As autonomous AI agents increasingly browse, compare prices, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers, one challenge is becoming unavoidable for merchants: trust.
On Wednesday, Akamai Technologies announced a strategic collaboration with Visa aimed at addressing that problem. The partnership integrates Visas Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamais behavioral intelligence, allowing merchants to authenticate AI agents, link them to real consumers, and block malicious bot traffic before it ever reaches sensitive systems.
The move comes as agent-driven traffic floods the internet. According to Akamais 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report, AI-powered bot traffic surged more than 300% over the past year, with the commerce industry alone seeing more than 25 billion AI bot requests in a two-month period.
We all continue to be excited about the proliferation of agentic AI use cases, said Patrick Sullivan, CTO of security strategy at Akamai. Were seeing billions upon billions of requests coming from agentic AI use cases.
When AI becomes the intermediary
For decades, digital commerce has been built around a simple assumption: A human is on the other end of the transaction. Agentic commerce breaks that model.
Instead of navigating a merchants site directly, consumers increasingly rely on software to search, compare, and sometimes buy on their behalf. For instance, whereas previously buying a new suitcase might involve exploring a dozen retailer’s sites, soon you might have AI do the legwork for you. That shift introduces a new intermediaryone that can be helpful, harmful, or fraudulent.
Theres a new entity thats now sitting in between the merchant and the consumer, said Rubail Birwadker, Visas global head of growth. Things could go wrong.
From a consumer standpoint, that raises questions about refunds, disputes, and chargebacks. Whose fault is it if you asked for a black bag and received a dark blue one by mistake? From a merchant perspective, it creates uncertainty around intent, legitimacy, and risk.
If youre a merchant, and youre thinking about your website, there are a lot of changes coming your way, Sullivan said. You built your website originally in the era where there was going to be a human on the other end.
Now, discovery may happen through an AI-powered chat interface. Browsing may be conducted by an autonomous agent. Even the browser itself may be software acting on behalf of a user.
We need to make sure that its still on behalf of the right human and its not a fraudster taking advantage of some new evolution in technology, Sullivan said.
Proving both the agent and the human
At the center of the VisaAkamai partnership is a dual-identity problem: verifying not just who the human is, but who the agent acting for them is.
Its important for us to always know who the human is, Sullivan said. But then, as we see these agentic use cases emerge, its important for us to get signal from Visa of who that agent is in that interaction.
Visas Trusted Agent Protocol provides authentication signals indicating whether an agent is authorized and whether it intends to browse or pay. Akamai reads and reinforces those signals using behavioral intelligence, often before traffic reaches a merchants core systems.
Youre going to see traffic before it ever reaches a merchant system, Sullivan said. That allows us to build a trusted user profile so we can understand that Jim is actually Jim.
Because Akamai sees end users repeatedly across the internetshopping, banking, reading newsit can establish consistency and spot anomalies early in the transaction flow.
That allows us to very, very early in the transaction reduce attempts at fraud and impersonation, Sullivan said.
Scale changes the threat model
The surge in AI-driven traffic has raised concerns about whether volume itself becomes a security risk. Sullivan argues scale cuts both ways.
Weve seen AI bot traffic surge 300 plus percent this year, he said. But while the numbers are in the billions, thats still sort of a rounding error for the overall traffic that we see.
Still, Sullivan expects automation to accelerate abuse over time.
Anything that can be automated, its just so much more profitable for attackers, he said. If you can automate your attack, you can pull off more attacks.
Thats why both companies emphasize operating at global scale. Visa processes transactions across nearly 200 markets, while Akamai manages traffic and bots at internet-wide levels.
These are two companies that operate at massive scale, Sullivan said. Its companies like ours that we think will stand up to the pace of these automated processes.
Why merchants matter most
While consumers may benefit immediately from smoother discovery and purchasing, Birwadker said the heaviest lift lies with merchants adapting their infrastructure.
A large amount of change really lies on the acceptance side, on the merchant side, Birwadker said. Their infrastructure needs to keep up with all the changes that are happening.
Merchants will need to decide what information agents can access, how pricing and inventory are exposed, and how loyalty and personalization work when an AI, not a browser, is driving the interaction.
This is just keeping up with changes to consumer behavior, Sullivan said. Theyre having an AI agent do something on their behalf.
A compatibility play for the future
Neither Visa nor Akamai claims to know exactly what agentic commerce will look like three years from now. But both frame Trusted Agent Protocol as a compatibility layerone that allows commerce infrastructure to evolve without losing control.
Our goal is just to make sure that our ecosystem remains compatible with the agentic world, Birwadker said. Its more about compatibility than about almost anything else.
As AI agents move from novelty to necessity, that trust layer may determine whether merchants embrace agentic commerceor shut it out altogether.
The idea of the Queen Bee has been buzzing around corporate life for decades. Youve heard the story: A woman finally breaks into senior leadership, only to turn around and block other women from rising behind her. She is territorial, icy, maybe even hostile. She has clawed her way to the top, the logic goes, and she intends to stay there alone.
It is a vivid image, and that is precisely why it has survived. It gives managers a neat explanation for gender inequity: maybe women just dont support each other. Maybe the problem isnt the system; maybe its . . . women. But that explanation falls apart the moment you look closely.
A zero-sum world
The term Queen Bee was coined by Graham Staines and his colleagues in a 1973 article in Psychology Today. The researchers observed a small number of senior women who appeared to distance themselves from other women in heavily male-dominated environments. Even in the original study, the behavior wasnt framed as spite. It was framed as adaptation. These women were navigating environments where there was room for exactly one of them to succeed. In a zero-sum world, survival strategies look a lot like coldness.
In the 50 years since, the corporate world managed to turn a situational observation into a personality diagnosis. Yet the newest research makes one thing clear: the Queen Bee stereotype says very little about women, and a great deal about the cultures they are operating in. One of the striking pieces of recent evidence comes from a 2024 study published in the Journal of Business Ethics. It examined what happens when women leaders distance themselves from other women. The surprising finding wasnt that distancing happens; it was who pays the price when it does. Female subordinates showed lower feelings of belonging, lower leadership ambition, and higher intentions to leave. Male subordinates, by contrast, were unaffected. In other words, when the culture pressures a woman leader to blend in with the dominant group, the cost is absorbed by the women below her.
