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As recently as 2021, Figma was a one-product company. That product was Figma Design, the dominant tool for creating app and web interfaces. The company’s subsequent addition of offerings such as FigJam (whiteboarding) and Figma Slides (presentations) was hardly a frenzied land grab. But the announcements Figma made this week at its Config conference in San Francisco cover so much ground that my impulse was to interpret them as a massive, sprawling new attempt to take on . . . well, almost everybody. Figma Make turns prompts into AI-generated code? Shades of GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and numerous other AI programming tools. Figma Sites provides features for constructing, hosting, and updating websites? Well, that’s a content management system, like WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix. Figma Buzz helps companies create marketing assets that retain a degree of consistency, with AI help if desired? Sounds akin to Canva and Adobe’s Canva rival, Express. Figma Draw lets people create free-form vector illustrations? So does Adobe’s 38-year-old Illustrator. When I asked Figma cofounder and CEO Dylan Field whether the company was indeed trying to compete directly with so many well-established players in multiple categories, he discounted the notion. Instead, he told me, the new products all support its original focus on turning raw concepts into shippable software. “The Figma journey that we’re trying to support users on is going from idea to product,” he told me. “Everything’s truly through that lens.” Still, it would be a mistake to regard Figma’s news as NBD. Even if its original product was a design tool, two-thirds of its users aren’t designers. They’re all the other people inside companies who play roles in product creation, and even if all the company does is address their needs, it will brush up against new rivals. As Field likes to declare, “Creativity is the new productivity.” Figma might be in as good a position as anyone to spread that vision to additional classes of software. As a business, Figma also has every incentive to think big. It’s been almost a year and half since its $20 billion deal to be acquired by Adobe fell apart over antitrust concerns, leaving it as an independent entity pursuing a self-contained vision. Last month, it confidentially filed a draft S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission, beginning the process that will eventually lead to it going public. The more optimistic investors are about the company’s ability to keep growing, the better its IPO will fare. (Figma Design’s ubiquity as a UX design tool is manifestly obvious—90% of designers who responded to a 2023 survey said they used it—but as a private company, Figma is secretive about hard numbers relating to its business. It does say that 85% of users are outside the U.S., proving that it’s a global phenomenon. But the last time it talked about financial return was in September 2022, as part of the Adobe deal announcement. Back then, it said that it expected to do $400 million in revenue that year, with a gross profit of 90%. More current information will come out as part of the IPO process.) As Figma has decided which new products it might build, it hasn’t had to look far. Like Excel and Photoshop, Figma Design is the kind of tool that people grow comfortable with and call into service for jobs well beyond its theoretical mandate. Rather than turn it into too much of a kitchen sink, the company has tended to spin out tasks into new purpose-built apps. All of them have a familial resemblance and work together as a suite. The centrality of Figma Design does serve to set the company’s latest products apart from others in the same general zip code. Maybe Figma Buzz will win some hearts based purely on its quality. But it seems even more likely that people will pick it over Canva or Adobe Express because it’s optimized to serve workflows that are already Figma-centric. “It’s very easy to be able to push a template from Figma Design to the Buzz surface,” Field says. “And then people know exactly what they can edit. They can go edit it, insert images, or go find a different template if they so choose, and know that they’re on brand. Or they can go off the rails if they want to.” Then there’s AI, which was already in the air at Config 2023. At last year’s conference, the company announced a design-generating feature called Make Designs, which—like AI rollouts all over the tech industry—got off to a bumpy start. After controversy ignited on Twitter over the eerie similarities between a weather app it designed and the one Apple ships on the iPhone, Figma pulled back the feature and reworked it. Even now, designers are still puzzling out how they feel about AI. In a new study commissioned by Figma, only 31% said they currently use the technology for their core work, 69% were satisfied with it, and 54% thought it improved quality. All those figures were notably lower than ones reported in the same study by developers. Uncertainty over AI might be a sign the killer apps haven’t arrived. “People value efficiency,” Field says. “And so where we can help there, that’s really important. But also, they really value raising the ceiling and making it so they’re able to do better work. And I think that’s where AI has not yet had the impact it should.” Customer feedback might help explain Figma’s careful positioning of its new AI features. The company says some organizations may ship products created by Make, which lets users start with something they’ve roughed out in Figma Design and then use prompts to generate code. Mostly, though, it’s emphasizing the potential to quickly turn flat designs into rich prototypes that help push progress along. Another application: adding a dash of custom interactivity to websites powered by Figma Sites. AI is also present in both Figma Design and Figma Buzz in the form of image generation features based on OpenAI’s latest GPT-Image-1 model. But when I spoke with Field, he seemed less excited by the prospect of turning over image creation to a machine than by Figma Draw, a classical sort of illustration tool for people who want to hand-create imagery that’s precise, reflects a distinctive style, and may even mimic work done with old-school art implements such as a paintbrush. If Draw has any AI at all, it didn’t matter enough to merit a mention in the blog post introducing the product. “We have a lot of opportunity to build tools for folks [to] be more divergent and have more craft and stand out,” Field told me. “And we think that’s the differentiator that’ll make people win over time.” As some organizations lean too heavily on AI, we’re going to see more and more bland, look-alike products. It’s nice to think that doubling down on unmistakably human creativity could be a competitive advantage. And that Figma won’t stray too far from its traditional emphasis on helping create such work, even as it figures out how to make AI make sense. You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company My favorite tools for a focused, restful second half of the day From post-lunch planning to bedtime wind-down, these apps, devices, and routines help me stay present, productive, and unplugged. Read More → ‘The school has to be evacuated’: Connecticut students are setting their Chromebooks on fire for TikTok Students are filming themselves inserting items into the charging ports of their school Chromebooks in order to spark a fire. Read More → LinkedIn’s new AI tools help job seekers find smarter career fits Users can now describe the kind of job they want in plain language, and AI helps surface matches they might have otherwise missed. Read More → Your Netflix app is about to get a ‘For You’ page The streamer’s mobile UI is about to look a lot more like TikTok. Read More → Bigger fonts and no trucks: How Lyft designed its new app for older riders Lyft Silver is the ride-sharing company’s simplified service for older adults. Read More → AI scam calls are getting smarter. Here’s how telecoms are fighting back Scammers are using deepfake voices, caller ID spoofing, and machine learning to target victims with frightening precision. But telecom providers and regulators are deploying AI defenses of their own to stop the surge in fraud. Read More → View the full article

Uncertainty has become a defining feature of life today, a reality that challenges workplace leaders to adapt rapidly, make decisions with limited information, and foster stability amid constant and sometimes highly erratic change. At the same time, this uncertainty directly affects employees, making it incumbent upon leaders to provide the support and direction their teams need to successfully navigate an unpredictable world with both resilience and clarity. It goes without saying that the role of a leader has grown increasingly more complex, requiring us to instill stability, foster adaptability, and maintain focus without being overwhelmed by the relentless pace of change. In just the past month in America, we’ve witnessed the introduction, removal, and reintroduction of tariffs, massively disrupted supply chains, a whipsawing stock market (putting everyone’s retirement savings at risk), major companies mandating a return to office work, and the emergence of artificial intelligence technologies—innovations sparking equal parts excitement and fear as they reshape industries and raise questions about job security and the future of work. It’s a lot for all of us to deal with. Through my own leadership experience, I’ve learned that it’s absolutely pointless to try to control chaos—and far wiser to coach teams on how to thrive in spite of it. The following are five strategies I’ve used over the course of my career that workplace leaders can adopt to help their people negotiate complexity and perform at their best—regardless of what turbulence the universe throws our way: 1. Be a Rational Optimist In today’s world, it’s all too easy for pessimism to seep into our consciousness and negatively shape how we interact with those we lead. Being an abject pessimist, however, is entirely at odds with effective leadership, as it curtails productivity, stifles creativity, narrows perspective, and stands in the way of meaningful progress. Yet, while pessimism can directly undermine progress, leaning too far into optimism also carries its own risks. Effective leadership requires striking a balance—offering hope and inspiration while remaining realistic about the challenges ahead. In his book Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes, New York Times bestselling author Morgan Housel makes this exact point by urging leaders to be “rational optimists.” He emphasizes that our role as leaders is to imbue a deep belief in people that difficult challenges can indeed be overcome, while also being very honest about the strong likelihood that they’ll face setbacks, surprises, and disappointments along the way. When people know to expect a rough road ahead, choosing hope over despair naturally opens the door to opportunities and more creative solutions. 2. Foster Team Connection and Belonging When teams face uncertain times, the belief that “everyone is in this together” is a powerful force for fostering unity, sustaining morale, and motivating employees to collaborate and support each other to overcome major challenges. This is why leaders who prioritize team connection create environments where individuals feel secure enough to navigate difficulties together. The goal is to cultivate a team culture where no one feels isolated and everyone is inspired to have each other’s back—truly embodying the spirit of “all for one and one for all.” Recent research shows that feelings of belonging are the glue that holds teams together, as well as being the cornerstone of employee well-being. For leaders, creating this sense of belonging requires nurturing deeper relationships with our employees and learning their concerns. It’s also about fostering an environment where differences are celebrated, inclusion is more than a buzzword, and every voice carries weight. Togetherness can be a great source of strength. 3. Proactively Build Team Resilience Long before crises or unexpected setbacks arise, leaders must not only remind employees that risk is an inherent aspect of every business. They must equip them to respond emotionally, to even the smallest hurdles, with confidence and resilience. As Nassim Taleb, the author of bestselling books on randomness and complexity, wisely advises, leaders should “prioritize preparation over prediction,” focusing on flexibility and readiness rather than relying on forecasts that are often uncertain or incomplete. One way to achieve this is by regularly engaging employees in “what if” discussions—posing questions like, “How would we respond if this situation happened?” Additionally, empowering teams to collaboratively brainstorm solutions to everyday challenges on their own will help build their adaptability and creativity muscles, so they are ready when needed. Finally, workplace leaders must cultivate their own self-mastery during challenging times. Learning how to maintain composure, reframe setbacks as opportunities, and display optimism in the worst of times is a collective skill set that demands diligent effort and commitment to develop. In the end, leaders must model the behavior they’ll expect from their team. 4. Influence Through Stories, Less Through Data In Same as Ever, Morgan Housel clarifies that humans are wired for stories, not spreadsheets. Highlighting how storytelling creates clarity and sparks action, he explains, “We don’t think in terms of odds and probabilities; we think in terms of narratives.” Unlike raw data or abstract concepts, stories resonate deeply because they are inherently relatable and emotionally engaging. Imagine a CEO who’s suddenly faced with a market downturn. Instead of bombarding employees with forecasts and financial metrics, telling stories about times in the past when their company was faced with great difficulties—and triumphed—is a transformative way of framing the current challenge as being equally surmountable. According to Housel, “We live in a world where people are bored, impatient, emotional and need complicated things distilled into easy-to-grasp scenes.” So, craft stories that make the unknown feel conquerable, and watch them resonate with your teams. 5. Set Reasonable Expectations When unforeseen disruptions occur, projects often veer off schedule, and teams fall behind on critical targets. These setbacks are pivotal moments for leadership, as the urge to quickly regain momentum can place employees in an untenable position, feeling as if they’re fighting against the universe. In these circumstances, wise leaders display patience and avoid placing undue pressure on their teams by setting unrealistic goals. Instead, they emphasize that while external factors may be uncontrollable, effort is always within their influence—even in the absence of guarantees. In the 1970s, Disney’s stock dropped 70%. Walt Disney responded by setting modest internal goals, assuring employees that he believed the company would recover through steady, determined action. His measured approach proved to foster resilience across the organization. Navigating rough seas In times of turbulence, the teams that will thrive are those who work cohesively, maintain an optimistic yet pragmatic outlook (acknowledging that big challenges may not have simple solutions, but can be conquered), and are trained to pivot rather than freeze when circumstances seem most dire. And, while we might wish for life to be easier and our objectives more readily attainable, we should also always remember that “a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” View the full article

