Chipotle would like to be invited over for dinner.
The Newport Beach, California-based fast-casual chain is going DIY mode with “Build-Your-Own Chipotle,” a takeout, digital-only menu item meant to feed four to six people. For Chipotle, the build-your-own meal is about delivering value and speed at a time when competition over consumer dollars for out-of-home meals is fierce and getting fiercer, and it benefits from a base emotion: guilt.
The Build-Your-Own Chipotle meal comes with eight tortillas, two bags of chips, plus other toppings, as well as salsas, rice, and beans for about the price of six burritos. The chain says it can be ready to pick up in as little as 15 minutes. Customers can pick everything from their choice of protein to either guac or queso blancobut the BYOC meal is only available to order on the chain’s app or website.
Building on what works
The menu item aligns with Chipotle’s future plans to iterate on what’s already working. In the company’s July earnings call, the chain reported quarterly revenue of $3.1 billion, a growth of 3% year over year. But it also saw a 4% drop in its comparable sales and expects comparable sales to be flat for the rest of the year due to consumer volatility. In other words, the company is adding stores and growing, but existing stores are seeing sales fall.
[Photo: Chipotle]
The value of faster food at home
Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright said on the earnings call that the company’s value proposition of a burrito or burrito bowl that sells for less than $10 before taxes and fees in most markets was something they would build on. “Going forward, we will roll out new and creative ways to emphasize our value proposition while improving the benefit of our offering through better execution, menu innovation, and amplifying our rewards program,” he said.
The chain’s new offering might create increased sales from existing customers by convincing someone who orders Chipotle for lunch once a week to pick it up for dinner, too.
But the strategy here is about more than just the price. The DIY model also might make this takeout meal easier on the conscience. Just as Betty Crocker saw cake mix sales rise after requiring customers to add an egg, Chipotle might be able to sell even more burritos if it offers some as BYOC kit ingredients instead of a ready-to-eat product. It doesn’t feel like fast food if you make it at home. It’s family dinner.
Good news for Donald Judd fans: The renovation of his Marfa, Texas, architecture office is now complete.
The two-story brick building built in 1907 looks almost exactly as Judd left it when he died in 1994, but now it features environmentally conscious building methods, some contemporary and some traditional, including energy-efficient windows, rooftop solar, and a passive cooling technique called night flushing.
Designed by the Houston-based architect Troy Schaum of Schaum Architects and the Donald Judd Foundation, the project illustrates how historic preservation and honoring an artists legacy intersect with the realities of climate change. This is a locally responsive based system of conservation, Schaum says.
[Photo: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation]
A Desert Town Dedicated to Art and Architecture
After moving to Marfa in the 1970s, Judd purchased 22 buildings in the small Chihuahua desert town and transformed them into spaces to live, work, and display art. Among them are a former military complex turned residence and galleries for his large-scale pieces, an adobe house for his paintings and collection of antique Swedish and Shaker furniture, and an old Safeway for his art studio.
Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas. 1993. [Photo: Laura Wilson/courtesy Judd Foundation]
As the towns economy declined and more spaces went up for sale, he purchased them in order to realize his vision of a city where art was everywhere and accessible to anyone. This is what led him to the 5,000-square-foot, brick building he renovated into his architecture office in 1990.
As with most of his architectural work in Marfa, Judd exercised a light touch with his renovations. He sandblasted paint from the exterior, removed anything inside that wasnt original to the building, then brought in tables and desks he designed. The ground floor storefront became a place for him to display architectural drawings and models and receive clients (his architecture studio was in a former bank building across the street); the second floor held apartments.
[Photo: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation]
This was an office with no telephone, no fax, no computerjust a place to look at things on tables, says Flavin Judd, Judds son and the artistic director of the Judd Foundation. While most of Judds work in Marfa was about the town itself, he used this space for European projects he had hoped to build, but never realized like a train station in Basel, Switzerland.
Its a very simple space and it was right next door to the office where his assistants were, Flavin says. The interior wall is brick and you don’t really hang art on a brick wall, so that would indicate the building needs to be for something else. And using it as an office makes a lot of sense.
Historic Preservation with Contemporary Considerations
In the years after Judds passing, the building deteriorated. The structure was boarded up and had a leaky roof that led to significant interior damage. The brick facade had cracked. In his will, the artist left instructions to maintain his properties as he had left them and to open them to the public. But the Judd Foundation recognized that for the long-term health of the building, and greater sense of environmental responsibility, they couldnt just reconstruct everything exactly as it was. Instead, they interpreted what low-impact design means in the context of today.
We’re basically just continuing in a certain sense what Don was doing, says Flavin. The overall kind of ethic for both us and Don and originally was being responsible to past energy spent on building something, to the planet, and for the future.
[Images: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation (photos), John Chamberlain/Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society, New York (artwork)]
The initial work involved retracing Judds steps, then figuring out where to go from there. Fortunately, Schaum and the Foundation had a lot of historic documentation of the building to work with, including photographs from the artists archives as well as from the state of Texas and Marfa Public Library.
Schaum was familiar with the building. He visited the town for the first time in the 1990s and began working with the Judd Foundation on other restoration projects in Marfa in 2013. But working with Judds architecture in the context of restoration led him to more intensely study what made it unique. One of the first things he noticed was how Judd treated the bricks as distinct forms. In addition to sandblasting the paint from the facade, he also raked the mortar between the bricks.
