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Even as digital and physical threats reach record levels, advances in security and privacy are giving us stronger defenses than ever before. New tools can now scan the wireless spectrum to flag hidden risks, protect faces and voices from AI misuse, map out who has access to sensitive data in real time, and guard large language models against prompt injection and data leaks. Together, these innovations are reshaping how we safeguard both our information and our personal safety. Bastille Networks For keeping tabs on airborne threats Wireless signals are more crowded than ever, from Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to 5G and beyond—and the data they carry is as valuable as anything sent over fiber. That makes them an appealing target for attackers. Bastille’s platform uses software-defined radio and AI to map the wireless environment in real time, detect threats, and trigger instant alerts while integrating with major security platforms such as XDR, CAASM, SIEM, SOAR, and Zero Trust systems. Based in Santa Cruz, California, the company holds 34 patents, with more pending, and has tripled its annual recurring revenue in the past year. Its customers include Fortune 500 firms, government agencies, and military units, with deployments already protecting 5 million square feet of intelligence community facilities. In its most recent Series C round, Goldman Sachs joined Bessemer Venture Partners to invest $44 million. Loti AI For helping people control their name, image, and likeness in the AI era How do you keep control over your face in the age of AI? Loti AI does it at scale with a massive network of tens of thousands of servers that collectively scan everything uploaded to the internet each day. The three-year-old Seattle-based company’s system combines large-scale web crawling; multimodal detection across voice, image, and video; and an automated rights-enforcement layer tailored to the entertainment and media industry. Loti AI reports a 95% takedown success rate within 17 hours. With regulatory momentum from the proposed No Fakes Act, $16 million in new funding from Khosla Ventures, and partnerships across media and security, the company has also launched a free app for individuals. Pangea For keeping LLMs safe and secure As companies adopt LLMs and AI-driven applications, protecting the data flowing through them has become a critical concern. Pangea’s AI Guard acts as a proxy that developers can access via API, sitting between applications and the LLM or agent to defend against advanced prompt injection attacks such as token smuggling and multilingual exploits. Its suite of tools—including sensors and a Chrome extension—lets administrators monitor for sensitive-data leakage while applying native access controls for agentic and RAG systems. To keep latency low, Pangea uses smaller LLMs to flag malicious or inappropriate content and prevent confidential data from entering models. The four-year-old startup, which pivoted from cloud security after the rise of ChatGPT, was acquired by security giant CrowdStrike in September 2025. Veza For monitoring access and privileges in real time As apps, databases, and agents proliferate, companies are hard-pressed to know who has access to what, what they can do with that access, and whether they should even have it. While traditional identity governance tools rely on static roles and manual processes, Veza’s “identity security platform” looks at authorization metadata in real time—the data that governs what users and machines can actually do across apps, infrastructure, and data systems, from AWS and Salesforce to Active Directory and Snowflake—to build a dynamic graph of permissions across human and nonhuman identities. That hands admins more fine-grained visibility and control through risk detection, least privilege analysis, just-in-time access, and real-time access reviews. Founded five years ago in Los Gatos, California, Veza more than doubled sales last year and raised $108 million this spring in a round backed by Atlassian, Snowflake, and Workday, valuing the company at $800 million. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process. View the full article

Construction and real estate are in a challenging moment, with prices beyond reach for many buyers and little sign of near-term relief. Still, several recent breakthroughs could bring the goal of homeownership closer for more Americans, while other innovations focus on providing shelter for those who might otherwise go without. Beewise For a buzzy way to help resurrect the bee population Honeybee colonies in the United States could decline by as much as 70% in 2025, according to researchers at Washington State University. Beewise aims to counter that trend with the BeeHome, an autonomous hive that manages routine tasks and helps commercial beekeepers reduce colony losses. The system also considers human interaction, limiting nuisance when hives are placed near populated areas. Through Beewise’s app, beekeepers can monitor colonies with high-resolution cameras, track health metrics, and rely on AI and robotics to address problems in real time. Cuby Technologies For offering a possible solution for the housing crisis By blending automation and modular manufacturing, Cuby can set up a housing factory in under two months and then produce 200 code-compliant homes every 30 days. Those domiciles are delivered at a 40% cost savings and with 80% less waste—and come with aerospace-level tolerances, making them a lot more durable than prefabricated homes. It’s more than theoretical: Cuby is already building homes in Eastern Europe and has deployed a facility outside of Las Vegas that will create 1,890 homes in the next 11 years. iGuide For making it easier for online home shoppers to narrow their list Online listings have become a crucial part of the home-buying process, with shoppers looking for ways to evaluate properties efficiently. iGuide gives real estate professionals tools to create virtual tours and detailed floor plans, and the company says the technology can shorten sales timelines by up to 39%. The system relies on a 360-degree lidar-equipped camera from Planix that lets agents capture a property in full during a single visit. Multiply Mortgage For making houses a little bit less expensive for buyers With mortgage rates at 10-year highs and housing prices increasingly out of reach for first-time buyers, Multiply Mortgage offers a tool that can reduce loan interest rates by nearly a full percentage point. The platform uses AI to automate tasks such as document review, underwriting, and compliance checks, passing along savings that can lower rates by up to 0.75%. Borrowers are also paired with mortgage advisers for guidance throughout the process. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process. View the full article

A smooth retail experience depends on efficient shipping and hassle-free purchases, two elements that can create significant cost implications for retailers. These honorees in the commerce category are developing infrastructure that can make more efficient use of freight trucks, streamline theft detection, and ease the checkout process in warehouse club environments. Flock Freight For reducing inefficiency in truckloads When it comes to freight trucks, wasted space is wasted money. Flock Freight estimates that the equivalent of one in three trucks runs empty because of inefficient deck-space utilization. The Certified B Corporation has built on its patented Shared Truckload technology, a kind of demand-side “carpooling for boxes,” with STL AddOns, which allow suppliers to dynamically add their compatible shipments even after a truck is en route, reducing costs for shippers and carriers while cutting emissions. One trucking customer says STL AddOns helped it achieve an 88% increase in earnings. Sam’s Club For automating the receipt-checking process The popularity of warehouse clubs often leads to long lines as staffers ensure that customers’ items appear on the receipt. To speed things along, Walmart’s Sam’s Club has leveraged an array of cameras that point down at shoppers’ carts and use a proprietary computer vision algorithm that identities items using shape, size, color, and branding markers. The results are matched against a customer’s digital receipt within 400 milliseconds, eliminating the historic wait time when departing the store. Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions For reducing retail “shrink” without hassling shoppers Retailers lose $100 billion to shoplifting, fraud, and just plain checkout error. The Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions ELERA Security Suite uses edge AI to help guard against this “shrink” at self-checkout lanes, produce scales, and grocery carts without bogging down the shopping process. The system also uses AI to help customers more easily ring up their own orders—by, for example, detecting the kind of unpackaged produce being checked out. In Toshiba’s 2024 fiscal year, ELERA processed more than 25 million transactions. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process. View the full article

