Business update with Garth Bray

0:00Spot oil prices hit levels not seen in three years over the weekend, 140 bucks a barrel, but what about dated Brent here with more of his Garth Bray host of your business? Good morning. Dated Brent sounds like a really, really bad text that you'd seen somebody if you've had a bad experience, but dated Brent is actually the price of the oil that's on the water at the moment. So you're talking about what's actually at there and available for sale and so that's a real snapshot measure of, I guess, how volatile the market is, how much ferocious bidding there is for anything that seems to be available or bittable. And the kind of thing I suppose that is a country and as individuals were all watching out for us, those shipments move around the world and head our way. But the futures price, if you like, which is the forward contract, I think it's sitting about 108 bucks a barrel, 109 sorry bucks a barrel, it's edging about 11 across the weekend and I largely that's driven by the headlines that we've been seeing playing out. What's also been interesting, Garth, is the West Texas price being high than the Brent, which is the benchmark price and you think why is the American oil, and it's all to

1:00do with the timing of delivery, it's all to do with what you can get your hands on now is worth more than what you can get your hands on in two months. Because this is less and less, this is about a supply shock rather than just a price shock necessarily, this is about availability, which is, you know, the real crunch. Yeah, absolutely. Right, what's happening with IKEA and their robots that they are apparently running in store? This is a great little piece from Tom Rainer over at the NZ Herald today who's been obviously all over the IKEA round, I've got to say, but they have rolled out a solution that basically enables them to get the little itzy bits and pieces that make up parts of orders from the shop floor, they might be small items, lamps, whatever, and a symbol them into this large stack of robot pickers that move that and put that in front of the person that's then actually putting it in order to gather with some big flat pack desk or whatever, and they say it's 20 times faster. The reason they'd be unable to do this is because they built a new store here, so this is technology that they're looking at rolling out across Australasia, but they've put it in New Zealand first because the idea of Plymouth and as they

2:02develop rather than sort of retrofit it into a store and, you know, ride and suddenly, or whatever. So this is like another example of how you're saying automation really speed up the process. It's probably cut employment a little bit, but it definitely sort of increases the pace at which they can deliver orders. Yeah, and I was watching a Dock of the Weekend about in home robots that you can get, like basically like maids that you get for your house, I think the cost about $20,000 is very early tech, but just making the point that, you know, for AI is going to replace some jobs that are maybe like knowledge jobs, but these robots will eventually start replacing more physical work as well. Different people would have different views about that, they would say the human hand is going to take a long time to replicate in a robot. So if you see these guys washing dishes, it's not bad. It's probably better than me. Finally, this one in Crystal Dell has written a WAPA essay from a Weekend Paper. What's this about? This is a, you know, guys, you know, one of the more influential New Zealanders on the planet if you count his time in the White House.

3:02Also former CFO of GM and Microsoft News now on the Board of Anthropic, which is one of those big AI firms behind Claude, and he's basically saying, New Zealand, we need to get on this wave. This AI is like a tsunami that's coming, but it's one that we actually need to work out how we navigate rather than just retreating from. So it's a bit of a call to action, I suppose, and probably some little nuggets out of the chat, a long chat we had with him just this morning, was around, within New Zealand needs an AI, sovereign fund, effectively government, and maybe the super fun, maybe somebody else needs to be tipping some serious money into looking at how we plan for this, how we actually take advantage of it, but also that really you can't wait for big plan. Everybody's got to start working out how to use this stuff because it is going to transform things. And to the point where we've got these massive data centers that are like a country full of Nobel laureates in one room kind of thing, they will rapidly increase the level of scientific discovery and development that we've got to get on that work out how we take part of it. Interesting stuff, Garth. Thank you.

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