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Jon Stewart, who hosted The Daily Show on Comedy Central from 1999 to 2015 and has returned for once-a-week hosting stints since 2024, lashed out at his show’s parent company for choosing to unceremoniously end The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and discontinue the franchise. In a segment on Monday, Stewart noted his well-documented allegiance to Colbert, even showing a photo of the duo when they were both on The Daily Show from 1999 to 2005. While statements about the events surrounding the cancellation of The Late Show have been made by many celebrities on social mediaand even by hosts of other late-night programsStewart added to the conversation by boldly calling out CBS for appearing to overlook the value that compelling late-night programs bring to the media giants that own them. I understand the fear that you and your advertisers have with $8 billion at stake, but understand this: Truly, the shows that you now seek to cancel, censor, and controla not insignificant portion of that $8 billion value came from those fucking showsthats what made you that money, Stewart said directly into the camera. The $8 billion that Stewart is referring to is the proposed merger between Paramount Global, which owns CBS, and Skydance, a production company founded and helmed by David Ellison, son of tech billionaire and Trump supporter Larry Ellison. The deal has faced regulatory hurdles, first under the Biden administration and then under the Trump administration. All of this also comes as CBS News announced in July that it will settle a lawsuit filed against 60 Minutes by Trump, who claims that the show unfairly edited an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris to make her look more favorable. The fact that CBS didnt try to save their No. 1-rated network late-night franchise thats been on the air for over three decades is part of whats making everyone wonder, was this purely financial or maybe the path of least-resistance for your $8 billion merger? Stewart asked on his show. Fast Company reached out to CBS, Paramount Global, and Skydance Media. None immediately responded to a request for comment. CBS has referred to the decision to cancel The Late Show as a financial one and unrelated to the show’s content, citing a “challenging backdrop” for late-night television. Although The Late Show has reportedly been losing roughly $40 million a year, according to a source cited by the Wall Street Journal, Stewarts larger point is buoyed by the fact that Paramount earns more than half of its revenue from its television businesses. Indeed, Paramount has played up its TV assets, including The Late Show and much of its news content, in its pitch to investors about the proposed merger. Colbert’s image appears multiple times on the New Paramount PowerPoint presentation, with the company touting CBS as a leader in late-night TV. Ratings from Nielsen likewise show The Late Show as the top-rated show in its block, with about 2.417 million viewers across 41 new episodes. If you believe, as corporations or as networks, you can make yourself so innocuous, that you can serve a gruel so flavorless that you will never again be on the boy kings radar? A) why would anyone watch you? And B) you are fucking wrong, Stewart said.
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E-Commerce
Over the past few years, artificial intelligence has dominated business conversations. What once felt like a futuristic concept is now a tangible, widely accessible tool, one that is now seen as table stakes for businesses. AIs greatest promise is efficiency. For small-business owners who wear multiple hats, this promise sounds like a dream, and for some larger companies, that dream has become reality. Yet for many small and midsize businesses (SMBs) that have invested precious time and money into AI-enabled solutions, that promise remains unfulfilled. As a CEO of a company that provides fintech solutions for SMBs, and as a small-business owner myself, I understand the desire to do more with less. I understand how AI can seem like a magical solution. But the reality is, AI tools are not currently made with small businesses in mind. Whether you have already invested in AI tools, are in the consideration phase, or still testing tools, I urge you to pause everything, take a step back, and reevaluate AIs role in your business. AIs Promise Is Not for the Masses AI is pitched as a game changer for businesses, promising improved productivity, faster workflows, cost savings, and business growth. Major companies like Duolingo and Shopify have even suggested AI can replace human-led roles. And this may be true, for enterprises. This level of efficiency is possible only through custom, complex, and expensive AI models that are programed by dedicated AI teams and trained on an immense amount of dataresources, and results, that are unattainable by SMBs. The reality is, many SMBs are still digitizing their practices, their data sets are small, budgets are tight, and IT resources are minimal. This is why, instead of trying to mirror the AI adoption strategies of large enterprises, SMBs should take a different approach, one that is slow, simple, and focused on business fundamentals. By focusing on core operations like admin, customer service, and reporting, small businesses can lay the groundwork to ensure AI enhances, rather an complicates, their workflows. A False Start: SMBs and AI