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As a Customer Service Strategist, you analyze current service practices to spot areas needing improvement. You develop strategies that boost customer satisfaction and loyalty, overseeing onboarding processes to guarantee customers effectively use products. By utilizing customer usage data, you inform decision-making and create churn prevention strategies. Comprehending these roles is essential for nurturing positive customer relationships, but there’s much more to explore about the skills and tools involved in this field. Key Takeaways Analyzes current customer service practices to identify areas for improvement and enhance overall service quality. Develops strategies aimed at increasing customer satisfaction and fostering long-term loyalty. Oversees customer onboarding processes to ensure effective product usage and smooth transitions. Utilizes customer usage data to inform decision-making and create churn prevention strategies. Collaborates with teams using various tools for effective communication and project management of customer initiatives. Responsibilities of a Customer Service Strategist A Customer Service Strategist plays a crucial role in enhancing an organization’s service offerings by analyzing current practices and identifying areas for improvement. You’ll develop and implement strategies that aim to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty, which can greatly affect the organization’s bottom line. A key responsibility involves overseeing customer onboarding processes, ensuring customers receive the required training and support to utilize products or services effectively. Moreover, you’ll analyze customer usage data to inform decision-making, track product adoption, and identify at-risk customers. This helps you formulate churn prevention strategies. Key Skills Required for Success Success as a Customer Service Strategist hinges on a diverse set of key skills that enable effective engagement and problem resolution. Strong verbal and written communication skills are essential, as they help you convey important information clearly to customers. Your problem-solving abilities will allow you to analyze customer issues, developing effective solutions that improve service quality. Empathy is significant, enabling you to understand customer needs and cultivate trust, which builds lasting relationships. Furthermore, project management skills are important for efficiently handling multiple initiatives simultaneously. Finally, analytical skills are necessary to derive insights from customer data, informing your decisions and identifying trends that can enhance overall service strategies, especially when delivering customer service consulting services. Tools and Technologies Utilized To effectively manage customer interactions and improve service strategies, Customer Service Strategists rely on a variety of tools and technologies. They utilize CRM software like Salesforce or HubSpot to track engagement and manage customer relationships efficiently. Customer success platforms such as Gainsight or ChurnZero help monitor customer health and identify at-risk accounts, ensuring proactive support. For data analysis, analytics tools like Google Analytics or Tableau provide valuable insights into customer behavior and product usage. Communication tools like Slack or Zoom promote collaboration, enhancing communication between team members and customers. Furthermore, project management software like Asana or Trello assists strategists in tracking customer success initiatives and managing multiple projects, integral to effective customer service management consulting services. Career Path and Growth Opportunities As you commence a career as a Customer Service Strategist, comprehension of the various levels of progression can help you navigate your professional path effectively. Entry-level roles often start as Customer Success Associates, where you’ll gain foundational experience in customer interactions. Mid-level positions include Customer Success Managers, responsible for managing relationships and engagement. Level Role Examples Entry-Level Customer Success Associate Mid-Level Customer Success Manager Senior-Level Senior Customer Success Manager Executive Vice President of Customer Success Specialization opportunities exist in onboarding or product adoption. High performers might evolve into executive roles or even explore entrepreneurial ventures within a customer service consulting firm, shaping strategies at a higher level. Best Practices for Effective Strategy Implementation Implementing effective customer service strategies requires a systematic approach that begins with a thorough analysis of your existing practices. Start by identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement, aligning them with customer expectations and business objectives. Establish clear, measurable goals for your initiatives that support overall growth and improve customer satisfaction. Embrace omnichannel support, ensuring consistent communication across various platforms to meet customers where they prefer to engage. Regularly gather and analyze customer feedback to refine your service offerings and adapt strategies, promoting continuous improvement. Moreover, invest in training for your customer service representatives, equipping them with the skills to deliver exceptional service. Consider engaging in customer service consulting to gain expert insights and boost your implementation efforts. Frequently Asked Questions What Is a Customer Service Strategist? A customer service strategist focuses on improving service quality and customer satisfaction. You’ll analyze existing practices, pinpoint areas for improvement, and implement effective strategies. By utilizing customer feedback and data analytics, you refine service offerings to better meet customer needs. Collaboration across departments is crucial, ensuring that improvements align with broader business objectives. Furthermore, you’ll provide training and support to customer service teams, nurturing a culture of continuous improvement in service delivery. What Are the 4 P’s of Service Strategy? The 4 P’s of service strategy are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Product refers to the service’s features and benefits that fulfill customer expectations. Price involves setting a cost that reflects the service’s value during being competitive. Place focuses on how the service is delivered, ensuring it’s accessible through preferred channels. Ultimately, Promotion encompasses the marketing tactics used to highlight the service’s advantages, increasing customer awareness and engagement effectively. What Are the 7 Steps to Developing a Customer Service Strategy? To develop a customer service strategy, start by identifying customer needs through surveys and analytics. Set measurable goals aligned with your business objectives. Clearly define your brand voice for consistency in interactions. Utilize technology like CRM systems to improve personalized support. Establish omnichannel communication to cater to diverse customer preferences. Finally, train your team to guarantee they deliver excellent service, continually monitor performance, and adjust strategies based on feedback and metrics. What Are the Five Key Elements of Customer Strategy? When developing a customer strategy, focus on five key elements: grasping customer needs through data analysis, setting measurable goals aligned with business objectives, ensuring a consistent brand voice across interactions, leveraging technology like CRM systems for personalization, and establishing omnichannel communication for accessibility. Conclusion In conclusion, a Customer Service Strategist plays an essential role in enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty through data-driven strategies. By analyzing service practices, overseeing onboarding, and developing churn prevention plans, you can greatly impact customer relationships. Utilizing the right tools and skills guarantees effective implementation of strategies. As you navigate this career path, focusing on best practices will not merely improve customer experiences but will additionally contribute to the organization’s long-term success and growth. Image via Google Gemini This article, "What Does a Customer Service Strategist Do?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