You see a shadow between the brick instead of seeing mortar between the brick, Schaum says. The facade is a series of individual elements of brick sitting next to each other with a shadow in between, which is, in my opinion, a very Judd way of thinking about composition and assembly in that you have one part sitting next to another.
Then, inside Judd had removed plaster from an interior wall to reveal the brick behind it. He left the tin ceilings and wood floors as they were.
[Photos: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation]
Judds practice was one of restraint, of erasure and revealing strategies that opens up the building rather than adding a lot of things to a building, Schaum says. This conceptual underpinning informed Schaums interventions. So how do you restore something without covering up that or without getting in the way of that very subtle revealing that Donald Judd was engaged in his architecture?
Schaum and the Foundation decided to keep as much of the original architecture as they could, working with masonry consultants to repoint the brick to Judds style. But the realities of Texass climate becoming warmer each year led to some modifications. They kept the single-pane storefront windows because of their distinctive hardware and because integrating double-paned glass would have been too big of a departure from the original building. They then applied a low-e coating to block heat from the sun. They also reconstructed the damaged mahogany frames out of Accoya, a responsibly forested engineered wood to avoid using tropical hardwood.
To further protect the storefront from the sun, they added a metal awninga detail that wasnt present during Judds tenure but had existed in previous years. Since the building is in a prominent downtown location and there are larger historic preservation efforts happening in the city of Marfa itself (the National Parks Service listed Central Marfa on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022 and designated a Donald Judd Historic District in the city this year), the design team deemed the addition appropriate.
This [building] is from a time before air-conditioning when if you had big windows in the desert, they were shaded, Flavin says. You didn’t have plate glass, you didn’t have reflective glass, you didn’t have glass buildings. So that simply makes sense.
[Image: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation (photo), John Chamberlain/ Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society, New York (artwork)]
A Climate-Informed Approach
The Judd Foundation experimented with passive cooling strategies to keep the building comfortable instead of relying on artificially cooled air. In the high desert, temperatures reach into the 90s during the day but drop down to the 40s at night. Using the buildings thermal mass and a technique called night flushingwhich floods the interior with cool air at night and vents hor air during the day with fansthey hope theyll be able to keep the interiors cool.
Its an attempt to go back to 19th-century cooling methodswith an eye toward 21st-century apocalypse, Flavin says.
[Image: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation (photo), John Chamberlain/Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society, New York (artwork)]
The Foundation will use the upstairs apartments as accommodations, and they decided to install air-conditioning on that level just in case someone needs it. But downstairs, in the spaces that are reserved for Judds work, its all naturally ventilateda departure from conventional conservation practices that typically call for an environment that remains at a stable temperature.
Working with the Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Schaum and the Foundation modeled four-hour intervals of indoor temperature to determine if the archival materials would remain protected even if there were swings into red zones that might negatively impact preservation.
What we’re trying to do is end up in the red zone as little as possible, but not necessarily have perfect stasis, Schaum says. Its a shift in thinking that acknowledges were in a precarious environment. Hes also exploring what passive systems for museums hes working on in New Orleans and India could look like, predicting that the buildings might be affected by power loss due to storms and might have to be self-sufficient for periods of time.
Looking ahead at where the climate’s going, its saying maybe a consumption-based model of conservation is not totally sustainable, Schaum says.
And to cap the project off: The Foundation added rooftop solar to power the building.
In a 1993 interview, Judd said that a good building should embody a certain wholeness, consistency, coherence, attention to the function, attention to what the building is supposed to be for, consideration for the people who work in the building or use it, he said. The restoration and adaptation of the architecture office keeps true to these values in perpetuity. What this work has taught me, and what I always say Donald Judds work teaches me, is a mature architects lesson, Schaum says. It teaches me about restraint and about care.
When Stephanie Downs, cofounder of Uncaged Innovations, a biomaterials startup creating alternatives to animal leathers, learned about the tariffs earlier this year she was forced to add manufacturing outside of the U.S. Since less than 2% of fashion goods are produced in the U.S., all of Uncaged customers are overseas and now enduring a price hike.
Like many startup founders, Downs has had to react and adjust operations and business plans based on geopolitical and economic shifts. Over half of small business leaders report negative impacts of changing tariff and trade policies as of this July, according to the WSJ/Vistage Small Business CEO Confidence Index.
Just as the pandemic forced massive shifts across sectors, todays founders are navigating a new wave of disruptions: tariff uncertainties, declining federal grants, and changing customer behavior. The same index found that two out of five business leaders are reporting delayed orders, as well as longer sales cycles and a more carefully examined buying process. Downs has experienced similar challenges at Uncaged, with some customers canceling orders due to tariffs on materials shipping into China.
Tack and shift
These shifts arent always within a founders controlbut how they respond to them is. Companies that simply freeze in uncertainty often dont survive. Those that tack and shift their approach can manage though, and even take advantage, of the changes.
At Golden Seeds, after two decades of experience investing in early-stage women-led companies, weve come to view this as swerving and its just as criticalif not more sothan the dramatic course corrections that pivots imply.
The art of adapting isnt a one-time decision. Its a continuous process of listening, learning, and iterating. Its important to distinguish between the two concepts.
Think of a swerve as proactive responsiveness. Its when startups pick up on early signalslike customer feedback, market shifts, or changes in funding sourcesand adjust accordingly. They are often smaller, tactical shifts that respond to new data. A pivot, in contrast, usually emerges when the product market fit hasnt been clearly determined or the product is no longer viable. Its a deliberate, and often high-stakes, decision to fundamentally change the product, business model, or target market.
