• Meghan Markle's Netflix show dropped on Tuesday, and she is launching a lifestyle brand this spring.
• It might be difficult for Meghan to stand out and seem relatable in the lifestyle industry.
• PR and branding experts said leveraging her royal status may help Meghan find success.

Say hello to the new Meghan Markle — again.

On Tuesday, "With Love, Meghan" dropped on Netflix. In the first episode alone, the Duchess of Sussex explained how to make a bath salt kit, shared a hack for making homemade popcorn in a paper bag, harvested honey from her personal hive, and made candles with the leftover wax.

The lifestyle series presents Meghan as a jack of all trades when it comes to hosting and homemaking, complementing her lifestyle brand, As Ever. The brand's first product line will be available later this spring. On Tuesday, Meghan revealed As Ever's offerings will include spreads, teas, crepe and cookie mixes, and flower petal sprinkles, which she often uses on "With Love, Meghan."

These new ventures won't surprise longtime fans who have followed Meghan since her scrappy blogging days, but it's also no secret that critics are primed to critique these latest moves. Add in the pressure of entering the oversaturated aspirational lifestyle market, and it's clear Meghan has an uphill battle in creating a brand that feels inviting and approachable. After all, few things are less relatable than a duchess telling you your life can be like hers.

Still, if Meghan can stay true to her fans and lean into her life's fairy-tale arc, she might be on her way to starting her best chapter, experts say.

The crowded lifestyle industry

Although she was known for her acting career before she married Prince Harry, Meghan also ran a blog called The Tig from 2014 to 2017, sharing recipes, travel stories, and posts about her favorite restaurants.

Her two new ventures — "With Love, Meghan" and As Ever — allow her to tap back into those interests before her royal detour, though it will have to evolve as she did in the last eight years.

"She was creating some branding, but it was not as cultured. It was not as refined," Stacy Jones, the founder and CEO of Hollywood Branded, told Business Insider of The Tig. "Becoming part of the royal family, she opened up a whole different level of product class."

Although Meghan's passion for lifestyle is well-established, the industry is crowded.

Martha Stewart has long been the it-girl of the lifestyle world, and celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Jessica Alba have carved their own place in the industry with Goop and the Honest Company, finding commercial and financial success. Goop was worth $433 million in 2020, and as of March 2025, the Honest Company, which went public in 2021, was valued at about $530 million.

Likewise, influencers such as Meredith Hayden have built massive social media followings with lifestyle content, appealing to viewers as "every women."

Jones said Meghan will "need a strong and unique selling point" to make As Ever resonate. Megan Balyk, the vice president of Jive PR + Digital, told BI she thinks Meghan will struggle if she "cannot find a clear, consistent brand identity."

Consistency has been an issue for Meghan since 2020, said Balyk. Meghan has tried her hand at ventures that didn't pan out, like her animated series "Pearl" or the $20 million Spotify deal to make podcasts with Harry. (People reported on March 3 that Meghan is working on a new podcast with Lemonada Media.)

The ever-evolving nature of Meghan's post-royal life has also bred some public distrust, and she doesn't do herself any favors by seeming to take cues from the royals' "never complain, never explain" mantra when it comes to her middling business dealings.

For instance, Meghan announced in February that she was changing her company's name from American Riviera Orchard, a nickname for her neighborhood of Santa Barbara, to As Ever. She cited her partnership with Netflix, her desire to make items that aren't just localized, and the name's nod to her longtime love of cooking as the reasons for the change.

There's truth there, but it doesn't tell the whole story. The trademark office temporarily denied Meghan's application for American Riviera Orchard in August 2024, saying the name was "primarily geographically descriptive."

That denial was likely a motivating factor in the rebrand, and when that kind of information trickles out to the public from the media or internet sleuths as Meghan tells an edited version of events, her critics — who have no reason to give her the benefit of the doubt — may feel even more vindicated in distrusting her.

Finding her brand

Meghan's ventures have an effortlessly luxurious feel in their branding so far, simultaneously appealing and just slightly out of reach. Their light tones are also starkly different from those of her previous Netflix hit, "Harry & Meghan," which detailed her struggles with royal life. Harry is also largely absent from her new show.

