Santa keeps delivering for quantum computing investors this year.
On Monday, shares of well-known quantum computing firms shot up by double digits, with D-Wave Quantum stock up almost 15% and Quantum Computing Inc. up 11%. Shares of IonQ Inc. and Rigetti Computing were likewise up roughly 10%.
The exact catalyst spurring those increases is unclear.
It may have initially been sparked in part by D-Waves Monday announcement that it would be attending the CES 2026 trade show next month.
The Palo Alto-based company plans to showcase its award-winning annealing quantum computing technology, hybrid quantum-classical solvers, and real-world customer use cases that are demonstrating measurable performance benefits, often beyond classical computing alone.
Quantum computing stocks have seen strong growth in 2025
Aside from that announcement, there may simply be ongoing excitement about the quantum space in general.
Publicly traded quantum computing firms have captivated investors over the past year or more, despite the speculative nature of the underlying technology that some say will transform the computer industry.
A June report published by McKinsey & Company dug into the appeal, saying that surging investment and faster-than-expected innovation could propel the quantum market to $100 billion in a decade.
It added that as quantum computing startups have received more funding from both public and private sources, the technology itself has started seeing more commercial deployment, and companies are also making progress in patenting the technology theyre developing.
Year-to-date growth for these stocks has been mostly impressive and in some cases eye-popping.
As of Tuesday morning, D-Wave shares are up 235% since January 1. IonQ shares are up 25%, and Rigetti shares are up 34%.
The outlier is Quantum Computing Inc., which has seen its stock price fall 35% year-to-date.
Will the end-of-year quantum rally last?
It’s unclear how long the holiday rally is going to last, but some profit-taking already seems to be underway.
As of early trading on Tuesday morning, D-Wave shares had fallen roughly 3%, while Rigetti was down around 1.58%. Shares in Quantum Computing Inc. IonQ were roughly flat.
We used to argue whether design was about aesthetics or about functionality. But in 2025, those conversations seemed downright quaint. Simpler debates for a simpler time.
Now were wondering if craft can survive the age of AI, and if well ever escape the politicization of every brand and object again.
For the December episode of our podcast By Design, I discussed these trends and more with Fast Company senior editor Liz Stinson.
We were joined by some of our brightest friends in the industry who shared their biggest own moments in design for the year, including Paola Antonelli (senior curator at MoMA), Cliff Kuang (FC Designs first editor and senior staff designer at Google), Forest Young (Global Design & AI Resident at Wolff Olins), and Elizabeth Goodspeed (editor-at-large at Its Nice That). Just try to guess who called out vibe coding, and who highlighted Sabrina Carpenters latest tour.
Tune in through Apple or Spotify, and please give us a few stars if you like it.
See you in 2026!
Across the country, a growing sentiment suggests the university degree is an artifact of a bygone era, a depreciating asset in an economy obsessed with speed. A recent Gallup poll confirms this shift, revealing that Americans confidence in the value of a college education has plummeted to a 15-year low.
Nowhere is this skepticism louder than in my own backyard. In Silicon Valley, the “skip college” mantra has evolved from a “hot take” to accepted wisdom. Fueled by the rise of generative AI, the logic is seductive: If artificial intelligence can code, write copy, and analyze data faster than a junior employee, why spend four years and a small fortune on skills a bot will master before you graduate?
It is a compelling argument. It is also fundamentally wrong.
As the CEO of an AI company, I witness the trajectory of automation daily. I see exactly what our models can do, and I recognize the massive disruption coming for knowledge work. Yet, my conclusion is the exact opposite of the current narrative.
As AI automates technical execution, the core purpose of the university sharpens. Far from making college obsolete, the AI revolution is making the benefits of higher education like wisdom, maturity, and the forging of mental models, the most critical economic differentiator a human can possess.
THE COMMODITY OF “HOW,” THE VALUE OF “WHY”
For the last two decades, higher education has been sold largely as vocational training. You go to school to learn a hard skill like computer science, accounting, or law, that you then trade for a salary. Under this transactional model, the skeptics are right. If college is just a place to download technical syntax into your brain, it is inefficient. AI is rapidly demonetizing the ability to simply do things.
However, the universitys true value was never entirely the how but it was always the why.
In an AI-native world, the technical barrier to entry is collapsing. Soon, natural language will be the only programming language required. When anyone can build an app, draft a legal brief, or design a product with a few prompts, execution becomes a commodity. The premium shifts to the ability to discern what to build, why it matters, and how it impacts the human ecosystem.
This requires a type of thinking that is rarely self-taught. It requires the kind of broad, interdisciplinary exposure that a university curriculum provides. We don’t need more people who can optimize a sorting algorithm; we need people who can debate the ethics of that algorithm, understand the sociological impact of its deployment, and navigate the geopolitical landscape it operates within.
COLLEGE AS SCAFFOLDING FOR THE MIND
Beyond the curriculum, the “skip college” contingent ignores the universitys profound developmental role. They view the four-year degree as a delay of adulthood. I view it as the necessary scaffolding for it.