Why Swerving MattersMaybe More Than Pivoting
Every startup swerves. Or at least, every successful one does.
It might not be flashy. It doesnt always make headlines. But its the everyday work of managing a company: testing assumptions, talking to customers, analyzing sales patterns, and adjusting accordingly. Its also what investors are often really betting onnot just the initial idea, but the founders judgment and willingness to adjust when reality doesnt match the original vision.
Failure to swerve can be fatal. Companies that rigidly stick to the original plan, even when its not working, tend to burn through capital and fade away. Remember, hope is not a strategy. If the company isnt making sales targets, find out exactly why.
When the Pivot Is Necessary
Still, sometimes swerving isnt enough. When a startup realizes the product isnt viable or the market has evaporated, its time for a true pivot.
Take BentoBox, for example. Originally a marketing services platform for restaurants, the company saw opportunityand urgencyduring the pandemic. As dining rooms closed, restaurants needed digital tools for online ordering and payments. BentoBox made a do-or-die shift to become a payments and e-commerce platform, ultimately selling for over $300 million.
Lark Health is another notable pivot. Initially a consumer sleep device company, it evolved into an AI-driven nurse platform treating millions of patients struggling with chronic conditions on behalf of health insurers, employers, and PBMs. That transformation didnt happen overnight, but it was a full reinvention that unlocked significant market potential.
These examples highlight another common thread: successful pivots often come from companies that were already good at swerving. They were listening, learning, and adapting all alongso when the time came for a bigger move, they were well positioned to act quickly.
Great founders and teams are constantly testing, refining, and asking hard questions. They sit in on sales calls. They ask why a customer said no. Is it a product issue? Is onboarding taking too long? Does it require too much manual intervention? Is it too expensive? They look for patterns in whats working and whats not. They make small bets, try new features, and critically, know when its time to either double down or switch gears entirely.
They also know how to test demand. In hard tech, for instance, that might mean getting a customer to fund development of a new featurenot just waiting and hoping a sale materializes. That kind of resourcefulness and discipline is what gives a company options when the winds shift.
Advice for Investors and Founders
For angel investors and board members, supporting a startup goes far beyond capitalit’s about recognizing when a company is at an inflection point and helping the team navigate it with clarity and confidence. That means staying close to the business, asking probing questions, and encouraging founders to test their assumptions early and often.
Swervesthose smaller, iterative shiftsshould be a regular topic at the board table, not just in times of crisis. This type of creative and adaptive thinking should be a part of every board meeting. Great investors and advisers recognize that swerving is simply managing a company, its not a sign of failure.
And when a pivot becomes necessary, investors can play a critical role in helping leadership assess whether the product, market, or business model needs to changeand how to communicate that shift to employees, customers, and future funders. Great board members challenge, guide, and help founders course correct before the runway runs out.
Ultimately, whether you’re advising a tactical swerve or leading a company through a full-scale pivot, the goal remains the same: stay aligned with the market, respond to what the data and customers are telling you, and keep moving forward. In the world of startups, and most specially in this current economy, resilience is importantbut adaptability is essential. The companies that endure and thrive are the ones that listen, learn, and evolveover and over again.
This year, global EV sales are expected to jump almost 25% compared with 2024. As the demand for electric vehicles soars, theres a looming concern for industry experts: figuring out the best way to repurpose the several-hundred-pound batteries that power these vehicles.
According to a 2023 study by McKinsey, the global supply of EV batteries for recycling is steadily increasing and is expected to hit a whopping 7,850 kilotons in 2035. That same year, McKinsey projects that EV battery recycling will be a $7.2 billion industry in the U.S. Currently, though, experts are still trying to find the best way to actually scale the recycling process. The prevailing strategy is a technique that essentially involves shredding EV batteries into a superfine powdera process that has proved costly, complicated, and inefficient.
Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have published a study showing a new way to potentially bypass the shredding step altogether. According to Yukio Cho, lead author on the study and a Stanford energy postdoctoral fellow, the team has developed a new way to build a battery that makes it much easier to separate its component parts, leaving them ready for recycling.
The current state of EV recycling
The two main ways that EV batteries are diverted away from landfills are through reuse and recycling. Some companies are finding ways to repurpose EV batteries after theyre no longer fit for driving. One startup is using retired EV batteries to power up an entire data center in Nevada, for example, while another is repurposing old batteries to run new EV charging stations.
Others are searching for ways to break these batteries down and reuse their valuable components. The current industry standard is to shred the batteries into a fine powder called black mass, which has to be sorted into salvageable metal parts. The sorting process is messy, complicated, and often requires specialized facilities in advanced recycling markets like China to actually make the metals usable. Even then, Cho says, the acids used to sort out the metals can pose an environmental riskand, to top it all off, the whole process is expensive.
Elemental components are so complicated, Cho says. Once youve generated this black mass, it’s really difficult to make recovering the critical materials cost-positive.
Cho says theres not much consensus among experts today on how many EV batteries are actually getting recycled and how many are being diverted to landfills. What is clear, though, is that theres plenty of motivation to turn EV manufacturing into a more circular economy. To start, siphoning e-waste into trash heaps poses the risk of leaching hazardous materials into soil and water. From an economic perspective, EV batteries also contain valuable metals like nickel, cobalt, manganese, and lithium, which can be harvested and reused to prevent more expensive and polluting ore-mining operations.
