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You wouldnt pay a surgeon to file your tax return, and you wouldnt ask your accountant to perform your appendectomy. The same is true for AI: Organizations should start realizing that different AI providers excel at different needs, from coding to specialized research or creative design. Over the coming year, enterprises will absorb a variety of these AI providers technologies in earnest and at scaledepartment by department, role by role. Legal teams will standardize on tools like Harvey. Customer service teams will rely on Glean or purpose-built agents. Development teams may choose resources from Anthropic. Marketing, engineering, finance, and HR will similarly gravitate toward AI resources from Microsoft, xAI, or OpenAI, optimized for their specific needs. In other words, enterprises will evolve from the idea that single-provider AI resources will solve their needs to an era of targeted, role-based, or need-based AI. Making matters even more complicated, many AI providers are now beginning to roll out their own browsers. Enterprise leaders thus face a new challenge: how to manage the onslaught of AI needs that are now arriving. HISTORY IS REPEATING ITSELF Enterprises have been here before. When cloud computing emerged, many dipped their toes in the water by standardizing on a single provider. The logic was simple: fewer vendors, lower cost, less risk. But as cloud usage expanded, different workloads demanded different strengths, and organizations diversified their cloud infrastructure. The same dynamic emerged with data platforms. Early efforts focused on centralized applications like data lakes, but as use cases multiplied, organizations often found that no single system served every real-world use case equally well. Most enterprises responded by adopting multiple tools around a shared data foundation. In both cases, organizations that had prepared themselves for flexibility were better positioned. AI is following this same trajectory, only faster. And unlike cloud or data infrastructure, AI adoption isnt happening quietly behind the scenes. Its happening in daily workflows across departments, often without central coordination. Leaders can therefore best help their organizations succeed by embracing many tools, each chosen for what it does best, while managing them through shared controls. THE RISK OF AI TOOL SPRAWL As AI systems and use cases proliferate, failing to prepare poses real risks to the enterprise. This proliferation extends beyond standalone AI tools. Increasingly, SaaS applications from CRM systems and productivity suites to finance and HR platforms embed their own AI. In many cases, AI adoption will happen by default, not by deliberate choice. With these tools, teams will also inherit fragmented security policies, inconsistent controls, and limited visibility. Tools that seem harmless in isolation can create meaningful risk in aggregate. This is the rise of shadow AI: systems introduced to solve real problems, but without the oversight to manage them responsibly. With agentic AI, where systems act on users behalf, those risks compound: permissions expand and accountability becomes harder to trace. If these tools are left unchecked, leaders will lose sight of where AI is used, what data it touches, and which systems act autonomously on the organization’s behalf. Experimentation and innovation should not be allowed to scale faster than oversight. GOVERNANCE IS THE MISSING LAYER Multimodal flexibility does not have to come at the expense of visibility and security. Again, we have been here before. With SaaS, enterprises dont manage a wide variety of capabilities by forcing everyone onto one system. They manage it by establishing shared controls across many tools. Enterprises need a governance layer that sits above all AI vendors. That layer should provide: Visibility across AI usage Policy enforcement independent of model provider Guardrails for data access Safe experimentation Support for bringing your own device, contractors, and distributed teams Governance doesnt restrict freedom. It enables it by allowing organizations to choose every model they want and assign them across their teams without introducing new risk. And true governance cant rely on technology alone. Leaders must cultivate a culture of AI literacy, where every employee can confidently evaluate, validate, combine, and challenge AI systems. Then organizations can embrace a multitude of AI tools, safely, and effectively. PREPARE FOR MULTI-MODEL SUCCESS Much like SaaS, the cloud, and data platforms before it, AI will soon spread across roles, workflows, and applications. Leaders that build in the capacity to manage all these modelsthrough visibility, governance, and an AI-fluent workforcewill be best positioned to capture all of AIs advantages without compromising safety, trust, or control. Steve Tchejeyan is president of Island.
