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Weve spent decades building frameworks to help people lead teams: courses, certifications, coaching, culture decks. All aimed at shaping better managers of humans. But thats no longer enough. Because for many workers, their first report wont be a person. Itll be an agent. In June BNY Mellon onboarded 1,000 digital workers while JPMorgan Chase is building AI teams at scale. This isnt theoretical. The new direct reports are already clocked in and they dont need coffee, feedback, or PTO. The problem? Most organizations are still running on legacy management models built for human hierarchies and not set up to manage machines. Leading humans versus governing agents When you manage people, you guide behavior. You motivate, delegate, coach, and course correct. Its a loop built on trust and conversation. When you manage an AI, none of that applies. You dont coach a model. You govern it. You define inputs, monitor outputs, escalate issues, and answer for the consequences. And you do that in real time. In AI-led teams, leadership is less about motivation and more about judgment. The ability to assess, adjust, and act across decision chains is what separates performance from liability. Its knowing what good looks like. Its catching the drift, asking the right question before the system generates the wrong answer, and being accountable for outcomes, even when you didnt directly produce them. The HR model is out of sync HR isnt ready for this shift. Most performance frameworks still assume linear paths, human reports, and long-term role tenure. But digital agents break that logic. They dont climb ladders. They execute tasks. They can outperform junior staff one day and be outpaced by a new model the next. You dont manage their growth. You manage the conditions in which they operate. That shift puts pressure on organizational design itself. Hierarchies built for human oversight dont hold when decision loops involve systems acting faster than approvals can be processed. That means rethinking how we define productivity, collaboration, and leadership. It means building new metrics for how human employees interact with agents, not just what they produce on their own. Are they designing good prompts? Are they escalating ethical concerns? Are they reviewing outputs critically or rubber-stamping them? These are the new leadership signals. Most performance reviews arent built to detect them. Prompting is a leadership act Prompting isnt a technical skill; its a management one. The way you frame a prompt shapes what an agent does. Vague prompts lead to vague results. Biased prompts produce biased outcomes. And poor prompting isnt just inefficient. It can become a legal or reputational risk. Yet most companies treat prompting like its keyboard wizardry. Something for the engineers or the AI power users. Thats a mistake. Everyone managing agents, from interns to executives, needs to learn how to design clear, intentional instructions. Because prompts are decisions in disguise, shaped by where they sit in the organizational context and why theyre being made. The ethics chain is breaking In traditional teams, ethics and escalation follow a chain of command. Something goes wrong, someone flags it, and a manager gets involved. But with agents acting independently and often invisibly, the chain breaks. You cant escalate what you dont notice. And too often, companies havent defined what ethical escalation looks like when the actor is synthetic. Whos accountable when an AI produces a discriminatory recommendation? Or leaks sensitive information? Or makes a decision a human wouldnt? If your answer is the tech team, youre not ready. Governance cant sit in the back office. It needs to be built into team workflows. The best companies are training their people to pause, question and report, not just accept what the system spits out. Chain of thought and chain of reasoning arent just cognitive tricks. Theyre how human teams will spot drift, bias, and breakpoints in the AI value chain. And that skillset is only going to grow in importance. The bottom line AI wont replace all managers, but it will redefine what management means. Leading agents demands flexing a different muscle and most organizations havent trained for it. This isnt about replacing soft skills with hard skills, but rather its replacing passive management with active stewardship: less people-pleasing and more decision accountability, fewer status meetings and more escalation pathways. Managing machines still means leading people. But the people you lead need new tools, new rules, and a different playbook. The companies that get this right wont be the ones with the flashiest tech. Theyll be the ones that know how to change the game by managing what theyve built.
