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For those of us who earn a living publishing content on the open internet, Amazon’s lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity can seem darkly amusing. Perplexity is among the many AI companies that has spent years extracting value from the internet in exchange for little. Its crawlers have synthesized endless amounts of content from publishers, even working around publishers’ attempts to block this behavior, all so Perplexity can summarize content without having to send traffic to the websites themselves. Now Perplexity and its rivals are going a step further, with a new wave of AI browsers that can navigate pages automatically. Perplexity has Comet, OpenAI has ChatGPT Atlas, Opera has Neon, and others are on the way. The pitch is that AI “agents” will soon be able to trudge through the web on your behalf, booking your flights, buying your groceries, and shopping on sites like Amazon. Both Perplexity and OpenAI view these browsers as imperative in their goals to build AI “operating systems” that can manage your life. Amazon, which has a lot to lose if people stop accessing its website directly, is suing to stop that from happening. It’s been trying to block Perplexity, but so far to no avail. Therein lies the irony: These AI browsers promise a future where you’ll never have to visit a website again, yet that promise depends on having viable websites to crawl through in the first place. Amazon’s lawsuit is a sign that these two goals may be incompatible. Feeding the beast For companies like Perplexity and OpenAI, web browsers are suddenly important because they open the door to content and data that would otherwise be inaccessible. Consider Amazon. If you’re just using ChatGPT’s website, you might ask it to recommend a few Amazon items or summarize a product’s user reviews, but its answers wouldn’t include any personal data from Amazon’s site. By contrast, ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity Comet can access Amazon exactly as it appears in your own browser window. That means they can crawl through your order history or weigh in on Amazon’s personalized product recommendations. Perplexity says these “agentic” browsers make for a better shopping experience, which is why Amazon should embrace thembut Perplexity also stands to benefit in other ways. By understanding things like your order history, personalized recommendations, and all the questions you asked Perplexity’s AI to arrive at a particular product, the company can build a much richer user profile for things like targeted advertising. “You’ve gone from behavior tracking to psychological modeling,” says Eamonn Maguire, who leads the machine learning team at Proton. “Where you have traditional browsers tracking what you do, AI browsers infer why you do it.” This isn’t speculation. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on the TBPN podcast earlier this year that its browser will enable “hyper-personalized” ads by understanding more about users’ personal lives. “What are the things youre buying, which hotels are you going to, which restaurants are you going to, what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you,” Srinivas said. Amazon, meanwhile, has much to lose from AI shopping agents, even if they ultimately help make a purchase. The company has its own $56 billion advertising business, fueled in part by the ads it stuffs into its shopping pages. CEO Andy Jassy has acknowledged that AI agents could disrupt that business. You may have little sympathy for Amazon in that scenario, but consider also the many smaller entities that stand to lose from an agentic web. Your favorite newsletter, for instanceone that paywalls content for its most loyal readersmay now have that content exposed within the tabs of an AI browser. Eamonn also gives the example of research papers that sit behind paywalls, or personal documents that wouldn’t exist on the web at all. The contents of emails, shopping lists, and productivity apps could all become fodder for AI to learn more about you. And while Perplexity and OpenAI have said they won’t train AI models on what people view in their web browsers, Eamonn says they could easily change that policy in the future. “Cynically speaking, it’s a smart way not only of building particularly good profiles of users but also getting more data,” Eamonn says. Why the web? Srinivas has acknowledged that AI companies need the openness of the web to provide them with all this context, because other platforms are too locked down. “The only reason we’re doing a browser is there’s no other way to build an agent with enough control over many applications simultaneously,” Srinivas said at the Upfront Summit in February. “Especially on iOS, you cannot even access another app. You don’t want to be bottlenecked by how Apple is building its ecosystem. You want to work around it, and the browser is a very good work-around in the short term for us.” OpenAI has similarly described the web browser as key to its broader ambitions. “Now that we have feedback and signals from hundreds of millions of people around the world, its clear ChatGPT needs to become so much more than the simple chatbot it started as,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, wrote in a blog post announcing the Atlas browser. “Over time, we see ChatGPT evolving to become the operating system for your life: a fully connected hub that helps you manage your day and achieve your long-term goals.” While AI companies have clear ideas of what they can do on te open web, it’s less certain whether the open web will cooperate. Lots of websites already attempt to block AI crawlersReddit has even cut off search engines that don’t provide compensationbut AI browsers represent yet another way around those restrictions. Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity could be a sign of further fights to come when attempts to block AI fail. AI companies would have you believe that these efforts are just delaying the inevitable. But that raises a bigger question of what the open web even looks like if it becomes entirely intermediated by AI. A common complaint against AI tools like ChatGPT is that they’ll erode the incentives to create new content, and that AI itself will ultimately suffer from having nothing new to train on. “Nothing really gets better unless you have content, but the content is getting worse because people are just using AI to generate this content, and then these models are getting worse because the content is getting worse,” Proton’s Maguire says. With the rise of agentic AI browsers, a similar argument could be applied to the web as a whole: What motivation will exist to design beautiful, unique websites for humans when there’s no one left to browse them?
