For weeks, corporate leaders across the country largely stayed silent as immigration officers descended on the city of Minneapolis, eventually killing two civilians. In recent days, however, CEOs and prominent tech figures have slowly raised their voices in protestthough many of them have been careful not to mention President Trump by name or directly criticize ICE agents.
Over 60 CEOs from Minnesota-based companiesincluding the likes of Target and 3Mcalled for an immediate deescalation of tensions in a letter on January 25. In leaked comments, tech leaders like Sam Altman and Tim Cook claimed to have spoken to Trump, while Altman noted that whats happening with ICE is going too far. In a recent editorial in the San Francisco Standard, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman called on fellow tech executives to speak out against the Trump administration rather than remaining neutral. Januarys tragic events in Minneapolis should end that posture, he wrote. We leaders in tech and business have powereconomic, social, platform powerand sitting on that power right now is not good business.
Many of the statements from CEOs have faced criticism for not being forceful enough, and tech workers have urged their employers to use their influence to put pressure on the White House. Still, any kind of public comment from corporate leaders represents a shift from the defensive crouch many of them have taken since Trump took office, due to fears that they would be targeted by the administration.
Fast Company spoke to Ike Silver, a marketing professor at the USC Marshall School of Business, about what to make of business leaders wading into this issueand why even a muted corporate response indicates the tides may be turning across corporate America.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Fast Company: How would you characterize the corporate activism weve seen from companies under the Trump administration?
Ike Silver: For a long time, the general status quo marketing strategy advice was: Avoid political issues. Over the course of the last 20 years or so, that landscape has shifted such that consumers demand to know more about where companies stand. People can question businesses, and that sort of thing can go viral. But there have been these shifting market-based incentives for companies to get involvedat least up until November 2024.
At that point, there was a shift, and I would attribute that shift to two things: One is that the Trump administration has been very vocal and active, both in signaling that it would not tolerate companies that took a political stance it did not agree with, but also actually going through with various executive actions to make life for businesses who speak out more difficult in various ways. We’ve seen things as simple as Trump getting on Truth Social and just trashing a company and calling on his followers to boycott, all the way to threats to use the FCC in various ways to block corporate actions.
So to my eye, what we’re seeing from business leaders is keeping their fiduciary commitments in mind and being more reticent to respond to consumer demands out of fear of being targeted by the current administration. That kind of targeting can have very real economic costs for companies.
The other thing that’s worth mentioning is that Trumps election, I think, signaled a shift in the perceptions of the national moodit wouldn’t surprise me at all if business leaders looked at Trump’s election and thought, well, the tides are moving against some of these liberal causes that we’ve previously taken sides on. So it’s not just threats from the administration, but it’s also a perception that maybe there is less consumer appetite for companies to take sides. There is some research suggesting that, as a general rule, conservatives are a bit less enthusiastic about companies taking political sides, even their side. Liberals tend to demand that companies get involved to a greater extent.
Weve now seen a number of CEOs and business leaders speak out about whats happening in Minnesota, though some of them have faced criticism for being too neutral. Is this a shift companies have made since Trump took office?
I think the devastating carnage that we’re seeing out of Minneapolis has spurred some CEOs to speak out. There are CEOs of AI companies coming out and saying, I tend to be very moderate, but what I’m seeing is very disturbing to me. And every little statement of that sort kind of adds up and creates a sense that companies are a bit more willing than they’ve been to speak out. Because there are more doing itand they’re not immediately facing direct punishment from the governmentthat creates even more safety.
Why do you think were seeing corporate leaders comment at all on this issue, given the political environment?
Public opinion on this issue is much clearer. A big part of what companies do when they decide whether or not to get involved in these issues is thinking about: What percentage of my target market is going to align with what I’m saying, and what percentage of my target market is going to oppose what I’m saying?
The combination of outcry on social media, days of activism across the country, the visibility of the protests, the unpopularity of ICE in the wake of some of the videos that we’ve seen coming out of Minneapolisall of those factors combine to give business leaders the sense that the consumer market will be amenable to them getting involved in this kind of issue.
This isn’t going to be Bud Light with Dylan Mulvaney, where half the people respond positively, but half the people respond super negatively. This is the kind of issue where there is a bit more national consensus, at least insofar as people are concerned about the specific tactics that ICE is using for enforcement.
It is true that the executive branch is quite powerful, but they still have to admonish companies one by one for this kind of action. If thousands of CEOs are speaking out, the likelihood that any one will be punished is lower. If one actor pokes their head up and says something, then the government can kind of squash that. But it’s much harder to do that when it feels more like the whole business community is taking a stand.
Do you think companies feel a moral imperative to speak out about ICEs actionsthat they’re treating this any differently than other political issues?
A question that is really hard to answer from the outside is whether any given business leader is speakig out because of their own conscience or because of market forces. My personal perspective is that business leaders typically want to do both. When opinion polling clearly shows that people are against what ICE is doing, CEOs who might already have had reservations about the Trump administration’s actions, but who might have felt it would be costly for them to speak out, now have cover to come forward and make a business case for the company taking a stand in some way.
You can’t go to your stakeholders and shareholders and say, The government is against us, and it’s not clear if consumers want us to, but my conscience says we have to speak out on this thing at any cost. But if you are the kind of CEO who wants to speak your mind, who wants to be able to behave in line with your moral compass, then the fact that the national environment seems to be amenable to that at the moment, can provide cover. That’s not to say that every business leader is doing this for conscience reasons, but given that there are still salient costs and that many CEOs tend to be risk averse at baseline, I think there’s probably a lot of speaking conscience going on right now.
How much value is there in corporate leaders speaking out later, once they feel as though the environment is more amenable to it?
