Investors in Pinterest (NYSE: PINS) are waking up to a wall of red this morning. The stock price of the popular digital image-sharing board has fallen off a cliff after the company reported its Q4 2025 results yesterday. Heres what you need to know.
Pinterests Q4 2025 results
From a quick glance, Pinterests results for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 didnt look too bad. The company reported some impressive gains in a couple of key metrics. Those metrics include:
Total revenue: $1.32 billion (up 14% year over year)
Global Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 619 million (up 12% year over year)
However, despite those gains, the company’s $1.32 billion in revenue came in below what analysts were expecting. As noted by CNBC, LSEG consensus estimates were that Pinterest would post $1.33 billion in revenue.
The company also reported an adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of 67 cents. That was below analyst expectations of an EPS of 69 cents.
Worse, Pinterest said it expects its current-quarter revenue, for Q1 of its fiscal 2026, to be between $951 million and $971 million.
While that range represents year-over-year growth of between 11% and 14%, even the high-end estimate is well below the $980 million analysts were expecting.
Pinterest blames tariffs for earnings miss
So what is behind the worse-than-expected results? The company blamed one primary thing: tariffs.
At first, a tariff’s impact on Pinterests revenue might seem a little unbelievable. After all, Pinterest does not import and sell physical goods, which would seem to lessen any potential impact that President Trumps erratic tariff policies could have on the companys bottom line.
The problem for Pinterest is that while the company may not be in the business of selling imported goods, many of Pinterests main customersits advertisersare. And those advertisers are responding to increased tariff costs by cutting back on their ad spend, which impacts Pinterests bottom line.
Many of the largest retailers have been disproportionately impacted by tariffs and have been pulling back on advertising spend across the industry as they seek to protect their margins, Pinterests CEO, Bill Ready, said on the companys financial call, according to a PitchPook transcript of the call. Our higher mix of large retailers relative to some of our peers has resulted in us feeling more of an impact.
But while Ready shifted the blame to tariffs, he also conceded that the company wasnt diversified enough when it came to its range of advertisers.
This highlights the need for us to further accelerate our growth with a broader set of mid-market, SMB, and international advertisers with less than $30 billion of GMV [gross merchandise volume], Ready said. This is the next phase of our sales and go-to-market transformation.
Pinterest’s stock price has had a bad year
Even before todays 20% premarket decline, PINS stock has been having a rough time lately. The companys stock price closed at $18.54 yesterday. That represented a fall of more than 28% since the year began, and a staggering 52% drop over the past twelve months.
At its current premarket price of around $14.56 a share, PINS stock has not seen a price this low since early 2020.
To put Pinterest’s recent share price doldrums into a broader context, the stock market Pinterest trades onthe New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)has seen gains while PINS continues to drop.
Data from Yahoo Finance shows the NYSE Composite Index has risen 5.3% year to date, and more than 15.5% over the past 12 months.
Since Spencer Rascoff took over as Match Group CEO in early 2025, he has set about trying to revive its portfolio of dating apps, in part by winning back user trust and courting Gen Z. Trust is the foundation of real connections, and we are committed to rebuilding it with urgency, accountability, and an unwavering focus on the user, Rascoff said last March in a letter to employees sharing his vision.
As part of that turnaround and effort to cultivate trust, Match Groupthe parent company of Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupidhas also sought to revamp its internal culture over the last year, in the interest of imbuing the company with greater transparency. A few months into Rascoffs tenure as CEO, the company also announced layoffs, which affected 13% of its workforce.
In a LinkedIn post today detailing Match Group’s culture shift, Rascoff argued that transparency had been critical to the companys transformation over the last year. Ive seen a noticeable shift: stronger collaboration, faster ideas sharing, and sharper execution, he wrote. It’s a sign to me that the culture of transparency has taken hold.
Rascoff shared how, exactly, Match Group fostered that transparency, starting with giving employees a direct line to ask questions or provide feedback.
