Running a solo business can feel like operating without a map at times. Sometimes you can stumble along the path, figuring things out as you go. Other days, you look around and realize that youve wandered pretty far off course.
One of the hardest parts is not having anyone to rely on for guidance. Thats why community matters so much for solopreneurs. Rather than operating in a vacuum, you can bounce ideas off other people. Or you may find that community reduces your feelings of loneliness and isolation.
The sooner you find (or build!) a community, the easier it becomes to navigate the inevitable ups and downs of being a solopreneur.
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The connections that make solo work sustainable
Even though you dont have coworkers, you can still create a network that fills the same role: support, accountability, and a place to ask questions. For example:
One-on-one relationships
Fellow solopreneurs or business friends are incredibly important. These are the people who understand what your day actually looks like, because theirs looks similar. If you find a solopreneur with a similar business or in a similar niche, you can gain a lot. You can swap ideas, compare notes on pricing, or share resources. Or simply be a sounding board for each other when a client is being difficult.
The other day, I got a Slack DM from a fellow solopreneur who said, Can I run something by you real quick? And I was happy to answer. She would do the same for me.
If you dont know where to begin, start with platforms youre already using. Reach out to other solopreneurs and invite them to a virtual coffee chat. Be specific about why youre reaching out. Youd be surprised at how many solopreneurs are generous with their time and knowledge.
Structured communities (paid or free)
If you prefer something formal or with a larger group, consider joining a free or paid community for solopreneurs.
Paid memberships often come with perks, like workshops, expert Q&As, or networking sessions. If youre a new solopreneur, these communities can significantly shorten your learning curve, because youre surrounded by people whove been there, done that.
Free communitieslike Slack groups, LinkedIn groups, or Discord serverscan offer many of the same benefits. However, youll need to do a bit of quality control. Some spaces are overrun with self-promotion or spammy messages. Others are simply too quiet, for the group isnt big enough for conversations to happen organically.
Some solopreneurs hesitate to spend money on community, especially in the early days. Its an understandable concern. But the right community can save you hours of trial and error, or prevent you from making a costly business mistake.
Coworking (in person or virtual)
Maybe you dont need advice. You simply want to be around other people. What you miss most about corporate life is the time spent with coworkers.
Traditional coworking spaces give solopreneurs a way to work around other humans again. They can be especially helpful if you miss the rhythm of an office or struggle with motivation at home. Even being around strangers who are deeply focused on their laptops can be energizing. (Im a big fan of working in coffee shops.)
Virtual coworking offers a similar effect without the commute. Focus sessions and online coworking communities help solopreneurs stay accountable. Ive done virtual coworking with complete strangers, friends, and even people who arent solopreneurs but just want to get things done.
Of course, formal coworking usually has a monthly fee for either coworking spaces or virtual coworking. However, if youre more productive during coworking time, it might be worth the cost.
You dont have to navigate work alone
Theres no single right way to find community as a solopreneur. But one thing will always be true: The support you build now will grow alongside your business. Youll never regret the time you spend finding your people. Ive done all three things I suggest here: one-on-one relationships, structured communities, and coworking. The people Ive met are truly incredible.
The people you surround yourself withwhether through relationships or coworkingwill influence your business just as much as any tool or strategy you adopt. Theyre worth the investment.
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I am an introverted person who feels shy at events. Early in my career, I found conferences to be so overwhelming that I’d sometimes just hide in the bathroom, go into an anxious spiral of fear and guilt, and then try to convince myself to get out and talk to at least one person. Watching how other people seemed to enjoy these events and easily talk to everyone made me think something was wrong with me. The truth is that 36% of young people have anxiety. But knowing that didn’t make networking any easier.
However, networking is an important skill, and connections help drive your career and bring new opportunities. Research shows that people who network often tend to have higher compensation, get promoted more, and have greater career satisfaction.
As a business owner, I have to constantly build my network and go to various events. Over time, I’ve developed a set of mechanisms to help me be effective at attending such functionsand even enjoy them. After four years in New York, I’ve been to over a hundred events and landed several deals with many reputable partners and clients that resulted in significant revenues for my company.
Pre-event mindset
A long time ago, I used to pressure myself by thinking things like, I have to find a client … or … I have to land a partnership deal. This only made me more anxious. What helped is when I switched my goal to enjoying the event, meeting interesting people, learning new things, and making new friends. This made me more relaxed and, thus, more willing to be open and talk to people.
A study from Harvard Business School also found that those who relabeled their preperformance anxiety as excitement did better than those who tried to calm down.
Event prep
If Im attending a big conference, I research who is attending and set up meetings in advance. When I reach out to people, I always try to find an angle of how I can help a person, as opposed to just suggesting a meeting without an agenda. Since I run a PR firm, I usually check the latest news happening with the company, come up with ideas on how to amplify their brand, and suggest that we discuss it. Here is an example of the LinkedIn message that secured a meeting.
Hi [Name],
Nice to e-meet you! Love how [Company] is doing comms, and congrats on the recent news with [Recent news].
Will you be at [Conference]? Would love to chat and see if there is any way we can help expand the coverage (i.e., to additional local regions like LatAm). I have been in the space from 2013, ex-Cointelegraph CEO, and now have a comms agency. Always happy to connect with female leaders in the space.
