Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

Regional tensions are driving economic volatility. The situation in the Middle East has driven a surge in oil prices and heightened broader inflationary pressures. The American Automobile Association (AAA) reports that the average price of gasoline has risen to approximately $4 per gallon, up from $2.98 prior to the conflict. Other economies are likely to be harder hit, with the UK particularly vulnerable according to the OECD, which has cut its 2026 forecast for UK GDP by 0.5 percentage points—down from its previous estimate of 1.2%. At the same time, inflation is also predicted to be higher than expected.

The latest McKinsey Global Survey tracking executive sentimenton the economy finds that geopolitical instability currently overshadows all other perceived economic risks.  The survey was in the field when Middle East tensions escalated on February 28. Responses collected on and after that date were significantly less optimistic about both the global and domestic economies, although expectations for company growth remained primarily positive.

Unsurprisingly, energy prices have also become a significant focus. However, this was only seen in the responses received on and after February 28. For the first few days the survey was in the field, respondents were about equally likely to cite geopolitical instability and trade policy changes as a top risk to their countries’ economies, and energy prices weren’t a commonly cited risk. Then, geopolitical instability appeared as the predominantly cited risk, and energy prices became nearly as common a concern as trade policy changes.

Nevertheless, respondents remain optimistic about expectations for their own companies, with just over half of private sector respondents expecting demand for their companies’ products or services to grow over the next six months—a similar figure to last quarter. About 60% expect profits to grow, consistent with the past two quarters, the survey found.

Moving to the growth figures, global activity remains subdued and uneven. US real GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2025 was revised down sharply to an annualized 0.7%, while the European Central Bank (ECB) now expects eurozone GDP growth of just 0.9% in 2026. UK growth also remains weak, with GDP up only 0.8% year on year in January.

Among emerging economies, India continues to outperform but is beginning to show signs of moderation. Brazil’s economy expanded by 2.3% in 2025, down from 3.4% in 2024, while Russia recorded only 1.0% growth. Mexico’s economy grew 1.2% year on year in February, supported mainly by services.

Consumer sentiment remains subdued across most economies, even if retail sales have held up better than expected.  Central banks largely kept rates unchanged in March.  Inflation pressures, however, are beginning to rise again. Energy prices linked to the conflict in the Middle East pushed inflation higher in several economies. Consumer inflation increased in the eurozone, India, and China, while inflation remained stubbornly above target in the UK and rose further in Mexico.  Commodity markets saw significant volatility in March.  At the same time, manufacturing activity strengthened globally, reaching its highest level in almost four years, driven mainly by Asia.

Labor markets remain broadly stable. Unemployment has ticked up in the US and a few other countries but generally remains low. The UK unemployment rate was steady at 5.2%, while eurozone labor market conditions continued to hold up relatively well.  Financial markets weakened noticeably in March as investors reacted to higher energy prices and concerns over slowing growth. Equity markets declined across most economies, volatility rose sharply, and borrowing costs remained elevated.  Trade performance remained mixed.

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According to the author he doesn’t need to tell you that AI is everywhere.  Or that it is being used, increasingly, in hospitals. Doctors are using AI to help them with note-taking. AI-based tools are trawling through patient records, flagging people who may require certain support or treatments. They are also used to interpret medical exam results and x-rays.

A growing number of studies suggest that many of these tools can deliver accurate results. But there’s a bigger question here: Does using them actually translate into better health outcomes for patients?  We don’t yet have a good answer.

That’s what Jenna Wiens, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, and Anna Goldenberg of the University of Toronto argue in a paper published in the journal Nature Medicine this week.  Over the last few years, she says, it’s as though “a switch flipped.” Health-care providers not only appear much more interested in the promise of these technologies but have also begun rapidly deploying them.

The problem is that many providers aren’t rigorously assessing how well they actually work.  Take “ambient AI” tools, for example. Also known as AI scribes, they “listen” to conversations between doctors and patients and go on to transcribe and summarize them. Multiple tools are available, and they are already being widely adopted by health-care providers.  That’s all well and good. But what about patient health outcomes? “[Researchers] have evaluated provider or clinician and patient satisfaction, but not really how these tools are affecting clinical decision-making,” says Wiens. “We just don’t know.”  The same holds true for other AI-based technologies used in health-care settings. Some are used to predict patients’ health trajectories, others to recommend treatments. They are designed to make health care more effective and efficient.

