Business Insider's creative team covered an array of projects this year. We brought our stories to life by incorporating animations, crafting bespoke multimedia experiences for our biggest stories, producing and commissioning hundreds of illustrations, and working with photographers around the globe.
Our visuals captured a wide range of topics, from looking into illegal lockouts in major US cities to Ozempic Scams.
We hired nearly 250 talented freelancers who helped bring our most compelling stories to life, producing over 1,500 pieces of custom art that enhanced our storytelling.
Here are some of our favorite visual creations from 2024.
Illustration by Andrei Cojocaru, Design and Development by Rebecca Zisser, Isabel Fernandez-Pujol, Randy Yeip, and Annie Fu, Photos by Bridget Bennett, Callaghan O'Hare, Alyssa Pointer, Abel Uribe
Design and Development by Kim Nguyen, Rebecca Zisser, Isabel Fernandez-Pujol, Photos by Jovelle Tamayo, Tim Evans, Helynn Ospina, Andre Chung, Brittany Greeson, Libby March
Tim Evans for BI, Brittany Greeson for BI, Helynn Ospina for BI, Andre Chung for BI, Libby March for BI; Rebecca Zisser/BI
The Equatic engineering team at the company's development plant in Los Angeles.
Stella Kalinina for Business Insider
Startups like Equatic and Climeworks develop ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Carbon removal helps businesses meet ESG goals and offset emissions through a carbon credits system.
This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.
Out on a barge in Los Angeles, a team of engineers is hard at work tweaking the designs of a collection of machines withmultiple tubes attached to tanks filled with air and different minerals.
The team works for a startup called Equatic, which uses a process called sea electrolysis to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Seawater runs through an electrolyzer, which separates the water into an acid and a base. Rock minerals neutralize the acid, and the base mixes with CO2 from the atmosphere. This results in carbonates that can safely return to the ocean.
Carbon removal technologies, like those developed by Equatic, can transform businesses by helping them reduce their legacy carbon footprint. For many companies with environmental, social, and governance goals, investing in carbon removal through the purchase of carbon credits helps them offset their emissions and get closer to their goal of being "net zero." For rapidly developing industries like artificial intelligence that massively consume energy, implementing carbon removal could help offset emissions in the long term.
Equatic uses sea electrolysis to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Stella Kalinina for Business Insider
The idea of Equatic emerged in the research labs at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a team led by its cofounder Gaurav Sant, a sustainability professor at the school.
Sant said that his team began thinking about how to activate and expand the capacity of oceans, which already naturally absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. Processes such as sea electrolysis have been used for decades, though scaling ocean carbon removal technology has started only in the past few years. Sant said his experience as a cement chemist helped him consider ways to reduce carbon emissions.
"There was very little attention that was being paid truthfully to reducing the carbon intensity of cement production and concrete construction," Sant said. "The journey started with low-carbon cement and low-carbon concrete, and from there, it sort of went into a bunch of other things."
For startups that want to break into the industry and market their product's integrity, they must make carbon removal measurable. At the development plant in Los Angeles, Equaticengineers measure the machinery's ability to remove carbon and produce hydrogen. They then quantify carbon removal results. They also publish their findings in peer-reviewed scientific research papers.
Equatic uses minerals to neutralize the byproducts of the electrolyzer.
Stella Kalinina for Business Insider
Equatic is developing the world's largest ocean-based carbon removal plant in Singapore, a demonstration project in partnership with the country's National Water Agency. The plan for the new plant is to remove 4,000 tons of CO2 annually and create 300 kg of carbon-negative hydrogen a day, according to its website. If these projects succeed, Equatic intends to take its idea to a commercial scale.
For Climeworks, a Zurich carbon removal startup, scaling has taken place gradually over the past fifteen years. The company uses direct air capture technology at its plants to suck CO2 out of the air and then later mineralize it into a solid rock form and store it underground.
"What carbon removal can offer to businesses is making sure that CO2 in the atmosphere, or climate in general, is not a barrier to growth," Jan Wurzbacher, the CEO of Climeworks, said.
The carbon credits market has shortcomings
Carbon dioxide gets converted into carbonates, which can be safely put back into the ocean.
Stella Kalinina for Business Insider
While these companies plan to scale commercially, startups like Equatic sell carbon credits to businesses and individuals who want to reduce their carbon footprint. Two of Equatic's customers are Boeing and Stripe. Climeworks counts Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group, and Shopify as clients.
The carbon credits market is highly unregulated, dotted with stories of credits sold but followed by incomplete actions and scams. An investigation by The Washington Post found that some carbon credit ventures reaped profits from protected public lands in the Brazilian Amazon forests and failed to share profits with locals. Essentially, these ventures gave the impression that they would reduce emissions but used lands they had no rights to, possibly invalidating the credits they said they would offset for companies such as Netflix, Salesforce, and Boeing.
"Some 'cheaper' carbon credits that you can buy are not easily verifiable," said Indroneil Ganguly, an environmental and forests sciences professor at the University of Washington.
Critics of carbon credits argue that this system allows businesses to continue polluting. Some businesses, such as Occidental Petroleum, invest in carbon removal and use the process to extract more fossil fuels. While telling businesses to cut emissions would be ideal, Wurzbacher said that cutting them entirely or converting to more sustainable practices could be costly and not immediate.
Carbon removal can be expensive
Stella Kalinina for Business Insider
Even at the rapid scaling rate of these carbon removal startups, their emissions removal is only a small drop in the sea. In 2022 alone, the global aviation industry emitted 800 megatons of CO2. In comparison, Climework's first commercial plant in Iceland, called Orca, can remove 4,000 tons a year, the company says. Climeworks said its larger Mammoth plant would be able to remove 36,000 tons.
The biggest hurdle for carbon removal startups like Equatic and Climeworks is cost. A plus side of Equatic's sea electrolysis process is that it creates hydrogen, which can be used as a clean energy source and lower the technology's costs.
"So you push the price down, right, and that's what stimulates the market," Edward Sanders, the CEO of Equatic, said.
What's more, carbon removal is a voluntary purchase and an elastic good, meaning that it depends on the desire of individuals or businesses to participate, and the demand can shift significantly with price.
"The way in which we are going to get the necessary volumes is going to be at a price point they can accept and still manufacture the goods they are making and clear the services they do," Sanders said.
