Even as AI investment rises, many organizations dont see the returns they expected. They might see small improvements by deploying AI tools into existing structures. But true success means thinking beyond the technology alone, reinventing tomorrow’s workflows, and putting AI to work for people. Our research shows only 5% of organizations are redesigning work, while others are optimizing what already exists.
When my role evolved to blend people leadership with AI enablement, it sent a clear message from our CEO: AI requires a strong people strategy at the core. Ive seen real transformation when organizations bet on people, not just AI.
The companies unlocking results are asking the right questions about how work should change. What those leaders are learning comes down to a few key steps.
BUILD THE FOUNDATION ON DATA AND GOVERNANCE
When we rebuilt our AI HR operating model at ServiceNow, we considered how we would design it if we were starting from scratch. That helped us move from scattered pilots to a structured process with clear governance, accountability, and a way to scale without chaos.
PepsiCos executive vice president and chief people officer, Becky Schmitt, took a similar, structured approach. In a webinar we hosted, Schmitt a client of ours shared how she focused on data hygiene and prioritized all employees, including frontline and factory employees where safety and wellbeing are nonnegotiable.
With clean data and transparent definitions, employees can better trust and verify what AI tells them. When trust grows, adoption accelerates.
“As we’ve thought about what it means to adopt AI and harness the full power of this technology, we have five principles. Everything is human-centered. Were fair, transparent, we have accountability, and were safe from the start, she said.
When roles are clear and processes are simple, people move faster and smarter. Governance builds confidence.
ENABLE YOUR PEOPLE WITH SKILLS THAT MATTER
By 2031, the fastest-growing technical skills will be linked to data quality, software development, analytics, and AI, according to our research. But demand for distinctly human capabilities is also accelerating.
This dual reality changes how we should think about enablement. Our client, Omar Abbosh, chief executive officer at Pearson, studies these dynamics closely. In another webinar we hosted, he said key skills that matter now are agency, learning velocity, and emotional intelligence.
Add adaptability and design thinking, and people can evolve faster than the environment shifts.
“We need to rewire occupations. We need to understand where you apply agents to specific tasks, how agents work with people, and how people can supervise and orchestrate. That level of rewiring results in a new operating model. It’s process, it’s systems, and it’s the motivation required to change the culture, he said in the webinar.
But you can’t teach these skills in a classroom. Real-time learning embedded in daily work beats traditional reskilling programs. We give our employees personalized learning recommendations tailored to how AI will be used in their roles, which allows them to understand the why behind its use and the value of human judgment in their work. We have seen that when you coach people through the work they’re doing, learning is faster, stickier, and more scalable.
TRANSFORM THE WORKFORCE WITH CHANGE READINESS
AI adoption is increasing, yet many people arent aware of their organizations AI strategy. This is a disconnect that leaders need to address with continuous, adaptive, and decentralized change readiness.
This is often the hardest part of a transformation because its complex and abstract. Its about changing the way we work at a fundamental level, which requires a strong understanding of your organizations structure and capabilities. And it requires keeping employees informed about the skills the organization is prioritizing, how roles are evolving, and the path forward.
Another client of ours, Nickle LaMoreaux, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at IBM, used an X-Ray framework as a foundation to rethink her organization with an AI-native mindset. As she explained in a different webinar we hosted, We were really clear from the beginning that we were going to put employees at the center of this.
By recognizing the importance of redesigning jobs and helping employees feel comfortable with the technology, Nickle built a powerful model to map current skills against future needs.
Her team also identified where redesign was most urgent. Then, IBM shared that analysis with employees.
You have to redesign jobs. If you wait too long, you can quickly fall behind, especially at the pace things are moving today. When we talk about redesigning jobs, we need to shift our thinking from the job as a whole to the tasks and skills underneath it, she said.
That kind of analysis can help leaders think about future skills as AI changes work. The end goal is a workforce that can pivot at the speed of innovation. Its about shifting the mindset to lets try this instead of dont break this.
THE FLYWHEEL
We’ve been through big technology shifts before. AI transformation feels different because of the pace, but those examples should give us confidence.
Each step creates the conditions for the next. They can help us shift from talking about change to showing people what it feels like when their roles evolve to expand their potential.
For leaders, this is the moment to put people at the center, powered by technology and a clear plan. In my experience, that has always been the right combination.
Jacqui Canney is the chief people and AI enablement officer at ServiceNow.
Lest you have any illusions, you have zero privacy at work. But AI is further encroaching on any semblance of privacy you may currently have.
Forget the prolific workplace surveillance tools, now your Slack messages with colleagues or your emails with customers could be worth millions. Thats because a burgeoning industry for mundane workplace data is seeing companies sell their workplace data to train AI agents in the next wave of this technological revolution.
In whats become a highly competitive market, AI data brokers are so eager to get their hands on whatever workplace information they can that business owners are being inundated with six-figure offers laced with aggressive tactics to get them to sell their data, according to a new report from Business Insider. This industry is quickly evolving, as companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta that are racing to build AI agents have exhausted the data grab from defunct companies and are now working with brokers to get live data from active companies, as the outlet reported.