But even a tool that is “accurate” won’t necessarily improve health outcomes. AI might speed up the interpretation of a chest x-ray, for example. But how much will a doctor rely on its analysis? How will that tool affect the way a doctor interacts with patients or recommends treatment? And ultimately, what will this mean for those patients?  The answers to those questions might vary between hospitals or departments and could depend on clinical workflows, says Wiens. They might also differ between doctors at various stages of their careers.  “We like things that save us time, but we have to think about the unintended consequences of this,” she says.

“I do believe in the potential of AI to really improve clinical care,” says Wiens, who stresses that she doesn’t want to stop the adoption of AI tools in health care. She just wants more information about how they are affecting people. “I have to believe that in the future it’s not all AI or no AI,” she says. “It’s somewhere in between.”

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Ever since Google was founded in 1998, search has been the core of the company’s identity. For much of that time, search has also been the engine (no pun intended) driving Google’s business.   On Wednesday, that began to change. The company’s cloud computing business was the undisputed star of parent company Alphabet’s first-quarter earnings, posting an eye-popping 63% revenue growth from the prior year, for a total of $20 billion.

AI is of course what’s driving the booming growth in the Google Cloud business, as CEO Sundar Pichai and other company executives noted on the earnings call. And investors were delighted, sending shares of Alphabet up 7% in after hours trading.   But lost in the excitement of the moment is something more fundamental: Google Cloud now represents 18% of the company’s overall business. It’s perhaps just one quarter or two more quarters away from comprising one-fifth of the Google empire—something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.   At this time last year, Google Cloud represented 13.6% percent of Alphabet’s total revenue. In the first quarter of 2024, Cloud was just 11.8%. 

Advertising has always been the center of gravity for Google, with its high-margin and recession-proof search ads at the top of a mountain that includes YouTube video ads, display ads that Google distributes to other sites, and ads that appear in Google’s portfolio of popular properties like Gmail and Maps. 

It’s not that Google’s ads business is in any danger of going away. Ads generated $77 billion in the first three months of the year, up roughly 16% year-over-year. That’s more revenue than American Express generated in all of 2025. And many Google-watchers believe that AI will only enhance the company’s capacity to serve ads to searchers.

But the cloud business has reached an inflection point where it’s no longer just a cute sideshow. In addition to the revenue growth, Google’s cloud’s operating income tripled from the year-ago period to $6.6 billion. More impressive still, the cloud business operating margin expanded from 9.4% a year ago to 32.9% in Q1.

The blooming of the cloud business is likely to have a significant impact at Google beyond the income statement. The cloud business is run by enterprise sales people in suits like Cloud boss Thomas Kurian, an Oracle veteran. It’s a completely different culture than the rest of Google, where sandal-wearing engineers, product managers, and media types set the tone. How that cultural contrast plays out inside the company in the quarters and years ahead will be fascinating to watch, especially when the time comes to choose a successor to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. 

Of course, the main factor that will determine how big the Cloud business becomes is AI. Right now, customer demand for AI is insatiable (Google Cloud’s current backlog is $460 billion) and Google’s cloud business is rising along with it. If the AI train suddenly comes to a halt, or even slows—which many observers think could happen—Google’s cloud business could find itself back in second class.

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We’ve entered a new era of organizational life when, for the first time in history, people can turn to something other than a fellow human for conversation and support during the workday. They now can engage with AI. But how are employees using AI for social purposes? How is that usage affecting them? In our ongoing research we’ve been trying to answer those questions and understand where this new dynamic might take us in the future.

The problem that sparked this study is loneliness—specifically, the loneliness that many employees around the world feel at work every day. It has significant business consequences, including lower job satisfaction, performance, and retention. We wondered if people might be assuaging it by talking to generative and agentic forms of AI at work. After all, we’ve seen how quickly people have become attached to their AI friends, romantic partners, and therapists.

To find out, the author studied knowledge workers who were relatively far along the AI adoption curve; nearly all of them used it weekly, daily, or even hourly in their jobs.  To avoid fraying the social fabric of organizations, the authors encourage leaders to harness AI in five specific ways that will prioritize and promote connections to humans—not to the technology.

How People Relate to Bots?  In fact, the authors were surprised by how common it was for employees to use AI for the kinds of social support once provided only by humans. Three-quarters (74%) of participants reported using AI for at least one form of it at work. Here’s how they employed AI in each area:  Career development, Personal growth, Friendship, and Emotional support.

