Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! Im Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
Before becoming CEO and president of C.H. Robinson in 2023, Dave Bozeman worked at four of the worlds most iconic companies: Harley-Davidson Motor Company, Caterpillar, Amazon, and Ford Motor Company.
During each stop, he gleaned valuable lessons:
Harley-Davidson (16 years): The motorcycle maker educated him on the power of lean principles, including continuous improvement and just-in-time inventory management. He adds: I learned the value of connecting with people who do the work. I came in as an engineer, but I wanted to be on the [manufacturing] floor.
Caterpillar (9 years): The construction and mining equipment maker offered him an opportunity to experience operational excellence globally and at scale. Cat allowed me to see that people around the globe want to do a great job, but they want clean process and workflows to do that, he says.
Amazon (5+ years): Bozeman built the tech giants Middle Mile global transportation business, which moves customer orders from vendors and fulfillment centers to its sorting facilities and delivery stations. Amazon allowed me to learn how to solve problems at scale with technology, he says.
Ford (1 year): While heading customer service and enthusiast brands such as Mustang and Bronco, Bozeman says his time at the automaker offered a deeper, tactile understanding of how things get made. It was really about getting back to touch, feel, smell, he says.
Bozmans collection of experiencesindustrial, technology, transportationprepared him to run C.H. Robinson, a freight broker connecting shippers with truck, rail, ocean, and air carriers. But it is a customer-centricity he learned from all four companies that is helping propel his modernization and transformation of the 120-year-old company.
These companies, at their heart, are all about the customer, he says. Its an obsession at Amazon; at Harley-Davidson, the customers tattooed themselves [with the company logo]; at Caterpillar, youre in the dirt with them; and Ford is all about the brand and its customers. Thats why Im obsessed with customers and customer service.
Dealing with the “freight recession”
C.H. Robinson customers have benefitted from several new programs announced on Bozemans watch. The company is deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to increase the speed and volume of freight quotesthe estimated cost to ship goods. Touchless appointments technology schedules freight pickups and deliveries, replacing a process traditionally handled by phone or email, and AI chooses the ideal appointment time.
As a result of cost cutting, divestitures, and productivity gains, the company earlier this year reported an 11% reduction in staffing. Its not just about headcount, Bozeman counters. We look at it as upskilling; were investing in customer-facing people, who can now help solve supply-chain, logistical problems with customers as we move away from manual tasking.
Bozeman says implementing new technology and disciplined execution have been keys to its improved financial performance. Despite a freight recession, marked by weak demand and low rates, C.H. Robinson posted a 68% increase in third-quarter net income even as revenue fell 11% to $4.1 billion. The company says the recent quarter was its seventh straight period of outperforming analyst earnings-per-share estimates.
At a time when many of C.H. Robinsons customers face supply-chain challenges and tariff uncertainty, Bozeman is applying lessons hes learned firsthand from timeless brands and putting them to work in new ways. The result: C.H. Robinsons companys ability to innovate may prove to be a competitive edge during a challenging time for freight.
Experience counts
Leaders often use their past experience in new ways. What are some of the lessons youve collected from the different companies youve helped lead? How have they benefited the company you lead now? Share your top takeaways from each rolebrief bullet points are greatand well compile unexpected experiences in a future newsletter.
Also, were still soliciting nominations for the 2025 Modern CEO of the Year. Please nominate yourself or someone you admire via this link. Submissions are due November 21.
Read more: CEO lessons
What Alicia Boler Davis had to unlearn from Amazon and Jeff Bezos
Beautycounter founder Gregg Renfrews season of learning
GE Vernovas Scott Strazik is trying to rekindle its former parents entrepreneurial zeal
At its best, work can be energizing, creative, and meaningful. It can also be emotionally exhausting and stressful. Even in healthy organizations, we all deal with interpersonal tension, stinging feedback, impossible deadlines, and the constant pressure to perform. Add in the rapid pace of change and a steady diet of uncertainty, and its no wonder many of us feel perpetually on edge.
Stress isnt just a sign that somethings wrongits a signal that something matters. Emotions like frustration, anxiety, and excitement all contain useful data about whats important to us, what we value, and what we need. Yet in most workplaces, were trained to treat emotions as distractions from rational thought rather than as essential information that guides it. When we ignore or misread that emotional data, we lose access to one of our most valuable internal resources.
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), originally developed by psychologist Marsha Linehan to help individuals struggling with chronic emotion dysregulation, offers a powerful framework for understanding and responding to emotions effectively. DBT isnt about suppressing or indulging emotionsits about interpreting them accurately and acting wisely in response. The same skills that help people navigate crises and build healthier relationships can help you stay centered in a difficult meeting, receive feedback without spiraling, and recover from professional setbacks with greater resilience.
Heres how DBTs core principles can help you use your emotions as dataand manage stress and intensity at work more effectively.
1. Recognize When Youre in Emotion Mind and Do Something Different
DBT starts with the idea that many of our problems arise from emotion dysregulationfeeling hijacked by strong emotions and acting in ways that make things worse.
At work, that might look like firing off a reactive email, shutting down in a tense discussion, or replaying a negative interaction long after its over. These reactions come from what DBT calls Emotion Minda state in which feelings drive thoughts and behavior, often overriding reason and long-term goals.
The antidote is Wise Mind, the integration of emotion and reason. Wise Mind is the space where you can both acknowledge how you feel and still act in ways that serve your goals.
When you notice your pulse racing before a presentation or frustration mounting in a team meeting, take a breath. Ask yourself: What is this emotion trying to tell me? Maybe its signaling that you care about doing well, that you value fairness, or that you need more clarity. Once youve decoded that data, you can decide how to respond skillfully rather than react impulsively.
2. Check the Facts
Emotions provide information, but not all that information is accurate. Sometimes theyre based on assumptions or incomplete data. You might feel angry when a manager doesnt include you on an email chain and interpret it as rejection, or anxious when a colleagues brief message reads as criticism.
