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Hello and welcome to a special edition of Modern CEO! Im Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs; this week Im dropping a few extra newsletters from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. To hear the creative leaders assembled at Cannes Lions this week, reports of the advertising industrys death by AI are greatly exaggerated. In keynote speeches and panel discussions, advertising and marketing executives say they are wholeheartedly embracing generative AI as a partner they are integrating into their work. In 2023, AI were the two most-used letters at Cannes, Josh Rosenberg, cofounder and CEO of Day One Agency, an independent creative and communications shop, tells Modern CEO. Fast-forward two years, and the conversation has evolved from novelty to practicality. Weve moved beyond the hype into implementation, and with that comes a more grounded understanding of both the potential and the limitations of the technology. The AI advantage Susan Howe, CEO of the Weber Shandwick Collective, says the communications advisory group uses GenAI to create synthetic personas to understand how different demographics and constituencies might respond to a clients message. Other executives have talked about using AI to review written work to query what questions they forgot to ask or topics they failed to address. The AI enthusiasm is tempered by an admittedly self-serving belief that the technology is a tool that will helpnot replacethe human touch. The good news is AI is not going to kill advertising, declared Tor Myhren, Apples vice president of marketing communications, in his keynote speech here. The bad news is AI is not going to save advertising. Weve got to save ourselves by believing in whats always made this industry special: human creativity. Day Ones Rosenberg concurs, noting, The dominant theme at Cannes isnt just what AI can do but how it should coexist with human creativity. AI will never replace our most powerful creative asset: emotion. It can accelerate workflows and expand possibilities, but it cant replicate taste, intuition, or the spark that makes a piece of work truly move people. Exceptional work still requires humans Of course, Rosenbergs and Myrens organizations are responsible for award-winning, groundbreaking campaigns that embody the ingenuity, heart, and humor that feel viscerally humanat least for now. Apple is the 2025 Cannes Lions Creative Marketer of the Year, and Day One was short-listed in the last year for a Chipotle social campaign. So while a computer might not be able to conceive, script, shoot, edit, and recruit talent such as Pedro Pascal to star in a short film promoting AirPods, it is pretty easy to imagine GenAI capably replacing mediocre or uninspiring advertisingof which there is plenty. In fact, AI is just one of the forces buffeting the ad business: The large holding companies that dominate the industry are consolidating (Omnicom late last year agreed to acquire rival Interpublic Group, prompting fears of layoffs). Taking the lessons from AI in advertising What lessons can the rest of the business world learn from advertisings experiences with AI? Companies in the space have successfully moved beyond proof of concept into adoption of the technology, but whats perhaps most striking is the way AI has galvanized agencies and brands to move quickly and take risks. In an environment where products and services need to constantly differentiate and reach new audiences, such nimbleness is a good skill to havewhether or not your company is responding to the potential disruption of AI. Read more: creativity at work Where the design jobs are in 2025 121 Brands That Matter How MNTN is bringing creativity to small business
Category:
E-Commerce
Its time to stop being so humble at work. When it comes to forging a career path in a moment that is shaped by increasing flexibility, pervasive layoffs, and less company loyalty than ever, following the old rules and quietly waiting for opportunities to be awarded will no longer cut it. Wildly counterintuitive The reality is that today, career success requires us to be more outspoken, vocal, and self-directed. For many of us, this feels wildly counterintuitive and deeply uncomfortable. As elder millennial and Gen X workers, we were raised inside of cubicles and taught to keep our heads down, assimilate, and pursue a slow climb up a prescribed career ladder. Meanwhile, we watch as our younger counterparts boldly start their own companies, juggle side hustles, draw clear boundaries at work, and build their identities online. I coach executives all the time who privately express distaste at seeing professionals muddy the boundaries of what we are, and are not, allowed to say, express, or expect in work settings. It appears too entitled, or tone deaf, for these workers to think and talk about their needs and wants so much. But the truth is, many of us struggle to self-advocate simply because weve lost track of what we need and want