The cost to permanently remove 1 ton of CO2 right now is between $600-$1,000. Scaling up existing technology requires more laborers and building very specific machinery, Wurzbacher said. Both Climeworks and Equatic have received grants from the US Department of Energy, including a grant for Climeworks to subsidize its expansions in Louisiana and Texas.
Climeworks uses direct air capture to suck out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Climeworks
This year, Climeworks expanded beyond permanent carbon removal and began offering a new solutions branch of its business. If the direct air capture method is too expensive for customers, Climeworks finds a portfolio of other options they can use, such as reforestation and biomass storage.
The incoming Trump administration raises questions about the future of carbon removal and whether companies will be motivated to cut emissions.
Both Climeworks' and Equatic's respective CEOs said that while timelines and execution could change, these solutions still had bipartisan support and political momentum. Also, carbon removal itself is inherently adaptive.
"The nice thing about direct air capture," Wurzbacher said, "is that you can basically do it anywhere in the world and have your customers at a very different place."
Healthcare-focused AI startups are raising billions to help improve the US system.
AI can help streamline clinical documentation, drug research, and medical billing.
This article is part of "Trends in Healthcare," a series about the innovations and industry leaders shaping patient care.
The founder of Suki, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to automate healthcare documents, raised $70 million in funding from investors in a Series D round that was disclosed this past fall.
He said it really didn't take that much persuading: With an epidemic of stressed- and burned-out physicians, there was an obvious need for their AI software, he added.
"Most of the investor conversations over the last year and a half have been, 'Well, it looks like the market is here,'" said Punit Singh Soni, Suki's founder. "Are you going to be the winner or not?"
Suki sells an AI-powered assistant that takes notes during a conversation between patients and clinicians. The notes can be reviewed by the doctor and submitted as an electronic health record. This saves time on administrative tasks and allows physicians more time to take care of patients, a resource that's becoming increasingly limited among healthcare professionals.
Surveys have consistently found that doctors and other medical workers are burned out from working in an often overloaded, convoluted, and inefficient system. The US spent $4.8 trillion on healthcare in 2023, according to a January report from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The US also spends more per person than nearly all other developed nations, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Despite this, health outcomes were poorer, with Americans facing a lower life expectancy, higher rates of treatable and preventable excess deaths, and less efficient healthcare systems.
Cash-strapped hospitals and private practices have lagged behind the financial-services and telecommunications industries in applying newer technologies, but the healthcare industry is increasingly considering artificial intelligence as it contends with high labor costs and a lot of opportunities to automate routine tasks. The pandemic exacerbated these challenges with staffing shortages as overworked doctors and nurses quit the profession.
To make healthcare more efficient, AI startups like Suki, Zephyr AI, and Tennr have raised millions with vast promises, including making repetitive tasks like billing and note-taking easier, improving the accuracy of clinical diagnosis, and identifying the right patient population for emerging treatments.
But the challenges are vast. The healthcare industry's budget allocations for generative AI are trailing those of many other core industries, such as energy and materials, consumer goods, and retail. Clinical diagnosis will continue to require a human in the loop, so the process can't be fully automated. The healthcare industry is highly regulated, and quite often, venture capitalists will wait for clarity on laws from the federal government before aggressively pushing AI tech advancements forward.
A $370 billion bet on boosting the healthcare sector's productivity
The consulting firm McKinsey estimates that generative AI can boost productivity for the healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and medical-products industries by as much as $370 billion by accelerating drug research, making clinical documentation easier, speeding up medical billing, and helping doctors make diagnoses.
Some big funding rounds announced in 2024 highlight the diverse use cases for AI in the healthcare sector. They include $150 million raised by the clinical-documentation AI startup Abridge in February, the drug-discovery AI startup Xaira Therapeutics bringing in $1 billion before its launch in April, Atropos Health's $33 million Series B in May to help doctors analyze real-world evidence with generative AI, and the medical-billing-automation provider Candid Health raising $29 million in September.
Parth Desai, a partner at Flare Capital Partners, has steered investments into healthcare startups such as Photon Health and SmarterDx. He said that healthcare organizations had been dedicating more money to bolster their AI strategies, beginning in late 2022 and accelerating through 2024. That's boosting demand for the tools these startups are developing. There's also less pressure to immediately prove a return on investment, which budget-conscious health systems have closely monitored in the past when allocating dollars for technology.
"The thing that we're really studying before making an investment decision is: Do budgets exist today to pay for this technology?" Desai told Business Insider. "Or are they going to exist in a large-enough fashion in the next five to 10 years to support this technology?"
Candid Health and Akasa aim to cut costs and automate medical billing
One area of particular promise has been medical billing, which could benefit from large language model automation. An LLM could, for example, analyze a large volume of claims in a client's system and accurately match them with insurers' unique billing codes, a process required for repayment to a physician for their services. Hospitals have traditionally relied on human medical coders to hunt down reimbursements from insurers.
"The software used to do billing was built a long time ago and basically wasn't kept up to date," Nick Perry, a cofounder and the CEO of Candid Health, said.
Malinka Walaliyadde, the CEO of Akasa — another medical-billing-focused AI startup — said the company builds customized LLMs for each healthcare institution it serves. Typically, the aim for these LLMs is to lower costs by lessening the reliance on human medical coders. This often reduces errors in billing and speeds up repayment cycles.
"We looked at what are the biggest pain points for health systems," Walaliyadde told BI. He said that Akasa's focus is on developing LLM products for medical coding and simplifying prior authorization, a process that requires approval from a health-plan provider before a patient can receive a treatment. "Those are the ones where you could really move the needle," Walaliyadde said.
AI for health screenings
George Tomeski, the founder of Helfie AI, is in the middle of pitching investors to raise as much as $200 million in a new round of funding that he hopes to close by the first half of 2025.
Tomeski said the funding would help Helfie scale as it exits beta testing for the company's app. The app, also called Helfie, uses a smartphone camera to do medical "checks" that screen for illnesses including COVID-19, tuberculosis, and certain skin conditions.
"We're targeting all the health conditions that lead to avoidable mortality," Tomeski said, adding that the app focuses on respiratory and cardiovascular conditions. The intention is for these checks —which can cost as low as $0.20 a person per screen — to serve as a form of preventive care and as an incentive to go see a doctor in person.
While some funding is going toward sales and marketing, talent acquisition, and ensuring adherence to regulations around privacy and healthcare data, a large chunk is still being allocated to product development as AI tech advances quickly.
