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As small business owners, we all know that growth comes with both opportunity and challenge. Scaling efficiently—without losing control over operations, finances, or customer experience—has always been one of the toughest balancing acts. For years, technology has promised to make that journey easier, yet many of us still find ourselves managing a patchwork of systems that barely communicate with each other. At SuiteWorld 2025, Oracle NetSuite’s annual user conference, that conversation took center stage—particularly around how artificial intelligence is shifting what’s possible for small and midsize businesses. I sat down with Sam Levy, Senior Vice President of Growth and Execution at Oracle NetSuite, to talk about what’s new, what’s next, and how the company continues to shape its vision for small businesses that want to compete like large enterprises—but without the complexity. From the debut of NetSuite Next and its conversational AI “Ask Oracle” assistant, to real-world success stories from customers who doubled their revenue without doubling staff, Levy offered a front-row look at how automation and integrated systems are redefining small business efficiency. For entrepreneurs considering when to move beyond QuickBooks or spreadsheets, or for those already seeking smarter, faster ways to grow, this discussion highlights where NetSuite sees the greatest potential—and what small business leaders should be doing now to prepare for the AI-driven future ahead. Leland McFarland All right, I am here at Oracle’s NetSuite, um, SuiteWorld 2025 with Sam Levy, SVP of Growth and Execution at Oracle NetSuite. Um, got a few questions for you. So, SuiteWorld always brings exciting uh updates. Uh, for those who couldn’t attend, what’s the key message Oracle NetSuite wants small and mid-sized business business owners to take away this year? Sam Levy Obviously. Well, well, SuiteWorld’s our annual user conference. And what’s more exciting, this is, I think our 12th or 13th year doing SuiteWorld as a as a conference where we bring all of our customers together and talk about strategies of what we’re where we’re going. Our theme this year is “No Limits.” And it’s really been practiced into “no limits of scaling your business.” And whether you’re a small or medium-sized business, scaling, growth can be hard. And so the things that we are talking about and the themes we’re talking about is “no limits” is how do companies scale? What’s the current trends of scaling? How is technology an enabler? And now this exponential multiplier, what we call AI, how is AI going to help me scale or how should I be, you know, consuming AI in our business? Leland McFarland Perfect. So, NetSuite has long uh served growing companies. How would you describe its current vision for SMB companies compared to five years ago? Sam Levy Well, the vision has much been the same for us uh for NetSuite for since 27 years ago when Evan started the company and really being one, a revolutionary company that was cloud-first. So, we only service cloud, we only deliver in the cloud, and that was from the born-on date 27 years ago through today. And so, part of what our transformation strategy of helping small and medium businesses is to transform their business. One, to do that digital experience of how do you take and do that digital transformation? Digital transformation is not just moving your books from on-prem to the cloud. That is kind of just a functional shift and lift of technology. Processes have to evolve in that, and so there’s a maturation that occurs. And our biggest strength is one, we go to business and go to market by industry. So, we understand your industry, what it takes to operate your industry. And so, whether you’re a healthcare company or you’re a manufacturer or you’re a retailer, there’s a different set of automation and industry metrics that you need to solve your business issues. And we come to small businesses and help them mature that. So, when we talk about digital transformation, the first thing is looking at is, how do we help businesses just get control of their current environment? Look at their processes and then unify them. Because we’re a suite for each industry, we offer all the components to run your business. And it’s really nice for a small or mid-sized business that they really want to act like a big company, but they want the processes and the scaling of the entry points to be for the small and medium-sized companies. Exactly what we do. Provide them that level of industry comfort, and then let them scale. Leland McFarland Perfect. So, for many small businesses, they see uh ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning, um, they they kind of view it as enterprise software. I mean, it’s kind of in the name. Um, and it’s kind of meant for larger or maybe medium-sized businesses. Uh, how is NetSuite breaking down that perception to make ERP accessible for smaller companies? Sam Levy Yeah. This is something that we introduced a decade ago with the conversation of “SuiteSuccess.” And SuiteSuccess was essentially is taking an industry playbook and saying, “For this industry, here is your stairway.” Start with financials first, then add on operations, then add on sales, then add on your supply chain, then add on commerce, whatever it might be for your industry. And what’s the nice part about that is how we scale down for businesses that are very simple, but yet they’re going to evolve, is we have that stairway approach. Making it really fast and simple for them to join NetSuite, and then have a growth patch, you know, pattern with capabilities that they never have to leave. It’s simply as kind of what we look at probably with our iPhones. You get onto the iPhone platform, you buy a few modules and applications, and the outset is, you need some more capacity, you just turn it on. You need another module, you get another application and you go with it. Same with business, making it really easy for a business platform to start the financials and then grow the rest of the way. Leland McFarland Perfect. So, what are some of the biggest pain points that you see small and medium-sized businesses that are facing um that are they’re facing today, um, that NetSuite directly helps to solve? Sam Levy Most businesses today, and I was just, you know, meeting with hundreds of customers this week, have a business need for certain systems and requirements. They have business issues. And whether they need to fill out a timesheet, they don’t have tracking, they need some information for human capital and talent, they can’t close the books, they have business issues. And I think what one of the things that NetSuite’s making it really easy for companies to do is, jeez, if you have these ripe issues, how do we help you, you know, transform your business? And that’s been the secret sauce for for us, I think is is the first part of your question. I think the second part was, how are we transforming? What was the second part of your question? Leland McFarland Um, how are are you using or what what’s involved with the NetSuite? You know, what what does NetSuite have that can kind of really address those uh pain points? Sam Levy Okay. So the the main thing I was talking about is, well, I was saying they say business issues that arise from small businesses, they want to grow quickly or they want to manage cost. And most small businesses have to chew gum and walk at the same time, meaning both. They have to grow, but they don’t have a bunch of people that they can add into their business. So they need some automation, a platform to help them. Let me give you an example. A company that comes with us with $25 million in revenue, they want to double and get to $50 million in revenue. They need to invest in their product and R&D, but they don’t want to add in a bunch of accounting and operational staff. They come to NetSuite because they can automate their business and grow without adding additional headcount to support their business system. They’re adding the investments where it truly is going to make them grow. So that’s one of the offsets that we see is, just basic automation and operational improvement helps them get control of their operational costs. Leland McFarland Okay. That seems like it’ll be very helpful, um, for small businesses, uh, who need to get, you know, as you said, control over their finances and and whatnot. Um, can you share a recent example or a customer story where a small business significantly improved operations or profitability using NetSuite? Sam Levy Yeah, I mean, I’ll talk about some of the companies that were on stage even this week. We did some keynote addresses. One that comes to mind is a company called Cymbiotika. Now, Cymbiotika is a wellness company. They’re well-known for taking supplements and wellness, liposomal, I should say. It’s not supplements, but it’s just liposomal. And those are good for your body. And so one of their challenges is as they were growing from a $50 million company to $100 million company and launching their brands, is the complexity with them. Now, their organization adopted NetSuite and they went live with NetSuite. And what’s interesting about their operations is their operation headcount has roughly stayed flat through their growth patterns. They’ve added a few employees, but as they doubled their revenue, they did not double their employees. I think that’s a true testament, I think, a case study of, how do you look at leaders in your industry and what are they doing that perhaps we should be considering doing? Or how do they do it? What is their secret sauce? So how do you double revenue without adding double staff? And so for them, they were using automation to do that. They were doing the things that that once took a team of people can now be done by an individual. An individual now instead of owning one account can manage 10 times the number of accounts. And so that became their offsetting maneuver. That was a great story that Kimberly talks about on their growth strategy. Leland McFarland Oh, that’s perfect. All right, switching over to AI and automation, which has been basically uh most of what’s been talked about this week. Um, AI has been a huge theme this year. How is uh NetSuite’s approach to AI helping small businesses uh compete on the same level as the uh big boys? Sam Levy The big boys? This is interesting. Uh, AI is in every, you know, it’s in every conversation seems like in business today. How we are helping companies is twofold. One, we are unique that every one of our customers is on the same version, the same release, and ultimately the same data model. So 43,000 organizations all use the software the same, from the biggest to the smallest. AI, we believe that the best AI comes from the best data. So having all of your data in one place, there’s two approaches: outside-in versus inside-out. The outside-in approach is, let me take a Claude or a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude and use it against my current NetSuite account. So how do I unlock all of my data in my current infrastructure and tie it into a large language model? And that’s what we’ve done. We announced Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is a connector. It’s free for all of our customers to connect their NetSuite data to Claude or to ChatGPT. Now you can go in there and simply ask prompts inside of Claude, which is, “Who are my top five customers?” “What is my inventory levels?” “What’s my financial statements?” Your conversational AI, that’s an outside view in. That’s our first approach to AI being outside-in. It’s been really successful and taking an enterprise product like that and really making it simple for small and medium businesses. The inside-out approach is doing the opposite. Building AI with inside of NetSuite and solely for just NetSuite data is you can go into NetSuite now and use certain AI capabilities inside your your your application. So, you can use either either or or and or both ways to do it. There’s a lot of things that we use and we’ve released now for years of continuing to add onto AI capabilities from the inside-out. The outside-in approach has been good because sometimes you want NetSuite data connected to other systems. And Model Context Protocol allows then chat to not just interface with NetSuite data, but also maybe another system that you have out there. Maybe it’s a commerce system or maybe it’s Salesforce data, you can then pull in together through MCP. Leland McFarland Right. Um, are you partnering with any outside LLMs to kind of or are you building from scratch, um, your own LLM, um, or or AI uh protocols within uh um your own system? Sam Levy We definitely partner because those best-of-breed applications are certainly market leaders. When you think about ChatGPT and what they’ve done, you think about what Google has done, you think about what Meta has done, you think about xAI, they’re big in R&D and billions of dollars just in these large language models. Uh, we did we first start with Cohere two or three years ago as our first large language model, and then we’ve adopted all the others as subprocessors within inside of our environment. So we’re definitely leveraging all of them. Leland McFarland Perfect. Um, what are some practical ways SMBs can use NetSuite’s new AI capabilities to save time or make smarter decisions without needing a data science team? Sam Levy Well, the new interface, and