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Caralynn Nowinski Collens, Ramille Shah, and Adam Jakus spent years developing an innovative technology to regenerate injured bone. The results, they thought, were . . . okay. The company they founded, Dimension Bio, received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration for its approach: providing a 3D-printed lattice or “scaffold” for new bone to grow in. However, it didn’t form new bone fast enough to compete with established treatment methods, such as transplanting a patients own bone tissue. But Collens, Dimension’s CEO, sees the experience as a net positive, validating the companys technology and processes with the FDA. That could help the Chicago-based startup work toward a more-ambitious goal in about three years: building a human liver using its scaffold and donated cells. It would actually be a miniature, simplified version of the organ, meant to function well enough to keep someone alive. That could provide breathing room for an injured or diseased liver to heal, or buy time for the patient to receive a transplant. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 52,222 people died of liver disease and cirrhosis in 2023. The death rate from cirrhosis increased 26.4% from 2000 to 2019, per the National Institutes of Health. (Cirrhosis is most often the result result of fat buildup, viral hepatitis B and C, or long-term alcohol abuse, though there are other causes.) “The mortality rates are very high when a patient can’t get a transplant. And so that’s where we’re looking to be able to provide [help],” Collens says. [Photo: Dimension Bio] Reprinting Older Science Building a scaffold for cells to grow in is not novel, Collens concedes, nor is the material the company uses: poly lactic-co-glycolic acid. PLGA is found throughout everyday medicine, including in dissolving sutures, dermal fillers, and tiny capsules to deliver drugs to the body. Dimension Bios innovation is in how it utilizes 3D printing to build the PLGA scaffold, part of an overall system its dubbed BioNidum. [When] we put that in the body, what happens is it gets new blood vessels very quickly, and that’s unusual,” says Collens, noting that typically the immune system walls off the foreign body and prevents blood vessels from growing easily. Collens attributes the success to a scaffold structure that provides pores of different sizes, designed to help cells move into the scaffold easily and not provoke a strong immune response. The larger pores allow the blood vessels to grow into the new tissue. The company was originally called Dimension Inx, a bit of wordplay. “We make biomaterial inks,” Collens says. The technology grew out of Northwestern Universitys TEAM lab, short for tissue engineering and additive manufacturing (a fancy name for 3D printing), founded by Shah in 2010. At the time, Collens was running an advanced manufacturing innovation center in Chicago, part of a national network of institutes funded by the federal government and companies including Microsoft and Lockheed Martin. In 2015, one of the board members sent Collens an email, “and he said, I just saw this rock star young faculty member present, and I think you should meet her,” she recalls. Shah, a materials science professor at the time, and then-graduate student Jakus founded Dimension Inx in 2016, and Collens joined as a cofounder and CEO 2019. Jakus left the company in 2023. Shah serves as chief science officer. She, Collens, and three other women account for all voting members on Dimension’s board of directors. The overall staff is about “70% diverse,” Collens says. “I’ll say it’s intentional only in the fact that we have a strong belief, and it’s one of the values of the company, that diversity leads to better outcomes and better innovation.” The company raised $20.52 million through seed rounds in 2020 and 2021, and a series A in 2023. Lead investors include KdT Ventures and Prime Movers Lab. Another major investor is Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, which focuses on startups outside top investment regions and doesnt typically fund biotech. The company is planning what it calls a series A2 funding round in 2026, with the goal of raising up to $50 million. Boning Up on the Technology CMFlexthe companys earlier bone repair productis considered a “medical device, requiring a less-stringent FDA review than medications or Dimensions upcoming mini-liver. Thats because CMFlex is just the scaffold for the patients own cells to grow into, rather than to introduce new cells. Bone provided the “lowest hanging fruit,” for Dimension to prove out its technology, Collens says, because its a naturally regenerative tissue. “We were putting this matrix or scaffold inside to serve as a guide or an instigator to get new bone.” The FDA didnt require human trials for this medical device. Although it had success in animal studies, Dimension chose to do a pilot program in patients before making the product available. “We have lots of examples of being able to create bone in patients and in animals,” Collens says, adding, however, “We didn’t do it fast enough for the structure that’s neededand the structure meaning the hardness to withstand the forces that bone allows you to withstand.” Dimension eventually decided working with tissue would be more impactful, and decided not to go to market with CMFlex. Moving to soft tissue and then organs was part of the original pitch deck to