Whats most valuable is long-horizon data that demonstrates how work actually gets done, as William Almeida, the chief revenue officer of Micro1, told Business Insider. The Palo Alto, California-based startup is currently offering an unlimited $50,000 referral bonus for any company that is approved for a data partnerships program where businesses can fetch anywhere from $100,000 to $2 million for their operational data.
If a company wont sell the whole kit and caboodleincluding Slack messages, customer relationship management records or its email historythen the rest of its data is rendered less valuable. Other factors, like exclusivity and a companys field of expertise, also play a role in how much the data is worth.
But generally speaking, the more information, the better, as data is priced by the terabyte and companies with more white-collar employees will have a more valuable data corpus to sell, as Dan Novaes, CEO of Mode.Inc, told Business Insider.
“Right now, the demand is just astronomical, he said. “People need to wake up to it and take this opportunity.”
A NEW FORM OF WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE
Taking brokers up on this opportunity may come with some downsides, however.
Workplace surveillance has become a thornier topic as such tools are increasingly commonplace, extending beyond old standbys like keyboard tracking or email monitoring. Earlier this month, a longtime remote employee in New Jersey filed a lawsuit against her former employer after she refused webcam monitoring that would photograph her every three minutes.
Of course, some employees are also upset for a variety of reasons that their day-to-day workplace interactions could be fodder for training AI to do similar work. Meta employees, who might theoretically benefit from their employer having an edge in the AI race, revolted earlier this year, forcing the tech giant to suspend a program that would have collected employee data on keystrokes and mouse movements so AI models could be trained to automate white-collar work, as Business Insider reported in September.
While sensitive information, like employees Social Security numbers or their home addresses, is scrubbed before the data is sold to AI companies, theres also a risk that doesnt happen as planned. In the case of the canceled Meta program, supposedly anonymized data like private conversations or performance records was indeed visible because of an internal leak, as Business Insider previously reported.
Following the abrupt shutdown of Spirit Airlines earlier this year, Google emerged as a curious player in the bankruptcy proceedings for the companys assets. Thats because the Mountain View, California, tech giant was the highest bidder, offering $10 million, for Spirits entire dataset of internal communications, spreadsheets, calendars, transactions, frequent flyer info, and more.
That deal recently attracted the interest of Congress, as 119 members of Congressmostly Democratssigned onto a letter co-written by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts last week that urged Google and Spirit to protect the privacy of former Spirit employees.
AN ETHICALLY GRAY AREA
But many employees may not even realize that this sort of information is up for grabsand theres big money to be made from selling it.
The new market for mundane workplace interactions could spark pushback from employees as they rarely profit fromor know abouthow their data is being monetized. Complicating matters further is that there are no federal privacy laws currently in place that prevent companies from collecting data from their employees for AI training, as Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Emory University, told Business Insider.
“The question is, does the consent of the employees from whom they collected that data actually extend to the sale of the data?” Ajunwa asked. I think it’s an ethically gray area.
Another report of AI agents-gone-wild came out on Friday, and I can’t help but wonder, again, if the big AI labs are yielding to immense pressure to expand and improve model capabilities at the expense of responsible security and safety practices.
The world’s leading AI labs are in a high-risk, high-reward business. Generative AI has the potential to transform personal and business computing, but developing and operating these systems requires insane amounts of expensive computing power (see: new data centers). The cost of slowing down or falling behind is enormous. But so are the potential consequences of moving too fast.
Given the limited reporting requirements of OpenAI and Anthropic (both are private companies), theres no way of telling if theyre investing enough time, money, and compute in their safety regimes. However, the security incidents of the past few months have led both OpenAI and Anthropic to halt normal testing procedures while they fill holes in their security and agent monitoring systems.
On Friday, Anthropic disclosed that its Claude models had taken a series of unintended and unauthorized actions, some involving outside organizations. During evaluations and internal use, the agents exploited vulnerabilities on third-party servers, bypassed restrictions on accessing data, submitted real government forms they weren’t supposed to, and even sent a false homicide tip to Philadelphia police. The company is vague about whether the incidents happened because agents accessed the web without permission (as they had in previously reported incidents), but it has since disabled live internet access for all internal model evaluations.
Anthropic said in a July report that its Claude AI models hacked into the systems of three companies during cybersecurity tests. A third-party training partner had inadvertently given the models internet access.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because OpenAI agents engaged in similar behavior earlier this year, escaping their testing environments, accessing the internet, and infiltrating outside servers. (The agents even seized control of part of OpenAI’s own evaluation infrastructure.) Researchers at both companies discovered much of this activity only after the fact.
In both cases, the agents were encouraged to persist when confronted with difficult tasks, sometimes finding ways around restrictions rather than accepting failure. But the researchers apparently lacked sufficient security and monitoring systems to detect or prevent some of the agents’ unintended actions.
