Across the country, solopreneurship is taking off. People are starting their own, one-person businesses in droves. But when it comes to who is doing all of this solopreneuring (yes, it’s a word), one-woman businesses are gaining more traction.
More women are starting their own businesses than everwhether solo or with employees. According to May 2025 data from small business platform Gusto, in the last five years, there’s been a huge leap in just how many women left their jobs to start their own business. In 2019, just 29% of new businesses were started by women. By 2024, that number was 49%. Moreover, over half (52%) of solopreneurs in the U.S. are now women.
So, why are women so interested in steering their own ships? According to the May 2025 Gusto report, women crave a sense of autonomy. Almost three-quarters of women who started businesses in 2024 said they did so to have control over their own schedules. Likewise, 71% said they wanted to be their own boss. Meanwhile, men were more likely to cite earning more money as an incentive than women, with 35% pointing to increasing their income as a driving force compared to 29% of women.
Female solopreneurs aren’t uninterested in money, but they do seem to deeply value making their own decisions at work. That’s true for Ana Beig, a mix-media artist and retreat host based in Austin, Texas. She tells Fast Company that autonomy isn’t just important. It’s “a condition for doing meaningful work.” For starters, she says that’s because her environment is deeply impactful when it comes to how she’s able to show up to create every day.
She adds that while financial incentives do matter, they are far from what drives her to stay committed to her solo work. “I was drawn to solopreneurship because it lets me integrate work with life rather than constantly negotiating between the two. I can choose how I structure my time, how I engage emotionally, and what kinds of relationships I build through my work,” she explains.
For Gigi Robison, a solopreneur with a chronic illness, who helps creators and thought leaders build brands, and was recently named one of Gen Z’s leading voices in the creator economy, becoming a solopreneur was all about having autonomy. She says having control over her work schedule enables to put her energy exactly where she needs to and to structure her day in a way that works for her life. It also enables her to redefine “success beyond someone elses version of productivity.”
Before she started her own ventures, she says she didn’t feel as if her time was nearly as well-spent. “In a traditional job, I often felt like I was spending more time proving my value than actually creating value,” she explains. “In solopreneurship, I get to focus on outcomes, impact, and building something that lasts.”
There are plenty of good reasons why so many people are starting their own businessesand doing it solo. But for women, who may be more heavily impacted by power dynamics at work, running your own operation may be a reprieve from office dynamics. According to one recent study from the University of Georgia, even women who were leaders felt constrained by gender dynamics at work. That means that womeneven those who successfully climbed the corporate laddermay still not feel a sense of autonomy.
For womenwho earn less on the dollar than men, are promoted less often than men, and, according to new research, less interested in promotionssolopreneurship may offer a way to build a future without having to deal with the thorny gender dynamics of corporate life. For women solopreneurs, freedom is the real draw. And it’s one that’s catching on.
There is a type of business story that has become nearly cliché: A legacy brand is facing stagnating growth. Loyal customers are aging out, and new customers arent taking their place. So the brand reinvents itself to pull in a younger segment of the market, often by borrowing ideas from cooler competitors to seem more on-trend.
But instead of younger and cooler, the rebrand comes off as insincere, stilted, or cringey. Worse, the brands older, core customers, who liked the brand as it was, are irritated by the changes. Instead of spurring new growth, the effort drives off some of the existing customers, leaving the brand worse off than when it started.
This is the recent story of The Bachelor television franchise. After a two-year hiatus, ABCs dating show returned this summer, having made changes that were designed to appeal to a younger audience. The updated Bachelor in Paradise cribbed from Love Island, its primary rival in the competitive-dating-in-bathing-suits genre, and a show beloved by the younger audiences The Bachelor wanted to attract.
The changes included an aggressive, quick-cut editing style and the introduction of a cash prize for the winners. Younger consumers werent drawn to the new format, but previously loyal fans panned the changes in online forums, suggesting the show should have included a seizure warning. Both the ratings and viewership numbers for this season hit historic lows.
Cracker Barrels recent woes also fit this pattern. Its traditionalist segment of 65-plus diners was dwindling, leading the brand to try attracting new, younger customers by updating the interiors and changing the logo. It is not clear that the changes brought in those younger diners in significant numbers. But the changes did produce an exhaustively dissected backlash from its loyal customer base, for whom, it turned out, nostalgia was a significant part of the Cracker Barrel appeal.
Meanwhile, JCPs major reinvention more than a decade ago was also driven, in part, by trying to attract younger customers with its elimination of deep discounts in favor of everyday low pricing. But the move was far more successful in driving away its older loyalists, who loved hunting for those deals. Lands’ End tried to lure in younger customers when it introduced a high-fashion line and edgier branding. Instead, they went from profits of $9M to losses of nearly $8M within a year.
The desire to attract younger customers made sense for all these brands. But they each fell into the same trap: They assumed they could make changes to their offerings and branding to attract new customers without having to worry about how their current customers might react to those changes. The stewards of these brands forgot that different people want different things from the brands that serve them.
While there are times when young and old consumers both want the same things from their brands, the fact is, younger customers and older customers also frequently want different things. Changing a brand to make it more appealing to younger customers may (or may not) draw in those younger customersbut it may also accidentally displease the older customers who like the brand just the way it is.
