Its a bird. Its a plane. Its the next phase of expansion planned by Walmart and drone company Wing.
The companies plan to roll out additional locations for drone delivery in metropolitan hubs like Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Miami this year in what they call the next chapter of the worlds largest drone delivery expansion.
This expansion adds to the 100 stores already planned in metro areas like Orlando and Houston. The drones are expected to start flying in the latter city this week. The expansion will increase Walmart and Wing’s network to more than 270 locations across the country in 2027.
Whether its a last-minute ingredient for dinner or a late-night essential for a busy family, the strong adoption weve seen confirms that this is the future of convenience, said Greg Cathey, senior vice president of digital fulfillment transformation at Walmart, in a statement. By expanding drone delivery to new major metro areas, we are helping more customers solve for their last-minute needs faster than ever before.
[Photo: Walmart]
New heights
In the first two years of Walmart and Wings partnership, their delivery service was available in seven states. With this planned expansion, more than 40 million shoppers across at least 10 states will have the option of drone delivery.
The rapid expansion is a sign that customers find real value in getting what they need when they need it, in a matter of minutes, Wing’s new chief business officer, Heather Rivera, tells Fast Company in an email. Adoption of drone delivery is quick, and it makes a real difference to customers.
Walmart and Wing first partnered in 2023 to bring drone delivery to customers with a few simple steps. Shoppers order with Walmart, Wings marketplace, or even a third-party service like DoorDash. They select drone delivery and specify an exact delivery location. Then, the drone is loaded up and takes off with the order.
This airborne delivery is faster than other methods, especially in car-dependent metropolitan areas, since the drones can avoid traffic and other obstacles in the sky. As the partnership continues to expand, Wing leadership has their eyes on the sky.
This expansion elevates Wing from a regional success to a truly national delivery service, Rivera says in an email. Its no longer a question of if Wing drone delivery will come to your city, its when.
Almost lost and nearly forgotten, a sculpture by one of the most noted mid-century modernist designers has been given a meticulous restoration and a starring place in the new headquarters of General Motors in downtown Detroit.
Designed by artist Harry Bertoia and first installed in 1970, the sculpture is made of two clusters of long steel wires intertwined like twigs in a bird’s nest. Stretching 26 feet in height, the sculpture is now hanging in the atrium of a newly built 12-story mixed-use building in Detroit that’s the home of GM’s new global headquarters. GM, which has featured Bertoia’s work in other company properties since 1953, spent an undisclosed sum of money to have the sculpture restored and installed in the heart of its new offices.
It’s a remarkable resurgence for a sculpture that was nearly lost in the rubble of a demolished shopping mall.
Lost to time
The sculpture was originally commissioned as decoration outside a J.L. Hudson’s department store at the Genesee Valley Center in Flint, Michigan, which opened in 1970. Bertoia, an Italian-born artist who moved to Detroit in 1930 at the age of 15, designed the sculpture using simple steel rods that were coated in melted brass, bronze, and other metal alloys.
Most famous for his furniture design work for Knoll Associates, Bertoia also had a long career as a sculptor, creating mainly metal-based works. His first project for GM was a 36-foot-long decorative wall screen installed in a cafeteria at GM’s Global Technical Center in 1953, which is still in place today.
[Photo: GM]
The nest-like sculpture Bertoia made in 1970 hung in the Flint mall until 1980, when it was removed during a renovation. It was taken to another nearby regional mall, the Northland Center, where it was stored in the basement and eventually forgotten.
Built in 1954 in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Northland Center is considered by some to be the first regional shopping mall and was designed by shopping mall creator Victor Gruen and his firm Gruen Associates, which was also involved in designing the Genesee Valley Center. An open-air cluster of stores connected by pedestrian paths and green plazas, it preceded by two years the enclosed and air conditioned Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, another Gruen project that is more often referred to as the first shopping mall.
The developer and anchor tenant of Northland Center was the J.L. Hudson’s department store, which originally commissioned Bertoia’s sculpture for its Flint location. Presumably, the company moved the sculpture to the Northland Center basement because it wanted to keep the artwork for future use.
Instead, the sculpture languished in the Northland Center basement for decades. Then, in 2017, during a partial demolition and renovation of the mall, the sculpture was rediscovered, coated in dust and partly bent out of shape. The Hudson’s company had long since dissolved, so the city of Southfield’s arts commission took over stewardship of the sculpture. A restoration process ensued, and about halfway through, GM’s design team learned about the sculpture.
“It looked like there were decades of dirt and grime covering the metal rods. It was tough looking,” says Christo Datini, manager of GM’s archive and special collections.
Given GM’s long association with Bertoia, the company felt obligated to finish the restoration. “We started to think about how we could help the situation. What could we do?” says Datini. “And then of course when the new headquarters came into play, it seemed like an obvious place.”
A new place to hang
The new headquarters is on the site of the old Hudson’s department store in Detroit, once the second-largest department store in the world. The building was demolished in 1998, and has since been redeveloped into a $1.4 billion skyscraper complex. GM’s offices fill the top floors of the 12-story mixed use building that makes up half of that project, and look out on a large atrium in which the Bertoia sculpture now hangs.
Getting the sculpture there was challenging. Given its size, there was no easy way to bring it into the building, which finished construction in late 2025. To crane the sculpture inside, a 15-foot-wide and 75-foot-tall section of the facade of the building had to be partly deconstructed. It was then carefully moved, in two pieces, into the atrium, where it now hangs below a wide skylight. “There are no anchor points directly above. It’s actually anchored at several points, suspended kind of like a tight rope,” says Datini.
Walking into the building’s atrium on a recent day in January, the sculpture soars overhead, with its jumble of metal rods appearing both orderly and chaotic. Corridors wrap around the sculpture on each of the six floors in the atrium space, offering varied views of an artwork that’s at once simple and complex.
Unfortunately this atrium is not open to the public, but Bertoia’s sculpture will be a daily presence for hundreds of GM workers at its new headquarters. After decades sitting in the dust of a shopping mall basement, it’s a triumphant second act.
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m 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, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
In recent weeks Modern CEO has published predictions for 2026 from CEOs across industries and a list of books that can help leaders get ready for the year ahead. We invited readers to share their own prognostications and book recommendations. (Respect to the author who endorsed her own book.) Heres a sampling of the responses.