DBTs Check the Facts skill helps you distinguish between what your emotions are telling you and whats actually happening. Ask yourself:
What exactly happened?
What are other possible explanations?
Am I assuming intent I cant verify?
This isnt about invalidating your feelingstheyre real, even if the story attached to them isnt. Its about ensuring your next action fits the facts, not your assumptions. When you treat emotions as data, checking the facts becomes the emotional equivalent of verifying a source before acting on it.
3. Practice Opposite Action to Change Your Emotion
Once youve checked the facts, you can choose whether to act on an emotion or shift it. DBTs Opposite Action skill is a behavioral way to update your emotional data. If your emotion doesnt fit the facts, you do the opposite of what it urges you to do.
If youre angry and want to withdraw or lash out, the opposite action might be to approach calmly and with curiosity. If youre anxious before a presentation and want to avoid, the opposite action might be to step forwardto practice, to engage, and to risk.
Opposite Action doesnt mean pretending to feel great when you dont. Its about behaving in line with your goals rather than your impulsesand, over time, reshaping the emotion itself.
4. Use Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills to Navigate Difficult Conversations
Emotional data doesnt just live inside usit shows up between us. Interpersonal friction is inevitable, especially in environments with high stakes and constant feedback. DBT offers practical tools for these moments.
The skill of DEAR MAN provides a clear structure for asserting needs or saying no effectively:
Describe the situation objectively.
Express how you feel or what you think.
Assert what you want or dont want.
Reinforce why collaboration helps everyone.
Stay Mindful of your goal.
Appear confident, even if you dont feel it.
Negotiate when needed.
You might say:
The last few deadlines have been difficult to meet because the workload has increased significantly. Im feeling stretched thin. Id like to discuss redistributing tasks or adjusting the timeline so the work remains high-quality.
By integrating emotion and reason, you turn emotional informationIm overwhelmedinto effective communication. Thats what Wise Mind looks like in real time.
5. Cultivate Mindfulness of Current Emotions
Mindfulness, the foundation of DBT, helps us observe emotional data without reacting to it. When youre flooded with stressheart pounding, shoulders tense, thoughts racingpause for a moment and name whats happening.
Tension in my chest. Tightness in my jaw. Thoughts saying, I cant handle this.
Labeling activates the brains prefrontal cortex, shifting you from reaction to reflection. You move from being in the emotion to observing it. That small shiftrecognizing emotion as data rather than as dangercan completely change how you respond.
6. Practice Radical Acceptance
Sometimes the data your emotions deliver points to something you cant change: a difficult colleague, a lost opportunity, or an organizational decision you dont agree with. Fighting that reality adds suffering to pain.
Radical Acceptance means acknowledging reality fully so you can decide what to do next from clarity rather than denial. You can say:
I dont like this, and its happening.
This situation is painful, and resisting it isnt helping.
Acceptance doesnt mean resignationit means seeing the full picture so you can use your emotional data wisely rather than fighting it blindly.
7. Build Resilience Proactively
Most of us think of reslience as bouncing back after stress, but DBT teaches that resilience starts before the stress hits. Skills like PLEASE (taking care of physical health) and ABC (accumulating positive emotions, building mastery, and coping ahead) help maintain emotional stability so your system processes stress more accurately.
When your body and mind are well cared for, youre less likely to misread emotional signals as threats. Daily habitssleep, nutrition, movement, connectionarent just wellness clichés. Theyre how you keep your internal data system online and responsive.
A New Model of Effectiveness at Work
DBTs philosophy is dialectical: balancing acceptance and change. In the workplace, that means recognizing that emotion and reason arent opposites to be managedtheyre partners to be integrated.
Emotions are data. They tell us what matters, guide our attention, and strengthen connection. But like any data, they require interpretation and skill to use well. The most effective people and teams arent the ones who avoid emotional intensity; theyre the ones who train for itwho can read emotional cues accurately and respond with balance and wisdom.
Thats the heart of DBT: learning to stay grounded, curious, and fully human in the middle of lifesand workschaos.
Adapted from Real Skills for Real Life: A DBT Guide to Navigating Stress, Emotions, and Relationships (Guilford Press, 2026).
President Barack Obama famously chided Donald Trump in April 2011 during the annual White House correspondents dinner. The reality show star had repeatedly and falsely claimed that Obama had not been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president.
Trumps demands that Obama release his birth certificate had, in part, made Trump a front-runner among Republican hopefuls for their partys nomination in the following years presidential election.
Obama referred to Trumps presidential ambitions by joking that, if elected, Trump would bring some changes to the White House.
Obama then called attention to a satirical photo the guests could see of a remodeled White House with the words Trump and The White House in large purple letters, followed by the words hotel, casino, and golf course.
A projected image is shown on a large screen during President Barack Obama’s speech at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Gala at the Washington Hilton hotel, Washington, D.C., on April 30, 2011. The president showed his humorous side to show what a “Trump” White House might look like. [Photo: Martin H Simon/UPI/Shutterstock]
Obamas ridicule of Trump that evening has been credited with inspiring Trump to run for president in 2016.
My book, The Art of the Political Putdown, includes Obamas chiding of Trump at the correspondents dinner to demonstrate how politicians use humor to establish superiority over a rival.
Obamas ridicule humiliated Trump, who temporarily dropped the birther conspiracy before reviving it. But Trump may have gotten the last laugh by using the humiliation of that night, as some think, as motivation in his run for the presidency in 2016.
Demolition of the East Wing of the White House continues for the construction on U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed new ballroom, on October 26, 2025, in Washington, D.C. [Photo: Al Drago/Getty Images]
There is a further twist to Obama joking about Trumps renovations to the White House if Trump became president. Trump has fulfilled Obamas prediction, kind of.
The Trump administration has razed the East Wing, which sits adjacent to the White House, and will replace it with a 90,000-square-foot, gold-encrusted ballroom that appears to reflect the ostentatious tastes of the president.
The US$300 million ballroom will be twice the size of the White House.