in the first place. Years of seeing this behavior as selfish has kept us locked in place until we eventually crash, crack, or simply lose ourselves altogether. Its time for a reframe. Getting what we want Here is what Gen Z knows, and what we all need to learn: When we take the time to explore and advocate for ourselves more vocally at work, it helps us and our colleagues to succeed and thrive. Running too hard up someone elses ladder will inevitably lead to burnout and helps uphold those outdated norms that need to change and evolve. Meanwhile, knowing ourselves and pursuing what we want will ultimately lead to a healthier workplace culture that endorses individual needs and identities, rather than stifles them. As leaders, this is something we need to practice as well as preach. So, for anyone who feels a little queasy about this change and unsure where to begin, I offer you this list of four ways to be more selfish at work. Step 1: Revisit your past desires The very best way to begin this process for anyone who feels adrift or unsure what they want in their careers is to look backwards and revisit the past. I find that this is helpful because, quite often, career success makes us feel disconnected from who we are and what we really want to do. We get so fixated on one trajectory or stuck in the industry or skill sets we have cultivated that we lose sight of whats even possible beyond that. So, I always begin with my clients by going back to some of the earliest moments in their lives. We discuss questions like: What were you like around age 10? What did you want to be and why? Where did you go to college? What did you study? Why? Where did you almost go? What did you almost study? Why did you change paths? We are looking for early interests, then breaking them down to examine what it was that piqued your curiosity. I want to know what it was about a place or topic or theme that appealed to your identity, or what forces and beliefs and obligations led you to pick one thing over another. Revisiting these old passions and big decisions help remind you what has motivated you in the past, and the insights will be revealing because of what has changed, or what has stayed the same. Free writing, talking with a friend or colleague, or bringing these questions into therapy can help immensely. Make sure to take notes on observations and patterns that emerge. Step 2: Explore favorite moments Moving forward in time, I like to ask people to consider their favorite days or moments at work and in life. This isnt about what you are doing so much as connecting the activity to the way it can make you feel. Questions to consider might include: Describe a typical favorite day at work. The kind that leaves you buzzing. What are you doing? Are you alone? In groups? A combination? What is your ideal weekly cadence? Is it a mix of live and virtual? High stakes and low key? When you design your perfect day off to spend alone, what are you doing? Why? Has this changed over time? Personally, I did this exercise at a moment when I felt irretrievably stuck in my job and unable to divine my next steps. What it revealed for me was that, while I love people, I dislike managing them. I had conflated the two for a long time, in part because of my preconceived notions of what career success looks like. When left to my own devices, Id rather spend my work time alone, and my personal time with people. That insight helped unlock new angles on my goals and needs going forward. Step 3: Seek out new inspiration The biggest limitation that many of us face in designing our own career path is simply a lack of imagination and inspiring examples. The further we go in one industry, company, or trajectory, the more entrenched we become in one version of how its done. So, as you spend time revisiting your past and becoming reacquainted with your desires, make sure to cast your networking reach wider to see what others are doing. Invite in new thinking, pay attention to other modes of working, and ask lots of questions. There are two great ways to get started: First, brainstorm. Think of people whose work lives and job situations you admire. Maybe its a solopreneur you know, or a friend who works in a field you covet, or someone who has achieved a work-life balance you always pined for. Reach out to these people. Ask them how they make it work, how they address the things you worry about most: money, rates, income, fluctuations. We are always constructing obstacles that stop us from pursuing big dreams. Your goal is to name those, then talk yourself through them by seeing how others have tackled these barriers. Second, turn to LinkedIn. Curate your feed. Find people who do the kind of work you might enjoy or secretly admire and follow them. Follow who they follow. Expand your universe with people in different fields or situations and engage with them in the comments, build relationships. Seek out advice from these people, too. Invite in new ways of thinking. It will be revealing, I promise. Step 4: Speak up at work