The companies that create the foundational technologies that enable other companies’ progress are embracing AI, of course. But that’s only part of the story. These honorees made big progress in 2025 on quantum computing, battery science, and other fronts. AIStorm For giving sensors the power of neural networks AIStorm’s technology pushes AI to the edge of computing experiences by allowing sensors to run neural networks—a feat with applications everywhere from consumer electronics to factory-floor robotics. The company has a deal with Audioscenic to put latency-free, position-adaptive 3D sound in laptops, monitors, and soundbars starting in 2026. Aledia For charting a bright future for AR glasses For AR glasses to have a shot at catching on, they need display technology that’s compact, power-efficient, and capable of rendering bright imagery. Aledia’s 3D nanowire microLEDs emit red, green, and blue light from a single chip—a key to achieving those goals. To ensure scalable quality control, the company has invested $200 million in its own manufacturing line in Grenoble, France. Classiq For helping experts harness quantum computing’s advances As quantum computing’s potential to blaze through algorithms that classical computers can’t tackle at all edges toward reality, it’s time to think about implementing specific applications in a range of domains. Domain experts at companies such as BMW, Rolls-Royce, and Deloitte use Classiq’s Qmod functional modeling language to design programs. Deep knowledge of quantum computing is not required. And the results run on cloud platforms from Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. D-Wave For showing what quantum computing can do right now The future of quantum computers is all about getting the technology out of the lab and into the real world. Available both as a cloud service and in an on-premises form, D-Wave’s sixth-generation Advantage2 computer packs more than 4,400 qubits, the building blocks of quantum computing’s unprecedented capabilities. Customers such as defense contractor Davidson Technologies are already using the Advantage2, whose “annealing” technology sets it apart from the more common gate-based designs used by other quantum computer manufacturers. In March, D-Wave reported that the Advantage2 performed a calculation job that would have taken the U.S. Department of Energy’s Frontier supercomputer almost a million years to complete. Enovix For building a battery for the AI era Thanks in part to AI, devices such as smartphones, headsets, and smart glasses are rapidly evolving. But most are still dependent on lithium-ion batteries, a technology that long ago plateaued—and, under certain circumstance, can be dangerous. Enovix’s fully active silicon anode batteries house strips of silicon in a steel container, overcoming the risk of swelling and damage that’s inherent to lithium-ion battery design. The company, whose next-generation EX-2M battery offers 22% more energy density than lithium-ion, says it has agreements with large manufacturers of smartphones, mixed-reality headsets, and IoT products to adopt its batteries in upcoming devices. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process. View the full article

The next frontier of consumer tech isn’t just about adding more screens to your life or boosting your devices’ processing power. Instead, it’s empowering users to accomplish more, from powerful new maker tools to more efficient skincare solutions. On the home front, assistive robots are suddenly in reach, and AI cameras are learning to provide better pet care instead of just surveilling humans. Of course, there’s cool screen-related stuff too, including wildly thin foldable phones and increasingly immersive AR glasses. Anker For 3D printing onto pretty much anything Printing 3D textures onto materials such as wood and metal usually requires industrial-grade tools, but Anker has plans to bring this technology home. Its $1,699 EufyMake E1 is about the size of a desktop computer and uses an ultraviolet lamp to cure a special kind of ink. Hobbyists can use it to print custom patterns and textures onto phone cases, glass bottles, ceramic plates, and more. Anker says it’s close to shipping the first units to early backers on Kickstarter, where the idea raised nearly $47 million. Honor For putting slimmer batteries in new places Honor continues to prove that its foray into new battery chemistry isn’t a fluke. With its Magic V5 foldable phone, Honor has pushed battery capacity to 6,150 mAh—versus 4,400 mAh on Samsung’s rival Galaxy Z Fold 7—while still offering the slimmest foldable on the market. New efficiencies in its silicon carbon anode battery chemistry allow it to incorporate a record 25% silicon content, for an even denser battery. Honor has also brought the same type of battery to its MagicPad 3 tablet, hinting at a future in which all of our gadgets last longer on a charge. L’Oréal For taking skincare analysis below the surface level To help folks find the right skincare products without months of tedious trial and error, L’Oréal believes it needs to get under the skin. With its Cell BioPrint assessment device, the company can analyze skin cell samples to determine their biological age and look for underlying issues such as chronic inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction. Machine learning algorithms then generate personalized recommendations within minutes, based on how the skin might react to different ingredients. L’Oréal says it’s the culmination of more than a decade of research into the biomarkers that indicate potential skin problems. It plans to launch the tech in Asia later this year. Petlibro For building a pet cam with purpose For pet owners who want to keep track of their furry friends throughout the workday, Petlibro aspires to do more than just capture video. Its Scout camera uses on-device image processing to recognize individual pets from multiple angles, then uses cloud processing to understand when they’re playing, eating, drinking, or using a litter box. Eventually, Petlibro hopes to flag signs of potential stress or illness so that owners can take action earlier. As a way to stay informed about pet behavior, it beats setting up a general-purpose webcam that surveils your entire family in the process. Roborock For giving a hand to robot vacuums New versions of robot vacuums tend to be pretty boring, with incremental upgrades to cleaning power or room mapping. Roborock‘s Saros Z70 includes something truly new, with a five-axis robotic arm that can pick up small objects and carry them to predefined spaces. While the arm’s only purpose right now is to move things out of the way while cleaning, it could also clear a path to more ambitious home robots that tackle a wider range of tasks. Xreal For busting the AR glasses field wide open Peering through augmented-reality glasses can feel a bit claustrophobic, with narrow fields of view that squeeze whatever projected screen is in front of you. Xreal’s One Pro glasses represent a big step forward, with a 57-degree field of view that stretches the picture to your peripheral vision. For now, Xreal’s glasses mainly act as portable monitors that can plug into gaming systems, phones, and laptops, but a true foray into augmented reality is coming. The company is partnering with Google on a separate set of lightweight glasses for Gemini AI, codenamed Project Aura, with motion sensors for gesture control and cameras to interact with the outside world. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process. View the full article

