Small businesses are planning to hire fewer recent college graduates than they did in 2025, making it likely harder for this cohort to find entry-level jobs. In our recent national survey, we found that small businesses are 30% more likely than larger employers to say they are not hiring recent college graduates in 2026. About 1 in 5 small-business employers said they do not plan to hire college graduates or expect to hire fewer than they did last year. This would be the largest anticipated decrease in small businesses hiring new graduates in more than a decade. Small businesses are generally those with fewer than 500 employees, based on standards from the U.S. Census Bureau and federal labor data. This slowdown is happening nationwide and is affecting early-career hiring for people graduating from both college and graduate programs—and is more pronounced for people with graduate degrees. Nearly 40% of small businesses also said they do not plan to hire, or are cutting back on hiring, recent grads who don’t have a master’s of business administration. Almost 60% said the same for people with other professional degrees. National data shows the same trend. Only 56% of small businesses are hiring or trying to hire anyone at all, according to October 2025 findings by the National Federation of Independent Business, an advocacy organization representing small and independent businesses. Job openings at small employers are at their lowest since 2020, when hiring dropped sharply during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some small businesses may change their hiring plans later in the spring, but our survey reveals that they are approaching hiring cautiously. This gives new graduates or students getting their diplomas in a few months information on what they can expect in the job market for summer and fall 2026. How small businesses tend to hire new employees Our survey, which has been conducted annually at the LeBow Center for Career Readiness at Drexel University, collected data from 647 businesses across the country from August 2025 through November. About two-thirds of them were small businesses, which reflects their distribution and proportion nationally. Small businesses employ nearly half of private-sector workers. They also offer many of the first professional jobs that new graduates get to start their careers. Many small employers in our survey said they want to hire early-career workers. But small-business owners and hiring managers often find that training new graduates takes more time and support than they can give, especially in fields like manufacturing and health care. That’s why many small employers prefer to hire interns they know or cooperative education students who had previously worked for them while they were enrolled as students. Larger employers are also being more careful about hiring, but they usually face fewer challenges. They often have structured onboarding, dedicated supervisors and formal training, so they can better support new employees. This is one reason why small businesses have seen a bigger slowdown in hiring than larger employers. Then there are small businesses in cities that are open to hiring recent graduates but are struggling to find workers. In cities, housing costs are often rising faster than starting salaries, so graduates have to live farther from their jobs. In the suburbs and rural areas, long or unreliable commutes make things worse. Since small businesses usually hire locally and cannot pay higher wages, these challenges make it harder for graduates to accept and keep entry-level jobs. Industry and regional patterns Job prospects for recent college graduates depend on the industry. The 2026 survey shows that employers in health care, construction and finance plan to hire more graduates than other fields. In contrast, manufacturing and arts and entertainment expect to hire fewer new graduates. Most new jobs are in health care and construction, but these fields usually do not hire many recent college graduates. Health care growth is focused on experienced clinical and support roles, while construction jobs are mostly in skilled trades that require prior training or apprenticeships instead of a four-year degree. So, even in growing industries, there are still limited opportunities for people just starting their careers. Even though small businesses are hiring less, there are still opportunities for recent graduates. It’s important to be intentional when preparing for the job market. Getting practical experience matters more than ever. Internships, co-ops, project work and short-term jobs help students show they are ready before getting a full-time position. Employers often say that understanding how the workplace operates is just as important as having technical skills for people starting their careers. We often remind students in our classes at LeBow College of Business that communication and professional skills matter more than they expect. Writing clear emails, being on time, asking thoughtful questions and responding well to feedback can make candidates stand out. Small employers value these skills because they need every team member to contribute right away. Students should also prepare for in-person work. Almost 60% of small employers in our survey want full-time hires to work on-site five days a week. In smaller companies, graduates who can take on different tasks and adjust quickly are more likely to set themselves apart from other candidates. Finally, local networking is still important. Most small employers hire mainly within their region, so building relationships and staying active in the community are key for early-career opportunities. Murugan Anandarajan is a professor of decision sciences and management information Systems at Drexel University; Cuneyt Gozu is an associate clinical professor of organizational behavior at Drexel University, and David Prisco is a director at the Center for Career Readiness at Drexel University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nearly seven tons of ready-to-eat grilled chicken breast products are being recalled over Listeria concerns.  According to a Jan. 16 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) notice, the product was distributed by Suzanna’s Kitchen, a Georgia-based food company known for its prepared meats. The recall targets 10-pound cases containing two 5-pound bags of fully cooked grilled chicken breast fillets with rib meat, which were produced on Oct. 14.  13,720 pounds of ready-to-eat chicken were recalled, per the notice. According to the notice, the lot code 60104 P1382 287 5 J14 is printed on the side of the case and on the package. The products were distributed to operations in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Ohio.  “The problem was discovered when a third-party laboratory sample reported a positive Listeria monocytogenes result in the ready-to-eat fully cooked grilled chicken breast fillets product,” the notice explains.  There have been no confirmed reports of illness due to consumption of these products. Anyone concerned about a potential illness should contact their healthcare provider immediately. Listeria symptoms can range from mild gastrointestinal issues like fever, muscle aches, nausea, and diarrhea to more severe neurological symptoms like headache, stiff neck, confusion, and convulsions if the infection spreads, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC also says that the bacteria can be especially dangerous for pregnant women, newborns, older adults and people with weakened immune systems. Friday’s recall is not the first Suzanna’s Kitchen has initiated recently. In December, the company issued a recall of 62,550 pounds of fully cooked, bone-in breaded chicken products. The product, which was distributed nationwide, was recalled over allergen concerns. While the product was labeled with a product code that classifies it as non-allergen-containing, the product actually contained soy, one of the “big nine” allergens. The recall notice also advises concerned customers to direct any additional questions to Dawn Duncan, Customer Service Director, Suzanna’s Kitchen at dduncan@suzannaskitchen.com.

Struggling to fall asleep is irritating. Struggling to get enough sleep is at least partially debilitating. Research shows: People who sleep five to six hours are almost 20 percent less productive than people who sleep seven to eight hours per night. People who only get six hours of sleep per night have greater difficulty performing any task that requires focus, deep thinking, or problem-solving.  People chronically sleep-deprived (think six hours or less) have a much harder time performing complicated tasks. So, yeah: Performing at your best requires getting enough sleep. But what if you struggle to fall asleep? Here are three techniques sleep science says you should definitely try. The 4-7-8 method  Here’s how it works. First, place the tip of your tongue against your two upper front teeth, and keep it there. (The goal is to inhale and exhale around your tongue.) Then: Breathe in through your nose while you count to four. Hold your breath while you count to seven. Purse your lips and exhale—you should make a “whooshing” sound—while you count to eight. Repeat up to four times. While inhaling and exhaling deeply—and worse yet, holding your breath in between—sounds like it will make you less sleepy, that pattern activates your parasympathetic nervous system and helps switch your body to rest mode. That’s especially important if you feel stressed, since anxiety shifts your sympathetic nervous system (think fight or flight) into overdrive. Kick-starting your parasympathetic nervous system helps counteract that effect. And gives you something else to think about in the process. Keep in mind practice is the key. The 4-7-8 method may not help you fall asleep faster the first few times. But the more you use it, the more you’ll train yourself to relax. And even if you don’t fall asleep quicker, you will feel a little less stressed and anxious. A 2022 study published in Physiological Reports found that 4-7-8 breathing reduced heart rate and blood pressure for several minutes. You’ll feel calmer, more grounded, and better able to relax and let go. So, as with using the physiological sigh, you can also use the 4-7-8 method to regain focus when you feel anxious. The military method The military method is a two-minute routine created by the Navy Pre-Flight School to help pilots fall asleep. Within six weeks, 96 percent of the pilots could fall asleep within two minutes or less, even if they were sitting in a chair, listening to a recording of machine-gun fire, and had just drunk coffee. Here’s how it works: Relax your entire face. Close your eyes. Breathe slowly and deeply. Then slowly relax all of your face muscles. (If it helps, start with your forehead muscles and work your way down.) Relax your jaw, your cheeks, your mouth, your tongue, everything. Including your eyes; let them go. Drop your shoulders and hands. Let go of any tension. Relax your neck, your traps; feel yourself sinking into the chair or bed. Then start at the top of your right arm, and slowly relax your biceps, forearms, and hands. Repeat on the other side. And don’t forget to keep breathing slowly and deeply. Exhale and relax your chest. With your shoulders and arms relaxed, that should be easy. Relax your legs. Start with your right thigh; let it sink into the chair or bed. Then do the same with your calf, ankle, and foot. Repeat the process with your left leg. Now clear your mind. Granted, it’s hard to not think about anything. (I end up thinking about not thinking about anything.) If that’s you, try holding an image in your mind. Choose something relaxing. Picture yourself lying comfortably in darkness. But if that doesn’t work— Try repeating the words “Don’t think” for 10 seconds. If nothing else, that should help distract you from thinking about whatever it is that might otherwise keep you awake. Like the 4-7-8 method, the military method may take practice. Remember, it took pilots up to six weeks to regularly fall asleep within two minutes. But once you’ve gained the skill . . . The 10-3-2-1 method This routine takes a little longer to execute; think of it as daylong sleep prep. As Jess Andrade describes:  10: Stop drinking caffeine 10 hours before you plan to go to sleep to clear the stimulatory effect from your bloodstream. 3: Eat your last big meal (or last drink of alcohol) three hours prior to reduce reflux and ensure alcohol doesn’t impair your natural sleep cycle. 2: Create a to-do list for the next day two hours prior; as Getting Things Done author David Allen says, “Your head is for having ideas, not holding ideas. Without exception, you will feel better if you get stuff out of your head.” 1: Stop using screens one hour before you go to sleep, both to reduce exposure to blue light and to disengage. Granted, this technique takes more time and effort. Then again, combining the 10-3-2-1 method with the military or 4-7-8 method can only increase your odds of falling asleep quickly. Which increases the odds you’ll get sleep better and hopefully longer tonight. And be able to perform at your best tomorrow.

Chances are good that many investors are happy today is a holiday, and thus the stock markets are closed. That’s because over the weekend, President Donald Trump announced the threat of new tariffs levied against America’s most prominent European allies.  But this time, Trump’s tariff threats aren’t driven by trade imbalances. Instead, they center around the president’s desire to acquire ownership of Greenland. Here’s what you need to know, including how assets that are trading today—gold and cryptocurrency—are reacting. What’s happened? On Saturday, Trump took to social media to announce that he would impose additional tariffs on eight European nations that have spoken out against his plan to acquire Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark.   The president announced that, beginning on February 1st, goods from those nations will be charged an additional 10% tariff when they enter the United States. The nations Trump threatened to levy the additional tariffs against include: Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. But Trump didn’t stop there. He also announced that those additional 10% tariffs would rise to 25% on June 1 and “will be due and payable until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.” Currently, there is already a 10% tariff on goods from the United Kingdom and a 15% tariff on goods from the other countries Trump cited. The additional Greenland tariffs would raise the levies on goods from those countries to at least 25% next month and at least 40% in June. Trump’s stated reason for wanting Greenland to become part of the United States is its strategic national security importance—the landmass lies directly between North America and Russia. However, Greenland is also home to vast mineral deposits and other natural resources with significant market value. Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland is deeply unpopular with the American public, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found this month, with just 17% of respondents approving of the goal. A 2025 Verian poll of Greenlanders found that an overwhelming 85% of respondents said they did not want their homeland to become part of the United States. How has Europe responded? European leaders are in crisis mode. Despite leaders on the continent telling President Trump that Greenland is not for sale, Trump’s resolve on acquiring the Danish territory has only strengthened. On Sunday, the European Council (EC) of the European Union issued a definitive statement on the matter. “Territorial integrity and sovereignty are fundamental principles of international law. They are essential for Europe and for the international community as a whole,” European Council president António Luís Santos da Costa and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen wrote. They added, “The EU stands in full solidarity with Denmark and the people of Greenland. Dialogue remains essential, and we are committed to building on the process begun already last week between the Kingdom of Denmark and the US. Tariffs would undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral. Europe will remain united, coordinated, and committed to upholding its sovereignty.” How had gold reacted? Geopolitical uncertainties tend to send investors fleeing from more volatile assets, such as stocks, to safer ones, such as gold. And Trump’s weekend escalation over Greenland is following this trend. While stock markets are closed today in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, assets such as gold and other precious metals are being traded. Gold, particularly, is seen as a safe-haven asset that investors flee to in times of uncertainty.  As of the time of this writing, gold is currently at an all-time high of $4,671.10 per ounce. Silver is also at an all-time high of $93.20 per ounce. How have Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies reacted? Precious metals aren’t the only assets being traded today. Unlike the stock markets, which are closed on federal holidays, cryptocurrencies trade 24/7. And unlike gold, cryptocurrencies are generally not seen as safe-haven assets. Cryptocurrencies are historically volatile in the best of times. When geopolitical uncertainties hit, crypto tends to sell off as investors take profits and move into safe-haven assets. As of this writing, most major cryptocurrencies are retreating amid the rising geopolitical and economic uncertainty between America and its European allies. Crypto king Bitcoin is currently down more than 2% to $93,170 per coin. Ethereum is down nearly 3%, XRP is down nearly 4%, and Solana is down nearly 6%. Memecoin Doge is down nearly 7%. Where do things go from here? Right now, no one can say where Trump’s Greenland escalations go from here. Most of the political establishment in America and the overwhelming majority of the international community are deeply concerned about the president’s insistence on acquiring the landmass. Numerous observers, including European leaders, have said that Trump’s threats could undermine the very foundation of NATO, of which the U.S., Greenland, and European countries are part. Right now, European leaders are debating how to respond to Trump’s threats if the president does not back down. If diplomatic efforts fail, the next most likely step would be for Europe to threaten economic countermeasures against America, including tariffs of its own on American goods, and perhaps even invoking what is colloquially called the “big bazooka”—officially known as the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI). As CNBC noted, the ACI is a trade policy tool in the EU’s arsenal designed to counter coercion by economically and militarily powerful countries. The ACI is a deterrent instrument that, if enacted, could restrict not just trade with a country, but also place a cessation on foreign investment and intellectual property rights. The ACI was created in 2023, but it has never been enacted before. All eyes will be on Trump when he is in Europe on Wednesday, where he will address world and business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Each year on the holiday that bears his name, Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered for his immense contributions to the struggle for racial equality. What is less often remembered but equally important is that King saw the fight for racial equality as deeply intertwined with economic justice. To address inequality—and out of growing concern for how automation might displace workers—King became an early advocate for universal basic income. Under universal basic income, the government provides direct cash payments to all citizens to help them afford life’s expenses. In recent years, more than a dozen U.S. cities have run universal basic income programs, often smaller or pilot programs that have offered guaranteed basic incomes to select groups of needy residents. As political scientists, we have followed these experiments closely. One of us recently co-authored a study which found that universal basic income is generally popular. In two out of three surveys analyzed, majorities of white Americans supported a universal basic income proposal. Support is particularly high among those with low incomes. King’s intuition was that white people with lower incomes would support this type of policy because they could also benefit from it. In 1967, King argued, “It seems to me that the Civil Rights Movement must now begin to organize for the guaranteed annual income . . . which I believe will go a long, long way toward dealing with the Negro’s economic problem and the economic problem with many other poor people confronting our nation.” But there is one notable group that does not support universal basic income: those with higher levels of racial resentment. Racial resentment is a scale that social scientists have used to describe and measure anti-Black prejudice since the 1980s. Notably, in our research, whites with higher levels of racial resentment and higher incomes are especially inclined to oppose universal basic income. As King well knew, this segment of Americans can create powerful opposition. Economic self-interest can trump resentment At the same time, the results of the study also suggest that coalition building is possible, even among the racially resentful. Economic status matters. Racially resentful whites with lower incomes tend to be supportive of universal basic income. In short, self-interest seems to trump racial resentment. This is consistent with King’s idea of how an economic coalition could be built and pave the way toward racial progress. Income is not the only thing that shapes attitudes, however. Some of the strongest supporters of universal basic income are those who have higher incomes but low levels of racial resentment. This suggests an opportunity to build coalitions across economic lines, something King believed was necessary. “The rich must not ignore the poor,” he argued in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, “because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny.” Our data shows that this is possible. This approach to coalition building is also suggested by our earlier research. Using American National Election Studies surveys from 2004-2016, we found that for white Americans, racial resentment predicted lower support for social welfare policies. But we also found that economic position mattered, too. Economic need can unite white Americans in support of more generous welfare policies, including among some who are racially prejudiced. At a minimum, this suggests that racial resentment does not necessarily prevent white Americans from supporting policies that would also benefit Black Americans. Building lasting coalitions During his career as an activist in the 1950s and 1960s, King struggled with building long-term, multiracial coalitions. He understood that many forms of racial prejudice could undermine his work. He therefore sought strategies that could forge alliances across lines of difference. He helped build coalitions of poor and working-class Americans, including those who are white. He was not so naive as to think that shared economic progress would eliminate racial prejudice, but he saw it as a place to start. Currently, the nation faces an affordability crisis, and artificial intelligence poses new threats to jobs. These factors have increased calls for universal basic income. Racial prejudice continues to fuel opposition to universal basic income, as well as other forms of social welfare. But our research suggests that this is not insurmountable. As King knew, progress toward economic equality is not inevitable. But, as his legacy reminds us, progress does remain possible through organizing around shared interests. Tarah Williams is an assistant professor of political science at Allegheny College and Andrew Bloeser is an associate professor of political science; Director, Center for Political Participation at Allegheny College. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Being a field dependent on big developer clients and even bigger sums of money, rarely do architects get to pick the projects they work on. Would they if they could? Absolutely. Fast Company asked architects and designers from some of the top firms working around the world to think about the kinds of projects they wish they could do, clients, budgets, and possibly reality notwithstanding. From the abstract to one very specific (and notorious) train station, seven architects shared building projects they’d love to tackle in 2026. Here’s the question we put to a panel of designers and leaders in architecture: What’s your dream project in 2026? An urban district reimagined The dream project for me isn’t a skyline object or spectacle, it’s a long-life system—a project whose structure is reused, materials are upgraded and recycled rather than replaced, and performance improves over time. Where sustainable strategies aren’t hidden in basements, or rooftops, but become part of the architectural experience. A dream project would be an urban district reimagined, edited with a scalpel (rather than a sledgehammer) with its declining building stock given a new life through subtle upgrades, modest interventions, and attention to craft and building performance. —Trent Tesch, Principal, KPF Solutions to current crises My dream project would be to design beyond the scale of a single building—at the district scale—to define a new way of living. We have the ability to overcome the segmentation we have created in the built environment and move toward convergent places where people can not only live, work, and play in the same space, but also innovate, learn, and care for ourselves and each other. Embedded in this approach are solutions to current crises like housing, access to food and care, and more: to think about community-building and what people need around them to ensure a safe, vibrant, and supported life. —David Polzin, executive director of design, CannonDesign An example of where design needs to go My dream project should break ground right near the end of the year — the New York Climate Exchange on Governors Island. It will be arguably the most sustainable project ever undertaken in the city and an example of where design needs to go in the coming decade. —Colin Koop, partner, SOM A tangible vision of a ‘heaven on earth’ A dream project with a design ethos grounded in simplicity, sustainability, and the clear expression of engineering functions, this project would function as a living laboratory at a district-to-regional, maybe even country scale, exemplifying human-centered, climate-responsive urbanism. It would demonstrate how architecture can create healthier built environments, advance decarbonization, promote human well-being, foster thriving ecosystems, and deliver scalable models for resilient cities worldwide—a tangible vision of a “heaven on earth” in a built environment. —Luke Leung, sustainable engineering studio leader, SOM Breaking down silos Our firm’s portfolio has always been shaped by the idea of architecture as social and civic infrastructure, rather than isolated objects. Our dream project in 2026 is one that will allow us to further break down overly prescriptive disciplinary and programmatic silos, to the benefit of those who use the spaces we create. This could take the form of a new kind of mixed-use district, a daycare-driven residential building, woodland cabins, or reinvented urban infrastructure, but it would be guided, as all our work is, by the idea of long-term stewardship and deep collaboration with community and our peers in architecture, engineering, and beyond. We are most interested in projects where design builds capacity and trust, and where success is measured not only by what gets built, but by what it enables over time. —Claire Weisz, founding principal, WXY architecture + urban design Destinations for learning and gathering There is growing need for cultural and community catalysts that bring people together, especially in communities that are lacking destinations for learning and gathering. Design can support a sense of belonging and grounding to the physicality of architecture that is important in this day of instant gratification. —Nick Leahy, co-CEO and executive director, Perkins Eastman A nightmare-turned-dream? Pennsylvania Station! —Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder, PAU