Category:
E-Commerce
Shares in Palantir Technologies (Nasdaq: PLTR) are rising this morning, one day after the AI data analysis software company with significant U.S. government contracts reported better-than-expected Q4 earnings. Heres what you need to know about Palantirs latest results and its rising stock price. Palantirs Q4 2025 beat Wall Street expectations Yesterday, Palantir announced its Q4 2025 earnings, and investors breathed a sigh of relief. For Palantirs Q4, which ended on December 31, the company brought in $1.41 billion in revenue, signaling 70% year-over-year growth. The majority of that revenue comes from Palantirs U.S. customers, which is split roughly evenly between the U.S. government and commercial U.S. businesses. Palantir said U.S. government revenue totaled $570 million for the quarter, representing 66% year-over-year growth in that vertical. U.S. commercial revenue totaled $507 million137% year-over-year growth. But more important than those actuals was what Wall Street had been expecting. And Palantir easily surpassed those expectations, leading to the rapid rise in its stock price today. As cited by CNBC, London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) estimates expected Palantir to bring in $1.33 billion for the quarter. The company ended up surpassing that estimate by around $80 million. Analysts were also expecting an earnings per share (EPS) of 23 cents. Palantirs actual EPS for the quarter was 25 cents. PLTR shares are still down from their all-time highs Palantir released its earnings results after the closing bell yesterday, and today its stock price is reaping the rewards of those results, enjoying double-digit growth in premarket trading. As of this writing, PLTR shares are up 11.35% to $164.55. The companys share had closed at $147.76 yesterday. That share price pop will be music to the ears of Palantir investors. Before this morning’s premarket trading bump, PLTR shares were down nearly 17% year-to-date. Its current premarket price rise doesnt quite put PLTR shares back in the black for the year, but its definitely a move in the right direction. Palantir shares had hit an all-time high of above $207 in November, after seeing a phenomenal year of growth. The previous November, in 2024, started with shares sitting in the low-40s range. But increasing government contracts and AI optimism throughout the remainder of 2024 and into 2025 sent PLTR shares surging. Then came December 2025, and PLTR shares got pummeled. Between December 24 and 31, the companys stock price fell from the $194 range to around $177. That fall reflected both rising concerns about Palantirs lofty valuation and broader worries about a potential AI bubble. Where does PLTR go from here? Despite Palantir beating expectations for Q4, the future of its stock price likely hinges on its abilityor notto continue delivering results that justify its valuation. As of yesterdays close, Palantir was valued at around $352 billion and traded at a price-to-earnings ratio of more than 230, which is incredibly high for even a tech company. The companys stock price could also be significantly impacted if upcoming Big Tech earnings do not meet expectations and thus reignite fears of an AI bubble. If investors turn sour on AI stocks, Palantir shares could once again be hit hard. For instance, Google parent Alphabetthe best performing of the so-called Magnificent 7 tech stockswill report earnings on Wednesday. Fellow tech giant Amazon will report the following day. Later this month, meanwhile, AI chip giant Nvidia Corporation will report its results. Investor sentiment around AI could be deeply impacted by the results of any one of those companies. As for Palantir itself, the firm issued guidance yesterday for both its current Q1 2026 and its full-year 2026. For its Q1, Palantir said it expects revenue of between $1.53 billion and $1.54 billion. Thats more than the $1.32 billion that many analysts were expecting. For its full-year 2026, Palantir expects revenue of $7.18 billion to $7.2 billion. That is nearly $1 billion more than many analysts were expecting.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump said Monday that he’s “not ripping down” the Kennedy Center but insisted the performing arts venue needs to shut down for about two years for construction and other work without patrons coming and going and getting in the way.The comments strongly suggested that he intends to gut the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as part of the process.“I’m not ripping it down,” the Republican president told reporters in the Oval Office. “I’ll be using the steel. So we’re using the structure.”Such a project would mark the Republican president’s latest effort to put his stamp on a cultural institution that Congress designated as a living memorial to President Kennedy, a Democrat. It also would be in addition to attempts to leave a permanent mark on Washington through other projects, the most prominent of which is adding a ballroom to the White House.Shortly after taking office last year, Trump dismissed Kennedy Center board members who had been appointed by Democratic presidents and replaced them with loyalists, who voted to make him chairman. He helped choose the recipients of the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors, a program he avoided during his first term. He later hosted the event, and the board voted late last year to rebrand the Kennedy Center by adding his name to the building and website.Trump announced Sunday on social media that he intends to temporarily close the performing arts venue on July 4 for about two years “for construction, revitalization, and complete rebuilding,” subject to board approval.The announcement followed a wave of cancellations by leading performers, musicians, and groups since the president took over leadership of the arts institution. Trump did not mention the cancellations in his announcements, or during his comments Monday.Kennedy Center Arts Workers United, which includes several unions representing the institution’s arts workers, said in a statement that it was aware of Trump’s announcement but had received no formal notice or briefing about his plans. The group pledged to enforce its members’ contractual rights.