 |
|
|
|||||
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
A lot has been written about how AI is coming for your job, but EY’s latest AI survey found some surprisingly results. Out of 500 top executives at major U.S. companies who said artificial intelligence was boosting productivity at their companies, only 17% of those polled actually turned around and laid off workers or cut their jobs. Instead, the new survey found they are reinvesting those gains back into the company. “Executives are plowing productivity gains right back into more AI tools and more talented people,” EY America’s consulting leader Colm Sparks Austin said. “The real breakthrough isnt automationits amplification. Leading companies are using AI to scale human capacity at a pace weve never seen before.” The EY US AI Pulse Survey, the fourth in a series of polls, surveyed 500 key U.S. business decision-makers across sectors (either senior vice presidents and above) and found nearly all organizations investing in artificial intelligence are experiencing some amount of AI-driven gains in productivity (96%), including 57% that say their gains are “significant.” However, among those organizations experiencing AI-driven productivity gains, only 17% say these gains led to reduced headcount; far more reported reinvesting those gains into existing AI capabilities (47%), developing new AI capabilities (42%), strengthening cybersecurity (41%), investing in R&D (39%), and upskilling and reskilling employees (38%). While AI readily raises the floor by improving efficiency, the transformative potential comes from raising the ceiling, according to Dan Diasio, EY global consulting AI leader. Organizations that shift from a productivity mindset to a growth agenda are using AI to drive innovation, create new markets and achieve what was previously considered impossible. Diasio said the survey results reveals that successful companies are reinvesting their gains today to build the businesses of the future, not just optimizing the current operations. The survey also found the amount of money a company invested in AI, influenced how much productivity gains it saw in 2025. For example, senior leaders at organizations currently investing $10 million or more in AI across all business units or teams (71%) were more likely than those investing less than $10 million (52%) to say their organization has seen significant AI-driven productivity gains over the past year. Finally, when asked about the impact of AI investments on their financial outcomes, a majority of the senior leaders (56%) who have seen positive ROI from AI investments report it has lead to significant measurable improvements in overall financial performance. As a result, that performance is leading to increased planned AI spend by companies. While 27% of respondents investing in AI currently commit a quarter or more of their IT budget to AI, that figure is set to roughly double to 52% in 2026; and the group spending half or more of their total IT budget on AI is expected to quintuple, jumping from just 3% in 2025 to a whopping 19% in 2026. In short, those businesses investing the most in AI today, will likely be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition in the future. The companies out in front on AI investment are pulling farther ahead, Whitt Butler, EY Americas vice chair of consulting explained. The magnitude of investment matters: the organizations committing more funding to AI are seeing the strongest productivity gains, showing that AI is moving beyond pilots to become a true driver of enterprise value.
Category:
E-Commerce
In theory, AI should have transformed manufacturing by now. From predictive maintenance and fatigue detection to real-time quality control, the promise has always been smarter, faster, and safer operations. But in practice, the factory floor is still a place where AI ambitions often run into real-world limitations. Thats a huge problem, especially because the size and weight of this industry are hard to ignore. U.S. manufacturing alone contributes $2.9 trillion to the economy, accounting for over 10% of total output and supporting nearly 13 million workers, according to the National Association of Manufacturers. Globally, manufacturing represents 16% of world GDP and a total market value well over $16 trillion, per a new report from Cargoson. Now, as AI advances even further and policymakers push for reindustrialization in the U.S.aiming to restore domestic production capacity, regain supply chain control, and modernize strategic infrastructurethe spotlight is back on factories. Theres momentum and money behind the movement, but without restructuring the fragmented digital systems that dominate most production floors, that momentum may stall. An estimate by MarketsandMarkets projects the global AI in manufacturing market would grow to $155 billion by 2030, up from $34 billion in 2025 — but that growth will remain theoretical unless companies solve the bottlenecks slowing down adoption. Outdated infrastructure According to a 2025 survey of more than 500 manufacturing leaders, 92% say outdated infrastructure is holding back GenAI progress. Another report on the state of AI infrastructure by A10 Networks found that 74% of global IT decision-makers believe their current infrastructure is not fully prepared to support AI workloads. For all the talk of digital transformation, many factories are still running on architecture that predates smartphones, most of which cannot support new AI capabilities. The hype around AI in manufacturing is real, but so are the technical barriers, Shahid Ahmed, EVP of New Ventures and Innovation at NTT DATA, tells Fast Company. Modern connectivity is unlocking the next wave of AI-driven innovation in manufacturing. Private 5G and next-gen Wi-Fi give manufacturers the speed and reliability to finally turn AI into a productivity engine. However, better connectivity is just one part of the big problem with getting AI to produce optimal results on the factory floor. Whats really stopping AI from working on the ground isnt just weak networks but also a mismatch between how factories run and how AI systems