As a Customer Service Strategist, you analyze current service practices to spot areas needing improvement. You develop strategies that boost customer satisfaction and loyalty, overseeing onboarding processes to guarantee customers effectively use products. By utilizing customer usage data, you inform decision-making and create churn prevention strategies. Comprehending these roles is essential for nurturing positive customer relationships, but there’s much more to explore about the skills and tools involved in this field. Key Takeaways Analyzes current customer service practices to identify areas for improvement and enhance overall service quality. Develops strategies aimed at increasing customer satisfaction and fostering long-term loyalty. Oversees customer onboarding processes to ensure effective product usage and smooth transitions. Utilizes customer usage data to inform decision-making and create churn prevention strategies. Collaborates with teams using various tools for effective communication and project management of customer initiatives. Responsibilities of a Customer Service Strategist A Customer Service Strategist plays a crucial role in enhancing an organization’s service offerings by analyzing current practices and identifying areas for improvement. You’ll develop and implement strategies that aim to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty, which can greatly affect the organization’s bottom line. A key responsibility involves overseeing customer onboarding processes, ensuring customers receive the required training and support to utilize products or services effectively. Moreover, you’ll analyze customer usage data to inform decision-making, track product adoption, and identify at-risk customers. This helps you formulate churn prevention strategies. Key Skills Required for Success Success as a Customer Service Strategist hinges on a diverse set of key skills that enable effective engagement and problem resolution. Strong verbal and written communication skills are essential, as they help you convey important information clearly to customers. Your problem-solving abilities will allow you to analyze customer issues, developing effective solutions that improve service quality. Empathy is significant, enabling you to understand customer needs and cultivate trust, which builds lasting relationships. Furthermore, project management skills are important for efficiently handling multiple initiatives simultaneously. Finally, analytical skills are necessary to derive insights from customer data, informing your decisions and identifying trends that can enhance overall service strategies, especially when delivering customer service consulting services. Tools and Technologies Utilized To effectively manage customer interactions and improve service strategies, Customer Service Strategists rely on a variety of tools and technologies. They utilize CRM software like Salesforce or HubSpot to track engagement and manage customer relationships efficiently. Customer success platforms such as Gainsight or ChurnZero help monitor customer health and identify at-risk accounts, ensuring proactive support. For data analysis, analytics tools like Google Analytics or Tableau provide valuable insights into customer behavior and product usage. Communication tools like Slack or Zoom promote collaboration, enhancing communication between team members and customers. Furthermore, project management software like Asana or Trello assists strategists in tracking customer success initiatives and managing multiple projects, integral to effective customer service management consulting services. Career Path and Growth Opportunities As you commence a career as a Customer Service Strategist, comprehension of the various levels of progression can help you navigate your professional path effectively. Entry-level roles often start as Customer Success Associates, where you’ll gain foundational experience in customer interactions. Mid-level positions include Customer Success Managers, responsible for managing relationships and engagement. Level Role Examples Entry-Level Customer Success Associate Mid-Level Customer Success Manager Senior-Level Senior Customer Success Manager Executive Vice President of Customer Success Specialization opportunities exist in onboarding or product adoption. High performers might evolve into executive roles or even explore entrepreneurial ventures within a customer service consulting firm, shaping strategies at a higher level. Best Practices for Effective Strategy Implementation Implementing effective customer service strategies requires a systematic approach that begins with a thorough analysis of your existing practices. Start by identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement, aligning them with customer expectations and business objectives. Establish clear, measurable goals for your initiatives that support overall growth and improve customer satisfaction. Embrace omnichannel support, ensuring consistent communication across various platforms to meet customers where they prefer to engage. Regularly gather and analyze customer feedback to refine your service offerings and adapt strategies, promoting continuous improvement. Moreover, invest in training for your customer service representatives, equipping them with the skills to deliver exceptional service. Consider engaging in customer service consulting to gain expert insights and boost your implementation efforts. Frequently Asked Questions What Is a Customer Service Strategist? A customer service strategist focuses on improving service quality and customer satisfaction. You’ll analyze existing practices, pinpoint areas for improvement, and implement effective strategies. By utilizing customer feedback and data analytics, you refine service offerings to better meet customer needs. Collaboration across departments is crucial, ensuring that improvements align with broader business objectives. Furthermore, you’ll provide training and support to customer service teams, nurturing a culture of continuous improvement in service delivery. What Are the 4 P’s of Service Strategy? The 4 P’s of service strategy are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Product refers to the service’s features and benefits that fulfill customer expectations. Price involves setting a cost that reflects the service’s value during being competitive. Place focuses on how the service is delivered, ensuring it’s accessible through preferred channels. Ultimately, Promotion encompasses the marketing tactics used to highlight the service’s advantages, increasing customer awareness and engagement effectively. What Are the 7 Steps to Developing a Customer Service Strategy? To develop a customer service strategy, start by identifying customer needs through surveys and analytics. Set measurable goals aligned with your business objectives. Clearly define your brand voice for consistency in interactions. Utilize technology like CRM systems to improve personalized support. Establish omnichannel communication to cater to diverse customer preferences. Finally, train your team to guarantee they deliver excellent service, continually monitor performance, and adjust strategies based on feedback and metrics. What Are the Five Key Elements of Customer Strategy? When developing a customer strategy, focus on five key elements: grasping customer needs through data analysis, setting measurable goals aligned with business objectives, ensuring a consistent brand voice across interactions, leveraging technology like CRM systems for personalization, and establishing omnichannel communication for accessibility. Conclusion In conclusion, a Customer Service Strategist plays an essential role in enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty through data-driven strategies. By analyzing service practices, overseeing onboarding, and developing churn prevention plans, you can greatly impact customer relationships. Utilizing the right tools and skills guarantees effective implementation of strategies. As you navigate this career path, focusing on best practices will not merely improve customer experiences but will additionally contribute to the organization’s long-term success and growth. Image via Google Gemini This article, "What Does a Customer Service Strategist Do?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Samsung’s fan editions are meant to give you most of the flagship experience without the flagship price—and the Samsung Galaxy S25 FE does just that. Right now, it’s down to $509.99 from $709.99; a price drop that, according to price tracking tools, marks its lowest price yet. That puts it well below the regular Galaxy S25 while keeping much of the same look and software. Samsung Galaxy S25 FE 256GB Unlocked Phone (JetBlack) $509.99 at Amazon $709.99 Save $200.00 Get Deal Get Deal $509.99 at Amazon $709.99 Save $200.00 PCMag rated it “excellent,” and after looking at what it offers, that tracks. Its 6.7-inch AMOLED screen is big, bright, and responsive, with smooth 120Hz scrolling and enough brightness to hold its own in most settings, though you might catch some glare under direct sunlight. It includes Samsung’s full Galaxy AI feature set, the same tools found on its pricier siblings. In practice, that means features like live translation, AI photo editing, and writing help are all here. The battery’s a solid performer too, clocking in at 17 hours of video playback in PCMag’s testing. Charging’s fast enough at 45W wired, and you get wireless and reverse wireless charging (handy for earbuds) as well. On the connectivity side, it supports 5G, along with Wi‑Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and NFC for contactless payments. You can use one physical SIM and one eSIM, or go fully digital with dual eSIMs. The camera setup sticks close to its more expensive siblings with a 50MP main sensor (with OIS), a 12MP ultra-wide, and an 8MP telephoto lens offering 3x zoom. Photos are sharp from the main lens, with Samsung’s typical slightly saturated colors, and the ultra-wide and telephoto lenses are good for social media, though fine detail reportedly falls off when you zoom or crop in. Audio is decent through the stereo speakers, but you’ll want Bluetooth headphones or earbuds for better sound. There’s no headphone jack or microSD card slot, and storage is capped at 256GB—but for the price, that’s not unreasonable. If you want to be in the Samsung ecosystem and try out its newest AI features without spending $800 or more, this is one of the better deals going right now. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancelling Wireless Earbuds — $139.99 (List Price $179.00) Apple Watch Series 11 [GPS 46mm] Smartwatch with Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band - M/L. Sleep Score, Fitness Tracker, Health Monitoring, Always-On Display, Water Resistant — $329.00 (List Price $429.00) Apple iPad 11" 128GB A16 WiFi Tablet (Blue, 2025) — $299.00 (List Price $349.00) Blink Mini 2 1080p Security Camera (White) — $23.99 (List Price $39.99) Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Plus — $29.99 (List Price $49.99) Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ 10.9" 64GB Wi-Fi Tablet (Graphite) — $149.99 (List Price $219.99) Bose QuietComfort Noise Cancelling Wireless Headphones — $229.00 (List Price $349.00) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

An Idaho-based beef processing facility is recalling about 22,912 pounds of raw ground beef over concerns that the products might be contaminated with E. coli O145. The company, CS Beef Packers in Kuna, issued the recall following testing by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), according to a recall notice published late Wednesday. An FSIS test at a “downstream customer” showed E. coli O415. This strand of the bacteria is a variation of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC). The USDA has labeled the recalled products as high risk, with the potential to cause adverse health consequences or even death. Here’s what you need to know about the recalled CS Beef Packers items. What products are affected? The recalled products come in cardboard cases and were produced on January 14, 2026. Each case has a time stamp between 7:03 and 8:32 printed on them and a use-by or freeze-by by date of February 4, 2026. Plus, they bear the establishment number “Est. 630” inside the USDA’s inspection mark (available on the outside of the case and the clear packaging of each chub). As that expiration date has passed, the FSIS is worried “that some products may be in food service freezers.” Think you might have some in a freezer? The below cardboard cases of products are included in the recall: Eight 10-pound chubs of “Beef, Coarse Ground, 73 L,” case code 18601 Four 10-pound chubs of “Fire River Farms Classic Beef Fine Ground 73 L,” case code 19583 Four 10-pound chubs of “Fire River Farms Classic Beef Fine Ground 81 L,” case code 19563 You can view images of the product labels here. Where and when was the product sold? According to the FSIS, CS Beef Packers shipped the impacted products to distributors in California, Idaho, and Oregon. However, they were likely then sent to food service locations for further distribution. The recall notice does not include a list of potentially impacted restaurants or food-service establishments. Fast Company has reached out to CS Beef Packers for information on where else the recalled products might have gone. We will update this post if we hear back. What should I do if I have this product? The FSIS states that “Foodservice locations are urged not to serve these products. These products should be thrown away or returned to the place of purchase.” What E. coli symptoms should I look out for? As of Wednesday, there have been no reported illnesses from consuming the beef. However, people can become sick between two and eight days after exposure to E. coli O145. According to the USDA, symptoms include diarrhea (typically bloody) and vomiting. Diagnosis occurs through a stool sample. In most cases, people feel better within a week through treatments like “vigorous” rehydration, the USDA states. In rare cases, a person might develop a kidney infection known as hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). This condition is most likely to occur in children under five-years-old, individuals with weakened immune systems, and older adults. Symptoms of HUS include easy bruising, pallor, and reduced urine output. Get medical help immediately if you experience any of these symptoms. View the full article

