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Google updated a number of its Google Ads help documentation to say "Primary conversion actions not used for optimization may be used to enhance predictions." It is not clear if this is a change in what is actually happening or just a clarification to the Google help documentation about what was happening already.View the full article

Do you really know who your audience is? In this article, we introduce the R.E.M. Framework for better audience targeting in the the signal-loss era. The post Rethinking Audience Targeting In A Signal-Loss Era (With The R.E.M. Framework) appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Google AI Mode is now showing an edit and copy button when you mouse your cursor near the search term or prompt. Otheriwse, the edit and copy button go hidden. Copy, copies the prompt and edit lets you edit the prompt. View the full article

AI may be attracting billions in venture capital, but money is not flowing to every founder with a chatbot demo and a slick deck. In fact, as AI makes building a great product faster and more accessible, founder behavior, judgment, and credibility become even more important. In a crowded market where every pitch claims “category-defining AI,” red flags can surface fast. Founders must recognize that most investors are not just underwriting your product. They are underwriting you as a person for the next seven to ten years. If they sense weak leadership, poor decision-making, or shaky ethics early on, the meeting or any next steps is often over before diligence even begins. Here are the top founder red flags VCs most commonly spot, and why they can kill your chances of raising capital as an AI company. 1. You’re Building a Thin Wrapper, Not a Real Business One of the fastest-growing concerns among investors is founders who simply place a user interface on top of third-party models and call it innovation. If your entire product depends on another company’s API, with no proprietary data, workflow integration, or defensible moat, VCs may see it as temporary value. Investors increasingly are moving away from “thin AI wrappers” and generic productivity tools because switching costs are low and it’s easy to launch copycats that can do what you do, but perhaps better. VCs want to know what remains valuable when the next model or release drops. If your moat is “we use GPT too,” expect skepticism and pushback. 2. You Claim There Are No Competitors Nothing damages credibility faster than telling investors you have no competition. I’ve heard too many founders share this with me. Every startup has competition: incumbents, internal workflows, spreadsheets, agencies, or customer inertia. Founders who insist they are alone in the market often signal naivety, weak market research, or ego. Investors are especially turned off when founders cannot articulate what could threaten their business. Strong founders understand risks. Weak founders deny they exist. Smart founders frame competition honestly by explaining who exists, why customers still struggle, and why now is the moment to win and scale at large. 3. You Treat Fundraising Like a Chore Many founders talk about fundraising like it distracts from the “real work” of building. But for venture-backed startups, raising capital is part of the job. Strong founders learn to value the process. Pitching sharpens the vision, investor questions test assumptions, and relationship-building can open doors long after the round closes. VCs want founders who understand that fundraising is not separate from building the company. It is part of building the company. 4. Your Numbers Feel Inflated or Misleading Metrics manipulation is one of the quickest ways to lose trust with an investor. That can mean overstating revenue, using vanity metrics in place of retention, redefining “active users,” or presenting aggressive projections with little evidence. Investors know early-stage metrics are imperfect. What they cannot tolerate is dishonesty. Misrepresenting numbers is an immediate deal-breaker for some investors. Once trust is broken, every other claim becomes suspect. Be clear and transparent. A flawed metric explained honestly is better than a perfect metric nobody believes. 5. You’re Defensive Instead of Coachable The best founders are confident enough to be challenged. VCs often test how founders respond to pushback. Do you get curious and thoughtful, or argumentative and combative? Do you treat every question as an attack? Investors know they will disagree with founders many times after investing. If you become defensive in a first meeting, they imagine years of friction ahead and won’t want to move forward. Coachability does not mean agreeing with everything. It means listening, reasoning clearly, and showing a learning mindset. 6. The Founding Team Dynamic Feels Off Investors study founder chemistry closely. Tension, disrespect, unclear roles, or one founder constantly interrupting another can sink confidence quickly. Visible imbalance between business and technical cofounders is a major warning sign. If one founder dominates every answer or speaks for the other’s domain, investors worry about future conflict and decision bottlenecks. 7. You Don’t Understand the Economics of AI Many founders underestimate the operational realities of AI businesses: inference costs, margins, data labeling expenses, enterprise sales cycles, compliance, and churn. VCs increasingly want founders who understand not just what AI can do, but what AI costs to run and scale. If your revenue model ignores compute spend or assumes infinite gross margins, it suggests superficial thinking. AI startups are not funded because they use AI. They are funded because they can build durable economics around it. 8. Your Vision Is Huge, but Your Execution Is Vague Saying you will “transform healthcare,” “reinvent legal work,” or “disrupt finance” is easy. Explaining your first expansion, customer acquisition motion, and adoption path is harder. Investors often reject founders whose vision is massive but whose go-to-market plan lacks clarity. Grandiosity without sequencing feels immature. The best founders think big and execute narrowly. They know exactly which customer pain point they solve first. 9. You Lack Self-Awareness Perhaps the most underrated red flag is a founder who lacks realism. If you insist everything is going perfectly, dismiss concerns, or believe intelligence alone guarantees success, investors may walk away. Startups are brutally hard. Strong founders know what they do not know. Self-awareness signals maturity, resilience, and leadership. Delusion signals future pain and potentially a sinking ship for an investor. VCs don’t expect perfection from founders. We do, however, expect honesty, clarity, adaptability, and evidence that you can navigate chaos. For AI founders, that means more than flashy demos or buzzwords. It means proving you understand your customers, your economics, your competition, and yourself. The companies that get funded are the ones whose founders remove doubt. View the full article

For most of modern marketing history, the operating assumption was surprisingly theatrical. Brands performed. Consumers watched. Channels existed primarily to distribute persuasion more efficiently than the next company. Even performance marketing, for all its mathematical confidence, still revolved around a fundamentally human premise: somewhere on the other side of the screen sat a person making a series of reasonably linear decisions. That model is beginning to fracture. Not because consumers disappeared. Because software started participating in the decision-making process and now marketers need to take notice. Recommendation systems already shape discovery more aggressively than most creative campaigns. Fraud models silently determine who gets trusted. Identity systems decide which experiences persist across channels. Inbox providers filter commercial visibility before the first pixel renders. Algorithms increasingly negotiate attention long before a consumer consciously exercises preference. Now layer autonomous agents into that environment. The industry likes to discuss AI as though it were another productivity layer strapped onto existing workflows. Faster segmentation. Faster content generation. Faster optimization. The framing is comforting because it preserves familiar power structures. Humans remain pilots. AI becomes copilots. That interpretation will age poorly. The rise of machine coordination What is emerging looks less like workflow automation and more like distributed machine coordination, where marketing becomes the orchestration layer sitting above thousands of semi-independent systems continuously interpreting intent, trust, risk, relevance, identity, and value in parallel. Air traffic control is the more accurate analogy than broadcasting. Not because marketers suddenly gain more control. Quite the opposite. Air traffic controllers do not fly the planes. They govern dynamic systems they cannot fully see, predict, or command directly. Their value comes from maintaining harmony under conditions of partial visibility, compressed decision windows, and escalating complexity. Modern marketing is drifting toward the same operational reality. A customer journey no longer resembles a funnel so much as a negotiation between competing models. One system predicts purchase intent. Another scores fraud risk. Another suppresses outreach frequency. Another determines deliverability. Another rewrites creative dynamically. Another optimizes toward revenue. Another optimizes toward retention. Increasingly, those systems are not sequential. They are simultaneous. And occasionally adversarial. The uncomfortable truth is that many organizations already have machine ecosystems making contradictory decisions about the same customer at the same time. One model flags a user as high value while another quietly suppresses them as suspicious. One system personalizes aggressively while another strips identifiers for compliance reasons. One platform optimizes for engagement while another inadvertently rewards synthetic behavior because the metrics still look healthy on dashboards presented during quarterly business reviews with reassuring shades of green. The machines are not aligned because the organization itself is not aligned. AI simply exposes the inconsistency faster. Why identity infrastructure is moving back to the center This is partly why identity infrastructure is becoming strategically central again after years of being treated as plumbing. The market spent the better part of a decade obsessing over activation while quietly underinvesting in signal integrity. That was manageable when humans remained the dominant interpreters inside the system. Humans compensate for ambiguity surprisingly well. Autonomous systems do not. They operationalize it. An inaccurate identity layer inside a partially automated environment behaves less like a data quality issue and more like corrupted air traffic telemetry. Small inconsistencies compound. Routing errors multiply. Trust deteriorates asymmetrically. And unlike human teams, machine systems rarely announce confusion elegantly. They simply optimize into distortion. This creates a strange inversion inside marketing leadership. Creativity still matters enormously, but increasingly at the architectural level rather than the asset level. The future advantage may belong less to organizations producing the highest volume of content and more to those capable of designing stable coordination systems between intelligence layers operating at machine speed. In practical terms, this changes the strategic role of signal networks. Historically, identity verification, email intelligence, engagement activity, and fraud prevention were often treated as supporting functions orbiting around “core” marketing execution. Useful. Necessary. Operational. That hierarchy is beginning to reverse. The dangerous illusion of ‘good enough’ signals In environments driven by autonomous decisioning, the quality of orchestration becomes inseparable from the quality of underlying identity confidence. Systems cannot coordinate effectively if they cannot reliably distinguish between persistence and noise, trust and mimicry, engagement and manufactured activity. Which introduces a slightly uncomfortable possibility the industry has not fully metabolized yet. Many companies may discover they do not actually know how much of their current performance is being generated by real human value versus increasingly sophisticated synthetic behavior patterns that merely resemble value convincingly enough to pass thresholds. Because AI systems do not inherently optimize for truth. They optimize for measurable success criteria. If synthetic engagement produces downstream metrics that resemble commercial performance, large portions of the ecosystem may continue rewarding it until economic consequences surface somewhere else entirely. Usually finance. Eventually legal. Occasionally regulatory testimony delivered in rooms with very expensive wood paneling and unusually tense water pitchers. This is where the industry’s fixation on personalization starts looking slightly outdated. The emerging challenge is not simply predicting what customers want. It is maintaining stable trust frameworks across environments where humans, agents, synthetic actors, fraud systems, and optimization engines increasingly interact with each other continuously and often invisibly. That is a fundamentally different operating environment. The new competitive advantage It also explains why resilient signal infrastructure is becoming more valuable than isolated data abundance. Volume alone becomes dangerous when orchestration complexity rises faster than governance maturity. More signals do not necessarily create more clarity. Sometimes they create atmospheric interference. Experienced pilots know this instinctively. During periods of turbulence, the problem is rarely lack of instrumentation. It is determining which instruments remain trustworthy under pressure. The same principle is beginning to apply across marketing ecosystems. This is partly why activity-based intelligence is gaining strategic importance beyond traditional campaign optimization. Persistent behavioral validation, identity confidence, deliverability integrity, fraud detection, and cross-channel trust signals increasingly function less like marketing enhancements and more like stabilization infrastructure for autonomous ecosystems. Quietly, the center of gravity is shifting. Not toward companies with the loudest AI messaging. Toward organizations capable of maintaining operational trust while automation scales. Toward signal networks built from continuous real-world activity rather than static assumptions. Toward systems designed to evaluate identity dynamically because static identity itself is becoming less economically useful in machine-mediated environments. The irony is difficult to miss. For years, marketing departments were told to become more scientific. More automated. More data-driven. Now many are discovering that scaling intelligence without scaling signal integrity resembles building faster aircraft while neglecting radar calibration. Impressive right up until visibility disappears. And visibility is about to become the defining constraint of the next decade. Not visibility into consumers. Visibility into the behavior of the systems acting on their behalf. View the full article

When Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon founded Spotify in April 2006, they were two Stockholm entrepreneurs with a prototype so skeletal that Per Roman, the cofounder of investors Bullhound Capital, who would later back the company, says his first look at it was “world-changing,” despite there barely being a product to look at. Two decades and 300 million subscribers later, Spotify has become a defining force in the Swedish tech scene: a company whose alumni have gone on to found, fund, or run many of the most ambitious startups Stockholm has produced, in much the same way Silicon Valley’s PayPal Mafia shaped the U.S. tech ecosystem. It’s one of several tentpole companies, alongside Skype, Klarna, and King, that have had an outsized impact on Sweden. Ex-Spotify engineers and operators now run venture firms backing the next wave of Swedish startups, including Lovable. Last month, Patrik Torstensson, one of Spotify’s most senior engineers during its growth years, was announced as Lovable’s new head of engineering, another addition to an alumni network that includes the founders of Tictail (acquired by Shopify), Soundtrack, Lifesum, Kovant, and Homer. But Spotify’s influence on Stockholm extends beyond headcount. The company helped instill a culture of ambition and a growing confidence that the Swedish capital can produce globally dominant consumer technology companies, and that failure, should it come, won’t be fatal. Fast Company spoke with several Spotify alumni who have since gone on to found companies of their own and further expand Stockholm’s startup ecosystem. Henrik Torstensson, partner, Alliance VC Henrik Torstensson joined Spotify in May 2010 as head of premium sales, when the company had around 300,000 paying subscribers. By the time he left three years later to cofound the wellness app Lifesum, that figure had grown to 6 million. He points to Spotify’s willingness, beginning around 2010, to hire commercial operators from top American companies—early Google ad sales staff, Facebook partnership leads—as the moment Stockholm’s talent pool truly leveled up. “You got a really good mix of very ambitious, very good, mostly Swedish engineers and product people with a commercial acceleration which would have taken much longer,” says Torstensson, who now invests in the Nordics’ next big startups at Alliance VC. Ali Sarrafi, cofounder and CEO, Kovant Ali Sarrafi arrived at Spotify just as it was launching its first iPhone app, working on the data and machine-learning team, and stayed through the company’s IPO. During that time, headcount ballooned from around 100 employees to roughly 3,000, growth so relentless that engineers on his team complained about spending too much time interviewing candidates. “We didn’t really think much of it back then, because we were in the midst of it,” he says. Sarrafi later left to build an industrial AI startup before founding Kovant, which sells autonomous agents to manufacturing firms grappling with what it estimates is a $3 trillion annual global efficiency gap. The cultural blueprint he learned at Spotify still shapes his company. “Best ideas, best facts, always win, not the person who’s the boss,” he says. Wilhelm Lundborg, founder, Homer; partner, Greens Ventures Wilhelm Lundborg has toured many of the biggest names in Stockholm tech: Spray, a Yahoo-like portal, in the late 1990s; Skype in the 2000s; Spotify from fewer than 100 employees to 3,500; then Tictail, which Shopify acquired; and now Homer, an AI-driven home-management app. He is also a limited partner in Greens Ventures, a venture fund made up mostly of ex-Spotify employees backing companies such as Lovable, Tandem Health, and Sana. Lundborg argues that the Jante law, a Scandinavian cultural convention discouraging people from standing out, is fading in Stockholm. “I’m prepared to call that dead,” he says. “Everybody’s super excited and super happy and celebrates the successes of each other.” Ola Sars, cofounder and CEO, Soundtrack Ola Sars never worked at Spotify, but his company likely would not exist without it. A five-time music startup founder, Sars led the launch of Beats Music in Los Angeles before returning to Stockholm burnt out and convinced there was a business-to-business opportunity Spotify wasn’t pursuing. In a secretive Stockholm bar, he pitched the idea to Spotify executives, who backed it. In 2014, the two sides jointly funded Soundtrack, which is now licensed in 75 countries with more than 50 million tracks and around 110,000 paying business customers spending roughly $30 per month. Spotify still holds a stake in the company. Sars says he values the village-like feel of Stockholm tech over what he sees as the Bay Area’s cutthroat culture. “My neighbors are C-levels at Spotify, and I can always ask Daniel or Martin or Alex what they think,” he says. “We’re not competing about shops here—we’re competing outside of Sweden.” View the full article