If there’s one thing businesses have in abundance, it’s data—in some cases, far more of it than they know what to do with. AI can turn daunting mountains of information into knowledge that’s accessible to staffers across the organization, regardless of their technical chops. These honorees are helping their customers unlock better understanding of data to do everything from supercharging sales teams to choosing the right music to license. Baseten For giving companies big and small a head start on inference Anyone building an AI application has access to powerful open-weight LLMs such as DeepSeek-R1. But the fact that the models are freely available doesn’t mean they’re easy to adopt. Running on thousands of GPUs spread across more than 10 cloud providers, Baseten’s Inference Stack lets startups build apps based on open AI without having to assemble and manage their own infrastructure, freeing them from the need to sweat details like uptime and capacity. Startups such as Descript, Abridge, and Gamma build on Baseten’s platform; its customer base has grown 5.5x in the past year, with larger companies representing a growing percentage of the mix. Gong For capturing the nuance of customer interactions No information is more valuable to companies than the data reflected in customer meetings, calls, emails, and other interactions. Gong’s revenue AI is engineered to outperform general-purpose LLMs at extracting actionable insights from such data. The company’s new AI Agents then use it to help revenue teams make strategic decisions relating to existing and prospective customers. In May, Gong announced a partnership with Microsoft that allows users to build custom autonomous agents for use in apps such as Teams, Outlook, and Dynamics 365 Sales. Incorta For letting companies talk to their data Incorta’s Nexus is a generative AI platform designed to help people throughout companies get more out of live operational data stored in systems such as Oracle, SAP, and Workday. Its copilot-assisted experience allows employees to retrieve information by posing natural language questions, reducing their reliance on IT and data engineering teams. The list of big customers Incorta has signed up—including Broadcom, Genworth, Shutterfly, and Skechers—conveys Nexus’s broad applicability. Known For building an AI operating system for marketers Marketing agency Known’s Skeptic applies AI to an array of challenges faced by its clients. It can perform automated bidding on their behalf, track media spend efficiency, and score assets for brand compliance. A tool called “The Big Lebotski” helps marketers pinpoint Reddit conversations they might want to join. In the past 12 months, Known says, Skeptic has led its clients to more than $500 million in growth opportunities and savings. Songtradr For turning music into actionable data Songtradr has used AI to generate more than 18,000 data points about each of the more than 200 million audio tracks it’s analyzed. That wealth of information powers multiple tools for its customers, including music licensing recommendations, MusicIQ scores that help brands connect with audiences, and enhanced search for global music platforms. More than 400 audio dimensions are covered by the company’s analysis, including energy, genre, instrumentation, and mood. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process. View the full article

The coming years offer an opportunity to transform education. AI can provide precise insights about student needs and deliver lessons in a way that resonates with students’ interests and learning style. However, the technology also raises questions about academic integrity and the future nature of learning and teaching, questions that emerging tools are taking thoughtful approaches to addressing. Amira Learning For accelerating literacy with AI and neuroscience The Amira Reading Suite is designed to capture virtually every aspect of a student’s reading performance, using AI and neuroscience to prioritize instruction needs. Thanks to a partnership with Anthropic, the platform now provides instruction via voice-based conversations. Working in collaboration with educators, the company says its tool has been shown to accelerate reading growth by up to 70% faster than traditional methods, which translates into an average of seven additional weeks of reading growth in a single school year. eSelf For personalizing AI tutor avatars Many students who could benefit from a tutor don’t have that opportunity because of cost or location. eSelf is developing lifelike avatars that help students understand academic material, practice independently, and prepare for exams in more than 30 languages, with culturally relevant touches such as posing a question about baseball to a student in the U.S. versus one about soccer to a student in Brazil. In March 2025, the company teamed with Harvard and Israel’s largest textbook publisher to deploy its tutors to every school in Israel. Grammarly For tackling AI cheating at the source Long before ChatGPT started composing essays, Grammarly was helping millions of users polish their prose. Now the company is focusing on helping students prove that their work is authentic. Taking advantage of the 500,000 apps and websites on which it’s used, its opt-in Authorship tool can identify which content has been generated by AI, modified by AI, pasted from another source, or edited by Grammarly or a native spell-checker. Launched in October 2024, the tool was used to generate more than 4 million reports in its first eight months. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process. View the full article

Companies that endure beyond 15 years understand that innovation is not optional—it’s essential to fend off constant disruption, stay ahead of competitors, and sustain growth. The opportunities are endless, from modernizing entrenched processes to strengthening business continuity. Axon For helping law enforcement coordinate manhunts The proliferation of public cameras, vehicle sensors, and other data sources can greatly aid law enforcement in locating suspects, but only if the information is efficiently collected and analyzed. Axon Fusus provides a unified interface that integrates video feeds, alerts, analytics, and vehicle data from Axon devices, community cameras, and partner technologies. The result is not just more effective pursuit but what one police captain describes as “precision policing,” where fewer innocent people are questioned. Fusion Risk Management For turning static continuity plans into actionable simulations Businesses often focus on refining operations when conditions are favorable but approach contingency planning with less urgency. Fusion Risk Management‘s BC Plan inFusion addresses this gap by eliminating the fragmentation and incompatibilities of traditional continuity plans using automated scenario testing, predictive modeling, and cross-functional coordination. Early adopters have cut manual plan-management time by more than 70%, while organizations that have faced crises report marked improvements in plan accuracy. Milwaukee Tool For helping pipe fitters find a new groove For decades, professionals needing to groove pipes faced a trade-off: portable tools that were difficult to operate or large machines that were cumbersome to deploy. Milwaukee Tool’s cordless M18 Fuel Roll Groover changes that equation, using built-in intelligence for quick setup and eliminating manual ratcheting and cranking. After an operator enters pipe specifications, the tool calculates the ideal force, speed, and indexing, adjusting automatically to the material. One foreman estimated it saved his crew 40 to 50 hours on a project—much of it otherwise spent on exhausting manual labor. TraceLink For making the medical supply chain safer The circulation of counterfeit or unsafe medications poses a serious public health risk. TraceLink’s Opus is a supply chain management platform designed to bring order to a highly fragmented system spanning multiple transaction types and thousands of partners. Built for operations professionals without coding expertise, it helps ensure the safe and timely delivery of prescriptions. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process. View the full article

Takeover of Nexperia plunges Netherlands into US-China tech warView the full article