Warning Signs Ahead.  There are four reasons human relationships in organizations could suffer as AI adoption increases.  First, AI can depopulate the workplace and create more isolation.  Second, AI can cause individuals’ social skills to atrophy and lower their motivation to connect with humans. Talking with an always reachable, sycophantic AI chatbot can be more appealing than conversing with real people.  Third, by removing the need to go to colleagues for help, AI can undermine opportunities to build trust.  And fourth, despite its lifelike capabilities, AI is indeed artificial and thus capable of triggering a sense of existential loneliness.

Despite these long-term risks, only 33% of the participants in the study had received any leadership guidance or information about how AI might affect their work relationships. It appears that organizations are now so focused on AI’s instrumental gains that they’re ignoring its potential interpersonal costs. That must change. The authors argued previously that alleviating workplace loneliness requires sustained managerial attention to structures, culture, and incentives. That imperative now extends to the impact of AI on work relationships.

How to Ensure AI Doesn’t Weaken Human Connections.  It is possible to both integrate AI into work and protect and nurture human connections. Inspired by authors’ research and the emerging practices of some far-thinking organizations, the authors recommend five measures:  Monitor the social impact of AI adoption, Establish guidelines for when and how AI can be used to replace human interactions, Design AI to promote human interaction, Use AI to organize relationship-building activities, and Train employees how to apply AI in healthful ways.

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Minimizing chaos is one of the healthiest goals an organization can set. Sadly, in today’s environment, this can seem impossible to leaders. Most organizations deal with both a chaotic external world (featuring wild daily gyrations in everything from geopolitics to weather to technology) and a chaotic internal landscape (featuring the level of shifting priorities that comes with the scale and complexity of so many companies today). If 2026 feels especially chaotic, you’re not wrong.  All hope is not lost, though. Leaders can take steps to help people handle chaos before things go off the rails, or at least before things go off the rails entirely. Let’s take a look at four of them.

Constantly talk to the teams your team works with.  Poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island,” and no team is, either. You don’t have to be a big, messy matrix organization to operate in a teams-of-teams manner. Even relatively small companies feature incredible amounts of interdependency between groups.  This phenomenon causes chaos by generating competing priorities. It also exacerbates the chaos that comes in from the outside by multiplying and fragmenting the organization’s strategies to respond to any given event.  According to the author, the sanest organizations she has done consulting work with, and the healthiest leadership teams she has ever been a part of, all addressed this issue in the same fairly informal way: Leaders got to know who their teams were teaming with, and they stayed in contact with those teams’ leaders.  Leaders are challenged not to map every interaction for their team but to understand the “mosts”: most frequent, most strategic, and most charged team-to-team interactions.  Once leaders engage in a regular, everyday dialogue about the work their teams are doing together, chaos levels begin to modulate. Multiple leaders can work together to collectively shift people’s priorities to what the organization really needs. They can also minimize collisions between people doing the same or conflicting work.

Create and protect space in meetings for impromptu dialogue.  On average, we were able to address issues more quickly with more of the right people in the room — and we were able to lessen silent emotional burdens among the team by bringing issues up quickly and publicly — because we had already designated time to do so.  What if the things off-road?  You need to kill a bunch of standing meetings, loose the agendas for the gatherings that did remain, create space for whatever was happening at that moment, for silence so that people could think, or for — brace yourself — the meeting to end early if we didn’t need the full time slot.  Reserving space in meetings can feel uncomfortable when you first implement it. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, corporate environments hate blank space in meetings or on calendars. It may be tempting to delete that agenda bullet that says “AOB” (any other business). But resist the urge to pack every hour. When you need that extra five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes because something has come up, it will feel like absolute magic to have time to talk about what you actually need to talk about.

Explicitly guard against the bad behavior that chaos can cover.  Are we making the experience of chaos worse than it needs to be by simply tolerating unpleasant behavior in chaotic times? After all, in the workplace, we often normalize crummy conduct in these sorts of moments. Results are suddenly bad? Of course the CEO is yelling. An unexpected deliverable is due ASAP? Of course the team is clashing. Conditions on the ground are wild? Of course folks are bickering with customers. All of this, of course, makes the chaos worse and the underlying issues less surmountable, but many organizations have come to accept it as a normal way of working in tough moments.  We shouldn’t.  A certain amount of back-and-forth is healthy and actually an indicator of psychological safety. But in chaotic moments, leaders must be vigilant about recognizing when strong statements have become bullying, when push and pull about roles and responsibilities have become toxic infighting, and when boundary-setting with customers has become too fraught.  Once you’ve identified truly over-the-line behavior, name the problem — contextualized to the chaotic situation to remove excuses: “I know this supply chain shortage is taxing us all, but the way you spoke to Sally was degrading and unhelpful.” Make it explicit that chaos does not issue everyone a blank check to indulge their worst impulses.  While chaos and bad behavior unfortunately often travel together, that’s not a coupling that sane leaders need to accept.