Dr. Brigham Hyde, a cofounder and the CEO of Atropos Health, said his latest funding announcement, in May, was timed to coincide with the geared-up launch of ChatRWD, an AI copilot that can answer doctors' questions and quickly churn out published studies based on healthcare data. Hyde said he's keen to bring in big partners this time, including the pharmaceutical giant Merck and the medical-supplies and equipment maker McKesson.
But Hyde also had to show some restraint. He said that when Atropos Health moved forward with its Series B rounds, dozens of venture capitalists expressed interest in leading the round. The company was offered up to $100 million but took only one-third of that amount.
"I don't always think that's a good idea," Hyde told BI. "As a founder, you want to raise the right amount of money for your business and for the stage you're at."
It may be tempting to take more, as many healthcare AI startups — a vast majority still in the seed and early-stage funding rounds — are racing to outmaneuver rivals. Even if the technology is right, it has to get past regulatory approvals and persuade cautious hospitals and health systems to open up their wallets.
"You can build as much product as you want, but you can never build a market," Soni of Suki said. "It shows up, or it doesn't show up."
He's the CEO and cofounder of Clockwise, which aims to help people manage their work calendars so they have more time to get things done — and not just sit in meetings.
Earlier this year, in a bid to be more efficient, he started using an artificial-intelligence tool called Granola to help him take notes in meetings and summarize takeaways and to-dos.
The result for Martin is time saved and "actually pretty damn good notes," he told Business Insider.
Efforts to reduce the sting of meetings are perhaps as old as meetings themselves. Yet the imperative can feel more urgent thanks to our propensity, hardened during the pandemic, to wedge more gatherings into our calendars.
Now, thanks to AI, we might soon have fewer work meetings — or at least attend fewer. It's likely, according to execs leading the development of the technology, that corpulent calendars will be no match for AI-powered notetaking apps capable of being everywhere all at once.
And AI meeting bots won't serve just as digital scribes. They'll resemble all-knowing, indefatigable assistants able to take on tasks like answering questions on our behalf, interviewing job candidates, and training workers, execs told BI.
The boss' avatar
Sam Liang generally has as many as 40 meetings a week.
It's not practical for him to attend each one, so sometimes he sends an AI stand-in. This is easy enough for Liang since he's the CEO and cofounder of Otter, an app that records audio from meetings and produces a real-time transcript using AI.
Liang told BI he uses Otter to forgo some meetings. He then reads the summaries or listens to the recording. Liang expects more leaders will soon do this.
He estimated that perhaps 20% of C-level executives would use AI avatars to attend routine meetings on their behalf by the end of 2025.
In his case, Liang has an avatar that acts like a "personalized agent." Otter trained the AI using seven years' worth of Liang's meetings, along with emails and some Google docs he wrote on topics like product principles, Otter's strategies, and why the company does certain things.
"When people ask me those questions, my avatar can answer probably 90% of those," Liang said.
This knowledge can flow to new hires at Otter. Liang said his AI avatar could use what he's said and written to explain his vision for the company, its strategies, and its origin, for example.
A view of the future
The ramifications of having an ever-present AI available to document our workdays — and beyond — will be similar in scale to that of the introduction of the internet, said Terry Sejnowski, a distinguished professor at the University of California, San Diego, who's a neuroscientist and the author of the book "ChatGPT and the Future of AI."
"Nobody predicted the impact it was going to have on our lives," Sejnowski said. "Same thing here. It's going to take decades."
He said keeping track of meetings and other interactions would go well beyond capturing audio or video. Sejnowski sits on the scientific advisory committee for Softeye, a startup developing glasses intended to work with a smartphone to serve as an AI assistant. Similar attempts have been made, of course. Remember Google Glass?
Ray-Ban Meta glasses allow users to take photos and videos. In September, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said updates to the glasses aimed to let users translate certain languages, scan QR codes, and capture images of what they've seen so they can refer to them later when, for example, they need to buy something.
Softeye's plan, Sejnowski said, is to have glasses that constantly recognize objects and people around the wearer and provide related information. He said they would also take snapshots and store them, along with the time they were taken. That would make it possible, he said, to reconstruct where a user was — and rely on the AI assistant.
"You can ask it questions," Sejnowski said. "Did I promise anything to this person?"
Highlight reels of meetings
Richard White, like so many other desk workers, found himself stuck on endless Zoom calls during the pandemic.
He found it frustrating to take notes, jump to another call, and have little time to clean up his takeaways in between. Plus, White said, even good notes weren't always reliable after too long.
"Do you really remember what was important?" he said.
Four years ago, White started Fathom, a company that uses AI to capture video and generate notes from meetings.
People don't necessarily want a transcript, he said, though it's often necessary for AI to work its meeting magic — including generating notes, making to-do lists, and updating data on customer-relationship management.
White said that what most meeting-goers are after, aside from a list of action items, is a better recall of the ephemeral and unstructured information that's often delivered at these gatherings. Showing up, White said, is often the only way to access it.
He said AI notetakers would be able to produce highlight reels of key meeting moments. The goal, White said, would be to reduce "meeting inflation" by enabling fewer people to attend them while maintaining information flow.
"You'll have an AI that actually goes out and listens to every meeting in your org and comes back and tells you, 'Here's the five minutes of content you should pay attention to today,'" White said.
White said an accessible record of all but the most sensitive meetings within an organization could serve as a basis for identifying gaps in training or generating feedback. That's in part because AI can now accurately discern sentiment and tone — something that's become possible only in the past six months to a year, he said.
Beyond that, he said, AI meeting bots will be able to act on ideas. So if someone in a meeting proposes creating a document, the AI would have a draft ready soon after.
White doesn't expect we'll necessarily each have individual bots that go to meetings on our behalf. He said that would quickly result in meetings swimming with AI avatars.
The best approach, White said, would be to use a "federated" system where all the meetings are accessible. That way, anyone not in the meeting could access the content through a personal agent that lives in the cloud, he said.
White said bosses could ask AI for instances in which a meeting was positive or when participants grew frustrated. A search might take the form of, "Give me a pricing discussion that didn't go well," he said. That goes well beyond parsing a transcript for the word "price," he added.
"The tech is finally there, and it's really good," he said.
An interview with AI
AI could also help document meetings with prospective employees, said Alan Price, the global head of talent acquisition at Deel, a global human resources company that helps employers hire abroad. Price told BI that Deel had begun using AI meeting tools to reduce the time and personnel needed to hire for roles like customer service.