Having a scheduled meeting is much less stressful than randomly wandering around the conference and approaching strangers. Several studies have found that having a structured plan before a social event helps to reduce anxiety and improve perceived social competence.
Know how to introduce yourself
Have a prepared intro tailored to the agenda of the event. Understand the attendee profile and think how you can help them. Focus on the result you can deliver rather than what you do. Instead of “I run a consulting firm that specializes in strategic advisory,” try “I help companies reduce customer churn by identifying early warning signs in their data.” The specificity gives people an immediate mental hook.
Career centers at MIT, Princeton, and similar institutions all recommend having a 30- to 60-second elevator pitch that highlights actions and results, not just job titles. Instead of saying you run a consultancy, you can say you help companies reduce churn by looking at early warning signs in their data. The more specific you can be, the better.
A side note on your facial expressions: Since Im from Eastern Europe, I tend to look very serious if Im not paying attention. That does not help when you want to connect with people. If you just start smiling, people smile back and start talking to you first.
Out-of-the-box conversations
At the events, 90% of people tend to ask similar questions that drive the same conversations over and over againwhich makes people tired and, ultimately, bored. Arrive prepared with a list of questions that will drive conversation in an unpredictable direction, making you stand out.
Instead of What do you do?, ask What was the most exciting thing that happened to you this week? Have some fun facts or stories to tell that would be relevant to the event. Another great way to be remembered is to let people know how they make you feel (I love your energy! or I love how open you are!).
Be present
This one might sound a bit esoteric, but its a game changer. When you are in your head too much, it builds a wall between you and other people. If you start internal dialogues with yourself too much, people will sense it. Neuroimaging work shows that when people feel actively listened to, it activates reward-related brain regions, resulting in more positive emotions toward the listener. Practice being focused on the person you are talking to, and you will have better outcomes.
Figure out what you can give people
Find out what the goals are of the people you talk to, and think about how you can help them. Give exact examples of ways you could work together or what kind of intros you could make for them. Networking is about giving. Based on Wharton Business School professor and author Adam Grants work on reciprocity styles, people who are natural givers help others without immediate expectation of having the favor returned, tend to build broader and more supportive networks, and, over time, often end up among the most successful in their fields.
Follow up and follow through
I am shocked by how rarely people follow up after an event unless they’re trying to make a straight sale. This habit definitely needs discipline, but it’s how you build a reputation as “the person who follows through.”
Take notes on the people you meet, what you talked about, and what they needed. That way, you can create better follow-ups after the event and increase the likelihood of a reply.
Follow up and, based on your notes, let the person know how you can help. If you suggested making an intro, make that intro.
All of this takes practice and positive reinforcement. Over time, you will learn that people love it when you apprach them and ask questions. They love talking about themselves. Even now, I sometimes fall into my old patterns and find myself hiding in the corners or wanting to leave early. Dont beat yourself up over that. Its a long, continuous journey, and the key is just to continue. Consistency is the key to success.
A headline catches your eye: A company you admire, known for its market performance and strong culture, is embroiled in a massive scandal. It causes reputational harm, profitability tanks, and customers notice. The details feel depressingly familiarenough to fill books (most recently The Dark Pattern).
With postmortems pointing to culture problems, your instinct might be to double-check your own organizations cultural health. So, you pull up last years employee engagement survey: 85% of employees feel comfortable raising concerns, and 90% believe leadership demonstrates ethical behavior. The numbers are reassuring. But the company youve read about probably had similar results.
The real question isnt whether your culture looks good on paper. Its whether youre reading the room, catching both the subtle tensions that statistics might miss and the signals for how to enable your people to succeed, which ultimately drives growth.
The annual engagement survey isnt enough
Most companies wouldnt run their operations based on annual customer feedback surveys alone. They track pipeline metrics, conversion rates, and customer interactions in real time, often with sophisticated analytics that account for regional and cultural differences in customer behavior.
Yet when it comes to their own people, many leaders still default to annual engagement surveys as their main culture check. A quick look at the culture assessment market shows that the flagship products are still benchmarked survey tools, underscoring this approach as the industry standard. These can be valuable as one source of cultural data, but they tend to capture abstract opinions rather than real workplace experiences and to provide insights months after cultural shifts have taken hold.
These surveys ask employees to rate their agreement with statements like I feel comfortable raising concerns. These approaches produce clean year-over-year statistics but suffer from predictable problems. Research shows that on surveys like these, people tend to give answers they think are expected rather than honest responses. Some employees may genuinely believe they would speak up in a hypothetical scenario and respond to the survey accordingly, but they actually stay silent when real situations come up. The result is bad data that leads to organizations believing they have healthy ethics and compliance cultures while missing signs of emerging problems.
This business-as-usual approach to assessing culture can be enormously costly: By some measures, toxic corporate culture was the single best predictor of attrition among for-profit companies during the Great Recession and, according to a pre-pandemic estimate, it cost U.S. employers nearly $50 billion annually due to attrition, stymied innovation, and impacts on employee health and well-being.
Learning to “read the air”
Better approaches combine multiple data sources and ask employees to share real workplace experiences, rather than focusing on abstract opinion gathering. Like “reading the room” in real conversations, effective culture monitoring requires picking up on subtle cues that reveal whats happening beneath the surfacethe tension when certain topics arise, the silence that follows questions about speaking up, the stories people tell when they feel at ease.
