It’s Q1 2026. Your chief financial officer is cutting innovation budgets by 20%.
Your AI pilot showed 94% accuracy improvements. The LLM is yielding solid results. You’re getting defunded anyway.
The reason? You solved a problem AI can solve. Your budget-holder needed you to solve theirs.
Companies launch AI pilots that produce results, then stall at scale. The team’s diagnosis: “They don’t get it.” What’s really going on: These projects never earned budget-holder buy-in.
Passing the budget-holder test requires three things pilot teams fall short on: analytic proof that you move their needles, execution confidence that scale is achievable, and relational trust that you have their back.
As economic headwinds hit 2026, here’s how to know if your project will surviveand what to do about it now.
Analytic ProofDo You Move Their Needles?
Budget-holders don’t fund impressive technology. They fund solutions that move metrics they get credit for at bonus time.
Your pilot team celebrates: “Our AI improves processing accuracy by 40%!”
Your budget-holder asks: “Does that improve my customer retention rate? Lower my cost per acquisition? Move my net promoter score? Show me the math and where this shows up in monthly financial reports.”
Most teams can’t answer. They proved the technology works. They got great feedback from customers. They didn’t prove it moves the drivers of financial outcomes that matter to the person holding the purse strings.
One of the most challenging barriers I encountered in banking: We proved migrating customers to digital self-service generated huge impacts on customer segments aligned to product P&Ls. But accounting systems didn’t attribute these improvements to each P&L owner. They couldn’t “get the credit” in performance reviews.
Without attribution in the system of record, results almost didn’t exist. P&L owners had no incentive to shift resources from familiar approaches to digital initiatives they wouldn’t get recognized for.
You may prove improvements in metrics everyone claims to supportcustomer experience, innovation, digital transformation. But if those improvements aren’t attributable to line items on their scorecard, they won’t survive prioritization discussions.
This requires analytic work most pilots skip: understanding what drives the budget-holder’s financial metrics, connecting AI outputs to those drivers with causation and magnitude, and confirming results will manifest in financial reporting.
When the CFO asks “prove ROI,” showing AI accuracy improvements isn’t an answer. Showing how accuracy translates to their measured outcomes is.
Execution ConfidenceCan You Actually Scale This?
Your pilot worked in controlled conditions with a small team, friendly users, and tolerance for iteration. Your budget-holder knows what you might not: What you needed to test is totally different than what you need to scale.
They’re assessing execution risk. Can you articulate what’s different about scaling? Have you anticipated the capabilities to address those differences?
Four capability gaps erode budget-holder confidence.
Strategic optionality: AI evolves faster than traditional planning cycles. If your road map locks the organization into today’s context, you’re creating risk.
Human judgment integration: Edge cases that were 2% of your pilot become thousands of customer impacts at scale. Do you know where human judgment is essential, or will you create operational chaos?
Quantitative versus qualitative reality: Your dashboard shows 85% adoption. But are users completing tasks because the experience works, or because they have no alternative?
Sustaining motivation: Organizational anxiety about AI is realpeople fear being replaced. What’s your impact on the budget-holder’s team motivation to achieve 2026 targets?
Budget-holders who’ve seen technology work in pilots but fail at scale won’t fund projects where execution risks aren’t anticipated and addressed.
Relational TrustDo You Have Their Back?
This is the most critical dimension.
Your budget-holder is assessing: Do you understand my pain? Are you here to make me successful, or to pursue the latest “shiny object”?
The gap shows up in how teams frame problems. “We can use AI to automate customer service” starts with what AI can do. “Your call center costs are 15% above target and customer satisfaction is droppinghere’s how we address both” starts with their problem.
It shows up in how you treat pushback. If the budget-holder or their team are “obstacles” to what you believe should happen, you’ve already failed. Their messages are loaded with intelligence about what they need before they’ll get on board.
A team I worked with spent two years trying to get a test file of customer names from an operations team to validate a hypothesis. They kept asking without diagnosing the real issue: colleague fear of a new approach that seemed implausible and raised risks to predictable results. It could be overcome only through trust-building and patience.
Given anxiety about AI replacing jobs, are you building confidence or eroding motivation among the people who need to execute?
Budget-holders fund teams they trust understand their reality. Active champions invest in your success. Passive tolerance means you’re first on the cut list.
The MetroCard Lesson
In 2006, my team at Citi partnered with Mastercard and the Metropolitan Transit Authority to prove contactless payments worked in subway turnstiles. The technology performed. User feedback was strong. But scaling required three complex organizations to align business models, priorities, cultures, and decision-making. The execution capability took two decades to build.
Today’s AI leaders don’t have 20 years. You have until Q1 budget reviews.
What to Do This Week
Assess where you stand on all three dimensions:
1. Analytic ProofCan you draw a direct line from AI outputs to your budget-holder’s measured outcomes? Not “Our accuracy improved, but “Here’s how accuracy translates to the retention rate you’re accountable for and will show up in your results”?
If you can’t make that connection, do that analysis before asking for scale funding.
2. Execution ConfidenceCan you articulate what’s different about scaling versus piloting? Have you identified execution risksstrategic optionality, human judgment integration, what dashboards miss, organizational anxietyand built capability to address them?
If you think scale is just “bigger pilot,” you haven’t earned their confidence.
3. Relational TrustHonest assessment: Are you focused on making your budget-holder successfu, or on building impressive technology? Are you treating their concerns as intelligence or obstacles? What’s your impact on their team’s motivation?
If they’re not actively championing your project, you’re at risk.
The AI projects that survive 2026 won’t necessarily be the most technologically impressive. They’ll be the ones where teams built all three dimensions of budget-holder confidence.
Economic pressure doesn’t care about your pilot. It cares whether you solve their problem or yours.
An Olympic torch is a small, flaming time capsule.
Since the start of the modern Games in 1936, the torch has been passed by thousands of runners in a relay that goes from Olympia, Greece to the host city’s stadium. It’s a feat of engineering, since it needs to be durable enough to resist wind and rain, while keeping the Olympic flame arrive. But torch designers also imbue them with symbolic meaning.