and beyond As your aspirations and ideas become clearer, start putting your needs and wants in writing. Think about one step you can take to get you closer to where you want to head and start asking at work for a small but significant shift. Maybe to begin, you just need some space. Consider a relocation, or a change in work schedule. Maybe you need accommodations to work remotely more often, or you want to try a new project on the side to build a new skill set and pilot something. Ovr time, with each ask, youll get stronger at self-advocacy. Each time you challenge a rule thats been set or implied about what you can and cant have or do, you will increase your belief that you can design things in a way that works better for you. New surroundings For me, my first big change after nearly a decade in one job was to physically move. After my family relocated, I found it easier to dream of other things Id like to change, as if I had released myself from a fixed sense of who I was and what I could become. I also found myself getting less afraid to try things or ask for things that I had assumed I couldnt have. Step by step, I left my job, built my own business, started speaking more, and built a platform to write in a way Id always longed for. It didnt happen overnight. But with each step I regained my confidence in my instincts and found it easier to tap into what I want and need. Give it a try. Listen to yourself. Examine your past. Surround yourself with fresh thinking and people who believe in you. And start getting much more selfish at work. Maybe youll surprise yourself with where it leads you.
Category:
E-Commerce
Media portrayals of college life often show the dorm as a melting pot, where students from a diversity of backgrounds get thrown together to learn about life beyond the classroom. But the reality is that just one in five coeds in the U.S. today actually live on campus in such a setup. Many live off campus, a majority face significant affordability challenges, and stable student housing is far from a givenan ongoing crisis that threatens the achievement of higher education. An experiment in housing affordability, which turned a dilapidated motel into a new home for students, is a case study in building cheaper, more affordable student housing, and ideally an example of how to create a more equitable college experience. Recently opened in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, Abigail Court offers a new model for serving the significant population of college students in dire need of affordable housing. What was once a falling-apart motel has been remade into a series of 70 studio apartments with an airy common room and a brick-lined courtyard. It houses students from Mt. Hood Community College, Portland State University, and Portland Community College. Its the work of College Housing Northwest (CHNW), a Portland nonprofit focused on designing and building affordable, accessible spaces for students. For this 55-year-old nonprofit, Abigail Court became a new model for funding and creating a space thats better suited for students to study. [Photo: courtesy CHNW] As the nations college population began an upswing starting in the 1960s and 70s, due in large part to expanding access to more Americans from different economic backgrounds, the cost of collegeand especially housing near schoolbegan increasing as well. Room and board, the fastest-growing expense for students, can often be more than tuition, said Jim Rader, CHNWs executive director. There was an expectation when the organization started in the 60s that any college student had family support and didnt need to worry about housing costs. A 2025 report from Temple Universitys Hope Center, which studies challenges in college life, found that 48% of U.S. college students are experiencing housing insecurity today, with 14% having experienced homelessness. Student housing is also one part of the affordable housing puzzle that often doesnt get addressed, and its a crucial one, since enabling students to make it through to graduation helps them better their earning potential and access better housing later in life. According to Sara Goldrick-Rab, a sociologist and academic who studies college affordability, existing research clearly shows that housing access and affordability greatly improve educational outcomes for students. A multiyear study Goldrick-Rab ran in Tacoma, Washington, found that federal housing assistance for students not only increased their graduation rates but also improved their overall physical health; they had fewer emergency room visits, lower rates of food insecurity, and fewer interactions with police or law enforcement. Its a huge deal, Goldrick-Rab said. About 50% of college students are struggling with rent. [Photo: courtesy CHNW] Today, the nations colleges and universitiesincluding community colleges, which often draw more working-class and low-income studentshave begun to build out more dorms and housing meant to help close the gap, but institutions dont have the means