Employees have the option of remaining anonymous or including their name and engaging in a back-and-forth with Rascoff if appropriate. I read every single submission, and I respond to every message that comes in, he wrote, adding, If the sender includes their name, I follow up with that person directly, and many great conversations have been sparked in this way. If the sender chooses to remain anonymous, then I write up an answer and share it broadly with the company monthly.
This feedback channel has prompted more than 300 messages and led to several changes at Match Group, including a shared GitHub repository for engineers across the company and a standing monthly meeting between Rascoff and the Gen Z employee resource group. Rascoff also claims to answer every question that is submitted prior to the companys all-hands meetings.
Transparency only works if it goes both ways, he wrote on LinkedIn. You cant expect people to speak up if you dont show them it makes a difference.
Rascoff has also taken the unusual step of not only asking for feedback but actually receiving feedback on his own performance in a public forum. Match Groups head of talent management conducted his mid-year review in an all hands meeting last year, allowing employees to listen in on his performance evaluation and see the goals that would govern his priorities for the rest of 2025. In March, Rascoff also plans to share his 2025 self-assessment with the whole company.
Its not yet clear whether Match Groups overhaul will prove successful. But Rascoff claims the push for transparency has already moved the needle on company culture.
At Tinder, employee engagement has jumped by 10% over the last six months. And in Match Groups annual employee survey, there was a 13% increase in the share of people who agreed with the statement that the executive team keeps them informed.
One year as CEO, whats mattered most to me is creating the conditions where great people can thrive, Rascoff told Fast Company. When teams are trusted and aligned, they move faster and feel more connected to the work. Watching that happen has been deeply motivating for me, and it makes me excited about the progress we can continue to make from here.
Kathy Ruemmler, the top lawyer at storied investment bank Goldman Sachs and former White House counsel to President Barack Obama, announced her resignation Thursday, after emails between her and Jeffrey Epstein showed a close relationship where she described him as an “older brother” and downplayed his sex crimes.Ruemmler said in a statement that she would “step down as Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel of Goldman Sachs as of June 30, 2026.”Up until her resignation, Ruemmler repeatedly tried to distance herself from the emails and other correspondence and had been defiant that she would not resign from Goldman’s top legal post, which she had held since 2020.While Ruemmler has called Epstein a “monster” in recent statements, she had a much different relationship with Epstein before he was arrested a second time for sex crimes in 2019 and later killed himself in a Manhattan jail. Ruemmler called Epstein “Uncle Jeffrey” in emails and said she adored him.In a statement before her resignation, a Goldman Sachs spokesperson said Ruemmler “regrets ever knowing him.”In her statement Thursday, Ruemmler said: “Since I joined Goldman Sachs six years ago, it has been my privilege to help oversee the firm’s legal, reputational, and regulatory matters; to enhance our strong risk management processes; and to ensure that we live by our core value of integrity in everything we do. My responsibility is to put Goldman Sachs’ interests first.”Goldman CEO David Solomon said in a separate statement: “As one of the most accomplished professionals in her field, Kathy has also been a mentor and friend to many of our people, and she will be missed. I accepted her resignation, and I respect her decision.”During her time in private practice after she left the White House in 2014, Ruemmler received several expensive gifts from Epstein, including luxury handbags and a fur coat. The gifts were given after Epstein had already been convicted of sex crimes in 2008 and was registered as a sex offender.“So lovely and thoughtful! Thank you to Uncle Jeffrey!!!” Ruemmler wrote to Epstein in 2018.Historically, Wall Street frowns on gift-giving between clients and bankers or Wall Street lawyers, particularly high-end gifts that could pose a conflict of interest. Goldman Sachs requires its employees to get preapproval before receiving or giving gifts from clients, according to the company’s code of conduct, partly in order to not run afoul of anti-bribery laws.As late as December, Goldman CEO David Solomon described Ruemmler as an “excellent lawyer” and said she had his full faith and backing.
Ken Sweet, AP Business Writer
If you are dealing with an employee or colleague who consistently underperforms and makes excuses, it can be extremely frustrating. When someone underperforms it not only slows down team progress and lowers the quality of work, but also forces others to take on extra tasks. This increases the workload for the rest of the team, which often means more stress and potential burnout for those left picking up the load.
