What's on Your Mind?

The Walt Disney Co. on Tuesday began layoffs expected to lead to 1,000 job cuts across the company. Josh D’Amaro, who in February succeeded Bob Iger as chief executive, announced broader layoffs following a move in January to consolidate Disney’s marketing division. The cuts are expected to fall across the Burbank, California-based company’s traditional television businesses, including ESPN, as well as its movie studio. Employees in product and technology, and in certain corporate functions will also be affected. “Over the past several months, we have looked at ways in which we can streamline our operations in various parts of the company to ensure we deliver the world-…

When Tiffany Davis has a question about a symptom from the weight-loss injections she’s taking, she doesn’t call her doctor. She pulls out her phone and consults ChatGPT. “I’ll just basically let ChatGPT know my status, how I’m feeling,” said the 42-year-old in Mesquite, Texas. “I use it for anything that I’m experiencing.” Turning to artificial intelligence tools for health advice has become a habit for Davis and many other Americans, according to a West Health–Gallup Center on Healthcare in America poll published Wednesday. The poll, conducted in late 2025 and backed up by at least three other recent surveys with similar findings, found that roughly one-quarter of U.S…

For years, companies have assumed the internet was built for people. Websites were designed to attract human attention, explain, persuade, reassure, and eventually convert. Search engine optimization, user experience, digital merchandising, and checkout design all rested on the same basic premise: the user was a person sitting in front of a screen. That premise is beginning to crack. Not because people are disappearing, but because they are starting to delegate. More and more often, the first system reading your site, comparing your offer, interpreting your policies, or even initiating a purchase will not be a human being. It will be a software agent ac…

I had a student visit my office hours recently looking for career advice to help him marry his scholastic endeavors with his extracurricular activities as a student athlete. He began to expound upon his experiences in and out of the classroom here at the University of Michigan, the high expectations of the business school, and the pace of the classes. But what captured my attention most was the way he described the complexities of being a gymnast. Of course, it was more nuanced than just jumping and flipping; there’s the full-body physical conditioning of the sport and the mental fortitude it commands. All the things. However, as the student gave me a peek into his world …

The organizer behind SantaCon, a Santa-themed crawl that raises money for local charities, is being charged with defrauding ticket-buyers and establishment owners. On Wednesday, 50-year-old Stefan Pildes was arrested in New York and charged with wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of twenty years in prison. Prosecutors claim Pildes, who served as the president of and controlled the nonprofit entity that organizes the event called Participatory Safety, Inc. (“PSI”), diverted funds that were meant to go to charity to his own accounts. Per the indictment, from November 2019 through April 2026, Pildes allegedly defrauded tens of thousands of participants …

When Pokémon launched in 1996, the brand offered just a pair of video games, a single region within its world for players to explore, and 151 creatures for them to capture and train. 30 years later, Pokémon mania is stronger than ever. The most recent mainline games in the series, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, sold 10 million copies in their first three days, while the accompanying Pokémon Trading Card Game printed 10.2 million new cards between 2024 and 2025. The franchise now features 1,025 Pokémon across its more than a hundred video game titles under the Pokémon umbrella, including the mobile gaming phenomenon Pokémon Go, which ranks among the highest-grossing mobil…

The fall of former direct-to-consumer darling Allbirds has taken a very weird turn. Allbirds, the sustainable shoemaker that caught fire with the Silicon Valley set about a decade ago, will start selling silicon itself. The company said in a press release that it will transform itself into a business focused on leasing GPUs – the powerful graphics chips underpinning the AI boom that are in short supply and high demand, much to the chagrin of gamers and tech CEOs. The husk of the shoe company that once was will “pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure, with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions …

In 1988, a London pre-teen with a penchant for programming and gaming wrote a version of the classic board game Othello—also known as Reversi—for his Amiga 500 home computer. Teaching a piece of software to play the game was an ambitious coding project for someone so young. And with that, Demis Hassabis notched his first achievement in the field of artificial intelligence. The Othello-playing app “beat my kid brother, who was only five at the time,” Hassabis remembers. “It was an ‘a-ha’ moment for me, because I just thought, ‘Wow, it’s incredible that you can make a program that’s inanimate and it can go off and do something on your behalf.'” That proved to be a fatefu…

