What's on Your Mind?

One of the most striking aspects of Sarah Wynn-Williams’s best-selling memoir, Careless People, about her years at Meta, is the way she portrays Sheryl Sandberg. Contrary to Sandberg’s carefully crafted public image as a levelheaded advocate for working women and their families, she is shown to be narcissistic, mercurial, and hypocritical. Whether you see Wynn-Williams’s book as an important exposé of Big Tech culture or a hit job by a disgruntled former employee, it’s hard to escape the sense that Sandberg’s public persona was more fantasy than reality. The image of a fabulously wealthy executive and doting mother living her best life every hour of the day was alway…

Starbucks‘ chief technology officer Deb Hall Lefevre resigned without a permanent replacement, according to an internal memo sent to corporate staff on Monday, seen by Reuters. The memo, written by Chief Financial Officer Cathy Smith, named Ningyu Chen, previously senior vice president of global experience technology, as interim chief technology officer. Lefevre’s resignation comes as Starbucks announced its second round of deep cuts in corporate roles, effective Friday, as CEO Brian Niccol pushes a tech revamp in stores to make labor more efficient, part of a turnaround strategy to revive flagging sales after six consecutive quarters of decline. Using AI to…

There’s no doubt we are witnessing a quiet shift in labor: artificial intelligence is no longer confined to experimental labs or consumer chatbots, it is now eroding the foundation of human labor in ways that are less visible, but potentially more consequential, than the headlines about “AI assistants” or “superintelligence.” Last week, Google abruptly terminated 200 AI contractors, many of them involved in annotation and evaluation work. Officially, the company described this as part of a ramp-down, but workers pointed mainly to low pay and job insecurity. What matters is that the roles being cut are precisely those that ensure human oversight of AI systems: the rat…

There’s an old myth that Inuit cultures have as many as a hundred words for snow. I remember learning about it in school, and there was just something wonderful about the idea that people’s perceptions can be so deeply rich and different. I guess that’s why, although it has been debunked many times, the story keeps getting repeated. There is also a lot of truth to the underlying concept. As anybody who has ever learned another language or lived in a different culture knows, people’s perceptions vary widely. In The WEIRDest People In The World, Harvard’s Joseph Henrich documents how important and interesting these differences can be. So if the Inuit snow myth hig…

I keep seeing articles and conferences about “humanizing” AI in one way or another. And while I get the sentiment, I think they’re taking the wrong approach. There’s no point in making technologies more human. Being human is our job. If anything, AI is less an opportunity to humanize technology, than to re-humanize ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning. AI is just the latest, perhaps greatest advancement yet in what OG computer scientist Norbert Wiener dubbed “cybernetic” technologies. Unlike traditional technologies, cybernetic ones take feedback from the world in order to determine their functions. They work less like a machine you turn on than a home heater’s th…

Most immersive experiences today may feel stale in retrospect. Brands have invested heavily in creating spaces meant to captivate, yet these experiences all replicate the same visual and audio cues, making it increasingly difficult for brands to differentiate. The underlying issue is a technological design constraint: You can either create something highly personalized or something that scales to hundreds of people simultaneously, but rarely both. A seismic change is afoot that will dwarf the previous chasm, like the shift from black and white film to color cinema. Multimodal AI is poised to eliminate the joint scaling and personalization limitation, enabling truly mu…

Brands matter now more than ever. You don’t have to say it, I know what you’re thinking: the CEO of a brand agency arguing for brands? How surprising. But this isn’t for me. This is for every CMO looking to secure their seat at the table and fighting to keep brand investment alive. This is for every CEO and CFO balancing the pull of GenAI and the flood of new tools that promise optimization, automation, personalization, and agentic transformation. And yes, dare I say it, this is for my competitors, who I know are on their own crusade to prove that brand still matters. Because brands are quietly under attack, through budget cuts, short-termism, and the …

What’s the biggest company in the world? Apple? Amazon? Microsoft? No. It’s Nvidia, which in early August became the world’s first $4 trillion company, overtaking both Apple and Microsoft. Last week’s results were eagerly awaited by the world’s markets and actually helped push the S&P 500 and Dow Jones to all-time highs. By the end of August, Nvidia accounted for more than 8% of the S&P 500, the largest weighting for a single stock in the index’s history. Yet, Nvidia isn’t a household name. It doesn’t make the devices in your pocket or the apps you use every day. Nvidia makes chips. Excellent chips, yes, but not unique in the way we tend to assume a $4 tri…

In my old banking job, where I worked for 12 years, I found myself frustrated with the slow pace of the work, the layers of red tape and approvals to get anything done. After all, banking was a highly regulated industry, and while there were many rules to follow, they were just simply being a good bank by following them. I felt tired, drained, and lacked energy—similar symptoms to burnout. While the organization was frequently voted a “best place to work,” I couldn’t figure out why my “great job” felt so bad. I wasn’t overworking or spending endless evenings logging in, so the typical paths to burnout didn’t make sense. What I was actually experiencing was rust out. …

