All Activity

There is new data out from Newzdash that shows just how often AI Overviews appear within Google across new sections. And while AI Overviews shows 60%+ of the time for health queries, when it comes to breaking news and major headlines, it shows less than 6% of the time.View the full article

Social media scheduling tools can streamline your content management, making it easier to engage with your audience. With options like SocialBee, Pallyy, and Sendible, you can find features that cater to different needs, such as content curation or seamless integration with design tools. Each tool has its strengths and weaknesses, which can impact your strategy. Comprehending these differences is essential as you consider the best fit for your management style and objectives. Key Takeaways User-Friendly Interfaces: Look for tools like Pallyy that offer drag-and-drop functionality for easy scheduling and content management. Robust Analytics: Choose platforms with extensive analytics dashboards, such as Agorapulse, to track performance metrics and optimize strategies. Content Curation Features: Select tools like SocialBee that help organize and recycle posts to maximize audience engagement and reach. Collaboration Capabilities: Opt for solutions like Sendible, which provide multiple client dashboards and facilitate teamwork effectively. Flexible Pricing Options: Consider tools with varied pricing plans, such as Buffer at $15/month, to find a cost-effective solution for your needs. Overview of Social Media Scheduling Tools In today’s fast-paced digital environment, social media scheduling tools have become essential for anyone managing multiple platforms effectively. These social media schedulers streamline the process, allowing you to plan, publish, and analyze your content from a single platform. The best social scheduling tools, like Buffer and Hootsuite, offer features such as analytics, collaboration tools, and content curation to improve productivity and engagement tracking. Pricing varies, with options like Publer starting at $12/month and Sprout Social at $99/month, catering to different budgets. Features such as bulk scheduling, ideal posting time recommendations, and post recycling help maximize your audience reach. Furthermore, tools like SocialBee and Agorapulse provide advanced functionalities for effective social media profile setup and integration. Key Features to Look For When choosing a social scheduling tool, you should focus on a user-friendly interface that simplifies the scheduling process, allowing for efficient content management. Look for content curation features that help you organize and recycle posts, maximizing your reach as well as ensuring your content stays relevant. Furthermore, robust analytics and reporting capabilities are crucial, as they enable you to track performance metrics and make informed decisions for future strategies. User-Friendly Interface A user-friendly interface is essential for efficiently managing your social media scheduling, as it directly impacts how easily you can plan and execute your content strategy. Look for tools that offer drag-and-drop scheduling capabilities, allowing for easy post rearrangement and visual planning, like Pallyy and Later. A centralized dashboard for multiple accounts simplifies your workflow, as seen with Sendible and Agorapulse. Intuitive features, such as a visual content calendar or feed planner, help you track scheduled posts effectively, exemplified by Metricool and CoSchedule. Furthermore, choose schedulers that enable bulk scheduling and content categorization to improve efficiency. The best social media content strategists benefit from platforms providing easy access to analytics within the same interface, as offered by Buffer and Sprout Social. Content Curation Features Effective content curation features are crucial for streamlining your social media scheduling process and improving your content strategy. Look for tools that offer RSS feed integration, allowing you to gather and schedule relevant content effortlessly from various sources. A robust content categorization system helps you organize posts by themes or topics, boosting your management efficiency. Advanced tools should incorporate AI capabilities for generating post ideas and captions and automating content suggestions based on trends and audience engagement. Moreover, consider platforms that provide bulk scheduling options, enabling you to upload and schedule multiple posts at once using CSV files, saving you valuable time. These features collectively improve your ability to curate and manage your content effectively. Analytics and Reporting To maximize your social media strategy, incorporating robust analytics and reporting features into your scheduling tools is essential. Look for tools that offer extensive analytics dashboards, allowing you to track engagement metrics like likes, shares, comments, and click-through rates across multiple platforms in one view. Prioritize schedulers that provide performance comparisons against industry benchmarks, helping you gauge how your content stacks up against competitors. Choose tools with customizable reporting features for generating reports based on specific time frames, platforms, or content types. Make sure the tool includes real-time analytics capabilities to adjust your strategy quickly based on current performance trends. Finally, consider platforms that integrate AI-driven insights, offering personalized recommendations to improve post performance and audience targeting. Top Recommendations for 2025 As you plan your social media strategy for 2025, it’s essential to contemplate the tools that can streamline your scheduling and improve your content management. SocialBee is highly recommended for its robust content curation and publishing capabilities, starting at $29/month with a 14-day free trial available. If you focus on visual content, Pallyy offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, particularly for Instagram and TikTok, along with a generous free plan for basic users. For agencies, Sendible provides scalability and integrates with Canva and Pexels, starting at $29/month with a free trial. Buffer stands out for its simplicity, with plans beginning at $15/month, whereas Agorapulse shines in collaboration and reporting, priced from $79/month. In-Depth Comparison of Popular Tools Now that you’ve explored some top recommendations, let’s compare popular social scheduling tools to see how they stack up. You’ll want to evaluate key features like content curation, scalability, and collaboration capabilities, in addition to pricing plans that fit your budget. Comprehending these aspects will help you choose the right tool for your social media management needs. Key Features Analysis In the constantly changing environment of social media management, choosing the right scheduling tool can greatly affect your brand’s online presence. SocialBee stands out with its extensive content curation tools, including unique features like post variants and content approval workflows, which are ideal for organized management across platforms. Pallyy excels in visual content scheduling with a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, perfect for creators focused on Instagram and TikTok. Sendible offers scalability and strong content curation tools, suitable for both agencies and individuals. Agorapulse provides advanced reporting and team collaboration tools for efficient multi-platform management. Finally, Buffer simplifies management with an AI Assistant for content generation and detailed analytics, making it a budget-friendly option for users. Pricing and Plans Comparison Selecting the right social scheduling tool involves not just comprehending its features but furthermore evaluating its pricing and plans. SocialBee starts at $29/month, providing a 14-day free trial and focusing on content categorization. Pallyy offers a free plan with 15 scheduled posts/month and premium options beginning at $25/month for visual content. Sendible’s pricing likewise starts at $29/month, featuring scalable plans that lower costs per user as you add more. Metricool has a free plan allowing 50 scheduled posts, with paid plans beginning at $22/month, which includes analytics. Agorapulse, more suited for agencies, starts at $79/month, offering advanced reporting and collaboration tools. Each option caters to different needs, so assess what fits your requirements best. Pricing and Plans When considering social scheduling tools, comprehending the pricing and plans is crucial for selecting the right fit for your needs. Each tool offers unique pricing structures and features, allowing you to choose based on your budget and requirements. Tool Starting Price SocialBee $29/month (14-day free trial) Pallyy Free (one social set, 15 posts/month) or $25/month Sendible $29/month (14-day free trial) Metricool Free (up to 50 posts) or $22/month Publer $12/month (14-day free trial) Understanding these options can help you find a tool that balances functionality with affordability, making your social media management more efficient. Pros and Cons of Each Tool Choosing the right social scheduling tool involves weighing the pros and cons of each option to find the best match for your needs. Here’s a quick look at some tools: SocialBee: Great for organized posting with content curation tools, yet lacks social listening features, limiting advanced monitoring. Pallyy: User-friendly interface, especially for Instagram; on the other hand, its premium plan starts at $25/month, which might be a bit pricey. Sendible: Offers scalability with multiple client dashboards, but may not have all the advanced features you might find in other tools. Each tool has its strengths and weaknesses, so consider what features matter most to you before making a decision. User Experiences and Testimonials How do users feel about the various social scheduling tools available today? Feedback varies across platforms, highlighting strengths customized to different needs. Here’s a summary of user experiences: Tool Key Features User Feedback SocialBee Content curation, post management Extensive tools for organized scheduling Pallyy Drag-and-drop interface Perfect for visual creators on Instagram and TikTok Sendible Scalable features, visual campaign overview Ideal for agencies managing multiple clients Metricool Affordable pricing, robust analytics Great for small businesses tracking performance Agorapulse Collaboration tools, unified inbox Excellent for teams managing content interactions Users appreciate these tools for their unique functionalities, ultimately improving social media management efficiency. Final Thoughts on Choosing the Right Tool Selecting the right social media scheduling tool can greatly impact your overall social media strategy. To make an informed choice, consider these key factors: Essential Features: Look for content categorization, analytics capabilities, and an intuitive interface to boost management efficiency. Pricing Options: Many tools provide free plans or trials, like Buffer’s free tier and SocialBee’s 14-day trial, allowing you to test before committing. Integration and Collaboration: Ascertain the tool integrates well with platforms like Canva or Unsplash, and includes collaboration features such as approval workflows and shared calendars for team efficiency. Frequently Asked Questions What Is the Best Social Scheduling Tool? Choosing the best social scheduling tool depends on your specific needs. If you’re focused on content curation, SocialBee is highly effective. For visual platforms like Instagram, Pallyy offers a user-friendly interface. Agencies might prefer Sendible for its scalability, whereas Metricool provides budget-friendly options with analytics. If collaboration is key, Agorapulse thrives with advanced reporting features. Evaluate your requirements, such as budget and platform focus, to find the right fit for you. Which Is the Best Social Media Management Tool? When considering the best social media management tool, evaluate your specific needs. Tools like Buffer offer simplicity for individuals and small businesses, whereas Hootsuite provides extensive features for larger organizations. Sprout Social focuses on analytics and team collaboration, ideal for businesses aiming to convert engagement into revenue. If visual content is your priority, Later’s Instagram-centric features might suit you. Assess each tool’s pricing and functionality to find the best fit for your strategy. What Is the Best Planner for Social Media Managers? When choosing the best planner for social media managers, consider your specific needs. Tools like SocialBee excel in content curation and publishing across multiple platforms. Pallyy stands out for visual content scheduling with its user-friendly interface. If scalability is important, Sendible offers customizable options for agencies or individuals. For affordable management, Metricool is a solid choice with advanced features. Agorapulse focuses on collaboration and reporting, making it suitable for teams. Which of the Following Tools Is Commonly Used for Social Media Scheduling? Commonly used tools for social media scheduling include SocialBee, which thrives in content curation, and Pallyy, known for its visual scheduling capabilities, especially on platforms like Instagram. Sendible is popular among agencies because of its scalable features and integrations. Metricool offers a combination of planning and analytics, whereas Agorapulse stands out for collaboration and reporting functionalities. Each tool has different pricing tiers and features, catering to various user needs and preferences. Conclusion To conclude, choosing the right social scheduling tool can greatly improve your social media management. Consider your specific needs, such as content curation, user interface, and scalability. Tools like SocialBee, Pallyy, and Sendible each offer distinct advantages that cater to different users. By evaluating their features, pricing, and user experiences, you can make an informed decision that boosts your efficiency and effectiveness in managing social media strategies for 2025 and beyond. Image via Google Gemini This article, "Best Social Scheduling Tools for Effortless Management" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Google is testing showing a call to action in the search results that says, "Skip digging, start guided research" which drives users to a Web Guide-like results page.View the full article

