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A decade ago, we argued about which app would win your attention. Now the fight is over who mediates it. AI assistants are becoming the front door to everything we do with computers: search, shopping, media, work. Whoever wins that interface will decide what you see first, which option you consider default, much of the narrative surrounding it, and how much of your life is routed through their business model. In that context, three strategies are colliding. Apple, following its instincts about privacy, is baking a privacy-forward layer called Apple Intelligence straight into the devices people already use, with on-device models and a new Private Cloud Compute for heavier requests. Amazon is pushing Alexa+, a paid, more agentic assistant that does real tasks end-to-end. And Meta is pitching a world of personal superintelligence, custom, high-context AIs tuned to you, not just to a platform. Each vision is coherent, each has a different set of incentives, and each points to a bifurcated future where a small group enjoys bespoke, high-performance own AIs while most people live inside a commercial, one-size-fits-most assistant. At WWDC25, Apple unveiled new Apple Intelligence features coming to iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. [Photo: Apple] Apples move is the most predictable and, in its way, the most radical: keep as much as possible on device, and when you must go to the cloud, do it inside a verifiable privacy envelope. Thats the promise behind Private Cloud Compute, which Apple describes as extending device-grade security into the data center; it underpins the new Siri and the system-wide writing, image, and notification tools announced at WWDC25. For developers, Apple also opened access to the on-device foundation model so apps can call into this layer without shipping your life to a third party. Its the Apple playbook applied to AI: integrate, de-risk, and turn trust into lock-in. Amazon is taking a different tack: make the assistant an agent that does multistep work, charge for it, and leverage the Prime bundle to drive adoption. Alexa+ is a re-architecture, not a skin: more natural language, third-party actions, and a subscription price of $19.99/month (free with Prime). Early access began in spring and rollouts are continuing to Echo devices with screens. The economics matter: paying for the assistant reframes it from a loss-leader to a product with its own P&L, and makes it easier to justify the heavy compute behind agentic tasks. [Photo: Amazon] Googles late push outlines whats at stake: Gemini for Home will start replacing Google Assistant on Nest speakers and displays, with free and paid tiers and a more conversational, context-aware experience. When the wake word changes less than the behavior, you know the platform is serious: this isnt a novelty feature, its a replacement strategy. Then theres Meta: Mark Zuckerberg has started using the phrase personal superintelligence, framing the goal less as an assistant that lives in an app and more as an AI that lives in your context, across devices, services, and knowledge. Its not hard to see the architecture: open-weights models (from Llama 3.1 onward) tuned with your corpus, running locally where possible and on rented compute when necessary. The spend signals the seriousnessand the desperation. Two Classes What does all of this mean for real people? In practice, two AI classes are forming: Class A is a minority with the time, money, or institutional support to build their own superpowered assistant: a personal knowledge base, continuous memory, custom tools, controlled privacy, and the ability to inject domain data (papers, contracts, code, archives) into every answer. The pieces already exist in the wild: open-weights models you can run yourself, Home Assistant integrations that give a local LLM real control over your environment, and maturing desktop stacks that make a DIY second brain less of a weekend hack and more of a workflow. Its still geeky, but much less exotic than a year ago. Class B is the majority, living with a default assistant from one of the big platformsbecause it ships with the phone, or its bundled with Prime, or it replaced the thing on your kitchen speaker. Those assistants will be competent, even delightful. But they will also be shaped by the platforms incentives: a shopping giant will optimize for commerce and partners; an ads company for discovery inside its ecosystem; a hardware company for brand and retention. Thats not a conspiracy; its the point of having an assistant at all. With ad-funded assistants from Meta or Google, the core incentive is still advertising: even as both companies insist they dont sell your data, the ad-tech plumbing runs on real-time bidding that broadcasts behavioral and device signals to a long tail of intermediaries during each auction, a practice regulators and researchers have criticized for pervasive data leakage. These assistants will keep turning your life into auctionable signals, and most people will accept the trade because convenience masks the true cost of lost privacy. The market sorting itself Notice the new paywalls around capability: Apple bakes intelligence into devices you already bought, Amazon sells a tier with heavier agentic skills, Google is teeing up free and paid versions of Gemini for Home. This is how the market sorts itself: casual users get a competent baseline, power users pay for more autonomy, and enterprises build their own stacks. In the middle, a long tail of enthusiasts is stitching together local models, personal data, and automations that feel like a bespoke service . . . because in a sense, it is. If the business model is ads, expect the assistant to optimize for monetizable moments, and for the data it gathers about you to keep feeding a market that regulators are still trying to corral, from cookie deprecation U-turns to ad-tech antitrust