Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

You might remember ZenBooths—Amazon’s contribution to corporate well-being. These were booths installed in the middle of warehouses, equipped with a fan, a potted plant, and a monitor playing meditation videos. The company called them mindful practice rooms. Employees called them despair chambers. The internet called them coffins for workers—workers who, incidentally, didn’t even have time to use the bathroom because of crushing productivity demands. ZenBooths are, I think, a fitting metaphor for modern corporate wellness. According to Gallup, employee engagement dropped to 20% in 2025—the lowest it’s been since the COVID-19 lockdowns. Companies are pouring money into…

A large Applebee’s franchisee that filed for Chapter 11 protection in March is seeking to close additional restaurants as it works its way through the bankruptcy process and sale of its assets, a new court filing reveals. NRPF Group Two, which operates roughly 50 Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill + Bar locations in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, has asked a federal court for permission to reject the leases on five additional properties. Most of the Applebee’s restaurants associated with the properties appeared to be still open this week, though a few were marked as temporarily closed on Google as of Wednesday. Atlanta-based NRPF Group Two said in the court filing …

On a recent weekday, around 50 people gathered outside the headquarters of a Chinese mobile internet company, waiting to get help with installing an artificial intelligence assistant. The scene in Beijing, China’s capital, was repeated for days at several events and was also seen in the southern technology hub Shenzhen in March, as engineers helped crowds trying to set up the popular AI “agent” OpenClaw on their laptops. “I’m worried about falling behind in technological developments,” said Sun Lei, a 41-year-old human resources manager at the Cheetah event. She said she hoped the tool might help her source and screen resumes across various recruitment platforms. More …

Burger King’s slogans have long emphasized personalization, like “Have It Your Way” and “Your Rule.” Now there’s a text generator that lets you personalize its logo, too. A new Burger King logo font generator lets users customize the red, rounded letters that sit between the logo’s burnt-orange-colored buns. It’s by Pixel Frame, a website that makes album cover and logo text generators for everything from Drake’s discography to Dragon Ball Z and Donkey Kong. Just a few words will render big and bold in the logo generator, but the text will become increasingly squished and stacked as you add more text, with one line stacked on top of the other like hot-off-the-gril…

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. A year ago, amid a wave of DOGE cuts to federal agencies, Modern CEO highlighted the things government gets right, notably its ability to solve problems that businesses can’t or won’t because doing so isn’t necessarily profitable. Finding solutions to many of those challenges—including affor…

Imagine hiring every all-star on the market, paying top dollar, and then finishing sixth in your division. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s what happened to Sinan Aral’s beloved Liverpool F.C. last season, and it’s also, he argues, an almost perfect metaphor for how most organizations are deploying AI right now. Aral is a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and one of the leading researchers on human-AI collaboration. His lab has spent the last several years running large-scale, real-world experiments on what actually happens when humans and AI work together… and the results should give every leader pause. “In about 85% of the studies we’ve seen,” he told me, “…

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. A look at the AI landscape for small businesses So much of the conversation around the great AI transformation of business has centered on enterprises, meaning companies with more than 500 employees. That makes sense: For AI and cloud companies, landing a large enterprise customer can mean securing a significant stream of recurring revenue. But if we’re really talking about AI reinventing work and making everyone more productive, small and medium-sized businesses should be a much bigge…

Bill Gross has a long history of betting on technological shifts and watching those bets pay off. But the latest proposition from one of Silicon Valley’s most storied founders and investors depends on forces far beyond the Bay Area. With ProRata, Gross is betting he can build a market in which publishers and creators can see how their work informs AI-generated outputs and get paid accordingly. He doesn’t expect AI companies to participate out of goodwill. In fact, Gross has already launched a spinoff, Gist, which allows ProRata partners to generate additional revenue from ProRata’s indexing of their work. Instead, he believes outside pressures will eventually leav…

There’s a popular narrative around starting a solo business: quit your job, take the leap, figure it out along the way. It sounds bold. It also ignores what many successful solopreneurs actually do: start while they still have a paycheck, figure it out, and then quit. I freelanced alongside my 9–5 for two full years before going solo full-time. That runway gave me time to figure out my offer and ideal clients, build a portfolio, and develop the confidence that I could make it work. As a result, the transition didn’t feel like a free fall. If you’re thinking about solopreneurship, a side hustle might be a smart way to get started. The 9–5 is your (temporary)…

The Ordinary, a cosmetics company known for its lower-priced, often single-ingredient products, just announced that it was furthering its mission to “remove unnecessary barriers to provide accessible, high-quality solutions.” To do so, it is offering people a free shuttle bus that runs between Williamsburg’s Domino Park and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York. The company claims that The Ordinary Bus, which will run from May 26 through June 6, solves for a transit gap that can often involve a 50-minute subway detour through Manhattan. The tenuous parallel with the company’s skincare line is that it also provides a no-frills solution to a common problem (bad skin). …