As more companies come forward, consumers become aware that it’s reasonable to expect companies to come forward, and they start to penalize companies that don’t. The other aspect of this is that if you are late to the party, you’re typically seen as less authentic in your support.
I happen to think that we want to have business environments in which companies are encouraged to come forwardthat even if you’re late to the party, it’s better that you sort of come forward and stand up for your morals than not. But there’s a consumer skepticism that goes with that. I’m working on a paper that basically argues that for any social purpose activity to go well, the company needs to choose a cause that consumers are aligned with, and they need to communicate an authentic commitment to it.
In 2020, there was a lot of public pressure on companies to speak out after George Floyds murder. Many of them made bold commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion and then quietly divested from that work, as we have seen more recently. Do you think this moment is different?
I don’t think that it is reasonable to expect that companies will devote all of their resources to fighting every political battle consistently forever. I think what’s important is for consumers who care about issues to help create an environment in which companies are incentivized to get involvedso consistently rewarding companies who do things in line with our values, and trying to move away from spending our money with companies who do things that contravene our values.
Were obviously in an employers market right now. Do companies care as much right now about demands from their workforce to speak out on political issues?
Companies are somewhat less concerned about this now, in an environment in which employees have fewer outside options. That also relates to the general health of the economy and the rise of AI. There are a number of companies who may legitimately be thinking, if some folks leave because of this, we won’t show up on the cover of The Wall Street Journal over layoffs. As a general rule, it’s harder for employees to leave than it is for customers to leave, so I tend to think that companies are a bit more responsive to the consumer landscape than to the employee landscape.
That said, there are some companies who position themselves as being sort of explicitly moral, and those kinds of companies attract people who care about that a lot as employees. I’m thinking about Patagonia, or Ben and Jerry’s, or National Geographic. It also matters a lot what the political makeup of the employee base is. If you’re a large multinational company and you have employees on either side, maybe you’re thinking, our involvement will galvanize some but alienate others, so let’s just stay out of iteven if there are swaths of employees asking us to speak out. In this particular case, the public opinion data suggests that people are quite angry, so companies are in this position to be able to satisfy a lot of different stakeholders.
This week, the Trump administration pulled hundreds of ICE officers out of Minnesota. Do you think the statements from corporate leaders had any bearing on that decision? And do you expect to see more companies speak out now?
Although the administration is quite powerful, they are not at all immune from the costs of contravening public sentiment. The midterms are coming. Trump will not be in power forever. If you look at senators and Congress people from more moderate districts, they are speaking out.
One thing that’s interesting is that in many cases, these companies are speaking out in the absence of any particular boycotts or consumer pressure on their own brand. There are definitely signals that there is broad consumer sentiment in favor of taking a stand against ICE. But it’s not as if many of these companies speaking out are themselves facing targeted, economically costly boycottswhich I think speaks in favor of the idea that business leaders do care about this issue. Business leaders are people, too. They also don’t like seeing Americans gunned down in the streets.
The less you think that a company is in the public eye and expected to speak out about this thing, the more you should kind of assume that when they do speak out, they’re doing it for some moral reasons. Unfortunately, we can’t put a secret camera in these boardrooms that would tell us definitively why companies are doing this. But I generally think it’s a mix of these things. There are market forces, and then there’s also the moral compasses of these CEOswhich are sometimes faulty, but not non-existent.
Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes fell sharply in January as higher home prices and possibly harsh winter weather kept many prospective homebuyers on the sidelines despite easing mortgage rates.
Existing home sales sank 8.4% last month from December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.91 million units, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday. Thats the biggest monthly decline in nearly four years and the slowest annualized sales pace in more than two years.
Sales fell 4.4% compared with January last year. The latest sales figure fell short of the 4.105 million pace economists were expecting, according to FactSet.
The decrease in sales is disappointing,” said Lawrence Yun, NARs chief economist. “The below-normal temperatures and above-normal precipitation this January make it harder than usual to assess the underlying driver of the decrease and determine if this months numbers are an aberration.
Home sales slowed sharply across the Northeast, Midwest, South and West. But sales had their biggest annual and monthly drop in the West, which wasn’t as affected by last month’s winter storm as the other regions of the country. Plus, theres usually a month or two lag between a contract signing and when the sale is finalized, so many of January’s sales reflect contracts signed late last year.
Despite the sharp drop in sales, home prices continued to climb last month. The national median sales price increased 0.9% in January from a year earlier to $396,800. Home prices have risen on an annual basis for 31 months in a row.
The U.S. housing market has been in a sales slump dating back to 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from pandemic-era lows. The combination of higher mortgage rates, years of skyrocketing home prices and a chronic shortage of homes nationally following more than a decade of below-average home construction have left many aspiring homeowners priced out of the market. Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes remained stuck last year at 30-year lows.
Sales have been hovering close to a 4-million annual pace now going back to 2023. Thats well short of the 5.2-million annual pace thats historically been the norm.
Still, mortgage rates have been trending lower for months, which helped give home sales a boost in December and brightened the outlook for the upcoming spring home-buying season at least for home shoppers who can afford to buy at current rates.
Many of the homes purchased last month likely went under contract in November and December, when mortgage rates eased to their lowest levels of the year.
The average rate on a 30-year mortgage briefly dropped last month to 6.06%, the lowest level since September 2022, according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac. It has since inched higher, remaining this week at just above 6%, but close to a percentage point lower than a year ago.
Even so, affordability remains a challenge for many aspiring homeowners, especially first-time buyers who dont have equity from an existing home to put toward a new home purchase. They accounted for 31% of homes sales last month. Historically, they made up 40% of home sales.
Today we have minimal foreclosures, housing wealth continues to build out, it’s just that renters who want to become homeowners are finding difficulty, Yun said.
