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Getting away from work to go on a vacation? Great! Returning to work after said vacation? Not so great. Few people enjoy being welcomed by a maxed-out inbox and a list of decisions they missed. Work is very noisy right now, and it moves real fast, says Smita Hashim, chief product officer for Zoom. There are so many messages flying around and constant meetings. Its easy to understand the fear of coming back. According to a survey by MyBioSource, 80% of participants experience post-PTO burnout, and 42% dread going back to work after taking time off. It can almost leave you questioning whether that trip to the beach was worth it. Fortunately, AI can help ease your reentry by streamlining the catchup process. Before You Go Preparing to leave often means handing off projects to coworkers who may not be familiar with the details. Andrew Reece, chief AI scientist at the coaching platform BetterUp, recommends leveraging AI to get others up to speed on your projects. Set up an AI-generated PTO handover, he says. Auto-summarize project status and key contacts for team members that will cover you while youre gone. The more prepared they are, the less youll worry while away. Before you leave, Raju Dandigam, engineering manager at the travel management platform Navan, also recommends setting up messaging filters like Superhuman and Gmail Smart Labels and Outlook’s AI categorization system. Enable email tagging based on criteria such as project or priority level. When I return to work, I encounter five to six relevant summary groups instead of facing a 1,200-email unmanageable wall, he says. Some platforms use AI to create brief summaries which appear at the beginning of messages thus saving users from lengthy scrolling and message interpretation. If you or your workplace hasnt done so already, Mo Nasir, co-founder and CEO of General Aency AI at Tessa AI, recommends setting up and running a notetaker for video calls like fireflies.ai. Transcripts can be fed into ChatGPT in order to summarize the latest developments since your departure, he says. Or check if your video conferencing tool has a built-in AI companion. For example, Zoom has an AI Companion, a generative AI assistant. While Youre Gone Help AI do its job by truly leaving work behind. That means disconnecting fully and not checking any messages while on vacation. While it sounds counterintuitive, it reduces stress upon returning because all your messages will be tagged as unread, says Nasir. [Anything you open] clears the unread badge, and it’s easy to forget to turn it back on, he explains. The unread message queue is rather convenient for keeping track of any unprocessed messages or emails. Once Youre Back In areas with a lot of volume, such as team chat platforms or meeting transcripts, an AI assistant can summarize what happened when you were gone. After returning from PTO, Hashim will review her calendar for the important meetings she missed. She enters prompts, such as What are the top points that were discussed in this meeting? or Was my name mentioned? or Were there any action items for me? It gets the stress out of the important meetings right away, she says. I can see if I missed anything critical. Same goes for messaging. In team chat messages, Hashim will ask the AI assistant to Catch me up on what happened in the last seven days. What are the most recent messages in [a specific thread?] or Were there any action items for me? You can also quickly search for messages from important people, such as your boss or the company CEO. Then, I scan through, she says. If I see something interesting, I will dig in further. If it’s not interesting, I know I can move on because I have a very broad preview. Dandigam says the Slack AI Assistant monitors essential channels and prepares a daily summary report in a private log. After my absence I receive a concise summary of decisions and blockers and changes that occurred during my time off through Slack, he says. My anxiety decreases through this method which enables me to start meetings with self-assurance. Nasir recommends catching up on email by using AI-powered email management, such as Superhuman, Fyxer.ai, or simply using Gemini via Google’s recently released version. I personally sort my inbound email into three categories: notification, response required, and action required, he says. Response required is when an email is asking me for information that is readily available, and action required is when the email is telling me to do something. Finally, spam or people trying to sell me things are generally ignored. An AI assistant like Beesly.ai can do the same with your voicemails, providing summaries of the messages, which are quicker and easier to review than taking time to listen to the individual recordings. And when it comes to project documents, Dandigam uses tools like Notion AI or Google Workspace AI integration to receive a brief summary. What changed? What was decided? and Whats still pending? are my go-to questions, he says. Hashim says AIs capabilities dont need to be only leveraged after time off. Catch me up can happen if you step out to take your kid to a doctor’s appointment, or if you are 10 minutes late to a meeting, she says. It helps people feel so much better, rather than having to interrupt and ask. Its foundational to how people manage their stress and how they actually show up.
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E-Commerce
If you’re a designer looking for work, where should you live? That depends entirely on the kind of designer you are. Fast Company crunched the data to show you where the opportunities really are.