1936 Berlin [Photo: IOC]
The Berlin 1936 torch was engraved with the Nazi iconography of an eagle. The Sapporo 1972 torch was a thin, cylindrical combustion tube that was a marvel of Japanese engineering. The Rio 2016 torch featured rippling blue waves celebrating the country’s natural beauty.
1972 Sapporo [Photo: IOC]
What kind of torch represents the world we now live in? Carlo Ratti, the Italian architect and designer tasked with creating the torch for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, pondered this question for a long time. Ratti’s work largely explores the future of cities, particularly as global warming looms. For him, the biggest issues of our time are climate change and political polarization. Three years ago, he began the process of making a torch that captured these big ideas.
2026 Milan Cortina [Photo: IOC]
His torch is perhaps the most sustainable one we’ve seen. It is made of recycled materials and it is designed to be refilled, so it can be used up to 10 times. It is minimalist to a fault, meant to fade into the background so that the world focuses on the flame within it. The flame, he says, is a powerful symbol of our joint humanity.
At this time of deep polarization and divisions, he says, we tried to strip down most of the things from the torch and really let the fire speak. Fire, after all, predates every nation that now passes it along. Its one of the first technologies of mankind, Ratti notessomething ancient, sacred, and shared long before borders existed.”
A Lineage of Torch Makers
Before sketching a single form, Ratti traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland, where every Olympic torch is preserved at the Olympic Museum. Seeing them in person, rather than online, made the pattern unmistakable.
Everybody somehow tried to capture the moment of their time, Ratti says. Each torch, he observed, follows the same basic logic: a burner at the core, wrapped in a designed shell meant to convey meaning. Like car design, he explains, the engine is hidden beneath an eye-catching exterior. And then the second thing is capturing the momentconnecting with local motifs.
1992 Albertville [Photo: IOC]
Early torches, beginning with the relay introduced at the Berlin 1936 Summer Olympics, leaned heavily on classical references. The London 1948 torch resembled a chalice, while the Rome 1960 torch was designed to look like a column.
1994 Lillehammer [Photo: IOC]
Toward the end of the 20th century designs were more sculptural and declarative, often mirroring national ambition. The 1992 Albertville torch, designed by Philippe Starck, was in the shape of an elegant curve and was meant to reflect French modernism. The 1994 Lillehammer torch had a distinct Viking aesthetic.
2000 Sydney [Photo: IOC]
In the 21st century, the emphasis shifted again to focus on technological innovation. The torch for Sydney 2000 famously combined fire and water. Beijing 2008 engineered its torch to survive the winds of Mount Everest.
2008 Beijing [Photo: IOC]
A Radical Shift
Against that backdrop, Rattis instinct was to do something quietly radical: design the flame, not the torch.
That idea led to an inversion of the usual process. Rather than starting with an expressive exterior, Ratti and his team began with the burner itself, shaping only the minimum structure needed to hold and protect it. The result is the lightest Olympic torch ever producedsmall, slender, and almost an afterthought in the runners hand. We just start from the inside, Ratti says, and we do the minimal shape around the burner.
[Photo: IOC]
The effect is intentional disappearance. In photographs, the torch nearly dissolves into its surroundings, reflecting sky, snow, or cityscape depending on where its carried. The runner and the flame take precedence; the object recedes. Ratti describes the earliest sketch as a runner with a flame in her or his hand instead of the torch itself.
1964 Tokyo [Photo: IOC]
There are a few earlier torch designers who had similar instincts. Ratti points to the torches designed by Japanese industrial designer Sori Yanagi for Tokyo 1964 Summer Olympics and Sapporo 1972 Winter Olympics as key inspirationsboth exercises in restraint. What has changed, he argues, is technology. Today, advances in aerodynamics, materials science, and fuel systems make it possible to minimize the object without compromising the flame.
That same logic extends to sustainability. Milano Cortinas torch is not only smaller but engineered to be refilled and made largely from recycled aluminum. For Ratti, this approach is part of his broader philosophy. He argues that any designer working today must consider the environmental impact of their work.
This applies to his work as an architect, creating a floating plaza in the Amazon River where people can experience the impact of climate change to turning a former railyard in Italy into a logistics hub featuring a renewable energy plant. The first step in order to adapt is to use less, to use less stuff, he says.
[Photo: Andrea Amato/NurPhoto/Getty Images]
Looking back at Olympic history is bittersweet. Earlier generations didn’t have to focus as much on sustainability because the climate hadn’t yet been so damaged. But today, it is impossible to design a torch without thinking of its environmental impact.
For Ratti, it was important to imbue the torch with a clear message because the passing of the torch is seen by millionspossibly billionsof viewers around the world. By designing a torch that fades into the background, Ratti is making the case that we should pull back on overconsumption and excess, and focus our energies instead how we can work together to keep thriving as a species. Maybe humanity will lose interest in oversized ballrooms and gilded pastiche, he says.
Laying people off takes its toll.
Going back 25 years plus ago, I can still remember every situation that I had to do it in, says Robert Kovach, a work psychologist and former corporate executive.
The experience sticks with you, he says. Because its not just about operational stress: Have I filled out the forms? Made the calls? Its also filled with moral stress, he adds.
Even when the decision is necessary, it can feel like a violation of your own personal values.
People laying off their coworkers often feel a clash between their responsibility to their company and their responsibility to be a good person to the people theyre laying offparticularly because layoffs are about a company needing to downsize, not always about the individual employees poor performance.
These feelings have been coming up a lot lately, with layoffs reaching a high in 2025, and 2026 already being off to a layoffs-filled start, with Amazon, Pinterest, UPS, Home Depot, Dow, and others announcing cuts so far.
While getting laid off can of course be devastating, theres a big emotional challenge for the people who must do the laying off, as well.
How do you [show] respect [for] someone when you know you’re about to mess up their life? Kovach asks. Though you may get feedback from higher-ups that you shouldnt feel bad for letting someone go because its just business, you know deep down, that its not.
Its all very personal, Kovach says.
Fast Company spoke with several mental health experts about the psychological underpinnings of having to lay someone off at work: the anxiety leading up to the event, the language to use during the moment of truth, and the guilt-provoking aftermath.
Maintaining composure throughout is keybut how do you? Like Kovach says: Youre about to mess up someones life.