I don’t know if you use ChatGPT, hopefully you probably do to summarize notes and so forth, or if you’ve used Claude, I think that the most interesting piece of it is it’s taking what used to be a technical way to get your answers, and it’s it’s really making it simple into context, a simple language context. So before, if you wanted to go ask a question, which is summarize summarize my financial statements and show me year-on-year compares and show me, you know, FEs that I had, you might have to go run data from multiple systems or multiple NetSuite reports and searches to do that. You’d have to write the research or report and then pull it all together. So, very feasible, and that’s what customers have done for years. Very linear though, one report, one answer, one report, one answer, and then pulling it all together. The nice part about taking chat is I just ask the question inside ChatGPT or I ask it inside of Claude. Show me the same data, pull my financial statements, do the year-on-compairs, do the FEs, change my visualization, show it to me in a chart, make it beautiful, hit enter. It goes and runs the searches, runs the reports inside the data, shows you where it’s got its data, and then it presents it back to you in matter of minutes now, what perhaps was days before. And that’s a simple way, I think that the most people are getting the biggest value is just taking a non-technical approach just asking the conversational questions. Leland McFarland All right, perfect. That’s seems very useful. Hopefully it’ll save uh small business owners a bunch of time and effort. Sam Levy And give them the visibility to their business, right? Most important, yeah. Leland McFarland Um, switching over to industry and growth trends. Uh, from your perspective, what are the next biggest trends shaping the future of small and mid-sized businesses over the next two to three years? Sam Levy Well, I think everyone is being asked, the biggest trend is, how can I grow but yet control my operational cost? And we’re seeing that with these, you know, the invention of the AI business models out there where, you know, we call it the multiplier effect with AI. And I think the biggest trend right now is, how can AI give me an advantage, a competitive advantage going forward? One, I got to simplify my back-office processes, make it really simple to do business from the back office, meaning how do I enter an order? How do I collect cash? How do I create a procurement transaction, receive it, and so on? So making that really simple is number one. But then how do you take that simplified process and make that a competitive advantage externally? So when a customer comes and does business with you, they don’t find it five, you know, it may take them too long to get their product or their service. Making it very easy to do business with them, and that’s been the growth lever is they’re trying to simplify things, because transactions are happening faster and faster. But we’re simplifying the complexity of the transaction, which has been the big theme today. Not a lot of complexity, simplify it, but just more transactions. Leland McFarland More transactions, more money. Sam Levy Well, that’s good. That should be the simple linear equation with that one. Yeah. Leland McFarland Um, are there specific industries like manufacturing, retail, or services where you’re seeing especially strong SMB adoption or innovation through uh NetSuite? Sam Levy This is a uh it’s a good leading question of which industry is hot and which one’s not. They all seem to have challenges going on in their business and headwinds, whether that’s macroeconomic or it’s industry pressure. You know, some product and inventory-based companies had tariff issues. And so that helped, you know, that helped help create a big headwind for them. How they reacted to it, though, I think were a little bit differently. And so, I look at some of these industries are breakthrough, meaning inventory ones that had to deal with tariffs, they were forced to use better planning and budgeting tools to get the right SKU assortments and so on. The people that were in healthcare on the other side of it, finding more avenues to service their customers. And so they wanted to automate billing, automate billing to their insurance carriers. So they needed help on automating. For them to grow, their issue wasn’t buying more product, it was making billing to their insurance carriers more easily and more streamlined without people. And so we’re we’re seeing it kind of all industries are growing. And some are some are, I wouldn’t say contracting. High-tech has been a good one because of AI, and you’re a high-tech company creating AI. So you see a lot of sourcing, you know, uh capital going into AI companies. But I think that money is being used now across all the other industry segments. Leland McFarland All right. Um, flipping that a little bit, are you seeing any kind of industries that it’s it’s a little difficult for you for for NetSuite and in general to kind of break into for the small business? Sam Levy For small business? Well, one of the things we we generally say is if you’re in a regulated industry, that can be more difficult for NetSuite. Government or municipalities have a lot of restrictions. Some health and biotech have a lot of restrictions. Some government contracting and DOD have a lot of restrictions. And the restrictions are how and their compliance works with their data and how it works with the government entities and businesses that they solve. So for our commercial business, we tend not to go after heavily regulated industries. There’s compliance, but heavily regulated industries, when you look at public sector or uh financial uh institutions that have different type of governance, we generally stay away from those. Uh, just not not our bellywick, right? We stay to the ones that are commercially available that we are really good with. Leland McFarland All right, that’s good to know. Um, many small businesses are moving from QuickBooks or spreadsheets to cloud platforms. What triggers this transition and how is NetSuite supporting them in that journey? Sam Levy One of the most popular systems that we replace on the entry-level market is QuickBooks. And it’s not even it’s just entry level anymore. We’re finding that it’s not just entry-level, they’re medium-sized businesses that are running QuickBooks, but they’ve certainly outgrown it, mostly for the capabilities. The number one reason they usually come to us is they can’t do something or it’s too bespoke. So, if they’re growing internationally, they have too many databases to manage, and they want to put it in one infrastructure and have one global process. It’s very hard to do with QuickBooks. So that’s an interesting one. If they have advanced inventory items, where they’re putting in multiple warehouses and demand planning and point of sale and distribution, QuickBooks is for very simple companies. Once you add a lot of complexity to it or start to customize it, you’ve really outgrown it. And that’s where NetSuite picks up and really excels. The complex small business. Leland McFarland All right. If you had, if you had uh one piece of advice for a small business owner looking to future-proof their operations, what would it be? Sam Levy Wow, hire the right people. I mean, that’s a bit, you know, people and human capital and certainly in a small business is critical. And and some of the traits you say, “Well, that’s fine, but what type of competencies would you look for?” Certainly the entrepreneur spirit, challenge the status quo, and you you’ve got to make some big bets. And if you’re not making the bets around using AI in your companies, I tell founders all the time, I think you’ll be leapfrogged by a founder who is using AI to get that competitive advantage. Leland McFarland All right, final question. What’s next for NetSuite when it comes to serving the small business market? Any areas of investment or innovation where you’re uh you’re especially um excited about? Sam Levy Well, we announced it this week, “NetSuite Next.” It is our next generation of how we’re evolving our AI strategy and just making it available everywhere in the application from the inside-out. What we’re building and what we’re releasing for all of our customers and new customers is the kind of “Ask Oracle” concept. It’s AI-ready everywhere at any time. And it’s the conversational piece of it. You don’t have to go learn a menu structure and navigation, the how-tos. Our firm belief is the way that you interact in the future is going to be conversational. Like we’re having now, that’s how you’re going to be interacting with your business system. Very much conversational, not menu-driven, searching for data. You’re going to be asking and prompting versus clicking and pointing. And so that is, right, the big excitement that we have is we’re doing it, we’re prototyping it now, and we’re slowly releasing it to the masses. This time next year, it’ll be fully available and it’ll be so exciting to see so many customers on it. Leland McFarland That will be exciting and I’m I’m I’m interested in trying it out. Having a nice digital assistant. Sam Levy Yeah, exactly. Leland McFarland All right. Well, that’s all I got for you today. Thank you so much for uh coming on and uh putting up with all my questions. Sam Levy Great. Good to meet you, Leland. After speaking with Sam Levy, one thing became clear: small businesses no longer have to choose between growth and control. The tools that once seemed out of reach—enterprise-grade analytics, automation, and now AI-driven insights—are being built with accessibility in mind. NetSuite’s approach to scalability, especially through its “SuiteSuccess” industry playbooks and AI integrations, is transforming how entrepreneurs operate. The idea of “no limits,” this year’s SuiteWorld theme, isn’t just a marketing slogan—it’s a mindset shift. Levy’s point about AI serving as an “exponential multiplier” resonated deeply. Small business owners have always worn multiple hats. Now, AI can help us wear them more efficiently—managing data, identifying trends, and freeing up time for strategic decisions. Whether it’s automating billing, unifying processes, or simply asking conversational questions to get answers that used to take days, the value of accessible AI is undeniable. What’s most encouraging is NetSuite’s commitment to making this technology practical—not just powerful. As Levy put it, the future of business systems will be “conversational, not menu-driven.” For small businesses, that future is arriving faster than many realize. The real question now is how quickly we’ll adapt. Those who embrace AI as a trusted partner in growth, rather than a distant concept, will likely define the next wave of small business success. This article, "NetSuite’s Sam Levy on How AI and Automation Are Redefining Small Business Growth" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

As small business owners, we all know that growth comes with both opportunity and challenge. Scaling efficiently—without losing control over operations, finances, or customer experience—has always been one of the toughest balancing acts. For years, technology has promised to make that journey easier, yet many of us still find ourselves managing a patchwork of systems that barely communicate with each other. At SuiteWorld 2025, Oracle NetSuite’s annual user conference, that conversation took center stage—particularly around how artificial intelligence is shifting what’s possible for small and midsize businesses. I sat down with Sam Levy, Senior Vice President of Growth and Execution at Oracle NetSuite, to talk about what’s new, what’s next, and how the company continues to shape its vision for small businesses that want to compete like large enterprises—but without the complexity. From the debut of NetSuite Next and its conversational AI “Ask Oracle” assistant, to real-world success stories from customers who doubled their revenue without doubling staff, Levy offered a front-row look at how automation and integrated systems are redefining small business efficiency. For entrepreneurs considering when to move beyond QuickBooks or spreadsheets, or for those already seeking smarter, faster ways to grow, this discussion highlights where NetSuite sees the greatest potential—and what small business leaders should be doing now to prepare for the AI-driven future ahead. Leland McFarland All right, I am here at Oracle’s NetSuite, um, SuiteWorld 2025 with Sam Levy, SVP of Growth and Execution at Oracle NetSuite. Um, got a few questions for you. So, SuiteWorld always brings exciting uh updates. Uh, for those who couldn’t attend, what’s the key message Oracle NetSuite wants small and mid-sized business business owners to take away this year? Sam Levy Obviously. Well, well, SuiteWorld’s our annual user conference. And what’s more exciting, this is, I think our 12th or 13th year doing SuiteWorld as a as a conference where we bring all of our customers together and talk about strategies of what we’re where we’re going. Our theme this year is “No Limits.” And it’s really been practiced into “no limits of scaling your business.” And whether you’re a small or medium-sized business, scaling, growth can be hard. And so the things that we are talking about and the themes we’re talking about is “no limits” is how do companies scale? What’s the current trends of scaling? How is technology an enabler? And now this