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Modern CEO has reported on disparate levels of enthusiasm for AI between corporate leaders and the general public. More worrying, there’s an emerging trust gap in the workplace, with only 27% of workers in the U.S. saying they “trust their employers to use AI responsibly,” according to one survey. It’s not too late for CEOs to win employees’ trust on AI, says Mark Surman, president of Mozilla, known for its Firefox web browser and its long-standing support of open-source technologies. Indeed, Surman’s advice for CEOs is drawn from open-source principles and Mozilla’s experiences seeking to build a more trustworthy internet. Here’s his counsel. 1. Empower your team. “If you want to do right by your employees, have them be involved in how you reshape and rebuild the company,” Surman says. “Give them ways to create and learn and have agency over how [AI] is used.” Surman discourages companies from thinking of AI strictly as a productivity tool or a way to track workers’ keystrokes so machines can take over their tasks. (Indeed, research suggests that if employees know they are being mined for their data, they may withhold information.) Surman commends the efforts of Karim Lakhani, a Harvard Business School professor whose research suggests that AI-human collaboration can be potent and will require companies to reimagine the way organizations are structured and led. 2. Build the right guardrails. In the same way that the internet brought new safety issues that required cybersecurity experts, AI governance is becoming a specialty. Mozilla Ventures has invested in AI governance companies such as Fiddler AI and Credo AI, which Surman feels are leading the way in helping companies and nonprofits with oversight and control of their agents. “The CEO totally has to be on top of modernizing safety and security” in the age of AI, he says. “You can lean on people who are really experienced at building the guardrails and rules for how AI should work at your company.” 3. Be worthy of trust. “The consequences of being untrustworthy and ignoring accountability are through the roof,” Surman says. While he is excited about the creativity that responsible AI can unleash, he also acknowledges that AI can create slop and error-filled content that will erode trust in brands and institutions: “If trust isn’t something that you think about as a company, you are going to struggle in a world where people are more skeptical than ever about whether something is reliable.” Get your most pressing AI questions answered It’s not too late to sign up for our first Modern CEO live-streamed event, The CEO’s Guide to AI. Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies, will help leaders understand where AI can have an impact—and what’s hype. You can RSVP here, and if you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up here. And if you have questions for Matt, you can submit them to stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. Read more: CEOs and founders love AI OpenAI says this is how founders actually use ChatGPT Claude productivity hacks CEOs can’t live without 7 CEOs explain how they use AI to do their jobs View the full article

A father-son duo has vibe-coded a gaming company that’s generated nearly 30 million plays and 20 million visits across four mini-games in just 90 days. Say hello to Dialed. Dialed is a gaming website that tests players’ senses and memory in games about color, sound, time, and shape. Geoff Teehan, chief design officer at the payments services company Lightspark and former vice president of design at Meta, created a color-matching game using Cursor and Claude during a hackathon. The project was inspired by an old college professor’s comment about how bad humans are at recalling color. “They think they’re really good at it, but you show them a color and then they go to a paint store and try to pick it out, and they forget it,” Teehan tells Fast Company. The color-matching game he vibe-coded is simple: It shows you a color for a few brief moments, and then takes it away and tests how well you can re-create it using controls to set hue, saturation, and brightness. Players are then scored based on how close they come to matching the original. Teehan says their data shows vivid blues and greens are some of the easiest colors for people to successfully recall, while cyans and reds are some of the hardest. Pastels are 7% harder to match than vivid colors, he says. The game launched in February after Teehan posted about it on Threads and X. It then “grew just way faster than I expected,” he says, with about half a million plays in a few days. He brought on his son Sam to run and grow it full time in hopes of turning the website into a real business, and it’s since expanded into more vibe-coded mini-games along similar lines. A sound game, in which players try to recreate a tone’s frequency, launched in March, followed by a time-matching game in April and a shape-matching game this past Tuesday. “I think we just figured out a simple formula that works,” Teehan says. “You’re going to perceive a stimulus, then you’re going to re-create it from memory using simple inputs or controls.” Players are scored, and they can share their scores and compete with friends. Simplicity is key. “We’re stripping out everything else that’s unnecessary,” he says. “There’s no instructions . . . there’s no sign-ups or logins. There’s no onboarding. There’s no app to download. You just click a link, and you’re playing.” Scaling the site from a single-use app to a multi-game page that supports millions of plays has been a learning curve for Teehan’s son, 23, who got his undergrad degree in finance and is now getting a crash-course education in growing a vibe-coding video game brand. “It’s just really fun to build these out and actually see in real time, when we launch a game, how people react,” Sam Teehan says. He gets game feedback, suggestions, and ideas from Dialed’s Discord server. Not every game idea has been shipped, and some of the concepts have been duplicative. The new shape-matching game combines earlier ideas for games they tried called Position, Rotation, and Scale. “We built out a bunch of other games that were, frankly, kind of bad, in order to get to that game,” Geoff Teehan says. “It’s a lot of experimentation.” He says the growth of Dialed shows how it’s easier than ever before to build products with just a few people. View the full article

In a recent speech at Rome’s La Sapienza University, Pope Leo XIV warned that investments in artificial intelligence and high-tech weapons could push the world into what he called a “spiral of annihilation.” Leo has identified AI as a critical issue for humanity and is expected to soon release a papal encyclical (a kind of open letter on Catholic doctrine) addressing the subject. His concerns reflect a broader debate taking shape across religious communities: Though artificial intelligence in its current form has only been in the marketplace for a few years, religious leaders and scholars from traditions stretching back centuries or more have already weighed in on the technology. While perspectives naturally vary across faiths and, in some traditions, between sects and congregations, many discussions have focused on the roles AI can and can’t play in religious teaching and study. Additionally, scholars are examining its implications for human labor, society, and the environment. AI and religious teaching and practice Some clerical leaders have experimented with using AI to draft sermons and other religious materials, while some faith communities have built chatbots designed to answer doctrinal and ethical questions. A team that included researchers from Kyoto University has even deployed a robotic Buddhist monk, dubbed the “Buddharoid,” at a temple in Kyoto, where it can assume postures associated with prayer. The project comes as Japanese Buddhism, like some other religious traditions around the world, faces declining numbers of adherents. Other developers have created AI versions of spiritual figures, including emulations of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and even Satan. But other leaders have been more cautious about how AI should be used in religious practice, often emphasizing the unique relationship between humans and the divine. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently told Decision magazine that a pastor who uses AI to write a sermon (versus using it for research) is essentially committing plagiarism. “Let’s just state the theological obvious: A pastor is a human being who is called to study God’s Word, to hear God’s Word, to preach God’s Word, and to obey God’s Word,” Mohler said. “A machine is called to none of those things and capable of none of those things.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints noted late last year that AI “cannot replace the gift of divine inspiration or the individual work required to receive it,” indicating that AI can be used for tasks like research, editing, and translating but not to “replace the individual work and spiritual guidance required to prepare divinely inspired talks, lessons, prayers, or blessings.” Pope Leo recently called on priests to avoid “the temptation to prepare homilies with artificial intelligence,” arguing that AI “will never be able to share faith.” Still, other Christian organizations have developed AI for purposes like training for missionary work and even answering questions about scripture. More than 600,000 people have used FaithBot, an AI tool launched by the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board last year, for instance. Overall, according to a survey from evangelical research organization Lifeway Research, only about 10% of U.S. Protestant pastors say they’re regular users of AI, with another 32% experimenting with it. Another 18% are actively avoiding it, while 20% are ignoring it, according to the survey. Pastors expressed concern about errors in AI content, while 55% agreed with a statement that “God has always shared His Word through people, and AI isn’t a person.” Protestant churchgoers surveyed are divided over the technology’s use in sermon preparation: About 44% say they don’t see anything wrong with pastors using it to prepare sermons, but 43% disagree. They’re also divided on the merits of hearing a sermon about “applying biblical principles to AI,” with younger churchgoers more likely to say such a presentation would be valuable. About 61%, though, say they’re concerned about AI’s influence on Christianity. Similar questions apply in other religions, with AI tools readily available for studying a variety of religious texts from essentially all major traditions, even amid concern that their responses may lack nuance, human wisdom, and divine inspiration. Rabbi Yehuda Shurpin, author of a question-and-answer column for Chabad.org, recently weighed in, saying that AI can’t “replicate the depth of human connection required for spiritual counseling and support” or substitute for a rabbi on questions of Jewish law. And Egyptian religious authorities have warned against the use of AI in interpreting the Quran, while writers for the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research recently cautioned allowing AI to devalue religious scholarship. “In the Islamic tradition, knowledge has never been an exercise in processing information; it is a moral and spiritual pursuit rooted in sincerity and realized through meaningful application,” wrote Mohamed AbuTaleb, Ibtihal Aboussad, and Kenan Alkiek. “Knowledge should draw us closer to Allah.” AI and labor Multiple religious leaders have expressed concerns about AI’s potential role in replacing human labor from both a theological perspective and a humanitarian one, with the pope recently advising that AI should be a tool to serve flesh-and-blood humans, not replace them. Mohler, of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, discussed “the possibility that AI could take away meaningful work and jobs from human beings who, as we see in the earliest chapters of Genesis, were made in God’s image and were made to work.” Conflating humans and AI can also risk devaluing human labor in general, some religious leaders say. Daniel Daly, executive director of the Center for Theology and Ethics in Catholic Health, recently warned that a human may come to be viewed as a “machine to be used.” And the technology’s occasional tendency to regurgitate existing material without properly citing or compensating the people behind it can disrespect those authors and go against religious precepts, warned Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman in a recent article. Other religious leaders have expressed concern about AI and copyright, too: “Islamic ethics place a high value on fairness and the protection of property,” the Yaqeen Institute authors noted. AI accuracy remains a concern as well, with hallucinations far from a solved problem. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints counseled last year that church leaders shouldn’t turn to AI to give church members advice on “medical, financial, legal, or other sensitive matters,” suggesting they turn to trained human professionals instead. Nor, say some religious leaders, can AI replace human creativity. “Artificial intelligence has certainly opened up new horizons for creativity, but it also raises serious concerns about its possible repercussions on humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, and capacity for wonder and contemplation,” Pope Leo said in December, warning about the displacement of human labor and the abandonment of God-given talents. While AI, in theory, can provide more time for rest and leisure, allegedly labor-saving devices certainly haven’t always done so, writes pastor and technology scholar A. Trevor Sutton in Christianity Today. True rest, he suggests, comes from following religious commandments to seek it—not simply from putting machines to work for us. Additionally, Jewish scholars have begun to weigh in on how and when AI may be used during the Sabbath, when work is generally forbidden, citing precedent from prior technologies. Social and environmental justice In a 2021 essay, Soraj Hongladarom, a philosophy professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, argued that ethical AI development can follow the Buddhist principle of seeking to eliminate world suffering. Some religious leaders hope for AI’s help in addressing humanitarian issues—from developing new health treatments to boosting food and industrial production. In 2023, Southern Baptist officials sought to “acknowledge the powerful nature of AI and other emerging technologies, desiring to engage them from a place of eschatological hope rather than uncritical embrace or fearful rejection.” But many faith communities have expressed concern about the negative aspects of AI, including labor issues, AI’s use in combat, the potential for generating misinformation, and the environmental costs of deploying sprawling new data centers. The pope recently warned that military AI should be monitored “so that it does not absolve humans of responsibility for their choices and does not exacerbate the tragedy of conflicts.” The World Council of Churches has similarly warned about the risk of “killer robots,” or autonomous weapons systems, to human life. Jewish scholars frequently compare modern technology and AI to the centuries-old legend of the golem, a clay creature who is brought to life to act as an obedient servant or protector but (in most stories) eventually becomes independent of its masters, spiraling out of control and wreaking havoc. Furthermore, religious leaders and scholars have warned about AI’s potential for misinformation—including false claims about religion and religious communities. “Because most of that data is Western and secular in origin, AI often carries blind spots about Islam and Muslims,” wrote the Yaqeen Institute authors. “Some models, for instance, have even failed to acknowledge real-world injustices, such as the persecution of Uyghur Muslims.” The American Jewish Committee has noted that many Jewish Americans are concerned about AI’s potential for spreading misinformation about Jews. And Pope Leo himself has been the target of AI misinformation. The potential environmental costs associated with data center use of water and power also haven’t gone unnoticed by faith communities—from the Presbyterian Church (USA) to the Methodist Church in the United Kingdom—even as some express optimism that AI could help develop new technologies to aid the environment and humankind. Different communities are likely to reach different conclusions about those trade-offs. In some parts of the United States, Capital B News recently reported, reactions to data center projects have divided churches along racial lines. View the full article