think. At aiOla, a conversational AI company that works with Fortune 500 manufacturers, Assaf Asbag sees a common pattern: data silos, fragmented systems, and little end-to-end accountability. Even when manufacturers bring in advanced models and top-tier talent, the results rarely scale. Even with expensive AI talent, teams cant generate value if they dont have clean, connected data, explains Asbag, aiOlas Chief Technology & Product Officer. You need aligned data, integrated workflows, and clear accountabilityotherwise pilots never scale. Thats because many manufacturing systems were never built to support AI in the first place. Legacy enterprise systemslike outdated ERP (enterprise resource planning) tools, old-school CRMs (customer relationship management platforms), and manual data entrystill dominate much of the landscape. When critical insights are buried across disconnected platformsor worse, written down in logbooksit becomes nearly impossible to feed AI models the context they need. Ahmed points to a recent deployment with materials manufacturer Celanese, where private 5G and edge AI were introduced to improve worker safety and equipment monitoring. They were able to identify fatigue risk factors and detect hazards in real time, he claims. It was only possible because the infrastructure was there to support that intelligence. For him, the key to successful AI deployments in manufacturing isnt just having data but also having the right data, in the right place, and at the right time. Without that, he warns, factories will keep seeing failed pilots, no matter how powerful the model. Not all use cases are built the same While the buzz often centers on predictive maintenance and visual inspection, those arent plug-and-play features. They require reliable data flow, ultra-low latency, and hardware compatibility that many plants simply dont have. In remote or offline environments, traditional cloud-based systems cant keep up. Use cases that demand real-time decision-makinglike voice-enabled workflows or autonomous quality checksare especially sensitive to network and system performance, Asbag notes. Thats why edge computing matters. It allows speech recognition or LLM-driven tasks to happen on-site, without depending on cloud access. Picture a factory line that shuts down every time it loses Wi-Fi. Without local processingmeaning the ability to run AI tasks on devices in the factory instead of sending them to the cloudeven a short loss of connectivity can stop production and make AI tools more of a problem than a help. For factories operating with limited or unreliable connectivity, edge AI offers a way forward. By processing data locally, companies can cut lag time, protect sensitive data, and reduce downtime. But again, these benefits only materialize if the surrounding infrastructurefrom sensors to routersis up to the task. Think of it like trying to run a modern electric vehicle on outdated roads, Ahmed says. No matter how powerful the engine, if the path is broken, youre not going anywhere fast. Getting real ROI One of the biggest traps in AI adoption is mistaking model accuracy for business success. Just because a model performs well during testing doesnt mean it will drive positive outcomes on the floor. The most successful AI initiatives begin with a clear visionimproving quality, boosting efficiency, or unlocking insights, says Ahmed. From there, quick wins build momentum. Asbag agrees with him. ROI in AI is not about proving that the modelworks or that accuracy improves on a benchmark. Those are technology goals, not business goals, he notes. Companies should avoid fluff by defining ROI in clear, specific business termsfaster processes, better decisions, or measurable savings. That means tracking metrics like how many more inspections a worker can perform with a voice assistant or how predictive maintenance reduced unexpected machine downtime. When AI is tied to concrete, operational KPIs, it becomes a tool for transformationnot just a tech experiment. And thats the big difference between the hype-induced claims of faster operations in the AI space and real measurable impact. Its one thing to say your model is 96% accurate in a test environment. Its another to show that it actually helped to cut defect rates by 12% in real production. While the first might get a nod from the technical team, the second gets leadership to sign off on a bigger rollout. The path forward Getting AI to work in manufacturing isnt about chasing the most advanced model. Its really about understanding the problem, cleaning up the data, modernizing the systems, and making sure every deployment serves a real business need. Too many companies fall into endless discussions, pilots, and meetings without ever delivering value, says Asbag. Success with AI comes from being precise about the problem, aligning with the business outcome, and giving teams the autonomy to execute. Ahmed puts it even more directly: AI without infrastructure is like trying to build a smart city with no roads. You need the foundation in place before you scale. Sateesh Seetharamiah, CEO of Edgeverve, also agrees. Without a defined set of use cases and outcomes, manufacturers will be stuck without a clear strategy to prioritize the right emerging tech capabilities for business success, he says. Conversations about building AI infrastructure in manufacturing often stall because leaders assume it means ripping everything out and starting from scratch. But meaningful progress rarely requires a full overhaul. Some of the biggest wins come from small, targeted changeslike installing local edge devices to reduce lag, connecting isolated systems, or clarifying who owns what data so teams can move faster. Manufacturing may be one of the toughest environments for AI, but its also one of the most rewarding. The factories that get it right wont just optimize how work gets done. Theyll also lead a new era of industrial work, while the ones that hesitate may fall behind. This isnt the time to sit on the fence, says Seetharamiah. Manufacturers who delay risk missing out on enormous opportunities to create digital experiences for their customers.
