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Influencers get a lot of stick these days. The latest thing theyre being blamed for: shark attacks. Scientists have noted a recent rise in shark attacks, and according to new research published in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science, of the 74 recorded bites in the seas around French Polynesia, 5% were assessed as acts of self-defense. Professor Eric Clua of PSL University in France, who led the research, holds social media responsible. I dont encourage, as many influencers do on social networks, [people] to cling to a sharks dorsal fin or stroke it, under the pretext of proving that they are harmless, Clua told The Times. The sharks here feel like family, one such influencer with 111,000 followers wrote in the caption of an Instagram post. In one picture, she is seen grabbing the nose of a shark; in another, she reaches out and gently pushes its nose as it swims toward her. Dont get it twisted, the sharks dont give a f*** about me, she adds in the caption. Which absolutely makes me a crazy shark lady. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Taylor Cunningham | Sharks & Freediving (@taylork.sea) While they might feel like family, that doesnt mean the sharks consent to being used as props in a social media posta lesson some people have unfortunately learned the hard way. Earlier this year, a tourist vacationing in the Caribbean was allegedly trying to take a photo of a bull shark swimming in shallow waters when it bit off both her hands. Although sharks are not naturally inclined to bite humans, they are wild predators that will act in self-defense. Researchers examined a global database known as the Shark Attack Files and found more than 300 incidents fitting the same defensive pattern, dating back to the 1800s. Most of these bites involved small and medium-size sharks, including gray reef sharks, blacktip reef sharks, and nurse sharks. When it comes to great whites, which are more dangerous, humans are generally wise enough to steer clear. People know the difference between a [Yorkshire terrier] and a pit bull, whereas they dont know the difference between a blacktip reef shark and a bull shark, which are their marine equivalents, Clua said. They are responsible for fewer than 10 human deaths a year worldwide. Whereas dogs are responsible for more than 10,000 deaths and are perceived positively by the public. Even using the term shark attack is misleading, researchers argue, as it creates the perception of sharks as aggressors and undermines conservation efforts that rely on public support. Around 100 million sharks are killed annually (about 274,000 per day), targeted for their fins, meat, and as bycatch. As it stands, they have more reason to be scared of you than you have of them. So, if you find yourself swimming alongside a shark, the scientific advice is simple: Look, don’t touch.
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E-Commerce
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Doom-and-gloom narratives about artificial intelligence going rogue to the detriment of humans are a staple of popular culture. For some people, just say AI, and visions of Skynet from the Terminator movies taking over the world will instantly pop into their heads. Skepticism about AI isnt just in the realm of science fiction, of course. As AI becomes more mainstream, legitimate concerns about its accuracy, privacy, transparency, and the possibility of job displacement continue to be voiced. Theres simply not an overabundance of trust when it comes to AI. A quick internet search will turn up plenty of surveys indicating more people than not are tired of the hype around AI and worried about potential risks. I have a different point of view. Im not the guy to ask about the downsides of AI. Im the guy who says a world you cant even imagine is right around the corner, thanks to AI. What happens with this new technology is entirely up to us. Its ours to own and do amazing things to make lives better. If we embrace and employ it wisely, AI will be a tremendous positive for people. I believe in AI for good. Why Im optimistic I come to my optimism in the most personal way possible. Technology changed my life and perhaps even saved it. In my mid-20s, I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, a chronic condition where my immune system attacked insulin-producing cells in my pancreas. For years, my body was a constant chemistry experiment due to a lifelong dependence on prescription insulin. I had to check my blood sugar with a fingerstick 10 times a day, and then inject myself with insulin another 10 times a day. Administering too much or too little made for some very panicky moments. Today, I have an insulin pump attached to one side of my abdomen and an insulin sensor on the other. Those two amazing devices communicate in real time and deliver the proper dosage I need to stay healthy. It just happens automatically. The result is that Im blessed with a safer, more productive, and more enjoyable life. So, I have a deep appreciation of the profound and transformative nature of technology in our lives. Lets extend this to AI. I recently spoke with leaders at a hospital network who are reimagining how AI can improve care. Their vision? When a child is diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, theyre immediately supported by a lifelong AI assistantone that understands their condition, offers guidance, and grows with them. I wish Id had that kind of support years ago. Its not about replacing doctors or caregivers. Its about augmenting care with intelligencesafely, consistently, and with empathy. Thats just one example. I believe AI should be used to solve real human problems making essentials like food, shelter, healthcare, and opportunity more accessible to more people. The promise of AI is longer, healthier lives. Smarter, more sustainable systems. At its best, AI doesnt remove the human element, it amplifies it. Thats what this moment demands, not just building technology, but building a better world with it. We still need guardrails Now, theres a difference between being optimistic and a starry-eyed Pollyanna. This vision only happens if AI is carefully curated and managed. Secure guardrails must be in place to ensure AI is used responsibly, ethically, and