exponential multiplier, what we call AI, how is AI going to help me scale or how should I be, you know, consuming AI in our business? Leland McFarland Perfect. So, NetSuite has long uh served growing companies. How would you describe its current vision for SMB companies compared to five years ago? Sam Levy Well, the vision has much been the same for us uh for NetSuite for since 27 years ago when Evan started the company and really being one, a revolutionary company that was cloud-first. So, we only service cloud, we only deliver in the cloud, and that was from the born-on date 27 years ago through today. And so, part of what our transformation strategy of helping small and medium businesses is to transform their business. One, to do that digital experience of how do you take and do that digital transformation? Digital transformation is not just moving your books from on-prem to the cloud. That is kind of just a functional shift and lift of technology. Processes have to evolve in that, and so there’s a maturation that occurs. And our biggest strength is one, we go to business and go to market by industry. So, we understand your industry, what it takes to operate your industry. And so, whether you’re a healthcare company or you’re a manufacturer or you’re a retailer, there’s a different set of automation and industry metrics that you need to solve your business issues. And we come to small businesses and help them mature that. So, when we talk about digital transformation, the first thing is looking at is, how do we help businesses just get control of their current environment? Look at their processes and then unify them. Because we’re a suite for each industry, we offer all the components to run your business. And it’s really nice for a small or mid-sized business that they really want to act like a big company, but they want the processes and the scaling of the entry points to be for the small and medium-sized companies. Exactly what we do. Provide them that level of industry comfort, and then let them scale. Leland McFarland Perfect. So, for many small businesses, they see uh ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning, um, they they kind of view it as enterprise software. I mean, it’s kind of in the name. Um, and it’s kind of meant for larger or maybe medium-sized businesses. Uh, how is NetSuite breaking down that perception to make ERP accessible for smaller companies? Sam Levy Yeah. This is something that we introduced a decade ago with the conversation of “SuiteSuccess.” And SuiteSuccess was essentially is taking an industry playbook and saying, “For this industry, here is your stairway.” Start with financials first, then add on operations, then add on sales, then add on your supply chain, then add on commerce, whatever it might be for your industry. And what’s the nice part about that is how we scale down for businesses that are very simple, but yet they’re going to evolve, is we have that stairway approach. Making it really fast and simple for them to join NetSuite, and then have a growth patch, you know, pattern with capabilities that they never have to leave. It’s simply as kind of what we look at probably with our iPhones. You get onto the iPhone platform, you buy a few modules and applications, and the outset is, you need some more capacity, you just turn it on. You need another module, you get another application and you go with it. Same with business, making it really easy for a business platform to start the financials and then grow the rest of the way. Leland McFarland Perfect. So, what are some of the biggest pain points that you see small and medium-sized businesses that are facing um that are they’re facing today, um, that NetSuite directly helps to solve? Sam Levy Most businesses today, and I was just, you know, meeting with hundreds of customers this week, have a business need for certain systems and requirements. They have business issues. And whether they need to fill out a timesheet, they don’t have tracking, they need some information for human capital and talent, they can’t close the books, they have business issues. And I think what one of the things that NetSuite’s making it really easy for companies to do is, jeez, if you have these ripe issues, how do we help you, you know, transform your business? And that’s been the secret sauce for for us, I think is is the first part of your question. I think the second part was, how are we transforming? What was the second part of your question? Leland McFarland Um, how are are you using or what what’s involved with the NetSuite? You know, what what does NetSuite have that can kind of really address those uh pain points? Sam Levy Okay. So the the main thing I was talking about is, well, I was saying they say business issues that arise from small businesses, they want to grow quickly or they want to manage cost. And most small businesses have to chew gum and walk at the same time, meaning both. They have to grow, but they don’t have a bunch of people that they can add into their business. So they need some automation, a platform to help them. Let me give you an example. A company that comes with us with $25 million in revenue, they want to double and get to $50 million in revenue. They need to invest in their product and R&D, but they don’t want to add in a bunch of accounting and operational staff. They come to NetSuite because they can automate their business and grow without adding additional headcount to support their business system. They’re adding the investments where it truly is going to make them grow. So that’s one of the offsets that we see is, just basic automation and operational improvement helps them get control of their operational costs. Leland McFarland Okay. That seems like it’ll be very helpful, um, for small businesses, uh, who need to get, you know, as you said, control over their finances and and whatnot. Um, can you share a recent example or a customer story where a small business significantly improved operations or profitability using NetSuite? Sam Levy Yeah, I mean, I’ll talk about some of the companies that were on stage even this week. We did some keynote addresses. One that comes to mind is a company called Cymbiotika. Now, Cymbiotika is a wellness company. They’re well-known for taking supplements and wellness, liposomal, I should say. It’s not supplements, but it’s just liposomal. And those are good for your body. And so one of their challenges is as they were growing from a $50 million company to $100 million company and launching their brands, is the complexity with them. Now, their organization adopted NetSuite and they went live with NetSuite. And what’s interesting about their operations is their operation headcount has roughly stayed flat through their growth patterns. They’ve added a few employees, but as they doubled their revenue, they did not double their employees. I think that’s a true testament, I think, a case study of, how do you look at leaders in your industry and what are they doing that perhaps we should be considering doing? Or how do they do it? What is their secret sauce? So how do you double revenue without adding double staff? And so for them, they were using automation to do that. They were doing the things that that once took a team of people can now be done by an individual. An individual now instead of owning one account can manage 10 times the number of accounts. And so that became their offsetting maneuver. That was a great story that Kimberly talks about on their growth strategy. Leland McFarland Oh, that’s perfect. All right, switching over to AI and automation, which has been basically uh most of what’s been talked about this week. Um, AI has been a huge theme this year. How is uh NetSuite’s approach to AI helping small businesses uh compete on the same level as the uh big boys? Sam Levy The big boys? This is interesting. Uh, AI is in every, you know, it’s in every conversation seems like in business today. How we are helping companies is twofold. One, we are unique that every one of our customers is on the same version, the same release, and ultimately the same data model. So 43,000 organizations all use the software the same, from the biggest to the smallest. AI, we believe that the best AI comes from the best data. So having all of your data in one place, there’s two approaches: outside-in versus inside-out. The outside-in approach is, let me take a Claude or a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude and use it against my current NetSuite account. So how do I unlock all of my data in my current infrastructure and tie it into a large language model? And that’s what we’ve done. We announced Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is a connector. It’s free for all of our customers to connect their NetSuite data to Claude or to ChatGPT. Now you can go in there and simply ask prompts inside of Claude, which is, “Who are my top five customers?” “What is my inventory levels?” “What’s my financial statements?” Your conversational AI, that’s an outside view in. That’s our first approach to AI being outside-in. It’s been really successful and taking an enterprise product like that and really making it simple for small and medium businesses. The inside-out approach is doing the opposite. Building AI with inside of NetSuite and solely for just NetSuite data is you can go into NetSuite now and use certain AI capabilities inside your your your application. So, you can use either either or or and or both ways to do it. There’s a lot of things that we use and we’ve released now for years of continuing to add onto AI capabilities from the inside-out. The outside-in approach has been good because sometimes you want NetSuite data connected to other systems. And Model Context Protocol allows then chat to not just interface with NetSuite data, but also maybe another system that you have out there. Maybe it’s a commerce system or maybe it’s Salesforce data, you can then pull in together through MCP. Leland McFarland Right. Um, are you partnering with any outside LLMs to kind of or are you building from scratch, um, your own LLM, um, or or AI uh protocols within uh um your own system? Sam Levy We definitely partner because those best-of-breed applications are certainly market leaders. When you think about ChatGPT and what they’ve done, you think about what Google has done, you think about what Meta has done, you think about xAI, they’re big in R&D and billions of dollars just in these large language models. Uh, we did we first start with Cohere two or three years ago as our first large language model, and then we’ve adopted all the others as subprocessors within inside of our environment. So we’re definitely leveraging all of them. Leland McFarland Perfect. Um, what are some practical ways SMBs can use NetSuite’s new AI capabilities to save time or make smarter decisions without needing a data science team? Sam Levy Well, the new interface, and I don’t know if you use ChatGPT, hopefully you probably do to summarize notes and so forth, or if you’ve used Claude, I think that the most interesting piece of it is it’s taking what used to be a technical way to get your answers, and it’s it’s really making it simple into context, a simple language context. So before, if you wanted to go ask a question, which is summarize summarize my financial statements and show me year-on-year compares and show me, you know, FEs that I had, you might have to go run data from multiple systems or multiple NetSuite reports and searches to do that. You’d have to write the research or report and then pull it all together. So, very feasible, and that’s what customers have done for years. Very linear though, one report, one answer, one report, one answer, and then pulling it all together. The nice part about taking chat is I just ask the question inside ChatGPT or I ask it inside of Claude. Show me the same data, pull my financial statements, do the year-on-compairs, do the FEs, change my visualization, show it to me in a chart, make it beautiful, hit enter. It goes and runs the searches, runs the reports inside the data, shows you where it’s got its data, and then it presents it back to you in matter of minutes now, what perhaps was days before. And that’s a simple way, I think that the most people are getting the biggest value is just taking a non-technical approach just asking the conversational questions. Leland McFarland All right, perfect. That’s seems very useful. Hopefully it’ll save uh small business owners a bunch of time and effort. Sam Levy And give them the visibility to their business, right? Most important, yeah. Leland McFarland Um, switching over to industry and growth trends. Uh, from your perspective, what are the next biggest trends shaping the future of small and mid-sized businesses over the next two to three years? Sam Levy Well, I think everyone is being asked, the biggest trend is, how can I grow but yet control my operational cost? And we’re seeing that with these, you know, the invention of the AI business models out there where, you know, we call it the multiplier effect with AI. And I think the biggest trend right now is, how can AI give me an advantage, a competitive advantage going forward? One, I got to simplify my back-office processes, make it really simple to do business from the back office, meaning how do I enter an order? How do I collect cash? How do I create a procurement transaction, receive it, and so on? So making that really simple is number one. But then how do