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You know the ancient proverb: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. For leaders, first-generation AI tools are like giving employees fish. Agentic AI, on the other hand, teaches them how to fish—truly empowering, and that empowerment lifts the entire organization. According to recent findings from McKinsey, nearly eight in ten companies report using gen AI, yet about the same number report no bottom-line impact. Agentic AI can help organizations achieve meaningful results. AI agents are highly capable assistants with the ability to execute tasks independently. Equipped with artificial intelligence that…

Consistent with the general trend of incorporating artificial intelligence into nearly every field, researchers and politicians are increasingly using AI models trained on scientific data to infer answers to scientific questions. But can AI ultimately replace scientists? The The President administration signed an executive order on November 24, 2025, that announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative to build and train a series of AI agents on federal scientific datasets “to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.” So far, the accomplishments of these so-called AI scientists have been mixed. On the one hand, AI sys…

Hey ChatGPT, you talk too much. You too, Gemini. Like many LLMs, you are insufferable. You make Fidel Castro’s 6-hour speeches feel like haikus. I ask, “why do you LLMs talk so damn much?” and in response, you churn out a 671-word answer that resembles a third-grade essay—75% of it devoid of any real meaning or fact. You ramble about how much you ramble. You are incapable of giving me one straight answer, even if I carefully craft a two-paragraph prompt trying to coerce you into it. When I finally get you to respond with one monosyllable, you ruin it by adding a long apologetic promise that it will never ever happen again. Apparently I’m not alone in my ire. I’ve been…

The generative AI revolution has seen more leaps forward than missteps—but one clear stumble was the sycophantic smothering of OpenAI’s 4o large language model (LLM), which the ChatGPT maker eventually had to withdraw after users began worrying it was too unfailingly flattering. The model became so eager to please, it lost authenticity. In their blog post explaining what went wrong, OpenAI described “ChatGPT’s default personality” and its “behavior”—terms typically reserved for humans, suggesting a degree of anthropomorphization. OpenAI isn’t alone in this: humans often describe AI as “understanding” or “knowing” things, largely because media coverage has consistently…

In the past decade, AI’s success has led to uncurbed enthusiasm and bold claims—even though users frequently experience errors that AI makes. An AI-powered digital assistant can misunderstand someone’s speech in embarrassing ways, a chatbot could hallucinate facts, or, as I experienced, an AI-based navigation tool might even guide drivers through a corn field—all without registering the errors. People tolerate these mistakes because the technology makes certain tasks more efficient. Increasingly, however, proponents are advocating the use of AI—sometimes with limited human supervision—in fields where mistakes have high cost, such as health care. For example, a bill in…

The narrative is familiar: Revolutionary technology arrives, promising to liberate women from domestic drudgery and professional constraints. The electric oven would free housewives from coal-burning stoves. The washing machine would eliminate laundry day. The microwave would make meal preparation effortless. Yet as historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan argued in her landmark book, More Work for Mother, these innovations didn’t reduce women’s workload. They simply shifted expectations, creating new standards of cleanliness and convenience that often meant more work, not less. So when we speak of AI as the solution to professional and personal burdens, skepticism is warranted.…

Artificial intelligence capabilities have rapidly shifted from nice-to-have extras to essential requirements across industries and job levels. Employers now prioritize candidates who can harness AI tools to multiply productivity, accelerate innovation, and solve complex problems with lean resources. In this article, experts reveal how mastering AI skills can unlock career opportunities, faster promotions, and competitive advantages in today’s job market. Own One System and Share Insights For me, the secret to standing out in the age of AI was pretty simple: if your company is starting to use AI, use it. Don’t wait for someone to tell you where to start. Pick one to…