When people ask me, “What do you do?” the question still gives me pause. For over two decades at Christie’s, I could easily answer by handing out a business card with my title clearly stated: global managing director. It had a nice ring. But the longer I stayed in corporate life, the more I realized I wanted more titles under my name, not fewer. Over those years, I led many teams and eventually became global head of strategic partnerships, a division I launched in my second decade at the company. But my true passion began at 24, when I volunteered as a charity auctioneer for nonprofit galas after work. That passion grew into a career that took me to more than a thousand stages over 20 years, and ultimately became what I was most recognized for outside the company. In 2019, I published my first book, The Most Powerful Woman in the Room Is You, based on lessons I learned in the corporate world while excelling in a role traditionally dominated by men. While my Christie’s card still read global managing director, I preferred the titles auctioneer and now author. In the years that followed, I pursued the “white space” those titles opened, ultimately leaving Christie’s to launch the Lydia Fenet Agency, representing charity auctioneers. The years I spent honing my skills onstage prepared me to fully embrace life as a multi-hyphenate. Today, I hold the titles of CEO, auctioneer, author, keynote speaker, retreat host, social media influencer, and mom of three. This November, I’ll host my first summit at Rockefeller Center, The Most Powerful Woman in the Room Summit. I’ve built a career and a life that are not only lucrative, but also more fulfilling and exciting, because I answer only to myself. Here are three lessons I’ve learned that helped me build a thriving multi-hyphenate career: 1) Become an expert in one thing—and look for the white space To succeed as a multi-hyphenate, you must drill down on what makes you unique and become an expert. Once you’ve defined your expertise, you can build from there. My foundation is auctioneering, but that skill opened doors into public speaking, consulting, teaching, and storytelling. Identify the adjacent skills you’ve developed and move into that white space. 2) Say yes to what gives you energy In corporate life, I said yes to everything, even when it wasted time and drained me. Now, as an entrepreneur, I say yes only when I want to. If I don’t, I pass along the opportunity to someone in my network and stay connected. Saying yes with intention creates energy instead of depleting it. 3) Have fun with failure The faster you learn to fail, the more successful you’ll become. I usually juggle five or six projects at once, knowing half won’t work out. If you tie your happiness to one outcome, failure feels devastating. But when you diversify, you learn, adapt, and keep moving forward. Success comes and goes, so swing big, and remember: You’re the only one who defines what success looks like. View the full article

Designer and educator Omari Souza conceived of his new book Design Against Racism: Creating Work That Transforms Communities, well before the The President administration began its campaign to demonize diversity, equity, and inclusion. But the ideas the book wrestles with aren’t a reaction to a single moment in time; they’re deeper, and go to the heart of design’s pitfalls—and potential. Souza, a first-generation American of Jamaican heritage, born and raised in the Bronx, now teaches at the University of North Texas in Denton. In September 2020, his online event “The State of Black Design” drew more than 2,000 live viewers. Souza’s book challenges design students and professionals alike to rethink consequences, collaboration, and context, and offers fresh insights and arguments about what design is really for. We spoke in September. The book is propelled by the idea of “restorative design,” which I think we can say descends, or is evolved, from the idea of restorative justice. Can you, for those unfamiliar, say a little bit about what restorative justice is? Restorative justice is a social science practice that focuses less on punitive punishment and more on communal healing. So it is asking questions about who’s been harmed, what their needs are, whose responsibility it is to meet those needs, and how can relationships and trust be built and repaired in order to move forward. It also believes that punitive measures actually perpetuate harm rather than resolve the issue at hand. Restorative design is really this idea of: How do we survey whether or not the products, services, or artifacts we create cause harm to folks? And if they do, how, as designers, do we attempt to repair the harm that’s been done and reestablish trust with the audiences that have been harmed? With that in mind, how did the book come to be? Why did you feel the need to do this? I have not been in academia as long as some of my contemporaries, but one of the things that I have noticed with the field of design is that it treats the practice as a trade. There’s a handful of skills they want you to learn, not a lot of conceptual thought, or of teaching students how to quantify or even think about some of the harm that the designs that they make may have. So I’ve been thinking for years about, “How do I introduce to students frameworks to consider people that happen to fall on the fringes, who may be harmed by particular practices?” And I came across a book by Zora Neale Hurston, whose primary focus was African and African-diasporic folklore. So she would travel from Harlem, New York, before the end of the Jim Crow South, before women had the right to vote or own a bank account without their husband’s permission. She would drive through the South as a Black woman on her own, to capture and tell these stories. And her efforts were rehumanizing these audiences and capturing details about them that were otherwise omitted. Her entire process was around humanizing and giving the same respect and gravitas that she would give to anyone. The book arrives in a moment that has become hostile toward formal efforts to increase and implement diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and we’ve seen a lot of companies backing away from those programs and that kind of branding. I wonder if you see the current cultural-political climate making the book’s message more challenging? More urgent? Both? I think both, for a number of reasons. When I started writing this book, it was a few years shy of the George Floyd incident. So there were a number of companies and organizations and political officials that were making pledges to assist in rectifying harm that was already being caused. I assumed the book might not be as important to people by the time it came out, just because there seemed to be so much momentum around acknowledging these issues. But I still felt that it was important to have a book like this that can be a part of the design dialogue. With the current administration, it has felt like there’s a ton of rollbacks to progress that was being made, and it has felt that a lot of work like this is being targeted. I’m a professor currently in the state of Texas, and with Senate Bill 17, there are certain words that we can’t even say in a classroom. As a UX designer and a research professor, it’s really hard to teach people how to design experiences for folks without talking about the different needs of different audience groups. I think it makes it extremely important for professors to find a way to still teach those skill sets. Listening, particularly to overlooked or unheard voices, seems like a big theme of restorative design, and the book. If you’re designing a school, you write at one point, talk to the janitors, not just the principal. A lot of creative practices have traditionally been top-down. So you have this figure who happens to be charismatic and extremely talented, who will create this philosophical approach that other people buy into. And then once they buy into it, they begin to distribute it. So it’s kind of built from the top of the hill and then rolls its way down as the accepted approach. But if you spoke to the janitor and designed the school for the janitor, the students, as well as the principals, you might find some innovations in the school experience that you otherwise may not have had if you only spoke to the principal. At one point in the book, you write, “everyone designs; it’s an innate human ability.” It struck me because I feel like the profession spent the last 20 or 30 years arguing that designers are a unique problem-solving species. But in the book, you write a lot about “co-designing” and why it’s so important to the restorative design practice. I think designers sometimes elevate themselves above the people that they’re designing for, versus designing alongside them. And that’s kind of what I mean by co-design. It’s very hard to design something effectively for an audience that you have no connection to. An exercise that I do for my students is to have them map their experience attempting to go to the bathroom at a concert or a sporting event. I just ask them to list the steps. And for the men, the steps are always three to four. For the women, the steps range from eight to 30. I’ll ask the women to explain to the men the complexity of the factors shaping those steps. It ranges from the length of the line, the size of the stall, whether there’s a place to hang their purse, the complexity of the outfit, whether they’re with a child, on their cycle, yada, yada, yada. I ask the men to raise their hand if they felt that they would’ve been able to equitably design a bathroom experience for the women without their input. All of them put their hands down. I ask the women: Do you feel that you can design an equitable experience for yourselves and the men in the room? They keep their hands up. But then I’ll add a caveat. What if the woman you’re designing for is trans, or what if she’s disabled? What if she’s from another section of the world where the bathroom toilet flushes with a different mechanism or the symbols are different? The hands begin to drop. So it’s my way of saying that yes, you’ve been trained as a designer, and yes, you might be intelligent. But without immersions into particular cultures, you don’t know the bottlenecks that they have. There’s a lot in the book about understanding histories, but as you say in your conclusion, a big part of the idea is to imagine and frame a different future or different futures. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because one of the criticisms often used against DEI seems to be that it’s too backward-looking and negative, dwelling on past wrongs instead of looking ahead. I find that whenever people say that something is too backward-looking, it’s really their way of saying that looking back is painful. I think for me and for the book, the idea of restoration or healing is never comfortable. If you get a tattoo, if you break an arm and it’s healing in the cast, it’s wildly uncomfortable. The healing process is always something that is inconvenient. However, the question then becomes what do you want? If harm perpetuates, then it becomes hard to establish trust and it becomes hard to move forward. So when envisioning a brighter future, we have to think about: What actions do we need to take in the meantime? There are a few examples that I used in the book of companies that wanted to establish partnerships in particular communities, and before beginning, they needed to emphasize the history of corporate relationships with particular communities. If you’re looking for an end to conversations around DEI, or around systemic oppression, then in many regards addressing systemic oppression and then helping to heal the harm that’s caused, that’s how you stop it. It’s how you stop it. It feels like some want to step over the wound and hope that it heals on its own; like if people don’t pay attention to it, it won’t hurt anymore. But in reality, it’s more akin to a hunger or broken bone than it is to a scratch, and it’s not something that you can just ignore. View the full article

