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Many organizations are racing to build AI strategies, but too often they focus on adopting the latest tech, rather than creating the environment to support it. The reality is that lasting transformation is fueled by people, which requires companies to take a good look at their culture. At Architech, that’s exactly what we did. By prioritizing and rewarding innovation, we aligned our culture with our AI strategy—and it worked. This year, we are proud to be recognized as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Workplaces. We are one of 10 companies globally recognized by Fast Company for excellence in AI, automation, and machine learning. Here’s how we built an award-…

The debate around AI ROI has gotten loud—and, frankly, a little cyclical. One moment, we’re hearing that AI is the key to exponential growth; the next, that 95% of AI pilots fail. At Addi, we’ve been able to leverage AI to grow 4x faster while operating at ~2x the profitability of BNPL peers. This year alone, we’ve saved more than $500,000 from our AI initiatives. But how have we accomplished such strong AI ROI? The difference between performative AI and AI with returns isn’t in which model or tool you’re using; it’s how your team is using them. Here’s how we’ve driven genuine AI-native team adoption and built a workflow/data pipeline that actually makes sens…

For decades now, we have been told that artificial intelligence systems will soon replace human workers. Sixty years ago, for example, Herbert Simon, who received a Nobel Prize in economics and a Turing Award in computing, predicted that “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.” More recently, we have Daniel Susskind’s 2020 award-winning book with the title that says it all: A World Without Work. Are these bleak predictions finally coming true? ChatGPT turns 3 years old this month, and many think large language models will finally deliver on the promise of AI replacing human workers. LLMs can be used to write emails and reports, summ…

I love FM radio. It’s okay: You can call me a Luddite. My alarm clock is the local public radio station. I love toggling between a few music stations while driving, or even while reading at home. And during a road trip, there’s nothing quite like discovering a community station with random locals curating their own playlists—it gives you a sense of where you are that no Spotify playlist can match. The problem: It’s hard to know what stations exist locally, even in your own town but particularly while on a road trip. You can explore the dial, which has a certain serendipity, but what if you just want to . . . know? And be able to tune in with or without an actu…

The job market is rough right now. Mass layoffs have people desperately clinging to their current positions. The Great Flattening has more and more workers competing for a dwindling number of roles as entry-level roles dry up and AI potentially rendering entire career paths obsolete. Long-term unemployment is at a post-pandemic high, with more than one in four workers without jobs unemployed for at least half a year. Which makes it a nerve-wracking time to be moving through any sort of career upheaval. If you do find yourself unmoored in the current market, whether or not by choice, it could be a good time to recalibrate and get clear on your next steps. Th…

Shares in CoreWeave Inc are sinking this morning after the company revealed its third-quarter 2025 results yesterday. While the New Jersey-based AI infrastructure firm more than doubled its revenue from the same quarter a year earlier, it also revised down its full fiscal 2025 forecast, sending its stock price tumbling. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, AI infrastructure company CoreWeave announced financial results for its Q3 2025, which ended on September 30. There was some good news for the quarter, including revenue of nearly $1.4 billion (up 134% year over year) and a revenue backlog of $55.6 billion (up 271% YoY). Revenu…

Amazon ushered in a new era for television advertising when it converted Prime Video into an ad-supported experience by default in 2024. By the middle of this year, some 130 million U.S. viewers were on Prime Video’s ad tier, watching between four and six minutes of ads per hour, according to an Adweek report. The move is part of the company’s long-term plan to dominate television advertising as viewership shifts from traditional broadcast and cable TV to streaming platforms. “The digital advertising landscape is rapidly evolving with streaming TV becoming mainstream,” says Kelly MacLean, VP of Amazon DSP, the company’s ad-buying platform. Under MacLean, Amazon’s…

To the uninitiated, the term Scope 3 might sound like an obscure technical label. However, for those managing corporate carbon emissions, the term can inspire a range of emotions, from dread to dismay. Scope 3 emissions are generated by indirect upstream and downstream operations, and typically account for the largest share of a company’s carbon footprint. They also lie outside the organization’s direct control. Although one of the sustainability agenda’s most daunting items, technology can provide solutions to the Scope 3 challenge. There’s mounting pressure to tackle these emissions, as institutional investors such as pension funds pay close attention to the cli…