The researchers are clear: the distancing originates not from rivalry, but from discrimination. Women who experience bias early in their careers often learn that aligning with the dominant (often male) culture is the safest path forward. That alignment can look like toughness, or hyper-competence, or refusing to mentor junior women because theyve been taught that visibility is dangerous. It is armor, not malice.
When identity becomes a liability
A broader 2024 literature review goes further, arguing that the term Queen Bee has become so misapplied that it obscures more than it reveals. The recommended term is self-group distancing, which describes how members of any underrepresented group may behave when identity becomes a liability. The behavior is well documented among racial minorities, first-generation professionals, LGBTQ+ employeesanyone who feels they have something to lose by being too closely associated with their own group. It is not a woman problem. It is a scarcity problem.
And the scarcity is real. When leaders tell me about a Queen Bee, I often ask a single question: How many women are in the room where decisions are made? The answer is almost always the same: one, or maybe two. In those environments, it is hardly surprising that some women feel pressure to prove they are different from the stereotype of women as emotional, inexperienced, or not leadership material. Distancing becomes a way to signal, I am not like them. It is not pretty, but it is predictable.
What is rarely acknowledged is how differently these dynamics play out when women are no longer tokens. Studies of global organizations show that when women hold multiple senior roles, sponsorship of women increases, not decreases. In firms with women CEOs, the next generation of senior women is larger. Leadership pipelines are healthier. And the Queen Bee patterns that managers fear become almost nonexistent. Put simply: when women stop being the only one, the motivation to distance evaporates.
‘Too soft’
To understand how this works on the ground, consider the experience of a leader. Early in her career, she worked under a woman who had a reputation for being harsh. Colleagues whispered that she was a classic Queen Bee. My client recalls thinking the same, until she learned that this leader had repeatedly been told she was too soft and not decisive enough, feedback her male peers never received. She had built a leadership style around eliminating any sign that could be read as feminine. Her high standards werent meant to sabotage other women; they were meant to make sure no one questioned their competence. This is the part managers often misinterpret. Behaviors that look like ice can actually be fear. Behaviors that look like competitiveness can be self-protection. When conflict between women appears, people leap to the Queen Bee label. The story we tell changes the behavior we see.
For managers who want a healthier culture, the task is not to root out Queen Bees. It is to remove the conditions that create them. That starts with representation. When there are enough women in senior roles, solidarity becomes easier than distance. But it also requires clearer evaluation systems, because vague criteria give stereotypes room to breathe. It requires rewarding sponsorship and collaboration, not just individual performance, because people invest in what gets recognized. And it requires noticing the small signals in daily life: who gets interrupted, who gets invited to meetings, whose mistakes are scrutinized.
If you believe a senior woman is acting like a Queen Bee, the first question to ask is: What in this culture made distancing feel necessary? When leaders approach it this way, they stop treating womens behavior as a problem to fix and begin treating the culture as a system to redesign. The Queen Bee myth persists because it is simple. But workplaces are not simple, and people certainly are not. The truth is far less dramatic and far more useful: When the hive is hostile, bees protect themselves. When the hive is healthy, they support each other. That means the Queen Bee is not your warning sign about women. She is your warning sign about the workplace.
The USS Enterprise was an impossible dream rendered in fiber glass. Designed for Star Trek, it looked like a creation straight out of creator Gene Roddenberry’s imagination: Twin nacellesthose long, gleaming engine pods held by elegant pylonsextended from a central saucer holding the engines that allowed Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. Bones, and the rest of the crew to travel across the cosmos.
Inside those nacelles, the show’s creators imagined, lay the secret that made those trips possible: a warp drive that could crease spacetime itself, folding the universe in front of the ship while unfurling it behind, allowing faster-than-light travel not through speed but through geometry. For decades, physicists dismissed it as beautiful nonsensea prop master’s fever dream.
But now the math has caught up to the dream.
Harold “Sonny” Whitea mechanical engineer and applied physicist who worked on warp drive concepts at NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratoryhas published a peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious Classical and Quantum Gravity that proposes a new design for a warp drive that happens to look a lot like the Enterprise.
White told the science and tech publication The Debrief that the resemblance to the twin nacelles of [Star Treks] USS Enterprise is not merely aesthetic, but reflects a potential convergence between physical requirements and engineering design, where science-fiction architectures hint at practical pathways for real warp-capable configurations.” In other words: When White and his research colleagues came up with a design that could bend spacetime but also keep a crew safe inside the ship, the optimal geometry that emerged was twin engine pods arranged around a central habitable zone.
That’s the Enterprise.
Perhaps it’s because there are only so many ways physics allows you to arrange exotic energy efficiently. Star Trek‘s production designers, working on pure intuition and ’60s aesthetics, accidentally landed on a rare optimal solution. It’s as if someone sketched the ideal car design in 1920 without knowing anything about aerodynamics, and a century later, physics said: “Actually, you were right.”
The USS Enterprise in the Star Trek: The Next Generation [Image: CBS/Getty Images]
The warp drive
According to White and his colleagues, the original mathematical model for a warp drive envisioned a spacecraft encased in a continuous, donut-shaped ring of negative energy, a bizarre form of matter that works like gravity in reverse, pushing space apart rather than pulling it together.
Physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed this model in 1994 after watching Star Trek episodes and wondering if the science could actually work. This theoretical geometry could effectively move an object faster than light by deforming the space around it, but his idea came with headache-inducing problems for any engineer trying to build it.
White’s breakthrough was simpler. Instead of trying to make Alcubierre’s donut-shaped design work, he asked a different question: What if you broke the energy ring into separate tubes, like engine pods, arranged around the ship? That small geometric shiftfrom one continuous ring to multiple discrete cylinderschanges everything about how the physics plays out inside the bubbles. The math suddenly became manageable. The interior could remain flat and safe. The dangerous forces could be confined to the nacelles, away from the crew.
“The results of this study suggest a new class of warp bubble geometries,” White explains. By organizing the exotic matter into these specific pods, engineers could theoretically maintain a completely flat, calm interior for the ship while the external geometry handles the violent warping of space.
But this research doesn’t mean we are going to be kirking and spocking all the way to the Crab Nebula any time soon. Faster-than-light travel remains a theoreticalbut possibleway to travel across the cosmos that depends on many factors, like producing the fuel necessary to make it happen. If it ever happens, it will be generations away. White’s paper, however, provides a mathematical blueprint for practical design and engineering. Once built, his proposed design will result in something that looks like every nerds favorite spaceship.