The years between 18 and 22 are a neurological and psychological crucible. The brain is finalizing its development; identities are solidifying. The university environment provides a unique sandbox where young adults can collide with diverse philosophies, navigate complex social hierarchies, and fail in a relatively low-stakes environment.
When I hire for leadership roles, I rarely seek the fastest coder in the room. I seek resilience. I seek the ability to collaborate with dissenting voices and the maturity to navigate ambiguity. These are traits honed in lecture halls, seminar debates, and student organizations just as much as they are in internships.
THE SHELF-LIFE OF SKILLS VERSUS MINDSET
Critics often weigh the cost of tuition against the starting salary of a graduate’s first job. But in a world of accelerating technological velocity, the specific skills learned at 20 are often obsolete by 25. To skip college for a specific trade or tech stack is to bet one’s career on a snapshot in time.
A university education, particularly one grounded in the liberal arts and fundamental sciences, plays a longer game. It teaches you how to learn. It builds a mental operating system capable of updating itself.
Consider the “hallucination” problem in large language models. To effectively use these tools, a human must possess critical thinking skills robust enough to audit the machine. They need a foundational knowledge of history, logic, and science to discern when the AI is fabricating reality.
The worker who skips college risks becoming a passive consumer of AI output while the college graduate becomes its orchestrator. That is a difference in career trajectory that may not appear in year-one earnings, but compounds exponentially over a lifetime.
A CALL FOR A HUMAN RENAISSANCE
Silicon Valley loves efficiency. We love to optimize. And yes, the modern university is often inefficient, expensive, and bureaucratic. It is ripe for disruption and reform.
But lets not confuse the need for reform with the need for abolition. The “skip college” narrative is an oversimplification. It assumes that because machines are becoming more intelligent, humans can afford to be less educated.
The opposite is true. As we hand over more cognitive labor to AI, we free humans to operate at the peak of their intelligence. We are entering an era where philosophy, ethics, creative synthesis, and interpersonal leadership will be the most high-value skills in the global economy.
We should not encourage the next generation to skip the one institution dedicated to developing those traits. We should encourage them to go, but with a new purpose. Do not go to college just to get a job. Go to college to build the kind of complex, adaptable, and nuanced mind that no AI can replicate.
The future isn’t about competing with machines. It is about becoming more human. That is an education worth the investment.
Bhavin Shah is CEO and cofounder of Moveworks.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Novo Nordisk’s weight-loss pill on Monday, giving the Danish drugmaker a leg up in the race to market a potent oral medication for shedding pounds as it looks to regain lost ground from rival Eli Lilly.
The pill is 25 milligrams of semaglutide, the same active ingredient in injectable Wegovy and Ozempic, and will be sold under the brand name Wegovy. Novo already sells an oral semaglutide for type 2 diabetes, Rybelsus.
The approval could help spur a turnaround for Novo after a rocky year of sliding shares, profit warnings and slowing sales of its injectable Wegovy amid intense competition from Lilly and pressure from compounded versions.
U.S.-listed shares of Novo jumped 8% and Lilly fell 1% in extended trading after the approval announcement.
A 64-week, late-stage study showed participants who took 25 mg of oral semaglutide once daily lost an average of 16.6% of their body weight, compared with 2.7% for those on a placebo.
The pill was approved for chronic weight management in adults with obesity or overweight and at least one related health condition, broadening the potential patient pool at a time when insurers, employers and governments are wrestling with spiraling healthcare costs related to obesity.
It could help open the door to tens of millions of untapped patients in a global market, forecast to be worth some $150 billion a year by next decade.
“You’re going to see a huge uptake in the patient base as new indications open up and as oral versions hit the market,” said Anand Iyer, chief AI officer at telehealth firm Welldoc.
Novo is banking on the pill’s first-to-market advantage to revitalize sales in the U.S., where it has lost ground to Lilly. Lilly’s next-generation weight-loss pill orforglipron could be approved as soon as late March.
David Moore, Novo’s executive vice president of U.S. operations, said a daily pill could boost interest and uptake of the drug. Novo is manufacturing the pill in the United States in North Carolina and has been building up supplies of the pill “for some time” to ensure that it has “ample supply”, he said.
Some 40% of American adults are obese, U.S. government data shows, and around 12% say they currently take GLP-1 drugs, according to a poll published last month by health policy research organization KFF.
Novo had a first-to-market advantage with injectables, but initially struggled to meet explosive demand. Eventually, Lilly got ahead with its rival Zepbound, which now leads for weekly U.S. prescriptions.
Novo and analysts say a weight-loss pill would address injection hesitancy and expand access.
Analysts say pills could capture around a one-fifth share of the market by 2030, particularly among patients who prefer simpler and less invasive treatment options.
“The pills will not displace or replace the injections,” said Christopher Chrisman, a managing director and partner at consultancy BCG, adding some patients may prefer to continue with weekly injections.
“But pills offer clear advantages to some people. There’s travel convenience and no need for a fridge,” he added.
PRICING AGREEMENTS
Novo said the 1.5-milligram starting dose of the Wegovy pill will be available in early January.
Novo and Lilly had agreed to offer starter doses of their weightloss pills at $149 per month for the U.S. government Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs and to cash-paying customers via the White House’s direct-to-consumer TrumpRx site.