Google added a new section to the "Understand available performance metrics" within the Google Business Profiles help documentation. The new section added a section on offer data and it shows the number of times customers viewed and clicked on offers on your Business Profile.View the full article

London-based firm has become high-profile victim of market upheaval sparked by Middle East conflict View the full article

On March 17, 2026, Google retired some of its Google Ads policies on Ad format requirements. These are specific to "old ad formats that are no longer in use are also being retired," Ginny Marvin of Google.View the full article

When global trade buckles, Ryan Petersen is the person executives call. The founder and CEO of Flexport offers a real-time account of the Strait of Hormuz crisis—what he’s seeing on the ground, on the water, and across the supply chains straining under the pressure. As ripple effects of the crisis are being felt in different ways in different parts of the world, Petersen provides both a micro and macro view that business leaders need to hear. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. The attacks on Iran have effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical oil choke point. Oil prices are up, ships are stranded, global shipping is kind of in limbo. So I know this is changing as we speak, but from what you can see at Flexport, what does the traffic jam look like? What’s the snapshot right now? The big story, of course, here is oil and energy generally, natural gas, all of that. I think that’s pretty well covered in the media—that prices have been spiking and shortages are starting to appear. Places like Australia, which is very energy-rich but doesn’t produce a lot of oil, are running out of diesel and moving toward a world where they’re just not going to have enough fuel. There are secondary things that are less well covered, which are maybe even more impactful, around fertilizer. That’s actually probably a more important story here. It’s planting season, and if those don’t come to market, you’re going to have big, big problems in food production around the world. Container shipping is not that impacted, actually, just because the Persian Gulf is a cul-de-sac. You don’t really need to go in there. Air freight’s a bigger deal. The Middle Eastern airlines own somewhere between 15% and 20% of all cargo airline capacity, depending on what source you look at. And Dubai is the biggest cargo airport in the world. Huge numbers of planes that go from Asia to Europe stop over there to refuel, and it’s a hub for transshipment of cargo. So there, you’ve seen the price of air freight double since the war started. And it’s even up 50% to 60% on trades that would seemingly have nothing to do with that, like Vietnam to the US across the Pacific. Air freight prices have gone up 50%. I saw the United Airlines CEO say that they’re modeling this is going to cost $11 billion in fuel expense. So these costs are going up because fuel prices are going up, or also because it’s disrupting routes or forcing people to change direction? Or is it hard to know right now? It’s both. Fuel price is the big one, but it’s going up also because supply and demand is sort of a global market. And if you pull out all that Emirates and Etihad and Qatar Airways capacity—those are big airlines—then they start moving planes around, and it’s all kind of fungible. A plane that’s flying across the Pacific could instead fly somewhere else. Freight is a very mercenary market. They get away with what they can get away with. The actual big impact here is that, in February, the container shipping lines had, for the first time, started to return to the Red Sea. We haven’t had container shipping through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal since December 2023 because of the Houthi terrorist attacks in the Red Sea. And they just started to return in February following the ceasefire in Gaza. And now they’ve all immediately gone back to routing around Africa. So that’s actually the bigger impact for container shipping because, again, the Persian Gulf is the cul-de-sac, whereas the Red Sea is massively important for container shipping. I mean, are container ships stranded? Are they stuck? Yeah, a small percentage. I saw someone who had gone and counted them all, and he said there are 57 container ships inside the Strait of Hormuz. Now, many more are on routes that would have called in the Strait of Hormuz and have had their routes disrupted and are dropping containers at random ports. If you had a container that was meant to go to Dubai, they’re just leaving it wherever. And now it’s your problem as a business. Oh, really? They’re just like, “I’m letting it off here”? Yeah. Let’s say you were going from Argentina to Dubai. What they’ve been doing is saying, “All right, just drop it at the next port of call.” So now you have a container stuck in Morocco or Brazil or France or somewhere, and you’re only given seven days of free storage at that port before you start paying big fees. So yeah, there are definitely some cases where people are living business nightmares right now. As you talk about this, the United States is a little more insulated from some of this than places in Europe and Asia. Is there a scenario where American companies gain a competitive advantage from this? Is it good? Or is that a misread of the situation? Well, certainly our oil companies are. I mean, Texas is going to boom. The price of oil’s gone way up. Texas college football’s probably going to have a great NIL team. No, sorry. It’s not appropriate to joke. Yeah, certain segments of the US are going to do very well. We’re the biggest oil producer in the world, so it’s going to be very good for them. But on a net economic basis, most of America—yeah, we might be better off than other countries because we have oil and energy and food, but it’s not a zero-sum game, the economy. If others do worse, it doesn’t mean we do better. We actually also do worse. For folks listening to this, what do you feel is at stake for global trade right now, in this moment? It goes beyond trade. You’re just starting to realize how tied to globalization our economies are, how interconnected everything is. I had someone last night tell me, “Oh, we should just close the Strait of Hormuz forever and just get on with it.” The naivete of not realizing that it’s not just oil—and oil is not just about pumping gas into your car. That’s what you’re used to because that’s where you see it in your life. But it’s part of so many different products. It’s a precursor to so much in the chemicals industry. It goes into all sorts of plastics. These glasses that I’m holding. Helium—30% of the world’s helium comes from Qatar. It’s not just for clowns at children’s parties. It is used to make semiconductors. You can’t make semiconductors without it. You can’t launch SpaceX rockets without helium. We just don’t understand how much of this stuff matters. The U.S., post-World War II, kind of established this order that said, “Hey, everybody can trade with everybody. And you can just send a ship wherever you want, and the US Navy will provide freedom of navigation.” And that worked until, really, we’re now seeing with the Houthis and now the Iranians that maybe the US Navy can’t provide that guarantee anymore. And so much of our civilization depends on it that it’s a really, really important question. And if the The President administration backs off, is there an off-ramp here? Does that mean Iran backs off? If they don’t, then what? It is existential, I think, for the modern economy. People look at the stock market or the price of fuel or something, but this is much more than the price of some commodity or equities or bonds. It’s how all of the economy functions now. Every company is interconnected with everybody else. And if you stop that, you end up in a much darker place. So let’s all pray. Civilization depends on peace, and we often just take it for granted. So pray for those who are trying to bring back a peaceful world. View the full article

Marketing leaders are grounding SEO in zero- and first-party data to better align content with real-world customer behavior and needs. The post How Zero-Party & First-Party Data Can Fuel Your Intent-Based SEO Strategy appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Today, Alix Earle is launching a skincare line—but if you’ve been looking close enough you probably knew it was coming. For the last year, the influencer has been dropping Easter eggs across her social feeds in the lead-up to her debut venture. There were the vlogs from her dermatologist’s office. The un-get-ready-with-me posts featuring unnamed products in unbranded packaging. The puzzle-like billboard in NYC that popped up with missing pieces. Now today, Earle is finally revealing Reale Actives, a skincare brand that Earle developed for acne-prone skin but is “designed for everyone” launching March 31. Those who have been following Earle for years might say that the Easter eggs began at the beginning of her influencer journey. Early videos detail her experiences on the prescription medication Accutane, which she tried three separate times. “It was, by far, what resonated with people the most out of anything I had posted,” Earle tells Fast Company. Since posting her first video in 2020, Earle has built a following in the millions. She has leveraged that following into a number of successful business ventures, investing in and partnering with prebiotic soda brand Poppi, which was later acquired by PepsiCo for $1.95 billion. She is also involved as an investor and partner in the canned cocktail brand SipMargs. But Earle always knew she wanted to found her own brand; she just wasn’t sure what. Initially, she shut down the idea of a skincare brand. “I didn’t like skincare. I’d never had a good experience with it,” she says. But she was unable to ignore the fact that sharing her skin journey was at the core of her brand. “I kept coming back to acne as the one topic I felt so strongly and passionately about,” says Earle. She noticed a gap in the market for dermatologist-backed products that embraced the messiness of real life and also came in cute packaging. From there, she came up with the idea for Reale Actives, which includes a streamlined four-step skincare routine featuring a cleansing balm ($29), gel cleanser ($28), mandelic acid serum ($39) and a barrier-boosting moisturizer ($36). It’s a crowded market. The success of influencer-founded brands like Rhode by Hailey Bieber and Summer Fridays, co-founded by Marianna Hewitt, has meant tapping an existing audience and launching a beauty brand has now become the gold standard. “I don’t want to look to any other brand for comparison,” says Earle. “I want Real Actives to pave its own way and stand on its own.” A marketing Easter egg hunt After developing the products with guidance from her dermatologist Dr. Kiran Mian and bringing on Andrea Blieden as CEO in 2024, it was time to start seeding the products. During her stint on Dancing With The Stars in 2025, Earle would post un-get-ready-with-me videos on TikTok. Blieden would trawl the comments, waiting for someone to ask which cleansing balm Earle was using to take off her heavy stage makeup. “I was sure people would ask about it,” Blieden says. “But she crushed her dance that week, and everyone just kept talking about her performance.” By December 2025, they decided to ramp up the products’ visibility. Rather than relying on a content plan, they entrusted Earle free rein over what to post and when. “There were times I’d be watching her TikTok and she’d tease our Mandelic Acid serum and I had no idea,” says Blieden. “She is so good at knowing what her audience wants and what her community responds to that she does it all on the fly.” Earle has also subtly been introducing her audience to Dr. Mian, who first featured in a vlog back in 2024 and has since made regular appearances throughout her content. “They just think she’s a dermatologist I see—they don’t know we’ve been working on this together behind the scenes,” Earle tells Fast Company. “They may be a little shocked when they find out.” The fact that the product seeding has mostly flown under the radar for the past year is a testament to the creator-product-market fit. Skincare has been a content pillar since the beginning. Over the past year Earle has subtly been posting regular skin updates, talking through the routine that has been working with one glaring omission (the products). Of course, there’s been some speculation in the comments section. “We actually hoped they’d start guessing skincare, because we wouldn’t want to launch something that completely surprised her audience,” Blieden says. “We wanted people bought into the journey before launch day.” Over the past week the marketing has ramped up after a new Instagram account called @wtfisalixdoing appeared on Instagram. The account has 398,000 followers at the time of writing and a number of posts teasing the launch. “Yesterday, a TikTok live—at times with over 500 people—was dedicated entirely to solving “WTF is Alex doing?” says Blieden. These armchair detectives somehow found the one thing Blieden most feared, the trademark filing under the stealth company name. Despite the last-minute leak, Blieden was happy they were able to keep the news under wraps for as long as they have. Looking ahead, Reale Actives already has product launches planned through 2027 and Earle will continue taking her audience along for the journey – this time with their prior knowledge. And for consumers to buy into the brand and the results, they only need to scroll back through Earle’s social media for a walking, talking product advertisement. View the full article