Imagine an EV battery like a ham sandwich
To skirt around the issue of black mass entirely, Cho and his team decided to take a totally novel approach to EV battery design.
So far in the battery industry, weve focused on high-performing materials and designs, and only later tried to figure out how to recycle batteries made with complex structures and hard-to-recycle materials, Cho told MIT News in an interview. Our approach is to start with easily recyclable materials and figure out how to make them battery-compatible.
A rendering shows (left) the mPEGAA molecule designed by researchers, (middle) how the molecules self-assemble into nanoribbons, and (right) how the molecules are used for the battery electrolyte. [Image: courtesy of the researchers]
EV batteries are made of three main parts: the positively charged cathode, the negatively charged electrode, and the electrolyte that shuttles lithium ions between them. Typically, EV batteries are sealed so tightly that, in order to take them apart efficiently, shredding them becomes the best way to recycle them. The novel innovation from the MIT team is a new electrolyte material which, when soaked in an organic solvent, just dissolves like cotton candy, easily separating the batteries parts.
Cho compares the innovation to a hypothetical ham sandwich. Imagine that the sandwich has been glued shut, and in order to retrieve the bread, lettuce, and ham, it has been shredded and must be sorted by minute particles. Now, imagine that the sandwich was held together by mayo instead: You could easily separate all of the sandwiches compoents. Thats essentially the difference between the black mass recycling step and the electrolyte process that his team is working on.
Chos team created a solid-state battery to test the material, finding that it held up against the batterys demands. Then, once the battery was treated with an organic solvent, the material dissolvedcutting out the necessity of a shredding step entirely.
A depiction of batteries made with MIT researchers new electrolyte material, which is made from a class of molecules that self-assemble in water, named aramid amphiphiles (AAs), whose chemical structures and stability mimic Kevlar. [Image: courtesy of the researchers/edited by MIT News]
Whats next
There are a few shortcomings with the current dissolvable prototype. To start, Cho says the test batterys performance was well below that of todays gold-standard commercial batteries.
The performance is at a level that the industry will never think aboutif you have an iPhone 13, youll never think about swapping that for an iPhone 4, Cho says. Matching the performance to the current state-of-the-art batteries is definitely a challenge we haven’t demonstrated yet.
Part of that performance deficit, Cho says, likely comes from the fact that his team built its battery from the ground up. While it will be at least several years before this new material might be commercially viable, he believes it could be swapped into future EV batteries without too much hassle on manufacturers parts.
I think in the future, we can integrate this material as a part of the battery, Cho says. If you imagine that it dissolves like cotton candy, it can just be a very thin layer somewhere in between the component parts. That will serve the purpose of opening the battery in an autonomous way.
Weve spent several years now obsessing over models and assistants, but heres a new interesting truth: the next competitive edge in AI wont be another benchmark, but electrons. And not just any electrons, but cheap ones. As the AI wars heat up, the winners wont simply be those with the best UX or the most compute. Theyll be the firms that can secure abundant low-cost power at scale, hour after hour, year after year.
Thats where AI is colliding with the physical world, and where the story stops being about software and starts being about grids, turbines, and price curves. Most recent analyses show that AI-driven data centers are now a visible driver of U.S. electricity demand and are starting to send retail prices higher, a clear signal that the constraint is shifting from graphics processing units (GPUs) to kilowatt-hours.
Then theres also a lot of insistence about water, and it deserves some observations. In fact, the problem is that water use is often confused with water consumption. In data centers, much of the water involved in most cooling systems is withdrawn, then used to absorb heat, and later returned. Warmer, yes, but reentering the water cycle after discharge is brought back within permitted temperature ranges. Only some designs (notably evaporative cooling) consume water through vapor losses; others trade water for electricity by leaning on air-cooled chillers or direct-to-chip liquid loops that dramatically cut onsite withdrawals.
Think local
The right way to think about the problem is local: Water stress is a catchment-level issue, not a global one, and the risk depends on where you site the load and which cooling technology you choose. In short, the headlines often overstate a universal thirst that the engineering and the definitions dont support.
None of this, of course, minimizes communities that are water-stressed, where a single facility can matter. Investigations have shown clusters of data centers in arid regions, prompting scrutiny and new local rules. Thats the right debate: match technology choices to basin realities, and stop treating water for AI as the same problem everywhere. In places with abundant non-potable or reclaimed water, or with dry/thermosyphon cooling, the footprint can be managed; in stressed watersheds, it becomes a siting decision, not an engineering afterthought.
Electricity is different. There is no local workaround if the price is structurally high. And on cost, the market is brutally clear. The latest Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy+ (LCOE+) report again shows utility-scale wind and solar at the bottom of the price stack, with new gas combined-cycle plants rising in cost and nuclear still the most expensive new build in rich-country conditions. If youre trying to run large training runs or always-on inference, the delta between clean, cheap power and legacy generation is not a rounding errorit is the margin that decides where you build and whether the unit economics make sense.
Consider nuclear: Georgias Vogtle expansion finally went online, but only after historic cost and schedule overruns that translated into material rate hikes for customers. If AIs advantage is speed and scale, its hard to square that with technologies that arrive late, over budget, and with levelized costs that sit at the wrong end of the curve. The physics is fine. The economics, today, are not.