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E-Commerce
One stock recently impacted by a whirlwind of volatility is Blockthe fintech powerhouse behind Square, Cash App, Tidal Music, and more. The companys COO and CFO, Amrita Ahuja, shares how her team is using new AI tools to find opportunity amid disruption and reach customers left behind by traditional financial systems. Ahuja also shares lessons from the video game industry and discusses Gen Zs surprising approach to money management. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. As a leader, when youre looking at all of this volatilitythe tariffs, consumer sentiment’s been unclear, the stock market’s been all over the place. You guys had a huge one-day drop in early May, and it quickly bounced back. How do you make sense of all these external factors? Yeah, our focus is on what we can control. And ultimately, the thing that we are laser-focused on for our business is product velocity. How quickly can we start small with something, launch something for our customers, and then test and iterate and learn so that ultimately, that something that we’ve launched scales into an important product? I’ll give you an example. Cash App Borrow, which is a product where our customers can get access to a line of credit, often $100, $200, that bridges them from paycheck to paycheck. We know so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That’s a product that we launched about three years ago and have now scaled to serve 9 million actives with $15 billion in credit supply to our customers in a span of a couple short years. The more we can be out testing and launching product at a pace, the more we know we are ultimately delivering value to our customers, and the right things will happen from a stock perspective. Block is a financial services provider. You have Square, the point-of-sale system; the digital wallet Cash App, which you mentioned, which competes with Venmo and Robinhood; and a bunch of others. Then you’ve got the buy-now, pay-later leader Afterpay. You chair Square Financial Services, which is Block’s chartered bank. But you’ve said that in the fintech world, Block is only a little bit finthat comparatively, it’s more tech. Can you explain what you mean by that? What we think is unique about us is our ability as a technology company to completely change innovation in the space, such that we can help solve systemic issues across credit, payments, commerce, and banking. What that means ultimately is we use technologies like AI and machine learning and data science, and we use these technologies in a unique way, in a way that’s different from a traditional bank. We are able to underwrite those who are often frankly forgotten by the traditional financial ecosystems. Our Square Loans product has almost triple the rate of women-owned businesses that we underwrite. Fifty-eight percent of our loans go to women-owned businesses versus 20% for the industry average. For that Cash App Borrow product I was talking about, 70% of those actives, the 9 million actives that we underwrote, fell below 580 as a FICO score. That’s considered a poor FICO score, and yet 97% of repayments are made on time. And this is because we have unique access to data and these technology and tools which can help us uniquely underwrite this often forgotten customer base. Yeah. I mean, creditsometimes it’s been blamed for financial excesses. But access to credit is also, as you say, an advantage that’s not available to everyone. Do you have a philosophy between those polesbetween risk and opportunity? Or is what you’re saying is that the tech you have allows you to avoid that risk? That’s right. Let’s start with how do the current systems work? It works using inferior data, frankly. It’s more limited data. It’s outdated. Sometimes it’s inaccurate. And it ignores things like someone’s cash flows, the stability of your income, your savings rate, how money moves through your accounts, or how you use alternative forms of creditlike buy now, pay later, which we have in our ecosystem through Afterpay. We have a lot of these signals for our 57 million monthly actives on the Cash App side and for the 4 million small businesses on the Square side, and those, frankly, billions of transaction data points that we have on any given day paired with new technologies. And we intend to continue to be on the forefront of AI, machine learning, and data science to be able to empower more people into the economy. The combination of the superior data and the technologies is what we believe ultimately helps expand access. You have a financial background, but not in the financial services industry. Before Block, you were a video game developer at Activision. Are financial businesses and video games similar? Are there things that are similar about them? There are. There actually are some things that are similar, I will say. There are many things that are unique to each industry. Each industry is incredibly complex. You find that when big technology companies try to do gaming. They’ve taken over the world in many different ways, but they can’t always crack the nut on putting out a great game. Similarly, some of the largest technology companies have dabbled in fintech but haven’t been able to go as deep, so they’re both very nuanced and complex industries. I would say another similarity is that design really matters. Industrial design, the design of products, the interface of products, is absolutely mission-critical to a great game, and it’s absolutely mission-critical to the simplicity and accessibility of our products, be it on Square or Cash App. And then maybe the third thing that I would say is that when I was in gaming, at least the business models were rapidly changing from an intermediary distribution mechanism, like releasing a game once and then selling it through a retailer, to an always-on, direct-to-consumer connection. And similarly with banking, people don’t want to bank from 9 to 5, six days a week. They want 24/7 access to their money and the ability to, again, grow their financial livelihood, move their money around seamlessly. So, some similarities are there in that shift to an intermediary model or a slower model to an always-on, direct-to-consumer connection. Part of your target audience or your target customer base at Block are Gen Z folks. Did you learn things at Activision about Gen Z that has been useful? Are there things that businesses misunderstand about younger generations still? What we’ve learned is that Gen Z, millennial customers, aren’t going to do things the way their parents did. Some of our stats show that 63% of Gen Z customers have moved away from traditional credit cards, and over 80% are skeptical of them. Which means they’re not using a credit card to manage expenses; they’re using a debit card, but then layering on on a trnsaction-by-transaction basis. Or again, using tools like buy now, pay later, or Cash App Borrow, the means in which they’re managing their consistent cash flows. So that’s an example of how things are changing, and you’ve got to get up to speed with how the next generation of customers expects to manage their money.
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E-Commerce
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