Recently, Grok AI faced criticism after users found it was creating explicit images of real people, including women and children. Although xAI has now implemented some restrictions, this incident revealed a serious weakness. Without safeguards and diverse perspectives, girls and women are put at greater risk. The dangers artificial intelligence poses to women and girls are real and happening now, affecting their mental health, safety, healthcare, and economic opportunities. Last fall, a mother discovered why her teenage daughter’s mental health had been deteriorating: It was a result of conversations with a Character.AI chatbot. She’s not alone. Aura’s State of Youth …

Black, unassuming, about the size of a pack of chewing gum: On the surface, the Fire TV 4K Select stick released in mid-October looks just like any other streaming device made by Amazon. Plug it into your TV, and you’ll be greeted by Amazon’s tried-and-true living room interface, complete with icons for popular streaming apps like Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video. And yet, the Select streaming stick is unlike any of its predecessors. That’s because the device is running Vega – a new, Linux-based operating system Amazon has quietly been building over the past couple of years as a replacement for its legacy, Android-based Fire OS. The company plans to eventually la…

Amazon is betting big on movie theaters—even if it isn’t counting on mega profits. The Silicon Valley giant told The New York Times last week that it is planning to release about 14 movies annually in theaters across the United States, an untraditional move for a company that has for years focused on streaming. Instead of simply dropping films directly onto Prime Video, its streaming service, Amazon wants audiences to see its movies on the big screen first—typically for 45 days—before they’re available for streaming. Three years after Amazon bought MGM for $8.5 billion, the tech giant is signaling that it is ready to compete more directly with Hollywood’s biggest …

Amazon’s new Echo Dot Max is a $99 ball. Its Echo Studio is a $199 ball. Its Echo Show is a tablet (starting at $179), attached to a ball. For its grand refresh of its Alexa-powered line of speakers and tablets, Amazon spent three years rethinking the foundations of its audio engineering to conquer the home theater market in the most spherical manner possible. “Legitimately—they sound really good,” says our senior editor Liz Stinson, after a listening test. But from my own discussions with the design team, it’s clear that what Amazon has created are not just new voice assistants, or even mix-and-matachable speakers capable of creating a 3D soundscape for movies an…

Throughout Harvard Square, there are many bookshop brimming with the latest literary fiction and intellectual memoirs, patronized by scholarly types. But in January, a new bookshop popped up in the neighborhood that is nothing like the others. Lovestruck Books is a romance bookstore. It’s Instagrammable entrance is adorned with pink and purple flowers. There’s a coffee shop that transforms into a wine bar for evening events. Besides an enormous selection of romance novels, you can also purchase sex toys and tote bags emblazoned with “I read smut.” “We want to toe the lie a little bit with being provocative and edgy,” says Rachel Kanter, the store’s founder. “But the …

In his February 2025 cover story for The Atlantic, journalist Derek Thompson dubbed our current era “the anti-social century.” He isn’t wrong. According to our recent research, the U.S. is becoming a nation of homebodies. Using data from the American Time Use Survey, we studied how people in the U.S. spent their time before, during, and after the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic did spur more Americans to stay home. But this trend didn’t start or end with the pandemic. We found that Americans were already spending more and more time at home and less and less time engaged in activities away from home stretching all the way back to at least 2003. And if you t…

If you’re in charge of selecting a leadership development solution for your organization, your budget might feel dwarfed by the goals and needs the program must address. And while the money you have to spend is limited, the options you have to choose from—coaching, learning platforms, content libraries and more—are not.  All of those factors can make it difficult to identify the option that will deliver the best ROI. An “affordable” subscription to a vast digital library of leadership videos and courses is no bargain if it doesn’t deliver the results you need. On the other hand, premium coaching for a few key executives might feel extravagant at first but ultimat…

Eat this, not that. This one food will cure everything. That food is poison. Cut this food out. Try this diet. Don’t eat at these times. Eat this food and you’ll lose weight. With society’s obsession with food, health, and weight, statements like these are all over social media, gyms, and even healthcare offices. But do you need to follow rules like these to be healthy? Most often the answer is no, because health and nutrition is much more complex and nuanced than a simple list of what to eat and what to avoid. Despite this, rules about health and nutrition are so common because of diet culture—a morality imposed by society that sees falling outside the arbitrary idea…