Repeat after me: You do not need expensive software just to make basic edits to PDF files. Maybe if you’re a legal professional collecting countless e-signatures on confidential documents, a tool like Adobe Acrobat is a necessity. For the rest of us who just need to sign, merge, split, or fill out PDF documents, there are simple online tools that do the job just as well. The latest advancement in online PDF editing? One that doesn’t require you to upload any of your personal files—and doesn’t even need an internet connection to function. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Try this instead of Acrobat The next time you need to edit a PDF, check out PDF Barber​. ➜ PDF Barber​ is a free online PDF editor that processes your documents directly in your browser, promising not to ever upload them to its own servers. ⌚ It takes just a minute or two to edit a PDF file, with no logins or usage limits. ✅ To get started, choose the type of edit you want to perform, make your adjustments, and download the modified file. As of this writing, PDF Barber offers 14 different editing tools—including tools for splitting and reordering pages, merging separate documents, appending signatures, and filling out form fields. Each of these tools is separate from one another, which makes them individually pretty simple to use. If you want to rotate a PDF file, for instance, you can just head to the Rotate page, then choose which pages to flip. (This does mean, however, that if you want to make a few different kinds of successive edits, you’ll need to download a new resulting file each step of the way.) As for PDF Barber’s privacy claims, I tested them by loading the website, turning off my computer’s internet connection, then using a bunch of the editing tools. Most of them worked entirely offline, though the Split tool produced an error message when I tried to download the zip file with all my documents. ⚠️ While most of PDF Barber’s tools work offline, though, you do still need an internet connection to load the website initially. You can install the site as a progressive web app, but it still needs a connection at the outset. For 100% offline use, PDF Barber offers a Chrome extension​—though it’s limited to 30 edits before requiring a $10 lifetime license. When I tried installing the extension with Chrome’s Safe Browsing settings set to “Enhanced,” the browser threw up a “Proceed With Caution” message, noting that the extension isn’t trusted by Google’s Enhanced Safe Browsing measures. Google says new extension developers may need a few months​ to become trusted​. That may be the issue with PDF Barber’s Chrome extension, which otherwise doesn’t require access to your browsing data or any other unusual permissions. But as long as you have any kind of internet connection, you can just bypass the extension, load the PDF Barber website, and edit unlimited documents for free, knowing that nearly all of it is working offline. And if your work is so sensitive that you must be completely cut off from the internet to do it, maybe you should be paying for a solution after all. PDF Barber is primarily web-based​, with no downloads needed—though you can install its Chrome extension​ if you’d like. The tool is completely free to use, so long as you stick to the web version. You’ll only run into a payment requirement if you opt to use the browser extension beyond its limited trial period. The PDF Barber ​privacy policy​ is clear about the fact that the service handles all processing locally, on your own device, and doesn’t collect or even so much as see your documents, files, or any manner of personal info. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletter—starting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app that’ll tune up your days in truly delightful ways. View the full article

For more than a century, a stretch of riverfront in Toronto was an industrial wasteland, with oil storage tanks, factories, and shipping infrastructure sitting on former wetlands. Now, part of the site is a sprawling new park, and next year, construction will begin on a new neighborhood inside it. “It’s incredibly transformed,” says Emily Mueller De Celis, a landscape architect at the firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, which won a competition to “renaturalize” the area in 2007. “Rather than walking around in and amongst oil refineries and other industry, now you are immersed in nature, walking along the banks of a river with spectacular views back to the city.” The area was dotted with factories in the late 1800s. The river was dredged and corralled into a channel as the city tried to flush pollution from the factories into the nearby harbor. By the early 1900s, the wetlands in the area—now overrun with toxic waste—were filled in to build a new industrial district. Pollution kept getting worse. The changes to the river also caused new flooding. By the 1980s, activists were calling for the restoration of the river. By the early 2000s, the government launched an effort called Waterfront Toronto to revitalize the area and create new flood protection, and it started to demolish some of the old industrial infrastructure. The scale of the $1.4 billion project, along with inevitable delays, meant that it’s taken a very long time. “This is the largest infrastructure project in North America,” says Mueller De Celis. The project carved out more than 1.3 million cubic meters of soil, reshaping a new mouth for the river and creating a new island where the park, called Biidaasige Park, now sits. The design helps protect adjacent areas from flooding. From the beginning, Waterfront Toronto wanted to use green infrastructure for flood protection. “They had the vision to identify that this wasn’t going to be an engineering solution,” Mueller De Celis says. “It would be a solution that really tied us back into the naturalized system of the [river] valley, and into the public realm to get people access to nature.” The excavated river is now deeper and surrounded by new wetlands where the water can spread, with berms that help hold water back from other neighborhoods. The island where the park sits was built high enough to avoid flooding. A coalition of partners working on the project carefully designed the park to help bring back wildlife to the area. The park is filled with trees that will eventually form a canopy forest. Along the edge of the river, where engineers might typically use stone or concrete, the team brought in large trees and locked them together in a pattern that helps prevent erosion—and creates new “fish hotels” in the empty spaces as habitat. Other felled trees were laid down hanging over the water to add more new space for amphibians, fish, and birds. Red-tailed hawks, eagles, and otters have returned. This summer, the first phase of the park opened to the public, and the next phase will open in 2026. The park surrounds the new island, and the center will soon become a mixed-use development. Design work started this year on streets and infrastructure, and construction of new homes is expected to begin next year. Eventually, the island will be home to 15,000 residents, 3,000 jobs, and another 15 acres of park space. Nearly a decade ago, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary focused on urban technology, hoped to build a smart city along a nearby part of the waterfront. But it abandoned the project in 2020. Toronto is now focused on using the whole area to help deal with its housing shortage. At the beginning of 2025, the Canadian government, along with the city and provincial governments, invested another $975 million to build new housing on the waterfront. The park and redesigned river had to come first, to make sure any new development would be protected from floods. “It’s a different way of thinking about building within a city,” Mueller De Celis says. View the full article