It can also create a sense of unfairness and lead to conflicts among team members due to the uneven distribution of effort and responsibility. For managers, handling underperformance adds extra work as well, taking up valuable time and energy that could be spent on other important tasks.
If the issue goes unaddressed, it can erode trust among team members. When leaders fail to act, people may see the situation as unfair and believe there is little accountability for behavior. This doesnt just impact how the team works together in the short term; over time, it can lower team morale and slow down progress toward goals. If leaders dont step up, people dont feel safe. When someone keeps making excuses, it’s important to approach the situation constructively.
Here are some steps you can take as a colleague, team, or leader.
Be clear on your goals
Whatever your companys style, one thing is key: Make sure the goals you are working on are crystal clear and connected to the teams overall purpose. If you are a leader, you can schedule a team meeting or, if needed, a one-on-one meeting in advance to discuss the team members role and responsibilities within the team. If you notice behavior that’s full of excuses and lacks focus on goals: Spell out what good, bad, and totally unacceptable results look like. Clearly communicate what you require from your colleagues or the team, including deadlines, outcomes, and standards. Once you agree on these expectations, you can hold them accountable and give specific feedback if the work isn’t meeting expectations. Make sure everybody understands the importance of their responsibilities. Next, get on the same page about the process. Together break down the steps needed to do their job well, maybe even walk them through it or ask what they need. And answer any questions they have early on to avoid future excuses about not knowing what to do.
Find out why
It’s important to delve deeper by asking open-ended questions to uncover the root cause if somebody is not working as expected or needed. Why are you not meeting your goals? can be a simple but helpful question. Start by listening to their explanations without jumping to conclusion or immediate judgment. Sometimes, what initially appears as an excuse may actually come from valid concerns or obstacles that you hadn’t previously recognized. There might be underlying issues that individuals may be hesitant to tell you directly.
If we know what the reasons are behind their excuses, we might be able to help them. Is the task too challenging for them? Are they bad at time management? Do they need training or other resources? Ask them what support they need to overcome their challenges and see if you are able and willing to offer it.
Explain the impact
We should communicate to people the impact their behavior has on the work, themselves, or others. This way, they’ll understand how their actions slow everyone down and why it’s important to do better. If they dont know, they cant change their behavior. Give feedback that is specific, objective, and focused on behavior and outcomes, not personality.
Ive noticed that youve missed a deadline three times now. You often have an explanation, which I understand, things come up. But when it happens more than once, it comes across as avoiding ownership and it impacts the teams momentum. Meeting deadlines is a basic expectation, so I need you to take full responsibility and let me know early please if something might slip.
Explain clearly what happens if they don’t improve and what they gain if they do.
Adjust the work
If things aren’t working out, as a leader you may decide it’s time to rethink an employees tasks. Instead of letting excuses become a pattern, encourage a shift towards finding solutions. If necessary, consider reassigning some of their tasks (temporarily) to better align with their capabilities.
The feedback may not only focus on their content or goals but also on their overall approach to life. It’s important to address how their actions affect both others and their own professional development. Encourage them to reflect on why they often resort to making excuses.
Set Boundaries
Sometimes enough is enough. You have to let people know in advance what’s at stake. Explain how doing their job successfully can create opportunities and build their reputation. On the flip side, not getting the job done will have consequences. If after support and opportunities to improve, the behavior doesnt change, it may be necessary to take more formal steps depending on the context. At that point you may need to have that difficult conversation and part ways. Sometimes reaching a breaking point is unavoidable.
With these actions, you can help your colleagues or employees step up their game and create a more productive work environment. Remember, the goal is to create a safe culture of accountability and growth that benefits everyone involved. Keep motivating and supporting your team towards excellence but dont be afraid to set boundaries along the way.
You can always remember the phrase: We help first, but we hold firm.
From AI tools to self-driving cars, new technologies regularly tout themselves as being autonomous. Yet, their companies often have to recruit us humans for help in unexpected ways.