Bold Predictions
ChatGPT becomes the new DoorDash
2026 will mark a fundamental shift: ChatGPT and other AI platforms will become the primary interfaces between consumers and restaurants. Discovery will evolve into actionpeople wont just find new restaurants on ChatGPT; theyll order and review there, too. In an AI-first world, the need for intermediaries fades as ordering rails connect restaurants directly to these platforms. This creates a massive opportunity for restaurants to reclaim the direct relationships they lost to third-party marketplaces.
Savneet Singh, CEO, PAR Technology
Customer experience shifts from speed to substance
Over the past two years, companies raced to embed AI into service interactions, but many of those deployments are now revealing cracks. Our testing data proves it: In a recent analysis of enterprise models, 82% of AI failures stemmed from misinformation, especially in chatbots. These silent errors quietly erode customer relationships long before companies realize it. The next phase of CX (customer experience) innovation wont be about smarter automation; it will be about trustworthy automation. Ultimately, the companies that win customer trust wont be those deploying AI the fastest, but those ensuring every AI-driven interaction is accurate, safe, and human-centered.
Dean Hickman-Smith, chief revenue officer, Testlio
More technology, more vulnerabilities, more responsibility
Let us all individually be ready for more and entirely new technologies in 2026, [and] embrace and prepare to secure ourselves even more. A lot of work is to come, especially for the specialists in the field. We can clearly see more vulnerabilities coming our way, but we should be ready to fight back. Experts should expect their expertise being needed more than ever in all aspects and fields, including policy development [for] and general awareness [of] cybersecurity.
Ella Hamwaka, cybersecurity specialist
Prepare for the “vibe coding” compliance crisis
Organizations rushing to adopt AI coding assistants without proper governance will face a reckoning in 2026. While vibe coding feels efficient, its creating invisible and silent security gaps that traditional audits arent designed to catch. Companies that fail to implement AI-specific governance frameworks now will find themselves scrambling when regulators start asking hard questions about AI-generated code provenance and security controls.
Shrav Mehta, CEO, Secureframe
Cybersecurity hits the limits of system complexity
2026 is the year the cybersecurity industry confronts an uncomfortable truth: Were nearing the fundamental limits of sustainable complexity in distributed systems. This isnt about better tools or bigger budgets; its about the thermodynamic coordination constraints weve ignored for too long. Organizations that recognize this earlyand design for graceful degradationwill adapt and survive.
Trey Darley, founder, Proper Tools
Companies will rehire for jobs eliminated by AI
Next year, companies that rushed to make layoffs hoping AI would fill a significant gap will realize they need to rehire to fill some of those roles. We saw this starting this year with companies like Klarna, rehiring to fill customer service roles that chatbots failed at. Next year, well see more of this.
Mahe Bayireddi, founder and CEO, Phenom
996 culture loses steam because the output is not real
We used to call it hustle culture, but this year it was rebranded to 996. Outside of short sprints (less than three months), I have never seen anyone produce long-term quality work for six days a week, 12+ hours in front of a screen. Actual output is similar to a normal day. VCs often push this culture more than founders, which fuels the perception that extreme hours are required. Its not sustainable, and it signals that a company is not building a culture for the long term.
Immad Akhund, cofounder and CEO, Mercury
Book Recommendations
Sound Is Not Enough by Svetlana Kouznetsova
The book explains why accessibilityparticularly audio and communication accessibilityis not optional or a nice to have, but a core business requirement for all organizations of any size.
Svetlana Kouznetsova, accessibility strategy consultant
The Art of Living by Epictetus
This book sits on my desk (and in my work bag when I am on the road) 365 days a year. I commit to reading a page from it every day and have for over a decade. It is a practical manual for Stoic philosophya reminder of core values and whats actually in our control to live a happy, virtuous, and resilient life.
Leagh Turner, CEO, Coupa
The Odyssey by Homer
If youre looking for inspiration on how to write a comeback story for your company, theres no better tale than The Odyssey. On the surface, its a Marvel comic-style adventure story of a warrior conquering obstacle after obstaclethe Sirens song, Cyclops grasp, Charybdis pull. Its also a story of leadershipof what it takes to overcome a fractious, even mutinous crew. Its a tale of tapping into motivation (over 10 years!) and keeping your eyes on the prize.
David Risher, CEO, Lyft
Share your thoughts and recommendations
What books, resolutions, or big ideas are you embracing in 2026? Write to me at < href="mailto:stephaniemehta@mansueto.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">stephaniemehta@mansueto.com, and well revisit some of these topics throughout the year.
Read more: the year ahead
Venture investors share their market predictions
How to rewire your brain for success in 2026
Five ways to build global teams this year
Its become almost a cliché to talk about how consistently organizational change fails. Study after study finds that roughly three-quarters of change efforts dont achieve their objectives. There are underlying forces that work against us adapting to changeincluding synaptic, network and cost effectsthat lead to resistance.
Another problem lies in how we study change itself. Typically, researchers at an academic institution or a consulting firm interview executives that were involved in successful efforts and try to glean insights to write case studies. These are famously flawed, lacking controls, and often relying on self-serving accounts.
One unlikely place to look for insight is a little-known academic named Gene Sharp, who wasnt interested in business at all, but political revolutions. What he found was that there are sources of power that support the status quo and these have an institutional basis. As long as they remain in place, nothing will ever change. But if you can shift them, anything becomes possible.
A Revolutionary Shift
Before 1789, the world was ruled by monarchies rooted in the divine right of kings and the feudal system. Yet that year would prove to be an inflection point. The American Constitution and the French Revolution began a fundamental realignment of power that culminated in the revolutions of 1848, a widespread uprising against monarchies that spread across Europe.
But in the late 19th century something new emerged: nonviolent movements. Rising out of the abolitionist efforts in the US, which then morphed into the struggle for womens suffrage, new techniques of fighting for change emerged. Among those watching closely was a young law student, Mohandas Gandhi. He would later perfect their techniques in South Africa and India.
It was Gandhis work that Gene Sharp first began to study and led him to an epiphany: violent revolts would always be at a disadvantage because the regime controls the means of violence, such as the military, police and other security agencies. It also has the power to create and enforce laws.