In order to believe in the idea of "competition" in credit scores, the Washington housing community must believe that large institutional investors who buy whole loans and mortgage-backed securities are really, really dumb, writes the Chairman of Whalen Global Advisors View the full article

The housing agency director told Sen. Cortez Masto a Federal Home Loan Bank reform review is ongoing and took issue with Sen. Warren's inquiries about meeting transparency. View the full article

BlackRock’s assets under management surge as Wall Street earnings kick offView the full article

We live in a culture that glorifies leadership. Titles like manager, director, or CEO are treated not just as jobs, but as glamorous career destinations (even when the actual job is anything but). In the corporate world, ambition and talent are often defined by how many people report to you, and the ladder of success is measured by headcount under your name. You can be the most talented coder, designer, analyst, or scientist, but sooner or later the corporate current will push you toward leading others. It is the professional equivalent of a rite of passage: You can only go so far unless you manage people. This obsession with leadership explains why nearly everyone wants to be one, and why admitting that you don’t may get interviewers and recruiters to label you as “unambitious.” The fact of the matter is, that the number of people aspiring to lead far exceeds the number of people who can actually lead, especially if we measure leadership talent not by the ability to get the job but actually having a positive impact on your team and organization after you do (yes, this applies to politics, too). Data from organizational psychology is sobering: Most people are not competent leaders. Studies suggest that 50% to 60% of leaders are seen as ineffective by their employees, and engagement surveys regularly show that “my manager” is the single biggest factor driving dissatisfaction at work. In other words, the demand for leadership positions is far greater than the supply of leadership competence. The real problem is not the enthusiasm for leadership, but that people are bad at evaluating their own leadership potential. Many confuse ambition with aptitude, confidence with competence, or popularity with effectiveness. Fortunately, science has given us some reliable markers. Leadership is not mystical. It can be assessed. And while there is no perfect recipe, there are 10 questions you should ask yourself if you are considering the move from individual contributor to leader of others. Think of this as a checklist, not a guarantee of success, but a necessary starting point. Do you have technical expertise? In the past, leaders were legitimized because they knew more than the people they supervised. The master craftsman became the workshop head. The top surgeon ran the department. The best soldier led the unit. Today, AI and automation are eroding the value of expertise. A machine can often answer factual questions faster and better than your boss. Still, expertise matters, not just what you know but whether others see you as credible. A leader without expertise is like a captain who cannot sail: The crew will not follow. The key is not to be the smartest in the room, but to have demonstrated competence in a domain that earns you the respect of those you lead. This legitimacy is essential. Without it, your authority will be questioned at every turn. Are you a fast learner? Intelligence is often misunderstood. It is not about trivia knowledge or SAT scores. It is about the ability to learn new things quickly. In leadership, this matters enormously. Every new project, crisis, or strategy requires you to absorb information, process it, and adapt. Smarter leaders are more likely to solve complex problems, avoid repeating mistakes, and keep pace with change. The real measure is not raw IQ but whether you can demonstrate learning agility. The best leaders are not those who never make mistakes, but those who rarely make the same mistake twice. Are you curious? If IQ is the ability to learn, curiosity is the willingness to do so. It fuels exploration, questions, and the humility to say “I don’t know.” Curiosity also enhances intelligence because it pushes you to acquire knowledge you did not have. Meta-analytic studies show that trait curiosity predicts leadership effectiveness. The paradox is that curiosity tends to decline with age and expertise. The more senior we become, the more tempted we are to rely on what we know instead of questioning it. The best leaders resist this temptation. They continue to ask questions even when they already have answers. Do you have integrity? This should go without saying, but it rarely does. Leadership without integrity is not just ineffective, it is dangerous. Integrity is not about never making mistakes, but about having a moral compass. It requires altruistic values and, critically, self-control: the ability to resist temptations, avoid abusing power, and make decisions that benefit the group rather than the individual. History is full of leaders who failed on this count, from corporate scandals like Enron to political leaders who enriched themselves while destroying their nations. A lack of integrity may not always prevent people from climbing to the top, but it always determines how they are remembered. Do you have humility? Humility is the underrated secret of leadership. It means knowing what you do not know, being self-critical, and acknowledging when proven wrong. It also means being able to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you in certain areas and not feeling threatened by it. We crave humility in leaders precisely because it is so rare. Politicians who admit mistakes are refreshing because they are exceptions. CEOs who credit their teams rather than themselves stand out because they are uncommon. Humility is not a weakness, but an understated strength. Without it, leaders become delusional. With it, they inspire trust. Are you ambitious? Ambition has a bad reputation, but it is essential. Leaders need drive, energy, and persistence. The crucial distinction is motivation: Why do you want to lead? If your ambition is fueled by power hunger, vanity, or narcissism, you will likely harm others in the process. The right kind of ambition is prosocial. It is about wanting to make others better, to create impact beyond yourself, and to leave a legacy that matters. Do you have people skills? Leadership is the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team. That requires emotional intelligence: empathy, listening, influence, and conflict resolution. It will be very hard for you to lead if you cannot manage yourself, or manage others. You can be brilliant, curious, and ambitious, but if you cannot connect with people, you will never sustain their trust or loyalty. Think of great coaches in sports. Their tactical knowledge is important, but their ability to motivate, read the mood of a locker room, and manage egos is what separates the great from the mediocre. Leaders in business face the same test. Your success is measured not by your individual performance, but by the collective performance of the group you lead. Can you tame your dark side? Everyone has one. For some, it is arrogance. For others, impulsivity, paranoia, or aggression. These “dark side” traits are not inherently bad, since they often fuel ambition and resilience, but when unchecked they derail careers. The difference between great and terrible leaders is not the presence of flaws, but the ability to control them. Good leaders know how to edit themselves, even when nobody forces them to. They resist the temptation to “just be themselves” when their unfiltered selves would damage relationships. As I illustrate in my latest book, Don’t Be Yourself: Why Authenticity is Overrated and What to Do Instead, some of the best leaders succeed not by being authentic, but by being disciplined versions of themselves. Can you inspire others? Charisma is a multiplier. When you are competent and ethical, charisma amplifies your impact. Leaders who can communicate a vision with confidence, passion, and clarity are far more effective at rallying teams. But charisma without substance is dangerous. It can make bad leaders even more destructive by persuading people to follow them off a cliff. Think of Martin Luther King Jr., his charisma mattered because it was grounded in integrity, purpose, and competence. Compare that with countless populist leaders whose charisma fuels division and chaos, not to mention charismatic leaders who were utterly destructive (most populist brutal dictators or colorful tyrants fit the bill). If you are ethical and competent, be as magnetic as possible. If you are not, please be boring. Are you coachable? Leadership is never a finished product. Even if you check every box above, the world will keep changing, and your skills will eventually become outdated. The only way to stay relevant is to be coachable: to seek feedback, listen, and adapt. Some of the most successful leaders in history were relentless learners. Leaders who stop learning become rigid, outdated, and irrelevant. Being coachable is not about deference. It is about evolution. So, should you be a leader? If you can answer “yes” to most of these questions, you are better prepared than the majority of people who aspire to lead. If not, it is worth reconsidering. There is no shame in remaining an expert, an individual contributor, or a collaborator without a managerial title. In fact, organizations increasingly recognize the value of technical specialists who do not want to, or should not, manage people. Of course, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the elephant in the boardroom: Plenty of people ascend to leadership not because they are especially talented, but because they lucked into the right family, the right network, or the right school tie. Nepotism, privilege, and elite membership still grease the wheels of many leadership careers. I’ve left these off the checklist for the simple reason that not everything that is should be. Just because these forces still work doesn’t mean we should celebrate them, let alone confuse them with actual leadership potential. Leadership is not for everyone, nor should it be. But when done well, it can transform teams, organizations, and societies. When done badly, it can destroy them. The checklist above is not just about career advancement, it is about protecting others from the wrong kind of leadership. If you do not have the integrity, humility, or people skills to lead, the most responsible thing you can do is abstain. In the end, leadership is not about you. It is about what you do for others. And that is the question worth asking before you chase the title: Do you want to lead for their sake, or yours? View the full article