Novo recently cut the cash price for Wegovy to $349 a month, from $499. U.S. list prices are about $1,000 per month or more.
Novo CEO Mike Doustdar said in November that people using weight-loss drugs show more “consumer-like” behavior than its traditional diabetes patients, acknowledging that the company needs to adapt to this and bring in new expertise.
Whether another semaglutide product can solve Novo’s current ills remains to be seen.
Novo’s oral semaglutide needs to be taken in the morning on an empty stomach, 30 minutes before eating, drinking or using any other oral medication. Lilly’s pill does not have those restrictions.
(Reporting by Maggie Fick, Patrick Wingrove, Mariam Sunny, Christy Santhosh and Mrinalika Roy; Editing by Adam Jourdan, Bill Berkrot, Rosalba O’Brien and Jamie Freed)
Maggie Fick and Mariam Sunny, Reuters
Markets are flat early Tuesday in holiday-thinned trading before head of the release of new data on how the U.S. economy fared in the third quarter.Futures for the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq are all essentially unchanged before the opening bell.Shares of the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk jumped more than 7% overnight after U.S. regulators approved a pill version of the blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy, the first daily oral medication to treat obesity. Novo’s Wegovy is a GLP-1 drug that works like widely used injectables to mimic a natural hormone that controls appetite and feelings of fullness.Again touching new records, the price of gold rose 1.2% early Tuesday to $4,523.30 an ounce, adding to its consistent gains throughout the year. Silver rose 1.7%, to $69.71 an ounce.Oil prices edged higher early Tuesday after jumping more than 2% on Monday when the U.S. Coast Guard said it was pursuing another sanctioned oil tanker in the Caribbean.U.S. benchmark crude added 4 cents to $58.05 per barrel. The price of Brent crude, the international standard, gained 7 cents to $62.14 per barrel.Even after five straight days of gains, oil prices are down about 19% since the beginning of 2025 with demand lagging. U.S. factory conditions are weakening with activity readings hitting five-month lows, according to S&P Global.Markets in the U.S. will close early on Wednesday and remain closed on Thursday for the Christmas holiday. Yet several economic reports during the shortened week could shed more light on the condition and direction of the U.S. economy.The government on Tuesday releases the first of three estimates on gross domestic product, a reflection of how the broader U.S. economy fared in the third quarter. Also, the Conference Board will offer results from its December consumer confidence survey.Wednesday will bring a weekly update from the Labor Department on applications for jobless benefits, a proxy for U.S. layoffs.In Europe at midday Germany’s DAX edged 0.1% higher, while the CAC 40 in Paris slipped 0.2%. Britain’s FTSE 100 was unchanged.In Asian, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 was flat at 50,412,87 and the dollar fell against the Japanese yen after officials in Tokyo warned they would intervene if the yen weakened further.The dollar traded at 155.95 yen, down from 157.04 yen late Monday. Instead of gaining after the Bank of Japan raised its key policy rate on Friday, the yen had weakened, drawing the usual objections from the Finance Ministry to larger than usual currency fluctuations.“The hint of currency intervention proved to be such a serious threat that the yen, which had been significantly oversold after the Bank of Japan meeting, rose from the ashes,” Alex Kruptsikevich of FXPro said in a commentary.The euro climbed to $1.1797 from $1.1762.Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gave up early gains to fall 0.1% to 25,774.14. The Shanghai Composite index edged 0.1% higher, to 3,919.98.South Korea’s Kospi added 0.3% to 4,117.32. Shipbuilder Hanwha Ocean’s shares jumped 12.5% after President Donald Trump said it would help build a new class of U.S. battleship at the Hanwha Philly shipyard.The S&P/ASX 200 in Australia jumped 1.1% to 8,795.70.In Taiwan, the Taiex advanced 0.6%, while India’s Sensex was nearly unchanged.
Elaine Kurtenbach and Matt Ott, AP Business Writers
In the fall of 2024, six college students joined forces to start an AI company together. Five of them had met while studying computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The sixth, its CEO, was pursuing a degree in childhood and adolescent development at Sacramento State, with an eye on becoming a grade-school teacher. That wasnt the only thing that made him an outlier. He also happened to have been in the tech industry for well over 30 yearslonger than his fellow founders had been alive.
The Georgia Tech students are Ian Boraks, Jacob Justice, Drake Kelly, Ella McCheney, and Abhinav Vemulapalli, all of whom happen to be 21. The Sac State student/tech veteran is Bill Nguyen, whose past startups amount to a guided tour of Silicon Valley trends over the years, from push technology to unified messaging to digital music to social networking to telehealth. Their new company, Olive.isOlive for shortis developing technology to make AI better at grasping the full meaning of spoken communications, as conveyed by elements, such as inflection and dialect, that current models may gloss over. It plans to offer its tech as a service for enriching AI-powered applications in education and other areas.
Olives name references the companys ambitious hope of fostering better understandingan olive branch, if you willbetween humans and machines. Its still in the process of researching and developing its AI model, and has raised $5 million in seed funding from education-focused venture capital firm Owl Ventures and Georgia Tech. The unusual founding team was a selling point to Owl, which also backed one of Nguyens previous ventures, Hazel Health.