trials. As usual in ad-funded models, your attention (and the exhaust of your behavior) is the product on the shelf: They wont sell your data as a CSV, but theyll sell access to your profile, again and again, at auction speed. This split matters for power and for culture. If your assistant knows your files, your history, your tastes, and your constraints, it stops being a chat box and starts being a context engine. It will presort the world for you. That can be liberating: less friction, fewer tabs, more time. It can also be dangerously normative: a single vendors defaults become your defaults, not because you chose them, but because they came baked into the thing that listens when you talk. The more decisions we outsource to agents, the more we should care about whose agent it is. What to watch for What should we watch for next? Three simple questions cut through the marketing: Who pays? If you dont, youre the product. If you do, what does the meter measure: tokens, tasks, or time? Alexa+ makes that trade explicit, while Googles reversal on cookie deprecation shows how hard ad-funded ecosystems let go of the data firehose. Where does your context live? Apples pitch is verifiable privacy with PCC; Metas is open weights and portability; Googles is Gemini everywhere. The detailsnot the slogansdecide if your assistant remembers for you or about you. Can you take it with you? The early signs of a DIY tier, like Home Assistant, local LLMs, or second brain workflows, suggest a path where your assistant is an artifact you own, not a subscription you rent. Theres also the culture of default. Most people wont assemble a personal superintelligence: theyll use whatever came with the phone, the speaker, or the social app, and those assistants belong to companies whose revenues depend on profiling and targeting. Europes courts and regulators keep pushing back on that model, and in the U.S., the ad stack still sprays data through auctions at internet scale. The convenience is realso is the privacy bill. The majority will live inside assistants that treat privacy as collateral, not because theyre malicious, but because they underestimate what its worth. How to choose My bet: well end up with both worlds at once. A small but growing cohort will assemble their own personal superintelligence (RAG on steroids, tuned to their corpus and values), while most people will know no better than to blindly rely on the assistants that ship with their devices or their memberships. If you want the first path, start by owning your context: keep your notes, documents, and history in portable formats; experiment with local models; and avoid locking critical workflows into any one vendors UI. If you prefer the second (or you were not able to follow this article), at least be intentional about which platforms incentives youre adopting, because that assistant will optimize something. Make sure its optimizing for you.
Category:
E-Commerce
Fantasy football draft season is hereand its no longer a boys club. Of the 62.5 million people playing fantasy sports in the U.S. and Canada, 35% are women, according to the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Associations 2023 survey. The trend is only growing: Women 35 and older visiting the Yahoo Fantasy appthe top-rated app for fantasy footballgrew 61% year over year as of last month. For the uninitiated, fantasy football lets players draft their own teams of real NFL athletes. Those teams compete in a league that runs alongside the NFL season. When your quarterback throws a touchdown or your running back racks up yards, your fantasy score goes up too. Draft days usually happen in late August or early September, just before the new season kicks off. One all-female Yahoo Fantasy league, Tequila, Ta-Tas, and Tight Ends, held its draft at the Yahoo Fantasy Draft Weekend in Las Vegas August 22 to 24. The league was started by commissioner Samantha Metcalf, a lifelong Seattle Seahawks fan. “I avoided fantasy football for a while because I figured it would consume my life. And it has, but it’s been really fun, Metcalf tells Fast Company. I was able to find pretty easily 10 other women friends of mine that were enough into football that I figured they would have fun with it. Today, Metcalfs Seattle-based league includes 12 women spanning different generations and backgrounds. “Everybody’s busy and I feel like sometimes, especially women, are so busy running a household and trying to do everything else, they think Where am I going to squeeze this in? she says, noting, however, that once the league got going, the women were hooked. Theyre part of a broader movement of women getting into the game. A Yahoo Sports survey with DKC Analytics ahead of last season found that of the 22% of respondents who said theyd be playing fantasy football for the first time, half were women and nearly one in five were Gen Z. Yahoo Fantasy as a whole hit an all-time participation high in 2024, surpassing its previous peak in 2015. The Taylor Swift effect may have had something to do with it. One in 10 people surveyed said theyd paid more attention to fantasy football since the singer struck up a high-profile romance with Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs. When it comes to assembling a team, 37% rate drafting players who are dating my favorite celebrities or influencers as a good or excellent draft strategy. Still, most women join for the same reasons men do. It’s the fun camaraderie between people, Metcalf says. Then theres the friendly competition and the social aspect. Research backs that up. A study by the North American Society for Sports Management found that both men and women are motivated by enjoyment, engagement with the game, and social bonding. Where women differ is they are also motivated by the desire to compete in a male-dominated arena. Metcalf says: My husband actually asks me for advice on who he should draft and who he should play.