you take that simplified process and make that a competitive advantage externally? So when a customer comes and does business with you, they don’t find it five, you know, it may take them too long to get their product or their service. Making it very easy to do business with them, and that’s been the growth lever is they’re trying to simplify things, because transactions are happening faster and faster. But we’re simplifying the complexity of the transaction, which has been the big theme today. Not a lot of complexity, simplify it, but just more transactions. Leland McFarland More transactions, more money. Sam Levy Well, that’s good. That should be the simple linear equation with that one. Yeah. Leland McFarland Um, are there specific industries like manufacturing, retail, or services where you’re seeing especially strong SMB adoption or innovation through uh NetSuite? Sam Levy This is a uh it’s a good leading question of which industry is hot and which one’s not. They all seem to have challenges going on in their business and headwinds, whether that’s macroeconomic or it’s industry pressure. You know, some product and inventory-based companies had tariff issues. And so that helped, you know, that helped help create a big headwind for them. How they reacted to it, though, I think were a little bit differently. And so, I look at some of these industries are breakthrough, meaning inventory ones that had to deal with tariffs, they were forced to use better planning and budgeting tools to get the right SKU assortments and so on. The people that were in healthcare on the other side of it, finding more avenues to service their customers. And so they wanted to automate billing, automate billing to their insurance carriers. So they needed help on automating. For them to grow, their issue wasn’t buying more product, it was making billing to their insurance carriers more easily and more streamlined without people. And so we’re we’re seeing it kind of all industries are growing. And some are some are, I wouldn’t say contracting. High-tech has been a good one because of AI, and you’re a high-tech company creating AI. So you see a lot of sourcing, you know, uh capital going into AI companies. But I think that money is being used now across all the other industry segments. Leland McFarland All right. Um, flipping that a little bit, are you seeing any kind of industries that it’s it’s a little difficult for you for for NetSuite and in general to kind of break into for the small business? Sam Levy For small business? Well, one of the things we we generally say is if you’re in a regulated industry, that can be more difficult for NetSuite. Government or municipalities have a lot of restrictions. Some health and biotech have a lot of restrictions. Some government contracting and DOD have a lot of restrictions. And the restrictions are how and their compliance works with their data and how it works with the government entities and businesses that they solve. So for our commercial business, we tend not to go after heavily regulated industries. There’s compliance, but heavily regulated industries, when you look at public sector or uh financial uh institutions that have different type of governance, we generally stay away from those. Uh, just not not our bellywick, right? We stay to the ones that are commercially available that we are really good with. Leland McFarland All right, that’s good to know. Um, many small businesses are moving from QuickBooks or spreadsheets to cloud platforms. What triggers this transition and how is NetSuite supporting them in that journey? Sam Levy One of the most popular systems that we replace on the entry-level market is QuickBooks. And it’s not even it’s just entry level anymore. We’re finding that it’s not just entry-level, they’re medium-sized businesses that are running QuickBooks, but they’ve certainly outgrown it, mostly for the capabilities. The number one reason they usually come to us is they can’t do something or it’s too bespoke. So, if they’re growing internationally, they have too many databases to manage, and they want to put it in one infrastructure and have one global process. It’s very hard to do with QuickBooks. So that’s an interesting one. If they have advanced inventory items, where they’re putting in multiple warehouses and demand planning and point of sale and distribution, QuickBooks is for very simple companies. Once you add a lot of complexity to it or start to customize it, you’ve really outgrown it. And that’s where NetSuite picks up and really excels. The complex small business. Leland McFarland All right. If you had, if you had uh one piece of advice for a small business owner looking to future-proof their operations, what would it be? Sam Levy Wow, hire the right people. I mean, that’s a bit, you know, people and human capital and certainly in a small business is critical. And and some of the traits you say, “Well, that’s fine, but what type of competencies would you look for?” Certainly the entrepreneur spirit, challenge the status quo, and you you’ve got to make some big bets. And if you’re not making the bets around using AI in your companies, I tell founders all the time, I think you’ll be leapfrogged by a founder who is using AI to get that competitive advantage. Leland McFarland All right, final question. What’s next for NetSuite when it comes to serving the small business market? Any areas of investment or innovation where you’re uh you’re especially um excited about? Sam Levy Well, we announced it this week, “NetSuite Next.” It is our next generation of how we’re evolving our AI strategy and just making it available everywhere in the application from the inside-out. What we’re building and what we’re releasing for all of our customers and new customers is the kind of “Ask Oracle” concept. It’s AI-ready everywhere at any time. And it’s the conversational piece of it. You don’t have to go learn a menu structure and navigation, the how-tos. Our firm belief is the way that you interact in the future is going to be conversational. Like we’re having now, that’s how you’re going to be interacting with your business system. Very much conversational, not menu-driven, searching for data. You’re going to be asking and prompting versus clicking and pointing. And so that is, right, the big excitement that we have is we’re doing it, we’re prototyping it now, and we’re slowly releasing it to the masses. This time next year, it’ll be fully available and it’ll be so exciting to see so many customers on it. Leland McFarland That will be exciting and I’m I’m I’m interested in trying it out. Having a nice digital assistant. Sam Levy Yeah, exactly. Leland McFarland All right. Well, that’s all I got for you today. Thank you so much for uh coming on and uh putting up with all my questions. Sam Levy Great. Good to meet you, Leland. After speaking with Sam Levy, one thing became clear: small businesses no longer have to choose between growth and control. The tools that once seemed out of reach—enterprise-grade analytics, automation, and now AI-driven insights—are being built with accessibility in mind. NetSuite’s approach to scalability, especially through its “SuiteSuccess” industry playbooks and AI integrations, is transforming how entrepreneurs operate. The idea of “no limits,” this year’s SuiteWorld theme, isn’t just a marketing slogan—it’s a mindset shift. Levy’s point about AI serving as an “exponential multiplier” resonated deeply. Small business owners have always worn multiple hats. Now, AI can help us wear them more efficiently—managing data, identifying trends, and freeing up time for strategic decisions. Whether it’s automating billing, unifying processes, or simply asking conversational questions to get answers that used to take days, the value of accessible AI is undeniable. What’s most encouraging is NetSuite’s commitment to making this technology practical—not just powerful. As Levy put it, the future of business systems will be “conversational, not menu-driven.” For small businesses, that future is arriving faster than many realize. The real question now is how quickly we’ll adapt. Those who embrace AI as a trusted partner in growth, rather than a distant concept, will likely define the next wave of small business success. This article, "NetSuite’s Sam Levy on How AI and Automation Are Redefining Small Business Growth" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

The White House, one of the most historically significant and secure buildings in the United States, is being torn apart. Demolition crews were on the White House grounds this week to begin demolition of the front facade of the East Wing in order to make way for the construction of a new 90,000-square-foot ballroom that President The President announced in July. “I am pleased to announce that ground has been broken on the White House grounds to build the new, big, beautiful White House Ballroom,” The President wrote on social media the day the work began. When the ballroom was first announced this summer, The President said the project “won’t interfere with the current building.” During a press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went even further, saying “nothing will be torn down.” Those statements turned out to be false. Photos and videos taken at the site on October 20 show the walls of the building being chewed to bits by heavy construction equipment outfitted with a jaw-shaped demolition tool that looks like the head of a tyrannosaurus rex. “This is one of the most important buildings in the nation. This is one of the symbols of who we are as a people,” says Bryan Green, a former commissioner on the National Capital Planning Commission, a government agency that oversees and advises on planning in the Washington, D.C. area. “It’s hard to look and see a wrecking ball hitting it.” An exemption leaves little protection for the People’s House Despite the White House’s historic and symbolic significance, there was little to protect it from the demolition work now underway. The White House, along with the Supreme Court building, the Capitol building, and several other properties, is exempted from historic preservation rules that would otherwise stand in the way of such a building being torn down. Under section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, a strict review process is required for federal projects that may affect historic buildings, leading to both public scrutiny and legal obligations surrounding any proposed changes to existing historic resources. When it comes to the White House, various other entities have some level of oversight, including the National Park Service, the Commission of Fine Arts, and the National Capitol Planning Commission, but none can fully override a project like the demolition and ballroom addition due to the building’s Section 106 exemption. During his time on the National Capital Planning Commission, Green says he participated in the Section 106 review process and found it beneficial to the outcome of the projects in question. “Projects generally improve as a part of that process,” he says. “You’re having lots of eyes on them, having lots of different people with different interests look at these things and comment on them. They get better.” The White House ballroom project and its related East Wing demolition had very little, if any, public involvement. Though The President initially said that several concepts were being considered for the project, the administration did not release any designs or name any architects ahead of July 31, when The President announced that the White House had chosen Washington, D.C.-based McCrery Architects as the lead architect of the project. The President has said the project, with an estimated cost of $200 million, would be funded by donors, himself included, “with zero cost to the American Taxpayer!” The White House did not respond to a request for comment. McCrery Architects referred Fast Company’s questions to the White House. “A reminder of how far that exemption can be taken” The White House’s exemption from the Section 106 review process is “unfortunate,” says Priya Jain, an associate professor of architecture at Texas A&M University. “This project and what is happening serves as a reminder of how far that exemption can be taken,” Jain says. The exemption for the White House, along with the Supreme Court and the Capitol, is not explicitly explained by the policy, but Jain says it likely has to do with evolving security and operational needs that officials don’t want bogged down with an official review or approval process. “Security and safety concerns are paramount,” she says. Jain is also chair of the Heritage Conservation Committee of the Society of Architectural Historians, which recently issued a statement expressing concern over the lack of oversight on this project, calling for “a rigorous and deliberate design and review process.” The organization notes that the White House has undergone numerous exterior and interior modifications since construction began in 1792, including a major reconstruction after the British set fire to the building during the War of 1812, the construction and expansion of the West Wing in the first decade of the 1900s, and the construction of the two-story East Wing building in 1942. This was the last major addition to the White House. The White House has evolved, but so has the preservation field In a recent post on LinkedIn, White House Historical Association president Stewart McLaurin ran through the changes the White House has seen over the centuries, and the criticism they caused. For example, the now-iconic colonnades added to the building by Thomas Jefferson in 1801 were seen at the time as extravagant and reflecting “aristocratic tendencies,” according to McLaurin. The East Wing, as it was until a few days ago, was built in the midst of World War Two, sparking criticism about the misappropriation of funding during an international crisis. Even the Rose Garden, which has since been paved over by The President, was criticized for its elitism. “Media and Congressional criticisms have often focused on costs, historical integrity, and timing, yet many of these alterations have become integral to the identity of the White House,” McLaurin writes. “It is difficult for us to imagine The White House today without these evolutions and additions.” Notably, all these changes happened before the creation of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act, which is why the Society of Architectural Historians is so concerned about the Section 106 exemption being exploited for such a large demolition and construction project. “The preservation field has come a long way,” says Jain. She notes that though the section had exempted the buildings at the time of writing, their status as prominent public buildings sets a precedent for other preservation projects and “they should follow some of these best practices that have been established.” The The President administration has emphasized the importance of having the ballroom completed “long before” the end of The President’s term, which may have played a role in the fast pace of design selection and starting construction. “Designing in public takes time. It takes time to work towards a consensus,” Green says. “I would assume that the goal was just go fast, no revisions. I don’t know that for sure, but it sure looks like that.” View the full article