President Donald Trump speaks holding a photos of the new ballroom during a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on October 22, 2025. [Photo: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post/Getty Images]
Its expected to be big enough to accommodate nearly a thousand people. Design renderings suggest that the ballroom will resemble the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, the presidents private estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
I dont have any plan to call it after myself, Trump said recently. That was fake news. Probably going to call it the presidential ballroom or something like that. We havent really thought about a name yet.
But senior administration officials told ABC News that they were already referring to the structure as The President Donald J. Trump Ballroom.
The renovation will have neither a hotel, casino, nor golf course, as Obama mentioned in his lighthearted speech at the 2011 correspondents dinner.
Obama pokes fun at Trump
In the months before the 2011 correspondents dinner, Trump had repeatedly claimed that Obama had not been born in Hawaii but had instead been born outside the United States, perhaps in his fathers home country of Kenya.
The baseless conspiracy theory became such a distraction that Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011.
Three days later, Obama delivered his speech at the correspondents dinner with Trump in the audience, where he said that Trump, having put the birther conspiracy behind him, could move to other conspiracy theories like claims the moon landing was staged, aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico, or the unsolved murders of rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur.
Did we fake the moon landing? Obama said. What really happened at Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?
Obama then poked fun at Trumps reality show, The Apprentice, and referred to how Trump, who owned hotels, casinos, and golf courses, might renovate the White House.
When Obama was finished, Seth Meyers, the host of the dinner, made additional jokes at Trumps expense.
Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republicanwhich is surprising, since I just assumed that he was running as a joke, Meyers said.
Trump gets the last laugh
The New Yorker magazine writer Adam Gopnik remembered watching Trump as the jokes kept coming at his expense.
Trumps humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man on a pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of laughter struck him, Gopnik wrote. There was not a trace of feigning good humor about him.
Roger Stone, one of Trumps top advisers, said Trump decided to run for president after he felt he had been publicly humiliated.
I think that is the night he resolves to run for president, Stone said in an interview with the PBS program Frontline. I think that he is kind of motivated by it. Maybe Ill just run. Maybe Ill show them all.
Trump, if Stone and other political observers are correct, sought the presidency to avenge that humiliation.
I thought, Oh, Barack Obama is starting something that I dont know if hell be able to finish, said Omarosa Manigault, a former Apprentice contestant who became Trumps director of African American outreach during his first term.
Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump, she said. It is everyone whos ever doubted Donald, whoever disagreed, whoever challenged himit is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.
The notoriously thin-skinned Trump did not attend the White House correspondents dinner during his first presidency. He also did not attend the dinner during the first year of his second presidency.
Although Trump has never publicly acknowledged the importance of that event in 2011, a number of people have noted how pivotal it was, demonstrating how the putdown can be a powerful weapon in politicseven, perhaps, extending to tearing down the White Houses East Wing.
Chris Lamb is a professor of journalism at Indiana University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Company culture doesnt affect performance. Thats not a hot take, thats what a 2022 meta analysis from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found when they compared more than 500 research papers on the topic. From the report:
The findings are very clear: there is little evidence consistently linking organizational culture to performance, but if such a link should exist, it is very weak and too small to be practically meaningful. As such, organizations and practitioners should be careful spending time and money on company-wide culture change programs as they are not likely to increase performance.
And yet, when asked, 92% of executives believe that improving their firms culture would increase the value of their company. So are 92% of executives wrong? And are millions, if not billions, of dollars wasted each year on culture efforts?
The short answer? Yes and yes. The full answer is a bit more complicated.
Why the myth persists
Leaders cling to the idea that culture drives results because it feels controllable. You can write new values, host an off-site, or hire a chief culture officer. Its far easier to reprint the employee handbook than to rewire incentives, decision-making, or priorities. Culture talk offers the illusion of progresssomething visible, moral, and manageablewhile the real performance drivers remain untouched.
Company culture is still deeply misunderstood
Many leaders talk about culture as something you havea vibe, a set of values, a moodrather than something you do. But culture is not a static asset; its the emergent result of how decisions are made, what gets rewarded or punished, and which behaviors the system makes easy or hard. When executives say we need a culture of innovation, but still require six layers of approval for new ideas, theyre confusing aspiration for infrastructure.
Leaders arent being honest about their culture, or with themselves
Research from MIT Sloan Management Review (2020) found no correlation between a companys stated values and the lived experience of its employees. In other words, what leaders say their culture is and what people actually feel day-to-day are worlds apart. Firms with large culture gaps see lower productivity and impaired alignment. The misalignment fuels cynicism and distrust, undermining managerial credibility and depleting morale. Employees in these organizations report reduced commitment and higher turnover. Instead of confronting that gap, many double down on optics: slogans, all-hands pep talks, or off-sites meant to rebuild trust.
But culture isnt changed through words or ritualsits changed through systems. Decision rights, information flow, meeting cadence, and incentives form the real architecture of behavior. Until leaders are honest enough to align those structures with their rhetoric, culture initiatives will keep delivering the same result: symbolic satisfaction with no measurable performance gains.
Leaders arent being strategic about their culture
Every era has its cultural role modelthe company everyone else is told to emulate. In the 90s it was Jack Welchs GE. Then it was Apple, then Amazon. Now its Jensen Huangs Nvidia. Each time, executives rush to borrow their rituals and slogans, hoping to import a little of their magic. But lets be honest: your company isnt that companyand it shouldnt be.
Culture is simply how strategy gets lived. Which means a best culture doesnt exist, only a fit cultureone that reinforces your distinct strategy and constraints. Copying someone elses culture while pursuing a different strategy isnt just naive, its counter-strategic.
The culture obsession is a distraction
The corporate world is hooked on culture because its comforting and it makes leadership feel human and moral. But culture talk often becomes a way to avoid harder truths: bad strategy, misaligned incentives, broken systems, and unclear ownership. In our experience as a consulting partner to some of the worlds largest and most complex companies, a culture problem is usually a smokescreen for problems that leaders have long known about and shirked responsibility for: a nice way to avoid assigning blame or deflecting responsibility. And when we analyzed 1,700 public companies and their Glassdoor ratings, we found that the No. 1 topic among negative reviews were complaints about leaders and management. So, poor leadership produces poor cultures.
