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AI is quickly moving beyond rote tasks and into the realm of bigger-picture decisions that once relied only on human judgment. As companies treat AI as a thinking partner, the technology also introduces new risks. But the efficiency gains are hard to ignore, and companies are going head first into adoption. Its very much like a chief of staff or a senior adviser, says Stacy Spikes, CEO of cinema subscription service MoviePass. To Spikes, AI platforms are a second or third set of eyes, helping him approach vendors or handle tricky people-to-people situations. He says he treats AI as a sounding board, not a decider. Im not letting it make the decision for me, or letting it predetermine what I’m going to go in and do, but I’m having it give me a better understanding, he says. Spikess experience shows the tension companies face as they roll out early use cases. AI can help employees act quickly and with greater precision, but organizations are still weighing what works and what doesnt, where the guardrails should be, and how to prevent judgment from slipping into autopilot. Across industries, leaders are now testing the interplay between AI and human judgmentand developing the processes that let the two work together. AI as a strategic partner Spikes embeds AI into his executive workflow. He likens it to how large firms use management consultants to map scenarios and risks, as well as act as a sounding board. He uses AI to help with complex decisions across people dynamics, situational gray areas, and selecting external partners or service teams: It could, for example, offer advice on handling disagreements between colleagues or partners, or offer alternate perspectives that challenge someones initial point of view. I’m constantly having conversations with different AI tools, says Spikes. Ill give them information and have stand-up conversations with themalmost like a full research team, the way you would use McKinsey or PwC consultants. He says hell come to a fork in the road of decisions and uses AI to decide this pathway or that pathway. Hell run scenarios related to ambiguous judgment calls through multiple models to compare perspectives, before stepping in himself. He says no sensitive data is shared with LLMs; when hes working with his team or vendors, he often asks for ideas on handling challenging milestone situations, including when the company has set goals or KPIs and misses them. The AI doesnt replace his decision-making; rather, it simply gives him more insight with which to make a decision. He points to a recent case with a contractor he let go. The work ended in the first week of the month, but the contractor insisted on being paid for the full month. Spikes ran the scenario through two different AI models. One gave a firm, black-and-white answerprorate the work and move on. Another tool framed the issue more gently, emphasizing the persons past contributions. While Spikes ultimately held to his earlier decisionprorating the paymenthe says the AI conversations influenced the tone, leading him to approach the discussion with more empathy. He thanked the vendor for their earlier work but explained that prorating was necessary to maintain fairness across the team, especially since people talk, he pointed out. But had he not consulted AI, he may not have been nudged toward that balance. Asked whether AI changed the underlying decision, Spikes says no, but it influenced his tone. It made me a little bit kinder than I would have been. Supporting day-to-day decisions Elsewhere, companies are weaving AI into operational decisions to give employees clearer visibility and speed up decision making. Dave Glick, Walmarts senior vice president of enterprise business services, says corporate teams use an internal AI tool called the associate super agent. It works like a single front door: employees ask a question, and the system quietly hands it off to small, task-specific tools in the background. One use case is when employees want to understand what went wrong with a shipment or delivery. A shipment might arrive without a corresponding purchase order or end up at the wrong building; the AI system gathers data from multiple sources to piece together what likely happened. Many of these tasks are sort of detective work, Glick says. This purchase order showed up at the wrong building, or this shipment showed up and we dont have a purchase order for it. So, the AI pulls everything together and shows them what likely happened. Glick emphasized that the human remains in control and can override any conclusion the AI suggests. What used to require digging through multiple databases is now compressed into a much faster preliminary review, with the AI assembling the data before the employee makes the call. Ultimately, the value of AI comes down to its ability to find and assemble the right data; if the data isnt clean, AI cant meaningfully support a decision. Marne Martin, CEO of expense-management software firm Emburse, noted that AI works best when the decision is repeatable and the data feeding it is clean. If you have more than 3.5% of inaccurate or highly biased