Artificial intelligence is changing the calculus when it comes to career paybacksView the full article

The best thing I can say about Google’s Pixel Watch 4 is that I don’t think about it all that much. Whenever I wear my Apple Watch, it’s kind of a nuisance. Stand up. Breathe. How are you feeling right now? Looks like you’re on a walk. Was that an exercise you just started? Even just regular notifications for emails and text messages can get overwhelming. The Pixel Watch 4 is unintrusive by comparison. While it’s full of fitness tracking features and can put notifications on your wrist, it doesn’t ask for much of your attention in return. In a way, that’s pretty refreshing. Fitness optional My big disclaimer with this review is that I’m not big into quantified health. Filling an activity ring never clicked for me as extrinsic motivation (I blame decades of video games for numbing me to such things), and I don’t need a fitness band to remember whether I went for a swim or walked more than usual. So while the Apple Watch has leaned ever further into fitness features, I’ve felt increasingly alienated from it. Yes, you can turn off the various notifications to get out of your chair, consider some exercise, or focus on mindfulness, but figuring out how to do that is a hassle. It also comes with a pang of guilt: Am I neglecting my health by telling my watch to shut up? The Pixel Watch 4’s fitness features aren’t as aggressive. While it performs all the requisite activity tracking—counting steps, checking heart rate, measuring sleep—and can log an array of specific exercises, it never interrupts you to start doing those things. There’s a “Reminders to Move” setting deep within Google’s Fitbit app, but it’s off by default. Google won’t even bother you to start logging an exercise in progress, and will instead wait until afterward to ask whether you want to confirm it or look at a recap. The Pixel Watch 4’s biggest out-of-the-box nag involves stress levels. The watch uses a continuous electrodermal activity sensor to understand when there’s sweat on your skin, and combines that with changes in heart rate and skin temperature to pick up on potential stress events. You then get a notification encouraging you to reflect and optionally log how you’re feeling. I’m not entirely bothered by this, because the point is to be mindful of something that’s actually happening. It’d be nice if these reminders arrived sooner, though. Too often I get pinged about some anxiety from 10 or 15 minutes earlier and can no longer remember what triggered it. Google still hasn’t shipped the Personal AI Coach that demoed a couple of months ago, so we’ll see if that feature introduces more nuisances. For now, I’m thankful for a watch with fitness features that arise only when you actually want them. Charging is easy and fast Charging is another common annoyance for smartwatches, especially as they push into sleep tracking and discourage overnight charging. Google has solved this problem by making the charging mechanism on the Pixel Watch 4 faster and more convenient. In my testing, a complete charge from dead to 100% took 42 minutes, but it needed only about 15 minutes to get from 25% to 80%. If you use the watch for sleep tracking, you can recharge while getting ready in the morning and still have enough power to get through the day. You’ll also get a helpful notification when the watch is fully charged, though I wish you could tweak the threshold to get an alert at, say, 80%, in case your morning routine doesn’t allow enough time for a full charge. Google also redesigned the Pixel Watch 4 charger so that the watch sits upright in a little groove, with the screen facing out and the crown facing up. If the charger’s on your desk or nightstand, this allows the watch to face outward so you can tap the screen to glance at the time. It also allows the charger to rest flat on a table even with a continuous, loop-style watchband. It’s just a smarter design that Apple and every other smartwatch maker ought to copy. Fewer nagging notifications The Pixel Watch 4 has a smart way of handling notifications as well, particularly around sleep. Like most smartwatches, the Pixel Watch 4 lets you set up a sleep schedule that’s synced to your phone, so your wrist doesn’t buzz during bedtime, but it can also use sleep detection to toggle “Bedtime” mode automatically. This can prevent you from being jolted awake by late-night notifications if you fall asleep early, and can resume notifications if you’re awake earlier than usual. This can backfire if, like me, you sometimes wake up too early and struggle to fall back to sleep, as the watch might disable Bedtime mode during those times of restlessness. Fortunately, you can disable turning Bedtime mode off automatically in the morning and still have it turn on by itself at night (or vice versa). What’s still annoying Most of my Pixel Watch 4 usage is passive. I’ll glance at the time, look at a notification, or get a sense of how I slept, but otherwise will leave the watch mostly alone. Some small annoyances arise, though, when I’m actively trying to use it. For one thing, Google’s Wear OS platform needs better app support. While watch apps tend to be less useful than just taking out your phone, I’ve missed having an MLB app to check scores, along with the “Live Activities” that appear on the Apple Watch for things like fantasy football scores or Uber ride status. (The latter aren’t full-blown apps, but are mirrors of the same feature on the iPhone.) I’ve also struggled with the raise-to-talk feature for Gemini, which is one of the Pixel Watch 4’s hallmark features. While this ought to be the best way to have quick exchanges with Google’s AI, the response to raising your wrist just doesn’t feel snappy enough. Too often it failed to respond at all. Out of the way The Pixel Watch 4 doesn’t fundamentally change what smartwatches can do. It’s obviously nicer than its predecessors, with a higher screen-to-body ratio and brighter display. I appreciate that it’s a genuine breakthrough in smartwatch repairability. But it’s not a huge leap from earlier Pixel Watches or a major departure from what competitors offer. Instead, the Pixel Watch 4 takes the existing smartwatch formula and makes it a little less intrusive. Rather than being another device I have to constantly babysit, it’s mostly just a watch. That’s alright with me. View the full article

In 2022, Elisha Zepeda had given up on becoming a designer and was working as a barista at an Oregon bookstore. Today, he’s a salaried book cover designer at Penguin Random House and an in-demand freelance designer—and it’s all thanks to one TikTok video. Zepeda spent four years at California State University working for his school’s marketing department. After he graduated in 2018, though, he faced a problem that’s become commonplace for job seekers today: No one in the design industry seemed to be hiring. So he started working as a barista at a local bookstore with a coffee shop. While organizing the shop’s books into categories by color palette and typography, he became fascinated with book cover design. This interest led him to curate a portfolio of faux book covers for about a year before a book cover design studio in the area hired him. On a whim, Zepeda decided to share his design process on social media. The first video he ever posted to TikTok—a relaxed breakdown of how he builds out cover options for publishers—hit more than a million views overnight. Since then, Zepeda has honed his editing technique to create a video style that feels entirely his own, centered on calming music, simple text, and engaging visuals. Today, he has almost a million total followers across TikTok and Instagram. This visibility earned Zepeda his job as a designer at Penguin Random House’s nonfiction Penguin Press vertical, where he produces about 20 covers per year. Outside of that position, he also takes freelance work from clients who primarily discover him through TikTok. The lesson, he says, is clear: Designers across categories need to start viewing social media as their primary portfolio. Fast Company sat down with Zepeda to chat about breaking into book cover design, how to start using social media like a portfolio, and which book cover tropes he tries to avoid. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Why did you start sharing your work on social media? I was with that local studio for about a year, and I knew that no one I worked with was on TikTok. There was a book I was working on called Infinite Life, and one night, without telling anyone I worked with, I made that video and posted it. Overnight, it had a million views. I ended up talking to my boss, and they were really stoked about it, but they were like, “Let’s just check with publishers from here on out before you post anything.” From then on, I just consistently kept doing it. What kinds of ripple effects has this had on your career? It truly changed my career path. I saw that Penguin was hiring, and I reached out to the art director, and he was like, “I know your work from social media,” and I was pretty much hired. Suddenly, all of these art directors and publishers knew who I was, and then I got to work with Penguin. It’s the perfect fit for my style. I just really lucked out, and it all happened so fast—from when I started posting, it was maybe three to six months later that I was getting work from big art directors, hired by Penguin, switched my job, and moved cities. What does your brainstorming process look like when you first get an assignment? I love Pinterest. The first thing I do is make a mood board. I’ll get a brief from clients that has maybe a couple of paragraphs. Lately, it seems like the bigger the client, the less restriction they have on the cover. They’re like, “You’re the person we’re paying to be creative—just make a bunch of options and we’ll see where it lands.” Which is why I think these huge publishers have all these bestsellers—because they trust creatives. During my brainstorming process, I think of every project like, How can I make something that I personally would want to buy, and I personally think looks good? Every bestseller becomes a bestseller because it’s fresh and looks new. You can’t copy something else and expect it to have the same reaction from an audience. All you can really do is make a mood board and trust your instincts with what you think looks good. How important has creator-led marketing become for designers? I think people should be viewing their social media as their portfolio. I know we have portfolio websites, and you can make it clean and crisp and how you want it to be, but realistically, art directors check social media like anyone else. Are there any book cover design tropes that you tend to steer clear from? Now that I’m working with these art directors that I admire, I have to be very aware of what is out there already in a certain genre, because you never know who you’re going to work with. I just don’t ever want to rub someone the wrong way if it looks like I totally ripped off something they did that succeeded. As far as trends go, I wouldn’t say there’s necessarily a no-no. A lot of times, if something follows a trend, it was very specifically asked for by the publisher. The first thing that comes to mind is that thrillers are teal and yellow. We really try to push back on that, but our directors will be like, “No, it has to be teal and yellow so people know it’s a thriller.” And it’s like, okay, well, that’s why there’s this trend, because they’re specifically asking for it. View the full article

