What's on Your Mind?

Disengagement is expensive, and most organizations know it. A 2025 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimates that disengagement costs about $5 million a year for every 1,000 employees and that’s before accounting for what’s harder to measure. Teams deliver—narrowly avoiding burnout—but the creativity, the discretionary effort, the genuine spark of someone who truly cares? That’s becoming a rare commodity in today’s turbulent working world as AI continues its disruption. Sure, most AI is exceptional at scale, speed, and synthesis. It learns from what already exists, optimizes from the middle, and produces output that is arguably an average of every…

After 15 years as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook announced in an open letter that he is stepping away from his role at the end of this year to become executive chairman. In the letter, he also shared the first thing he does every morning—and it’s a habit that all leaders can lean into. “For the past 15 years I’ve started just about every morning the same way,” Cook wrote in the letter. “I open my email and I read notes I received the day before from Apple’s users all over the world.” “You share little pieces of your lives with me and tell me things you want me to know about how Apple has touched you,” Cook continued. “About the moment your mom was saved by her Apple W…

JetBlue replies to customers on social media every day, from assuaging their customer service woes to thanking them for choosing their flights. But one seemingly innocuous JetBlue response may have set a class action lawsuit in motion, after customers became convinced that the airline implicated itself in using surveillance pricing. A social media frenzy JetBlue first drew suspicions of surveillance pricing with an April 18 reply on X to a user complaining about the airline’s prices. “A $230 increase on a ticket after one day is crazy,” they wrote. “I’m just trying to make it to a funeral.” JetBlue replied, recommending that the user “try clearing your cache an…

Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to select employees, it announced in a memo on Thursday, CNBC reported. The move is a first for the company, as the tech industry at large faces shifts in the era of artificial intelligence. The program will be available to U.S. workers at the senior director level and below whose employment years and age add up to at least 70. Employees with sales incentive plans are ineligible. Those who qualify and their managers will receive more information on May 7, according to the memo. The plan is expected to take effect in the fourth quarter of Microsoft’s fiscal year 2026, which ends June 30. About 7% of the U.S. workforce is expe…

OpenAI on Thursday released its most capable AI system, GPT-5.5, which the company says will enable a more powerful Codex coding agent. OpenAI is quick to say, however, that GPT-5.5 will power the widening set of general digital work tasks that Codex is capable of. The system is significantly better than previous releases at helping with scientific work, including creative aspects of generating new hypotheses and testing them. The system represents an improvement in autonomous or agentic capability. GPT-5.56 “represents a step toward AI systems that can complete complex, multi-step tasks on a computer without human guidance,” OpenAI says in a blog post. GPT-5.5, …

Meta announced to employees on Thursday that the company is laying off around 10% of the company on May 20—about 8,000 employees out of its workforce of more than 78,000 will be impacted, Bloomberg first reported. The company will also close 6,000 open roles it planned to fill, according to a memo that was sent to staffers today from Meta’s chief people officer, Janella Gale. In the memo, obtained by Business Insider, Gale attributed the cuts to Meta’s “continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making.” The memo did not specify what those “other investments” are, but it’s public knowledge that …