A rendering of the ‘donut drive’ from Warp Field Physics by White et al. 2013. [Image: Mark Rademaker/Mike Okuda/NASA]
White’s math dictates that to keep the ship’s internal clock synchronized with the outside world and avoid ripping the pilot apart, the most efficient structure involves arranging these energy tubes around the craftexactly like the twin nacelles of the USS Enterprise.
A figure from Interior-flat cylindrical nacelle warp bubbles: derivation and comparison with Alcubierre model
by White et al., 2025 [Image: White et al./CC-BY 4.0]
“I knew it should be possible to construct warp bubbles basedon a nacelle-like topology,” White says, noting that the new geometry allows for structures that act as modular propulsion units rather than a single, unmanageable energy field.
The USS Enterprise in the Star Trek: The Original Series. [Image: CBS/Getty Images]
Humanitys hallucinations
This phenomenon of fiction functioning as a crystal ball/R&D lab for reality has pervaded civilizations progress since Jules Vernes predictions of moon trips and nuclear submarines. Take Ryan McClelland, a research engineer at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, who found himself staring at the screen during the pandemic, watching The Expanse, a series that imagines a realistic scenario for humanity spread throughout our solar system.
“They have these huge structures in space, and it got me thinking . . . we are not gonna get there the way we are doing things now,” McClelland told me in a interview from 2023. That sci-fi binge-watch led to Evolved Structures, a project where McClelland uses generative AI to hallucinate spacecraft parts that look unnervingly organicas if they were extracted from an extraterrestrial ship secretly stored in an Area 51 hangar.
The AI, unburdened by human preconceptions of what a bracket should look like, designs twisted, bone-like metal forms that are a third lighter than human designs but just as strong. McClelland believes it is the only way that we can mass manufacture the future of space colonization.
The translation from page to pad is often even more direct. NASA engineer Les Johnson became obsessed with the idea of laser sails after reading the novel The Mote in Gods Eye written by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven in 1974, which describes a sail that uses photons as a thrust force to move a spaceship over vast distances at extremely high speeds. It made him become an engineer.
I had an opportunity to get involved in a project that was looking at different types of propulsion, and this is one that I added to the mix to consider, he told me during an interview for a story on how he and his team designed the largest solar sail ever created. Now the technology is herewe can build these things. And thats been on again, off again part of what Ive worked on for the last 20 years.
[Photo: CBS/Getty Images]
The list of fictional technologies that are now mundane reality is so long that it is actually exhausting. Sometimes they take a handful of years to become real. Other times decades pass between the dream and the device.
In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke published a technical paper proposing geostationary satellites to relay communications; 19 years later, NASAs Syncom 3 broadcast the Tokyo Olympics to the U.S., fulfilling the prophecy. Clarke was also to theorize solar sails in his 1964 story “Sunjammer.” Way earlier, in 1933, H.G. Wells imagined video calls on glass screens in The Shape of Things to Come; it took 87 years until the Zoom era made us sick of them.
A rendering of the ‘donut drive’ from Warp Field Physics by White et al. 2013. [Image: Mark Rademaker/Mike Okuda/NASA]
It’s not the first time this has happened with Star Trek. Saying that the series shaped humanity as we know it today is not an exaggeration. It introduced ideas that, many decades later, resulted in designs and technologies that have moved humanity forward.
Not just automatic doors, but mobile phones, touchscreen tablets and interfaces, voice-activated AI assistants, medical scanning devices, and virtual reality. Star Trek didn’t just predict the futureit became the blueprint engineers actually followed to design it.
Clearly, theres a pattern here of dreaming up the impossible, putting it on a screen or in a book to entertain ourselves, and then, slowly but surely, our math and our machines evolve until they catch up to the fantasy. It feels like we are not just observing the universe; we are designing it to match the stories we tell ourselves, proving that the most powerful force in physics might just be a good writer’s deadline. Some scientists think we all may be part of a cosmic simulation in some alien computer. Perhaps we are all giant AI, like in Asimovs short story “The Last Question.” Whatever the case is, the fact is that humanity seems to have a peculiar knack for reverse-engineering its own hallucinations.
At one time or another, weve all sat next to someone interesting on a plane or a train, making small talk that sometimes leads to long-winded conversations about life, the world, even personal struggles or accomplishments.
Its been said its easier to talk to a stranger . . . but could these random, chance chats lead to networking opportunities?
To be clear, vacation provides crucial time to unplug, relax, spend time with family and friends and is vital in maintaining work-life balanceso no one is saying you should treat your holiday like a business conference. (Not least any travel companions you may have.)
But the trick is, should you recognize when a conversation on a beach, boat or beyond could be moving in a direction related to your skills, experience or care . . . it might lead to surprising, beneficial results, says Ronald Placone, associate teaching professor emeritus of management communication at Carnegie Mellon Universitys Tepper School of Business.
There are always opportunities to network, he says. Sometimes they emerge when least expected. Whether its at the airport bar flying home for the holidays, or at a tropical resort as you seek warmer temps this winter . . . the thing you could find instead is someone who could help you out down the road.
Fast Company asked three business experts about how to keep in touch with interesting folks you meet on your travels.
The magic of the vacation dynamic
You never know who youre going to meet when youre in a new environment. You may cross paths with an industry leader, a fellow professional in your field, or even a recruiter while enjoying your mai tai by the pool, or while killing time in the Amtrak café car.
This random meeting could facilitate a conversation.
You may be more relaxed, less scripted, and come across as more genuine in such contexts, adds Placone.
Even when youre unplugging, casual conversations often touch on what we do professionally, says Kara Ayers, senior vice president of talent at Xplor Technologies, an Atlanta-based SaaS and payments company. She calls potential benefits to these meetings to be tremendous. After all, referrals fill many positions and often make solid hires.
Sharing your skills and success with someone in a vacation context is more casual, and not as performative as it would be in a mixer or at a formal work event. Chatting with potential contacts on vacation feels refreshing because its unbiased and pressure-free, Ayers says. And if you love what you do, encounters like these with someone like-minded in the wild may remind you of that.
For example, during a recent vacation, I had a simple discussion with another HR professional which evolved into an exchange of best practices for managing global benefits, she shares, an encounter she calls enlightening and valuable.