Either you’ve lived it, or you’ve heard about it from friends: the endless job search, featuring hundreds of applications sent. Maybe one or two companies reply . . . that end up being bots. It can feel like your résumé has been sucked into a black hole. And in a way, it has. It’s perhaps been consumed by a “ghost job”—a job listing that looks legitimate, with a full description for a role, maybe even a starting date and a LinkedIn link. There’s a twist, though. The job isn’t real. It’s either an essentially fake listing for a job that doesn’t really exist, or the role isn’t really open. And they make up roughly 40% of job listings, according to a 2024 Resume Builder survey. “There may be no hiring manager on the back end, or it’s not really a position that exists,” says Brandi Britton, an executive director at recruiting company Robert Half. They’re becoming more common, and companies do this for a variety of reasons. But in a job market as miserable as this one, they can feel like a cruel trick on job applicants—which is exactly how the recruiters Fast Company interviewed for this story describe them. “A lot of companies see this as a harmless strategy,” says Michael Baynes, cofounder and CEO of financial consulting firm Clarify Capital. His company led a 2025 survey that asked 1,000 U.S. employers why they weren’t “actively trying to fill current open job positions.” Answers included: “their company is always open to new people” (37%), “to have an active pool of applications in case of turnover” (22%), and “in case irresistible candidates apply” (16%). But frustrated job seekers feel misled. Why would companies bother to post jobs they’re not hiring for? And how can you spot them? Fast Company talked to several hiring professionals—who point-blank call the increasingly common practice toxic. Read on where we’ll cover: How to spot ghost jobs a mile away Which types of jobs tend to be magnets for ghost jobs Why recruiters think it’s a failing strategy for both applicants and employers, but why it persists Who’s posting ghost jobs and why? Recruiters who spoke with Fast Company for this story say posting ghost jobs might even damage companies’ reputations with job seekers who come to find them unreliable. But that’s not stopping companies of all stripes from posting notices for ghost jobs. Tech, education, manufacturing, healthcare, and retail are posting the most, in that order, per Clarify Capital’s survey. But recruiters who spoke with Fast Company say it’s about equally prevalent across industries. “Ghost jobs are usually for roles that are more entry level, more junior, that have multiple head count, or for companies that know they’re going to be hiring tens of hundreds that year, especially with bigger companies,” says Lamar Nava, vice president of customer services at Betts Recruiting. She’s seen a lot of employers post them, particularly when “hiring took a big dip” in the wake of COVID-19 lockdowns. They were either posting for roles they assumed would open back up in the future, or trying to look more like they were thriving while they were struggling. But “pipelining for roles that aren’t open”—aka building a talent pool to potentially tap for future roles when it’s not time to actually hire—is a request Nava’s employer clients have been making for the past decade. It’s one of the most typical reasons recruiters see companies posting ghost jobs. Sometimes, Nava’s clients will fill a role and then ask her to continue sending through candidates for that pipeline, just in case they find someone really good. “I have always been very against that. Not only is it a huge waste of time,” Nava says, “but it’s a horrible candidate experience.” Bill Sofio, an Express Employment Professionals and Specialized Recruiting Group franchise owner, says companies create pipelines for specific roles via ghost jobs because those companies have already filled roles with overqualified candidates who they fear will leave once the job market improves. The biggest problem with this pipelining technique, says Robert Half’s Britton, is that “most companies never end up going back to that pool of candidates.” Either their priorities change, or they simply don’t have the bandwidth. Then there’s company reputation. Posting lots of job openings can indicate a company’s success, either for the sake of potential candidates, or for investors. But Nava thinks it can have the opposite effect: When a role is open for so long, it can make people suspect of the company and ultimately hurt its brand. That’s despite companies posting ghost jobs to signal growth. “They want to show the market exists [for that role], and there is a need,” says Gillian Robles, vice president of accounts and growth at Maven Recruiting, even though “they don’t necessarily have the budget or head count to hire.” Ghost job postings may also serve to test out the overall candidate pool. A couple of years ago, in the tech space, Nava says, “people would post to test out potential salaries for specific areas . . . just see what their talent pool would look like.” Now, she adds, there’s so much technology that can do that for companies—like websites that offer salary benchmarking tools—that ascertaining possible ranges through job postings ranks among the least efficient ways to get that information. Still, some hiring managers, particularly newer ones at smaller companies with fewer resources, may post jobs to simply scope out the candidate scene. “They post a ghost job to potentially see: What is out there? How do I look for this? What should I price this at?” Robles says. They want to see what’s out there “before engaging with candidates.” Sometimes, companies list ghost jobs as a signal for current employees—particularly underperforming ones. “They throw the job posting out there while the underperforming employee is on a performance improvement plan,” Sofio says. While he interprets that as companies hedging their bets, others see it as an explicit threat to employees—as in, you’d better shape up because you’re replaceable. Lastly, certain companies or scenarios necessitate posting jobs that a company’s already hired for. For example, says Britton, some government entities “are required to post to make sure they consider all applicants” and to show they’re recruiting from a diverse pool, even if they’re not. In situations where companies want to hire someone specific from abroad, who would join with an H-1B visa, they’re obligated to post that role to the job market in the U.S. to prove that it’s specialized enough to necessitate hiring from abroad. How do you spot a ghost job? Fortunately for job seekers, there are a few tells that a post for an open position isn’t real. Look out for “long-running job postings with no updates, or postings that appear and disappear all the time,” Sofio says. That may seem obvious, but Robles cautions that a job that’s been up for six months could mean two things. “It could be an evergreen posting, or it’s a stale job,” she says. If it’s “evergreen,” it doesn’t mean it’s not a ghost. It could represent wishful thinking—the company wants to always be hiring for that position, so they leave up the posting even when hiring has come to a standstill. “Vague” job descriptions, says Britton, can also mean a posting is fake, as can ones with start dates from a few months before the time you’re seeing it. (An August start date listed on a post that’s up in October constitutes a red flag.) Some signs point to real jobs. On LinkedIn, for example, you can see if a job has been “promoted,” meaning a company spent extra money to get that post in front of more candidates. “You wouldn’t necessarily do that if this is a ghost job,” Robles says. She adds that “clear next steps” in a job posting is a positive sign. “Is there a specific hiring manager tied to the job posting?” she says. “If there’s no contact information, to me, that’s a red sign.” Lingering specters That said, some ghost jobs even lead candidates to interviews. Even if there are no plans to hire, they could sometimes just take advantage of the growing candidate pools they create. In that case, candidates should ask their employer contacts why the position is open, how long they’ve been looking to fill it, and what they’re not seeing, but would like to see, in the candidates who have applied. Questions that drill down on these specifics, says Robles, can help reveal to candidates whether companies have a “real need” or if they’re being “wishy-washy.” Overwhelmingly, recruiters who spoke with Fast Company felt that posting ghost jobs was bad corporate practice. “You’re not only frustrating a whole bunch of people,” says Sofio, “but those people talk to the people you’re trying to attract.” Nava calls it “cruel” to job seekers, who are in a vulnerable position. Despite job seekers voicing frustrations over nonresponsive job postings, some signs point to the practice letting up. New Jersey, Kentucky, and California have all introduced legislation that would require companies to remove inactive job postings or disclose if a posting is for a future opening. Plus, Clarify Capital saw the rate of employers who kept job postings active for more than 30 days go from 68% in 2022 to just about 33% in 2025. Robles advises optimism. With companies using more tech like AI to search through candidates’ résumés, they might have an easier time returning to those pipelines their ghost job postings filled that they previously didn’t have the bandwidth to meaningfully explore. In other words, ending up in a ghost job-fueled talent pipeline may not be as hopeless as it once was. “Technology tools can pull your application again to the surface when needed,” she says of the increasing use of AI in hiring. Perhaps, then, unlike a ghost job that was never really real—your very real application comes back from the dead. “If you encounter a ghost job,” notes Robles, “maybe it comes back around.” View the full article

In July, President The President signed an executive order aimed at expanding access to alternative investments like private equity and cryptocurrency in retirement accounts. The move reflects a broader shift in how Americans think about wealth building and financial freedom, and it is a signal to employers that the future of employee benefits is going to look very different. While crypto may have once seemed fringe or speculative, digital assets have steadily moved into the mainstream. From Fortune 100 companies to institutional investors, the appetite for diversification beyond traditional asset classes is growing. According to a survey by NYDIG, 36% of employees ages 30 and under would be interested in putting a portion of their salary toward Bitcoin; nearly a third of respondents would choose an employer that offers that kind of benefit over one that does not. Today, the question for HR leaders is no longer if crypto should be on the table, it is how to responsibly offer it as part of a modern benefits package. Whether you are crypto-curious or already exploring alternative benefits, 2026 presents a pivotal moment to reevaluate your retirement offerings and meet your workforce where they are. The Shift in Retirement Planning For decades, 401(k)s and employer-sponsored retirement accounts have focused almost exclusively on stocks, bonds, and mutual funds – and were the gold standard for most company benefits packages. These traditional assets remain foundational, but they are no longer the full picture. The recent executive order removes some regulatory barriers that have made it difficult for plan administrators to offer alternative investments like crypto. This is particularly relevant for younger, tech-savvy employees. A growing share of Gen Z and Millennial workers are seeking out portfolios that reflect both their values and their appetite for innovation. A recent YouGov study found 42% of Gen Z investors own crypto, which is nearly four times higher than the share (11%) who have a retirement account. For these employees, diversification is not just about returns. It is about autonomy and flexibility and moving away from traditional norms. Why Crypto Deserves a Seat at the Benefits Table Cryptocurrency is continuing to mature, and over the last decade, Bitcoin has delivered a total return of more than 43,000%, compared to roughly 200% for the S&P 500. While volatility remains a key characteristic, digital assets have demonstrated long-term potential as hedges against inflation, vehicles for international wealth transfer, and tools for financial inclusion. Major institutions now offer crypto products and ETFs tied to Bitcoin are increasingly accessible through traditional brokerages. From a benefits perspective, offering crypto access is not about replacing existing options. It is about adding choice. In the same way some employees opt for ESG-aligned investments or Roth versus traditional accounts, digital assets offer a new flavor of personalization in retirement planning that caters to younger demographics. Importantly, this aligns with broader trends. Employees are demanding more modern, self-directed benefits that reflect how they live, spend, and save in the digital age. Acknowledging the Risks and Addressing Them Of course, crypto is not without risks and I always recommend that individuals do their research before opting in. The solution is not to avoid the topic; it is to empower employees with tools and education. Employers exploring crypto-based benefits can take a