investors. The company is investigating restoring function in ovaries, for instance. It also succeeded in growing insulin-producing cells seeded in its scaffold in diabetic mice, which could pave the way for treating diabetes in humans. But that area was already a crowded market, Collens says. “We ended up focusing on liver failure for a variety of reasons, but probably one of the biggest reasons is it’s a huge problem with no good alternative, except for liver transplant,” she says. Dimensions plan is to grow a small, simplified liver under the skin as a temporary fix until either the full liver can recover or the patient can get a transplant. “I think that’s a good way to go, says James Anderson, a retired professor of pathology, macromolecular science, and biomedical engineering who taught at Case Western Reserve University for more than 40 years. Anderson, who is not associated with Dimension Bio, reviewed its research and was impressed with the methods and results. The liver, he says, is not only a worthy target for regenerative medicine; its also a conducive one. “They picked an organ that can reproduce itself,” he says. But even a mini-organ is much more complicated than bone. “It’s a fundamentally ifferent type of product, when we’re talking about putting cells on a scaffold,” Collens says. In mice whose livers were deliberately damaged, the company reports that it increased the survival rate by more than 70% after seeding with liver cells from mice and humans. That required hundreds of millions of cells. But according to Collens, building the miniature human liver could require seeding the scaffold with 5 billion to 20 billion cells. For humans, Dimension will use stem cells to produce those billions of liver cells. But first come tests in rats and pigs. The companys timetable is aggressive. It aims to start clinical trials in humans in 2028. The next question might be: Why not grow an entire liver replacement? That seems to be, at best, a very distant goal. Anderson is not sure its possible, given the complex structure of the full organ. Collens says Dimension Bio is not working on that lofty goal, for now. But she doesnt rule it out. “I think we’re at a really interesting inflection point . . . of this convergence of engineering and biology, where we can actually engineer biological systems that support function that we couldn’t do before.”
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Heres a common pattern in my house. See if it seems familiar to you. After my husband showers, he often forgets to put his dirty clothes in the hamper. This drives me batty, so I remind him to please pick them up. Again and again and again. Weve been married for 15 years now and the result of all my nagging appears to be exactly zilch. Half the time I go in the bathroom there is a ball of socks and underwear on the floor. My husband is an otherwise thoughtful and considerate guy. So whats going on? According to psychology research, the problem likely isnt him. Its my belief that nagging is an effective strategy to get another person to change their behavior. The psychology of why nagging doesnt work We have a perception that we wont get what we want from the other person, so we feel we need to keep asking in order to get it, psychologist Scott Wetzler explained to The Wall Street Journal. But rather than prompting change, nagging causes people to feel demeaned and withhold the desired behavior. The nagger then nags more and resentment builds. This dynamic can kill a romantic relationshipstudies find that, unsurprisingly, a lot of nagging is associated with low relationship satisfactionbut its equally useless between parents and kids, cofounders, or bosses and employees. So what works better to get someone to actually change their behavior? A new study has a suggestion. But, be warned, if youre stuck in a pattern of habitual nagging, it will probably feel counterintuitive. The jujitsu mind trick that actually changes behavior After years of low-level laundry conflict, I admit the last thing I feel inclined to do is thank my husband the one time in a dozen that his clothes end up in the hamper. But according to a new study out of the University of Toronto recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, when it comes to changing his behavior, gratitude would beat nagging. The research was conducted by psychologist Natalie Sisson and colleagues and consisted of three separate studies looking at the connection between expressions of gratitude and behavior change in couples. One study asked 151 couples to keep a daily diary of their interactions around some change sought by one member of the pair. These diaries showed that the more a member of the couple felt their partner was grateful for their efforts to change, the more likely they were to make further adjustments. After nine months, partners who felt their better halves were most grateful had made the biggest changes. Taken together, all the findings suggest that, if you ask your partner to change something about themselves or their behavior, and they say they are willing to try, being grateful will help them to develop their own motivation to make that change, making it more likely to happen, writes the British Psychological Societys Research Digest, summing up the results. Easy to explain, harder to implement In some sense, thats intuitive. When you praise someone for their efforts, even if theyre minimal, they feel positive about you and themselves. When