American Express is making a push to play a bigger role in how businesses operate day to day with a new card and tools to support it. Alongside the launch of its Graphite Business Cash Unlimited Card, the company on Wednesday announced a broad set of updates across its commercial and AI-powered tools. Together, they signal a shift in how Amex wants to present itself to business customers. At the center of the rollout is a new product called the Graphite Business Cash Unlimited Card. But the bigger story is how that card fits into a larger system designed to help businesses manage spending, track expenses, and automate routine work. Expanding beyond the card American Express has long focused on rewards, service, and travel perks. Now it is building out tools that sit behind the scenes of a business. “Our expertise is unmatched,” said Raymond Joabar, group president of global commercial services at American Express, in the company’s announcement. The company already has a large footprint. It’s the top issuer of small-business cards in the U.S. by spend and serves millions of small businesses, as well as many of the largest public companies. What’s changing is how much of a business’s workflow Amex wants to touch. The company is bundling cards with software and data tools that help manage expenses and operations in one place. A simpler rewards card with flexible spending The new Graphite Business Cash Unlimited Card is designed for business owners who want straightforward rewards and flexibility. It includes: 2% cash back on eligible purchases 5% cash back on flights and prepaid hotels through Amex Travel No preset spending limit Pay Over Time, which allows balances to be carried when needed There are also incentives tied to higher spending, including up to $2,400 in statement credits for use on Amex’s accounts payable platform, One AP after spending $250,000 on eligible purchases in the current calendar year. Later this year, Amex plans to introduce a Corporate Cash Back Card with more built-in controls and integrations for larger companies. Bringing expense management into one system Alongside the new cards, Amex is also introducing expense management software that brings card activity and expense tracking into a single platform. The system will allow businesses to issue virtual cards, track employee spending, and automate approvals. It will also connect with accounting, ERP, and HR systems so that data updates automatically. For many businesses, that could replace a mix of separate tools used to manage expenses today. Adding AI to everyday workflows Amex is also putting more focus on how AI can fit into the day-to-day work of running a business, especially when it comes to saving time and reducing manual tasks. One of the most visible additions is a new $300 annual statement credit for ChatGPT Business subscriptions on U.S. Business Platinum and Business Gold cards. The company says it is the first time a credit card has offered a benefit like this, and it is designed to help business owners use AI tools to handle tasks more efficiently. The move reflects how quickly AI is becoming part of everyday operations. According to an Amex Trendex survey, 87% of small business owners using AI say it is saving their business time, while 81% report spending less time on manual processes and 73% say it is improving employee productivity. Beyond the ChatGPT credit, Amex is building AI directly into its own products. For larger companies, a new Insights Agent is designed to pull together data across cards, expenses, and accounts payable systems to generate reports and surface patterns in spending. The idea is to give finance teams a clearer view of where money is going without needing to manually compile that data. The company is also introducing an AI-powered expense app for corporate card users. The app prompts employees to upload receipts, checks purchases against company policy, and submits expenses for approval automatically. That kind of automation could cut down on one of the more time-consuming parts of expense management. Why this shift matters Financial tools are increasingly looking like software platforms, especially for businesses seeking greater visibility and control over spending. Newer companies have built products that combine payments with expense tracking and automation. Amex is moving in a similar direction, while leaning on its existing customer base and service model. For business owners, the appeal is straightforward. Fewer systems to manage and more visibility into how money is being spent. For Amex, it is a way to stay closely connected to how businesses operate, not just how they pay. View the full article

Microsoft’s recently announced use of a West Virginia data center that will run entirely on natural gas could cause the company’s emissions to skyrocket by 44%. That’s according to a new report from Stand.earth researchers, who say Microsoft’s power needs at the facility will see it burning the same amount of methane as annually as more than 1.2 million homes. The data center, called the Monarch Compute Campus, is an example of a “behind-the-meter” or “off-grid” data center, which generates its own electricity, bypassing the public grid. With the growth of AI data centers threatening to overload the electricity grid and raise residents’ energy bills, these sorts of projects have been praised for avoiding those effects. Though they don’t directly affect the power grid in their areas, natural gas-powered data centers still carry hefty environmental toll. What is the Monarch Compute Campus? Technically, the Microsoft doesn’t own the data center it will be using. As of last week the 2,250-acre Monarch Compute Campus is owned by Nvidia-backed cloud computing startup Nscale. Nscale buys AI processors, installs them in data center servers, and then leases those processors to AI developers, according to the Wall Street Journal. Microsoft signed a letter of intent in mid-March to lease 1.35 gigawatts of AI computing capacity (via Nvidia chips) from the Monarch Compute Campus. Microsoft will be just one portion of the entire data center complex. The campus has a full planned capacity of 8 gigawatts in 2031. When that capacity it reached, it means Microsoft and the other data center clients will together emit 25.55 million metric tons of CO2 annually—the same amount as putting nearly 6 million cars on the road. AI and Natural Gas The Monarch Compute Campus is just one of the facilities powering the AI boom, which is fueling a surge in natural gas development. Proposals for new natural gas plants in the U.S. tripled in 2025 compared to the year prior, according to nonprofit research organization Global Energy Monitor. The U.S. now has the most gas-fired power capacity in development out of any country, with more than a third of that capacity slated to directly power data centers. Behind-the-meter data centers can be particularly environmentally harmful, per Stand.earth, because they are often built with smaller, less-efficient gas turbines. Natural gas is primarily made of methane. That has real consequences for the neighborhoods around the data center complex. A recent Virginia Commonwealth University study found that on-site power from methane gas and diesel generators for a single data center in Virginia could lead to $53 to $99 million in health-related costs. How does the project fit with Microsoft’s climate goals? The analysis from Stand.earth Research Group about this project’s environmental impact builds on, and verifies, estimates recently published by journalist and analyst Michael Thomas. The research highlights how, in the rush to bring data centers online, companies like Microsoft “are essentially abandoning their pledges to protect the climate,” Rachel Kitchin, senior corporate climate campaigner at Stand.earth, said in a statement. Microsoft has committed to reducing its carbon emissions, with a goal to become “carbon negative” and to power its data centers with carbon-free energy by 2030. “You can’t claim to be a leader on climate and then build out massive fossil-fuel facilities that emit millions of tons of climate pollution and poison the people living next door,” Kitchin added. In response to a request for comment about the Stand.earth emissions estimates, and how emissions from data centers fit with Microsoft’s climate goals, a spokesperson told Fast Company that Microsoft’s letter of intent with Nscale “represents our investment in scaling AI compute capacity. As we grow our Cloud and AI infrastructure to respond to short and long term customer demand, we take a portfolio approach to energy, using different power sources across our data center fleet based on local conditions, grid readiness, and long‑term goals.” The spokesperson added, “This flexible approach allows us to bring capacity online faster, ensure reliability, and limit strain on local grids while continuing to invest in efficiency and carbon‑free energy for the future.” View the full article

For the past several years, marketing strategy has reorganized itself around a simple premise. Third-party data is fading. Privacy expectations are rising. The solution, we are told, is first-party data. Collect more of it. Centralize it. Build the customer view around it. In many ways, the shift was necessary. Direct relationships with customers are more durable than rented audiences. Consent and transparency matter. Organizations that invested early in their own data ecosystems are better positioned today than those that relied entirely on external signals. But the industry’s confidence in first-party data has grown so strong that it now obscures a more complicated reality. Owning customer data does not automatically translate into understanding customers. Most marketing leaders have sensed this tension already. Despite increasingly sophisticated technology stacks, many organizations still struggle with familiar questions. Which records represent active individuals? Which identities are stale or misattributed? How much of the customer view reflects current behavior versus historical assumptions? These are not philosophical concerns. They surface in everyday operational decisions. Campaigns that reach fewer real customers than expected. Personalization efforts that plateau. Measurement models that appear precise but produce inconsistent outcomes. The problem is not the absence of data. If anything, the opposite is true. The problem is the assumption that the data sitting inside our systems still reflects reality. When first-party data becomes historical data One of the quiet characteristics of customer data is how quickly it shifts from present tense to past tense. Most organizations gather identity information at moments of interaction. Account creation, purchases, subscriptions, service requests. These events create durable records that enter CRM systems, marketing platforms and data warehouses. From that point forward, the records largely persist as they were captured. What changes is the world around them. Consumers rotate devices. Email addresses evolve from primary to secondary. People move, change jobs, create new accounts, abandon others. Behavioral patterns shift with new platforms, new habits, and new privacy controls. The record still exists, but the certainty surrounding the identity begins to loosen. Marketing teams encounter this reality in subtle ways. Lists that appear healthy but deliver diminishing engagement. Customer profiles that fragment across systems. Identity graphs that require constant reconciliation as signals drift out of alignment. None of this means first-party data is wrong. It simply means it ages. The moment of collection is precise. The months and years that follow are less so. The distance between records and reality The idea of a unified customer profile has become foundational to modern marketing infrastructure. Customer data platforms, identity graphs and advanced analytics environments all attempt to bring scattered signals together into a coherent picture. When the signals align, the results can be powerful. But the effectiveness of these systems depends heavily on the integrity of the identifiers entering them. Email addresses, login credentials, device associations and other identity anchors serve as the connective tissue between records. When those anchors drift or degrade, the unified profile begins to lose clarity. This is not a failure of the technology itself. Most identity platforms perform exactly as designed. They connect the signals available to them. The challenge is that many of those signals were captured months or years earlier, during moments when the system had limited visibility into the broader identity context surrounding the individual. As the digital environment evolves, the original record becomes one reference point among many. Marketing leaders recognize this gap when their systems produce technically accurate profiles that still fail to explain current customer behavior. The database reflects what was known. The customer reflects what is happening now. Closing that gap requires something more dynamic than stored attributes alone. The value of activity signals In recent years, some organizations have begun looking beyond the traditional boundaries of customer records and focusing more closely on signals that indicate whether an identity is still active within the broader digital ecosystem. Activity signals provide a different kind of intelligence. Instead of asking what information was collected about a customer in the past, they ask whether the identity attached to that information continues to exhibit real-world behavior today. Is the email address still being used? Does the identity appear in recent digital interactions? Are the signals surrounding it consistent with genuine consumer activity? These questions are becoming increasingly important for teams responsible for both growth and risk management. For marketing, activity signals help clarify which audiences remain reachable and which identities have quietly gone dormant. For fraud teams, they help differentiate legitimate consumers from synthetic identities that appear valid on the surface but lack authentic behavioral patterns. Both disciplines are ultimately trying to answer the same question. Does this identity correspond to a real person who is active in the digital world right now? Stored data alone rarely answers that question with confidence. A more durable identity anchor Among the many identifiers circulating through the digital ecosystem, one has proven particularly resilient over time. Email. For decades it served as both a communication channel and a persistent identity anchor. It appears in authentication systems, commerce transactions, subscriptions, customer service interactions and countless other digital touchpoints. That ubiquity produces a secondary effect. Email addresses generate a continuous stream of activity signals that reflect how identities move through the online world. When those signals are analyzed across large networks, they reveal patterns that extend far beyond a single company’s customer database. They can indicate whether an identity is actively engaged in digital life or has fallen silent. They can highlight inconsistencies that suggest risk. They can surface connections that help reconcile fragmented customer views. In other words, they transform a simple identifier into a dynamic indicator of identity health. Organizations that understand this dynamic tend to treat email differently. It becomes less of a campaign endpoint and more of a reference point for understanding identity across channels. Rethinking what it means to know the customer Over the past decade, marketing technology has made extraordinary progress in storing and organizing customer data. Few organizations today lack the infrastructure to capture and analyze enormous volumes of information. The next frontier is not accumulation. It is validation. Knowing a customer increasingly depends on the ability to verify that the identities inside a database still correspond to real individuals with ongoing digital activity. This shift changes how teams think about data quality. Instead of focusing solely on completeness, forward-looking organizations pay closer attention to vitality. Which identities remain active. Which have quietly faded. Which exhibit patterns that suggest fraud or synthetic creation. These distinctions influence everything from campaign reach to attribution accuracy to risk exposure. When identity signals are strong, the rest of the marketing ecosystem performs more reliably. Personalization becomes more relevant. Measurement reflects real outcomes. Customer experiences align more closely with actual behavior. When identity signals weaken, even the most advanced tools begin operating on uncertain ground. Moving beyond the illusion The industry’s embrace of first-party data was an important correction after years of dependence on opaque third-party sources. But ownership alone does not guarantee clarity. Customer records capture moments in time. The people behind them continue to evolve. For organizations that want to truly understand their customers, the challenge is no longer simply collecting data. It is maintaining an accurate connection between stored identities and real-world activity. That requires looking beyond the database itself and paying closer attention to the signals that reveal whether an identity remains alive in the digital ecosystem. Companies that make that shift discover something important. The most valuable customer data is not the information they collect once. It is the intelligence that helps them keep that data connected to real people over time. View the full article