Most organizations still hire for culture fit—even those that loudly champion diversity and inclusion. The phrase sounds benign, even wise: who wouldn’t want colleagues who “fit in”? But behind this feel-good notion lies one of the biggest obstacles to innovation and progress in modern workplaces. Culture fit has become a euphemism for cultural cloning: selecting people who already look, think, and behave like the incumbents. It’s a polite way of saying, we want people like us, because there’s nothing more comforting than working—and hanging out—with people who are just like you! The irony, of course, is that such homogeneity kills the very things organizations claim to want: creativity, adaptability, and innovation. As Adam Grant notes, originality thrives in contexts that tolerate dissent and deviance, not conformity. Yet the more organizations glorify “fit,” the more they drift toward cultish sameness. The difference between a culture and a cult, after all, is just one letter—and often one lawsuit. This tendency isn’t new. Social psychology has long shown that we’re drawn to those who resemble us; similarity reduces friction and uncertainty. But comfort is the enemy of progress. Uniformity might make life easier for recruiters and managers, but it makes systems fragile. Nature offers a cautionary tale: the Irish potato famine. For decades, Ireland depended almost entirely on a single potato variety, the Lumper. When a blight struck in 1845, the lack of genetic diversity turned one crop failure into a national catastrophe. Organizations that over-rely on a single “type” of employee risk the same fate—a cultural monocrop vulnerable to shocks, blind spots, and collective stupidity. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. ","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/drtomas.com\/intro\/","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91424798,"imageMobileId":91424800,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} The cost of fitting in too well Empirical research supports this. Studies show that while culture fit predicts short-term satisfaction and commitment, it’s often negatively related to long-term innovation and change readiness. A large meta-analysis by Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman, and Johnson found that person–organization fit strongly predicts employees’ attitudes but not their creativity or performance in changing environments. Similarly, Michele Gelfand’s cross-national study on cultural “tightness” found that organizations and societies that enforce conformity underperform in dynamic contexts, while “looser” cultures—those that tolerate rule-bending and deviance, are more innovative and adaptive. There are also considerable costs for businesses that hire for culture-fit: when everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks at all! In line, cultural homogeneity reduces innovation, creativity, and curiosity, as well as increasing conformity and resisting change. By contrast, organizations that value constructive misfit—hiring people who stretch or challenge the dominant mold—show higher rates of creativity and problem-solving. Google’s famous Project Aristotle study on team effectiveness found that the best-performing groups weren’t the most harmonious or homogenous, but those with psychological safety—teams where people felt free to disagree without social punishment. The best cultures, in other words, don’t eliminate tension; they use it productively. Unfortunately, many companies still confuse alignment with excellence. “Fit” becomes the criterion for hiring and promotion, even as executives pay lip service to diversity. As illustrated in Don’t Be Yourself: Why Authenticity is Overrated and What to Do Instead, in practice, “bring your whole self to work” often means “bring the parts of yourself that look and sound like the rest of us.” The result is a well-intentioned echo chamber. Everybody belongs—and nobody thinks. The case for the moderate misfit So, what happens if you don’t quite fit in? If you’re the person who feels slightly out of sync with the corporate rhythm—too analytical for the sales culture, too candid for the political one, too global for the parochial one? At first, it’s uncomfortable. You’ll have to work to fit in, even as the company insists you shouldn’t have to. “Inclusion” sounds effortless, but it usually requires emotional labor—the cognitive gymnastics of decoding unspoken norms, managing impressions, and adapting without losing yourself. Yet being a moderate misfit—someone who respects the system but doesn’t worship it—comes with real advantages. You bring a different perspective. You see what insiders can’t because you aren’t fully hypnotized by the culture. Research on task conflict shows that moderate levels of disagreement improve decision quality and innovation, as long as they’re respectful. The worst decisions in history (from Enron to the Challenger disaster) share one trait: too much agreement. You’re more likely to become a change agent. Because you don’t fully identify with the status quo, you’re less invested in preserving it. Decades of research on minority influence show that consistent dissenters (even when initially unpopular) eventually shift group norms.  You’ll stay an independent thinker. Irving Janis’s classic work on groupthink revealed that cohesive groups under pressure tend to suppress dissent, leading to catastrophic decisions. Misfits disrupt that comfort. They’re less likely to self-censor or outsource their thinking to the hive mind. Even when they play along, they keep a mental escape hatch open—a capacity for self-reflection that prevents total ideological capture. And you might even grow. Working alongside people who aren’t like you forces you to reconsider your assumptions. A widely cited meta-analysis shows that exposure to difference reduces prejudice and increases cognitive complexity. Growth happens when you’re challenged; when you collaborate, debate, and adapt outside your comfort zone. Leadership, progress, and the art of misfitting Ultimately, leadership is not about comfort but progress. As Gianpiero Petriglieri reminds us, leadership is always an argument with tradition, a dialogue between what is and what could be. Fitting in completely, therefore, is not a strength but a symptom of stagnation. When everyone agrees, nobody leads; they merely administer. The playwright George Bernard Shaw put it even more bluntly: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Moderate misfits are those “unreasonable” people, balanced enough to survive within the system but different enough to question it. They’re the ones who stretch cultures, challenge orthodoxies, and prevent organizations from fossilizing. Yes, it can be exhausting to swim against the current. It takes empathy, restraint, and strategic impression management. But the payoff is immense: you remain curious, independent, and relevant in a world that worships conformity. To be sure, many don’t survive so pragmatically it is worth wondering whether you want to be part of an organization or system that regards and treats you as an outlier or part of the outgroup—it requires a great deal of willpower and resilience . . . the struggle is real!. So, here’s to the misfits, the ones who don’t quite belong, who ask inconvenient questions, and who resist the seductive comfort of sameness. They may never win the “culture fit” award, but they’re the reason culture evolves at all . . . if we are brave to hire them in the first place! {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. ","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/drtomas.com\/intro\/","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91424798,"imageMobileId":91424800,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}

Artificial intelligence capabilities have rapidly shifted from nice-to-have extras to essential requirements across industries and job levels. Employers now prioritize candidates who can harness AI tools to multiply productivity, accelerate innovation, and solve complex problems with lean resources. In this article, experts reveal how mastering AI skills can unlock career opportunities, faster promotions, and competitive advantages in today’s job market. Own One System and Share Insights For me, the secret to standing out in the age of AI was pretty simple: if your company is starting to use AI, use it. Don’t wait for someone to tell you where to start. Pick one tool, go deep, and let curiosity lead you. When I was a learning designer at Zapier, I decided to focus on one thing, a new tool that had just rolled out: AI Agents by Zapier. I pushed everything nonessential to the side and gave myself two weeks to learn it inside and out. Along the way, I realized that to make my Agents even better, I needed to understand other tools too: AI fields in Tables, Chatbots, and AI steps in automation workflows. That one deep dive became a crash course in the future of work. I started filming myself as I learned, sharing the process and mistakes with others. Soon, teammates were reaching out for help. Product teams asked me to test new features and give feedback. And before I knew it, I’d become the go-to AI person — without a technical background. Eighteen months later, I was promoted to senior AI automation engineer. If you want to stand out and make yourself indispensable, start there: Go deep on something. Master one AI tool instead of dabbling in many. Share what you learn. Help your teammates, post your insights, and be generous with your knowledge. Be strategic. Know when AI is the right solution (and, importantly, when it’s not). Being proactive about AI isn’t just about saving time. It’s about showing that you can drive change, not wait for it. That’s what makes you valuable, no matter how much technology evolves. Emily Mabie, AI Automation Engineer, Zapier Start Companies With Generative Help Generative AI is not just a differentiator; it’s a career accelerator that can expand career opportunities far beyond traditional paths. AI literacy empowers individuals to create entirely new opportunities that would previously have been inaccessible to them without significant resources or institutional backing. One powerful example is how generative AI tools, even free ones like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, can enable someone to launch a company instead of simply searching for yet another corporate role. With AI, an aspiring entrepreneur with a business idea is empowered to research and draft a well-thought-out business plan in hours, create and iterate on a brand identity without hiring a creative agency, develop a full-fledged marketing plan, and even simulate customer feedback by asking AI to role-play as an ideal customer persona to review, critique, and evaluate offerings through their lens. This ability to work with AI on tasks that once required significant investment and teams of consultants, designers, and executive focus groups fundamentally changes the opportunities for career advancement. It lowers the barrier to entry for entrepreneurship, allowing individuals to test ideas, refine messaging, and build expertise at a fraction of the cost and time it would take without AI. It’s like having an entire team of executives, business planners, marketers, and writers at your fingertips. When I began building my consultancy, I used free generative AI tools to do just that. One of the biggest advantages my AI skills created was being able to use AI to role-play as my ideal customer persona, asking it to critique my offerings, evaluate my positioning, and highlight my blind spots. That iterative feedback loop gave me insights into how the C-suite would look at my services so I could better address their needs and concerns, and “speak” their language so it would be easier for me to build trust and, ultimately, close the deal. I believe the real power of AI skills is not that it just makes you better at your current job, but that it opens doors to entirely new ones. It helps individuals transform from simply being a “job applicant” to being an “opportunity creator.” That’s how AI is truly going to reshape the future of work. Because AI skills don’t just prepare you for the future — they give you the agency to create it for yourself. Kristin Ginn, Founder, trnsfrmAItn Scale Impact With Lean Force Multipliers AI skills are no longer optional—they are becoming fundamental for every job seeker, regardless of profession. The reason is simple: AI is transforming how work gets done in three very clear stages—first by automating routine tasks, then by enhancing our abilities, and finally by transforming what individuals and small teams can achieve. Most people stop at the first stage, using AI to save time on emails, reports, or documentation. But the real opportunity lies in the next two stages. When you use AI to enhance your thinking, creativity, and output, you suddenly operate at a much higher level. And when you reach the transformation stage, AI becomes a force multiplier—enabling you to do work that previously required large teams and significant resources. I’ve experienced this personally while building my company. Thanks to AI, we have been able to build and scale one of the best all-in-one AI platforms for teachers and students with a two-member team. Everything from product management to engineering to content, design, marketing, and operations has been streamlined because AI handles a significant portion of the heavy lifting. What would traditionally require 20–25 people can now be executed by a lean, agile team that is able to move quickly and deliver high-quality output across every area. This is the true power of AI—not just automating tasks but transforming the very structure of how teams and companies operate. This is why AI proficiency is becoming a defining skill for today’s workforce. People who know how to use AI don’t just work faster—they think better, create better, and adapt better. They become more strategic, more creative, and more capable. In every field—teaching, engineering, design, marketing, HR, sales — the professionals who embrace AI will accelerate, and those who don’t will find it increasingly difficult to stay competitive. The reality is that AI is not here to replace human talent; it is here to elevate it. It levels the playing field, giving individuals access to capabilities that once required entire departments. For job seekers, students, and professionals, mastering AI tools is the most direct way to stand out in a crowded job market and open doors to opportunities that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. And if a two-member team can build and scale a platform like ours using AI, imagine what individuals can do in their own careers with the same mindset. That’s the future of work. Binit Agarwalla, Founder, TeachBetter.ai Pair Technology With Irreplaceable Human Strengths AI skills are essential because they sit at the heart of how work gets done now. But here’s what matters more: AI can’t replace the human skills that truly differentiate us—listening, building relationships, making judgment calls.  When people master AI tools, they gain time and headspace to focus on what makes them irreplaceable. You can work faster, produce better quality output, and tackle projects that once felt impossible. Combined with your human abilities—empathy, curiosity, strategic thinking—you become far more valuable to any organization. When I built my company, AI became my operational backbone. While I focused on listening to clients and shaping their transformation stories, AI helped me analyze feedback, test messaging, and turn rough ideas into polished content. This meant I could build a coaching practice at startup speed while staying focused on the deeper human work—understanding what people really need. AI gave me velocity. But the human insight—the listening, the connection, the meaning-making—that’s what made the work valuable. That combination opened doors to bigger stages and leadership conversations I wouldn’t have reached as quickly otherwise. The future belongs to people who can combine AI efficiency with irreplaceable human skills. Tünde Lukacs, Founder Executive Coach Keynote Speaker, The Change Republic Launch Software Through Prompt Mastery AI tools are erasing technical gatekeeping—opening up high-value, technical jobs and paths to starting companies to nontraditional candidates. There used to be a four-year coding college prerequisite to building production-quality software, gluing stuff together, or making things happen. The most striking effect of AI I’ve seen in the last year is people bypassing it. One of the most impressive career leaps I’ve encountered was of a former VC CFO whom I talked to recently. He used Replit’s AI pair programmer to build and launch his own SaaS app in under 3 months. He had zero software experience. He just sat down with Excel and workflows he knew from his finance job and threw them right into AI co-pilot to make an app. This was not possible two years ago. He couldn’t become a “real” engineer, and this app that he’s making is not an Excel-based macro. He literally taught himself how to make software with the AI acting as his partner in the driving seat. Prompt engineering—talking in English to make AI do complex things—is now as valuable a skill as coding was 10 years ago. We see that the primary accelerant is not coding per se, but prompt engineering. Many of the most effective users of our service are not coders. They have to figure out how to give the AI goals and constraints and hammer out a detailed process, all in English. They have to turn their thoughts into instructions that involve their home context. This skill is getting to be worth more than coding. Now people can go to sleep thinking up videos they want to show, and then by morning have those videos done, without having to learn VFX or hire a studio. That’s a sea change. That’s why I tell job seekers to put “prompt engineering” on their resumes. Runbo Li, Cofounder & CEO, Magic Hour Drive Uptake and Unlock Bigger Roles AI skills are becoming essential because, obviously, they save time and effort. And it’s not about just handing everything over to a tool and hoping for the best—instead, it’s about knowing what to ask, how to review the output, and when to trust your own experience over the suggestion. In essence, AI allows everyone to become a kind of manager rather than someone who just executes tasks. Employers know this, which is why they’re increasingly looking for people who can get better results with AI. And, if you’re the person who consistently does more without working more, you naturally become the one invited into bigger projects, strategy conversations, and cross-functional work. That’s where bigger opportunities tend to open up. A good example is our Sr. Director of Communications & Creative, who recently moved into an AI Operations Manager role. He stayed current on new tools, tested them, and openly promoted what worked across the company. In under one year, he switched from Replit to Cursor, which is typically seen as a tool for more tech-savvy users. Eventually, he also pushed for a company-wide effort to upskill by launching “AI Days”—a monthly initiative where everyone focuses only on AI projects for the day. We use that time to build custom tools with platforms like v0.dev, create custom GPTs, or test new third-party AI solutions to boost productivity. Dovilė Gelčinskaitė, Senior Talent Manager, Omnisend Adopt Smart Tools to Accelerate Advancement The requirement for AI skills is increasing rapidly, as virtually every occupation includes aspects of the artificial intelligence sector. The capacity for tools to obtain greater levels of intelligence, and the expectation that workers will be able to work side by side with technology, has increased dramatically. Those who possess the ability to effectively use AI will have the potential to work faster and achieve better outcomes. This skill has evolved to be a primary skill as opposed to an additional skill. Having an understanding of AI also opens up new opportunity avenues. You can transition to a different occupation, automate your mundane tasks, and illustrate your adaptive capabilities. This indicates that you are prepared for the future of work, not the present. A brief example from my experience. I hired a junior level analyst who had no prior experience in technical fields, but had extensive knowledge and understanding of artificial intelligence tools. This junior level analyst utilized AI tools for tasks such as data organization, analysis, and report creation. Within a few months of being with us, she became the premier person within the organization to utilize AI workflows and gained considerable recognition, leading to a promotion to a higher level role, as part of the product development team, much sooner than anticipated. The AI tools that this analyst used did not supplant her work, but rather enhanced what she was doing. Therefore, for everyone today, this is the opportunity available to them. Mr Edward Tian, Founder/CEO, GPTZero Adapt Swiftly and Clarify Decisions AI skills have become essential because the pace and complexity of work have outgrown what anyone can hold in their head. The job seekers who thrive are the ones who know how to pair their human judgment with tools that help them think, create, and decide more effectively. It’s no longer about what or how much we know. It’s what we do with this information and how we apply it in innovative and influential ways. AI isn’t the destination. It’s a method of reaching it. It is the way we clear mental clutter and speed up the work that bogs us down. When we define AI as a resource and a tool rather than an identity, the whole conversation shifts, allowing us to move faster, solve problems with greater precision, and spend more time on work that advances us personally and professionally. I am an executive coach and leadership development facilitator. Two recent clients proved how much AI can sharpen career clarity. One used AI to compare three possible career paths against his 20 years of experience, which helped him choose the strongest direction and craft a short bio for informational interviews. Another uploaded her 360 feedback and used AI to distill pages of comments into a clear summary for her managers, outlining the skills she wanted to strengthen and the support she needed to evolve. But let’s be real. There’s no “mastering” AI. How can we when this tool is evolving by the hour? The real skill is learning to adapt to AI, get comfortable with it, and shape it to our own work. AI is the how behind better thinking, better decisions, and, fortunately for job seekers, better storytelling about our value. When job seekers show they can work with a rapidly changing tool set, they signal agility, curiosity, and the kind of problem-solving that sets them apart in an AI-shaped workplace that’s changing in real time. Tina Robinson, Founder and CEO, WorkJoy Gain Capacity and Elevate Quality AI skills will transform an individual’s ability to be able to increase efficiency creating capacity to either do more or to utilize excess capacity to improve quality of their deliverables. The ability to do more and improve their effectiveness will allow those earlier in their career to develop quicker and accelerate through the organizational stack sooner. For more senior folks, in addition to the personal benefits of the above-mentioned efficiency and effectiveness principles, the knowledge and exposure of AI skills will allow them to build and transform their organizations to have higher levels of throughput, distinctive competitive muscle, and an ability to serve existing as well as gain new customer segments.  For me, this was transformative when I was launching my podcast in Q2 of 2024. Having never done it before, I was initially relying primarily on manual editorial work using video and sound editing tools, manually transcribing interviews, and going through numerous keyword iterations to post a single video. This effort was taking over 40 hours for a single episode. In the last five quarters while I have had to invest my time in learning and keeping up with the pace of rapidly developing AI-enabled tools, my efforts on each episode are now down to less than four hours. From transcription, to video and sound editing, to intelligent copywriting, posting, and engagement, the use of AI-enabled tools has given me hours of capacity back and the product quality is far superior than what I was able to previously achieve with manual work. Rohit Bassi, Founder & CEO, People Quotient (PQ) Prove Relevance to Overcome Bias I’ve reviewed hundreds of job postings in the past year, and the common theme is showing some understanding of how AI can be used to become more efficient. You don’t necessarily need to be an AI expert, but you do need to show that you are upskilling and aware of how you can use AI to do your job better. This is important for job seekers of all ages, but especially for experienced job seekers who can often face ageism and/or assumptions that they aren’t staying on-trend with current technology. However, demonstrating AI skills can definitely mitigate ageism risk. I recently worked with an IT analyst client in his late 60s—we led off his résumé/LinkedIn with his generative AI experience and he landed his dream job within months in spite of the challenging market. The key is being clear that you know how to leverage this technology to improve the company’s bottom line. Colleen Paulson, Executive Career Consultant, Ageless Careers Harness New Leaps to Build Empires Many fear AI will replace white-collar jobs. I argue that AI will instead re-skill them, favoring those who master it as a strategic tool. Our primal “fight or flight” response makes us see AI as a foe, but every technological leap in human history has been driven by those who dared to harness a powerful new force. Consider the transition just a century ago: horses were the dominant mode of transportation. Those who daringly mastered the automobile and aviation, often through self-teaching, built the next generation of empires. Today, early adopters of AI are positioned to dominate the next half-century. New enterprises will be founded, and a new cohort of technology leaders will emerge. This is simply the natural progression of every technological revolution, from controlling fire to inventing the wheel. In my own case, I started small, using ChatGPT and Gemini to research and draft content for a liquor store blog I was operating. Initially, my prompt engineering was clumsy. However, as I improved, the tools made producing content (listicles, cocktail trends, spirits history) significantly more efficient. This AI-fueled content strategy provided strong SEO and value, helping the brand scale from a single store to three, eventually leading to my successful exit with a 3X ROI. I am now leveraging these newly acquired skills to capture Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) business—specifically, using AI to rapidly generate, refine, and optimize marketing content for discovery across platforms. This has enabled me to scale my marketing agency, which had not actively onboarded new clients in three years. What began as an efficient way to pump out content for a single store has transformed into a core, highly profitable service offering. At 52, I can attest that this proficiency is not age-limited; mastering AI adds tangible, immediate value to clients and unlocks significant career growth. Mr. Steven Paul Matsumoto, Founder, Chief Strategist, Stigmare Inc Prototype Solutions Fast to Win Offers Many companies today test candidates’ creativity by giving them a very specific problem to solve with little to no time. This is precisely where AI can help you in your next job application. Four months ago, I started at Productive, and one of the tests I had was to create a functioning cold outreach campaign from scratch in four hours without spending too many resources. In those two hours, I learned the basics of n8n and used it to create an almost completely autonomous sequence by connecting tools like Ocean.io, Apify, ChatGPT, and Reply.io. Of course, it did not work perfectly, but the concept was enough to get me the job. Milos Radic, Marketing Partnership Manager, Productive.io Automate Workflows and Earn Rapid Promotion I had a content manager at our marketing agency who was mostly responsible for ensuring his content team was creating the right content and enough of it, but he’d often have to help them out himself. He’s always been a huge AI fan, talking about new advances and boring most of us. Over a period of 3–5 months, he’d occasionally want to show me something he’d built that either integrated with or utilized AI to automate or semi-automate tasks and processes that were responsibilities of his content team. After about four months of this and him getting better and continually creating more automated tasks/work by AI, he’d reduced the amount of human work needed by the content team by almost 60%. My concern was always quality or mistakes, so I’d test things and double check, but the end result was consistently BETTER than human work. Long story short, he quickly received a promotion to a new job that didn’t exist at our company before, so I made it up, and his title became chief operational efficiency officer. He went from a lower-level manager to an executive in a few months due to his AI proficiency and ability to implement. Landon Murie, CEO, Goodjuju Marketing