you nag them, the opposite happens. Which scenario do you think is more likely to result in someone putting in more effort? But my personal experience at least suggests that, in the heat of the moment, this jujitsu mind trickpraising faint signs of improvement even when you feel like complainingcan be hard to muster. The last thing I want to do when I finally spot one of my husbands socks in the hamper is to offer him kudos. Its hard not to think about the hundreds Ive had to deposit there before. If you care about effectiveness more than venting, though, psychology suggests this is the way to go. Positive reinforcement works best to train a puppy. It also apparently works best to train people. Bigging others up with gratitude is more likely to motivate them to change their behavior than tearing them down with nagging. Other tricks to help someone change their behavior What else can you do to help other people change their behavior? This isnt the first study to dig into ths question. Experts have other ideas that may complement a liberal application of gratitude. BJ Fogg, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, has suggested catching a ride on the other persons motivational wave. When you notice the other party seems keen to make the desired change, step up and offer them concrete support. If you want someone in your life to exercise more, that could mean going to tour gyms with them when they express an interest. Or it could mean sitting down with your perpetually disorganized employee and walking them through a new calendar system when they come to you for help. Another idea, suggested by psychologist Devon Price, is digging into what barriers or obstacles might be preventing a person from changing. If my husbands laundry delinquency is a result of being rushed in the morning, maybe we could switch around some chores to ease his time crunch. If your colleague is putting off a task because of fear of failure, additional training or support will probably work better than scolding. Finally, time-use expert and author Laura Vanderkam says that, if you want others to change, you should first talk about your own self-improvement projects. If a direct report is struggling with time management, for instance, she advises walking them through your own diary as a way to get a conversation about tradeoffs and challenges started. Step one: Give up the nagging What all of these experts agree on is that if you really want someone to change their behavior, nagging might relieve some of your frustration. But its not going to actually work. Try gratitude, support, and open dialogue instead. By Jessica Stillman The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com. This article originally appeared in 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.
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Do your office, inbox, and calendar feel like a ghost town on Friday afternoons? Youre not alone. Im a labor economist who studies how technology and organizational change affect productivity and well-being. In a study published in an August 2025 working paper, I found that the way people allocate their time to work has changed profoundly since the COVID-19 pandemic began. For example, among professionals in occupations that can be done remotely, 35% to 40% worked remotely on Thursdays and Fridays in 2024, compared with only 15% in 2019. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, nearly 30% worked remotely, versus 10% to 15% five years earlier. And white-collar employees have also become more likely to log off from work early on Fridays. Theyre starting the weekend sooner than before the pandemic, whether while working at an office or remotely as the workweek comes to a close. Why is that happening? I suspect that remote work has diluted the barrier between the workweek and the weekendespecially when employees arent working at the office. The changing rhythm of work The American Time Use Survey, which the U.S. Labor Departments Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts annually, asks thousands of Americans to recount how they spent the previous day, minute by minute. It tracks how long they spend working, commuting, doing housework, and caregiving. Because these diaries cover both weekdays and weekends, and include information about whether respondents could work remotely, this survey offers the most detailed picture available of how the rhythms of work and life are changing. This data also allows me to see where people conduct each activity, making it possible to estimate the share of time American professionals spend working from home. When I examined how the typical workday changed between 2019 and 2024, I saw dramatic shifts in where, when, and how people worked throughout that period. Millions of professionals who had never worked remotely suddenly did so full time at the height of the pandemic. Hybrid arrangements have since become common; many employees spend two or three days a week at home and the rest in the office. I found another change: From 2019 to 2024, the average number of minutes worked on Fridays fell by about 90 minutes in jobs that can be done from home. That change accounts for other factors, such as a professionals age, education, and occupation. The decline for employees with jobs that are harder to do remotely was much smaller. Even if you just look at the raw data, U.S. employees with the potential to work remotely were working about 7 hours