After a two-year battle with regulators, a federal judge ruled in late December to block the merger of grocery behemoths Kroger and Albertsons. The deal fell apart after facing significant pushback—and a lawsuit—from the Federal Trade Commission under the Biden administration, in part over concerns that unionized grocery workers would have less leverage to negotiate wage increases and respond to layoffs following a merger. Those concerns were not unfounded: The overwhelming majority of grocery workers (92%) are frontline staff in nonsupervisory positions, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—and as industry leaders, Kroger and Albertsons employ 28% of grocery workers across the country. Hourly wages for all grocery workers have effectively stagnated for the past two decades, hovering just under $18 in 2024 when adjusted for inflation, and weekly earnings have actually dropped by 15%. A new report by the nonprofit organization Economic Roundtable—which draws heavily on surveys of Kroger and Albertsons workers in California, Colorado, and Washington conducted by the United Food and Commercial Workers union—suggests that understaffing at these grocery stores impacts many workers and exacerbates the industry-wide issue of depressed wages. For many grocery employees, chronic understaffing and being denied additional hours on the job without a meaningful increase in hourly pay makes it even more difficult to earn a living wage. The report’s authors argue that reduced staffing at grocery stores has affected the shopping experience for consumers, as workers struggle to keep shelves fully stocked and manage their workload. Three-quarters of workers surveyed by UFCW said they struggled to finish assigned tasks during shifts. Kroger itself reported 14.1% fewer labor hours per store in 2023 than in 2019. But the Economic Roundtable’s report estimates that Kroger decreased labor hours despite increased demand due to e-commerce sales, leading to a labor shortfall of 21% relative to 2019. At Albertsons, which the report found was already understaffed in 2019, the shortfall amounted to 13%. In a statement to Fast Company, a Kroger spokesperson said, “We are committed to improving associates’ wages and benefits while keeping prices affordable for customers. We intentionally staff our stores to keep them running smoothly and creating an outstanding customer experience. Our decisions are data-driven to balance workload, schedules and customer service. Unrealistic demands by UFCW that do not reflect today’s competitive retail landscape will jeopardize the long-term sustainability of unionized businesses and advance non-union competitors.” (Albertsons did not respond to a request for comment.) The rise of lower staffing levels alongside wage stagnation also measurably affects workers’ ability to manage their finances and cover basic expenses. In the UFCW surveys, many grocery workers report getting their hours cut or being denied additional hours by their employer—a trend that is also captured by BLS data, which indicates that average weekly hours logged by nonsupervisory workers have dropped 11% since 2003 to under 29 hours. Grocery workers are also more likely, on average, to be part-time employees relative to workers in other industries, with the share of workers being 58% greater. By and large, the workers surveyed believed their pay did not fairly compensate them for their workload and experience, and that they saw themselves as essential frontline workers but were not treated as such by their employers. Many of them reported struggling to afford monthly expenses like rent, with more than two-thirds of grocery workers claiming to not have secure housing. Only 16% of grocery workers said they made enough money to cover basic expenses. On average, annual pay for nonsupervisory grocery workers in the regions surveyed is just over $25,000—and many such workers are eligible for Medicaid and other federal programs that help support low-income families. Over the past few decades, wage stagnation—and the yawning gap between worker pay and executive compensation—has impacted rank-and-file employees across industries. Even so, many workers have actually seen a bump in pay: According to the Economic Roundtable report, weekly earnings have increased by 15% over the past 20 years for production and nonsupervisory workers in other industries. Grocery workers, however, have experienced the opposite, leading to a 50% gap in pay relative to workers in other industries—a shift that the report finds has also coincided with a notable decline in union membership across the grocery industry. View the full article

Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. It’s the promotional event nobody asked for: You could call it Tariff Deal Days. From auto dealers to underwear brands, companies are cajoling consumers to buy now before tariffs jack up prices, cause shortages, or both. Despite constant uncertainty about how a U.S. versus everybody trade war might play out, the widespread consensus that prices will rise is translating into short-term marketing hook. Some brands have taken a blunt tone in messages to customers and on social media. Underwear maker MeUndies’ CEO criticized the tariffs with an expletive in an Instagram post—before announcing a tariff-inspired discount code. Lingerie and swimsuit brand Bare Necessities touted a “pre-tariff sale” in a text to customers that was picked up by CNBC and others: “We didn’t know how to spell tariff last week, but we do know this: Up to 30% off is a good idea!” Clothing brand Universal Standard emailed customers about a Mystery Box promotion offering deals on pieces already in its warehouses and thus un-tariffed. In an attention-getting message to shoppers, luggage brand BÉIS conceded price increases were likely on the way even though “we’ve considered everything from company-wide ramen diets to asking our CEO to start an OnlyFans.” The message: Buy now! While these Tariff Deal Days campaigns have been piling up lately, moves toward converting the looming tariff threat into a sales call to action were bubbling up even before the The President administration’s “Liberation Day” announcement of its sweeping tariff regime on April 2. At least one Subaru dealer began promoting “pre-tariff savings”—basically estimating a tariff’s potential future cost to shoppers and positioning it as discount—in late March. Sticker company Stickerjunkie admitted it was “as uncertain as everyone else” about price hikes in a March Instagram post promoting a “Pre-Tariff Sale” of its own. Other brand responses have ranged from limited-time markdowns to more general encouragement to shop before they’re forced to raise prices. Partly this is about signaling transparency and a we’re-all-in-this-together vibe to consumers in a muddled and ominous retail environment. But it’s also about getting sales on the books: Smaller brands and businesses may be particularly motivated to get more cash on hand as soon as possible to buy time to rethink supply chains and otherwise weather whatever that trade battles turn into in the months ahead, and beyond. And many consumers seem to be in a similarly uncertain state that’s left many open to deals. “There’s an expectation that certain products are going to be expensive, so having a promotion today is very valuable,” a KPMG analyst told NBC, citing a survey from the accounting firm finding roughly half of consumers are looking for pre-tariff deals. The flurry of pre-tariff branding moves comes on the heels of months of cautious watching and waiting by advertisers about what’s going to happen, and how to communicate with customers about it. A few, including Chipotle and Rivian, are currently saying they won’t raise prices. Others, such as Ford, are highlighting their best made-in-America stories. (About three-quarters of Ford vehicles are manufactured in the U.S., a fact that’s now marketing “gold,” according to Adweek; that said, Ford has also announced trade-war-related price bumps for three of its models.) Still others—from Adidas to Walmart to Mattel—are simply warning of likely price hikes; Black & Decker and Shein have started them. Many ad agencies expect ad budgets will be cut by up to 10% this year. Another notable strategy has come from discount online retailer Temu, which has begun breaking out and labeling the “export fee”—that is, tariff costs—that is driving up its prices. Amazon reportedly considered a similar move before the The President administration harshly criticized the idea. But consumers seem to want such information—nearly three-quarters of adults in one poll said they would be at least somewhat interested in seeing tariff impacts quantified. Maybe that thirst for clarity isn’t surprising, given the marketplace chaos that seems likely headed our way this year. In fact, while pre-tariff branding events will presumably be fleeting, the most important thing brands may achieve with their openly tariff-centric marketing is a sense of openness and communication with consumers. A protracted trade war will mean escalating rhetoric and frustrating uncertainties, and for better or worse brands will have to figure out the best way to be part of that conversation. View the full article

Andrew Bailey believes agreement is ‘good news’ but warns that uncertainty is clouding business decisions View the full article