Prepare
Being the person who has to deliver the news can be deeply distressing, says clinical psychologist Melanie McNally. Psychologically, many people experience anxiety, guilt, and even a sense of grief.
Approach a layoff meeting with a clear idea of how you want to handle it, says Victor Lipman, a Psychology Today contributor who provides coaching on mindful management at work. This doesnt necessarily mean having a script ready, as that can come off robotic or impersonal, but lay out some key talking points you need to hit during the conversation. These might stem from organizational obligations.
Consult with the appropriate powers that be, says Lipman, whether thats human resources or the companys legal department. You may be obligated to make certain statements about severance or explain the reason for layoffs in a certain way. Its worth making sure those points are covered not just to fulfill the duties to your organization, but also to add some predictability to an otherwise unpredictable situation.
You may also want to turn to colleagues for moral support. Preparing emotionally might involve talking with a trusted colleague or supervisor, says McNally. HR and mental health providers might also be available at your company to help with layoff prep.
Ultimately, to go into a layoff meeting prepared, its important to acknowledge and validate your own feelings first, says McNally. One way to do that, says Kovach, is to name that this is going to be tough.
Dont pretend that youre a robotaccept the emotional component and choose to lean into the empathy that comes with it.
Be direct
Everyone knows that there is a wrong way to lay someone off.
When former Google employee Vivek Gulati prepared for a meeting one morning in January 2023, he checked his email to find an announcement that the company would conduct 12,000 layoffs. (At least this email was sent on purposejust last month, Amazon accidentally sent employees an email announcing a round of global layoffs, which they later confirmed would indeed take place.) The next email in Gulatis inbox contained his personal layoff notice. In a story he wrote about this experience for Harvard Business Review, Gulati also shares how his manager learned about his layoff.
He had tried to enter an office building, and his badge didnt work, Gulati writes. It was a rough way to find out.
This is why mental health experts recommend conducting layoffs in person.
Employees deserve personal communication, says Lipman. Laying someone off face-to-face exhibits emotional maturity in a companys leadership.
For the person conducting the layoff, however, the temptation to do so at a distance is understandable. By using text or email, you wont have to see the person break down; you wont be faced with trying to comfort them in a situation where you cant provide much assurance.
Kovach compares these at-a-distance layoffs to the studies from the 1960s where participants were told they were tasked with administering electric shocks to people they couldnt see in another room. It was much easier to knowingly cause someone harm when the administrator didnt witness it.
While you should be physically present to lay someone off, its best if no one else is. Ideally, layoffs should be conducted in a private, neutral space, like your office or a quiet meeting room, says McNally.
Be clear and direct. McNally suggests avoiding euphemisms, which might confuse or minimize the situation. For instance, you might feel compelled to cushion the blow with something like, Were going through a rough time financially now at the company, but if things turn around, Id love for you to get your job back. That likely doesnt represent a promise you can keep. You want it to be an efficient meeting, Lipman says, one that doesnt heighten existing emotional distress or provide false hope.
Zoom can constitute such a private, neutral space if its facilitating a one-on-one meeting. This work for layoffs when thats the usual way you communicate with an employee, but if youre both working at a physical office, its best to eschew video calls in this tense moment. (And of course, mass firings over Zoom never go well, yet continue to be part of many big firms MO for laying people off.)
Also: dont bash the company. Youre still management, Lipman says, and need to act professionally.
Lipman suggests saying something like, I’m sorry to see you go. I’ve enjoyed working with you, but this is just something that has to be done. While Kovach acknowledges certain enterprises might offer scripts to ensure everyone losing their jobs get treated the same (for legal and/or policy reasons), its okay to massage that script into your own words for a personal touch.
At the organizational level, companies should give transparency about why the layoffs are taking place: was a particular department underperforming? Did a new product fail to meet revenue goals? Companies can also offer mental health resources for employees conducting layoff, whether that’s in-house or via referrals. Also, the timing of layoffs should be well thought out and diligently coordinatedno one should find out theyre jobless because their key card suddenly doesnt work.
Ready for reactions
Calmness can be contagious, as can agitation, Lipman says.
Bad reactions to getting laid off run the gamut, says Kovach. From tears to physical outbursts to even suicidal ideation, responses reflect the fact that losing a job is a massive, detrimental shakeup to someones life and well-being.
It can fuel what somebody already believes about themselves, so they can slip into a narrative of I just wasn’t worth keeping, says social worker Yvonne Castaeda. This is why an explanation of its not you; its the company can be so important.
When encountering emotions from employees like shock, anger, sadness, anxiety, or even relief, McNally suggests, the best practice is to allow space for these emotions and dont try to fix them right away. Thats because you wont be able to.
Instead, take the time to listen to the employee, and validate their feelings in that moment. Provide support resources where you can, either from within your company or an outside trusted job placement organization, and give concrete details about severance packages. You can also encourage those whove been laid off to reach out to family, friends, or mental health professionals, McNally says.
Not everyone handles these emotions calmly, even if you exude calm while conducting the layoff. People are very capable of making a scene in a layoff situation, says Lipman. You want to be sure you have some backup in case anything goes wrongsecurity, if it comes to that.
Then theres dealing with your own guilt for having to lay off a coworker.
Maybe this persons also a friendsomeone with whom youve shared successes and failures at work, and whose families youve maybe barbecued with on Sunday afternoons.
Its normal to feel guilt, sadness, or even anger after laying someone off, McNally says.
Reflecting on what took place, either alone, with friends, or with a mental health professional, can help process these emotions, as can generally practicing self-care, like getting enough sleep and exercise.
At the end of your day, reassure yourself that this was something you had to do in the management role that you were in, Lipman says.
If you offered empathy and clarity during a layoffthen its better you conducted it, than someone who considered it just business.
The news cycle is seemingly always full of OpenAI stories. The state of various investments from fellow tech giants like Nvidia and Microsoft, the competitive landscape between other big AI players like Google and Anthropic, and, of course, the more existential questions surrounding the direction of artificial intelligence and its impacts on society.
For its new Super Bowl campaign, OpenAI is focusing on a simpler narrative: how ChatGPT helps people build things that have real-world impact.