What to do instead
Before rushing to rewrite values, produce swag, or drag people to town halls, leaders first need to hold themselves accountable. Do they actually behave in the way they hope others will? Do they collaborate with their peers as one company or is that really just a slogan? Does the way they allocate resources match what they claim to prioritize? Are the people theyre promoting really the best culture bearers or merely squeaky wheels or political players?
Then, leaders should consider culture as the shadow cast by the operating model they design and manage. If you want to change the shadow, you have to move the object casting it. That means redesigning how decisions get made, how information travels, and what gets measured and rewarded. Culture is not a lever to pull; its a reflection of the choices leadership makes every day about how work actually happens.
So yes, culture matters, just not in the way most executives think. You dont fix performance by fixing culture; you fix culture by fixing performance. Because in the end, culture lives in the rules you enforce, not the words you endorse.
Executives like to say they are integrating AI. But most still treat artificial intelligence as a feature, not a foundation: they add a chatbot here, an automated report there, and call it transformation. Thats the same mistake companies made in the early days of the web: building websites as brochures instead of re-thinking their business models around digital interaction.
AI is not a feature. Its an architectural layer that will reshape every workflow, decision, and product. Those who treat it as decoration will fade, those who treat it as structure will lead.
From automation to agency
As product strategist Connor Davis noted, every great company will soon have an agentic layer, a system that not only automates tasks but also orchestrates them across functions. The distinction is crucial.
Automation is about efficiency: doing existing tasks faster or cheaper. Agency is about delegation: letting the system make decisions, coordinate actions, and even manage other software on your behalf. Think of it as moving from tools that execute commands to assistants that understand context.
The leap is subtle but profound. When a finance team uses an LLM to summarize quarterly reports, thats automation. When the same system proactively flags anomalies, adjusts forecasts, and alerts the CFO with recommendations, thats agency.
Companies that understand this shift are already reorganizing around it. They are not adding AI to workflows: they are building workflows around AI.
What an AI-first roadmap really means
To be AI-first doesnt mean using the latest model or adding generative features. It means designing products and processes that assume continuous intelligence at their core.
Andrew Bolis captured this well: AI will become the orchestration layer across every SaaS tool. Instead of humans jumping between apps, agents will execute intent across systems.
Thats the future of enterprise software. Todays SaaS stack forces humans to be the middleware: copying data between CRMs, spreadsheets, and dashboards. Tomorrows agentic layer will do that work automatically, turning enterprise systems from silos into a single, adaptive organisms. And heres no less than a biologist telling you so, and a few years in advance.
This evolution mirrors what happened when APIs transformed the web. At first, companies built isolated web apps: then APIs connected them. Now AI agents will do the connecting and the deciding too.
The three pillars of an AI-first architecture
From what were seeing across industries, AI-first organizations share three foundational traits:
A data substrate, not a data warehouse Traditional data systems store information; AI-first systems understand it. That means building contextual layers, from embeddings, to knowledge graphs and retrieval systems) that make data retrievable in natural language and usable in real time.
A semantic interface If your team still clicks through dashboards, youre behind. The AI-first enterprise interacts through language: voice, text, or context-aware prompts. The interface becomes conversational because the workflow becomes cognitive.
An agentic layerEvery AI-first company needs an orchestration layer that can act autonomously within defined boundaries. Agents handle not just information retrieval but task execution, generating code, scheduling, procurement, customer response, and compliance checks. The challenge isnt whether they work: its how much you trust them to decide.
The cultural reset executives must lead
This is not a technical project: its a cultural one. Building an AI-first organization requires leaders to unlearn decades of linear thinking about processes and hierarchy.
The question is no longer how can technology support our employees, but how can employees supervise technology that works alongside them. The manager of the near future wont just oversee people: theyll coordinate agents.
Executives who think in terms of software adoption will miss this entirely. The right question isnt which vendors AI tool to buy , but which decisions youre ready to delegate to a machine.
That shift demands a new kind of governance: clear ethical boundaries, data transparency, and oversight mechanisms that ensure AI recommendations remain auditable and explainable. Companies that fail to define those boundaries early will end up with AI that works but works for the wrong goals.
The new competitive advantage
The competitive edge in the AI era wont come from access to the biggest model or most GPUs. It will come from organizational adaptability, or the ability to incorporate AI decision-making without losing accountability.
In every industry, a similar pattern will emerge: the incumbents will integrate AI as a feature, the challengers will rebuild their stack around it. The difference will show up in speed: companies that treat AI as infrastructure will compress decision cycles from weeks to hours. Those that dont will move at human speed while their competitors move at machine speed.
But dont confuse velocity with chaos. The best AI-first companies arent automating indiscriminately: theyre orchestrating intelligently. They design human-in-the-loop architectures where humans remain the moral and strategic governors, and AI handles execution at scale.
Building the agentic future responsibly
The temptation, of course, is to delegate everything. After all, if agents can optimize marketing spend, supply chains, and code deployment, why not let them? The reason is simple: trust is earned, not automated.
AI agents must be auditable: their decisions explainable and reversible. Without that, an organization risks the black box syndrome that has already plagued large-scale AI deployments. Ive written before about this risk in Fast Company: when you build on systems you dont understand, you surrender control.
Agentic systems make that surrender seductive. They dont crash, they comply. And thats precisely why theyre dangerous if left unsupervised. Remember the paperclip maximizer
Practical steps for executives
For leaders beginning their AI-first journey, heres a roadmap:
Start with one value chain Pick a process with measurable outcomes such as customer service, logistics, or internal reporting, and prototype an agentic version. Dont start with chatbots, start with impact.
Form an AI governance board Blend technical and ethical oversight early. Youll need both to scale safely.