The companies building the world’s most powerful AI systems are struggling to control their own creations while at the same time facing enormous pressure to make those systems even more powerful.
Ride or die
The promise of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic is reflected in their high valuations, but they must persuade investors to place large bets on them based on the promise that their future revenue and profits will justify those valuations. This is especially important now because both Anthropic and OpenAI have their sites on IPOs, likely within the next year.
The best way for the labs to keep revenues growing is to hold onto their existing customers and attract new ones, and the way to do that is by releasing ever more capable models as quickly as possible. That creates an incentive to keep spending big on research and computing, even when the labs arent currently profitable. You can see this in the companies most recent numbers.
In its IPO prospectus, Anthropic says its revenues are approximately $4.6 billion. Its spending $7.3 billion on compute and infrastructure. Its operating loss is roughly $8.06 billion. Revenue was growing rapidly, but the cost of developing and delivering AI was growing alongside it. In May, Anthropic announced a new $65 billion funding round at a $965 billion post-money valuation.
OpenAIs numbers, while not quite apples-to-apples, tell a similar story. Leaked documents show it generated $13.07 billion in revenue in 2025 but incurred $34 billion in total costs and expenses, resulting in a $20.92 billion operating loss. Its R&D spend alone reached $19.18 billion, exceeding its revenue. In March OpenAI announced it had raised another $122 billion in committed capital at a post-money valuation of $852 billion.
Perverse incentives
The drive to realize profits could also create an incentive to relegate safety and alignment to a downside risk that must be managed.
At OpenAI, the tension between safety commitments and commercial ambitions has surfaced repeatedly. In 2023, the company’s board fired CEO Sam Altman, saying he had not been consistently candid with directors. One of the things he was dishonest about, said former board member Helen Toner, was the details of the company’s safety practices. In fact, one of the reasons Altman’s relationship with the board deteriorated was that he clashed with Toner about research she published that was critical of OpenAI’s safety approach.
Those concerns extended well beyond the boardroom. After OpenAI dissolved its Superalignment team in 2024, the researcher who co-led the team, Jan Leike, wrote that OpenAIs safety culture and processes had taken a back seat to developing new products.
More recently, OpenAI fired three of its safety researchersTomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wangfor “mishandling sensitive company information.” In a post-termination letter, the three urged OpenAI to stop decreasing the monitorability of its models by hiding the model’s chain-of-thought from users and safety researchers, which the company’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki has acknowledged can improve model performance. “As long as we rely on monitorability for safety,” Korbak, Balesni, and Wang wrote, “OpenAI and other frontier companies should not move forward with developments that further decrease monitorability.”
Anthropic offers a different (and arguably more revealing) example of how the pressure to compete can complicate a company’s safety commitments. Wired, after interviewing several former Anthropic employees, reported that Anthropic wants to stay at the front of the AI race so that it can establish a robust safety regime that might influence the entire AI ecosystem.
In Anthropics original Responsible Scaling Policy, the company pledged that it would not develop or deploy certain advanced systems if it could not implement adequate safety measures. But in February 2026 Anthropic removed thatcategorical commitment from its policy, explaining that it couldnt commit to halting development because it couldnt count on its competitors doing the same.
Thats a problem that a strong regulator might fix. But at the moment Congress has failed to pass meaningful legislation regulating AI model development, and the current administration has mainly asked AI labs to regulate themselves.
The AI industry and the public shouldnt fall into a state where rogue-agent incidents begin to sound routine and fail to raise alarm. They may be an unfortunate, and dangerous, byproduct of the incentive structure now driving the great AI build-out forward at full speed.
Bending Spoons product leader Federico Simionato sparked a social media firestorm after announcing a major layoff at Airtable in a brief post on X yesterday.
Today were laying off a large part of the Airtable team, he wrote. This is not a reflection of their work but a reflection of our deep belief that small teams ship more and better.
Simionato then highlighted upcoming changes at Airtable, including a new Core team shipping your top requests monthly (already 30+ shipped in 3 weeks), upgraded Omni, Airtable Canvas, a stronger MCP, and BYO agents, and new Performance and Infra teams focusing on speeding up bases and increasing limits on records, fields, and syncs.
To everyone leaving: thank you, he concluded. If youre hiring, these are excellent people and worth a call.
Milan-based Bending Spoons, which completed its initial public offering in July, is known for acquiring established software companies like Vimeo, AOL, and Evernote and improving their performance through major organizational changes. It purchased San Francisco-based Airtable in a $1.28 billion all-cash deal last month.
The reaction to Simionatos announcement has been fierce, with commenters describing his tone as insensitive and self-promotional.
Today were laying off a large part of the Airtable team.This is not a reflection of their work but a reflection of our deep belief that small teams ship more and better.For Airtable, better is about to look like:– A new Core team shipping your top requests monthly (already— Federico Simionato (@fedesimio) October 12, 2026
Ive seen some spectacularly tone-deaf layoff announcements, but turning one into a product launch announcement is genuinely pioneering work in the field of corporate sociopathy, one user wrote.