The most recent example comes courtesy of Waymos self-driving cars. The Alphabet-owned company has been hiring DoorDash drivers to close vehicle doors after a passenger leaves them open, CNBC reports.
Yes, Waymos whole thing is driverless cars, but it needs another type of driver to show up and fix the simplest things.
The arguably embarrassing predicament came to light when an Atlanta-based DoorDash driver shared Waymos request on Reddit. It reportedly offered the gig worker $11.25 to close a Waymo door less than a mile away. The driver was guaranteed $6.25 with the remaining $5 sent after verified completion.
The request also showed a deadline to complete the task and clearly stated that it didnt require pickup or delivery.
Waymo and DoorDash have confirmed to CNBC that the companies are running a pilot program in Atlanta to get cars quickly on their way. Waymo claims that automated door closures are coming to future vehicles.
Fast Company has reached out to Waymo and DoorDash for more information, including when Waymo will roll out automated door closures. We will update this post if we hear back.
Atlanta is one of the limited cities where Waymo vehicles operate without a safety driver. Notably, though, riders in Atlanta call the cars through Uber, which operates UberEats, a DoorDash competitor.
However, Waymo and DoorDash announced in October that they would be testing autonomous delivery services in Phoenix.
Waymo has also used Honk, an independent roadside assistance company, to shut doors. The Washington Post reports that users have received $24 a door in Los Angeles.
Fleet response workers on call from abroad
This isnt Waymos first time relying on humans for support. Earlier this month, Waymos chief safety officer, Mauricio Pea, told senators during a hearing that the company has some fleet response workers stationed abroad.
These individuals, based in countries such as the Philippines, can provide suggestions when a vehicle is in an unusual circumstance.
Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts called this unacceptable, Business Insider reports. He continued: Having people overseas influencing American vehicles is a safety issue.
When I spoke at the Arabian Business Awards a few years ago, I showed a slide describing research that shows meetings literally make people dumber: a study published in Transcripts of the Royal Society of London found that meetings cause you to (during the meeting) lose IQ points.
A bunch of people in the audience took photos of that slide.
The same was true when I presented a slide describing research published in Journal of Business Research showing that not only do 90 percent of employees feel meetings are unproductive, but when the number of meetings is reduced by 40 percent employee productivity increases by 70 percent.
A bunch of people took photos of that slide, too.
Both findings seem easy to remember, if only because the research confirms what most people feel about meetings: Most of the time, the only person who thinks a meeting is important is the person who called the meeting. But what if you really wanted to remember that meetings tend to make participants dumber, and tend to negatively impact overall productivity?
Or, more broadly, have a better shot of remembering things you really want to remember? Dont take photos.
In a study published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, researchers evaluated the effectiveness of a variety of memory-boosting strategies: taking photos, typing notes, and writing notes by hand.
As you can probably guess, people who wrote notes by hand scored the highest on subsequent recall and comprehension tests, even when people who took photos or typed verbatim notes were allowed to review those items before they took the tests.
Or maybe you couldnt guess that: The researchers also found that learners were not cognizant of the advantages of longhand note-taking, but misjudged all three techniques to be equally effective.
So why does taking notes by hand work so well? According to the researchers:
Which makes sense. Taking a photo requires no mental participation at all. You dont have to consider, synthesize, decide how youll capture the information in shorthand, etc. Typing notes verbatim for example, transcribing a lecture or meeting recording is more of a process than a thought exercise. The focus is on accuracy, not retention. (I can type fast enough to capture everything someone says in real time, but that doesnt mean I remember any of it without reviewing what Ive typed.)
Maybe thats why Richard Branson carries a notebook everywhere he goes. (Literally: Ive seen him with one at least 10 times.) Summarizing, putting concepts or ideas in your own words, deciding not just what to write, but how to write it all those things engage different parts of your brain, and therefore improve your retention and recall.
Especially if you dont stop there. According to a study published in Psychological Science, people who study before bed, then sleep, and then do a quick review the next morning can not only spend less time studying, they also increase their long-term retention by 50 percent.