per weekday on average in 2024, down about 13 minutes from 2019. These averages mask substantial variation between those with jobs that can more easily be done remotely and those who must report to the office most of the time. For example, among workers in the more remote-intensive jobs, they spent 7 hours, 6 minutes working on Fridays in 2024, but 8 hours, 24 minutes in 2019. That means I found, looking at the raw data, that Americans were working 78 fewer minutes on Fridays in 2024 than five years earlier. And controlling for other factors (e.g., demographics), this is actually an even larger 90-minute difference for employees who can do their jobs remotely. In contrast, those employees were working longer hours on Wednesdays. They worked 8 hours, 24 minutes on Wednesdays in 2024, half an hour more than the 7 hours, 54 minutes logged on that day of the week in 2019. Clearly, theres a shift from some Friday hours, with employees making up the bulk of the difference on other weekdays. Fridays have long been a little different Although employees are shifting some of this skipped work time to other days of the week, most of the reductionwhether at the office or at homehas gone to leisure. To be sure, Fridays have always been a little different than other weekdays. Many bosses allowed their staff to dress more casually on Fridays and permitted people to depart early, long before the pandemic began. But the ability to work remotely has evidently amplified that tendency. This informal easing into the weekend, once confined to office norms, can be a morale booster. But as it has expanded, its become more individualized through remote and hybrid arrangements. Those workers in remote-intensive occupations who are single, young, or male reduced their working hours across the board the most, relative to 2019, although their time on the job increased a bit in 2024. The benefits and limits of flexibility There are a few causal studies on the effects of remote work on productivity and well-being in the workplace, including some in which I participated. A general takeaway is that people tend to spend less time collaborating and more time on independent tasks when they work remotely. Thats fine for some professions, but in roles that depend on frequent coordination, that pattern can complicate communication or weaken team cohesion. Colocationbeing physically present with your colleaguesdoes matter for some types of tasks. But even if productivity doesnt necessarily suffer, every hour of unscheduled, independent work can be an hour not spent in coordinated effort with colleagues. That means what happens when people clock out or log off early on a Fridaywhether at home or at their officedepends on the nature of their work. In occupations that require continuous handoffssuch as journalism, healthcare, or customer servicestaggered schedules can actually improve efficiency by spreading coverage across more hours in the day. But for employees in project-based or collaborative roles that depend on overlapping hours for brainstorming, review, or decision-making, uneven schedules can create friction. When colleagues are rarely online at the same time, small delays can compound and slow collective progress. The problem arises when flexible work becomes so individualized that it erodes shared rhythms altogether. The time-use data I analyzed suggests that remote-capable employees now spread their work more unevenly across the week, with less overlap in real time. Eventually, that can make it harder to sustain the informal interactions and team cohesion that once happened organically when everyone left the office together at the nd of the week. As some of my other research has shown, that also can reduce job satisfaction and increase turnover in jobs requiring greater coordination. The future of work To be sure, allowing employees to do remote work and have some scheduling flexibility on any day of the week isnt necessarily bad for business. The benefitsin terms of work-life balance, autonomy, recruitment, and reducing turnovercan be very real. Flexible and remote arrangements expand the pool of potential applicants by freeing employers from strict geographic limits. A company based in Chicago can now hire a software engineer in Boise or a designer in Atlanta without requiring relocation. This wider reach increases the supply of qualified candidates. It canparticularly in jobs requiring more coordinationalso improve retention by allowing employees to adjust their work schedules around family or personal needs rather than having to choose between relocating or quitting. Whats more, many women who might have had to exit the labor force altogether when they became parents have been able to remain employed, at least on a part-time basis. But in my view, the erosion of Fridays may go beyond what began as an informal traditionleaving the office early before the weekend begins. It is part of a broader shift toward individualized schedules that expand autonomy but reduce shared time for coordination. Christos Makridis is an associate research professor of information systems at Arizona State University, Institute for Humane Studies. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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H Company and CEO Gautier Cloix turn AI and APIs into the next office colleague by creating agentic systems to perform real tasks alongside humans.
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