morally. We must be careful to ensure AI models are free of biases and inaccuracies. And in the workplace, we must deploy AI to help people perform their jobs better, not replace them. The biggest worry I hear about AI is the fear of employment loss. Trust me, I get how AI can be a scary topic if we think it will impact our livelihoods. But history is a good guide in showing us what ultimately happens when new technologies emerge and change the old ways of doing things. Consider some of the great shifts of the past, whether it was the Industrial Revolution, the manufacturing revolution, or the computing revolution. There was always the concern that the machines were coming for our jobs. Yes, there were adjustment periods. But the jobs didnt go away. They just changed. In the process, quality of life improved. Well likely see something similar with AI. The people who will thrive in this new era and have nothing to fear are those who learn to use AI in their daily roles. Thats because humans will always be in the loop. Well be the ones overseeing and orchestrating AI processes. Instead of AI eliminating roles for humans, we should think more about the era of the super-human thanks to AI. Great technology reduces tedious work, makes our lives easier, and allows us to focus on the activities that make our careers more rewarding. AI will take that to the next level. Weve all been hearing so much about the potential of AI agents to help us do our jobs. But they will need watchful management and governance to ensure they aid, not hinder, our businesses. Well need to be attentive stewards to increase AIs veracity and credibility to ensure it becomes practical in our lives. When properly managed, I unequivocally believe AI should be embraced, not feared. If we do that, powerful agentic systems will do far more than make our businesses hyperproductive. They will transform everything. What this world looks like in 10 years will be extraordinarythanks to AI. Steve Lucas is CEO and chairman of Boomi. Hes the author of the new book Digital Impact: The Human Element of AI-Driven Transformation.
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E-Commerce
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. We all want our companies to make a real difference, but how often does our message truly cut through the noise? It’s a complex challenge: How do we ensure our genuine efforts to create social impact actually resonate with the people we want to reach? Because in today’s world, simply doing good isn’t enough; we need to communicate the impact of that work effectively to build trust and inspire real change. Build trust through transparency These days, with everything online, people expect brands to be upfront and honest. Being transparent isnt just a nice thing to do; its how to build trust. Patagonia stands out in this area, demonstrating how their sustainability efforts and environmental impact can cultivate a loyal customer base that genuinely trusts their brand. With initiatives like Footprint Chronicles, they give a peek behind the curtain, showing where their products come from and exactly how they affect the environmentfor example, in terms of carbon footprint and water use. This level of transparency has not only built trust with Patagonias customers but also inspired confidence in their brand. Research shows that genuinely conveying your social responsibility values and illustrating how you operate by those values, significantly enhances consumer trust and loyalty Engage employees and communities Effective engagement goes beyond building trust; it’s also about connecting with employees and communities in meaningful ways. Ben & Jerry’s does a great job of getting their employees and customers involved in social justice initiatives and sharing their stories in different ways. They highlight the contributions of employees and customers who are making a difference, fostering a sense of belonging and connection. At Humble, our model is built on empowering customers to support important causes while getting games, books, or software they love. Through our Humble Choice subscription service and monthly bundles, we make it easy for our community to contribute to charities while shopping for great deals. We also use our platform to help our charity partners get their message out to more people. Each month, we feature a selected charity partner across our social media channels and dedicate space on our YouTube channel for them to share their mission and work with our community of millions. Additionally, we profile their initiatives on our blog, providing additional visibility and context about the causes we support. This approach not only highlights these organizations impactful work, but also demonstrates how businesses can use their platforms to authentically amplify significant social and environmental causes. By finding ways to foster these types of connections, businesses can strengthen their audiences engagement with the social impact initiatives theyve worked hard to build. Beyond initiative-by-initiative engagement, companies that are doing this work should consider implementing proactive communication strategies that focus on telling the companys overall social impact story in an authentic and engaging way. As an example, our recently finalized 2024 Social Impact Report highlights our efforts across the year, colorfully illustrating how the $12.4 million we raised with our community last year made a meaningful difference for more than 4,500 charities worldwide that we were able to support. Strategies for authentic communication To build engagement and trust around their CSR initiatives, companies can adopt specific social impact communication strategies: Transparency in reporting: Be open and share detailed reports about your social impact. Its a great way to make an impression with your audience and show youre truly committed. TOMS Shoes sets a great example by sharing comprehensive reports on their One for One model, which outlines the impact of every purchase on communities in need. Companies should consider tracking metrics like community feedback or employee engagement levels to enhance their reporting. Storytelling: Tell stories about the impact of your work. It helps people really connect emotionally with what youre doing. Warby Parker effectively highlights