Nowadays, with the rise of digital nomads, greater remote work opportunities domestically and abroad and even more expats in the workforceit could very well be a real possibility that your next holiday sees you cross paths with a potential future colleague.
But dont push it, adds Placone.
Reading the room
The absolute key to vacation-networking, and why it even unfolds in the first place, is that its casual and organic.
If the stranger you strike up small talk with in the hotel lounge reveals they work in the same field as you, go with the flow without an agenda. Not everyone wants to talk about work while their OOO message is on back home, especially when so many U.S. workers report feeling guilty for going on vacation to begin with.
A big part of doing this right is being able to accurately pick up vibes. Avoid the all-time rookie mistake, of course, of trying to chat to your neighbor on public transportation once they put their headphones inthats the universal travelers signal for stop talking to me.
If an airplane seatmate pulls out their computer or tablet and either starts working or watching a show, that’s another signal, says Ruth Sherman, a communications coach, media trainer, and consultant in Greenwich, Connecticut. You might be okay with talking to strangers on your vacay, but others might not be. And of course, if the individual is with other people, make sure the conversation is inclusive for everyone to participate, Ayers adds.
If they seem uninterested, pivot the conversation back to other topics, advises Ayers. Listen and be engaged with the other individual and their interests. In this setting, the chat is “not self-promotion, she says. Be authentic and enjoy the serendipitous meeting for what it is: an unplanned encounter with a friendly stranger who shares interests, or a similar life context when it comes to career.
And if things feel right, approach the topic about staying in touch.
Lets connect
Many people want to be 100% disengaged from anything that even reminds them of work while on vacation. Its okay to acknowledge that now is not the time to have networking-type conversations. (Good form, even.) But you could always mention that youd value a future opportunity to reconnect and talk shop when youre back online.
Ask about how to best to communicate with that individual in the future, if theyre open to it, Placone says. Many people do not carry business cards these days, so Ayers recommends offering to connect on LinkedIn. This is low pressure and a great way to stay connected, she adds.
Other vacation-goers opt for the Instagram follow when they hit it off with fellow travelers. If that feels right, do that, even if you do hope for a potential professional relationship down the line.
Networking on vacation is about doing what feels right, easy and authentic.
You are not pitching someone or showing them that you are the best candidate for a hypothetical role, Ayers says. You are sharing stories and experience. Maybe thats trading war stories from earlier jobs, hot takes on buzzy industry news in the headlines, or just bonding with someone similar on a human level in a comfortable, low-stakes environment.
That authenticity builds trust and makes the interaction more memorable, Ayers says.
And in a labor market as fraught as this one, a genuine bond in a surprising setting might be the unexpected boon your career needs.
Contract roles can feel like the perfect job setup: flexible hours, work-from-home perks, and a way to break into your dream company. For some, they also serve as a temporary solution until a more permanent position comes along.
Yet sometimes when freelancers decide to transition to a full-time gig, their contract history can potentially come back to bite themeven when it shouldnt.
In a job interview, employers might ask: Can you work effectively on a team? Can you take direction from a manager? Will you think about your work long term?
Or they might not ask at all, but theyll still wonder.
To be clear: Freelancing or contract work is work, of course. But if full-time employment is your goal, knowing how to address these concerns does matter in a job interview.
Dont assume
First, in a job interviewno matter which side of the table youre sitting onits essential not to make assumptions.
Its important for hiring managers to be aware of assumptions they might have. Instead of assuming, ask very direct questions, says Phoebe Gavin, a career and leadership coach. Dont just assume they cant work a 9-to-5, or that theyre not willing to commit to a company long term.
If youre a job seeker, when applying for roles and in interviews, get ahead of assumptions by addressing them head-on. If the employer is looking for a collaborative team member, share examples of how youve worked effectively with others in the past.
The hiring manager may genuinely not be aware of how collaborative freelance or contract work can be. So for the person who’s being interviewed, don’t make any assumptions about what they know about your work, Gavin says.
Can you work on a team?
Freelancers often work more independently, but that doesnt mean you prefer to, or that you work entirely alone. After all, you probably send your work off to someone for review.
If you thrive in a team environmentor even miss being part of a teamsay so.
When working as a freelancer, there may have been times when your work has required working with multiple parties and collaborating with teams. Even if it was temporary for a particular project, make it really clear that that’s something you have experience with, Gavin says.
Highlight specific examples from past projects where you successfully collaborated with others, showing that you can contribute effectively on a team.
Career coach Patrice Williams Lindo recommends saying something like: I rebrand quickly into the teams operating model. That means understanding how decisions get made, who owns what, and where my work fits into the broader system. I dont operate in silos. I network intentionally across stakeholders so my work lands cleanly, on time, and without creating friction. Independence, for me, means high trust, not high isolation.
Can you take direction?
When looking for a new job, remember that youll most likely have a manager. If youre thinking, I don’t really need a manager; I can do the work without you managing me, that mindset can create challenges with the person providing direction.
Showing that you can take direction demonstrates adaptability and immediately makes you a stronger candidate.
Williams Lindo suggests saying something like: I dont need micromanagement, but I do respect structure, accountability, and feedback. My goal is to deliver in a way that strengthens leadership credibility, not competes with it.
Can you think beyond the project at hand?
Freelancers usually focus on the work in front of them and dont always have to think about long-term impact, but in a full-time role, youre expected to see the bigger picture. If thats something you do already, make sure you say that.
For example, if you like to promote your work after its published, thats something worth highlighting.
Williams Lindo suggests saying, Even when my engagement is project-based, my mindset is enterprise-level. I document decisions, build repeatable processes, and leave behind claritynot just deliverables. Im always thinking about how my work ladders up to longer-term outcomes, because recognition comes from impact, not just execution.
Contract roles can help you land a full-time position if you want one.
By addressing assumptions up front and showing that you can collaborate, take direction, and think beyond individual projects, you signal that youre ready to thrive in a full-time role.
Freelance experience is real work, and it matters. When presented strategically, it can showcase your impact and position you as a strong candidate for permanent opportunities.
Whenever I tell people Im an auctioneer, there are inevitably two follow up questions:
First: Do you talk really fast like those guys on TV? followed by a cartoonish imitation, complete with an imaginary microphone and a pseudo Southern accent.
Second: Whats the most expensive thing youve ever sold? After two decades of auctioneering, the answer is usually something in the many millions. I typically just name the last item I sold for over a million dollars.