I'm the latest early-adopter in history. I finally got my hands on an Apple Vision Pro VR/AR headset, two years after launch, and I feel like I'm showing up at a party at 4 a.m., just in time to watch the last stragglers call for Ubers. Back in the more innocent days of 2024, Apple said the Vision Pro would be "the beginning of a new era for computing," but it's become an industry cautionary tale, proof that making a product that's better than everything else on the market (arguably) doesn't guarantee squat. I've had this thing strapped to my face nearly 24/7 for the last week, and it's a frustrating device. It's insanely cool, among the most impressive pieces of hardware I've ever used, but I don't need to have it. It struggles to answer the most basic question: "What would I actually do with this thing?" The same question was asked by many when it launched, and from my late-comer perspective, the answer has yet to arrive. The Apple Vision Pro's design is... astronaut chic Credit: Stephen Johnson I love the design of the Vision Pro. The aluminum grey and orange accent with bubbled-out faceplate screams "NASA moon mission." It looks like it's going to take you into orbit. It's so sleek: A single piece of rounded glass acts as both an optical lens for the cameras and a display for the Eyesight feature where people can see your eyes outside the headset. The aluminum alloy frame curves around your face and the cushy light shield snaps on magnetically. The fit and finish (as they used to say in car magazines) is top-notch too. Nothing rattles. No knob or button feels chintzy. There's a heft and solidness to the Vision Pro that makes it clear that this is equipment, not a toy. But that makes it fairly heavy too. A Vision Pro weighs between 26.4 and 28.2 ounces, about the weight of an iPad Pro and a half. The headband (much improved with the newest version of the Vision Pro) and external battery do a ton to keep it from feeling saggy, but after awhile—maybe an hour or two depending on your neck muscles—you definitely feel the weight. The Apple Vision Pro's technical specs are so good, they almost don't matter Credit: Stephen Johnson I could get into the tech specs of the Vision Pro, the micro-OLED displays and dual-chip architecture, with M2 and R1 processors and all that, but the important part is what the tech does: blow your mind. After a painless set up, the first thing I did with the Vision Pro was check out "Encounter Dinosaurs," a free app that comes with the device. In it, a window opens to a prehistoric world. I'm sitting there enjoying the dinosaur drama on 10-foot tall virtual screen, a little shook at how perfectly defined it is, when the damn Rajasaurus sticks its entire head into my living room. Then it makes eye contact. Genuinely feeling like prey, I said, "holy crap" out loud, and the thing reacted. It all feels entirely real. The lighting matches your room lighting. The sound comes from all around you. It's jaw-dropping. I was ready to go on a full dinosaur adventure in my new space helmet, but then the tech demo ended. It's a few minutes of dazzle. "Encounter Dinosaurs" encapsulates the overall experience of the Vision Pro—it's a tease, the suggestion of space flight, only to find you're the third backup astronaut who might get to go to the moon, if congress doesn't cut Apollo's spending first. But the tech is so good. The eye-scanning, gesture-based UI (no controllers here) is flawless and feels like you're operating a computer with your mind. The spatial audio is pristine. The integration with other Mac gear is seamless. The definition and brightness of the graphics is perfect—no pixels visible at all. You can even use it to do things. What it's like to use the Apple Vision Pro for work and entertainment Credit: Stephen Johnson I'm totally spatially computing right now. I'm looking at a wide-screen version of the display from my laptop floating before me, with a music app open and Olympic skiing in another window. I'm combining my laptop screen with apps from my helmet, sizing and arranging everything in virtual space, and navigating with my eyes and gestures. Everything works great. It's like living in the future. And the future is exhausting. It's not just the weight of the headset becoming more noticeable with each moment or the eyestrain headache I can feel coming on, it's the maximalism of it; it's too much. I'm sure some people dig it, but I feel like I need to escape, maybe to a nice beach or something. But the Vision Pro's streaming is excellent, as good or better than your TV, whether you're watching movies from major streaming services, getting fully immersed in an NBA game or Metallica concert (both amazing, by the way), or just scrolling TikTok. The colors are brilliant. There's no hint of edge-blurriness. The dual micro-OLED displays create a virtual screen that's approximately 3660 x 3200 pixels per eye. That's better than 4K, on a display that can be as big as a movie screen. No notes. Gaming is more of mixed bag. It's clear gamers weren't Apple's primary focus with the Vision Pro. You can link the Vision Pro to your PC or Mac for more complex games, but there aren't any real "AAA" games developed specifically for the device. There are some cool smaller titles, though. I was very impressed with recently released Retrocade, a collection of perfect ports of 1980s arcade games. They're the best ports I've ever played, because you play them on perfect virtual recreation of actual arcade cabinets, detailed down to reflections on the CRT screens. But it's kind of sad that the best gaming use of 2026's most advanced consumer technology is playing Frogger. There's so much possibility here, but the Vision Pro gaming section of the app store is a lonely place. I downloaded some random games—a shooter, a horror game—all glorified tech demoes. Overall, the Vision Pro apps in the App Store are few and mostly forgettable. Two years in, the ecosystem hasn't developed, which is a shame, given the possibilities. I'm not sure what I actually want from the Vision Pro. It's advanced technology that you can use to privately stream movies at extremely high quality, play a few mildly diverting games, or get some work done in a new way. Shouldn't that be enough? Maybe. Mine is borrowed, but if I had dropped $3,500 for a Vision Pro, I would not think, "This was a wise use of my money." It's not just the money, though, it's also the friction. What "augmented reality" is like on the Apple Vision Pro Credit: Stephen Johnson While full-immersion virtual reality is possible with the Apple Vision Pro, the focus has always been on augmented reality—real life, just with digital bells and whistles—but it's not really augmented reality. You can walk around with the headset on, but you're seeing the world through some cameras, with a field of view of 100° X 75°, about half of reality's FOV. And the outward looking cameras aren't nearly as good as the display, so "reality" is blurry around the edges, where "augmented" is clear as day. As good as the tech is, it still feels unsettling and alienating to use, particularly the transition from augmented life to just life. That sense of fakeness plus the strapping-a-heavy-thing-on-your-face factor adds up to it feeling like a chore to use a Vision Pro. It's the kind of device I'd use sparingly—pull it out to show a friend how cool it is or bring it on my next flight—but I haven't seen a killer app that overcomes the pain-in-the-ass factor enough to use it more often than that. Ok, except that dinosaur thing. I want augmented reality to be that, but for longer than a few minutes. I want the transformative, the transcendent, something you couldn't experience any other way to make the weight and digital claustrophobia feel worth it. Sadly, it seems unlikely that Apple will be putting out the Apple Vision 2 any time soon. The future is smart glasses, and it's going to be a few years (if ever) for augmented reality to get closer to reality-reality in a pair of spectacles. Until then, I'll be waiting for the dinosaurs to come back. View the full article

Ineos founder has come under pressure to apologise for claim the UK was being ‘colonised’View the full article

The multimillion-dollar acquisition boosts PennyMac Financial Services' total portfolio above $1 trillion and adds to a wave of industry consolidation. View the full article

When the iPhone first introduced apps in 2008, a feverish gold rush followed. New APIs and design standards made it easier to make software—even by non-coders. The question became: Could you create a small experience, perhaps something as simple as a fart button app, that could make you a million dollars in a weekend? (And while some people definitely cashed in, a majority of us did not.) Nearly two decades later, the rest of us have another opportunity to rethink mobile software. We’ve entered the era of vibe coding—in which complex software can be generated with nothing but plain language prompts. Now, rather than offer developers the tools to make the next hit app, it seems phone manufacturers may urge everyone to vibe-code their next widget. The hypebeasty smartphone company Nothing Technology has launched what it’s calling Essential Apps in beta on its website. What that really means is that, for the first time, you can simply describe the widget you’d like to have (maybe the latest scores from your favorite team, or a slideshow of beautiful public domain imagery), and it will become a widget that you can download right to your phone, or even share with the public. Nothing’s mantra? “One billion apps for one billion people.” I still prefer the term “widgets” for what Nothing is sharing, but I’ll admit that it’s a good line. Because it seems quite feasible that, for many of us, our first experience with vibe coding will actually be a widget. The rise of widgets Full-blown apps have been the main modality of smartphones since the early days of the App Store. But the industry has embraced widgets for nearly as long—as lighter-weight, glanceable apps that are always open on your screen. Desktop computers had used widgets for years before Google introduced them to Android in 2009. Apple held out until 2014. While they’ve always represented a strange mortar of our digital lives, widgets have remained an established part of our app lexicon as bite-size vessels for information that can live wherever you want on your phone. Vibe coding is amazing, but it’s still involved in building something as complex as a modern app. Widgets, on the other hand, have such a limited scope that they seem perfect for an inexperienced vibe coder. The information you want is the interface, and there’s not a lot more to it. Nothing isn’t technically the first company to come up with the idea of vibe-coding widgets on a mobile platform. You may have forgotten that this was also the biggest promise from Rabbit, the early AI hardware company that captured the tech world’s imagination in 2024—before turning out to be less capable than promised. (Meanwhile, its founder, Jesse Lyu, is building a new piece of hardware completely dedicated to vibe coding that’s called the Cyberdeck.) Nothing has sold over 7 million devices to a loyal crowd that appreciates its quirkier, more expressive approach to design. Its phones have touches like its Glyph Button on the back, which can contain cute micrographics that evoke the Atari era. As it turns out, Nothing’s vibe coding supports new animations for this button—and people have already generated music visualizers and timers. Other early works you can find from Nothing vibe coders—which, for now, seem to be Nothing’s own employees—include tic-tac-toe and phases of the moon. They’re also letting people generate and share custom music equalizers and photo slideshows. Two different early hands-ons both suggest Nothing’s vibe coding isn’t as perfectly automated as we may imagine, but the modality seems promising all the same. While I don’t believe every human on earth is capable of developing the next Uber by vibe coding, it’s easy to imagine myriad people having a tiny, very specific problem related to their commutes, or a transportation challenge that they’d love to solve. And vibe-coded widgets offer a reasonable container for those solutions. This is only the beginning This is all to say that while Nothing was first(ish) out of the gate, I suspect vibe-coded widgets are going to be an extraordinarily popular modality sold by phone manufacturers. And not even necessarily because people need or want them, but because their limited scope seems just right for welcoming the masses into a cutting-edge behavior. Samsung, for instance, is already trying to distinguish its platform with AI integration of all types. Google, a global leader in all things AI at this moment, is almost certainly working on tools like this. On our December By Design podcast, former Fast Company design editor—and current Google senior staff designer working on Android AI—Cliff Kuang suggested vibe coding would be the biggest paradigm for “the next decade or even century.” Even Apple, a company I would naturally assume would never touch vibe coding, may come to surprise us. Consider that it’s already embraced generative AI in Messages and other apps, and it just signed a deal to source its next AI model from Google. I could certainly imagine Apple, working with its collection of internally designed components, creating a widget customizer for its users. And of course, we cannot count out Chinese companies, which produce around 50% of smartphones globally. Huawei, in particular, already offers a variety of Service Cards—an evolution of the widget that can turn an app into a little card, complete with the app’s core functions, right on the home screen. Why couldn’t AI make the perfect intermediary here, for a user to customize exactly what they want to surface from an app? I’m not saying that vibe-coded widgets will become the predominant way we interact with our smartphones. As few as 15% of Apple users report actively using them today. But I do believe that a combination of feasible scope and FOMO-driven strategy could drive the entire smartphone industry in this direction over the next year or two. In other words: If you haven’t delved into vibe coding yet, don’t be surprised if your first project is a widget. View the full article