Uncertainty over the job market is also likely keeping many would-be buyers on the sidelines.
While the economy has been registering solid growth, the labor market has been sluggish for months. U.S. job openings fell in December to the lowest level in more than five years. And while hiring by U.S. employers was surprisingly strong in January, government revisions reduced the number of jobs created last year to the weakest total since 2020, when the pandemic began.
The sales slowdown means more homes are staying on the market longer.
There were 1.22 million unsold homes at the end of January, down 0.8% from December and up 3.4% from January last year, NAR said. Thats still well short of the roughly 2 million homes for sale that was typical before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Januarys month-end inventory translates to a 3.7-month supply at the current sales pace. Traditionally, a 5- to 6-month supply is considered a balanced market between buyers and sellers.
More homes traditionally go on the market ahead of the spring home-buying season, which could give prospective buyers a wider selection.
Buyers will find a more favorable market as we head into spring, said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS. More inventory, lower rates and slower price growth will give buyers more room for negotiation.
Alex Veiga, AP business writer
In late 2025, Interpol coordinated a global operation across 134 nations, seizing roughly 30,000 live animals, confiscating illegal plant and timber products, and identifying about 1,100 suspected wildlife traffickers for national police to investigate.
Wildlife trafficking is one of the most lucrative illicit industries worldwide. It nets between US$7 billion and $23 billion per year, according to the Global Environment Facility, a group of nearly 200 nations as well as businesses and nonprofits that fund environmental improvement and protection projects.
People buy and sell a wide range of items, including live animals, plant powders and oils, ivory carvings, and musical instruments.
Historically, enforcement has been largely reactive. There is so much global trade that fewer than 1 in 10 international cargo shipments of any kind are physically inspected. Traffickers also avoid detection by using false or generic names instead of proper species identification, employing coded language in online listings, rerouting shipments, and shifting to different messaging platforms when enforcement pressure increases. Emerging digital tools are helping authorities link online monitoring, legal reference tools, and on-the-ground investigations.
As a researcher at the University of Florida working at the intersection of conservation science and applied technology, I observed these advancements firsthand at an international meeting of governments and partner organizations under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, often known by its acronym, CITES. This treatythe cornerstone for international regulation of trade in endangered plants and animalsis enforced by national customs and wildlife agencies.
AI and digital tools for inspection
A huge challenge for officials seeking to prevent wildlife trafficking is knowing where to lookand then figuring out what theyve found.
Cargo screening: Advanced X-ray screeners, similar to those used in airport security but designed for cargo, are being paired with software that helps spot unusual shapes or materials inside packages.
Trials conducted at major ports and mail processing centers in Australia have detected animals concealed in various kinds of shipments. The software does not identify species but highlights anomalies, helping inspectors decide which packages deserve closer inspection.
Assisted identification: A software program supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences uses artificial intelligence to help identify the species of animals or animal parts found in shipments. Inspectors can use chatbot-style interfaces to describe what they have found to a system trained on technical documents with detailed descriptions of a wide range of species.
This type of work can help inspectors tell the difference between closely related species whose legal protections differ. For example, trade of African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) is strictly regulated. There are different, often less stringent protections for similar-looking species, such as the Timneh parrot (Psittacus timneh) and the brown-necked parrot (Poicephalus fuscicollis).
Portable DNA testing: Enforcement efforts dont always happen in offices and labs. One company aims to provide small, handheld kits that can detect up to five species in about 20 or 30 minutes without needing traditional lab equipment. The kits show their results on a simple strip that changes color when the DNA of a particular species appears in a sample. Conceptually, its similar to a pregnancy test, which changes color when a hormone is detected.
Timber identification: Handheld scanners use software to quickly identify timber species by examining the internal cellular structure of the wood. This can help to distinguish protected hardwoods from legal alternatives in regions where illegal logging is widespread, such as South America, Southeast Asia and Africa.
Background research and risk profiling
Even before wildlife-related items appear at national borders, there can be signs of illegal trafficking that technology can help identify.
Monitoring online trade: Large volumes of wildlife trafficking now occur through online transactions. To avoid detection, sellers often use vague descriptions or coded language, such as listings that omit species names entirely or use emojis instead of words. Others hide key details in images or brief text that say little about what is being sold, even just showing a photo with no description.
Anti-trafficking organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund collaborate with tech companies to scan online listings using AI and content moderation tools. Between 2018 and 2023, the tech companies blocked or removed more than 23 million listings and accounts related to protected species, including live reptiles, birds, and primates, and elephant products.
Early warnings from paperwork: Shipping documents often provide early warning signs of illegal trade. Wildlife enforcement officers, transport sector personnel, government tax officers, and others are using new software tools to analyze millions of manifests and permits, looking for species names that arent usually traded on particular routes; shipments that are unusually heavy or underpriced; and complex routing through multiple transit countries. Instead of inspecting shipments at random, these systems help enforcement agencies identify the consignments most likely to contain illegal materials.
Navigating wildlife trade laws: Enforcement officers have to navigate vast legal complexity. New tools seek to compile laws from multiple countries, helping inspectors understand regulations across export, transit, and destination nations.
Using trade data to identify other species to monitor: Researchers at the University of Oxford have developed a method that uses wildlife trade records to identify thousands of highly vulnerable endangered species that could benefit from stricter international trade protections and stronger law enforcement to limit exploitation.
Taken together, these devices and systems extendbut do not replacehuman expertise. They help officers decide which shipments or sites to focus on, identify what they find, and share information internationally. No single technology will end wildlife trafficking, but these digital tools can enable a shift from reactive enforcement toward proactive, coordinated action, helping authorities keep pace with adaptive criminal networks.