The people watching "With Love, Meghan" will likely differ from those eager to hear about her dramatic life as a royal.

"People like looking at train wrecks and car crashes, and they want to gossip," Jones said. "You're really leaning into a very different type of fan base."

Meghan has to build out a new audience that trusts her, but her existing supporters can help. Young women make up much of her fan base, and Black women have been some of Meghan's strongest supporters as she's risen to fame.

Jones said it could "be a huge missed opportunity" if Meghan doesn't prioritize Black women in her lifestyle ventures.

"Most celebrity lifestyle brands cater to a polished, elite, mostly white audience," she said. "If Meghan embraces this community with real action, As Ever could be powerful. If she doesn't, it may feel like she's lost touch with the very people who saw themselves in her story."

Balyk also said that it might be easier for Meghan to build a brand people trust if she positions Melinda Gates and Oprah Winfrey as her contemporaries rather than Stewart or Paltrow, as her passion for philanthropy has been clear to the public from the earliest days of her fame.

If she can incorporate that focus on giving back into her lifestyle work, Meghan may even be able to get the best of both worlds.

Authentically Meghan

When Meghan made The Tig, she was in the sweet spot of being successful but not too famous.

Now, though, she is among the most famous people in the world, married to a prince, and mother to children who are sixth and seventh in line for the British throne. She also lives in a celebrity-studded neighborhood in California and counts A-list stars among her close friends.

Lifestyle content thrives when consumers relate to the creator, but Meghan's life is so singular that relatability isn't an option for her anymore, no matter how much she wants it to be.

Ironically, Jones told BI that Meghan may be able to make herself more approachable to audiences by reminding them that she isn't like them.

"Everyone can buy in on the princess," she said. "Americans like a fable. They like a happy ending."

Viewers might not be able to see themselves in much of Meghan's life, but they can invest in the American dream she lived, looking to her for guidance on how to make their ordinary lives just a bit more sparkly. The duchess can also use her show to tell that story and sell customers on As Ever.

"She has a literal infomercial for who she is that can be viewed 24/7 and streamed," Jones said. "She can tell the stories about the lifestyle and the brand. She can paint pictures about her jam and how it came to be and all the little steps that actually people are fascinated with."

Meghan's fairy tale shouldn't be hard to sell. She is a beautiful actor who fell in love with a prince and wants to live happily ever by helping people make their lives more aesthetically pleasing. If she can tap into that narrative, Meghan will finally find a niche that feels like home.

• In a Deloitte survey, 26% of leaders said their organizations were seriously exploring autonomous agents.
• ServiceNow, SAP, and Salesforce are among the firms that have debuted AI agents to do work tasks.
• This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.

When clients of the cloud-based-software provider ServiceNow contact the company's customer support center, 80% of the cases — in the form of calls and chat messages — are handled without any human intervention.

Instead, the company relies on analytical and generative artificial intelligence — in the form of AI agents — to address common customer questions.

Chris Bedi, ServiceNow's chief customer officer and enterprise-AI advisor, said employees still handle one out of every five customer-support requests.

They're getting new support from agentic AI, which can automate tasks such as drafting a response email to a customer. Workers remain in the loop for a final sign-off before any agentic-AI actions are executed. The combination of human workers and agentic AI shrank the amount of time it took to handle the more complex cases by 52% in a two-week period, ServiceNow said.

OpenAI's cofounder Sam Altman and other leading technologists have said that 2025 will be the year that AI agents "join" the workforce.

In addition to ServiceNow, software developers such as Salesforce and SAP have rolled out their own agentic-AI platforms. These can perform workplace tasks such as processing customer invoices, providing customer support to clients, and drafting emails. The business software giant Intuit, which owns TurboTax and QuickBooks, began rolling out agentic-AI capabilities in December.

Humans mostly remain in the loop for now, but vendors anticipate this technology will become fully autonomous. Multiagent systems, where two or more AI agents collaborate to complete work, will proliferate.

"Agents are the next level of understanding around how you apply AI," Jim Rowan, the head of AI at the consultancy Deloitte, said. "It can perform actions for you."