Nonviolent movements, on the other hand, could fight with very different weapons, those of psychology, sociology, and economics, where the regime can be put at a disadvantage. Thats how Gandhi was able to win against seemingly impossible odds. What Sharp wanted to do was create a systematic strategic framework so that anyone could achieve what Gandhi did.
Thats what led to his key insight: power is rooted in institutions, and only by shifting them can true transformation occur.
Understanding Sources Of Power
Think about an all-powerful dictator somewhere, like Vladimir Putin in Russia or Xi Jinping in China. Then, imagine that all of the janitors decide not to come in to work. That all-powerful dictator is now powerless to get the trash picked up. He can arrest the janitorsor even have them killedbut picking up all the trash in the country is not something he can do himself.
The point is that a leaders power extends only as far as their ability to control or influence institutions. They can only make laws to the extent that they control the legislative system and can only enforce those laws if they control or influence the legal system and the police. The same goes for commercial institutions, educational institutions, the media and so on.
That, in a nutshell, is Sharps key insight: power is never monolithic but distributed across many institutions, all of which have vulnerabilities. It can be attacked wherever you find a weakness. If you can influence the institutions that the regime depends on to maintain and enforce its power, you can create genuine transformation.
This is not just a theory. It has been proven to work in practice. The color revolutions were rooted in Sharps ideas as was the Arab Spring in Egypt. The Center for Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS) has put them to work in over 50 countries and even offers a comprehensive curriculum to help others bring about the change they want to see.
Yet Sharp’s ideas dont apply only to political movements. As I showed in Cascades, they can be just as effective in driving organizational change.
Mapping Power In Your Organizational Ecosystem
One thing every leader quickly learns is how little real power they really have. Formal authority only goes so far. Much like Gene Sharp observed about regimes, the status quo has sources of power keeping it in place. Often these have had yearseven decadesto entrench themselves. They will work against any significant change effort.
Consider the dilemma of the PC manufacturers in the 1980s. It was clear that Dells direct sales model was vastly superior to selling through distributors and market leaders like Compaq and HP made a number of efforts to adopt it. Yet so many stakeholders, including powerful executives within the company and external partners, had a stake in the existing model. So nothing ever changed.
Think about that for a minute. Pundits like to portray firms that get disrupted as simply not paying attention. But thats often not true. In this case, the leaders of these PC firms accurately diagnosed the problem and created strategies, such as modified compensation schemes, to address it, but still failed to overcome the forces keeping the status quo in place.
Thats why in our transformational change workshops, one of the first steps is mapping the sources of power well nee to influence to make change happen. Much like Sharp revealed about political revolutions, once youve identified institutional targets, you can start designing tactics to address them.
Change Isnt About Persuasion, Its About Power
All too often, we think about change in terms of persuasion. We think if we can just come up with the right message, broadcast it widely and get it to the right people, that change will happen. But decades of evidence shows thats not true. Even if we are able to inform people and change their attitudes, they are unlikely to change their behavior.
What Gene Sharp showed us is that change isnt about persuasion, its about power. To bring about transformation, we need to undermine the sources of power that underlie the present state while strengthening the forces that favor a different future. If you can influence the institutional stakeholders keeping the status quo in place, change can happen. If you cant, it is unlikely things will ever change.
That also helps explain why so many change efforts fail. They start with tactics designed to create a specific effect, such as build awareness or create a sense of urgency. Leaders roll out communication campaigns, design training programs, or host events like hackathons. Then they congratulate themselves when the action achieves the intended effect and wonder why genuine change never happened.
Until you identify, analyze, and understand exactly what your actions need to be targeted at, youre just wasting your time. Every enterprise, whether its an organization or an entire society, is governed by institutions that maintain the status quo. Once you are able to internalize that simple truth, you are ready to lead change effectively.
Change isnt about snappy slogans or clever campaigns. Its what happens when you build the capacity to influence institutions.
Yes, there are the New Years traditions of setting ambitious goals and ditching bad habits, but one evergreen resolution that ought to top lists is to banish bad design. Why endure something that simply doesnt work (or is an affront to aesthetics) any longer than we have to?
In the spirit of fresh starts, we polled experts in architecture, tech, industrial design, and urbanism on the everyday annoyances and the big-picture issues that they think are in desperate need of a refresh in 2026. (Top on my personal list? Eye-searing headlights.)
Design is inherently an optimistic act, and by fixing these issues, were a step closer to a more beautiful and better world.
[Photo: Snehit/Adobe Stock]
Data Centers
Data centers are the significant buildings of the moment, and we have a responsibility to make them part of our cities as theyre really powering the future. The buildings have to perform at the highest technical level, but they also need to connect and respond to a sense of place and to the community around it. For example, we designed a data center with a facade that has an intricate pattern language that feels more like a theater or civic building and other centers with mass timber, which lends warmth and beauty to the structure while also bringing a sustainability story to the structure.
Every data center project of ours now starts with thinking through resilient strategies, including reducing or eliminating evaporative cooling and integrating next-generation thinking on energy usage. At the same time, there are people still working in these buildings and there needs to be consideration for the workplace as well. It’s about technology plus people, and we can’t ignore the human side of this because recruitment and retention are still key considerations.
Its also interesting to think about what to do in a really dense urban environment. Were involved in conversion projects that take aging, underutilized office buildings and explore vertical mixed use. It’s not just about converting office to residential, which were doing in many locations. Can you take an aging office building and part of its reuse becomes a data center? In 2026, well see more of a global dialogue from a real estate standpoint on urban opportunities that includes thinking about data centers vertically.
Jordan Goldstein, Co-CEO of Gensler
[Source Image: whitecityrecords/Adobe Stock]
Crossover and Compact SUVs
Living in Los Angeles, Im surrounded by automobiles all day. Im always disappointed by how homogenous so many archetypes are. Crossover and compact SUVs are all so similar that you could swap the badges on any of them, and no one would know the difference between the brands.
Unfortunately, over the last decade the same can be said of most sports cars. All the major brands have adopted the wide rear body of the [Porsche] 911, and for no reason; their engines are in the front of the car and dont demand the stability and width to balance the weight that sits on the rear wheels of the 911.