An irony of mainstream corporate sustainability efforts is that they focus significantly on the power of consumption. H&M promotes its “Conscious Collection” that uses organic cotton or recycled polyester. Samsung’s “Galaxy for the Planet” showcases its use of recycled plastics in its devices and sustainable packaging. When companies advertise their products as sustainable, consumers frequently assume they can buy new items more frequently, making such moves paradoxically self-defeating. But these marketing ploys typically only focus on a selective element of a product’s impact. The problem is that while each individual product may have less of an impact than what came before it, the increase in overall consumption mitigates any environmental savings, and so inherently perpetuates the cycle of consumption that’s a root cause of today’s environmental problems. Over the last half century and more, the environmental movement has gradually morphed into a consumer movement, with corporate messaging expertly shifting responsibility from systemic change to individual purchasing decisions. We’ve been led to believe that the solution to environmental catastrophe lies in meticulously examining product labels for terms like organic, sustainably produced, green, and other buzzwords often coined by corporations themselves. Millennials and Gen Z are portrayed as eco-conscious generations that will correct the poor environmental decisions of their parents. But while many initiatives today tick corporate sustainability boxes and make individuals feel like their purchases are righteous, they fail to address the deeper systemic challenge: as long as companies prioritize endless growth, they will continue to push more consumption—and no amount of “green” products can offset that. We need to come to grips with the fact that consumption is—and will always be—exceedingly hard to constrain, especially when companies are spending over $1 trillion a year to convince us to buy more. Any sustainability effort that relies solely on the purchase of more responsible goods will fail. This challenge has only intensified in the current political landscape. Since returning to office, President The President and his administration have relaxed standards for fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions for vehicles, and claimed that “more drilling would bring down energy bills.” Furthermore, the Department of Energy announced plans to pause efficiency standards for seven categories of appliances, while the Environmental Protection Agency began overhauling the WaterSense label program to prioritize “effectiveness and consumer experience” over efficiency. These policy shifts effectively prioritize short-term economic growth and resource extraction over environmental stewardship, and they create a regulatory landscape that rewards consumption rather than conservation and regeneration. Given this, what can companies do to address the fundamental paradox of sustainable consumption? Creating sustainable consumption opportunities starts before the purchase A first step for companies interested in consumption being sustainable is to ensure that their entire supply chains are built on sustainable and equitable principles. Reducing the footprint and environmental impact of products in this way is a much more robust path to sustainable consumption than today’s focus on telling consumers to buy products with green attributes. For instance, beverage maker Guayakí Yerba Mate has developed a regenerative model that connects the dots between consumers purchasing its products and positive societal and environmental effects in its supply chains. Ben Mand, CEO of Guayakí, told me that his company works in the Atlantic Forest communities in South America where yerba mate leaves from a tree in the holly family are grown. They work with smallholder producers to implement high environmental and social standards, and then ensure that the economic benefits of their work flow directly into the communities rather than being captured by intermediaries​​. In other words, if companies can ensure their production and distribution create an overall positive benefit, the environmental problems that stem from the eventual consumption of their products are significantly reduced. It may seem easy to dismiss strategies like these because they’re done by a company in a niche category. But I’ve observed similar practices being scaled in many other prominent multinational firms across industries around the globe. For instance, leading global coffee maker Illycaffè created a regenerative coffee production system, focused on enhancing biodiversity, improving soil health, and fostering resilient farming communities. Illycaffè collaborates directly with coffee farmers in South America and Africa to support agro-ecological practices that not only boost crop yields but also protect ecosystems. This approach ensures the long-term viability of coffee cultivation—a crop under significant environmental threat—while promoting fair trade and social equity. Thus, one way to mitigate the paradox of consumption is by starting with materials and supply chains and fostering a model where each purchase directly delivers social and environmental benefits to the communities producing the raw materials. The difference between H&M and Samsung versus Guayakí and Illycaffè is subtle but important. H&M and Samsung spotlight isolated “green” features—like recycled materials—to market select products. Guayakí and Illycaffè, by contrast, embed sustainability throughout their supply chains, prioritizing the overall impact of their businesses rather than promoting individual eco-friendly attributes. Helping consumers understand the extended life cycles of products Moving up the value chain also highlights the importance of the design of production systems. Ikea, the world’s largest furniture retailer with more than 480 stores across 63 markets, offers another example of how a global corporation can fundamentally reimagine its relationship with consumption. In an industry where Americans discard more than 12 million tons of furniture annually, Ikea is working to break the “take-make-dispose” cycle that has defined furniture retail. As Mardi Ditze, country sustainability manager for Ikea U.S., explained to me, a key initiative is the Buy Back & Resell program, launched in 2022, which allows customers to return an Ikea product they no longer want and then receive credits worth between 30% and 50% of the original price. Depending on the condition, items are either resold, refurbished, or recycled. This program is now operational in most U.S. stores and accepts nearly 3,000 products for resale. Each returned item undergoes a detailed evaluation process, prioritizing resale through their “As-is” section, with recycling as a last resort. Hege Sæbjørnsen, Ikea’s sustainability manager for the U.K. and Ireland, said the plan would help to promote Ikea’s progress toward achieving its “fully circular” and “climate positive” goals by 2030. In addition, Ikea has introduced the Ikea Preowned platform, which facilitates peer-to-peer sales of secondhand furniture. The program is currently being tested in Madrid and Oslo, with potential global expansion. The Swedish retailer already resells some 47 million products worldwide. Companies like Patagonia and Eileen Fisher are also challenging throwaway culture by designing programs that extend product life cycles and reduce waste. Patagonia’s Worn Wear initiative repairs and resells used gear—more than 130,000 items in 2024 alone—thereby encouraging shared responsibility between brand and customer. Eileen Fisher’s take-back program has reclaimed more than two million garments, transforming them into resale items, new clothing, or other goods, and built dedicated facilities to support this near-zero-waste model. Both companies demonstrate how brands can work to reshape purchasing habits and production systems to prioritize sustainability. Conclusion There’s no denying that people will want to keep buying new products. We must therefore move beyond current paradigms that place the onus on consumers to drive sustainability. If we are to achieve legitimate sustainable consumption, businesses must redesign their value chains from the ground up and embed environmental and social responsibility into every decision from design, sourcing, and production to also how they communicate with consumers. Since returning to office, the The President administration has systematically dismantled environmental protections that could have incentivized more sustainable business practices. But the examples of Guayakí, Illy, Ikea, Patagonia, and Eileen Fisher point toward an alternative paradigm—one where consumption isn’t positioned as the solution to our environmental crisis, but rather as one element in a broader economic system designed primarily to serve people and planet. View the full article

When Christopher Pelkey was killed in a road rage incident in Arizona, his family was left not only to grieve but also to navigate how to represent him in court. As they prepared to confront his killer, Gabriel Horcasitas, during sentencing, they made an unusual and deeply controversial choice: to have Pelkey appear to speak from beyond the grave. To do so, they turned to technology: An AI-generated video featuring a re-created voice and likeness of Pelkey was presented as a victim impact statement ahead of sentencing. The video showed a digitally resurrected Pelkey appearing to speak directly to the judge. Of course, the statement wasn’t truly Pelkey’s. He couldn’t have possibly said those words—he died the day Horcasitas shot him. Yet the judge accepted the AI-generated message, even acknowledging its effect. “You allowed Chris to speak from his heart as you saw it,” the judge said. Horcasitas was sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison. The extraordinary courtroom moment has sparked widespread discussion, not just for its emotional power but for the precedent it may set. Arizona’s victims’ rights laws allow the families of deceased victims to determine how their impact statements are delivered. But legal and AI experts warn that this precedent is far from harmless. “I have sympathy for the family members who constructed the video,” says Eerke Boiten, a professor at De Montfort University in the U.K. specializing in AI. “Knowing Pelkey, they likely had a preconceived view of how he might have felt, and AI gave them a way of putting that across that many found attractive and convincing.” Still, Boiten is uneasy about how the video has been interpreted by both the public and possibly the court. “The video should be read as a statement of opinion from the family members, with AI providing a convincing presentation of that,” he explains. Yet public reaction suggests it was taken as something more. “The reactions show that it was taken as an almost factual contribution from Pelkey instead,” Boiten says. The victims’ rights attorney who represented Pelkey’s family told 404 Media that “at no point did anyone try to pass it off as Chris’s own words.” Yet the emotionally charged format of presenting a deepfaked version of the deceased gives those words far more weight than if they had simply been read aloud. And it’s worth emphasizing: Pelkey could never have written them himself. “It’s an inappropriate use of AI which has no relevance and should have no role at sentencing,” says Julian Roberts, emeritus professor of criminology at the University of Oxford and executive director of the Sentencing Academy. Data protection specialist Jon Baines of the firm Mishcon de Reya adds that the incident is “profoundly troubling from an ethical standpoint.” Roberts argues that using an AI-generated likeness of a victim oversteps the purpose of a victim impact statement. “The victim statement should inform the court about the impact of the crime on the victim and advise of any possible impact of the imposition of a community order, et cetera,” he says. “It is not an exercise in memorializing the victim.” In his view, that’s exactly what the Pelkey video did. Roberts also criticized the content of the statement itself: “The statement should contain information, not opinion or invention—human or AI-derived.” Still, a precedent has now been set—at least in Arizona. One that blurs the line between mourning and manipulation. One that allows people to “speak” from beyond the grave—and could, in the future, influence the length of prison sentences in ways that justice systems may not yet be prepared to handle. View the full article