In our book, The Growth Dilemma, Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025), we identify a few key strategies brands can use to manage the risk of conflict between customer segments as they grow. Here are three:
1. Create different spaces for different audiences
One strategy involves carving out separate spaces within a brandeither conceptual or physicalfor different customer segments. For example, many brands use multiple social media handles to communicate to different segments. Timberland has different Instagram channels for its blue-collar worker segment and its fashion segment. Starbucks has different store formats catering to those who value Starbucks as a place to get a quick and convenient coffee on-the-go (kiosk and drive-through locations), and those who value Starbucks as a place to work and socialize (its third place lounge locations).
Some brands diffuse potential conflict between customers by creating separate gated communities within the brand that cater to different customer segments. Historically, Nike was great at creating sport-specific communities that were each distinct within the Nike brand. Nike basketball customers had different products, apps, advertising, and experiences than Nike runners, tennis players, or sneakerheads.
Some brands create a hierarchy among their customer base, allowing a status separation among customers. This is a common path for many fashion brands that serve segments with different price sensitivities and design demands. For example, Armani serves different segments under the Giorgio Armani, Emporio Armani, and Armani Exchange sub-brands.
Credit card and financial services brands often create a hierarchy of customers based on net worth and spend to tailor products and services. Escalating levels of service and benefits allow a company like American Express to simultaneously serve mass markets and elite customers without causing tension between groups with very different expectations.
2. Focus on one audience
Sometimes two segments are so divergent in their preferences or identities that they simply cannot be served well under the same brand. In these cases, brands may opt to fire a customer segmentas Burberry did in the early 2000s after it inadvertently became popular among soccer hooligans, by discontinuing products popular among chavs and reducing the prominence of its iconic check pattern.
In other cases, they may develop a new brand to serve a new segment. Toyota is able to successfully serve a diverse set of customers under a single brand. But management wisely realized that there were limits to how far they could stretch the Toyota brand and so introduced Lexus to serve a set of customers with a fundamentally different set of preferences.
Especially in the cases of ideological conflict between customer segments (e.g., Bud Lights attempts to be an apparent ally of the transgender community), the gulfs between customer groups may simply be too vast to span with a single brand. Some segments are best served by different brands.
3. Find common ground
Perhaps the best strategy for brands looking to grow into younger segments is in looking for convergence in values and preferences across segments before the brand starts making changes. Instead of reorienting the brand to appeal to the new, hoped-for customers, brands should first look for the Venn diagram intersection among 1) preferences of existing customers, 2) preferences of the new customers, and 3) the brands image and history. Growth strategies that dont satisfy all three criteria tend to fail.
Consider the remarkable recent resurgence of another legacy TV franchise. Despite being around for 20 years, Dancing with the Stars has been growing in recent easons, and attracting younger viewers in the process. DWTS didnt pull this off by fundamentally changing what its longtime fans love about the show, but instead by innovating in areas around its successful formula.
These tangential improvements have increased the draw for new, younger fans without stepping on the toes of loyalists. For its stars, DWTS has been increasingly turning to celebrities relevant to younger audiences, including recent Olympians, TikTok influencers, and reality TV stars. It has also created additional, meme-worthy social media content, including footage of the dancers training or goofing around backstage. This content serves as a supplemental draw to younger segments, without messing with the on-stage magic that loyal watchers love.
Just like the relationships in Bachelor in Paradise, the relationships among customer segments can be nuanced and difficult to manage. Unlike the relationships in Bachelor in Paradise, the goal is not maximum drama. Knowing the rules of customer relationship management can allow brands to attract customers across generations without experiencing the backlash.
Look, we all know the drill by now: You type a question into the magic AI box, and the magic AI box spits out an answer that is usually pretty good, occasionally mind-blowing, and every once in a blue moon mind-blowingly bizarre.
But if youre just treating Google Gemini like a glorified search bar, youre leaving a lot of utility on the table. Its sort of like buying a Swiss Army knife and only ever using the toothpick.
If you want to move past the beginner phase and actually make Gemini work for you, here are four tricks that might not be immediately obvious but are surprisingly handy.
Stop copy-pasting your own emails
If youre trying to summarize a long email thread or find a specific document to pull data from, your first instinct is probably to open a new tab, find the email, copy the text, go back to Gemini, paste it in, and then ask your question.
No need: Gemini has “Extensions” built right in. If you want to know when your flight is or summarize a Doc, just type @ in the prompt box. Youll see a menu pop up for Google Docs, Gmail, Drive, Maps, and other Google services.
Select one, and say something like, “@Gmail find the email from Bob about the Q3 budget and summarize the main points.” It goes and finds the info, saving you from tab fatigue. If you need to turn on these extensions, heres how.
The trust but verify button
Use AI long enough and youll eventually come across “hallucinations,” which is a polite way of saying the AI just made something up because it sounded good.
If youre using Gemini for important research, make sure to use the Double-check response feature, which can be found by clicking the three-dot icon at the bottom of a response.
When you click it, Google runs a search to see if theres content on the web to substantiate what the AI just told you. A green highlight means Google found a search result that supports the statement, while an orange highlight means Google either found content that might contradict it, or it couldn’t find a match.
Its not foolproof, but its a helpful extra step to take in order to make sure Googles info isnt too far off base.