It looks like ordinary paint, but a new coating called Lilypad Paint has a hidden ability to pull moisture out of the air. It works like a dehumidifier, without the energy use. If it’s on the wall in your bathroom, it can suck water vapor out of the air after you’ve taken a shower. The paint holds the humidity in nano-size pores, and then slowly releases it as humidity levels fall in the room. Under the paint, a layer of custom primer “acts like a smart gatekeeper ensuring that vapor doesn’t end up accumulating in the wall,” says Derek Stein, founder and CEO of Adept Materials, the startup behind the product. A passive fix for moisture in modern buildings The tech spun out of Stein’s research as a physics professor at Brown University. While working with students on the design of a solar-powered house, he learned about a growing problem: As buildings become more energy-efficient, air quality can get worse. “As we’re making buildings really, really tight thermally, they tend to trap in moisture and trap in air,” Stein says. A new house might use less energy for heating and cooling but more for ventilation—and if the system doesn’t work perfectly, the home could end up with mold. Older houses that don’t have mechanical ventilation also often have mold problems. Stein iterated on new materials that could passively regulate humidity inside a building and landed on the idea of a simple two-layer structure. It’s “like a material machine that can regulate humidity in a space while also teaching direction to the wall,” he says. The design moves moisture out of the wall while preventing it from getting in. In conversations with the construction industry, Stein realized there was a clear demand for a product like this. In 2018, he left Brown and launched the startup to bring it to market. “It became clear to me that to make this happen on any realistic time scale, I had to leave the ivory tower and go out into the proverbial real world to do this,” he says. Scaling up outside the lab The basic tech, which the company calls Vaporwisp, could be incorporated in many different building materials—drywall, for example, would benefit from humidity management. Adept Materials is also developing a new building wrap for construction that can keep moisture out without trapping it inside. In a seed round of funding a little over a year ago, investors included large home builders like D.R. Horton. “Why are home builders investing in this? It’s not just because of the paint. A lot of their problems, operationally, are related to moisture,” says Stein. (The technology can also have broader applications, including packaging to keep food fresh longer, or moisture-wicking clothing.) Paint was a logical place to start in part because it’s used both by builders and by consumers working on DIY projects. And unlike drywall—a low-margin, unbranded product—paint is something consumers can seek out by brand. In hundreds of lab tests on the paint, the team showed that the system worked as expected to absorb and release moisture. In two identical rooms filled with humidity sensors, testers painted one with Lilypad and one with ordinary paint, and ran a series of humidity assessments. The new paint kept moisture out of the walls. The process works as long as the paint is on the walls. In other words, the performance is tied to its physical properties, not to chemical additives that can wear out. “Lilypad works because it gives moisture a place to go, and a way back out,” Stein explains. “When humidity rises, water temporarily clings to tiny surfaces inside the paint. When the air dries, that moisture naturally releases back into the room. It’s the same everyday process that makes a bathroom mirror fog up and then clear again. The difference is scale: Inside a gallon of Lilypad, those invisible surfaces add up to about a million times the area of a mirror.” After ensuring that the coating worked as expected on humidity, the company optimized it as a paint. The finish had to be perfect. It was engineered to flow onto walls as smoothly as top paint brands. “We’ve really been engineering this to be a no-compromise paint,” Stein says. “The other thing, as a startup company, without the economies of scale that Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore will have, we’re not going to be able to compete on price. And so we’re necessarily going to be competing with higher-end products. . . . We cannot be deficient in any of that.” Because it’s being sold not just as a paint, but as a coating to control moisture, it’s sold at a premium: A kit with a gallon of primer and a gallon of paint goes for $175. At launch, the coating is available only in white. “There’s a a kind of poorly kept secret within the paint industry that about 80% of paint sales are whites,” Stein says. “So people go into the paint store, they bring the pillows and a sample of the drapes and the whatever and they’re checking all the colors, and after an hour they go up to the front and they say, ‘A gallon of double white.’ We wanted to free people of the decision paralysis and free ourselves of the operational headaches of having to offer every color under the rainbow.” He notes that the company can easily add colors later. Saving energy and money In an ultra-tight new building like a passive house, the paint can’t replace mechanical ventilation. But it can reduce how much ventilation needs to be used, saving energy. “If you can automatically regulate humidity, it can lighten the load on the HVAC system—and that’s not insignificant,” Stein says. “The fraction of energy that goes to managing humidity in a building is typically . . . about 10% to about 40%.” In an older building, Lilypad coating can reduce moisture without the need to install expensive new HVAC systems. Adept Materials is now in discussions with the Boston Housing Authority about a pilot that would test the paint inside public housing apartments that don’t have exhaust fans in bathrooms. “It’s accessible by design,” Stein says. “My hope is that while we are releasing this and people are going to be putting it in fancy remodels, there’s also the opportunity to put it into public housing.” View the full article

Schruveen? Because Nuders sounds too rude View the full article

Need some recipe inspo for dinners this week? Look no further than the latest viral food trend on TikTok: boy kibble. The gym bro’s answer to girl dinner, which gained traction online in 2023 as an artfully arranged snack plate, boy kibble is consumed mainly by men trying to hit their protein goals while keeping calories low. “It’s 8PM and I’m rawdogging some 93/7 ground beef,” one enthusiast posted on TikTok. “We’re not the same.” In an era of strange diets (see meatfluencers scarfing down whole sticks of butter and wellness warriors championing E. coli–riddled raw milk) a meal that consists largely of rice, minced meat, and perhaps a handful of vegetables isn’t particularly shocking. Minor details like flavor matter less than how quickly and efficiently macros can be consumed. Here, food is simply fuel. A profile of the typical boy kibble consumer has emerged. Social media suggests these men are often corporate workers, the kind who also order a slop bowl for lunch from Cava or Sweetgreen. That said, some are pushing back on the stereotype. “Making boy kibble in a girl-dinner-trying-to-add-protein-to-my-meal way, not a scary-villainous-bro way,” one creator posted. The viral food trend has also been referred to as “human kibble” online, with women spotted eating it too. Substitute the ground beef for tofu and I feel horribly seen. Still, scrolling social media, it appears to skew male. The act of cooking and consuming boy kibble is now known as “ground beef o’clock.” One viral video shows two men in stacked apartment windows, both simultaneously pan-frying what we can only assume is ground beef. “Boyhood,” the caption reads. “Running home for ground beef o’clock” reads another video’s caption. In the clip, a man maintains a vice grip on his pack of beef while striding purposefully back to his apartment. Still, many people can relate to the feeling that coming up with a meal that sits within the Venn diagram of healthy, easy, and delicious every night for the rest of our lives can feel overwhelming. It may be part of why a recent viral New York Times article about Americans’ DoorDash habits struck a nerve. “Genuinely unnerved by the DoorDash discourse,” one X user wrote. “I am God’s worst and most unwilling cook and yet when I say ‘I don’t cook’ I mean I put $11 worth of pre-marinated meat in the air fryer and serve it with $2 worth of rice.” Genuinely unnerved by the DoorDash discourse. I am God’s worst and most unwilling cook and yet when I say “I don’t cook” I mean I put $11 worth of pre-marinated meat in the air fryer and serve it with $2 worth of rice. You’re telling me a large number of people can’t even do that pic.twitter.com/mr3H9nTaWW — Charlotte Lee (@cljack) February 2, 2026 In that context, boy kibble isn’t a sign of grindset optimization maxxing. Instead, it’s a simple, nutritious, and affordable way for burned-out workers to take one responsibility off their plates. View the full article

On the way to work, you see a TikTok video of the president admitting to a crime. In the elevator, you hear your favorite band, but the song is completely unfamiliar. At your desk, you open an email from an executive in another department. It contains valid sales information and discusses a relevant legal issue, but the wording sounds oddly wooden. After lunch, the CEO sends all managers a link to a new app she had casually proposed just a few days earlier. Later, you interview a job candidate via Zoom, but the person looks different from his LinkedIn picture. Any or all of these things—the video, the song, the email, the CEO’s app, the candidate—could have been generated by AI tools or agents. But our epistemic defaults, I’d argue, are still set to assume these things are human-created unless available information proves otherwise. We have not yet entered a “zero-trust” paradigm where content is “generated unless proven authentic.” Instead, we find ourselves in an anxious middle ground. The question now arises whenever we encounter a new image, video, or piece of information: Is this AI-generated? Increasingly, the answer will be yes. We are close enough to that zero-trust reality that we can see it approaching on the horizon. Beyond deepfakes Deepfakes were just the beginning. AI-generated video designed to mislead or incite was, not so long ago, seen as a novelty. Now it’s common in everything from revenge porn to politics. AI-generated music has gone mainstream. Last year, a fully generated country song called “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust reached No. 1 on the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart in the U.S. An AI-generated TV ad, made with Google’s Veo 3, Gemini, and ChatGPT, ran during Game 3 of the NBA Finals last year. According to a Gallup Q3 2025 report, 45% of U.S. employees now use AI at work. In a similar vein, the email deliverability firm ZeroBounce found in a September 2025 survey that one in four workers use AI daily to draft emails, and that number has likely increased. The same survey found that a quarter of workers suspect their performance review was written using AI. By most accounts, the use of AI agents in corporate workflows is still in the early innings. But AI companies say we’re moving toward a future in which agents from different departments collaborate to complete back-office tasks, such as compensating suppliers, or to compile decision-support materials, like a business case for entering a new market or making an acquisition. It’s already likely that AI agents, including deep research or business intelligence tools, play some role in assembling reports managers receive at work. Amazon’s AWS says its customers have used AI agents to save more than 1 million hours of manual effort. McKinsey predicts that by 2030 the use of agents and robots could create about $2.9 trillion in value in the U.S. if organizations redesign their workflows for “people, agents, and robots working together.” (Of course, McKinsey wants to help them do that.) Depending on her technical savvy, the CEO mentioned above may have mocked up a new app using Replit or Bolt. These so-called vibe-coding tools can generate a credible proof of concept in a weekend. She may then have handed it off to software engineering, whose developers might use Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor to turn the idea into a production-ready app that connects to company databases and third-party tools. A late-2025 Stack Overflow study claims that about 84% of developers now use, or plan to use, AI coding tools, with roughly half already using them daily. When applying for remote jobs, more candidates are trying to improve their odds with AI tools that enhance their face or voice or generate answers in real time during interviews. The voice authentication firm Pindrop says that in its own video interviews it regularly encounters applicants using deepfake software and other generative AI tools to try to land a job. Gartner predicts that by 2028 a quarter of all remote applicants will be AI-generated. Deepfakes once threatened to distort reality; now the distortion is structural, embedded in the systems that produce culture, manage companies, and decide who gets hired. AI, weaponized But the scammer may have a different goal in mind, and this points to scenarios where generative AI tools aren’t just used as timesavers, but as weapons. AI can help conceal the real identities of job applicants who are trying to extract sensitive company information or, worse, secure a role in order to install ransomware. Scammers are also increasingly using advanced face- and voice-swapping tools for outright fraud. In 2024, a team of scammers posed as top executives of the engineering firm Arup during a video call using sophisticated AI tools. They tricked a finance employee into sending them $25 million. We sense that our epistemic defaults—our AI slop detectors, if you will—may lag behind what technology can already do. And that suspicion is correct. The holy-shit moments accompanying new AI breakthroughs now arrive with striking regularity. Recently, some users and journalists concluded that the OpenClaw agent platform had become sentient after watching agents complete tasks independently, deploy humans to finish assignments, and then gather in their own online forum to discuss it. At the same time, many ChatGPT users are grieving the forthcoming loss of GPT-4o because they developed a personal attachment to the model. New Chinese video generation systems such as ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0 are producing highly controllable video that’s increasingly difficult to distinguish from footage captured by a camera. The next tech wave Social networks, in many ways, act as intermediaries—providing a wide-angle lens through which a person sees the world. To increase engagement and ad views, Facebook distorted that lens, to the detriment of both democracy and children. This week, Facebook-parent Meta is defending itself in a Los Angeles courtroom after years of deploying design features, including endless scroll, that critics say proved harmfully addictive for younger users. That was the last tech revolution, and it depended on user-made content. But with AI, the web can generate its own content on demand. This may put an immense amount of power in the hands of a few AI companies, perhaps even more so than was given to social media companies. With so much money and influence at stake, the question is whether AI companies will do what firms like Meta did not and draw a clear line between human-created and machine-generated content. I seriously doubt it, especially with a billionaire class and a The President administration doing everything possible to stifle legislation that might protect AI consumers. If that’s the case, then maybe taking a zero-trust approach to everything that appears on our screens is the only rational path forward. View the full article