Having rejection sensitive dysphoria, or RSD, is physically painful, all-consuming, and disproportionate to the event that triggered it. While a neurotypical person is able to recognize rejection, rationalize it, feel bad about it, and then move on with their day fairly quickly, RSD feels like a bull has charged at you and headbutted you in the chest, and it comes with a tremendous amount of shame. RSD is defined by the Cleveland Clinic as “severe emotional pain because of a failure or feeling rejected,” and is a symptom of the emotional dysregulation often seen due to the extra criticisms a person with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) will have encountered as a child. What it’s like My RSD used to rule my day-to-day office life and therefore my career. I lost count of the number of times I was told that I took things “too personally.” Being late for work was excruciatingly painful: I either overexplained or shut down entirely. If someone replied to my email and it didn’t match the energy of my original email, I’d feel rejected. I was often unable to focus on my work because my brain was replaying a social encounter. I often assumed someone didn’t like me if they walked past me in the corridor without a few words of friendly small talk. I used to over-apologize a lot because I always assumed that disapproval was imminent. RSD made me scared to ask for help. I watched other, less competent people get promoted above me simply because I was too scared to ask for a promotion. And if I sensed I was about to be fired, I’d seize whatever control I could by quitting before they could say they didn’t want me there anymore. The multiple ways RSD can affect your career If you’re someone with RSD, it can hugely shape your career. Firstly, colleagues may think you’re rude, because RSD can turn people into blunt communicators. You’ll want to get in and out of social interactions as quickly as possible because, in your mind, the less you say, the less chance there is for criticism, rejection, or talk behind your back. However, being a snappy communicator is often perceived as rudeness, which actually increases the chances of sensing negativity from others. You may not ask for help, because this is an extremely vulnerable thing to do, and it’s preferable to struggle with a task than risk having a colleague reject your request. Having both RSD and a compulsion to not let anyone down is hard because the people pleaser within you makes it impossible to turn down work, yet the RSD within you makes it impossible to hand in work until you are certain it’s perfect. Burnout is inevitable when you’re constantly adding more to your work pile but also struggling to offload anything. As someone with RSD, you’ll be extremely empathetic due to a heightened awareness of emotions. As a result, you’ll tend to communicate with all human beings in the same way. But this worldview can cause friction in the workplace, where there is usually a clear hierarchy. Speaking to your boss in the same manner as you speak to your colleagues seems natural to you, but can cause tension at work, and when you sense that tension, yet another trigger will be created. How you can manage RSD in the workplace There are strategies you can implement to take away the power that RSD has over you and help you thrive in the workplace. Be honest with your team. Have an open conversation about what RSD is, how it affects you, and what measures can be put in place to help manage it. This topic is likely new for everyone, so while lots of people will want to accommodate people with RSD, many simply won’t understand how, or will worry that they’ll come across as patronizing. Have a plan for when something triggers you. Remove yourself from the office and take some time. Analyze the event and separate the facts from your feelings. Reevaluate whether the person meant any harm by what they said or did, and reapproach the event with a calmer mind. Try not to react in the moment, as this often leads to irreversible shame from an RSD-fueled office outburst. Unless someone specifically tells you that they have a problem with you, assume they don’t. If someone has a problem with you, especially in the workplace, it’s their responsibility to let you know directly, rather than you trying to read their mind. When you’re spiralling, take a break. Breathe, repeat positive self-talk, and remember all the amazing qualities that you bring to your job. Remind yourself that your work isn’t bad, incorrect, or not enough; it’s done, it’s completed to a very high standard, and that’s more than sufficient. Always remember your worth and advocate for yourself in a way that minimizes the effect of RSD on your well-being. And if your current workplace doesn’t offer the support you need, you can leave and find another job that will value you, RSD and all. View the full article

What was once a bipartisan and broadly popular housing bill has been weighed down with a pair of provisions that banks can't support. Even with those headwinds, the bill is more likely than not to pass, but not without drawn-out negotiations between the House and Senate. View the full article

As I walked into a Sunset Boulevard venue this past February, Luka Dončić’s face greeted me, flashing across a wall of old-school televisions. The TV screens flickered between a surreal reel of images: Dončić’s mug, a NTSC rainbow effect, a Valentine sweetheart candy image with the words “too small,” and a graphic with the words “Lil Luka’s Heartbreak Factory: Level 1.” For the uninitiated, this scene probably makes no sense. But for superfans of Dončić, star player of the Los Angeles Lakers, the messages are like a secret code to a new kind of fandom. Luka Dončić In February, Dončić celebrated the launch of his new direct-to-fans media company, 77X, by transforming a venue into his own personal brand playground. Dončić’s team built out a space around his personal aesthetic—think: old school video games—that featured a basketball court, candy shop, flower stand, photo booth, and a gift shop adorned with “Lil’ Luka,” Dončić’s alter ego. This three-day activation was Dončić’s first proof of concept for 77X, which he is using to push his NBA brand beyond merchandise drops and brand sponsors. For Dončić, 77X is an opportunity to create a completely self-owned platform that can serve as a universe for his fandom by merging content, commerce, and community under his own banner. “I want to feel like I connect with the fans, bring them out here so they can help me build this and show them what I like so they get to know me better,” Dončić tells Fast Company. In this current moment across basketball, elite athletes are renegotiating their standing with leagues and brand sponsors. Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown launched 741, his independent sneaker brand, and Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry ended his 13-year relationship with Under Armour to operate his Curry brand independently. These athletes know that the future of fandom is direct connection that can’t be mediated through third-party brand deals. “The traditional athlete model is super fragmented,” says Lara Beth Seager, chief brand officer and business manager for Dončić and 77X CEO. Traditionally, content, merchandise, collectibles, and community are split across different stakeholders. Since most of these pillars are controlled by leagues, brand partners, social platforms or retail partners, athletes typically don’t own the relationship with their fan base. In partnership with Shopify, 77X offers a central place for Dončić’s fandom. “[In this] new world of . . . people loving athletes more than they love the teams and the franchises, which was the traditional model, Luka has really found a way for him to get closer to the fans and for them to participate more fully in his life,” says Jessica Williams, head of global brand marketing and partnerships at Shopify. This phenomenon is reflective of how Dončić’s youngest fans, who are between 13 and 25 years old, want to engage. “Fans today don’t just want to be passive,” says Seager. “They want to be active, they want to consume, and they want to live inside worlds.” “Fans today don’t just want to be passive,” says Seager. “They want to be active, they want to consume, and they want to live inside worlds.” Designing a New Type of NBA Athlete Brand In order for fandoms to live inside a world, a world must first exist. Creating 77X’s visual identity was a collaboration among Dončić, Seager, 77X President and Chief Creative Officer Chris Eyerman, and their team. “With Luka’s brand, we wanted to create a universe that reflected his actual personality and interests,” says Eyerman. “We wanted him to own everything we built, and we wanted fans to have a real aesthetic identity they could be part of.” Designing Dončić’s aesthetic identity required understanding who he is beyond his basketball career. Outside of his sport, Dončić is an avid gamer and is particularly fond of Overwatch, a team-based action game set in the future, among other video games. This passion for gaming served as the basis for designing 77X’s brand identity. The result is an aesthetic that mixes retro gaming with a playful, specific tone. Eyerman describes the identity as a “Slovenian late night animated broadcast, all built around Luka, gaming, and basketball.” A visit to 77x.world invites fans to sign up for a digital membership called Fan Pass. That’s their entry point into exclusive Dončić content, giveaways, signed memorabilia, and the 77X shop with branded merchandise ranging from t-shirts and hoodies to keychains available for purchase. “Gamified for us is a brand philosophy, just as much as it is any visual thing,” says Eyerman. “The way we think about toys, trading cards, blind box collectibles, live experiences, it’s all designed with the same logic. We want 77X to feel like the next great collectibles company as much as it feels like an athlete brand.” In traditional athlete models, the product drops from the athlete and brand were the heart of the relationship. But Dončić wants to build a reciprocal and collaborative relationship with fans. Research shows that more than 70% of professional athletes engage with their fans in online communities. Socially savvy brands understand that co-created content with fans performs better. For 77X, merch and product drops are just the starting point. Through Fan Pass, fans will have the opportunity to earn rewards through participating in Dončić ’s world, whether that’s through attending a game, leaving a comment, voting in a poll, or buying merchandise. Each time a fan checks in with Fan Pass, they earn reward points. These points unlock different opportunities like collaborating on product drops and contributing to designs with the 77X team. Every action fans take on the platform from what they click, purchase, or vote on informs what the 77X produces next. “Because the world has such a specific tone, creators and fans can easily make things inside it,” says Eyerman. “We’ve had animators, indie game designers, illustrators, content creators, and fans all contributing to the world, which is exactly what we designed for.” Bringing 77X’s Design to Life The Heartbreak Factory activation laid the foundation for how the team is going to conceptualize 77X events going forward. It established a creative playbook, or lore bible, and will be a point of proof for how 77X will handle inter-brand relationships, which appear to be a still valuable part of Dončić’s plan. For the February event, Dončić and the team invited his existing brand partners like the Nike Jordan Brand and Gatorade into the 77X universe. This invitation changes the nature of Dončić’s relationship with these brands. “An athlete basically rents their image to a brand when you sign an endorsement deal,” Seager explains. “The brand owns the relationship with the fans and the consumers. This way we can invite brands like . . . the Jordan brand . . . into this universe. You’ll see ‘Lil Luka,’ has the Jordan Luka Fives on him. They’re now activated inside Luka’s world. [It’s] the same with Gatorade, an important partner. So rather than Luka renting his image on the outside with brand partnerships and stepping into the traditional brand partnerships, we’re doing the reverse.” All these elements, Fan Pass, brands, commerce, live events, are designed to scale together. So far, the 77X team is encouraged by the results of their first pop-up, which marked the first test of Fan Pass in a live environment. For now, the 77X team says more live events are planned, each is theme-driven and designed to extend the world they’ve built across digital and physical spaces. For Dončić, that’s the point.” “This is something that hasn’t been seen before,” Dončić says. “This [event] is the first [one] we’re going to do. . . . The things in here are the things I like, the things I want to create. . . . This is a big start for us.” View the full article