President Donald The President just can’t quit tariffs. He suffered a major defeat when the Supreme Court ruled in February 2026 against the sweeping emergency tariffs he announced the previous year. Then, on May 7, a federal court knocked down the interim tariffs he announced after the high court’s decision. Yet The President appears undeterred and keeps finding a plan B—and then C and D. “So, we always do it a different way,” the president told reporters after the May 7 decision. “We get one ruling, and we do it a different way.” That different way, currently, is using an authority called Section 301. This option is likely to invite more litigation, but it may wind up more powerful and durable than previous levies. To that end, the administration has opened two probes, paving the way for fresh tariffs later this year against China and other major trading partners. Why does this matter? U.S. trade policy, to the average person, may seem like a complicated mess of acronyms and legalese. But as a trade economist who has been following the tariff wars, I believe The President’s strategy of making aggressive global tariffs the centerpiece of his foreign economic policy is quite clear—even as his trade policy overall remains deeply unpopular. And if he succeeds, the average levy may jump to the highs of the “Liberation Day” tariffs of April 2025, before some were scaled back in subsequent—if incomplete—deals with trading partners. A tariff obsession At first glance, The President’s fixation with tariffs may seem surprising. They have failed to stimulate U.S. manufacturing and employment, while consumers and importers have absorbed the brunt of the price hikes. But to The President, what seems to matter is that the Supreme Court took away his tariff-making power when it ended his emergency tariffs. He now wants that power back. Indeed, that power was the appeal of the Liberation Day tariffs, which let The President set tariff rates at any level and for any length of time, with the flexibility to assign different tariffs to different countries. With such tools, he could threaten more punishing levies to enforce bilateral trade deals. In addition, he saw the revenue that those tariffs brought in as a source of power and has resented the Supreme Court order that they be refunded to the U.S. companies that paid them. The President is even angry at any companies that have decided to collect the tariff refunds. But The President is especially furious at his Supreme Court appointees Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, whose votes swung the February decision, and continues to excoriate them. He declared he was “ashamed” of all the justices who voted to strike the tariffs, characterizing them as “fools” and “lapdogs” who didn’t have “the courage to do what’s right for our country.” The President also said the court’s decision would inadvertently push him to “impose tariffs more powerful . . . rather than less.” In short, The President is moving from his Liberation Day tariffs to what I call “revenge tariffs”—in an attempt to show the high court that it cannot stop him. Planning the next battle Section 301 of the 1971 U.S. Trade Act is designed to remedy foreign countries’ trade practices deemed discriminatory, unfair, unreasonable, or burdensome to U.S. commerce. It sets no limit on the tariff amount; lets the president discriminate among targeted countries; and generates tariff revenue without violating the Constitution’s taxation clause, a major element in the Supreme Court’s February decision. Another potential advantage: Federal courts have typically given the president discretion in determining the purpose, scope, and remedies chosen to implement Section 301. The main reason why The President didn’t use Section 301 last year for his Liberation Day tariffs—opting instead for another law, the International Economic Emergency Powers Act—was because he thought the latter would grant that kind of unlimited tariff authority but without any extra procedural requirements. To a certain point, that proved correct—until his Supreme Court loss. As for next steps, the The President administration has proposed two Section 301 investigations. One is against alleged “excess industrial capacity” among several countries—shorthand for overproduction through government intervention—and the other against alleged failures to enforce bans on trade using forced labor. To The President, the appeal is that these probes have a vast scope. And he has already indicated that he seeks to use any tariffs stemming from the probes as leverage: If a country that has inked a trade deal considers abandoning the agreement, for example, The President has warned that he could threaten Section 301 tariffs later. “Any Country that wants to ‘play games’ with the ridiculous supreme court decision, especially those that have ‘Ripped Off’ the U.S.A. for years, and even decades, will be met with a much higher Tariff, and worse, than that which they just recently agreed to. BUYER BEWARE!!!” The President wrote on his social platform, Truth Social, in February. Using Section 301, in short, would be akin to declaring that every U.S. trading partner in some way damages the U.S. and will be targeted with punitive tariffs. This action would be unprecedented—and likely face legal challenges. These would first go to the Court of International Trade, which also nixed the interim tariffs, and appeals would go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The final instance of appeal would be the Supreme Court. Fair and balanced? International trade law has established mechanisms for trading partners to crack down on forced labor or address industrial capacity through policy changes or negotiations. In such a scenario, tariffs would provide the means, not the ends, to address these more substantive policy disputes. But so far, The President seems to have another goal: correcting the “unfair trade imbalances” that he also cited for the Liberation Day tariffs. One government Section 301 petition claims that foreign excess capacity is letting countries rack up “persistent” trade surpluses. Another claims that trade in forced-labor goods harms the U.S. trade balance by increasing U.S. imports of underpriced products and decreasing U.S. exports by forcing them to compete with cheap competition. If these petitions succeed, The President could then impose the Section 301 tariffs individually, country by country, as part of his global trade balancing goal. The President also wants to seize back the revenue that his tariffs generated. The catch is that Section 301 requires cases to be based on actionable practices, not trade balance outcomes. Moreover, the 2025 tariffs didn’t even accomplish any balancing: The U.S. deficit in goods actually increased that year. So using Section 301 is just as unlikely to improve the U.S. trade balance, which is determined by macroeconomic factors, not foreign excess capacity or imports of goods made with forced labor. A question of deference Will there be any guardrails on The President’s plan to introduce the new tariffs in July 2026, as he has indicated? This will depend in part on whether courts continue the traditional deference of the pre-The President era to the president in these cases. The President is counting on this, but it’s not a slam dunk. Many experts question whether overcapacity is a trade violation. And on the forced labor issue, the U.S. National Trade Estimate Report added potential offenders besides China only in March 2026—an announcement well timed in anticipation of the current Section 301 case. The forced labor case may in fact be intended to compel U.S. trading partners to abandon supply chains that include Chinese goods. But as it happens, the European Union and other countries are more effective than the U.S. in prohibiting forced-labor imports and therefore shouldn’t be targeted. Trade experts also point out that the U.S. itself produces forced-labor goods in private prisons and has often failed to stop forced-labor imports. It’s just as guilty as many other countries of not enforcing its ban on such trade, these legal scholars argue. Still, courts have traditionally given latitude to the president on Section 301. It lets the White House pursue trade liberalization while respecting the norms of global trade rules that the U.S. championed at the time. The President has, in contrast, made a practice of undermining those rules and can be expected to stretch Section 301 as far as possible. Indeed, his rhetoric seems to suggest that the Section 301 cases were chosen primarily to establish a permanent tariff regime by providing all-purpose bargaining leverage, not correcting damaging foreign trade practices. For these reasons, it’s likely that The President will face legal challenges—as well as a potential impact on his party at the midterm ballot box—as he tries to test the limits of U.S. trade law. Kent Jones is a professor emeritus of economics at Babson College. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

One cold Friday night a few years ago, I collapsed to the ground in the arrivals hall of a small French airport. I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. It took physical collapse for me to acknowledge that I was burned out and that my work life was unsustainable. In the time since my own burnout, the term has become ubiquitous. And given the abundance of research on the topic, I’m not going to deny its dangers. Burnout is real, serious, and measurable. However, I don’t believe that we’re living in a burnout epidemic. What we are living through is an epidemic of the use of the term burnout. And that overuse is blunting the urgency of a massive global issue. What burnout actually is Burnout is not a catch‑all synonym for “tired,” “busy,” or “stressed.” The World Health Organization defines burnout as a prolonged response to chronic workplace stress, characterized by three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism (or mental distance from work), and reduced professional efficacy. That specificity matters: burnout is contextual (it is about work), chronic (it builds over time), and multidimensional (it is not just “being exhausted”). Exhaustion can be horrible. But the term “burnout” loses its meaning when someone uses it to describe a bad week at work. Why “everyone is burned out” is bad data Headlines and social media captions routinely declare that “everyone is burned out,” often based on self‑report surveys that equate feeling stressed or tired with clinical‑level burnout. And yet peer‑reviewed studies paint a far more nuanced picture: prevalence varies widely depending on occupation, context, and, crucially, the definition and thresholds that they’re referring to. When a media outlet asks “Do you feel burned out at work?” in a poll and reports the percentage of “yes” answers as the burnout rate, it conflates a colloquial feeling with a clinically defined syndrome. That slippage fuels a dramatic narrative but weakens the scientific one. The epidemic of the term “burnout.” In the broader culture, burnout has become a catch‑all label for a number of things—from being overcommitted to feeling a sense of disillusionment with a job, career, or industry. Perhaps you’re struggling with your mental or physical health, or are just frustrated with the nature of late‑capitalist work. This is a textbook example of “concept creep,” where diagnostic or technical terms expand to cover increasingly mild or diverse phenomena. Concept creep isn’t neutral. While labels can increase empathy and legitimacy, they also inflate assumptions about chronicity. Often, when I introduce myself as a burnout prevention consultant, people respond with sneers and comments of “burnout’s all between your ears” or “I’m sick of people being lazy and blaming their workplace.” I’m not a fan of their response, but I understand it. When the word burnout creeps to include every instance of tiredness or dissatisfaction, we dilute its meaning. How overuse undermines the gravity of burnout Overusing the term burnout has several concrete downsides. First, it can reduce the urgency of cases that actually fit the definition of burnout. When everyone is “burned out,” it becomes harder to recognize and prioritize those at genuine risk of exiting the profession or experiencing long‑term health consequences. It can also lead to policy fatigue. If leaders rely on shaky data, they may roll out low‑impact wellness initiatives (think: fruit bowls and meditation apps) that fail to address structural drivers, leading to cynicism when nothing changes. If employees don’t know the difference between normal fluctuation in motivation, acute stress, and true burnout, it can make it harder to seek appropriate support or intervene early. And lastly, Concept creep can both destigmatize (“it’s normal to feel this way”) and inadvertently pathologize normal strain (“if I’m not thriving 24/7, I must be burned out”). In turn, this may undermine a sense of agency. Ultimately, by calling everything burnout, we make it harder to prevent and treat burnout. Five ways to shift the narrative For practitioners and leaders, the goal is not to police language for its own sake. We need to protect the precision that drives effective action. Here are five practical shifts. 1. Use the research definition, not the mood of the week Anchor your language to established frameworks. When you use the term burnout, check that you’re talking about the WHO definition. For everything else, name the experience more precisely. That might be “chronic time pressure,” “role conflict,” “moral distress,” or “demoralization.” 2. Be transparent about data limitations Before you cite statistics like “70% of workers are burned out,” interrogate the methodology: How was burnout defined? Which scale? What cut‑off? Was it a single‑item self‑label? Varying thresholds, instruments, and cultural norms produce wildly different prevalence rates. Commit to explaining, in plain language, how you or your own organization is measuring burnout and what those numbers actually mean. If you are only measuring exhaustion, call it that. 3. Re‑center systems, not self‑care The popular narrative frames burnout mostly as an individual resilience or self‑care deficit. The WHO classification is explicit: burnout is a workplace phenomenon resulting from chronic stress. Burnout is primarily a systems issue. Treat it as such. Shift your language from “You need better boundaries to avoid burnout” to “We need to address workload, role clarity, decision latitude, and psychological safety to prevent burnout.” Use burnout data to drive job redesign, resourcing decisions, and better leadership development – not just yoga classes and ping pong tables. 4. Create a vocabulary for shades of strain Most workplaces operate within a binary: you’re either “fine” or “burned out.” That leaves little room to talk about early warning signs or non‑burnout forms of suffering, Like boredom, disengagement, or moral injury. Conceptual clarity allows nuance. Co‑create a shared language for different states: terms like “stretched,” “struggling,” “at capacity,” “disillusioned,” and “on the edge” can be helpful. Pair each term with specific supports (e.g., workload review, values conversation, mentoring), and reserve “burnout” for when the triad of exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced efficacy is clearly present and persistent. 5. Tell more accurate stories about recovery Overblown narratives can make burnout seem inevitable (“everyone is burned out; it’s just modern work”) and recovery impossible (“once you’re burned out, you’re done”). Share case examples that highlight early recognition, negotiated workload changes, supportive supervision, and gradual restoration of engagement and efficacy. Emphasize that burnout is serious but not an identity. Subvert the dominant paradigm If we care about preventing burnout, we have to become more disciplined about how we talk about it. Overusing the term minimizes the very phenomenon we are trying to address. By reclaiming a precise, research‑grounded definition and pairing it with nuanced language about other forms of distress, we can respond more intelligently and design better workplaces. That way, when someone says, “I’m burned out,” or collapses at an airport, people will take them seriously rather than responding with a sneer. View the full article

To make room for more housing without losing green space, planners in a new Toronto neighborhood flipped the usual approach: Instead of carving out room for parks and plazas, they made the streets do that work instead. “The street is almost like a public courtyard,” says Rasmus Astrup, design principal and senior partner at SLA, the Denmark-based firm that was part of the design team for the new neighborhood, called Ookwemin Minising. The main street will be car-free, “like a linear park,” he says, and filled with 400 trees. Other streets will allow cars, but prioritize large swaths of green space. The design gives residents public space, and doubles as climate infrastructure that can reduce urban heat, support biodiversity, and capture water in storms. Rethinking development The area, south of downtown Toronto where the Don River meets Lake Ontario, used to be industrial. More than a century ago, the city channelized part of the river and filled in wetlands to make room for factories. The old infrastructure didn’t work well: The river and industrial zone became polluted and the changes to the river led to more flooding. But over a massive, decades-long redevelopment project, the local government cleaned up the waterfront, reshaped the river into a more natural shape, and added other new green space for flood protection. The larger project created an island where the new neighborhood will sit. The original plan for the neighborhood, released two years ago, called for more typical North American streets—wide and built for cars, lined with blocks of uniform apartment buildings. After negative community feedback, the public development agency running the project, Waterfront Toronto, realized that the neighborhood needed more apartments to help deal with Toronto’s housing shortage. It brought in a new design team, including SLA, and asked them to come up with a new plan that would increase density by 27%. “We thought, how are we going to do that? We don’t have the space,” says Astrup. They had to get creative with their approach and conceived of streets that perform like urban spaces. “The street is where you hang out, and where you read a book, and where you sit,” he adds. The design takes out street parking, making room for plantings and seating areas. It’s filled with trees—not just in straight lines at the curb, like typical street trees, but extending deeper into the road, so cars have to take a meandering route and slow down. On the side of one street, the “Sandbar Trail” follows the path of a former sandbar and is filled with plants. Trees will also be planted in a natural mix of species. Filling the space with nature makes it a place where people want to be. “It doesn’t work if it’s asphalt and concrete,” Astrup says. Directing the flow In a storm, the streets will suck up rainwater before it flows through traditional sewers. A “sponge” approach to street design, using green infrastructure, isn’t new. But it’s more often applied piecemeal to existing streets. Since the new neighborhood is built from scratch, planners could approach it differently. First, since the island isn’t entirely flat, the team looked at how the existing topography directs the flow of water. The designers wanted to get away from a traditional street grid. “It’s a very rational and highly engineered system that has nothing to do with the natural flows in nature, and it’s actually fragile,” says Astrup. The streets gently slope to guide water toward bioswales, or plant-filled channels designed to absorb rainwater. The streets also have traditional sewers, but nature captures and stores water first. “What this really does is provide resilience and reassurance,” says Jason Haelzle, market lead for property and buildings at GHD, an engineering firm that partnered on the design. The plants and soil type inside each bioswale are chosen both based on the stormwater needs at that location and other goals like biodiversity. Other partners on the project, Trophic Design and Monumental, considered indigenous design priorities like “co-living” with other species; a network of greenery throughout the neighborhood will help wildlife move through the space. Other cities could copy the nature-led approach, Astrup says. “I think we need to redefine what development means,” he says. View the full article