Research shows employees who engage in unethical behavior—surprisingly—are not new to their organizations. They have been there for a considerable amount of time, typically at least six years, and have risen through their companies. Worse, the longer they have been with their organizations, the greater the financial and reputational damage when unethical behavior occurs. And though we might think of corporate misconduct as C-suite malfeasance, unethical behavior can occur at all levels—and many offenders have a steady career path. It begs the question: could an ethical assessment have been designed during their career progression to have detected someone being more s…

Anthropic’s Claude Code tool is having a moment: It’s recently become popular among software developers for its use of agents to write code, run tests, call tools, and multitask. In recent months the company has begun to stress that Claude Code isn’t just for developers, but can let other kinds of workers build websites, create presentations, and do research—and stories about non-coders completing interesting projects have filled social media. The latest offering, called Cowork, is a new version (and a rebranding) of Claude Code for work beyond coding, and it could dramatically widen the audience for Anthropic’s tools within the enterprise. Cowork is in “research prev…

Apple and Google would like to see your identification, please. With the former’s “Digital ID” launch last week, both companies now let you scan a digital version of your passport at more than 250 Transportation Security Administration checkpoints, using an iPhone or Android phone. A growing number of U.S. states already support digital driver’s licenses for the same purpose. But the push for these digital IDs isn’t merely about airport security (which still requires you to carry a physical license or passport anyway). It’s really part of a broader effort to verify who you are online, one that can finally start in earnest with passport-based digital IDs that are a…

Six hours after OpenAI’s launch of GPT-4.1, Sam Altman was already apologizing. This time, it wasn’t about hallucinations or bias or Scarlett Johansson. No, it was about the model name. GPT-4.1 seemed nonsensical to many, difficult to parse from their already launched models like GPT-4o and GPT-4.5. “How about we fix our model naming by this summer and everyone gets a few more months to make fun of us (which we very much deserve) until then?” Altman wrote. Streamers take the brunt of the internet’s name-mocking: Are you a Hulu, Tubi, or Fubo subscriber? But AI companies are just as bad, if not worse. Their model names are often incoherent and unmemorable. From S…

If you walk into a grocery store in the Netherlands or Germany, you might not realize you’re being steered toward plant-based protein, from vegan tortellini to plant-based yogurt. But across Europe and the UK, major retailers are quietly driving that shift. And they’re seeing results at a time when plant-based sales are struggling in the US. Lidl, a budget supermarket, grew UK sales of its private-label plant-based line by nearly 700% from 2020 to 2025. In Germany, France, and Italy, plant-based retail sales are growing across multiple categories, with most of that growth coming from supermarkets’ own brands. Lidl is one of several retailers with a deliberate stra…

Neri Karra Sillaman is an adviser and speaker who was recently recognized on the Thinkers50 “Radar” list for 2024 as one of the top 30 emerging management thinkers. She is an adjunct professor and entrepreneurship expert at the University of Oxford, and founder of Neri Karra, a global luxury leather goods brand that has been manufacturing for leading Italian labels for over 25 years. A former child refugee, she brings a powerful perspective on resilience, cultural innovation, and ethical business to her work. Her insights have been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, and Fortune. What’s the big idea? It’s no coincidence that immigrant-led bus…

Some words are far too mild for the violence of what they describe. Migraine is one of them. For many people, it evokes a simple headache—an inconvenience solved with an aspirin (or Tylenol) and a glass of water. For those who’ve never experienced it, migraine is almost a cliché: a lame excuse to stay in bed or avoid a meeting. But for millions of people—and I’m one of them—migraine is anything but benign. It is a debilitating neurological disease that can force life to grind to a halt for days at a time. It is an invisible disability that millions are expected to simply “push through.” The Mild Version Everyone Sees—and the Severe One No One Understands I ofte…