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. One of the clearest messages from KB Home’s leadership during its last earnings call was that the homebuilder—ranked No. 526 on the Fortune 1000—is intentionally shifting away from elevated spec inventory and back toward more built-to-order (BTO)—which will also help firm up its compressing margins given that BTO has higher margins than spec. “When the supply chain crashed [during the pandemic] and our build times significantly extended, it was very difficult to sell a built-to-order home to a buyer when it was going to take 10 or 11 months to build… You can’t lock the interest rate for that long,” Mezger tells ResiClub. So they did more spec. That’s over now. “We’ve significantly compressed our build times… We’re back down to four months or less, which is our historical level,” Mezger tells ResiClub. With shorter cycle times and shifted conditions, KB Home wants to move to less spec. “For years and years, [built-to-order] was 70% to 80% of our business,” Mezger noted. “In the fourth quarter, deliveries were around 50% BTO.”In late January 2026, ResiClub interviewed KB Home CEO Jeffrey Mezger and COO Rob McGibney. Beginning March 1, 2026, McGibney will assume the CEO role, with Mezger—who has served as CEO since 2006—moving into the newly created position of executive chairman. Below are some main housing market takeaways from our recent conversation with KB Home. KB Home says its Florida business is showing signs of stabilization—but the story is hyper-local Speaking on their September 2025 earnings call, KB Home executives said they had cut home prices across Florida—last year’s weakest pocket of the housing market—and were beginning to see signs of stabilization in the Sunshine State as a result. Do they still stand behind that “signs” of stabilization statement? “That’s still largely accurate… But it really remains very market specific,” McGibney tells ResiClub. McGibney adds that some Florida communities have improved, allowing KB Home to lift prices a little this spring. Other Florida communities remain sluggish, requiring additional price adjustments even after earlier cuts. “We look at every community as its own business,” McGibney explained. “It can vary significantly within the same metro—Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville—you name it.” As for magnitude, KB Home estimates most Florida home price adjustments since peak are modest. “Even -10% would be on the extreme side,” McGibney said, referring to price moves from peak levels. “Most of what we’re talking about is in a -1% to -10% range.” The new-home supply pipeline is pulling back some in softer markets “We’ve seen [housing] starts come down year-over-year in many [weaker] markets,” Mezger tells ResiClub. “Especially spec starts.” KB Home says the pullback is helping limit further inventory pressure in markets like Florida, Phoenix, and Denver where “prices just ran up too much relative to incomes.” “It’s good to see that there’s not a lot more inventory being injected into some of the softer markets, and I think that’s going to help places like Florida stabilize,” Mezger says. The new-vs-existing price gap is compressing—and that’s making new construction more attractive According to the ResiClub New Home Premium Index, the median sales price of new single-family homes in October 2025 was -1.2% lower than the median sales price of existing single-family homes. This shift reflects how the affordability-strained housing market of the past three years has played out unevenly across segments. Many existing-home sellers have resisted downward price pressure, often at the expense of being able to transact. Homebuilders, by contrast, have been more willing to make affordability adjustments—most notably through price cuts, incentives, and a greater mix of smaller homes—to avoid a sharper pullback in new-home sales. While there’s no question that the new-construction premium has fallen meaningfully from a few years ago, national median comparisons (i.e., ResiClub’s index) likely overstate the magnitude of the decline somewhat due to mix-shift effects. KB Home says its premium has compressed; however, it still exists. “There’s a lot of [existing] sellers that have stuck to pricing that’s very high, and they haven’t moved off the pricing so it doesn’t trade. And historically, we’ve always, over time, been able to support a 10% premium to resale—and above 15% when there was no resale inventory. The premiums for the industry gapped well above that [during the Pandemic Housing Boom], and you have seen them compress. But in our case, we try to target our product when we open a community to be within that 10% to 15% range. And when we do that, we’ve [still] seen a buyer that will absolutely take new over used,” Mezger tells ResiClub. View the full article

You might think the most important amenities a hotel could provide would be a comfortable bed and a friendly concierge. For workers looking to shake up their WFH routine, though, a lightning-fast internet connection and electrical outlets aplenty may top that list. The chicer cousin of the coworking space, a hotel lobby is no longer a place to simply check in or out: It’s an often overlooked third space in major cities, where guests and remote workers alike can mingle, relax, and get work done. Kayla Terzi is a recent convert. The hospitality real estate broker used to bounce around different cafés while working remotely in New York City—that is, until she discovered the common area of the Soho Grand. “I started noticing hotels offer a quieter, more consistent environment, especially for long calls or focused work sessions,” Terzi, 26, told Fast Company. “At the same time, an energized, cool, social environment helps me stay inspired.” The concept of using hotels as coworking spaces is far from new, but as many companies increasingly opt for hybrid working arrangements, hotels are filling a growing gap between demand and supply when it comes to workspaces. Nearly one in three workers say their company has cut office space since 2020, with 43% reporting that no replacement workspace was provided. That’s according to a November 2025 study conducted by Engine, a booking platform for business travel. Additionally, the rise of the gig economy means there are more freelancers and self-employed workers than ever before. According to the MBO Partners State of Independence in America Report, there were an estimated 72.9 million Americans freelancing in some capacity in 2025. Those workers need space to work, with nearly one in five surveyed by Engine regularly going on “space scavenger hunts” for a change of scenery from their cramped apartments and desk-next-to-bed setups. Instead of turning visitors away, hotels are increasingly opening their doors to take in stray workers—even if they’re not guests. “As long as I order a coffee or something to eat, they usually let me work and hang out for as long as I need,” Terzi said. “Of course, I make sure not to overstay my welcome.” For those who are looking for a little more privacy, services like Engine Spaces make it easy for workers and business travelers to make use of professional workspaces and meeting rooms from the platform’s extensive hotel network, 82% of which otherwise sit empty most of the time, a December 2025 Engine survey found. “People shouldn’t need to call a hotel to get basic information about a meeting space,” Elia Wallen, founder and CEO of Engine, told Fast Company. “It’s 2026, and this is one of the last corners of hospitality that needs to come online, fast.” There’s a gap in the market, apparently. Within the first month of Engine’s beta launch, more than 1,000 spaces were added to the marketplace by hotels, according to the company. What Terzi looks for in a hotel lobby is reliable Wi-Fi, accessible power outlets, and comfortable seating. “One of my favorite lessons is that nothing extraordinary happens in ordinary spaces,” Terzi said. Remember, even if you’re not forking out hundreds or thousands of dollars a night for a room in a five-star hotel, in most cases you can still order a coffee and take advantage of the property’s common spaces. Then, following a productive day of work, seamlessly make your way to the hotel lobby bar. Because why not? View the full article