data in your model, you will not get to the accuracy that you can just trust AI, she says. Similarly, Infosys CTO Rafee Tarafdar says the IT services firm ties AI reliance to risk: the higher the stakes and the shakier their confidence in the model for a given use case, the more a human needs to step in. Is it risky to over-rely on AI? The efficiency gains from using AI are early wins, but researchers caution that exposure to AI can change how people act, prompting them to defer to either AIs judgment too much or default to more control-oriented responses. In an interview, University of Massachusetts Lowell associate professor of management José-Mauricio Galli Geleilate says his research shows that consulting AI turns your framing of the problem and how you see the problem, nudging leaders more towards control, like punitive or surveillance-oriented solutions. His co-author Beth Humberd, also an associate professor of management at UMass Lowell, describes the effect as a kind of psychological distancing: when managers turn to a machine instead of a colleague, you dont have the human cues that you would have in asking another person for their thoughts, she says, which make you pause and consider the person on the other side. Léonard Boussioux, an assistant professor of information systems at the University of Washingtons Foster School of Business, says his research shows people can quickly fall in line with AI because the models are really good at crafting sound arguments, and humans tend to trust anything that feels logical and well-articulated. To curb these effects, researchers say organizations need to build in frictionby forcing people to slow down, questioning the output, and bringing in human context that AI cant capture. Companies say theyre using I to augment but not replace human judgment. And as adoption grows, many are still figuring out where the handoff will be. For many, the hurdle may be more cultural than technical: forcing employees to question AIs output, while getting comfortable with its integration into daily workflows. AI is a level up from where we normally are, says Spikes. A CEO now has another counselor that is limitless in its ability to pull in data and information. it’s informing me, and it’s giving me a wider point of view.
Category:
E-Commerce
LinkedIn is often seen as the purview of recruiters and thought leaders. But the professional networking platform is quietly attracting a rather unexpected audience. According to recent data, 18- to 24-year-olds now make up 20.5% of its user base. That tracks, as college students and recent grads enter a cutthroat job market, eager to build a personal brand and online résumé that might help them stand out from the competition. Whats more surprising is that high schoolers are also getting in on the game younger than ever, treating the platform as a means to get ahead. High school students are discussing how having a professional online presence before even beginning a career is simply showing initiative. Sharing volunteer work, internships, and professional goals where future employers can see them (and keeping brainrot slang content on TikTok) shows ambition, some argue. The pressure to hit 500 connections is real. LinkedIn opened its doors to users 13 and up back in 2013, long before todays teens were even online. But Gen Z and Gen Alpha are coming of age in a world where career anxiety starts early, as social media feeds them an endless scroll of entrepreneurs, side hustlers, and monetizable passions complete with six-figure salaries, however unrealistic it may be. As a result, early signs have shown that Gen Z and Gen Alpha may have stronger entrepreneurial aspirations than previous generations. A new survey of 2,002 Gen Z and Gen Alpha users (ages 12 to 28) by social commerce platform Whop found that more than half are already using the internet to earn money through digital side hustles like selling vintage clothing, streaming video games, and posting on social media. And its paying off. Gen Alpha members report making an average of $13.92 per hour from digital pursuits, well above the federal minimum wage. When teens are bringing in the equivalent of a $28,000 salary before they can drive, its no wonder they want a professional profile to match. For some teens, the platform acts as a great equalizer. LinkedIn can connect students, especially those who dont come from wealthy or well-networked backgrounds, to mentors, internships, and career paths they might not otherwise be aware of. Tools like LinkedIn Learning offer free courses in leadership, coding, design, and more. Yet, comparison culture is rampant across social media. And LinkedIn is no exception. The pressure of worrying about future careers is taking grip younger and younger. As the World Economic Forum’s The Future of Jobs and Skills report estimated back in 2016, 65% of children entering primary school that year will likely work in roles that didnt even exist yet. The same will most likely be true another decade from now. If you dont even know what job youll be applying for when you graduate, theres really no use worrying too much about it. After all, you only are 15 once.