measured approach. They can consider offering it as an optional investment, not a default. I’d also suggest working with vetted providers who prioritize security, compliance, and clear communication. Pairing any offering with robust educational resources, FAQs, and access to financial advisors who can demystify digital assets, is also a great way to boost comfortability. The key is to treat crypto the same way you would any emerging benefit, with transparency, optionality and a commitment to employee well-being. Practical Steps for HR Leaders in 2026 For HR leaders ready to explore crypto benefits, the first step is understanding your workforce—demographics and culture matter. A fintech startup with a younger, more digitally native employee base might see strong engagement with crypto offerings, while a more traditional organization may need to start with education before adoption. Surveying employees to assess their interest in digital assets can be a simple but powerful way to temperature check. The next step is choosing the right partners. Not all crypto providers are equipped to support retirement accounts, so it is critical to work with platforms that prioritize regulatory compliance, custodial protections, and seamless integration with existing 401(k) systems. Some platforms now offer hybrid investment options that allow employees to allocate a portion of their paycheck into select digital assets without leaving the benefits ecosystem they are already using. Transparency is important. It’s best to avoid automatically enrolling employees in crypto offerings. Instead, HR teams should provide opt-in structures that come with clear, plain-language explanations of both the opportunities and the risks. Educational webinars, explainer videos, and live Q&A sessions with financial experts can go a long way toward demystifying the space. If your company already hosts financial wellness sessions, this could be a natural extension of that programming. Pilot programs can also be an effective way to start small. For example, a small to medium-size tech company might roll out crypto access to new hires first or limit participation to a single office location. This allows HR teams to collect feedback, monitor engagement, and refine the program before scaling company wide. Finally, do not forget governance. Any new benefit, particularly one tied to emerging financial tools, may need to be incorporated into your company’s official investment policy statement and reviewed by legal and compliance teams. Document the process for evaluating and updating these benefits, and make sure employees receive up-to-date risk disclosures and support materials. Crypto does not have to be a wholesale transformation of your retirement program. But offering a responsible, opt-in pathway to digital assets could send a strong message to employees that your company is forward-thinking, flexible, and prepared to meet the evolving financial needs of its workforce. The Future of Financial Benefits Offering access to crypto does not mean veering from traditional assets. It means you are acknowledging the financial lives of your employees are evolving and that your benefits should, too. An important strategy for companies looking to hire smart young talent. As the regulatory landscape continues to shift, employers have a rare opportunity to lead with innovation. Crypto-based benefits are not a gimmick or a passing trend, they are a signal that your company is preparing for the future of work and the future of wealth. As a leader, make sure you empower your team with the options they need to build a more diversified, resilient financial future. View the full article

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Melinda French Gates has been very busy since her divorce and subsequent departure from the Gates Foundation. For example, she launched her own venture, with $12.5 billion to put toward advancing causes she cares about, specifically those related to women and families. She has even gotten involved in politics, endorsing a candidate for the first time ever. French Gates isn’t new to leading an organization, or to leading people. She has spent the past few decades leaving her imprint on what is arguably the most influential charitable organization in the world. Still, I imagine it can all get a little overwhelming at times. The key to managing it all isn’t to work constantly, according to French Gates. As counterintuitive as it might seem, one of the most important things is getting enough sleep. In an interview with Vanity Fair, French Gates says she believes in the importance of getting seven or eight hours of sleep a night. She also had a few choice words for those who claim they don’t need to sleep more than a few hours a night, something she says is “so dumb.” You can probably imagine the type. At some point, it became a weird sort of flex to suggest that you didn’t need sleep. It was as though sleeping was considered some kind of weakness. Instead, there is a type of leader who seems to think working all the time is a strength. Elon Musk, for example, has claimed that working long hours was necessary to run his companies. While Musk now says he tries to get at least six hours of sleep, there are a number of instances where he talked about working more than 120 hours a week and sleeping on the factory floor for a few hours at a time. The same goes for Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of Pepsi, who has said she only needs four hours of sleep. I guess you could argue that if you aren’t sleeping, you could be using that time to be productive. The problem is, that’s almost never how it works. Working excessive hours is not a virtue. It might feel like a badge of honor, but it rarely amounts to better outcomes. Sleeping less doesn’t make you stronger or more productive; it just makes you more tired. And tired people almost never perform as well as they could with a good night’s sleep. Look, I am definitely a morning person. I prefer to get up pretty early because it’s when I’m most productive, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need any sleep. It means I need to plan accordingly and go to bed early enough to get seven hours of sleep. In fact, I’ve argued on a number of occasions that the single best thing you can do to be more productive is to get enough sleep. It turns out, science agrees with me, and with French Gates. The Centers for Disease Control has said that most adults need at least seven hours of sleep. In fact, some scientific studies have suggested that sleeping for only four hours a night is just as bad for your body and your mind as not sleeping at all. The consequences for not sleeping aren’t just that you’re ready to doze off by the fourth meeting of the day. Lack of sleep can contribute to real health issues like stress, anxiety, heart disease, and diabetes. The CDC also says that almost 40 percent of adults don’t get enough sleep, defined as fewer than six hours. That’s a lot of tired, stressed-out people not performing at their best. The lesson here seems really simple: You should make it a priority to get enough sleep. You’ll be far more productive when you show up to work rested and energized. If you lead an organization or a team, you owe it to your people to be at your best. If you think you can be at your best by working constantly without taking time to rest and—more specifically—to sleep, well, French Gates has a few words for you. Like this column? Sign up to subscribe to email alerts and you’ll never miss a post. —Jason Aten This article originally appeared on Fast Company‘s sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy. View the full article

When teachers rely on commonly used artificial intelligence chatbots to devise lesson plans, it does not result in more engaging, immersive, or effective learning experiences compared with existing techniques, we found in our recent study. The AI-generated civics lesson plans we analyzed also left out opportunities for students to explore the stories and experiences of traditionally marginalized people. The allure of generative AI as a teaching aid has caught the attention of educators. A Gallup survey from September 2025 found that 60% of K-12 teachers are already using AI in their work, with the most common reported use being teaching preparation and lesson planning. Without the assistance of AI, teachers might spend hours every week crafting lessons for their students. With AI, time-stretched teachers can generate detailed lesson plans featuring learning objectives, materials, activities, assessments, extension activities, and homework tasks in a matter of seconds. However, generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot were not originally built with educators in mind. Instead, these tools were trained on huge amounts of text and media drawn largely from across the internet and then launched as general-purpose chatbots. As we started using these tools in our practice as educators, we noticed they often produced instructional materials and lessons that echoed the “recite and recall” model of traditional schooling. This model can be effective for memorizing basic facts, but it often fails to engage students in the active learning required to become informed citizens. We wondered whether teachers should be using these general-purpose chatbots to prepare for class. For our research, we began collecting and analyzing AI-generated lesson plans to get a sense of what kinds of instructional plans and materials these tools provide to teachers. We decided to focus on AI-generated lesson plans for civics education because it is essential for students to learn productive ways to participate in the U.S. political system and engage with their communities. To collect data for this study, in August 2024 we prompted three GenAI chatbots—the GPT-4o model of ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Flash model and Microft’s latest Copilot model—to generate two sets of lesson plans for eighth grade civics classes based on Massachusetts state standards. One was a standard lesson plan and the other a highly interactive lesson plan. We garnered a dataset of 311 AI-generated lesson plans, featuring a total of 2,230 activities for civic education. We analyzed the dataset using two frameworks designed to assess educational material: Bloom’s taxonomy and Banks’ four levels of integration of multicultural content. Bloom’s taxonomy is a widely used educational framework that distinguishes between “lower-order” thinking skills, including remembering, understanding and applying, and “higher-order” thinking skills—analyzing, evaluating and creating. Using this framework to analyze the data, we found 90% of the activities promoted only a basic level of thinking for students. Students were encouraged to learn civics through memorizing, reciting, summarizing and applying information, rather than through analyzing and evaluating information, investigating civic issues or engaging in civic action projects. When examining the lesson plans using Banks’ four levels of integration of multicultural content model, which was developed in the 1990s, we found that the AI-generated civics lessons featured a rather narrow view of history – often leaving out the experiences of women, Black Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asian and Pacific Islanders, disabled individuals and other groups that have long been overlooked. Only 6% of the lessons included multicultural content. These lessons also tended to focus on heroes and holidays rather than deeper explorations of understanding civics through multiple perspectives. Overall, we found the AI-generated lesson plans to be decidedly boring, traditional, and uninspiring. If civics teachers used these AI-generated lesson plans as is, students would miss out on active, engaged learning opportunities to build their understanding of democracy and what it means to be a citizen. Why it matters Teachers can try to customize lesson plans to their situation through prompts, but ultimately generative AI tools do not consider any actual students or real classroom settings the way a teacher can. Although designed to seem as if they understand users and be in dialogue with them, from a technical perspective chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot are machines that predict the next word in a sequence based on massive amounts of ingested text. When teachers choose to use these tools while preparing to teach, they risk relying on technology not designed to enhance, aid or improve teaching and learning. Instead, we see these tools producing step-by-step, one-size-fits-all solutions, when what’s needed in education is the opposite – flexibility, personalization and student-centered learning. What’s next While our study revealed that AI-generated lesson plans are lacking in many areas, this does not mean that teachers should not use these tools to prepare for class. A teacher could use generative AI technologies to advance their thinking. In the AI-generated lesson plans we analyzed, there were occasional interesting activities and stimulating ideas, especially within the homework suggestions. We would recommend that teachers use these tools to augment their lesson-planning process rather than automate it. By understanding AI tools cannot think or understand context, teachers can change the way they interact with these tools. Rather than writing simple, short requests – “Design a lesson plan for the Constitutional Convention” – they could write detailed prompts that include contextual information, along with proven frameworks, models and teaching methods. A better prompt would be: “Design a lesson plan for the Constitutional Convention for 8th grade students in Massachusetts that features at least three activities at the evaluate or create level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Make sure to incorporate hidden histories and untold stories as well as civic engagement activities at the social action level of Banks’ four levels of integration of multicultural content model.” Our study emphasizes the need for teachers to be critical users, rather than quick adopters, of AI-generated lessons. AI is not an all-in-one solution designed to address the needs of teachers and students. Ultimately, more research and teacher professional development opportunities are needed to explore whether or how AI might improve teaching and learning. Torrey Trust is a professor of learning technology at UMass Amherst. Robert Maloy is a senior lecturer of education at the University of Massachusetts. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