Every brand has an origin story, and many of their older iconic cars were based on original ideas. As recently as the 90s, car brands held a unique design language. In the past, the only market that had homogeneous design was the Soviet Union. Our culture is based on differentiation in the market, where customers have choices. Today we lack real choice.
This all points to a lack of vision and conservative leadership at the major automakers. There is no risk-taking, and the customer is given a design thats the result of market research rather than innovation and design. This should be a priority because it instills poor valueslack of originality, fear-driven business strategy, zero risk-takingon the built environment and our culture.
Jonathan Olivares, Creative Director of Knoll
[Illustration: FC]
Data Ownership
Every time we swipe our MetroCard, visit a doctor, buy groceries, or scroll through our phones, we are creating data. But we almost never get to see it to understand ourselves better. The data flows in one direction only, from us into systems that are used to optimize operations and algorithms and train models. What if instead our data could come back to us in a form that can help us see the patterns in our lives and understand our own stories? I want to redesign this fundamental relationship.The issue is that data has become the language that we need to navigate life but we haven’t been taught to speak it; and the interfaces that could help us learn are designed for administrators and quarterly reports only, rarely for actual people trying to understand their own lives. Imagine getting home from a doctor’s appointment and receiving a beautiful understandable visualization of your healthover time, where you can see patterns you didnt know existed. This is the type of context that can help us ask better questions about our health.
Or imagine your transit system revealing the mundane rhythms of your own life back to you (the coffee shop you always stop at on Tuesdays, the routes you take when you’re stressed versus calm). This would close the literacy gap by making data comprehensible in the moments when it matters most without dumbing down complexity and nuances. I’ve spent my career proving we can do this. Better design here means more agency. It means people who can advocate for themselves. It means closing the gap between those who can speak data and those who can’t.
Giorgia Lupi, Partner at Pentagram
[Illustration: FC]
AI Interfaces
Im excited to see how teams rethink and redesign user interfaces for an AI-native world. Today, were still in the MS-DOS era of AI where every prompt, every agent, and every emerging modality is, for the most part, a long text response in a conversational interface. My prediction is that in 2026, well see a shift toward richer, more dynamic interfaces where both inputs and outputs evolve far beyond text.
Its not surprising that AI user interfaces began as chatbots. Large language models operate on tokens, and text is the fastest, cheapest medium to build, debug, and evaluate. But decades of software and interface design have made something clear: humans dont think in language alone. We think spatially. We understand through motion, contrast, hierarchy, and causality, and our instinct is to act through direct manipulation, not just typed commands.
As AI capabilities evolve, design is more important than ever. Visual interfaces arent going away, and neither is the need to see, shape, and refine ideas as we work. Designers have a rare chance to define the rules and patterns of this new interface era, shaping what work, play, and productivity will look like for decades to come.
Loredana Crisan, Chief Design Officer of Figma
[Source Photo: serdarerenlere/Adobe Stock]
Material Labeling
When anyone (architects, clients, contractors) walks into a big-box store, it would be transformative to see a Nutri-score or Local Law 33 energy grade for materials, but for wood in particular since its so widely used. A better system would treat wood like food, with clear, standardized material labeling. You should be able to see where the wood comes from, almost like buying eggs when youre faced with this wall of different levels of chicken torture.
Material supply chains struggle with standardization and transparency for many reasons, but in my opinion, it is because consumers didn’t know they should be demanding it. For example, once it became clear that Quartz countertops were causing silicosis by those cutting the material, consumers were horrified. So much so that the Australian government made the material illegal. The problem is big-box retailers, where most wood is purchased, rarely surface this information, despite occasionally stocking high-quality or responsibly sourced material hidden in plain sight.
Greater transparency at the point of purchase would empower people to make more precise decisions about a whole host of values that are important to them. When I walk into a box retailer, I want to know which 2xs are Code A (regeneratively cultivated through methods of land conservation and repair by a local within 100 miles who has been historically disenfranchised) or Code B (selectively harvested and replanted by a fifth generation land and sawmill owner using Indigenous cool burning to prevent forest fires) or Code C (small batch monocultures grown at high efficiency to prevent the replacement of biodiverse unproductive forests), etc.
Lindsey Wickstrom, Architect and Founding Principal of Mattaforma
[Source Photo: Emagnetic/Adobe Stock]
Outdoor Lighting
How about we all start taking a neighborly approach to outdoor lighting?
When colleagues and friends talk to me about lighting, they used to mention wonderful festival lights they had just seen or lamps they appreciated or hated. But these days they mostly complain about light streaming into their windows from someone elses outdoor lighting.
In the city, a new commercial tower in midtown streams constantly changing light into bedroom windows literally miles away. Entertaining for some, apparently, and intensely disruptive for others. Not to mention the damage to fish and bird habitat.
Most adults are in the very early stages of grasping how to use artificial intelligence. The The Lego Group thinks that children need to build their own learning path to understand the fast-evolving technology.
On Monday, the Danish toy maker debuted a new computer science and AI curriculum for K8 classrooms, Legos first foray into AI that comes more than three years after the debut of OpenAIs ChatGPT chatbot. The Lego Education Computer Science & AI kits include Lego bricks and other interactive hardware components, as well as online education materials intended to take children from the beginning stages of AI literacy through hands-on experimentation.
Debuting in classrooms this April, Lego says each package will cost $339.95 and is designed for groups of four students.
Kids want in on the AI conversation
Lego says 90% of kids want to learn more about how to use AI, but two-thirds feel left out of the AI conversation, according to a survey of 800 students ages 8 to 14 across the U.S., Germany, South Korea, and Australia conducted in late 2025.
Children have their own thoughts on how AI should be used, or how it shouldnt be used, says Andrew Sliwinski, head of product experience of LEGO Education. Lets bring children into the conversation in an informed and empowered way.
The curriculum will be sold in three grade bandsK2, 35, and 68and was designed as an end-to-end program for teaching both computer science fundamentals and AI concepts. According to Sliwinski, no data children share ever leaves the computer. The system works offline, and no private information is sent to Lego or any third party.
Escaping the AI panic cycle
Sliwinski says Lego wanted to move past the two dominant narratives around AI and children. One frames AI as an unstoppable force that will render kids obsolete before adulthood. The other calls for strict bans that prevent children from interacting with the technology at all.