to meet the scale of the challenge. Goldrick-Rab believes many institutions starting to build out housing simply arent experienced as developers or landlords. In addition, two of the nations more prominent affordable housing programsLIHTC, or the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which finances new housing construction, and Section 8, a voucher program to help assist with rental paymentsdont apply to college students. Along with a booming for-profit student housing industry (the surging sector of commercial real estate saw $8.5 billion in transactions last year alone), this lack of public funding has created a college housing market much like the larger rental market in the U.S.: lots of high-priced, market-rate options, a handful of highly subsidized units for those most in need, and a widening gap for those with low to middle-range incomes. CHNW was able to afford to do the Abigail Court project via an Oregon state program called Project Turnkey, which launched in 2020 to help create housing for Oregonians displaced by wildfires. Alex Wallace, a real estate manager at CHNW, heard about the program and decided to see if it might be applicable to college students. CHNW proposed to use funds to turn the Ponderosa Inn of Gresham, Oregon, into a new kind of student residence, and was awarded about $6 million from Project Turnkey to acquire the property. [Photo: courtesy CHNW] The nonprofit spent another $8 million to adaptively redevelop the lodging into modern student housing, which added up to about $112,000 per unit, less than half what Wallace estimates it would take to build a brand-ne dorm from scratch. The whole build-out, which took 18 months, opened last September with rent for a studio set at $915; its now 100% leased, and a state-funded rental assistance program helps 32 students pay functionally zero rent. In May, CHNW got approval to use state tax credits for affordable student housing, and hopes to use this ability to buy a 100-unit building near Portland State University that it can convert into a similar housing project. Hotels and motels of this size are great for small housing, Rader says. We go into these areas where theres a community college, its often in need of revitalization, and these renovations can help revitalize the community.
Category:
E-Commerce
As a proud Gen Xer, I remember that most of my college buddies and I had similar aspirations: land a full-time job, hope the hours werent too brutal, pay off our loans, maybe buy a car and, one day, a home. Now, as the CEO of a company with a growing Gen Z employee base, Ive found it fascinating to see how different their outlook is. This generation isnt interested in hustle culture if it doesnt lead to something meaningfulor sometimes, even if it does. As a growing number of studies show, the youngest cohort of professionals isnt focused on ownershipthey care more about access. Theyre not blindly chasing higher salaries or leadership roles. Those things still matter, but finding purpose in their work is just as important. Their ambitions may be different from mine at their age, but I dont disagree with them. In fact, I think its possible to find that elusive trifecta at work: money, meaning, and well-beingif leaders are paying attention. And increasingly, they have no choice. Gen Z cant be ignored; theyre the ultimate influencers. As Janet Truncale, global chair and chief executive officer at EY, puts it, Gen Z is like a gravitational force pulling all other generations into its orbit. Heres how leaders can embrace Gen Zs demand for purpose and flexibility at work. Give employees options for how to approach tasks When I entered the workforce, working remotely was virtually unheard of. For Gen Z, its nearly a baseline expectation. Many came of age during the era of digital nomadism. Some finished school entirely online. In short, Gen Z is used to a high degree of autonomy. Micromanaging simply wont work for this generation. When assigning work, consider delegating not just the task but the how as well. Trust employees to figure out the best way to meet objectives. For example, if a younger employee is tasked with a presentation, let them choose the formatslide deck, short video, or live demoinstead of prescribing every detail. If theyre emailing a client, let them use their voice, instead of insisting they imitate the boss (as long as theyre appropriately professional). This kind of trust builds confidence and sparks creativity. Whats more, it helps younger employees feel a sense of ownership over their work. Break hierarchies and keep communication open In the past, workflows followed a strict order, and expertise flowed from the top down. But at Jotform, weve seen firsthand that every generation brings unique value. Expecting new employees to listen but not be heard is not only outdated, its a disservice to your organization. Gen Z, for example, is fluent in tech and social media, whether theyre editing iPhone photos or explaining why Snapchat still matters. To harness their