This is why the new moat isnt access to energy in the abstract: Its access to cheap energy, reliably delivered. The firms that can lock in 24/7 low-cost supply, time-shift non-urgent workloads into off-peak windows, and colocate compute with stranded or overbuilt renewables will win. Everyone else will pay retail, and pass those costs on to users or investors. We are already seeing utilities, grid operators, and tech companies negotiate curtailment and flexibility, and the International Energy Agency’s (IEAs) modeling makes the near-term picture obvious: AI-related demand is rising, and it will test systems that were not designed for this kind of always-on compute.
The China factor
This brings us to the comparison nobody in Silicon Valley likes to make out loud: China. Look past the coal headlines for a moment and follow the build rates. China hit its 2030 wind-and-solar target in 2024, six years early, and added roughly 429 GW of net new capacity to the grid in 2024 alone, the vast majority wind and solar, backed by massive investment in transmission. Pace matters, because marginal megawatt-hours from ultra-low-cost renewables set the floor for training and inference costs. Chinas grid still has big challenges (curtailment among them), but if youre simply asking Who is manufacturing cheap electrons at scale the fastest? the answer today is not the United States.
That doesnt mean resignation; it means focus. If the U.S. wants to stay competitive in AI economics, the priority is not another model announcement: Its a buildout of cheap generation and the wires to move it. Anything that delays that, be it doubling down on gas price volatility, pretending coal is cheap once you factor in capacity payments and externalities, or dreaming of next-gen nuclear that wont arrive on time, will keep AI sited where the power is inexpensive and predictable. In a world of location-aware workloads, electrons decide geography.
The takeaway
The practical takeaway for companies is straightforward: If you are spending real money on AI, your CFO should now know your blended cost of electricity as intimately as your cloud bill, and should be negotiating for both. Favor regions with abundant wind and solar and strong transmission, insist on time-of-use pricing and demand-response programs, push your vendors on 24/7 carbon-free energy rather than annual offsets that do nothing for peak prices or local loads. None of this is environmental, social, and governance (ESG) posturing. Its cost control for a compute-intensive product line whose unit economics are married to energy markets.
On water, keep the conversation precise. Ask for cooling designs, not slogans. Is the system evaporative or closed-loop? Whats the water-use effectiveness and the discharge temperature profile? Where does the site sit on the World Resource Institute’s (WRIs) aqueduct map today and under climate-adjusted scenarios? If your supplier cant answer those basics, theyre not ready to build where youre planning to grow. But dont let the AI is drinking the planet meme obscure a simpler reality: With the right technology and siting, the binding constraint is cheap electricity, not moisture in a recirculating loop.
The narrative arc is changing. The first phase of the AI boom rewarded companies that could raise capital and buy a lot of GPUs. The next phase will reward those that can buy electrons cheaply, cleanly, and continuously. If you want a preview of who wins the assistant wars, dont look at the demos. Look at the interconnection queues, the power-purchase agreements, and mostly, the maps of wind and solar buildoutsthe cheapest energy available. Software is glamorous, but power is destiny.
In business, the art of the pivot is a delicate thing, difficult to get right. That’s why it doesn’t happen that often; you only do it when you’re convinced the alternativecontinuing down a path that isn’t workingwill be worse.
I have to think this is the basic logic factoring into Perplexity‘s recent relaunch of its revenue-sharing program with publishers. Quick recap: Perplexity announced a new kind of subscription called Comet Plus. Users can pay $5 a month to access content from Perplexity’s publisher partnersthat is, those who sign up to participateand Perplexity passes on most of the revenue to them. It’s already set aside $42.5 million to kick-start the program, according to CEO Aravind Srinivas.
Although the program is named after the company’s new Comet web browser, users can use any browser to access the content via Perplexity. However, using Comet means you’ll also be able to use the Comet Assistantmore on why that’s important in a minute. And if you already have a Pro or Max subscription, Plus is part of the package.
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The thing is, Perplexity already shares revenue with publishers via the Perplexity Publishers’ Program. Launched last summer, the PPP is an ad-based program; when a partner’s content is featured in an answer, revenue created from ads in that answer (typically a sponsored question) is shared with that partner. Perplexity isn’t sunsetting the PPPGannett just signed up for it. Still, it’s hard to see Comet Plus as at least a partial admission that the PPP wasn’t a great answer to building a business around AI search, at least not one that excites publishers.
It didn’t shield the company from their ire either. News Corp sued Perplexity last year over alleged copyright violations, simultaneously praising OpenAI for its willingness to sign up-front content licensing deals instead of experimental revenue-sharing models. Perplexity’s recent bid to get the case dismissed failed, and Japanese publishers Nikkei and The Asahi Shimbun Co. sued around the same time.
Getting that agent money
Comet Plus is a different tack on a revenue model, but it’s also an opportunity to reset the conversation around monetization, copyright, and the lawat least a little. While competing AI search engines have been slowly migrating toward either licensing deals or “pay per crawl” models that charge bots in the moment they access content, Perplexity has so far been resistant to an approach that involves them (or their bots) paying up front for content.
Instead, they’re going to monetize when others payeither advertisers or usersand share the money with publishers. With respect to Comet Plus, Perplexity says it’s going to share 80% of that money, with the other 20% going to compute costs. A key part of the structure is that it plans to apportion the money based on three different types of traffic: human engagement, search indexing, and agent activity (i.e. bots).
That in itself is interestingI’ve written before about the rise in bot traffic and the opportunity it represents for publishers to provide context for those bots. This is where the Comet Assistant factors in: it’s the agent in Comet Plus’s three-part revenue plan (obviously, Perplexity can’t track and monetize agent bots it doesn’t control). Credit to Perplexity for creating a way to make money from the activity that its own Assistant creates.