Apple said it has pulled two of China’s biggest gay dating apps, Blued and Finka, under pressure from Chinese authorities, in the latest sign of a tightening grip on the LGBTQ+ community. An Apple spokesperson said in a statement that the company removed the two dating apps from China “based on an order from the Cyberspace Administration of China”, without further elaborating. “We follow the laws in the countries where we operate,” the spokesperson told The Associated Press. A check by The Associated Press on Tuesday found that the two apps are not available on Apple’s app store in China, although an “express” version of Blued could still be found. It was uncl…

On Tuesday, SoftBank, the Japanese financial giant, announced plans to dump all 32 million of its shares in Nvidia, the AI chip maker. The news won’t be the needle that pops the AI bubble, but it did cause enough of a stir to make Nvidia’s shares drop 2% Tuesday morning. The bad vibes were muted somewhat by news of what SoftBank says it will do with the proceeds of the sell off, along with those from the sale of some of its $9.17 billion T-Mobile stake: The firm will double down on another big bet in the AI space–OpenAI. SoftBank expects to directly invest $30 billion in OpenAI this year, according to its second-quarter financial statement in September. And it had …

Self-growth requires two things parents often lack: time and energy. Between cleaning messes, cooking meals, and managing extracurriculars, the average parent gets just two hours a week to focus on personal development. Growth doesn’t stop when you become a parent. Raising children offers lifelong learning. Yet, for parents used to measuring their success in qualifications and promotions, it often doesn’t feel like growth—especially when you’re sleep-deprived and energy-drained. To them, professional development and personal development are one and the same. It’s no wonder 50% are left feeling as if parenthood has hijacked or delayed their growth. As Headway’s pro…

America’s aviation system is straining under the weight of the longest government shutdown on record: thousands of flight cancellations, long delays at major airports, and frustrated travelers nationwide. In an unprecedented move, the Federal Aviation Administration last week ordered airlines to scale back domestic flight schedules, saying the cuts are meant to ease pressure on an overstretched system and help manage air traffic control staffing. Unpaid for more than a month, some air traffic controllers have begun calling out of work, citing stress and the need to take on second jobs—leaving more control towers and facilities short-staffed. The numbers show t…

Asked what viewers should expect when television’s MSNBC makes its corporate divorce from NBC News final this weekend, network president Rebecca Kutler points to a poster on the wall of a conference room at its new offices off Times Square. Its message reads: “Same Mission. New Name.” “To me, that encapsulates exactly what we need to be saying,” Kutler said. “Our job in the next few weeks is to flood the zone … and make sure they know the thing that they love will be the exact same thing on Nov. 15.” Saturday is when MSNBC officially becomes MS NOW, standing for My Source for News, Opinion and the World. That’s the most visible manifestation of parent company …

Culture does not scale linearly with revenue or headcount —it requires intentionality the faster you grow. When I joined DPR Construction in the early 1990s, we were a small startup with a shared vision. Today, we have over 13,000 employees worldwide. Along the way, we’ve learned that sustaining culture through growth isn’t automatic—it takes clarity, intention, and continual reinforcement. With growth, we faced a familiar challenge many companies do: How could we preserve the cultural core we started with as a smaller company as we grew to an organization of thousands of people spread across the globe? Company culture is often described as intangible; however, li…

If you’re in the business of publishing content on the internet, it’s been difficult to know how to deal with AI. Obviously, you can’t ignore it; large language models (LLMs) and AI search engines are here, and they ingest your content and summarize it for their users, killing valuable traffic to your site. Plenty of data supports this. Creating a content strategy that accounts for this changing reality is complex to begin with. You need to decide what content to expose to AI systems, what to block from them, and how both of those activities can serve your business. That would be hard even if there were clear rules that everyone’s operating under. But that is far …

After Viagra came to market in 1998, women began clamoring for a drug of their own. But it has taken decades for the medical community to take women’s sexual health seriously—and even longer to develop and approve a drug that improves women’s libido. A new documentary called The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs, and Who Has Control, premiering at the DOC NYC film festival, explores the fight to launch Addyi, a drug known as “the female Viagra.” Directed by Aisling Chin-Yee, the film follows Cindy Eckert, the founder of Sprout Pharmaceuticals, who worked for five years to bring Addyi to market, which she managed to do in 2015. But just as fascinating, the film explores society’s …