Humans have long been transfixed by the moon, awed and inspired by its reassuring presence in the night sky and its influence on the tides. In recent decades, though, our fascination with our nearest celestial neighbor has become somewhat more opportunistic: The moon contains valuable resources, and governments and companies are eager to get their hands on them. One such resource is helium-3 (He-3), a gas that some experts say could unlock clean and abundant energy on Earth as a fuel for fusion. It’s this gas that Interlune, a Seattle-based startup, has its sights on. The company wants to be the first to commercialize space resources, starting with He-3, which it plans to begin harvesting from the moon and selling on Earth by the end of the decade. Helium-3 is used mostly in medical diagnostics and national security, but it has great potential to unlock groundbreaking technological advancements, the most tantalizing of which is nuclear fusion. Fusion is what powers the stars, and as the climate crisis deepens, scientists are desperately trying to harness it in reactors to produce abundant energy without the use of fossil fuels. He-3 is a desirable fuel for fusion reactors because it would produce very little dangerous radioactive waste. “Helium-3 fusion reactors open up the opportunity to have power available for people on Earth in a way that’s never been available before,” says Aaron Olson, a research physicist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center who has studied helium-3 extraction. “And that’s not only for those of us who happen to live in areas where we have grids that function really well, but it could bring energy to people who live in areas like sub-Saharan Africa, where 90% of the population doesn’t have access to electricity.” The problem is that He-3 is extremely rare on Earth, and therefore very expensive. A kilogram of the stuff will set you back roughly $20 million. Most of the terrestrial supply comes from the decay of tritium, which is a byproduct of nuclear reactors and aging nuclear weapons. The United States has been rationing He-3 since 2010. By contrast, the moon holds an abundance of He-3. The isotope is emitted from the sun’s corona and carried through the solar wind, and because the moon isn’t protected by an atmosphere or magnetic field, these particles have been embedding themselves in the lunar soil—or regolith—for billions of years. Recent estimates suggest the moon has about 1.1 million metric tons of He-3, compared to Earth’s reserves of just 1.6 tons. “Helium-3 is the only resource worth going all the way to the moon and back for,” Interlune’s director of business development, Nina Hooper, explained. “Now it’s up to us to go develop the technology that’s going to help us extract it.” Interlune’s plan is to send its “harvesters” to an area that’s about a mile wide and located near the moon’s equator on its near side, or the side that’s always visible to Earth. These unmanned machines will dig into the top three meters of lunar regolith, crush the rocks, extract the He-3 gas, and then put the regolith back where it belongs. “When we’re done, it looks like a tilled field,” says Interlune CEO and cofounder Rob Meyerson, who previously served as president of Blue Origin. Interlune is aiming to start with two test missions, one in 2027 and another in 2029, to measure He-3 levels on the moon, harvest it on a small scale, and bring some back to Earth. It wants to go to market with 20 kilograms of He-3 in 2030, ramping up to 100 kilograms over five years. “That will do a great job to stabilize the supply chain,” Meyerson adds. Could it also unlock the future of clean energy? Despite promising advances in fusion science, commercial fusion is still a ways off. “There is still a lot of work to be done before a functional reactor goes online,” says NASA’s Olson. “There are still questions that persist as to how quickly that can happen.” An abundance of He-3 for fusion research could, however, help speed up that process. In the meantime, Interlune has another sector in mind for its first target market: quantum computing. This market is projected to balloon between now and 2030, with big tech players like IBM, Nvidia, and Apple pouring billions into quantum tech research and development with the hopes of creating breakthrough innovations and rapidly solving stubborn problems across science, medicine, and other fields. Helium-3 helps keep these supercomputers cool enough to function efficiently, and Meyerson says Interlune has already secured contracts with “more than one” company and letters of intent for “more than a billion dollars” worth of He-3 even before it has demonstrated its technology. “These customers are relatively price insensitive, so they’re willing to pay something near the current market price, and they’re really, really eager to secure supply,” he says. This week, Interlune announced Maybell Quantum, a quantum infrastructure company, as its first commercial customer. Maybell agreed to buy “thousands of liters” of He-3 to be delivered between 2029 and 2035. The U.S. Department of Energy has also agreed to buy He-3 from Interlune in its quest to top up its reserves. Not everyone is eager to see the moon become an industrial hub, though. Astronomers are particularly worried about mining because the moon is an important outpost for space science thanks to how quiet, still, and cold it is. For example, the far-side of the moon is “the most radio quiet part of the inner solar system,” explains Richard Green, an astronomer emeritus at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory and a vocal advocate for preserving lunar science. That makes it the best place to use radio astronomy to learn about the universe and look for signs of life beyond Earth. “If the mining equipment is next door and blasting rocks and digging things up, that would just be inconsistent with the stable platform that those really sensitive detections need,” Green adds. He and other researchers want to see the creation of an international system that evaluates claims to certain regions on the moon and allows scientists to “reserve” sites in advance so they can study the area before any mining takes place. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with mining, it’s a legitimate activity,” he says. “But so is science. How do we set up a system of communication and coordination that doesn’t lead to conflict?” The existing rules around space mining are fairly new, and don’t offer much help. A 2015 U.S. law ruled that private American companies can own any space resources they mine. In 2020, NASA’s Artemis Accords sought to introduce some guidelines on the practice of harvesting space resources, stating that any extraction must be done in compliance with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. That means countries carrying out mining would have to do so for the benefit of all mankind. They’d have to avoid “harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies,” and would be liable for any damage they cause. All of that said, regulations might be hard to enforce. “There are no police that are going to land on the moon,” says Green. (Neither China nor Russia have signed onto the Artemis Accords, which aren’t legally binding anyway.) Meyerson is quick to underscore that what Interlune wants to do isn’t traditional mining. “There are no chemicals used to strip the helium-3 out of the material,” he says. “You’re not leaving contaminated tailings behind. So as far as comparing this to mining, it’s just 180 degrees apart.” He believes that by being the first to harvest moon resources, Interlune can set the standard as the lunar gold rush accelerates. Eventually, Interlune plans to expand its scope to harvest other lunar resources that could be used to build infrastructure and produce rocket fuel on the moon, all of which could serve as a stepping stone for future space exploration. “We’re in this for the long run of building an in-space economy,” says Meyerson. “We would be processing other resources on the moon, like water that we can turn into rocket fuel, metals like aluminum and titanium and silicon, and then construction material.” Some proponents of space mining also argue it’s an environmental Hail Mary. “There is the notion of the Earth becoming an oasis,” says Olson. “It’s an idea that harvesting resources, whether it be the moon or other places in space, could help us preserve the Earth for future generations in a way where maybe we’re not doing as much damaging extractive work on Earth, and some of that could be put in places that are, for lack of a better term, barren.” View the full article

Navigating professional transitions can be a whirlwind of emotions for employees, whether starting a new job or leaving a company. Onboarding is essential for creating a sense of belonging and shared purpose that extends throughout a new hire’s tenure. And this vital initiative should be about more than following a checklist. Onboarding provides an opportunity to make your newest colleagues feel genuinely connected to the team and confident in their contributions. This ensures they can thrive from day one until their final day with the company. The importance of onboarding The first 90 days are a crucial time for employees to establish themselves and for leadership to set the tone. It’s a great time to encourage new hires to envision their contributions to the business’s success. When leadership actively engages and guides new team members through this process, it fosters a sense of alignment with the organization’s goals. This transforms onboarding from a routine task into a long-term motivation, engagement, and loyalty initiative. Yet too often, companies miss the mark. A recent Gallup poll found that only 12% of workers strongly agreed that their firm excelled in onboarding them, and just 29% said they felt supported and fully prepared to start their role. These numbers reveal a huge opportunity gap. When companies approach onboarding as a mere formality, new employees can feel disconnected and disengaged, which leads to costly turnover and lost potential. Offboarding is another aspect of the employee experience that companies overlook. But it’s worth noting that how we support workers as they leave is just as important as onboarding them. A Gallup poll of 150 Fortune 500 CHROs found that just 10% considered their employer highly effective in managing departures. Leaders play a vital role in connecting employees to their colleagues and organization, especially during transitional seasons. Psychological safety invites belonging Thoughtfully designed onboarding and offboarding processes foster a supportive environment where the company makes new hires and seasoned veterans feel valued. Psychological safety is a critical element of this. It ensures employees can express themselves—ask questions, offer ideas, or admit mistakes—without fear of negative consequences. When managers promote this sense of security from day one, they lay the groundwork for their colleagues to make meaningful contributions to the business’s success throughout their tenure. Inclusion from the start The first three months are critical for new hires to understand their tasks and the company’s culture and values. Preboarding and starting onboarding before an employee’s first day can ease the transition. Simple initiatives like giving a tour, pairing new employees with peers to answer questions, or sharing background materials in advance have a significant impact. By pacing out key details, you allow new hires to adjust in comfortable increments. This ensures that you make them feel supported and included from the start. A community approach to onboarding Onboarding isn’t just about bringing our new colleagues up to speed. It’s about helping them see themselves as integral team members. When you do this right, onboarding goes beyond basic training and allows new employees to envision the unique impact they can have on the company’s success. This sense of ownership and alignment with the business’s values is critical, yet many companies still take a one-size-fits-all approach. Onboarding should be a strategic tool to drive long-term commitment and growth, benefiting both the employee and the company. Creating this connection requires a team effort—everyone has a role in making new team members feel welcomed and valued. Encourage early wins New hires often experience a mix of excitement and anxiety. While they may be eager to demonstrate what they can do, they might also be hesitant about when and how to engage. Empowering new recruits to take ownership of their work by notching early wins—whether that’s achievable projects or tasks—can build confidence quickly. Assigning a familiar project that aligns with their prior experience validates employees’ contributions from the start and is a great way to ease them into their new role. An early win is more than a confidence boost. It creates a connection with the broader team, allowing new employees to find their footing during those pivotal first three months and beyond. Shape meaningful departures How a business approaches an employee’s departure reveals more about the leadership culture than it does about the individual who is leaving. A respectful and supportive offboarding process should be an extension of the sense of belonging that an employee cultivates throughout their career with the company. However, offboarding processes often lack care. An inclusive offboarding process aims to gather feedback, enhance retention, and build trust among current and future employees. Effective exit interviews allow departing workers to express their thoughts, helping organizations understand the employees’ reasons for leaving. When former employees feel appreciated, they advocate for the company, promoting a positive reputation in the job market. A valuable exit experience reflects the organization’s values and leaves a lasting impression, strengthening a sense of belonging for the departing employee and current and future team members. Foster cohesion through belonging Taking a team-based approach to onboarding deepens everyone’s sense of belonging. It fosters collaboration and empathy while bolstering cohesion and satisfaction. By working together to integrate new hires, existing team members can refine their leadership skills. This approach helps dismantle the hypercompetitive tendencies that can become destructive within some workplaces. When new employees feel that they are part of a team that works together, they’re more likely to engage fully and contribute to the company’s long-term success; then, when they are ready to move on, their experiences and insights shape and inform the next generation of talent. View the full article