One of the best days of Gabriella’s career was also one of her hardest days as a parent. Gabriella, who asked for a pseudonym to protect her children’s privacy, had just filmed the launch video for her new company. On the train ride back home, she got a call from her daughter’s school. The new nanny she’d hired, who had been thoroughly vetted, had left her two-year-old son locked in the car in the school’s parking lot and disappeared for half an hour before teachers heard the crying and rushed to help. “I remember feeling so guilty and crushed, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I don’t feel like I can leave my children because I don’t know how to find childcare that I can trust,’” Gabriella says. It’s been a bad time for working women. Last year, men joined the workforce at three times the rate of women (572,000 men vs 184,000 women). Meanwhile, over 455,000 women left the workforce between January and August. Almost half (42%) cited caregiving as the reason. Lean In and McKinsey’s “Women in the Workplace” report found 60% of senior level women reported burning out, compared with about 50% of men. Two researchers at Rutgers University found that caregiving strain is the largest predictor of burnout and leaving a job, especially among women who are 10 to 15 years into their careers. The girlboss is out and the power pause is in. Fast Company put out a call on LinkedIn, asking senior-level mothers how they were doing it and what hacks they were using. Over 100 wrote in, and their responses totaled over 48,000 words—the length of a short mystery novel. What their responses reveal is that while senior-level women might be making it work, they’re barely hanging on. “Do other women have hobbies? Rich social lives? Energy enough to do much more than collapse into bed and scroll for a few minutes before passing out?” a chief content officer with one kid wrote. Some of the hacks they offered unconsciously mirrored the hellscape they lived in. One mother said she used AI to generate a bedtime story read aloud in her own voice for her children during business trips. Another gave her child a toy laptop and trained her to “work” on it while she works. “Stop hacking the system and literally burn the system down. It does not work, clearly,” Colleen Curtis, the head of community growth at Reddit and a single mother with two kids, commented. The intensification of everything Senior-level mothers are caught in a two-way trap: the intensification of work and the intensification of parenting. The pandemic gave rise to remote jobs, but it also gave rise to the infinite work day as organizations discovered the boundary between work and home could be erased. This is a gift for working parents juggling school pickup times and nap schedules, but it’s also an exhausting burden for moms trying to power down during non-work hours. According to Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Annual Report, on average, workers receive 117 emails a day and 153 Teams messages, and go two minutes between interruptions whether it’s a meeting, email, or message. Emails sent after 8:00pm have increased 16% in the last year, and the average worker receives over 50 emails after work hours. One third of workers said the pace of work over the past five years has made it impossible to keep up. The intensification is hitting leaders hard. In its 2025 Global Leadership report, the leadership consultancy firm Development Dimensions International found 71% of the nearly 11,000 leaders it surveyed reported a significant increase in their stress level after taking on their current role, up from 63% in 2022. Another report found leadership burnout rose to 56% in 2024. Meanwhile, Gallup found about one third of leaders said they dealt with anger and sadness on a daily basis, and 46% were stressed every day—substantially higher than other employee groups. Parenting is experiencing the same trend. Since the 1980s, the average amount of time spent with children has increased by an hour a day for fathers, and 1.5 hours for mothers. In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General wrote an op-ed declaring that parental stress is a public health issue: 48% of parents say most days their stress is overwhelming. “My current position: You can choose about 2-3 things to do ‘well’ on any given day, and the rest . . . well, my late thirties have been about making peace with letting the rest be imperfect or unfinished,” wrote a mother who’d stepped back from a fast-paced media job to work remotely. Mothers are bearing the brunt of this load. The Pew Research Center found mothers are more likely to help children with their homework, manage schedules, provide emotional support, and feed and bathe their child. On average, fathers have three more leisure hours a week than mothers. Meanwhile, according to the Women at Work report, in 2024 women with partners were more than three times as likely as men with partners to be responsible for all the housework. Parenting should be a two-body solution, but more often than not, the women who wrote in said they were shouldering most of the burden. “If I need to pick up kids at 4 p.m., there’s absolutely no way I’ll accept a meeting at that time, not even for Obama,” wrote a divorced mother of two in Mexico. “But flexibility comes both ways. I stop at 4 p.m., then I come back and finish stuff until 6 p.m. and if I’m missing something, I’ll open my laptop after the kids are asleep. The truth is I can manage work and kids. The one I’m missing is me. Healthy eating and a gym routine has been left as a fourth priority and I haven’t managed to make time for that. I hate that because it’s not what I want my kids to learn from me. Mom needs to take care of herself.” Hacks for surviving a broken system The vast majority of the hacks mothers offered were about carving out a few extra hours to survive in a broken system, and fell in three main buckets. First, hire as much help as you can afford, especially for tasks that you don’t like, whether it’s cleaning or cooking. However, many younger leaders said childcare was all they could afford. Second, outsource the mental load to AI agents: More than one mother had even built companies with AI products to help others do this. Third, become superhumanly organized: There were countless emails recommending batch cooking on weekends, time blocking and calendaring everything (“school pickup is a standing meeting”), and being ruthless about saying no. Very few hacks got at changing the system itself. Finding the right fit The mothers who were the happiest had one thing in common: They had found workplaces that genuinely believed in work-life balance. An overwhelming majority of the mothers who wrote in said they worked remotely, or switched to a remote job once they had children. One survey found that over a third of women (37%) who left their jobs in 2025 worked in companies without flexible schedules. Megha Sharma, the chief legal and people officer at Aryaka, a global network security company, has two children and says working mothers should evaluate prospective employers on two fronts. First, examine the company’s benefits: “If your organization is not providing parental leave, and only providing maternal leave, consider whether they are providing it only because it’s required by law or because they truly support working parents,” she says. “When they are not providing flexible spending accounts for childcare or other childcare-related benefits, ask yourself what is the company telling me? Is the company [in] early stages and therefore, truly not in a position to provide support [yet] or does the company simply not recognize . . . the demands on working parents . . . ?” Second, look up other employees on LinkedIn: “Are all employees in one age group? Are employees spread across age groups?” Sharma wrote. “[If so,] likely they’re encountering and supportive of employees who are . . . having varying life events, marriages, pregnancies, young children, older parents, caregiving responsibilities across the board.” Shamim Noorani Gillani, senior vice president of growth and client success at Carrum Health, took this a step further. During her maternity leave with her second child, she knew she needed to find a company that was more family friendly. She folded childcare into her interviews. At Carrum, she said, “The first [interview] was with the female chief growth officer. At one point I was like, ‘Hey, I’m sorry you hear that screaming. I have an infant. Can you give me a second?’ I just came back on video, and I had a cover, and I was breastfeeding on an interview . . . For [the follow-up] I had the baby strapped to me, because . . . it was during nap time. For the final round interview with our CEO . . . he said, ‘Please bring the baby, there’s no concern.’” He and Gillani met at the public gardens at a child-friendly coffee shop. Gillani admits she did not bring her baby to another company that invited her to bring the baby, but scheduled the interview at a high-end restaurant. She ended up with several offers. “The feedback I got throughout the interviews is, ‘Wow, if she can handle this stage in her life and also send very thoughtful follow-up with us, it seems like she can handle our clients and she can handle a large team.’” Ultimately, she chose Carrum because “it was a lot more accommodating and could read cues of what I needed for an interview.” Set your boundaries and hold firm Tamara Sykes, director of strategy and insights at Stacker, a content distribution platform, sends a “Get To Know Me” deck to everyone she works with. It includes a slide with her best meeting times (9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. during the school year) and she updates it to include her kids’ summer vacation schedule. She walks through it with new hires on her team, and sends it to her bosses as well as any other teams she might be working with. “It’s actually helped people stop looking at me in a negative light because I’m very honest . . . There’s a line in the deck that says, ‘I will always ask for a deadline’ because the truth is I’m playing calendar Tetris as a mom. That helped people understand that I wasn’t coming for them—I was asking so they could do their job well, and so I wasn’t the one holding things up.” Sykes got the idea from a female boss she had early on in her career who had gone through a divorce and was solo parenting. Michele Morris, vice president of U.S. marketing for Big Green Egg, an outdoor cooking brand, has two children. Every night from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. she and her husband put their phones in a drawer so they can be present with their kids. She listed this in her company onboarding document which she got at the start of the job. “I’m very clear about that boundary. . . . It’s not that I won’t respond to the ping, I’ll respond at 8:15 p.m.” However, both Morris and Sykes pointed out that the success of their boundaries rested on the shoulders of an understanding boss and company culture that did not penalize them for having boundaries. Slice and dice When Kelly Stack, now a vice president of midwestern partnerships at the adtech firm Big Happy, was pregnant with her first child she successfully negotiated to work four days a week. However, her friend Jessica Pfennig told her: “You’re going to work five days a week and only get paid for four.” Stack proposed that she and Pfennig split the job. Today, Stack works Monday through Wednesday, and Pfennig works Wednesday through Friday. They each receive 60% of a full-time salary and split their commissions 50/50, and have a shared login account to access of all their company’s systems. To get the arrangement approved, they put together a formal pitch deck, pointing out the savings—they would cover each other’s maternity leave and vacations. They were turned down at first, but finally negotiated a six-month trial period. It also helped that Stack was the top salesperson at the company. Thirteen years later, they’ve maintained this partnership at three different companies. The arrangement has allowed both—each a mother of three—to be present in their children’s lives. However, Pfennig points out that there’s a cost: “We’re vice presidents, but we’re still individual contributors. I think we could manage together fine, but I don’t think that’d be fair to the people we’d be managing because . . . they’d have [two] different expectations.” Literally burn the system down When she had her first child in 2020, Taylor Capuano was working a mid-level marketing role. She crunched the numbers. “I remember sitting at the counter with my husband looking at our expenses, going ‘I just don’t know if it makes sense for me to continue working.’ And I’m someone who gets a lot of fulfillment for my career.” Fast forward three years. Capuano did not stop working, but she and her sister Casey started a new company called Cakes, which makes silicone nipple covers. In 2024, Capuano had a second child: “I was in a very different financial situation, and I had sufficient childcare. I didn’t stress about great quality childcare when I was returning back to work. It was a very different experience when I didn’t have the emotional and financial burden of childcare costs. I was more productive, and rested.” “I realized it’s a luxury in our country to have good quality child care . . . I remember talking to my sister being like, ‘Well, I wish we could do something for our team, a lot of them are young moms . . .’ And she’s like, ‘Let’s just pay for their child care costs.’” Last year, Cakes started offering employees a $3,000 monthly childcare stipend for each child under the age of five. Since then, it’s seen a 10% increase in revenue, had a 0% attrition rate and gone viral. What’s less discussed is that Cakes also has an employee handbook that meticulously outlines what a parent-friendly work culture looks like in practice. Core hours are 9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. in an employee’s time zone. “During this time, everyone should be reachable and meetings may be scheduled. Outside these hours, employees are empowered to structure their time around real life,” the handbook states. It goes on to list norms such as respond to Slack messages within two hours, email within 24, and Wednesdays are protected time with no meetings. It also acknowledges the realities of being a working parent and says: “Kids can unexpectedly appear on Zoom. Parents may turn their camera off while managing a little one in the background.” “A lot of times, like, companies will have flexible work policies, but they don’t really say what that means,” says Tracy Park, chief business officer at Cakes and a mother of two. “Something as little as your child can appear on screen during a Zoom, is not usually something you would think you’d need to call out, but I think seeing it there relieves the pressure.” The company also has a formal support system for employees returning from parental leave. These parents receive a 30-60-90 day reentry plan tailored to their role and a manager check-in protocol for the first three months back. This policy was created as Cakes prepared for its first two employees to go on leave. “A lot of the employees are working moms and we just think about what we would have loved to have as a working mom,” says Park. “It’s built into the culture: How should we help?” At the moment, the team is 87% female, and 58% are mothers. The company also has a one-month quiet period between December to January, akin to a summer vacation, which was created after Capuano and her sister went on back-to-back maternity leaves and the company saw 10x growth. “They realized as long as they planned for it and built it into the strategy, the whole company could take a month off,” Park says. The policy is enforced from the top down. “Managers and leaders are encouraged to model flexible behaviors, leaving for pickups and taking parental leave . . . Culture is set from the top,” the handbook says. “We measure our output, not hours.” No end in sight In many ways Cakes, which was built by working mothers for working mothers, is the prototype of what a healthy work culture can and should look like. It’s worth noting Cakes’ sales revenue was $95 million last year, up 240% YoY. This year it’s on track to make $120 million. Many women who are discovering that today’s work culture is no longer sustainable are following suit and building their own companies. In 2019, 24% of new businesses were started by women. By 2024, this had climbed to 49%, and today over half of solopreneurs in America are women. “As much as it pains me to say it, I’ve accepted that the corporate table wasn’t built to support working moms. Consulting gives me control over my time, income and my trajectory,” wrote Jess Santini, a mother of two and a former vice president of global marketing at a media agency who was laid off last year. She has since opened her own freelance business. “Consulting gives me control over my time, my income, and my trajectory and after years of working in the advertising industry, I’ve built enough contacts to gain a steady stream of client work.” Still, companies designed by women for women are the exception, not the rule. With the rise of AI, and the tight job market, there’s little incentive for large employers to change. At the policy level, advocates are busy fighting for baseline protections. For example, Chamber of Mothers, a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of mothers in America, has identified the three most important policies working mothers need to fight for: paid parental leave, maternal health, and government-subsidized childcare. By comparison, the needs of senior-level women feel hardly urgent. After all, if these women are barely hanging on, the rank and file are on fire or have simply given up on having children. As Erin Erenberg, CEO and cofounder of Chamber of Mothers, points out, “Cultural flexibility inside the workplace happens once we live under federal and state norms that expect people to be taking time for care.” But she’s living the problem, too. When pressed further about what a workplace that allows women to be mothers would look like or what policies could facilitate this, Erenberg pauses. She’d built a national coalition of over 100,000 mothers with over 40 chapters. She’s also a lawyer specializing in intellectual property law and the founder of Totum, an advocacy platform for mothers. She tells me she’s struggling, mentioning her guilt over missing her son’s soccer games, which are an hour-and-a-half drive away. But Erenberg probably didn’t even need to tell me of her personal challenges and the ways in which the problem runs deeper than simple solutions. After I put out my request on LinkedIn, she was one of the first mothers who responded. Her practical solutions for managing her career and motherhood are very familiar: meal prepping and time blocking. View the full article

If you’ve been following technology news recently, you’ve probably noticed a sudden increase in references to a 19th-century economics theory called the ​Jevons Paradox​, which is named for the neoclassical economist William Stanley Jevons, and captures the observation that increasing the efficiency of a resource can lead to greater consumption. Jevons first articulated this idea in an 1865 book, pithily titled, ​The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines​. He argued that building more efficient steam engines – ones that required less fuel to generate the same power – would not solve the problem of England’s diminishing coal supplies. If you made the engines more efficient, Jevons predicted, people would find more applications for steam power, and even more coal would be burned overall. This is indeed what happened. (At least, the part about increased coal consumption. The feared coal shortage was averted through new mining techniques.) The Jevons Paradox is popular again because it provides a useful frame for understanding the potential impact of AI on jobs. Many fear that this technology will make workers so efficient that the labor market will shrink. If one programmer can now do the work of five, then companies will fire 80% of their programmers! The Jevons Paradox implies the opposite might occur. If you make workers more efficient, their output will become cheaper, and the demand for their services might grow. If one programmer can now do the work of five, the effective cost of creating software will become so cheap that many more individuals and organizations will now pay to develop their own tools and applications. This is a fascinating prediction that’s worth keeping an eye on. (For a deeper dive into the counterintuitive economics of AI, I recommend Derek Thompson’s ​recent interview​ with Alex Imas.) But there’s also a darker side to the Jevons Paradox that hasn’t been discussed as much recently: suddenly increasing demand for a resource can create unexpected negative side effects. More efficient steam engines, for example, led to soot-stained buildings and the smoky start to the era of human-driven climate change. More recently, in the context of knowledge work, the arrival of digital communication tools such as email and Slack created similar unanticipated problems. By making communication significantly more efficient, the demand for fast interaction exploded, leading to our current moment in which the average knowledge worker is now interrupted once every ​two minutes​. (For more on how this descent into communication madness occurred, check out my 2021 bestseller, ​A World Without Email​.) If AI ends up making certain types of workers more efficient, I hope the Jevons Paradox holds, as it’s better than the alternative of labor market contraction. But we need to remain vigilant about its side effects. It’s tempting to assume that increasing efficiency, in any context, can only make things better, but economic history has often told a more complicated tale. The post The Dark Side of the Jevons Paradox appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

