#116: navigating the digital well-being space

Happy Friday and welcome to This Week in CX! We're bringing you our roundup of industry news summarised in an exclusive LinkedIn newsletter. For more detail on any news featured here, check out 'This week in CX' on the Customer Experience Magazine (CXM) website.

This week, we’ve been looking at the latest research on the first digital wellbeing hub, what are businesses up to this holiday season, and how should you communicate with your customers.

Cisco and the OECD: Building the World's First Full Picture of Digital Well-being

Cisco, the worldwide technology leader, with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), today launched the Digital Well-being Hub, the world's first cross-cutting study into the complex relationship between digital technologies and individual well-being. As AI and technology rapidly transform the ways we live, work, and connect, there has never been a comprehensive understanding of the overall impact of digital transformation on our well-being.

Existing research already indicates that 40% of adults in OECD countries lack basic digital skills, potentially hampering their ability to safely navigate digital environments, including understanding digital privacy and the mental health implications of online activities. The situation gets more complex when considering that more than half of the workers in these countries are concerned that AI-related data collection could result in biased decisions against them.

During the next several months, Cisco and the OECD are calling on people globally to contribute their experiences via the Hub. Once enough responses are collected, the OECD will analyze and synthesize people's experiences (the subjective data) with existing OECD research (objective data) to provide a more holistic view of digital well-being in 2025.

• A new crop of search tools that are underpinned by artificial intelligence may pose a risk to the world wide web as we know it. Writing in MIT Technology Review, former Google employee Benjamin Brooks notes how AI search tools like Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, or OpenAI’s SearchGPT can summarise information from various websites and provide concise digests with source links. But these AI search tools could deprive web page publishers of the eyeballs they need to survive.
• A thousand workers at 17 companies in the UK are testing a four-day working week for the next six months. Starting immediately, employees at businesses including Crate Brewery in Hackney, London, and the British Society for Immunology will work four days on full pay, The Times reports. It is the second large-scale trial by the 4 Day Week Campaign, following a test in 2022 in which 61 businesses took part. Data will be collected measuring staff morale, productivity and burnout between now and the end of April.
• The Bank of England has cut interest rates for the second time this year, reducing its benchmark rate from 5% to 4.75% in a widely anticipated move. The rate cut will make borrowing money more affordable but will likely reduce savings returns. The decision, announced at noon by the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), comes amid cooling inflation and slowing wage growth. It marks a significant shift in monetary policy following last year's aggressive rate-hiking cycle.

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