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We know that having friends at work is good for your performance and happiness. But could ChatGPT replace your happy hour bestie? According to a new study from KPMG that surveyed more than 1,000 professionals, almost all (99%) would be open to the idea of an AI chatbot assuming the role of close friend or trusted companion at work. That same study teases out a separate, also compelling thread: 45% of workers reported feelings of loneliness at work. Thats a huge jump, up nearly double from last year. On top of that, the survey found that friendship seems to be a big priority for most workerseven over money. More than half (57%) of those surveyed said they would take a salary 10% below market rate if it meant being able to have close friends at work, as opposed to accepting a salary 10% above market rate and having no close friends at work. (Whether theyd be willing to take a pay cut for a chatbot is another matter.) Still, it begs the question: Would people settle for Gemini as a close friend at work? The survey results suggest its possible. Plus, compared to “traditional” (read: human) colleagues, AI is always happy to assist, is hyperefficient, and doesnt complain when delegated tasks or when offered criticism. (Theres also the fact that one in three U.S. employees say they would rather scrub a toilet than ask a human colleague for help.) From therapists to relationship counselors to romantic partners, AI-powered digital companions are rapidly emerging as alternatives to any number of human relationships. Now AI may well be ready to assume its newest role of work spouse. This reflects a deeper truth: People are craving connection, Sandy Torchia, vice chair of talent and culture at KPMG, told Fast Company. When something shows up consistently, listens without judgment, and responds in a supportive way, it starts to feel familiareven comforting. We already know that having a work bestie or office ally isnt just good for happiness, its good for productivity and performance. Employees in the KPMG survey said that having workplace friendships increases their motivation to go above and beyond their job description. But right now, we have zero idea whether any of these benefits transfer to a human-chatbot work friendship. What we do know is that the worker value on friendship is growing; 87% of employees consider work friendships “very important. And the youngest workers value workplace friendships more than their older counterparts: 90% of Gen Zers surveyed said those friendships are very important, compared to 77% of boomers. The trend is playing out alongside an increase in public familiarity and comfort with AI tools. In the past couple of years, the share of U.S. employees who say they have used AI in their role a few times a year or more has nearly doubled, from 21% to 40%, according to a Gallup survey in June. While this is predominantly for work-related tasks, chatting with AI can also reduce stress, anxiety, and loneliness for some users, according to a 2023 study published in The Journal of Medical Internet Research. Of course, correlation doesnt mean causation when it comes to chatbots being used more as stand-ins for human friends at work. But even if employees dont want AI to step into the role of friend, almost all surveyed in the KPMG report said they would like to use AI to aid their friendships in some capacity; 98% said they would like AI systems to connect them with coworkers based on shared interests. Its still early days in terms of widespread chatbot adoption, so who knows what will happen. For now, dont count on a bot to fully replace your gossip buddy by the watercooler. AI can mimic aspects of friendship; it cant replace the depth, nuance, and emotional resonance of human relationships, Torchia says. Thats where employers have a real opportunityto engineer environments where authentic connection can thrive.
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E-Commerce
Remember CDs? Theres a new company betting that, if you dont already, youre about to. Jewel is a Norwegian company specializing in manufacturing high-end display cases for CDs. The brand recently soft-launched online in Europe and is planning to expand to the U.S. in the coming months. It offers products that range from an $130 freestanding case that fits four CDs to a $300, 16-slot case designed to be mounted directly onto the wall. Launching a CD-based brand more than 20 years after CDs hit their peak feels like a counterintuitive prospect. After all, how many people even own a CD player these days? But Marius Brandl, Jewels founder, says the brands thesis is simple: Vinyl records have had their renaissance. CDs are next. [Photo: Jewel] Are CDs on the rise? Retro tech and physical media have experienced an undeniable comeback, in part driven by young consumers looking to cut back on social media. Gadgets like iPods (yes, those are considered retro), Game Boys, film cameras, and even pagers have seen a resurgence. And, as Brandl notes, that applies to the music industry, too. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), vinyl posted its 18th straight year of growth in 2024, generating $1.4 billion in retail revenue, its highest share of physical format revenue since 1984. Meanwhile, CDs may have fallen out of fashion in the mid-2000s, but theyre not a dead medium. In 2024, the RIAA reports, 33 million CDs were sold in the U.S., up 1.5% from 2023. [Photo: Jewel] For some fanbases, theyre becoming a more popular collectors item: Taylor Swift, for example, has a longstanding partnership with Target and tends to sell several versions of her albums in the format, including the upcoming Life of a Showgirl album, which will include three exclusive CDs. Charli XCX also gave the CD an injection of instant cool last summer, when her brat CDs sold out almost instantly. What’s interesting is the generation born before and after the year 2000, especially in Europe, have really, really been collecting [CDs], Brandl says. My feeling is that CDs will have a comeback. [Photo: Jewel] The making of a CD brand in 2025 Brandls idea for Jewela brand name inspired by the plastic jewel case that most CDs come inactually started back in the 90s, when he was in college. Brandl remembers attending a party where he saw a table strewn in CDs, and wondering to himself whether there might be a better way to organize and display them. [Photo: Jewel] At the time, Brandls concept of a grid-based display case received lots of positive feedback from his professors, who saw the CD as a promising new medium. He only made it to early development stages, though, before realizing that he couldnt find a way to both display the CDs and open their cases without damaging them, and the idea fizzled out. [Video: Jewel] When Brandls close friend convinced him to revive the idea in 2023, Brandl spent more than half a year developing the right blend of rubber to hold each jewel case inside his display prototype. The rubber, which lines two sides of each square-shaped slot,needed enough grip to keep the cases from sliding, but not so much that the cases would break when opened. The rubber was the biggest challenge, and also how to be able to make it not to be too expensive to produce, Brandl says. He adds that the acrylic, aluminum, and hardware that serve as the backbone of the displays are all premium materials sourced from European manufacturers, which has bumped up the brands price points. Instead of making it as cheap as possible with cheap materials, we thought, The ones who will buy this are probably the ones who like music so much that they have a nice Hi-Fi system, and they want new design solutions. Given that Jewel just launched, Brandl says its difficult to measure sales numbers at this stage. From inside his street-level office in Oslo, though, he talks with interested customers every day who stop by to take a closer look at the product. The people are from eight, nine yearsold to 82 years old,” Brandl says. I think the ones between 17 and 25 show the most interest. And I tell them, Your parents and grandparents and great grandparents listen to LPs. But the CDthat’s your generations physical connection to music.
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E-Commerce
As press releases go, it was a mic drop moment. On September 4, OpenAI announced that it was coming after LinkedIn. And it was coming after job search specifically. For those unfamiliar with the story, it was reported across multiple sources that not content with torpedoing Google, education, interpersonal relationships, and entire industries such as psychiatry or management consultancy (both smugly considered untouchable until about 15 minutes ago), OpenAI is now coming after the age-old industry of human resources. Specifically, the $300 billion company wants to streamline the process of hiring by automatically matching candidates to roles via context alone, without the need for titles, résumés, applications, or screeninga fully automated, frictionless match between resource and need, run at zero cost in a fraction of the time it would take Becky from HR to book meeting room 14B next Tuesday, but with near-infinite scope and efficiency. Its yet another cold, logical extension of artificial intelligences purported ability to reduce human intuition down to a series of predictable algorithmic factors. LinkedIn Dethroned? Now, lets be fair. OpenAIs proposition assumes (probably rightly) that virtually all future roles will require some degree of AI knowledge or fluency. Moreover, the press release breathlessly proposes an OpenAI Academy, one that will train the machine-picked workers of the future on how to best serve their artificial overlords. But will this really be enough to dethrone LinkedIn? An incumbent platform of over 1 billion people who now spend the bulk of their time not in job search or hiring, but in perpetual AI comment-discussions about the nature of authenticity while posting Canva-selfies of their weekend getaway to Puglia? Perhaps we should first recognize that human resources is one of the oldest and most safeguarded functions within the corporate world, holding out defiantly as personal assistance, finance, and even marketing have been variously usurped by automation. Its a curiously old-fashioned industry in many respects, relying on judgments about physical appearance and behavioral norms such as eye contact and punctualitycharacteristics that in any other sector would be subordinated to ones ability to deliver value or output. But recently, HR has gone through something of a transformation, and its safe to say that LinkedIn has been at the heart of that. In fact, the worlds largest business platform been an unwitting catalyst for an onslaught of AI-driven fraudboth from candidates (either building fake AI profiles or even replacing themselves in Zoom interviews with omniscient AI avatars), or from dubious recruiters (leveraging advanced AI tools to build fictitious companies in order to solicit payment or personal details). The market is now flooded with AI cover letters, AI résumés and AI-curated portfolios, while on the other side of the table, the screening process is often (and increasingly) handed off to AI scanning