The company will roll out a 60-second national spot during the big game, but it has also made three regional ads, which are debuting exclusively on Fast Company. The regional spots (with both 30-second and long-form versions) profile three different American small businessesa seed farm, a metal salvage yard, and a family-run tamale shopthat are utilizing ChatGPT to grow and thrive.
According to OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch, more than half of ChatGPT users in the U.S. say it has helped them do something they previously thought was impossible. The company’s Super Bowl strategy aims to tell those stories.
Our core brand belief is that free access to these tools unlocks possibilities for people, and that anyone can build, Rouch says. We are for that person with an idea that doesn’t know how to make their idea real. Now they can, and that’s so much more important to us than any other thing we could use the Super Bowl for.
ChatGPT Stories
For Rouch, these ads are personal. In fact, the guy who runs the salvage yard in one spot is actually her neighbor. That’s how this series started, she says. He was showing me how he was using [ChatGPT]. That’s real. That’s cool. So the truth of this is how people are using the product.
The creative approach here is essentially a small-business extension of the vibe the brand unveiled back in September, showing individuals using ChatGPT for everyday things like finding recipes, sourcing exercise tips, and planning a road trip.
Its not the first time Rouch has used hyper-specific personal stories to illustrate the power of technology. When she was CMO at Coinbase, the brand used a similar approach to show that the crypto exchange and payments platform is a utility for everyday people, and a safe, dependable, and sensible option for modern commerce far away from Silicon Valley or Wall Street. The opportunity for Coinbase was to leverage its position to help give regular people a voice, she told me at the time. This is not crypto bros and Lambos.
OpenAI faces a similar challenge of convincing people its tools are for more than asking simple questions. These ads, Rouch says, are a way to platform the very real stuff people are building with the technology.
Millions of people are using ChaGPT every day to do meaningful things in their lives that extend their sense of what’s possible and help them in real ways: running businesses, caretaking for their children and parents health, exploring their own health, she says. This is happening and it matters.
Thankfully, OpenAI takes its brand challenges seriously enough not to jump on the Super Bowl AI gimmick bandwagon (see Svedka Vodka’s big game fever dream), instead emphasizing how many human minds and hands went into creating this campaign.
OpenAI needs to be telling more stories like these. For as much enthusiasm as there is around AI from brands, many people are currently feeling existential dread over the technology. The good news for a company like OpenAI is that it’s liberated from selling capital “T” transformation in its ad work. Now the onus is on them to make it more human.
Check out the long-form versions of each ad below.
Federal immigration enforcement officers operating in New York will soon be met by legal observers in purple vests.
New York Attorney General Letitia James announced on February 3 that her office is launching an initiative called the Legal Observation Project. Trained legal observers from her officeincluding lawyers and other state employeeswill serve as “neutral witnesses” of the federal government’s immigration enforcement activity on the ground in the state, James’s office said.
By observing and recording the actions of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or other federal agencies, which the public has a right to do, the observers will provide the attorney general’s office with information that could one day be used in future legal action if any laws are broken. By having a uniform, they are standing out and identifying themselves.
“We have seen in Minnesota how quickly and tragically federal operations can escalate in the absence of transparency and accountability,” James said in a statement. “My office is launching the Legal Observation Project to examine federal enforcement activity in New York and whether it remains within the bounds of the law.”
James’s office says specifically that observers from the initiative won’t interfere with enforcement activity and that their job is to merely document federal conduct safely and legally. Her office did not respond to a request for comment.
The purple vests these observers wear will bear the insignia of the attorney generals office. They’re the latest example of state-level officials turning to colored vests amid President Donald Trump’s escalation of federal immigration enforcement. In Minneapolis, the Minnesota National Guard last month began wearing yellow safety vests so people could tell them apart from federal agents.
In the absence of a single dress code, mostly masked federal officers from multiple agencies have worn a range of clothing, from jeans to fatigues and tactical vests in the Minneapolis area. The yellow vests are bright signifiers “to distinguish our members from those of other agencies, due to similar uniforms being worn,” as Minnesota National Guard spokeswoman Army Major Andrea Tsuchiya put it. A safety vest signals that the wearer wants to stand out and actually be recognized.
In New York, the vests color “will aid in the ability of the trained legal observers to stand out in a crowd of bystanders and federal agents,” University of Minnesota College of Design faculty lecturer Kathryn Reiley tells Fast Company. “The federal agents tend to wear uniforms that are black, navy blue, or army green. The purple vests will produce the intended result of making the trained legal observers identifiable as a separate group of government employees that are not federal agents.”
The ramping up of New York’s Legal Observation Project comes as the Trump administration is scaling down its enforcement efforts in Minnesota. On February 4, the administration said its withdrawing 700 officers immediately, about a 25% reduction.
The reduction in force in Minnesota only came following public pressure made possible thanks to citizen footage that showed the reality on the ground in Minneapolis and galvanized the public against ICE. A 56% majority of U.S. adults have little or no confidence in the agency, according to the latest American Values Survey released this week by the nonpartisan research nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute, including 85% of Democrats, nearly two-thirds of independents, and more than one in five Republicans.
Its easy to be charmed by the first delivery robot you see. I was driving with my kids in our Chicago neighborhood when I spotted one out the window last year. It was a cheerful pink color, with an orange flag fluttering at about eye level and four black-and-white wheels. It looked almost like an overgrown toy.
When I told the kids that it was labeled Coco, they started waving and giggling as it crossed the street. Over the months that followed, spotting Cocos rolling down the sidewalk became one of our favorite games.
Then, last fall, another type of delivery robot appeared. This one was green and white, with hardier all-terrain wheels and slow-blinking LED eyes. My kids and I tried to read the name printed on its side as it idled across the street: Peggy? Polly?
I later learned that the green newcomer was a Coco competitor made by a company called Serve Robotics. Every Serve robot is christened with its own individual moniker.
At first, my interactions with the robots were mostly polite. One slowed to a stop while my dog cocked his head and sniffed curiously. Another waited patiently while we crossed Lincoln Avenue on our daily walk home from school, giving my stroller right of way on the ramp at the curb.
In principle, they seemed like an improvement over double-parked delivery drivers and careening e-bikes.
But some of my neighbors were having more negative experiences.
