a brand-new Iveco Daily for his florist delivery round, then spent two months driving the same roads in the same order at the same time every morning. Which brings me, against all odds, to a BCG survey of nearly 12,000 workers — and why the hour a day your team is saving with AI is almost certainly not appearing on your P&L.
There's a quiet mood among business owners that it's time to keep data in your own building again. The instinct isn't daft — but the thing most likely to bite you isn't a rogue AI or a headline breach. It's much closer to home.
The government's under-16 social media ban is well-meant, but banning apps one at a time is a losing game. The only version that actually holds is age verification built into the device itself — exactly what Apple has quietly started doing.
If a Field Note made you laugh and then made you slightly nervous about your own setup, that second feeling is the one to act on. Book a free, no-obligation chat with the Finnwood team.