Adoption Its no surprise that SMB adoption of AI dropped to 28% this year, a 33% year-over-year decline. Some have learned from experience that trying to mimic enterprise adoption of AI has had the opposite effect: draining time, money, and productivity. Many SMBs still have a poor understanding of AI and its learning curves. Without proper in-house resources to implement and train on the technology, SMBs are paying for expensive tools that are not optimized to their business needs. For SMB owners who feel theyve overcommitted, I encourage you to pause and reassess. Ask yourself: Is this tool achieving what I need it to? Back to Basics Broad adoption of AI is a costly mistake for SMBs. Business leaders must slow down and thoughtfully assess where AI can truly make an impact. Start small: Choose one area, such as marketing or administrative tasks, and measure results before expanding further. Rather than investing in new tools, explore the AI features already built into your existing tech stack. Tools like Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, and Box now offer AI integrations allowing small businesses to easily explore AI applications without significant investment or complexity. By starting with the tools you already use, you not only lower the barrier to entry, you also concentrate your learning and adoption in a familiar environment. AI Applications That Work AI can be highly effective with repetitive tasks such as answering common customer questions and managing inventory. One small business, Something Sweet Cookie Dough, used AI to scale recipes and reduce ingredient waste, while also automating responses to frequently asked customer questions. AI can be a great resource for creative ideation and research as well. However, its important for a human to review all materials produced by AI as the technology is prone to misinformation and to misinterpretation of the task at hand. I suggest treating AI like a new employee: regularly checking its work, conducting performance reviews, and slowly introducing new tasks. Do not overrely on AI or assume it can operate unsupervised. AI Is Not Automatically Secure Another major oversight is the assumption that AI is inherently secure. Most AI toolsincluding popular free versions like ChatGPTlearn from the data you share with them. That means sensitive business information could become part of a models training data. If youre in a regulated industry or working with proprietary or confidential information, this is a major risk to your business and customers. Before you input sensitive data into any AI tool, understand how that data will be stored and used. Once youve done some trial and error with free versions, consider upgrading to enterprise-grade AI tools that offer security, data privacy, and compliance features tailored to you industry. AI Will Have a Place in SMBs AI can support small businesses, but only if the tools are chosen, applied, and monitored with care. Until AI companies build solutions tailored to the unique needs of SMBs, emphasizing simplicity, affordability, and support, its up to business owners to be diligent in the tools evaluation. With a measured approach, SMBs can capture the benefits of AI without overinvestment, complicating workflows, or overwhelming you and your team.
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E-Commerce
Americas demand for new infrastructure is surging, driven by the AI data center boom, clean energy projects, and a growing national housing crunch. Yet just as the country needs to build faster than ever, its facing a mounting challenge: a severe construction labor shortage. The U.S. construction industry is already short more than half a million workers, and nearly 41% of its workforce is expected to retire by 2031. For a sector still heavily dependent on manual labor and analog tools, there soon may not be enough people left to do the building. To confront this growing labor crisis, Boris Sofmana Carnegie Mellon robotics Ph.D. and early Waymo executivecofounded Bedrock Robotics in 2024. Instead of building autonomous machines from scratch, Bedrock retrofits existing construction equipment like excavators, bulldozers, and loaders with AI-powered operating systems, sensors, and lidar to make them fully autonomous. Sofman has brought together fellow engineers from Waymo, Google, and Caterpillar (CAT), many of whom were instrumental in scaling autonomous technologies in some of the worlds most complex machines. The team shares a fundamental belief: the future of construction lies in autonomy, not more manpower. I saw the powerful potential of applying modern ML approaches we developed at Waymo to construction. This is a problem you could not solve without the modern approaches we saw to be so effective, and helped deploy, in transportation, so it felt like a huge opportunity to address this critical need, Sofman tells Fast Company. We can get to a deployed product for a fraction of the cost it took Waymo, and continue to build toward the full potential while growing revenues and serving real customers. Based in San Francisco, the startup recently emerged from stealth mode with $80 million in seed and Series A funding from top-tier investors including Eclipse, 8VC, NVIDIAs NVentures, Valor Equity Partners, Two Sigma Ventures, and Samsara. John Krafcik, former CEO of Waymo, also joined as an early investor and adviser. Construction is a sector that represents over 10% of global GDP, and it’s under