Try it. At night, take a quick look at notes youve written during the day. Take a few moments to remember not only what, but why: why youll use what you jotted down. When youll use it. Why it will make a difference in your professional or personal life. Then do a quick review the next morning.
Unless youre a compulsive note-taker, both exercises will take only a minute or two.
After all, if it was important enough to write down, its important enough to remember and more to the point, to do something with.
Because knowledge is useful only if you do something to make it useful.
Inc.
This article originally appeared on Fast Company‘s sister publication, Inc.
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Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Companys Plugged In.
A February 9 blog post about AI, titled Something Big Is Happening, rocketed around the web this week in a way that reminded me of the golden age of the blogosphere. Everyone seemed to be talking about itthough as was often true back in the day, its virality was fueled by a powerful cocktail of adoration and scorn. Reactions ranged from Send this to everyone you care about to I dont buy this at all.
The author, Matt Shumer (who shared his post on X the following day), is the CEO of a startup called OthersideAI. He explained he was addressing it to my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me so what’s the deal with AI? and getting an answer that doesn’t do justice to what’s actually happening.
According to Shumer, the deal with AI is that the newest modelsspecifically OpenAIs GPT-5.3 Codex and Anthropics Claude Opus 4.6are radical improvements on anything that came before them. And that AI is suddenly so competent at writing code that the whole business of software engineering has entered a new era. And that AI will soon be better than humans at the core work of an array of other professions: Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service.
By the end of the post, with a breathlessness that reminded me of the Y2K bug doomsayers of 1999, Shumer is advising readers to build up savings, minimize debt, and maybe encourage their kids to become AI wizards rather than focus on college in the expectation it will lead to a solid career. He implies that anyone who doesnt get ahead of AI in the next six months may be headed for irrelevance.
The piecewhich Shumer told New Yorks Benjamin Hart he wrote with copious assistance from AIis not without its points. Some people who are blasé about AI at the moment will surely be taken aback by its impact on work and life in the years to come, which is why I heartily endorse Shumers recommendation that everyone get to know the technology better by devoting an hour a day to messing around with it. Many smart folks in Silicon Valley share Shumers awe at AIs recent ginormous leap forward in coding skills, which I wrote about last week. Wondering what will happen if its replicated in other fields is an entirely reasonable mental exercise.
In the end, though, Shumer would have had a far better case if hed been 70% less over the top. (I should note that the last time he was in the news, it was for making claims involving the benchmark performance of an AI model he was involved with that turned out not to be true.) His post suffers from a flaw common in the conversation about AI: Its so awestruck by the technology that it refuses to acknowledge the serious limitations it still has.
For instance, Shumer suggests that hallucinationAI stringing together sequences of words that sound factual but arentis a solved problem. He writes that a couple of years ago, ChatGPT confidently said things that were nonsense and that in AI time, that is ancient history.
Its true that the latest models dont hallucinate with anything like the abandon of their predecessors. But they still make stuff up. And unlike earlier models, their hallucinations tend to be plausible-sounding rather than manifestly ridiculous, which is a step in the wrong direction.
The same day I read Shumers piece, I chatted with Claude Opus 4.6 about newspaper comicsa topic I often use to assess AI since I know enough about it to judge responses on the flyand it was terrible about associating cartoonists with the strips they actually worked on. The more we talked, the less accurate it got. At least it excelled at acknowledging its errors: When I pointed one out, it told me, So basically I had fragments of real information scrambled together and presented with false confidence. Not great.
After botching another of my comics-related queries, Claude said, I’m actually getting into shaky territory here and mixing up some details, and asked me to help steer it in the right direction. Thats an intriguing glimmer of self-awareness about its own tendency to fantasize, and progress of a sort. But until AI stops confabulating, describing it as being smarter than most PhDs, as Shumer does, is silly. (I continue to believe that human capability is not a great benchmark for AI, which is already better than we are at some things and may remain permanently behind in others.)
