Tehran's store owners take to the streets in anger.
It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service.
I'm Leanna Byrne.
Lululemon is going through major change and before he retires, we look back on Warren Buffett's career.
We're starting in the Iranian capital, Tehran.
That's the sound of shopkeepers demonstrating for a second successive day, shouting Besharif, which means dishonourable in Persian, a slogan they were directing at the government.
Annual inflation is running at over 40 and business owners are angry at the rapid devaluation of the currency, the rial, partly due to pressure of Western sanctions.
Arash Azizi is an Iranian journalist based in the US.
It has lost half of its value in the last year.
But even if you go a little more, it's third of what it was just like 18 months ago.
So people lose their savings.
They're really affected because much of the things you have to buy are linked to the international market in one way or the other.
And many people deal with foreign currency more directly.
Their job is linked to it in one way or the other, or they have to buy commodities in the global market.
So the fact that Iran is doing really bad and the economy is in a terrible condition and people's have really become widespread is somewhat a point of consensus now.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran's parliament speaker, said the issues need dealing with.
People's concerns and protests regarding livelihood problems must be responded to with full responsibility and dialogue, especially with representatives of guilds, and taking necessary measures focused on increasing people's purchasing power and reforming the economic decision-making process must be placed on the agenda of executive officials.
That was Iran's Parliament Speaker, Mohamed Bagher Khaliboff.
Now, Canadian activewear company Lululemon Athletica is back in the spotlight.
Its founder, Chip Wilson, has nominated three candidates for the board, putting the pressure on directors as the company searches for a new chief executive.
Bill Denning, Chief Investment Officer for W1M, is with me now.
Bill, what is Chip Wilson trying to achieve by nominating these board candidates?
Well, although he doesn't have an active role in the company, he's still a big shareholder.
And his view is that the company is under such pressure that he thinks the board needs to change.
The company is looking for a new CEO, but he's arguing that there needs to be a new board in place to select a new CEO.
There are other activist shareholders invested in the company as well.
So it may be that we see that change to the board before they do nominate a CEO.
And very quickly, what has been going on wrong with the company?
Well, they've been losing market share and the share price has recovered a bit from the lows of a few months ago, but it's still more than halved in the last two years.
So that market share loss is the big problem.
All right, Bill, stay right there.
Denmark's National Postal Service is delivering its last letter today, bringing an end to four centuries of letter delivery by the state-owned firm Postnord.
Denmark is one of the most digitized countries in the world, and over the past 25 years, the number of physical letters have dropped by more than 90.
Postnord says it no longer makes sense to handle them and it will instead focus on delivering parcels.
Now the Beatles, the Bible and Warren Buffett.
That's the best-selling artist of all time, the best-selling book of all time and arguably the most successful investor of all time.
But now.
Warren Buffett will retire at the end of this month after 60 years as the CEO of the American investment firm Berkshire Hathaway.
Warren Buffett, sometimes known as the Sage of Omaha, sometimes the Oracle of Omaha.
I stick with what I know.
If somebody owns 50 stocks, can they really like the one they rank as number 50 as well as the one they rank as number one?
Can they know it as well?
I don't think so.
Despite the immense wealth he's accumulated, he actually doesn't seem to enjoy spending money.
Like many of our billionaires,
Like his favorite food is ice cream sundaes.
He drinks cherry Coca-Cola.
Buffett superfan Charlie Newsome, who's divisional director of the wealth manager Rathbones, attended some of Buffett's shareholder conferences and told us some of his best advice.
It's very simple advice and some of it is very detailed advice that if you want to really compound your wealth, you've got to be very patient and buy things which can compound over many, many years.
I think essentially what he tries to say is make a few investments and be patient with them.
Only invest in things you understand, as I've already said.
But just quietly let them compound over many years.
He says that if you're not sure what you should be doing, you should be investing in an exchange traded fund, like an ETF, like the SP 500.
And that will do a very good job and you'll get a very good return over many, many years.
And trying to buy individual stock is much harder.
That was Charlie Newsome from Rathbones.
Bill, did he ever have an influence on you at all?
Well, he's obviously been a sort of hero to anybody in the investment world, I think.
I've not had any personal interaction.
I did see him in a McDonald's about 30 years ago.
But obviously those lessons that your previous commentator was talking about, I think those are still very relevant.
Patience is very important.
Understanding what you own is very important.
He didn't have anything to do with the dot-com bubble.
It took him a long time to invest in some of the leading companies, technology-related companies like Apple.
And I think those lessons of making sure you understand what you're invested in and time is on your side.
Compounding is critical.
Good advice overall, I think, even just for life.
There you go.
Indeed.
Bill Denning, thank you so much for joining us.
Now, artificial intelligence is driving a shake-up in the legal profession worldwide.
It's pitting tech nerds against legal laudites, young against old and disrupting the business model, underpinning it all.
Our correspondent in New Zealand, Alex Funvell, has been talking to those dealing with that disruption.
Hi.
Hello.
You've got a business meeting today.
From his downtown Auckland chambers, barrister Josh McBride is becoming known as an AI pioneer.
All right.
So what I'm going to show you is some workflows that I'm developing using a tool called Notion, which I've been playing with now for most of this year.
And broadly what it does is it sets up a three-dimensional model of what this case is about, with lots of spinning moving parts.
What it then allows me to do on top of that is I can go into CLAWD.
So now I've got it set up where I can use CLAWD to ask, for instance, what have I got on this week?
Tell me what the priority should be.
McBride's pushing the boundaries in an industry that doesn't take kindly to change.
I'm Deborah Manning.
I'm a lawyer and I have specialised in refugee and human rights law, and I'm also a senior lecturer at AUT.
So if we're using AI as a tool to help us summarise complex cases, to draw out, for example, key themes or principles, that's OK.
But my approach to AI is that it's a starting point.
It's not the finishing point.
And everything needs to be checked and double checked.
Holly Nill is an AI and productivity expert who's been inside New Zealand law firms watching them grapple with the issues as they unfold.
We've had plenty of instances, generally stemming from the US, where young lawyers have opted to use precedents provided to them by ChatGPT and have been subsequently fired.
I haven't yet heard of that happening in New Zealand.
Any lawyer I've spoken with here, whether or not they're a partner, they check their precedents.
Fact verification has become mandatory for any lawyer using AI.
Even so, the productivity gains are so promising, firms worry AI could disrupt the business model on which they depend.
If you can do the work in a fraction of the time, you can only bill for a fraction of it too.
I think that the consumption model for law firms is likely to be a thing of the past.
Billing in six-minute increments is going to be harder to justify or potentially more expensive, depending on how you sell your talents.
That was a report by Alex von Well, and there's more on how AI is affecting New Zealand on our next edition of World Business Report.
That's it from us from World Business Express.
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I'm Leanna Byrne.
Thanks for listening.
