Here are the business stories making the headlines across Scotland and the UK this morning.
Aberdeenshire construction firm’s record year proves it’s not a ‘one-trick pony’
Aberdeenshire construction firm Chap has had a record-breaking year with turnover hitting £65.8million.
It’s the sixth year of consecutive growth for the Westhill-headquartered firm, which operates across three trading divisions – construction, civils and homes – and employs 180 people.
Managing director Hugh Craigie said the results reflect a conscious strategy to strengthen the business’s core divisions and compete for larger projects.
Chocolate kept in anti-theft boxes as retailers warn it's being stolen to order
Chocolate bars are being locked in plastic boxes in some UK shops as retailers and police forces warn thieves are stealing them to order.
Sainsbury's said it had begun using "boxes on products which are regularly targeted", with £2.60 bars of Cadbury Dairy Milk locked up in one London branch.
Chocolate was more recently being "sold on by criminals and is now being targeted more frequently by prolific offenders," according to the Association of Convenience Stores (ACS).
Moneysupermarket boss: ChatGPT won’t find your next insurance deal
The boss of Moneysupermarket has insisted that artificial intelligence will be a net gain for the business despite investor unease about how it could upend the price comparison industry.
Mony Group, which owns Moneysupermarket and the consumer finance website Moneysavingexpert, was swept up in an AI-driven sell-off this month after an American competitor launched an app allowing users to compare car insurance quotes directly through ChatGPT.
The announcement from Insurify, a Massachusetts-based online insurance marketplace, also sent shares in Future, the media company behind Go Compare, down sharply.
Number of workers on zero-hours contracts hits record high ahead of crackdown
The number of workers on zero-hours contracts has hit a record high, ahead of Labour's planned crackdown on the practice from next year.
A surge in 16-to-24-year-olds and workers not in full-time education helped drive the number of people employed on the contracts to 1.23 million in December.
Analysis by the Work Foundation at Lancaster University, based on Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, revealed that was a 91,000 increase on a year earlier.
Billions wiped off US firms over fears of mass job losses from AI
Billions of dollars were wiped off the stock market value of US-listed software and financial companies on Monday after a Substack post outlining a bear case for artificial intelligence and the American economy went viral.
Citrini Research, an equity and macro research firm in New York, described a potential scenario for the “consequences of abundant intelligence”, in which by 2028, while the “owners of compute” saw their wealth explode as labour costs vanished, real wage growth collapsed as white-collar workers lost jobs to machines and were forced into lower-paying roles.
The article conjured up a future whereby, starting in software, technological disruption would hit ecommerce, payment processors and other sectors. The fallout would spread across the private credit and insurance industries. Meanwhile, unemployment would fuel mortgage defaults in formerly affluent housing markets. The economy would take a hit.