Josh Robertson, who lives around the corner from me with his wife and two young children, was unnerved enough by a standoff with a robot that he decided to start a petition: No Sidewalk Bots. Thus far, more than 3,300 people have signed, with nearly one-third of those submitting an incident report.
Through the incident field, Robertson has heard about feet being run overa Serve robot weighs 220 pounds and can carry 15 gallonsnear-collisions, unwelcome noise, blocked entryways, and more. In one case, a man required stitches around his eye after stumbling into a robots visibility flag.
Sidewalks are for people, Robertson says. Vehicles, in general, should be in the streets.
Robertsons petition, the first so far in the cities where Coco and Serve operate, has revealed a groundswell of frustration over the strategically cute autonomous vehicles.
In conversations with the CEOs of Coco and Serve, I got a close-up look at the arguments in favor of delivery robots, which the companies say are better suited to short-distance deliveries than 2-ton cars. If they have their way, whats happening where I live will soon be playing out across dozens of cities as these well-capitalized startups seek to deploy thousands of their sidewalk bots.
But in a matter of months, my neighborhoods robots have arguably gone from novelty to nuisance. Silicon Valley startups are good at launching bright ideas, but bad at estimating their collateral damage.
Are our sidewalks destined to be their next victim?
From cute to concern
In early December, around the same time the petition started to get local media coverage and gain momentum, I found myself sympathizing for the first time with the petitioners point of view.
I was running an errand on a sidewalk that was crusted on one side with a thick layer of dirty snow when I noticed a Serve robot named Shima inching forward in my direction. It stopped as I approached, per Serves protocols. But in order to pass it by without stepping onto the snow, I had to navigate an inches-wide lane of space. If I had been pushing a wagon or a stroller, I wouldnt have fit.
The tree-lined sidewalks in my neighborhood are among the reasons I love living here. Outside my front door, near DePaul University, there is a constant stream of activity: bedraggled undergrads, eager dogs, bundled babies, dedicated runners. Within a 10-minute walking radius, I can find coffee, ice cream, playgrounds, vintage shopping, two Michelin-starred restaurants, my doctor, and my dentist.
I began to worry that delivery robots would change Lincoln Parks sidewalks for the worse.
Why delivery robots are suddenly everywhere
In the U.S., startups have been experimenting with delivery robots for close to a decade. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the first were deployed in San Francisco. By 2017, the Bay Area city had become a hotbed for robot innovationand residents frustration. In December of that year, city lawmakers passed an unusually restrictive policy limiting companies to deploying just three robots and requiring that a human chaperone accompany them.
But the idea of sidewalk-based robots remained attractive to both entrepreneurs and delivery companies. Zach Rash and Brad Squicciarini founded Coco in 2020; as UCLA undergrads, they had built research robots to assess transportation and accessibility issues on campus. The following year, Uber spun Serve Robotics out of Postmates (which it had acquired for $2.65 billion to bolster its Uber Eats business), installing Ali Kashani, who had led Postmates X, as CEO.
The delivery economy is booming, with three in four restaurant orders now eaten outside of the restaurant itself. For eateries and the platforms that enable their deliveries, robots offer a way around the labor costs and unpredictability associated with drivers. In an investor presentation from last year, Serve projected that its cost of delivery, with increased scale and autonomy, could be just $1 per trip.
Mass adoption of delivery robots is now possible because of recent technology advancements, says Rash, Cocos CEO, as he ticks off the list. We have Nvidia compute on the vehicles thats designed for robotics. Battery capacity has gotten a lot better, so you can drive multiple days without needing to recharge. Then, we have really robust supply chains around wheels, motors, motor controllersa lot of the basic stuff you need to drive these things.
Put it all together, and Coco aims to operate a global fleet of 10,000-plus vehicles in select U.S. cities and overseas locations like Helsinki. Were delivering hot food, so [the robot] has to be able to get from point A to point B incredibly reliably every single time while maintaining a really low cost, Rash says.
Though Coco, like Serve, is only as wide as the shoulder width of an average adult, it can tote four grocery bags or even eight large pizzas. It can fit all the types of things people need delivered, says Rash, but its incredibly compact, its safe, its energy efficient, and I think its the best way to shuttle stuff around our cities.
For now, that stuff consists almost entirely of restaurant deliveries. Both Coco and Serve have partnerships with Uber Eats and DoorDash.
But the vision for the two startups extends far beyond burgers and burritos. Someday our kids are going to look back and think how weird it was that a person had to be attached to every package that comes to our front door every day, says Serves Kashani, who believes delivery robots true transformative potential lies in last-mile delivery.
I ordered a pair of climbing shoes for my daughter, and it was the wrong size, he says. It took two days to come, and then I had to deal with the reverse logistics of shipping i back and waiting for the next pair. Well, instead of ordering from Amazon, I could have ordered from a local store. [A delivery robot] could have shown up with two, three sizes. The robot could have waited while we tried the shoes and taken back the ones that didnt fit. So you have all these new types of things that people can do that werent possible before because last-mile was just too inefficient and expensive.
Serve started 2025 with roughly 100 robots. By December, it had built 2,000. Thats a point where it makes sense for the Walmarts of the world to want to integrate because now theres a fleet they can access, Kashani says, noting that Serves robots can accommodate more than 80% of Walmarts SKUs.
How Coco and Serve approach safety
Coco and Serve, along with competitors like Starship (which raised a $50 million Series C last October and announced at the time it planned to have 12,000 robots by 2027), are all, in a sense, bets on autonomy.
Behind the scenes, human operators are training the robots and stepping in to resolve problems. But the success of the model ultimately hinges on how well the vehicles learn to navigate neighborhoods on their own.
Robot companies often point out that unlike self-driving cars, bots can usually just hit the brakes to de-escalate an encounter or avoid a collision.
Its usually appropriate to stop, right? A car cant just stop; you might cause an accident, says Rash, acknowledging, though, that the sidewalk is a much less structured environment with a lot more chaos.
If my robot stops in the middle of a sidewalk, nothing bad happens, echoes Kashani, adding that Serve robots have thousands of times less kinetic energy than a car. That also gives us some affordances. Because we are moving more slowly, we have more time to think. So we dont need as expensive of sensors, for example, or as many computers to achieve the same thing [as a self-driving car].