What both of those narratives are often missing is that children are capable, he says. They have their own opinions and thoughts on AI and how it should and shouldnt be used.
Why toy makers are struggling with AI
The broader toy industry is still fumbling its approach to artificial intelligence. Mattel failed to deliver an AI-powered toy in 2025 under its partnership with OpenAI. Another AI-enabled teddy bear was banned after it engaged in sexually explicit conversations with minors.
In California, a state senator has introduced a bill that would enact a four-year ban on AI chatbot toys for children under 18.
Why banning AI wont work
I would never suggest buying a toy that has AI embedded in it, says Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It is just way too soon.
Still, Winthrop argues that banning AI in schools is unrealistic. Students will find workarounds, and many already encounter AI passively through everyday apps.
If AI can write a seventh-grade paper on World War II, students lose the critical thinking that comes from doing the work themselves, Winthrop says. That means educators will need to redesign assignments so the processnot just the outputmatters.
Teachers are really going to have to shift the assignments they give, she says.
Teaching under uncertainty
Justin Reich, an associate professor at MIT, says schools will need to operate under uncertainty for years. No one knows exactly what a 5-year-old should understand about AIbut waiting for perfect answers isnt an option.
Were almost certainly making mistakes, Reich says, likening the moment to early internet literacy efforts that later proved flawed.
Sliwinski says the payoff becomes clear in the classroom. During a recent visit to a fourth-grade class in Chicago, students trained Lego-based robots to dance using a machine-learning model. When commands were off, the robots lost their rhythm.
That creates a shift in power dynamics, Sliwinski says. AI is no longer the smartest thing in the roomthe kids are.
The majority of us see change as a blind scary leap into the unknowna scary evolution that demands we give up on everything we know. But what if we reframed change, not as something that happens to us, but as something we actively choose?
Traditionally people perceived change in black-and-white terms: either you can change, or you cant. That kind of thinking sets us up for failure by assuming that change requires some grand, perfect plan or major shift in direction. However, we also have the power to make small changes, no matter how minor they seem. And it’s these small changes that, over time, lead to profound transformation.
Fear Takes the Wheel
The most common reason people resist change is fear. And fear takes many forms: fear of failure, fear of the unknown, and fear of making the wrong move hold us back from making choices that could improve our lives. The fear of taking that first step is often so overwhelming that we decide to stay stuck, because inaction feels safer than risking the potential for discomfort or failure. We keep telling ourselves, Im not ready yet, or Ill probably fail. But these stories we tell ourselves only deepen our sense of powerlessness. They might make us feel comfortable by letting us off the hook, but these excuses dont help us become more capable, either.
The issue is that fear doesnt just make us inactive; it keeps us stuck. As humans, we’re always making choicesconsciously or unconsciously. The hamster running on its wheel is a perfect metaphor here: it runs tirelessly, not because it doesnt have the ability to stop, but because it doesnt choose to stop. At any moment, that hamster can step off the wheel. And in many instances, so can you.
The Cost of Inaction
You have more control than you think.
Staying stuck is a decision in itself, one that often carries a higher price than taking a leap. Consider this: Even if you stand in the middle of the road, you risk getting run over. This is the paradox of fear: Were afraid of making a “bad” choice, yet the failure to choose can often be the most costly decision we make.
Research on organizational change shows how employees who resist change are more likely to experience disruption, anxiety, and negative emotions the longer they resist, which can make changing in the future even harder. Unchecked resistance can decrease productivity, lower morale, cause project delays, and increase turnover. Leaders and organizations that proactively manage resistance by building trust, clarity, and support can transform these challenges into opportunities for growth and adaptation.
In contrast, those who embrace even small, incremental changes are more likely to experience increased confidence, a sense of accomplishment, and a willingness to face bigger challenges. The learning? Its the small wins that build momentum.
In his 20 years as manager of the All Blacks, the New Zealand Rugby team, Darren Shand has seen how embracing even small change can catalyze teams to perform in remarkable ways. For over a decade, the All Blacks were the top ranked rugby team in the world, driven largely not just by talent but by embracing trust, positivity, and growth: During my time with the All Blacks, I learned that transformation rarely comes from radical changeit comes from consistent small choices made with purpose. At the highest level, we found that growth was less about doing more, and more about doing the little things better, every single day.
The Power of Minor Shifts
So, whats holding you back from better embracing change? Instead of seeing change as a monumental task, think of it as a series of small choices that add up over time. Start small: maybe it’s trying a new hobby, having a conversation with someone that you’ve been avoiding, or taking a short walk every day. These tiny decisions may seem insignificant in the moment, but theyre the building blocks of personal transformation. Each time you make a choice to step out of your comfort zone, no matter how small, youre signaling to yourself that change is possible.
Ready for Change? Consider This
If youre ready to embrace change, start by asking yourself a few simple but powerful questions:
Whats the cost of staying where I am? Reflect on what youre risking by not making a change. Sometimes, the discomfort of the present moment is less painful than the long-term consequences of staying stuck.
What ONE small step can I take today? Change doesnt have to be grandiose. Whats one tiny action you can take today that will start to shift your course?
What am I afraid of? Often, fear is exaggerated in our minds. What is the worst thing that could happen if you tried something new? Could the benefits outweigh the risks?
Who can support me in this change? Change doesnt have to be a solo endeavor. Who can be your accountability partner, or who can offer guidance along the way?
By asking these questions, youll gain clarity on why change matters to you and how you can begin to make it happen, step by step.
Change is Always a Choice
Change is not as hard or as out of reach as we often make it out to be. The key is recognizing that, just like a hamster on its wheel, you have the power to stop running in circlesand step off. You have the power to make a change, however small, and with each choice, your world transforms. In the end, so much of the change we face isnt something that happens to us. Its something we choose.
As 2026 begins, many organizations are launching AI transformation initiatives. The new year brings with it fresh budgets, renewed strategic focus, and mounting pressure to capture value from artificial intelligence. Yet studies consistently show that most AI projects fail to generate meaningful returns. Companies pour resources into promising experiments that never scale, accumulate tools that are never integrated, and watch initial enthusiasm curdle into skepticism.
What separates organizations that create lasting value from those that dont is rarely the technology to which they have access. Instead, the critical secret sauce lies in having a systematic, rigorous, and repeatable approach that allows the leadership team to move from the identification of opportunities to operational deployment.