In Japanese workplace culture, the concept of reading the air (, or kuuki o yomu) embodies the nuanced ability to perceive and interpret unspoken social cues, group moods, and implicit expectations. This skill enables individuals to navigate complex interpersonal dynamics and maintain harmony, often without the need for explicit communication.
If you want to know what culture really feels like inside a company, you need stories. Thats why when a scandal breaks, journalists and investigators dont stop at financial findings or compliance reportsthey talk to people inside. Its an essential part of understanding what pressures employees were under, what signals they picked up on, and how decisions were actually made. The same principle applies to leaders trying to get ahead of cultural risk and contagion before it causes harm.
Interviews and focus groups give people space to describe actual workplace situations: the pressure they felt in a meeting, what happened when they raised a concern, how their manager responded. Those accounts bring out details that are flattened by standardized survey scores, like how people read signals, which trade-offs they face, and what they believe it takes to succeed. They also provide a space for employees to offer their own solutions or surface the informal approaches that are already being developed on the ground to tackle challenges.
This is the organizational equivalent of reading the air. Instead of observing body language cues in a conference room, leaders detect patterns across short narratives. Across several domains, qualitative methods are especially good at capturing this mix of context and action, which makes them valuable for understanding where risk lives in daily work.
This doesnt mean stories alone are enough. Anonymized administrative data from HR systems and helplines provide behavioral indicators that complement self-report feedback and produce a more rounded picture of the issues at hand. The goal is to develop organizational sensitivity to the imperceptible shifts that signal cultural problems before they become visible crises.
A field guide for “reading the room” of your companys culture
To make that kind of sensitivity practical, leaders need a way to structure what theyre listening for. One useful framework comes from cultural psychology, which breaks culture down into four interconnected elements: ideas, institutions, interactions, and individuals (the “Four Is”). These elements are present in every culture. What matters is whether they reinforce each other or send mixed signals.
Ideas: What really gets praised or promoted? Listen for whether shortcuts are framed as resourcefulness or as ethics that are slowing things down.
Institutions: How do targets, incentives, and policies shape behavior? Check if systems align with stated values, or if they create pressure to cut corners.
Interactions: In meetings or reviews, what actually happens when someone speaks up or challenges a decision? Watch who gets heard, who gets shut down.
Individuals: How do employees describe the choices theyve had to make under pressure? Look for stories that suggest they felt forced to choose between performance and principles.
Most compliance programs concentrate on two parts of this framework: making sure institutions are in placepolicies, trainings, reporting hotlinesand catching individual bad actors. Those pieces matter, but they nly cover a fraction of how culture operates. Assessments of toxic corporate cultures show that formal systems were often present.
What was missing was alignment with the other elements of corporate culture: leaders in practice rewarding results over the ethics they preach in town halls, daily interactions normalizing corner-cutting of carefully laid out procedures, and individuals feeling trapped in impossible trade-offs between organizational values and bonus incentives. This dissonance breeds toxicity and performance failures. The “Four Is” give leaders a way to avoid blind spots and to then design multiple small initiatives that foster alignment across every layer of the organizations culture.
Successful organizations recognize that culture isnt something you build once and maintain with annual training. Its a living system that requires the same continuous attention companies give to financial performance or operational efficiency. When early warning systems and thoughtful measurement align across the ideas, institutions, interactions, and individuals that make up an organization, something powerful happens: coherence.
Employees stop having to choose between doing the right thing and doing what gets rewarded. When leaders and organizations adopt tools to read the roomlistening for real experiences and collecting cues at all levels of the culture cycleethical decision-making becomes the natural way to succeed and grow the business, not an obstacle to overcome.
Dating in 2025 has been rough. According to articles, data, and personal narratives on social media, it seems that it’s never been more challenging to find a partner. But, according to a new report, when it comes to one qualification, daters may actually be lowering the bar.
Tawkify, a matchmaking service, surveyed 1,010 U.S. adults to find out how work-related trends are shaping modern dating. Turns out having a job is no longer a must-have for a growing number of romance seekers. These days, only 29% of daters say that unemployment is a red flag that would make them inclined to turn down a potential partner. Likewise, while living with one’s parents would’ve once been considered a major turnoff, nowadays, less than half of singles (42%) say it would be a deal-breaker.
The data seems to speak to just how financially tough times really are, which could lead to a small but important silver lining: a lot less judgment over potential partners not being gainfully employed. But the findings get even better for those who are unemployed but showing off their ambition in other ways. Nearly three in four employed people said they were open to dating someone who is unemployed as long as they have a “side hustle” or “a meaningful personal project.” And, well, who doesn’t?
Still, not having a job does change the way people date. Only one in three singles who is unemployed is actively looking for a partner after a job loss. A third say they’ve had to stop going on dates due to a job loss, and 25% say they’ve had to pivot to going on cheaper dates. Likewise, 65% say that not being able to afford dates, along with other pressing financial stressors, is the biggest challenge to dating after becoming unemployed. But losing a job is also a blow to dating confidence: 62% say they feel less desirable, and 52% experience anxiety about sharing that they are jobless on dates.