Eve Bohnett is an assistant research scholar at the Center for Landscape Conservation Planning at the University of Florida.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Estée Lauder has accused Walmart of selling counterfeit beauty goods on its website in a lawsuit filed in California federal court earlier this week that namechecks celebrities including Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.
The New York-based beauty giant is taking the big-box retailer to court on grounds of trademark infringement after purchasing, inspecting, and testing products and determining they werent actually made by its eponymous brand, along with others that it owns: Le Labo, La Mer, Clinique, Aveda, and Tom Ford.
The lawyers for Estée Lauder didnt hold back, either, shaming Walmart for its business practices.
The conduct herein complained of was extreme, outrageous, fraudulent, and was inflicted on plaintiffs in reckless disregard of plaintiffs rights, the lawsuit reads, in part. Said conduct was despicable and harmful to plaintiffs and as such supports an award of exemplary and punitive damages in an amount sufficient to punish and make an example of defendants and to deter them from similar such conduct in the future.
The lawsuit goes into detail about the specific products owned by brands under the Estée Lauder umbrella that it deemed counterfeit, including a fragrance from the Le Labo brand, La Mer moisturizer, Clinique eye cream, an Aveda hair brush, and several Tom Ford fragrances.
Searches on Walmart.com still generate results for the products that the lawsuit claims are identical, substantially indistinguishable, or confusingly similar to the trademarks for the Estée Lauder-owned brands.
A 1-ounce jar of Crme de la Mer moisturizer that retails on La Mers website for $200, for example, is still available for purchase on Walmarts website for as little as $146.35 though reviewers for similar products have raised the possibility that theyre counterfeits.
ZERO TOLERANCE
After the lawsuit dropped, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer initially issued a longer statement to some media outliers, including CNBC, that mentioned it doesnt tolerate bad actors on its platform.
However, it later shortened the statement to the following, which it issued to Fast Company: “We are aware of the complaint and have zero tolerance for counterfeit products. We will respond appropriately with the court when we are served.”
We are aware of the complaint and have zero tolerance for counterfeit products, the revised statement read. We will respond appropriately with the court when we are served.
In September, CNBC published a lengthy investigation about how Walmarts embrace of third-party sellers on its online marketplace resulted in its seller and product vetting becoming more lax with time, resulting in products later confirmed to be counterfeit.
ESTÉE LAUDER ALSO UNDER FIRE
Estée Lauder hasnt exactly been immune to criticism lately.
A grassroots effort emerged on social media last month urging people to boycott Estee Lauder products. That came after The Guardian reported in detail last month that President Donald Trump was keen for the U.S. to acquire Greenland on the urging of a longtime associate, Ronald Lauder, heir to the founder of the beauty brands namesake.
One such post on the r/MakeupAddiction subreddit urging people to boycott the companys many brands has received 7,100 upvotes and more than 650 comments.
Estée Lauder didnt immediately respond to a request from Fast Company for a comment regarding the lawsuit nor the calls for a boycott of its brands.
ROSE PRICK VS PICKY ROSE
In the case of the Tom Ford fragrances the lawsuit identified copycat versions of five, private blend products that it said are very likely to cause confusion for consumers given the similar-looking bottles and names to originals.
Instead of Tom Fords Rose Prick fragrance, for example, shoppers on Walmart can snag a bottle of Picky Rose. Other fragrances cited include Intense Peach, whats alleged to be a knockoff of Tom Fords Bitter Peach fragrance.
The knockoffs are still available for purchase on Walmarts websiteand for a fraction of the price. For example, Tom Ford sells a 50-millimeter bottle of its Rose Prick fragrance for $405. A larger, 80-milimeter bottle of Picky Rose is available on Walmart.com for $21.34.
CELEBRITY FACTOR
Blakely Law Group, which is representing Estée Lauder, specializes in intellectual property law and has previously represented a variety of plaintiffs, including Paris Hilton, who reached an undisclosed settlement with Hallmark in 2010 after the greeting card company used her thats hot catchphrase.
In the lawsuit against Walmart, the lawyers mentioned the celebrity factor for only one of its brands. The lawsuit cites Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Joe Jonas, Sophie Turner, and Gracie Abrams as examples of a myriad of celebrities that wear La Labo fragrances, while noting that Beyoncé was shown burning two Le Labo candles in her 2016 visual album Lemonade.
The lawsuit doesnt appear to be a factor for investors at this point. Shares of Walmart have risen more than 1% since last Fridays close as of mid-day Thursday, while shares of Estée Lauder have surged nearly 9% during that time.
Stellantis, the maker of Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram, issued a do not drive warning for certain late-model vehicles, telling drivers not to use their vehicles until defective air bags are replaced, according to a notice from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
This stop-drive directive was issued for 225,000 U.S. vehicles from 2003 to 2016 that contain the “defective, deadly” Takata airbag inflators, and is part of a larger, ongoing recall. More than 67 million Takata air bags have been recalled in tens of millions of vehicles across U.S.
“Over time, the chemical propellant inside certain Takata inflators can degrade, particularly in hot and humid conditions, increasing the risk of rupture during airbag deployment and the potential for metal fragments to enter the vehicle cabin,” Frank Matyok, a spokesperson for Stellantis, tells Fast Company.
Such explosions have caused injuries and death, according to the NHTSA which confirmed 28 people in the U.S. have died as a result of the defective airbag exploding; and injured at least another 400 people. Older vehicles pose a higher risk, as they are more likely to explode.
Meanwhile, a separate group of defective Takata air bags were recalled in late 2019 which involve non-azide driver inflators.
Which vehicles are being recalled?