If there’s one thing worse than having to assemble a PowerPoint presentation, it’s being forced to sit through an achingly dull one conducted by someone else. So what if there were a better option—a way anyone, regardless of skill, could create a sleek and actually engaging slideshow that looks like a professional designer had a hand in it? If you ask Grant Lee, we’ve already reached the point where that’s possible. And it doesn’t end with presentations. Lee is the founder of an AI-centric startup called Gamma. You may not have heard of it yet, but 50 million people have—and are already using the service. That’s led the scrappy, 30-person company to reach a milestone of $50 million in annual recurring revenue a mere two years into its existence. “I realized just how important it was for people to be able to communicate their ideas in a visual way that others can consume,” Lee says. “Many of us have these ideas in our heads, but then to be able to actually convey that in a way that gets in other people’s heads—it’s really hard.” Lee came to that realization while working in investment banking. He spent his days immersed in underwhelming, clunky-to-create slide decks. Now, he wants to make sure no one else is forced to dawdle their days away with those sorts of distractions. If you’ve wasted any amount of time wading through painfully bad presentations—or documents, websites, or social media posts—Gamma could be just the upgrade you never knew you needed. But, like most generative AI tools of the moment, it isn’t without its limitations. A broader approach to AI creation Let’s get one thing out of the way now: On the surface, Gamma seems an awful lot like another AI-centric startup I wrote about for Fast Company last year—a now-eight-year-old presentation-making service called Beautiful.ai. But while both services do aim to take the pain out of presentation creation, they differ not only in their philosophical foundations but also in the scope of what they offer. “All of these [other] tools actually have the same sort of approach, which is a design-first approach,” Lee says. “We’ve always taken a completely different approach, which is: What if we were design later, or even design last? What if we were content first?” To that end, Gamma encourages you to not even think about things from a visual perspective. Instead, you just focus on the message, and the tool transforms that into any medium and form you want. “You start with writing or an outline or existing notes, then we turn that into something that’s much more dynamic, with rich content that can be shareable,” Lee says. Specifically, when you launch a new project in Gamma, you’re presented with three choices. You can paste in text—be it a series of loose notes or a fully finished document; you can import an existing document, presentation, or slideshow from PowerPoint, Google Slides, or another similar program; or you can simply input a single-line prompt and have Gamma’s network of AI models take the reins from there. “We don’t expect you to go in and try to move pixels around,” Lee explains. “We expect you to go in with your thoughts. We’re going to help you shape them [and] visualize them.” So, yes: You can drag and drop elements and adjust specific parameters around colors, styling, and so on. But the idea is that you don’t have to do that. Instead, you can let Gamma handle that heavy lifting while you focus entirely on what you want to say—not how you want to convey it. “We’re not trying to be incrementally better slide-ware,” Lee says. “We’re introducing a new set of building blocks.” Lee’s ultimate goal is to allow us, as humans, to focus solely on the content itself by leaning on AI to handle practically everything else. Even if Gamma’s creations are more of a starting point than a final, polished product, working with the framework it gives you is intended to be akin to editing a document—with a handy virtual helper at your side every step of the way. Want to improve the writing, for instance? Tighten up your copy? Even just make some block of text more visually appealing—or replace some existing images with more eye-catching illustrations? You’ll find one-step commands for all of those things within Gamma’s slide-by-slide AI menus. All you’ve gotta do is click. “It’s as if you have your expert designer sitting right next to you,” Lee says. “At the end, you get a beautiful output, and regardless of your technical or design abilities, you feel like you have something you’re proud to present to others.” The million-dollar question, of course, is how well all of that actually works in practice. After all, nearly every AI tool sounds incredible on paper. But when you move beyond the carefully controlled demos and start actually trying to use this type of technology in the wild, it’s frequently far less impressive than it initially appears. The short answer with Gamma is that it depends—both on the type of input you’re providing and on your expectations for how, exactly, the service should operate. The ups and downs of the AI designer We’ll start with the not-so-good piece of the puzzle: When I’ve tried putting in already-created PDFs or presentations and asking Gamma to jazz them up for me, the results haven’t exactly been awe-inspiring. Here, for instance, is a peek at Gamma’s take on an existing media kit presentation I had for my independent newsletter-publishing business, The Intelligence: It’s an awkward and ineffective interpretation of the original that honestly feels like a step in the wrong direction. Where Gamma has worked better, for me, has been when I start fresh. I give it a simple prompt, let it build a completely new framework on its own, and then use that as a starting point to fill in the actual info I want and finish things off from there. With that in mind, I tried to re-create that very same media kit from scratch, and the results were actually pretty decent. The specific information here isn’t at all accurate or even remotely related to reality, but it creates an interesting and attractive structure to use for adding in the right data and molding it into something sensible. And even that part of the process can be pleasingly easy—with Gamma offering a helping hand, as needed, to refine and polish everything from text to the layout itself as individual assets move around. All that AI effort does come at a cost, as you’d imagine. Gamma leans on a variety of generative AI engines to power its product—everything from OpenAI to Anthropic and Google’s Gemini technology, though the underlying logic automatically selects what it believes to be the best option for any given purpose, and you’re rarely aware of which model is being used when. Because of the expenses involved, Gamma’s free tier limits you to 400 AI credits per account and only basic AI image generation. For the full experience, you’ll need to pony up $96 a year for unlimited AI creation and advanced image access—or bump up to $180 a year for even more powerful capabilities. Long term, Lee believes Gamma will be able to provide enough value in exchange that the tradeoff will be a no-brainer. The Gamma vision So far, Lee says Gamma’s customers have primarily been a category of users he calls “prosumers”—individuals or small teams that need to create a lot of visuals and wouldn’t typically have the resources to work with a full-fledged design team in their organizations. But he envisions a future in which everyone, from freelancers and small business owners to sales and marketing teams in larger companies, relies on Gamma to do what’d otherwise require a lot of time, effort, and aggravation—even when traditional resources are readily available. And you’d better believe that same principle applies to creating PDFs, websites, and social media assets as much as it does presentations (and Lee says the list of available formats will only expand from here). The humble, hated slide deck was just the easiest and most logical entry point to what Lee sees as an entire ecosystem of convenient content creation—all with AI at its core. “We chose slides as the sort of initial wedge because slides as a format is ubiquitous,” he says. “[But] knowledge workers don’t just need to create slides. They actually have a need to create all forms of content.” Lee sees it all as a sliding scale with lots of blurred lines. At the end of the day, what’s really the difference between a presentation and a PDF? Or a PDF and a website? Or a website and a promotional LinkedIn post? Once you start relying on Gamma to help you create anything and everything, you quickly realize the various formats all share the same basic building blocks. And it doesn’t take much to move from one to the next. “Our bet is that presentations can always just be the gateway,” he explains. “We don’t want our users to have to think about it in a traditional sense—like, ‘Oh, I’m creating a slide deck.’ It’s more, ‘I’m creating a piece of content, and that can be consumed in different ways.’” The challenge, then, is getting people—and organizations—to break their habits and inch away from the uninspiring but familiar tools they’ve relied on for ages. And by making Gamma so simple to use that it requires virtually no specific skills or training, Lee’s optimistic he can win over crowds and frame the service as the one-stop shop for anything creative. “A tool like Gamma is trying to lower the floor so any knowledge worker can pick up skills that they couldn’t have imagined being able to do in the past,” he says. “We really believe that’ll open up doors for them.” Be the first to find all sorts of interesting tech tools with my free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. You’ll get a single new off-the-beaten-path discovery in your inbox every Wednesday! View the full article

Federal Reserve Gov. Michael Barr said global supply chain disruptions and inflation caused by tariffs could weigh heaviest on small businesses, especially those with little access to credit. View the full article

Influencers often face more negativity than most people experience in a lifetime—and with that comes a significant mental health toll. Now, a new therapy service has been launched specifically for content creators. CreatorCare, cofounded by digital creator Shira Lazar and backed by Creators 4 Mental Health and Revive Health Therapy, aims to break down both financial and systemic barriers to mental health care. While some creators earn millions of dollars, many struggle to make ends meet. To ensure therapy is accessible to all, CreatorCare offers sliding-scale rates starting at $60, with or without insurance. Launched initially in California, with plans for national expansion, the program provides licensed and associate therapists in person and via telehealth. These professionals specialize in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and mindfulness-based therapy. With more than 200 million creators worldwide, the mental strain of this profession is often overlooked. Behind the scenes, creators deal with online abuse, constant pressure to stay relevant, and financial instability—challenges that rarely receive public sympathy. Discussions around burnout are frequently met with dismissive remarks urging influencers to get a “real” 9-to-5 job. But the numbers tell a different story. A 2023 Awin & ShareASale Influencer Survey found that nearly 80% of creators reported burnout, and 66% said it directly impacted their mental health. Nearly half rely on alternative income streams to reduce the pressure. Lazar, host of the talk show What’s Trending, is now helping to build a safety net for creators. “The creator economy has exploded but the support systems haven’t kept up,” she told Passionfruit. “As more Gen Z step into this space professionally, we need to treat it like the real workplace it is. That means sustainable systems not just for monetization, but for mental health, too.” Amy Kelly, cofounder of CreatorCare and CEO of Revive Health Therapy, echoed that sentiment: “Social media is not just a platform—it’s a recruiter,” she said, noting that 57% of Gen Z teens in the U.S. say they would become influencers if given the chance. “We’re grooming teens into a digital workforce with proven mental health hazards—the modern equivalent of sending kids into coal mines without protective gear.” CreatorCare isn’t the only initiative addressing creators’ well-being. SAG-AFTRA’s new influencer committee aims to expand labor protections, while the National Association of Broadcasters recently launched a Creator Council to amplify creators’ voices. The Creators Guild of America also released a contract rider to safeguard creators in brand partnerships. Because, yes, content creation is a “real job.” View the full article

Many brands take advantage of Mother’s Day to sell more products, like flowers and cupcakes. But 50 companies, including workwear label M.M. LaFleur, framing startup Framebridge, and stroller brand Bugaboo, are joining forces to draw attention to America’s lack of federal paid leave. Across the country on Saturday, May 10, the nonprofit MomsRising, the Paid Leave for All campaign, and 50 brands are hosting pop-ups in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; Nashville; Hoboken, New Jersey; and Cleveland, offering more than $100,000 in donated goods and services. The idea is to help new moms by giving them things like formula, breast pumps, clothing, and strollers, while also giving them a little break with massages and food. For those who can’t attend in person, there is a nationwide giveaway that moms can enter or nominate fellow moms to receive things like care packages. Ultimately, though, the goal is to show that this kind of mutual aid is not enough. What mothers and other caregivers need is paid time off after they give birth. The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world without a federal paid leave policy, and as a result nearly a quarter of mothers have returned to work within just two weeks of giving birth. (This can be unsafe: After a C-section, doctors recommend that women rest for at least six weeks as their scars heal.) While some companies voluntarily offer workers parental leave, many don’t. For example, in Ohio and Tennessee, 72% of workers don’t have access to paid family leave; in Pennsylvania, that figure is 62%. And families lose $34 billion every year because women take unpaid time off. As a global brand, based in the Netherlands, Bugaboo interacts with parents from around the world. Jeanelle Teves, the company’s chief commercial officer, has seen the positive impact of paid leave in other countries. “Especially when you’re having your first child, giving birth and taking care of an infant can be overwhelming,” she says. “It makes such a difference when parents don’t also have to worry about their jobs during this period.” She also points out that in the U.S., it is often wealthier people working at white-collar jobs who have access to paid time off from their employers. “In many other countries, there is this sense that all parents deserve this time to focus on their families for a while,” she says. “It takes a lot of flexibility to get a new life underway” Dawn Huckelbridge, founding director of Paid Leave for All, contends that this is not just a human rights issue; it’s also a business issue. Companies that have good family leave policies are better able to hire and retain workers. “A federal paid leave policy will ensure that companies have the resources they need to give workers time off,” she says. Susan Tynan founded Framebridge a decade ago as the mother of small children. From the start, she wanted to ensure that all workers had paid time off. Today, the company has 600 employees, 500 of whom work in manufacturing or retail stores. All of these workers receive four months of paid time off after having a baby, and one month of flexibility as they return to work. The non-birthing parent also gets a month off. “It takes a lot of flexibility to get a new life underway,” Tynan says. She points out that this kind of generous policy is much harder for a smaller, newer startup. Most small companies don’t have enough staff to fill in for the person who is on leave, so they might have to hire someone else, which is an added expense. “Even though we all know someone who has given birth should be on leave and should be supported, the company needs to continue to run,” says Tynan. “A [federal] paid leave policy would be better for the economy because it would allow businesses to thrive and help women stay in the workforce.” Huckelbridge notes that this campaign occurs at a time when the country is dealing with many pressing political issues brought on by the new administration, including job cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency and deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the goal of the campaign is to ensure that the fight for paid leave continues—even though this administration may not seem particularly amenable to it—and perhaps more importantly, to provide hope that paid leave is possible. “The point of this campaign is to ensure that people feel seen,” says Huckelbridge. “We want them to know that we see their struggle and we’re fighting for a better future.” View the full article