In a recent Deloitte survey of 2,773 business leaders, 26% of respondents said their organizations were exploring autonomous agents to a "large or very large extent."

Why AI agents have become the new focus for generative AI

For the first two years of the generative-AI boom — which kicked off after the debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022 — most businesses that adopted the technology scaled it to power chatbots and complete routine tasks like drafting meeting summaries. AI agents represent an evolution of generative-AI technology, built to complete tasks autonomously, though most are still monitored closely by workers.

Agentic AI "actually possesses some unique skills around reasoning, planning, and orchestration," Bedi told Business Insider. "These agents can collaborate with each other and really start to deliver on the promise of work happening autonomously."

Buzz for AI agents kicked into high gear after Salesforce debuted Agentforce in September to automate tasks in customer support, sales, and marketing. The company has said it will roll out 1 billion agents to customers by the end of this year. The company also reported that more than 340,000 of its customer support questions had been answered autonomously with Agentforce.

ServiceNow estimates that the company's AI agents, already deployed in various parts of the business, such as customer service, human resources, and IT, are driving an estimated $325 million in annualized value by bolstering workplace productivity by 20%. ServiceNow says AI-agent-supported work saves 400,000 labor hours annually.

Still, technology companies are in the early stages of their agentic-AI development. Many are figuring out which processes they can fully automate with the technology. As a result, company leaders implementing agentic AI are training their workers to collaborate with — and provide feedback on — their new "coworkers."

AI agents are often developed as worker-collaboration tools

John Kucera, the senior vice president of product management at Salesforce, recommended that businesses be transparent about what work AI agents can handle and what will remain with workers. He added that businesses should be clear about what an AI agent actually is, saying that not all agentic systems are equal.

"There's a lot of false agents out there," Kucera said. "It's only an agent when you're taking a request and the agent is figuring out what to do and then what data to put in."

While surveys frequently find that many workers worry that AI will replace them, technologists say AI agents won't replace people but assume responsibility for mundane tasks.

"These agents are going to help me do my job, but at no point will they make me do something I'm not aware of," said Walter Sun, the global head of AI at SAP, which sells software for financial, supply chain, and other business management needs. "The most important thing is that the employees are always in control."

How companies are tailoring AI agents with employee feedback

To ensure workers have a voice in how AI agents are developed, SAP encourages employees across its various business lines — including the travel- and expense-management provider Concur and SuccessFactors, which provides HR, payroll, and talent management software — to use an internal online form to reach out to the AI team and propose compelling agentic use cases.

At Intuit, the AI-powered financial assistant Intuit Assist can get businesses paid 45% faster by detecting past-due invoices and automatically drafting a personalized reminder note. After a business owner approves the note's language and sends it out, they are paid, on average, five days sooner than with a human-only process, Intuit Assist said.

But before Inuit Assist takes action, humans have the final say. "What we're trying to do is have the right human-automation interaction," Ashok Srivastava, Intuit's chief data officer, said.

Intuit has embraced a robust AI-training program, focused on responsible AI and what the technology can and cannot do, and built a "sandbox" called GenStudio that allows employees to interact with large language models in a secure environment. The company has also developed educational programs tailored to senior executives, directors, and engineers. "It's very pervasive across the company," Srivastava added.

Asana, which makes work-management software, launched AI agents in October, focusing on a few functions, including marketing, IT, HR, and research and development. Rather than track a specific number of actions that agentic AI takes over, Asana monitors the types of work that can be automated, eliminating the drudgery of busy work to allow employees to focus on more complex tasks.

The company is also keeping a close eye on which tasks AI systems get wrong compared with people. In cybersecurity, human errors tend to occur later in the day, when workers are tired after a long shift. AI doesn't get tired, but it is susceptible to hallucinations — or when an AI model generates a response that is misleading or false information but nonetheless presents it as fact. For example, Asana's AI agent might respond to certain questions by suggesting tasks that are, in reality, nonexistent to a particular workflow.

"The kinds of errors we see are different, so the way we fix them needs to be different," Asana's chief information security officer, Sean Cassidy, said. He said the company conducts automated tests to detect hallucinations and improve the product when they occur.