Tables and spreadsheets
Were used to chatbots just . . . chatting. But if youre trying to make a decision, like comparing three different project management tools or deciding among five hotels for that Nashville trip, paragraphs of text are actually pretty annoying to parse.
You can force Gemini to make information more digestible by telling it, for example: “Output this as a table comparing [Option A] and [Option B] based on price, reviews, and features.”
Itll organize the messy data into a clean grid. And if youre feeling especially ambitious, youll notice an “Export to Sheets” icon underneath the table.
One click creates a brand-new Google Sheet with all that data populated, formatted, and saved to your Google Drive. It turns cumbersome manual data entry into a single button press.
Audio uploads
Most people know Gemini can read text and look at pictures. But it also has ears.
If you have a recording of a chaotic 45-minute meeting, a rambling lecture, or an interview you recorded on your phone, dont waste your time listening to it at 2x speed.
You can upload audio files directly into the prompt bar. Just click the plus (+) icon, select Upload files, and drop in your audio clip.
Then ask for what you need: “Summarize this meeting and extract the three action items assigned to me” or “Find the timestamp where they discuss the Q3 budget, for example.
It doesnt just transcribe; Gemini “listens” to the context and turns an hour of audio into a 30-second read.
Its been called the AI Super Bowl, thanks to Anthropic and OpenAI launching what (hopefully) might become AIs very own Cola Wars.
Its been called the MAHA Bowl, thanks to brands like Novo Nordisk promoting Wegovy pills, while Ro and hims & hers are pitching telehealth services, Novartis got NFL tight ends to relax for prostate cancer checks, and pharma company Boehringer Ingelheim hypes kidney health.
But we know it was the Super Bowl because mixed in amongst the trends were Sabrina Carpenters FrankenPringles man, both T-Mobile and Coinbase hit play on the Backstreet Boys, Oakley Meta made connected glasses look pretty good, and Manscaped somehow turned shaved body hair into emotionally-resonant characters.
Another distinct sign this was as Super Bowl-y an ad game as any other Super Bowl? Celebrity directors. Taika Waititi took on Pepsi, Spike Jonze went full Italian variety show with Ben Stiller for Instacart, and Joseph Kosinski took all the innovation from his experiences at the helm of last years blockbuster F1 to get Kurt Russell to teach a guy how to ski. Oh, and somehow the award-winning director with the least commercial films had two spots in the gameYorgos Lathimos directed both Squarespace and Grubhub.
Apple continued its complete reinvention of the halftime show, turning Bad Bunnys electric performance into a global event.
We also saw a respectable number of hit songs get classically commercial reinterpretations. The aforementioned Backstreet Boys were joined by Andy Samberg becoming Meal Diamond for Hellmanns, Danny McBride and Keegan-Michael Key butchering Bon Jovi for State Farm, and both the NFL and Rocket crafting emotional gut punch moments by reinterpreting two songs from the Mr. Rogers catalog.
Advertising!
It was a feast for the sensesa cornucopia of commercial extravaganza. All with enough choices that everyone watching the game has their own favorites Including me!
Here are my picks for the best ads from the 2026 Super Bowl. But first, the worst!
Svedka Vodka Shake Your Bots Off
Its apparently the first Super Bowl ad known to be produced primarily with AI. I never wouldve guessed
This ad so bad Im not sure its fair to make fun of it, even if its somehow purposely awful. This is the kind of bad that should be taught in schools. It looks like it was made by Advertising 101 students in a rush. The AI angle is a gimmick for gimmicks sake, obviously, and doesn’t add anything to the ad at all except the robots’ nightmare fuel faces.
What is so disappointing is that vodka has historically been a pretty great place for advertising. For anyone curious about the kind of creativity is possible in the vodka category, just watch Belvedere Vodkas 2022 spot Daniel Craig, directed by Waititi. Or Absoluts Vodka Movie from 2008, made by Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, and Zach Galifianakis. Glorious.
Svedka, conversely, serves up the advertising equivalent to the most vapid, superficial people youve ever seen in a club. A robot apocalypse as imagined by the Butabi brothers.
OK, now lets get to the good stuff. Here are my Top 5 ads from this year…
Budweiser “American Icons”
As I said in my pregame brand power rankings, Bud was here for the crown.
Created by BBDO New York, this takes Budweisers penchant for animal buddies to a new, non-partisan patriotic level. What could possibly be cuter than a horse and a yellow lab becoming best friends? Well, when its Buds 150th anniversary and Americas 250th, the answer, of course, is EAGLET.
These are divisive times, with many states feeling less and less united with every news cycle. But here, just for a moment, Bud has served up something that we can all agree on.
When that bald eagle spread its big grown wings for the first time from behind that leaping horse, red states, blue states, MAGA, Democratic Socialists, coastal elites, flyover rednecks, and everyone in between were able to say, Oh HELLS yeah.
And in 2026, thats something to raise a glass to.
Jeep Billy Bass Goes to the River
What initially appears to be a pretty run-of-the-mill car ad takes a decidedly epic turn that transforms ths spot into a classic.