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E-Commerce
Stretch fabrics are notoriously hard to process. When your old leggings wear out, they will probably end up in a landfilleven if you try to drop them off for recycling. But a Manhattan startup has developed a new material that could finally make this corner of the apparel industry circular. Theres a reason why billions of pounds of textiles ends up in landfills, says Gangadhar Jogikalmath, cofounder and chief technology officer of the startup, called Return to Vendor. When we dial it down to the microscopic scale, it’s because everything that we wear has blends of yarn put together to create this apparel nylon blended with spandex, wool with nylon, cotton, polyester. Any fabric blend is hard to disassemble, and stretch fabric is especially challenging. You cant shred it, says Jogikalmath. The spandex melts at a lower temperature, gums up the recycling machinery, and your recycling system really suffers from having even a small amount of spandex in it. To tackle the challenge, the startup has spent the last four years designing fabric that uses a single materialnylonand transforms it so that a material with fibers that normally wouldnt stretch suddenly can. Then, at the end of its life, since its a mono material, it can easily be recycled and turned into new fabric for new clothing. [Image: RTV] Making stretch fabric from a single material Jogikalmath, who started his career as a protein chemist, took inspiration from the way that proteins are structured. Normally, nylon has tight hydrogen bonds that make the material stiff and resistant to stretching. Using a protein-inspired approach, the startup re-formulated the structure so that the molecules can slide past each other under stress and then spring back when the stress is released. After making a proof of concept and raising a seed round of funding from Khosla Ventures, the team went through years of R&D. This year, it worked with a mill that specializes in stretch fabric to make samples of the final material. They were equally as excited with the results, says CEO and cofounder William Calvert. And now were putting it through the paces where it can be commercialized. With the use of the startups chemistry, the material can be made in any mill that makes nylon yarn, not just those that specialize in stretch. After the yarn is made, it can be made into fabric without adding any new machinery or process changes, meaning that it could easily scale up, unlike some other novel materials. The material is made from recycled nylonturning old fishing nets or carpet into new fiberand is already at cost parity with virgin nylon. But the cost will keep going down the more its recycled; as brands collect their old clothing for recycling, the next generation feedstock will cost even less. Theres strong demand across multiple categories, says Calvert, from athleisure to intimate apparel and outdoor wear. Brands are now beginning to test it in pilots. When I put it on LinkedIn, the brands started calling, says Jogikalmath. A bigger vision for circularity To ensure that final garments are fully recyclable, the company has also redesigned smaller components like zippers and buttons so they’re also made from 100% nylon. (One designer, Willy Chavarria, has already worked with the startup to use some of these materials to make baseball hats, swim trunks, and eyewear.) The startup’s basic approach for stretch fabrictweaking nylon so that the material has new characteristicscan also be used in applications outside apparel. The company is currently working with a large motorcycle brand to make new injection molded parts, for example. The company will work with brands to get back the clothing that’s made with its material at the end of life. Brands can include a label so customers know that the garment or other product is fully recyclable. “We want to be the ‘Intel Inside’ of circularity,” says Jogikalmath. In the fashion world, where brands are continually looking for new ways to cut their carbon footprints, the stretch fabric has the potentially to quickly scale. “When you have a huge carbon savings, when it’s recycled, it’s recyclable, and it comes in at cost and performance parity, why wouldnt they adopt it?” says cofounder and chief recycling officer Adam Baruchowitz. “It’s a complete win for them, and for everyone: for the brand, for the customer, for the planet.”
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E-Commerce
Tom Freston could easily fill a book with stories from the formative days of MTV and his celebrity encounters Bono would merit a few chapters on his own. Ultimately, though, Freston feels that his life has a more valuable lesson to offer. His memoir, Unplugged, shows by example that trying to follow a straight line to success is not the only path. Freston, 80, was at MTV from the start and became its leader, along with sister networks Comedy Central, VH1, and Nickelodeon, at their greatest periods of success. He rose to become CEO of parent corporation Viacom before chairman Sumner Redstone’s impatience led to his ouster in 2006. Since then, Freston has largely freelanced, advising the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Vice, before its implosion. He made a memorable return to business in Afghanistan, and has been chairman of the ONE Campaign, the anti-poverty organization devoted to Africa that Bono spearheaded, for nearly two decades. I was improvising, he said. It was like a bebop lifestyle, hitting notes instead of having a long, set classical structure. His wanderlust