Interestingly, there’s a gender gap when it comes to how much having a job weighs on singles. Men largely feel that there is more of a stigma about being jobless: 68% of respondents say they feel there is a greater stigma about men who have been laid off than women, compared to only 5% who say the reverse is true. And the men may be spot on, as four times more men than women report being broken up with after a job loss.
Regardless, women feel more pressure to prove they are still ambitious. Overall, 36% of Americans say they feel pressure to prove they are still ambitious after becoming jobless, but women are more affected. Forty percent of women say they feel pressure to prove their worth, compared to only 29% of unemployed men who feel similarly.
Love may not pay the bills, but hey, at least paying the bills is no longer a requirement for finding love.
As the festive season gets into full swing, young corporate employees are taking to social media to flex their high-budget company holiday parties.
My company just brought in a whole glam squad to do our hair and makeup in the office before our holiday party, one TikTok creator posted. The video shows an office full of employees getting their hair curled and makeup touched up.
Sometimes I love corporate America, she wrote in the caption.
The comments were full of people desperate to know which company, and industry, she works in. My company has an $11 per person food budget, one wrote. This is pre-covid tech company energy and I love it for you, another added.
Another TikTok creator, who works in consulting, posted one clip last week that shows an elaborately decorated ballroom-style hall, avant-garde dancers, a sprawling bar, and decadent food served on silver platters. Corporate holiday party season, they wrote.
What a holiday party looks like at the largest hedge fund in the US, another wrote, over footage of a tightly packed room of people in suits dancing to a live saxophonist.
In spite of what you may see on social media, the share of companies hosting any kind of holiday party has been on the decline for years. In 2007, 90% of firms said they hosted one, according to data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global outplacement and consulting firm. By 2024, that number had dropped to just 64%.
Once upon a time, the holidays were an opportunity for the ultimate corporate flex. In 2000, Bloomberg reportedly spent 1m on a London Christmas party based on the seven deadly sins, which included 10 different bars.
In 2006, Google threw a Greek myththemed party at Pier 48 for a reported 10,000 guests, dubbed Googlympus. Setup for the bash took a reported five days. Nearly a decade on, Yahoo hosted a Great Gatsbythemed holiday party at the same location in 2015, which reportedly cost $7 million.
Now the days of lavish, multimillion-dollar blowouts are long gone, especially amid ongoing layoffs and economic precarity. But if the envious comment section on TikTok is anything to go off, the appetite for corporate shindigs is still there.
Nobody throws a holiday party like a big tech company, one TikTok creator posted earlier this month. The video walks through the evenings activities, including floral arranging and a mariachi band.
Young professionals are largely prooffice partiesthe party just has to be worth actually attending.
Ninety-five percent of workers ages 18 to 34 believe holiday soirees boost engagement, according to an Indeed study. A recent KPMG report found that most professionals, and especially Gen Z employees, believe companies should encourage holiday parties and happy hours to help facilitate work friendships. In the same report, one in four employees felt their company wasnt prioritizing those opportunities enough.
They may not be into forced fun. But actual fun? Workers are still down for that.
When Apple launched the App Store in 2008, it was impossibly influential to the future of the internet. The all-powerful world wide web was sliced and diced into bite-sized apps oft-dubbed Web 2.0. What followed was not just software that fit in your pocket. From TikTok to Uber, these camera-wielding, GPS-integrated, cloud-connected platforms changed the way we lived.
Now, in the wake of AI, the app store is arising anew. But instead of being built as tappable icons inside a mobile OS, they are plugging directly into the conversations of LLMs like Microsoft CoPilot and Anthropics Claude.
Today, OpenAIthe largest AI platform with 800 million weekly usersis opening ChatGPT for any developer to integrate their app right into the flow of conversation (pending review and approval). Following a pilot earlier this year, now any developer can plug in their own apps to be suggested contextually during any chat, or summoned by a user by @ing their specific name.
[Image: Adobe]
Early partners like Adobe will let you edit images right in the flow of conversation (complete with sliders to tweak them), while Target will pull up any manner of product to buy. No matter your feelings on AI, the tools seemed destined to change the way we think about apps and even multitasking, by shifting us from software based upon nouns (Canva, Figma) to verbs (build a slide deck).
Its not going to feel like you’re entering through a front door anymore. You’re kind of meeting these [users] at a very specific moment in time, says Bryant Jow, a designer at OpenAI overseeing app integration. I really think one of the most important things is that it should not feel like there’s a learning curve or that you have to re-anchor yourself. It should just kind of feel like immediately and instantly intuitive.
[Image: Canva]
Indeed, the promise from all the partner companies I spoke to is to fulfill what LLMs generally only tease. We brainstorm all sorts of ideas inside AI chats, but when its time to bring them to life, we can hit a wall. This is where integrated apps can show up, offering their finer tuned services. But the devil is in the details. And very few of the details have been fully worked out.
If you remember the first apps that people made on the App Store, like the beer drinking app [iBeer], they were like, whatever, right? A lot of people took a moment to figure out how do we behave in this ecosystem? What do we build? How do we provide utility? And how do we optimize for that? says Gui Seiz, who leads product design on the AI team at Figma. I think we’re still at that stage.