software, in order to save valuable time filtering out unsuitable candidates before proceeding to a final interviewone that may ultimately be conducted and processed by an AI avatar. Surely then its simply a short step to full automation, one that removes these very ghosts in the hiring machine? Perhaps. But Id suggest that any scholar of organizational psychology would hold a very different view. The intangibles We can look, for example, at evidence highlighting the predictive power of nonverbal cues such as vocal tone, facial expressions, and body language in forecasting later job performance. A 2022 Harvard Business Review piece, on the other hand, cautioned that automated interviews may be prone to missing these types of intangible characteristicspotentially valuable employee attributes (say, curiosity or resilience) that might only be registered via live human interaction. Yet suffice to say, these same factors are also deeply subjective. Economists have long shown that reliance on intuition and first impressions can also be a major source of bias in recruitment, perpetuating disparities around race, gender, and class. AI proxies Whatever the case, the stark reality is that we now find ourselves in an era where a growing majority of both candidates and recruiters are using AI as proxies. And in this world, the very notion of authentic observationwhether helpful or notis starting to erode. ButI hear you cry as onesurely HR isnt just about hiring? Its about people management, professional development, organizational health, and so many other things? Yesexcept that of all these functions, hiring has historically required the highest amount of dedicated resource, training, and physical presence, far outstripping what can now be done by AI in areas such as coaching, psychometric testing, and even therapy. If we delegate the very function of organizational building itself, what remains must necessarily become diminished, at least in part. To circle back then to OpenAI, perhaps iterative machine learning will finally win out. Perhaps time might tell us that the match between employee and role is near-flawless in an AI, dehumanized world. And yet, it may also be this very unpredictability of human nature that will represent the biggest loss to a future workforce. And as to the suggestion that OpenAIs hiring platform will take down LinkedIn itself? If it can somehow balance hiring efficiency with the high level of fluffy, eye-pleasing pseudo-business interactions that now so predominate on LinkedIn itself, perhaps. But to do that, youd need to first understand a little of the idiosyncrasies of human nature, in order to build (and foster) an appropriately sticky forumif only for the reason that business is a gateway into so many other areas of recreational and emotional life. And doing that, Im afraid to say, still requires a deeply human sensibility.
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E-Commerce
A decade ago, inventor Jeneva Bell launched a startup called Ruggable that seemed radical at the time: A rug brand with products that you could throw in your home washing machine when they got dirty. Rugs have been a household staple for thousands of years, adding warmth and color. But wool and cotton rugs are delicate and require expert cleaningwhich creates challenges for people who have toddlers, or pets, or cups of coffee that occasionally spill. Bell knew there was another way, so she designed a rug with two partsa base and a polyester top layerthat could be separated and cleaned in a home washing machine. She believed that if she created a product that looked and felt like a traditional rug but was easily washable she would have a massive business. And she was right: Ruggable now has nearly 1,000 employees, and its annual revenue is in the nine-figure range. [Photo: courtesy Ruggable] Today the company is launching its most innovative product yet. It’s called the All-in-One rug, and it doesn’t have a separate base and top layer. Instead, it looks and feels much like a traditional rug. It has a textured, cushioned feel, but its been carefully designed to be rolled up and washed in a home machine. The company is releasing this new design in two textures, Plush and Tufted, in four sizes, priced from $119 for runners to $1,299 for the largest size (10 feet by 14 feet). [Photo: courtesy Ruggable] Washability Isn’t Easy Bell spent two years tinkering in her garage before launching Ruggable. She took apart dozens of traditional rugs to understand their structure, identifying which parts were designed to provide padding, texture, or softness. The final rug she created was a two-part set: a rug base that went on the floor, and a soft top layer made of polyester that could be removed, thrown in a household washing machine, and laundered at least 20 times without wearing out. “Jeneva effectively deconstructed the rug into its core elements,” says Nicole Otto, Ruggable’s new CEO. The company took off quickly. And while some consumers loved the original rug system, feedback from others proved instrumental to continued innovation. The very first Ruggable rugs were very thin, with almost no pile. They added warmth to a cold floor and were useful under wheeled office chairs, but they couldn’t compete with thicker, fluffier rugs. So Ruggable’s team developed plusher, yet still washable, upper layers. “The past decade has been all about reconstructing the rug, but doing so in a way that makes it washable,” Otto says. New Tufted (left) and Plush designs from Ruggable [Photo: courtesy Ruggable] The idea for an all-in-one rug came in part from customer feedback. There are some