Shumer also gets ahead of himself in his assumptions about where AI might be in the short-term future when it comes to being competently able to replace human thought and labor. Writing about the kind of complex work tasks he recommends throwing AIs way as an experiment, he says, If it even kind of works today, you can be almost certain that in six months it’ll do it near perfectly. That seems extraordinarily unlikely, given that all kinds of generative AI have been stuck in the kind-of-works era for years now. A decent rule of thumb: Dont believe AI will be able to do something well until it actually does.
Ultimately, the takeaway from Shumers post Ill remember most isnt anything he wrote. In the spirit of AI experimentation, I fed his piece to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude with the prompt Give me an analysis/critique of this essay. Tell me whether its overly cautious, not cautious enough, what your own take is on the subjects discussed, etc. I was prepared for them all to respond with something facile but shallow, more a bullet-point summary than anything. ChatGPT and Gemini lived up to those expectations.
However, Claudes swing at the topicwhich it popped out in seconds, and you can read in its entirety herestartled me. It took issue with some of the same things about the piece that bothered me, but also raised other weaknesses I hadnt considered. I felt smarter after reading it, which still isnt what I expect from AI prose.
A few nuggets:
Coding is a uniquely favorable domain for AI the outputs are verifiable, the feedback loops are tight, the training data is abundant, and the environment is fully digital. Lawyering, medicine, and management involve ambiguity, institutional context, human relationships, regulatory accountability, and adversarial dynamics that are qualitatively different. He acknowledges this briefly and then waves it away.
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Yes, many people tried GPT-3.5 and wrote off the whole field. That’s a real problem. But plenty of serious, current users including people paying for the best models still encounter significant limitations: hallucination (reduced but not eliminated), brittleness on novel problms, inability to maintain coherent context over truly long projects, poor calibration about its own uncertainty, and difficulty with tasks requiring real-world grounding. Shumer treats all skepticism as outdated, which is intellectually dishonest.
.
He also doesnt seriously engage with the possibility that the economic incentives might not play out as smoothly as AI can do the job, therefore the job disappears. Adoption friction is real. Liability concerns are real. Organizational inertia is real. The history of technology suggests that even transformative tools take much longer to restructure industries than the pure capability timeline would suggest. Electricity took decades to reshape manufacturing even after it was clearly superior to steam.
I think the underlying signal Shumer is pointing at is real. AI capabilities are improving faster than most people outside the industry appreciate, and the gap between public perception and current reality is genuinely large. He’s right that most people should be engaging with these tools more seriously than they are.
But I think the essay is doing a thing that’s very common in Silicon Valley: mistaking the potential trajectory for the inevitable trajectory, and compressing timelines based on vibes and extrapolation rather than grappling seriously with the many real-world frictions that slow adoption. The piece reads like it was written in the immediate emotional aftermath of being impressed by a new model release and those moments tend to produce overconfidence about pace.
To recap: In the same day that I found Claude Opus 4.6 writing something about Shumers piece that was not only coherent but insightful, it also devolved into a hallucinogenic fit. Thats just how AI is these days: amazing and terrible at the same time. Somehow, that reality is tough for many observers to accept. But any analysis that ignores it is at risk of badly misjudging what will come next.
Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.
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Once the king of the chicken sandwich, Popeyes faces a lot of competition for the crown these days.
Ascendant fried chicken hotspot Raising Canes exploded in growth last year, knocking off KFC to become the third most-popular fast food chicken chain in the U.S. behind Chick-fil-A and Popeyes. Meanwhile, upstarts like Daves Hot Chicken and Hangry Joes Hot Chicken & Wings are growing fast and eyeing a similar trajectory.
Popeyes once inspired feverish hordes and all-day lines for its top-selling chicken sandwich, but its been a rocky ride as of late. Popeyes parent company Restaurant Brands International (RBI) just reported its quarterly earnings, and In the last quarter, the chicken chains U.S. sales were down nearly 5%its fourth consecutive quarterly slide.
Other fast food brands under RBIs umbrella saw sales tick up during the same time period.