At $600, Jamie Haller loafers aren’t an impulse buy, but they’ve become one of those rare fashion items people evangelize anyway. The shoes, which resemble classic men’s leather loafers, have quietly built a cult following thanks to a surprising claim: Fans—from TikTokers to Wirecutter—say they mold to your feet the moment you step into them. This didn’t happen by accident. The Los Angeles-based designer spent years seeking out a factory that would be willing to make her loafers using sacchetto construction, a labor-intensive Italian technique more often found in bespoke men’s footwear. “Take all of the hard bits of the loafer out,” she remembers telling the cobbler in her Italian factory. “Just make it skin on skin so that it fits your foot like a slipper.” Now Haller is betting that the same philosophy—comfort engineered through old-world technique—can translate into her next hero product. On February 12, Haller is launching sneakers. The new style is made in Italy and uses the same sacchetto construction that turned her loafers into bestsellers. “I wanted to create a beauty-forward everyday sneaker that has the same very, very special construction that the loafers have,” she says. The sneaker, inspired by climbing shoes and ballet slippers, is low-profile, flexible, and subtly sculptural. “It feels like a hug,” Haller says. The New Class of Luxury Brands The sneaker launch comes as Haller’s business is accelerating quickly. She spent years designing for other labels, including Guess and Bebe. But in 2020—weeks into the pandemic—she decided to launch her own brand. At first, the business was built around a single slipper-like shoe that was a precursor to the loafer. But by early 2023, the Jamie Haller label had grown enough that she felt ready to leave her day job. Since then, the business has taken off. Year-over-year growth was in double-digit multiples early on, and momentum has continued as the business scales. Today, about 65% of sales are direct-to-consumer through her website and Montecito, California, store, with the rest coming from wholesale. The brand has expanded into ready-to-wear, bags, and now jewelry, and is entering more stores globally. Net-a-Porter picked up the shoe line and is adding ready-to-wear this spring—a major inflection point for international reach. Haller’s rise places her squarely within a broader shift in luxury, alongside other female designers like Nili Lotan and Trish Wescoat Pound, who design collections focused on quality and construction. Their clothes offer devoted customers a uniform they can wear repeatedly. “I’m toeing the line between casual and polished,” Haller says. Making Menswear Work for Women What makes Haller’s collections stand out is her deep affinity for vintage menswear. As a child, she loved her grandfather’s overcoats, well-worn briefcases, and shoes. She scours vintage markets to find classic men’s garments that might fit her but often doesn’t like how they hang on her curves. So she taught herself how to translate those garments to suit a woman’s figure, combining the hard edges of menswear with the sensuality of a woman’s body. It is this blending of masculine and feminine that is intriguing to her. Haller says men’s trousers usually don’t fit her well because she has curvaceous hips. To maintain the straight, slung look of a men’s trouser, she pulls seams forward and adds shape only where it’s needed, often in the back rise. “The visual appearance is still very straight,” she says, even though the pattern is doing more work underneath. That same logic applies across categories. Her shirts are cut with straighter armholes and dropped shoulders, often in Japanese yarn-dyed cottons meant to mimic the feel of a perfectly worn vintage Oxford. “It’s always a balance of small and big,” she says—rolling cuffs, opening collars, exposing just enough of the body to create contrast. Jewelry, too, follows this masculine thread. Haller’s debut jewelry collection, launched last fall, centers on chunky signet rings inspired by “the rings you’d see on an 80-year-old Sicilian man,” she says. They aren’t precious everyday pieces, but styling elements—meant to add contrast to an outfit built from polished basics. “It’s the styling layer you put on top of the button-down and the basic trouser,” she explains. At every stage, Haller designs for herself first. She fits everything on her own body and refuses to release pieces she doesn’t love. That conviction seems to resonate with customers, many of whom return again and again. “I’m making clothes they can wear every day very comfortably,” she says. Haller’s success reveals a shift in what women want. Many are eschewing larger, flashier designers for independent labels, brands offering understated clothing that doesn’t overshadow the woman wearing them but rather makes her feel put-together thanks to a relentless focus on quality and fit. Haller’s designs borrow the best of menswear—durability, ease, comfort—without losing sensuality. Now her customers will be able to swap their loafer for a sneaker to add a casual touch to their outfit. “I design to make myself happy,” Haller says. “If I’m wearing something every single day, that’s usually a good sign. And I never take these sneakers off.” View the full article

Sridhar Sharma, Mr. Cooper's chief innovation and digital officer until it was bought by Rocket, is the new president of the mortgage servicing tech provider. View the full article

The Federal Housing Finance Agency and Ginnie Mae agreed to look more closely at credit line use, according to the Government Accountability Office. View the full article

A Washington court denied a plaintiff request, pointing to past Supreme Court rulings that showed a compelling interest for the state's SPCP. View the full article

For many Black tech founders, raising venture capital is often positioned as the ultimate milestone. It signals that your idea is validated, your business is taken “seriously,” and opportunities begin to take shape. As the managing partner of an early stage VC firm, and a 3X Black tech founder that speaks and meets with thousands of founders a year, I can tell you the truth is far more nuanced. Venture capital can be powerful, but it’s not for everyone. Before chasing your first check, founders need clarity, preparation, and strategy. Fundraising is not just about storytelling or networking; it’s about understanding the system you’re stepping into and deciding whether raising venture capital truly aligns with your long-term vision. Venture Capital Is a Business Model, Not a Badge of Honor It’s important for first time founders to understand the venture business model. Investors are not simply backing “good ideas”; we are seeking outsized returns within a defined time horizon. That means VCs are looking for companies that can scale rapidly, dominate large markets, and potentially return 10x, 50x, or even 100x their investment. For founders, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, this distinction matters. Too often, VC is treated as a symbol of success rather than a strategic tool. Before you fundraise, ask yourself these tough questions: Is your business designed to scale quickly? Does it address a large enough market? Can it grow aggressively without breaking what makes it special? If the answer is no, that doesn’t mean your business isn’t valuable, it just simply means venture capital may not be the right fuel for it. And that’s okay. VC Readiness Starts Long Before the Pitch Deck Many first-time founders assume fundraising begins when the pitch deck is finished. In reality, that’s often the final step. True VC readiness starts months earlier. It takes time to develop your story. Even at the earliest stages, founders should be able to clearly articulate who their customer is, what problem they’re solving, and why their solution is meaningfully different from competitors who are already in market. Part of that story are performance metrics, why your team, and why is this the right time. Equally important is team readiness. VCs invest in people as much as products, especially first-time founders. You’re almost betting on the person more than you are the business concept. Founders with complementary skill sets, operational discipline, and the ability to execute consistently tend to inspire confidence with VCs. For solo founders, this often means building a roster of strong advisers, impressive early hires, and/or strategic partners who help de-risk the business. The more prepared you are, the better leverage you’ll have throughout the fundraising process. Holding Your Power in VC Rooms Venture capital, like most industries, doesn’t hold Black founders in mind, and that reality shows up in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. From biased pattern matching to lowered expectations, founders will encounter dynamics that challenge their confidence. That’s why entering investor conversations with the right mindset is critical. You are not “lucky” to be in the room; you earned your place there. I see founders make this mistake often. Investors are evaluating an opportunity, but you need to remember that you’re also evaluating them. Not every VC is the right fit for your business. Alignment, values, and long-term partnership matter just as much as check size and valuation. Holding your power means controlling the narrative around your business, being clear about your vision. It also means taking a collaborative approach to conversation as opposed to a subordinate one. You are supposed to answer questions to VCs but you’re not in a job interview. Confidence (not desperation), when backed by preparation and performance, can shift the entire dynamic of a fundraising conversation. Knowing When Venture Capital Is Or Isn’t The Right Move It’s important to remember that not every successful company needs venture capital. Bootstrapping, revenue-based financing, grants, and strategic partnerships can often provide growth capital without sacrificing equity or control. This is more possible than ever in the era of agentic AI. Founders need to be sure that they have a massive market, directional customer demand that validates the market, and the right team at the earliest stages. Even better is true confidence in scaling the offering to $100M+ revenue in 5–7 years, given ideal conditions. VCs are looking to accelerate something that’s already working, not serve as a lifeline. Raising money out of desperation only leads to two possible outcomes: a bad deal from a predatory partner or no deal at all. Extraordinary people with amazing opportunities know their worth in a room. It’s also important to consider, the larger the raise, in most cases the deeper the partnership with your investors. This is why setting up the correct relationships up front is key. You want to be in position to work with your board, not for your board. Take the time to evaluate whether a VC truly fits your business model, personal goals, and tolerance for risk. The Real Work Starts After the Check Clears Fundraising is often glamorized, but the real work begins after the money is in the bank. Scaling a team, managing burn, hitting milestones, and navigating investor expectations can be more challenging than raising the round itself. Post-funding success requires operational maturity, strong communication, and the ability to grow as an individual. You’ll quickly find that what you did to get to level one does not work to get you to level two. This is where clarity of values matters. Founders who raise with intention and choose investors who understand and respect their vision are better positioned to grow without losing themselves Raising venture capital is a strategic decision. Understand how VC works, prepare deeply, know how to manage your power dynamic with investors, and choose the right path to build your company (not theirs). If you decide that venture capital is the right path for you, the goal isn’t just to get funded. It’s to build something meaningful, scalable, and sustainable on your own terms. View the full article