’Tis the season for carved pumpkins, god-awful candy corn, and an inevitable workplace costume that lands someone a well-earned talking-to from HR. Halloween is near, which means it’s the perfect time to reflect on a tale from the cubicle that’s even spookier than Tales From the Crypt. It starts with three words that would strike fear in the heart of anyone who’s ever worked in corporate America. Performance. Improvement. Plan. Taken at face value, the phrase sounds gentle, maybe even helpful, like the start of a company-sponsored self-care journey. In reality, a PIP is usually the workplace equivalent of a death sentence, a corporate guillotine that gives “being on the clock” a whole new meaning. At least that’s how it felt early in my career when it happened to me. The news hit like a cold email from HR with no greeting. I remember sitting across from my manager (let’s call her Lisa) at a long-ass boardroom table, fluorescent lights humming, my coffee going cold as she explained the “expectations moving forward.” She had that tone people use when they’re rehearsing empathy. And while I tried to keep my composure, all I could hear as Lisa spoke was, “Your days here are numbered.” I was working at a startup—one of those scrappy, ever-changing companies where job descriptions are more like suggestions. Every few months, my priorities shifted, as did my boss, team, and sometimes the department I worked in. Still, I kept my head down, remained adaptable, and did solid work. But at some point after my third job title change, I started to lose steam. Projects dragged. Deadlines slipped. Some of it was on me—constant change can burn out even the most proactive employee. But a lot of it came down to the chaos: unclear direction, competing priorities, constant pivots. I’d go from one “urgent” request to another, without anyone assessing my workload or considering whether I was merely spinning my wheels. So it was a wake-up call when Lisa summoned me into that 1:1 meeting and told me I was being put on a PIP (no Gladys Knight). I didn’t just need to tighten up; I needed to learn how to move in a room full of vultures. There’s something humbling about having your performance questioned in black and white. I felt embarrassed, frustrated, and, honestly, a little angry. I’d been juggling a revolving door of responsibilities while management kept changing the rules mid-game. But once the sting wore off, I realized this was a turning point. I could either take it as a big L like the late Harlem rapper or treat it as feedback. I decided to lock in. The thing is, I had a publicity problem. So many of my contributions were going unseen, unrecognized, or worse, attributed to someone else. I set out to change that. Asana became my amigo. Weekly emailed status updates to Lisa became the norm. Long division had nothing on the way I was showing my work. I also stopped waiting for clarity. If directions were vague, I asked all of the questions until I got specifics. If priorities clashed, I pushed for alignment. It wasn’t easy; when you’re a young professional, advocating for yourself can feel like being confrontational. But I also understood how silence had been making me complicit in my own confusion. Believe it or not, things improved. My work got sharper. My time management leveled up. Even Lisa softened a bit, noticing that I was handling the pressure with a new kind of steadiness. I started to believe I might survive the PIP and come out on the other side even stronger—not unlike how 50 Cent emerged from the gunsmoke of nine bullet wounds before becoming a household name. Then the layoffs hit. Lisa sat there silent while her boss broke the news: My role was being eliminated as part of a “restructuring.” I raised an eyebrow when she assured me it had nothing to do with the PIP. It didn’t really matter, though. All that growth, all that effort—and I was still out of a job. But I didn’t walk out defeated. I knew I’d done my best work during that PIP. I learned the annoying art of workplace communication and receipt-taking. I stood up for myself. And I left that job with more confidence than I had going in. That was the real win. (Not to mention the years-later apology from Lisa, who admitted that she “undervalued” me. Better late than never, I guess.) My Scottie PIPpen days taught me a difficult but necessary truth: Sometimes you can do everything “right” and still get caught in the wrong storm. But if you use that pressure to sharpen your processes, you’ll come out stronger, no matter how it ends. So if you ever find yourself cast as the main character in your own workplace horror story, don’t panic. Get organized. Get visible. Get curious. (And get your résumé updated, just in case.) Because it’s not about proving anyone else wrong. It’s about proving to yourself that even when things get scary, you’re built to survive. The Only Black Guy in the Office is copublished with LEVELman.com. View the full article