Beyond Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, RBI also owns Burger King, Tim Hortons, and Firehouse Subs. With almost 20,000 locations, Burger King is RBIs biggest chain, dwarfing the 5,000 Popeyes locations around the globe.
Weve had weaker performance than wed like over the last few quarters, and thats why you saw us make the change in leadership, RBI CEO Josh Kobza said on the companys earnings call.
He noted the companys decision to bring former Burger King COO Peter Perdue in as Popeyes U.S. and Canada president. Popeyes also plans to triage its lowest-performing locations with targeted support, coaching visits and experience rallies for Popeyes restaurant general managers across the U.S.
Kobza said that Popeyes plans to double down on operations and narrow the focus back to chicken on the marketing and product side.
We know Popeyes is capable of much more and we’re taking decisive action to put the brand back on the right path while supporting our franchisees to deliver stronger results at the restaurant level, Kobza said.
Reviving Popeyes
In January, almost 20 Popeyes locations in George and Florida closed their doors after one of the chicken chains major operators declared bankruptcy. While Popeyes says that the majority of the 100-plus locations operated by franchisee Sailormen Inc. were profitable, borrowing rates, high inflation, and dwindling foot traffic contributed to the closures.
Popeyes insists that the closures dont reflect the broader brand, which is owned by quick-service restaurant conglomerate RBI. Perdue reportedly reassured other franchisees that Sailormens bankruptcy does not reflect the healthy unit economics that you are experiencing in your restaurants.
For Popeyes, the problem clearly isnt chicken. Persistent inflation continues to take a toll on the restaurant industry, but Americans are still opting for poultry on the go at Popeyes competitors like Raising Canes and Daves Hot Chicken. Traffic is down at fast food joints broadly too, but chicken restaurants lapped their lagging peers last year. For Popeyes, the problem is Popeyessomething the company seems well aware of right now.
Our performance this year reinforces a clear reality, Kobza said in the earnings report, noting the intense level of competition in the quick-service chicken game. At its core, the chicken business is a service business and winning requires consistent speed, accuracy and reliability in every restaurant every day.
Advertising in generative AI systems has become a fault line. Last month, OpenAI released that it would start running ads in ChatGPT. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, OpenAIs chief financial officer defended the introduction of ads inside ChatGPT, arguing that it is a way to democratize access to artificial intelligence, and that this decision is aligned with its mission: AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for the benefit of humanity who can pay.”
Within days, Anthropic fired back in a Super Bowl commercial, ridiculing the idea that ads belong inside systems people trust for advice, therapy, and decision-making. In some way, this is a spat about how each company is marketing itself. In another way, this debate echoes the debates about the early internet, but with far higher stakes.
The big question
The underlying question is not whether advertising generates revenue. It clearly does. But rather: is advertising the only viable way to fund AI at scale. And whether, if adopted, it will quietly dictate what these systems optimize for.
History offers a cautionary answer. The last several decades of online advertising has proven that when profit is decoupled from user value, incentives drift toward harvesting data and maximizing engagementthe variables that can be most easily measured and monetized.
That trade-off shaped everything in the internet economy. As advertising scaled, so did the incentives it created. Attention became a scarce resource. Personal information became currency.
What Google taught us
Googles founders themselves acknowledged this risk at the dawn of the modern web. In their 1998 Stanford paper, Sergey Brin and Larry Page warned that ad-funded search engines create inherent conflicts of interest, writing that such systems are biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers, and that advertising incentives can encourage lower-quality results.
Despite this warning, the system optimized for what could be measured, targeted, and monetized at the expense of privacy, transparency, and long-term trust. These outcomes were not inevitable. They flowed from early design choices about how advertising worked, data moved, and influence was disclosed.
A pivotal moment
Artificial intelligence now finds itself at a similar pivotal moment, but under far greater economic pressure and with far higher stakes. It is worth noting, artificial intelligence is not cheap to run. OpenAI projected that it will burn through $115 billion by 2029. Like internet users, AI users are unwilling to pay for access, and advertising has historically allowed the internet, and businesses depending on it, to scale beyond paying users.