the lives changed through their buy-a-pair, give-a-pair program. For instance, they share stories of how access to glasses has improved education and education outcomes for recipients, showcasing the tangible difference their initiative makes. Regular updates and engagement: Make sure you keep your community in the loop about what youre doing and how its going with regular updates. Salesforce excels at this by providing annual sustainability reports that detail its initiatives. Companies can also use platforms like newsletters or social media for ongoing engagement. Understand your audience: Really knowing what your audience cares about is key to making your message land. Use the right tone, speak their language, and focus on what matters to them. At Humble, we understand that our community is passionate about gaming and giving back. On the product side, we curate bundles that align with these interests, pairing great content with opportunities to support meaningful causes, and then we take every opportunity we can to tie it all together with relevant outreach through blogs, videos, social media, and more. This approach strengthens engagement and reinforces shared values. A call to action When companies communicate well, it can bring everyone togetheremployees, customers, and the wider community. It can build trust, get people involved, and help create real change. As we continue our journey at Humble, we remain committed to these principlesleveraging our platform not only as a marketplace but as a tool for meaningful change driven by our passionate community of gamers and givers alike. By focusing on clear, relatable communication, we can collectively strengthen our ability to create the positive change the world needs.
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E-Commerce
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. In a world increasingly shaped by the potential of artificial intelligence, the life sciences industry may be one of the largest beneficiaries of its transformative potential. Artificial intelligence (AI) has already revolutionized elements of the drug discovery and development process, redefined research methodologies, enhanced disease detection and diagnosis, and paved the way for personalized medicine. Knowing that we have just begun to scratch the surface of AIs potential, I am excited to see how its continued evolution will accelerate our collective mission of bringing novel medicines to patients in need. But I am also cognizant of its limitations. While we can outsource human tasks to AI, we simply cannot outsource humanity. AI is not intelligent when it comes to emotion, imagination, empathy, or qualities critical to creating and leading. Similarly, the spark of ingenuity and the recognition of serendipity exists solely within the bounds of the human experience. AI also lacks context and nuancea critical component when considering the myriad factors needed to be successful in drug development, such as evaluating patient needs, defining new white spaces in an increasingly competitive environment, and other macro considerations. A case study for humanity In founding Tarsus, we set out to develop a treatment for a large, underdiagnosed eyelid disease, Demodex blepharitis (DB). Both the literature and our discussions with many eye care providers validated early on that this was a highly prevalent disease, with very low disease awareness, and no FDA-approved therapies. We needed to prove how significant the unmet need was and build a market that would support an entirely new category in eye careand there were no benchmarks to assist us in establishing a path forward. Our early clinical trials were conducted in Mexico City. I recall sitting in a large eye hospital, packed with hundreds of patients and family members of all ages, while we worked with the eye care team to find patients with visible signs of DB. After many hours searching individual clinics for DB patients with very little return, we questioned our initial prevalence modeling and wondered whether this disease was, in fact, as large as we predicted. Recognizing a potential lost opportunity in front of me, our clinical team used the microphone for the waiting area. In Spanish, we asked if anyone in the waiting roomwhether they were there to see a doctor or notwas experiencing eyelid irritation, redness, crusting, and itching (all signs of DB). To our surprise, a couple dozen people stood up and got in line to be seen by an eye care provider, and roughly half of them were diagnosed with DB during a routine exam. This serendipitous moment changed everything, and it would not have occurred without several very human elements: instinct, informed risk taking, and an inherent sense of how to connect and engage with other humans. After seeing hundreds of people line up over the next few months, we knew we had uncovered a unique opportunity to potentially serve millions of patients living with DB. Active listening and human connections Our Mexico City experience further reinforced that AI is no match for the type of insights and perspectives that can be gained from human-centric approaches like active listening and empathy. These very personal interactions inform the work we do every day across every aspect of our businessfrom clinical development to strategic marketing to building an award-winning culture, and so much more. More recently, as we listened carefully to the thousands of doctors now prescribing our treatment for DB and doing careful eyelid exams, we identified another large, underdiagnosed eye disease, ocular rosacea, that now presents a promising opportunity in our pipeline to potentially serve millions more. The human ability to adapt, relate, and emotionally connect with other humans, and our aptitude to make ethical and rational decisions has ensured that people come first in medicine and science. And that will not change. It is clear we are on the cusp of a technology-enabled revolution that will improve howand how quicklywe can deliver innovative new treatments to patients. And we are finding numerous ways to strategically leverage AI. But our collective success as an industry will be dictated by our ability to maintain a nimble, empathetic, and uniquely human-centered approach. Bobak Azamian, MD, PhD is CEO and chairman of Tarsus Pharmaceuticals.