benefits to a two-part rug system, like being able to swap out the outer later seasonally. But some customers found it laborious to have to separate the outer and bottom layers every time the rug needed to be washed. “Some people also found it hard to perfectly line up the two layers or get out the air bubbles between the layers,” says Maria O’Brien, Ruggable’s VP of global design. To design the all-in-one, Ruggable’s R&D team had to be strategic about each layer. They wanted to create a plush, cushioned feel under foot, which adds bulk. Adding a base layer to serve as a rug pad increases the size and weight of the final product. All of these factors affect washability; if the rug is too thick or rigid, it won’t fit into a home machine. [Photo: courtesy Ruggable] For several years, Ruggable tested different materials in its prototypes. The result is the All-in-One collection, which comes in two textures: Tufted, with a 7-millimeter pile height; and Plush, with a 14-millimeter pile height. Both are made from 100% polyester that has a waterproof barrier for stain resistance. Theyre also both significantly thicker than the companys original flat woven designs, which are just 2 millimeters high, as well as most other washable rugs on the market, which tend to be fairly thin. Originally, the Ruggable team wanted to create an even plusher, fluffier rug with a higher pile, but being washable was key. (Tufted All-in-One rugs up to 8 feet by 10 feet are compatible with home washers; Plush rugs up to 6 feet by 9 feet are compatible with home washers. They weigh between 10 pounds and 85 pounds, depending on size.) This outer layer is now glued to a middle layer of foam that adds a cushioned feel, and then a thin backing that isnonslip, serving as a kind of rug pad. “When you’re designing products, you’re usually cost engineering,” O’Brien says. “But here, we were weight engineering. We needed to make sure the final product was flexible, and not too stiff, dense, or tight to fit in a washing machine.” [Photo: courtesy Ruggable] A big market A decade after Ruggable’s founding, washable rugs are more common, as consumers are looking for low-maintenance home decor solutions. According to a report by analytics firm Market Intelo, the global washable rug market was valued at $6.2 billion last year, and its forecasted to hit $13.7 billion by 2033. While Market Intelo’s report notes that Ruggable is a standout player in the space, theres increased competition, including Lorena Canals, Karastan, and Nourison. In fact, washable rugs are ubiquitous, available everywhere from Ikea and Walmart to Amazon. [Photo: courtesy Ruggable] Ruggable aims to maintain its dominance through continued innovation. To meet consumers varying aesthetic preferences, O’Brien says the company has been open to collaborations. It has worked with designers Iris Apfel, Jonathan Adler, and Justina Blakeney, the Netflix show Bridgerton, and Architectural Digest magazine, among others. Since Ruggable manufactures its rugs in its own factories in California and Illinois using digital printing technology, it can make rugs on demand, allowing for a wide array of offerings. Ruggable is now trying to expand beyond its primary market of the United States. North America currently leads the washable rug market, making up 38% of global market share, but Europe and the Asia-Pacific region are now showing interest in the trend. Otto says Ruggable is investing heavily in expanding to Australia, the U.K., Germany, and France. “Having such a diverse range of styles allows us to connect with a diverse consumer base around the world,” she says. “We’re finding that wanting a rug that can be easily washed is a universal desire.”
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E-Commerce
In summer 2019, Bob McDonough took a full stack web development coding bootcamp at the University of Pennsylvania. An English-turned-telecommunications major in college, McDonough had been working at a bar while sending out job applications for positions he barely wanted. Most paid below $50,000 a year, an undesirable salary for a 27-year-old in Philadelphia. McDonough says his degree really wasn’t doing it for him. So, I figured I’d add a certificate to stack my résumé, he says. What McDonough was doing was upskillingthe practice of learning new skills or sharpening old ones to attain maximum desirability in the job market. While taking this web dev course, McDonough wasnt sure it would be worth the time and cost. But by the end, he had a polished portfolio, he says, a filled-out GitHub and new skills added on LinkedIn. Within three months of completing the course, McDonough had a salaried job at a design studio. Someone saw my profile and gave me a call pretty quickly, he says. But hes not sure job seekers could replicate his experience today. The skillsets deemed desirable seem to be shifting faster than ever, and job seekers are reporting dismal experiences on the market. In the 2010s, “upskilling” may have just meant enrolling in a coding academy and hoping for the best. But fast, seismic changes like the rise of AI have quickly made a path to professional staying power much murkier. Ten years ago, completing a certificate might have been enough to land a role in high-demand fields, says Nora Gardner, senior partner at McKinsey. The days of taking a General Assembly course and landing a plum coding job may be gone. In this Premium story, youll learn: Hear from workers who upskilledand whether or not it led to new jobs Learn out-of-the-box ways to make yourself desirable beyond “learn Python” What employers are actually looking for, beyond