Fashion resale company Poshmark just got its first app redesign in 15 years, and it’s taking a page out of Depop’s book of UI. The new look encompasses an updated algorithm, redesigned navigational tools, and a new, streamlined aesthetic. It comes as a pivotal moment for the second market, which, according to ThredUp’s 2025 Resale Report, is expected to reach $367 billion by 2029, growing 2.7 times faster than the overall global apparel market. The majority of this growth, the report notes, has been driven by young consumers—millennials, Gen Zers, and Gen Alpha shoppers who are familiar with buying products through apps or in-app features like TikTok Shop. And competition is getting more fierce in the resale industry in light of eBay’s recent acquisition of Depop, which will allow the two platforms to pool their resources (though Depop will retain its own brand and site). Technically, Poshmark’s user base is actually broader than Depop’s, boasting 165 million active users compared to Depop’s 56.3 million. But unlike Depop, Poshmark’s previous app was not set up to capitalize on resale’s big moment, for the simple reason that it was difficult and unpleasant to use. Crowded design and unintuitive sections made shopping on the app feel more like a chore than an enjoyable activity. Now, though, Poshmark appears to be taking notes from its Gen Z-centric competitor and other social media sites to design an app that’s both easy on the eyes and easy to use. “The former UI was focused on transaction over inspiration” The first word that comes to mind to describe Poshmark’s previous app is clutter. Opening the app would lead to a front page, called the “Feed,” which was bisected into a page of recommended items and a page of Poshmark sellers hosting livestreams. Each featured item was previewed inside a small window, allowing nearly six items to fit onto the page at a time. Most of the page was black and white, but some pops of the brand’s signature purple would appear on highlighted pieces of text. Navigating to the app’s search function only made matters worse. Underneath the general search bar, the app included a laundry list of suggested destinations, like popular brands, the user’s liked items, and, for some reason, more live Poshmark shows. These were accompanied with additional tiny images of items and previews of livestreams. The result of these design choices was an extremely information-dense experience. Looking at the old Poshmark app felt like being bombarded with layers of text and imagery that the user would need to dig through to find even a nugget of interest. “The former UI was focused on transaction over inspiration,” says Heather Gordon Friedland, Poshmark’s chief product officer. “For shoppers, this often translated into a feeling of ‘endless scrolling,’ making it challenging to find unexpected pieces that matched their personal style.” Poshmark gets the Depop treatment In comparison, the new design is a breath of fresh air. The entire app has been simplified: Photos are displayed in a larger portrait mode, allowing only four to appear on-screen at a time; livestreams have been sequestered into a small icon at the top of the homepage; and the search function now loads to a clean, white page that only highlights past searches. The pops of purple have been eliminated in favor of a clean black-and-white look. Like Depop, the new app prioritizes white space and large images to keep the user from feeling overwhelmed. “The app now features larger, more immersive portrait imagery, shifting the focus to visual storytelling, much like on platforms such as Instagram or Pinterest,” Friedland says. “This makes browsing more engaging and allows the quality of our sellers’ items to shine.” Design inspiration from socials also shows through on Poshmark’s new TikTok-esque “For You” page, which surfaces trends and styles related to the users’ tastes. According to Friedland, the algorithm uses AI that’s been trained by human sellers and editorial teams to help users stumble across more niche items that the former algorithm, which prioritized shares, might not have surfaced. “While we’ve retained the share button, a core community feature, the new ‘For You’ feed prioritizes the relevance and quality of a listing over the frequency of sharing,” Friedland says. “This ensures a more magical discovery experience where users find high-quality, unique items, rather than seeing the same posts repeatedly.” When it comes to resale app shopping, young users want to feel like the act of scrolling is helping them imagine their dream closet, not forcing them to sort through as many options as possible—and it looks like Poshmark finally caught on. View the full article

Over the course of his 50 years in the art world, Michael Hafftka’s figurative expressionist work has been exhibited at many of the world’s most prominent galleries. His paintings have hung at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Sauf Gallery in Paris. Now, his work is being presented in a more unusual place: on Hugging Face, the AI website. The New York–born artist, now 72, has uploaded roughly half his oeuvre to the platform. He did it on his own initiative after researching Hugging Face and recognizing it as a gathering place for AI work. The move functions as both an artistic gesture and an archival one. His path to AI is less surprising than it might seem. Hafftka has long gravitated toward emerging tools, from early experiments with computer-based art to more recent efforts with Web3. He was already plugged into the communities tracking generative AI as it began to accelerate, and followed that momentum in. He describes the project as “a new kind of catalogue raisonné,” a living record of his work, and a way to make it available for noncommercial AI experimentation. “I decided that I could best use my work as a huge dataset, because so many artists are reluctant to collaborate with AI, but I like the idea of doing that,” says Hafftka. “That way I could actually wind up with a much better-trained model.” Hafftka stands out as unusual in that space for embracing tech, and specifically AI. Most artists are opposed to the rise of AI, with some 61% of artists agreeing that AI is a threat to their livelihoods. Despite that, and because of the ease with which art can be made using simplistic prompts through tools like DALL-E, Google’s Nano Banana and Midjourney, the web is now flooded with AI-generated artwork. Michael Hafftka While Hafftka is a tech booster, he’s also a pragmatist. “It’s inevitable anyway,” he tells Fast Company. In other words, if you can’t beat them, join them. Still, Hafftka doesn’t see this as surrendering his future to AI. He argues that many artists have overstated their fears about the technology. “All of the fear that artists have about copyright usage rights, from actually making physical work, I think those fears are naïve,” he says. “We as a human being make something different from a machine, and I don’t really have the worry that I’ll be overtaken by machines.” So far, the dataset—about 40.4 GB—has been accessed roughly 5,500 times, though Hafftka hasn’t yet seen anyone do anything with its contents. Where others worry about their work being scraped, Hafftka is more concerned about how it’s used. Low-resolution versions of his paintings already circulate through museum collections online, and he assumes those are being pulled into training sets. “Those reproductions represent a small portion of my work”—though he plans to upload the rest in the coming months. “When that work is scraped from the internet and included in data sets, then I’m being done a disservice, because I feel all of my work is valuable and interesting, and I would rather that models training on my work be comprehensive.” That position diverges sharply from artists suing or protesting AI companies. Hafftka’s concern is not that machines might learn from him, but that they might learn from him poorly. “Using one or two of his paintings is not going to reflect the brilliance or the interesting, unique aspects of John Singer Sargent,” he says. He also situates AI within a longer arc of artistic change. “You can never stop technology,” he says. “What art is about is actually experimenting in order to create a unique and different vision.” His confidence is rooted partly in the continued value of original artworks, which in his case sell for tens of thousands of dollars. “You make art for the world,” he says. “I sell original, and original cannot be duplicated by AI printing technology as it is today.” He frames artistic influence less as theft and more as a continuum. Citing the late painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom he knew personally, Hafftka notes that imitation has always surrounded major artists without diminishing their work. “That’s how art progresses in the future,” he says. “Artists influence each other,” adding that “the idea of keeping it all locked down and afraid of future technologies is kind of paranoid.” That makes Hafftka something of an outlier for now. But he doubts he’ll be alone for long. “I’m just the first to do this, because I have so much experience now with technology,” he says. View the full article