But despite those advantages, combined with years of training data, robots are still making mistakes. Social media abounds with robot bloopersand worse. In one recent example, a high-speed passenger train in Miami mowed down a delivery robot stopped at a crossing on the tracks. Stopping, in that case, was fatal to the robot.
In my own experience, one of the challenges pedestrians encounter with robots is simply their unpredictability. Cocos robots tend to drive more smoothly, perhaps a result of the startups choice to have human pilots more involved.
“Coco has been operating in Chicago for over a year with strong community support and without any major incidents or safety concerns,” Rash says. “Safety and community partnership are our top priorities.”
Serves robots, in contrast, are more reliant on lidar and AI; their stilted driving often reminds me of the remote-controlled toy car my son used to drive as a toddler.
A Serve spokesperson tells Fast Company: We are working closely with city officials and local stakeholders to ensure responsible deployments, and we are committed to being a positive, safe, and respectful presence in the communities we serve.
Knowing that the robot is designed to cede to pedestrians is little comfort when its jerking back and forth right in front of you.
Whats next for Chicago
Robot deployment in Chicago is still, technically, part of a pilot program. Two city agencies, the Chicago Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection and the Chicago Department of Transportation, are jointly involved in licensing and assessment. If the City Council doesnt renew the pilot, Coco and Serves licenses will expire in spring 2027. This week, one city alderman began soliciting feedback from his constituents as Coco and Serve seek to expand into other Chicago neighborhoods.
Robertson, who created the anti-bots petition, is calling for an immediate halt to the program. The delivery robots promised benefits are appealing, he acknowledges, from reduced emissions to lower congestion. But I think we should be skeptical [of those claims] and make sure were taking a data-driven approach, he says. What if robot trips replace bike trips instead of car trips? Or what if opening our sidewalks to these little vehicles leaves the total number of trips in the street unchanged? We need data. Then Chicagoans will be able to decide for ourselves if thats how we want to tackle emissions and street congestion.
Robertson also raises the problem of enshittification, a term coined by author and journalist Cory Doctorow in 2022 to describe the perhaps inevitable degradation of online platforms over time as they seek to wring greater profits from their users. Eventually, these robot companies, even if they do save consumers a buck or two right now on delivery fees, theyve got to make a return for their investors, people like Sam Altman, he says. (OpenAI cofounder and CEO Altman has invested in multiple rounds of Cocos funding; last spring, OpenAI and Coco announced a partnership that will make use of Cocos real-world data.)
Already, ads supplement Serves revenue, turning some robots into rolling billboards and inserting the commercial into the public way.
Last month in Chicago was bitterly cold and snowy, the kind of weather that drains robot batteries and presents obstacles to even all-terrain robot wheels. After growing accustomed to seeing Coco and Serve on a daily basis, I found myself wondering whether they were even attempting to brave the frigid January sidewalks.
But I cant say that I missed them.
Burnout is best understood as a work-related psychological syndrome arising from sustained emotional and interpersonal strain. It has three core components: emotional exhaustion, characterized by chronic affective depletion; depersonalization, in which work becomes alienating and psychologically distancing rather than engaging; and reduced professional efficacy, marked by declining confidence, poorer self-appraisals, and a loss of self-worth.
Importantly, burnout is not the same as stress. Rather, it is a pattern of responses to work stressors, and can also be distinguished from depression by its work-specific context. Burnout is best assessed via self-report questionnaires (psychometrics), and the below statements provide a simple checklist for evaluating its three components.
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1. Emotional exhaustion (energy depletion)
I feel emotionally drained by my work.
By the end of the workday, I feel used up or wiped out.
I wake up feeling tired at the thought of another day at work.
I feel I have nothing left to give emotionally at work.
2. Depersonalization (psychological distancing and cynicism)
I have become more cynical or negative about my job.
I feel detached or emotionally distant from my work.
I am less interested in what my job means or contributes.
I find myself being more irritable, blunt, or indifferent with colleagues or clients.
3. Reduced professional efficacy (poor self-evaluation and self-perceived impact)
I feel that I am not accomplishing worthwhile things at work.
I doubt my effectiveness or competence more than I used to.
I feel less confident in my ability to handle my job well.
Even when I work hard, it feels like it does not make much difference.
A workplace epidemic
As with most modern workplace malaise, precise prevalence figures are elusive. Yet multiple surveys show burnout is widespread in the industrialized world (where working conditions are actually better). According to a recent Gallup study, about 48% of employees globally report feeling burned out at work, and three-quarters say they experience burnout at least occasionally.
Regional data paints a similar picture. Surveys across Southeast Asia find that 62.9% of workers report high or very high burnout, and U.S. workforce research shows that roughly 31% of employees feel job-related stress often or always, a common precursor to burnout. Younger workers and those with high-demand roles typically report even higher rates, with some employer studies suggesting more than 80% of workers have experienced symptoms such as exhaustion or cognitive strain.
Overlapping forces
Burnout, like most behavioral outcomes, reflects the interplay of internal and external forces. Individual differences in personality and resilience shape vulnerability, while job design, organizational culture, and leadership determine exposure. The same role can exhaust one employee and leave another largely unscathednot because the pressures differ, but because their capacity to absorb and interpret them does.
So, for instance, job control, or the degree to which individuals experience control over their jobs, is a consistent negative predictor of burnout: The less control you feel you have over your job and career, the more at risk of burnout you are. In contrast, when people are given autonomy and resources to perform their jobs, they will experience a sense of control and agency, which in turn increases employee engagement and motivation, and decreases exhaustion and depersonalization.
Much like the difference between driving a car and being a passenger stuck in the back seat, having control makes even demanding journeys more tolerable. It increases motivation and engagement while reducing the emotional fatigue and cynicism that sit at the core of burnout.
Personality as predictor
But no matter how well jobs are designed, individual differences matter a great deal. Most notably, personality is a remarkably consistent predictor of burnout, with lower emotional stability (or higher neuroticism) standing out as a particularly strong risk factorincreasing vulnerability while eroding resilience. Meta-analyses evidence suggests that a substantial share of the variance in burnout symptoms can be traced back to personality, which in turn helps explain downstream outcomes such as job performance, absenteeism, and turnover.