As students themselves, the Georgia Tech founders are deeply connected and have a lot of recency with the ideal cohort of potential users that are going to benefit from all this technology, says Owls Lyman Missimer. But Bill is giving this team the full kind of Silicon Valley hustle out in the middle of Atlanta.
More than words can say
When I first met Nguyen in 2006, he was already a Silicon Valley vet and burbling with enthusiasm for a company hed founded called Lala, which helped people trade CDs through the mail. (It later moved into music streaming and was acquired by Apple in 2009.) His knack for high-energy pitchmanship helped his next company, the location-based, photo-centric social network Color, raise $41 million from firms such as Sequoia. It was ultimately best known for crashing and burning, as detailed in a 2011 Fast Company feature by Danielle Sacks.
Today, Nguyen is as exuberant as ever when discussing Olives goals and origin story, and doesnt seem to have aged nearly 20 years since our earliest encounter. As he explains it, AI models for turning speech into text, such as OpenAIs Whisper, have gotten uncannily good at correctly transcribing the literal meaning of what they hear. Yet the words we choose hardly convey our intent all by themselves. Elements such as inflection matter, tooand are sometimes absolutely crucial to understanding what someone is trying to say.
There’s definitely a lot in human conversation that gets chopped off by LLMs, says Nguyen. For example, if you ask me a question and I go, Yeeeeeees?he infuses the word with uncertaintyit’s not really a Yes. But an automated speech recognition system will basically truncate all that nuance, get rid of it, and just put it as a Yes.
If existing LLMs struggle with some of the subtleties of how we talk to each other, its at least in part because theyve been trained on material thats publicly available in vast quantities, such as podcasts. Such recordings probably sound really, really clean and they’re great audio, says Nguyen. But that’s not how we actually converse.
Nguyens interest in this current limitation of AI is intertwined with his long-standing passion for education. Years before he went back to school to become a teacher himselfhes halfway to earning his degreehe cofounded a public charter school near Lake Tahoe. As a result, he learned that few doctors in the area accepted Medicaid, greatly limiting student access to healthcare. That helped catalyze Hazel Health, which provides telehealth services through K-12 schools. It now serves 5,000 of them in 19 states.
Bill Nguyen and Ella McChesney, two of Olives six cofounders. [Photo: Olive.is]
The Hazel experience left Nguyen attuned to the real-world challenges schools face as they adopt technology. He provides an example relating to speech recognition. In a school district, one of the things that they have to focus on is the ability to understand when to do an intervention for a student around reading, he says. In theory, AI might help by analyzing audio of them speaking. But only if it understands what theyre saying, regardless of whether a student has a Mexican-American vernacular, African-American English vernacular, or Hawaiian vernacular.
To complicate matters, Children are especially hard [for AI to understand], because they have very limited vocabulary, says cofounder McChesney. So in order to express themselves, they find more creative ways to use words. And so what we’ve seen is that that can mean that models misinterpret them more, which can have negative consequences, especially when teachers are trying to leverage these tools to help them bring better experiences to the classroom.
The glimmer of opportunity in the idea of training AI models using audio that reflects how real people talkespecially studentsled to Olives founding. How Nguyen, based in Tahoe, ended up collaborating with a bunch of young techies in Atlanta is a story in itself. At first, he noodled on the idea with Justice, who is his son as well as a fellow Olive founder. As they forged ahead, the project expanded to include more people from Justices social circle.
McChesney, whose credentials include high-school work at the Department of Defense and four years interning at Lockheed Martin, hadrecently returned from a study trip to Korea when she joined the effort, right as Nguyen was prepping to pitch the company to investors. I got a text while I was in Costco from Drake, and he’s like, Bill wants your résumé, send it in the next 10 minutes, she remembers. Which would’ve been great if I wasn’t in a Costco with my phone at 5% and no cell service, because Costco is a giant steel box. She Airdropped her CV to a friend, who sent it to Nguyen just in time.
Olives iPhone app, as seen in the process of analyzing audio. [Screenshot: Olive.is]
The Atlanta-based cofounders do much of their partnering with Nguyen over Discord, though they quickly ran into the limitations of typed messages as a form of collaboration. In their minds, that only underlined the richness of verbal communications and the importance of teaching AI to comprehend it.
We’d always end up doing late-night calls, because that was the easiest way to communicate amongst ourselves, and the easiest way to really get our ideas across and understand what people are saying, says McChesney. There’s no ambiguity, the way there is in a lot of these text messages, and we can iterate faster. That really inspired what we’re trying to do here.
Its all in the data
To overcome current AI models limitations when it comes to capturing how humans express themselves verbally, Olive had to start with better data. More specifically, it had to start with raw audio of people talking to each other in unscripted situations. Our whole idea was if we can get really clean data sets, if we don’t remove any of the information, if we train a model that actually retains all of this context, then we can solve these mission-critical cases, says Nguyen.
More specifically, it decided to start with audio recordings of students engaged in conversations with professionals such as teachers and therapistsrecorded, it stresses, with the participants permission and awareness that they could be used for training.