That's important because when Deel posts that type of job, Price said, the company might soon have some 4,000 applications. So Deel uses an AI bot to conduct an initial interview with promising candidates. Then, a recruiter can evaluate the summary of the interview and, if necessary, review the audio and video to determine whether the candidate should move on to an interview with a person.
Price said that rather than spending 30 minutes on a single interview, a recruiter could review five or six interview summaries in that same time.
That bump in efficiency has enabled a single recruiter to hire 30 to 35 candidates within about two weeks, he said.
"The recruiter makes the decision," Price said, "but it's streamlined."
But the impact of AI on employment is complex and far-reaching. Some roles may become obsolete; others may be augmented or even created by AI. Workers are simultaneously experiencing anxiety, doubt, and excitement. What new skills will I need to develop? How can I stay relevant? And importantly, is my organization prepared for this AI-driven future?
Whether employees can trust their organization's leaders to navigate these opportunities is a pivotal question, said Brian Solis, the head of global innovation at ServiceNow, a cloud-based automation platform, and author of the book "Mindshift: Transform Leadership, Drive Innovation, and Reshape the Future."He said that while many executives recognize AI's promise in increasing efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, they often fail to grasp the technology's profound potential.
"Leaders talk about the new normal or the next normal, but then they natively snap back to business as usual," Solis said. "It's the leaders who explore and ask: 'What if? Who will unlock entirely new ways of working?'"
Brian Solis is the head of global innovation at ServiceNow.
Photo Courtesy of Brian Solis
Workers themselves have a responsibility to learn and grow, he added. They need to experiment with new technologies both in and outside work and challenge themselves to push beyond their comfort zones. "You need to literally rewire your brain," he said. "If you're waiting for someone to tell you what to do, you're on the wrong side of innovation."
'Workers need to be proactive'
Despite the breathless headlines about AI changing everything about the way we work, the reality is more mundane.
In a quarterly Gallup survey of American workers conducted in May, seven in 10 respondents said they never used AI in their jobs, and only one in 10 said they used it regularly. The survey used a random sample of 21,543 working adults. Among those who said they did use AI, the most common applications included generating ideas, consolidating information, and automating basic tasks.
Still, investment in AI continues to surge. A report from IDC predicted that global spending would reach $632 billion by 2028, more than double what it is now, covering AI apps, infrastructure, and related services.
Companies are investing in AI to avoid falling behind, said Mansour Javidan, an expert in digital transformation and the executive director of the Najafi Global Mindset Institute at Arizona State's Thunderbird School of Global Management. "There's a lot of hype driven by board expectations, and that's led to a herd mentality to move quickly," he said. "No CEO is going to look bad by investing in AI right now."
Mansour Javidan is the executive director of the Najafi Global Mindset Institute.
Photo Courtesy of Mansour Javidan
Workers, meanwhile, are caught between uncertainty and anticipation. "There's a disconnect," Javidan said. "At the highest levels of the organization, there's a lot of excitement about AI. But among lower- and midlevel employees, there's a good deal of anxiety and ambiguity because there's no clear path."
But "workers mustn't rely on senior executives and hope things will turn out rosy," he said.
Javidan advises employees to seize development opportunities within their organizations and seek out online courses. Many top universities, including MIT and Stanford, provide free classes and workshops to help people build their skills. Grassroots and community-based learning groups, such as Women Defining AI, can be valuable resources.
"Workers need to be proactive and educate themselves," he said.
AI as a strategic collaborator
Beyond formal training and coursework, getting comfortable with AI requires a fundamental mindset shift, experts say.
"We were born with skills like curiosity, wonder, and imagination, but we often unlearned these in schools," Solis said. "The aim with AI should not be to generate expected answers or reinforce existing thinking but to challenge our conventions."
Solis said he uses AI as a tool for perspective taking, asking it to generate responses from the personas of the Apple founder Steve Jobs and Walt Disney. This approach helps him identify blind spots, explore alternative viewpoints, and seek inspiration. "They're my personal coaches," he said.
Molly Sands, the head of the teamwork lab at the software company Atlassian, which studies teamwork in the age of AI and distributed work, recommends viewing AI as a creative partner, not just a task-completion machine. "The people who are saving the most time and seeing the biggest benefits are those who see AI as a strategic collaborator," she said.
Molly Sands is the head of the teamwork lab at Atlassian.
Photo Courtesy of Molly Sands
This involves engaging with AI through dynamic, iterative conversations — much like working with a team of experts, she said. A new study by researchers at the MIT Sloan School of Management backed this up, finding that human-AI teams showed the most promise in creative tasks like generating content and imagery and translating software code.
"A lot of people use it for one or two use cases, but the growth we're going to see in the next year or two is the people who think about it more ubiquitously," Sands said. "Agents will be a key driver of this."
Her team at Atlassian, for example, has developed a custom agent designed to help employees write more clearly. Essentially, she said, workers "word-vomit" into the agent with information about their audience, context, and key details. The agent then offers up a tailored draft in the worker's voice.
"Our workdays are consumed by writing emails, creating slide decks, and other routine tasks," Sands said. "If AI can take on some of this load — freeing us up for creative thinking and solving meaty problems — the better off we'll be."
The value of soft skills
Learning how to work with AI is imperative for most workers, but it's important to recognize that human skills remain essential.
After all, said Hakan Ozcelik, a professor of management at California State University, Sacramento, the value of human workers lies in their cognitive, behavioral, and emotional abilities. "There are all sorts of skills that AI doesn't have yet, and maybe never will," he said.
"Humans are inherently social beings, constantly interacting with customers, colleagues, competitors, and their physical environment," Ozcelik said. "These interpersonal skills are invaluable assets for any organization."
Hakan Ozcelik is a professor of management at California State University, Sacramento.
Photo Courtesy of Hakan Ozcelik
While AI can process information and perform repetitive functions with speed and accuracy, it lacks the soft skills necessary for effective communication and strategic decision-making. A report by Cornerstone, a skills-development platform, said that while generative-AI-related job postings had risen 411% since 2023, the demand for soft skills such as leadership, communication, and emotional intelligence outpaced digital skills by 2.4 times in North America and 2.9 times in Europe.
This is why Ozcelik advises employees to embark on what he calls "a process of professional soul-searching." Closely analyze your daily activities to determine your unique contributions and core competencies that cannot be outsourced, he said: "Dissect your work and look at what you offer your organization in a given day or a week."