Stellantis tells Fast Company the affected vehicles are the following:
20032016 Dodge Ram pickup trucks and Dodge Sprinter vans
20042009 Dodge Durango SUVs
20052012 Dodge Dakota pickup trucks
20052008 Dodge Magnum station wagons
20062015 Dodge Charger sedans
20072009 Chrysler Aspen SUVs
20072008 Chrysler Crossfire coupes
20082014 Dodge Challenger coupes
20052015 Chrysler 300 sedans
20072016 Jeep Wrangler SUVs
What should I do if I own one of the recalled vehicles?
A spokesperson for Stellantis tells Fast Company it will fix the vehicles free of charge, and began notifying affected customers earlier this week on February 9.
Drivers can also find out if their vehicles are affected by this recall by contacting Stellantis’ customer service hotline toll-free at 833-585-0144, or by entering their 17-digit vehicle identification number (VIN) at the NHTSA.gov website.
For most of modern management history, wasting time has been treated as a vice. This sensibility can be traced back to Frederick Taylors doctrine of scientific management, which recast work as an engineering problem and workers as components in a machine to be optimized, standardized, and controlled. In reducing human effort to measurable outputs and time-motion efficiencies, Taylorism marked the beginning of the end for seeing people as thinking agents, turning them instead into productivity units not unlike laboratory rats, rewarded or punished according to how efficiently they ran the maze.
Since then, we have come a long way. The post-war rise of the knowledge worker, and later the age of talent that took shape from the 1960s onwards, marked a decisive break with the logic of the factory floor. Work was no longer merely a job to be endured, but a career to be developed. Organizations began to concern themselves with engagement, motivation, wellbeing, and worklife balance, not out of benevolence alone but because value increasingly resided in peoples minds rather than their muscles. Human capital came to mean employability, shaped by intelligence, drive, expertise, and a new, if imperfect, meritocracy that coexisted with vocational careers. The growth of the creative class reinforced this shift: machines would handle the boring, repetitive tasks, freeing humans from the assembly line to think, design, and imagine.
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The latest iteration of this story is, of course, AI. What makes it different is not merely that it automates standardized and repetitive work, but that it increasingly encroaches on intellectual, creative, and cognitive tasks once thought to be distinctly human. Writing, analyzing, summarizing, designing, even ideating are now faster, cheaper, and more scalable when performed by machines.
The irony is hard to miss. Just as work had evolved away from crude measures of output, we find ourselves drifting back towards a Taylorist logic, where value is once again assessed in terms of raw productivity: how much, how fast, how cheaply. Only this time, the benchmark is no longer the stopwatch but the algorithm. Worse still, the machines are not merely competing with us on these terms; they are learning from us how the work is done, refining it, and then doing it better. In the process, the very qualities that once distinguished human work risk being reduced to inputs in someone elses optimization function.
This is widely framed as progress. It may turn out to be a costly misunderstanding.
Engineering inefficiencies
Deep thinking is inefficient by design. It is slow, cognitively demanding, and frequently unproductive in the short term. Experimentation is worse. Most experiments fail, and even the successful ones rarely succeed on schedule; plus if you know in advance whether an experiment will work, then its not truly an experiment. Intrinsic curiosity is even more unruly, leading people into intellectual detours with no obvious payoff. None of this lends itself to neat metrics or reassuring dashboards. From a narrow productivity perspective, it looks like waste.
Those inefficiencies are not limited to how humans think. They also define how humans relate to one another at work.
Acting human, and especially acting humane, is inefficient by design. Greeting your barista and asking how they are doing slows the line, even as the system is optimized to maximize how many lattes can be poured per hour and you are encouraged to streamline your order through an app. Asking colleagues how they are doing at the start of a meeting consumes time that could otherwise be spent racing through the agenda. Showing genuine interest in others, listening without an immediate instrumental purpose, or helping someone become better at their job often sits well outside your formal goals, your key performance indicators, or your objectives and key results.
From a narrow productivity perspective, this too looks like waste.
Friction in the system
Efficiency, however, is indifferent to relationships. It privileges throughput over connection, output over meaning, and speed over understanding. Optimized systems have little tolerance for small talk, empathy, or curiosity because these behaviors resist standardization and cannot be cleanly measured or scaled. In a perfectly efficient organization, no one asks how anyone else is doing unless the answer can be converted into performance. Help is offered only when it aligns with incentives. Time spent listening, reflecting, or caring is treated as friction in the system.
The problem is surprisingly common, namely that when organizations optimize for the system, they often end up sub-optimizing the subsystems within it. This is a familiar lesson from systems theory, but one that is easily forgotten. In the age of AI, the system increasingly appears to be designed around what machines do best, while humans are quietly downgraded to a supporting subsystem expected to adapt accordingly. We hear a great deal about augmentation, but in practice augmentation often means asking people to work in ways that better suit the technology rather than elevating the human contribution.
Talent, however, will not be elevated if human output continues to be judged by the same raw, quantitative metrics that define machine performance: speed, repetition, and operational efficiency. If you are simply running faster in the same direction, you will only get lost quicker (and maybe even lose the capacity to realize that you are lost). These apparent efficiency measures reward behavior that machines naturally excel at and penalize the very qualities that distinguish human work. They focus obsessively on outut while ignoring input: the role of joy, curiosity, learning, skill development, and thoughtful deployment of expertise. In doing so, organizations risk building systems that are optimized for AI, but progressively impoverished of the human capabilities they claim to value most.
Inefficiency and new value
This is why efficiency so often feels dehumanizing. It removes the informal, relational, and moral dimensions of work that make organizations more than collections of tasks. Humans do not learn, trust, or collaborate best when they behave like streamlined processes. We improve through interactions that appear inefficient on paper but are foundational in practice. In this sense, the inefficiencies of acting human are not a failure of management but a feature of humanity. They are the social and psychological infrastructure that allows thinking, learning, and cooperation to occur at all, and the necessary counterweight to systems designed to optimize everything except what makes work worth doing.