In fact, it might be the only one who could. That’s because Perplexity is one of several AI companies that gives its user agents permission to bypass a site’s Robots Exclusion Protocol (the internet standard for blocking bots). So rather than partnering with others on an existing “pay per crawl” program (by, say, paying TollBit or Dappier when its bots want access to content), Perplexity is effectively building its own system, and setting the price of that activity itself.
That seems like an obvious conflict. Although a Perplexity spokesperson told me it provides “robust and transparent” visibility to publisher partners about how their content is performing, agent activity is largely uncharted territory. Perplexity promises to compensate publishers based on it, but they also control it. The company is adamant that its search engine will surface only the answers that best answer a query, but exactly how agents make queries could end up being a subject of great interestespecially to media companies who start to make money off it.
How much for just the scrape?
Comet Plus also exposes the central contradiction of how the AI companies value content, but in a different way. Since the program is charging users to access certain content, that content is by definition valuable. But Perplexity doesn’t treat “free” content differentlyit will still surface the best content to answer a user query regardless of whether or not the publisher is part of Comet Plus. The onus is on the publisher to erect defenses (block crawling via either robots.txt, Cloudflare, or some other means) to prevent that.
Put another way, Perplexity is essentially saying, “We’re happy to share revenue ith you if you join our program, but if you don’t we’ll ingest and surface the content anyway, unless you tell us not to.” This approach is certainly more legally dicey, but since Perplexity’s business model depends on being able to access the entire internet, it’s clearly decided that the ambiguity is worth the risk.
And to be fair, Perplexity is hardly the only AI company with this de facto stance. It’s not like ChatGPT will ignore sites that don’t have a deal with OpenAI. “Ingest first, sort it out later” has essentially become an operational standard in the AI world. How that shakes out will ultimately be answered by the courts.
Will users pay?
In the meantime, the media world will be watching Perplexity’s new, three-pronged revenue model with great interest. Monetizing user agents and AI search activity are new ideas, but whether they succeed ultimately depends on if users think Comet Plus is an experience they want to pay for. Because if they don’t you can bet a different revenue model will rise to take its place: advertising.
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At the University of Texas, where I’m senior vice provost of academic affairs, our credo (coined by the head of our Office of Academic Technology, Julie Schell) is to be AI Forward and AI Responsible. In service of this, over the past few years, we launched a homegrown AI tutoring platform (UT Sage), launched a second platform to enable faculty, staff, and students to engage with building AI tools (UT Spark), provided a license for Copilot for everyone at UT, and engaged a working group called Good Systems focused on the ethical implications of AI models.
Although all of the conversation about AI makes it seem like it’s taken over the world, it hasn’t. Although it appears to be growing in popularity, there’s no shame in having waited to see how the tech matures and the hype shakes out. But if you’re ready to dip your toe into the AI waters, here’s my advice. In this piece you’ll learn:
The first thing you should ask AI to do for you
How to get AI to perfect your tone when communicating with clients
Why you actually need to read the terms of service before you start
Read the fine print
It is important to remember that AI/large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini are commercial products. The dictum that if the product is free to use then youre the product holds for these tools as well. The generic versions of some LLM tools will include text you enter into the models into the training set for the model.
That means you need to actually read over the End User License Agreement (that thing you usually skip through and click that you agree to the terms). If the model is going to take any text you enter and ingest it (that is, to incorporate it into the models training), then you need to make sure you want to give that text over to the system (and that you have permission to do so if youre adding either proprietary business information or text that is copyrighted by someone else).
When possible, try to use a version of these models that someone has an enterprise license for. Most companies that pay for a license to one of these products stipulate that data entered by employees wont be used by the system for training. That is true for all of the tools we have launched at the University of Texas, for example. If you cant access an enterprise license and want to protect your data, you can consider purchasing an individual license that also typically protects your data.
Many people have heard about concerns about the energy consumption and water usage associated with the server farms that power AI models. There is certainly a growth in the resources being consumed by the computers underlying these models, and it is important to pay attention to this. At the same time, youd have a much bigger impact on the environment by giving up eating meat than stopping your use of AI.
First steps
Because large language models spit out text based on something you type in (the prompt), it is natural to start by getting a system to write something for you. I dont recommend asking these models to write anything for you that you plan to send to someone else. As I have written about before, while asking an LLM to write a document may make you feel like you have improved on your own writing, it tends to make your writing sound like anyone else who has engaged with an AI tool.
That said, if you have never played with an LLM, give a quick description of yourself and ask the model to pretend youre a superhero and ask it to describe your superpowers. This is a fun (and harmless) exercise that will give you a flavor of how the models work.
After that, I recommend trying an exercise where you use an LLM as a partner to help you think about a problem. Find something youre struggling with at work. Describe that situation to the LLM in your prompt. Ask for suggestions for solutions, courses of action, or advice. Often, the system will suggest possibilities you hadnt considered. More importantly, the suggestions you get from the LLM may inspire you to think of other factors you hadnt considered before.
AI as your tone coach
While I dont recommend asking an LLM to write something for you in a professional context, it can be quite helpful in massaging something you have written to give it a different flavor. A colleague in our law school, for example, often asks students in a law clinic to draft letters to clients and then describe the client to an LLM, give it the initial text of the letter and ask the system to write a new draft tailored to that client. Often, the initial drafts of letters are brusque and clinical, and the drafts produced by the LLM have more empathy and engagement.