Whether someone pictures a fast talking cattle auction or a refined British gentleman selling Picassos in black tie, auctioneers are assumed to do one thing: talk. A lot.
Which is why most people are shocked to learn that the most powerful tool I like to use on stage isnt my voice at all.
Its silence.
When Im onstage in front of 500 people, yes, fast, energetic bidding can electrify a room. But in auctioneering, as in negotiation, the person who is comfortable with silence holds the advantage. Think about the last time you negotiated anything. The one who jumps to fill every uncomfortable silence often reveals the most. The one who sits in the quiet controls the pace.
Lessons learned
After years in the boardroom and on stage, here are the top three lessons Ive learned about how silence can capture the attention of any room:
1. When a room is talking, dont talk over it. Own the moment.
If a crowd wont quiet down, talking louder rarely works. Instead, I smile and say, Ill wait until the room is quiet enough to hear me. The shift is immediate. People realize theyre missing something or they are being rude, and they stop. Once theyve realized Im willing to wait for them to stop talking before Ill start again the dynamic is shifted, and now they are paying attention.
2. Make your point, then stop talking.
Many times when I am onstage with a new crowd I will ask the audience where I should start the bidding. Instead of throwing out a number that could intimidate half the room, I will say to the audience who wants to start the bidding? When the person raises their hand Ill ask where are we starting the bidding tonight? and then I simply wait . . . 9 out of 10 times the person will come in at a higher level simply because they dont know where I plan to start and want to be sure they dont announce a low bid. Youll be amazed how often the other side rushes to fill the space, usually revealing exactly what you need to know.
3. Silence raises more money than any speech ever could.
During the paddle raise portion of a charity auction paddle raise, Im not offering a vacation home or a puppy. Im simply asking for donations. When I begin at the highest level, say, $25,000 the room gets very still. People shift in their chairs. They look at each other. They wait. But more importantly, I wait. And sometimes Ill throw in a joke to show them how at ease I am in the silence Ill wait just long enough until it starts to get really uncomfortable and then I smile and wait a little longer. Inevitably someone will raise their hand simply to break the tension. Its no concern for me; I will wait all night.
Thats the power of silence: It moves people to act.
The next time you are in an important meeting, giving a speech, or presenting on stage, remember the power of silence and use it to your advantage.
Cloudflare has often been described as some version of the most important internet company youve never heard of. But for the better part of 2025, cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince has been trying to change that.
The companys core business is to improve the performance and enhance the security of websites and online applications, protecting against malicious actors and routing web traffic through its data centers to optimize performance. Six billion people pass through our network every single month, Prince says. If Cloudflare is doing its job well, no one notices.
But in July, Prince declared Content Independence Day, a broadside against the AI companies that, in his view, were unfairly scraping content to the detriment of the media industry. Cloudflare enabled clients that signed up for its pay per crawl service to block AI crawlers from accessing their content unless the companiesAnthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc.paid for the privilege. This was catnip to the media, Fast Company included, which immediately started paying a lot more attention to Cloudflare. I think this is the most interesting question over the next five years, Prince says. What is the future business model of the internet going to be?
Prince has a personal interest in this question. He was the editor of his school newspaper at Trinity College (the Connecticut one, not Dublin) and, in 2023, he and his wife purchased the Park Record, his hometown newspaper in Park City, Utah. I appreciate the hard work of our journalistic team, whos showing up at city council meetings, covering local politics. There has to be a business model to support that work, he says. That work is critically important if were going to have a functioning society.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Before Cloudflare, you cofounded Unspam Technologies, an email spam-checker service, and the open-source Project Honey Pot, which tracks and identifies spammers and malicious bots. Theres a common thread to your companies. Theyre all about preventing something bad from happening, from spam to cyberattacks to unauthorized data scraping. What would a psychiatrist say about this?
I guess I have a superhero fetish or something.
Youre a protector.
A protector, yeah. I went to law school, and so a lot of the ideas start with: Where is there a failure in society? And if we solve that problem in some way, well be able to turn that into a business. And thats worked, really. It didnt work as well with the first spam company [Unspam], but at Cloudflare, its really driven everything that weve done.
[Photo: Amber Hakim]
What was your original mission for Cloudflare and how has it changed?
Cloudflare started about 15 years ago, when [cofounder and COO] Michelle [Zatlyn] and I were business students. When people would ask us what our mission was, wed say, Our mission is to take advantage of this interesting market opportunity, make some money, and impress our parents. Which is, I think, if anyones being honest, kind of why almost everything starts.
We knew that in order to build out the network to service large customers, we needed data and we needed ways to build the models to figure out who the good guys were, who the bad guys were, and [how] to stop them.
We had the bright idea that we would offer a free version of the service. We thought startups and individual developers would be the ones who would sign up. Thats not what happened at first. What happened was that every civil society organization, every nonprofit, every humanitarian organization signed up because they had small budgets but big security problems. So one day we realized that everyone who was doing some sort of good around the internet was relying on us. I remember going to lunch with a bunch of our engineers, and one of them said, This is the first job where I feel like Im actually helping build a better internet. That resonated, and that phrase kept coming up. Finally someone said, Thats Cloudflares mission: to help build a better internet. And thats what stuck.
Cloudflare experienced a significant outage in mid-November after a routine infrastructure update. You corrected that problem within a few hours, but how do you mitigate these risks moving forward? Does the rise of AI affect the risk of these kinds of incidents?
Any outage is unacceptable given Cloudflares role in supporting a large portion of the Internet, and we take full responsibility. Were implementing additional safeguards to help prevent similar incidents in the future. Past outages have always led us to build new, more resilient systems. We’ll also remain transparent, as we’ve always been in these situations; we published a postmortem within about 12 hours to share what happened and what were learning.
As the internet evolves, including the rise of AI, we continually assess new risks to ensure our systems remain resilient. Outages and bugs can happenthats the nature of softwarebut our customers trust is our top priority.
Over the years, youve come under pressure to deny service to sites that are associated with hate speech and harassment, raising questions about Cloudflares role in content moderation. As you look ahead to the midterms and the 250th anniversary of America next year and then the national election in 2028, what concerns you most when it comes to misinformation and disinformation in the AI age?
I think its funny that Im sort of known as the content moderation guy. Were 15 years old, and weve had basically three incidents [the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer and extremist forums 8chan and Kiwi Farms].
