Alphabet spells out people power

The Great Hiring is becoming a bigger theme than the Great Resignation as we emerge from the pandemic, with the leading tech companies bulking up on staff and talent to sustain their dominance.

Alphabet reported last night it took on 6,500 new employees in the fourth quarter, breaking a ten-year record for staff additions and 50 per cent higher than analysts expected. It now has a workforce of 156,500 and last month said it would spend $1bn to purchase a central London office building to give it the capacity to host 10,000 workers in the UK as it encourages a return to desks.

Apple has a new London campus at Battersea Power Station and we report today that Amazon recruited 15,000 more British workers than it expected to last year as demand for home deliveries and digital services boomed during the pandemic. This took overall staff numbers to 70,000 in the UK and the worldwide Amazon workforce is around 10 times the size of Alphabet’s at 1.5mn.

The search company is upping investments in cloud servers and data centres as well as real estate and people. Chief financial officer Ruth Porat told analysts the company expects a “meaningful increase in capex” in 2022.

That will not concern investors when ad sales are booming, with the core search business registering a 36 per cent jump in revenues year-on-year to $43.3bn in the December quarter. The company’s Street-beating numbers, along with the prospect of a 20-for-one stock split, have driven the shares 8 per cent higher today.

As Big Tech gets bigger in not just market cap but people as well, there is renewed pressure on smaller rivals, who are either deprived of talent or have to pay much more to acquire it. Apple and Alphabet have both roared this earnings season, and Meta may show its strength after the market close today. But the likes of Snap and Pinterest could reveal margins under pressure on Thursday.

The Internet of (Five) Things

1. PayPal tumbles on warning
PayPal shares tumbled more than a quarter in early trading on Wednesday after the company warned that inflation, supply chain pressures and weakening ecommerce figures would hit its expected growth rate this year.

2. Germany orders Facebook to provide personal data
Germany’s constitutional court has told Facebook it must divulge the personal data of users who insulted a prominent Green politician, in a judgment that could have far-reaching consequences for social media platforms operating in the country. The politician, Renate Künast, identified 22 insulting comments on Facebook and asked the company to provide her with the authors’ data so she could sue them. Meanwhile, the EU has been outlining a more aggressive approach to setting global standards for cutting-edge and green technologies.

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3. DeepMind takes on programming
Google’s UK-based artificial intelligence unit DeepMind has invented an AI tool that can write computer code at a competitive level to solve open-ended problems that require critical thinking, logic and understanding of language. The system, known as AlphaCode, is a sign of the evolution of AI and would allow the automation of computer programming. Elsewhere, Brooke Masters reports on how AI expertise is helping revive dreams of a Silicon Glen in Edinburgh.

4. Noom’s room for big improvement
Weight-loss adviser Noom has 3,000 health coaches worldwide that are assigned to hundreds of clients at a time and are expected to respond to messages within 48 hours using the in-app service. Some coaches say they are overworked, with targets of up to 100 interactions a day. And that’s not the only problem with the service, reports Cristina Criddle.

5. Cruise opens to public in SanFran
Cruise, General Motors’ driverless car unit, is opening its robotaxi service to the public in San Francisco, a development that prompted another $1.35bn investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund. There are some caveats: it can’t charge and it can only operate in one part of the city from 11pm to 5am.

Tech tools — Aqualisa’s personalised shower

It looks quite like a Nest thermostat and there are similarities in function, but the Quartz Touch (£764) is a smart-shower gadget from Aqualisa, a British manufacturer with past form in creating market-leading innovations (they invented the digital shower in 2001). Jamie Waters explains you can change the water pressure at the push of a button (activate “eco” mode and it will reduce consumption by 33 per cent) and if you momentarily step away from the water, a motion sensor will pause the flow. Via an app, you can set up profiles for each household member so that, whenever someone hops in, it’s preprogrammed with their preferred shower temperature, pressure and duration. In one final trick, when installed above a tub, it can draw your bath to an exact height and temperature.