Since opening in Silicon Valley in 2019, NTT Research has operated as a long-horizon science lab, a dedicated arm of Japan’s telecommunications giant NTT Group, which invests more than $3 billion annually in global R&D. Now in its seventh year, the lab was built as a research subsidiary insulated from quarterly pressure and product roadmaps. Unlike startups or typical corporate innovation teams, NTT Research is a wholly owned entity focused on seeding advances in computing, security, and healthcare that can later fold into NTT’s global infrastructure and enterprise services. Many of these efforts take five to fifteen years to approach commercialization, a timeline…

As founder, chair, and CEO of the Exceptional Women Alliance, I am privileged to engage with extraordinary female leaders across industries. This month, I spoke with Shari Hofer about a workforce issue hiding in plain sight: eldercare. For many organizations, caregiving is still viewed as something employees manage quietly outside of work. According to the 2025 Caregiving in the US report, released by AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, approximately 63 million Americans provide family care, with almost 48 million providing unpaid care to adults. The 2021 AARP report estimated that the economic value of care was over $600 billion annually. Today, these prof…

The challenges with AI adoption have little to do with the technology itself. In the work environment, the hardest part is bringing together a new orchestration model that fully integrates AI tools while ensuring teams both adopt and master new behaviors to deliver tangible results. As Steve Lucas recently wrote in Fast Company, we have entered the era of the “AI natives and the AI nots.” This delta will become vividly apparent this year. At the center of the AI revolution: a fundamental reevaluation of organizational design. Roles are evolving because the skills, intelligence, and processes we have relied on are being upended and redefined. OLD PROCESSES AND …

In 2002, 45% of the world’s top 250 companies reported on sustainability. Today, 96% do. Sustainability metrics that once differentiated companies have become the new baseline. This doesn’t mean sustainability has stalled. Rather, it has matured. As geopolitical and regulatory risks continue progressing, what it means to be a sustainable business is evolving. For leaders guiding their companies into the future, sustainability must be more than an aspiration or a value. It’s a practical tool for operating stronger, more resilient businesses. The leaders best positioned for success are the ones integrating sustainability as a core business function, operating at the in…

Professional workdays are full, fast, and designed for productivity, not recovery. In Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, 80% of global workers said they don’t have enough time or energy to do their work, and workers were interrupted about every two minutes during the day. That’s the experience of modern work: back-to-back meetings, endless emails and chats, and constant task-switching. The day doesn’t pause for you. We know breaks matter. But for most of us, the problem in taking them isn’t desire or discipline, it’s that the workday doesn’t seem to have room. The good news is you can build short, targeted recovery into the day you already have, once you learn to see …

Social media has fundamentally rewritten the rules of beauty. Trends that once took years to trickle from runway to consumer now emerge, peak, and drive real-world consultations within weeks. Consumers scroll past filler trends and noninvasive procedures during their lunch breaks and book appointments before dinner. The trend-to-treatment pipeline has never moved faster, and the stakes have never been higher. There’s a fundamental mismatch at the heart of the system: Aesthetic inspiration is social and collective, but aesthetic results are deeply personal. What works for one face, skin type, or bone structure won’t always work for another. Yet, consumers routinely mak…

With the Strait of Hormuz in crisis and gas prices surging, few executives are feeling the pressure more acutely than Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Farley. He gives a candid account of what the turmoil means for the auto industry, and for an iconic American brand navigating one of the most turbulent moments in its history. Plus, Farley gets frank about the China threat reshaping the global auto business, and his frustration with Ford’s own ingenuity. 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 conversa…

Most business leaders are laser-focused on the existential threat that AI poses, with many of them citing it as a reason for major layoffs. At an event this week, however, Indeed CEO Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba suggested there was another force that would wreak havoc on the labor market—one that he argued was more pressing. “Actually, what is happening in all developed countries, including European countries and the U.S., what is happening is a big demographic change: an aging labor market,” Idekoba said at Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Wednesday, as Business Insider reported this week. He said the sheer number of workers aging out of the workforce and retiring would…

If you’ve been curious about #vanlife but can’t justify dropping $100,000 on a kitted-out camper, a new patent from a Chinese automaker offers a compromise – but you might not like it. Seres, a prominent EV maker out of China, just secured a patent for an in-car toilet that slides out and tucks away beneath the seat. The patent, first reported outside of China by Autoblog, was filed in April of last year, approved last week, and is currently active. The patented design looks practical enough, with a rail system that allows a compact toilet to slide out from under the seat like a drawer and remain hidden from view when not in use. The design is intended to “satisfy…