extraordinary pressure. Were entering a new phase where industrial AI becomes the most important, and perhaps most underestimated frontier, Krafcik says. With Bedrock, I saw a chance to take the best of what we built at Waymo and apply it to one of the most vital yet overstressed sectors in the global economy. At the heart of Bedrocks approach is the Bedrock Operatoran AI-powered software and hardware platform that installs in under four hours and can run 24/7, even in remote or high-heat environments where human crews are difficult to retain. Bedrock uses large-scale machine learning to translate real-world inputs into precise actions for construction equipment, starting with excavators focused on heavy earthwork. This is designed to start with an excavator . . . but be efficiently scalable to new capabilities and new machines, says Sofman. From Robo-Taxis to Job Sites Bedrocks founding team includes Kevin Peterson (CTO), former head of perception for Waymos commercial trucking division; Tom Eliaz (VP of engineering), who built Segments New York engineering office and worked on IBMs DB2 query optimizer; and Ajay Gummalla (also a VP of engineering), a former director of engineering at Waymo who also helped launch Google Wifi. The broader team includes engineers from Uber Freight, Google, and Adept (now OMRON), marketers from Deloitte Consulting, and operators from companies like Sonos. While many startups chase the dream of artificial general intelligence (AGI), Bedrock is laser-focused on industrial autonomyturning legacy machines into intelligent systems without upending workflows. Coupling AI with a modern safety framework based on data analysis and statistics unlocks true autonomy and collaborative machine capabilities in a sector that desperately needs it and is interconnected with our entire economy, says Matthieu Guilbert, Bedrock’s robotics lead. This allows robots to work safely and effectively in human-centric environments. Boris Sofman [Photo: Bedrock Robotics] The upgraded machines feature 360-degree cameras with LiDAR for full-field visibility and detailed work area understanding. Survey-grade inertial measurement units (IMUs) and GPS provide centimeter-precision localization, while LTE antennas keep worksites connected for real-time monitoring, explained Sofman. Rugged casings protect components from harsh conditions, while the computing system sits inside the cab, integrating sensor data and executing decisions from a large-scale machine learning model. With restrictions on foreign labor tightening and infrastructure investment risingfueled by federal stimulus and AI-driven demandautonomous construction is becoming not just feasible but necessary. With rising costs and economic uncertainty, contractors are seeking more predictability on job sites. Bedrocks autonomous machines offer consistent performance and accurate forecasting. As Sofman puts it, These machines deliver consistent, predictable output . . . helping accurately forecast project timelines. Bedrocks machines are already running at test sites in California, Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas, in collaboration with firms like Sundt Construction and Zachry Construction. Initial customer deployments are planned for August 2025, with full commercial rollout expected in early 2026. Is Industrial Autonomy the Real AI Gold Rush? Bedrock isnt aiming to eliminate human workersits aiming to ensure theyre no longer the bottleneck. Skiled crews can focus on complex tasks like pipe-laying, while autonomous systems handle repetitive work such as digging, loading, and overnight shifts. Automation and robotics are often misunderstood as a zero-sum game. The Bedrock Operator will enhance safety and productivity, fostering growth for team members rather than replacing them, due to its ability to integrate into existing workflows, says Guilbert. Increased productivity is expected to encourage general contractors to undertake more projects, resulting in a net increase in labor. Given constructions high accident rates, Sofman believes Bedrocks Operator can deliver superhuman safety. On high-risk or remote job sites, that capability could be transformative. Additionally, the AI provides real-time insights such as project progress, earth volume metrics, and billing databoosting transparency and speeding up payments. [Photo: Bedrock Robotics] That pragmatism appeals to investors like John Krafcik. While AI headlines often focus on AGI, Bedrocks investors are betting on near-term impact through industrial autonomy. Where can AI deliver real impact today? Industrial autonomy, especially in construction, is one of those places, says Krafcik, who praises Bedrocks unusually deep talent pool from Waymo as a significant advantage. Despite the pace of digital innovation, much of the world still runs on physical industries like construction, agriculture, and logistics. Bedrock is one of the few companies applying autonomy to this economically essential layer. As it approaches commercial launch, its positioning autonomy as a pragmatic solution to the modern infrastructure crisis. Sofman envisions a future where construction is fully digitized and managed by intelligent systems. Ultimately, this is about digitizing the entire construction process, he says. The goal? A general contractor can just define the goal and let the system run.
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E-Commerce
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