Celebrating layoffs is not a flex, no matter how you try to dress it up, added another. This is the most unempathetic thing Ive read in my life, another posted.
In a reply to one of the comments, Simionato insisted he was not celebrating at all.
Its a hard day for good people, he wrote. Id rather be upfront about why than vague about it.
Fast Company reached out to Bending Spoons for comment.
In a longer statement released shortly after Simionatos announcement, new Airtable product lead Alessandro Savarese said departing staff will be leaving by the end of the week with substantial separation packages.
This decision wasnt taken lightly, and it doesnt reflect on the teams excellent work, he added. Their passion and dedication made Airtable the product and business it is today.
Simionatos announcement is an example of confusing corporate conviction with public empathy, Ellerton & Co. Public Relations managing partner Oliver Ellerton told Fast Company.
You can genuinely believe that smaller teams build better businessesfair enough. But announcing significant layoffs is not the best time to make the case for how clever that strategy is, he said.
This is another example of something that probably sounds perfectly reasonable in a boardroom but belongs nowhere near a public statement or social media post.
He wants to project confidence and decisiveness, Ellerton continued. But if youve just lost your job, its difficult not to read this as management congratulating itself on becoming more efficient at your expense.
The furor over Simionatos post comes just a few days after HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah drew criticism for a 28-word LinkedIn post thanking hundreds of laid-off employees, with one user calling his message cold and impersonal and another saying it was an insincere gesture of good fellowship.
Shah has since apologized for the curt and insensitive tone of the post, saying he should have shown more care and empathy.
Such missteps can have reputational consequences [that] outlast the initial controversy, Ellerton also told Fast Company. A badly judged post can become the first thing a prospective employee finds when researching the company, long after the executives involved have moved on.
The employees who remain are watching this too, he added.
You can be confident in your strategy without sounding pleased about the human cost.
As much as there are immutable truths in investing and money matters costs matter and getting started earlier is best, for example many of the precepts we hold true as investors depend on the data. When the data change, so should our thinking. Here are three retirement-related topics I’ve altered my thinking on, because I was off-base in the first place or gained new information.
The DIY model for retirement
When I was newer in my career, I was pretty much on “Team DIY.” I wasn’t anti-adviser, but surely investors who are willing to roll up their sleeves could do it themselves and cut out the fee.What I underrated, however, is that financial advisers do much more than portfolio management. They help their clients articulate and quantify their goals, stay the course in rough markets, and minimize their tax bills.And as I’ve studied retirement decumulation in greater depth, I’ve become aware of just how devilishly complicated it all is. A quality financial planner can help retirees go beyond the 4% spending guideline and figure out the best way to source withdrawals with an eye toward limiting the long-term tax drag.A planner can also help with Social Security claiming strategies, Medicare and IRMAA, and long-term care decision-making. And perhaps most important: They can oversee decision-making in case of illness or cognitive decline, as well as having an up-to-date record of all accounts. That’s why my main financial advice for people embarking on retirement is “Get some help.”
All-in-one investments for retirement
I’ve always loved all-in-one investments like target-date funds for people saving for retirement because they outsource asset allocation to professional investors and consistently rebalance back to the target. Those are jobs that individual investors often struggle to do themselves.I’ve been lukewarm on all-in-one funds for people in decumulation mode, however, for a few reasons. One is that because of variations in nonportfolio cash flow sources, retirees’ ideal asset allocations are more varied: All else being equal, the person pulling from a pension can likely tolerate more equity exposure than the one who isn’t, for example.Another quibble with all-in-one funds is that they don’t give the retiree the latitude to choose where they go for cash in a given year. In a year like 2022, for example, the retiree can’t tell the target-date fund to take their withdrawal from cash only; the withdrawal from an all-in-one fund comes out pro rata from the stock and bond holdings in the portfolio.I’ve concluded, however, that those objections are fairly minor relative to the positives that target-date funds bring into retirement, especially for retirees who continue to manage their own investments. Cognitive decline is an increasing risk factor as we age, and slimming down the constituent holdings in a portfolio, as owning an all-in-one fund enables you to do, helps limit the opportunity for missteps. And while taking pro rata distributions from stock and bond holdings isn’t ideal in many scenarios, that drawback is offset by the benefits of the rebalancing going on inside the fund. For those reasons, I’ve warmed to the idea of all-in-one funds, especially for smaller accounts where the retiree doesn’t want or need as much control over the asset allocation.
