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The U.S. workforce is facing a pivotal challenge: A widening skills gap that threatens economic growth and innovation. While demographic trends—like declining birth rates and a shrinking pipeline of young workers—are real, the more actionable issue is the growing mismatch between the skills employers need and those available in the labor market. According to Pearson’s recent “Lost in Transition” research, nearly 90% of U.S. employers report difficulty finding candidates with the right skills, and more than half of workers feel unprepared for the demands of the future workplace. This problem is decades in the making, and its consequences will be global. Without …

Each business has its unique challenges, but one commonality today is that AI is poised to disrupt almost every business everywhere. Organizations aren’t the only ones rapidly shifting to adopt AI—attackers are too, and they’re doing it faster. The implications of this AI arms race are alarming for legitimate businesses around the world. Security teams must rapidly evolve their cyber strategy to meet these new threats, moving away from a reactive posture that detects and then responds after an incident happens. To outpace attackers, organizations will need to be preemptive instead—deterring, neutralizing, and preventing threats before they happen. HOW AI IS CHANG…

CIOs are grappling with how to leverage AI, but most are asking the wrong question. It’s not about an “AI strategy.” It’s about a business strategy powered by AI. At Samsara, when we focused AI on clear business problems, we cut support chat volume by 59% with virtual agents, our IT help assistant auto-resolved 27% of tickets during the pilot, and engineers accepted about 40% of suggested code from AI code-assist, freeing teams to ship faster and tackle harder work. My takeaway is that if you treat AI as a separate initiative, you’ll chase tools. If you treat it as leverage on a business KPI, you’ll create impact. The VC Mindset: Investing in AI My philosop…

Across America, a new generation of farmers is reimagining what it means to work the land. They are engineers, ecologists, and entrepreneurs—people who see farming not only as a way to grow food, but as a form of innovation. In fields across the country, these farmers are harnessing soil science, biodiversity, and technology to restore what decades of extractive agriculture have depleted. Their work represents one of the most powerful opportunities of our time: The opportunity to regenerate our planet from the ground up. Yet, the odds they face are immense. Land prices have soared, access to capital is limited, and isolation comes with choosing a career path few under…

Miami Art Week usually exists behind invisible velvet ropes. It is a place where private dinners, celebrity walkthroughs, and invitation-only installations dominate the social landscape. But this past week, Capital One tried something unusual. It opened one of Art Week’s most insular cultural moments to people who are not part of the traditional art world by giving its cardholders access to the kind of programming that normally requires a personal invitation, using Art Week not simply as a cultural stage but as a strategic laboratory for understanding what premium consumers now expect from financial brands. The brand’s presence featured a collaboration with artist…

For global companies, Africa’s promise has long been tempered by a persistent operational myth: that the continent is not ready for complex business. The reality is different, however. The barrier isn’t a lack of demand, but the inability of traditional global systems to handle Africa’s unique financial landscape. Nearly 400 million African adults remain on the fringes of the formal financial system, yet digital adoption is exploding. The conversation has decisively shifted from basic financial access to a more critical question: How can multinationals efficiently manage their core operations like paying suppliers, collecting revenue, and moving money across borders, …

Massachusetts’ highest court heard oral arguments Friday in the state’s lawsuit arguing that Meta designed features on Facebook and Instagram to make them addictive to young users. The lawsuit, filed in 2024 by Attorney General Andrea Campbell, alleges that Meta did this to make a profit and that its actions affected hundreds of thousands of teenagers in Massachusetts who use the social media platforms. “We are making claims based only on the tools that Meta has developed because its own research shows they encourage addiction to the platform in a variety of ways,” said State Solicitor David Kravitz, adding that the state’s claim has nothing to do the company’s al…

The new Pentagon press corps gathered last week for their first in-person briefing. That’s since almost all credentialed reporters from traditional media companies surrendered their passes in October to protest new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s strict media policy. Refusing to sign a 21-page Pentagon document that in effect banned journalists from trying to solicit any kind of information that was not pre-approved, the Pentagon instead issued passes to a newly credentialed corps of influencers, conspiracy theorists, and conservative commentators who happily agreed to the strict rules. The handpicked press corps were active on social media last week as they doc…

Planner vs. Engineer is a well-known professional rivalry in the infrastructure world. The arguments are sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile, sometimes about important issues, sometimes insignificant. I’m in a peculiar spot because of my career as a “plangineer.” My parents helped me buy a civil engineering degree, but several years into my career, I bought the certified planning certificate. I know the two camps very well. The roundabout question Roundabouts are one of the many Planner vs. Engineer debates, and it happens to be a very important issue where emotions cloud good judgment. As much as I criticize the engineering profession, they are generally correc…

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built Apple in a garage, the incumbents they were up against were slow-moving hardware companies. When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, Barnes & Noble wasn’t pouring billions into machine learning or cloud infrastructure. This doesn’t mean that it was easy for these entrepreneurs to change the face of whole industries. It was not. But it was at least possible. Back then, giants could be out-innovated because they were bureaucratic, cautious, and often blind to the potential of what the upstart start-ups were building. The situation is very different today. The startup landscape has changed radically. Where once it was populated by boots…

IBM announced on Monday it is acquiring Confluent for $11 billion, sending shares of the data streaming platform up about 29% in morning trading. By midday trading, at the time of this writing, Confluent (CFLT) stock was holding steady, up 29%. International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) stock was up about 1.5%. Confluent provides a leading open-source enterprise data streaming platform that connects, processes, and governs reusable and reliable data and events in real time, foundational for the deployment of AI. The deal is an example of how IBM is actively engaging in the increasingly competitive, high-stakes AI arms race that’s now dominating technolo…

On November 26, a water leak at Paris’ Louvre Museum damaged between 300 and 400 historical books in the Egyptology and scientific documentation section. Then, on December 8, workers at the museum voted to initiate a strike over poor working conditions. And that’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the Louvre’s overall woes so far this year. For years, the Louvre has been struggling with a combination of old, weathered infrastructure and increased foot traffic brought about by mass tourism. But in 2025, the museum has been hit by the full consequences of operating out of a relatively un-updated building to house some of the world’s most influential (and valuabl…

A Cinnabon worker in Wisconsin has been fired after a racist outburst directed at two customers went viral, the Georgia-based cinnamon roll chain said. Cinnabon posted a statement on social media that the worker, who it did not identify, was “immediately terminated” by the franchise owner over a “disturbing video” of the incident. “Their actions and statements are completely unacceptable and in no way reflect the values of Cinnabon, our franchisees, or the welcoming environment we expect for every guest and team member,” the company added in a follow-up statement to The Associated Press on Sunday. The video was posted on TikTok and showed a white, female emplo…

Letterboxd, the movie tracking app and social media platform for cinephiles, first announced its new online film rental platform earlier this year at Cannes Film Festival. Now, more details about the launch date and titles have been revealed. The Video Store will officially launch on Wednesday, December 10, and will feature nine films across two curated shelves, which includes titles from nine countries. Here’s some of what film fans can expect: Think a Todd Haynes deep cut, to a restored version of a Filipino classic, and more, including Chile and Indonesia’s submissions for the upcoming 98th Academy Awards, a hit from the 2025 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, a…