As the company was finding sources of such material, Nguyens background at Hazel Health came in handy. We worked with school districts, we worked with universities, he says. The data set is pretty extensive now. Its north of 40,000 hours.
The company also built an iPhone app of its own, which I tried in pre-release form. Taking advantage of the beefy AI capabilities of Apples newest smartphone chips, it builds an understanding of the users needs by applying Olives models to verbal input. All processing is done on the phone, and input isnt used for training purposes.
Olive doesnt see this app replacing other AI tools so much as enhancing them. For instance, you could talk into the Olive app at length about an app youd like to create, then have it turn your verbal meanderings into a product requirements document to feed into a vibe-coding platform. Youre using your voice to have a more engaging conversation and actually hash it out, says McChesney. That’s what makes this so cool.
However, Olive isnt building its business around this iPhone app. Nor does it intend to provide fully-baked applications based on its technology. Instead, it plans to offer its AI model as a cloud-based service. Other companies will be able to use it as a technological layer in their own creations, providing them with a deeper understanding of speech than theyd get by relying entirely on existing voice models.
Along with possible uses in educationranging from tutoring to helping scale up college counselingOlive is targeting hiring, healthcare, and finance as areas where it hopes to find customers. These are all high stakes, and theyre all regulated in terms of what you can do, says Nguyen.
Theyre also all places where the limitations of existing AI may introduce harm that Olive hopes to overcome through better, fairer comprehension of a wider range of communications styles. You want AI access to be more equitable, says McChesney. You want everyone to be able to leverage these tools, because these tools are inherently part of our workforce.
The companys home page is currently devoted to a sobering blog post, Covert Racism: The Voice Inside the Machine. Heavily footnoted, it cites research that shows how prejudices are baked into AI in ways that can be difficult to detect even if its creators are actively trying to combat bias.
The part of it that’s mind-blowing to me is people are not getting jobs, Nguyen says. People are getting declined on loans. People are having adverse health effects. And no one knows why.
Olives potential to steer AI in a better direction might be particularly relevant in education, where the technology is still in the process of finding applications and the company has a shot at being foundational. Every major new technological shift is developed, built, and scaled, and then 10 years later it finally finds its way into education, says Owl Ventures Missimer. When we saw what Bill and team were building, we knew that the edtech market couldn’t wait 10 years for this type of technology, especially in a time where voice is becoming such a larger part of the technological stack.
With that in mind, Owl is helping to introduce Olive to other companies in its portfolio of education startups. They include Amira Learning, a 2025 Fast Company Next Big Things in Tech honoree that offers a suite of AI and neuroscience-based reading aids.
Given that Olives strategy is to provide its AI model as an ingredient for other companies products, those kinds of relationships have everything to do with its long-term fate. For now, it remains tiny, though its already grown to nine people. Nguyen says hes reveling in the hands-on experience of running something so tiny.
At his previous, larger startups, I, as the founder, was pretty separated from the actual engineering process, says Nguyen, who is not an engineer by background. But now Im not. I’m in the code base. I check it every day. I know what’s happening with it.
Once again, he exudes enthusiasm. Once again, hes working on something that taps into the tech industrys current obsession. Nguyen, who dubbed himself the Don Quixote of startups in Sacks 2011 article, may not be destined to run Olive forever. (Did I mention his intention to become a grade-school teacher?) But if this startup takes flight, having helping his youthful cofounders get it off the ground will be a legacy in itself.
In December 2024, our survey with Harris Poll asked B2B marketers to share their top areas for investment in 2025. Artificial intelligence tools were at the top of the list. It also wasnt surprising to see the AI architects named Time magazines Person of the Year as the ripple effects of the technology continue across every sector. And in 2026, we will see B2B decision makers do something new: return to basics andembrace AI to reimagine whats possible.
This approach reveals a compelling duality in how marketers are planning for 2026. Theres a return to what weve always known while also betting big on AI as a force not only reshaping work, but rewriting todays B2B marketer and modern buyer playbook. According to our most recent Harris Poll survey, next year will bring a clear acknowledgement that while the fundamentals of marketing havent changed, the way we execute these absolutely will.
THE PENDULUM SWINGS BACK
For years, marketers have chased the next shiny object: new formats, new platforms, new channels. But the pendulum is swinging back. According to the survey, leaders say their biggest 2026 investments will focus on customer experience and brand buildingnot the newest social platform or the latest ad tech novelty.
Theres a collective realization happening. In an environment of AI-enabled disruption, the brands with the strongest emotional equity and deepest buyer trust will win. By doubling down on loyalty, automation, and reputation, organizations can differentiate and ensure that every marketing dollar contributes to sustainable, long-term growth. Loyalty isnt a metric anymore; its a moat.
But this return to what works doesnt necessarily mean a return to traditional tactics.
AI ISNT REPLACING STRATEGY
More than half of marketing decision-makers (55%) expect AI to reshape both the development and execution of marketing strategies. Thats not a subtle shift. It means strategy will move from something built in quarterly cycles to something that updates dynamically based on behaviors, signals, and real-time learning.
This shift requires marketers to embrace AI, not fear it. When positioned as a strategic input, AI enables strategy to evolve with the market and puts leaders in the strongest position to reach todays modern buyer at the right time and place.