Invest in retraining Your teams dont need prompt engineers: they need problem-framers who understand what can and cant be delegated.
Keep data open inside the enterprise AI thrives on accessibility, not silos. Build policies for responsible internal sharing.
Measure decision latency, not output volume The real gain from AI-first design isnt producing more: its deciding faster.
From feature to foundation
AI is no longer the icing on the product: its the yeast in the dough. It changes everything from the inside out.
Companies that understand this will design architectures where agents and humans collaborate seamlessly, data flows freely, and decisions happen in real time. Those that dont will keep bolting AI onto outdated systems and wondering why nothing truly changes.
The agentic future isnt coming: its already here. The only question left is whether your company is ready to stop piloting and start delegating.
It became clear in the late 2010s that Amherst Colleges science center had aged far past its prime. As the concrete building fell into disrepair, school leaders suspected a demolition was in order.
Old, poorly insulated, and inadequate for the technical demands of todays research, it seemed like too steep a challenge to repurpose, says Tom Davies, the schools Executive Director of Planning, Design, and Construction. Especially after a new science center opened on campus in 2020.
It was a stranded asset with essentially no value, he says. But what our consultants were able to show is that it does have quite a bit of value.
[Rendering: Herzog & de Meuron]
In the course of exploring options, engineers and the architectural team at Herzog & de Meuron devised a different future for the building, firmly rooted in its past. They decided that the hefty concrete frame could be stripped down, and two comparatively lightweight floors of mass timber could be added on top to create additional space. This approach, which stays within the schools commitment to reduce its carbon footprint, was approved, and the repurposed building will soon reopen as a new student center in the fall semester of 2026.
[Rendering: Herzog & de Meuron]
The Amherst project exemplifies the potential of found capacity, a concept advocated by Justin Den Herder, vice president and principal at global engineering firm TYLin, which worked on science center renovation. He believes theres extensive opportunity in this form of mass timber top-off, but theres simply not enough familiarity with this material, or enough examples, to spur additional investment and development.
Engineers like Den Herder have concluded that much of the older building stock in big cities, built with solid foundations able to hold additional weight, could easily support a few additional floors, especially if they were constructed of more lightweight material. More modern office projects, value engineered to cut costs, likely wouldnt have this capacity.
I would be willing to say the majority of buildings could accept this, said Den Herder. I think the number of buildings that couldn’t accept at least one story in mass timber are probably certainly in the minority.
An architectural rendering of the Amherst “Living Room” and study space (left), and an in-progress photo of the construction (right). [Images: Maria Stenzel (photo)/courtesy Amherst News]
Mass timberrising in popularity due to its biophilic properties and lower carbon footprintfits this use case perfectly. A number of recent projects utilizing this concept of stacking additional floors on existing buildings suggests a new direction for those seeking added density in our downtowns.
Europeans have been doing these designs for years. Theres even a Dutch design concept, optoppen (topping up in Dutch) that describes these kinds of developments. A coalition of industry partners has gathered a portfolio of dozens of existing projects, and created tools to evaluate the potential of such projects in cities like London.
The 80M building in Washington, DC.[Photo: Ron Blunt Photography]
But its starting to see more recognition in the United States, with a few recent high profile projects. In Washington, D.C., the 80M building, which opened in the fall 2022, added three mass timber floors atop a downtown office, which were quickly leased by BP and the American Trucking Association. The project didnt require costly reinforcement of the existing foundation, says Steve Trapp, executive vice president for Columbia Property Trust, and the wood interiors and 12-foot-tall windows with commanding views of the nations capital offered a compelling, unique office environment for tenants.
[Photo: Ron Blunt Photography]
Other projects rely ess on mass timber, but take a similar approach to expanding the square footage of an existing building. The Terminal Warehouse renovation in New York City, designed by CookFox, will add six floors of new office space, clad in glass and metal, atop a brick warehouse during renovations set to commence this year. Another recent project in Manhattan, 787 11th Avenue, added additional floors with floor-to-ceiling glass atop a 20s-era building that initially served as an automobile showroom.
[Photo: Ron Blunt Photography]
Adding floors in this manner can work well, says Trapp, especially for something like a warehouse-to-office conversion, since the original structure has such a solid foundation. Columbia was also behind the Terminal Warehouse project.
However, the current office market, with demand down and vacancy rates over 20% in many U.S. cities, means theres little to no appetite at the moment to stack new floors and add space when theres already too much. If we had the right investment conditions, we would absolutely go forward with [similar projects], says Trapp. Mass timber has really taken off since 80M was conceived. We just havent had the right circumstances.
But the proof of concept for projects like 80M suggest the idea would work well when the economics become more favorable. And mass timber additions remain ripe for residential projects. Den Herder says that in New York City, for example, the building code allows for adding a few additional stories on many townhomes and brownstones, offering a potential pathway for more densification, especially in the outer reaches of boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn. By changing the lens by which you view a building renovation, this kind of vertical addition with mass timber can help save a building, instead of demolishing it.
A lifelong Manchester City fan stands in front of a 3D virtual avatar of the teams star player, Erling Haaland, at an EA Sports FC prelaunch event. Towering and lifelike, the avatars every grin, gesture, and movement is perfectly synced to Haaland himself. The fan plays, interacts, and even shares a laugh during a spontaneous dance battle with the digital Haaland in real time. For a few electrifying moments, its as if their football hero has come to life in front of their eyes, blurring the line between reality, fandom, and technology.
This isnt a far-off sci-fi scenario; it already happened.
3D digital avatars are starting to transform how humans connect in virtual spaces, offering a level of immediacy, responsiveness, and personalization that was once impossible.
For brands, this represents a massive opportunity to engage audiences in ways that feel human, scalable, and alive.
The shift is already underway
According to Gartner, 54% of brands are using some form of chatbot or conversational AI platform for customer-facing interactions. But while 2D avatars and text-based chatbots have paved the way, 3D digital avatars are poised to take this evolution to the next level. With advancements in AI, real-time animation, and emotional modeling, brands can now create avatars that move, react, and even emote like humans, making digital encounters feel as authentic as real ones.