Essentially, 6 billion people pass through our network every single month. Thats the entire online population. Thats the scale that we have, and we have a responsibility to those people. So the question is, When you have that responsibility, what do you do?
People have written about this for a long time. I actually went and dusted off a bunch of my philosophy books from college. Aristotle writes a lot about how governments build trust. Were not a government, but we operate at a scale that would be inconceivable to Aristotle, and at some level have the same challenges around that. Fundamentally, Aristotle argued that there are three things you need for trust: transparency, consistency, and accountability. Transparency: You need to know what the rules are. Consistency: The same rules should be applied the same way all the time. And ten accountability: The people who apply the rules should be responsible to the rules themselves.
In answer to your question, thereve been a couple of big AI companies that have invited me to be on their boards. Ive always said no, but I engage with them; 80% of the big AI companies are Cloudflare customers, so we have a relationship with them. I think theyre doing the right thing, and theyre going a million miles an hour. And, I mean, its so exciting. But we have to stop and think about: How do you build trust?
I think Im the largest nonacademic buyer of Aristotles Politics on Amazon. Ive sent signed copies to every AI executive Ive met, saying, I know you dont have a lot of time, but take the time to read this.
Lets talk about how AI is eroding the traditional information ecosystem and what Cloudflare is trying to do about it.
Twenty-seven years ago, a fateful thing happened: Google launched and did two things. One, it built a better search engine. Even more importantly, it built the first business model and monetization model for the internet. It helps generate traffic, and then it provides you the tools to make that traffic profitable. That has funded the growth of the vast majority of the internet. Weve gone through some platform shifts along the way. We went to social, but social was still driven by traffic.
Whats going on right nowthat I think people dont completely understandis were going through another platform shift. Its a bigger platform shift than weve ever seen before, which is that the way youre going to consume information is through AI.
With a search engine, you did a search, it returned 10 blue links, and then the search wasnt over. Google was a treasure map, which generated traffic to Fast Company or whoever; behind that treasure map, you could monetize it. But we know thats not the end state because sci-fi tells us its not, and sci-fi often predicts the future pretty well. If you think about any movie that has a helpful robot in it, if you say, I would like a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, the robot doesnt come back and say, Here are 10 links, go follow em and maybe youll find a nice recipe. It says, Heres the recipe.
And thats exactly what ChatGPT, Anthropic, and increasingly Google with AI Overviews are doing. And make no mistake: For 95% of users, 95% of the time, thats a better user interface. That user interface is going to win and is going to be the new platform by which we consume information.
Which is quite a problem for any entitynot just the mediathat wants to be found on the internet.
Right. Instead of going and generating traffic, following a treasure map, and getting to Fast Company, now youre reading a derivative thats been summarized and maybe combined with other sources, taking the Fast Company information and putting it in this new ChatGPT interface. And thats a problem because the entire internet has been built on traffic, and that traffic is going away. So no matter what, as the interface of the internet changes, the business model of the internet is going to change.
You have a solution for this: the pay-per-crawl model. This business proposition theoretically enables those content providers to continue to provide that content, and be compensated for it, in a way that wont compromise this new andI agreebetter user experience. How would this work?
Im optimistic because both sides need each other. There are really three things you need to be an AI company, two of which are very expensive and one of which has largely been free. The two things that are expensive are going to get cheaper and cheaper, and the thing that has been free is going to be what differentiates AI companies, which theyre going to be willing to pay more for.
So, what are the three things? The first is chips, GPUs, but its silicon, right? Theres never been a time in history where a silicon shortage doesnt turn into a silicon glut. Theres a bunch of sand in the world. GPUs will increasingly become commodities, the same way that CPUs and all other silicon have.
The second is talent. Five years ago, if you were getting a PhD in AI, you were kind of a laughingstock. It was thought of as this dead industry that was hot in the 70s and 80s, and then it became the place where the sort of weird computer science professor went and promised that tomorrow AI was coming. Well, it turns out they were right. They just had the time frame wrong. But now its gone from this backwater to every university spinning up a department. I dont think there will be a glut of AI researchers, but I think the days of billion-dollar salaries at Metathat wont last forever because the education markets are efficient.
The last bit is content. In almost all these cases, unique content ends up being the thing that differentiates media over time. YouTube, for example, started out as a technology play. It could deliver streaming video cheaper, faster than everybody else, and thats why it won. As the rest of the industry caught up with the technology, YouTube had to differentiate. First it was discoverability with search, now its with unique content that you can only get on YouTube.
I think the AI companies are going to be very, very similar, which means theyre going to need that information that only you [media companies] have. So the keyif youre a media company todayis to stop the free buffet: Only you have the review of the hot restaurant in Tuscaloosa, which is unique content thats going to be incredibly precious and incredibly essential. So step one is to say: Were not going to give every AI company our content for free. Were going to say, Youre blocked. Thats what we at Cloudflare have been helping with.
And then how the market develops after that, we have some ideas, but Im not quite sure. What Im confident inand what the data so far bears outis that the more unique, the more quirky, the more local your content is, the more valuable it is to AI companies, and the more likely it is that theres going to be a healthy and sustainable marketplace that exists for you to be able to sell that content.
I think that this can be pie-expanding and that we might be on the doorstep of a golden age of media.
I love the optimism, and I want to believe it, for obvious reasons. To put a fine point on the mechanics of it, the publisher signs up; Cloudflare blocks the AI crawlers from accessing their content; the publisher sets the price for the AI company to access that content and get paid; and you guys get a cut. Thats pretty much how that works?
We have a bunch of different theories of how this could work [over time]. It could be micropayments. Thats what youve described, where the publisher sets a price, and then whenever an agent or a crawler or scraperthose are all synonymstries to access that content, they pay a fraction of a penny or a few pennies. It could be something thats closer to a Spotify model, where maybe all the AI companies contribute to a pool and that pool gets aggregated and then [distributed]. In Spotifys case, its based on how many minutes get listened to.
Exactly what the business model looks like, its going to take some time to mature. If you think about music, we ended up with Spotify, but in order to get to Spotify, we started with Napster, which was sort of anything goes, and then Steve Jobs steps onstage and launches iTunes, 99 cents a song, which was revolutionary at the time, but that wasnt the business model that eventually won. The business model that eventually won was something closer to all you can eat for $10 a month.
My hunch is that were not going to get the business model right the first time around, and it may not be Cloudlare that figures it out. There are lots of people who are thinking about this problem. But no matter what, we have to start with scarcity. Weve got to close the spigot.