If you’ve ever taken a sick pet to the vet’s office, you know the pain of seeing your four-footed family member hurting. Then, of course, comes the secondary anguish of figuring how to pay for their veterinary care, which may have you wishing you’d ponied up for pet insurance. While Insurify reports that the average cost of a routine vet visit is about $138 for a cat and $214 for a dog, emergency veterinary care can run the gamut from $300 to $10,000, according to Marketwatch. The insurance industry touts pet insurance as the financial solution to the high cost of veterinary care. Like human health insurance, you pay monthly premiums so that your pet insurance wil…

President Donald The President has worked to blame Democrats for the government shutdown, but a majority of Americans are unconvinced that it’s Democrats’ fault. The President’s administration has used the levers of the state to communicate partisan messages during the shutdown, which ended November 13. Ultimately, however, messaging through government channels like web design, out-of-office email replies, and public service announcements weren’t enough. A 52% majority of Americans blame The President or Republican lawmakers for the shutdown, according to a poll this week from Stack Data Strategy, a London market research firm. That’s in line with an NBC News …

When the camera was invented in 1826, many people thought painting would die. But it didn’t. Instead, painters found new ways to express themselves. Painters reinvented expressionism, impressionism, and abstract art. Monet, Munch, and later Picasso, all thrived after the camera arrived. When personal computers became common in the 1980s, there was fear that creative thinking would become less valuable. But computers opened the door to digital design, animation, and new forms of storytelling. Studios like Pixar, founded in 1986, showed how technology could help artists create worlds that were impossible before. When Photoshop launched in 1988, photographers worri…

Today marks a milestone: my 250th “Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights” series post. Back on October 5, 2020, when I published the first piece in this strategy series, “The Role of Management Systems in Strategy,” I was simply responding to a client’s question and trying to provide practical advice on the often-ignored fifth box of the Strategy Choice Cascade. I had no idea that first post would be the launch of a series that reaches 263,000 people (at last count) on a weekly basis. It feels fitting for this 250th post to return to the original topic in Revisiting Management Systems: The Nervous System of Strategy. And as always, you can find all the previous Playing to …

You may think working hard, showing initiative, boosting your skill set, and being a team player is what it takes to be noticed to get promoted. But even with all these notable wins and strides, the call to a higher position often never comes. The reality of being repeatedly passed over is frustrating—and such a “promotion plateau” can leave you questioning what’s really within your control. To learn more about the concept, Fast Company asked three career experts for advice on how to handle a stagnant job path . . . as well as what you can do to add some momentum to your promotion game plan. What exactly is a promotion plateau? The most significant te…

’Tis the season for giving—and that means ’tis the season for shopping. Maybe you’ll splurge on a Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal, thinking, “I’ll just return it if they don’t like it.” But before you click “purchase,” it’s worth knowing that many retailers have quietly tightened their return policies in recent years. As a marketing professor, I study how retailers manage the flood of returns that follow big shopping events like these, and what it reveals about the hidden costs of convenience. Returns might seem like a routine part of doing business, but they’re anything but trivial. According to the National Retail Federation, returns cost U.S. retailers almost $89…

Every industry eventually reaches its productivity era. Manufacturing had automation. Finance had algorithmic trading. Today, real estate is stepping into its own transformation: the age of intelligent decision making. I’ve seen firsthand how investors are reimagining their operations. For decades, property investment was managed with clipboards, paper checks, and late-night phone calls. It left investors buried in minutiae. Now, just as modern supply chains run on smart logistics, real estate is running on smart systems that streamline everything from payments to tenant communications. The result? A shift away from chasing down tasks and toward making wise, fu…

Starting a new job can be exhilarating and stressful at the same time. You are excited to meet new people, take on new responsibilities, and grow. You also want to demonstrate to your new employer that they made the right choice by hiring you. So, how do you put your best foot forward? Perhaps the most important thing to remember about that impression is that how you do things is more important than what you accomplish in those first few weeks. You are helping your new colleagues to get to know what it is like to work with you. This approach is valuable whether you’re entering the organization near the bottom or the top of the org chart. Listen first When …

Google Maps is one of the most valuable digital marketing tools available to your business, particularly if you’re using the Google Local Pack. The Google Local Pack displays top-ranked business listings in a user’s local area. So, when searching for “hairstylists near me” or “Italian food in my area,” a user sees their local best-ranked and reviewed listings for salons or Italian restaurants at the very top of the search results page, along with a map. These listings occupy a valuable space on the search results page, as the first items many users see and appear higher than traditional results. In fact, many users will click on one of those listings without scrol…