Incidentally, inefficiency also plays a central role in the creation of new value, both in discovering better ways of doing existing things and in discovering entirely new things to do. Many important advances in science and business did not arise from tighter optimization or marginal efficiency gains, but from allowing room for exploration, deviation from plan, and attention to unexpected outcomes.
In science, this is often the product of curiosity-driven research rather than narrowly goal-directed problem solving. Alexander Flemings observation in 1928 that a mold contaminant inhibited bacterial growth on a culture plate did not, by itself, produce a usable antibiotic, but it did reveal a phenomenon that later became penicillin once developed by others. Similarly, early work that eventually led to technologies such as CRISPR gene editing emerged from basic research into bacterial immune systems, conducted without any immediate application in mind. These discoveries were not accidents in the casual sense, but they did depend on researchers having the freedom and attentiveness to notice anomalies rather than discard them as inefficiencies.
The role of anomalies
Business innovation shows a comparable pattern. The adhesive behind Post-it Notes was not the outcome 3M originally sought, but its unusual properties were documented rather than rejected, and only later matched to a practical use. This kind of outcome depends less on speed or optimization than on organizational tolerance for ideas that lack an immediate commercial rationale. Systems optimized exclusively for efficiency tend to filter such anomalies out before their value becomes apparent.
Even in exploration and trade, progress has often followed from imperfect information and miscalculation rather than from optimal planning. European expansion into the Americas, for example, was driven in part by navigational errors and incorrect assumptions about geography. While hardly an argument in favor of error, it is a reminder that historical change frequently arises from deviations rather than from flawlessly executed plans.
The broader point is not that inefficiency guarantees innovation, but that innovation is unlikely without it. Systems designed to maximize efficiency excel at refining what is already known. They are far less effective at generating what is new. Allowing space for uncertainty, exploration, and apparent waste is not an indulgence, but a necessary condition for discovering value that cannot be specified in advance.
This distinction is captured neatly in the work of Dean Keith Simonton, who has argued that innovation follows a two-step process: random variation followed by rational selection. New ideas arise from error, experimentation, and departures from established rules, and only later are refined and selected for value. AI is exceptionally strong at the second step. It can evaluate options, optimize choices, and select efficiently among existing alternatives. What it cannot meaningfully do is generate the kind of genuine variation and rule breaking from which truly novel ideas emerge. That responsibility remains human. The risk in an AI-saturated environment is that organizations double down on selection while starving variation, becoming ever more efficient at refining yesterdays ideas.
Reheating ideas
If, in the name of efficiency, creativity itself is outsourced to AI, the result is not randomness but prefabrication: synthetic re-combinations of existing ideas, smoothed and averaged across prior human output. This often resembles creativity without delivering it, more akin to reheating ideas than inventing new ones. The food analogy is instructive. Cooking a proper meal is inefficient and time-consuming, while a frozen meal is faster and perfectly adequate. But no one serves a microwaved lasagna to an important guest and mistakes it for craft. The extra effort is the point.
The same logic applies to thinking and work. Deep thinking is inefficient, but it converts familiarity into understanding. Stepping outside established processes may slow things down, but it is often how better methods are discovered. Time spent feeding curiosity rarely pays off immediately, but it expands skills, connections, and optionality. Even social inefficiencies, such as investing time in relationships that do not yield immediate returns, build trust and create opportunities that efficiency metrics fail to capture.
In this sense, inefficiency is not the opposite of effectiveness but a different path to it. Systems optimized solely for speed and output may function smoothly in the short term, but they do so by eroding the very conditions that allow learning, adaptation, and originality to emerge.
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Think about how many emails you receive each day. Then how many of those include the phrase please find attached in the body. One X user has made a plea to retire the phrase, a relic leftover from a time when business communication relied on typewritten letters posted in envelopes, which actually included attached documents to be found.
The post quickly went viral, gaining nearly 15 million views since it was posted earlier this week.
While the user doesnt elaborate why exactly they personally take issue with the phrase, or what to say instead, the post had the desired effect, with many weighing in with their own takes on modern email etiquette.
Some agreed that the phrase is stuffy and outdated.
Please find attached adds zero information, sounds robotic, and does not respect the reader’s time, one wrote. Here’s the file does the job better than a sentence that adds zero information, another added.
Its true, these days email attachments are instantly accessible, clearly marked, and dont require a physical search. While young workers have no qualms including memes, emojis, slang, and abbreviations in their emails, and despite nearly one in four employees now using AI to help write emails, please find attached has somehow slipped through the net.
Others staunchly defended the use of the tried-and-tested phrase.
But if I don’t type those magic words, how will Outlook know to warn me when I inevitably forget to actually attach the file? one wrote.
Baby, no, another added. The people are stupid.
Many of us are trapped in a terminal cycle of reaching out and circling back, with dozens of corporate buzzwords and phrases that some argue make smart people sound less intelligent. But if youre in the market for some more creative ways to signal theres a PDF attached that needs attention, the replies to the X post is a goldmine.
Behold, the attachment, one X user suggested as an alternative.
For a sinister edge, There are attachments in this email with us right now, another put forth, or Watch out for the attachment below.
Feeling pumped about the PDF attached? Get a load of this MF attachment, is another option.
Or alternatively, feeling deflated? Find attached, if you even care works here.
And if youd rather the receiver doesnt open the attachment, you could simply put: Please don’t find attached, one wrote. It’ll only be more work for us both.