If you’ve been following technology news recently, you’ve probably noticed a sudden increase in references to a 19th-century economics theory called the ​Jevons Paradox​, which is named for the neoclassical economist William Stanley Jevons, and captures the observation that increasing the efficiency of a resource can lead to greater consumption. Jevons first articulated this idea in an 1865 book, pithily titled, ​The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines​. He argued that building more efficient steam engines – ones that required less fuel to generate the same power – would not solve the problem of England’s diminishing coal supplies. If you made the engines more efficient, Jevons predicted, people would find more applications for steam power, and even more coal would be burned overall. This is indeed what happened. (At least, the part about increased coal consumption. The feared coal shortage was averted through new mining techniques.) The Jevons Paradox is popular again because it provides a useful frame for understanding the potential impact of AI on jobs. Many fear that this technology will make workers so efficient that the labor market will shrink. If one programmer can now do the work of five, then companies will fire 80% of their programmers! The Jevons Paradox implies the opposite might occur. If you make workers more efficient, their output will become cheaper, and the demand for their services might grow. If one programmer can now do the work of five, the effective cost of creating software will become so cheap that many more individuals and organizations will now pay to develop their own tools and applications. This is a fascinating prediction that’s worth keeping an eye on. (For a deeper dive into the counterintuitive economics of AI, I recommend Derek Thompson’s ​recent interview​ with Alex Imas.) But there’s also a darker side to the Jevons Paradox that hasn’t been discussed as much recently: suddenly increasing demand for a resource can create unexpected negative side effects. More efficient steam engines, for example, led to soot-stained buildings and the smoky start to the era of human-driven climate change. More recently, in the context of knowledge work, the arrival of digital communication tools such as email and Slack created similar unanticipated problems. By making communication significantly more efficient, the demand for fast interaction exploded, leading to our current moment in which the average knowledge worker is now interrupted once every ​two minutes​. (For more on how this descent into communication madness occurred, check out my 2021 bestseller, ​A World Without Email​.) If AI ends up making certain types of workers more efficient, I hope the Jevons Paradox holds, as it’s better than the alternative of labor market contraction. But we need to remain vigilant about its side effects. It’s tempting to assume that increasing efficiency, in any context, can only make things better, but economic history has often told a more complicated tale. The post The Dark Side of the Jevons Paradox appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

When managing multiple legal entities, selecting the right multi-company accounting software is essential for streamlining financial operations. These solutions offer features like automated intercompany transactions, real-time reporting, and multi-currency support, which improve efficiency and accuracy in financial management. Comprehending the key offerings of top software solutions, such as QuickBooks and NetSuite, can greatly impact your decision-making. Let’s explore the best options available and how they can benefit your organization. Key Takeaways QuickBooks allows management of up to 40 companies from one account, offering customizable invoicing and easy expense tracking for efficient operations. Xero provides a user-friendly, cloud-based accounting solution that enables real-time collaboration and extensive integrations for multi-company management. Sage Intacct features advanced financial management with automated intercompany transactions and real-time visibility into multi-entity performance for better oversight. NetSuite is a comprehensive ERP solution that automates intercompany transactions and offers robust financial reporting with unified dashboards for decision-making. Microsoft Dynamics 365 includes foundational multi-entity features with customizable automation options, tailored to meet specific business accounting needs. What Is Multi-Company Accounting Software? Multi-company accounting software serves as a vital tool for organizations operating multiple legal entities or locations, simplifying the management of their financial operations. This type of software is particularly designed for multi-entity environments, allowing you to maintain separate financial records for each business unit while additionally providing consolidated financial statements for thorough oversight. With the best multi-company accounting software, you can automate intercompany transactions and manage multi-currency requirements, which is critical for businesses operating internationally. Furthermore, these platforms improve your financial visibility by offering real-time dashboards and reporting tools, enabling you to analyze financial data at both the entity and corporate levels. Popular options like QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct, and NetSuite cater to various business sizes and intricacies, ensuring that you find a solution customized to your unique needs. This software streamlines bookkeeping and reporting processes, finally enhancing overall efficiency. Key Features of Multi-Company Accounting Software When evaluating multi-company accounting software, you’ll find several key features that improve financial management. Entity-level reporting capabilities allow you to maintain distinct financial records for each business as you still consolidate data for overall insights. Furthermore, automated intercompany transactions and multi-currency functionality simplify processes and support global operations, making your accounting practices more efficient and accurate. Entity-Level Reporting Capabilities Entity-level reporting capabilities are essential for businesses managing multiple companies, as they enable the generation of detailed financial statements for each entity. These features provide a thorough view of performance, allowing for better oversight. Here are some key aspects of entity-level reporting: Customizable Dashboards: Access key performance indicators (KPIs) and financial metrics designed for each entity. Automated Consolidations: Streamline data aggregation, reducing manual errors and ensuring timely reporting. Intercompany Eliminations: Accurately account for intercompany transactions to reflect true financial positions. Advanced Reporting Options: Drill down into specific transactions for insightful decision-making and resource allocation. With these capabilities, you can effectively monitor financial health across your organization and make informed strategic decisions. Automated Intercompany Transactions Managing multiple companies often involves complex financial transactions between them, making automated intercompany transactions a vital feature of accounting software solutions. This functionality streamlines billing processes by automatically generating invoices and journal entries, which reduces the risk of human error and saves valuable time. Many software options likewise offer automatic eliminations of intercompany transactions, preventing double counting in consolidated financial statements. With custom approval workflows, you can guarantee all intercompany transactions receive the necessary oversight before finalization, enhancing financial controls. In addition, real-time reporting and dashboards give you insights into these transactions, allowing you to effectively monitor and manage financial activities across all entities, facilitating better decision-making and operational efficiency. Multi-Currency Functionality During the process of maneuvering through the intricacies of global business operations, having robust multi-currency functionality in your accounting software can greatly improve financial management. Here are key features to take into account: Automated Currency Conversion: Seamlessly manage transactions in multiple currencies without manual calculations. Real-Time Exchange Rates: Verify your financial reports reflect accurate values at the time of each transaction. Comprehensive Module Support: Benefit from multi-currency functionality across accounts payable, accounts receivable, and inventory management. Advanced Financial Reporting: Generate consolidated financial statements that account for currency fluctuations, enhancing your overall performance analysis. Incorporating these features can simplify your operations and guarantee compliance with local tax regulations, making your global business management more efficient. Top Multi-Company Accounting Software Solutions In relation to managing multiple companies, selecting the right accounting software is crucial for efficiency and accuracy. QuickBooks and Xero are popular choices, allowing you to manage several businesses under one account while providing distinct financial reporting for each entity. Sage Intacct stands out with its thorough financial management and customized reporting features, improving oversight for multi-company operations. For those handling complex global operations, NetSuite offers robust multi-entity and multi-book capabilities, delivering real-time data insights. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management includes foundational multi-entity features and can be improved with solutions like AMCS, promoting automation and compliance. Each option presents unique advantages, so consider your specific needs, such as global operations or real-time reporting, when making a decision. Tipalti: Streamlining AP Automation Tipalti streamlines your accounts payable process with efficient invoice processing and advanced error detection. By utilizing paperless systems and OCR technology, it reduces manual data entry errors, whereas its 3-way matching system guarantees accuracy in transactions. Furthermore, with global payment solutions supporting over 120 currencies, Tipalti facilitates seamless international operations for your business. Efficient Invoice Processing When businesses seek to improve their accounts payable (AP) processes, efficient invoice processing becomes a crucial component. Tipalti automates this process, enabling you to manage and process invoices quickly through paperless methods. Here’s how it streamlines your AP operations: OCR Scanning: Automates data entry, reducing manual errors. 26,000 Payment Rules: Detects discrepancies with a robust 3-way matching system. Self-Service Supplier Onboarding: Validates suppliers against blacklists for improved security. AI-Driven Insights: Offers data analytics for informed decision-making. Global Payment Solutions Managing global payments can be a challenging task for businesses, especially those operating in multiple countries. Tipalti offers a cloud-based accounts payable automation solution designed to streamline these payments across over 200 countries and 120 currencies. Its self-service supplier onboarding feature allows for efficient validation against blacklists, reducing fraud risks. The platform’s paperless invoice processing, driven by OCR scanning, automates invoice handling, whereas more than 26,000 payment rules improve efficiency. Furthermore, Tipalti Pi delivers AI-driven insights, providing actionable analytics for better decision-making. With built-in compliance for local tax regulations and automated intercompany transactions, Tipalti is an ideal tool for managing multiple entities globally, ensuring your payment processes run smoothly and efficiently. Advanced Error Detection Effective accounts payable processes hinge on robust error detection, which considerably mitigates the risk of payment inaccuracies. Tipalti’s advanced features guarantee accuracy through a combination of methods: 26,000+ payment rules identify discrepancies and guarantee compliance. 3-way matching cross-verifies invoices, purchase orders, and receipts to improve payment accuracy. Self-service supplier onboarding validates against blacklists, preventing fraud before it occurs. Paperless invoice processing uses OCR scanning to automatically extract data for precise recording. These elements streamline your accounts payable workflow, markedly reducing manual oversight and errors. With AI-driven insights from Tipalti Pi, you can proactively analyze payment trends, allowing for informed decision-making and greater efficiency in your financial operations. QuickBooks: Affordable Multi-Entity Management QuickBooks stands out as a practical choice for businesses looking to manage multiple entities efficiently. With its multi-entity capabilities, you can handle up to 40 different companies from a single account, making it a cost-effective solution for small to mid-sized businesses. You’ll enjoy easy toggling between entities, which allows seamless access to individual financial reports and statements. QuickBooks also supports basic multi-currency functionality, letting you conduct transactions in various currencies during managing exchange rates with ease. Additional features like customizable invoicing, expense tracking, and automated reporting improve your financial management across multiple entities. Here’s a quick overview of its key features: Feature Description Multi-Entity Management Manage up to 40 companies from one account Currency Support Conduct transactions in multiple currencies Customizable Invoicing Tailor invoices to fit your business needs Expense Tracking Track expenses easily for all entities Automated Reporting Generate reports automatically for better insights With plans starting at a competitive price point, QuickBooks remains an affordable option for growing businesses. Xero: Cloud-Based Simplicity Xero is a leading cloud-based accounting software that allows you to manage multiple businesses efficiently from a single account during keeping their financial records separate. This platform is crafted to improve your accounting experience with several key features: Real-Time Collaboration: Multiple users can access and work on financial data simultaneously from anywhere, improving efficiency and communication. Multi-Currency Support: It seamlessly handles transactions in different currencies, making it ideal for international businesses. User-Friendly Interface: The customizable dashboards provide key financial insights and performance metrics customized for each business entity. Extensive Integrations: With over 1,000 third-party applications, you can easily boost its functionality to meet your specific operational needs. Sage Intacct: Advanced Financial Management Sage Intacct offers advanced financial management features that are crucial for multi-entity organizations like yours. With capabilities such as seamless intercompany transactions, real-time financial visibility, and strong role-based access controls, you can improve accuracy and efficiency across your business. Let’s explore the key features and integration capabilities that make Sage Intacct an influential tool for managing your financial operations. Key Features Overview When managing finances across multiple entities, having a robust software solution can markedly streamline the process. Sage Intacct stands out with its advanced financial management capabilities, offering you several key features: Real-time visibility into multi-entity financial performance via customizable dashboards. Automated intercompany transactions that reduce manual errors and simplify data consolidation. Multi-currency support and local tax compliance for global operations with diverse financial needs. Role-based access controls that improve data security and create customized workflows for various users. These features work in harmony, ensuring you can efficiently manage complex financial environments as you maintain compliance and accuracy in reporting across your entities. Sage Intacct is designed to empower you with the tools necessary for effective financial oversight. Integration Capabilities Explained To effectively manage multi-entity finances, integration capabilities play a pivotal role in enhancing the overall functionality of accounting software. Sage Intacct offers seamless integration with various third-party applications, including CRM systems and e-commerce platforms, which boosts operational efficiency. Its open API allows for easy data exchange, enabling you to customize and connect Sage Intacct with your existing systems for customized workflows. Pre-built integrations with tools like Salesforce, ADP, and Bill.com streamline accounting and payroll processes, reducing manual entry and errors. Furthermore, you can automate intercompany transactions and consolidations, improving financial oversight across multiple entities. Advanced features support real-time data synchronization, ensuring accurate financial reporting and insights for informed decision-making throughout your organization. NetSuite: Comprehensive ERP for Complex Needs NetSuite stands out as a thorough ERP solution customized for businesses with intricate multi-company accounting needs, providing you with real-time visibility and control over global operations. This platform shines in multi-entity management with features designed to streamline your financial processes. Here are some key benefits: Automated intercompany transactions: Simplifies the handling of transactions between entities. Currency conversions: Facilitates operations across different currencies, ensuring accurate financial reporting. Compliance with local tax regulations: Helps you navigate varying tax laws in different regions, reducing legal risks. Robust financial reporting: Generate consolidated statements as you maintain separate books for each entity, enhancing transparency. With a unified dashboard displaying key performance indicators, you can make informed decisions based on detailed insights. NetSuite is scalable, making it ideal for mid-sized to large enterprises that need to adapt to growing financial intricacies. Tips for Selecting the Right Software Selecting the right accounting software for multi-company operations involves careful consideration of various factors that align with your organization’s specific needs. First, assess your organization’s unique multi-entity requirements, including the number of businesses and locations, to guarantee the software can accommodate them effectively. Next, evaluate the integration capabilities with existing systems like ERPs or financial tools, as this facilitates seamless data exchange and maintains operational efficiency. Prioritize software that offers robust reporting features, allowing for both entity-level and consolidated views, which support informed decision-making across all businesses. Additionally, consider user limits and subscription plans; some software may charge based on the number of entities or users, potentially impacting overall costs as your organization grows. Finally, look for customer satisfaction ratings and reviews to gauge the reliability and effectiveness of the software, guaranteeing it meets your expectations for usability and support. Customer Success Stories in Multi-Company Accounting Success stories from organizations utilizing multi-company accounting software illustrate the transformative impact these solutions can have on financial operations. Here are some notable examples: The Language Group reduced data entry hours and payment runs by using Tipalti’s automation, streamlining their accounts payable processes across multiple entities. Lantern Community Services improved error tracking and data accuracy by integrating AI-driven insights through Sage Intacct, boosting financial management for their multi-entity operations. NEXT Insurance automated their invoice processes with FreshBooks, saving numerous weekly hours and promoting more efficient financial oversight across business segments. SmartShoot saved days on payouts and mitigated tax penalty risks by leveraging automation features in NetSuite, showcasing efficiency gained through advanced multi-entity accounting solutions. These stories highlight how multi-company accounting software can greatly boost operational efficiency, reduce errors, and improve financial management across various organizations. Frequently Asked Questions What Software Do Most Companies Use for Accounting? Most companies use accounting software to streamline their financial operations and improve efficiency. Popular options include QuickBooks for its affordability, Xero for its user-friendly interface, and Sage Intacct for advanced features customized for multi-entity management. Larger enterprises often opt for NetSuite because of its extensive ERP capabilities. These tools help businesses manage finances effectively, reduce closing times, and support better decision-making across various locations or business units. What Software Do Big 4 Accounting Firms Use? Big 4 accounting firms primarily use advanced ERP systems like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Dynamics for financial management. They often incorporate specialized tools such as Hyperion for financial planning and analysis. Cloud-based platforms like Workday and NetSuite help boost collaboration and provide real-time insights. Furthermore, firms utilize data analytics tools like Tableau and Strength BI to improve financial reporting. Many likewise develop proprietary software to meet specific client needs and streamline operations. What Is the Best Quickbooks for Multiple Companies? For managing multiple companies, QuickBooks Online is your best option. It allows you to easily switch between different entities as you keep their financial records separate. You’ll benefit from features like multi-currency support, customizable reporting, and automated invoicing, which improve efficiency. The tiered subscription plans let you choose the right features based on your needs. Can I Use Xero for Multiple Companies? Yes, you can use Xero for multiple companies. It allows you to manage various business entities from a single account, so you won’t need separate logins. Each company can maintain its own financial data and reports, keeping everything organized. You’ll additionally benefit from a centralized dashboard for overall insights, and Xero supports multi-currency transactions, making it suitable for global operations. Plus, it integrates with various third-party applications for improved functionality. Conclusion In summary, selecting the right multi-company accounting software is essential for efficient financial management across diverse operations. By comprehending key features and evaluating top solutions like QuickBooks, Xero, and NetSuite, you can better align your organization’s needs with the software’s capabilities. Consider factors such as automation, reporting, and multi-currency support to make an informed decision. In the end, the right software not just streamlines processes but additionally improves financial accuracy and decision-making for your business. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "Best Multi-Company Accounting Software Solutions" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