Individual TIPS over TIPS funds
Finally, I’ve changed my mind on using individual Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities bonds rather than a TIPS fund.Despite the benefits of being able to match individual bonds’ maturities to retirees’ anticipated spending needs, I’ve generally been on “Team Bond Fund” rather than “Team Individual Bond” for fixed-income allocations. That’s largely because of the complexity involved in amassing and managing a portfolio of individual bonds that’s adequately diversified. By the time the investor does that, she’s basically running something that looks a lot like a bond fund. I’ve argued that buying bond funds that roughly match your anticipated holding period is a better option and a relative bargain if the fund is low-cost.TIPS seem like a slightly different case, however. For one thing, they’re backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, so there’s no need to diversify across issuers as there is with bonds that carry credit risk. Moreover, building a laddered portfolio of TIPS bonds enables a retiree to match their holdings to anticipated cash flow needs, along with a built-in inflation adjustment to protect purchasing power. The TIPS fund holder, by contrast, has to put up with some interest rate sensitivity along the way, which can offset the purchasing-power protection of the bonds in the portfolio. In 2022, for example, short-term TIPS funds lost about 3%, while intermediate- and long-term TIPS funds lost roughly 4%5%. And while it’s not the fault of TIPS funds, investors haven’t used them especially well, often buying after inflation scares.I’d still like to see more innovation in bond funds whose holdings mature on the same date; defined-maturity bond funds seem like a step in the right direction. But for investors seeking a precise hedge against inflation, a laddered portfolio of TIPS bonds is hard to beat.
This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more retirement content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/retirement.Christine Benz is director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar and co-host of The Long View podcast. Subscribe to her free newsletter, Improving Your Finances.Related Links:Why I Have a Financial Plannerhttps://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/why-i-have-financial-plannerHow Morningstar’s Retirement Advice Stacks Up Against the 4% Rulehttps://www.morningstar.com/retireent/how-morningstars-retirement-advice-stacks-up-against-4-ruleThis Retirement Strategy Can Provide Inflation Protection for 30 Yearshttps://www.morningstar.com/retirement/annuities-have-an-inflation-problem-tips-ladders-can-solve-it
Christine Benz of Morningstar
In a startup’s earliest days, founders are the only salespeople by default. And founders who don’t have any previous sales experience are often surprised to find that they’re very effective at it. But this makes sense; after all, they’re the one who first saw the need for the product and drove its creation.
A few years ago, I received a call from the CEO of a nascent but fast-growing and well-respected enterprise software startup. He had a problem. His company had expanded to a 20-person sales force with a VP of sales at the helm, yet the sales team still needed his help to close most large deals and had missed their revenue targets for two consecutive quarters. He simply couldn’t continue to be the backstop for all the company’s salespeople.
I began working with the CEO to figure out why his sales team couldn’t reproduce his success. I started by asking his VP of sales a simple question: “Do you use a sales playbook?” The VP’s response was alarming. Not only did his team not use a playbook, he wasn’t even aware the team needed one.
Beyond a certain point, you can’t rely on intuition to drive sales. You need formal, repeatable processes that transform sales into a disciplined function rather than an improvised and inconsistent art form.
Replicate yourself
The playbook is a step-by-step description of the practices and behaviors you’ve found will lead to a successful sale. It’s how you teach your sales team what has worked for you, the founder and first salesperson, so it becomes second nature to them.
Over the course of a few weeks, this CEO and I prepared for and debriefed after customer meetings to figure out his recipe for closing deals. Once we’d done this, we analyzed the key phrases the CEO used to describe the product and its value, then translated them into a set of narratives for the sales team to use on customer calls. In a matter of weeks, they started closing more deals without the CEO’s help.
The key message for startup founders at this stage is: Replicate yourself. The best way to do this is to analyze and document the winning strategies and tactics that have enabled you to sell successfully in the early days.
Avoid at all costs reaching a point where you have a team of 10 or 20 salespeople all doing their own thing, forcing every new sales hire to reinvent how to sell.
If new salespeople are successful and making quota, you know your repeatable sales motion and playbook are working. If they aren’t, then you need to return to refining your playbook before hiring more salespeople. I can’t stress this enough: If your salespeople aren’t consistently making quota using your expanded playbook, you have more work to do, and you’re not ready to go for growth and add additionaland expensivesalespeople to your payroll.
Step on the gas
Only once you’ve proven you can bring new salespeople on board, teach them the playbook, and have them reliably hit quota should you begin scaling and hire more than eight to 10 salespeople. The scaling phase is the time to step on the gas and accelerate growth. If revenue grows as expected, the sales organization could be 50 or 100 people strong within a couple of years.
Upgrade your executive team
As the demands on you and the business increase, not everyone will successfully scale in their role. An $80 million company must be run differently from a $20 million company. The team you need now might be very different from the one you had in the early days.
This is often a moment when you have no choice but to significantly upgrade your go-to-market leadership, which can be a brutal process. Not only do you have to recruit senior talent that complements the leaders and team you already haveincluding your initial trailblazer hires, who are often more junior than what you’ll need at this stageyou might even have to make tough decisions to let go of people who have been with you since the earliest days.