If someone driving a new version of a Subaru Forester crashes into a cyclist, an airbag will immediately inflate on the hood to help protect the person on the bike. The SUV, which offers the feature only on vehicles sold in Japan, isn’t the first Subaru to include an external airbag. The company started including pedestrian protection airbags on its Japanese cars nearly a decade ago. But the brand says the new design is the first in the world intended to also protect cyclists. It’s a basic, commonsense idea. “Airbags have been proven to be effective to protect the occupants in a vehicle,” says Ben Crowther, policy director for America Walks, a nonprofit focused on walkability and safety. “And there’s plenty of testing to show that the same is true for people outside vehicles.” The Forester’s hood is also designed to have as few hard parts as possible, and to easily deform to help cushion the impact of a crash. But the bottom edge of the windshield and the pillars that go up to the roof have to stay rigid because they’re part of the frame. When a pedestrian is hit by a car, head injuries are most likely in those places—and that’s where Subaru’s U-shaped airbag can help. In a crash, the cyclist usually ends up higher on the windshield. That’s why the company redesigned its airbag to cover a larger area. The system deploys when sensors detect a certain amount of pressure on the front bumper. The vehicle has a suite of other safety features. When a driver turns on the turn signal at a corner, for example, the headlights light up an area diagonally in front, making it easier to spot pedestrians or cyclists on the road. A set of three cameras and radar offer a wider-angle view than in the brand’s previous cars, so it’s more likely to spot other road users. The vehicle also aims to reduce blind spots in all directions. These are all efforts toward Subaru’s goal to have no traffic deaths involving its cars by 2030. Of course, it’s possible to go even further—one of the best ways to make vehicles safer is to make them smaller. Beyond car design, infrastructure also obviously matters: With separated bike lanes, for example, a crash is less likely in the first place. Speed limits are critical. If you’re a pedestrian who gets hit by a car going 20 mph, one study found that you have a 5% chance of being killed. If the car is going 30 mph, that chance jumps to 45%. At 40 mph, the pedestrian’s chance of being killed is roughly 80%. (Japan has lower average speed limits than the U.S., along with other policies that support pedestrian safety, and much lower fatality rates for pedestrians and cyclists in traffic accidents.) External airbags aren’t a panacea, but they can help. It’s probably unlikely, though, that they’ll show up in the U.S. anytime soon, especially as automakers are already struggling to deal with increased manufacturing costs because of tariffs. And while the Biden administration was working on safety issues related to vehicle design, it’s not clear what will happen with policy now. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy “has certainly touted safety as something that his U.S. DOT wants to pursue,” Crowther says. “But there’s a lot of mixed messages, particularly through the reducing in staff at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.” The cuts at NHTSA made by the Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year disproportionately affected employees working on vehicle safety, according to reports. View the full article

A startup marketing to Gen Z on college campuses filed a lawsuit this week alleging that Instacart engaged in federal trademark infringement and unfair competition by naming its new group ordering app “Fizz.” The plaintiffs, Fizz Social Corp., claim they have been operating their event planning platform under the “FIZZ” trademark and have become a well-known social platform used on more than 400 college campuses. The app, which requires users to sign up with a college email, features anonymous text posts, polls, photos, and the ability to send direct messages. The company has raised at least $41.5 million as of last summer, TechCrunch reported in 2024. “This new Fizz App by Instacart and Partiful is a blatant attempt to misappropriate the goodwill that Plaintiff has painstakingly developed through its continuous use of the FIZZ Marks among the Gen-Z demographic,” attorneys for the social media app wrote in a complaint filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit follows Instacart’s launch this week of a new stand-alone app also named Fizz, which allows groups to order snacks and drinks ahead of parties for a flat $5 delivery fee. Instacart also integrated the app with Partiful, a popular event planning platform, which is also named as a defendant in the suit. “Plaintiff brings this action based on Defendants’ past, current, and planned use of the FIZZ trademark in connection with collaborative event promotion and planning, social discovery, and social networking services targeting the same Gen-Z consumer base that Plaintiff has served since at least January 2022,” the suit states. Fizz, the social app, is demanding an immediate halt to Instacart’s use of the Fizz name and is seeking damages. According to the lawsuit, Fizz has used the name since January 2022. However, it only filed for trademark registration in 2024, with applications still pending. Still, Kevin J. Greene, the John J. Schumacher chair and professor at Southwestern Law School, says that while unfair competition claims are often “throwaway claims” that lawyers routinely include, the social media platform could have a strong case under Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act. Greene notes that this section protects unregistered marks and addresses likely confusion over similar names. “I look at the case and think it would be a pretty strong case on their behalf,” he tells Fast Company. Instacart has established itself as a major player in the gig economy. Since going public in 2023, its shares have risen more than 47%. Partiful, meanwhile, was named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2025, and reported a 600% increase in user activity in 2024. Instacart and Partiful did not respond to Fast Company’s requests for comment on the lawsuit. View the full article

You don’t wait for the sidewalk. You don’t check an app to see if it’s working. You don’t wonder if it’s meant for someone else. Sidewalks are just there—always available, always on. And when they’re well designed, you barely notice them. They quietly support everything: commerce, mobility, safety, health, and freedom of movement. Sidewalks don’t require instructions. They’re intuitive. Step on, move forward. That’s the framing we need for local bus service. A well-run bus system is an express sidewalk—a piece of infrastructure that dramatically expands the number of destinations within walking distance. Unfortunately, buses aren’t thought of that way. In most American cities, public transit is treated like a last-resort service, a social program for people who can’t afford cars, something to be endured rather than embraced. And so they’re designed that way: infrequent, inconvenient, hard to use, and often stuck in traffic. The blueprint If a bus system is going to function as a seamless extension of the sidewalk, it has to operate on the same principles: ● Frequency. You don’t plan your life around a sidewalk’s availability. ● Convenience. Buses must go where people actually want to go, with direct routes that don’t meander like a bureaucrat’s fantasy map. ● Safety. Waiting at a stop should feel as safe and dignified as standing on a downtown corner. ● Reliability. If you can’t trust it to arrive when it says it will, it’s not infrastructure—it’s a gamble. If general purpose car traffic dominates the curb, buses will never scale, and walking—the most ancient, equitable form of transport—remains functionally capped. Dedicated transit lanes are the asphalt equivalent of pouring a continuous slab of concrete for pedestrians. Bus-only lanes ensure that the people choosing high-efficiency transportation aren’t punished for it. (As an added bonus, people can ride bikes in the bus lanes.) Treat the bus like a sidewalk, and people will use it like one Most Americans only experience a transit system that treats them like a priority when they travel overseas. “It was amazing. We didn’t even have to rent a car.” Here in the U.S., we’ve been conditioned to expect low-frequency bus service with few shelters, unpredictable arrivals, and a cultural subtext that transit is a charity case for those people. But we don’t build sidewalks out of pity. We build them because they’re essential infrastructure like plumbing or electricity. If we want to cut congestion, reduce emissions, boost economic access, and improve quality of life, we already have the most elegant, human-scaled delivery system imaginable: walking. But to expand the range of walkability, we need a mobility system that functions like walking at scale—intuitive, frequent, and always ready. That’s what a local transit system could be. The moment we stop treating the bus as a social program and start treating it like an express sidewalk, we unlock a public good that meets people where they are and moves them forward. The bus can’t be stuck in traffic If the local bus is going to function as an express sidewalk, I can’t overstate the importance of high-frequency, reliable service. That means it can’t be stuck in traffic jams. On multilane roads, the obvious answer is dedicated transit lanes. Transportation experts typically think of road reconfigurations as replacing general purpose lanes with bike lanes and a center bidirectional left-turn lane. But on a busy transit corridor, the road diet can just as easily be designed for express sidewalks. DIY street design You don’t have to be a professional engineer or graphic artist to come up with renderings that illustrate before-and-after scenarios for a street in your community. Streetmix is a free web tool that’s ridiculously easy to use. It’s set up for drag-and-drop design so you can make a typical section that reflects your local conditions. Here’s a short article with instructions to use Streetmix (free!) and Google Maps (free!) to design the future you want, instead of the one you’ve been told is inevitable. A bus isn’t charity, it’s concrete infrastructure that expands the reach of your feet. When we treat it like an express sidewalk—built for frequency, protected from gridlock, and trusted like any utility—it stops being a backup plan and starts being the backbone of a thriving city. We don’t need to convince people to ride the bus. We just need to operate it like we mean it. View the full article