It’s not all bad: Reap the upsides of chaos.  You may have read the heading above and done a bit of a double take. “The upsides – you don’t need to loathe chaos.”  Remember a few things:  Chaos accelerates personal development.  Chaos can shake up the corporate chessboard in helpful ways.  And chaos can give us all the opportunity for a cleansing laugh.

The reality of life at any organization is that you can’t fully shield your team from chaos, and per that last strategy, you shouldn’t, either. With the right team-to-team communication, the right space to have the right conversations, and the right protection from bad behavior, your team can grow, get new opportunities, and even chuckle together during chaos.  In Greek mythology, chaos is defined as simply the time before the world was formed. Under that framework, chaos itself is almost immaterial; it’s what comes after that matters. And leaders: That part is what you choose to make of it.

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Urgency is often a performance. Leaders equate speed with competence, but research suggests that ‘pumping the brakes’ is the actual hallmark of high-quality leadership.  Yet, with an estimated 35,000 decisions made daily, humans tend to speed up their decisions, especially when under pressure from others, even more so with people in power.

Slowing down when making a decision is important to making quality decisions. First, humans are not good at estimating how long activities like decision making will take; timelines are often arbitrary. Second, bias creeps into quick decision making, wreaking havoc on the quality of the decision. Finally, more structured decision making is associated with improved decision implementation efficiency and quality.

A recent ScienceDirect study found that setting tight deadlines ignores entire categories of relevant data that could have informed the decision making process. Giving a decision maker more time directly enhances their ability to conduct contingency planning, get the necessary context, and explore alternative options for the decision.

Not Every Decision is Truly Urgent.  Research shows that “people are less successful at prioritizing important tasks over those that are urgent or just feel urgent.” This “illusion of urgency” can overshadow and shorten decision making timelines.  How do you know if a decision is urgent?  Urgent decisions have a formal, quick deadline (business deal or price change) or detrimental consequences for indecision (life lost or opportunity disappearing).  If you feel you have more time to make your decision, consider clarifying the decision making timeline with others by asking, “What if we waited to make this decision later?” Listen for legitimate reasons to rush the decision, emphasizing the context that is missing to make the decision now.  While resisting arbitrary deadlines, you cannot wait for certainty. Jeff Bezos’s ‘70% Rule’ provides the perfect guardrail. If you have less than 70% of the information, you are likely being reckless. If you wait for 90%, you’ve likely missed the window. The goal is to find the sweet spot between the illusion of urgency and the paralysis of perfection.  If you don’t have enough information, ask for clarification before making a decision.

Fast Decisions are Riddled with Bias.  There are a plethora of biases activated in fast decision making. Confirmation bias, where people look for information that confirms what they already know, anchoring bias, where people’s first impressions influence their decision, and sunk cost fallacy, where people increase their commitments to decisions based on past investments (time, money, or effort) rather than the current benefits.  When you slow down decisions, you invite objective thinking, also known as System 2 thinking, which is a slower, more conscious, and effortful mode of reasoning that generally results in improved outcomes.

Use Criteria to Slow Down Decisions.  By now, you might be thinking, this sounds nice, but how do I resist the time pressure of others who want quick decisions?  First, if you have clarified that you have more time to make the decision, be transparent about the new timeline for the decision. Then, get the information and additional context that you need, inviting objective criteria into the decision making process.  Decision criteria are helpful in aligning multiple stakeholders on the decision and gathering information you need but do not have yet. Two common criteria are 1) ease of implementation (resources, timeline) and 2) impact (on the business, customer). You can rate alternative decisions on these two factors, or get more granular, and map the alternatives on a two-by-two matrix displaying those with high ease and impact as logical choices.

Before you make your next decision, reflect first: Do I have to make a quick decision, or do I have more time? What biases might I need to check? What context am I missing? What are the necessary decision criteria, and what alternatives could I explore?