Also, identify areas where AI could offer assistance. For example, teachers may realize that while AI can handle grading for grammar and syntax, they should focus on evaluating students' ideas and nurturing creativity. Similarly, healthcare professionals can leverage AI for administrative tasks or data analysis while dedicating more quality time to patients.
In an AI-driven world, the need for human skills will not change; instead, these skills will become even more vital as workers learn to collaborate effectively with technology, Ozcelik said.
"It's about what you contribute and the value you bring," he said.
Hospitality companies like Ritz-Carlton, Aman, and Four Seasons have expanded their portfolios with private jet tours and cruise ships, as seen in a Four Seasons rendering.
Four Seasons; Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
Four Seasons, Aman, and Ritz-Carlton are expanding their portfolios with private jet tours and cruises.
The offerings are part of a strategy to keep enticing high-paying customers in 2025 and beyond.
This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.
If you want to relax at a hotel, sip mai tais on a cruise, or see the world by private jet, you soon won't have to look further than your favorite luxury hotel brand.
Just don't refer to their vessels as "cruise ships." They'd rather you call them yachts.
Over the past few years, high-end hospitality companies such as Ritz-Carlton, Aman, and Four Seasons have expanded their portfolios to sea or air travel in a bid to keep high-paying customers within their networks.
After all, if you loved your Ritz-Carlton resort experience, wouldn't you be more inclined to try the at-sea version — even if you've never cruised before?
Four Seasons and Aman are creating an in-house vacation network
TCS World Travel operates Four Seasons' private jet tours, shown in a rendering.
Four Seasons
Aman and Four Seasons are in several markets — hotels, residential, retail, and travel "experiences" like private jet tours.
Alejandro Reynal, Four Seasons' president and CEO, told Business Insider that hotels and resorts accounted for about 80% of the company's revenue. Extracurriculars like its jet tours and coming ship then create a "halo effect" for the brand — an extension of its core business and another way to maintain relationships with loyal customers.
Both companies operate their multiweek group jet trips using third-party specialists. Four Seasons' launched in 2015 and uses a 48-seat Airbus A321LRneo. Aman's took flight two years prior, offering guests a sleek 19-seat loungelike aircraft (often an Airbus ACJ319).
Both include multicountry itineraries and overnight stays at their respective properties, creating a dream vacation for Four Seasons or Aman megafans.
Four Seasons' jet has a lounge area.
Courtesy of Four Seasons
For some travelers, these trips mark their first time staying at one of the luxe properties. But once they're in, they're hooked, Ben Trodd, Aman's COO, said.
"They will often come back and stay at our hotels and resorts individually," Trodd told BI in an email.
Four Seasons hosted eight jet trips in 2024. Almost all sold out, Reynal said, adding that the company was considering additional itineraries with varying aircraft or lengths (several of its 2025 tours already have a waitlist).
Despite their steady successes, both companies don't plan to go all in on private jets. Rather, they're turning their extra attention and resources to the friendly seas.
Ritz-Carlton is leading the hotel-to-cruise pipeline
The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection launched its first ship, Evrima, in 2022.
Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection
In recent years, a flurry of hospitality companies announced their cruises — often in the form of yacht tours — in close succession: Ritz-Carlton in 2017, Aman in 2021, and Four Seasons in 2022.
It's a great time to be in the cruise business. Throughout 2024, industry giants such as Carnival and Norwegian reported record revenues and bookings.
These luxury cruises aren't anything like what you'll find on massive boats from mass-market cruise lines.
A rendering of Evrima's amenities, which include a marina that opens onto the water.
Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection
It was a success, with only a few availabilities during its inaugural year.
The 149-suite vessel is 623 feet long, a far cry from Royal Caribbean's almost 2,000-foot-long vessels. It also has a yachtlike feel with an almost 1-to-1 guest-to-staff ratio, attracting travelers who might not have been interested in traditional cruises.
"There's been a ton of buzz about how they knocked it out of the park," Jackie Roth, a Scott Dunn Private travel manager, told BI. Once concerned, she now believes the Yacht Collection has "elevated" Ritz-Carlton's brand, she said.
The company expects to sail its third ship in 2025.
By then, Four Seasons will still be a year from its vessel's planned launch.
Four Seasons' and Aman's 'floating resorts'
Four Seasons' ship, shown in a rendering, is scheduled to launch in 2026.
Four Seasons
In 2026, Four Seasons plans to expand its "experienced-based business" beyond private jets with a 95-suite ship.
Reynal said bookings were already "very successful," with about two-thirds coming from the company's repeat customers.
"How do we create this luxury ecosystem around the brand, and which businesses do we need or don't need to be in?" the Four Seasons CEO said. "People were very favorable for us to pursue a Four Seasons experience at sea, and it has proven right."
Aman offers at-sea vacations with Amandira, a traditional five-cabin luxury yacht.
Its next vessel, set to launch in 2027, is planned to be more like a 600-foot-long cruise ship, flexing 10 times as many cabins.
Aman's ship, shown in a rendering, is scheduled to launch in 2027.
Aman
Loyalty to the brand — not cruises — is key for these projects.
"People will follow Four Seasons wherever they go and whenever they launch a new experience," Roth said.
Other travel agents said they'd already received requests for the coming floating resort.
"We are led by the demand of our guests, who often call for us to expand into certain categories," Trodd, Aman's COO, said. "Our customers will travel because it's Aman first and the destination as a second consideration."
Potential road (or sea) blocks
Four Seasons says the Funnel Suite, shown in a rendering, will have upscale amenities like a private elevator.
Four Seasons
"The luxury cruise market is niche but very competitive," Patrick Scholes, a lodging and leisure research analyst at Truist Securities, told BI. "Operationally, it's not easy. The risk and complexities are far greater than a land-based hotel."
Plus, not every wealthy traveler loves cruises, especially if their only experience is with the stereotypical attraction-filled, crowded megaships.
To overcome this, Four Seasons and Aman could simply continue doing what they do best — creating an ultraluxury experience.
"Customers are going to expect six-star service, and you better get it right," Scholes said.
Four Seasons' ship won't be like other companies' megaships.
Four Seasons
Four Seasons' ship will be no Carnival cruise. According to its CEO, it won't even resemble some of the traditional industry's smaller luxury ships.