[Image: Figma]
What ChatGPT apps can actually do, and how they do it
To be entirely frank, the AI model providers are creating something of an ouroboros with connected apps. You talk to ChatGPT. It recommends you connect with an app. That app, however, is likely powered by AI models that could be from OpenAI. And so its part-OpenAI-powered agent, filled with specialized knowledge, then shows back up on OpenAIs platform ChatGPT. Its our agents-talking-to-agents future, happening now.
However, the secret sauce to these connections isnt merely your typical pile of APIs that have been used to connect apps for years. Its a rapidly growing new standard called MCP (Model Context Protocol). Originally developed by Anthropic in 2024, its now open source under Linux.
When a company runs an MCP server, its essentially opening a door to make everything it wants grockable by AIsharing data, tools, and memoryall in one consolidated, automated process. While model companies originally brute forced their way across the internet, smashing and grabbing the data sets needed to build their systems, MCP is the equivalent of a butler asking them to wipe their feet and welcoming the AI in.
For Target, MCP meant that its initial launch on ChatGPT happened fasta mere four weeks from when discussions with OpenAI kicked off and Target was selling on its platform.
[Image: Target]
But whats it like to shop Target on an LLM? At the moment, you can type @target, and ask to shop, in my case, lego deals for xmas. It generates a thumbnail grid of options, all with prices. Tap one, and youre ushered to a new page with more info, just like youre on its website. There, you can add it to your cart. Target, like all of the partners I spoke to, promised more features will arrive fastmore at the scale of weeks than months.
Canva and Figma have both offered tools to create slide decks, turning a brainstorm or pretty much anything you want to paste into ChatGPT into a presentation. Both services are dipping into their own templates to build visual assets previewed as thumbnails. From there, you can tap into any preview to see the whole slideshow. The catch is that, in either case, you cant really edit these slides further through conversationthe app integration kind of kicks you back to stock ChatGPT following the query. Instead, the preview, like Target, refers you back to their respective apps.
[Image: Figma]
Its why the most ambitious integration seems to be that of Adobe, which integrated tools from Adobe Express, Photoshop, and Acrobat. Adobe actually built out its own, lightweight front end experience into ChatGPT, so if you ask it to brighten a photo, a few sliders will appear on the screen that only control exposure and black and white levels. That way you can get the image xactly as bright as you like, rather then telling the AI, “a little brighter, wait, no, a little darker.”
This UI is intentionally granular, built to surface only what you need for a task and nothing more.
Thats what makes this incredibly exciting, argues Govind Balakrishan, SVP and GM on Adobe Express. You’re no longer dealing with the the entirety of the Photoshop interface. You’re just dealing with those sliders that give you what you’re trying to do.
Discovering new apps will be the new SEO
App discoverability could still use work, though. And this represents both a short term and long term challenge for the company.
In the short term, conversational discovery just stinks.
To be honest, summoning these apps can be frustrating and buggy. OpenAI needs to do some clean up work on their front end, too, adding the creature comforts we expect. For instance, when you @ any available app, it autofills that app like an Instagram handlebut only after you paired the app successfully once already. In the case of Adobe, this gets extra tricky, as you summon specific functions via their separate apps like @Photoshop and @AdobeAcrobat (and don’t ask to build a PDF in Photoshop). Thats unnecessarily messy and should be sorted by the LLM, not the user.
[Image: Adobe]
Meanwhile, you arent even supposed to be forced to call out apps all the time, as they are supposed to be suggested casually by the LLM in what the company calls indirect invocation. Im not seeing much, if any, of that working yet.
When Im too casual, saying Id like to shop at Target instead of @target find me X, it listed nearby Target stores and then offered me shopping advice. When I said I was hoping to work with the Target app on ChatGPT right now, it explained I could do that, along with everything I could do in Target. But it was always up to me to invoke the aforementioned secret code@Target in this caseto make my query.
Its an easy enough affordance people will learn thats no different than using X or Threads, but the whole point of a friendly conversational interface is that it isnt a speakeasy. I was continuously surprised by the lack of contextual understanding (and OpenAI says they are not currently live for all users).
But this feels rapidly fixable.
[Image: Canva]
The greater existential question for OpenAI is how and why it would recommend one app over another app that offers similar features with similar quality.
Make no mistake, each company wants to be the app thats summoned on command. I myself wondered why some companies would even bother to plug into ChatGPT. As soon as they hand over their capabilities to a generalized AI, arent they diluting their own value? Target makes money with every sale, sure, and Canva still carefully offers its free items for free and its paid items for subscription. But Adobe, for instance, is offering all of its ChatGPT tools for free rather than upselling you to a subscription.
At some level, we believe that the more users we haveleveraging the breadth and strength of our applications, the better off we will be over time, says Balakrishan. Monetization will sort of work in its way out.
For now, it helps that all of these media generation services link you back to their respective apps, with full interfaces, to finish work you may only start on ChatGPT. Indeed, Canva shared early data from running its own MCP servers to field Claude, CoPilot, and ChatGPT requests since July. Theyve served 2.6 million users whove created more than 11 million designs, and its been working as a tool to attract attention. Canva notes that referral traffic from LLMs is rising at a faster rate than any other source.