And audiences are ready. Gen Z, in particular, is primed for animated interactions. Nearly half (48%) of this generation prefers animation to live-action, and adults aged 18 to 34 are now the biggest fans of animated content. From Roblox to VTubers, the language of animation has become the language of self-expression. For a generation that socializes online and personalizes digital avatars, interacting with 3D animated identities feels naturalan extension of how they already live and connect.
The opportunity for brands
The challenge for brands has always been how to create meaningful connections at scale. Brand ambassadors are one way, but talent isnt scalable. A celebrity ambassador cant record personal videos for every fan, and a top athlete cant be in three cities at once.
3D digital avatars are changing the equation. With real-time animation tools and AI modeling, brands can create content that feels live-action in quality but is lightning-fast to produce. This allows brands to be reactive, spontaneous, and human, without waiting for a shoot day or a gap in a busy brand ambassadors schedule.
Picture Shaquille ONeals digital twin welcoming customers to multiple Home Depot events simultaneously, each interaction tailored to the audience; Lionel Messis 3D avatar hosting a live Q&A with fans after a big game; or Wendys iconic mascot bantering with fans in real time, trained on years of the brands famously sassy tweets.
Why just use words on X when you can connect visually in real time?
Why 3D digital avatars feel real
A common question is, how can a digital avatar feel “real?” The answer lies in expressiveness. The difference between a 3D character and a 3D avatar is emotion. Characters like the M&Ms mascots communicate through jokes and dialogue. Avatars, on the other hand, mirror the subtlety of human interactionan idiosyncratic smirk, a pause, or a glance that creates genuine emotional resonance.
Early prototypes already show how users can pose questions to a digital avatar and receive individualized, emotionally attuned responses. This glimpse into avatar-based interaction hints at transformative potential, not just in marketing but in education, customer service, and healthcare. Imagine a child preparing for intensive medical treatment, comforted by a 3D animated character that brings warmth and understanding to the daunting journey ahead. Pediatric personas would be able to respond to the childs questions and concerns in a calm, reassuring manner, reaching them in the familiar environment of their own home.
Building empathy into the system
To make avatars feel authentic, AI models are trained on everything from a persons interviews to their mannerisms and speech patterns. If someone has a signature laugh, gesture, or way of speaking, the avatar learns it too. This ensures interactions feel personal, not mass-produced.
What excites me most is the scalability of empathy. Two people can have completely different, yet equally real, experiences with the same avatar, each interaction tailored to their interests, questions, and emotional tone. This level of personalization is a game changer for brands looking to deepen their connection with audiences.
How brands can get ahead now
Technically, this ecosystem relies on real-time animation engines like Unreal, AI-driven facial and voice modeling, and cloud-based data storage. The human layer is just as critical. This isnt plug-and-play software; it takes creative producers, animators, and AI engineers to make an avatar feel alive.
For brands to truly own this technology, theyll need to find experienced partners or build small internal avatar studios that blend storytelling with tech fluency. Its an investment in people as much as in infrastructure.
If youre a brand leader, heres how to prepare for this shift:
Identify your expressive assets. Who in your ecosystemmascots, ambassadors, talentbest represents your brands values and story?
Start gathering inputs. Video, voice, and movement data are the raw materials that power authenticity.
Establish creative guardrails. Set clear boundaries for what your avatar can and cant do, ensuring alignment with your brand values.
Build hybrid teams. Youll need a mix of creativity and AI literacy to bring avatars to life.
Experiment. Start small. Let an avatar greet fans, appear at an event, or respond to a limited set of questions. The goal is to learn how people connect.
The next phase of human connection
To understand where this space is headed, consider how far virtual representation has already come. When I played Madden NFL in college, the players were pixels. Today, they look like real athletes. In two years, our digital avatars could look and sound exactly like us, in 3D, and be fully trained to interact on our behalf.
The next frontier of digital experience isnt about technology aloneits about emotional presence. Brands that learn to speak this new language of presence have a distinct advantage.
If you are reading this from outside the U.S., you may have already seen the videos. Clouds rolling over the Grand Canyon. Kids screaming down roller coasters. Snowboarders gliding through white forests.
America’s latest tourism campaign, America the Beautiful, is out, and it is selling the American dream. But will tourists buy it?
According to a May 2025 report from the World Travel and Tourism Council, international visitor spending to the U.S. is projected to fall to just under $169 billion in 2025, down from $181 billion in 2024. Even in 2024, 90% of all tourism spending came from domestic travel, while international travel dipped from many of the countrys key source markets, including the U.K, Germany, South Korea, Spain, Ireland, and the Dominican Republic.
The country’s national tourism marketing agency, Brand USA, developed “America the Beautiful” to rebuild confidence in these shrinking markets. The campaign glows with idealism and nostalgia for the great outdoors, the great American road trip, and majestic landscapes that pulse with life in spite of their sovereign’s attempts to turn large swaths of it over to fracking.
By choosing a title that is associated with an 1890s poem that has become one of America’s most patriotic songs, Brand USA seems to want tourists to forget about the country’s present issues and travel back to a time, or a place, where patriotism didn’t so often manifest as nationalism.
[Image: Brand USA]
A campaign with high stakes
“America the Beautiful,” first announced in June, launched on October 20months after Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” tax and spending law slashed Brand USA’s federal funding by a staggering 80%. (Travel lobbyists are now fighting with Congress to restore the budget.) The agency laid off 15% of its staff in September, and shut down its ad-supported streaming service GoUSATV, which promoted inbound tourism.
By undercutting a national tourism marketing agency that promotes the U.S. internationally, Trump ostensibly flipped the finger to global visitors, reflecting, instead, his America-first priorities.
But America needs international tourism. International visitors contributed just over $217 billion in revenue in 2019, supporting nearly 18 million jobs nationwide. The tourism sector more broadly is also a reliable driver of federal, state, and local tax revenue, contributing more than $585 billion annually. The stakes for “America the Beautiful” are high.