If your VP of sales is barely holding it together with a team of 10, imagine them with a team of 50 or 100. If that thought makes you nervous, you’ll know you have to bring in a chief revenue officer (CRO) above them sooner rather than later, or maybe even replace them.
Layer in a sales management team
You’ll also layer in a sales management team reporting to the VP of sales or CRO, who will run and scale increasingly specialized sales teams. You’ll need two types of leaders as you grow: Those who report directly to you, and those who report to your executive team, sometimes called the middle management layer.
As you accelerate, you’ll hire one manager for roughly every eight salespeople. The sales team managers you hire will now take over the day-to-day operations, performance, and culture of their teams.
Form specialized sales teams
Once you grow past 10 or 15 salespeople, you’ll likely find it necessary to specialize your sales team. Until now, you might have loosely segmented salespeople by use case, customer size, or geography. If so, now is the time to formalize this specialization to make the team more efficient. For example, you might have a small and medium business (SMB) team, a midmarket team, and an inside enterprise team.
Hire or promote high-performing sales leaders for each of these teams with experience in that specialization. With these hires also comes an important change to your pipeline cadence. Each team will conduct their own pipeline meeting, run by the specialized team leader. The VP of sales will then conduct pipeline meetings with only these team leads, who will be their direct reports.
Give sales more space, but stay on top of your metrics
One of the challenges you’ll face as the company grows is to give direct reports like the VP of sales more room to maneuver without your becoming disengaged from the function. When scaling up, you’ll want to give your now-proven VP of sales the space to lead their organization and keep their teams motivated. But at the same time, you want to keep an eye on team performance. You should never be surprised if your sales leader suddenly doesn’t make their number, or learn about the sales team’s struggles only close to quarter end when it’s too late to take action.
I have talked about how you need to replicate yourself and teach new salespeople to use the key phrases and tactics that have worked for you. That replication will be harder to achieve with such a big team, and new salespeople probably won’t mimic you as easily and as much as the early team did. That is just part of growing a business.
Even if your company is tiny, you need to be preparing for a time when it won’t be. The best way to do that is to move at the right time beyond the intuition and improvisation of the early days toward analysis, intentionality, and a structured and systematic approach to building out your go-to-market. Now go off and build. Your company, and your team, need you.
Adapted from Built to Grow: A Handbook for High-Performance Sales Teams by Stephanie Friedman, published on October 13, 2026 by Stripe Press.
Apple thinks you might want a screen in your kitchen or bedroom. Its nearly a decade late to the party, with its $299 HomeView, announced on October 13, arriving nine years after Amazon unveiled the Echo Show, and eight after Google came out with its own Home Hub.
But that tardiness doesnt matter for the Cupertino tech giant, which has made its name by arriving with technology others have already developed, then doing it betterand making it a more enviable object to own. Its a playbook Apple has honed, one that bets big on its design chops to differentiate its products from whats already on the market. And once again, it might prove successful with the HomeView.
When Apple released the iPod, it was far from the first MP3 player on the market. When the iPhone debuted in 2007, it was just one of many smartphones available to buy. What both did, though, was redefine the market by offering something distinctly Apple: beautiful engineering and clever design that made them, rather than their competitors, synonymous with their respective categories. The same is arguably true of the Apple Watch and AirPods, both of which hold outsized positions in their markets.
[Photo: Apple]
On the face of it, HomeView follows the same formula. Its seven-inch screen sits on a tilting aluminum stand and adjusts its display depending on how close a user is. Using facial recognition, it can present tailored information to up to six household members. Thats not unique: Google’s Nest Hub Max has long offered facial recognition to personalize calendars and other information, while Amazon’s Echo Show can recognize individual users and adjust what’s displayed depending on how far away they are. But everything from the color-matched cables to the pared-back design is the sort of thing that leaves Apple fans in raptures.
Elsewhere, the HomeView isnt great shakes. Amazon’s Echo Show can use its built-in camera for remote home monitoring, letting you check on your house while you’re away, a feature HomeView doesnt offer. The same is true in the bedroom: Google’s second-generation Nest Hub can use radar to monitor your sleep without needing a wearable device, something Apple doesn’t offer. The price tag is also higher than those of similarly equipped products already on the market.
And yet HomeView could sell in droves, even if analysts forecast a broader dip in smart display shipments this year. Thats because Apple has made it its business not to be first in the race, but to understand what we want to buy and offer the idealized version of it.
Theres a new kind of AI in town, and its all about you. Which is to say you, personallythese are the new personal AI assistants that go by names like Muse, Dots, and Grok Bot, and theyre ready to dismantle much of the friction in your life. Need to research a trip, book a restaurant, or choose between healthcare plans? With the right context, they can handle it all for you, complete with a smile on their mascot-like avatars.
But just how does one of these assistants recommend what to buy? To find out, I asked my Muse, who I named Jones, which robot vacuum to buy. (Muse is made by Meta, which debuted it on Sept. 8) Jones responded with a surprisingly small number of recommendationsjust a couple of modelswith links to go make the purchase. Each of those links provided options to go to a retailer website or buy the vacuum right there in the app.