When managing multiple legal entities, selecting the right multi-company accounting software is essential for streamlining financial operations. These solutions offer features like automated intercompany transactions, real-time reporting, and multi-currency support, which improve efficiency and accuracy in financial management. Comprehending the key offerings of top software solutions, such as QuickBooks and NetSuite, can greatly impact your decision-making. Let’s explore the best options available and how they can benefit your organization. Key Takeaways QuickBooks allows management of up to 40 companies from one account, offering customizable invoicing and easy expense tracking for efficient operations. Xero provides a user-friendly, cloud-based accounting solution that enables real-time collaboration and extensive integrations for multi-company management. Sage Intacct features advanced financial management with automated intercompany transactions and real-time visibility into multi-entity performance for better oversight. NetSuite is a comprehensive ERP solution that automates intercompany transactions and offers robust financial reporting with unified dashboards for decision-making. Microsoft Dynamics 365 includes foundational multi-entity features with customizable automation options, tailored to meet specific business accounting needs. What Is Multi-Company Accounting Software? Multi-company accounting software serves as a vital tool for organizations operating multiple legal entities or locations, simplifying the management of their financial operations. This type of software is particularly designed for multi-entity environments, allowing you to maintain separate financial records for each business unit while additionally providing consolidated financial statements for thorough oversight. With the best multi-company accounting software, you can automate intercompany transactions and manage multi-currency requirements, which is critical for businesses operating internationally. Furthermore, these platforms improve your financial visibility by offering real-time dashboards and reporting tools, enabling you to analyze financial data at both the entity and corporate levels. Popular options like QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct, and NetSuite cater to various business sizes and intricacies, ensuring that you find a solution customized to your unique needs. This software streamlines bookkeeping and reporting processes, finally enhancing overall efficiency. Key Features of Multi-Company Accounting Software When evaluating multi-company accounting software, you’ll find several key features that improve financial management. Entity-level reporting capabilities allow you to maintain distinct financial records for each business as you still consolidate data for overall insights. Furthermore, automated intercompany transactions and multi-currency functionality simplify processes and support global operations, making your accounting practices more efficient and accurate. Entity-Level Reporting Capabilities Entity-level reporting capabilities are essential for businesses managing multiple companies, as they enable the generation of detailed financial statements for each entity. These features provide a thorough view of performance, allowing for better oversight. Here are some key aspects of entity-level reporting: Customizable Dashboards: Access key performance indicators (KPIs) and financial metrics designed for each entity. Automated Consolidations: Streamline data aggregation, reducing manual errors and ensuring timely reporting. Intercompany Eliminations: Accurately account for intercompany transactions to reflect true financial positions. Advanced Reporting Options: Drill down into specific transactions for insightful decision-making and resource allocation. With these capabilities, you can effectively monitor financial health across your organization and make informed strategic decisions. Automated Intercompany Transactions Managing multiple companies often involves complex financial transactions between them, making automated intercompany transactions a vital feature of accounting software solutions. This functionality streamlines billing processes by automatically generating invoices and journal entries, which reduces the risk of human error and saves valuable time. Many software options likewise offer automatic eliminations of intercompany transactions, preventing double counting in consolidated financial statements. With custom approval workflows, you can guarantee all intercompany transactions receive the necessary oversight before finalization, enhancing financial controls. In addition, real-time reporting and dashboards give you insights into these transactions, allowing you to effectively monitor and manage financial activities across all entities, facilitating better decision-making and operational efficiency. Multi-Currency Functionality During the process of maneuvering through the intricacies of global business operations, having robust multi-currency functionality in your accounting software can greatly improve financial management. Here are key features to take into account: Automated Currency Conversion: Seamlessly manage transactions in multiple currencies without manual calculations. Real-Time Exchange Rates: Verify your financial reports reflect accurate values at the time of each transaction. Comprehensive Module Support: Benefit from multi-currency functionality across accounts payable, accounts receivable, and inventory management. Advanced Financial Reporting: Generate consolidated financial statements that account for currency fluctuations, enhancing your overall performance analysis. Incorporating these features can simplify your operations and guarantee compliance with local tax regulations, making your global business management more efficient. Top Multi-Company Accounting Software Solutions In relation to managing multiple companies, selecting the right accounting software is crucial for efficiency and accuracy. QuickBooks and Xero are popular choices, allowing you to manage several businesses under one account while providing distinct financial reporting for each entity. Sage Intacct stands out with its thorough financial management and customized reporting features, improving oversight for multi-company operations. For those handling complex global operations, NetSuite offers robust multi-entity and multi-book capabilities, delivering real-time data insights. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management includes foundational multi-entity features and can be improved with solutions like AMCS, promoting automation and compliance. Each option presents unique advantages, so consider your specific needs, such as global operations or real-time reporting, when making a decision. Tipalti: Streamlining AP Automation Tipalti streamlines your accounts payable process with efficient invoice processing and advanced error detection. By utilizing paperless systems and OCR technology, it reduces manual data entry errors, whereas its 3-way matching system guarantees accuracy in transactions. Furthermore, with global payment solutions supporting over 120 currencies, Tipalti facilitates seamless international operations for your business. Efficient Invoice Processing When businesses seek to improve their accounts payable (AP) processes, efficient invoice processing becomes a crucial component. Tipalti automates this process, enabling you to manage and process invoices quickly through paperless methods. Here’s how it streamlines your AP operations: OCR Scanning: Automates data entry, reducing manual errors. 26,000 Payment Rules: Detects discrepancies with a robust 3-way matching system. Self-Service Supplier Onboarding: Validates suppliers against blacklists for improved security. AI-Driven Insights: Offers data analytics for informed decision-making. Global Payment Solutions Managing global payments can be a challenging task for businesses, especially those operating in multiple countries. Tipalti offers a cloud-based accounts payable automation solution designed to streamline these payments across over 200 countries and 120 currencies. Its self-service supplier onboarding feature allows for efficient validation against blacklists, reducing fraud risks. The platform’s paperless invoice processing, driven by OCR scanning, automates invoice handling, whereas more than 26,000 payment rules improve efficiency. Furthermore, Tipalti Pi delivers AI-driven insights, providing actionable analytics for better decision-making. With built-in compliance for local tax regulations and automated intercompany transactions, Tipalti is an ideal tool for managing multiple entities globally, ensuring your payment processes run smoothly and efficiently. Advanced Error Detection Effective accounts payable processes hinge on robust error detection, which considerably mitigates the risk of payment inaccuracies. Tipalti’s advanced features guarantee accuracy through a combination of methods: 26,000+ payment rules identify discrepancies and guarantee compliance. 3-way matching cross-verifies invoices, purchase orders, and receipts to improve payment accuracy. Self-service supplier onboarding validates against blacklists, preventing fraud before it occurs. Paperless invoice processing uses OCR scanning to automatically extract data for precise recording. These elements streamline your accounts payable workflow, markedly reducing manual oversight and errors. With AI-driven insights from Tipalti Pi, you can proactively analyze payment trends, allowing for informed decision-making and greater efficiency in your financial operations. QuickBooks: Affordable Multi-Entity Management QuickBooks stands out as a practical choice for businesses looking to manage multiple entities efficiently. With its multi-entity capabilities, you can handle up to 40 different companies from a single account, making it a cost-effective solution for small to mid-sized businesses. You’ll enjoy easy toggling between entities, which allows seamless access to individual financial reports and statements. QuickBooks also supports basic multi-currency functionality, letting you conduct transactions in various currencies during managing exchange rates with ease. Additional features like customizable invoicing, expense tracking, and automated reporting improve your financial management across multiple entities. Here’s a quick overview of its key features: Feature Description Multi-Entity Management Manage up to 40 companies from one account Currency Support Conduct transactions in multiple currencies Customizable Invoicing Tailor invoices to fit your business needs Expense Tracking Track expenses easily for all entities Automated Reporting Generate reports automatically for better insights With plans starting at a competitive price point, QuickBooks remains an affordable option for growing businesses. Xero: Cloud-Based Simplicity Xero is a leading cloud-based accounting software that allows you to manage multiple businesses efficiently from a single account during keeping their financial records separate. This platform is crafted to improve your accounting experience with several key features: Real-Time Collaboration: Multiple users can access and work on financial data simultaneously from anywhere, improving efficiency and communication. Multi-Currency Support: It seamlessly handles transactions in different currencies, making it ideal for international businesses. User-Friendly Interface: The customizable dashboards provide key financial insights and performance metrics customized for each business entity. Extensive Integrations: With over 1,000 third-party applications, you can easily boost its functionality to meet your specific operational needs. Sage Intacct: Advanced Financial Management Sage Intacct offers advanced financial management features that are crucial for multi-entity organizations like yours. With capabilities such as seamless intercompany transactions, real-time financial visibility, and strong role-based access controls, you can improve accuracy and efficiency across your business. Let’s explore the key features and integration capabilities that make Sage Intacct an influential tool for managing your financial operations. Key Features Overview When managing finances across multiple entities, having a robust software solution can markedly streamline the process. Sage Intacct stands out with its advanced financial management capabilities, offering you several key features: Real-time visibility into multi-entity financial performance via customizable dashboards. Automated intercompany transactions that reduce manual errors and simplify data consolidation. Multi-currency support and local tax compliance for global operations with diverse financial needs. Role-based access controls that improve data security and create customized workflows for various users. These features work in harmony, ensuring you can efficiently manage complex financial environments as you maintain compliance and accuracy in reporting across your entities. Sage Intacct is designed to empower you with the tools necessary for effective financial oversight. Integration Capabilities Explained To effectively manage multi-entity finances, integration capabilities play a pivotal role in enhancing the overall functionality of accounting software. Sage Intacct offers seamless integration with various third-party applications, including CRM systems and e-commerce platforms, which boosts operational efficiency. Its open API allows for easy data exchange, enabling you to customize and connect Sage Intacct with your existing systems for customized workflows. Pre-built integrations with tools like Salesforce, ADP, and Bill.com streamline accounting and payroll processes, reducing manual entry and errors. Furthermore, you can automate intercompany transactions and consolidations, improving financial oversight across multiple entities. Advanced features support real-time data synchronization, ensuring accurate financial reporting and insights for informed decision-making throughout your organization. NetSuite: Comprehensive ERP for Complex Needs NetSuite stands out as a thorough ERP solution customized for businesses with intricate multi-company accounting needs, providing you with real-time visibility and control over global operations. This platform shines in multi-entity management with features designed to streamline your financial processes. Here are some key benefits: Automated intercompany transactions: Simplifies the handling of transactions between entities. Currency conversions: Facilitates operations across different currencies, ensuring accurate financial reporting. Compliance with local tax regulations: Helps you navigate varying tax laws in different regions, reducing legal risks. Robust financial reporting: Generate consolidated statements as you maintain separate books for each entity, enhancing transparency. With a unified dashboard displaying key performance indicators, you can make informed decisions based on detailed insights. NetSuite is scalable, making it ideal for mid-sized to large enterprises that need to adapt to growing financial intricacies. Tips for Selecting the Right Software Selecting the right accounting software for multi-company operations involves careful consideration of various factors that align with your organization’s specific needs. First, assess your organization’s unique multi-entity requirements, including the number of businesses and locations, to guarantee the software can accommodate them effectively. Next, evaluate the integration capabilities with existing systems like ERPs or financial tools, as this facilitates seamless data exchange and maintains operational efficiency. Prioritize software that offers robust reporting features, allowing for both entity-level and consolidated views, which support informed decision-making across all businesses. Additionally, consider user limits and subscription plans; some software may charge based on the number of entities or users, potentially impacting overall costs as your organization grows. Finally, look for customer satisfaction ratings and reviews to gauge the reliability and effectiveness of the software, guaranteeing it meets your expectations for usability and support. Customer Success Stories in Multi-Company Accounting Success stories from organizations utilizing multi-company accounting software illustrate the transformative impact these solutions can have on financial operations. Here are some notable examples: The Language Group reduced data entry hours and payment runs by using Tipalti’s automation, streamlining their accounts payable processes across multiple entities. Lantern Community Services improved error tracking and data accuracy by integrating AI-driven insights through Sage Intacct, boosting financial management for their multi-entity operations. NEXT Insurance automated their invoice processes with FreshBooks, saving numerous weekly hours and promoting more efficient financial oversight across business segments. SmartShoot saved days on payouts and mitigated tax penalty risks by leveraging automation features in NetSuite, showcasing efficiency gained through advanced multi-entity accounting solutions. These stories highlight how multi-company accounting software can greatly boost operational efficiency, reduce errors, and improve financial management across various organizations. Frequently Asked Questions What Software Do Most Companies Use for Accounting? Most companies use accounting software to streamline their financial operations and improve efficiency. Popular options include QuickBooks for its affordability, Xero for its user-friendly interface, and Sage Intacct for advanced features customized for multi-entity management. Larger enterprises often opt for NetSuite because of its extensive ERP capabilities. These tools help businesses manage finances effectively, reduce closing times, and support better decision-making across various locations or business units. What Software Do Big 4 Accounting Firms Use? Big 4 accounting firms primarily use advanced ERP systems like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Dynamics for financial management. They often incorporate specialized tools such as Hyperion for financial planning and analysis. Cloud-based platforms like Workday and NetSuite help boost collaboration and provide real-time insights. Furthermore, firms utilize data analytics tools like Tableau and Strength BI to improve financial reporting. Many likewise develop proprietary software to meet specific client needs and streamline operations. What Is the Best Quickbooks for Multiple Companies? For managing multiple companies, QuickBooks Online is your best option. It allows you to easily switch between different entities as you keep their financial records separate. You’ll benefit from features like multi-currency support, customizable reporting, and automated invoicing, which improve efficiency. The tiered subscription plans let you choose the right features based on your needs. Can I Use Xero for Multiple Companies? Yes, you can use Xero for multiple companies. It allows you to manage various business entities from a single account, so you won’t need separate logins. Each company can maintain its own financial data and reports, keeping everything organized. You’ll additionally benefit from a centralized dashboard for overall insights, and Xero supports multi-currency transactions, making it suitable for global operations. Plus, it integrates with various third-party applications for improved functionality. Conclusion In summary, selecting the right multi-company accounting software is essential for efficient financial management across diverse operations. By comprehending key features and evaluating top solutions like QuickBooks, Xero, and NetSuite, you can better align your organization’s needs with the software’s capabilities. Consider factors such as automation, reporting, and multi-currency support to make an informed decision. In the end, the right software not just streamlines processes but additionally improves financial accuracy and decision-making for your business. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "Best Multi-Company Accounting Software Solutions" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Anthropic's 80-fold growth crisis mirrors Google's 1999 infrastructure crunch. The decisions made under pressure will reshape the tools marketers rely on. The post Anthropic’s Infrastructure Crisis – What It Means for Marketers & SEO Pros appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