[Image: Brand USA]
The fall of the American Brand
Next year will be a big year for the United States. Between America’s 250th anniversary, the 2026 World Cup that will take place across 11 U.S. cities, and the Route 66 centennial, the country is poised for celebration on many fronts.
“America the Beautiful” was timed to boost tourism ahead of those big events. Brand USA partnered with AI-powered software Mindtrip, which offers interactive maps and custom itineraries. They also created various video spots highlighting “America the Brave” and “America the Big Hearted.”
[Image: Brand USA]
“We’re not asking people to simply visit America; we’re inviting them to feel it, taste it, and carry home experiences that become core memories, Leah Chandler, Brand USA’s chief marketing officer, said in a recent press release.
What if not enough people don’t want what America has to offer? “My view is that advertising campaigns are useless at persuading people to change their minds about countries,” says Simon Anholt, a leading researcher and advisor on nation brands and national image. “You cant talk yourself out of an image that you behaved yourself into.”
According to the 2025 Anholt Nation Brands Index, a systematic survey of international perceptions of countries, the United States has dropped out of the top ten for the first time in 19 years. After topping the index in both 2005 and 2016, the U.S. fell from 1st to 7th place following Trump’s election in 2016. After his re-election in 2025, the U.S. has dropped to what Anholt calls an “unprecedented” 14th place. (Japan and Germany remain at the top of the list.)
The fall isn’t just about perception. Anholt says there is a “more than 80% correlation” between a countrys score in the Nation Brands Index and the amount of money it makes from tourism, foreign investment and trade. The exact breakdown remains unclear, “but its a certainty that when image declines, visits decline too,” he says.
[Image: Brand USA]
Politics or pleasure?
Whether some tourists are able to separate the political from the pleasurable will depend on who you ask. For Tom Buncle, the former chief executive of the Scottish Tourist Board and a tourism consultant who helps destinations improve their global competitiveness, the U.S. remains an appealing destination despite geopolitical tensions. “Regardless of all the issues, California is still going to have amazing beaches, Arizona is going to have amazing deserts, Florida is going to have amazing surfing, Colorado is going to have great mountains,” he told me. “Politics aren’t going to change that.”
Buncle agrees that many challenges are hard to ignore: Some tourists have said they are afraid to visit for fear of being turned away at the border. Others worry about visa restrictions and higher visa fees. “But as I keep saying, our countries, our cultures, our landscape is bigger than all of us,” says Buncle. “It’s been there for centuries, it’s going to outlast all of us.”
Anholt is less optimistic. He brings up the “halo effect,” namely when people start to dislike a countrys policies so much that they unconsciously downgrade many other unconnected aspects of the country. If tourists still want to like America, they’ll overlook the bad stuff. If they no longer want to like America, they might pick another travel destination. “Once they’ve flipped, they tend to stay flipped,” he says. And if enough people stay flipped, he adds, it will be “the beginning of payback time for America First.”
[Image: Brand USA]
Repairing the image
Brand USA, which declined an interview, is aware of the challenges. “So what’s our assignment? At this moment, the U.S. travel industry needs a rallying cry,” Leah Chandler told Travel Weekly in July. “We know that international audiences still love many things about the U.S. and are connected to the people through our culture and our stories. And while right now might not feel like it’s the right time for some, there are others who have the means and desire to visit the United States, and those people will prioritize a visit here.”
As an American resident (admittedly, not the target demo) I can’t help but cringe at the tone-deafness of the campaign. On the one hand is an agency promoting “connection,” “boundless adventures,” and the kind of open-armed welcome that has made what America is today. On the other hand is a president who has willfully stoked violence, torpedoed America’s global standing, and slashed refugee allotment (unless they’re white).
The dissonance is deafening, and it likely won’t be lost to those who get their news abroad. But perhaps there’s room for hope beyond the cynicism. “Yes, the global news is coming out with not a very pretty picture, but [there is value in] reminding people that the real USA is still there for them to visit to enjoy,” says Buncle.
Even if reality is dark, shining a light on the brightest spots doesn’t have to be false advertising. It could be an attempt at repair. Americans deserve that.
OpenAI is going house hunting.
The world-leading AI company is reportedly looking for a massive corporate campus of at least 500,000 square feet to house its ever-growing workforce of insanely well paid engineers and support staff.
Whats more important than OpenAIs desire to expand, though, is the companys choice of where to do it.
OpenAI is looking not in the trendy, vibrant heart of San Francisco, but deep in the dull, gray corporate expanses of Silicon Valley.
That bucks a major trend in the AI spaceand signals a broad and impactful change to the industry.
Corporate hermit crabs
For generations, Americas most successful tech companies have followed a familiar pattern: start in some tiny, inappropriate space, then expand to a massive office park in Palo Alto or Mountain View.
Hewlett Packard famously started in a garage before expanding to ever-larger campuses. Apple did the same, and now controls most of Cupertino from a bizarre, insular spaceship of a building.
Google started in a Stanford dorm room before moving to (surprise!) a garage, and later a 3 million square foot compound in Mountain View, the Googleplex.
Often, Silicon Valleys tech companies behave like corporate hermit crabs, taking over the campuses of their failed predecessors.
When Facebook moved to the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, they didnt even bother to invest in a new signthey just flipped the old one around and put a big Facebook logo on it.
Even today, the original Sun Microsystems sign still hides on the back of the Facebook one. When Google repurposed the former campus of Silicon Graphics to build the Googleplex, they kept a dinosaur named Stan.
Things will be great when youre . . .
A new wave of tech companies coming to power in the mid 2010s, though, started to trod a different path.
The social network X (née Twitter) had its headquarters in the Civic Center neighborhood of San Francisco until Elon Musk forcibly excised it. Uber and Square were originally down the block. Airbnb, Zynga, and Cloudflare are all in San Franciscos trendy but rough-around-the-edges SoMA district.