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E-Commerce
Child care costs are growing. Access is declining. But small businesses aren’t too concerned about the impact on business. The National Federation of Independent Business recently released its quadrennial report on the most pressing problems for small-business owners in the U.S. For the first time, it asked about the “cost and availability of child care,” which owners ranked as their 66th most pressing concern of the 75 assessed. Moreover, only 7% of small-business owners considered the problem “critical,” and 40% didn’t consider it a problem at all. This might be surprising, considering that child care costs increased 32% for American households from 2019 to 2023, and the share of parents without access to child care grew from 17.7% at the end of 2023 to 22.2%in the early months of 2024. But as Holly Wade, executive director of the NFIB Research Center, says, the results suggest that the problem is relatively limited in scope right now, at least in the eyes of business owners: “For some employers, they’re able to work around child care issues fairly easily, accommodate scheduling conflicts — [so it doesn’t rise] to the level of issues, for instance, like the cost of health insurance.” Indeed, in the NFIB report, health insurance costs ranked at the top of small-business owners’ concerns, as it has since 1986. The costs of supplies and inventories, economic uncertainty, and federal taxes were among other top issues for owners this year. Plus, if businesses have a “younger demographic of employees or an industry that has higher turnover [or] seasonal employment,” child care issues might not be a pain point for them at all, Wade adds. Other recent reports, however, still indicate that these pressures are impacting workforces. 29% of job switchers identified a lack of child care benefits as their top motivation in looking for another job, according to a 2024 report from Care.com. Women’s labor force participation is now lagging compared to pre-pandemic levels — and taking care of “the home or family” is the primary reason mothers are not working, according to the Pew Research Center. And as Inc. previously reported, there are still small-business owners who already believe that a lack of child care is negatively impacting their business — even if it may not be their top concern. By Sarah Lynch This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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E-Commerce
From Wall Street to Main Street, this week was packed with major business moves. There were big market debuts, tough earnings reports, and updates that show how quickly some industries are shifting. New companies made a strong entrance, established players faced some hard numbers, and key sectorseverything from housing to transportationsaw important changes. Taken together, this weeks news offered a picture of how businesses are adapting to a quickly changing economy and what that looks like right now on the ground. Here are the weeks biggest stories. Figma IPO Surges Past Expectations The collaborative design software company priced its IPO at $33 per share, well above expectations, and surged to $109 in its first hours of trading. Its $44 billion market cap makes it one of the years biggest tech debuts. Figmas IPO didnt just light up the stock marketit also minted a new class of billionaires. Cofounder and CEO Dylan Field now has an estimated net worth of $1.8 billion from his holdings, with the potential for another $1.3 billion in stock if FIG hits $130 per share. Zillows housing market report reveals hot and cold spots Zillow economists see a cooling housing market ahead. In its latest 12-month forecast released this week, the company projects U.S. home prices will fall 1% between June 2025 and June 2026, with a steeper 2% drop expected for the full calendar year. Rochester, New York, ranks as the nations hottest sellers market, while Jackson, Tennessee, tops the list of buyer-friendly areas. The U.S. market overall sits in neutral, with a national score of 52. Nissan reports $782 million loss Japanese automaker Nissan sank into a $782 million loss for April through June, but promised Wednesday it would return to profitability later this year. The automaker’s sales slipped 10% over the last quarter. CEO Ivan Espinosa outlined aggressive cost-cutting measures, including closing a flagship plant and slashing 20,000 jobs. SNAP cuts threaten thousands of grocery stores Reductions to SNAP benefits in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act could devastate small grocers in low-income areas, where up to 70% of sales depend on the program. According to the National Grocers Association (NGA), which represents independent community grocers across the United States, as well as their wholesalers, roughly 12% of grocery store payments currently come from SNAP. Citi Strata Elite Targets High-End Cardholders Citi reentered the premium card space this week with a $595-a-year offering featuring travel credits, lounge passes, and up to 12 times the rewards on bookings. The new card is designed to directly compete with Chases Sapphire Reserve card and the Platinum Card from American Expressboth of which have recently announced new features, fees, and revamps. Spain rescues Thirty Meter telescope Spain pledged $470 million and a new site in La Palma to revive the stalled Thirty Meter Telescope project after U.S. budget cuts pulled support. Faced with the risk of this major international scientific project being halted, the Government of Spain has decided to act with renewed commitment to science and major scientific infrastructures for the benefit of global knowledge, Diana Morant, Spains minister of science, innovation, and universities said about the potential acquisition. Union Pacific Pursues $85 Billion Merger A proposed acquisition of Norfolk Southern by Union Pacific would create a coast-to-coast freight rail network for the first time, connecting 43 states and 100 ports. The Surface Transportation Board (STB) will review the agreement after the companies file their application to mergesomething they say they plan to do within the next six months. Cinemark expands panoramic ScreenX theaters Cinemark is trying to lure audiences back into movie theaters. The company is rolling out 18 new ScreenX venues by 2026, featuring a 270-degree panoramic viewing experience. The deal expands Cinemarks existing partnership with South Korea-based CJ 4DPlex to a total of 26 Cinemark theaters. Rite Aid to close most pharmacies by mid-August As part of its bankruptcy process, Rite Aid will shut down nearly all remaining pharmacies by the end of next month, transferring prescriptions to other local providers. MLB prepares for record-breaking game The Braves and Reds will face off this weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway in front of more than 85,000 fans, the largest crowd in Major League Baseball history. The event, dubbed the MLB Speedway Classic, will mark the first MLB game ever played in the state.
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E-Commerce
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