You can do the same thing. Write a draft of a document. Then, describe your audience to the LLM as well as the purpose of the document. Paste in the text of the document, and ask the system to rewrite it so that it is tailored to the audience. I dont recommend just taking the output of the LLM verbatim. For one thing, it may actually change the meaning of things you intended. These systems dont actually understand your document, they are just word prediction engines. But, the inspiration you get from seeing a different approach to your text can make your next draft clearer and a better fit to your audience.
Be specific about what you want
The main thing to learn about engaging with an LLM is that it doesnt really know what you want to do. So, the more specific the prompt you give it, the more likely it is to give you a valuable output. Heres an exercise you can try to see this in action.
Find a Large Language Model youre interested in using. Ask it to write you a blog entry about using AI. Youll get a response. It might even have some interesting suggestions. Now, ask it to write you a blog entry about using AI for the first time. Youll get something different. Next, ask it to write a blog entry in the style of Fast Company on using AI for the first time. Youll see a shift in tone and style. Finally, ask it to write a blog entry in the style of Art Markman writing for Fast Company. (I have a lot of text on the internet, so this prompt actually makes sense to LLMs . . .), and youll get a different shift in tone. You can add other specifics to prompts like how long you want it to be.
The point is that if you try something on an LLM and you dont get quite what you want out of it, dont give up. Ask it a more specific question. Remember that the LLM is not a colleague who will naturally understand every nuance of what you want. The more clearly you describe what you want, the more likely you will be to get it.
The number of immigrant workers in the United States is declining. According to preliminary Census Bureau data analyzed by the Pew Research Center, more than 1.2 million immigrants left the labor force from January to June 2025. Per the report, 51.9 million immigrants lived in the U.S. as of June, down from a record high of 53.3 million (15.8% of the population) in January.
The report comes as immigration policies have evolved quickly under President Donald Trump. The president ran his 2024 campaign on the promise to deport illegal immigrants. Since January, aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids have swept the nation. According to the latest detention management data, 61,226 people are being held in ICE detention centers. While Trump had vowed to focus on deporting violent criminals, the data shows that at least 70% have no convictions.
Stephanie Kramer, senior Pew researcher, said immigrants make up around 20% of the workforce in the U.S. “It’s unclear how much of the decline we’ve seen since January is due to voluntary departures to pursue other opportunities or avoid deportation, removals, underreporting, or other technical issues,” Kramer said, per AP News. “However, we don’t believe that the preliminary numbers indicating net-negative migration are so far off that the decline isn’t real.”
Recent reports say deportations are up to the highest rate in 10 years, with at least 200,000 people deported so far. As ICE raids continue, many immigrants who do not have legal status have become afraid to leave their homes, leaving industries that rely most heavily on immigrant workerslike restaurants, construction, and farmingshort-staffed.
In response to reports that businesses supplying the country’s food were being threatened, Trump in June directed ICE to pause arrests at farms, restaurants, and hotels. Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, longtime workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace, Trump wrote on Truth Social. In many cases, the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!
Immigrant workers arent the only ones leaving the workforce. Black employment has dropped as well. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report from August 1, 7.2% of Black Americans are unemployed compared with 4.2% of the general population. This is almost a 1% increase from the previous year, when 6.3% were unemployed.
In addition, a record number of women have left the nation’s workforce this year. According to a National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) review of monthly releases from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, since January a net 338,000 women have left the labor force. During the same period, there was a net gain of 183,000 men in the labor force.
While some wonder how the chicken crosses the road, Raising Cane’s is figuring out just how chicken fingers can cross the pond. The nation’s fast-growing restaurant chain is set to open its first U.K. location next year.
Arriving in London’s West End in late 2026, Raising Cane’s flagship U.K. location will mark the privately held company’s first non-franchise international expansion and its first European foray, with an undisclosed number of U.K. locations to follow.
“Our vision is to grow restaurants all over the world and to be the brand that is known for craveable chicken-finger meals and be really, really good at it,” Raising Cane’s co-CEO and COO AJ Kumaran told Fast Company ahead of the announcement.
Beyond just chicken fingers and the restaurant’s fan-favored limited menu, Raising Cane’s is rapidly growing, with sales upward of $5.1 billion last year, marking world domination as an understandable next step.
While the company debuted franchised stores in the Middle East in 2015, the U.K. expansion marks its first fully company-operated international venture.
Coop d’état
This year, Raising Cane’s became the second-fastest growing restaurant chain in the United States, with plans to open nearly 100 new locations this year on top of last year’s record-breaking 118 new spots.
By the end of the year, the chain expects a total of 1,000 locations to be open, with Kumaran ambitiously looking for it to become a top 10 U.S. restaurant brand by the end of the decade.
In its Dallas office, the company is planning on quadrupling in size ahead of its move to a new support office in nearby Plano, Texas, next year.
“We like to beat our own milestones and do better than what we’ve done before,” Kumaran, who joined the company in 2014, says. “To grow restaurants all over the world has been our vision since day one of our existence.”
Chicken fingers come to London
While details on the store’s design are yet to be released, Cane’s flagship U.K. location will open at 21-22 Coventry St., between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, in a mid-20th-century commercial building in the city’s storied theater district.
Like all other Cane’s locations, the restaurant’s inside decorations will feature local graphics that represent the location’s community. For instance, in U.S. stores, restaurants tend to feature local iconography, such as the team colors of the town’s high school.