If you listen to the Super Bowl episode of Fast Companys Brand New World podcast (do it!), youll know I spoke to the folks who made it, Mark Gross and Chad Broude, who are co-founders and co-chief creative officers of Chicago-based independent ad agency Highdive. They have hundreds of Super Bowl ads between them, and this latest piece of work shows the benefit of that experience.
Highdive has become synonymous with great Super Bowl work since the 2020 Super Bowl and their fantastic Jeep commercial starring Bill Murray, reliving the classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day.
The level of difficulty here is highno nostalgic soundtrack, no celebrity, no gimmick. Just a straight shot of good ol fashioned copywriting, perfect casting and comedic timing straight into the veins.
Rocket x Redfin America Needs Neighbors Like You
With the amount of money required just for Super Bowl air timea reported $8 million, plus a required additional matching ad buy across other NBC sports brands need to ensure they get your attention.
This year, Rocket and Redfin did that by combining three things that would create a large Venn diagram of interest: Lady Gaga singing Mr. Rogerss Wont You Be My Neighbor?; a heartwarming commercial airing during the game; and, most crucially, giving viewers the chance to win a million-dollar house.
But everything revolves around the spot, which was a well-crafted, heartwarming vibe shift from all the comedy and celebrities.
I spoke to CMO Jonathan Mildenhall about this triple threat approach.
“The only way to win at the Super Bowl is to win a disproportionate share of conversation pregame, as well as during game, and, increasingly, the progressive brands are talking about postgame conversation, Mildenhall says. For us the pregame was Lady Gaga behind the scenes, then during the game there is the spot, and were announcing the Great American home search for people to participate in over the days after the game.
Hellmanns Meal Diamond
The Boston Red Sox, and every karaoke bar on the planet, utilize Neil Diamonds Sweet Caroline effectively to bring a crowd together, put an arm around one another and scream SO GOOD! SO GOOD! SO GOOD! in unison.
Here we get that 1969 hit remixed for mayo thanks to Andy Samberg as Meal Diamond. Of course this looks and sounds ridiculous. But it actually continues a strategy Hellmanns started in 2024.
Mayo Cat starred Kate McKinnon and was able to put one word into the mouth of every cat: Mayyo. Its ambition to embed itself in our brains in such an insidious way that we hear it every time a cat meows was commendable. Clearly, that ambition remains.
Now when youre making lunch, you may find yourself humming a familiar tune and whisper-crooning to yourself, Haaaam, touching ham.. until it hits a crescendo, Sweet Sandwich Time! Bah-bah-baaaaah.
Bud Light Keg
Bud Light was in a dark place not that long ago. It was unfairly punished for its one-off partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, which turned into an unlikely lightning rod for anti-trans weirdos and fans of Kid Rock.
Thankfully, with Shane Gillis, the brand has been building back its beer advertising pedigree by making commercials that are funny as hell. His impressive run includes Confessions, Wrong Commercial, and last years big game ad BMOC.
Now Gillis, Post Malone, and Peyton Manning return, this time at a wedding. When the keg gets knocked over and rolls down a hill, the entire wedding party does its best Princess Bride As you wish impression. Dumb, fun, and exactly what you want from a Bud Light ad.
In Southwest Airlines new Super Bowl ad, boarding looks more like the Hunger Games than an orderly process. Set in an airport thats been reimagined as a dense jungle, passengers rush to secure their preferred seats before its too late: a woman swings on a giant vine to cut her fellow travelers; a grandma shoulder-checks a passerby; and a man creates a dummy seatmate out of twigs to convince other fliers that his aisle seat has already been snagged.
The ad is a parody of Southwests former open boarding policy, which, since the airlines official founding in 1971, allowed passengers to choose their own seats in a system that aimed to reduce the hierarchy of tiered seating. In January 2024, Southwest announced that it would be nixing open seating in favor of a more standard assigned seating system, citing the time pressure involved in the open seating process and a new focus on premium seating options as the main reasons for the change. Assigned seating officially rolled out across the airlines operations on January 27.
Southwest describes its new spot, Boarding Royale, as a self-aware clap-back at its former boarding policy. And, at surface value, the ad is funny, well-executed, and accurate for anyone whos ever traveled with a nervous flier (or is one). But, taken alongside Southwests brand moves over the past two years, the ad feels less like a light-hearted self-own, and more like the hypocritical creative output of a brand thats seriously lost the plot.
“Boarding Royale” pokes fun at open seating
Boarding Royale was directed by the creative agency GSD&M, Southwests longtime agency of record. According to Julia Melle, director of brand and content at Southwest, the ad is designed to introduce assigned seating in a way that recognizes we understand its a category norm” and “feels authentic to our brand.
[Photo: Southwest Airlines]
Within the spot, there are nods to the various traveler behaviors associated with Southwest’s open seating, such as the traveler who checked in too late, the one who creatively saves seats, and the young families with children who will do anything to ensure they sit together, Melle says. Our most loyal customers have probably witnessed these behaviors more than anyone, so we believe the exaggeration will give them a chuckle.
Indeed, the ad does a good job at poking lighthearted fun at the kinds of exasperating, head-scratching behaviors one tends to encounter at the airport. This strategy mightve worked perfectly well if it was, say, making a silly joke at the expense of a rival airline. But it falls flat when its directly making fun of a feature that was a pillar of Southwests brand for decadesand was, until recently, a system that the company touted again and again in its own marketing materials.