unsettled Freston’s suburban Connecticut parents when he took a gap year after earning an MBA at New York University. They had reason to believe he had gotten it out of his system when he took a job at a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the early 1970s. Saying no to a life convincing people to squeeze the Charmin He soon faced a crossroads when he couldn’t muster enthusiasm for a role on his agency’s important Charmin account. An old girlfriend said to him: All those years of school, that fancy MBA degree, and you are selling toilet paper? You’re better than that. She had a point. It was January 1972, and the woman invited him to hitchhike through France and Spain, then eventually into the Sahara Desert. He left the agency behind. Thus began several years of travel, where he particularly fell in love with Afghanistan and India. Freston started a business importing clothing from Asia. The company, Hindu Kush, was successful for a time before restrictions on imports during the Carter administration killed it. Freston landed back in New York. He read an interview where an executive in the nascent cable television industry talked about starting a music network built on videos and reached out for an interview for a marketing job. He met with a 26-year-old Bob Pittman, who wondered about the appearance of Afghanistan on his resume. Pittman suspected Freston was a hashish smuggler, but that seemed to make him like me more, he wrote. Hey, it was rock n roll. Freston got the job. To encourage cable systems to carry the new network, Freston directed film crews that ambushed Pete Townshend on a London Street and David Bowie on a Swiss ski slope to record ads saying I want my MTV. Its rapid rise has been well documented, and by 1987, Freston was running MTV Networks. Music always played in Freston’s office, giving the young, creative employees the sense that it wasn’t a suit in charge. Former employees say he wasn’t afraid to take risks and empower people. It was almost a requirement particularly Once, MTV decided it needed to reinvent itself every few years to appeal to young people, rather than follow its original audience as it aged. His international experience helped him create MTVs for different countries all around the world. It was irreverent and edgy and nonhierarchical, a lot of creative people, he said. If you tried to run it in a classic MBA style, it would have been rejected. Looking in on a ghost network Several factors led to MTV’s demise, among them the rise of streaming that turned many once-popular cable destinations into ghost networks. Record companies wouldn’t grant MTV streaming rights to play music videos online, undermining chances for a digital transformation, he said. Now, when Freston lands on MTV, its like seeing your old high school burning down, he said. From his book, Freston is clearly still stung by his sudden ouster from Viacom. He makes it a point to tell of attempts to get him back. But in retrospect, the timing couldn’t have been better. It was a good thing, because I’m a loyal guy and I probably would have stayed longer, he said. In a way I got fired at the apex of the TV revolution. The digital guys were just starting to have an impact in a big way. So I really didn’t have to deal with those unpleasant facts and challenges. He was suddenly a free agent, but in demand. Most rewarding was a return to Afghanistan, and working with an entrepreneur, Saad Mohseni, on a television network for the people there. The Taliban put an end to that when they returned to power in 2021 but recently have let Mohseni produce educational programming for girls. Freston hasn’t been back since the takeover. I had a death sentence put on me by the Taliban, he said. They say we’re all friends now, but I don’t want to take the chance. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for It’s hard to resist one Bono anecdote. The singer’s seduction of Freston to join the ONE Campaign’s board was sealed on a late night of partying in the Riviera. It was 5 a.m., closing time at a disco and Bono, a Dublin buddy, and Freston were the only ones left besides a few busboys and a waitress. On the way out, Bono spied a microphone connected to a karaoke machine. Pick a U2 song, Bono told the server. Any one! She chose I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, and the famous frontman channeled Frank Sinatra as he sang his classic. The waitress was the only one left to clap. Who wouldn’t want to have this CEO’s life? Readers of Freston’s memoir probably won’t greet the dawn with rock stars. He hopes they appreciate the musical notes of his life and apply it to their own. Ideally, younger people would find some inspiration in the fact that you don’t have to graduate from college and start the next day at Goldman Sachs, and if you don’t you have a panic attack, he said. If you’re young, you should take some chances, he said. Take a risk. Go see the world. The world is the best classroom. Look at the United States from another person’s perspective. You’ll make yourself more interesting as a candidate for a job when you come back.” David Bauder, AP media writer
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E-Commerce