It’s graduation season and my email inbox is flooded with inquiries from students entering the workforce, looking for career advice. How do I land my dream job? What should I do at the company where I’ve been recently hired to get where I really want to be? How do I go from what I have to do to what I want to do? What I’ve gathered from these students is not much different from what we more seasoned professionals struggle with day in and day out. How do we square the incongruence between our duty—the thing we have to do to survive, pay our bills, and keep the lights on—and our conviction—the thing we feel called to do? The job, of course, is our duty. The gift is our conviction. For most of us, the two seem as far apart as east and west, and never the twain shall meet. For only a few lucky ones, their job and their gifts coexist, at least, that’s what we’ve told ourselves. But what if that’s not the case at all? What if we could have our cake and eat it, too? We invited Najoh Tita-Reid onto the latest episode of the From the Culture podcast to help us explore this tension. She is the former global chief growth officer at Mars Petcare, former global CMO at Logitech, and former VP of marketing at Bayer Consumer Care—a three-decade-plus veteran. Yet despite her incredible resume of leading big brands, she recently walked away from all of it, not because the work was bad but because her conviction was bigger. Tita-Reid had been working on her gift right alongside her duty for quite some time before she left the C-suite. She didn’t see the two as a mutually exclusive proposition, but more as a game of catch-up. Her corporate duty had been hard at work long before her gift began to manifest. It took years before she realized her conviction—her ability to peek around the corner and see change. Like a canary in a coal mine, as Tita-Reid puts it, she’s been able to sense shifts long before they happen. This ability started as a whisper and increasingly got louder, but by the time it registered that she was a “canary,” she was deep into her marketing career and her conviction seemed underdeveloped relative to her duty skills. So, she’d wake up at 5 o’clock to do the conviction work before the duty work began. For her, that meant teaching herself AI from independent instructors, on her own time, on her own dime, while her C-suite job was still going. The duty kept her solvent. The conviction kept her alert. Before long, she was bringing her newly developed canary skills to her marketing work, and it helped her rise through the ranks and up the corporate ladder, until her conviction and her duty were equally yoked. That’s when Tita-Reid realized that her conviction could lead her duty, so that the curiosity of her gift could actually become her duty. That is when she decided to disembark the traditional corporate train and ride her convictions into the sunset. As a career marketer myself, I relate to this deeply. I was a few years into my career before I realized my conviction. I became insatiably curious about the social sciences and their application to behavioral adoption. I wanted to study it, teach it, and practice it. By the time I became aware of it, I was already running a full department at an advertising agency, and, like Tita-Reid, my duty skill set far surpassed my curiosity. So, I did exactly what she did: I began to work on my conviction before and after work. I read nonstop—Kahneman, Ariely, Thayler, Lowenstein. One scholar led me to another and helped me build a theoretical repertoire. I taught classes about my learnings on the weekends, at night, and even in the early mornings. And the more I did it, the closer these two disparate worlds became. I even got a doctorate in the conviction while working my duty. This went on for over a decade before my conviction and my duty were parity, and it was at this point that, like Tita-Reid, I, too, allowed my conviction to lead me. So, I say to you what Tita-Reid told us and what I tell my students: Do your duty while developing your conviction skill set. Work your 9-to-5 and your 5-to-9 so that before long, your 5-to-9 becomes your 9-to-5. This is not a side hustle, but an investment. You’re investing in yourself today to realize the interest tomorrow. Because of those many years of investing in myself while also investing in my place of work (my duty), I can truly say that I’m now living in my gift—and it is a gift. I get to teach at one of the best schools in the world (the University of Michigan), work with some of the biggest brands in the world (Google, TikTok, and McDonald’s), and put ideas in the world through platforms like this article you’re reading, books, and stages. It’s not a dream; it’s compound interest, and it’s available to you, too. Check out our full conversation with Najoh Tita-Reid on the latest episode of From the Culture here. View the full article

I used to think I was a great salesperson because I had all the right answers. I knew my product inside and out. I could explain every feature, every benefit, every reason someone should say yes. And I did what most people do—I led with that. Confident. Certain. Ready to convince. And I lost deals I should have won. I remember one pitch early in my career like it happened yesterday. I walked into the room fully prepared. My slides circled the room like a victory lap. I spoke for ten minutes straight, laying out exactly why my offer was the perfect solution. When I finished, the client looked at me and said, “That’s nice… but that’s not what I’m looking for.” It was a gut punch. Not because they rejected me—but because I realized something in that moment: I never once asked what they wanted. I was so focused on what I thought they needed that I skipped the only step that mattered—understanding them. That moment changed everything. As The Queen of Pitch, with over $2.5 billion in sales, I’ve learned this with brutal clarity: people don’t buy what you think they need. They buy what they want—and then justify it later. If you’re not tapping into that want immediately, you’re already behind. Not a performance Here’s the rub: a pitch isn’t a performance. It’s a conversation with a rhythm. The best communicators don’t push—they pull. They don’t overwhelm—they align. They guide a conversation so the other person feels seen, heard, understood. And then, only then, do they present a solution that feels like the obvious next step. The moment you skip that rhythm, even the most compelling product lands flat. So what do you do instead? You start with discovery, not declaration. You lead with questions that pull back the curtain on the buyer’s world—the frustrations, the desires, the unspoken goals. You give them the space to tell you what success actually looks like for them. In that space, trust forms. There’s a line you hear a lot in sales circles: know your audience. The real skill is letting the audience tell you what matters. When you flip the dynamic—from telling to listening—you stop selling and begin solving. And that shift changes everything: resistance dissolves, decisions accelerate, and the act of buying begins to feel collaborative rather than coercive. What to do Here’s a practical cadence I’ve seen work again and again, in pitch rooms and on camera: Open with their world. Don’t lead with a feature list. Start with a concrete, vivid question or scenario that mirrors their daily reality. Invite them to talk about what’s hardest. Ask real questions that reveal pain, not just preferences. For example: What’s been most frustrating about this? What have you already tried that didn’t work? What would this look like if it actually worked the way you want? Listen for the gap between where they are and where they want to be. That gap is the opening—the “want” you’ll connect to. Mirror their dream, then anchor to your solution as the natural bridge. Don’t push; align with the next logical step they can take to close the gap. Close with clarity, not pressure. Make the next action obvious and easy, and let them justify it to themselves. From process to payoff A client of mine—the founder of a high-end coaching program—illustrates this perfectly. She’d poured her heart into a tiered program, but sales lagged. She led with her process—modules, protocols, steps. The market didn’t care about the logistics of her system; they cared about their own overwhelm and the fear of wasting money on something that wouldn’t deliver. We reframed the conversation around their experience: their days felt crowded; they doubted their impact; they were exhausted by promises that didn’t materialize. Then we introduced her program not as a series of steps, but as a framework to reclaim time, certainty, and momentum. The shift was stunning: within a week, three clients signed on. Same offer. Different conversation. That pivot—from process to payoff—applies in every arena, from stage to screen to boardroom. I’ve spoken to millions live on television, selling products I’d never demonstrated before. In those moments, I didn’t default to ammunition about features or reliability. I pictured the person at home: the woman who hoped for a shortcut to confidence, the dad who wished for a simpler path to making good on his promise to his team. When I spoke to that person—honestly, specifically—I didn’t have to convince her she needed something. I showed her how she could feel better, faster, more capable. And sales poured in not because I pressed harder but because I connected deeper. Pause, listen, align There’s another truth I’ve learned the hard way: your value isn’t in the perfect script. It’s in your capacity to pause, listen, and align with what actually matters to the other person. If you’re always pushing your own agenda—if you’re more concerned with proving you’ve got the right answer than with understanding the right problem—you’ll create resistance before you ever begin. But when you tune in—when you genuinely listen, ask, and align—people lean in. They feel seen. And in a world where everyone is shouting, that is your competitive edge. This isn’t about being soft. It’s about recalibrating the energy of the conversation so that the buyer believes the next step is theirs, not yours. It’s a collaboration, not a coercion. And yes, it’s a skill you can develop with practice and patience. It’s the difference between “I’m selling you something” and “I’m solving a problem with you.” So before your next pitch, pause. Ask yourself one simple question: Am I trying to prove something—or am I trying to understand someone? If the answer is the former, rewrite the scene. If the answer is the latter, you’ve already started the win. View the full article

In a recent survey of senior leaders at large U.S. and U.K. professional services firms, 61% said they had abandoned at least one AI project in the past year because their people lacked the skills to deliver it. Deloitte’s “2026 State of AI in the Enterprise” report, based on a survey of more than 3,200 business and IT leaders across 24 countries, found that insufficient worker skills are now the single “biggest barrier to integrating AI into the business.” There is no quick or easy solution to this problem. While it is possible to bring in new hires or contractors with the short-term capabilities you need, this approach is not sustainable in the long term as it is both expensive and creates critical dependencies. And it is equally impossible to flip a switch to develop these capabilities in-house overnight. But businesses can start the vital process of building those skills systematically. And there is no better time to begin than now. Organizations that get ahead of the pack in this critical area will build an advantage over their peers that will compound every quarter. The Capability Stack Organizational AI capabilities emerge from four mutually reinforcing layers of expertise. Technical depth. This is the specialized engineering capability that builds and maintains AI systems: machine learning engineering, data engineering, AI security, model evaluation, and related disciplines. Without sufficient technical depth, the wrong things get built and bought, and the organization creates risk that it doesn’t understand. Domain application. This layer is where AI strategy meets business reality. It consists of the capability to apply AI within a specific business function. And it relies on people who understand not just what the technology can do, but where it creates value in a particular operational context. General workforce fluency. This is the baseline capability that every knowledge worker needs: sufficient understanding to use AI tools productively, to recognize when outputs are unreliable, and to contribute usefully to conversations about how AI is being deployed in their area. Without this general fluency, adoption stalls, misuse spreads, and employees remain dependent on a small group of specialists. Organizational infrastructure for learning. This is the layer that sustains the other three: the systems, incentives, and management behaviors that determine whether capability grows or erodes. It includes how learning is funded, how time for development is protected, how reskilling pathways connect to real roles, and how managers are held accountable for the capability development of their teams. Without this layer, every investment in the first three decays. The 90-day plan that follows works through all four layers simultaneously. The 90-Day Plan Days 1-30: Map The goal of this phase is to understand what you have, what you need, and where the gap between them will hurt you first. 1. Define the capability model. Use the capability stack to define what AI capability means for your organization. Be specific. What does technical depth mean in your business? Which roles require domain application? What level of AI fluency should every knowledge worker have? The shared model needs to be explicit and agreed on. 2. Identify the workforce baseline. Assess existing employees against the capability model. Use a combination of self-assessment, manager assessment, and skill validation—and treat all three with appropriate skepticism. None of these tools is perfect, but that’s okay: the goal is not a perfect picture, just a better one. 3. Map capability demand to the strategy. Take your AI strategy and the innovation portfolio it has produced, and decompose them into the specific capabilities required at each layer of the stack. This is the demand side of the equation, and it is typically missing from AI strategies altogether. Organizations approve ambitious AI portfolios and then discover, months later, that they don’t have the people to staff them. The demand map prevents that discovery from arriving as a surprise. 4. Identify the highest-leverage gaps. The gap between current state and required state will normally be large. You will not close it completely in a quarter, and attempting to do so will dilute the impact of investment across the board. Prioritize ruthlessly. Identify the handful of capability gaps that will most directly constrain the AI initiatives already in flight or about to launch. If your innovation pipeline has three experiments ready to go and two of them require data engineering capabilities that you don’t have, then that’s where the first thirty days of investment should be directed. 5. Audit how learning currently works. Map the current state of organizational learning. The infrastructure layer of the capability stack depends on it. Flag the parts of the system that will scale into the AI era and the parts that need to be rebuilt or replaced. For a practical guide to building the AI innovation portfolio against which capability requirements should be mapped, see “How to build an AI innovation pipeline that creates real long-term value.” Days 31-60: Build In this phase, the organization begins closing the gaps previously identified while also laying the foundations for ongoing and systematic workforce development. 1. Launch the core technical hiring push. For the small number of roles that the organization genuinely cannot develop internally on the required timeline, run a focused external hiring effort. Be disciplined about which roles you select. Reserve external hiring for the positions where internal technical expertise of the required depth truly cannot be developed in the available window. For everything else, build from within. 2. Stand up the reskilling program. For the much larger population of employees who can move into AI-adjacent roles with the right investment, build a structured reskilling program tied directly to the capability model. The program should connect to real roles on the other side. Reskilling efforts fail when they become training programs with no path to a new job. 3. Drive baseline fluency across the workforce. Roll out a broad AI fluency program for the general knowledge-worker population. Tie completion to specific behavioral expectations, not just attendance. 4. Build the partner ecosystem. Identify the external partners—universities, training providers, specialist consultancies, managed service providers—that can accelerate the building of capabilities where internal investment alone cannot move fast enough. Partnerships should be structured with clear deliverables and explicit transfer-of-capability expectations. A partner that builds your capability is an investment, while a partner that performs the work without transferring the capability is a dependency-in-waiting. 5. Redesign the highest-leverage roles. Select two or three of the roles that will be most comprehensively transformed by AI in your organization. Redesign them deliberately, working with the people who do that job today. Ask practical questions. What parts of the job should AI take on? What parts should the human retain and do better? What new responsibilities emerge when routine work is automated? The redesigned role can serve as a template for the broader workforce transformation and as a concrete demonstration that capability development leads somewhere real. 6. Make managers accountable for capability development. Your middle managers are the transmission mechanism for every capability program you launch—if their teams aren’t developing, the programs aren’t working. So make your managers accountable for success. Success needs to be specific and measurable: employees reskilled into new roles, team fluency levels achieved against the capability model, learning time protected against competing demands, and internal moves into AI-critical positions. Managers who consistently develop their teams’ capabilities should be recognized and rewarded. The signal this sends through the organization is more powerful than any training program. For more on why AI reskilling demands organizational transformation rather than individual training, see “What AI reskilling really requires.” Days 61-90: Embed Now it’s time to lock the changes into the operating fabric of the organization so that building workforce capabilities specific to AI becomes a permanent discipline rather than a one-off initiative that fades when the next priority arrives. 1. Operationalize capability reviews. Make capability a recurring item in talent reviews, business reviews, and board reporting. Build a capability dashboard, updated on a defined cadence, that tracks the state of each layer of the capability stack against the demand map from Phase 1. This turns a set of programs into a managed discipline, with the same rigor as that applied to financial performance or operational metrics. 2. Make learning a standing expectation. The test of whether an organization is serious about capability development is what happens when learning time collides with operational demand. In most organizations, learning loses. The fix is structural: Define the learning time expectation, make it visible, and hold managers accountable when it isn’t protected. 3. Track the flow of capability, not just the snapshot. If you only measure the stock of capability, you will miss the trends that determine whether you’re building momentum or losing ground. Track the indicators that reveal direction: internal moves into AI-critical roles, retention in those roles, reskilling throughput and placement rates, external hires converted to productive contributors, and the rate at which fluency programs change actual behavior rather than just accumulating completions. 4. Stress-test the capability with real work. Deploy the newly developed capability on an active AI initiative from your innovation pipeline and watch what happens. Where the capability holds under operational pressure, scale the playbook that produced it. Where it breaks—where the reskilled engineer can’t handle production complexity, where the fluent marketer still can’t evaluate model outputs—fix the upstream investment before you scale it. 5. Treat AI-critical roles as organizational infrastructure. Every AI-critical role in your organization is, to some degree, a new role—one that didn’t exist five years ago and may not have an established internal talent pipeline. That means every such role is a potential single point of failure. If your lead ML engineer leaves and there’s no one behind them, you don’t just have a vacancy—you have a capability collapse that can stall an entire portfolio of initiatives. Build succession depth for these roles the way you would for any other critical piece of infrastructure: Identify the successors, invest in their development, and make the pipeline visible. 6. Iterate. By day 90, the data is available. Which hires worked? Which reskilling pathways produced employees ready to do the job? Which fluency programs changed behavior rather than just generating completion certificates? Use the evidence. Reshape the next cycle based on what you’ve learned. For a deeper look at how AI is redefining the management roles on which capability development depends, see “AI and the death (and rebirth) of middle management.” Conclusion This 90-day plan will not solve every capability problem. But what it will do is get you started on building the system that keeps capability growing long after the initial push. And this is more important than ever, because in the AI era, the workforce you have today is never the workforce you will need tomorrow. View the full article

