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AI experiments are usually simple to launch and often produce promising results in controlled settings. But translating those successes into scaled, enterprise-wide impact can be much harder. As Chair and CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLP, I have counseled many senior leaders on AI implementation, and this has become a recurring theme in my conversations with clients. Many of them turn to us to help them move beyond what I’d call “pilot fatigue.” Our latest State of AI in the Enterprise research points to the same trend: companies are launching numerous pilots but are scaling fewer than 30% of them. The pace of AI innovation is extraordinary. New models, tools, and…

Chipotle Mexican Grill needed to do something. In February, the fast-casual restaurant brand reported that traffic to its restaurants fell for the fourth straight quarter to end 2025, and it was projecting flat same-store sales growth for 2026. At that point, the company’s stock had dipped by about 33% over the last year. The brand needed a boost, and it just made a major move to get it. Chipotle named award-winning marketer Fernando Machado as its new chief brand officer. Machado’s last CMO role was with plant-based food company NotCo, which he joined in 2023 after two years as CMO at Activision Blizzard. But he’s best known for his epic run of success—and indu…

Emma Grede is the powerhouse entrepreneur behind size-inclusive fashion brand Good American and shapewear line Skims—some of the Kardashian family’s most successful business ventures. (Grede co-founded the brands with Khloé and Kim, respectively.) In a recent Bloomberg podcast, Grede shared her staunch take on the pitfalls of remote work. “Working from home is career suicide,” Grede said. “We only talk about the upside of working from home.” Not only does she believe the workplace perk is “career suicide,” but she sees the damage of remote work having wider, lasting societal implications. “Think about what’s happening in the world,” Grede said. “Declining bir…

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence has penetrated every aspect of the hiring process—even the elements that should necessitate a human touch, like conducting interviews. The vast majority of companies already rely on AI to sift through applications and resumes, but many of them are now also using it for screening calls and initial interviews. The AI interview has grown so ubiquitous, in fact, that a new report from the hiring platform Greenhouse found that nearly two-thirds of job seekers have been interviewed by AI during the hiring process—an increase of 13 percentage points from just six months ago. But that doesn’t mean they are happy about it. In a…

Chipotle has been tweaking its recipe to lure diners back, and in the first quarter of the year it appears to be working. The build-your-own burrito chain posted higher sales in its new quarterly earnings report, showing some signs of life after a record rough year. Chipotle reported that sales across established stores perked up by .5%, besting a predicted 1% decline. In the first three months of the year, the chain reported $302.8 million in net income, down from $386.6 million in the first quarter of 2025 – a period prior to its recent struggles. Cost of living stress tied to high prices – and now the war in Iran – continues to steer price-conscious consumers away fr…

When browsing social media it is sometimes hard to discern reality from AI. Is a video of bunnies jumping on a trampoline at night real-life? Probably not. But while some of us are stuck trying to figure out the authenticity of visual content, Spotify is jumping ahead to help users know if who they are listening to is actually human. The streaming giant’s newest feature, Verified by Spotify, gives artists who have been reviewed by Spotify a mint-green check beside their profile. The company evaluates robust criteria to determine a profile’s authenticity and trust, including data related to listener activity, engagement over time, and an identifiable artist presence in…

Ask any C-suite leader if AI is a priority in their organization. The answer is yes. The numbers back it up. Menlo Ventures reports that companies spent $37 billion in 2025 on AI. But spending does not guarantee success, and many companies are now coming out of major rollouts with little to show for it. Adoption is low, productivity hasn’t increased, and ROI is still an idea on a slide because organizations handed AI to their IT team like it was new software to install and called it a rollout. Deploying AI is a workforce strategy that demands behavior change and a new operating model. It’s not a technology rollout. It’s a workforce and culture transformation. …

McDonald’s’ latest menu drop is making a Mormon treat mainstream. On Tuesday, April 28, McDonald’s officially announced six new beverages coming to its menu on May 6. That includes three “crafted sodas”—Sprite Berry Blast, Orange Dream, and Dirty Dr Pepper—which combine sodas with flavored syrups and cold foam. The drinks make McDonald’s the latest franchise to embrace the concept of “dirty soda,” or soda with mixed-in flavors and creams. But dirty soda is more than just a viral food trend: It’s a cultural mainstay of Mormon communities, which have embraced the concept since it first rose to prominence in Utah, where 42% of the adult population identifies as Morm…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the Pandemic Housing Boom, many publicly traded homebuilders achieved record profit margins as home prices soared and homebuyer demand ran red hot. Once the national housing demand boom fizzled out in the summer of 2022, many large homebuilders compressed their margins in order to do affordability adjustments where and when needed to maintain their sales pace. That includes giant homebuilder PulteGroup, which reported on Thursday that it compressed its Q1 2026 gross margin to 24.4%, compared with 27.5% in Q1 2025 and 24.7% in Q4 2025. While th…

In a previous piece, I argued that large language models are not enterprise architecture. The response was clear: that argument is hard to dismiss. The harder question is what comes next: “if not this, then what?” It’s the right question. Because the problem was never that AI doesn’t work. It clearly does. The problem is that we tried to place it in the wrong layer. We didn’t fail at AI. We failed at where we put it. Over the last two years, companies have invested tens of billions into generative AI. The result is not ambiguity. It’s clarity. A growing body of research, including a widely cited MIT study, shows that around 95% of enterprise generative…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Are the biggest AI labs betting on the wrong horse? Big AI companies are betting nearly all of their R&D and capital expenditure on the idea that pre-trained transformer models can deliver AI with human-level general intelligence. This approach relies heavily on backpropagation, the standard algorithm used to train deep neural networks. Ben Goertzel, who coined the term “AGI” with his 2005 book Artificial General Intelligence (co-written with DeepMind founder Shane Legg), is skeptic…

If you’re self-employed and spend any time on social media, you’ve seen the debate. One person swears you need a professional website from day one. Another says a logo is the first thing to invest in. Someone else is selling a $500 course that promises to “elevate your brand’s presence.” Everyone has an opinion about where your money should go first (and they’re usually selling whatever they’re recommending). I’ve been running my own business for three years. I’ve run the branding gamut from DIY templates in Canva to hiring a professional brand designer. Here’s what I’ve learned: the right branding investment depends entirely on where your business is toda…

Executive leaders today face mounting pressure to boost productivity and innovation with AI. Employees—on the other hand—report low trust in organizational change and limited information about how AI will impact their work (or whether it’s going to replace the jobs that the company hired them to do). According to a December 2025 Gartner survey of 110 CHROs, 95% reported undertaking AI-related initiatives in their organizations. But while many companies are experimenting widely with AI, most organizations are struggling to translate AI investment into something that actually improves their businesses. Why AI adoption isn’t that simple AI adoption is uniquely dif…

When the New York Red Bulls professional soccer team heads to practice at its new state-of-the-art training facility in Morris Township, New Jersey, the players will be doing so alongside a bunch of 9-year-olds. The $100 million facility, which officially opened in April, was designed as much for the pros on the Major League Soccer squad as for the roughly 6,000 kids that take part in the club’s academy and soccer camp programs every year. “The objective was always to have a space that we could grow into—not just good for the moment, but to think about the future,” says Marc de Grandpré, president and general manager of Red Bull New York. “Our success on the first…

In the music video for “Runway,” Lady Gaga’s collaboration with Doechii for The Devil Wears Prada 2 soundtrack, the wardrobes are high fashion and the musicians and their dancers serve, pose, and vogue. Colorful and camp, it’s everything you’d expect considering the subject matter of the song is about turning dance floors into runways. For some viewers, though, it just looks like a Target commercial. The post activity for Popcrave’s tweet about the “Runway” music video is filled with commenters pejoratively comparing the clip to a Target ad. It’s not hard to see why. Swap out the black-and-white lines on the video’s main set with red-and-white circles, and i…

One of the hardest parts of being a homeowner is knowing whom to call when something goes wrong with your house—a process that starts with figuring out what’s actually wrong in the first place. “What if you wake up, you’ve got a wet spot on the ceiling, and you’re like, Oh crap, I’ve got a problem, but I don’t actually know what it is or who to hire?” says Marco Zappacosta, cofounder and CEO of the home-services marketplace Thumbtack. The 18-year-old platform has made a robust business of helping homeowners navigate the sometimes bewildering process of home improvements and repairs by connecting them with all sorts of service pros—handymen, roofers, electricians…

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve probably seen the marketing for The Devil Wears Prada 2, whether it’s a glamorous outfit from Anne Hathaway or Meryl Streep all over social media or a Diet Coke can plastered with the signature double-spiked red heel. The global press tour, which spanned cities such as Mexico City, Tokyo, Seoul, and Shanghai, culminated at the movie’s star-studded world premiere at New York City’s Lincoln Center earlier this month with Hathaway, Streep, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci present. As studios promote trailers for upcoming releases, it’s no surprise that they’re also using premieres as massive marketing vehicles as well. …

Plenty of brands use AI to talk to consumers. In other words, they’re tapping AI to generate customer service responses, automate interactions, and speed up outreach. But what they’re not doing is investing in the listening side of AI or leveraging into its vast capabilities here—i.e., using AI to better understand customer friction, synthesize feedback, spot patterns, or act on what people are saying. And to me, this is a major miss. Whenever leadership looks out onto their world below—rather than from within the trenches—gaps can emerge. And while leaders routinely make business decisions with the aid of spreadsheets, dashboards, and second-hand summaries, you can’t m…

Yesterday, two of the biggest tech giants in the AI boom reported their latest earnings. Google parent company Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Facebook owner Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META) posted Q1 2026 results with some striking similarities, including a surge in capital expenditures (capex) and strong revenue growth. But this morning, Meta’s stock is plunging, while Google’s is jumping. Here’s why. Google’s Q1 results give investors confidence in its AI strategy The way investors are reacting so differently to the two AI giants’ earnings results this morning makes the quarterly reports feel like A Tale of Two Cities, sorry, Tech Giants. For …

The next time you open Netflix’s app, it may look a lot more like YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. That’s no accident: On April 29, the streaming service begins rolling out its biggest mobile redesign in years, with a major focus on vertical video. Netflix is launching the new mobile UI in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and a handful of other countries now, with plans to expand globally in the coming months. Once the app updates, subscribers will gain access to a new “Clips” tab featuring trailers, highlights, and behind-the-scenes footage from Netflix shows, movies, and podcasts, all optimized for quick, on-the-go viewing. Clips appear in an endless scroll feed, much like the…

If I had to name my Mount Rushmore of brands seen as quintessentially American around the globe, it would probably be Levi’s, Harley-Davidson, McDonald’s, and Budweiser. While there are an impressive number of iconic American brands—Apple, Coca-Cola, Nike, Google, Amazon, and Walmart among them—only a few have an identity that is also closely tied to the idea of “America” itself. So it should come as no surprise that Budweiser is tapping that identity to simultaneously celebrate America’s 250th, along with its own 150th anniversary. The brand just launched a new spot called “Great Delivery” to start its summer campaign that will also include limited-edition patr…