China moved on Thursday to curb a fierce price war among automakers that has caused massive losses for the industry, after passenger car sales dropped nearly 20% in January from the year before, the fastest pace in almost two years.
The State Administration for Market Regulation released guidelines for manufacturers, dealers, and parts suppliers aimed at preventing a race-to-the-bottom price war.
They ban automakers from setting prices below the cost of production to squeeze out competitors or monopolize the market. Violators may face significant legal risks,” the regulator warned.
The rules also target deceptive pricing strategies and price fixing between parts suppliers and auto manufacturers.
Passenger car sales in China fell 19.5% in January from a year earlier, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. That was the biggest percentage drop since February 2024.
The 1.4 million passenger cars sold in January compared with 2.2 million units sold in December, CAAM said.
Weakening demand reflects a reluctance of cash-strapped buyers to splash out on big purchases. Sales also have suffered from a cut in tax exemptions for EV purchases, coupled with uncertainties over whether trade-in subsidies for EV purchases will continue after some regions phased them out, auto analysts said.
The aggressive price war in Chinas auto sector has caused an estimated loss of 471 billion yuan ($68 billion) in output value across the whole industry in the past three years, Li Yanwei, a member of the China Automobile Dealers Association, wrote recently.
Analysts expect domestic demand to dip this year. S&P has forecast sales of light vehicles, including passenger cars, in China will fall up to 3% in 2026.
However, Chinese automakers are gaining ground in global markets. China’s exports of passenger cars jumped 49% year-on-year to 589,000 in January.
We dont foresee a loss in momentum for the Chinese auto industry this year, said Claire Yuan, director of corporate ratings for China autos at S&P Global Ratings.
Chinese automakers such as BYD the country’s largest and one that overtook Tesla as the worlds top electric vehicle maker are targeting markets in Europe and Latin America as they confront intense competition in both prices and lineups at home due to oversupply.
Analysts at Citi expect Chinas car exports could jump 19% this year driven by exports of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.
BYD is targetings around 1.3 million of overseas car sales in 2026, up from the 1.05 million last year. Other major Chinese automakers have also set ambitious sales targets with a focus on exports.
Last month, Canada agreed to cut its hefty 100% tariff on China-made EV imports in a move welcomed by Chinese carmakers. China also recently reached a deal with the European Union that could allow more of its EVs to enter the European market.
Earlier this week, the European Commission accepted a request by the German auto group Volkswagen to exempt import tariffs for one of its China-built EV models under the CUPRA brand as long as those vehicles are sold at or above an agreed minimum import price in a first of such exemptions.
Chinas commerce ministry said Thursday that it welcomed the move and that it hopes to see more such exemptions.
Chan Ho-Him, AP business writer
Adam Mosseri, the head of Meta’s Instagram, testified Wednesday during a landmark social media trial in Los Angeles that he disagrees with the idea that people can be clinically addicted to social media platforms.The question of addiction is a key pillar of the case, where plaintiffs seek to hold social media companies responsible for harms to children who use their platforms. Meta Platforms and Google’s YouTube are the two remaining defendants in the case, which TikTok and Snap have settled.At the core of the Los Angeles case is a 20-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose lawsuit could determine how thousands of similar lawsuits against social media companies would play out. She and two other plaintiffs have been selected for bellwether trials essentially test cases for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury.Mosseri, who’s headed Instagram since 2018 said it’s important to differentiate between clinical addiction and what he called problematic use. The plaintiff’s lawyer, however, presented quotes directly from Mosseri in a podcast interview a few years ago where he used the term addiction in relation to social media use, but he clarified that he was probably using the term “too casually,” as people tend to do.Mosseri said he was not claiming to be a medical expert when questioned about his qualifications to comment on the legitimacy of social media addiction, but said someone “very close” to him has experienced serious clinical addiction, which is why he said he was “being careful with my words.”He said he and his colleagues use the term “problematic use” to refer to “someone spending more time on Instagram than they feel good about, and that definitely happens.”It’s “not good for the company, over the long run, to make decisions that profit for us but are poor for people’s well-being,” Mosseri said.Mosseri and the plaintiff’s lawyer, Mark Lanier, engaged in a lengthy back-and-forth about cosmetic filters on Instagram that changed people’s appearance in a way that seemed to promote plastic surgery.“We are trying to be as safe as possible but also censor as little as possible,” Mosseri said.In the courtroom, bereaved parents of children who have had social media struggles seemed visibly upset during a discussion around body dysmorphia and cosmetic filters. Meta shut down all third-party augmented reality filters in January 2025. The judge made an announcement to members of the public on Wednesday after the displays of emotion, reminding them not to make any indication of agreement or disagreement with testimony, saying that it would be “improper to indicate some position.”During cross examination, Mosseri and Meta lawyer Phyllis Jones tried to reframe the idea that Lanier was suggesting in his questioning that the company is looking to profit off of teens specifically.Mosseri said Instagram makes “less money from teens than from any other demographic on the app,” noting that teens don’t tend to click on ads and many don’t have disposable income that they spend on products from ads they receive. During his opportunity to question Mosseri for a second time, Lanier was quick to point to research that shows people who join social media platforms at a young age are more likely to stay on the platforms longer, which he said makes teen users prime for meaningful long-term profit.“Often people try to frame things as you either prioritize safety or you prioritize revenue,” Mosseri said. “It’s really hard to imagine any instance where prioritizing safety isn’t good for revenue.”Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to take the stand next week.In recent years, Instagram has added a slew of features and tools it says have made the platform safer for young people. But this does not always work. A report last year, for instance, found that teen accounts researchers created were recommended age-inappropriate sexual content, including “graphic sexual descriptions, the use of cartoons to describe demeaning sexual acts, and brief displays of nudity.”In addition, Instagram also recommended a “range of self-harm, self-injury, and body image content” on teen accounts that the report says “would be reasonably likely to result in adverse impacts for young people, including teenagers experiencing poor mental health, or self-harm and suicidal ideation and behaviors.” Meta called the report “misleading, dangerously speculative” and said it misrepresents its efforts on teen safety.Meta is also facing a separate trial in New Mexico that began this week.