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E-Commerce
In a post-pandemic world defined by speed, digital overload, and constant disruption, a quiet crisis is threatening the foundation of our workforce: loneliness. Once dismissed as a personal issue, social disconnection is now a public health emergency and an escalating business risk. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthys 2023 advisory equated the health risks of loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. But beyond its devastating impact on health, disconnection is eroding culture, driving attrition, and stalling performance. For boards and executive teams, the question is not whether to act, but whether they can afford not to. The data is alarming. Social isolation increases the risk of heart disease by 29%, stroke by 32%, and dementia by 50%. In the workplace, loneliness fuels disengagement, absenteeism, and burnoutcosting employers an estimated $154 billion every year. And that number is only rising. At CHCs recent “Fostering Connection as Medicine” Innovation Roundtable, we hosted C-suite leaders and board directors from some of the worlds most influential companies to ask a critical question: What if connection was treated not as a perkbut as a board-level strategy essential to performance, culture, and risk mitigation? The answer is clear: When people are connected, businesses are stronger, more resilient, and more competitive. Supported companies perform better Employees who feel seen, supported, and part of a community are more engaged, more productive, and more loyal. Connection is not fluff; its fuel. It enables collaboration, accelerates innovation, and anchors organizational resilience. A 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that workplace loneliness significantly undermines engagement and job satisfaction. A Wharton study showed that disconnected employees receive lower performance ratings and are less emotionally committed to their work. The American Psychological Association reports that 95% of employees who feel psychologically safe also feel a strong sense of belonging which is a critical driver of retention and morale. Belonging is a leading indicator of business performance. And yet, too many workplaces are still designed for efficiency over empathy, for output over humanity. This is not accidental, its structural. And the solution must be structural too. The cost of inaction is not just cultural, its financial. Disconnected workplaces lose talent, suffer reputational damage, and struggle to adapt. For boards and leadership teams, the imperative is clear that we must build cultures of connection, or risk falling behind. 4 things you can do Heres how companies can act: 1. Design for intentional connection. Belonging is built in daily moments like spontaneous chats, shared lunch breaks, team rituals, and peer recognition, just to name a few. Especially in hybrid or remote environments, these micro-interactions must be planned and protected. 2. Embed psychological safety at all levels. Leaders who listen, affirm, and empower create trust. Trauma-informed leadership, inclusive decision making, and transparent communication are now baseline expectations, not luxuries. 3. Hardwire connection into organizational systems. From onboarding and benefits to space design and scheduling, every policy signals what the organization truly values. Is your system designed to support family caregivers (there are 63 million of them)? Neurodiverse talent? Cross-functional collaboration? If not, you’re leaving potential on the table. 4. Measure what matters. Belonging must be tracked like any critical KPI. Use pulse surveys, connection metrics, retention data, and feedback loops to continuously evaluate, adapt, and improve. What gets measured, gets managedand what gets ignored, gets lost. To what extent are you asking your employees if they feel seen, heard, and that they truly belong? What systems are in place to capture that dataand act on it? Board leaders must demand the same rigor around human-centered metrics as they do around financial ones. This is more than a wellness issue. Its about strategic leadership in a new era of work. In a time when isolation is rising and trust is declining, the organizations that lead with empathy and design for belonging will be the ones that thrive financially, reputationally, and culturally. When people feel like they belong, they dont just fill roles, they fuel missions. They show up fully. They drive innovation, loyalty, and impact. Human connection is the glue that holds society together. Let it also be the strategy that secures our companies futures. For board directors, CEOs, and executive leaders, the call to action is urgent and clear: Build belonging. Lead with intention. Measure what matters. Because the cost of disconnection is no longer invisible and the ROI of connection has never been greater. Jean Accius is president and CEO of CHC: Creating Healthier Communities. Alexander Cole is a pre-med student at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University and scholar-in-residence at CHC.