If advertising is going to fund AI, personal data cannot be the fuel that powers it. If conversations on an AI platform leak into targeting data, users will stop trusting it and will start viewing it as a surveillance tool. Furthermore, once personal data becomes currency, the system inevitably optimizes for extraction.
That does not mean future advertisers on these AI platforms would have to operate in the dark. Brands will still need to know that their spending delivers results, and that their messages target users aligned with their values. Its justifiable that brands need outcome measurement and contextual assurance.
The real problem
The irony in Anthropics critique is instructive. A Super Bowl commercial is itself a testament to advertisings enduring power as a form of communication and cultural signaling. Advertising is not the problem. Invisible incentives are.
The way to satisfy both consumer trust and business growth is to build the advertising ecosystem on open, inspectable systems so that influence can be seen, measured, and governed without requiring the collection or exploitation of personal data. Standards such as the Ad Context Protocol sets out to do exactly this.
This is the window in which profit can still be aligned with value. At stake is the difference between advertising as manipulation and advertising as sustainable and enduring market infrastructure. The ad-funded internet failed users not because it was free, but because its incentives were invisible. AI has the chance to do better. The choice is ours to make.
Public transit could be on the verge of getting a whole lot more efficient.
The Bay Area city of San Jose says it has improved public transportation by implementing an AI transit signal priority (TSP) system that makes its bus routes 20% faster and shortens ride times for passengers. An urban planning win, it also broadens the strategies available to other cities looking to improve their public transport.
TSP systems are programs that make traffic lights responsive and adaptable to public transportation in real time. They can extend a green light to give buses an extra second to make it through an intersection or shorten a red light so they don’t have to wait as long. It’s similar to the higher-urgency emergency vehicle preemption (EVP) system for first responders.
While EVP systems for ambulances, fire engines, and police cars can immediately change signals, TSP systems for buses or trains can only nudge them. The extra moments from those lower-priority nudges, though, can still make a meaningful difference in keeping buses operating on schedule.
“By helping buses move more efficiently through intersections, the technology reduces delays, improves on-time performance, and shortens wait times for riders,” a statement from the city read.
Cities have found other ways to reduce wait times for riders. AI lane enforcement that tickets vehicles driving in or blocking the bus lane cuts the number of illegally parked cars in a hurry. In London, buses have switched to contactless boarding, which led to improved boarding times.
A passenger boards a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority bus. [Photo: VTA]
San Jose becomes one of several test cities
San Joses TSP was developed by Lyt, a Northern California transit software company. Its software interacts with a transit agency’s traffic manager center via a computer called Maestro.
Lyt’s system was piloted in San Jose beginning on just two Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) bus routes in 2023; now it’s used for 24 routes. Federal and state funds paid for a majority of the project.
Lyt provided TSP software for buses in Portland, Oregon, in 2022 that reduced delays by 69%. Last September the company announced it would pilot its tech on four bus routes in Baltimore. Lyt did not respond to a request for comment.
Lyt’s TSP technology uses criteria like routing information, traffic conditions, and vehicle location to predictively keep buses running on time. The company pitches its system as better and more cost effective than the analog prioritization method of dash-mounted strobes on buses that beam infrared or optical lights to traffic pole equipment.
“Our cloud-based transit priority system takes the global picture of a route into account and uses machine learning to predict the optimal time to grant the green light to transit vehicles at just the right time,” Lyt founder and CEO Tim Menard said in a statement about the system when it expanded across more San Jose routes in 2023.
Public transit garners new public interest
City bus speeds have grown from being strictly transportation and infrastructure issues to something that resonates more broadly after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani won last year’s election in part on a campaign promise to make city buses faster and free to ride.
Its a promise Mamdani’s office says he intends to keep, even after the federal Department of Transportation developed a proposal to stop its transit funding for any city that provides free bus service, according to Politicowhich represents a direct threat to the Mayors ambitious plans.
Nevertheless, smarter systems that give buses a few extra seconds to make it through an intersection could be the edge that makes public transportation in cities across the country faster and more reliable.