AI becomes the connective tissue unifying audience data, creative insights, content intelligence, and activation. Audience understanding becomes dynamic as AI continuously interprets signals and behaviors to identify whos truly in-market. Content and messaging adapt in real time as AI learns what resonates across channels. Orchestration becomes predictive, determining where buyers are most likely to engage next and routing the right message to the right surface. Measurement shifts from backward-looking to forward-driving, surfacing early signals that guide creative, budget, and activation decisions.
The strategy itself becomes fluid, evolving, and continuously optimizing. Instead of asking, Is my strategy right? marketers will ask, Is my strategy learning fast enough?
ZERO-CLICK IS RESHAPING BRAND COMPETITION
Nearly half of marketing leaders (45%) believe AI-powered search and assistants will dramatically change how customers discover brands. That means marketers are beginning to understand a new reality: In 2026, competition happens before the click.
In a zero-click environment, the buyer journey is no longer linear. People are forming opinions inside AI Overviews, chat assistants, recommendation engines, and result pages that summarize expertise without ever sending traffic your way. The search click read evaluate journey marketers built their strategies around has been replaced by one where discovery and evaluation happen simultaneouslyoften without a website visit. Buyers may never land on your page, yet theyve already developed a perception of your credibility, authority, and relevance.
This shift demands a fundamentally different approach to visibility. Its no longer enough to create great content; brands must create signals. Reputation, authority, and consistency become the new KPIs, because AI systems rely on patterns across the broader ecosystem, not just what lives on your domain.
Zero-click environments reward brands that show up with clarity and coherence across every channel, not just the ones they own. The brands that win are the ones influencing the answer long before a user ever reaches a brand webpage.
This isnt a retreat from brand building; its an evolution of it.
AI DOESNT REPLACE THE BASICS, IT AMPLIFIES THEM
The survey findings tell a clear story: AI doesnt exempt marketers from doing the hard work of brand building; it makes that work even more essential. Rather than overshadowing fundamentals like loyalty, reputation, and customer experience, AI deepens their impact. It enables personalization at a level previously impossible and transforms audience understanding by replacing static personas with living intelligence.
With AI orchestrating channels dynamically instead of treating them as disconnected tactics, the longstanding divide between brand and performance marketing collapses. The two disciplines become interdependent, each strengthened by AIs ability to learn, predict, and adapt across the entire customer journey.
But recognizing AIs potential and operationalizing it are two very different things. The real competitive advantage in 2026 wont come from experimenting with a handful of tools; it will come from embedding AI across the full lifecycle, including strategy, creation, activation, measurement, and optimization. Marketers already feel this shift coming. AI is becoming the operating system of modern marketing, not an accessory.
The question for the year ahead isnt whether marketers will use AI; its whether they will scale it in a way that elevates the core principles that have always distinguished the strongest brands.
BACK TO BASICS, BUT SMARTER
The headline for 2026: AI is making the basics matter more. Marketers are rediscovering that trust, loyalty, and brand still determine winners, while embracing AI to execute those fundamentals with far greater intelligence, speed, and impact.
And next year, the brands that thrive will be the ones that combine timeless principles with transformative technologygoing back to basics, but this time with an engine powerful enough to take them further than ever before.
Great marketing and advertising have always been an art. AI doesnt diminish that; it simply elevates it.
Keith Turco is CEO of Madison Logic.
Say what you will about Crumbl Cookies. It’s always sure to get a reaction.
Earlier this month, when a sudden swirl of social media rumors began to suggest that the polarizing bakery chain was closing down, some of the online reactions were downright gleeful. “Too sweet and too expensive!” went one typical comment.
The chatter was so loud that Crumbl cofounder Sawyer Hemsley took to TikTok to dispel the rumor, explaining that the fast-growing chain is just moving offices as it prepares for its next wave of expansion.
But while reports of Crumbl’s demise may be premature, the chain has in fact closed a number of locations over the last few years following a period of accelerated growth. Here’s what to know:
Is Crumbl Cookies still growing?
According to Rhonda Bromley, Crumbl’s VP of public relations, Crumbl now has 1,103 locations in the United States and 25 in Canada, up from just 326 at the end of 2021. And the Utah-based chain will indeed continue to expand its footprint next year.
“We have no plans for growth to stop and will be opening many more stores in both the United States and Canada in 2026,” Bromley tells Fast Company.
Which Crumbl Cookies locations have closed?
At the end of 2021, Crumbl hadn’t closed any of its locations, which speaks to the rapid, social media-fueled growth that it had famously experienced in its early years.
But over the last few years, at least 19 locations have closed, according to a Fast Company review of media reports, online review platforms like Yelp, and Crumbl’s own store locator.
The shuttered stores, which were located across 10 states, are listed below. A Crumbl spokesperson confirmed the closures.