Every TV and movie critic is loving to hate on Darren Aronofsky these days. The Academy Award-nominated filmmaker—creator of lyrical, surreal, and deeply human movies like Black Swan, The Whale, Mother!, and Pi—has released an AI-generated series called On This Day . . . 1776 to commemorate the semiquincentennial anniversary of the American Revolution. Though the series has garnered millions of views, commentators everywhere call it “a horror,” slamming Aronofsky’s work for how stiff the faces look, how everything morphs unrealistically. Although calling it “requiem for a filmmaker” seems excessive, they are not wrong about these faults. The series, created using real human voice-overs and Google’s generative video AI, does suffer from “uncanny valley syndrome” (our brains can very easily detect what’s off with faces, and we don’t buy it as real, feeling an automatic repulsion). But this month, two new generative AI models from China have closed the valley’s gap: Kling 3.0 and Seedance 2.0. For the first time, AI is generating video content that is truly indistinguishable from film, with the time and subject coherence that will make the 2020s “It’s AI slop!” crybabies disappear like their predecessors in the aughts (“It’s CGI!”) and the 1990s (“It’s Photoshop!”). Seedance 2.0, developed by TikTok parent company ByteDance, released in beta on February 9—exclusively in China for now. It’s widely considered the first “director’s tool.” Unlike previous models that gave the feeling you were pulling a slot machine lever and hoping for a coherent result, Seedance allows for what analysts at Chinese investment firm Kaiyuan Securities call director-level control. It achieves this through a breakthrough multimodal input system. ByteDance has redesigned its model to accept images, videos, audio, and text simultaneously as inputs, rather than relying on text prompts alone. A creator can upload up to a dozen reference files—mixing character sheets, specific camera movement demos, and audio tracks—and the AI will synthesize them into a scene that follows cinematic logic. The results have been startling. “With its reality enhancements, I feel it’s very hard to tell whether a video is generated by AI,” says Wang Lei, a programmer in Guangdong who tested the model to generate a 10-second history of humanity. He described the output as “smooth in storytelling with cinematic grandeur.” One of the tricks is that ByteDance trained it on the vast video dataset of Douyin (China’s TikTok). This gave the model the capacity to understand human nuance, which shows in the everyday shots it produces in addition to the Hollywood-level cinematic shots it can create. And then there’s Kling If Seedance is the visionary director, Kling 3.0 is the rigorous cinematographer. Launched February 5 by Kuaishou Technology, Kling 3.0 has earned the moniker “Motion Engine.” While other models struggle with the basic laws of physics—cars floating, people walking through walls—Kling 3.0 respects gravity and light. “The physics simulation finally lets you art direct motion instead of hoping for it,” Bilawal Sidhu, a former Google product manager and AI strategist, said on LinkedIn. This makes it uniquely suited to be integrated into commercial work where a product must look and behave like a real object. Commenters on Reddit were in awe of the model’s new abilities, especially for long takes and multishot. Kling’s major breakthrough is its Elements feature, which allows users to upload reference videos to lock in character consistency. Before, generative video AI would change the characters’ faces at random, like in Aronofsky’s series. With Kling, they always look exactly the same in any shot it generates—a holy grail feature for filmmakers who need actors to look like the same person from shot to shot. It doesn’t just generate pixels; it understands narrative pacing, cutting, and continuity. The level of realism is so high that Kaiyuan Securities believes the new model is positioned to be “widely adopted first in AI manga and short drama areas, bringing down costs and improving efficiency to benefit companies with large holdings of intellectual property or traffic.” The markets agreed. The release of these models immediately sent shockwaves through the Chinese tech sector. Digital content company house COL Group skyrocketed in the anticipation it will use these models. Shares in studio giant Huace Media and game developer Perfect World rallied 7% and 10% respectively. Investors aren’t betting on a toy; they’re betting on the total replacement of traditional production pipelines in gaming, film, and publishing. An industrial revolution for the visual arts For many professionals in the trenches, generative AI tools are not toys; they are the new standard. Julian Muller, an award-winning director and creative producer, told me the shift is already visible to everyone. “Just from what I saw in the Super Bowl commercials on Sunday, many incorporated AI elements to achieve creative results. We are definitely at the beginning of a shift in what is possible under tighter timelines and leaner production investments,” Muller says. “I’d say these models [Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0] clearly can produce stunning visual results,” Muller tells me, noting, however, that they’re not perfect. “They are very close to being indistinguishable from real production footage, yet I think there is still a detectable artificial quality to it.” Muller does believe that we have passed the point of no return. “Directors and producers who don’t use AI tools to enhance their projects will soon become the exception and not the rule,” he says. “This is te future, and we’re definitely not going back.” This sentiment is echoed by Tim Simmons, a 17-year Hollywood veteran who analyzes the industry on YouTube’s channel Theoretically Media. He told me that while big studios are paralyzed by their own infrastructure, indie creators are adapting. “Adoption at the large studios will remain slower because of the rigid postproduction specs that necessitate building customized AI workflows,” he says. “The challenge is the time required to build such a workflow versus the speed at which AI models are evolving.” Basically, by the time the studios have finished constructing your bridge, the river has moved 150 miles to the north, he points out. “Setting aside the complex discussions regarding unions and talent for a moment, it’s safe to say that through 2026, you’ll see tentative steps from larger studios,” Simmons says. “But for indie studios and international production houses working outside the traditional Hollywood system? Utilization will rise rapidly.” No soul in the machine Not everyone is ready to embrace the algorithm, of course. While the technology has nearly conquered the visual uncanny valley, a deeper, emotional chasm remains. “I don’t think we’ve ever been amazed and saddened like we are today,” Peter Quinn, a VFX artist and director known for his surreal, handcrafted effects, told me via email. “Spectacular ‘art’ has just become so dull,” he says. Quinn argues that we value art not just for the final image, but for the human struggle behind it—the painter mixing colors, the stop-motion artist moving a puppet millimeter by millimeter. “Kling 3.0 and Seedance 2.0, while spectacular, are 2026’s latest shiny AI toys . . . capable of generating soulless marvels, birthed in a data center somewhere,” he says. “It’s interesting how the ‘wow’ fades when we hear it’s AI.” In fact, Quinn is in the process of creating a TV docuseries about the anti-AI. Titled The Creators, it intentionally features dozens of “real” artists who’ve found interesting ways to express creativity by leaning heavily into showing the process, time, and effort it takes to make something. “We see a painter mixing and painstakingly applying paint to a canvas over days, stop-motion artist’s timelapse of weeks of tiny well-considered adjustments, a dancer getting it wrong, a collage artist cutting hundreds of pieces by hand, an artist who can create photo-real pencil sketches, a sculptor who knows the nuance of clay, or a photographer who sees something nobody else does,” he tells me. “It just feels like it’s time. [The] time it takes is what makes it valuable and worthy of looking at or hanging on a wall.” Titans of the industry share his skepticism. Guillermo del Toro has famously dismissed AI art as “an insult to life itself,” while Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan says he won’t use tools that remove the human element from storytelling. In Pluribus’s credits there is a line that says that humans proudly made it. Maybe TV and cinema will bifurcate between a minority of human-only-made art for the galleries and the purists, and algorithmic content for the masses. Just like there are fanatics of real film, like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, who refuse using digital cameras like everyone else in the industry. The new impressionism I understand Quinn, Del Toro, Nolan, and every purist out there. But, from a historical perspective, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Despite the existential angst—and leaving aside the huge problem that this will cause in terms of jobs and copyright issues, a topic for another article—there is reason for deep optimism. We are standing at a moment in history that mirrors the state of art in the late 19th century. Before the industrial revolution brought us the collapsible paint tube and pre-stretched factory-made canvas, painting was an expensive, studio-bound endeavor reserved for the elite who had the patrons that would pay them enough for them to grind their own pigments. The industrial revolution in paint manufacturing liberated every artist. It allowed Monet and Renoir to leave the studio, go outside, and paint the light. It birthed Impressionism. Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0 may be the paint tubes of cinema and TV, which has seen its cost go down with the analog and video revolutions, but it’s still reserved for a very few. Those models—and the ones that will come next from Google and others—truly open the gates for true AI-generated stories that will feel as real as the ones produced with real people, whether the purists like it or not. Simmons believes “there is a ‘new media’ coming that isn’t ‘just movies but cheaper.’” It will be interactive, generative, and personalized in ways we can’t fully articulate yet, he says. “I don’t think we have the language for it yet. Right now, we are looking at the internet in 1990 and asking, ‘How will this change the fax machine?’ The answer wasn’t a better fax machine.” I believe that he is right. By lowering the barrier to entry to zero, Seedance and Kling are inviting billions of people who have never held a camera to tell their stories. With the uncanny valley closed, the gatekeepers are gone. The only thing left is to see what humanity decides to paint with this terrifying, wonderful new brush. View the full article

Microsoft Teams isn’t going anywhere. For most organisations, it’s now the backbone of how work happens… meetings, updates, collaboration, decisions. And yet, many teams still feel stuck in: Back-to-back calls Vague outcomes Too many attendees Meetings that create more work than they resolve That’s exactly why we ran our ‘Love Your Microsoft Teams Meetings‘ Skills Booster webinar. If you joined us live, thank you. If you couldn’t make it or want a refresher, the recording is now available on our YouTube channel: What this skills booster covers In this practical session, Deane explores how to: Choose the right Teams format (meeting, webinar, or no meeting at all) Design meetings around decisions, not updates Use Copilot strategically before and after meetings Capture clear actions and next steps automatically Reduce meeting fatigue without reducing collaboration Microsoft 365 is powerful, but tools don’t fix unclear thinking. Meeting culture is leadership culture “If you want to understand a company’s culture, sit in on their meetings. The habits, the clarity, the energy, it’s all right there.” Meetings reveal everything. How decisions are made. Who contributes. Whether time is respected. Whether accountability sticks. The Skills Booster helps individuals run better Microsoft Teams meetings. But if the problem is bigger than one meeting, it’s cultural. Want to go deeper? If you’re looking for more structured development for your teams, we offer: Mastering Microsoft Teams Meetings A practical workshop focused specifically on using Microsoft Teams effectively from meeting formats to Copilot integration to follow-through systems. Explore the session here. This is ideal if your organisation is heavily invested in Microsoft 365 and wants to get real return from it. Fixing Meetings If the issue runs deeper too many meetings, poor structure, low energy, unclear outcomes, this workshop tackles the culture of meetings itself. It helps teams make meetings rare, purposeful and productive again. Explore our Fixing Meetings session here. Start with better meetings. Then build better meeting culture. Because when meetings work, work works. The post Love Your Microsoft Teams Meetings (Yes, Really) appeared first on Think Productive UK. View the full article