Renderings promise a sleek and luxurious vessel. On board, guests are planned to have 11 upcharged restaurants, a marina that opens onto the water,andcabins up to almost 10,000 square feet, some with au pairs and security personnel.
Aman, for its part, has remained mum about details. Its renderings also flex a yachtlike look. And as with its on-land properties, Trodd said the vessel would provide privacy, space, and a "restorative" experience.
When Four Seasons' and Aman's ships join Ritz-Carlton's, there will be no need to go to airlines for flights or cruise lines for cruises.
Just stay loyal to your favorite hospitality company, as they would want.
Investment tactics often require big buy-ins and high fees.
New tech is lowering the price of entry in fields like direct indexing and private markets.
This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.
Investing like a billionaire comes with a high price tag. But thanks to technology, the barriers to these elite opportunities are starting to crumble.
Consider direct indexing, a strategy favored by the rich to lower taxes by selling underperforming stocks and using the losses to offset other gains. These personalized portfolios used to be out of reach of the merely affluent, requiring steep account minimums. Over the past five years, direct indexing has exploded as technological advancements have made it worthwhile for wealth managers to offer the services to Main Street customers. The account minimum for Fidelity's FidFolios, for example, is only $5,000.
"Direct indexing has become accessible at a different level of wealth than it has been in the past," said Ranjit Kapila, the copresident and chief operating officer of Parametric. "That wouldn't have been available or possible without the technology trends we've had to be able to do this level of computation at scale in a cost-efficient manner."
Parametric, the pioneer of direct indexing, is also moving downstream. By adopting fractional-share investing, Parametric lowered the minimum for its core product to $100,000 from $250,000. The firm plans to offer a direct-indexing product with fewer customization features for $25,000 in 2025.
Private markets face steeper hurdles. This opaque field was traditionally reserved for deep-pocketed investors like pension funds and ultrarich individuals. But now investors have more access to financial results for funds and privately held companies as data providers race to meet their needs. Machine learning and AI have made it easier for these firms to extract and analyze data.
BlackRock views this data as the great equalizer and has grand ambitions of indexing these opaque private markets. The asset-management giant agreed this summer to acquire the data powerhouse Preqin for $3.2 billion.
"We anticipate indexes and data will be important to future drivers of the democratization of all alternatives," BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said on a conference call. "And this acquisition is the unlock."
Leon Sinclair, Preqin's executive vice president, argued that with the number of public companies dwindling, it's imperative for mass-affluent investors to get better access to private markets.
"Clearly there's more, deeper, better sources of funding for private companies that could stay private for longer," Sinclair said. "I think it's fair that the mass affluent can — in the right way — be brought along on that journey to get exposure to that part of the mosaic earlier."
Investing in automation for a competitive edge
Kapila described these technological developments as part of a trend in wealth management to capture customers before they make it big.
"There's a desire by financial advisors to try and engage investors earlier in their wealth-accumulation cycle," Kapila said.
Parametric, acquired by Morgan Stanley in 2021, operates in a competitive arena. Thanks to a wave of similar acquisitions, Parametric faces well-capitalized rivals such as BlackRock's Aperio and Franklin Templeton's Canvas. Industry stalwarts like Fidelity and upstarts like Envestnet also want a piece of the action.
Kapila said the need to compete on scale and fees required Parametric's technology to be as efficient as possible.
"It'll be harder," he said. "We have to do many, many more accounts to really drive growth in assets, etc. But those challenges are exciting to me as a technologist."
To meet that need, Kapila is pushing Parametric to develop more automated products, such as Radius, which launched this year. Radius constructs equity and fixed-income portfolios and runs simulations to identify the best selections for portfolio managers. He plans to launch more cloud-native tools, which are easier to scale and manage, for other asset classes in 2025 and 2026. Parametric is also piloting generative-AI tools to onboard accounts more efficiently.
Clients' expectations are also rising. There's demand for Parametric's tax benefits but with actively managed strategies rather than indexes, he said, spurring partnerships with asset managers.
Parametric recently launched an offering that allows customers to pick equities off strategies from the financial-advisory and asset-management firm Lazard.
To stay ahead of the curve, Preqin is developing more sophisticated products. Last year, the UK firm launched an Actionability Signal that uses machine learning to identify private companies likely to be open for investment.
"The sole focus on public information for certain tasks around valuation and risk management are not really going to be the way that people do this," Sinclair said. "We're moving much more to a world where real proprietary private information at the asset level, which is transactionally oriented, is available to people."
In June, his division launched a data tool that analyzes $4.8 trillion worth of deals across 6,500 funds. This database can be used in a slew of ways, from backing up valuations in negotiations to identifying which financial factors, such as revenue growth or debt paydown, contributed the most value to a successful deal.
With the rise of generative AI, Sinclair expects that users will be able to interpret data with more ease using natural language commands.
"I think you'll see that be more prominent across the industry where people expect to interact with large data sets in really natural common ways," he said. "We think all that will probably start to be visible over the coming years."
Tech is the first step to narrowing education gaps
On average, retail investors allocate just 5% of their portfolios to alternative investments. If BlackRock successfully indexes private markets, it could go a long way toward boosting that percentage.
However, Sinclair said more work is required to help mass affluent investors feel comfortable investing in private markets. As someone who grew up working class and was only introduced to finance in college, he knows there is an education gap to overcome.
"To get Joe Bloggs very excited and comfortable with committing capital, they need to be able to understand what the different basis of those returns are," Sinclair said.
He added: "I think it's in the industry's interest to enable those new sources of capital, to bridge the gap in understanding, to bridge the gap in analytics, to bridge the gap in frequency of reporting, to make that an easier journey for people to go on."
Advertising took over the streaming-TV experience this year, and it'll only get bigger next year.
Interactive ads that try to get viewers to shop or take other actions are gaining traction.
This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.
It's back to the future in Hollywood.
Streaming is starting to look like the TV days of old. Entertainment for the masses is back. Bundles are making it easier to consolidate subscriptions.
And ads seem to be everywhere.
Netflix, Disney+, and Max — which all started ad-free — now have cheaper ad-supported tiers. Amazon turned on ads in Prime Video this year, making advertising de facto for more than 100 million viewers in the US in one fell swoop.
According to the analytics firm Antenna, these cheaper versions are gaining traction with viewers, too. In May, most new paying subscribers to five major streamers were choosing ad-supported tiers — a year earlier, this was true for only two streamers.
On Disney's latest earnings call, execs said that about 60% of new subscribers in the US were opting for its ad-supported tier, which accounted for 37% of its total US subscribers.