And again, this isnt just about media.
The same challenges are coming for e-commerce companies, travel companiesanyone who sells anything online. Ive been struck by how many of the people who are calling us are saying, Hey, this is a real problem for us too. Big financial institutions where theyre like, No, no, no, the AI companies are disintermediating us as well, and theyre creating a problem where our research teams arent getting compensated as much. I mean, whats the future for a Booking.com in an AI-powered world? Whats the future for anyone who in the past aggregated a bunch of supply together? What is a brand? What is it worth if its just agents that are interacting and you dont have humans that are there? What I think people dont fully appreciate is that this is a more radical transformation than it was to go to mobile. Fundamentally, were going to have to reinvent how we interact and thats going to impact everyone.
Lets close by going beyond the information ecosystem. Something I struggle with is how seriously to take the existential threat of AInot to revenue models, but humanity itself. Very smart people argue very different ends of the spectrum, from the terrifying vision of Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose book on the dangers of a superhuman AI is called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, to the much more sanguine outlook of folks like Yann LeCun, Metas chief AI scientist. Where do you fall on this spectrum?
Im on the more optimistic side. More on Yanns side. But I will say that I feel like this is a distraction from the real problems [were facing now]. Is there going to be a Terminator moment? Weve got a lot of stuff to figure out before that. Sure, we can have cocktail party conversations about whether this is going to end the world or lead to kind of a utopia. But dont let that conversation distract from the more important, more immediate conversation, which is whos going to pay journalists going forward?
[Laughs] I agree: Nothing could be more important than that.
Is Reddit like other social media platforms? Thats the question before the High Court of Australia in light of the countrys under-16s social media ban.
Last week, Reddit filed a lawsuit in Australia’s highest court seeking to overturn the country’s recently enacted social media ban for children.
The San Francisco-based firm claims the law is unconstitutional because it infringes on Australias implied freedom of political communication. The lawsuit follows a case filed last month by Sydney-based rights group Digital Freedom Project.
Reddit is also asking the High Court to rule that even if the legislation is valid, that Reddit is not like other social media platforms.
The Australian eSafety Commissioners website provides a list of criteria for social media platforms subjected to the age restrictions, as well as a flow chart to help companies work out whether their platforms fall under the scope.
The regulatory agency lists the platforms that fall under its age restrictions as Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, and YouTube.
Sites that will not be subject to age restrictions are Discord, GitHub, Google Classroom, LEGO Play, Messenger, Pinterest, Roblox, Steam and Steam Chat, WhatsApp, and YouTube Kids.
In documents filed in the High Court, Reddit argues it does not satisfy the first criteria of having the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of enabling online social interaction between two or more end-users.”
Reddit brought up definitions of the word social in its filing to make its case that its users mostly do not interact in a social manner.
Reddit says that for an interaction to be social, it has to happen because of a particular users relationship with or interest in another user as a person; indeed, in most cases the identity of a user on Reddit is not even known to other users. The same could be said for other social platforms.
The company said it does not promote real-time presence, friend requests, or activity feeds that drive ongoing engagement. Instead, it “operates as a collection of public fora arranged by subject.” Reddit says it merely enables online interactions about the content that users post on the site. It facilitates knowledge sharing from one user to other users.
In a post accompanying the filing, Reddit admin LastBluejay said they are complying with the law and they are notably not against child safety measures or regulations, or trying to retain young users for business reasons. They wrote that the law carries some serious privacy and political expression issues for everyone on the internet.
Platforms now face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32.9 million) if they fail to take reasonable steps to remove the accounts of those under the minimum age.
For the past two years, I’ve written predictions for how AI will continue to change the media industry and the business of news in the coming year. Prognosticating is a risky business even at the most tranquil of times, and media’s AI era is anything but: bots are multiplying, newsrooms are shrinking, and new business models always seem to be still developing.
Last year, four of the five predictions I made came true, those being the spread of audio experiences like NotebookLM’s audio overviews, a greater emphasis on content licensing, more “legit” AI-generated content, and publishers doing more with their own summarization and chatbots. I should have probably known my one strike was going to be agentsthat was such a buzzword last year that I couldn’t avoid including it, but it turns out there were significant barriers keeping agents outside the mainstream (data privacy and complexity being the main ones).
This time, the task is even more challenging. Many trends, like AI adoption in newsrooms, are further along, which you would think makes their effects easier to predict. But the reality is that the most impactful things happen when those trends slam into realities, such as Cloudflare taking a hard stance against AI ingesting publisher content without compensation or consequence. Who saw that coming?
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With all that in mind, here are my predictions for how AI’s presence in media will evolve in the next year:
1. The copyright issue gets worse before it gets better
Despite an ever-growing set of lawsuits, the copyright issue is still largely unresolved. Publishers want compensation for how their content is ingested and used by AI companies, which continue to claim fair use. Sure, there are more licensing deals between the two sides, but the fundamental tension remains.
What’s changed is that more publishers have woken up to what they see as the predations of the AI industry, and they’ve gotten more aggressive at blocking AI crawlers. That prevents AI engines from bringing users the best, most up-to-date data, which makes them less competitive.
This, however, doesn’t apply to Google, because it uses the same crawler for search and AI, and no publisher in their right mind would ever block Google Search. That gives Google a competitive advantage at a time where OpenAI just went into “code red” for fear of falling behind. Similarly, Perplexity is now the target for legal action from both News Corp. and The New York Times for how it summarizes their content.
For any AI company in a race with Google, it’s hard to see how they can balance respecting copyright with staying competitive. If even the tremendously successful OpenAI sees the threat as existential, it’s hard to see how any of them wouldn’t see the copyright issue as secondary. My expectation: Not only will AI companies avoid making moves that broadly support content providers (such as enabling them to block user agents)they may even become more brazen about ignoring safeguards like the Robots Exclusion Protocol.
2. AI focus in newsrooms shifts to product and revenue
When The New York Times opened the doors for AI use by its staff, it was an indicator that newsrooms were becoming more comfortable with using AI to improve efficiency with things like transcription and social media management.