The implication is not that burnout is a personal failing or that organizations should select only the psychologically bulletproof. Rather, it is that prevention and support efforts should be unevenly distributed. Some employees are naturally more resilient and will weather demanding environments with little lasting cost. Others, equally capable and motivated, will require greater support, flexibility, and early intervention to avoid being pushed beyond their limits.
Treating everyone the same may feel fair, but it is rarely effective. In practice, this means paying closer attention to those most at risk and designing support systems that recognize differences in resilience, rather than assuming that the same pressures will be absorbed equally by all.
Situational factors
To be sure, some features of work increase the risk of burnout for almost anyone, helping to explain the high prevalence figures reported earlier. These risk factors are, for the most part, intuitive. Chief among them is workload. When demands consistently exceed the capacity of individuals or teams, energy is depleted faster than it can be restored, making recovery impossible. Burnout, in this sense, is less a sudden collapse than a slow failure to recharge
Workload problems are not limited to quantity. A mismatch can also arise from the nature of the work itself. Even moderate demands become draining when people lack the skills, inclination, or temperament required to meet them. Emotional labor is especially costly: Roles that require employees to display feelings they do not genuinely experience (perpetual enthusiasm, calm, or empathy on demand) create a form of psychological friction that accelerates exhaustion. Unsurprisingly, workload mismatches are most strongly linked to the exhaustion component of burnout, the first and most common stage of the syndrome.
Another powerful driver of burnout is perceived fairness. A serious mismatch between individuals and their work arises when people feel they are treated unjustly. Fairness signals respect and affirms self-worth; its absence does the opposite. Perceptions of unfairness emerge in many familiar forms: inequities in workload or pay, favoritism in promotions, opaque performance evaluations, or grievance processes that deny employees a genuine voice.
Such experiences are not merely irritating but emotionally corrosive. They drain energy, erode trust, and weaken the sense of mutual obligation that underpins healthy workplaces. Over time, persistent unfairness accelerates burnout by intensifying emotional exhaustion and fostering cynicism, as individuals disengage not because the work itself is unmanageable, but because the system governing it feels arbitrary or rigged.
Likewise, burnout is more likely to take hold when a sense of community at work erodes. People function best when they feel socially connected to colleagues they respect and trust, and when everyday interactions allow for shared recognition, support, and even humor. Such connections do more than provide emotional comfort; they reinforce a sense of belonging and shared purpose.
By contrast, work environments that are isolating, transactional, or impersonal deprive employees of an important psychological buffer against stress. Most damaging of all is chronic, unresolved conflict. Persistent tension with colleagues or managers generates ongoing frustration and hostility, undermines trust, and steadily reduces the availability of social support. Over time, the workplace ceases to feel like a community and becomes merely a site of strain, accelerating the path to burnout.
The role of engagement
A final and often overlooked point concerns the relationship between engagement and burnout. Intuitively, the two are negatively related, but empirical evidence suggests the connection is far stronger than commonly assumed. Meta-analytic findings indicate that the overlap is so substantial that engagement and burnout may best be understood as opposite ends of the same underlying continuum rather than as distinct constructs.
Across studies, the average true correlation between burnout and engagement dimensions rises to nearly .80, with burnout explaining well over half of the variance in core engagement components such as absorption, dedication, and vigor. The broader pattern of correlates is almost identical, with vector correlations approaching .90, implying that what predicts burnout largely predicts disengagement in reverse.
Complicating matters further, longitudinal evidence suggests burnout may also reshape personality over time: Higher burnout predicts subsequent declines in extroversion, challenging the assumption that more outgoing individuals are simply less vulnerable.
Finally, job control is more strongly associated with cynicism and diminished efficacy than with exhaustion, a finding with important implications for practice. Given how frequently organizations track engagement, these measures may offer an early and scalable way to detect emerging burnout risks at both group and individual levels, often even before exhaustion becomes visible.
Taken together, the evidence suggests that burnout is neither a passing fad nor a purely individual affliction, but a predictable outcome of how modern work is designed, managed, and experienced. It emerges where chronic demands overwhelm recovery; where control, fairness, and community erode; and where individual vulnerabilities go unrecognized or unsupported. Because burnout closely mirrors disengagementoften preceding visible declines in performance or well-beingit can be detected earlier than many organizations assume, especially through careful attention to engagement data.
Ultimately, preventing burnout is less about eliminating pressure than about restoring balancebetween demands and resources, effort and reward, autonomy and accountability, and uniform policies and differentiated support. Organizations that understand this are not just protecting their people; they are safeguarding their capacity to perform.
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One of the things that I love about working for myself is that I dont need to ask anyones permission before making a decision. If I want to make a change, I go for it, on whatever timeline makes sense for me.
But the freedom of solopreneurship can be a double-edged sword. Since you dont need approval from other people, nothing is stopping you from chasing every shiny tool, course, or strategy that promises to solve your problems.
The ability to say no to distractions is an underrated skill for solopreneurs. Theres a difference between making strategic decisions and letting yourself be pulled in a million directions. You need to master the former and resist the latter.
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Questions to ask yourself when evaluating something new
Before jumping on something new, run it through a quick filter. Ask yourself:
What specific problem does this solve? (If you can’t name it, it’s probably a distraction.)
Is this solving a problem I actually have right now?
If I have this problem right now, is it urgent? Or merely annoying?
What’s the cost of looking into this more? (Consider the time to learn something new, the time away from existing work, and the potential to derail other plans you may have.)
Most shiny objects appeal to problems we think we have, not problems we’re actually facing. Or they dont address an urgent need, and it makes more sense to look into them later.
If you ask yourself these questions, the answers can prevent you from hopping on the latest bandwagon when the shiny object doesnt actually make sense for your business.
Im guilty of not always taking the time to stop and think. I vibe-coded myself a new website the other weekend. Did it solve a problem? Yes. Was it necessary at that exact moment in time? No. I put other things aside to tinker with the website. In hindsight, it wouldnt have passed the urgency question, and I should have stayed focused on other projects.
Tactics to stay focused (when everything looks interesting!)