For years, we have been outsourcing pieces of cognition so gradually that the shift barely registered. We outsourced memory to search engines after the well-known “Google effect” showed that when people expect information to remain accessible online, they are less likely to remember the information itself and more likely to remember where to find it. We outsourced navigation to GPS, even as research began to show that heavy reliance on it can weaken spatial memory when we have to find our own way. And we outsourced more and more of our social coordination to platforms that decide what we see, when we respond, and how we stay in sync with one another. Now we are beginning to outsource something far more consequential: not memory, not route-finding, not scheduling, but thought itself. Or, more precisely, the labor of forming a judgment before expressing one. That is the real cultural shift hidden behind the current enthusiasm around generative AI. The technology is often presented as a productivity layer, a creativity booster, or a universal assistant. And yes, in many cases, it is all of those things. But it also creates a dangerous temptation: to confuse frictionless output with actual understanding, and fluent answers with earned judgment. Research from Microsoft Research found that higher confidence in generative AI is associated with less critical thinking, while an open-access study in Acta Psychologica linked greater AI dependence to lower critical thinking. A recent Nature Reviews Psychology commentary put the distinction perfectly: performance gains from generative AI should not be confused with learning. I have argued before that “AI won’t replace strategy: It will expose it”, and that focusing on cost-cutting during the AI revolution is a strategic mistake. This is the cognitive version of the same mistake. When people treat AI as a substitute for judgment rather than a tool to sharpen it, they are not becoming more capable. They are simply becoming more dependent. The age of cognitive offloading Psychologists call it cognitive offloading: shifting mental work onto an external aid. A shopping list is cognitive offloading. A calculator is cognitive offloading. So is a calendar, a notebook, or a reminder app. In that sense, there is nothing inherently new or sinister here. Human beings have always built tools that extend the mind. A recent Nature Reviews Psychology review notes that offloading can improve task performance, even if it also comes with tradeoffs. And a broader Nature Human Behaviour perspective argues that digital technology may be changing cognition without clear evidence of broad, lasting damage. The problem is not offloading per se. The problem is what we are offloading. When we outsource storage, we preserve effort. When we outsource navigation, we reduce uncertainty. But when we outsource judgment, we risk weakening the very faculty that allows us to decide whether the machine is useful, misleading, biased, shallow, manipulative, or simply wrong. That risk matters more than many organizations seem willing to admit. Because generative AI does not just answer questions: it creates an illusion of competence so persuasive that it can flatten the distinction between “I understand this” and “I can produce something that looks like understanding.” Nature recently reviewed the evidence around memory and digital tools and made an important point: the strongest claims of cognitive decline are often overstated. But the review also notes that specific capacities can be altered in meaningful ways, including inflated confidence and changed patterns of recall. That is exactly why the current moment deserves more seriousness than both the utopians and the doom-mongers usually bring to it. Fluency is not cognition What makes generative AI culturally destabilizing is not just that it is useful. It is that it is fluent. A calculator never pretended to understand arithmetic. Your GPS never claimed to know what a city feels like. Search engines did not speak in the first person and offer confident summaries in perfect prose. Generative AI does all of that. It produces language in a form so polished, and so close to human rhetorical performance, that it becomes easy to mistake linguistic coherence for reasoning. But a well-phrased answer is not the same as a considered one. Large language models are astonishing pattern engines, but they do not possess judgment in the human sense of the term. As a Harvard Business School recent article noted, human experience and judgment remain critical because AI cannot reliably distinguish truly good ideas from merely plausible ones, nor can it guide long-term strategy on its own. That argument is not anti-AI. It is simply anti-naivety. This is where the real divide begins to emerge. Not between people who use AI and people who do not. That distinction is already becoming trivial. The meaningful divide is between those who use AI as a thought partner and those who use it as a thought replacement. The former are amplified by it. The latter are slowly hollowed out by it. Education is where this becomes impossible to ignore If you want to see the cultural stakes clearly, look at education. The anxiety around AI in schools and universities is often framed in terms of cheating, plagiarism, or assessment integrity. Those are real issues, but they are not the deepest one. The deeper issue is that generative AI can improve performance without producing learning. The OECD’s Digital Education Outlook 2026 that I have linked in previous articles (it is seriously good) is unusually explicit on this point: when students outsource tasks to generative AI without proper pedagogical guidance, performance may improve even when real learning does not. UNESCO has made a similar argument in its guidance for generative AI in education and research, warning that these systems must be used within a human-centered framework rather than as shortcuts around the cognitive process itself. And the OECD has been emphasizing for years that creativity and critical thinking are not ornamental skills, but central educational goals in a digital society. That is why so much institutional panic around AI misses the point. The real question is not whether students will use AI: of course they will! The real question is whether they will still be required to exercise judgment while using it. I made a version of that argument earlier in “AI could transform education… if universities stop responding like medieval guilds”, because too many institutions are obsessing over surveillance instead of redesigning learning for a world in which cognitive outsourcing is now normal. If students can generate passable work without wrestling with ideas, then what is really being assessed is not learning but compliance. The paradox of the AI era Here is the paradox that most people still miss: the individuals who will benefit most from AI will not be the ones who use it for everything. They will be the ones who know when not to use it. That is not a romantic defense of artisanal thinking. It is a practical argument about leverage. People with strong judgment, clear domain knowledge, and disciplined skepticism can use AI to move faster without surrendering authorship. They can interrogate outputs, test assumptions, compare alternatives, and notice when the machine is glossing over ambiguity or inventing certainty. People without those habits are more likely to accept the first plausible answer and move on. Recent management writing has begun to converge around this idea. Harvard Business Review argued that working well with AI requires acting like a decision-maker rather than a passive tool-user. Another recent HBR piece warns that if AI handles the messy early work through which people normally develop discernment, organizations may end up with workers who can produce outputs without ever having built judgment. Even research discussed by HBR on creativity points in the same direction: AI tends to help those with strong metacognition more than those without it. That is what makes this a cultural issue, not just a technical one. We are not merely integrating a new tool into existing habits. We are renegotiating the relationship between effort and authorship, between convenience and competence, between expression and understanding. What we should actually worry about The most common mistake in public discussions about AI is to oscillate between two caricatures. One says AI will make us all stupid. The other says it simply frees us for higher-order work. Reality is messier, and more interesting. Used well, AI can absolutely reduce drudgery and create room for better thinking. Used poorly, it can erode the habits that make better thinking possible in the first place. That is why the correct response is neither prohibition nor surrender. It is design. We need educational systems, workplace norms, and product choices that preserve human judgment rather than route around it. We need interfaces that encourage verification, reflection, and comparison instead of seducing users into passive acceptance. We need to stop treating every reduction in mental effort as progress. Because not all friction is waste. Some friction is where understanding comes from. And that is the core mistake behind so much of today’s AI enthusiasm. We are measuring speed, convenience, and volume while neglecting a much harder question: What kinds of minds are these systems helping us become? That is the question that should define this phase of the AI era: not whether machines can think like us, but whether, by leaning on them carelessly, we might slowly stop thinking like ourselves. The future will not belong to the people who use AI the most. It will belong to those who know when not to. View the full article

Met hails significant breakthrough in investigation into antisemitic attackView the full article

UK’s fiscal constraints leave government reliant on blunter, supplier-side supportView the full article

Back in the 1980s, stack-ranking employees was seen as a state-of-the-art management practice. CEOs like Jack Welch at GE divided employees into three distinct segments: the top 20% of performers, the middle 70%, and the bottom 10%. Those at the bottom would be forced out to make room for new blood. The strange thing about stack ranking is that it’s long been shown to be ineffective and, in many cases, to undermine performance. The problem is that stack ranking doesn’t create a meritocracy. It creates a political system. The winners tend to be those most skilled at claiming credit, shifting blame, and building alliances. Yet still, the practice persists. The truth is that many CEOs thrive on competition. They like to see themselves as winners and want their people to be winners, too. The problem is that losers get a vote. “Humiliation is the nuclear bomb of emotions,” Amanda Ripley writes in High Conflict. It tends to fuel a cycle of conflict, which breeds more humiliation, and things spiral downward from there. Stalin’s Gift That Just Kept Giving One of the first things a visitor to Warsaw will notice is the Palace of Culture. When I first arrived in the Poland in 1997, it dominated the skyline. A replica of the Seven Sisters buildings in Moscow, it was forced upon the Polish people by Stalin in 1955 and for decades served as a reminder of Soviet domination. Its tower had the feel of Sauron, the evil force in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It was more than just a foreign presence at the heart of the capital city. It had the feel of an all-watching eye, a reminder that Poles’ lives were not fully their own. It was, in other words, an enormous physical artifact representing exactly the type of humiliation that Ripley wrote about. We remember the Solidarity movement in Poland as a struggle for labor against communism, and economics was certainly part of it. But the larger grievance was encapsulated in the Palace of Culture, the feeling of being completely subjugated by another nation. Poles felt it deeply and never truly accepted Soviet rule. It was that powerful sense of injury that pushed the Polish people to be passionate about change, much like the forces that propel others now. It is that deep sense of moral injury that creates what the ancient Greeks called thymos, a need for recognition so visceral that it compels one to act. Today, the Palace of Culture still stands, albeit diminished by the modern skyscrapers bustling with commercial activity that surround and obscure it. Yet that palpable sense of humiliation—and the enduring need for retribution—remains indelibly marked on the nation’s soul. The same dynamic plays out inside organizations. How Lou Gerstner Shifted From Humiliation To Collaboration At IBM When Lou Gerstner took over in 1993, IBM was near bankruptcy. One thing he noticed was how the company’s rituals reinforced internal rivalry. Instead of collaborating, business units often worked to undermine one another—hoarding information and maneuvering for dominance. As he would later write in his memoir, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: “Huge staffs spent countless hours debating and managing transfer pricing terms between IBM units instead of facilitating a seamless transfer of products to customers. Staff units were duplicated at every level of the organization, because no managers trusted cross-unit colleagues to carry out the work. Meetings to decide issues that cut across units were attended by throngs of people because everyone needed to be present to protect his or her turf.” “At IBM, we had lost sight of our values,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of Gerstner’s chief lieutenants, once told me. “IBM had always valued competitiveness, but we had started to compete with each other internally rather than working together to beat the competition. Lou put a stop to that and even let go of some senior executives who were known for infighting.” Pushing top executives out the door is never easy. Most are hardworking, ambitious, and smart—which is how they got to be top executives in the first place. Yet sometimes, you have to fire nasty people, even if they outwardly seem like good performers. That’s how you change the culture and build a collaborative workplace. By transforming a culture of competition—and humiliation—to one of respect and teamwork, Gerstner led one of the greatest turnarounds in corporate history. By the late 1990s, IBM was thriving again and continues to be profitable to this day. What Happens When You’re Nice To Greenpeace Founded by environmental activists in the late 1960s, Greenpeace is the type of organization that can send a chill down the spine of CEOs. Known for spectacular protests like scaling Big Ben and Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue, as well as for partnering with world-famous pop stars, it knows how to bring an issue into the public eye. A conflict with Greenpeace can send a stock price reeling. Yet in Net Positive, Paul Polman and Andrew Winston explain how engaging with NGOs can be good for business. At Unilever, where Polman was CEO, they made an effort to build relationships with Greenpeace and other environmental groups. “This level of transparency built up a trust bank that gave Unilever the benefit of the doubt if something went wrong,” they wrote. I noticed something similar working in the new market economies of Eastern Europe in the 1990s and 2000s, where you sometimes had to deal with unsavory characters. People who treated them as unsavory tended not to do well. Yet if you treated them respectfully, as you would any honest business associate, you tended to get a much fairer shake. And that’s the key to breaking the humiliation cycle. Rather than engaging on the basis of conflict, you start by identifying shared values. Once you establish that basic bond of trust and respect, disagreement can become productive instead of destructive. That’s how you can transform potential conflict into collaboration. Respecting Thymos In early 2000, with their company on the brink of failure, Netflix founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph flew to Dallas to meet with Blockbuster executives. When I interviewed former Blockbuster CEO John Antioco, he vaguely remembered the incident but insisted he didn’t attend the meeting due to a scheduling conflict and merely stopped by. Yet the Netflix founders remember events differently. They claim that not only did Antioco meet with them, but that he actually laughed when they proposed that Blockbuster buy Netflix for $50 million. “That night, when I got into bed and closed my eyes, I had this image of all sixty thousand Blockbuster employees erupting in laughter at the ridiculousness of our proposal,” Hastings would later write in his book, No Rules Rules. As I’ve previously explained, Antioco’s version of the story is more credible, but that’s really beside the point. What’s relevant is that for the Netflix guys, the humiliation felt very real. They were on the ropes, trying to survive, and cooked up a pitch to the industry’s 800-pound gorilla, only to be rebuffed. That, more than ambition, drove them to reinvent their business, make it work, and become an 800-pound gorilla themselves. That’s why we always need to be careful about competitiveness evolving into a will to dominate. When you humiliate people, you don’t defeat them—you motivate them. And sometimes, you create your most dangerous competitor. If you’re not careful, you can sow the seeds of a humiliation cycle and inadvertently trigger your own demise. That’s the cycle leaders need to learn to break. You need to design for collaboration by making respect visible and repeatable. The desire for recognition is a basic human need. If you don’t satisfy it constructively, it will emerge destructively. View the full article