This article offers a practical playbook for that journey, using the illustrative example of a midsize manufacturing firm (Aurora Windows). While the playbook itself distills learnings gained from large, technically sophisticated businesses in sectors such as defense and finance, our example shows how these lessons can be applied even in late-adopting companies with limited resources. At present, there are few examples of systematic end-to-end AI innovation pipelines that have been deployed successfully in the real world, so our example can only be illustrative. Nevertheless, forward-looking companies are already beginning their journeys along this path and evidence from decades of organizational and digital transformation efforts allow us to model what success will ultimately look like.
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I will be using this playbook in my upcoming guest lecture for IMD Business School’s AI strategy and implementation executive program, delivered in collaboration with Misiek Piskorski, dean of executive education at IMD, and Amit Joshi, codirector of the program. IMD is a world-leading business school, ranked No. 1 globally in custom executive education by the Financial Times (2025), renowned for transforming rigorous research into actionable leadership results.
An Illustrative Example: Aurora Windows
Aurora Windows is a 35-year-old, second-generation manufacturing company that designs and produces doors, windows, and architectural glass for commercial and residential building projects. With roughly 220 employees across one main plant and two regional distribution hubs, it sits in the classic too big to be small, too small to be big SME band: large enough to feel pressure from global competitors and construction giants, but without a dedicated transformation department or a large consulting budget. Over the next five years, the leadership team aims to position Aurora as the go-to innovation partner for sustainable, smart building projects by becoming a fully AI-driven business.
The Innovation Pipeline
To succeed in its goals, Aurora needs to take a disciplined approach to AI enterprise transformation that treats the innovation process as a continuous structured pipeline with clear stages. Projects flow from initial ideation into a rigorous assessment phase and on to operational deploymenta narrowing funnel that sees many ideas entering but only the strongest and most strategically aligned reaching production.
Firms in some sectorssuch as tech and pharmaceutical companieshave long relied on continuous product development pipelines that systematically advance projects from abstract ideas to market-ready products. In the AI age, every organization needs to adopt this kind of systematic approach to innovation. But this is more than just a new product development pipeline: Innovation projects must be aligned with the broader organizational culture and processes within which they will be embedded.
Step 1: Current-State AssessmentEstablishing Your Baseline
Before Aurora can begin managing an innovation pipeline, the leadership team needs to understand where the company currently stands. They conduct a baseline assessment across three dimensions:
Organizational purpose and strategic clarity
Auroras executive team revisits its core mission: creating high-performing, sustainable door, window, and glass solutions that make buildings safer, more comfortable, and more energy efficient. The team articulates three specific five-year goals:
40% revenue growth without proportional headcount increases
Margin protection despite volatile input costs
Positioning as the go-to AI-driven innovation partner.
This clarity becomes the North Star for evaluating every AI initiative.
Knowledge baseline
The team then assesses the companys current AI literacy. At present, there is a scattering of expertise across departments, with individual enthusiasts driving the current pilot programs. AI knowledge in the leadership team is limited and most of the businesss staff are unfamiliar with basic machine learning concepts.
Risk appetite
Aurora is a family business that has survived by not taking reckless bets. But the market is shifting. Competitors are beginning to offer AI-enhanced design services and predictive maintenance. The leadership team articulates a balanced stance toward risk: Aurora needs to advance more rapidly than they would normally be inclined to move, but with guardrails in place to protect the brands hard-won reputation.
This assessment reveals uncomfortable truths. Aurora has enthusiasm for AI transformation but no shared knowledge base or language for discussing AI, and no accepted criteria for assessing the value of pilot projects. The leadership team has ambition but there is currently no defined path to move projects from the pilot phase to company-wide operation. Most importantly, there is no mechanism for deciding what to do next.
Step 2: OpportunitiesPopulating the Innovation Pipeline
Auroras leadership now launches a structured ideation process to identify projects that are explicitly aligned with the companys strategic goals. Rather than asking What can we do with AI? cross-functional teams ask What poblems prevent us from achieving our strategic goals, and can AI help us solve them?
The teams quickly generate two dozen initial ideas spanning multiple AI types: analytical AI for process optimization, workflow automation to reduce manual tasks, generative AI for design acceleration, and even agentic AI systems operating semiautonomously within defined parameters.
Each idea receives a rapid initial assessment using five criteria scored 1 to 10:
Priority: How urgently does this support our core goals?
Risk: Whats the potential downside if this fails after deployment?
Value: Whats the likely financial or strategic return?
Cost: What investment is required to reach production?
Difficulty: How challenging will implementation and adoption be?
When scored and ranked, clear patterns emerge. Several high-scoring opportunities cluster around production efficiencyusing computer vision for defect detection, AI-driven equipment maintenance prediction, and automated quality documentation. A number of initiatives focusing on design acceleration and customer experience receive medium scores. Several moon shot projects that were initially very popular with senior leaders receive low scores because they are technically difficult, expensive, and come with significant risks, despite their high potential payoff.
This process also surfaces important dependencies. A design acceleration project that has many supporters would require clean CAD libraries and standardized templateswork that hasnt started yet. Similarly, a maintenance prediction system needs sensor data that is not yet available but that would be generated if one of the quality inspection projects goes ahead.
The ideation exercise produces more than a ranked list of ideas. It creates a common vocabulary for discussing AI opportunities at the same time as revealing capability gaps and building consensus around which directions make strategic sense. Of Auroras 24 ideas, 6 scored highly enough to warrant further detailed assessment. The rest remain in the backlognot definitively rejected, but requiring either new capabilities or a shift in strategic priority to make them viable.
Step 3: AssessmentEnterprise Architecture Analysis and Fit
The six projects that ranked highest in the initial screening now enter detailed assessment. Auroras leadership team first maps the organizations Strategic Enterprise Architecture (SEA) and then assesses each projects degree of fit across four dimensions:
Purpose and Strategic Intent
Does this project directly advance Auroras three strategic goals with clear, measurable outcomes?
People and Culture
Are leadership and staff ready for the changes the project involves?
Processes and Governance
Can the initiative integrate with current processes and operating models?
Technology Architecture and Data
Is the initiative feasible using existing or available systems?