Southwest’s boarding about-face
From its inception, Southwest cultivated a reputation as a quirky, low-cost airline for the everyman. Three key features sat at the heart of that brand positioning: open seating, a staunch stance against hidden fees, and an iconic Bags Fly Free policy. Over the past several years, the company has shaved away all of those commitments.
Some of Southwests earliest ads tout the airlines unique boarding process, which it promised at the time would take less than 10 minutes total. In the 80s, a series of print advertisements promised, Unlike assigned seating, youre free to sit next to someone just like you. For years, the brands unofficial slogan, oft repeated by flight attendants, was You can sit anywhere you wantjust like at church. In 2007, backlash to the concept of Southwest eliminating open seating was so strong that the company published a blog titled, You Spoke and We ListenedSouthwest Says Open Seating is Here to Stay!
Southwests marketing often used its open seating modelwhich meant no ticketed class divisions in the cabinto tout its lack of hidden fees compared to competitors. In the early 2000s, many of the brands ads parodied other airlines by showing passengers getting charged additional fees for small luxuries like using the overheard compartments, reclining their seats, or enjoying a snack. In one 2015 campaign titled Transfarency, the company promised, Transfarency means we dont dream up ways we can trick you into paying more.
A brand that’s lost the plot
To say that these spots have aged poorly would be an understatement. When it announced its new assigned seating policy in 2024, Southwest also introduced a category of premium seats which come with extra legroom, faster Wi-Fi, and larger overhead binsfor an added cost. Its currently in the process of renovating its cabins to make room for these seats, which will take up one third of each aircrats total seating. In August 2025, it also announced a new policy that requires travelers who dont fit within the armrests of their seat to pay for an extra one in advance.
[Photo: Southwest Airlines]
The brands most egregious move by far, though, came in March 2025, when it announced that it would kill its Bags Fly Free policy, which allowed travelers to check two bags without added costs. Bags Fly Free was a mantra that Southwest repeated in its marketing for decades, including spots in 2009, 2011, and one in 2023 that has since been made private by the company on YouTube.
As recently as September 2025, the company said on an earnings call that ending the signature program would be a destructive step too far. Southwest has also removed a 2024 study from its website which found that eliminating Bags Fly Free would destroy value.
This isnt to say that brands arent allowed to change their minds or their business strategies. But Southwest hasnt just evolved with the times; its sacrificed some of its most closely held brand attributes values in pursuit of profit. With just a bit of context on Southwests repeated capitulations to market pressure, Boarding Royale starts to feel less like a silly ad, and more like a betrayal of the companys purpose.
This weekend, a showdown between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots, some star-studded commercials, and a Bad Bunny concert are taking place.
Regardless of which part of Super Bowl LX is most important to you, it is all going down on Sunday, February 8, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.
Heres a quick recap before kick-off.
How did the Seahawks and Patriots get to Super Bowl LX?
This isnt the first time that the Seahawks and Patriots have faced off in the championship game.
In 2015, Seattle was defeated by the Patriots 28-24 after an eleventh-hour interception on the one-yard line. New quarterbacks Drake Maye and Sam Darnold may not have chips on their shoulders, but they are still determined to lead their respective teams to victory in this rematch.
Speaking of new, according to CBS Sports Research, this is the first Super Bowl that features two teams with both head coaches and QBs all in their first or second season with their respective teams.
The Patriots head coach, Mike Vrabel, led his team to a 14-3 season in the American Football Conference. The last obstacle to securing their Super Bowl LX spot was the Denver Broncos, whom they defeated 10-7 in blizzard-like conditions.
This marks their 12th Super Bowl appearance and the first since former QB Tom Brady left the team in 2020. If New England winds up victorious, the franchise will break the record for most Super Bowl titles. Both the Patriots and the Pittsburgh Steelers are currently tied with six titles.
Mike Macdonald, Seattles head coach, is doing everything in his power to prevent history from being made. He led his team to a franchise record 14-3 season in the National Football Conference.
Seattle defeated the Los Angeles Rams 31-27 to earn their spot in the big game. They are on a nine-game winning streak and dont want to see that end. The franchise has been in the Super Bowl three times prior, but they have only won once, in 2014.
Dont let their lack of titles deceive you, though: The Seahawks are currently favored to win because of their strong defense and stellar scoring abilities.
Who is performing at Super Bowl LX?
If you are in it for the music, three diverse artists are ready to put on a show. Green Day will open up the festivities and honor NFL MVPs.
Continuing the pre-game momentum, Charlie Puth will tackle the national anthem. Brandi Carlile will perform “America the Beautiful,” then Coco Jones will croon “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
At halftime Bad Bunny, known as Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio on his birth certificate, is ready to rock the house.
Hot off his three Grammy wins just one week prior, the BAILE INoLVIDABLE singer made sure to save his voice on musics biggest night so he could sing out for football fans. (This was despite host Trevor Noahs best efforts to get him to crack.)
The Puerto Rico native says he couldn’t be prouder. “What I’m feeling goes beyond myself,” he said when his involvement was announced, according to People. “It’s for those who came before me and ran countless yards so I could come in and score a touchdown.”
What commercials have already dropped?
If you are in it for the commercials, several were teased or released ahead of the big game.