For the first time in 36 years, the old-school Adidas trefoil logo will appear at the World Cup. The vintage Adidas logo shows three leaf-shaped foils with three parallel horizontal lines that cut through the bottom of the shapes. It previously appeared on Adidas World Cup kits until it was replaced by the brand’s triangular three-bars logo in the 1990s. Now, for the 2026 World Cup, the trefoil logo is making a comeback, appearing on the right chest of away jerseys for 25 countries, including Japan, Mexico, and Ukraine. Bringing the old logo back is a nostalgia play. Sam Handy, general manager of football for Adidas, said in a statement that the German sportswear brand “felt it was a fitting and inspired moment to bring the trefoil back to the biggest stage in world football.” The kits pay homage to each respective country with local references, like florals representing local plants for Costa Rica and Chile, and a pattern inspired by artist René Magritte for Belgium. The revived logo instantly gives the kits a classic feel. The history of the trefoil The trefoil logo was introduced in the 1970s, when the brand was in expansion mode. Previously, Adidas had sold only shoes, and its first logo showed a track cleat with three stripes on the side and situated between the two extended tails in the ds in Adidas. When the company started selling apparel in 1972, it rolled out the trefoil created by German designer Hans “Nick” Roericht to symbolize a new era. The trefoil stuck with the symbolism of the three stripes after founder Adolf Dassler put three stripes on the shoes for attention’s sake as they showed up better in photographs. The trefoil’s shape was inspired by florals, and the logo became a pop culture crossover after rap group Run-D.M.C.’s homage to the brand in the 1986 song “My Adidas.” The company modernized its visual identity in 1991 with its triangular three-bars performance logo, designed by creative director Peter Moore. It gave Adidas a more simple mark to better compete visually with the American brand Nike’s iconic Swoosh, and it represented the company during a period of rapid growth in the 1990s and 2000s. Today, Adidas shows how to use two logos at once, keeping its performance logo as its main mark while the retro trefoil appears on its Originals brand of casual sportswear and in nostalgic marketing campaigns. By bringing the old logo to one of the biggest global stages in sports, Adidas is looking to tap into the power of pre-Yeezy nostalgia for its vintage brand. View the full article

Work stress has become one of the most common challenges in modern life. According to recent national reports, nearly seven in ten employees say work is a major source of stress, putting us right back where we were in the early months of the pandemic. No matter where you work—at a desk in an office, from your kitchen table, or bouncing between the two—the pressure to perform has never been higher. Burnout has reached a six-year high despite the fact that most of us are doing everything we can think of to get rid of stress. We sign up for wellness webinars. We shuffle schedules. We tell ourselves we’ll rest “as soon as things slow down.” But instead of helping, those strategies only add to the problem. The webinar we signed up for? We can’t attend because we got double-booked. The work we rearranged to make space for breathing room? Turns out it was the one thing our team was actually waiting on. And the plan to rest when things slow down? Somehow that moment never seems to come. We end up stressed and exhausted from trying not to be so stressed and exhausted. The truth is that much of what we’ve been taught about dealing with stress is outdated, ineffective, or misunderstood. If we want real relief from stress (and who doesn’t?), we first have to understand what it actually is—and what it isn’t. The Chronic Stress Crisis Contrary to popular belief, not all stress is bad. Eustress is the positive, motivating kind—the energy you feel when tackling a meaningful project or learning something new you’re interested in. Acute stress is the body’s short-term response to pressure, like when you’re preparing for a deadline or navigating a tough meeting. These forms of stress aren’t the problem. The problem is chronic stress: the type that occurs when the body’s alarm system never shuts off. Instead of returning to baseline, the nervous system stays stuck in survival mode. Research from Harvard shows over time, constant activation erodes focus, creativity, and overall health. You simply cannot think clearly, innovate, or solve complex problems when your brain believes you’re under threat and kicks into survival mode. And here’s the part we don’t talk about nearly enough: Chronic stress doesn’t just drain your energy and reduce your performance—it dulls your joy, narrows your vision, and shrinks your capacity. The myth that stress is the price of success is a lie we’ve been taught, not a truth we have to live. That brings us to a powerful, surprisingly simple alternative. It’s Time for Your Joyful Rebellion A joyful rebellion is the daily, deliberate, unapologetic choice to reclaim your time, your energy, and your joy—without having to quit your job, blow up your life, or transform into someone who cold plunges at sunrise before blending a kale smoothie. And let’s be clear: Joy is not toxic positivity. We’re not slapping a smiley face sticker over exhaustion and calling it self-care. According to Pamela King, who has studied joy extensively, “Joy is our delight when we experience, celebrate, and anticipate the manifestation of those things we hold with the most significance.” Joy is meaningful and strategic. It doesn’t require perfection or endless free time—it requires intention. And intention is something we can cultivate, even on our busiest, most stressful days. It only takes three surprisingly simple steps known as the un-stressing method. Step 1: See Stress Differently Reducing work stress begins with two tiny questions that change everything: Is this important? Do I have control over it? Much of our work stress lives in the space where we skip these questions and jump straight to worry. We catastrophize. We assume the worst. We take responsibility for things that aren’t even ours to carry. But when you pause long enough to name what really matters—and whether or not it’s within your control—you might be surprised by what you discover. Step 2: Sort Stress into Five Actionable Categories Not all stress is created equal, and we need to stop treating it like it is. There are five distinct types of work stress, and each has its own symptoms and solutions: Schedule stress: Stress from having too much to do and not enough time. Back-to-back meetings, endless commitments—you barely have a moment to breathe. Suspense stress: Stress from waiting for what’s uncertain or looming. The deadline, decision, or tough conversation isn’t here yet, but the anticipation is already wearing on you. Social stress: Stress from tension in relationships and team dynamics. You can feel it in the awkward silences, the unresolved conflict, and the energy it takes just to get through a meeting. Sudden stress: Stress that arrives unannounced and demands a response. An urgent request, a last-minute change, or a full-blown emergency throws your day off course. System stress: Stress from structures, processes, and culture. Unclear expectations, power imbalances, inequity, and inefficient processes create stress across the organization. The first four align with research conducted by Karl Albrecht in the 1970s. Despite how much work has changed since then, those categories of stress are similar. The fifth type of stress, system stress, was added based on my research. A stressor can be more than one type, or even all five types. Sorting won’t magically remove the stress, but it does remove the confusion on what’s the real problem you’re trying to solve. Step 3: Solve Stress Without Spinning This is where we trade overthinking for doing. When we’re stressed, our brains spin. We run through worst-case scenarios. We rehearse imaginary conversations. We try to solve everything at once, which means we solve nothing at all. The un-stressing method uses a simple decision matrix to identify the next step. For each stressor, you’ll have one small, smart, doable action. That’s enough to interrupt the spinning that so often occurs when we’re stressed. Celebrate the Shift Toward Less Stress and More Joy And now for the fun part—celebrate! The goal isn’t just less stress; it’s more joy. When you begin using the un-stressing method, you reclaim time, energy, and capacity. You don’t have to earn joy or go searching for it. It’s been there all along; it’s just been harder to access because of all the stress. Work stress may be common, but living in constant survival mode doesn’t have to be. Burnout may be at a six-year high, but that doesn’t mean your joy has to be at a six-year low. We’ve spent so much time trying to manage stress that we’ve overcomplicated it, when what we needed all along was something far simpler—a way of seeing, sorting, and solving stress that actually works. It’s time to stop simply managing your stress. It’s time to start leading your life. View the full article