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E-Commerce
As artificial intelligence gets smarter, a growing number of companies are increasing its implementation in their operations or more heavily promoting their own AI offerings. The buzzword for this is “AI first.” Duolingo is among the latest to adopt an AI-first approach. The company’s CEO Luis von Ahn announced the change in an all-hands email Monday, saying it would stop using contractors to do work AI can handle and only increase headcount when teams have maximized all possible automation. The way we work is fundamentally shifting. AI is becoming the default starting point,” said Duolingos Chief Engineering Officer Natalie Glance in an internal Slack message she shared on LinkedIn. “Start with AI for every task. No matter how small, try using an AI tool first. It won’t always be faster or better at first – but that’s how you build skill. Don’t give up if the first result is wrong.” Von Ahn, in his email, said the AI-first approach was already paying dividends, helping the company with its content creation process. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners,” he wrote. Earlier this month, Shopifys CEO told workers at that company that using AI was now a fundamental expectation in daily tasks. Our task here at Shopify is to make our software unquestionably the best canvas on which to develop the best businesses of the future, Tobi Lütke wrote. We do this by keeping everyone cutting edge and bringing all the best tools to bear. . . . For that we need to be absolutely ahead. AI’s rise in business has been forecast for years, of course, but as more companies make it a priority, there are other impacts to be considered. A scientific paper released by Cornell University late last year titled The Unpaid Toll: Quantifying the Public Health Impact of AI said the pollution from data centers powering the AI industry could lead to up to 1,300 premature deaths each year by 2030. It further estimated, public health costs related to the air pollution those centers put out are already at $20 billion per year. Data centers are nothing new. They’ve been around since the 1940s, when the University of Pennsylvania built one to support the first general-purpose digital computer, the ENIAC. But as generative AI has grown, so too has the demand for newer, more powerful centers. The power requirements of data centers in North America increased from 2,688 megawatts at the end of 2022 to 5,341 megawatts at the end of 2023, according to MIT. And demand is only growing. (Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in February, called for more nuclear power plants to meet the growing demands of AI companies.) The demand for new data centers cannot be met in a sustainable way, said Noman Bashir, a Computing and Climate Impact Fellow at MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium. “The pace at which companies are building new data centers means the bulk of the electricity to power them must come from fossil fuel-based power plants.” This is all occurring as concerns about the environment have been deemphasized at many Big Tech firms. Companies like Walmart, Siemens and Apple all opted against signing an open letter earlier this year reaffirming commitment to the Paris Agreement. (Duolingo, which released an environmental statement last March, did not reply to questions about how the AI-first approach might impact the company’s environmental footprint.) Meanwhile, the Trump administration has dismantled dozens of climate programs in its first 100 days. And the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering overturning previous findings that classify greenhouse gas pollution as harmful, which could impact its ability to regulate carbon emissions. By 2030, Cornell forecasts, the public health burden of AI data centers will be double that of the U.S. steelmaking industry. And it could be on par with all of the cars, buses, and trucks in California. Shopify and Duolingo are hardly the only companies adopting an AI-first approach. Many companies large and small are racing to incorporate AI into all levels of their services and workflows. Financial services firm Lettuce leans into AI to assist with tax solutions. Findigs lets property managers use AI to screen rental applicants. And a real estate brokerage in Portugal is using an AI interactive real estate agent, which has already booked $100 million in sales. In the grand scheme, though, corporate use of AI is still in its infancy. ServiceNow’s Enterprise AI Maturity Index last year measured AI maturity at 4,500 businesses in 21 countries on a scale of 0 to 100. The average score was 44, with only one in six companies topping 50. Part of what’s keeping that score low is the newness of the technology. Another factor is cost. (Does using AI, especially one that’s developed in house, actually save money given the cost of data centers, for instance?) But in the coming months and years, more companies are likely to move to an AI-first approach. And that will likely increase emissions, pumping more CO2 and pollution into the atmosphere, raising even more health concerns.
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E-Commerce
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