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E-Commerce
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has faced a lot of backlash recently. Once celebrated as a win-win solution that tackled systemic injustice and boosted business performance, DEI has become politicized and scrutinized within an inch of its life. As it was happening, those of us working to advance DEI didnt adjust as the ground shifted beneath our feet. DEI was recast as an anti-meritocratic overreach that prioritized identity over skills or qualifications. Whether or not it was true (it wasnt) didnt matter. The new narrative gained traction and dismantling DEI became a political talking point. Then it became policy. Ever since executive orders promised to revoke federal funding from organizations committed to DEI, there’s been a scramble to pivot, roll back, or rebrand DEI programs. My colleagues have been forced to figure out how they can still create space where diversity can flourish and avoid the ire of political actors with dubious motives. The replacement: Pluralism? In a recent The New Yorker piece titled “What Comes After D.E.I.?” writer Emma Green floated a new term as a possible successor: pluralism. Unlike DEI, it has no political baggage, and its academic name and origin give it an air of neutrality. But I believe that neutrality may be a massive problem. I knew pluralism well from my days in seminary. Pluralism is, in the words of Harvard University’s The Pluralism Project, “an ethic for living together in a diverse society: not mere tolerance or relativism, but the real encounter of commitments.” It promotes the enthusiastic embrace and discussion of all viewpoints. When viewpoints clash, pluralism says you should seek to understand opposing perspectives and ways they are valid for those who hold them. Maybe that’s why I bristled when someone first suggested pluralism as a suitable alternative to DEI in business. In academia, there’s an understanding that students are there to learn how to think, reason, and engage differences. Its a space tailor-made for the kind of thoughtful conversations pluralism promises. For pluralism to function there must be grace, and a classroom can offer that in spades. But business is different. Our hiring teams aren’t admissions departments; they’re hiring people for practical skills we expect them to already have. When someone falters in the workplace, a business’s prerogative isn’t to extend grace. It’s to fix the problem, move on, and minimize risk. Pluralism may offer compelling language for navigating systemic injustices, but real social change demands structural and cultural commitments that pluralism isnt designed to make. Pluralism assumes a lot that isn’t often true in business: that we enter dialogues on equal footings, that all perspectives are welcome, that harm can be explored intellectually, and that participants have significant self-awareness and emotional intelligence. But in a workplace, harm is realit is lived and carries consequences. Im curious if the sudden interest in pluralism isnt because its a logical next step from DEI, but because it seems easier. While it isn’t equitable, you can see how well-intentioned execs could sell it as such: “agree to disagree” as corporate policy. But that’s the problem. Pluralism isn’t designed to address inequity or redress harm. It’s a posture for conversation without accountability. It feels like we’re circling back to well-intentioned but misguided thinkinglike the “I don’t see color statements that sought to solve systemic injustices by ignoring they exist. A Band-Aid on an open wound. Create space for real conversations In 2020, many people were shocked to learn there was an infection under that Band-Aid. For some business leaders, the protests following George Floyd’s murder were the first time they felt just how much their colleagues of color were suffering under systemic inequity. For others, it was the first time they asked: What’s my responsibility? How can I be an ally? But people were looking for something they could do in that moment, and DEI was the obvious answerexcept creating a true culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion isn’t something that can happen overnight. It cant just be handed off to HR. When people raised issues some legitimate, others less so we shrugged them off. Without realizing it, we created new divisions that metastasized into today’s backlash. The problem was never DEI; it was how we as leaders chose to implement it. Simply swapping DEI for “pluralism” is punting the real issue. Replacing a word in corporate handbooks won’t build equity culture, and it won’t keep workplaces from falling apart when real conflict hits. As leaders, we’re ultimately on the hooknot for adopting new vocabulary, but for showing up every day with clarity, honesty, vulnerability, and intention. This is the only way to create workspaces where hard conversations aren’t just allowed; they’re expected. If pluralism has anything to offer the business world, it’s as a complement to DEI, not a replacement. Natasha Nuytten is CEO of CLARA.