“Should we receive formal notice of a temporary suspension of Kennedy Center operations that displaces our members, we will enforce our contracts and exercise all our rights under the law,” the statement said. “We expect continued fair pay, enforceable worker protections, and accountability for our members in the event they cannot work due to an operational pause.” Promising ‘the highest-grade everything’ Recalling his past career in construction and real estate, Trump said, “you want to sit with something for a little while before you decide on what you want to do.” Speaking of the Kennedy Center, he said: “We sat with it. We ran it. It’s in very bad shape,” asserting that the building is “run down,” “dilapidated” and “sort of dangerous.”Roma Daravi, a Kennedy Center spokesperson, said in a social media post that “decades of gross negligence” has led to $250 million of deferred maintenance needs and that temporarily closing the institution “is the most logical choice to allow for comprehensive renovations, efficient project completion, and responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”Deborah Rutter, the Kennedy Center president who was ousted by Trump, declined comment Monday. In the past, she has said allegations from Trump and others about the center’s management were false.A representative for David Rubenstein, the board chairman who was also pushed out by Trump, said Rubenstein was not available Monday to comment.Trump, citing the complaints of a workman he said has been laying marble at the Kennedy Center, said the closure is needed because “you can’t do any work because people are coming in and out.”He pegged the cost at about $200 million, including the use of “the highest-grade marbles, the highest-grade everything.”“We’re fully financed and so we’re going to close it and we’re going to make it unbelievable, far better than it ever was, and we’ll be able to do it properly,” Trump said.Congress earmarked $257 million for the Kennedy Center in a tax cut and spending bill that Trump signed into law last summer. What kind of work is involved The White House said after the president spoke that some of the maintenance includes work on the building’s structural, heating and cooling, plumbing, electrical, fire protection and technical stage systems. Work on the building’s exterior, security standards and parking are also included.Daravi, the Kennedy Center spokesperson, declined comment when asked how the closure would affect the annual Mark Twain Award and Kennedy Center Honors events this year.Trump said last October, also on social media, that the venue would stay open during construction. But on Monday he said that plan was no longer feasible.“I was thinking maybe there’s a way of doing it simultaneously but there really isn’t, and we’re going to have something that when it opens it’s going to be brand new, beautiful,” Trump said.“The steel will all be checked out because it’ll be fully exposed,” he said. “It’s been up for a long time, but as anybody knows it was in very bad shape. Wasn’t kept well, before I got there,” he said. “So we’re going to make it, I think there won’t be anything like it in the country.”The Kennedy Center opened in 1971.Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, who in November opened an investigation into the Kennedy Center’s financial management, said the planned closure is part of Trump’s “demolition tour of Washington.” Whitehouse is the senior Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, which oversees public buildings, and is an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board.Since Trump returned to the presidency, the Kennedy Center is one of many Washington landmarks that he has sought to overhaul in his second term.He demolished the White House East Wing and launched a massive $400 million ballroom project, is actively pursuing building a triumphal arch on the other side the Arlington Bridge from the Lincoln Memorial, and has plans for Washington Dulles International Airport.-Associated Press writers Hillel Italie in New York and Steven Sloan in Washington contributed to this report. Darlene Superville, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
At a factory in Austin, a startup recently finished its first prototype: a row house it plans to replicate in cities nationwide to help with the housing shortage. Row housesnarrow, multistory homes that share walls with neighbors on each sideare ubiquitous in older neighborhoods from Brooklyn to San Francisco, but arent commonly built now. The American Housing Corp., wants to bring them back. Row homes are an underbuilt category in the United States, says Riley Meik, cofounder and CEO of the American Housing Corp. The company has developed a kit of parts that can be quickly manufactured, shipped to building sites in dense urban neighborhoods, and assembled, helping shrink construction costs. While the price of an American Housing Corp. row house will vary, some of the first row houses in Austin will sell for around $750,000. From left: American Housing Corp. founders Riley Meik, Bobby Fijan, Harris Rothaermel, and William Davis [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] The U.S. is actually good at building single family homes on the outskirts of townyou look at the numbers that Lennar or D.R. Horton does, they are building over 150,000 homes a year,” Meik says. “But they are never going to build in the cities where people already live and want to live. The challenge of the missing middle Meik, an engineer who previously cofounded a rocket company, started thinking about housing during a stint at SpaceXs former headquarters near Los Angeles. On his way to work, passing through single-family neighborhoods, he looked at the houses and wondered why more of them werent starting to be replaced with duplexes or fourplexes. Like many cities, large swaths of the greater Los Angeles area had