California
481 Madonna Rd Ste D San Luis Obispo, CA 93405
550 Woollomes Ave Ste 105 Delano, CA 93215
2750 41st Ave Ste E Soquel, CA 95073
12274 Palmdale Rd Ste 102 Victorville, CA 92392
8126 E Santa Ana Canyon Rd Ste 167 Anaheim, CA 92808
32545 Golden Lantern Ste C Dana Point, CA 92629
Connecticut
360 Connecticut Ave Unit 4 Norwalk, CT 06854
Colorado
1805 29th St Ste 1136 Boulder, CO 80301
3480 Wolverine Dr Ste G Montrose, CO 81401
Florida
1695 W Indiantown Rd Ste 22-23 Jupiter, FL 33458
Georgia
2615 Peachtree Pkwy Ste 210 Suwanee, GA 30024
Illinois
1441 N Wells St Chicago, IL 60610
1530 E Lake Cook Rd Wheeling, IL 60090
Ohio
3038 Westgate Mall #20 Fairview Park, OH 44126
34330 Aurora Rd Solon, OH 44139
Pennsylvania
3741 West Chester Pike Ste 103 Newtown Square, PA 19073
604 228th Ave NE Sammamish, WA 98074
Tennessee
8068 Hwy 100 Nashville, TN 37221
Utah
4211 Pony Express Parkway Suite 130, Eagle Mountain, UT 84005
It’s not unusual for restaurant chains to close locations even as they grow their overall footprint, as some stores will inevitably underperform or could succumb to other unfavorable location-specific factors.
A Crumbl spokesperson did not directly respond to the question of why these stores have closed.
Why did people think Crumbl was closing for good?
Some of the online rumors appear to have been spread by AI-powered social media accounts that post misinformation for engagement, as Reddit users pointed out in the Crumbl subreddit.
At the same time, a Bloomberg Businessweek story this month took a decidedly unflattering view of the brand and raised questions about its ability to sustain hypergrowth. The story may have added fuel to the rumors that Crumbl’s days are numbered.
Crumbl, which was founded in 2017, is known for its substantial social media presence. It has almost 11 million followers on TikTok alone, so it makes sense that rumors about the company would spread quickly across the internet.
Also, as stated earlier, controversy around Crumbl is not exactly new. It was more than a year ago that food blog Delish.com posed the question: “Has the Crumbl backlash begun?” We’ll let you decide the answer for yourself.
You quit the 9-to-5 to have more control over your time. You wanted flexibility, autonomy, and the freedom to structure your days around your life instead of someone else’s schedule.
Yet here you are, apologizing to a client for not responding to a message immediately. Feeling guilty on a Tuesday afternoon when youve only worked for four hours that day. Checking Slack at 9:00 PM because thats been your routine for most of your working career.
Many solopreneurs don’t realize they’ve inadvertently recreated corporate life until they’re already living it. You traded a demanding boss for a dozen demanding clients. You swapped mandatory meetings for back-to-back Zoom calls. That freedom you craved? Doesnt exist in your solopreneur world.
To find actual freedom as a solopreneur, you have to recognize that youre following a corporate playbookand make a conscious decision to change.
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Identify your corporate workday habits
Corporate habits are deeply ingrained. Weve worked that way for so long that they just feel like “how work is supposed to be done.”
For me, it was the instant email (or Slack) response. In my corporate job, quick replies signaled that I was on top of things, engaged, and reliable. When I started freelancing, I brought that habit with me. If a client sent me an email, Id reply immediatelyeven if I was in the middle of the grocery store.
Here’s something to try: What would happen if you took an entire day off, unplanned? Not a vacation day you scheduled weeks in advance, but a spontaneous decision to step away from your client work on a Wednesday. Does that break your clients’ expectations around your response time? Does the idea make you feel a bit squeamish?
Those feelings are your corporate habits talking. To embrace your freedom, you have to undo the rigid 9-5, always on mentality.
Structure your work for outcomes, not time spent
Corporate life is built around a 40-hour workweek. Even if you finish your work in less time, youre often expected to fill the bucket of the workweek with more work.
As a solopreneur, if you price your work by the hour, youre invariably still tied to the amount of time you workwhich has its limits. Youll have more freedom if you can earn the same amount (or more!) even if you work less. Clients pay you for your expertise and outcomes, not the number of hours you put in.
Over time, youll get more efficient, and each project will require fewer hours. Youll have a shorter workweek (if you choose), and can break free from a 9-5 schedule even more.
Build systems that protect your boundaries
Corporate life often has no boundaries. Someone else dictates your workload, schedules your meetings, and approves your PTO. Ill never forget the time a CEO texted me on a Saturday morning because he found a typo on a blog post and wanted me to fix it right that minute. No boundaries.
When you work for yourself, you might assume boundaries will naturally emerge. They won’t, unless you choose to define and enforce them.
The easiest way to do this is to build systems that make boundaries automatic. Turn off notifications. Set up email filters. Block off time for deep work and use a calendar scheduling app so clients cant meet with you during that time.
Boundaries are necessary if you dont want to feel like youre constantly working or letting other people control your schedule.
Don’t let yourself fall back into old habits
It’s easy to fall back into corporate habits because they feel familiar. It can be uncomfortable to shake things up at first.
You should regularly review your work habits to see if youre falling back into patterns that arent serving you or your business. You have to be intentional about the hours you work and how you interact with clients.