The results are sobering. Of the six projects under assessment, only three demonstrate clear alignment across all four SEA dimensions. Two of the others could become viable with specific capability-building work.
The SEA analysis also reveals positive insights. The quality inspection camera project will generate structured defect data that several other proposed projects can use. By recognizing this dependency, Aurora can sequence projects to build on this foundation.
Step 4: OperationalizationFrom Experimentation to Production
The three projects that passed detailed assessment now undergo active experimentation. Aurora structures these experiments as learning journeys, not just technical validations. The visual quality inspection project runs bounded pilots on specific production lines. The AI-assisted design tools are tested with a small R&D team before broader rollout. The data infrastructure project proceeds in phases, upgrading one integration at a time while minimizing disruption.
After six months of experimentation, the newly developed quality inspection tool passes all tests and moves to production. The data infrastructure project shows promise but needs another quarter of refinementit remains in experimentation. After a promising start, the AI-assisted design tools run into a technical wall. With no clear path forward, the project is paused until a technical solution is identified.
Systems that reach production require ongoing monitoring, cost tracking, and impact measurement. Aurora establishes guardrails to prevent misuse and implements continuous monitoring to catch issues before they become problems.
Sustaining the Pipeline
Auroras innovation pipeline is a long-term, repeatable system that provides the engine for continuous AI transformation. But to deliver its value, it must be carefully tended. The leadership team establishes a quarterly review process with three goals:
Project health checks
Are experimental projects meeting milestones? Are production systems delivering expected value? Do any initiatives need intervention, resources, or retirement?
Pipeline rebalancing
As projects advance, move into production, or are killed, the pipeline needs replenishment. The leadership team takes a view across the entire pipeline to ensure that the right mix of projects is moving through, balanced across time horizons, risk levels, and strategic targets.
Strategic recalibration
Markets, technologies, and organizational priorities shift. Quarterly reviews explicitly ask: Do our scoring criteria still reflect strategy? Are new capabilities or partnerships available? Have competitors made moves that change our priorities?
This operating rhythm transforms Auroras relationship with AI. Instead of episodic enthusiasm followed by disappointment when pilots dont scale, the leadership team has a sustainable engine for continuous improvement. Each quarter brings visible progresssome quick wins, some foundation building, some ambitious bets advancing.
Within 18 months, Auroras transformation becomes tangible. The company now has three AI systems in production (quality inspection across all lines, automated quality documentation, and a new LLM-powered customer portal). The projects in experimentation and assessment build on these initial experiences and include initiatives that have become viable thanks to the technical capacity, skills, and processes developed while working on the initial round of projects. By avoiding wasteful efforts to develop a series of unconnected pilots with no clear strategic value, Aurora has built a foundation of success that is propelling it past its competitors.
Conclusion: The Management System Behind the Pipeline
Auroras story highlights a fundamental truth about AI transformation: Technology is rarely the constraint. Most companies can access impressive AI tools. What they lack are the management systems needed to deploy those tools strategically, build repeatable capabilities, and create sustained value.
An innovation pipeline like the one in our example does not run itself. It requires systems and structures that creat both horizontal and vertical collaborationlinking the C-suite to project teams and linking project teams to the rest of the organization. Without these connections, even the best-designed pipelines will stall.
Cultural change is often framed as a precondition for AI transformation. But culture doesnt shift as a result of exhortation alone. It is shaped and steered by the processes, review rhythms, and governance structures that determine how decisions get made and how work flows through the organization. Quarterly reviews, cross-functional assessment teams, and clear advancement criteria arent bureaucratic overhead. They are the mechanisms through which a culture of disciplined innovation takes root.
The companies that succeed with AI wont be those with the most ambitious pilots or the earliest adoption of new tools. They will be those that build the management systems that are needed to move systematically from opportunity to assessment to operationand to sustain that movement over time.
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When a 7.7-magnitude earthquake hit Myanmar last year, roads buckled and thousands of buildings collapsed. But a group of small, ultra-low-cost homes made from bamboo survived without any damage.
Finished just days before the quake, the houses are emergency shelters for some of the millions of people displaced by Myanmars ongoing civil war. Myanmar-based architecture studio Blue Temple worked with its spinoff construction company Housing Now to make the simple prefab homes as low-cost as possible while still able to withstand natural disasters.
We built them for the price of a smartphoneabout $1,000 U.S. dollars per house, says architect and Blue Temple founder Raphaël Ascoli.
[Photo: Raphaël Ascoli]
Engineering bamboo for earthquake resilience
Bamboo has a long history as a construction material in the country, but the team saw an opportunity to innovate with it. Ascoli, who has been working in Myanmar for the last decade, partnered with a local bamboo carpenter on the concept.
[Photo: Raphaël Ascoli]
The material is already cheaper to use than wood, concrete, or steel. But the architecture studio helped cut costs further by using a thin, low-cost species of bamboounlike the large species typically used in constructionand bundling it together to make it stiff and strong.
The construction company builds beams from the bamboo and then puts them together in structural frames that we can just assemble like an Ikea kit in less than a week, says Ascoli. Because of the organic natural of the bamboo that we weave together into the frames, it gives the house a bit of flexibility. Instead of being very stiff and brittle like concrete, it can move a little bit.
[Photo: Aung Htay Hlaing]
Any bamboo structure has some advantages in earthquakes because of its light weight and flexibility, but the company found ways to boost that performance. We built a lot of prototypes and then pulled on them until the breaking point, Ascoli says. You can evaluate the maximum pressure that can be put on the house before failing. They made tweaks to each joint to make the buildings stronger and more weatherproof.
The massive earthquake was a real-life proof of concept, says Ascoli. The homes, in a camp for displaced people, were less than 10 miles from the epicenter of the quake, but none of them needed repairs.
[Photo: Aung Htay Hlaing]
A DIY path to scaling shelter without NGOs
The company has been building homes for displaced people since Myanmars coup in 2021. While the design can be flexible, its typically a simple room that residents can divide for living and sleeping; camps have separate shared bathrooms and kitchens.
[Photo: Aung Htay Hlaing]
So far, the work has happened at a relatively small scale. The team is small, and funding from NGOswhich was limited to begin withhas started to disappear. When the Trump administration shut down USAID, that had massive consequences on the humanitarian response in Myanmar, says Ascoli. A lot of NGOs are now closing down and unable to continue operating. Other countries have also cut funding. Theres also a shortage of construction labor because of the war.