zoning laws for years that restricted construction to single-family homes. Then a 2021 state law that changed that, allowing lots to be split for duplexes. Still, few developers were building the projects. [Image: The American Housing Corp.] Meik knew that building more missing middle housingbuildings like row houses that are bigger than apartments but smaller than single-family housescould help begin to fill the enormous housing shortage in cities like L.A. I started tweeting about it, and saying, Its legal. Why arent we doing it? he says. He connected with his eventual cofounders online. We met just kind of screaming into the voidthis is a problem that needs to get solved in this country, and we want to work on it, he says. That brought us all together. It’s something we’ve all been obsessed with for a very long time. So it wasn’t hard to convince each other that we should jump off into the deep end together and build this thing. They saw that a challenge for missing middle housing was the cost of construction. There were probably hundreds of projects that I was seeing where someone had the approvals in hand, they were fully cleared, but the construction costs were too high and they couldnt start the project, Meik says. [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] Shrinking construction costs To help reduce costs, the startup turned to prefab construction. The concept isn’t newbuilders have been making housing parts in factories since Sears houses were shipped on trains in the early 20th century. Basic manufactured homes, formerly known as mobile homes, now often look more like conventional houses but cost significantly less. Other startups have tried to scale up prefab construction for apartment buildings, backyard guest houses, or higher-end homes. Some have failed spectacularly, like Katerra, which raised more than $2 billion before going out of business. [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] To avoid one of the pitfalls that some other builders have faced, the American Housing Corp. designed all of its components to fit inside stndard shipping containers so that they can be moved cost-effectively. The shipping containers can travel affordably by rail, rather than on a truck, from the factory to a city. I think one of the things that has held back prefab to date, specifically volumetric modular, is it is incredibly expensive to ship those modules, Meik says. They’re oversized loads, and you get into the tens of thousands of dollars per module to ship them. We can be at less than $5,000, all-in, to ship a unit from Texas to California. [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] Factories can be expensiveKaterra spent $150 million on one before it closedand if they need to be built near each market, it makes the product uneconomical. (Cosmic, another startup that has been rebuilding homes in the L.A. area after the 2025 wildfires, takes a different approach to this problem, building low-cost microfactories at each site.) [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] The American Housing Corp. designed a new kit of partsfrom floor and wall panels to fully assembled kitchens and bathroomsthat can be built in an automated factory and then shipped to a site for quick assembly. The core materials, like steel and fiberglass reinforced cement panels, are more common in automotive or aerospace than housing, he says. Designing a system for multistory homes was a challenge. “I think most people thought we were crazy for choosing to build a three-story home as our first,” says Meik. “The structural engineering, assembly process, and equipment required are completely different than building something as simple as a backyard home. But we believe that the only way to solve the housing crisis is by building missing-middle housing at scale. And we felt that row homes were the obvious choice.” [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] A new manufacturing model The company started building a minimum viable factory last summer to begin testing its manufacturing process, and then started building a prototype house. They deliberately took it slowlydesigning and building one floor, learning from it before building the second floor, and then refining the process again before building the third floor. As the team experimented with the first house, the total manufacturing time took weeks, but as it begins operations, it will move much more quickly. The company is now planning a new factory that aims to build one home per day. Right now, the early factory is churning out building parts that are being sent to Intertek, a certification company, for testing. After certification, the company plans to begin building homes in its first factory this year, while the new, larger factory is under construction. [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] When the parts are delivered to a building site, theyre designed to be assembled with a crane in days. All of this shrinks costs enough that projects can pencil out, Meik says. The company also plans to act as a developer, working with partners to buy land on empty lots in dense neighborhoods, so that it can handle the entire process. “Our biggest learning from other [prefab] companies is that in order to have full control of what you build and how you build it (and truly be able to innovate in the way homes are built), you need to be both the prefab company and the real estate development firm,” Meik says. “Vertical integration has given us the freedom on the engineering side to redesign the home from the ground up in order to make it mass-producible in a factory setting. We don’t use two-by-fours, drywall, or hammers and nails. Our homes are designed to be built with machines.” Using density to lower housing costs For consumers, the biggest reason that the homes can be more affordable is density. Land is the most expensive thing in the areas that we want to build in, Meik says. So the only way that we can really decrease cost for the end customer is by fitting as many homes on a certain piece of land as we can.