The health care industry, like many others, has traditionally relied on tried-and-true conventional, one-way marketing tactics. However, that strategy is no longer enough to break through to consumers. More than 81% of consumers tune out generic ads and crave more engaged and personalized content, signaling that marketers need to adapt and stop ineffective communication that tries to pull consumers to them. Instead, we must go to our customers, meeting them precisely where their attention already lives. We know a great story has the power to transcend demographics, evoke emotion, and build lasting connections. Ultimately, brands are collections of human beings, an…

According to a recent study conducted by the global consulting firm, EY, 97% of respondents reported that it is important for companies to act with integrity. Many companies tout integrity as a core principle of their organizations in an attempt to reassure customers, employees, and the wider public that their organization “plays by the rules.” By some estimates, integrity is ranked as one of the most cited corporate core values, with over 80% of companies listing integrity as a core value. But simply including integrity on your list of core values and mounting that list on a plaque on a wall (as many companies do) won’t positively influence your culture unless your c…

Amazon reached a $2.5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Thursday over whether the e-commerce giant used “deceptive methods” to sign up consumers for Prime subscriptions, then made it “exceedingly difficult” to cancel. The agency argued Amazon enrolled millions of customers in Prime subscriptions without their consent, and knowingly made it difficult for consumers to get out of the agreement. That settlement, which comes just three days into the civil trial in federal court in Seattle, included a whopping $1 billion civil penalty, the highest in history, and a $1.5 billion fund to refund Prime users harmed by the deceptive enrollment pra…

Twenty-five years ago, Google unveiled Adwords, which pledged to enable advertisers “to quickly design a flexible program that best fits [their] online marketing goals and budget,” Google cofounder Larry Page said at the time. The principle was simple. AdWords allowed advertisers to purchase individualized, affordable keyword-based advertising that appears alongside search results used by hundreds of millions of people every day. That decision was a game changer for Google. Advertising now accounts for around three in every four dollars of revenue the company has made so far this year, growing 10% in the last year alone. The product, since renamed Google Ads, has …

“Zootopia 2” had a roaring and record-setting opening at the box office. The animated animal city sequel from the Walt Disney Company brought in $96 million in North America over the weekend, earned $156 million over the five-day Thanksgiving frame, and scored a staggering $556 million globally since its Wednesday opening, according to studio estimates Sunday. That made it the highest international opening ever for an animated movie, the fourth highest global debut of any kind, and the top international opener of 2025. “Wicked: For Good” stayed aloft in its second weekend for Universal Pictures, earning another $62.8 million domestically over the weekend for a North Am…

General Motors lifted its financial outlook for the year and slightly lowered its expected hit from tariffs, as the automaker awaits expected relief on tariffs in the U.S. while confronting a weakening market for electric vehicles. The company now expects its annual adjusted core profit to be between $12.0 billion to $13.0 billion, compared with its prior estimate of $10.0 billion to $12.5 billion. The Detroit automaker said tariffs would hit its bottom line less than anticipated, lowering its updated impact to a range of $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion, from a previous $4 billion to $5 billion. Shares rose about 8% in premarket trading. GM’s outlook hike lifted cros…

The Barclays Center is taking its dressing rooms for touring artists to the next level, and they looked to local inspiration to decorate them. The Brooklyn venue, which hosts concerts and is home to the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets and WNBA’s New York Liberty, has upgraded six dressing rooms that now resemble Brooklyn brownstone apartments, complete with moody tones, soft-glow lighting, and high-end fixtures and finishes. The makeover is part of Barclays Center parent company BSE Global’s $100 million, five-year upgrade of the venue that’s still set to include improvements like a new fan zone and a new premium membership club. Laurie Jacoby, BSE Global’s chief entertai…

It’s been a pretty wild year in the world of advertising and brand work. Amid broader industry shifts, there has been some incredible brand work created this year across many different platforms, film, experiences, and more. But as we bring 2025 to a close, I wanted to take a more targeted look at some of the best commercials of this year. I’ve tried to adhere to criteria that includes level of difficulty, creative inventiveness, risk, and sheer entertainment. Despite how much great work is out there, sadly, most advertising can be generously categorized as cultural wallpaper. But these select few pieces of brand weren’t a waste of time—they made me laugh, think…

Across the internet, eagle-eyed sleuths are crying “AI slop” after Saturday Night Live aired segments with what looks like AI-generated imagery. The first instance, from Saturday’s cold open, shows an illustrated Christmas storybook. The images feature a hazy, yellow-ish hue and an image of streets that don’t connect. The next, in “Weekend Update” showed an image of a woman playing a slot machine in an otherwise empty casino while using an oxygen tank with tubes that weren’t connected. While the images were on screen for a fraction of the episode, they have led to some very vocal backlash by fans, who are convinced they are AI-generated.On Reddit, viewers ca…

This week, news reports revealed that Meta would be cutting hundreds of jobs in its AI division. The layoffs will impact employees who work on AI products, research, and infrastructure. They come after Meta went on a hiring spree to shore up its AI efforts. But despite the job cuts, Meta’s chief AI officer told the Wall Street Journal that the company would, however, continue hiring “AI native” talent—a term that seems to have quietly slipped into the corporate lexicon amid the AI arms race. For the last decade, the term “digital native” has been circulating to describe Gen Z, as many of them don’t know life without the internet. The cohort following them, Generat…