strengths, leaders should move away from rigid hierarchies and overly structured processesthese can lead to burnout and frustration. Instead, create space for two-way dialogue and cross-generational collaboration. Create open channels for communication, like all-hands meetings, online feedback forums, and AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions with leaders. When all voices are invited to contribute, weve found that innovation accelerates in the day-to-day. Focus more on outcomes, less on hours Rather than sticking to the traditional nine-to-fine for the sake of clocking 8 hours, Gen Z is focused on working smarter. One growing trend: microshifts. As outlined in a recent workforce report from business software provider Deputy, Gen Z is reshaping shift work through short, flexible blocks, typically six hours or less, that support more adaptable schedules. These slightly shorter shifts help employees juggle responsibilities like caregiving or ongoing education. Gen Z now accounts for 51.5% of all microshifters, and the majority say it improves their roles. It makes sense: when were able to manage outside responsibilities alongside work, were more energized, more present, less stressed, and less bogged down by busywork. You dont have to give employees total control over their schedulesa little flexibility goes a long way. At Jotform, our office hours are fairly traditional, but within that structure, employees are trusted to manage their time. If someone needs to step away for a personal obligation, they can shift their workday, as long as quality doesnt suffer. That kind of autonomy supports both productivity and well-being. Gen Z employees get the flexibility they want, and the company gets the focus, brainpower, and creativity it needs.
Category:
E-Commerce
Can we measure what is in our hearts and minds, and could it help us end wars any sooner? These are the questions that consume entrepreneur Shawn Guttman, a Canadian émigré who recently gave up his yearslong teaching position in Israel to accelerate a path to peaceusing an algorithm. Living some 75 miles north of Tel Aviv, Guttman is no stranger to the uncertainties of conflict. Over the past few months, miscalculated drone strikes and imprecise missile targetssome intended for larger citieshave occasionally landed dangerously close to his town, sending him to bomb shelters more than once. When something big happens, we can point to it and say, Right, that happened because five years ago we did A, B, and C, and look at its effect, he says over Google Meet from his office, following a recent trip to the shelter. Behind him, souvenirs from the 1979 Egypt-Israel and 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaties are visible. Im tired of that perspective. The startup he cofounded, Didi, is taking a different approach. Its aim is to analyze data across news outlets, political discourse, and social media to identify opportune moments to broker peace. Inspired by political scientist I. William Zartmans ripeness theory, the algorithmcalled the Ripeness Indexis designed to tell negotiators, organizers, diplomats, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) exactly when conditions are ripe to initiate peace negotiations, build coalitions, or launch grassroots campaigns. During ongoing U.S.-led negotiations over the war in Gaza, both Israel and Hamas have entrenched themselves in opposing bargaining positions. Meanwhile, Israels traditional allies, including the U.S., have expressed growing frustration over the war and the dire humanitarian conditions in the enclave, where the threat of famine looms. In Israel, Didis data is already informing grassroots organizations as they strategize which media outlets to target and how to time public actions, such as protests, in coordination with coalition partners. Guttman and his collaborators hope that eventually negotiators will use the models insights to help broker lasting peace. Guttmans project is part of a rising wave of so-called PeaceTecha movement using technology to make negotiations more inclusive and data-driven. This includes AI from Hala Systems, which uses satellite imagery and data fusion to monitor ceasefires in Yemen and Ukraine. Another AI startup, Remesh, has been active across the Middle East, helping organizations of all sizes canvas key stakeholders. Its algorithm clusters similar opinions, giving policymakers and mediators a clearer view of public sentiment and division. A range of NGOs and academic researchers have also developed digital tools for peacebuilding. The nonprofit Computational Democracy Project created Pol.is, an open-source platform that enables citizens to crowdsource outcomes to public debates. Meanwhile, the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies built a peace agreement simulator, complete with a chart to track how well each stakeholders needs are met. Guttman knows its an uphill battle. In addition to the ethical and privacy concerns of using AI to interpret public sentiment, PeaceTech also