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Last week, Modern CEO shared reader recommendations of books leaders should read to get ready for 2026. Lyft CEO David Risher submitted a classic, writing: “If you’re looking for inspiration on how to write a comeback story for your company, there’s no better tale than The Odyssey.” Risher knows a bit about penning comeback stories. He’s undertaking the Homerian task of reviving rideshare company Lyft and narrowing the gap between the company and rival Uber. Taking on a turnaround When Risher became CEO of Lyft in April 2023, after serving on its board of directors for almost two years, the company’s stock was trading at about $9 per share, well below its IPO price of $72 per share. At the time, its U.S. market penetration was about 26% or 27%. Lyft, once hailed as an innovator and a whimsical alternative to Uber, was stagnating. Risher had previously worked at Amazon, where founder Jeff Bezos instilled an ethos of customer obsession, and he quickly assessed that Lyft had lost sight of its riders. Its employees also tended to overthink issues. Risher has sought to address both issues: Early in his tenure, for example, he noted that customers experienced a cancellation about 15% of the time. When Risher expressed concern over the stat, employees shrugged it off. Eventually a driver would show up, and rides were completed 99% of the time. “I said, ‘Okay, but 100% of the time, it’s annoying,’” Risher recalls. When some team members suggested they address Risher’s concerns by conducting research, he replied: “I don’t think we have to do a study. I can tell you right now, it’s just really annoying. So, let’s stop doing that, please.” Getting driver cancellations down required operational and technical work, but Lyft has made progress, with rates now below 5%. Risher believes that reliability helps customer loyalty. Other rider-centric moves include the national rollout last year of Lyft Silver, a service for older adults, and Women+ Connect, an opt-in feature that increases the odds of pairing female and nonbinary riders with female and nonbinary drivers. Still, Lyft has been called out on safety issues: A recent New York Times investigation into sexual assault by Uber drivers noted that Lyft bans all drivers with convictions for violent felonies but it, too, is facing sexual assault lawsuits from passengers. “We’re committed to continuously strengthening our systems and working with safety experts, advocates, and regulators to set the highest standards for our industry,” the company told The Times. Risher has also worked to expand Lyft’s reach via the recent acquisition of Freenow, a European mobility platform, a move that he says doubles the company’s addressable market. “Now we truly are a global company,” he says. Under Risher’s leadership, Lyft has eked out gains: Its market share has climbed to about 30%, and the stock now trades at about $19 per share, up about 40% over the past 12 months, outperforming Uber and the broader market. Some analysts have speculated that Lyft could be an attractive acquisition for Amazon, Tesla, Google, or Waymo as they look to expand their autonomous transportation ambitions. “As a public company, we’re on sale every day on the market,” Risher responds. “People can buy our shares anytime they want, but we’re not out looking for suitors.” Indeed, Risher—who was a comparative literature major at Princeton University—sounds like someone who hasn’t finished writing Lyft’s comeback story. When I asked what stage the turnaround is in, he says, “It might well be 10%.” What’s left to be done? “Having really focused on people, customer obsession, and a deep culture of operational excellence,” he says, “now, frankly, it’s asking: How do we grow in new ways?” He calls autonomous vehicles “one of the biggest opportunities we’ve had since the beginning of the company” and envisages a hybrid network that allows riders to decide whether they want a self-driving car or one with a driver. “I think that’s going to be a big unlock,” he adds. Tell us your turnaround tales Are you trying to turn around a company? What are some of the tactics you’re deploying to increase sales, grow market share, or restore your brand? Send me a few lines about what you’re doing at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. We’ll publish top insights in a future newsletter. Listen and read more: comeback kids Brian Niccol, Starbucks’s $100 million man, shares his vision Elliot Hill on his mission to “make epic shit” at Nike How to turn your company around after a crisis

To an outside observer (honestly even to the average American), the jurisdiction of the United States government appears convoluted—it’s a collection of states with one set of rules that can be overturned by the larger federal government. Holidays can sometimes fall into liminal space, and it can get confusing as to what is open and closed on days such as today (Monday, January 19), Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Let’s take a look at the man behind the holiday and the fight to get his birthday recognized, before we dive into how the day is observed. How was Martin Luther King Jr. Day established? Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) was a civil rights leader, Baptist minister, and social activist whose legacy cannot be overstated. King was instrumental in organizing the Montgomery bus boycott, which began in 1955. He cofounded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to continue the advancement of Black people in American society. He also organized the 1963 March on Washington, which helped usher in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and he was the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The movement to create MLK Day started just four days after King’s death in 1968. Representative John Conyers introduced the idea in the House of Representatives, but it would take 11 years before a vote would be held on the motion. It would take even longer for the vote to pass. Stevie Wonder got involved, dropping a single in an effort to get King’s birthday formal recognition. Another march on Washington was organized by King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, where around 500,000 people took to the streets to show their support of the cause. Finally in 1983, the House passed the bill, although the Senate proved to be another battle, as Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina attempted to block the bill with a filibuster. President Ronald Reagan signed it into law in 1983 and the first federal holiday was observed three years later. It wasn’t until 2000 that all 50 states recognized the holiday. Now that we know the history behind the observance, here’s what to know about the potential disruption of normal day-to-day services. Are banks open on MLK Day? No. Most banks are closed because it is a federal holiday. Online banking is available. ATMs are available if you need fast cash. Is the post office open on MLK Day? No. The United Sates Postal Service (USPS) is closed on federal holidays, and most physical post offices won’t be open. Mail will not be delivered. Are Fedex and UPS operating? UPS will be closed in observance of MLK Day. FedEx will remain open with modified service. Is the stock market open? No. Both the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq exchange will be closed. Are schools open? No. Most public schools will be closed in observance of the holiday. If your loved one attends or works at a private school it’s a good practice to double check. Are restaurants open? Yes. Most large chain restaurants will be open but some will modify their hours. This includes major fast-food chains such as McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and others. Smaller mom-and-pop establishments can make their own rules so it is best to call ahead. Are retail chains open? Yes. Most major retailers and big-box stores are open. This includes Walmart, Target, Costco, and Home Depot. Are pharmacies open? Yes. If you happen to catch the flu or a cold that always seems to go around at this time of the year, Walgreens and CVS are available to soothe your ailments. Are grocery stores open? Yes. Groceries stores are typically open, including major chains such as Whole Foods, Kroger, and Aldi. Are national parks free on MLK Day? Not anymore. Under President Trump, the National Park Service changed its policy and eliminated the free admission days that were previously available on both MLK Day and Juneteenth. Free admission is now available on Flag Day, which coincides with the president’s birthday. Many civil rights organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), are upset about this change because of the gravity of both of these observances. Ways to observe MLK Day There are many ways to honor the legacy of King on this day. You could volunteer at a local nonprofit and help your community, or you might consider visiting a Black history museum. You could even honor the day by simply reading a book about the visionary leader or watching one of his many moving speeches.

What did the latest holiday shopping season reveal about consumer confidence going into 2026? Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach unpacks the signals he’s seeing across global spending—from shifting consumer sentiment to AI’s growing role in financial security. Miebach also explores how credit cards fit into a future shaped by crypto, digital wallets, and agent-driven commerce, and what it will take for businesses to stay competitive amid continued market disruption. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You have a unique vantage point on consumer activity. So many payments run through your system. From this past holiday season, do you have any observations about consumer spending or customer sentiment? Any sort of emerging trends or lessons you’ve seen yet? When you think about what we do, we facilitate payments all around the world, so that provides a really interesting data set across all sectors, across all countries, 220 countries and territories. Last year we’re about 160 billion transactions through our network, so it does provide quite a unique view. The past holiday season, 3.9% was the year-over-year growth. So that’s a strong holiday season. You think political uncertainty, you think trade alignments and all these kinds of things, but the consumer held up well. One thing that I thought was striking was apparel sales. So we see this by categories. We don’t see individual Mastercard holder data, but the aggregate data of what are people buying and where are they buying it? So apparel sales had a real moment. So 7.8% growth in apparel, really a stick-out kind of category. One of the interesting things that I saw there in the data this particular season compared to last holiday season, consumers came in early. Probably it’s a continuation of what the consumer has done throughout 2025. “I can look for a better deal. I can look for a promotion.” So Black Friday was particularly strong, and then you look thereafter. So the savvy consumer is doing that, and so are businesses. Businesses were also worried about potentially sitting on inventory through that. So they’re trying to sell their inventory and put out offers earlier. So interesting to see what we’re going to see in 2026. The word affordability, at least in the U.S., has become like this big buzzword. And it sounds like you’re sort of seeing that in some of the data that that’s where people are leaning. When you look at some of the post-tariffs, certain prices have gone up, others have come down. But it’s very interesting when you look at the 3.9% overall. Is that inflation? No. It’s about half price increases, so pretty tame. And the other half is real volume increase where people were just still making investments into the things that they wanted to buy. It’s interesting. You must see data every day about spending patterns and changes. I’m curious how that impacts your planning and strategy. I had a CEO on the show out of the tech world recently who said he’s now replanning every week, that even monthly is too late. Very different leadership perspective from three-year, five-year plans. Is your system different because of the speed of the feedback you get? It’s not. Five years ago, we re-architected Mastercard’s network. We’re in more and more countries around the world. We’re facilitating more and more types of payments that might have been from an account-to-account are now happening on card rails or stablecoins or you name it. So we had to re-architect. From that perspective, that is not really changing our plans. What is changing our plans is if consumer behaviors and consumer choices are changing in more fundamental ways. Younger consumers like “buy now, pay later.” So we got to have that built into our system. Those are the kind of changes [we are tracking], not short-term changes. It’s ups and downs from the economy. Where are the payment trends going? Where do we invest to really understand where consumer or business payments are going? The payments need to be smarter, they need to be faster, they need to be safer. All those kinds of things, that’s where we’re investing. But that’s not week on week. We look out two, three years, and then we make those technologies available for our customers, which are generally banks or large merchants or airlines. Those are our customers. You mentioned “buy now, pay later,” a business like Klarna, which went public last year. Isn’t a credit card “buy now, pay later?”  What’s the distinction? Why do people get so excited about it? It’s yet another payment choice out there. So, payments have not been more competitive than they are today. So you can pay in stablecoins, you can have a push payment, you can have a prepaid payment. You can have a buy now, pay later. This goes straight to essentially a personal loan kind of equivalent. So those are choices. And those are the choices that if we see them amongst consumers or the customers of our customers, then we make them available. If you are a buy now, pay now—a pure play company—you’re going to find large merchants, large brands that are going to have these offers on their websites and in their stores if they have physical stores. The way that we did it, we built it just as an offer into our network. So wherever Mastercard is available, one of our acquiring partners can offer at the checkout terminal in an in-store and someone can buy now, pay later. So JPMorgan or Galileo are partners like that of us, they make that pay available. So the initial craze of buy now, pay later has died down a bit. I think it’s a very credible choice. We offer it. And a lot of young people think this is a good idea because it gives you more planability of your interest payments and all that. We also think loans on cards where you say, let’s say you pay $500 on a card and you turn that into three payments and many banks just offer that and it’s not going into a buy now or pay later route, but it’s the same outcome. So in the end, people want more control over their finances and more flexibility to buy bigger things that they maybe cannot afford in the moment. And different solutions to that. We’re all about consumer choice and we make all of that available. Obviously we’ve had this drastic evolution from physical cards and checks and even cash to contactless tap and digital wallets. Right. Is this new standard going to stay or do you think things will keep moving to things like biometrics or face scanning? I mean, I know you’ve talked about more personalized payments. Is that what you mean? That’s not quite what I mean. But when you think payments, it’s a constant evolution, so it’s not going to stay where it is. It took 10 years for contactless to get what it is today. So you tap with your phone, you tap with your card. It’s about two-thirds of global transactions on our network are now contactless. What is now a big driver for the next kind of experience is where checkout really becomes a non-issue. It just going to disappear. So we put a lot of focus on making checkout a non-event, and an enabling technology for that is tokenization. So you take your card data and you turn it into a one-time code that can only be used for the transaction that’s securely shot between the different participants and the payment ecosystem, very safe. Now you can do the same thing with your biometric identity, be your fingerprint or your facial, and that comes along with that transaction token and anybody on the other side can see that is the transaction and it should go through. So it increases security dramatically. So we invented tokenization in the payment side many years back, and it’s now scaling. So we made a commitment starting with Europe that by 2030, every transaction will be tokenized. Really the checkout moment is just going to really recede to the background.