But bigger picture, everyone seems to agree that baking apps into LLMs should be about more than just porting an app to a chat interface. It should unlock new workflows, functions, and UIs we haven’t imagined yet.
There’s some stuff that, for whatever reason, the modality that Figma offers isnt ideal to do that specific thing, says Seiz. “I wonder what kind of new use cases or new things people are going to be trying to do.
[Image: Figma]
Finding AIs next big modality
For Target, which launched just in time for Black Friday, one of its biggest surprises was a new shopping behavior. People uploaded handwritten lists instead of typing things in. That was interesting, and Target doesnt know whats possible from that, yet, but its one of many data points that could inform their future thinking.
We wanted to be early and have a role in how that path evolves, says Purvi Shah, VP of UX Design, Research and Accessibility at Target.
[Image: Target]
The greater concern for companies I talked to was not if they would be commoditized by plugging into a vast AI platform, but how they would be discovered in all that noise. Its no secret that Adobe, Canva, and Figma are each competitors, much like Target and Walmart (which was als was early to integrate shopping with ChatGPT]. Suggesting any of them contextually, in conversation, means that OpenAI needs to make a decision of which competing service is right for any given moment. Naturally, they all want to own that moment.
When I ask OpenAI how they will manage this issue, Jow admits, its definitely one of the hardest challenges facing the team. When I ask if well see paid placement, like the search ads that have driven Googles business for years, he says, Well see.
In the meantime, app developers shared their own nervousness about how this will develop, and agree we are likely to see a era of AI platform optimizationmuch like sites classically optimized themselves to be discovered by Googlein order to rise to the top of ChatGPT and other LLMs. For now, all developers can do is serve quality and relevant responses to any prompt, according to Seiz, so that OpenAI is incentivized to keep recommending ones service.
It’s certainly inevitable that there will be multiple adjacent experiences that offer a really great tool for that use case, says Jow. And I do think that what we want to really ensure is that those options are displayed to the user in a very transparent way, so the user can decide which tool is best suited for them.
In a seismic shift for one of televisions marquee events, the Academy Awards will depart ABC and begin streaming on YouTube beginning in 2029, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Wednesday.
ABC will continue to broadcast the annual ceremony through 2028. That year will mark the 100th Oscars.
But starting in 2029, YouTube will retain global rights to streaming the Oscars through 2033. YouTube will effectively be the home to all things Oscars, including red-carpet coverage, the Governors Awards, and the Oscar nominations announcement.
We are thrilled to enter into a multifaceted global partnership with YouTube to be the future home of the Oscars and our year-round Academy programming, said academy chief executive Bill Kramer and academy president Lynette Howell Taylor. The Academy is an international organization, and this partnership will allow us to expand access to the work of the Academy to the largest worldwide audience possible which will be beneficial for our Academy members and the film community.
While major award shows have added streaming partnerships, the YouTube deal marks the first of the big four the Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, and Tonys to completely jettison broadcast television. It puts one of the most watched non-NFL broadcasts in the hands of Google. YouTube boasts some 2 billion viewers.
The Academy Awards will stream for free worldwide on YouTube, in addition to YouTube TV subscribers. It will be available with audio tracks in many languages, in addition to closed captioning.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
The Oscars are one of our essential cultural institutions, honoring excellence in storytelling and artistry, said Neal Mohan, chief executive of YouTube. Partnering with the academy to bring this celebration of art and entertainment to viewers all over the world will inspire a new generation of creativity and film lovers while staying true to the Oscars storied legacy.
The Walt Disney Co.-owned ABC has been the broadcast home to the Oscars for almost its entire history. NBC first televised the Oscars in 1953, but ABC picked up the rights in 1961. Aside from a period between 1971 and 1975, when NBC again aired the show, the Oscars have been on ABC.
ABC has been the proud home to The Oscars for more than half a century,” the network said in a statement. “We look forward to the next three telecasts, including the shows centennial celebration in 2028, and wish the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences continued success.
The 2025 Academy Awards were watched by 19.7 million viewers on ABC, a slight increase from the year before. That remains one of the biggest TV broadcasts of the year, though less than half of Oscar ratings at their peak. In 1999, more than 55 million watched James Cameron’s Titanic win best picture.
The film academy, in choosing YouTube over other options such as Netflix or NBC Universal/Peacock, selected a platform with a wide-ranging and massive audience but one without as much of an established production infrastructure.
Still, more people especially young people watch YouTube than any other streaming platform. According to Nielsen, YouTube accounted for 12.9% of all television and streaming content consumed in November. Netflix ranked second with an 8.3% market share.
Jake Coyle, AP film writer
Gen Z is never beating the unemployable allegations.
For Gen Z, a growing confidence crisis means common workplace interactions are now a major source of anxiety. Working with unfamiliar colleagues, making small talk, using the phone, and waking up early were among the biggest anxieties for young workers, according to new research from Trinity College London.
These fears have also been echoed online.
Can we talk about the fear of having to make a phone call in a dead silent office of cubicles, one TikTok creator recently posted.
When you finally finish sending that email thats been giving you anxiety and they respond with are you free for a quick call? another viral post reads. The trick is to send this email a few minutes before you go home and then you have valid excuse for “not seeing” the response, one commenter suggested.