The U.S.military is paving the way for the regular deployment of high-energy laser weapons on American soil for air defense amid the expanding threat of low-cost weaponized drones. The Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S.Defense Department have reached a “landmark safety agreement” regarding the use of laser weapons to counter unauthorized drones at the U.S.-Mexico border following a safety assessment that concluded such countermeasures “do not pose undue risk to passenger aircraft,” the FAA announced on April 10. The assessment and resulting agreement were the direct result of two laser incidents along the southern border of Texas in February, which promp…

A Samsung Galaxy Tri-Fold smartphone sits beside something we haven’t seen before. It’s a round screen with a swiveling head. Called Project Luna, it has the mechanical charm of Luxo Jr., and a beep not so different from Wall-E. “The guests are here,” whispers a voice. Moments later, we hear an orchestra begin to play. Project Luna and the Galaxy become the conductors of a wide array of Samsung products and concepts, all of which share the same, pulsating orb graphic animation that lands somewhere between a face, mouth, eye, and the light ring of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL. This is how Samsung is saying hello to its visitors at Milan Design Week for its exhibitio…

About 20 minutes into the Devil Wears Prada—the 2006 David Frankel film that constitutes one of the most important and perfect films ever produced (please hold all dissent)—Meryl Streep delivers a critical speech to Anne Hathaway that encompasses the plot’s primary tension. The moment, which may come up in the sequel (an Instagram post from a professional dyeing service in New York suggests this may be the case), comes as Streep’s Miranda, the frigid chief editor of a top fashion magazine is pondering items that might be featured for an upcoming issue, while surrounded by her stressed-out underlings. Also in the office is Andie (Hathaway), a comparatively disheveled …

In 2021, newly relocated to San Francisco from New York City, Danielle Snyder Shorenstein went with her husband to her first Golden State Warriors game. She wasn’t a sports fan, really, and especially not a Bay Area sports fan. “I identify as a New Yorker,” she says. Having owned and run a fashion and jewelry brand called Dannijo with her sister, Jodie Snyder Morel, since 2008, and looking around at the game merch, she thought to herself how unlikely she’d be to wear any of it. Over the course of the season, Shorenstein continued to go to games with her husband and began experimenting with her own take on fanwear. She cut up a jersey, added a crochet collar, some cry…

Last year at SXSW, I got on stage with a colleague from Tangent, a London-based digital design agency, to ask a simple question: What if every time you checked your phone, a visible puff of smoke rose into the air? While we can’t immediately see the environmental impact of our digital lives, it is very real. Over the past two decades, the digital ecosystem has become society’s invisible infrastructure. More than 60% of the global population is now online. Each user generates 229 kilograms of carbon dioxide, amounting to almost 4% of average per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Most of us don’t know or even consider the hidden cost of our increasingly digitized world. …

Walk into any office and you’ll hear it. “She’s so nurturing — she’d be great leading the wellness committee.” “Don’t worry, the guys will handle the heavy lifting on this pitch.” “You look amazing today!” These statements arrive warmly, often from people who genuinely mean well. That’s exactly what makes benevolent sexism one of the most insidious and under-addressed forces in modern workplaces. Unlike overt harassment, benevolent sexism doesn’t announce itself. It hides behind chivalry, compliments, and cultural tradition. It flatters women while quietly limiting them, wraps restriction in a ribbon and calls it care. And for that reason, it tends to go unchallenged …

The software company Palantir has waded into online fashion discourse after its head of strategic engagement, Eliano A. Younes, posted pictures of a “lightweight Palantir chore coat” to X. the lightweight Palantir chore coat [04.30.2026 • 0930 AM EST] pic.twitter.com/9K5fmu3bSs — Eliano A Younes (@eliano) April 21, 2026 In his post, Younes detailed the make of the coat (100% cotton, designed and made in America, “relaxed fit”), adding that it goes on sale April 30. The perplexing framing has caught people’s attention: Is this internal merch for a controversial tech company, or a drop from a streetwear brand? Increasingly, those worlds are getting uncomforta…

Thousands of AI startups are fighting for the VC funding needed to win a slice of the enterprise market. But according to Scott Stevenson, cofounder and CEO of the legal AI startup Spellbook, many are inflating their real revenues to get it. In a viral tweet on April 17, Stevenson called out these fledgling companies for perpetuating a “huge scam” in their metric reporting. It’s time to expose a huge scam in AI startups: Contracted ARR The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage. The setup:… pic.twitter.com/NQ0qFSn…