For AI agents to create a compelling return on investment for the companies that implement them, Deloitte's Rowan said, workers should be tasked with frequently checking on simple automated tasks before any agentic AI actions are taken.

If businesses want to see big returns on their agentic AI investment, they need to place AI at the center of their work model, and then consider how humans will engage with the work, Rowan said. If not, "the savings really won't be there," he added.

ServiceNow's Bedi said the success of AI agents depends on companies nailing three factors: New agentic capabilities should be developed for each department and its specific needs, unique training plans should be designed for every part of the business — like finance, marketing, and sales — and the value and return on of agentic workflows should be closely monitored.

"The companies that combine all three of those ingredients are going to have a competitive advantage," Bedi said.

• The internet is rapidly destroying TV because it gives people more ways to spend their time, for less money.
• Except! The thing that commands the most live attention on the internet is the same thing that commands the most attention on TV.
• Yup: NFL games.

Two things can be true at the same time:

• The internet has atomized the way we absorb information, entertainment, and culture. Which means we all exist in our own bubbles of interest and affiliation.
• The internet is very good at showing lots of people the same thing lots of people used to consume before the internet existed. Which means we're all still watching the same things we used to watch on TV — we're just getting it through broadband pipes.

Here's evidence for the second thing: a list of the top live internet events, ranked by broadband traffic, for the last three months of 2024. If you'd like to see a nonscreenshot version, download this report from AppLogic Networks, a broadband infrastructure company.

As you can see, the fifth entry on the chart is Netflix's Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson kinda-fight — the kind of stunt programming that used to run on ABC's "Wide World of Sports." (See: Knievel, Evel.) And the remaining nine events are all NFL games, streamed by Amazon, or ESPN, or Peacock.

That is: NFL games — basically the only thing that draws big numbers of viewers on TV anymore — are also basically the only thing that draws big numbers of internet viewers. At least when it comes to live, concurrent viewing.

As anyone who works in the TV business can tell you, that doesn't mean you can simply port TV shows over to the internet and get the same viewership, or money, that the traditional TV infrastructure used to deliver. It's much more complicated than that.

But it does seem to mean that TV's biggest live draw is also the internet's biggest live draw.

• Amazon and GE Vernova are partnering on power solutions for data centers.
• Grid operators in the US struggle to keep pace with surging data center demand.
• Big Tech companies are exploring alternative ways to get power to their sites quicker.

Amazon and GE Vernova have signed a strategic framework agreement to help power the cloud provider's rapid data center expansion, both companies said Tuesday in a press release.

Under the agreement, GE Vernova is set to help Amazon connect its growing international fleet of data centers to the electric grid through major electrical equipment expansion, project management, and construction support. The companies will also partner on renewable energy projects, and Amazon plans to work with GE Vernova's accelerator business to explore new forms of power generation for data centers.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Amazon, along with other Big Tech companies, is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data center expansion to advance artificial intelligence technology. Amazon plans to allocate over $100 billion in capital expenditures this year, mostly on expanding its cloud and AI infrastructure.

The development boom has caused energy demand in the US to surge for the first time in decades, and grid operators are struggling to keep up with the pace of growth.

As a result, data center operators are partnering with energy companies to explore various alternative options for getting power to their sites quicker. Last year, Amazon signed a deal with Talen Energy to use power from its Susquehanna nuclear power station in Pennsylvania.

GE Vernova builds and implements electrical power systems and equipment for energy sources such as natural gas, hydropower, wind, nuclear, and steam. The company's gas division saw significant growth in orders in 2024 for natural gas turbines, partially due to data center demand, CEO Scott Strazik said on an earnings call in January.

The company's natural gas turbines are providing power at the first Stargate site in Abilene, Texas. Stargate is a $500 billion joint initiative by OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and the White House to build AI infrastructure.

Amazon and GE Vernova did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Do you have a story to share about data centers and energy? Contact this reporter at [email protected].

• Top hedge funds such as Citadel and Millennium lost money in February, BI has reported.
• Geopolitical tensions brought on by President Donald Trump led to rocky markets last month.
• See how some of the biggest multistrategy funds stack up.

Here's how multistrategy funds — which have raised billions in recent years because of their ability to handle volatility — stack up for the year so far: