Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has officially launched the TSA Gold+ program. While it sounds like a luxury program for travelers, it’s actually a major shift toward privatizing airport security. The TSA announced the move in an internal memo sent to employees on May 14. According to the TSA, the program is “the future of aviation security.” The site explains that the program is a “new public-private partnership aimed at modernizing aviation security at select airports across the United States” and says it will allow airports to opt-in to a “tailored security screening service unique to each airport’s needs and space configuration.” Those airports will …

The Onion is developing a documentary for America’s 250th anniversary, called Birth of a Nation, a project CEO Ben Collins says reflects the company’s growing focus beyond satire articles and headlines. “For the 250th anniversary of America, we’re making a documentary called ‘Birth of a Nation,’ which is great,” Collins said onstage at the Fast Company Most Innovative Companies Summit, in a conversation with Jill Bernstein. The documentary is one of several projects underway at The Onion, following its acquisition by Collins and a group of investors in 2024. Before buying the publication, Collins spent years at NBC News covering extremism and misinformation on…

It’s graduation week, which means the emissaries of the nation’s elite are now descending onto college campuses to deliver the much-discussed and, they hope, indelibly quotable college commencement address. These speeches are their own sort of literary genre. The celebrities, politicians, and titans of industry invited to give these keynotes must seem intelligent enough, but not bore—or worse, antagonize—their audience. Typically, this involves a speaker integrating a clever life story, select nuggets of eternal wisdom, a few trite asides to campus lore, and well-placed references to current affairs into one propulsive and affecting speech. The problem this year, howeve…

AI wears many hats at work, whether it’s a brainstorm partner, mentor, or doing the actual work itself. However, it’s time to add a new one to the list: spy. In a recent episode of the “All-In” podcast, Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, said he was using AI to analyze employee slack messages to understand what they’re complaining about. (Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021.) “Because you run your company on Slack, all your DMs, all your channels, we’re reading that now through the AI and we can tell you more about your business than you know,” Benioff explained. “Slackbot is reading stuff that, you know, nobody knew what was happening. I’m using that myself.” Benioff says, b…

In February, April Watson hit her head while stowing products at an Amazon warehouse outside of Atlanta, Georgia. The injury gave her a concussion, and she was told by a neurologist that she would have to go on restricted duty and work at a slower pace than was typically expected of her. Despite having paperwork from the doctor that clearly stated that she had to work more slowly, however, it took Watson over a month to get the necessary accommodations on the job—all because she couldn’t get the correct medical form from Amazon’s internal AI assistant or easily connect with an HR employee. In the meantime, Watson was flagged for making errors on the job, and had to si…

Like much of Facebook nowadays, the “California Life” Facebook page is full of AI slop. There are generated images of highway patrol officers holding up a groundhog and lengthy road signs detailing California quirks. And in between those are posts that admonish AI data centers. “It’s not worth giving up an inch of this for a data center,” reads one image, in which the words look carved into a field of crops. “Not a single square inch of California is worth giving up for an AI Data Center,” reads another posted the very next day, the text floating above a generated image of the California coast, the state flag in the foreground. A third post shows that…

The internet has repeatedly changed how people travel. First came the browser, then smartphones. Each shift promised to flatten the industry further, cutting friction, shrinking the role of middlemen, and pushing more of the experience into software. But AI introduces a different possibility entirely: What happens when people stop visiting travel websites at all? Few companies have lived through every phase of that evolution quite like Expedia Group. The company survived the rise of Google, the collapse of desktop computing, the mobile revolution, platform monopolies, and a pandemic that temporarily froze global travel. For decades, Expedia controlled nearly the e…

We are at an inflection point for AI. The question is no longer whether your organization is adopting it. It’s whether your people are actually capable of using it. Most aren’t. This isn’t a technology failure. The tools work. The problem is simpler, yet harder to fix now. Companies deployed AI before they built the people capable of using it. At Docebo, we help enterprises build workforces that can actually use AI. We surveyed 2,000 people to find out where adoption breaks down, and the bottleneck shows up in an unexpected place. The challenge with AI adoption isn’t one problem. It’s a compounding series of them, each one making the next harder to solve. The numbers b…

Raishelle Everett was thrilled when she became pregnant with her first child after undergoing IVF in 2022. The first thing she and her husband did was get on the wait list for Siemens Child Development Center (CDC), the popular and highly regarded on-site childcare center on the sprawling 53-acre Oregon campus of Siemens. The center, which serves as on-site childcare for Siemens employees as well the local community, cares for about 70 children from infant to pre-K and was built in 1992 to serve employees of Mentor Graphics (which was acquired by Siemens in 2017). The high curriculum standards and low student-to-teacher ratio meant that even though Everett’s husband wa…

A tough economy, rising grocery bills, high gas prices, credit card bills, fears of layoffs: A 2025 survey of 2,000 adults from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine revealed that 78% of adults lose sleep to financial stress. That double whammy of financial stress and bad sleep can lead to a slew of health problems—as well as declining performance at work, which in turn could lead to actual (or even worse) money problems. Insufficient or disrupted sleep affects every major physiological system, not just daytime energy levels, says Jennifer L. Martin, professor at Florida International University in Miami who specializes in sleep science. “Individuals facing money…

Work is the closest thing most adults have to a full-time identity. Strip away sleep, and roughly half of our waking lives are spent working. If you take a conservative estimate—40 to 50 hours a week, across four to five decades—you end up with well over 80,000 hours on the job. And yet, the most salient feature of work is not how many hours we devote to it, but rather how we experience it, which varies wildly. For some, it resembles what the sociologist Max Weber once described as a “calling,” a source of meaning and even a kind of secular transcendence. For others, it’s closer to what Karl Marx labeled alienation: a draining, joyless routine that disconnects effort fro…

Last week, I whooshed into a Luckin coffee shop in Lower Manhattan, snatched my mobile order off the counter, and was back on the street within eight seconds—as if I’d run upstairs to grab my keys. The fact that this required zero human interaction barely registered, especially because I was too giddy about the deal I’d scored on the app. My iced coconut latte cost a mere $1.99—a full 69% off the regular price, after I used one of the six active coupons that appeared on the screen. I had officially gotten myself swept up in America’s latest fast-food trend: cheap, flavorful drinks ready in an instant, sold by Chinese chains on apps where the coupons give hourly countdow…

Firefox is the browser that, statistically speaking, more people remember using than use today. Its market share in most countries is now just a sliver of what it once was. In 2011, it held more than a quarter of the U.S. desktop market. That many former users still remember it fondly may be a point of pride for the San Francisco-based nonprofit foundation behind the browser that broke Internet Explorer’s mediocre monopoly. But nostalgia alone doesn’t pay for the continued development of Firefox’s in-house Gecko rendering engine, along with versions of the browser for every major desktop and mobile operating system. “Anyone who was using the internet 15 years ago was pr…

Canva just pulled off a clean sweep in the AI design world that’s about to make AI-generated branding a lot more common. On May 19, the company announced that it’s partnering with Google Gemini to bring its Canva Design platform directly to Gemini users. Once Gemini users enable Canva in their app settings, they’ll be able to search their Canva content from within the chatbot, generate designs based on the context of their chat history, and easily take designs into Canva to edit them. The move means that Canva has successfully integrated its design tools with every major AI player in the game: Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, and, now, Gemini. Canva’s aggressive integr…

We need to have a blunt conversation about the word empowerment. In the majority of companies, the lie behind the word “empowerment” becomes apparent in familiar ways: job descriptions that promise autonomy, leaders who proudly talk about their empowered teams, and meetings that end with “you’ve got this.” Reality though strips away the veneer of this lie: that same work still runs through a gauntlet of approvals, sign-offs, and second-guessing. The language suggests freedom. The system reinforces control. The result is not empowerment. It is dependence with better branding. In our work at Amazon helping Fortune 500 leaders understand how to dismantle their rigid bure…

The Eva Longoria Foundation announced a $1 million investment in UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute (LPPI) to support long-term, data-driven solutions that integrate leadership development and narrative change within Latino communities. “This grant is going to fund a lot of the economic research and policy work for Latina entrepreneurs, because we need to know what our economic power is,” Longoria said at the Inc. Founders House Los Angeles. Through this partnership, the foundation will fund a three-year initiative aimed at advancing Latina economic mobility by generating data on Latina entrepreneurs and workers and the barriers they face to building weal…

Across job listing sites over the past few months, you might have noticed something curious. Alongside traditional titles like “designer,” “engineer,” and “product manager,” a new crop of roles is appearing. They have names like “designer engineer,” “builder,” or “design crafter,” and they represent a tipping point in the design industry that’s just beginning to play out. That tipping point is captured in the second annual AI in Design report, published by the investor firm Designer Fund and the venture capital firm Foundation Capital. This year’s report draws on a survey of over 900 designers across 60+ countries, including partners like Stripe, Framer, Linear, Notion,…

Areaware, the 22-year-old design brand, announced its closure back in February, bidding farewell to its dedicated fan base and selling off the last of its quirky home goods in a series of final sales. Just three months later, though, the brand is getting a surprising second chance: Today, the puzzle company Piecework is announcing its acquisition of Areaware for an undisclosed sum. Piecework, founded in 2019 by Rachel Hochhauser and Jena Wolfe, plans to keep Areaware’s name, website, and socials separate, and will maintain the two as distinct sister brands. According to Hochhauser, who will serve as Areaware’s chief brand officer, the idea to acquire Areaware was…

AI is everywhere these days. Try as you might to avoid it, you’re not likely to succeed. LinkedIn, though, is attempting to draw a line in the sand and, if not completely eliminate the AI slop on its pages, at least cut back on it. The company plans to target low-quality AI posts that distract its users from finding value on the platform. That has been a growing problem in recent months as people have trawled LinkedIn for engagement among professional users. The company’s VP of product, Laura Lorenzetti, says LinkedIn isn’t banning all posts generated by artificial intelligence. Some, she concedes, actually have some value. Others, though? Those need to go. …

Prices are rising again, and by some measures, consumer sentiment is as low as it’s ever been. That makes it an opportune time for some Americans to perhaps get a boost to their credit scores if they’re able to. Now they might be able to. Last fall, FICO announced a new generation of its UltraFICO Score—an upgrade to its existing scoring model—infusing it with real-time cashflow data (with consumer permission, of course) from fintech company Plaid. The new and improved model is now live and available to lenders. FICO’s leadership says it could help lenders make better decisions about creditworthiness and, in most cases, consumers could see a boost to their cre…

The Target boycott is ongoing but it might be having less of an impact. On Wednesday, the company reported first-quarter earnings that included successes like a 6.7% increase in net sales year-over-year (YOY). The $25.4 billion in net sales included a 24.5% jump in non-merchandise sales, like Target Circle 360 membership revenues and the Target+ marketplace. In that vein, Target saw its digital comparable sales rise by 8.9% thanks to a 27% jump in same-day delivery with Target Circle 360. The retailer also reported earnings per share of $1.71, surpassing Wall Street’s predicted EPS of $1.46, according to consensus estimates cited by CNBC. “There is mu…

Today, Figma announced an AI agent built natively inside its collaborative environment. Forget the disconnected, floating prompt boxes we’ve grown so tired of; this system gives you multiple digital assistants right on your digital drafting board in Figma Design. According to the company, it is capable of churning out interface elements and banishing the mindless drudgery of pixel-pushing, while keeping creators locked in their creative zone. With the update, Figma is fundamentally reengineering the digital drafting board into an autonomous engine. By throwing the gates wide open—inviting the marketing department, code-wranglers, and project supervisors to play …

Management and union leaders at Samsung Electronics failed to reach a last-minute deal over wages Wednesday, raising prospects for a strike at the South Korean electronics giant that could rattle global semiconductor supplies and the country’s trade-dependent economy. Government officials have threatened to invoke rarely used emergency powers to force a settlement at Samsung, where the union, which represents more than 70,000 workers, says the company has failed to offer adequate compensation despite its soaring profits fueled by the global boom in artificial intelligence. After the latest round of talks ended without a breakthrough on Wednesday, union leader Choi Seung…

U.S. markets are poised to open with gains on Wednesday as bond yields slipped and oil prices fell. Futures for the S&P 500 rose 0.4% while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average edged 0.2% higher and Nasdaq futures jumped 0.7%. The yield on the 10-year Treasury eased overnight to 4.64% from 4.66% late Tuesday, but are up from less than 4% before the war with Iran began. That’s a notable increase and part of the reason that stock prices look even more expensive while threatening to slow the economy. Higher yields can drive up rates for mortgages and loans going to companies to build AI data centers, which has been a big source of growth for the economy. Ther…