For many families with young children in the U.S., the cost of childcare is prohibitively expensive, preventing some parents, especially mothers, from returning to the workforce. That’s why one California-based company recently introduced a new childcare initiative, vowing to pay up to $3,000 a month in childcare costs for eligible employees. The cofounders of Cakes Body, 32-year-old twin sisters Casey Sarai and Taylor Capuano, say their own experiences as working mothers inspired the decision. Capuano recalls how, after having her first child, she made the difficult decision to return to work even though she had only $200 left each month after paying childcare costs. “This isn’t some distant memory for us,” Sarai says. “We felt how much of a burden the astronomical childcare costs were to us and our families and what a big stressor that was.” The sisters launched Cakes Body, which makes silicone nipple covers, in 2022. Since then, they say the company has grown about 10 times year-over-year, netting just under a million dollars their first year in business to a current revenue forecast of $150 million. They attribute that success largely to the team they’ve created, which is why they view the childcare credit as an investment. “It’s a way to maintain the talent that we have and keep moms in the workforce if they want to be there,” Sarai says. Cakes Body has 30 employees nationwide and about 20% will qualify for the childcare credit, which was announced during a team meeting last Thursday. The company’s TikTok account shared a video of the moment. According to the Department of Labor’s National Database of Childcare Prices, the median price range of childcare for one child in 2022 (the most recent year data is available) was $6,552 to $15,600, and families spent about 9–16% of their income on childcare. Sarai, who has an 18-month-old son and an 8-year-old stepdaughter, and Capuano, who has a 15-month-old son and a 4-year-old daughter, say they arrived at the figure of $36,000 a year by looking at national averages of childcare costs, as well as their own expenses. Their employees will self-report their monthly childcare costs and the full amount, up to $3,000, will be added to their paychecks each month, Sarai says. Employees who have children under public-school age are eligible, and the funds can be used for babysitters and nannies, in addition to childcare facilities. The childcare credit is part of Cakes Body’s overall work-life philosophy, which Sarai says has three pillars. The first is implementing a results-only work environment, or ROWE, which prioritizes flexibility and output over micromanaging and physical presence in an office. The second pillar is a “synchronized quiet period,” where the company takes an entire month off around the holidays. The new childcare credit is the third pillar. Sarai says that while she and her sister were motivated to start a company because of their own desire for better work-life balance, they also believe their company will see real benefits because of the changes they’ve implemented. “By offering a flexible work environment, we are able to tap into a completely under-leveraged demographic: working moms looking to get back into the workforce,” Sarai says. “Some of the women we have on our team, this was their first job back after being stay-at-home moms for a period of time, and I feel so lucky because they are some of the most efficient employees we have. A lot of the skills they have from being stay-at-home moms are very transferrable—knowing how to multitask, knowing how to prioritize.” The founders hope that other companies see their childcare credit as inspiration. “Match us, do better, go further,” Capuano wrote on LinkedIn. The U.S. is notoriously behind other wealthy, industrialized countries when it comes to support for young families. There is no federally mandated parental leave or universal childcare; tax credits and subsidies are limited; and even for families who can afford it, childcare is often difficult to obtain, as the industry faces persistent worker shortages, difficult-to-meet regulations, and shutdowns. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mothers left the workforce in record numbers to take on caregiving responsibilities when schools closed. While the Department of Labor reports that the number of employed mothers has since returned and even exceeded pre-pandemic levels, the childcare crisis persists. Some employers have aimed to bridge that gap by offering childcare benefits, from on-site childcare centers to childcare subsidies for parents. But it’s far from a perfect solution and even the best scenarios put parents at the mercy of their employers. For instance, last year, both Google and General Mills shuttered their on-site childcare centers. Sarai and Capuano acknowledge that access to affordable childcare shouldn’t fall solely on employers and that broader governmental support is essential. “But until that happens, we’re committed to doing what we can to support our team and remove barriers that hold working parents back,” Sarai says. View the full article

After raising billions in funding, vertical farming companies have struggled. Plenty, a Silicon Valley-based startup backed by investors including Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, filed for bankruptcy in March. Bowery, which was once valued at $2.3 billion, shut down last fall. Another startup, Fifth Season, shuttered its automated indoor farm in 2022. AeroFarms, a pioneer in the space, declared bankruptcy in 2023. The basic business model—growing crops like leafy greens indoors on tall vertical towers—hasn’t proven that it can work. But AeroFarms, which raised an undisclosed amount of money after its bankruptcy and found a new CEO, has managed to turn itself around. The company has now been profitable for the last two quarters as it sells microgreens at retailers like Whole Foods and Costco. “Despite the current skepticism, I think we’ve now demonstrated that vertical farming can be sustainable and profitable and deliver product at scale,” says Molly Montgomery, who became CEO of AeroFarms in September 2023. Before joining the company, Montgomery studied it at the request of investors who wanted to know if it could be a viable business. “I was extremely skeptical about vertical farms because I had never seen a profitable business model yet,” says Montgomery. “When they asked me, I was like, ‘I’m not sure that a vertical farm can be profitable.’” Montgomery, who also serves as board director for NatureSweet, a leader in greenhouse-grown tomatoes, previously led Landec Corp., a company that contracted with outdoor growers throughout the U.S. and Mexico to make salad kits and other packaged vegetable products. But doing the due diligence on AeroFarms convinced her that it could actually succeed. She calculated that AeroFarms’s technology could operate at the right production cost. And consumers liked the product, particularly its microgreens, tiny greens that are harvested when they’re 4 days old. “The missing ingredient was operational excellence,” she says. “There wasn’t enough experience in the company on how to run a vegetable production facility.” It was a tech company first, not a farming company. Montgomery’s initial step was to focus: She shut down R&D facilities in New Jersey and Abu Dhabi, so all that was left was a 140,000-square-foot production facility in Virginia that had opened in 2022. Half of the staff was laid off. “Everyone who was left was put on specific initiatives that I believed would enable us to get to farm profitability,” she says. She also hired employees with deep expertise in food production. The team went through several sprints on the basics, from food safety to training employees. Then it focused on operational issues like how to improve yield and how to maintain the robots that grow the crops. The company’s automated system loads plants in the tall towers where they grow, monitors and harvests the crops, and packs up products for stores. (It runs 24/7 and has more than 2,000 spare parts, meaning that maintenance is a major task.) Montgomery also chose to focus on microgreens, which have better margins than traditional leafy greens. The company grows a variety of crops, from kale and cabbage to bok choy and spicy wasabi mustard. The young greens are more nutritious than fully grown versions of the same crops. It’s not something that was ever readily available from traditional farms. When they’re grown outside in soil (and often with pesticides), they have to be washed, which harms the dainty plants. “As soon as you wash them, they begin to decay,” she says. “So [they have] a very short shelf life. When you grow them aeroponically, we don’t use any pesticides and we only spray the roots. So we do not need to wash them.” That means, she says, that AeroFarms’s greens have a shelf life that lasts as long as 24 days. The company currently supplies around 70% of the retail market for microgreens, and is seeing demand for more. The company’s tech may have some advantages compared to other approaches. It grows plants aeroponically, without soil and without submerging plants in standing water, so the whole system is lighter than some others, and more plants can be stacked vertically, making better use of floor space. Misting the roots with water and nutrients speeds up the plants’ growth rate. Because the farms can be more productive than competitors, the company can use less energy per plant; energy is one of the biggest factors in the cost of running a vertical farm. If vertical farming can work, there could be clear benefits. Right now, most greens in the U.S. come from drought-prone regions like Arizona and California; vertical farms use 90% less water than growing outside. As climate change makes farming more difficult—especially because of extreme heat—indoor farming could theoretically help support the supply chain. And instead of shipping produce thousands of miles across the country, East Coast grocery stores could get more of it locally year-round. The industry is still nascent, and two profitable quarters aren’t conclusive proof that vertical farming can succeed. Still, it’s a sign of hope for a teetering field, and AeroFarms is once again planning for expansion. View the full article

Dax index becomes first major European benchmark to recover all losses sparked by US tariff threatsView the full article

When OpenAI pulled back its latest ChatGPT release—one that apparently turned the helpful chatbot into a total suck-up—the company took the welcome step of explaining exactly what happened in a pair of blog posts. The response was a notable move and really pulled back the curtain on how much of what these systems do is shaped by language choices most people never see. A tweak in phrasing, a shift in tone, and suddenly the model behaves differently. For journalists, this shouldn’t be surprising. Many editorial meetings are spent agonizing over framing, tone, and headline language. But what is surprising—and maybe even a little disorienting—is that the same editorial sensitivity now needs to be applied not just to headlines and pull quotes, but to algorithms, prompts, and workflows that live in the guts of newsroom technology. Before we connect the dots to newsroom AI, a quick recap: OpenAI’s latest update to GPT-4o involved an extensive process for testing the outputs, and it scored well on the factors the testers could measure: accuracy, safety, and helpfulness, among others. However, some evaluators doing more qualitative testing said the model felt “off,” but without more to go on, OpenAI released it anyway. Within a day, it was clear the evaluators’ vibe-checks were onto something. Apparently the release had substantially increased “sycophancy,” or the model’s tendency to flatter and support the user, regardless of whether it was ultimately helpful. In its post announcing the rollback, OpenAI said it would refine ChatGPT’s system prompt—the invisible language that serves as kind of an “umbrella” instruction for every query and conversation with the public chatbot. Lost in translation The first thing that strikes you about this: We’re talking about changes to language, not code. In reaction to the recall, a former OpenAI employee posted on X about a conversation he had with a senior colleague at the company about how the change of a single word in the system prompt induced ChatGPT to behave in different ways. And the only way to know this was to make the change and try it out. If you’re familiar with AI and prompting, this isn’t a shock. But on a fundamental level, it kind of is. I’m not saying the new release of GPT-4o was entirely about changing language in the system prompt, but the system prompt is a crucial element—altering it was the only temporary fix OpenAI could implement before engaging in the careful process of rolling back the release. For anyone in communications or journalism, this should be somewhat reassuring. We’re in the business of words, after all. And words are no longer just the way we communicate about technology—they’re a crucial part of how these systems work. An editorial and product hybrid OpenAI’s ordeal has two important takeaways for how the media deals with AI: First, that editorial staff have a vital role to play in building the AI systems that govern their operations. (Outside frontier labs, tool building often amounts to prompt engineering paired with automations.) And second, transparency is the path to preserving user trust. On the first point, the way AI directly affects content, and the need for good prompting to do that well, has a consequence for how media companies are organized: Editorial and product teams are becoming more like each other. The more journalists incorporate AI into their process, the more they end up creating their own tools. Think custom GPTs for writing assistance, NotebookLM knowledge bases for analyzing documents, or even browser extensions for fact-checking on the fly. On the product side, the idea that media technology today isn’t just presenting content, but remixing and sometimes creating it is a massive change. To ensure those outputs adhere to journalistic principles, it doesn’t just make sense to have writers and editors be a part of that process—it’s necessary. What results, then, is a journalist-product manager hybrid. These kinds of roles aren’t entirely new, but they’re generally senior leadership roles with words like “newsroom innovation” in the title. What AI does is encourage each side to adopt the skills of the other all the way down. Every reporter adopts a product mindset. Every product manager prioritizes brevity and accuracy. Audience trust starts with transparency The audience is the silent partner in this relationship, and OpenAI’s incident also serves as an example of how to best include them—through radical transparency. It’s hard to think of a way OpenAI could have better restored trust with its users other than its decision to fully explain how the problems got by its review process, and what it’s doing to improve. While it’s unusual among the major AI labs (can you imagine xAI or DeepSeek writing a similar note?), this isn’t out of character for OpenAI. Sam Altman often shares on his X account announcements and behind-the-scenes observations from his vantage point as CEO, and while those are probably more calculated than they seem, they’ve earned the company a certain amount of respect. This approach provides a road map for how to publicly communicate about AI strategy, especially for the media. Typically, when a publication creates an AI media policy, the focus is on disclosures and guidelines. Those are great first steps, but without a clearer window into the specific process, indicators such as “This article is AI assisted” aren’t that helpful, and audiences will be inclined to assume the worst when something goes wrong. Better to be transparent from the start. When CNET used AI writers in the early days of generative AI to disastrous results, it published a long explanation of what went wrong, but it didn’t come until well after it had been called out. If the publication had been out front with what it was doing—not just saying it was using AI, but explaining how it was building, using, and evaluating it—things might have turned out differently. Journalists can shape AI—and should In its second post about the sycophancy fiasco, OpenAI revealed that a big part of its concern was the surprising number of people who now use ChatGPT for personal advice, an activity that wasn’t that significant a year ago. That growth is a testament to how fast the technology is improving and taking hold in various aspects of our lives. While it’s only just beginning to alter the media ecosystem, it could quickly become more deeply embedded than we had predicted. Building AI systems that people trust starts with the people building them. By leveraging the natural talents of journalists on product teams, those systems will have the best chance of success. But when they screw up—and they will—preserving that trust will depend on how clear the window is on how they were built. Best to start polishing it now. View the full article