This makes bathroom breaks so much easier. Among the early arrivals is a Grubhub spot featuring George Clooney in his first-ever Super Bowl ad directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
He is far from the only celebrity getting in on the action.
Dunkin’ is utilizing the talents of four movie stars in its spot: Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, and Jason Alexander. Budweiser went in a different direction, relying on nostalgia and its signature Clydesdale horses.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of ads, which according to the Financial Times, cost on average about $8 million for a 30-second spot.
How can I watch or stream the 2026 Super Bowl?
The party gets started on Sunday, February 8, at 6:30 p.m. ET./3:30 p.m. PT. You can catch it on NBC, Telemundo, and Universo.
This means that you are covered if you have a traditional cable subscription or over-the-air antenna. As a reminder, watching NBC live with an OTA antenna is free.
NBCUniversals subscription-based streaming service is Peacock, which will also stream the big game live. If you cut the cord, you can also utilize a live-TV streaming services such as Hulu + Live TV, Fubo, or YouTube TV. Just be sure to double check it carries NBC in your area.
NFL+ is also an option, but it only works on phones or tablets.
With ever-shrinking attention spans, film students today are struggling to make it to the end of a feature-length movie without getting distracted by their phones.
Thats according to a recent article by The Atlantics Rose Horowitch. In a snippet that has since circulated on X, gaining nearly 2 million views since it was posted last week, one of the film studies professors interviewed by Horowitch recalled asking his students about the ending of the 1962 François Truffaut film Jules and Jim.
The attention crisis is so dire at schools right now that film professors can't even get their students to finish movies, and the kids don't even look up the plots of the movies they skip, so students fail basic in-class quizzes like "what happened at the end of the movie?" pic.twitter.com/e09bN5ia8J— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) January 30, 2026
More than half of the class picked one of the wrong options, saying that characters hide from the Nazis (the film takes place during World War I) or get drunk with Ernest Hemingway (who does not appear in the movie), the screenshot read. The film has a run time of 1 hour and 45 minutes.
Naturally, much hand-wringing ensued online. Im so confused. You kind of have to go out of your way to take a film studies course, right?, one X user asked. Imagine not doing the homework, and the homework is watching a movie. Thats crazy, a Reddit user wrote.
Im so confused. You kind of have to go out of your way to take a film studies course, right?— Joseph Guarino (@RoninJoey) January 30, 2026
Others called it a crisis of attention. This bleeds into everything. Can’t pay attention to or finish a novel. Need cues to watch a movie because they are on second screens, another X user wrote.
The rise of second-screening and the resulting genre of casual, background-friendly TV shows and movies has been well documented. Many, myself included, will admit to putting on a film only to scroll TikTok with one hand and place an online order on a laptop with the other.
In a recent n+1 magazine article, Will Tavlin reports that screenwriters are now being told to have their protagonists announce what theyre doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.
Film studies professors interviewed by The Atlantics Horowitch say they have even resorted to assigning students only portions of films. One compares his students to nicotine addicts going through withdrawal.
Short-form content on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have rewired the brain to expect a dopamine hit every few seconds. The closest thing we had to doomscrolling back then was channel surfing, one Reddit user pointed out. Could they play the movies on 2x with Minecraft footage? one X user suggested.
could they play the movies on 2x with minecraft footage?— halogen (@halogen1048576) January 30, 2026
Long films arent the problem here. If anything, they might be the solution. Im actively trying to break my phone addiction, and a big part of that has been using movies as a guaranteed two hours a night off my phone, one Reddit user admitted. Its therapeutic, and Id encourage anyone trying to click less screen time to give it a try.
Homework assignment: Sit and watch The Brutalist without once touching your phone, and see how difficult it can be.
As Valentines Day approaches, finding the perfect words to express your feelings for that special someone can seem like a daunting taskso much so that you may feel tempted to ask ChatGPT for an assist.
After all, within seconds, it can dash off a well-written, romantic message. Even a short, personalized limerick or poem is no sweat.
But before you copy and paste that AI-generated love note, you might want to consider how it could make you feel about yourself.
We research the intersection of consumer behavior and technology, and weve been studying how people feel after using generative AI to write heartfelt messages. It turns out that theres a psychological cost to using the technology as your personal ghostwriter.
The rise of the AI ghostwriter
Generative AI has transformed how many people communicate. From drafting work emails to composing social media posts, these tools have become everyday writing assistants. So its no wonder some people are turning to them for more personal matters, too.
Wedding vows, birthday wishes, thank-you notes, and even Valentines Day messages are increasingly being outsourced to algorithms.
The technology is certainly capable. Chatbots can craft emotionally resonant responses that sound genuinely heartfelt.
But theres a catch: When you present these words as your own, something doesnt sit right.
When convenience breeds guilt
We conducted five experiments with hundreds of participants, asking them to imagine using generative AI to write various emotional messages to loved ones. Across every scenario we testedfrom appreciation emails to birthday cards to love letterswe found the same pattern: People felt guilty when they used generative AI to write these messages compared to when they wrote the messages themselves.
When you copy an AI-generated message and sign your name to it, youre essentially taking credit for words you didnt write.