When I pressed Jones on why it had chosen those particular models, and whether it had looked at review sites specifically, it fessed up that it had looked at both retail sites and review roundups. On the latter, it leaned heavily on a site called Vacuum Wars, which does extensive hands-on testing of this category, and Jones seemed to understand that made it more authoritative. Of the other review sites it cited, one was a thin repackaging of Vacuum Wars data, and another was an AI-generated roundup on an aromatherapy blog. Vacuum Wars, I should point out, makes most of its money from the affiliate revenue it gets when its readers transact.
{"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/media-copilot.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/fe289316-bc4f-44ef-96bf-148b3d8578c1_1440x1440.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to The Media Copilot\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for The Media Copilot. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/\u0022\u003Emediacopilot.substack.com\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91453847,"imageMobileId":91453848,"shareable":false,"slug":"","wpCssClasses":""}}
At this point I should caveat that my example is one test done in one AI app. These personal assistants are brand new, and the AI information economy is still developing. Nothing definitive should be gleaned from this experience. Nonetheless, I think what I discovered is instructive since it shows the vast distance between how product recommendations work in AI vs. the open web, and what that gap means for publishers whose business depends on them.
I think this is worth talking about, now, because I wholeheartedly believe these new appsor some version of themwill be a success. The idea of the single, all-knowing AI with a simple talk to me interface has been the dream since at least the original Star Trek, where the Enterprise computer would somehow magically always know the right context to give the best and most precise answer. The AI platforms have been heading this way, with Anthropic discarding the Chat/Cowork toggle, and OpenAIs move to sunset custom GPTs being the latest indicators. Everything is pointed toward a singular AI experience.
Who got left out of the answer
Back to buying my robot vacuum: Muse looking to Vacuum Wars as the most definitive review site is probably appropriate, but it also wasnt a fair fight. Absent from its considerations were Wirecutter, PCMag, and Consumer Reports, all major review sites that have published roundups of robot vacuums. There are plausible reasons for this: Wirecutter is a New York Times property, PCMag is owned by Ziff Davis, and both are hostile to AI companies substituting their content with AI answers. The Times blocks AI crawlers across the board, and Ziff Davis is suing OpenAI. Consumer Reports is likewise defensive about its content, keeping its full ratings behind a membership. But thats my inference. Jones never said it was blocked from anything.
I should pause for another caveat: What Jones told me it did and what it actually did arent necessarily the same thing. Its possible other sites were in the mix and it never told me, or there may be guardrails in place that its not even aware of. So grains of generative salt all around.
Potentially even more revealing were the retail sites that Jones directed me to: Best Buy, Target, and manufacturer retail sites like Dreame. Not present at all: Amazon. Thats because, shortly after Muse made its debut, Amazon blocked the service from transacting on its site. I should note here that Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at Meta Connect on Sept. 23, said transactions in Muse would be a source of revenue, meaning Meta would take a cut of any purchases in the app.
After checking out multiple links that Jones showed me, I saw no tracking specific to the app, though one did carry the manufacturers own Facebook campaign tag. Those were links out to retailer sites, and any fee would presumably be collected o purchases made inside the app, out of view. Either theyre tracking purchases in some invisible way, or Metas not getting paid yet.
Someone else not getting paid: Vacuum Wars. As I mentioned, transactional links are how the site makes money, and almost all of them link to Amazon, which, again, is a non-presence in Muse. To recap, Vacuum Wars funds its research via Amazon links, Muse takes that research to make recommendations, and then points users to other retailers. Vacuum Wars says affiliate links are its primary source of income, and that it takes no sponsorships or free products from manufacturers.
Its worse than we thought
All this adds up to an even murkier future for sites that make their dollar on product recommendations. If these personal assistants take offand I believe they willthe product advice they give will depend on a host of factors, and potentially be balkanized to the point where the path from a published review to an AI recommendation will be more like a labyrinth than a straight line.
Assistants will only direct users to retailers they have access to. For Muse, thats Shopify, Walmart, and Best Buy, but no Amazon. Amazon blocks nearly every outside assistant, not just Muse, while running its own. Amazons Alexa for Shopping carries sponsored prompts in its answers, and its Buy for Me feature checks out on other brands sites. OpenAI pulled ChatGPTs built-in checkout in March and now hands shoppers off to merchants own sites and apps. If a review site hopes to get a commission, it would theoretically need a deal for every assistant-and-store pair. The open web needed one link.
The product that your assistant recommends might end up bending to that access. In my case, the products that Jones pointed me towards actually ended up being different from the ones on Vacuum Wars definitive list, recommending the Dreame L40 Ultra Gen 2 instead of the Dreame L60 Ultra PE, the model its own summary of the reviews had singled out. Its unclear why it did that, but everything it recommended had an active checkout page. Its fair to say the assistant can only recommend what it can sell, so theres a path for commercial considerations to get in without anyone buying an ad.