Ah, the olden days of choosing where to spend your money on dining, travel, and all that connected those experiences. Neighborhood restaurants would drop flyers in your apartment lobby to let you know they were there. Hotels would rent space on billboards and place ads in newspapers and magazines. Some joined industry groups, such as the Leading Hotels of the World, which got its start by promising ship passengers when they arrived at their destinations there would be appropriate accommodation for them. The go-to reference for figuring out where to eat would have been the iconic burgundy Zagat guides, one of the original crowdsourced review guides with quotes from ordinary restaurant goers about what places were like. All of that changed, of course, with the advent of the Internet. Booking destination platforms took over the jobs travel agents once did. Hotels had to create their own websites or be left behind. Other travel-related services tried to get on the platforms and build loyal followings of their own as well. And now, we have another inflection point in the evolution of the hospitality experience with the advent of credit card companies vertically integrating access to entire hospitality ecosystems. As the economy becomes increasingly digitally intermediated, these players have quietly managed to insert themselves into critical decision points and, without many people realizing it, heavily influence the decisions consumers make. Free choice? Or plausible path of least effort? Imagine you opened the digital restaurant booking and management app Resy last week to book a table. Were you making a free choice? Or were you navigating an environment that someone else had very deliberately designed to achieve a specific outcome? The answer, increasingly, is both. American Express acquired Resy in 2019 and integrated it into its mobile app as a benefit for rewards cardholders. Five years later, Amex paid $400 million for another reservation platform, Tock. Chase acquired the restaurant discovery site the Infatuation in 2021 and has built exclusive dining promotions, food festivals, and content access into its Sapphire card lineup. Oh, and remember Zagat? That was sold initially to Google, then The Infatuation and is now being re-imagined as a Chase property. Even DoorDash spent $1.2 billion to acquire reservations platform SevenRooms, on the assumption that its CRM and location capabilities will better allow the platform to tailor offerings such as food deliveries to customers. What many don’t realize is that each of these ecosystem moves are the deliberate construction of what behavioral economists would call choice architectures. My colleague Eric Johnson, one of the world’s leading authorities on choice architecture, laid out the mechanics in his essential book, The Elements of Choice. Choice architecture refers to the way a decision process is designed. It can be manipulated, intentionally or inadvertently, to influence the decisions we make. The options may be the same, but the presentation can change your choice. Johnson’s key insight is that the choice architect, the person framing your choices, has a lot more influence than you think. Decision-makers are often unaware of the subtle environmental factors that actually drive their choices. Architecting choices involve creating several levers that have a surprising impact. One is what choice is presented as the default. Defaults are powerful. Why else would Google reportedly pay Apple $20 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones? Another lever is which choices seem to be the easiest. Eric calls this lever the creation of plausible paths. The number of choices matters, too. So does the sequence. And all of these levers operate on us without our even being aware, for the most part, that we are being influenced. Credit card issuers designing choice architectures for entire ecosystems Now as Fortune has recently reported, credit card issuers have seized an opportunity to create integrated choice architectures for entire ecosystems of travel, eating, and transportation. Consider how Chase structures its travel portal. Sapphire Reserve cardholders earn eight points per dollar when they book through Chase Travel. Book the same hotel directly, and they earn four. That differential is an illustration of choice architecture at work. Chase has created a default path with a reward attached. Once you’re booking through the portal, Chase processes the payment, controls the booking engine, and runs the rewards program. Every stage of the transaction sits inside the issuer’s infrastructure. Or consider how Amex has designed the discovery experience. Resy solicits partner restaurants by showing the value of credits earned by Amex users at their business, with a note promising “look out for more of these card members in your seats in 2026.” Think about what that means structurally. The restaurants that want Amex card members, and increasingly, they all do, are incented to participate in the Resy platform. Which means the universe of “great restaurants” that surfaces when an Amex card member opens the app is not a neutral representation of the dining landscape. It is a curated set of businesses that have opted into Amex’s ecosystem. The choice set has been prefiltered, and most users have no idea. This is what Johnson means when he writes that choice architecture changes the information we see. On the surface, user interfaces look as though they are about fonts, colors, and displays. Beneath that surface, the interface is being deliberately designed to change what goes on inside our heads. The ecosystem plays are accelerating. Amex plans to merge Resy and Tock into a single platform, bringing more than 25,000 restaurants, wineries, and culinary experiences into the Resy ecosystem. This gives cardholders far more places to use their dining credits. It hopes to make the competitive gap with Chase’s OpenTable partnership, which works at fewer than 400 participating restaurants, increasingly stark. Bilt, which began as a card for earning points on rent, has incredibly included BLADE helicopter transfers and car service for suite-level hotel bookings through a partnership, layering more of the trip into the same ecosystem, one that now reaches more than 5.5 million U.S. households. The traditional model—swipe, earn points, redeem them somewhere else—is giving way to something more vertically integrated. These are a portal to the ecosystem controlled by the credit card companies. The business logic is impeccable. Once upon a time, those customers who paid their bills every month were the scourge of the credit card business. The sky-high interest rates paid by those who carried balances (the “revolvers” in banking parlance) were far more attractive. With this strategic move, banks can make so much on interchange fees and annual fees that even a cardholder who never carries a balance is profitable. Once that customer is inside the ecosystem, the issuer can keep selling to them. Premium banking, wealth management, and travel. Every restaurant reservation booked through Resy, every hotel night booked through Chase Travel, every food festival attended with an Infatuation-curated lineup is a data point. And data compounds. The credit card companies are not doing anything that any platform-enabled business cannot do. You are a choice architect every time you present options to clients, employees, or partners—deciding the order of items, the categories to organize them into, and how to describe them. Even if you didn’t realize it, your design decisions influenced the choice. The question is whether you are designing deliberately or by accident. Good choice architecture works well for the architect and the decider Most people have a vague sense that how choices are posed might influence them, but they lack a concrete awareness of how, exactly, they are being influenced. When Amex surfaces a curated list of Resy restaurants with your credit preloaded and a 25% average spending lift embedded in the incentive structure, you are not browsing the open internet. You are inside an architecture. None of this is necessarily sinister. Johnson is careful to point out that good choice architecture can serve people’s genuine interests. It can help them save for retirement, make healthier food choices, locate hard-to-find providers and find better matches. The organ donor default is the canonical example: Changing a single checkbox led to dramatically more lives saved. But when the designer’s interests and the chooser’s interests diverge—when the architecture is built to maximize interchange revenue and platform lock-in rather than to help you find the best dinner—the burden falls on you to notice. And noticing, as Johnson documents across decades of research, is genuinely hard. The whole point of effective choice architecture is that it works without your awareness. The next time an app nudges you toward a “featured” restaurant, a “curated” hotel collection, or an “exclusive” experience available only to card members, ask yourself a simple question: Who built this environment, and what were they optimizing for? The answer will tell you something important about whether you are making a choice, or having one made for you. View the full article

The technical specifications for low energy LE-UWB are excellent - also compared to more established short-range options. The post UWB for ultra-low power ‘deterministic’ connectivity poised for a breakthrough, says SPARK appeared first on Wi-Fi NOW Global. View the full article

One of the more annoying things that could happen is that you spend $3,300 on a brand-new display, only to find out that, just after you’ve passed the return window, the price has dropped by $400. Nothing else has changed; just the price gets cheaper after you’ve already paid for it and can no longer return it to the store. That’s what happened for customers who bought Apple’s brand-new Studio Display XDR, the company’s high-end mini-LED monitor targeted at professionals with a few grand to spend on a monitor. The company offered the Studio Display XDR with two stand options—a VESA mount adapter and what Apple calls a “tilt-and-height-adjustable stand.” Both versions were the same price until this week, when Apple dropped the price of the version with the VESA mount adapter by $400. On Wednesday, Apple emailed customers who had purchased the Studio Display XDR with the VESA mount at the higher price, and let them know they would be refunded $400. Thank you for your recent online purchase at the Apple Store. Apple recently lowered the price of the Studio Display XDR— Standard glass—VESA mount adapter configuration you ordered. We are pleased to inform you that we will provide you with a refund for the difference between the price you paid and the new, lower price. For the most up-to-date information about your order, please visit online Order Status. That’s it—just four sentences explaining that the price changed, here’s your refund. There’s something almost radical about that kind of directness from a company the size of Apple. Most brands in this situation would have buried the refund in three paragraphs of goodwill language designed to make you feel like they were doing you a favor. A refund is obviously the right thing to do, but it made me think about how this could have happened in the first place. After all, the non-XDR version of the Studio Display also has a VESA mount option, as well as a tilt-and-height-adjustable stand option. The latter is $400 more. (There’s also a tilt-only stand that is the same price as the VESA mount model.) It really makes no sense that Apple would charge a $400 premium for the VESA mount on the XDR version. You’re literally getting less product since you have to provide your own monitor arm. So, why did Apple change the price? I mean, there are only two possibilities here. The first is that Apple meant to sell the VESA mount for $400 less than the tilt-and-height-adjustable stand on both of the new Studio Display models. If that’s the case, then someone just forgot to put that in the order flow. That’s not great, but Apple is a big company, and it released a half-dozen products that week, so maybe somebody just got busy and missed that step. On the other hand, it does seem like a pretty important step. The other possibility is that Apple meant to sell both XDR options for the same higher price. If that’s the case, it’s actually a lot worse because Apple is basically saying it thinks it can fleece customers willing to spend that much money on a display. Presumably, however, some of those customers complained, and Apple decided to reverse course. I don’t think Apple will ever explain which of these two possibilities really happened, but I’m inclined to believe it was likely the first. I just don’t think Apple would have meant to charge different prices for the same stand options across the two displays. That just doesn’t make any sense. Also, I prefer to think that Apple wouldn’t have priced its products in a way that basically punishes its high-end display customers. This isn’t the first time Apple has had to navigate the awkwardness of a post-purchase price drop. In 2007, just two months after the original iPhone launched at $599, Apple cut the price by $200. The backlash was immediate—people who had waited in line and paid the premium price felt burned. Steve Jobs responded with an open letter and offered affected customers a $100 Apple Store credit. It wasn’t a full refund, and the $100 came with strings attached, but it was an acknowledgment that Apple owed something to the people who had trusted the original price. The Studio Display XDR situation is smaller in scale and arguably cleaner in execution—full refund, no store credit gymnastics—but the underlying dynamic is identical: A price drops, loyal customers feel taken advantage of, and Apple has to decide how much that goodwill is worth. The lesson for other brands is simple: Pricing is a promise. In this case, Apple broke its promise because it wasn’t clear on its pricing. I think you can argue Apple should either admit it made a mistake or just be honest that it was willing to extract an extra $400 from customers who presumably wouldn’t push back. Neither option is a good look for a company that has spent decades building a reputation on the idea that its prices reflect its values. The good news is that Apple did the right thing, even if it did it quietly. The price got fixed, and customers will get a refund. But the brands that come out of these situations with their trust intact aren’t the ones who fix problems the fastest—they’re the ones who build pricing systems carefully enough that the problem never makes it to a customer’s inbox in the first place. A $400 refund is the right move. Not needing to send that email would have been better. —Jason Aten, tech columnist This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy. View the full article

Airline confirms new contract negotiations with chief Michael O’Leary after annual profits rise by a thirdView the full article