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Lots of work situations require some creativity. A client needs a nonstandard solution to a problem. A colleague is stuck in a dispute with their supervisor. You’re writing an article and you need to find a third good example of the concept you’re describing (see what I did there?). You may have the occasional brilliant insight, but then look on in dismay at all of the mediocre ideas you come up with in times of need. Is there something you can do to come up with better ideas? The answer is, “sort of.” Quantity over quality First off, don’t fret if you feel like most of the ideas you generate when trying to solve a new problem are bad. Research on creativity consistently demonstrates that the people who come up with the best ideas are the ones who come up with the most ideas. That is, you can’t really know as you’re thinking of a new idea whether it will be a brilliant stroke or another dud. But, if you keep generating ideas, you’ll eventually land on a gem. That means your focus should be on finding ways to keep generating ideas. Don’t get discouraged and give up when your first few thoughts aren’t amazing. Stick with it for longer than you think you need to. When the well seems to have run dry, don’t give up right away. Refocus yourself on the problem statement and think about whether there is another way to characterize the central problem. Consider giving the problem a title that encapsulates the central dilemma or try describing the problem to a colleague who knows nothing about it. (Computer programmers often keep a rubber duck on their desk to describe coding problems to, because they find it helps them find solutions to tough problems.) Don’t be afraid to incubate A creative flash may strike you when you set about trying to generate an idea, but sometimes you generate many thoughts and no gems. No matter how much pressure you may be feeling to come up with a great concept, try giving it a rest. There are several benefits to letting the problem sit for a while (a process called incubation). First, your initial thoughts about the problem may stick in your mind crowding out other potential solutions. Putting the problem aside may allow those persistent thoughts to fade into the background, allowing other ideas to emerge. Second, you may actually continue noodling on the problem in the background even when you’re not focusing on the problem explicitly. As a result, you may find yourself suddenly hit with an insight. Third, your memory for the problem description will change in subtle ways over time. You are likely to focus less on the details and more on the gist of the problem. This natural change over time (particularly if you sleep on the problem for a day or two) may provide an alternative method for redescribing the problem that has the benefits I discussed in the previous section. Learn to turn a B- into an A Another thing to know about great creative problem solvers is that they are often masterful editors. That is, they don’t just spin out golden thoughts at the drop of a hat. As I mentioned, most of the things they think of at first are more likely to be straw. But, they are good at spinning straw into gold. By continuing to think through the ideas they generate, they may find that a flimsy initial concept becomes stronger by addressing its weaknesses. So, rather than kicking every mediocre concept to the curb, hold onto the list of ideas you generate. Then, explore those ideas in more detail. Ask yourself why they won’t work. When you state the objection to the idea, you may find yourself thinking of elegant ways to adapt the initially bland concept into something that shines. That is, lurking within a B- idea that you have generated may be the roots of the A+ you really desire. View the full article

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. How much should I expect to hang out with my coworker on a week-long work trip? I have an upcoming work trip that I’m feeling a little anxious about, mostly because I’m unsure how to handle the social side of things. It’s a week-long trip with just one coworker. They seem lovely, but we haven’t worked closely together before. I’ve traveled with larger groups in the past, and in those situations the unspoken norm seemed to be: do dinner together at least once or twice, and apart from that, it’s okay to stay in or go out on your own if you prefer. After all, there are others in the group they can spend time with if they’d like. With just the two of us, though, I feel more responsible for their experience, and I’m not sure what’s expected. Should I plan for us to spend afternoons and dinners together every day, or is it okay to build in some solo time? I want this to be a positive experience for both of us, but as someone who’s neurodivergent, it’s hard for me to read the social cues. What’s the typical etiquette for a trip like this? Dinner once or twice during the week but doing your own thing the rest of the time is a pretty typical way to handle it, even when it’s just two of you. You can set those expectations early on in a warm way by saying something on the first day like, “Do you want to do dinner together one night this week while we’re here?” That way you’re offering it! You’re being warm and friendly. But you’re also setting the expectation that it won’t be every night. Related: can I do my own thing in the evenings on a business trip with colleagues? 2. How do I deal with my boss’s email overload? I work at a company that is very email-heavy, which means that we get a lot of emails and we are expected to read and respond relatively quickly. The problem is that my boss, who is a senior leader, is so inundated with emails that he regularly misses things (I would say he misses a quarter to a third of things I forward him, and at least one-third of external emails that we’re both on from new senders). Right now, my strategy if I need a quick response is to use our chat tool to follow up. Half the time, he’ll say he didn’t see the email and I’ll need to forward it so it’s at the top of his inbox. But if it’s, for example, an email that we’ve set up a meeting to discuss, often I’ll start the meeting and realize he hasn’t read the email, and then we’ll lose 10–15 minutes while I find the thread, send it, and wait for him to receive and then read it. It feels like there has to be a better way, and he knows this is an issue and I think would be happy to hear strategies. But I think the strategies I use (a custom priority inbox and judicious use of filters) won’t work for him, because it took me time to set it up when I started, and I do have more time in my day to keep on top of emails. Do you have any other suggestions? Or do I just accept this is how it is, and keep using strategies to work around it? Accept that this is how he is and be proactive about working around it. That means things like assuming that there’s a good chance he won’t see emails until you specifically follow up on them, assuming he won’t have read emails before meetings (unless you chat him and specifically ask him to, which is worth trying when it’s important), using good email “hygiene” (i.e., keeping messages as short as possible and with the upshot/action needed right up top) and communicating with him in ways that aren’t email as much as possible. For example, can you save some of these items up for regular check-in meetings and not bother emailing about them at all? That might not be ideal, but if he’s going to miss them anyway, your life will be easier if you plan for it to happen. Related: my boss hardly reads emails and says it’s my job to follow up with her when something’s important my boss is impossible to reach when I need responses my boss won’t answer my emails 3. My coworker said I look like JD Vance I work for government, and it is obviously a professional environment. As such, comments on appearance are very rare though people will give well intentioned compliments on new haircuts, clothing etc. Today in front of others out of nowhere, a colleague got excited and said that I look like JD Vance. I am around the same age and am a white guy with facial hair so there is some similarity but it was kind of weird and was definitely awkward with others around and with the current political environment. Is this comment appropriate in office or am I just overreacting because I detest JD Vance and find the comparison unflattering? Also, the colleague who made the comment seemed to not think commenting on appearance that way was strange — should I try to correct them? At the time I was baffled so didn’t say much. Eh, it’s the kind of thing that sometimes gets said in any group of people; perfect professionalism would dictate that appearance comparisons should never be made (and if your coworker had written in asking if he should tell you that you look like JD Vance, I would have told him not to), but I don’t think it’s so egregious that you need to go back and say something about it now. (However, if you had wanted to indicate you were displeased in the moment, you could have said, “I promise you we’re quite different.”) If he continues to harp on it, then yes, at that point it would be reasonable to ask him to give it a rest, but hopefully it’s not going to keep coming up. 4. We’re asked to chip in for gift cards for departing executives I have a question about a new practice at my org (a mid-size scale-up with 500-1000 employees). Recently, several VP/C-suite executives have left, and it’s become standard to send a virtual card for all staff to sign and a virtual gift card for optional donations. The latest card had a follow-up urging everyone to sign by tomorrow, which I didn’t do on the basis I’d never met her. There’s no guidance (other than calling it optional) on who should be gifting, but it bothers me that high-earning executives are receiving crowd-sourced gift cards. I wouldn’t be against the company seeing them off with a gift — these people have generally made an impact. Instead they’re getting around £200-£400 in donations from people almost exclusively below them. Typically, low-level employees have a gift card that has gone out to those they’ve worked with, not the entire organization. Am I wrong to feel uncomfortable about this? Most people don’t seem to want to gift, as there are usually only about 25 donations. Isn’t it strange to ask? I want to mention it to my manager but it feels a little petty. It’s not petty at all. It’s gross to ask lower-level employees to chip in for a goodbye gift to high-level, better paid executives (especially ones they haven’t even met, but it’s gross either way). It sounds like most of your coworkers agree, based on the low number of donations. If the company wants to send off departing executives with a gift, they can pay for it themselves. Whether or not it makes sense to mention to your manager depends on what your manager is like, your relationship with her, and your sense of how much capital it would take to raise it … but at a minimum you and your coworkers should feel very free to ignore these requests. If enough of you do that, hopefully whoever is organizing these will get the message. Related: my office wants us to chip in to send our CEO’s family on a ski trip 5. Managing my energy on days with a later start time I work in healthcare, and my field is known for its stress levels and physical intensity. Most of my career has been spent in a consistent 8-5 schedule. However, my new job involves some days of a later start and end time, like occasional 1-8 pm days. I’ve found that I’m really used to starting my work day with a “full tank” of energy and focus at 8 am, and I’m struggling to manage my energy and focus on my 1 pm start days. I feel like my energy is peaking before I even go in to work! It’s really tough knowing that the intensity of the work day is still to come. It spikes my anxiety, and I am having trouble making that time before 1:00 either relaxing or productive, and I am also struggling to maintain all the way until 8:00. I’d love any thoughts or ideas and how to manage this, and commiseration is welcome as well! Let’s throw this out to readers! The post socializing on a week-long work trip, boss’s email overload, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

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