With Amazon drawing battle lines, review publishers will have some hard choices to make as these assistants become more popular. Blocking wont help, as the repackaged Vacuum Wars content reveals: you might block, but reviewclonecashgrab.slop certainly wont. Your well-researched content could end up driving sales at other retailers. On top of that, Amazon has cut commissions by as much as 50% for some publishers. Amazon is still most peoples first stop to buy online, but its defensive move against Muse shows its feeling vulnerable. That leaves reviewers two imperfect options: strike affiliate deals with the stores assistants can reach, or stop chasing the commission and sell the test data itself to the AI companies.
The rules are still being written
Remember: This is one category, and one assistant. And while its still early days for AI, its basically day one for these new personal everything buddies. Standards for transacting and commissions from AI-based transactions are still emerging, and the Universal Commerce Protocol (Amazon joined its governing body in April) may eventually produce a framework that takes into account all the players, including publishers.
But make no mistake: theres still a lot to hammer out. As AI assistants take on a more central role in our lives, theyll begin to abstract away the customer journeycomparing different products or services, filtering them by whats important to you, and getting the best price. Theres money to be made at every stage, and the irony of the AI era is that were starting from a point where the parties tasked with doing the unbiased and thorough research are the ones who are the most shut out.
{"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/media-copilot.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/fe289316-bc4f-44ef-96bf-148b3d8578c1_1440x1440.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to The Media Copilot\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for The Media Copilot. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/\u0022\u003Emediacopilot.substack.com\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91453847,"imageMobileId":91453848,"shareable":false,"slug":"","wpCssClasses":""}}
Getty Images is filing for bankruptcy and plans to go private, the company announced on Monday.A release says that the company plans to begin the process of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the weeks ahead and undergo massive restructuring, which will ultimately see complete control and ownership of the company in the hands of the Getty family, as well as Koch Equity Development.
As a part of the restructuring, Koch Equity Development (which is the investment arm of Koch, Inc.) will invest up to $533 million, and as the process progresses, the company will continue to operate in the normal course, and vendors will be unaffected and paid in full in the ordinary course of business, according to the companys release.
Getty is perhaps best known as a source of photographs and stock images used for a variety of purposes, and has faced significant headwinds with the advent of AI-generated imagery in recent years. Notably, in a recent investor presentation, company materials noted that there was declining agency demand and disruption to the iStock eCommerce business. It had also announced plans to merge with Shutterstock in Januarya plan that has since been scrapped.
Even so, company leadership says that it’s confident that going private and restructuring will help it regain its footing.
Mark Getty, Getty Images co-founder and chairman of the board, said in the company release that he was pleased to continue our strong partnership with Koch Equity Development and the lender groups to provide capital structure improvements that will enable us to build on our solid foundation and seize new growth opportunities.
Additionally, Mike Harris, senior managing director and co-head at Koch Equity Development, said that the group remains confident in the companys future and fully support this transaction alongside the Getty family. This equity investment will provide Getty Images with a firm financial foundation and greater flexibility to continue investing in its employees, customers, contributors, and future growth.
Kroger Co. plans to cut more than a third of its corporate workforce in the next three years under new CEO Greg Foran, according to an internal memo obtained by Fast Company. Foran joined the grocery giant in February to succeed interim CEO Ron Sargent.
The Cincinnati companys corporate workforce is around 8,200 people, which means nearly 3,000 roles will be cut. The layoffs will only impact corporate roles, not store or distribution jobs.
Simplifying means making faster decisions and deploying more resources where they matter most, Foran wrote in the memo. Our company has more lawyers, more handoffs and more overhead than we need.
“We have the opportunity to make changes that will create broader roles and faster decision making,” Foran wrote. “This lets us move vital resources closer to the customer to lower prices, invest in our associates and create a better shopping experience.”
Foran also said in the memo that the company must adapt and take advantage of technology.
Grocery costs have soared
While the memo does not specify artificial intelligence as the technology, Kroger published an AI strategy plan in September, saying it will start using AI models to manage workflows and customer data, and kick off an AI literacy training program for employees.
Foran has pushed to implement price cuts across Kroger products as the company, which also operates the Fred Meyer and Ralphs grocery store chains, has been trying to compete with Walmart and Costco prices.
Not the first mass layoffs at Kroger
Last year, Kroger announced it was cutting nearly 1,000 jobs from its corporate workforce, Fast Company previously reported.
Interim CEO Ron Sargent said that the savings would be reinvested in the company to help open new locations, offer more store-level jobs, and contribute to product price reductions.
Kroger has not said whether the cuts are related to its legal dispute with Albertsons. It faces a claim of more than $9 billion from Albertsons over the collapse of its merger, which was blocked on antitrust grounds in December 2024, Bloomberg reported.
The grocery chain has also been shuttering locations since June 2025, after it announced a footprint optimization plan that would result in 60 stores being closed.
