Happy Friday! ‘This week in CX’ brings you the latest roundup of industry news.
This week, we’ve been looking at the latest research in the workplace, and it’s already time to look at the Golden Quarter of holiday season shopping.
We’re also discussing new research into travel and hospitality companies posing security risks, and sector lags on maternity pay.
Key news
- Workers in London go to the office the least in comparison to counterparts in five other global cities, according to research. The Centre of Cities thinktank found that London workers spend an average of 2.7 days a week in the office, while those in Paris led the ranking at 3.5 days a week. London saw the second-greatest drop of days in the office since the pandemic, with workers going 1.2 days less a week on average. The ranking looked at Paris, Singapore, New York, Sydney, London and Toronto. More than 25% of workers in London go into the office just one or two days a week and 62% go in at least three days. However, in Paris, 80% of workers go into the office three days a week.
- A number of countries signed a groundbreaking international treaty on artificial intelligence on Thursday, including EU member countries, the UK and the US. The AI Convention, which was adopted in May, aims to ensure that companies and organisations comply with human rights and the rule of law in their use of AI. The first-of-its-kind legal framework is a separate treaty from the EU AI Act, which focuses on the development, deployment and use of AI systems within the EU. Critics have raised concerns about broad principles and exemptions in the AI Convention, with some legal experts charging that the treaty has been “watered down”.
CXM news stories
Here’s the full news stories that CXM have reported on in the past week. Learn all about the latest research in the workplace, and it’s already time to look at the Golden Quarter of holiday season shopping.
Top travel and hospitality companies have security issues
The top 10 travel and hospitality companies have public-facing security and other cloud infrastructure vulnerabilities that expose customers to potential security risks, research has found.
Security vendor Cequence investigated the top 10 sites that people use to book flights, hotels, car rentals, and holiday packages online — including Orbitz, Kayak, Skyscanner, and Travelocity — and found that all of them have serious security flaws that can put site visitors at risk for compromise as well as negatively affect their own businesses and reputations.
The researchers didn’t name the most perilous companies for travellers to use, but did note that their online systems contained 91% of the most serious vulnerabilities that were discovered. Moreover, most of these flaws allow for man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks in which attackers can intercept and manipulate communications with users.
Eight out of the 10 companies had public-facing, non-production or internal application servers in their environments — systems that are typically unmonitored and unmanaged by IT staff. These assets, as many as 300 at one of the companies — allow threat actors system access, according to Cequence.
Private sector lags behind public sector on maternity pay
Three quarters (75%) of companies in the private sector provide enhanced maternity pay, compared with 97% of public sector companies, research by Brightmine revealed.
While the public sector had a higher proportion of women (65%) to men than the private sector (44%), more women overall work in the private sector (10.96 million) than the public sector (4.98 million).
This equated to 2.5 million women in the private sector being entitled to receive only statutory maternity pay from their employer, as opposed to 150,000 in the public sector.