Similarly, the launch of more sophisticated AI-infused products like Times AI Agentwhich turns the publication’s vast archive into a grounded, AI-ready corpussignals a shift toward AI products that could potentially improve the bottom line. Whether that opens up real revenue is unclear, and the road is certainly longer and bumpier than deploying an AI headline writer (Politico recently got into hot water with its newsroom union over an AI tool for its lucrative Politico Pro division), but the potential rewards are great enough that we’re sure to see more publishers go this route.
3. PR’s lean renaissance
The era of “go direct” PR led many to postulate that the whole industry might face a steep decline, if not become entirely obsolete. However, AI has revived PR for a new era: Since AI engines look for credibility across domains and platforms, the ability to get a story cited widely, even on lesser-known sites, is newly valuable.
However, AI is also forcing the industry to rethink the basicseven more than the media. Since much of PR work involves content, and it doesn’t have the same audience relationship that has kept almost all journalism authentically human, there’s intense pressure on the client side to leverage AI in content generation to cut costs. That all translates into a strengthened PR industry, but one that’s by necessity smarter and leaner than before.
4. Authenticity reasserts itself
When generative AI first arrived, there was existential dread that big chunks of journalism would end up being authored by AI. While AI has secured a place in many newsrooms, that prediction largely hasn’t come to pass. That’s not because AI isn’t capable of researching, analyzing, and writing stories, but because AI authorship alters the audience relationship.
In other words, human authenticity is back in style. AI can still be an accelerant here, helping more publications adopt video formats like the Times “explain the news” vertical shorts. With AI reducing the cost of production, the choice of expanding to a new platform will have more to do with audience opportunity, as it should be.
5. Continued prioritization of owned audience
Just because we’re likely not going to Google Zero, doesn’t mean media properties can relax. A world of “Google Smaller” still means publishers will need to keep divesting from strategies dependent on SEO traffic, and direct their energies toward building and nurturing direct, habitual audience relationships through proprietary apps and formats with traditionally higher engagement, like newsletters and live events. The bad news: the more who do, the harder it will be to stand out.
It may still be early days for AI, but we’re well past the point of no return. More and more people are using it for information discovery (34%, up from 18% a year ago, per the Reuters Institute) and journalists continue to adopt AI as part of their workflows (more than half now use it at least once a week). The industry is clearly adapting to the new AI reality, and whether or not we get clearer answers to the big questions around copyright and business models, 2026 might be the year the media’s AI survival manual gets written.
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Seasons greetings arent as cheery when its a season of layoffs.
November marked the eighth time this year that job cuts were up over the same period the year before, according to research from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. To make matters worse, hiring in November was down 35% from 2024, marking the lowest year-to-date total since 2010.
News about the current labor market can be unnervingeven more so when layoffs are hitting your company. Being prepared can help make it less so. And one group of people knows more about that than most.
A page out of the prepper book
The word prepper may bring to mind images of shows like Doomsday Preppers, in which people stockpile food, water, weapons, and supplies in anticipation of apocalyptic events. However, most preppers are simply people who want to have some basic essentials or plan in place just in case.
In fact, the last Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Preparedness Report found that more than half of U.S. adults (55%) had taken 3 or more of the 12 preparedness steps, like making a plan, gathering supplies, and securing documents.
It’s not that different from preparing for a layoff, says organizational psychologist Melissa Doman.
Going through an unexpected layoff is a form of a temporary doomsday for some people. They didnt expect it, they cant control it, and they dont know how long its going to last, she says.
If youre worried about an impending layoff, try preparing like a prepper.
Know what you have
When layoff rumors start circulating, if you start making plans as soon as the whispers begin, or before if possible, youll be in a much better position, says Michael McAuliffe, president and CEO of Family Credit Management, a nonprofit credit counseling agency.Personal finance expert LaChelle Johnson agrees, advising, Figure out exactly what you have in terms of cash on hand, liquid assets, and even funds you may have access to in an emergency that you can withdraw from, like retirement accounts or investment accounts.
Maximize income and benefits
In 2018, Michelle Arellano Martin had what she thought was her dream job. Then, she got a surprise. I had just completed a huge projectgarnered some incredible awards for my workand then my position was eliminated, she says.
If she had it to do over again, she says she would have applied for unemployment benefits immediately, because the first payment took several weeks to arrive. She also advises negotiating for the best severance package you can. After her second layoff, she was able to negotiate an additional three months of severance pay. This, in part, helped her launch her business, sustainable travel site Travara.
Talent strategist Brittany Dolin, CEO of the Pocketbook Agency recruitment firm, advises reviewing an expected severance package and how benefits like health insurance last after a layoff. You may also look for benefits that can give you immediate value, such as flexible spending account balances available to you.Johnson also suggests looking for items that you might be able to sell if necessaryeverything from future concert tickets to that bread maker you always wanted to use but never opened. She also advises thinking about side hustles (but be sure you understand their impact on unemployment benefits).
Slash spending
When Johnson was laid off years ago, she and her husband had car loans, private school bills, credit card balances, and a big mortgage. The couple decided to make serious changes, like moving in with his parents for a year, to protect what they had and get out of debt. I just felt like we were maxed out from wall to wall, she recalls.
Johnson advises taking a close look at spending and eliminating what you dont need: Cut subscriptions. Pause gym memberships. Plan meals, and eat at home. Look for cheaper housing options. Follow frugal living communities on Reddit or other social media for more ideas on cutting expenses. You may pick up some good habits and find room in your budget to beef up your emergency fund over time, she says.
Get your support team lined up
Three of the 12 disaster preparation actions FEMA recommends involve identifying people you need for help and communication during emergencies. Similarly, Doman says you need to identify your support team if you suspect youre facing something as stressful as a layoff.
Dont just default to your best friend or a family member. Instead, she says, think about the people who are going to let you feel your emotions and, when youre ready, devise an action plan if the layoff comes to pass.You dont want someone whos just going to brush off your emotions or give you a lot of toxic positivity, she says. In fact, she adds, You may need more than one person.Reach out to these trusted individuals and let them know whats going on so they can support youand perhaps even help you network to find a new job.
Keep a schedule
If the layoff does come to pass, you may need to wallow a bit.
Doman says its okay to take a duvet day to lie in bed and watch television if you need it. But dont do that for too long, she adds. Keep structure in your dayget up at a set time, work on some tasks to find a new job, get some fresh air, talk to a friend, she says.
Dolin agrees. Fear can be paralyzing, and if a layoff is pending or just happened, its time to buckle down and do your best to stay employable in an unpredictable market, she says. Preparation does not equal panic.