By Kaitlyn Huamani and Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology Writers
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here.
Is AI slop code here to stay?
A few months ago I wrote about the dark side of vibe coding tools: they often generate code that introduces bugs or security vulnerabilities that surface later. They can solve an immediate problem while making a codebase harder to maintain over time. Its true that more developers are using AI coding assistants, and using them more frequently and for more tasks. But many seem to be weighing the time saved today against the cleanup they may face tomorrow.
When human engineers build projects with lots of moving parts and dependencies, they have to hold a vast amount of information in their heads and then find the simplest, most elegant way to execute their plan. AI models face a similar challenge. Developers have told me candidly that AI coding tools, including Claude Code and Codex, still struggle when they need to account for large amounts of context in complex projects. The models can lose track of key details, misinterpret the meaning or implications of project data, or make planning mistakes that lead to inconsistencies in the codeall things that an experienced software engineer would catch.
The most advanced AI coding tools are only now beginning to add testing and validation features that can proactively surface problematic code. When I asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a recent press call whether Codex is improving at testing and validating generated code, he became visibly excited. Altman said OpenAI likes the idea of deploying agents to work behind developers, validating code and sniffing out potential problems.
Indeed, Codex can run tests on code it generates or modifies, executing test suites in a sandboxed environment and iterating until the code passes or meets acceptance criteria defined by the developer. Claude Code, meanwhile, has its own set of validation and security features. Anthropic has built testing and validation routines into its Claude Code product, too. Some developers say Claude is stronger at higher-level planning and understanding intent, while Codex is better at following specific instructions and matching an existing codebase.
The real question may be what developers should expect from these AI coding tools. Should they be held to the standard of a junior engineer whose work may contain errors and requires careful review? Or should the bar be higher? Perhaps the goal should be not only to avoid generating slop code but also to act as a kind of internal auditor, catching and fixing bad code written by humans.
Altman likes that idea. But judging by comments from another OpenAI executive, Greg Brockman, its not clear the company believes that standard is fully attainable. Brockman, OpenAIs president, suggests in a recently posted set of AI coding guidelines that AI slop code isnt something to eliminate so much as a reality to manage. Managing AI generated code at scale is an emerging problem, and will require new processes and conventions to keep code quality high, Brockman wrote on X.
Saas stocks still smarting from last weeks SaaSpocalypse
Last week, shares of several major software companies tumbled amid growing anxiety about AI. The share prices of ServiceNow, Oracle, Salesforce, AppLovin, Workday, Intuit, CrowdStrike, Factset Research, and Thompson Reuters fell so sharply that Wall Street types began to refer to the event as the SaaSpocalypse. The stocks fell sharply on two pieces of news. First, late in the day on Friday, January 30, Anthropic announced a slate of new AI plugins for its Cowork AI tool aimed at information workers, including capabilities for legal, product management, marketing, and other functions. Then, on February 4, the company unveiled its most powerful model yet, Claude Opus 4.6, which now powers the Claude chatbot, Claude Code, and Cowork.
For investors, Anthropics releases raised a scary question: How will old-school SaaS companies survive when their products are already being challenged by AI-native tools?
Although software shares rebounded somewhat later in the week, as analysts circulated reassurances that many of these companies are integrating new AI capabilities into their products, the unease lingers. In fact, many of the stocks mentioned above have yet to recover to their late-January levels. (Some SaaS players, like ServiceNow, are now even using Anthropics models to power their AI features.)
But its a sign of the times, and investors will continue to watch carefully for signs that enterprises are moving on from traditional SaaS solutions to newer AI apps or autonomous agents.
China is flexing its video models
This week, some new entrants in the race for best model are very hard to miss. X is awash with posts showcasing video generated by new Chinese video generation modelsSeedance 2.0 from ByteDance and Kling 3.0 from Kuaishou. The video is impressive. Many of the clips are difficult to distinguish from traditionally shot footage, and both tools make it easier to edit and steer the look and feel of a scene. AI-generated video is getting scary-good, its main limitation being that the generated videos are still pretty short.
Sample videos from Kling 3.0, which range from 3 seconds to 15 seconds, feature smooth scene transitions and a variety of camera angles. The characters and objects look consistent from scene to scene, a quality that video models have struggled with. The improvements are owed in part to the models ability to glean the creators intent from the prompts, which can include reference images and videos. Kling also includes native audio generation, meaning it can generate speech, sound effects, ambient audio, lip-sync, and multi-character dialogue in a number of languages, dialects, and accents.
ByteDances Seedance 2.0, like Kling 3.0, generates video with multiple scenes and multiple camera angles, even from a single prompt. One video featured a shot from within a Learjet in flight to a shot from outside the aircraft. The video motion looks smooth and realistic, with good character consistency across frames and scenes, so that it can handle complex high-motion scenes like fights, dances, and action sequences. Seedance can be prompted with text, images, reference videos, and audio. And like Kling, Seedance can generate synchronized audio including voices, sound effects, and lip-sync in multiple languages.
More AI coverage from Fast Company:
Were entering the era of AI unless proven otherwise
A Palantir cofounder is backing a group attacking Alex Bores over his work with . . . Palantir
Why a Korean film exec is betting big on AI
Mozillas new AI strategy marks a return to its rebel alliance roots
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