Ad-supported TV viewing also is on the rise through free services like Fox's Tubi, Paramount's Pluto TV, and The Roku Channel. According to Nielsen, those services plus YouTube made up 14.8% of viewing in July, up from 12.5% a year earlier.
"What's old is new again," said Jonathan Miller, a veteran media executive and chief executive of Integrated Media Co., which invests in digital media.
Miller sees ad tiers as a validation of the dual revenue streams that long supported cable. "Advertising and subscriptions have always been a successful model," he said.
Streaming ads are here to stay because — along with bundling, cheaper programming, and password-sharing crackdowns — they're one of the ways streamers can help make themselves sustainable.
Ads have also begun to directly shape the content streamers offer. Streamers are showing more sports and other live programming because of the big audiences and advertisers they attract.
For example, Netflix's highly anticipated Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight on November 15 was a win for the streamer despite some tech glitches. Why? Because it showed Netflix's ability to draw huge audiences at once; it said that as many as 60 million households tuned in. That large audience bodes well for Netflix's NFL games on Christmas and its live WWE programming set to debut in January.
Viewers' tolerance for ads will be increasingly tested
Streamers that dipped a toe in the ad space are looking to wade in.
The ad load — or ad volume per hour of entertainment — has crept up over the past year, according to the measurement firm MediaRadar. There was an average of six minutes of ads per hour in September across eight leading ad-supported streamers, up by 9% from January 2023, when Netflix and Disney had just entered the ad-supported game. That's still far lower than cable, where ad loads can push an eye-watering 15 minutes or more an hour. Viewers are also more likely to tolerate ads in live sports because people are used to them being part of that content.
Ryan Fitzpatrick, Charissa Thompson, and Tony Gonzalez host Amazon Prime Video's "Thursday Night Football."
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for Amazon
Amazon and Warner Bros. Discovery recently said they'd start showing more ads to their streaming viewers in 2025, while emphasizing that their ad loads were lower than their competitors.
"On the ad-load side, we are light," WBD's streaming chief, JB Perrette, said of the streamer Max during the company's third-quarter earnings call. "We have a very light ad load compared to everyone else in the market, so there's room to grow on the capacity side."
The industry consensus is that streaming ad loads won't become a throwback to cable, though — at least not anytime soon.
For one thing, it's a buyer's market. Amazon flooded the market with ad inventory, which depressed ad prices for everyone. Streamers aren't incentivized to add too much more ad inventory because it'll just drive the price down more. Some advertisers are also wary of annoying viewers who are still getting used to seeing ads in streaming.
"The supply has grown significantly over the last few years," said Maureen Bosetti, the chief investment officer for Mediabrands. "It's created a marketplace for marketers."
Makers of streaming video ads are also becoming more ambitious. It's not enough for an ad to be seen — they'll try to get viewers to take action, whether by clicking a QR code or dropping a featured product in their shopping cart. These interactive ads could get higher price tags at a time when streaming ad prices have come down.
"As a consumer, I'm seeing more of them," Jessica Brown, a managing director of digital investment at GroupM, said of interactive streaming ads. "We're getting more pitches from the streaming partners. You can measure success in a different way."
Warner Bros. Discovery recently rolled out two such formats. "Shop with Max" identifies items in TV shows and films and matches them with relevant advertiser products that viewers can shop while they watch. "Moments" uses AI to figure out themes, sentiments, and on-screen elements that line up tonally with the advertiser's message.
Fubo recently announced four ad formats, including ones that show trivia questions or polls and product carousels. Fubo said such ads made people 47% more likely to purchase something compared with standard video ads.
"A big objective we have is to make a majority of ads have some form of interactive or engaging feature," Krishan Bhatia, an NBCUniversal exec who was hired by Amazon to lead its Prime Video ads push, said at a recent event. "What brands love about it is not just the fact that you generate a potential purchase off it but people are spending more time with your brands."
From Left: Cathy Engelbert, Leon Sinclair, Jensen Huang, Fei Fei Li, and Arthur Sadoun
Tom Williams/Getty Images; Greg Sandoval; Alyssa Powell/BI
Innovation and business go hand in hand — and that's constantly on enterprise leaders' minds, regardless of their industry.
Executives must understand how technological advancements, systemic barriers, and generational shifts are affecting their growth, then strategize accordingly.
Business Insider's annual list of people transforming business highlights these leaders who work in media, finance, technology, transportation, and labor.
The WNBA's first female commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, is spearheading a transformation in the sports sector with her focus on fan engagement and equity among players. In finance, Leon Sinclair is leveraging data and analytics to reshape the world of alternative investments at Preqin, where he's an executive vice president. Mike Hopkins, the head of Amazon's Prime Video and MGM Studios, is forging an ad-focused entertainment-business strategy that could redefine how content is made and consumed in the digital age.
Below, in alphabetical order by first name, are the 10 business leaders our reporters and editors credit with shaking up and remolding their industries.
Anna-Lisa Miller, executive director of the KKR-cofounded nonprofit Ownership Works
Ownership Works
Employers often say they prefer to hire employees who act like owners. As the executive director of the nonprofit Ownership Works, Miller aims to get employers to act on that ethos.
"It's not credible to ask employees to feel, think, and act like owners if you don't give them a financial ownership stake," Miller said.
Since its founding in 2021, Ownership Works and its corporate partners have shared $570 million in wealth across six companies and worked with more than 160,000 workers at 113 companies.
One way Miller seeks to convince business owners of the merits of employee shareholding is by showing them how it can improve the bottom line. She pointed to a time an employee in an Ownership Works company helped their employer save money by replacing a component costing $100 with a 3D printed part that cost just a few dollars.
"They often know where the company is losing money or making a mistake or where things could be better," Miller said. "And they often have ideas for how to fix the problem. It's just nobody ever asked them to."
Miller's career in employee ownership grew out of an interest in community development. Early in her career she helped a nonprofit in Hawaii create farming cooperatives, and she worked with another nonprofit to convert small businesses into worker cooperatives.
Miller said she wanted to find scale, so she approached Pete Stavros, KKR's cohead of private equity. Stavros first experimented with employee ownership at a garage-door manufacturer in 2015, leading to some of KKR's best results. He was looking to spread that model further.
After announcing the creation of Ownership Works with a $10 million donation, Stavros hired Miller as his first employee. Now it's her job to help the company's 25 private-equity partners, including KKR and Apollo, institute plans in their portfolios.