faces financial hurdles. These companies must find ways to sustain themselves amid shrinking public funding and a transatlantic surge in defense spending, which has pulled resources away from peacebuilding initiatives. Still, Guttman and his investors remain undeterred. One way to view the opportunity for PeaceTech is by looking at the economic toll of war. In its Global Peace Index 2024, the Institute for Economics and Peaces Vision of Humanity platform estimated that economic disruption due to violence and the fear of violence cost the world $19.1 trillion in 2023, or about 13 percent of global GDP. Guttman sees plenty of commercial potential in times of peace as well. Can we make billions of dollars, Guttman asks, and save the worldand create peace? The Ripeness Index Every evening, Didis bots scrape the websites of 60 Israeli and 30 Palestinian media outlets, digesting keywords into its Ripeness Index model. The index, a colorful radar chart resembling a digital version of the vintage puzzle game Simon, aims to distill the complex dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian social unrest into simple categories. These categories indicate when the time may be right to push for peace through grassroots messaging and diplomatic activity. If the center of the index is red, it signals that conditions are not yet ripe for negotiations. In such cases, messaging efforts should focus on shifting the surrounding red sections of the model to yellow. Yellow indicates that both sides are beginning to recognize that the costs of continuing the conflict outweigh the benefits. The Ripeness Index scans news media to indicate when the conditions to start negotiations are met. In early May, Guttman and his cofounder, Keren Winter-Dinur, a doctoral student in conflict resolution, worked with a team of developers to put the system through its biggest test to date. The occasion was the annual Peoples Peace Summit in Jerusalem. This years summit was organized by the Its Time coalitiona network of dozens of grassroots organizations seeking solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflictand brought together 15,000 attendees from peace-focused groups on both sides of the border. Many of the summits events are talking about, Hey, Israelis, learn about and understand what Palestinians are going through, Guttman says. See the other. The ripeness theory of negotiation, first introduced by Zartman in 1989, proposes that conflicts become ripe for resolution when two conditions are met. The first is the experience of a mutually hurting stalemate, where both sides are suffering and see no viable, unilateral path to a satisfactory outcome. The second is that both parties perceive a way out of the conflict. At this moment of ripeness, the door to negotiation opens. Political scientist I. William Zartman (top right), now in his nineties, endorsed the ipeness Index, developed by Didi cofounders Keren Winter-Dinur (top left) and Shawn Guttman. More recently, as big datasets around conflict resolution have become more easily available, researchers have tried to quantitatively validate Zartmans theory on past diplomatic negotiations. Still, quantitative studies around ripeness theory remain limited. When they launched Didi in 2022, Guttman and Winter-Dinur began by testing their Ripeness Index model on a different conflict: the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the years leading up to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. After scraping a decades worth of speeches from the U.K. Parliament, the team found that support for negotiated peace increased on both sides just before key political partnerships formed, while support for continuing armed struggle diminished. Then October 7th happened. Guttman and Winter-Dinur knew they needed to pivot to Israel’s war. They began localizing their training database in Hebrew and Arabic and started scraping regional news. Their dataset now extends back to September 26, 2023. I said, Lets jump into the deep waters and see how we do, Guttman recalls. As it scans the news media, the bot tracks specific terms associated with each section of the Ripeness Index, such as confident in winning or willingness to compromise. At the bottom of the dashboard, graphs plot the frequency of flagged keywords in Israeli and Arabic news outlets over time, aligned with the models criteria. For the Its Time coalition, the model also tracks mentions of affiliated organizations, such as the pro-peace group Women Wage Peace and a recent Israeli-Palestinian memorial gathering. Guttman believes grassroots organizations should be using this data every day to spread pro-peace messaging to the public, alongside documentation of wartime atrocities, and to challenge the belief that military victory is necessary. We should be moving as fast as the news cycle moves, he says. The large timeline view lets users explore Didis full dataset. One promising signal came in January, at the start of a two-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, when