Category:
E-Commerce
Ive read a lot of books on building a culture at work. A lot of the advice is well intentioned but to me overly complex. A 20-step framework is a lot harder to live by than a simple operating principle. Culture is something people feel and live more than implement. Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz wrote in his book What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture, Its not the values you list on the wall. Its not what you say in company-wide meetings. Its not your marketing campaign. Its not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do. For me, culture is created through actions. Its the choices leaders make every day that shape how people experience their work. Words can motivate, but actions are what transform. I feel strongly that culture lives in daily behavior, in the decisions that happen behind closed doors, and in the examples leaders set. When those actions dont match the message, culture starts to crumble. At its core, culture is the outcome of how people treat one another. You can read an organizations culture in the everyday interactions between team members, customers, partners, and other stakeholders, notes Dan Pontefract, a leadership strategist and award-winning author of six workplace culture books. Good or bad, culture is contagious. When people observe respect and generosity, that behavior spreads. But when they see apathy, ego, or petty power plays rewarded, the culture will inevitably corrode. Wherever you look, culture is an outcome, and it becomes the core of how that organization operates. When Leaders Dont Live Their Values You probably remember when Uber experienced its explosive growth in the early 2010s. CEO Travis Kalanick was known for being bold and disruptive, in more ways than one. The companys innovation at all costs mantra fueled success, but behind the scenes the culture was the opposite. Despite all the values-based talking points emphasizing customer obsession and empowerment, employees defined the culture as toxic, with high levels of burnout, ruthless competition, and ethics issues. People complained about long hours, fear-based leadership, and a lack of trust and accountability. In 2017, former engineer Susan Fowler went public with her experience, describing a workplace filled with harassment, fear, and silence. Ubers culture didnt fail because it lacked values. In fact, it listed many of them on its website that sounded like ones you read about as best practices in Harvard Business Review. Actually, it failed because those values werent real because they werent practiced. What leaders said and did were two totally different things. Eventually Kalanick was fired and the company had to rebuild its culture from scratch. When Leaders Do Live Their Values Microsoft is a different story. When Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the companys culture was competitive and closed off. It was struggling to innovate and it was losing touch with its people, trying to operate in an industry that required constant change. Nadella knew that the strategy wasnt the big issue, the culture was. Instead of rolling out a new list of corporate values, as CEOs tend to do in grand fashion, he focused on improving behavior. Uncharacteristic for a tech exec, he talked about empathy, curiosity, and growth, and then he modeled them. Nadella openly shared his own learning journey and encouraged people to learn from mistakes. He talked about taking the company from a know it all culture to a learn it all culture. He created space for collaboration and growth instead of competition and fear. The shift is attributed to Microsofts dramatic increase in revenue and success in cloud computing and AI. Employee engagement improved, innovation returned, and Microsoft regained its energy and purpose. The company became known for its empathy-driven leadership and ability to adapt. Nadella didnt just talk about culture, he lived itand people followed. Actions Speak Louder Than Words Culture isnt what you say in meetings; its what people see you do that matters. If I tell people to say no to meetings but I attend every meeting, people will live in fear of my words. If I tell people to challenge the status quo and they see me actively questioning assumptions, theyre much more likely to do it themselves. When your actions reflect your words, trust grows. When they dont, it fades fast. Kevin Bishop, director of talent development at LinkedIn, believes culture is one of the most important things an organization can focus on. Culture isnt static, he says. Its a living, evolving force shaped by our daily choices and actions. If were not intentional, it can drift away from our values and become a liability rather than a strength. Are your actions aligned with your words? Do you practice what you preach when it comes to team culture? Ask yourself these questions: What words would I use to describe my teams culture? How am I demonstrating those words every day? What word would my team use to describe our culture? How am I empowering my team to succeed? How am I removing barriers instead of creating them? If youre brave enough, this is a great exercise to do with your team to shape the culture you want, together. Leading by Example Culture isnt a set of beliefs. Its a set of choices. Every day, your team watches what you do and learns from it. Thats what defines your culture. If your actions reflect your values, people will trust you. If they dont, theyll stop listening. The best leaders understand this simple truth: Culture is not what you say, its what you do.
Category:
E-Commerce
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