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What’s the best way to respond when someone (a coworker, boss, or family member) blames you for consequences of choices that they made?  —“Sick and tired of the blame game”  Your question is a good one—but it’s also extremely complex and involves a lot of nuance. There’s no “one size fits all” answer, as much will depend on various factors, such as:  your relationship with the other person; if this is a “one-off” or a repeated occurrence; the root cause for their blaming you; the amount of shared responsibility for the difficult situation; the limitations of the other person and your short and long-term goals, both in the situation and in dealing with the person.  

All of these factors should influence how you respond, but it’s that last one that’s most important, namely:  What are my goals here?  That question is important because emotional intelligence is all about using your understanding and ability to manage emotions to reach those goals. 

To be clear, you don’t want to be anyone’s punching bag. But you also don’t want to get caught up in the blame game. The one thing you know is, for whatever reason, they view you as contributing to the situation they find themselves in, one they are struggling with.

If the goals include establishing genuine connection, preserving or maintaining the relationship, and actually solving the problem at hand, focus on helping the other person, and the blame will likely disappear.  Here’s a simple framework you could try to do that:

1. Empathize: Here you don’t have to say anything…yet. Just try to imagine how they feel, and then try your best to relate to those feelings. Remember, the important thing is not who’s “right” or “wrong.” (After all, empathy does not equal agreement.) Rather, the goal is connection, so strive to remember the last time you felt like this, and how much you appreciated when someone was willing to help.
2. Apologize and share responsibility: “Please know, I’m genuinely sorry for anything I’ve done that’s contributed to this situation. I’d like to do all I can to work with you to make this better.”
3. Help first: “Tell me, what could I do to improve this situation?” Alternatively, you could brainstorm an idea you feel would genuinely help; then present that as an option. “Would it be helpful if I…”
4. Get them to commit: “Ok. I can commit to trying my best to make this happen. Can I ask something of you, too? It means so much to me when you…”

The idea here is not that you must follow these exact four steps, and the scripts are just examples. Also, keep in mind that this approach may or may not work for your situation, as everything depends on the factors above (among countless others).  But hopefully it serves as a starting point for finding a way to move forward, instead of staying stuck.

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According to the author in his years working in public relations, the most painful conversations he has aren’t with companies in the middle of a crisis. They’re with companies calling two weeks after one — when the damage is already baked into Google search results, employee morale has cratered and customers have already made up their minds. The pattern is almost always the same. A small problem festered for weeks or months without anyone paying attention. By the time leadership noticed, the window to contain it had closed.  Here are five reputation crises he has seen play out repeatedly — and how a PR agency on retainer would have changed the outcome every single time.

1. The Glassdoor spiral nobody was watching. A handful of negative employee reviews start showing up on Glassdoor over a few months. Leadership dismisses them as disgruntled outliers. Then, a job candidate screenshots the worst ones and posts them on LinkedIn with commentary. The post picks up traction. Suddenly, the company has a recruiting problem and a public culture narrative it never chose.  
2. The viral customer complaint that became the brand story. A customer posts a video on social media showing a terrible product experience or a frustrating customer service interaction. The company either ignores it completely or responds with a generic corporate reply that reads like it was written by a legal team. The internet piles on. Within 48 hours, the brand is a punchline.  
3. The founder’s social media post that went sideways. A founder or CEO shares a personal opinion on a polarizing topic — politics, industry drama, a competitor callout. It gets screenshotted and shared out of context. Employees are upset. Customers start tagging the brand account. The founder doubles down instead of pausing.  
4. The product recall was handled like a secret. A company discovers a product defect and quietly pulls the item from shelves or pauses the service without telling customers directly. Someone notices and posts about it. Now the story isn’t the defect — it’s the cover-up. Trust collapses faster than it would have if the company had simply been upfront from the start.  
5. The data breach announcement that came out wrong. A company experiences a data breach or security incident. Instead of communicating quickly and clearly, it waits weeks to notify affected customers. When the announcement finally goes out, the language is vague and legalistic. Customers feel like the company is protecting itself rather than protecting them.

How can a crisis-capable PR agency help?  A retainer relationship with a crisis-capable PR agency typically includes monthly reputation audits, ongoing media monitoring and social listening, executive communication coaching, pre-built response templates and scenario planning sessions. This isn’t a luxury reserved for Fortune 500 companies. It’s increasingly a baseline need for any business with online reviews, a public-facing founder or customers who have a platform to share their experiences.