In two national surveys of 1,538 people aged 16 to 29 across the U.K., 42% said they feel anxious about working with others, 38% find small talk anxiety-inducing, and 30% report phone anxiety. Notably, respondents were more worried about everyday office interactions than about their jobs becoming redundant because of AI.
Presenting work (25%) and accepting criticism (22%) were also major concerns. POV: youre presenting on a work call, but your anxiety thinks youre being hunted for sport, one TikTok creator summed it up.
More than half of respondents (59%) said they find it difficult collaborating with older colleagues. That may be tied to changing office culture and norms. Over half felt that traditional workplace banter can be inappropriate or offensive, while 42% said theyd had a negative interaction with a colleague or boss.
One TikTok creator claimed, Youve never really experienced jealousy until youve worked at a corporation where theres some old coworker who hates you for just being young, skinny and hot. A sentiment echoed by others online.
The poll also found 21% had or were dreading entering the workplace for the first time, while 33% of those already in employment said it was challenging. Starting out at work has never been an easy transition, but shifting workplace norms seem to be dialling up the anxiety for the youngest workers.
(And honestly, many of the things on the list stress out workers of all ages, too.)
So what can employers do to help mitigate the anxiety? Asked what they would change about the workplace, 32% said mental health days should be standard, while 28% would scrap the 9-to-5 in favor of flexible hours.
Early mornings and strict start times, many said, filled them with dread. Am I the only one who contemplates quitting their job when I keep having to wake up early and am really tired one TikTok post read. Or as one creator summed up the general mood: The concept of waking up early (which I hate) to go to work (which I hate) to be there ALL day (which I hate) to get off and go home (which I love) and to have to rinse & repeat literally everyday for the rest of ur life (which I hate).
Concerns about an AI bubble and increased competition are weighing on Nvidia as the stock fell to a three-month low on Wednesday.
Shares of the Santa Clara, California-based company tumbled more than 3% amid a broader decline for those chipmakers that are key to the artificial intelligence boom. Shares of Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom were also down 4% and 5%, respectively.
In recent weeks, a slew of companies have made moves that could chip away at Nvidias domination as the go-to maker of chips for the AI industry. One such company, MetaX Integrated Circuits of China, debuted an initial public offering on Wednesday and surged nearly 700%.
BEHIND NVIDIAS DECLINE
Once a darling among stock market investors, the hits keep coming for Nvidia lately. Some of its chips are effectively banned in China, while the company has also become a poster child for concerns of a bubble in the AI industry that some investors worry is reminiscent of the dot-com bubble about 25 years ago. In late October, Nvidia became the first stock to be valued at more than $5 trillion.
Even though enthusiasm has cooled since then, some investors still worry that the stock prices of AI-related companies are completely disconnected from reality. And the constant rumblings of skepticism don’t show any sign of letting up as Nvidia has become a popular target for short-sellers.
Some prominent investors who have successful track records of calling other market declines have become vocal critics of the AI boom. Michael Burry and Jim Chanos are both shorting Nvidia stock, meaning they will make money if the price goes down further.
ANALYSTS SIGNAL OPTIMISM
Even so, UBS strategists this week put out a report projecting that global capital expenditure on AI could surge nearly 35% next year to $571 billion. And the bank is projecting further gains through the end of the decade.
We do not see evidence of an investment bubble, Mark Haefele, chief investment officer at UBS Global Wealth Management, wrote in a research note Tuesday, as reported by Barron’s..
As AI adoption expands from consumer chatbots to broader enterprise and industry use cases, we estimate that the required compute capacity could be orders of magnitude greater than todays installed base, Haefele wrote.
What’s more, Bank of America analysts similarly say that the AI boom is still in its early days and has more runway for growth. Nvidia even tops the bank’s recommended list of AI stocks to buy in 2026, according to The Street.
But such positive reports did little to counter the negative sentiment surrounding Nvidia. The stock has tumbled more than 16% in the span of about two months.
In the months following 2023s Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors GuildAmerican Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strikes, film-industry workers adopted a refrain: Survive til 25 — a meager goal reflecting industry reality. The strikes came shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic ground production to a halt. The dream factory had become a nightmare.
The pandemic-inflicted production pause bled workers savings, forcing many to seek income outside the industry. Once work restarted, those who wanted to return to work — grips, camera operators, writers, directors, administrative staff, the Teamsters who ferry cast and crew to film sets — found some of those jobs never came back — the new normal of smaller, leaner Hollywood, had arrived. While union members voted almost unanimously in favor of the twin writers and actors strike, it dragged on, and the industry contraction continued. Two years after the end of those strikes, production is still down.
When news broke that Netflix sought to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery for $83 billion, a deal that includes its sprawling Burbank studio lots, and HBO Max (WBDs cable channels would be spun off into a separate entity), the industrys workers were quick to voice their opposition.
The worlds largest streaming company swallowing one of its biggest competitors is what antitrust laws were designed to prevent, the WGA-West and WGA-East said in a statement urging the deal be blocked. The outcome would eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers, raise prices for consumers, and reduce the volume and diversity of content for all viewers.
The DGA released a similar statement; Director James Cameron frankly warned that the buyout would be a disaster. SAG-AFTRA was slightly more measured. A deal that is in the interest of SAG-AFTRA members and all other workers in the entertainment industry must result in more creation and more production, not less, the union said in a statement.
Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos sees only upside, describing the merger as pro-consumer, pro-innovation, pro-worker as well as pro-creator and pro-growth. Prospects for the streaming giant appear rosy: On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that WBD is rejecting Paramount Skydances attempt at a hostile takeover, stemming in part from concerns over the deals financing. Netflixs bid, the board believes, still offers greater shareholder value. David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount-Skydance, has tried to assuage criticism of his proposed takeover by stating that a combined Paramount-WBD would have more than 30 theatrical releases per year, a slight increase over the current output of the two studios.
But skepticism among the industrys workers comes from precedent. When companies merge, it means job losses and fewer projects. IATSE, the union of below the line film workerscamera operators and technicians, makeup and costume artists, grips, electricians, and the likenoted the deleterious consequences that follow from such deals in a recent issue of its bulletin.
Unfortunately, when large entities merge, they dont continue producing the same amount of content as when they were two separate companies, the union wrote. (IATSE has not yet commented on the Netflix-WBD deal.)
Bleeding jobs
In April 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded a loss of 217,000 jobs in the motion-picture and sound-recording industry — its biggest single-month drop ever. Even as the pandemic receded, production didnt return. FilmLA, a nonprofit set up by the City and County of Los Angeles, found the LA metro area lost nearly 19.7 percent of its share of first-run scripted television projects between 2022 and 2023, one of the largest drops since the organization began tracking the data. The number translates to thousands of lost jobs.
In 2023, workers struck to secure more sustainable wages and benefits and protections against the threats posed by artificial intelligence. But strikes are an economic disruption (indeed, therein lies their power) and studios decision to downsize following the recent ones may prove permanent. A 2025 report from Otis College of Art and Design found that Californias film, television, and sound sector is roughly one-quarter smaller than in 2022. FilmLAs 2025 Q2 report logged 5,394 on-location shoot days, down 6.2 percent from the previous year and more than 30 percent below the five-year average. Productions continue chasing tax incentives abroad (you might be surprised how much unscripted television is shot in Ireland for this reason), further cratering domestic production.
By the end of 2024, the BLS recorded 100,000 jobs in the industry in the greater Los Angeles area, down from 142,000 two years earlier. When one considers freelancers and adjacent industriesthe citys service sector, for instance, is inextricably tied to cinemathe losses are even higher.
There is plenty of evidence to support that contention. When Disney merged with 21st Century Fox in 2021, 3,000 people lost their jobs amid downsizing, delayed or permanently shelved projects. Disney shuttered Blue Sky Studios (best known for the Ice Age franchise) the same year, eliminating 450 animation jobs. WBDs merger with Cartoon Network Studios eliminated axed departments. NBCUniversal, Lionsgate, and Netflix have all carried out company-wide layoffs in recent years.
Ellison, son of billionaire Larry Ellison, laid off 1,000 people at Paramount after purchasing the company earlier this year. The CEO has stated that he plans to reduce the workforce by a further 2,000 — numbers that are sure to weigh on WBD employees minds should Ellisons attempted hostile takeover of WBD succeed.
Uncertain future
The Netflix-WBD deal is expected to face regulatory scrutiny over its potential consequencs for consumers: Netflix is already the leading streaming-video-on-demand (SVOD) company, with 300 million subscribers; adding HBO Max to its base would make that 430 million. Antitrust regulations require investigation for any deal that would allow a single entity to control more than 30 percent of a market; this one would give Netflix a 43 percent share of the SVOD market.
But its not only the potential for subscription price hikes and the continued decimation of the moviegoing experience that are at issue. Worker opposition can also cause the Department of Justice to block the merger, as it did with Penguin Random Houses $2 billion bid to purchase Simon & Schuster. Authors, including Stephen King, testified that the merged super-publisher would mean lower advances for their books, with dire consequences.
A combined Netflix-WBD poses the same risks. A writer or director hoping to get a project greenlit by a studio will have one fewer potential buyer. The megacorporation may ultimately constitute a monopsony employer, able to dictate the standards of employment across the industry by dint of its size. The imperious studio executive declaring Youll never work in this town again! to an underling is a familiar trope in Hollywood; Netflix-WBD executives will hold such power. Fewer companies means fewer people deciding what art you can see, what options the viewer has. It means greater sidelining of visionary work, the type that executives dismiss as too weird, not marketable, or politically inconvenient.Its too soon to say how this will all shake out. Netflix and WBD believe it will take eighteen months to complete the deal and clear all regulatory hurdles. WBD’s rejection of Ellisons counter-bid may not put an end to hish campaign to turn the public and regulators against Netflixs purchase. Yet Ellisons proposed purchase of WBD has its own problems, from its conglomeration of financial backers whose ties to the Trump administration will alarm many in the industry, to its own possible antitrust obstacles.
For Sarandos, Ellison, and WBD CEO David Zaslav, making quality films that pay workers enough to keep them in the industry, is of course, not the goal. Maximizing shareholder value remains the priority. No matter what the executives say, neither potential merger is likely to be good for the worker. And so its up to them to look out for their own — and by extension, film itself. Even in the most unfavorable labor market, there is a power in such clarity of vision.