Here’s a story you’re probably familiar with: You buy the reusable coffee cup. It’s beautiful, ethical, made from recycled ocean plastic, and you feel good about your purchase. But then it leaks in your bag, ruins a notebook, and by week two it’s sitting in a cabinet while you’re back to disposable cups and a vague sense of guilt. Or maybe it’s the “eco mode” on your washing machine that takes three hours instead of one. The sustainable packaging that requires scissors, sweat, and a YouTube tutorial. The electric vehicle charging app with six steps when a gas pump has one. We’ve all been there. But here’s what’s interesting: The problem isn’t that you don’t care about sustainability. It’s that these products are designed as if caring should be enough. And the problem for businesses with this approach is that it’s not. The Big Misunderstanding: Care vs. Use There’s a gap that kills sustainable products, and it’s not about values. It’s about friction. In our research, we have examined hundreds of companies across many industries and found the same pattern: Products fail when they ask people to care more. They succeed when they ask people to do less. The difference seems subtle but it’s not. Caring is an intention. Using is a behavior. And between intention and behavior sits everything that makes us human: cognitive load, time pressure, habits, trade-offs, the path of least resistance. People don’t usually buy products to express values. They buy them first to solve problems with the least effort possible. When you add steps, costs, or complexity in the name of sustainability, you’re competing with convenience. And in this battle, convenience almost always wins. The question shouldn’t be, How do we get people to care more? Rather, it should be How do we design sustainability that works because it’s easier, not despite being harder? Three ways sustainability shows up in design When you map how sustainability actually intersects with product experience, you see three outcomes. Sustainability that’s neutral. It doesn’t help or hurt the core value proposition. Maybe it’s a recycled component the user never notices. It doesn’t drive adoption, but it doesn’t kill it either. Sustainability that adds friction. Extra steps. Higher up-front cost. Performance trade-offs. Packaging that’s harder to open. This is where good intentions go to die. Sustainability that improves the experience. Lower lifetime cost. Fewer decisions. Better performance. Less maintenance. This is where adoption happens, and it’s rarer than it should be. That third category is where things get interesting. What it looks like when sustainability makes things better Take Electrolux. A few years ago, the company redesigned its washing machines with a specific goal: Make clothes last longer. Not “wash greener” or “use less water,” but simply “make clothes last longer.” The machines became gentler on fabrics. Garments held their shape, color, and overall integrity through more wash cycles. For consumers, that meant real money saved over time, and fewer worn clothes that needed replacing. To be sure, energy and water use dropped too. Textile waste fell. Microplastic shedding from synthetic fabrics declined. But here’s the key: Customers didn’t adopt a sustainability feature. They adopted a better washing machine—one that made their lives easier and saved them money. The environmental benefits were an extra. Or consider John Deere, which shifted from selling machines to selling productivity. Using GPS, sensors, and software, farmers can now optimize exactly where and when to plant, spray, and harvest. The result? They use significantly less fuel and fewer chemicals while improving yields. Operating costs fall. Regulatory compliance gets easier. Farmers didn’t “go green.” Rather, they optimized their operations, and sustainability was the side effect of better data and smarter systems. Even in heavy industrial markets, the same logic applies. Siemens embeds sustainability into automation and energy systems by making them more efficient, more reliable, and cheaper to operate over their life cycle. Customers adopt because the total cost of ownership drops and uptime improves. The emissions reductions are real, but they’re not what closes the sale. In each case, sustainability doesn’t ask customers to sacrifice. It delivers something they already wanted, but better. The pattern: Make it invisible These examples have one thing in common: Sustainability works when users barely notice it. The Nest thermostat learns your patterns instead of asking you to program schedules. Spotify optimizes streaming quality based on your connection instead of making you choose bit rates. Modern cars shift gears better than you can, and are more efficient on the engine, so we stopped asking people to shift manually. The best sustainable products follow the same principle. They reduce waste by reducing steps. They save energy by making systems smarter. They cut environmental impact by cutting friction. This is the opposite of how most sustainable products are marketed. Usually, sustainability is positioned as a feature you have to actively choose, understand, and commit to. That’s a recipe for low adoption. If your product requires customers to believe in climate change, read the label carefully, or accept trade-offs, you’re building on shaky ground. Belief is fickle. Motivation is exhausting. Convenience is ruthless. What this means for innovators and builders If you’re designing products, leading innovation teams, or building sustainability into your road map, here’s what actually matters. Stop designing for believers. Some customers are deeply committed to sustainability and will tolerate friction. They’re vocal, they’re influential, and they’re a minority. Most of your market sits somewhere between “I care when it’s easy” and “I don’t think about it.” Design for them. Stop treating sustainability as something extra. If it’s a separate feature, an add-on cost, or a premium tier, it will struggle. Sustainability should be baked into how the product fundamentally works, not layered on top. Ask different questions early. Don’t ask How do we make this greener? Instead as How do we make this better and greener? Can sustainability reduce operating costs? Cut complexity? Improve reliability? Make usage simpler? If the answer is no, rethink the approach. Default matters more than choice. Every time you ask a customer to decide, you create friction. The most successful sustainable products make the right choice automatic. Eco mode isn’t a setting, it’s just how the product works. The future is invisible sustainability We’re living through a shift in how sustainability shows up in products. Sustainability 1.0 was about labels, pledges, and messaging. It asked customers to care, to choose consciously, to sacrifice a little for the greater good. Sometimes that worked. Mostly it didn’t. Sustainability 2.0 is about defaults, systems, and design. It stops asking people to be better and starts building better products. It embeds sustainability so deeply that using the product is the sustainable choice. The companies that win won’t be the ones with the best sustainability reports. They’ll be the ones that make sustainability disappear into products so good that people choose them for entirely selfish reasons. We have documented this shift across dozens of industries. The pattern is clear: Sustainability wins when it stops competing with convenience and starts enabling it. That’s not asking people to care less about the planet. It’s respecting how they actually make decisions—and designing accordingly. The future won’t be won by making people care more. It will be won by making sustainability something they don’t have to think about at all. View the full article

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman just announced a sweeping overhaul of America’s space strategy. Dubbed “Ignition,” it’s a tectonic shift in how the nation intends to conquer the moon. Isaacman, who took the agency’s helm in late 2025, laid out a hyper-accelerated road map to build a permanent lunar surface base before the end of President Donald J. The President’s term. It is an aggressive departure from the agency’s previous trajectory, but looking at the unforgiving physics and glacial pace of actual aerospace engineering, the timeline reads like pure fantasy. The plan is great on paper, though. It lays out three deployment phases—which will progress from landing robots to building human habitats to establishing a permanent base crew. Isaacman says the plan positions the U.S. to compete with China, a country that is steadily advancing on its 100-year plan to build its own lunar base and set up a network of spaceships to control and exploit the resources in our satellite and the solar system. Isaacman is very aware of this. “The clock is running in this great-power competition, and success or failure will be measured in months, not years,” he stated in NASA’s official press release announcing the Ignition presentation event at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. But the history of space exploration is not actually written in months. Not even years. It’s written in decades. The hardware required for all the milestones that Ignition has set up is nowhere near ready, starting with the landers that will fly the humans from the moon’s orbit to its surface and back. According to a March 9 report from the NASA Office of Inspector General, the lifeblood of this lunar ambition—SpaceX’s colossal Starship lander—simply will not be prepared for a 2027 touchdown. Nobody really knows when it will be ready, as Starship itself keeps exploding in midair from time to time. And the Space Launch System, the Boeing-built rocket that Isaacman criticized in the past, has been delayed again and again, given that it is plagued with problems. Every critical component of the supply chain is notoriously behind schedule, making the prospect of constructing a permanent extraterrestrial habitat before January 2029—the end of The President’s presidency—less of a viable blueprint and more of an impossible dream. Big change The Ignition initiative starts with the immediate suspension of the Lunar Gateway, the planned space station that would have orbited the moon like a cosmic tollbooth. Following the previous plan, astronauts would arrive in a spaceship from Earth—like Lockheed Martin’s Orion—to dock and transfer to a lunar lander made by SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, designed specifically to just go up and down the moon’s surface. With the new plan, instead of docking with the orbiting station, the lander will orbit the moon while waiting for Orion to arrive. The astronauts will move directly from Orion into the lunar lander—think about this spaceship as a reusable version of the Lunar Module that took the Apollo astronauts down to the surface—to go down, leaving Orion behind. Then, at the end of the mission, they will use the lander to go up, dock back with the Orion, and leave for Earth, leaving the lander orbiting for the next mission. “It should not be much of a surprise that we intend to pause Gateway in its current form and focus on building lunar infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the surface,” Isaacman remarked at the Ignition presentation event, claiming that NASA aims to have landings every six months. This abrupt pivot leaves a trail of whiplash and wasted hardware among America’s international allies, who had already invested heavily in the previous architecture. For years, the European Space Agency, Japan, and Canada poured funds and engineering hours into building modules for the now-mothballed Gateway station. Europe actually delivered its critical habitation module to NASA just last April, a massive metallic cylinder now left without a destination. The sudden policy apparently left ESA livid. An agency spokesperson told The Register that the agency “is consulting closely with its Member States, international partners, and European industry to assess the implications of the announcement, with further information to follow.” The agency will redirect the Lunar Gateway budget toward a three-phase lunar base built directly on the regolith. This permanent outpost begins with a $10 billion initial phase to deliver rovers and power generators, eventually scaling up to support continuous human habitation. How NASA imagines it Phase one of this ambitious settlement will happen in 2027. It relies entirely on a relentless barrage of private robotic landers. Instead of sending humans right away, NASA will bombard the lunar landscape with scientific instruments, uncrewed rovers, and advanced power systems like radioisotope thermoelectric generators (these are essentially rugged metal boxes that contain chunks of decaying plutonium that release continuous heat and electricity, an absolute necessity for machinery to survive the brutal, subfreezing lunar nights). Once that robotic foundation is laid, phase two will kick off in 2028 to support recurring astronaut visits. This will put more hardware on the surface, most notably a pressurized rover built by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency that will allow explorers to drive across the gray wasteland in a comfortable, shirt-sleeve environment rather than being trapped in bulky space suits. Phase three will come in 2029. This is when the agency officially transitions from brief camping expeditions into a permanent, entrenched human foothold. To make this happen, NASA plans to use massive cargo variants of those currently delayed commercial landing systems to haul heavy infrastructure, like habitats, down to the surface. This is where the rest of the international partners come into play, bringing in monumental pieces of equipment such as the multipurpose habitats designed by the Italian Space Agency and a rugged lunar utility vehicle provided by Canada. It is a grand vision of a bustling off-world colony, heavily dependent on all these colossal, unproven rockets magically maturing into reliable freight trains to the moon within the next couple of years. Can it be done? To execute this dizzying sprint, NASA is fundamentally restructuring its own workforce, stripping away layers of external contractors to hire engineers directly as civil servants and embedding federal experts directly into the factory floors of private vendors. Some observers seem to be quite excited. Veteran space journalist Mark Whittington, a firm supporter of the permanent lunar base idea, found Isaacman’s speech refreshing because it “acknowledges NASA’s shortcomings rather than minimizing or covering” the profound delays and wasted billions that plagued earlier iterations of the Artemis program. As a child of Apollo, I’m a huge supporter of permanent lunar bases, too. But my enthusiasm cannot bend the harsh realities of physics, space development timelines, and congressional purse strings. The vision to build this is meaningless without the actual cash to buy the aluminum and fuel. While a recent Senate committee advanced the 2026 NASA Authorization Act—which implicitly endorses this exact lunar base concept—that legislation does not actually allocate a single dime to the agency. As space policy analyst Marcia Smith bluntly pointed out to SpacePolicyOnline: “Authorization bills don’t provide any money; only appropriators do.” Even if the financial floodgates burst open tomorrow, the physics of keeping fragile human bodies alive in the lethal vacuum of space cannot be rushed by political mandates. The sobering March NASA OIG report explicitly commended NASA’s management but raised glaring alarms regarding crew safety on the commercial landers being developed by Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin. The watchdog discovered a terrifying blind spot in the current architecture: If a disaster strikes astronauts while walking on the lunar surface or orbiting above it, NASA possesses absolutely zero capability to mount a rescue mission. Rushing untested vehicles into the unforgiving environment of space without a safety net is a gamble that history shows often ends in tragedy. We have watched this movie before, witnessing private lunar landers crash into the regolith and watching legacy and new aerospace giants stumble on engineering hurdles for years on end. Isaacman’s desire to cut the bureaucratic fat and focus the agency’s brilliant minds directly on the machinery is a deeply noble and refreshing shift in philosophy: NASA as a startup. Great. Beam me up. But decreeing that a permanent lunar base and a nuclear-powered Martian flagship will materialize before 2029 ignores the brutal, unforgiving nature of orbital mechanics and the established cadence of human spaceflight. For all its good intentions and bold rhetoric, unless a hundred miracles happen, this sweeping new road map remains as profoundly tethered to fantasy as the heavily delayed plans it just replaced. View the full article