For its Times Square location in New York City, the design team included homages to Elvis Presley, whose first movie premiered on-site. “We wanted to pay homage to that, and so we incorporated that into the design,” Kuraman explained. “Likewise, we are in the process of understanding what that looks like in London and specifically in these upcoming locations.”
The research process to make each store design unique begins with hiring local leaders to spearhead community authenticity, developing the restaurant’s “ethos.”
“We study every location that we go into,” Kuraman says. “We go to the utmost details about finding the history on what existed there, what the city is known for, what’s the relevance of the building that we’re walking into.”
As part of the expansion, the chicken-finger company is looking to set up a home base in London with its own local team. It’s also hiring for executive roles in the U.S. as part of its broader expansion plans.
Still, one thing is set to remain the same: the cult-favorite menu.
“We want to be chicken finger experts. It is our chicken fingers, our sauce, our freshly brewed tea that is custom-formulated for us, and a freshly squeezed lemonade that is made in our restaurants by our crew members multiple times a day. It’s in the fries and the toast and the coleslaw,” Kumaran added. “This is it. We’re not planning on changing anything.”
Cultivated meatmeat grown from cells, not from whole animalsisnt yet a widespread option in grocery stores or restaurants. The innovation, which involves growing meat from real animal cells without raising or slaughtering any animals, is still relatively rare. But already, Texas lawmakers have decided to ban it.
Now, two cultivated meat companies are fighting back with a federal lawsuit that challenges the ban. The Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm, along with cultivated meat startups Wildtype and Upside Foods, argue that the Texas law is an unconstitutional move to protect the agriculture industry from competition.
This law has nothing to do with protecting public health and safety and everything to do with protecting conventional agriculture from innovative out-of-state competition, Institute for Justice senior attorney Paul Sherman said in a press conference on Wednesday. (The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration have approved both Upside’s and Wildtypes cultivated meat as safe.)
How do we know that? Sherman continued. Because the sponsors of the bill made absolutely no secret of it. Repeatedly in committee hearings and on the floor of the Texas House, they said that the purpose of this law is to protect Texas’s agricultural industry. But that is not a legitimate use of government power.”
Cultivated meat has been offered in only one Texas restaurant. Otoko, a sushi restaurant in Austin, began serving Wildtype salmon this summer. But once the ban went into effect, the restaurant stopped selling it. By limiting what Texans can eat, the companies involved in the lawsuit say the ban is also a slippery slope toward handing over personal choices to the government.
Lawsuits against cultivated meat
Cultivated meat has faced lawsuits before. In 2024, Florida became the first state to ban cultivated meat, with Alabama quickly following suit. This year, lab-grown meat bans passed in Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, and Texas. (Cultivated meat bans have also been considered in a handful of other states, including Georgia and Wyoming.)
Some bans dont bar lab-grown meat forever. The Indiana and Texas lawsuits prohibit the sale of cultivated meat for two years. The Texas bill, SB 261, was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott in June and went into effect on September 1. It imposes fines of up to $25,000 a day and even jail time for selling cultivated meat.
Texas is the largest beef-producing state in the country, with some 4 million beef cattle. Sid Miller, the states agriculture commissioner, applauded the ban, saying in a statement that it was a massive win for Texas ranchers, producers, and consumers.” He added: “Its plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives.
Cultivated meat companies fight back
To the companies that make this cultivated meat, these bans are clearly a way to protect the meat and ranching industry from competition.
Cultivated meat has been a burgeoning industry for about a decade, but it only recently received regulatory approval in the U.S. Upside Foods, which makes cultivated chicken, was the first to get that approval back in 2023. Wildtype, which makes cultivated salmon, received approval in 2025.
To make cultivated meat, these companies grow the cellswhether from chickens or salmonin big cultivators, usually with a blend of ingredients like amino acids and sugars. Wildtype CEO Justin Kolbeck likened the process to brewing beer. (Though cultivated meat has also been called lab-grown meat, Uma Valeti, CEO and founder of Upside Foods, has contested that label. Its not made in a lab, he has said, but in a production facility like any other food.)
These companies are offering consumers a choice, they sayespecially for people who may not want to switch to plant-based meats but who still want to curb their meat consumption as a way to benefit the climate.
The lawsuit filed against the Texas ban challenges it under two constitutional provisions: the Commerce Clause, which prohibits states from impairing interstate commerce, and the Supremacy Clause, which bars states from enacting laws that conflict with federal laws. The Poultry Products Inspection Act, for example, says states cannot enact requirements on ingredients in poultry products, or on the facilities and operations that produce them.
For the same reason California cannot ban Texas beef in California, Texas cannot ban salmon or chicken from California, Valeti said in a statement. Texans deserve the freedom to decide for themselves what to eat without politicians choosing for them.
Wildtype’s Kolbeck also noted during the press conference that when it comes to seafood, America needs more stateside production. More than 80% of seafood on Americans plates is imported, and in April, the Trump administration issued an executive order to restore American seafood competitiveness. [We] are an American small business trying to do exactly what this executive order envisions, he said.
In 2024, the Institute for Justice also filed a lawsuit in Florida, with Upside Foods, challenging that states cultivated-meat ban. In April, a judge denied the state’s attempt to dismiss the lawsuit, so it will move forward to trial court. The Texas lawsuit asks the district court to issue a preliminary injunction to block the ban, which would allow Wildtype and Upside to continue to make their cultivated meat available to Texans while the case continues.