This creates what we call a source-credit discrepancy, which is a gap between who actually created the message and who appears to have created it. You can see these discrepancies in other contexts, whether its celebrity social media posts written by public relations teams or political speeches composed by professional speechwriters.
When you use AI, even though you might tell yourself youre just being efficient, you can probably recognize, deep down, that youre misleading the recipient about the personal effort and thought that went into the message.
The transparency test
To better understand this guilt, we compared AI-generated messages to other scenarios. When people bought greeting cards with preprinted messages, they felt no guilt at all. This is because greeting cards are transparently not written by you. Greeting cards carry no deception: Everyone understands you selected the card and that you didnt write it yourself.
We also tested another scenario: having a friend secretly write the message for you. This produced just as much guilt as using generative AI. Whether the ghostwriter is human or an artificial intelligence tool doesnt matter. What matters most is the dishonesty.
There were some boundaries, however. We found that guilt decreased when messages were never delivered and when recipients were mere acquaintances rather than close friends.
These findings confirm that the guilt stems from violating expectations of honesty in relationships where emotional authenticity matters most.
Somewhat relatedly, research has found that people react more negatively when they learn a company used AI instead of a human to write a message to them.
But the backlash was strongest when audiences expected personal efforta boss expressing sympathy after a tragedy, or a note sent to all staff members celebrating a colleagues recovery from a health scare. It was far weaker for purely factual or instructional notes, such as announcing routine personnel changes or providing basic business updates.
What this means for your Valentines Day
So, what should you do about that looming Valentines Day message? Our research suggests that the human hand behind a meaningful message can help both the writer and the recipient feel better.
This doesnt mean you cant use generative AI as a brainstorming partner rather than a ghostwriter. Let it help you overcome writers block or suggest ideas, but make the final message truly yours. Edit, personalize, and add details that only you would know. The key is co-creation, not complete delegation.
Generative AI is a powerful tool, but its also created a raft of ethical dilemmas, whether its in the classroom or in romantic relationships. As these technologies become more integrated into everyday life, people will need to decide where to draw the line between helpful assistance and emotional outsourcing.
This Valentines Day, your heart and your conscience might thank you for keeping your message genuinely your own.
Julian Givi is an assistant professor of marketing at West Virginia University.
Colleen P. Kirk is an assistant professor of marketing at New York Institute of Technology.
Danielle Hass is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing at West Virginia University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question youd like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.
Is the whole universe just a simulation? Moumita B., age 13, Dhaka, Bangladesh
How do you know anything is real? Some things you can see directly, like your fingers. Other things, like your chin, you need a mirror or a camera to see. Other things cant be seen, but you believe in them because a parent or a teacher told you, or you read it in a book.
As a physicist, I use sensitive scientific instruments and complicated math to try to figure out whats real and whats not. But none of these sources of information is entirely reliable: Scientific measurements can be wrong, my calculations can have errors, and even your eyes can deceive you, like the dress that broke the internet because nobody could agree on what colors it was.
Because every source of informationeven your teacherscan trick you some of the time, some people have always wondered whether we can ever trust any information.
If you cant trust anything, are you sure youre awake? Thousands of years ago, Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly and realized that he might actually be a butterfly dreaming he was a human. Plato wondered whether all we see could just be shadows of true objects. Maybe the world we live in our whole lives inside isnt the real one; maybe its more like a big video game, or the movie The Matrix.
The simulation hypothesis
The simulation hypothesis is a modern attempt to use logic and observations about technology to finally answer these questions and prove that were probably living in something like a giant video game. Twenty years ago, a philosopher named Nick Bostrom made such an argument, based on the fact that video games, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence were improving rapidly. That trend has continued, so that today people can jump into immersive virtual reality or talk to seemingly conscious artificial beings.
Bostrom projected these technological trends into the future and imagined a world in which wed be able to realistically simulate trillions of human beings. He also suggested that if someone could create a simulation of you that seemed just like you from the outside, it would feel just like you inside, with all of your thoughts and feelings.
Suppose thats right. Suppose that sometime in, say, the 31st century, humanity will be able to simulate whatever they want. Some of them will probably be fans of the 21st century and will run many different simulations of our world so that they can learn about us, or just be amused.
Heres Bostroms shocking logical argument: If the 21st century planet Earth only ever existed one time, but it will eventually get simulated trillions of times, and if the simulations are so good that the people in the simulation feel just like real people, then youre probably living on one of the trillions of simulations of the Earth, not on the one original Earth.
This argument would be even more convincing if you actually could run powerful simulations today; but as long as you believe that people will run those simulations someday, then you logically should believe that youre probably living in one today.
Scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the simulation hypothesis and why he thinks the odds are about 50-50 were part of a virtual reality.
Signs were living in a simulation . . . or not
If we are living in a simulation, does that explain anything? Maybe the simulation has glitches, and thats why your phone wasnt where you were sure you left it, or how you knew something was going to happen before it did, or why that dress on the internet looked so weird.
There are more fundamental ways in which our world resembles a simulation. There is a particular length, much smaller than an atom, beyond which physicists theories about the universe break down. And we cant see anything more than about 50 billion light-years away because the light hasnt had time to reach us since the Big Bang. That sounds suspiciously like a computer game where you cant see anything smaller than a pixel or anything beyond the edge of the screen.