Christmas at Pemberley Manor and Romance at Reindeer Lodge may never make it to Oscar night, but legions of fans still love these sweet-yet-predictable holiday moviesand this season, many are making pilgrimages to where their favorite scenes were filmed. That’s because Connecticutthe location for at least 22 holiday films by Hallmark, Lifetime, and othersis promoting tours of the quaint Christmas-card cities and towns featured in this booming movie market; places where a busy corporate lawyer can return home for the holidays and cross paths with a plaid shirt-clad former high school flame who now runs a Christmas tree farm. (Spoiler alert: they live happily ever after.) Its exciting just to know that something was in a movie and we actually get to see it visually, said Abby Rumfelt of Morganton, North Carolina, after stepping off a coach bus in Wethersfield, Connecticut, at one of the stops on the holiday movie tour. Rumfelt was among 53 people, mostly women, on a recent weeklong “Hallmark Movie Christmas Tour,” organized by Mayfield Tours from Spartanburg, South Carolina. On the bus, fans watched the matching movies as they rode from stop to stop. To plan the tour, co-owner Debbie Mayfield used the Connecticut Christmas Movie Trail map, which was launched by the wintry New England state last year to cash in on the growing Christmas-movie craze. Mayfield, who co-owns the company with her husband, Ken, said this was their first Christmas tour to holiday movie locations in Connecticut and other Northeastern states. It included hotel accommodations, some meals, tickets, and even a stop to see the Rockettes in New York City. It sold out in two weeks. With snow flurries in the air and Christmas songs piped from a speaker, the group stopped for lunch at Heirloom Market at Comstock Ferre, where parts of the Hallmark films Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane” and Rediscovering Christmas” were filmed. Once home to Americas oldest seed company, the store is located in a historic district known for its stately 1700s and 1800s buildings. It’s an ideal setting for a holiday movie. Even the local country store has sold T-shirts featuring Hallmarks crown logo and the phrase I Live in a Christmas Movie. Wethersfield, CT 06109.” People just know about us now, said Julia Koulouris, who co-owns the market with her husband, Spiro, crediting the movie trail in part. And you see these things on Instagram and stuff where people are tagging it and posting it. Christmas movies are big businessand a big deal to fans The concept of holiday movies dates back to 1940s, when Hollywood produced classics like It’s A Wonderful Life,” Miracle on 34th Street and Christmas in Connecticut, which was actually shot at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California. In 2006, five years after the launch of the Hallmark Channel on TV, Hallmark struck gold with the romance movie The Christmas card, said Joanna Wilson, author of the book Tis the Season TV: The Encyclopedia of Christmas-Themed Episodes, Specials and Made-for-TV Movies. Hallmark saw those high ratings and then started creating that format and that formula with the tropes and it now has become their dominant formula that they create for their Christmas TV romances, she said. The holiday movie industry, estimated to generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has expanded beyond Hallmark and Lifetime. Today, a mix of cable and broadcast networks, streaming platforms, and direct-to-video producers release roughly 100 new films annually, Wilson said. The genre has also diversified, with characters from a wider range of racial and ethnic backgrounds as well as LGBTQ+ storylines. The formula, however, remains the same. And fans still have an appetite for a G-rated love story. They want to see people coming together. They want to see these romances. Its a part of the hope of the season, she said. Who doesnt love love? And it always has a predictable, happy ending. Hazel Duncan, 83, of Forest City, North Carolina, said she and her husband of 65 years, Owen, like to watch the movies together year-round because they’re sweet and family-friendly. They also take her back to their early years as a young couple, when life felt simpler. We hold hands sometimes, she said. It’s kind of sweet. We’ve got two recliners back in a bedroom that’s real small and we’ve got the TV there. And we close the doors off and it’s just our time together in the evening. Falling in love again… with a state Connecticut’s chief marketing officer, Anthony M. Anthony, said the Christmas Movie Trail is part of a multipronged rebranding effort launched in 2023 that promotes the state not just as a tourist destination, but also as a place to work and live. So what better way to highlight our communities as a place to call home than them being sets of movies? he said. However, there continues to be debate at the state Capitol over whether to eliminate or cap film industry tax credits which could threaten how many more of these movies will be made locally. Christina Nieves and her husband of 30 years, Raul, already live in Connecticut and have been tackling the trail little by little.” It’s been a chance, she said, to explore new places in the state, like the Bushnell Park Carousel in Hartford, where a scene from Ghost of Christmas Always was filmed. It also inspired Nieves to convince her husband not quite the movie fan she is to join her at a tree-lighting and Christmas parade in their hometown of Windsor Locks. I said, listen, let me just milk this Hallmark thing as long as I can, OK? she said. ___ This story has been corrected to reflect that the film title is Christmas at Pemberley Manor, not Christmas at Pemberly Manor,” and the co-owner of Heirloom Market at Comstock Ferre is named Spiro Koulouris, not Spiros Koulouris. Susan Haigh, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
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