Christoph Schumacher

It creates more unrest and more uncertainty in business.

So it's sort of a vicious circle.

So once it gets into your head, then things start to get tricky.

And I think that understanding made the Reserve Bank decide not to change the OCR.

And we might not see another hike in the next round either.

Maybe the Reserve Bank waits to see what will happen with inflation.

There's a great expectation and the market believes that there will be at least two rounds of sort of 0.25%.

We're looking at the forward market.

Will it materialize?

Well, we'll see.

I think businesses have started to learn that risk assessment has to become now part of the regular things they need to do.

We hit it very good.

We all remember that rock solid economy for so long when inflation was almost non-existent.

Companies simply didn't start thinking about what could happen and how to prepare for it, possibly to diversify, assess risk-haven strategies into place.

And then suddenly it happened and it caught everyone a little bit by surprise.

So maybe companies need to account for changes in the OCR more in their business plans than they have done before.

Maybe they need to do more global risk assessment and have strategies in place on what happens if it does come true.

Businesses just need to be more vigilant in accounting for those risks, planning for those risks, and then confident hopefully will come back that these events are better managed rather than come as a big surprise.

Absolutely, because the popularity of AI and the advances we have made in that space, that's only getting better, will have a huge impact on jobs that are very repetitive, that are very rule-based and very well-structured because these can be replaced and are starting to get replaced.

If I just think of accounting, writing, all these kind of areas where we will see replacement, there will be pressure.