certifications on LinkedIn The uncertainty surrounding AI is immense, and the job market continues to be rough: In an August survey by the New York Federal Reserve, participants reported a new low of 44.9% likelihood of finding a new job should they lose theirs. On top of that, research from the McKinsey Global Institute suggests around 10% of American workers may need to switch jobs by 2030. But 45% of employed survey respondents said that their need for more or different work experience, relevant skills, credentials, or education was the top barrier to finding a new job. And yet, the way to upskill effectively doesnt resemble the path McDonough took just a few years back. But that doesnt mean upskilling courses are obsolete. Combined with continued on-the-job development, the dedication can communicate to employers the soft skills it takes to succeed in a rapidly evolving workforce: adaptability, willingness to learn, and resilience. Mixed messages Multiple sources told Fast Company that employers are emphasizing experience over specific skillsets. But learning the latest tech in the workforce goes a long way. Diana Rocha, 37, a London-based product manager at predictive hiring company Applied, took a DeepLearning AI course on Coursera a few months ago. Then she went to Workeraa site where people can test their upskilled skillsand tested in the 75th percentile. She put that all on her LinkedIn in August, a quiet month professionally in London, but immediately saw at least two to three companies or recruiters reaching out to her per week, compared to the previous one to two per month, she says. Rocha originally got her Applied job by upskilling, too, via a masters program and Coursera courses on behavioral economics. However, Rocha isnt sure the recruiters recently reaching out on LinkedIn were only attracted to her new AI prowess. LinkedIn also shows her years of product management roles. Rocha says employers who contacted her were looking for that alongside the newer AI skills, so its unclear if upskilling truly led to the spike in recruiter interest. However, McKinseys Gardner says its the mix of both existing and upskilled experience that will most likely get candidates seen. If youve worked in your field for decades, certifications can signal commitment to learning, she says. But the differentiator is how theyre put into practice. Applying AI tools to improve workflow efficiency demonstrates adaptability in a way a credential alone cannot. Easier than you think? Today, McDonough has a new job, coordinating web content at a law firm. But his experience from the design role he landed via upskilling taught him to stay on top of the latest technology. He says he scouts YouTube and Reddit to see what people are talking about, he says. If I click on something that has 300 comments, then I know Im probably in the right spot. Learning while on the job is key to useful upskilling. While Molly Johnson-Jones, CEO and cofounder of job search platform Flexa, says organizations hawking upskilling courses often sell a dream, she adds that workers looking to switch careers can start doing so within their current company. Johnson-Jones says to identify what bits of your role could seep into moving towards that new role. Say you want to transition from marketing into tech: Find ways to collaborate more with your companys tech team, she suggests. Get to know the department leads. Doing that relies on soft skills: empathy, interpersonal awareness, and emotional intelligence that make workers effective collaborators and pleasant to be around. Were told these are the skills that AI will never snatch away from humans. Are those things even upskillable, though? Lisa Lie, founder of microlearning app Learna, thinks so. Her company provides 10-minute-or-less lessons on skills like boosting confidence, thinking differently, and working with anyone. Run by experts like psychologists and performance coaches, each short lesson begins by setting out a problem, followed by the expert walking users through the best language to use to diffuse a contentious situation with a coworker, for example. Lie doesnt call them soft skills, because they’re not optional or easy, she says. If AI is taking care of repeatable tasks, the value of people skills just went up. ‘You have to stay on top of it’ Upskilling can feel like throwing yet another stressor atop the existing mountain of stress that comes with being a working rofessional. But Gen Z appears ready to meet this future. Per Flexas Work Index study, which looked at more than 40,000 job posts and almost 30,000 job seekers, members of Gen Z are 68% more likely than older generations to prioritize personal development in their job search. Though millennials, both McDonough and Rocha have adopted this approach. Based on their own experiences landing new jobs as a direct result of upskillingit does seem to work. And if the youngest workers are prioritizing upskilling, it may well be the future. The tech moves so quickly, McDonough says. Instead of just taking a course like he did in 2019, he suggests job seekers looking to upskill today stay up to date, read, [and] listen to podcasts on what people are doing. The AI hype is going to calm down at some point, says Rocha. And yet? I wouldnt like to be left out because I didnt upskill on that front. McDonough agrees. AI might be todays hottest thing, but company executives are always reading about the latest trends, tech, and shifts, deciding what skills to hire for. You have to stay on top of it, he says, or else youll fall behind.
Category:
E-Commerce
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