These newer companies realized that their hip, young engineers didnt want to live in the suburban doldrums of the Valley. They wanted nice food, bars that stay open past 10 pm, and all the other cultural trappings of a major city.
After the pandemic, the trend towards downtown tech HQs accelerated. Companies realized it was easier to lure engineers back to the office if it happened to be down the block in a city where theyd love to live, rather than a chartered bus ride away.
As todays AI companies started their meteoric growth, then, it was only natural for them to situate themselves downtown.
OpenAI started in SoMAs historic Pioneer Building. When they outgrew that space, they moved to a massive, glass-fronted campus in the up and coming Mission Bay neighborhoodall skybridges, living walls, louvered windows to let in the bay breezes, and fancy cafes that serve boba tea in little glass bottles you get to take home.
Although a quietly-imposing security guard stares down anyone who approaches the front doors too closely, I love walking around the OpenAI campus and its adjacent urban parks.
Anthropic likewise started in a historic building right by San Franciscos Financial District, before moving to something a bit more corporate, but still in the heart of the city.
This influx of AI talentand the buckets of money that go with ithas been fantastic for San Francisco. As a professional photographer, I visit the city at least once a week to take photos.
Union Square, which struggled mightily during the pandemic and became a symbol of San Franciscos failings, is now home to a new Nintendo store, a bar from basketball star Steph Curry, and an eyeball-scanning hub for Sam Altmans crypto startup World. SF was just rated one of the safest cities in the world.
Back to the burbs
Now, though, that trend seems to be reaching its limits. Its one thing to locate your headquarters in an energetic, happening part of the city when youre a scrappy startup pursuing the impossible dream of AGI.
But when youre planning a trillion-dollar IPO and have a headcount in the thousands, even the biggest downtown office will struggle to hod you.
And so, the AI worlds inexorable march to the Valley begins! OpenAI is the first big AI company to plan an exodus from San Francisco. But as the flood of money continues to flow in, its unlikely to be the last.
To me, its indicative of the fact that the AI sector is slowly growing up.
Much as many young engineers start out living downtown, only to answer the siren song of the burbs as they have kids, cars, and schools to consider, so too has the rapidly maturing OpenAI decided to live somewhere with easier access to neighbors, more room to spread out, and virtually unlimited oceans of parking.
The startups serving the AI sector will surely continue to choose downtown digs. And OpenAI and its ilk will likewise keep satellite offices in the city, much as Google does today.
But as companies like OpenAI increasingly pursue a path toward serving corporate customers and worrying about such petty things as profitability, theyre moving back in line with the path taken by the tech giants who came before them. And that means moving to Valley HQs.
Ill admit, Im a little sad to see the locus of AI starting to move so predictably to the burbs. But it’s also strangely comforting. People are terrified of OpenAI and its friends for their ability to rapidly disrupt industries and otherwise remake the world.
But people felt the same way about Google back in the day. And Fairchild Semiconductor before it.
OpenAIs all-too-predictable march to the Valley is a reminder that AI companies feel powerful and all-encompassing today, but ultimately stand on the same ever-shifting tech sands as their predecessors.
Give it a few decades, and another hermit crab will come along to flip their signs around, move in their own generations of talented young engineers, and get to work building whatever comes next.
A business owner I know tends to only hire people in their twenties, under the assumption they bring new life into his business: new ideas, new innovations, new skills.
And hes sometimes right, especially in the specific.
But in general? Science says his hiring approach is probably wrong.
In a review of studies published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers found that the age at which scientists and inventors reach their moment of “genius” is increasing: while the average age used to be younger, the majority now make their biggest contributions to their field after the age of 40.
As the researchers write:
This research consistently finds that performance peaks in middle age: the life-cycle begins with a training period in which major creative output is absent, followed by a rapid rise in output to a peak, often in the late 30s or 40s.
The same is often true for entrepreneurs. A Journal of Business Venturing study found that the most successful entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged, even in tech. In fact, a 60-year-old startup founder was three times more likely to launch a successful startup than a 30-year-old startup founder, and nearly twice as likely to launch a startup that landed in the top 0.1% of all companies in terms of revenue and profits.
Why does scientific genius tend to occur later, rather than earlier? Sure, occasionally an apple will still fall off a tree to spark insight; Sir Isaac Newton was 23 when he developed his theory of gravity (as well as calculus, a subject my high school report card despised him for).
But true mastery typically takes time. As the researchers write, The link between creativity and extant knowledge may depend not just on the acquisition of extant knowledge via training, but may depend on the nature and difficulty of the cognitive processes involved in drawing together and extending sets of extant knowledge.
Or in non-researcher speak, its not enough to just know things; you have to know how those things fit within larger frameworks in order to make new connections and new breakthroughs.
The same is true for entrepreneurs. While younger startup founders tend to be more tech savvy and less risk-averse, older startup founders benefit from greater experience, business skills, connections, and access to connections and capital.
In a broader sense, its hard to develop a sound strategy, to make the endless number of tactical decisions required to build a business, or to be a good leader when you have limited experience. For entrepreneurs, being older isnt something to overcome. Experience is a genuine competitive advantage.
And thats also true for new employees. Sure, younger workers tend to be more tech savvy. They may possess recent education more applicable to a rapidly changing industry. If you need specific skills, a younger job candidate may be the perfect fit.
But if you need broader skills, or an interconnected set of skills like leadership, take a closer look at a more seasoned candidate.
Younger or older, the person you hire should be the best person for the job, regardless of age. Thats why the real key is to identify the skills and attributes you need, and then focus on finding the best fit regardless of any preconceptions you might haveespecially if you assume older dogs cant be taught new tricks.
Because contrary to popular belief, genius usually takes time to develop and emerge.
After all: Steve Jobs may have been 21 when he cofounded Apple, but his most commercially successful innovations came when he was in his late 40s and early 50s.
Jeff Haden
This article originally appeared on Fast Companys 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.