Psychologist: “Design influences behavior.” Neuroscientist: “Design influences behavior.” Uncivil engineer: “It’s not like my road design influences driver behavior.” Every day, preventable crashes are destroying lives because transportation planners and engineers don’t understand that design influences behavior. (I’m being charitable by assuming they don’t understand.) Drivers respond to the built environment much the same way water responds to a riverbed. The shape, width, and surface conditions of the riverbed determine the water’s speed, turbulence, and direction. Likewise, the width of a road, presence of visual cues, curvature, intersections, and surrounding land use dictate how fast, aggressively, or cautiously people drive. The grocery store model If water sounds like too much of a stretch as a comparison, consider a grocery store. If you want to create public spaces that are intuitive and inviting, and encourage people to engage with their surroundings, then the best place to perfect these skills might be the grocery store. Retail giants understand and exploit the fact that design influences how people move through space. A grocery store is a real place where influencing behavior determines whether a business thrives or dies. Store layout is based on the art of persuasion. It’s all about creating an environment that encourages customers to buy more products as easily as possible. Any parent knows this, but it’s not just about candy at the cash register. Stores large and small invest time and money understanding human behavior, so they know which techniques work the best to influence buying habits. Expectations and habits Our brains are hardwired to react to buildings and spaces based on their visual characteristics. Tragically, those of us in the infrastructure business weren’t taught about how psychology and neuroscience directly relate to everything we plan, design, and construct. Street design doesn’t just influence behavior—it creates expectations and habits, often without conscious thought. For example: 1. Lane Width. Wide lanes signal to the brain: “You’re safe going fast.” Narrow lanes or painted-edge lanes create a sensation of compression, signaling: “Stay alert, slow down.” Wider lanes increase speed, which multiplies injury severity rates exponentially when collisions occur. 2. Sight Lines and Curvature. Long, straight sight lines encourage higher speeds. The farther ahead a driver can see, the more they feel they can safely accelerate. Curved roads, particularly in urban contexts, force natural speed modulation because the driver’s sight distance shrinks and perceived risk increases. 3. Street Trees and Vertical Elements. Streets with trees, light posts, benches, and buildings close to the curb create a “street wall,” giving drivers the impression that the space is tight and shared. A bare, wide-open road without vertical edges feels boundless and invites acceleration. Researchers call this “edge friction.” The more visual complexity and physical containment along the sides of a street, the slower and more carefully people drive. 4. Speed Limits vs. Speed Cues. Posted speed limits are barely noticed if street design suggests otherwise. A street engineered for 45 mph but posted at 25 mph will still see speeds closer to 45 unless strong visual and physical constraints are introduced. Design speed always wins over posted speed. 5. Lighting and Nighttime Design. Overly bright, highway-style lighting often promotes a false sense of security and encourages speeding. Moderate, pedestrian-scale lighting at consistent intervals supports slower, more cautious driving. Subconscious instructions The human brain processes the street as a series of subconscious instructions. The street is constantly whispering to drivers: “Relax and go fast,” or “Pay attention and slow down.” No amount of signage or enforcement will undo the basic psychological script written by engineers. Maybe transportation professionals should start their workday by looking at pictures of horrific crashes on streets that followed status quo design. At some point, someone on staff will have the courage to say, “What if design influences behavior?” If this is piquing your interest, check out the Human Factors of Infrastructure Design and Operations research committee, which is part of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. They’re cranking out tons of important work that’s never put into practice by professionals in the infrastructure business. View the full article

Airlines group says demand for travel is strong despite macroeconomic uncertaintyView the full article

Meta has launched the first version of its standalone Meta AI app, bringing a more personal and conversational AI assistant to users across iOS, Android, web browsers, and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Built on Meta’s Llama 4 model, the app aims to deliver a more seamless and relevant AI experience with contextual memory and voice capabilities. According to Meta, the new app “gets to know your preferences, remembers context and is personalized to you.” The AI assistant integrates features such as image generation and editing, web search, and voice-based interaction, and is already available across Meta platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. New Features and Technology The Meta AI app introduces a Discover feed, where users can explore and share how others are using the assistant. This social element is designed to highlight the best prompts, which users can remix and use as inspiration. “Nothing is shared to your feed unless you choose to post it,” Meta emphasized. The app includes a voice assistant enhanced with full-duplex speech technology that generates voice output directly instead of reading text-based responses. Users can toggle this demo feature on or off to test its conversational flow. While it doesn’t have real-time web access, Meta says the demo provides “a glimpse into the future” of voice AI. Voice conversations, including the full-duplex feature, are available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand at launch. Cross-Platform Integration and Personalization The Meta AI app is designed to work as a companion to Ray-Ban Meta glasses, replacing the previous Meta View companion app. Existing users of Meta View will automatically see their settings, devices, and media transferred to the Meta AI app’s Devices tab following the update. Users can start conversations using their Ray-Ban Meta glasses and continue them in the Meta AI app or on the web via meta.ai. Conversations can be picked up in both directions between the app and the web interface, but not from the app or web to the glasses. Meta AI provides personalized assistance by drawing on information users have already chosen to share on Meta products, such as profiles and content engagement. If users have linked their Facebook and Instagram accounts through Accounts Center, the assistant can leverage both platforms to generate more relevant responses. “We’re using our decades of work personalizing people’s experiences on our platforms to make Meta AI more personal,” the company stated. Personalized responses are currently available in the U.S. and Canada. Web Experience Upgrades Meta has also enhanced the web experience for Meta AI. Users can now interact with the assistant via voice and access the Discover feed from desktop browsers. The web interface has been optimized for larger screens, with improvements to image generation features, including more presets and new options for adjusting lighting, mood, and style. Meta is testing a document generation and editing tool that enables users to create text- and image-rich documents and export them as PDFs. In select countries, the company is also testing the ability to import documents for Meta AI to analyze and summarize. Ongoing Development Meta stated that this launch is “the first step toward building a more personal AI” and emphasized that it plans to evolve the experience over time by collecting user feedback and expanding its capabilities. The company is positioning the app as an assistant for everyday use, capable of helping with tasks from recommendations to brainstorming and staying connected with friends and family. Image: Meta This article, "Meta Releases Standalone Meta AI App with Personalization, Voice Features, and Companion Integration" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Meta has launched the first version of its standalone Meta AI app, bringing a more personal and conversational AI assistant to users across iOS, Android, web browsers, and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Built on Meta’s Llama 4 model, the app aims to deliver a more seamless and relevant AI experience with contextual memory and voice capabilities. According to Meta, the new app “gets to know your preferences, remembers context and is personalized to you.” The AI assistant integrates features such as image generation and editing, web search, and voice-based interaction, and is already available across Meta platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. New Features and Technology The Meta AI app introduces a Discover feed, where users can explore and share how others are using the assistant. This social element is designed to highlight the best prompts, which users can remix and use as inspiration. “Nothing is shared to your feed unless you choose to post it,” Meta emphasized. The app includes a voice assistant enhanced with full-duplex speech technology that generates voice output directly instead of reading text-based responses. Users can toggle this demo feature on or off to test its conversational flow. While it doesn’t have real-time web access, Meta says the demo provides “a glimpse into the future” of voice AI. Voice conversations, including the full-duplex feature, are available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand at launch. Cross-Platform Integration and Personalization The Meta AI app is designed to work as a companion to Ray-Ban Meta glasses, replacing the previous Meta View companion app. Existing users of Meta View will automatically see their settings, devices, and media transferred to the Meta AI app’s Devices tab following the update. Users can start conversations using their Ray-Ban Meta glasses and continue them in the Meta AI app or on the web via meta.ai. Conversations can be picked up in both directions between the app and the web interface, but not from the app or web to the glasses. Meta AI provides personalized assistance by drawing on information users have already chosen to share on Meta products, such as profiles and content engagement. If users have linked their Facebook and Instagram accounts through Accounts Center, the assistant can leverage both platforms to generate more relevant responses. “We’re using our decades of work personalizing people’s experiences on our platforms to make Meta AI more personal,” the company stated. Personalized responses are currently available in the U.S. and Canada. Web Experience Upgrades Meta has also enhanced the web experience for Meta AI. Users can now interact with the assistant via voice and access the Discover feed from desktop browsers. The web interface has been optimized for larger screens, with improvements to image generation features, including more presets and new options for adjusting lighting, mood, and style. Meta is testing a document generation and editing tool that enables users to create text- and image-rich documents and export them as PDFs. In select countries, the company is also testing the ability to import documents for Meta AI to analyze and summarize. Ongoing Development Meta stated that this launch is “the first step toward building a more personal AI” and emphasized that it plans to evolve the experience over time by collecting user feedback and expanding its capabilities. The company is positioning the app as an assistant for everyday use, capable of helping with tasks from recommendations to brainstorming and staying connected with friends and family. Image: Meta This article, "Meta Releases Standalone Meta AI App with Personalization, Voice Features, and Companion Integration" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Vice-premier with close links to leader seen as ‘more difficult interlocutor’ for WashingtonView the full article