[Photo: Raphaël Ascoli]
To keep going, the team is experimenting with new approaches. If we want to scale, we have to be radical, he says. The latest project, developed over the last 18 months, is a DIY construction manual that helps citizens incorporate some of the design teams techniques to optimize bamboo construction as they build homes themselves.
The humanitarian sector is kind of failing at the moment because its relying on unreliable sources of funding, and its an archaic system, says Ascoli. Were basically trying to test out if there is an alternative to traditional humanitarian response, and trying to find what can be the post-NGO humanitarian response programs that will replace the old systems.
Trust used to be the benefit of the doubt. Now it is the battle to be won.
Recently, I asked a CEO client why she didnt want to speak on a panel her team had been invited to. Her answer? Id rather the company speak for itself. I dont want to make it about me. That hesitation is common. Many leaders assume visibility is self-serving. But today, staying behind the scenes isnt humility. It’s a risk.
When nearly 70% of people believe business leaders intentionally mislead the public, credibility and trust, not marketing, has become the new currency. We are leading in an era when silence is interpreted as indifference and visibility is mistaken for vanity. That tension has paralyzed many executives who want to do the right thing but do not want to appear self-promotional.
I have spent more than a decade helping CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs turn visibility into a strategy rather than a stunt. The most successful ones have mastered five internal shifts that rebuild trust from the inside out. None of them requires a massive budget. All of them require courage.
1. Step out from behind your business and stand beside it
Many leaders still assume that the company should speak for them. That used to work when audiences trusted corporations implicitly. Today, people look for the human behind the logo. According to Edelmans 2025 Trust Barometer, business remains the most trusted institution, yet that trust is now tied directly to individual leaders.
Visibility is not about ego. It is about accountability. When you put your name to your mission, it tells employees and customers that you believe enough in the work to represent it personally.
Start small. Write one LinkedIn post each week that connects your leadership values to what your team is building. Share a story from the trenches, a tough call you made, a lesson you learned, or even a mistake that clarified your priorities. Authentic leaders do not curate perfection. They clarify purpose. The goal is to stand alongside your company, not in front of it or hiding behind it.
2. Define your ‘Influence ID’ before you define your strategy
In every workshop I run, I ask leaders one question: Who are you in addition to being a CEO or founder?
That question is often followed by a long pause. Most can rattle off quarterly goals faster than personal convictions. Yet your ability to articulate who you are shapes whether people trust what you sell.
I call this your Influence ID. It is the unique mix of values, experiences, and strengths that differentiates you from every other leader in your industry. It is not a tagline. It is a compass.
Try this exercise. Write down eight aspects of your brand wheel: skills, stories, causes, or passions that make you who you are. Notice where they overlap. Maybe your financial discipline fuels your advocacy for small business transparency. Maybe your love of coaching kids sports mirrors how you lead teams. Those intersections reveal your authentic narrative.
When you know your Influence ID, every decision, from interviews to investor decks, aligns naturally. You stop performing a brand and start embodying one.
3. Turn your visibility into a trust engine
The loudest leaders do not necessarily win. The most trusted ones do.
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 61% of people believe both business and government are failing people like them. In that environment, communication has to shift from promotion to education. The leaders earning trust today act less like advertisers and more like teachers.
Start by reframing every outward communication with one question: What value does this give my audience? If you are announcing a product, explain the problem it solves. If you are celebrating a milestone, share the lesson that others can apply.
Use the three-to-one rule I teach executives: three insights or resources for every one piece of company or product promotion. This ratio forces you to build goodwill before you ever ask for attention. Over time, consistency compounds into credibility. People stop seeing you as a marketer and start seeing you as a mentor. That is the moment visibility becomes trust.
4. Treat thought leadership like a business asset, not a marketing hobby
For most organizations, the real decision-makers are not the ones sitting in sales meetings. They are the unseen influencers in legal, finance, or operations who quietly determine whether a deal moves forward. Edelman and LinkedIns 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report calls them hidden buyers. They read deeply, think critically, and use high-quality thought leadership to decide whom to trust.
That means every article, podcast or op-ed you publish is more than content. It is collateral in the trust economy.
Audit your digital presence the way you would a financial statement. Ask yourself:
Is your expertise visible where those hidden buyers are researching?
Do your insights challenge assumptions rather than echo trends?
Does your tone invite dialogue instead of demand attention?
Pick one platform, such as your newsletter or LinkedIn. Commit to showing up consistently for 90 days. Measure success not by likes but by opportunities: invitations, partnerships, and client inquiries. Those are the new trust metrics.
5. Build a brand that outlasts your business
Many founders sell their companies and then realize they sold their voice along with them. I have watched brilliant entrepreneurs exit successfully only to feel an unexpected emptiness. Their entire network, data, and even audience list transferred with the deal.
Your business is an asset. You are the equity.
Start protecting that equity now. Maintain an email list, personal website, or professional profile that belongs to you, not just your company. Capture the lessons you are learning in real time through a blog, internal newsletter, or short video updates, and keep those archives. When the next chapter comes, you will have a built-in platform ready to launch whatever comes next.
Think of it the way Sara Blakely did when she sold a majority stake in Spanx but announced it from her personal Instagram rather than a press release. Her audience followed her, which meant every future venture started with a foundation of trust already built.
The modern trust equation
You do not need millions of followers to be influential. You need the right 500 people who are in your target audience and believe you stand for something real. You want to create raving fans out of those 500 people.
Leadership visibility is not about spotlighting yourself. It is about directing attention toward a mission that matters. The skeptics will always ask, Cant CEOs just lead quietly? They can, but quiet leadership is invisible leadership, and invisible leadership no longer earns trust.
So stand beside your business. Define your Influence ID. Teach, not preach. Publish with purpose. Build a reputation sturdy enoughto outlast any logo.
In the age of skepticism, the most powerful marketing strategy remaining is the truth spoken by a leader who is willing to show up and stand by it.
Adapted from The Strategic Business Influencer: Building a Brand with a Small Budget. Copyright 2025 by Paige Velasquez Budde. Available from Matt Holt, an imprint of BenBella Books, Inc.