Guttman and his team observed a surge in Israeli sentiment toward compromise. According to the theory, that moment of ripeness was what gave the Israeli political echelon the legitimacy and the support to say, Okay, we’re going to have a ceasefire, we’re going to give humanitarian aid, we’re going to exchange Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages, Guttman says. But that sentiment declined soon after and dropped sharply in March. That same month, citing stalled ceasefire negotiations, Israel resumed its ground war in Gaza. Guttman interprets the public shift as a response to the perceived failure of political efforts to secure the return of Israeli hostages. Then, in the week leading up to the Peoples Peace Summit in early May, the model determined that both Israeli and Palestinian publics saw a potential way out of the war. Still, the moment was not yet ripe for negotiations. On the left side of the index, the confident in winning and impossibility of winning sections had yet to shift into the green zone. Individual graphs show timelines of keyword counts in the news media, grouped by two conditions in Zartmans ripeness theory: mutually hurting stalemate and way out. Alongside the insights Didi gathers from the news media, the Its Time coalition also has been collecting data from social media platforms, including Facebook and X. Social media sentiment analysis is on Didis road map as well, but Guttman and Winter-Dinur caution against using it as a source of ground truth. Guttman and his team are still learning the limitations of their own data, too. Manual validation is important because the AI still misclassifies news articles. And Guttman admits that the models capabilities in Arabic are not yet as good as they are in Hebrew, a problem future datasets will address, he says. What could go wrong? The companys mix of AI and big data will also need to win over skeptics in the world of diplomacy. One concern is that relying on historical data to make predictions and inform decision-making could lead to a repetition of past mistakes. Most of the time, any kind of prediction work, machine-enabled or human-enabled, is going wrong, says Martin Wählisch, associate professor of transformative technologies, innovation, and global affairs at the University of Birmingham. The representativeness of data is a major challenge for PeaceTech, says Wählisch, who founded his own startup in the space, Office for Dreams, which combines digital tools with creative strategies to facilitate decision-making. The currency is the data inflow, he says. Last month, Wählisch joined an interdisciplinary group of technologists, researchers, and peacebuilders at the Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development to define a vision for AI use in large-scale deliberation processes. One system, built at Googles DeepMind, uses large language models to assist with the mediation process itself. In experiments with more than 5,000 participants in the U.K., researchers found the system, named after the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas, outperformed untrained human mediators, with 56% of participants preferring AI-generated statements over human ones. The tool also increased group agreement by about 8 percentage points and incorporated minority views. However, the researchers noted, AI-assisted deliberation is not without its risks. . . . Steps must be taken to ensure users are representative of the target population and are prepared to contribute in good faith. Still, many of these efforts are swimming upstream at a moment when defense startups are seeing increased focus and funding amid surging military budgets. According to Bloomberg, private investors have already spent around $790 million on defense this year. Compare that figure to the investing trend in the past two decades, when private equity spending on defense reached $1 billion in nly five of those years. Private investment in PeaceTech is still nascent. Peacebuilding startups have traditionally been supported by government grants and donors, but these are harder to find now. The U.S. Agency for International Developments Development Innovation Ventures, for instance, typically funded startups like Didi, until it was shuttered by the Trump administration. Didis angel investor, B Ventures Group, exclusively funds tech firms with peacebuilding applications. Other PeaceTech investors include Peaceinvest, which focuses on local, pro-peace projects, and Kluz Ventures, which runs the annual Kluz Prize for PeaceTech. Two years ago, Didi won a Kluz Prize, which came with a $20,000 cash award recognizing the companys achievements in machine learning. Peacebuilding has traditionally been seen as the domain of nonprofits and governments, not a space for venture capital, Brian Abrams, founder and managing partner of B Ventures Group, wrote in a March essay. At the same time, this type of opportunity has been associated with impact investing and lower returns, a trade-off many venture