O-1B visas are for immigrants of “extraordinary ability,” originally designed for acclaimed artists, musicians, athletes, and scholars, But increasingly they’re being handed out to people with a more modern definition of “extraordinary ability”: influencers and OnlyFans creators.   Immigration lawyers say social media influencers now make up more than half of their O-1 visa applicants, according to a recent report by the Financial Times. These visas are intended for an individual who possesses “extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics,” or those who have “a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry,” according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). What defines “extraordinary ability,” though, is open to interpretation.  To qualify for an O-1B visa type applicants must submit evidence of at least three of the six regulatory criteria. These include, but are not limited to, performing a leading or starring role in a distinguished production or event, national or international recognition for achievements, and a high salary compared to others in the field.  USCIS regulations do not prescribe limits over what falls under the umbrella term “the arts”. While traditionally this might have been singers and actors, these days content creators are dominating new forms of media as cultural influence has shifted online.  The annual number of O-1 visas approved rose by more than 50% between 2014 and 2024, far outpacing the roughly 10% growth in nonimmigrant visas overall. Still, O-1s make up only a small fraction of the system: Fewer than 20,000 were issued in 2024, versus the hundreds of thousands of H-1B work visas granted. OnlyFans creators and influencers may have an advantage over other creatives when it comes to the application process. Their influence is easily quantifiable in terms of likes and follower counts, numbers that fit neatly into the O-1B framework. An artist or scientist, meanwhile, whose work is predominantly offline and less easily quantified, may find making their case of “extraordinary ability” more complicated.  The growing number of content creators seeking visas reserved for those with “extraordinary ability” has sparked mixed reactions online. On X, political analyst and writer Dominic Michael Tripi described the trend as a sign of “end-stage empire conditions.” Others suggested the administration was taking immigration advice from fictional character Ali G. “Trump is literally doing the Ali G ‘let the fit ones in’ policy.” one X user joked.  But the backlash against influencers applying for O-1 visas shows how little attitudes have shifted when it comes to recognizing influencing and content creation as legitimate work. And, when it comes to OnlyFans creators, one immigration lawyer told Fox News, “acting is acting”.

Putting yourself out there is difficult. Rejection is tough. And feeling like you’ve gotten the rug pulled out from under you is the worst. When you’re in charge of business development, where you’re responsible for growing your revenue within your current client portfolio as well as seeking out new potential opportunities, you can easily vacillate from feeling like a hero to feeling like a zero, depending on what kind of results you’re getting from your efforts. As a time management coach for 17 years, I’ve learned how to summon the inner resolve to continue forward with business development even when it feels difficult, and I’ve coached many clients on how to do the same. Here are three of the biggest challenges you may face with staying consistent with business development, and solutions for moving forward with tenacity no matter how vulnerable and overwhelming it may feel. 1. You’re So Busy with Current Clients That You’re Not Investing in Future Ones One of the hardest parts of success is maintaining that success, particularly if you’re not solely devoted to business development. I often have individuals come to me because they’re taking care of their current portfolio but keep pushing off the activities that will help them sustain and grow their business in the future. In these situations, I find this two-prong strategy works best: The first prong is to clearly define quantifiable actions that will support your goals. For example: “I will make 10 follow-up calls to strong leads per day,” or “I will have five business development meetings booked each week.” These concrete objectives help you to more clearly know what to do and to honestly assess whether you’re doing enough. The second prong is to decide on a timing strategy so you don’t keep putting off the business development tasks. Here are a few examples: I don’t look at email until I’ve made five prospecting calls, or before I eat lunch, I do all the needed follow-ups on outstanding proposals. I’ve found that doing business development activities earlier in the day and before a habitual activity you really want or need to do helps them to happen much more frequently. 2. You’re Getting Too Many Noes, So You Shy Away From the Ask  Experiencing noes is a natural part of the sales process. But in most instances, there’s a typical close rate that you expect. When you hit a long series of deals that don’t work out beyond what you were used to experiencing, doubt can creep in: What if other deals don’t close? What if I don’t hit my targets? What if I don’t get my bonus? What if I lose my job? What if other people lose their jobs? Even with a long history of success, this negative spiral can happen pretty quickly, and you need to catch yourself before your doubts and fears keep you from the actions that will move you into a more positive place. There are two powerful actions you can take in this scenario: First, think about what you can learn—if anything—from the deals that didn’t happen. Was it the wrong type of client? Could you have presented the benefits in a different way? Was there something about the financial structure that needed to change? Second, let go of the past and create as many opportunities as possible to get in front of other potential clients in the present and future. The only way to get out of a slump is to double down on the potential for people to say yes. 3. You’re Reeling From Market Changes, So You’re Uncertain About What Will Work Most of the time, effective business development requires a greater level of commitment to the strategies you know work. But sometimes broader circumstances have had an impact on your business, and you need to completely change direction. It could be that a platform that has been a wonderful source of leads no longer provides them. It could be that the industry you’ve typically served has contracted, and you need to pivot to a new one. Or it could be that AI has changed how people view the value of your business. These shifts can make business development even more overwhelming because you no longer have a repeatable, predictable strategy for your sales process. To keep moving forward when you face this dilemma, you need to shift your definition of success from closing deals to systematically testing strategies to learn what does or doesn’t work in this new environment. For example, you might decide that you’ll run a new ad campaign and see whether it generates the type of leads you’re hoping to attract. Or you might work with a consultant on tactics for breaking into a new industry. Or you might work on a new presentation strategy to help people understand the unique value of your company within the context of AI and test the response you receive. In these circumstances, it’s too vulnerable to base success on what revenue you do or don’t generate as a result of trying new things. That can leave you feeling frustrated, angry, and demoralized, thinking you would have been better off not even attempting a certain experiment if it doesn’t work out the way you hoped. Instead, you’ll want to count it as success that you tried something new, and then understand there’s valuable learning in every attempt. As you persistently try new strategies, you’ll eventually land on what works.   Business development in the face of disappointing results requires enormous inner courage to not give up. But by following these strategies mixed with a strong dose of resolve, you can not only survive whatever difficulty you may face but also thrive.

When the NFL and Apple Music announced Bad Bunny as the 2026 Super Bowl half-time show headliner, the choice surprised some. But to anyone tracking the data over the past few years, it was inevitable. In 2022, Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti redefined the market, driving Latin music’s streaming growth to new heights. It later became the first Spanish-language album nominated for Grammy Album of the Year. The takeaway is simple: When you have accurate, real-time data, you don’t guess where culture is going, you know. That kind of foresight is exactly what industries need now, especially as AI accelerates change at a pace that demands evidence, not instinct. In real time, we’re watching AI fundamentally reshape the economics of music, and much of the industry is still arguing that maybe it shouldn’t exist at all. The discourse surrounding AI and music is filled with necessary debates, from copyright infringement and artist compensation to vocal cloning and authenticity. These concerns are valid and must be addressed. But while the industry argues about whether AI should change music, our data shows it already is. Some of the resulting evolution has relevant precedent for reference. Some of it requires urgent action. Reliable information, detection, and measurement is required to make sense of it all. Here to stay Whether we like it or not, AI music is here to stay, and rather than fighting it, we should understand its benefits as a tool for artists—either to amplify existing production processes or to introduce new ways of designing music. Recent data from Luminate’s consumer research shows that 44% of U.S. music listeners say they’re uncomfortable with AI-created songs. But discomfort doesn’t predict behavior. The AI artist Xania Monet (created by Music Designer Telisha Jones) averaged 8 million weekly global on-demand audio streams in October, following her debut on multiple Billboard charts, including Hot Gospel Songs with “Let Go, Let Go” and Hot R&B Songs with “How Was I Supposed to Know?” Monet’s songs touch on emotional healing, life lessons, and heartbreak, pointing to the argument that music at its essence is how it makes you feel and not how it’s made. This conflicting tension between initial consumer attitudes and actual listening habits is not new. Consider what happened with auto-tune. In 2009, Jay-Z released “D.O.A (Death of Auto-Tune),” declaring war on the technology. That same year, The Black Eyed Peas released “Boom Boom Pow” and “I Gotta Feeling,” both anchored by auto-tune production. Today, each of those Black Eyed Peas songs has hundreds of millions of streams in the U.S. Jay-Z’s protest anthem? Less than 40 million. The market spoke. Technological evolution won. Infrastructure evolves If AI continues to earn its place in music production—and all signs point to that inevitable reality—it doesn’t mean that artists or rights holders have to lose. This is where foresight becomes essential. The sampler wars of the late 1980s offer an instructive parallel. When Biz Markie was sued in 1991 for sampling Gilbert O’Sullivan, the industry faced an existential crisis. The outcome wasn’t suppression of the technology, it was the creation of an entire licensing and clearance infrastructure. Detection and attribution became the foundation of a functioning market. That infrastructure has continued to evolve in the era of streaming and transmedia discovery. Millions are being spent on legacy music catalogs, and those high valuations are proving to be valid. At the midpoint of this year, Becoming Led Zeppelin was the most-viewed new music documentary in the U.S., and its high viewership drove a sustained 23% increase in streams for the band’s catalog. Notably, the documentary’s release drove Led Zeppelin to its highest-ever weekly total for global on-demand audio streams: 40.4 million in late February. But what happens if AI-generated music infringes on Led Zeppelin’s copyright during the creation process? I think we can all agree that no one should get away with stealing others’ creative IP for financial gain. The industry needs to move fast and policy needs to be implemented so that artists and rights holders continue to be paid fairly and rightfully as AI’s presence in music expands.  At Luminate, our mission is to provide the entertainment industry with essential, objective, and trustworthy data. When it comes to AI, that mission has only become more critical. Our data shows not just what happened, but what’s happening now, and increasingly, what’s about to happen. That visibility is what enables stakeholders across the industry, everyone from labels and publishers to platforms and policymakers, to make informed decisions rather than reactive ones. AI-generated artists designed for scale and low-cost delivery will proliferate. Online and live performance environments will be filled with algorithmically-optimized content. The technology will become more sophisticated, more accessible, and harder to detect without proper infrastructure. We all need to work with the same objective information to navigate these advancements.

Almost everywhere you go, from the doctor’s office to the library to the car dealership, there’s one ubiquitous design gem hidden in plain sight: the Bic Cristal. This unsung hero of the writing desk has produced uncountable signatures and annotations—but now it’s getting its moment in the spotlight through a collaboration with the Italian home goods brand Seletti. The Bic Cristal is the world’s best-selling pen, boasting more than 120 billion sales since its release in 1950. For the tail end of the pen’s 75th anniversary, Bic teamed up with Seletti to produce a work of art inspired by the pen: a giant, 12:1 scale lamp. The product’s massive scale translates particularly well for a lamp, with a clear case revealing a glowing, neon-like LED light inside. It can be positioned vertically or horizontally, and used as a floor lamp, pendant, or wall sconce. The lamp will be available in the pen’s classic blue, red, and black colorways when it debuts in the U.S. later this year for around $350.  [Photo: Bic] Why the Bic Cristal makes a perfect lamp The Bic Cristal is an adaptation of the first-ever ballpoint pen, invented in 1938 by a Hungarian journalist named László Biró (hence the pen’s common nickname, the Bic Biro). According to a breakdown written for the MoMA exhibition Pirouette: Turning Points in Design, which featured the Bic Crystal, Biró’s original pen was designed to allow ink to flow more consistently than older fountain pens, but it still had some issues with clogging and leaking. After acquiring Biró’s patent, Bic founder Marcel Bich adjusted the design to include a smaller, 1-millimeter-wide ballpoint tip with a simple quirk: an air hole, which prevented a vacuum from forming inside the pen. This tiny tweak allows the pen’s ink to flow freely to the nub, and is what makes it such a reliable choice to this day. Aesthetically, Bich’s choice of a clear plastic for the pen’s body reveals how it works and renders it instantly recognizable. Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s senior curator of architecture and design, said in the museum’s breakdown, “It almost looks like it is within a crystal tube. It was such a beautiful use of plastic that almost made us think plastic could be precious.” [Photo: Bic] Art director Stefano Seletti was similarly drawn to the Bic Cristal’s sleek, crystalline aesthetic as a potential lighting object for Seletti. Since the brand began dabbling in lighting several years ago, it’s embraced an out-of-the-box approach to its catalog, playing with everything from animal figures holding light bulbs to an anatomically correct rendition of a human heart.  “The structure of the pen was absolutely perfect for this project: The transparent tubular body allows light to pass through, the ink cartridge could easily be transformed into the LED that provides the light, and the electrical components could be easily hidden by the colored plastic parts,” Seletti says. His team partnered with Italian designer Mario Paroli, as well as with Bic, to bring the Bic Lamp to life. They used Bic’s archives and technical drawings to faithfully reproduce the pen at a 12-to-1 scale.  The final product is an ode to Bic’s simple-yet-functional design ethos—and it’s the perfect kitsch addition to any space where writing gets done.

You sit down at your desk, ready to start the day. Before you can even open your first email, you’ve already typed in three different passwords—each more complex than the last. By lunchtime, you’ve repeated the ritual half a dozen times. It’s frustrating, it’s slow, and it’s happening to millions of employees every single day. This is password fatigue—the silent productivity killer and hidden security risk plaguing modern enterprises. It’s more than an annoyance; it’s a costly vulnerability. Our global survey found that most users still rely on passwords as their primary authentication method. This should concern most organizations, because in an era defined by work-from-everywhere policies, apps, and mobile devices, businesses are still relying on a defense that hasn’t meaningfully evolved since the 1960s. Complexity Without Security When it comes to password complexity, organizations are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. They either abandon complexity altogether—look at the Louvre, which used “Louvre” as the password to secure its surveillance system—or require increasingly complex strings of mixed cases, numbers, symbols, frequent changes, and multi-factor authentication (MFA). While intended to strengthen security, complex password requirements can just as easily have the opposite effect. How many times has someone been locked out of their system for days because they forgot their recovery answer, or lost the phone that sends the authentication link needed to grant access? And in how many instances has that person decided to forsake those approved tools and upload sensitive data into a personal Google Drive—easier for them and their colleagues to access, but also easier for cybercriminals to exploit? The tragedy is that added complexity doesn’t guarantee safety. Cybercriminals have long since adapted to password advances with credential stuffing and brute-force attacks. But the most effective technique they’re using targets the weakest link in the password chain; not the password itself but the person who created it. Why spend hours trying to pick a lock when the owner will unknowingly hand you the combination? There have been instances of cybercriminals creating look-alike login pages to collect passwords. The massive data breaches that hit MGM Resorts and Clorox were the result of cybercriminals masquerading as legitimate users, asking the IT help desk to reset their password and MFA. These threat actors didn’t break in—they logged in. The rise of AI has made the password problem even more urgent. Cybercriminals now use AI to guess passwords, craft flawless phishing emails, and even generate deepfake voices to trick help desk staff. Traditional passwords simply can’t withstand this new generation of attacks. According to the 2026 RSA ID IQ Report, 69% of organizations reported an identity-related breach in the last three years, a 27-percentage-point increase from last year’s survey. These aren’t abstract statistics—they represent real financial losses, operational disruption, and reputational harm. And in many cases, they could have been prevented. But how? Employees are burdened with increasingly unmanageable login rituals, yet organizations remain exposed to the very breaches these measures were meant to prevent. So, what’s the answer? The Passwordless Solution The most viable way out of this cycle is passwordless authentication. When there’s no password to steal, organizations significantly reduce their risks and streamline the login process by eliminating the need to remember, update, or constantly reenter a password string. Passwords typically rely on “something you know” for users to gain access. Passwordless authentication replaces typing in a password with two or more other factors, including “something you have” like a mobile phone or hardware token, or “something you are,” like a face or fingerprint scan. Typically, using those factors manifests in one of three ways, each with its own trade-offs: Authenticator Apps & Push Notifications:  What it is: Instead of typing a password, the user enters their username and receives a secure notification on a trusted mobile app asking them to verify the login, often by matching a number. Pros: Highly popular in business environments; relies on the smartphone the user already carries.  Cons: Requires the user to have a smartphone with data access; slightly slower than direct biometrics; susceptible to phishing and other attacks.  Magic Links: What it is: Similar to the “forgot password” link Instagram or Slack might send you, the system emails a unique link or texts a code to log you in. Pros: No hardware or setup is required; it works on any device with access to email. Cons: While “password-free,” this is not truly “passwordless” in the security sense. It relies on the security of the email inbox (which is often protected only by a weak password) and is still susceptible to phishing and interception. Platform Biometrics (Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello): What it is: The user verifies their identity using a fingerprint scan or facial recognition built directly into their laptop or smartphone. Pros: This offers the highest convenience and speed; users are already trained to unlock their phones this way. Cons: It ties the credential to a specific device. If that device is lost or broken, account recovery mechanisms must be robust. What to Look for in an Enterprise-Grade Passwordless Solution If you’re evaluating passwordless options for your company, ask yourself these two questions: 1. Is it comprehensive? If your solution only works for one environment or user group, then you’ll need to bolt on additional solutions to cover everyone and everything. For example, a solution might offer seamless biometric login for modern cloud apps like Office 365, but fail completely with legacy on-premises mainframes or VPNs, forcing users to fall back to passwords for critical internal systems.  Your solution must work across every platform, deployment model, and environment—cloud, on-premises, edge, legacy, Microsoft, and macOS. 2. Is it truly secure?  Phishing-resistance is a key trend in passwordless solutions, and it’s a critical feature for  eliminating one of the most frequent and highest-impact attack vectors. But phishing-resistance isn’t enough—organizations also need to be bypass resistant, malware resistant, fraud resistant, and outage resistant. If a cybercriminal can evade passwordless MFA by convincing your IT Help Desk to let them in, then the passwordless method itself isn’t worth all that much. Making the Transition Shifting to a different paradigm doesn’t happen overnight, but the payoff is immediate. Start with your most critical applications or highest-risk users and choose device-bound passkeys over synced alternatives that allow keys to roam between devices for stronger security.  Build rigorous enrollment processes with identity verification and liveness detection, which validates that the biometric source is a live person. In addition, protect your help desk with bilateral verification: this process confirms the caller’s identity via a device prompt and proves the agent’s legitimacy by displaying their verified status on the caller’s screen. Plan for secure recovery when devices are lost by establishing high-assurance fallbacks, like pre-registered backup keys or biometric re-verification, instead of passwords. Look for solutions that automatically provide device-bound passkeys when users register the app. Lastly, measure the percentage of passwordless authentications over time against any suspected account compromises to ensure your actions are having a positive impact. By eliminating the daily drain of password fatigue while closing one of the biggest doors to cybercriminals, enterprises can finally reclaim both productivity and peace of mind.