When my business went through a difficult season, I turned to my friend, ChatGPT. I asked the Large Language Model (LLM) for insights and advice on how to leverage my strengths and pivot my business as budgets for women’s leadership programs shifted downward. When the well-framed answers started pouring in, I didn’t pause to check in with myself and ask if my opinion diverged from ChatGPT or whether this advice aligned with my values and mission. In fact, I didn’t even think to ask ChatGPT what might work in my favor if I just stayed the course. I was a “LLeMming”: a term Lila Shroff uses to describe compulsive AI users in The Atlantic. Lila Shroff shares that just as the adoption of writing reduced our memory and calculators devalued basic arithmetic skills, AI could be atrophying our critical thinking skills. A MODERN LEADERSHIP BLIND SPOT In my TEDx talk, I share that we are all susceptible to a cognitive bias called authority bias, which means we are heavily influenced by the opinions and judgments of perceived authority figures. This could be accepting your boss’s input without critical evaluation, or it could be blind trust that ChatGPT always provides the right answers. Large Language Models offer us 24/7 access to advice and guidance. It’s easy to fall into an authority bias toward LLMs because not only do tools like ChatGPT answer all questions with an astonishingly confident tone, but outsourcing our decision-making is convenient. Also known as Cognitive Offloading, the “outsourcing of cognition” helps people manage mental load, memory demands, and decision burden. There is also discomfort and effort involved in turning inward (and checking in is not quick, nor are the answers obvious). Given the fact that LLMs are not well-rounded, critical-minded people, this can be dangerous. LLMs have been known to hallucinate by making up data or resources, reduce cognitive problem-solving skills, and hinder spontaneous creativity. It also has a bias for positivity, which means it can validate or support even the worst of ideas. This bias can be especially powerful in making you drift off track as a leader. Here’s what to do when you realize you’re outsourcing your thinking (whether to an LLM or to a person). GET CURIOUS ABOUT YOUR MOTIVATIONS When I sought out ChatGPT to help me make some business pivots at the beginning of 2025, it seemed like a safe place to go to express my concerns and get advice without judgment. What I was really seeking was a sense of certainty in an uncertain time. It’s tempting to default to our favorite LLM when uncertainty hits. One of my clients, a founder in the events industry, was feeling stuck in a creative strategy. She wanted to offload some of the uncertainty she was feeling around her marketing strategy, and so she asked ChatGPT to give her feedback. It gave her a host of strategies to try. When she asked my opinion, I asked her: Does the strategy align with your values? Does it move you and your team closer to your goals and objectives? Most importantly, does this recommendation energize you, or does it drain you? If you are wondering whether or not to use a strategy or idea suggested by AI, you can ask yourself these same questions. You can also start to take track of your own tendencies, like how frequently you turn to your favorite LLM to solve a problem, or even validate your choices and beliefs. Are you: Trying to eliminate uncertainty? Seeking validation? Craving alternatives? Or looking for novel ideas? When you notice why you turn to your favorite LLM for advice, it becomes easier to slow down and ensure you are using it for the right reasons. TRUST YOURSELF FIRST For over three months, I’ve stopped asking ChatGPT (my preferred LLM) for advice on business challenges after I realized I was drifting off course. While building a skill set around AI and LLM is critical as a leader, this exercise helped me rebuild self-trust. I feel better in my physical and mental health, my creativity has returned, and I feel back in alignment with my business, my decisions, and my future. I made some hard decisions to quit things that weren’t working for me (that were very well supported by ChatGPT). One of my clients realized that she was trusting Claude, her preferred LLM, too much for leadership advice. To combat this, she started to read the advice in a toddler’s voice. It helped her remember that the recommendations, while sounding smart, generally offer no more experience and education than a toddler. It’s often guessing at best. Slow down enough to assess whether this advice aligns with your value system, feels aligned, or even whether it’s advice you’d entertain if a younger coworker suggested it. DON’T OUTSOURCE YOUR LEADERSHIP POWER A client of mine remembers the precise day she started looking for a new job. It was the day she shared her annual marketing strategy with her CEO. As CMO, she had spent months gathering enough data and research to craft this careful plan. Her CEO took her plan, put it in ChatGPT, and told her they would be moving forward with one of ChatGPT’s strategies, instead of her custom-crafted plan. She felt her intelligence was undermined as the CEO swapped her decades of marketing knowledge for a tool that has been known to guess. As modern leaders, we should be both proficient in using AI tools and also cognizant of when not to use them. We have to trust that we can bring all of our five senses to real business issues, and AI cannot. Delegating our approach and decisions to AI leads to a sea of sameness, and in my client’s situation, employee disengagement. In my own experience, defaulting to LLMs for the answer made it harder to think creatively and on the fly for solutions. Remember, your experience, insights, and senses are unique and valuable. They are your competitive advantage. No AI tool can replace this. View the full article

Romance scams used to feel like a cliché. Everyone pictured an email from an overseas “prince” that was poorly written and full of typos and pleas for cash. Now, that cliché is dead. Today’s romance scams are industrial-scale operations. Attackers use artificial intelligence to clone voices, create deepfake video calls, and write scripts with large language models (LLMs). In 2024 alone, the Federal Trade Commission reported that financial losses to romance scams skyrocketed, with victims losing $1.14 billion. The real number, hidden by shame and silence, is likely triple that. Romance scams aren’t just a tragedy for the victims. A successful scam is a massive risk for businesses, too. When an employee with access to sensitive data or funds is compromised, the “heartbreak hack” can harm an entire organization. What Today’s Romance Scams Look Like Phase 1: Contact. Romance scams often start on dating apps—but they’re also prevalent on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn—with a seemingly innocent message. These scams aren’t necessarily about love; they’re about establishing trust. For example: “Is this Alex? We met at the conference last week,” or “Sorry, wrong number, but your profile photo is lovely.” The goal is to continue the conversation on an encrypted app, such as Telegram or WhatsApp, where traditional security measures can’t monitor conversations. Once contact is established, the manipulation becomes emotional. Phase 2: Love bomb. Over weeks or months, the scammer builds intimacy. They’ll share mundane details, such as photos of their dog or personal struggles. But with today’s AI upgrade, LLMs can craft empathetic responses that mimic shared information to gain trust. Eventually, the relationship is leveraged for financial gain. Phase 3: Pivot. Once trust is established, the conversation pivots. The scammer doesn’t ask for a plane ticket or emergency money. They talk about success. They might say, “My uncle has an exclusive crypto trading algorithm.” They’ll agree to ‘teach’ the victim how to invest, showing massive (yet fake) returns on a legitimate-looking app. Then, the victim invests large sums of money. What makes these scams especially dangerous is that old warning signs no longer apply. When the Bot Flirts Back We used to say, “If they won’t video call you, it’s a scam.” That advice is now obsolete. In deepfake video calls, for example, scammers use real-time face-swapping technology. On your screen, the person moves, blinks, and smiles, wearing the face of the stolen identity. While the tech is good, it’s not perfect. Tip: Look for blurring around the neck and hairline or glitches when they pass a hand in front of their face. In voice cloning, scammers send voice notes that sound exactly like the person in the photos. Free AI tools now require less than 10 seconds of audio to clone a voice with 85% accuracy, enabling voicemails that reinforce the persona’s reality. Organizations Need to Pay Attention You might be thinking, “Why is it a CISO’s problem?” Take the now-former CEO of Heartland Tri-State Bank, who fell victim to such a scam. Convinced he was investing in a crypto opportunity for his “friend,” he embezzled $47 million of the bank’s funds, leading to the bank’s total collapse and a 24-year prison sentence. Had the bank’s chief information security officer known what was going on, the situation might have been identified earlier and nipped in the bud. Here are three forms of the corporate blast radius. Embezzlement: Employees with access to payroll or wire transfers may “borrow” company funds, believing they’ll pay it back once their “investment” clears. Sextortion and blackmail: Scammers typically encourage victims to share intimate images. Once they have this, it becomes leverage. BYOD malware: The “trading app” the victim installs is often sophisticated malware that gives the attacker backdoor entry. If that device connects to your corporate network, the attacker is inside. How to Stop a Romance Scam Defending against romance scams requires recognizing patterns in infrastructure and the psychology of influence. Here are three tips to avoid falling victim to a fraudster. Watch for the vibe shift: If a romantic interest mentions cryptocurrency, foreign exchanges (forex), or “nodes” within the first few weeks, it’s a 100% positive indicator of a scam—no exceptions. If they’ve been patient for months, but suddenly an opportunity is closing quickly, this is manufactured urgency designed to bypass critical thinking. The “specific action” test: Try to hop on a video call, and take two actions. First, ask the person to turn their head all the way around. Deepfake models often struggle with extreme movements or facial expressions, and the face can glitch. Second, ask the person to wave a hand in front of or behind their head. AI often gets confused about which object is in front, leading to face distortion. Move beyond awareness training: Social engineering defense used to be treated as a training problem, measured by click rates and phishing simulations. But modern attacks go beyond inboxes, and they don’t wait for employee mistakes. Today’s most damaging campaigns leverage impersonation tactics across email, messaging platforms, and social media, often targeting trusted relationships. Defense requires moving beyond reactive training toward early detection of impersonation and coordinated disruption, supported by human risk management practices that help employees recognize how attacks like romance scams begin and escalate. Trust, But Verify There’s now little distinction between personal life and corporate risk. When an employee or executive is emotionally compromised, so is the organization. Human intuition can’t win a fight against AI-powered psychological warfare. The heart will always be a vulnerability, and in the age of AI, it’s also an attack vector. Romance scams prove that attackers don’t need to break a firewall; they just need to break a heart, and it’s time to defend with rigor. View the full article

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