Category:
E-Commerce
Across the internet, eagle-eyed sleuths are crying “AI slop” after Saturday Night Live aired segments with what looks like AI-generated imagery. The first instance, from Saturday’s cold open, shows an illustrated Christmas storybook. The images feature a hazy, yellow-ish hue and an image of streets that don’t connect. The next, in “Weekend Update” showed an image of a woman playing a slot machine in an otherwise empty casino while using an oxygen tank with tubes that weren’t connected. [Image: NBC Universal] While the images were on screen for a fraction of the episode, they have led to some very vocal backlash by fans, who are convinced they are AI-generated.On Reddit, viewers called them “gross” and “a shame” while a Bluesky user said simply, “Booooooo.” “That Week In SNL,” a podcast, was having none of it. [Image: NBC Universal] AI fatigue is real, and the accusations against Saturday’s episode landed amid a wider conversation about AI-generated media. McDonalds Netherlands pulled an AI-generated ad from its YouTube page last week following widespread negative comments. Meanwhile, the studio behind Coca-Cola’s widely criticized new AI-generated holiday ad admitted it wasn’t 100% ready. Merriam-Webster on Sunday named “slop” its 2025 word of the year. Slop in an ad is one thing. But slop on a show like SNL strikes a nerve considering how well known the long-running show is for its intricate human-made sets and costuming. This is a show made by hand, and the janky Photoshop jobs during Weekend Update are part of the joke. SNL has joked about AI in sketches this year, including one in January starring Timothée Chalamet and Bowen Yang that poked fun at AI’s proclivity for producing images of people with extra fingers. And in a sketch last month, Glen Powell played a grandpa pictured in old photos brought to life in an AI app gone wrong. NBC, which airs SNL, has not confirmed that the images are AI-generated, and the network did not respond to a request for comment. SNL‘s visual effects workers unionized in July, and their contract included AI protections that VFX artist Richard Lampasone said at the time was “a worker-centric AI policy that will help us keep doing our best work as our craft evolves.”
Category:
E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. After announcing another 25-basis-point cut to the Federal Reserves short-term rate, Fed Chair Jerome Powellwhose term ends on May 15, 2026was asked about the U.S. housing market. Powell acknowledged that recent rate cuts wont restore affordability to the U.S. housing market. He suggested that the country needs to build more housing unitsand noted that central bankers don’t really have the tools to address it. Fed Chair Jerome Powell told reporters on December 10, 2025: So the housing market faces some really significant challenges, and I don’t know that, you know, a 25 basis point decline in the federal funds rate is going to make much of a difference for people. You know, housing supply is low. Many people have very, very low, low, low rate mortgages from the pandemic period, and they kept refinancing and caught the really low. So it’s expensive to them to move. And you know, we’re a ways away from that changing. Also, we’re just, we haven’t built enough housing in the country for a long time, and so a lot of estimates suggest that we just need more housing of different kinds. So housing is going to be, you know, a problem, and you know, really the tools to address it are we can, we can raise and lower interest rates, but we don’t really have the tools to address, you know, a secular housing shortage, a structural housing shortage. While Powell appears to suggest that a structural housing shortage is the underlying issue in the U.S. housing market, he acknowledged back in October that the Fed may have kept purchasing mortgage-backed securities (MBS) for too long during the Pandemic Housing Boomthough he added that its challenging to determine if and by how much it actually helped overheat the housing market during that period. Over the past year-plus, as the U.S. labor market has softenedwith the last published U.S. unemployment rate (4.4%) a solid clip above the cycle low in April 2023 (3.4%)and as the Federal Reserve has sought to move from restrictive toward neutral policy by making several cuts to short-term rates, weve also seen long-term yields and mortgage rates come down from their cycle highs. While Powell may be right that Fed policy changes right now alone are unlikely to return the U.S. housing market to average levels of affordabilitywere currently in the upper bandits worth noting that the recent mild decline in long-term interest rates, which the Fed does not directly set but which are influenced by financial markets expectations for the economy and future Fed policy, has been one of the levers that has helped nationally aggregated housing affordability improve a little this year. Indeed, last week the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate, as tracked by Freddie Mac, was 6.22%well below the cycle high of 7.79% reached in October 2023. “The bottom line is it appears 30-year mortgage rates will be in current range for some time barring a recession or a crisis,” wrote housing analyst Bill McBride earlier this week. Mortgage rates could still drift modestly lower next year, particularly if the spread between the 10-year Treasury yield and the 30-year fixed mortgage rate continues to compress. But the easiest mortgage-rate declines may already be behind us. To see a truly material downward shift in mortgage rates next year, many analysts believe it would take a more significant weakening in the labor market. Hypothetically speaking, if the unemployment rate were to spike and the economy weakened, financial markets could respond with a flight to safetydriving up demand for Treasuries, which would push bond prices higher and yields (including mortgage rates) lower. At the same time, the Fed could respond with emergency cuts to the federal funds rate and, if the downturn were severe enough, potentially resume purchases of mortgage-backed securities (MBS), adding further downward pressure on mortgage rates.
Category:
E-Commerce
Sites : [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] [56] [57] [58] [59] [60] [61] [62] [63] [64] [65] [66] [67] [68] [69] next »