The 2026 national park pass features a portrait of Donald Trump’s face, and the Department of the Interior (DOI) has threatened to penalize anyone who tries to cover it up. Now, park lovers are inventing their own clever work-arounds to remove the president’s visage from their passes. For over two decades, the annual America the Beautiful park pass design has featured photography of nature, animals, and scenery across the United States. But when the DOI revealed the 2026 pass in November, something was glaringly different. Rather than a cascading waterfall or towering redwoods, the pass included a portrait of George Washington, framed side by side with Trump’s mug-shot-inspired headshot. The response to the pass design was swift. Many cardholders took to the internet to show themselves covering Trump’s face with stickers as a form of protest. But mere weeks later, per an internal email obtained by SFGate, the DOI updated its “Void if Altered” policy in a transparent effort to discourage pass holders from covering Trump’s face. Whereas the policy previously stated that passes could be voided only if the signature section of the card was altered, it now overtly flags stickers and other coverings as alterations that could invalidate the pass. According to a policy document shared with The Washington Post, staff who come across altered passes are instructed to ask that stickers or coverings be removed. If that’s not possible, they’re permitted to either charge the guest with the regular entrance fee or give them the option to buy a brand-new pass. While the Trump administration is acting quickly to redesign the National Park Service in Trump’s literal image, national parkgoers are quicker. In the days since the pass policy was altered in early January, multiple designers have stepped up with clever work-arounds that conceal the president’s glowering face without running afoul of the restrictions. The simplest solution is a card sleeve that covers Trump’s face most of the time, but can be easily removed when the card is shown at park entrances. [Photo: Dirt Roads Project] How small designers are fighting back against the DOI Katie Weber and her husband, Chris, started their Michigan-based apparel brand Dirt Roads Project in March 2025. The company, Weber says, was her way to make a difference after feeling “overwhelmed by everything happening in our country.” So part of each purchase gives back to the preservation of parks and nature, including through collaborations with nonprofits like the Michigan Animal Rescue League, Alliance for the Great Lakes, and Reef Relief.  When Weber saw the park pass design for 2026, she immediately decided to create something that would cover Trump’s face.  “I was incredibly frustrated and wanted to be able to bring the parks front and center instead of showing someone who is honestly trying to dismantle our parks,” Weber says. “That night, I started going through all of our photography from past hiking trips, chose a handful that I loved, and created the design.” Her final selections, which run for just $6 each, feature photos taken at eight prominent national parks, including Zion in Utah, Haleakalā in Maui, and Yosemite in California. After they launched for preorder around Thanksgiving, Weber says, interest in the stickers has been “growing rapidly.” Weber specifically engineered the stickers to avoid covering any pertinent information on the cards, including the signature section, holographic strip, and barcode. But in the wake of the DOI’s new sticker ban, she adapted the design to guarantee that users won’t be penalized. Instead of adding the sticker directly to their passes, customers can now purchase a $2 plastic card sleeve from Dirt Roads Project to keep their cards completely unaltered while still obscuring the president’s face. After the DOI’s new regulations emerged, Weber says Dirt Roads Project has seen “skyrocketing” demand, bringing in over $6,000 from the stickers alone in the first weeks of January. “To me, that shows that this small form of protest is being seen, and that people’s frustration is being heard,” she says.  Other small businesses are similarly using their art to fight back. Mitchell Bowen is a graphic designer who runs a poster company called Recollection Project, pulling inspiration from 1930s illustrations to create posters of national parks and other travel destinations. He designed a $12 card sleeve with one of his illustrations for Grand Teton National Park, featuring two American bison in front of a mountain vista. Interest has been so high, Bowen says, that he’s had to pause new orders to focus on fulfilling his backlog. [Photo: Recollection Project] “Trump’s crassest, most ego-driven action yet” Both Weber’s and Bowen’s nature-centric designs call back to the history of the national park pass’s design, which has, by federal law, featured the winning photo of the National Park Foundation’s annual public lands photo contest since 2004. In fact, the DOI and the National Park Service are currently facing a lawsuit from the conservation group Center for Biological Diversity for failing to follow that federal design stipulation on the 2026 card.  In a statement on the lawsuit released on December 10, Kierán Suckling, the center’s executive director, wrote that the new pass design was “Trump’s crassest, most ego-driven action yet.” “It’s disgusting of Trump to politicize America’s most sacred refuge by pasting his face over the national parks in the same way he slaps his corporate name on buildings, restaurants, and golf courses,” he continued. “The national parks are not a personal branding opportunity. They’re the pride and joy of the American people.”

My grandmother never realized she was practicing a die with zero philosophy.  She liked to give generous presents to her children and grandchildren on birthdays, gift-giving occasions—and whenever the mood struck her. I once asked her why she kept her loved ones so well-supplied in gifts, and she remarked, “Why should you be glad I’m dead?” In other words, she didn’t see the point in holding onto the money that would come to her family anyway when she died. By spending her money on us while she was still alive, she enjoyed our delight in her generosity. She saw that as a better use of her money than letting it grow until it became our emotionally uncomfortable inheritance. In many ways, Grandma embodied the die with zero financial planning philosophy popularized by Bill Perkins. This philosophy encourages people to enjoy their money while they live—ideally spending their final dollar just before kicking the bucket—because there’s no point in being the wealthiest person in the cemetery. Considering the complexities of traditional financial planning—not to mention your understandable worries about running out of money in retirement—the die with zero philosophy may sound like a great way to live with low-grade anxiety during your golden years. But there’s a way to balance your impulse to save for the future with the joy of enjoying your money right now. The problem with traditional planning Every day without fail, you’ll find a brand new think piece about how painfully underfunded the average American retirement account is. That’s why financial media’s prevailing message about retirement planning is only slightly less hyperbolic than, “For the love of all that is holy, put some money in a 401(k) NOW before it’s too late!!!” Unfortunately, this hyperfocus on building wealth makes it seem like even the largest of nest eggs is one unwary purchase away from leaving you destitute. The majority of retirees have built the life they want, but almost half are afraid to spend their money so they can live that life. While this is not a problem that every retiree will face (see the depressing statistics about the size of the average American retirement account), it’s still a common issue for anyone who has internalized the “accumulate!” retirement planning message for decades. Enter the die with zero financial philosophy. What is Die with Zero? Although hedge fund manager Bill Perkins coined the term (and wrote the eponymous book Die With Zero), the concept is hardly a new one. With the possible exception of some pharaohs and oligarchs, we all know we can’t take it with us when we go. Instead, Perkins suggests that our highest goal should be to maximize positive life experiences using the three limited resources we are all afforded: health, time, and money. Of course, our levels of health, time, and money are not in perfect balance throughout our lives, which is why Perkins recommends using each of these resources when we have them. When you’re young, healthy, and have plenty of time, you can spend it enjoying low-cost but high-effort experiences, like backpacking through Europe. Once you’re older, time-crunched, and wealthier—but still enjoying good health—you can spend money to enjoy luxurious experiences that are lower-effort, like taking a cruise through the Greek Isles. And anytime your health is declining, you can spend time and money to help improve your health. Die with zero financial planning Die with zero is an appealing philosophy in part because it’s not just about money, retirement, or financial planning. It’s a framework for optimizing your life. Much of the die with zero model is about changing your view of money, health, and time throughout your life. However, the die with zero philosophy includes a blueprint for financial planning. Specifically, Perkins recommends the following rules for handling your finances so that you can “die with zero”: Plan for different seasons of your life: Described by Perkins as “time-bucketing,” this strategy separates your life into 5- to 10-year chunks. For each time-bucket, you set experience goals you want to meet that will change as your time, health, and wealth change. Spend with intention: Rather than accumulate wealth that you’re afraid to spend, joyfully spend your money on memorable experiences that will make your life more meaningful. Give money away to children and charities when it’s the most impactful: This is an echo of my grandmother’s attitude. Rather than leaving a financial legacy to beloved family or charities when you die—when they may no longer need the money—give it away when the money can do the most good and while you’re alive to see the benefit. Recognize when you’ve hit your wealth peak: So much of retirement planning is about accumulation, which means it can be tough to know when you’ve reached “enough.” And then it can be even harder to feel comfortable spending down your nest egg. This philosophy suggests that you figure out when you’re done growing your wealth so you can let go of the drive to keep growing. Balancing prudence with pleasure “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” may be an excellent motto for soldiers heading off to war, but it’s a little harder to justify as a responsible life maxim when you’re impulsively charging once-in-a-lifetime trips to Bali on your high-interest credit card. Which is why it’s a good idea to fold the philosophy of the die with zero movement into traditional financial planning. Focus on growing your nest egg, especially when you have the benefit of compound interest over time. But make sure you also invest some of your resources—time, health, and money—into making memories. Plan ahead for potential health problems in old age, which may mean earmarking money for future medical expenses. But also let yourself be generous with money to your loved ones when they need it. Continue to make smart and frugal financial decisions in retirement. But keep meeting the experience goals you set for yourself, too, so that you continue to have new adventures to look forward to. Treating your finances with intentionality is the best way to enjoy yourself and your money—now and in retirement.

There are few things in the digital world as annoying as spam emails. They flood our inbox after our email address is sold by a data broker, shared with third parties from a site we’ve willingly given it to, or obtained through a data breach. It’s natural to want to get off these lists as fast as possible, but if there’s one thing you should rarely ever do with one of these spammy emails, it’s click the “unsubscribe” link found in it. Here’s why, and what to do instead. The problem with ‘unsubscribe’ email links With few exceptions (see below), you should avoid clicking on unsubscribe links in most emails you receive. This is especially true if the link is in an email that is clearly spam, one from some business or website you have never given your information to. This is because these unsubscribe links usually take you to a web page via a URL embedded in the unsubscribe text that identifies your email address, either in plain text or via an alphanumeric code. The moment this unique URL loads, the spammer at the other end knows that you were the one to click it; they now know that the email address they blasted does, in fact, have a real person at the other end. If the email is from a spammer, there is a high chance that they will not—and never intended to—delete your email address from their database. In this case, clicking on that unsubscribe link reveals to the spammer that the email address they’ve sent the message to is being read by a human. This confirmation usually only makes your email address a target for even more spam emails. This is the best-case scenario. But there’s a worst-case scenario as well. Scam emails often imitate genuine organizations—such as your bank or a subscription service provider. These emails typically claim that you can opt out of what appear to be marketing messages by clicking the unsubscribe link. However, when you do, the link directs you to a malicious website that appears legitimate and asks you to log in or provide other personal information to verify that you are the account owner who wants to unsubscribe. The scammers then use the information you enter on their fake site to hack into your real account or commit other types of identity theft with the data you’ve given them. Here’s what to do instead It should be noted that if you are 100% certain an email is from the organization it purports to be (such as Netflix, Apple, or Chase Bank, for example), it’s pretty safe to click on the email’s unsubscribe link. Large companies tend to honor unsubscribe requests because they would face significant public backlash (and potential legal troubles) if they didn’t. But if you are even remotely uncertain, or the email is clearly from a spammy site you never signed up for in the first place, it’s probably best to avoid clicking on that tempting “unsubscribe” link. Instead, if you want to stop receiving emails from the sender, you can block the offending email address. When you block an email address, any emails from that address will usually be sent directly to your spam or junk mail folder, so you should never see a message from the sender’s email address in your inbox again. How to block an email address The best way to block an email address depends on the email service provider you have.  If you use Gmail on the web, you can click the “More” button in the Gmail menu bar of the offending email and then select “Block [sender].” Future messages from that email address will be sent right to the spam folder. If you’re using a mobile device, you can find Google’s instructions for blocking an email address here. If you use Apple’s iCloud—or the built-in iPhone Mail app—you have several options for blocking an email address. If you’re on an iPhone, the quickest way to block a sender is to swipe on the email message in the Mail app’s inbox to reveal its “More” button. Tap that button and then tap “Block Contact” to block the sender of the email.  This will cause a banner to appear above the email stating that the sender is blocked. However, emails from a blocked sender will still stay in your inbox until you set the Mail app to automatically move messages from a blocked sender to the Trash folder. Do this by opening the iPhone’s Settings app, tapping Mail, tapping Blocked Sender Options, and then selecting “Move To Trash.” Other major email providers, such as Outlook.com (owned by Microsoft) and Yahoo Mail, offer ways to block email addresses. See instructions here for Outlook and here for Yahoo Mail. Protect your email address without needing to unsubscribe from anything A final way to avoid getting a deluge of spam email is to avoid using your real email address in online forms or websites. Instead, use an email alias, which is a randomized email address you can use instead of your real one. Emails sent to this email alias will still arrive in your real email address’s inbox, but if that email alias is ever abused, you can just delete the alias, which means that any emails sent to it never reach your inbox. The easiest email alias system to use is Apple’s Hide My Email service—a feature available to paying iCloud Plus subscribers—and arguably the best reason to become a paying subscriber. As I wrote previously, Hide My Email is probably the best Apple product you aren’t using. It’s effective, easy to use, and costs as little as 99 cents a month. But what if you’re not an Apple user? Google is reportedly working on bringing a “Hide My Email”-like feature to Gmail users, called Shielded Email. In the meantime, Android and Windows users with non-iCloud email accounts could get similar Hide My Email functionality with Proton’s SimpleLogin service. But whatever you do, try to avoid clicking on those tempting “unsusbscribe” links in spam emails.

One year on from the catastrophic LA wildfires, journalist, author, and MS NOW correspondent Jacob Soboroff examines what the fires reveal about America’s growing age of disaster. Drawing from his new book Firestorm, Soboroff shares hard lessons from the aftermath, exposing systemic failures, unlikely heroics, and what today’s recovery efforts tell us about how the U.S. will respond to the next crisis. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You grew up in the Palisades, which were the heart of the fires. For our listeners who haven’t been there, can you describe the Palisades? What it looks like, what type of place it is, and then what happened when the fire swept through and the aftermath? Pacific Palisades is a coastal enclave, I think you could say, in between Santa Monica and Malibu, the iconic Malibu, and it’s nestled along the Pacific Coast. And it’s actually on the absolute opposite side of Los Angeles County from Altadena where the Eaton fire also burned. And the reason it’s the costliest wildfire event in the history of the country is that both of these massive urban conflagrations unfolded at the same time.  The Palisades fire due to a holdover fire from an arson fire seven days earlier up at the top of Lachman Lane in the Santa Monica Mountains, and the Eaton Fire in Altadena because of, the prevailing theory goes, faulty electrical equipment that energized and led to a spark, that when there were hurricane force Santa Ana wind gusts 80 miles per hour or greater, which by the way, were predicted by the National Weather Service as a particularly dangerous situation, one spark like that led to what they knew was going to be a catastrophic situation. And so the Palisades, the fire raced down from the Santa Monica Mountains and engulfed the community of tens of thousands, and the same exact thing happened in Eaton Canyon on the other side of Los Angeles County, engulfing Altadena. You said that the winds were predicted. There are some folks who talk about how the conditions were unprecedented, these hurricane force winds, and dry landscape, and densely populated homes altogether. Folks weren’t really prepared to handle what unfolded. No, definitely not, and growing up in the Palisades, I evacuated the house that we lived in as a kid, and you always return home and the house is fine. And certainly, there have been homes lost in these fires, but nothing like this. Nothing like thousands of homes, 31 people killed, hundreds of thousands of people displaced. This was something that I don’t think any of us had ever seen, and as you mentioned, the conditions were such that we had received barely any rain at all in the late part of 2024 and into the beginning of 2025, and so Los Angeles was a tinderbox ready to go. And I think what I’ve uncovered, discovered, learned about what it was that I experienced was that this was really the fire of the future. I thought it was a time machine into my past, but really, it was a look into the future that my children and our children will inhabit. And when I say the fire of the future, this was a senior emergency manager working for the federal government that said to me in a clandestine meeting after the fires, who this guy had been to every mass casualty fire in the last five years working for the federal government, there’s not one proximate cause. And certainly, there’s lots of investigative reporting to be done about whether or not there were predeployed firefighters in the right places or the reservoir was full, and it wasn’t full and should have been and who’s to blame for that? Or should Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, have been in town or out of town? Did Gavin Newsom do what he said? Did Donald Trump’s misinformation and disinformation affect this as the president elect? But really, this man, Jonathan White, from the Commissioned Health Service Corps, said to me, he took my notebook and he said, “Let me draw an X on it.” And on the forums of the X were obviously climate change, infrastructure falling apart, changes in the way we live, thousands of electric car batteries, another new technology exploding during the fires. And then the big one is the misinformation and the disinformation in terms of how people got notified, or didn’t, about what was happening in Los Angeles. And all of those things together is what made this not only the Great Los Angeles Fires, but also in some measure, the new age of disaster, America’s new age of disaster where it isn’t just a spark. It’s a spark combined with our politics, it’s a spark combined with the ways we live, it’s a spark combined with hurricane force winds in bone dry Los Angeles in the middle of the winter. It’s all of those things combined. You write in the book about people fighting to save their homes or spraying down their own property with flames all around them. What’s our individual responsibility in a disaster versus what we should be expecting of our government? The tales of people spraying down their own houses, it seems dangerous. I think it certainly was. My own brother spent a long time considering whether or not to leave their house that ultimately burned down that he was living in, his in-laws’ home. And I know many stories like that, that people didn’t leave till the very last second, and I think it’s human nature to want to stand up and defend what is yours. These men and women of the LA County Fire Department, of the LA City Fire Department, of the mutual aid efforts from all over not just Southern California, but the American West and Mexico and Canada, firefighters came from everywhere, thousands and thousands of firefighters. They did everything they could to stop this blaze. There’s a firefighter, Eric Mendoza, who I write about, who laid on his stomach in the middle of El Medio Street in the Palisades with his hose, two and a half diameter hose, biggest hose they could flow open full bore with thousand plus degree temperatures, automobile metal melting around them, and saying to himself, “I’m going to have black shit in my lungs and be coughing up stuff for days and weeks. I can barely see. I need to go into a house to wash my eyes out.” The question is what’s our government’s role? Our government’s role is to provide services to us to mitigate and ideally stop, but the reality is it’s not going to be possible. And as I said, are there questions to ask about could there have been more pre-deployed firefighters in the Palisades? Of course, those are important questions to ask. But to me, it’s also as much a story, if it’s a story about failures, it’s a story about hope, because I got to meet and spend time around incredible people, not just the firefighters from the Palisades and from Altadena, wildlife biologists who studied the animals that were the first to repopulate these areas, federal government employees like the meteorologists that predicted this stuff. All of them give me hope in the way in which they have approached this. Day laborers, by the way, who are out rebuilding and cleaning up, despite the fact that they’re under the crosshairs of this administration. I always find that in a catastrophe, there are hopeful threads. It’s easy to think about the negative parts of this, but to me, I’m also as uplifted as I’ve ever been after having a really hard year, and I think that that’s what this book was for me as much as anything, which was a cathartic process to work through.

For years, AI at work felt like a quiet helper in the background. It summarized meetings, suggested text, and answered questions when we asked. That era is ending. The latest AI agents are beginning to move through systems more like teammates. They join projects, update plans, and act across teams. For the first time, organizations are effectively bringing on colleagues that can see more of the workplace than any single person ever could. I’ve spent years building tools to give teams clarity and save them time, so I see the upside. But that shift forces a harder question: what does it really mean for an AI to “see everything” in a workplace? The ethical issue isn’t whether agents can technically access information. It is whether their access mirrors what a reasonable employee would encounter in the course of doing their job. When Visibility Turns Into Influence Most workplaces rely on role-based access and permissions to maintain order. People see only the information relevant to their role, and those boundaries shape how teams collaborate and how they resolve disagreements. AI agents complicate that system. If an agent has more access than it should, even by accident, it can surface information that changes how work is interpreted and shifts decisions away from the people meant to make them. These scenarios usually appear in small ways first. An employee might ask an agent a question and receive an answer based on sensitive information they did not realize was in the agent’s scope.  People also produce their best ideas through drafts, notes, and early sketches that are not meant for broad consumption. Even the chance that AI might leverage those early drafts changes how people ideate. They’ll start revising earlier, sharing less freely, and spending more time avoiding misinterpretation. Each incident can seem isolated, but together they alter how authority, context, and trust flow through an organization. What Responsible Use Should Look Like The central question for leaders is not what AI agents are capable of doing; it is what they should be allowed to see. Boundaries must be clear before these systems become part of daily work. An agent working on behalf of an employee should have the same access that employee has, no more and no less. Anything else creates uncertainty. Who can see what? Who can change what? That uncertainty erodes internal trust. Limiting agents to any other standard also creates problems. An agent that lacks access to shared context, public decisions, or common company knowledge will give incomplete or misleading answers. Ethical design is not about minimizing access. It is about giving agents enough accurate, live context to be genuinely useful. Responsibility also has to remain with people. Access defines what an agent can do; accountability defines who owns the outcome. When an agent takes an action, the individual who invoked it should be accountable for the result. Just like a manager owning the work done by their team, delegating tasks to AI can help with efficiency, but decision-making still belongs to the humans who direct the work. Private creative spaces deserve protection as well. Drafts, personal notes, and early explorations help employees test ideas before presenting them. These spaces do not need to be sealed off, but they should be clearly defined and respected. Preserving them supports healthier experimentation and a more open exchange of ideas. Transparency matters throughout this process. Protected spaces only work if the system around them is visible and understandable. When an agent recommends an action or executes one, employees should be able to understand, at a basic level, how it reached that conclusion. As companies adopt AI agents more widely, technical and organizational decisions will converge. The systems will influence how teams collaborate, how information moves, and how people feel about their work. This shapes whether AI becomes a supportive part of the workplace or a source of friction. The issue is no longer whether AI can see everything. It is how leaders define the limits, and how clearly they communicate those choices to the people who rely on them.

In today’s rapidly changing work environment, developing trust among team members is crucial for success. Yet, many organizations struggle to foster an atmosphere of collaboration and understanding, often resulting in communication breakdowns, conflicts, and a decrease in productivity. The inability to trust can be the result of misunderstanding, conflicting values, or misjudging others because they trigger us and remind us of a negative situation or experience in our past. Building our emotional intelligence can help us increase our awareness and become less prone to building up barriers to trust. “Trust isn’t built through charisma or authority—it’s built through emotional presence. Leaders who create environments where people feel emotionally safe, seen, and respected accelerate not just connection, but performance,” says Dawn Christian, the CEO of BeLeadership, a leadership coaching community.           Emotional intelligence means we become more effective at recognizing and managing our own emotions, as well as understanding and influencing the emotions of others. As an author of two books on emotional intelligence, I’ve found that by boosting emotional intelligence, leaders and employees can build a culture that reduces and eliminates many of the barriers that lead to a lack of trust. Emotional intelligence can be broken down into five major areas: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Through developing these areas, employees and leaders at all levels can become more adept at navigating through all the areas that build barriers to trust.   1. Self-awareness The first area is being able to reflect on situations. At the end of the day, everyone needs to take an inner journey and consider why they reacted the way they did to a situation. In hindsight, we could ask ourselves how well we managed our reactions in the moment. Would another way of interpreting and reacting have been more effective? Would the outcome have been more positive? Journaling is a known way to aid in the process of self-reflection. It helps us track emotions and reactions and look for patterns that keep coming up that we may want to work on changing. 2. Self-regulation We need to practice self-regulating our emotions. When we notice strong emotions emerging, we need to keep ourselves from reacting. For example, when we have a strong desire to act out from our emotions, count to 10 or remove ourselves from the situation. After taking time to think things through, it is unlikely that we would choose the same response we would if we reacted purely from our emotions. When we continually practice this, we will feel more confident that we have mastered our emotions and won’t react in a manner that we may later regret. “Busyness doesn’t just drain our energy—it erodes our emotional capacity . . . Breaking up with busyness isn’t about doing less—it’s about clearing the space where emotional intelligence, trust, and leadership actually take shape,” Christian points out. 3. Motivation A good practice is to always view a situation through the lens of how our reactions will serve us. Once we have a firm understanding of our goals—professionally and personally—it becomes easier to motivate ourselves. Once we have a clear picture of what we want from life, and where we are going, we are better able to hold ourselves accountable and not deviate from actions that prevent us from moving in the direction of our goals. With this comes a strong realization that we have to be able to collaborate and work as part of a team to succeed. This makes us the kind of person others trust and want to work with. 4. Empathy Practice active listening and empathy. Most of the time when someone is speaking, we are thinking of a response rather than really listening. Everyone has a need to feel that they have been heard. When others are speaking, pay full attention and let them know by your posture and body language that you are engaged. After they have spoken, ask questions to clarify that we have understood them correctly. Even if we do not agree with their perspective, it is crucial that they feel heard and respected. This is a major step towards building trust. 5. Social skills Continually build our social skills through activities that encourage collaboration. Any type of team-building activity is a good way to engage with others in an authentic and supportive manner. Activities in which people share both their successes and their struggles help show that we all have strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. Whenever we engage in activities that bring out more of our human side, we build stronger bridges between people and deepen trust.

The Food and Drug Administration commissioner’s effort to drastically shorten the review of drugs favored by President Donald Trump’s administration is causing alarm across the agency, stoking worries that the plan may run afoul of legal, ethical, and scientific standards long used to vet the safety and effectiveness of new medicines. Marty Makary’s program is causing new anxiety and confusion among staff already rocked by layoffs, buyouts, and leadership upheavals, according to seven current or recently departed staffers. The people spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss confidential agency matters. At the highest levels of the FDA, questions remain about which officials have the legal authority to sign off on drugs cleared under the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher program, which promises approval in as little as one month for medicines that support “U.S. national interests.” Traditionally, approval decisions have nearly always been handled by FDA review scientists and their immediate supervisors, not the agency’s political appointees and senior leaders. But drug reviewers say they’ve received little information about the new program’s workings. And some staffers working on a highly anticipated anti-obesity pill were recently told they can skip certain regulatory steps to meet top officials’ aggressive deadlines. Outside experts point out that FDA drug reviews—which range from six to 10 months—are already the fastest in the world. “The concept of doing a review in one to two months just does not have scientific precedent,” said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor at Harvard Medical School. “FDA cannot do the same detailed review that it does of a regular application in one to two months, and it doesn’t have the resources to do it.” On Thursday, Reuters reported that FDA officials have delayed the review of two drugs in the program, in part due to safety concerns, including the death of a patient taking one of the medications. Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said the voucher program prioritizes “gold standard scientific review” and aims to deliver “meaningful and effective treatments and cures.” The program remains popular at the White House, where pricing concessions announced by the Republican president have repeatedly been accompanied by FDA vouchers for drugmakers that agree to cut their prices. For instance, when the White House announced that Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk would reduce prices on their popular obesity drugs, FDA staffers had to scramble to vet new vouchers for both companies in time for Trump’s news conference, according to multiple people involved in the process. That’s sparked widespread concern that FDA drug reviews—long pegged to objective standards and procedures—have become open to political interference. “It’s extraordinary to have such an opaque application process, one that is obviously susceptible to politicization,” said Paul Kim, a former FDA attorney who now works with pharmaceutical clients. Top FDA officials declined to sign off on expedited approvals Many of the concerns around the program stem from the fact that it hasn’t been laid out in federal rules and regulations. The FDA already has more than a half-dozen programs intended to speed up or streamline reviews for promising drugs—all approved by Congress, with regulations written by agency staff. In contrast, information about the voucher program is mostly confined to an agency website. Drugmakers can apply by submitting a 350-word “statement of interest.” Increasingly, agency leaders such as Dr. Vinay Prasad, the FDA’s top medical officer and vaccine center director, have been contacting drugmakers directly about awarding vouchers. That’s created quandaries for FDA staffers on even basic questions, such as how to formally award a voucher to a company that didn’t request one. Nixon, the HHS spokesman, said that voucher submissions are evaluated by “a senior, multidisciplinary review committee,” led by Prasad. Questions about the legality of the program led the FDA’s then-drug director, Dr. George Tidmarsh, to decline to sign off on approvals under the pathway, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter. Tidmarsh resigned from the agency in November after a lawsuit challenging his conduct on issues unrelated to the voucher program. After his departure, Dr. Sara Brenner, the FDA’s principal deputy commissioner, was set to have the power to decide, but she also declined the role after looking further into the legal implications, according to the people. Currently, the agency’s deputy chief medical officer, Dr. Mallika Mundkur, who works under Prasad, is taking on the responsibility. Giving final approval to a drug carries significant legal risks, essentially certifying that the medicine meets FDA standards for safety and effectiveness. If unexpected safety problems later emerge, both the agency and individual staffers could be pulled into investigations or lawsuits. Traditionally, approval comes from FDA drug office directors, made in consultation with a team of reviewers. Under the voucher program, approval comes through a committee vote by senior agency leaders led by Prasad, according to multiple people familiar with the process. Staff reviewers don’t get a vote. “It is a complete reversal from the normal review process, which is traditionally led by the scientists who are the ones immersed in the data,” said Kesselheim, who is a lawyer and a medical researcher. Not everyone sees problems with the program. Dan Troy, the FDA’s top lawyer under President George W. Bush, a Republican, says federal law gives the commissioner broad discretion to reorganize the handling of drug reviews. Still, he says, the voucher program, like many of Makary’s initiatives, may be short-lived because it isn’t codified. “If you live by the press release then you die by the press release,” Troy said. “Anything that they’re doing now could be wiped out in a moment by the next administration.” The voucher program has ballooned after outreach by FDA officials Initially framed as a pilot program of no more than five drugs, it has expanded to 18 vouchers awarded, with more under consideration. That puts extra pressure on the agency’s drug center, where 20% of the staff has left through retirements, buyouts or resignations over the past year. When Makary unveiled the program in October, there were immediate concerns about the unprecedented power he would have in deciding which companies benefit. Makary then said that nominations for drugs would come from career staffers. Indeed, some of the early drugs were recommended by FDA reviewers, according to two people familiar with the process. They said FDA staffers deliberately selected drugs that could be vetted quickly. But, increasingly, selection decisions are led by Prasad or other senior officials, sometimes unbeknownst to FDA staff, according to three people. In one case, FDA reviewers learned from GlaxoSmithKline representatives that Prasad had contacted the company about a voucher. Access to Makary is limited because he does not use a government email account to do business, according to people familiar with the matter, breaking with longstanding precedent. Under pressure from drugmakers, some FDA reviewers were told they can skip steps Once a voucher is awarded, some drugmakers have their own interpretation of the review timeline—creating further confusion and anxiety among staff. Two people involved in the ongoing review of Eli Lilly’s anti-obesity pill said company executives initially told the FDA they expected the drug approved within two months. The timeline alarmed FDA reviewers because it did not include the agency’s standard 60-day prefiling period, when staffers check the application to ensure it isn’t missing essential information. That 60-day window has been in place for more than 30 years. Lilly pushed for a quicker filing turnaround, demanding one week. Eventually the agency and the company agreed to a two-week period. Lilly’s CEO, David Ricks, told attendees at a healthcare conference on Tuesday that the company expects FDA approval of its pill in the second quarter of the year. Nixon declined to comment on the specifics of Lilly’s review but said FDA reviewers can “adjust timelines as needed.” Staffers were pushed to keep the application moving forward, even though key pieces of data about the drug’s chemistry appeared to be missing, according to one person involved in the process. When reviewers raised concerns about gaps in the application, the person said, they were told by a senior FDA official that it was okay to overlook the regulations if the science is sound. Former reviewers and outside experts say that approach is the opposite of how FDA reviews should work: By following the regulations, staffers scientifically confirm the safety and effectiveness of drugs. Skipping review steps could also carry risks for drugmakers if future FDA leaders decide a drug wasn’t properly vetted. Like other experts, Kesselheim says the program may not last beyond the current administration. “They are fundamentally changing the application of the standards, but the underlying law remains what it is,” he said. “The hope is that one day we will return to these scientifically sound, legally sound principles.” —By Matthew Perrone, AP health writer The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

U.S. President Donald Trump suggested Friday that he may punish countries with tariffs if they don’t back the U.S. controlling Greenland, a message that came as a bipartisan Congressional delegation sought to lower tensions in the Danish capital. Trump for months has insisted that the U.S. should control Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark, and said earlier this week that anything less than the Arctic island being in U.S. hands would be “unacceptable.” During an unrelated event at the White House about rural health care, he recounted Friday how he had threatened European allies with tariffs on pharmaceuticals. “I may do that for Greenland too,” Trump said. “I may put a tariff on countries if they don’t go along with Greenland, because we need Greenland for national security. So I may do that,” he said. He had not previously mentioned using tariffs to try to force the issue. Earlier this week, the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland met in Washington this week with U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. That encounter didn’t resolve the deep differences, but did produce an agreement to set up a working group—on whose purpose Denmark and the White House then offered sharply diverging public views. European leaders have insisted that it is only for Denmark and Greenland to decide on matters concerning the territory, and Denmark said this week that it was increasing its military presence in Greenland in cooperation with allies. A relationship that “we need to nurture” In Copenhagen, a group of senators and members of the House of Representatives met Friday with Danish and Greenlandic lawmakers, and with leaders including Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. Delegation leader Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, thanked the group’s hosts for “225 years of being a good and trusted ally and partner” and said that “we had a strong and robust dialogue about how we extend that into the future.” Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said after meeting lawmakers that the visit reflected a strong relationship over decades and “it is one that we need to nurture.” She told reporters that “Greenland needs to be viewed as our ally, not as an asset, and I think that’s what you’re hearing with this delegation.” The tone contrasted with that emanating from the White House. Trump has sought to justify his calls for a U.S. takeover by repeatedly claiming that China and Russia have their own designs on Greenland, which holds vast untapped reserves of critical minerals. The White House hasn’t ruled out taking the territory by force. “We have heard so many lies, to be honest and so much exaggeration on the threats towards Greenland,” said Aaja Chemnitz, a Greenlandic politician and member of the Danish parliament who took part in Friday’s meetings. “And mostly, I would say the threats that we’re seeing right now is from the U.S. side.” Murkowski emphasized the role of Congress in spending and in conveying messages from constituents. “I think it is important to underscore that when you ask the American people whether or not they think it is a good idea for the United States to acquire Greenland, the vast majority, some 75%, will say, we do not think that that is a good idea,” she said. Along with Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, Murkowski has introduced bipartisan legislation that would prohibit the use of U.S. Defense or State department funds to annex or take control of Greenland or the sovereign territory of any NATO member state without that ally’s consent or authorization from the North Atlantic Council. Inuit council criticizes White House statements The dispute is looming large in the lives of Greenlanders. Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said on Tuesday that “if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the EU.”” The chair of the Nuuk, Greenland-based Inuit Circumpolar Council, which represents around 180,000 Inuit from Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russia’s Chukotka region on international issues, said persistent statements from the White House that the U.S. must own Greenland offer “a clear picture of how the US administration views the people of Greenland, how the U.S. administration views Indigenous peoples, and peoples that are few in numbers.” Sara Olsvig told the Associated Press in Nuuk that the issue is “how one of the biggest powers in the world views other peoples that are less powerful than them. And that really is concerning.” Indigenous Inuit in Greenland do not want to be colonized again, she said. —By Daniel Niemann and Darlene Superville, Associated Press

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said on Friday it will start including ads for those who use the app for free or have the least expensive of its paid subscription tiers, ChatGPT Go. In the coming weeks, the company plans to start testing those ads in the U.S., which will directly relate to user prompts and conversations “so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay,” the company said. According to OpenAI, the ads will be “clearly labeled” at the bottom of the chat, and users can turn off personalization if they want. As for whether the ads will influence the answers ChatGPT provides, OpenAI said the “responses are driven by what’s objectively useful, never by advertising,” and user data and conversations “are protected and never sold to advertisers.” ChatGPT Go, which launched in India last August and has since rolled out in 170 countries, is now coming to the U.S. and everywhere the AI chatbot is available. It’s ChatGPT’s fastest-growing plan, and OpenAI claims it is “among the most affordable AI subscriptions globally.” (Of course, many AI chatbots are free.) ChatGPT Go costs $8 a month and offers access to its latest model, GPT‑5.2 Instant, giving users expanded access to messaging, image creation, file uploads, and memory, the company said in a statement. For those who want to avoid ads, more premium subscriptions come ad-free. With this launch, ChatGPT now offers three subscription tiers globally: ChatGPT Go at $8 per month, ChatGPT Plus at $20 per month, and ChatGPT Pro at $200 per month.

Stocks wavered in afternoon trading on Wall Street Friday as the first week of corporate earnings season closes out with markets trading near record levels. The S&P 500 rose 0.1% after shifting between small gains and losses. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 52 points, or 0.1%, as of 3:17 p.m. ET. The Nasdaq composite rose 0.1%. Technology stocks were the strongest forces behind the market’s moves. The S&P 500 has slightly more losers than gainers, but several big technology stocks made strong gains and countered losses elsewhere. Nvidia rose 0.4%, Broadcom rose 2.8%, and Micron Technology rose 6.8%. All three are semiconductor companies that are among several Big Tech companies with outsized valuations that often push the market higher or lower. A handful of regional U.S. banks reported their earnings following mixed reports from their larger peers. Pittsburgh’s PNC jumped 3.9% after it beat Wall Street’s fourth-quarter targets, but Regions Financial fell 3% after reporting results that missed forecasts. Outside of the banking sector, transport company J.B. Hunt Transport Services fell 1% after reporting mixed quarterly financial results. The latest round of earnings updates from companies could help give Wall Street a better sense of how consumers are spending their money and how businesses are operating amid economic concerns brought on by inflation and tariffs. Results from the technology sector are being scrutinized by investors trying to figure out whether the high stock prices fueled by the craze around artificial intelligence are justified. “Despite the strong start to 2026, we would not be surprised if markets experience volatility in the coming weeks as fourth-quarter earnings progress and the threat of escalating geopolitical tensions remains,” wrote Doug Beath, global equity strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, in a note to investors. Wall Street will have a broader mix of earnings to review next week, coming from airlines, industrial companies, and technology companies. United Airlines, 3M, and Intel are all scheduled to release their quarterly earnings results next week. Crude oil prices rose after dropping sharply on Thursday. The price of U.S. crude oil rose 0.4% to $59.44 and the price of Brent crude, the international standard, rose 0.6% to $64.13. Oil prices have been volatile amid widespread protests in Iran against that country’s leadership and President Donald Trump’s warnings that the U.S. “will come to their rescue.” Gold prices, which have also been volatile this week, fell. Prices for the precious metal, often viewed as a safe haven amid economic and geopolitical uncertainty, fell 0.6%, but are still up more than 5% so far in January. Treasury yields moved higher in the bond market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.23%, from 4.17% late Thursday. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for what the Federal Reserve will do, rose to 3.60%, from 3.57% late Thursday. The Fed’s next policy meeting on interest rates is in two weeks, and Wall Street is betting that it will maintain its current benchmark interest rate. The central bank is trying to balance a slowing jobs market with stubbornly high inflation. Updates on inflation this week showed that prices remain above the Fed’s 2% goal. The U.S. central bank will get one more update on inflation next week when the government releases the personal consumption expenditures price index, or PCE. It is Fed’s preferred measure for inflation. European markets fell, and markets in Asia were mixed. Taiwan’s benchmark index rose 1.9% after its government signed a trade deal with the U.S. China, which claims the self-governed island as its own territory, protested the agreement. The deal with Taiwan comes amid an ongoing trade war between the U.S. and much of the world. Uncertainty over tariffs have raised concerns about inflation and economic damage because of higher costs for businesses and consumers. Canada is the latest to shift its partnerships because of the uncertainty. It has agreed to cut its 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars in return for lower tariffs on Canadian farm products as part of the break with the U.S. Tesla rose 0.4%, and Rivian fell 2.6%. —By Damian J. Troise, AP business writer

The northern lights could light up the skies above several U.S. states this weekend. The aurora borealis will be visible January 16 and 17 over North America, and most prevalent for those states on the northern border of the mainland, according to a forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center.  Friday offers the highest odds of visibility for most Americans, with the northern lights potentially visible in states stretching from Washington to Maine, and as far south as Iowa. And Friday’s aurora could be brighter, with a score of 5 out of 9 on an index measuring the three-day geomagnetic forecast.  For aurora borealis fanatics, NOAA offers an even more detailed 30- to 90-minute forecast of the location and intensity of the lights. This weekend will mark the first in 2026 when the northern lights are predicted to be visible in the U.S. When and where to see the northern lights Northern lights can bring vibrant greens and purples to the night sky, and the best aurora is typically in the 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. period. NOAA recommends facing north in a spot away from light pollution for the best viewing. According to NOAA, the aurora borealis could be visible in up to 15 states on Friday: Alaska, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.  If you seem to be seeing the northern lights more frequently than you recall in the past—or, at the very least, hearing about them—it’s true: They’ve become a more common sighting in recent years. Astronomers say that’s because the sun is at the maximum of its 11-year solar cycle. “During solar maximum, the sun blazes with bright flares and solar eruptions,” according to information from NASA about the current solar cycle that began in 2019. Look to the sky The northern lights won’t be the only highlight of the night sky this weekend: If you missed the optimal naked-eye viewing of Jupiter last weekend, when it was its biggest and brightest for the year, the largest planet in our solar system will also light up the sky this weekend with a bright orange color. With small binoculars, you may even be able to view Jupiter’s four moons.  Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune will also be visible this weekend, according to the Sky Live.

Meet the new CEO of Sam’s Club: Latriece Watkins. As you’ll hear from my interview with Watkins on the January 15 episode of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies podcast, she is a Walmart veteran who began her career in the real estate division in 2006. Over the next two decades, she rose up through the ranks to become Walmart’s chief merchant in 2023. With responsibility for choosing the $500 billion worth of products Walmart sells every year, that made her one of the most powerful people in the retail industry. In recent years, Watkins has made a deliberate attempt to woo higher-income consumers into stores by introducing higher-end brands, like Sonos and La Roche-Posay, as well as elevating its fashion, home, and food private labels. Her team’s product curation appears to be working: In recent quarters, Walmart has been gaining market share among households that make upwards of $100,000 a year. Now Watkins has been tasked with running Walmart’s membership club, which generated $90.2 billion in net sales across its 600 stores in 2024—making up roughly 13% of Walmart’s total revenue. In many ways, her promotion makes sense, since Sam’s Club customers tend to be more affluent than those from Walmart. Watkins has proven she’s skilled at meeting the needs of these customers. Watkins will aim to steal market share from Costco, the biggest player in the membership warehouse club industry, which generated $269.9 billion last year, an 8.1% increase over its 2024 sales. Part of Costco’s success has come from its private label, Kirkland, which drives roughly a third of its total revenue. Watkins is skilled at developing successful private labels. It was under her leadership that Walmart launched Bettergoods, its first new private-label grocery brand in two decades. Every aspect of the brand—from its chic, colorful packaging to its focus on global flavors—was carefully designed to win over today’s consumers. And yet 90% of products in the line cost less than $5. Sam’s Club has its own private label, Member’s Mark, which also generates about a third of its revenue. Part of Watkins’s mission will no doubt be to ensure that Member’s Mark grows as a business and continues to evolve to keep pace with changing consumer tastes. In some ways, Watkins has the opportunity to be more experimental at Sam’s Club than she was at Walmart. As a smaller, nimbler brand, Sam’s Club has become something of an innovation lab to test out retail concepts that, if successful, may be adopted by Walmart. For instance, in 2024 Sam’s Club unveiled cashierless checkouts in a few stores: Customers simply scan products themselves on their Sam’s Club app, pay for them using their credit card, then walk out the door. (Entrances now have arches equipped with computer vision to check what’s in a person’s cart, avoiding manual receipt checking.) In 2022, Sam’s Club set out to remove 40 potentially harmful ingredients in the Member’s Mark line—a goal it achieved last week. Walmart used learnings from this process to make Bettergoods products free of those ingredients. Watkins has helped Walmart navigate through difficult times, from a volatile economy to new tariffs to inflation. She’s well-equipped to steer Sam’s Club through these choppy waters.

During the Hollywood strikes of 2023, a major sticking point for members of the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA was artificial intelligence. When the unions ultimately came to an agreement with Hollywood studios, they won key protections for actors regarding digital replicas and guardrails for how generative AI could be used in writers’ rooms.  The stipulation that studios could not create digital replicas of actors—at least not without their consent—reflects growing concerns over how AI might compromise the livelihoods of artists and creatives.  Now it seems some performers may be looking for new ways to protect themselves against more general misuse: A January 13 Wall Street Journal report revealed that actor Matthew McConaughey filed eight trademark applications that are intended to deter unauthorized AI-generated simulations of his voice or likeness.  The trademarks, which have been approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, include several video clips of McConaughey, along with one of his most iconic moments: audio of him saying, “Alright, alright, alright,” a line from the 1993 movie Dazed and Confused that has since become a catchphrase.  “My team and I want to know that when my voice or likeness is ever used, it’s because I approved and signed off on it,” McConaughey told The Journal. “We want to create a clear perimeter around ownership, with consent and attribution the norm in an AI world.” McConaughey has reason to take preemptive action. AI has already enabled fraudulent ads that used the likeness of actors like Tom Hanks to promote “wonder drugs.” Just this week, there was a deepfake video circulating on the internet that featured eerily realistic face swaps with the cast of Stranger Things—an example of how easily AI can be exploited by virtually anyone. The video has more than 15 million views (and counting) on X. Another creator shared a similar video using the likeness of Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street.  By trademarking himself, McConaughey is looking to prevent this kind of content from being monetized. From a legal perspective, Orly Lobel—a law professor and the director of the Center for Employment and Labor Policy at the University of San Diego—says this is a “novel way to combat deepfakes.” The traditional name and likeness protections under state law, otherwise known as publicity rights, are meant to protect against the unauthorized use of an actor’s image to sell products.  But those laws are inadequate in the new era of generative AI, according to Lobel, since AI content can be monetized on the internet. There is less clarity on what constitutes commercial use on those platforms. McConaughey’s decision to trademark his voice and likeness is “a hybrid approach, and it elevates the protections to federal claims,” Lobel says.  Even McConaughey’s lawyers—among them prominent entertainment attorney Kevin Yorn—have noted that they’re not entirely sure whether this measure of protection would hold up in court. “I don’t know what a court will say in the end,” Yorn told The Journal. “But we have to at least test this.”  A trademark also primarily protects commercial use, though McConaughey’s lawyers seem to believe the risk of federal claims may act as a deterrent and discourage people from creating any kind of AI-generated content with his likeness.  Still, this could set a precedent for other actors and performers to take similar action at a time when creatives are fighting an uphill battle against the use of AI—and gearing up for another contract negotiation that will likely revive a number of AI-related concerns.  “I think [this] is a signal that actors and others want attribution and consent and are ready to fight back,” Lobel says.

The data centers that power the AI boom also need power themselves—and a lot of it. Now the Trump administration wants the tech companies cashing in on AI to foot a bigger part of the bill. The administration said Friday that it would urge major East Coast power grid operator PJM Interconnection to hold an emergency power auction for tech companies, inviting them to bid on 15-year contracts for new electricity generation. Under the plan, the auction would raise billions of dollars that would then go directly toward building out $15 billion in new power plants.  Tech companies would be locked into paying for the power they buy at auction over the lifetime of the long-term contracts, whether they wind up using the electricity or not, a measure designed to smooth out spikes in electricity costs and offer “15-year revenue certainty” for new plants.  The governors of Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other states in PJM’s area signed on to the proposal to remake America’s power supply. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also support the plan, which urges the power grid operator to make changes but isn’t binding.  “For two years, I’ve been sounding the alarm, explaining that without fundamental changes to PJM, Pennsylvanians were going to be paying more and more, and getting nothing in return,” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said in a press release. “I’ve been working with my fellow governors and federal energy officials to push PJM to make needed reforms, and I’m glad the White House is following Pennsylvania’s lead and adopting the solutions we’ve been pushing for.”  In a fact sheet on the proposal published on the Department of Energy’s website, the Trump administration is also encouraging PJM to cap what existing power plants charge in an effort to pass along savings to residential power users. The DOE described the measures as “temporary,” noting that the changes could stave off painful future price increases and make blackouts less likely. Worries grow over resource-hungry AI Acknowledging the growing backlash around AI data centers, on January 13 Microsoft announced a new initiative that it claims will protect residential customers from eating the cost of its AI buildout. The tech giant says it will “work closely” with utility companies on the price of electricity, likening its AI expansion to other historic national infrastructure improvements like “canals, railroads, the electrical grid, or the interstate highway system.” “Communities value new jobs and property tax revenue, but not if they come with higher power bills or tighter water supplies,” Brad Smith, Microsoft vice chair and president, wrote in a blog post. “Without addressing these issues directly, even supportive communities will question the role of data centers in their backyard.” Trump hinted at Microsoft’s plan earlier this week in a Truth Social post, stating that new policies would ensure Americans don’t “pick up the tab” for higher energy bills. “I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers,” Trump wrote. “We are the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and Number One in AI. Data Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE but, the big Technology Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way.’” Americans are starting to blame AI for high bills In the AI arms race, tech’s hottest companies often frame their insatiable appetite for electricity as an inevitability rather than its own problem. But as the cost of electricity goes up, Americans may disagree. Tech giants are pouring billions into massive electricity- and water-guzzling server warehouses to fuel their AI ambitions. In 2025 alone, five companies making big bets on AI invested $399 billion into the technology and its accompanying infrastructure, and that number is expected to shoot up to $600 billion by 2028. Those investments have prompted broad concerns that the stock market’s concentrated growth around AI represents a single point of failure if the industry starts to wobble. Other worries are much less theoretical. Americans are grappling with higher power bills and they’re starting to blame the tech industry. A nationwide survey last year found that two-thirds of those polled believe AI is driving up their electricity bill, and most said they couldn’t afford a $20-per-month increase.  Beyond power, data centers need massive amounts of water for cooling all of those servers humming day and night. In the Dalles, Oregon, city officials are seeking to buy part of a nearby national forest to get access to more water—a move that is alarming some residents and environmental groups. While officials have claimed the water will meet growing population demands, Google is the city’s thirstiest resident; the tech company’s data centers already consume a third of the city’s water.

Breaking with the United States, Canada has agreed to cut its 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars in return for lower tariffs on Canadian farm products, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Friday. Carney made the announcement after two days of meetings with Chinese leaders. He said there would be an initial annual cap of 49,000 vehicles on Chinese EV exports coming into Canada at a tariff rate of 6.1%, growing to about 70,000 over five years. China will reduce its total tariff on canola seeds, a major Canadian export, from 84% to about 15%, he told reporters. “Our relationship has progressed in recent months with China. It is more predictable and you see results coming from that,” Carney said. Carney hasn’t been able to reach a deal with U.S. President Donald Trump to reduce some tariffs that are punishing some key sectors of the Canadian economy and Trump has previously talked about making Canada the 51st state. Earlier Friday, Carney and Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged to improve relations between their two nations after years of acrimony. Xi told Carney in a meeting at the Great Hall of the People that he is willing to continue working to improve ties, noting that talks have been underway on restoring and restarting cooperation since the two held an initial meeting in October on the sidelines of a regional economic conference in South Korea. Carney said that “this agreement will drive considerable Chinese investment in Canada’s auto sector, creating good careers in Canada and accelerating our progress towards a net zero [emissions] future and the auto industry of the future.” Nelson Wiseman, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto, called Friday’s deal good for both China and Canada. “Canada is diversifying its bets economically,” Wiseman said. “And China is succeeding in driving a small wedge between Canada and the U.S.” Improve global governance Carney, the first Canadian prime minister to visit China in eight years, told Xi that better relations would help improve a global governance system that he described as “under great strain.” Later, he said at the news conference that the system may give way at least in part to country-to-country or regional agreements rather than the global ones that have underpinned economic growth in the post-World War II era. “The question is: What gets built in that place? How much of a patchwork is it?” he said. The new reality reflects in large part the so-called America-first approach of Trump. The tariffs he has imposed have hit both the Canadian and Chinese economies. Carney, who has met with several leading Chinese companies in Beijing, said ahead of his trip that his government is focused on building an economy less reliant on the U.S. at what he called “a time of global trade disruption.” A Canadian business owner in China called Carney’s visit game-changing, saying it re-establishes dialogue, respect and a framework between the two nations. “These three things we didn’t have,” said Jacob Cooke, the CEO of WPIC Marketing + Technologies, which helps exporters navigate the Chinese market. “The parties were not talking for years.” Canada had been aligned with US on tariffs Canada had followed the U.S. in putting tariffs of 100% on EVs from China and 25% on steel and aluminum under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Carney’s predecessor. China responded by imposing duties of 100% on Canadian canola oil and meal and 25% on pork and seafood. It added a 75.8% tariff on canola seeds last August. Collectively, the import taxes effectively closed the Chinese market to Canadian canola, an industry group has said. Overall, China’s imports from Canada fell 10.4% last year to $41.7 billion, according to Chinese trade data. Carney tried to address the concerns of Canadian automakers and auto workers by saying the initial cap on Chinese EV imports was about 3% of the 1.8 million vehicles sold in Canada annually and that, in exchange, China is expected to begin investing in the Canadian auto industry within three years. “We’re building [a] new part of our car industry, building cars of the future in partnership, bringing affordable autos for Canadians at a time when affordability is top of mind, and doing it at a scale that allows for a smooth transition in the sector,” he said. “For the exchange of a small piece of the Canadian market, we have a commitment. We are waiting for an investment commitment in Canada. The real leaders of the new industry. So it’s an agreement that will create the future for our industry.” But Ontario Premier Doug Ford, the leader of Canada’s most populous province where the country’s auto sector is based, blasted the deal. “Make no mistake: China now has a foothold in the Canadian market and will use it to their full advantage at the expense of Canadian workers,” Ford posted on social media. “Worse, by lowering tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles this lopsided deal risks closing the door on Canadian automakers to the American market, our largest export destination.” China sees an opening under Trump China is hoping Trump’s pressure tactics on allies such as Canada will drive them to pursue a foreign policy that is less aligned with the United States. Carney, though, noted Canada’s relationship with the U.S. is much more multifaceted, deeper and broader. Canada and China have different systems and disagree on issues such as human rights, he said, limiting the scope of their engagement even as they seek ways to cooperate on areas of common interest. The Canadian leader leaves China on Saturday and visits Qatar on Sunday before attending the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland next week. He will meet business leaders and investors in Qatar to promote trade and investment, his office said. —By Ken Moritsugu and Rob Gillies, Associated Press Associated Press business writer Chan Ho-him contributed to this report.

Quickfire question: Who, in a business, should be responsible for AI? Most of us would assume the tech side of an organization should hold the bag: the CTO, CIO, CDO, CMO or perhaps even a new chief AI officer. And while this direction certainly made sense in the early wave of AI adoption—when it was still a mere tool—the rise of agentic AI (read: autonomous, intelligent agents that behave less like gadgets and more like colleagues) forces us to rethink our assumptions. Which means we should be asking whether AI should be treated as a technology or as a member of the team. And if it’s the latter, is HR actually the role best positioned to oversee it? WHY HR IS RE-EMERGING AS A STRATEGIC AI PLAYER While some might think that AI will diminish the influence of chief people officers, human-centered agentic design is bringing HR back to the center of business transformation. After all, autonomous AI could transform the very definition of an HR role: managing workflows, employee experiences, and workplace culture. One challenge blocking effective AI management is often rooted in organizations’ outdated design models. Traditional enterprise structures, especially in the Fortune 500, lag years behind the market and best practice. For instance, until recently CFOs were often leading AI decisions, largely optimizing for cost savings only. But just because a machine can do something doesn’t mean it should. Research by Gather found that 95% of AI pilots fail to deliver meaningful business impact because they’re overly based on algorithms. Meanwhile, employees spend $13 billion annually on their own subscriptions as enterprise tools don’t meet their needs. Human-centered design is the missing ingredient for AI success at scale; companies that design for human needs achieve faster ROI, lower risk, and sustainable competitive advantage. Fortunately, I can see a more progressive mindset emerging. It’s no longer “How do we do the same with fewer people?” but “How do we help the same people do more with AI?” And instead of “What roles can AI replace?” it’s “What roles can only humans perform?” These reframed attitudes make the people function central to AI transformation. If AI is treated as an employee-like resource that affects experience, workflow, and culture, HR becomes its logical home. REINVENT HR: INTRODUCING THE CHIEF RESOURCE OFFICER But if AI really is joining the workforce, HR must evolve beyond managing just “human” resources. In the agentic era, the function becomes responsible for orchestrating all faculties: human and digital. Enter the chief resource officer (CRO). This is a new role that would reflect AI’s real place in a company, responsible for integrating AI into workforce planning, ensuring ethical and effective use, and promoting a culture that encourages augmentation over replacement. Mic drop, I know. Now hear me out. We’ve seen similar transformations before. The chief revenue officer didn’t exist until CFO priorities shifted, and suddenly organizations needed a new leader to capitalize on growth opportunities. AI represents a similar inflection point, one that expands HR’s mandate rather than diminishes it. THE REAL CHALLENGE? UPSKILLING THE C-SUITE The biggest barrier to this shift will be leadership readiness. Many existing HR managers are not yet AI experts, and they’re often stereotyped as preferring traditional processes and workflows. But as companies adopt agentic systems, CROs will become core stakeholders. They’ll need fluency in data governance, workflow management, and experience design. Any AI work integrations must be human-centered and, from an agentic perspective, negate the chances of garbage in/out. As a result, CRO training and upskilling, whether performed in-house or with the help of an external partner, become more important than ever. The risks of unwittingly fostering an AI knowledge gap are real. At Gather, we partnered with a major global financial services company whose lifecycle management systems weren’t communicating properly with its AI capabilities—resulting in churn, operational escalations, increased risk, and inconsistent messaging to card members. But the problems were organizational, rather than technological. Gather interviewed five core user groups to map the complete automation lifecycle (intake to execution), identifying opportunities to improve efficiency and consistency. Then, we created assets to showcase automation use cases and build stakeholder awareness, introducing structured data models for better reporting, governance, and reuse. So far, the changes have proved a huge success—powering significant progress for the business’s automation adoption goals. DESIGN A HUMAN-CENTERED AI FUTURE Thriving in the agentic era starts with asking another quickfire question: What work must remain human? Creativity, empathy, judgment, and relationship-building remain irreplaceable, and these are the areas that determine long-term business success. So, a new CRO must: Bring HR into AI strategy early Upskill executives together, not in silos Treat AI as a collaborator rather than a cost-reduction tool Design systems where both humans and agents can thrive Far from diminishing HR’s role, AI will expand it. As agentic systems take on more responsibility, HR and the chief resource officer will become some of the most important stewards of the modern workforce. Ultimately, AI won’t replace people—but it will replace organizations that fail to redesign around them. Justin Tobin is founder and CEO of Gather.

If drivers want to switch away from a completely gas-powered car to something electric, they have a few options. Namely, battery electric vehicles, hybrids, or plug-in hybrids (PHEVs). All are seen as a way to reduce transportation emissions and move away from gas-guzzling internal combustion cars.  But it turns out that plug-in hybrid owners may not actually be plugging in their vehicles, making PHEVs not quite the environmental solution that they would appear to be. General Motors CEO Mary Barra, speaking this week at the Automotive Press Association conference in Detroit, touched on this reality when she discussed GM’s plans for electric and hybrid vehicles. “What we also know today with plug-in hybrids is that most people don’t plug them in,” Barra said. “So that’s why we’re trying to be very thoughtful about what we do from a hybrid and a plug-in hybrid perspective.”  Hybrids as a solution to EV sales growth EVs are seen as a crucial climate solution. In the U.S., transportation accounts for the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, and switching to electric vehicles cuts those emissions and reduces air pollution. The recent growth in EV sales meant that transportation emissions stayed relatively flat in 2025, despite an increase in road traffic (and an increase in electricity emissions at large).  But the rate of that sales growth has been slowing, and is expected to slow even more in 2026, in part because the Trump administration ended federal subsidies that helped people purchase EVs. With the end of those tax credits, plus tariffs and bad consumer sentiment tainting EV sales, automakers have looked to hybrids as a way to still get customers into more efficient cars.  GM is one of those automakers. In 2024, the company said it planned to bring plug-in hybrid options to North America in 2027.  At the conference this week, Barra said that while GM is enthusiastically investing in EVs “because we think that’s the endgame,” the automaker is still “continuing to evaluate” hybrid and plug-in hybrids. Plug-in hybrids don’t need to be plugged in If drivers aren’t plugging in their plug-in hybrids, though, then that vehicle option isn’t as helpful for the climate as it seems.  There are two main types of hybrids: HEVs, or hybrid electric vehicles, which use regenerative braking to recharge the battery, and PHEVs, or plug-in hybrids, which can be plugged in just like an EV to charge. (PHEVs also allow regenerative braking to charge the battery—just by a smaller amount.) But plug-in hybrids don’t need to be plugged in to work. Plugging those vehicles into an EV charger will make them more efficient, and can allow drivers to avoid using their gas engine at all. However, they can still be driven without a charge and rely solely on gas. Doing so could make plug-in hybrids even less fuel-efficient than gas-only cars, according to Consumer Reports.  “For example, once the BMW 330e xDrive sedan’s 20-mile electric range is exhausted, it only gets 25 mpg—3 mpg less than the conventional 330i xDrive’s EPA rating of 28 mpg,” per the outlet. That’s likely because a plug-in hybrid’s battery increases the vehicle’s overall weight, making them less fuel-efficient. (Because of their batteries, electric vehicles are heavier than gas-powered cars.) The climate reality of plug-in hybrids So, are plug-in hybrids’ climate benefits actually overblown? Research says yes.  An October 2025 report from Transport and Environment, a European advocacy group for clean transportation, found that plug-in hybrids are “a diversion on the road to zero emissions.” The real-world carbon dioxide emissions of plug-in hybrids, the report found, are nearly five times the ”official” emissions estimates.  European Commission driving data released in 2024 came to a slightly different conclusion, but showed the same trend: Plug-in hybrids produce about 3.5 times the official emissions determined in lab tests for regulatory purposes, that report found. Basically, regulatory assessments to determine emissions assume that 84% of PHEV drivers operate their vehicles primarily with the battery. In reality, only about 27% do so. Data on U.S. plug-in hybrid drivers shows the same issue. A 2022 report by the International Council of Clean Transportation found that for plug-in hybrids in the U.S., “real-world electric drive share may be 26% to 56% lower, and real-world fuel consumption may be 42% to 67% higher than assumed within the EPA’s labeling program for light-duty vehicles.” How efficient, and helpful to the environment, that plug-in hybrids really are, then, depends on their drivers. That’s why environmental experts—and even Barra herself—say that EVs are still ultimately the endgame for the auto industry.

Social media companies have revoked access to about 4.7 million accounts identified as belonging to children in Australia since the country banned use of the platforms by those under 16, officials said. “We stared down everybody who said it couldn’t be done, some of the most powerful and rich companies in the world and their supporters,” communications minister Anika Wells told reporters on Friday. “Now Australian parents can be confident that their kids can have their childhoods back.” The figures, reported to Australia’s government by 10 social media platforms, were the first to show the scale of the landmark ban since it was enacted in December over fears about the effects of harmful online environments on young people. The law provoked fraught debates in Australia about technology use, privacy, child safety and mental health and has prompted other countries to consider similar measures. Officials said the figure was encouraging Under Australian law, Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, and Twitch face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($33.2 million) if they fail to take reasonable steps to remove the accounts of Australian children younger than 16. Messaging services such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are exempt. To verify age, platforms can either request copies of identification documents, use a third party to apply age estimation technology to an account holder’s face, or make inferences from data already available, such as how long an account has been held. About 2.5 million Australians are aged between 8 and 15, said the country’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, and past estimates suggested 84% of 8- to 12-year-olds held social media accounts. It was not known how many accounts were held across the 10 platforms but Inman Grant said the figure of 4.7 million “deactivated or restricted” was encouraging. “We’re preventing predatory social media companies from accessing our children,” Inman Grant said. The 10 biggest companies covered by the ban were compliant with it and had reported removal figures to Australia’s regulator on time, the commissioner said. She added that social media companies were expected to shift their efforts from enforcing the ban to preventing children from creating new accounts or otherwise circumventing the prohibition. Meta removed 550,000 accounts Australian officials didn’t break the figures down by platform. But Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, said this week that by the day after the ban came into effect it had removed nearly 550,000 accounts belonging to users understood to be under 16. In the blog post divulging the figures, Meta criticized the ban and said smaller platforms where the ban doesn’t apply might not prioritize safety. The company also noted browsing platforms would still present content to children based on algorithms—a concern that led to the ban’s enactment. The law was widely popular among parents and child safety campaigners. Online privacy advocates and some groups representing teenagers opposed it, with the latter citing the support found in online spaces by vulnerable young people or those geographically isolated in Australia’s sprawling rural areas. Some said they had managed to fool age-assessing technologies or were helped by parents or older siblings to circumvent the ban. Other countries might follow Since Australia began debating the measures in 2024, other countries have considered following suit. Denmark’s government is among them, saying in November that it had planned to implement a social media ban for children under 15. “The fact that in spite of some skepticism out there, it’s working and being replicated now around the world, is something that is a source of Australian pride,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Friday. Opposition lawmakers have suggested that young people have circumvented the ban easily or are migrating to other apps that are less scrutinized than the largest platforms. Inman Grant said Friday that data seen by her office showed a spike in downloads of alternative apps when the ban was enacted but not a spike in usage. “There is no real long-term trends yet that we can say but we’re engaging,” she said. Meanwhile, she said, the regulator she heads planned to introduce “world-leading AI companion and chatbot restrictions in March.” She didn’t disclose further details. —Charlotte Graham-McLay, Associated Press

Almost 1 million Frigidaire mini-fridges are being recalled because they pose the potential to catch fire, according to a notice from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) released on Thursday. The notice expands an earlier recall from 2024. Canada-based Curtis International is recalling another 330,000 mini-fridges, on top of the 634,000 units it recalled back in July of 2024. The company has received at least six reports of the model EFMIS121 mini-fridges catching fire and resulting in property damage, per the CPSC notice. The mini-fridges were sold exclusively at Target stores nationwide and online at Target.com from January 2020 through October 2023, for around $30. What is the reason for the Frigidaire recall? The mini-fridges’ internal electrical components can short-circuit and ignite the surrounding plastic housing, posing fire and burn hazards.  What are the product details? This recall covers Curtis International six-can Frigidaire-brand mini-fridges, model EFMIS121, with limited serial numbers, in addition to certain mini-fridges with model numbers EFMIS129, EFMIS137, EFMIS149, and EFMIS175 that were previously recalled. “Frigidaire” is printed on the front of the units. The model and serial numbers are on a label on the back of the mini-fridge. This recall includes only the serial numbers identified below. The items were sold in the color red at Target stores.  Brand and product name: Frigidaire-brand mini-fridges, model EFMIS121 (plus EFMIS129, EFMIS137, EFMIS149, and EFMIS175 from a previous recall) Units: About 330,000 Manufacturer: ShangYu North Electron Manufacture Co. Ltd. of China Importer: Curtis International Ltd. of Canada   Manufactured in: China Recall number: 26-199 Recall Date: January 15, 2026 What to do if you own one of the mini-fridges Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled mini-fridges and follow the instructions to register for a refund at recallrtr.com/minifridge. Consumers should unplug and cut the power cord and write “Recall” using a permanent marker on the front door of the unit. Consumers should dispose of the recalled mini-fridges in accordance with local and state regulations.

For a moment, Eric Adams was riding high. Fresh off trips to Dubai and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the now jobless ex-mayor of New York City was back in Times Square on Monday to announce his first initiative as a private citizen: a new cryptocurrency coin that would also serve to beat back antisemitism and “anti-Americanism.” “We’re about to change the game,” he promised, without describing how, exactly, the digital asset would support those lofty ambitions. “This thing is going to take off like crazy.” But after surging to a nearly $600 million valuation within minutes of its launch, the new coin, dubbed NYC Token, went into free fall, losing nearly 75% of its value by that evening. The drop came after an account linked to the token’s creation withdrew $2.5 million worth of coins, according to the crypto-analytics firm Bubblemaps. Around $1.5 million was later returned, the firm said, though by then investor confidence had collapsed. To some cryptocurrency experts, the rollout had all the hallmarks of a “rug pull.” The scheme — prevalent among celebrity-linked meme coins — involves insiders hyping an asset then quickly dumping their stakes, saddling amateur investors with deep losses. Others have suggested that Adams and his inexperienced team were themselves duped by savvier investors, who took advantage of a sloppy launch. The debate has found Adams back in a mode of damage control that defined so much of his one-term mayoralty: denying misconduct, attacking the press and facing scrutiny about the competence of his inner circle of loyalists. Through a former campaign spokesperson, Adams has released multiple statements in recent days clarifying that he had not profited off the token and had not moved investor funds, calling reports otherwise “false and unsupported by evidence.” “Like many newly launched digital assets, the NYC Token experienced market volatility,” the spokesperson, Todd Shapiro, said Wednesday. “Mr. Adams has consistently emphasized transparency, accountability, and responsible innovation.” A machine lawyer and an Israeli hotelier Despite claims of transparency, Adams has so far declined to reveal his partners in the token. But two people close to the project confirmed that Frank Carone, Adams’ former chief adviser and one-time lawyer for the Brooklyn Democratic Party, was closely involved in the launch. The two people spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they had been asked not to disclose the identities of people involved in the token’s creation. One of Carone’s former clients, Yosef Sefi Zvieli, a real estate investor linked to several Israeli hotels, was also part of its creation, Shapiro confirmed to The Associated Press. Zvieli, whose involvement was first reported by Business Insider, previously owned a college dorm in Brooklyn, which drew complaints from students of filthy conditions and neglect. After defaulting on his mortgage, Zvieli hired Carone as his attorney and was able to turn the troubled property into a city-financed homeless shelter. Their exact role in the token launch was not immediately clear, though at least part of Zvieli’s job involved reaching out to influencers ahead of the debut. Neither he nor Carone appeared to have direct experience in cryptocurrency. Messages left with the two men were not returned. As questions around the launch swirled this week, Adams sought guidance from Brock Pierce, the billionaire crypto investor, and former Mighty Ducks child actor, whose private jet he sometimes used as mayor. After looking into the project, Pierce said he was confident that “no one has run off with anyone’s money.” Though he described himself as Adams’ “crypto adviser,” Pierce said he was only made aware of the project after its launch. “Had I been consulted, I would’ve put together a team of more qualified people who knew what they’re doing,” he added. Political-coin instability Even within the largely unregulated world of meme coins, experts say projects promoted by politicians are especially prone to unsavory trading practices. The president of Argentina, Javier Milei, has faced fraud allegations for his own crypto promotion, which drew thousands of investors before swiftly collapsing. Coins launched by President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, also saw significant price fluctuations upon release. The number of accounts that invested in NYC Token were far less than those ventures, totaling just over 4,000 as of Thursday, according to Nicolas Vaiman, the founder of Bubblemaps, which conducted an analysis of publicly available trade records. Roughly 80% of those accounts had bought in during a 20-minute period before Adams had announced the coin but after it was made available for purchase, the analysis found. The window, Vaiman said, provided an advantage to insiders involved in the launch and other traders who pay close attention to new tokens. “Political coins are driven purely by attention, and the crypto community is aware that attention peaks right after the launch,” Vaiman said. “People know you don’t want to stick around, especially for such a vague prospect, like fighting anti-Americanism or antisemitism. What does it even mean? How are you going to achieve that in a token?” The website for the coin says a “portion of the proceeds” will be divided evenly among three causes: antisemitism and anti-Americanism “awareness campaigns,” crypto education for the city’s youth and a scholarship initiative. It does not detail which organizations will be supported, or what percentage of the proceeds will go toward charitable causes. Uncertain fate Adams has disputed that any money had been pulled by the token’s creators. He has said the appearance of withdrawals were the result of adjustments made by the designated market maker, an entity that buys and sells orders of a new token to ensure traders can make purchases without major price shifts. The market makers include FalconX, a well known digital asset broker. The company declined to respond to inquiries on the record. As of Wednesday, a majority of accounts that invested in the coin had lost money, according to the Bubblemaps analysis. Fifteen traders were down at least $100,000, while 10 had netted $100,000. Pierce said he was still hoping the project could be salvaged, adding that “the fate and outcome of this project will be determined in the coming days.” But some in the crypto world had their doubts. “It could be a legitimate project with just a really bad rollout,” said Benjamin Cowen, the founder of another crypto research analytics firm, Into the Cryptoverse. “But the way it was launched didn’t instill a lot of confidence. It’s hard to regain trust in the crypto community.” —By Jake Offenhartz, Associated Press