Category:
E-Commerce
In todays professional landscape, we face a paradox. Even as businesses increasingly seek candidates who have mastered adaptive skills like navigating ambiguity, communicating effectively, and demonstrating resilience through setbacks, our classrooms remain largely fixated on teaching content knowledge that AI can now provide instantly. This skills and readiness disconnect isnt new. Consider that most corporate leadership development programs have emphasized many of these same adaptive skillsaka soft skillsfor decades. The difference is we can now see the disconnect more clearly, and the consequences of inaction are dramatic. AI has become an X-ray for our education system, revealing critical fractures that have long been masked by traditional assessment methods. When information is universally accessible, success increasingly depends on developing adaptive skills that our current educational approach has struggled to prioritize because theyre notoriously difficult to teach and measure at scale. With AIs proliferation, this disconnect will become a chasm if we dont address it now. 3 pillars for instructor-enterprise collaboration The why behind addressing this disconnect is straightforward. Classrooms are the source of workforce readiness. The how is more complex but represents an unprecedented opportunity for instructors and enterprises to develop solutions together and learn from each other. I see three key opportunities for collaboration. 1. Use AI-powered technology to measure vital adaptive skills. Enterprises have long recognized the value of adaptive skills, but theyve struggled to reliably evaluate them during hiring processes and performance evaluations. Similarly, educators understand the importance of these skills but lack scalable methods to teach and assess them. This shared challenge presents an opportunity for collaboration. AI technologies like sentiment analysis, natural language processing, and behavioral pattern recognition can revolutionize how we measure previously intangible qualities. Imagine environments where learners receive real-time feedback on communication effectiveness, collaboration patterns, or problem-solving approachesnot just whether they arrived at the right answer. By collaborating to develop these assessment technologies, enterprises can help instructors understand which specific behaviors and capabilities correlate with workplace success, while instructors can provide insights into how these skills develop over time. The result is graduation requirements that reflect workforce needs and hiring practices that meaningfully evaluate candidate readiness. 2. Create immersive learning laboratories to develop AI fluency. Both traditional and workplace learning environments are facing what Omid Fotuhi, director of learning innovation at WGU Labs, calls the AI Trolley Problem. It borrows from the classic ethical thought experiment which asks whether one should pull a lever to redirect a runaway trolley, sacrificing one life to save five. Fotuhi uses the metaphor to describe a form of institutional paralysis: a deep discomfort with taking action that might cause harm, even when inaction guarantees it. When it comes to AI, theres a tendency to fixate on what might go wrong if we act, Fotuhi explained to me. But we rarely consider what might go wrong if we dont. This aversion to action, though rooted in caution, can quietly perpetuate harm. Failing to implement AI tools could also mean missed opportunities to provide more personalized learning, reduce burnout among educators, or close equity gaps at scale. In many cases, the cost of doing nothing is not neutralit’s compounding. We need to shift the frame, Fotuhi added. Yes, using AI carries risk. But so does sitting still. If we only focus on the potential harm of pulling the lever, we ignore the damage being done by letting the trolley barrel forward. One way of overcoming the risks could lie in creating collaborative learning environments where learners and professionals can safely experiment with AI tools. Enterprises can provide real-world business challenges and access to industry-specific AI applications, while instructors contribute pedagogical expertise and learning environments where failure carries no permanent consequences. These immersive learning laboratories would serve dual purposes: Help learners develop practical AI fluency theyll need in future careers, while giving enterprises insights into how next-generation workers approach and leverage these tools. Such environments would help foster the metacognitive abilities to determine when and how to best leverage AI. Those are skills that no machine can replicate. 3. Establish continuous feedback loops between learning environments and workplaces. The pace of technological change demands a more dynamic relationship between classrooms and enterprise than our current system allows. Annual curriculum reviews and occasional industry advisory boards are insufficient when workforce needs evolve monthly rather than yearly. We need continuous, bidirectional feedback mechanisms where learning innovations inform workplace practices and workplace needs shape learning priorities. This means embedding instructors within businesses and bringing industry professionals into classrooms as integral contributors to the learning ecosystem. AI can facilitate this exchange by aggregating and analyzing real-time data about skill demands across industries, helping instructors understand emerging trends before they become mainstream requirements. Simultaneously, instructors can share insights about learning approaches that effectively develop adaptability and resiliencequalities that enterprises increasingly recognize as essential for organizational agility. A more collaborative future At Udemy, we believe instructors must prepare learners not to compete with AI, but to leverage it effectively. This requires a fundamental shift from mere knowledge acquisition to developing the metacognitive abilities and street smarts that machines cannot replicate. This vision for the future extends to instructors, too. Far from replacing them, AI is poised to elevate their role. By automating administrative tasks, enabling personalized support at scale, and creating new ways to teach and measure adaptive skills, it offers opportunities to create learning environments where instructors have the time and tools to set learners up for success in an AI-powered world. For enterprises, this partnership with instructors means investing in the future workforce by contributing expertise, challenges, and resources to classroom innovation, rather than lamenting skills gaps after they emerge. The disconnect between instructors and enterprise is not new, but AI has simultaneously amplified its consequences and offered powerful solutions. By working together to reimagine education with AI as an enabling force rather than a threat, we ca build learning environments that prepare learners for a lifetime of adaptation and growth. Hugo Sarrazin is CEO of Udemy.
Category:
E-Commerce
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