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This week in branding news, Volvo released its first-ever entirely AI-generated ad, fashion brand Pretty Little Thing attempted to overhaul its brand image, and Crystal Light made a late bid on the canned cocktail craze. Here’s everything you need to know. Volvo veers into the uncanny valley The news: Volvo just released a new AI-generated ad, and it doesn’t include a single car. That was probably a mistake. Big picture: The ad, which aired in Saudi Arabia, is Volvo’s first spot made entirely with AI. Created by the agency Lion, the minute-long video used Midjourney for visuals, Runway editing software for touch-ups, and ChatGPT for narration. It’s essentially …

Tyler, the CEO of an early-stage technology company, reached out for executive coaching support at the recommendation of a college friend: “Give it a try,” she encouraged. He was skeptical about anything “touchy-feely” and wondered if coaching could offer his leadership an “edge.” After we reviewed his 360 results together, Tyler’s skepticism took center stage. His feedback consisted of descriptors like controlling, arrogant, and dismissive. Tyler was unmoved. He asked, “Why should I care about what people think of me if we’re getting great results?” Tyler’s not an anomaly. There are leaders everywhere who behave badly interpersonally but exceed sales goals, secu…

Have you seen the new Volvo ad made with generative artificial intelligence? Go ahead. Watch it. . . . I’ll wait. If you think it looks awful, you’re not alone. The physics are all wrong, with hair, sand, and objects going in the wrong direction at the wrong time. The humans look like they’re made of plastic. Their emotions are forced, their expressions deformed, their smiles anything but warm. Instead, they likely fill you with an uncanny Grand Canyon of dread. The lighting is artificial, too—no film, digital camera, or grading would produce that unnatural palette. Some people are saying that Volvo made a mistake by not putting a car in the ad, obviously not realizi…

How are the world’s most creative people using AI to drive their work forward? This was the question at the heart of an in-depth survey Fast Company recently conducted in partnership with Whalar, a leading social agency focused on content creators. We found that, for most, AI has become a routine part of the creative process—and a return to an AI-free working life has become almost unfathomable. Yet the survey also found the world’s creative elite are grappling with a technology that gets more powerful and useful every day but remains unwieldy, error-prone, and not entirely trustworthy. “I want people to understand how well it can augment and enhance the thinking…

Gen Z isn’t “quiet quitting”—they’re rejecting outdated leadership. That’s the conversation my recent Fast Company article sparked, and the response has been overwhelming. Leaders, managers, and employees from across industries have reached out, confirming what many of us have seen firsthand. Workplace culture is changing fast, and leadership needs to evolve with it. But as the dust settles on this conversation, I’ve been thinking about a different question: If leadership needs to evolve, what role does Gen Z play in shaping the change they want? It’s easy to say leadership is broken—and in many cases, it is. But just as bad leadership creates disengaged employees, di…

Management at the Bay Area transportation startup Glydways wants you to be clear about what the company is not: It may plan to move people in futuristic autonomous pods, but it’s not hyperloop-grade vaporware. And its funding by big-name Silicon Valley investors does not make it a ride for the 1%. “Public transit for everyone, everywhere,” says founder Mark Seeger. But Glydways is starting smaller than that. Its first green-lit project (after a temporary test track now under construction next to an abandoned mall in Richmond, Calif.) and others under consideration by local governments will have Glydways’s four-seat electric vehicles plying short on-demand routes between …

As artificial intelligence begins to “devour the world,” job seekers must adapt their strategy to stand out in the hiring process. Hiring managers have begun to populate their interviews with questions about how prospective employees use AI in their work. According to industry experts, these types of questions will become more common as time goes on and AI continues to advance. In fact, 88% of C-suite leaders say speeding up AI adoption is important over the next year, according to LinkedIn’s 2025 Work Change Report. This can be daunting for people who don’t work in technology. You certainly don’t want to tell a hiring manager that you use ChatGPT to write and id…

Efforts to hollow out the federal workforce by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have resulted in a dramatic rise in layoff announcements. The latest monthly data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas shows that employers in the United States announced more than 172,000 layoffs during February, which was an increase of 245% from January and the highest monthly total since mid-2020, during the pandemic. Further, it was the highest number of layoffs for the month of February since 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession, when more than 186,000 layoffs were announced. So far, through the first two mo…

As an app designed to facilitate gay hookups, popular site Sniffies has had a limitation since it started in 2018—it was only accessible via web browser. Until Monday, when the map-based cruising site debuted its Apple-approved iOS app. Building an app that complies with Apple’s notoriously stringent content moderation—and total ban on apps that directly serve adult content—was a challenge for Sniffies, which wears its sexuality proudly. Its users, which it calls “cruisers,” do, too. Many users put nude images as their cover photos, meaning adult content is visible from the second the platform is opened in a browser. The company needed to tame the experience for…