As a solopreneur, you have to create your own guardrails. You don’t have a boss or a team to push back when you want to overhaul your entire tech stack or change your business model.
If you follow a few constraints, you can stay focused.
Set boundaries for yourself. Try a “no new tools” or “no new strategies” rule for a specific period of time (like 90 days) unless something is truly broken. This prevents you from making snap decisions.
Keep a running list of things to try. When something catches your eye, write it down so you don’t lose the idea. I have a list in my project management tool called Ideas. I include a few notes to myself about why I think the idea might be good for my business.
Review your list quarterly. When you sit down and look at your ideas list a few weeks or months later, some things will have lost their appeal. The ones that still seem worthwhile? Now you can formulate a plan and set aside time to work on them. If the answer is still, Not yet, but maybe someday, the idea stays on your list until the next time you review it.
Develop the discipline to say “no”
The solopreneurs who build sustainable businesses are the ones who learn to distinguish between opportunities and distractions. They know that changing directions too often holds them back. If you chase every shiny object, you sacrifice time you can spend on client work (or your personal time).
You need to have the discipline to say “not right now” to most things that cross your path. Dont be like mevibe-coding on a whim because an idea popped into my head.
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Mark Cubans enthusiasm for artificial intelligence is well known. He has called the technology the ultimate time-saving hack and bluntly stated that if youre not learning AI, youre fed. But with his latest investment, the billionaire bypassed the plethora of AI startups and focused instead on something more human-centered.
Cuban has invested an undisclosed amount in live events company Burwoodland, which produces nightlife experiences throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The investment will make him a minority owner in the company.
Founded in 2015 by Alex Badanes and Ethan Maccoby, the New York City-based company says it has sold more than 1.5 million tickets to live events like Emo Night Brooklyn, Gimme Gimme Disco, All Your Friends, and Broadway Rave, which center on DJ sets that are themed to a certain musical genre.
Its time we all got off our asses, left the house, and had fun, said Cuban in a statement. Alex and Ethan know how to create amazing memories and experiences that people plan their weeks around. In an AI world, what you do is far more important than what you prompt.
Thats not the first time Cuban has touted the potential of real-world experiences in an increasingly AI-dominated environment. Last June, he took to social network Bluesky to write, Within the next 3 years, there will be so much AI, in particular AI video, people wont know if what they see or hear is real. Which will lead to an explosion of f2f [face-to-face] engagement, events, and jobs.
Burwoodland leans hard into that way of thinking, producing over 1,200 shows per year. Strategic partners of the company include music industry veterans Izzy Zivkovic (founder of artist management company Split Second, which counts Arcade Fire among its clients) and concert promoter Peter Shapiro. Klaf Companies, the investment and advisory platform founded by Justin Kalifowitz (who also created Downtown Music Holdings, which represents songwriting copyrights from John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Ray Davies, and One Direction), is also a partner.
Ethan and I started this company because we know firsthand how powerful it is to find your people through the music you love, Badanes said in a statement. That sense of community shaped our lives, and creating spaces where others can feel that connection has always been our purpose. Having the confidence of an investor as respected and accomplished as Mark is a tremendous honor.
With concert ticket prices continuing to escalate, Burwoodland keeps entry fees low, offering a low-cost live experience for music lovers. Tickets to its events generally run in the $20 to $40 range, though some events cost more. The company has already booked 2026 events in Milan, Brooklyn, Louisville, Nashville, and Antwerpand later this month will host the Long Live Emo Fest at Brooklyns Paramount theater, which holds up to 2,700 patrons.
The experiences have become popular enough that some of the artists being celebrated in the various genres Burwoodland focuses on have shown up at the events, with some even performing.
Maccoby and Badanes didnt plan to start a business. The two, who have been friends since childhood, began throwing house parties in college and kept up the practice afterward, when they lived in Brooklyn. When those soirees got too big for their apartment, they took over a nearby bar to host them and Burwoodland (named after an area in London where they grew up) was born. The duo quit their day jobs in 2022 to focus exclusively on the startup.
There has been increasing interest in the live event space from investors lately. Last June, NYC-based Fever, a live-entertainment discovery platform, secured a $100 million investment from L Catterton and Point72 Private Investments. And in September, DJ/producer Kygos company Palm Tree Crew (which hosts music festivals) received a $20 million Series B investment led by WME Group, giving it a $215 million valuation.Chris Morris
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.
Alphabet said on Wednesday it was targeting capital expenditure of $175 billion to $185 billion this year, in yet another aggressive ramp-up in spending from the Google parent as it deepens its investments to push ahead in the AI race.
Analysts on average had expected Alphabet to spend about $115.26 billion this year, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Shares of the company fell more than 6% in extended trading.
Revenue at Google Cloud grew 48%, to $17.7 billion, in the fourth quarter ended December, compared with analysts’ average estimate of a 35.2% jump, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Cloud computing majors have poured hundreds of billions of dollars to grow their AI infrastructure, both to meet the growing enterprise demand for their cloud services and to fuel their own development of AI technologies and products.
Like larger rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsofts Azure, Google Cloud has been grappling with capacity constraints that have dented its ability to fully cash in on AI demand from its customers.
Along with Meta, the three cloud companies are expected to collectively shell out more than $500 billion on AI this year. Meta last week hiked its capital investment for AI development this year by 73%, targeting spending between $115 billion and $135 billion, while Microsoft also reported record quarterly capital expenditure.
The aggressive expansion in outlay comes at a time when investors have increasingly grown concerned about payoffs from AI investments. However, Google has been able to show strong progress in its AI efforts.
The launch of its latest Gemini 3 model in November saw strong reception and propelled the company forward in the AI arms race. Following the launch, Sam Altman, CEO of AI frontrunner and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI, reportedly issued an internal “code red” to push teams to accelerate development.
Google’s Gemini AI assistant app exceeded 650 million users per month in November, while the company’s AI Overviews feature in search also reached more than 2 billion monthly users.
Last month, Google struck a deal to power Apples revamped Siri voice assistant with its Gemini models, a partnership that unlocks a huge market for Google, with Apple’s installed base of over 2.5 billion devices.
By Deborah Sophia, Reuters