The way to build a sustainable solo business is to find a schedule that works for you. Maybe you still follow a mostly 9-5 schedule, even if youre more flexible with your days. Maybe you work best late at night or before the sun rises. Any of those decisions is fine, as long as youre in control of when and how work gets done.
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It’s easy, for me at least, to be cynical about the state of design. Our visual environment can feel bland, everything from brands to buildings homogenized around similar styles. The ever-impending AI takeover can make the future of this work uncertain. My reading around design this year tended to focus on two things: looking back and looking ahead.
In looking through design history, I was looking for glimpses of alternative ways of designing: the experimental, the absurd, the weird. And in looking forward, I was searching for hope in a dark time, for answers on how design, and the design industries, move beyond the stasis I feel like we’re in. The intersection of these interests is an attempt to understand what design is, what it has been, and what it could be next. The books that were my favorite this year are the books that show design as something fun, experimental, future-looking, and constantly in flux.
[Cover Image: Hachette]
The Invention of Design by Maggie Gram
Maggie Grams excellent new book, The Invention of Design, is one of those books I’m surprised didn’t already exist, and now I don’t know how I’ve lived without it for so long. This is not a history book of famous designers or trends or movements but rather an intellectual history of how the “idea” of design came to be what it is today. Charting the major conceptions of design from beauty to problem-solving, thinking to experience, Gram, a designer and historian, presents design as an inherently optimistic endeavor but one that often fails to live up to its promises.
[Cover Image: Inventory Press]
A *Co-*Program for Graphic Design by David Reinfurt
What does it mean to teach graphic design today? Or better yet: what does graphic design even mean today? The designer and educator David Reinfurt thinks through these questions in this casual and conversational book built around three courses he’s taught and developed at Princeton University over the last decade. Jumping back and forth through design history, moving across formats and mediums, and inviting a range of voices to participate in the conversation, Reinfurt shows that graphic design continues to be an expansive, ever-shifting space in which to think about ideas and how they move through the world giving us a flexible framework to think through teaching the next generation of designers.
[Cover Image: Chicago University Press]
The House of Dr. Koolhaas by Francoise Fromonot
Perhaps the strangest book I read this year, but also most delightful, François Fromonot’s The House of Dr. Koolhaas is the first book from Gumshoe, a new series from Park Books that approaches architecture criticism as if it were a detective novel. Written and packaged like the pulpy genrecomplete with over-the-top illustrated covers and cliff-hanging chaptersFromonot does a close reading of Rem Koolhaas’s Villa Dall’Ava, untangling its place both in Koolhaas’s work and in the larger architectural media context. Propulsive, insightful, expansive, and highly illustrative, I can’t wait to see what buildings the series tackles next.
[Cover Image: Park Books]
Buildings For People and Plants by WORKac
In this focused, highly visual monograph, the New York-based architecture office WORKac presents 10 built projects that together can be read as the thesis for the firm’s ideas. Founded in 2003 by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, WORKac has worked across scales and contexts and styles, but in this book, a coherent body of work emerges, showing how the studio has engaged with color and form, civic interests, and sustainability. Sparse on text and heavy on photographs (almost 200, total), Andraos and Wood make the case for an architecture that engages with the worldan architecture for people and plants, if you willand they show us how they’ve done just that.
[Cover Image: Macmillan]
Could Should Might Dont by Nick Foster
Nick Foster, futures designer, former design director of Google X, and self-described “reluctant futurist” writes in his great book that when we imagine the future, we often imagine images made by other people and those images have become strangely homogenized. Foster thinks that’s a problem. Through breezy chapters, he probes how we imagine the future, how it becomes reality, and most importantly, who has a stake in that future. In doing so, he makes the case for a more rigorous, thoughtful, and provocative way to think about the future and how we get there.
[Cover Image: Archigram]
Archigram: The Magazine
You can’t talk about avant-garde architecture without talking about Archigram, the British collective that drew upon their interests in everything from pop art to Buckminster Fuller. Over 15 years, the collective also published Archigram, a lo-fi, experimental, and freewheeling magazine to share their ideas. Long hard to find, this gorgeously packaged box set includes facsimiles of all 10 issues, including flyers, pockets, and pop-ups, alongside an excellent reader’s guide that features writing from Archigram founder Peter Cook, architecture writer Reyner Banham, and tributes from Kenneth Frampton, Norman Foster, and more. It might be a stretch to call this a “book” but it’s a worthy collectable for anyone interested in experimental architecture, design history, publishing, and zine culture.
[Cover Image: Macmillan]
Enshittification by Cory Doctorow
In 2023, the science fiction writer and pioneering blogger Cory Doctorow coined a term that seemed to perfectly describe the moment we seem to be stuck in: “enshittification.” Writing about online platforms, Doctorow described enshittification as the gradual worsening of so many services we’ve come to rely on. Two years later, he’s expanded that into a full book, looking at everything from Facebook to the iPhone App Store, to Twitter while also making the case that we, as users, can take back the internet we are losing. Though not explicitly a book about design, designers will certainly see themselves in these pages as Doctorow shows how the design of so many services have shifted from solving problems for users to padding the pockets of shareholders.