investors are unwilling to make. But PeaceTech challenges those assumptions, offering a model that prioritizes both profit and purpose. Pursuing profits means presenting PeaceTech as useful outside of conflict zones too, the way defense firms typically diversify their business with the sale of dual-use technologies. Palantir, for instanceknown for the AI-powered data tools it sells to military and immigration authoritiesalso works for Fortune 500 companies and develops tools for humanitarian purposes. After its software was used to facilitate Ukrainian refugee assistance, the company was awarded a special distinction by the Kluz Prize for PeaceTech in 2023, the same year Didi won its award. We need to expand the current dual-use framing of technologycivilian and militaryto a triple-use paradigm that includes peace as a third pillar, Artur Kluz, founder and CEO of Kluz Ventures, and Stefaan Verhulst, a research professor at New York University, wrote in a recent Fast Company op-ed. This would mean structuring investments in a way that not only supports battlefield advantage and economic competitiveness, but also actively contributes to conflict prevention, mediation, and resolution. Abrams sees many commercial opportunities in Didis tool: Imagine a private equity firm using the Ripeness Index to time its mergers and acquisitions perfectly, or a public relations firm tuning its crisis management messaging just right. Recent estimates gauge the market size for public opinion and election polling at $8.93 billion in 2025. In any scenario, developers and entrepreneurs must be mindful about the use of personal data, says Abrams. PeaceTech begins, I think, with Hippocratic guardrails. First, do no harm. Make sure the technology is contributing toward peace and not in any way being used for anything counterproductive, he says. That concern is heightened by the use of AI for political influence. Governments throughout history have sought to monitor and police public sentiment during times of war and peace. More recently, governments have used artificial intelligence to identify people for deportation and arrest, sometimes wrongfully. The expanding use of AI and data analysis tools to police social media accounts, and the increasing use of large language models (with their tendency to fabricate), exacerbates these risks. Algorithms already purport to track what millions of people are thinking, but there are few ways of knowing if those are correct. The true test of AI in diplomacy will not be whether it can pass the Turing test, but whether it can contribute to a more cooperative, stable, and just international order, writes Erman Akilli, professor of international relations at Ankaras Hac Bayram Veli University, in a blog post for the SETA Foundation for Political Economic and Social Research. He urges policymakers to regulate the use of AI in diplomacy to prevent the tech from being exploited for strategic manipulation or coercion. Promising trends Two days before the Peoples Peace Summit, Guttman noticed anomalies in the trends he had been seeing in the previous few weeks. Willingness to compromise had been on the uptick, but the double-whammy of Israels Memorial Day and Independence Day events had a notable impact on public sentiment. Everything leading up to Memorial Day and Independence Day, the way that people were talking was very much pro-military: remembering soldiers who died, remembering these tragic stories of heroism and so on, Guttman says. The confident in winning line started to rise, reflecting a perception that a military solution to war is still possible. In this timeline view, events surrounding Israels Memorial Day and Independence Day are superimposed. Meanwhile, the hurt measure in the Ripeness Index has remained green, as it has been for most of the war, reflecting the public sentiment that the price of war is too high. Despite that high price, Guttman says, many Israelis appear to believe that there’s nothing to do but pay it and keep fighting because the military can win. A very big victory would be increasing the sentiment in Israeli society that we can’t win the war militarily, he says. As the U.S. attempts to broker a new cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamasand as Israel launches a new war against Iranthe Didi team has been tracking a sudden, upward spike in the “Confident in Winning” indicator. More recently, Guttman and his team have offered a new recommendation to the Its Time Coalition and its partners as they push for peace: Link the high cost of war with the fact that military resources are limited and military options will eventually run out. In general, a missing element in Israeli discourse has been the connection between the feeling that the price of this war [in Gaza] is too high with the sentiment that we have exhausted our military options, says Guttman. Making this connection could create a tipping point in Israel discourse that pushes the Ripeness Index to yellow.
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