OpenAI never wanted to build a chatbot. As an early beta tester for OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, I can vouch for the fact that the company was caught totally off guard by ChatGPT’s runaway success. An email that OpenAI sent me on November 28, 2022—just two days before ChatGPT came to market and kicked off a trillion-dollar, multiyear, economy-distending AI scramble—didn’t even mention the new interface. Rather, it bragged about the company’s then-revolutionary “DaVinci” model and how it could “deliver clearer, more engaging, and more compelling content” and allow developers to “take on tasks that would have previously been too difficult to achieve.” From the breathless tone of the email, it was clear that OpenAI had bigger ambitions than creating a text-based tool to help you argue with your insurance company or write KPop Demon Hunters fanfics. As Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of product, admitted this week, the company “got a little sidetracked” by ChatGPT. Now OpenAI’s true ambitions are becoming increasingly clear. In Turley’s words, OpenAI “never meant to build a chatbot.” Instead, the company always planned “to build a super assistant.” And that’s exactly what it’s now doing. The ‘super app’ In America, our app landscape is highly fragmented. Yes, if you want to know how fast bamboo grows or figure out the chords for R.E.M.’s 1985 classic “Wendell Gee,” you might fire up the ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini app and ask the bots. If you want to post to social media, though, you’re likely to reach for Instagram, TikTok, or—perhaps steeling yourself for the possibility of encountering MechaHitler—X. Need to bank? Open up the crappy app for your local bank branch with the UI from 2012, and hope for the best. Buying something? There’s Amazon, Instacart, and DoorDash for that. Want to secretly determine how much wealth your friends have accumulated? Zillow to the rescue! In other parts of the world, apps aren’t like that at all. Many countries, especially in Asia, have super apps that integrate all those functions and more into one tool, often controlled by a single, über-influential company. In China, WeChat provides messaging and gaming, but also mobile payments, social media, and mini apps for things like ride-hailing, paying bills, and even getting city services. In many Southwest Asian countries, Grab provides financial services, rides, food delivery, and much else. In the Middle East, Careem provides similar functions. Africa, Latin America, and many other geographies have similar super apps. America doesn’t. And to American technology companies, that’s a big problem. Because the apps are so all-encompassing, their creators control incredible amounts of capital and power. Tencent, the company behind WeChat, had revenues of more than $90 billion and profits approaching $30 billion in 2024—much of it driven by WeChat—and is growing fast. That’s an especially colossal sum in China, making Tencent one of the country’s most profitable companies, behind only a handful of largely state-controlled banks and conglomerates. Here in America, Elon Musk had ambitions to turn X into a super app, but his politics and penchant for second grade humor got in the way. No one else has really taken up the gauntlet. Until now. OpenAI Eats Everything At its October 2025 “Developer Day,” OpenAI made clear that it intends to create a super app, and will spend an almost limitless amount of money to make that happen. During the event, the company announced the ability to run apps directly within the ChatGPT interface. These are very similar to the “mini apps” that have made WeChat so powerful. Initial partners include Spotify and Zillow, but the list will inevitably grow. Simultaneously, the company has rolled out multiple functions that make it look less like a chatbot maker and more like a super-app company. Last week, OpenAI launched new features that let the bot spend your money for you, as well as a protocol to allow direct purchasing from any merchant who opts in. OpenAI’s Sora social network—where all the content is joyfully fake—takes on TikTok and has immediately leapt to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store. And earlier this year, OpenAI shared that it plans to launch a browser to rival the ubiquitous Google Chrome. OpenAI seems to suddenly be everywhere, doing everything. That broad-ranging ambition is the hallmark of a super-app maker. And again, if all the signals weren’t clear enough, Turley essentially confirmed the company’s new direction with his “super assistant” comments. So, will it work? If any company can create a super app, it’s OpenAI. With its wild consumer success, the company has access to bottomless pits of capital. ChatGPT has 800 million weekly active users, and that number continues to grow. OpenAI is the first company in a generation to create an entirely new way of interacting with computers. Its intelligent chat interface lends itself to the integration of other apps and services. My own experience using Instant Checkout confirms that buying things within the ChatGPT interface really is seamless. Still, America’s existing tech titans won’t go quietly. Google is reportedly expanding its own Gemini app, and its Nano Banana system proves it can still grab the public’s attention. Meta already has its own Sora doppelgänger. And while OpenAI is growing quickly, its revenue is only around $10 billion—a drop in the bucket compared to Google’s $350 billion, and still a fraction of the revenue of its Chinese super-app rivals. OpenAI would love to take over every aspect of your digital life. And it may. But despite the hype, the company still has a very long way to go. View the full article

Measures extend trade war between Washington and Beijing to third countries View the full article

Metal has staged a bigger rally than gold this yearView the full article

Official figures showed payroll employment rose by 10,000 between July and August View the full article

The race among dockless e-bike companies to expand in the city is causing disruption View the full article

While most employers offer mental health care coverage as part of their health insurance packages, major gaps in care exist. According to new research, many employers aren’t sure how mental health care services are being used by employees. The 2025 Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) Employer Survey, released Friday, polled professionals at 400 companies with 500 or more employees who made benefits decisions. Mental health coverage was a given almost across the board (97% of respondents said their company offered it), and several companies covered nontraditional programs, like financial therapists (62%) and mindfulness apps (74%). However, there were also several gaps in coverage. Only two-thirds of companies covered substance use treatment. Only one-third of companies covered ongoing treatment for chronic conditions, and only a quarter covered care for those with “diverse cultural backgrounds and unique employee needs.” Even lower on the spectrum was stigma reduction campaigns that help create an environment that encourages employees to seek mental health care. Interestingly, the gaps in coverage could be explained, at least in part, by the fact that companies largely aren’t tracking whether their employees are using mental health services. Only 22% analyzed claims data to ascertain how benefits were being used. Likewise, only 37% of employers measured how satisfied employees were with their health care plans overall. “Complete and transparent access to claims data enables employers to design benefit programs that truly meet the needs of their employees and their families,” said Margaret Faso, policy director with the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, in a press release. “This study reinforces the importance for employers to continue efforts to achieve transparency to better support the health and wellbeing needs of their workforce.” However, the survey also found that employers don’t feel that the breadth of mental health care services, pricing, or quality should be their responsibility. Only 10% said that the employer should be responsible for those aspects of care plans, and instead, that responsibility is on insurance companies (28%), federal (30%), and state governments (24%). View the full article

US Treasury secretary says China’s restrictions on critical mineral will hurt their own international standingView the full article