Of course, there are other explanations for all of that stuff. Lets face it: You might have misremembered where you put your phone. But Bostroms argument doesnt require any scientific proof. Its logically true as long as you really believe that many powerful simulations will exist in the future. Thats why famous scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and tech titans like Elon Musk have been convinced of it, though Tyson now puts the odds at 50-50.
Others of us are more skeptical. The technology required to run such large and realistic simulations is so powerful that Bostrom describes such simulators as godlike, and he admits that humanity may never get that good at simulations. Even though it is far from being resolved, the simulation hypothesis is an impressive logical and philosophical argument that has challenged our fundamental notions of reality and captured the imaginations of millions.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question youd like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age, and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limitadults, let us know what youre wondering, too. We wont be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
Zeb Rocklin is an associate professor of physics at Georgia Institute of Technology.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A few months ago, I walked into the office of one of our customers, a publicly traded vertical software company with tens of thousands of small business customers. I expected to meet a traditional support team with rows of agents on the phones, sitting at computers triaging tickets. Instead, it looked more like a control room.
There were specialists monitoring dashboards, tuning AI behavior, debugging API failures, and iterating on knowledge workflows. One team member who had started their career handling customer questions over chat and email (resetting passwords, explaining features, troubleshooting one-off issues, and escalating bugs) was now writing Python scripts to automate routing. Another was building quality-scoring models for the companys AI agent.
This seemed markedly different from the hyperbole Id been hearing about customer support roles going away in large part due to AI. What I was seeing across our customer base looked more like a shift in how support work is defined.
So I decided to take a closer look. I analyzed 21 customer support job postings across AI-native companies, high-growth startups, and enterprise SaaS. These jobs run the gamut from technical support for complex software products to more transactional, commercial support involving billing and other common issues.
What I found was that customer support is being rebuilt around AI-native workflows and systems-level thinking. Yes, responding to individual tickets is still important, but roles are designing and operating the technical systems that resolve customer issues at scale.
The result is a new kind of support role, one thats part operator, part technologist, part strategist.
AI Skills Are Now Table Stakes
For most of the last two decades, support hiring optimized for communication skills and product familiarity. But that baseline is now gone.
Across the 21 job postings I analyzed, nearly three-quarters explicitly required experience with AI tools, automation platforms, or conversational AI systems.
These roles are about configuring, monitoring, and improving the AI systems over time. They are reviewing conversation logs, auditing AI behavior, and identifying failure modes.
In other words, AI literacy has become the baseline for modern support work. If you dont understand how AI systems behave, you cant support the customers relying on them.
More than half of the roles I analyzed required candidates to debug APIs, analyze logs, write SQL queries, or script automations in Python or Bash. Many expected familiarity with cloud infrastructure, observability tools, or version control systems like Git.
That would have been unthinkable in support job descriptions even five years ago.
But it makes sense. When AI systems fail, they fail at scale. Diagnosing those failures requires technical fluency like understanding how models interact with external systems and when an issue is rooted in configuration versus product logic.
The job has evolved from fixing problems ticket by ticket to preventing the next thousand tickets.
Humans are Needed to Solve Harder Problems
Once AI becomes part of the support workflow, the nature of the work becomes more technical. One support leader I spoke with at a company that now contains more than 80% of its tickets with AI put it plainly: once automation handles the easy questions, the work left behind gets harder. The same frontline agents who used to focus on quick wins are now handling the most frustrated customers and edge cases, and theyve had to scale up their skills accordingly.
In practice, this often looks like a customer trying to complete a critical workflow, like syncing data between systems before running billing. An AI agent starts by working off documentation that a subject matter expert has synthesized from multiple functions across the company. From there, the AI agent can confirm that everything is configured correctly. However, the AI agent may not be integrated to the right underlying system that failed silently hours earlier. The customer follows the guidance, only to discover downstream that data didnt move as expected. When the issue escalates, the subject matter expert has to reconstruct what happened across systems, reason through what the AI agent missed, and help the customer recover without losing trust.
This is the kind of end-to-end work that AI still cant do on its own. It requires both technical fluency to trace failures across disparate systems, in addition to human judgement to decide what can be fixed immediately versus what needs deeper product or engineering intervention. In this way, support has become less about answering questions out of the manual, and more about creating the manual and solving the problems that it doesnt cover.
The Hybrid HumanAI Model Is the Default
Despite widespread fear about AI replacing support jobs, not a single posting I analyzed suggested that support would be 100% automated in the future.
Instead, nearly every role gravitated toward a hybrid model where AI handles routine interactions, while humans oversee quality and continuously improve the system.
This makes sense when you consider the fact that 95% of customer support leaders said they would retain human agents in their operations to help define AIs role when surveyed by Gartner last year.
Titles like AI Support Specialist, AI Quality Analyst, and Support Operations Specialist were almost entirely focused on orchestration, designing escalation logic and defining when humans step in.
This is where the earlier control room image becomes reality. The work of humans changes from simply answering questions to actually shaping systems.
Taken together, these trends point to a single conclusion: customer support is specializing. The repetitive work is going away, but the judgment-heavy, technical work is expanding. That shift is already visible in how companies hire. The question now becomes whether organizations (and workers) are ready to adapt fast enough.