She does this in part by partnering with accountants, lawyers, and professional-services firms to make it easier to create these plans, acting as an employee-ownership consultancy. The organization also collects and shares metrics of success, such as hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to employees and decreasing turnover and higher profits at companies with employee ownership.
She's helping the nonprofit expand beyond private equity. Ownership Works recently worked with the cold-storage company Lineage to give $100 million in IPO proceeds to its employees and create a stock-ownership plan.
Miller believes that expanding employee ownership could significantly narrow the wealth gap and reduce financial insecurity.
Arthur Sadoun, CEO of Publicis Groupe
Publicis Groupe
Sadoun said he mostly received pushback when, in 2017, he told creative agencies that the future of creativity was commerce and AI.
"It's funny when you look at what happened now," Sadoun, the chief executive of the French advertising giant Publicis Groupe, told BI.
Back then, Sadoun faced a daunting task. He had just taken over as the third-ever leader of the 91-year-old company, home to the storied agencies Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Publicis Conseil, which had created iconic advertising like the Marlboro Man, Tony the Tiger, and "Labour Isn't Working."
But Publicis was languishing behind its competitors having lost key clients like McDonald's. Financial growth was anemic.
Sadoun embarked on a plan to turn Publicis from a communications partner to a company that could help clients transform their businesses. He sought to break down silos between Publicis' various agencies and help them retool around a bet on "personalization at scale," advanced by the biggest acquisition in its history: the 2019 purchase of the data marketing firm Epsilon for $4.4 billion.
"The financial market did not like that," Sadoun said.
Neither did many of Publicis' own employees, particularly the Don Draper-esque creatives who were maddened that an outsize focus on data and programmatic ads meant the Parisian company would lose its je ne sais quoi. Competitors mocked Publicis' multimillion-dollar investment in creating an AI platform.
Sadoun and Publicis are having the last laugh.
At about $27 billion, Publicis' market capitalization is the largest of any individual advertising-agency holding company. It's forecast to end the year with the largest annual revenue, too, with the combination of its data and media offerings representing about half of its sales. While 2024 was a cause for celebration, it faces challenges ahead: This month, its rival Omnicom announced a deal to acquire Interpublic Group that would create the largest ad-agency network.
Sadoun credits his leadership team and employees for Publicis' turnaround. He has a more personal hope for his own legacy.
In 2022, Sadoun had an operation to remove a tumor in his neck that turned out to be cancerous. Unusually for the CEO of a public company, he disclosed his diagnosis before he underwent treatment: grueling rounds of chemo and radiotherapy that would affect the jet-setting executive's ability to travel. He was flooded with messages revealing that many people were hiding their chronic illnesses from their employers and colleagues.
The following year, Sadoun helped launch the Working with Cancer Pledge, which encourages companies to commit to offering more recovery-focused working environments. More than 600 companies have signed up, and the initiative was promoted with a splashy Super Bowl ad bought and created by Publicis last year.
"My one mission in life now, apart from my family, is to erase the stigma of cancer in the workplace," Sadoun said.
Cathy Engelbert, commissioner of the WNBA
WNBA
2024 was a transformative year for the WNBA. It said that attendance increased by nearly 50% year over year and that ratings on ESPN were up by 170% from last season, fueled in part by its rookie stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Sponsorship deals have boomed, bringing in advertisers newer to the sports world like Bumble and Skims.
Presiding over its astronomical growth is Engelbert, a former Deloitte CEO who became the league's commissioner in 2019.
The league has been planting the seeds of its growth for a while. It gained attention by playing during the pandemic in a bubble. It raised $75 million from investors, allowing it to invest in marketing and fan engagement. And it landed sponsorships on its own, separate from the NBA. External factors like the rise of "name, image, and likeness" deals and social media also helped draw attention to the sport.
"The thing that was overlooked is that Rome wasn't built in a day," Engelbert told BI. "We didn't do this overnight." One emphasis was on improving the fan experience by meeting spectators where they were, such as updating the app to look more like TikTok, Engelbert said.
The WBNA is a big brand now, and with its growth has come scrutiny. Engelbert took heat when she didn't directly condemn threatening comments on social media toward players but likened the situation to a rivalry between male players in the 1970s. She later apologized, promising to do better.
"We've been debriefing around a lot of things that happened this year," Engelbert told BI, adding that the league was looking at beefing up security and mental-health resources. "The vitriol our players, me, we all get, we're going to try to tackle that multidimensionally."
Engelbert also wants to talk about the flip side.
"There's a huge negative to all the vitriol, but there's also people caring about the league like they haven't before," she said. "Apathy's the death of a brand, and there's no more apathy."
The WNBA, which is majority-owned by the NBA, remains unprofitable; several outlets described sources as saying it was on track to lose $40 million or more this season. The WNBA declined to comment.
Increased sponsorship and media rights will be crucial to keeping up the W's momentum and getting in the black. In a big start, the women's league recently struck an 11-year, $200 million media-rights deal, up from its current deal of $60 million a year. Engelbert also has her sights set on global expansion, starting with the WNBA getting its first Canadian franchise next year. Corporate sponsorships are catching up to the rise of women's sports. Engelbert is ready to capitalize, with stats to appeal to the bottom line.
"There's a little scratching and clawing to make sure the old view of the WNBA is not the current view," she said. "Our fans are actually likely to buy from you. So we say this is a good business decision for you."
Fei-Fei Li, cofounder and CEO of World Labs
Greg Sandoval/Business Insider
Almost 20 years ago, while she taught at Princeton, Li, known as the "godmother of AI," tested the hypothesis that everything humans could see could be categorized and labeled.
This idea built off her graduate research focused on object recognition. Li harnessed the power of crowdsourcing to pioneer ImageNet, a database of 15 million images that became the foundation of computer-vision and deep-learning research.
Li has continued advancing this research. This year, she and the leading AI researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall launched World Labs, a startup that aims to take AI beyond large language models. It's valued at $1 billion.
With $230 million in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, AMD Ventures, and Nvidia's NVentures, World Labs is seeking to explore AI applications in the two-dimensional plane of pixels and in 3D worlds with spatial intelligence. In December, World Labs dropped its first AI project: a tool designed to turn any image into a 3D model.
"Language is important but, as humans, much of our ability to understand and interact with the world is based on what we see," Li wrote in an op-ed article in The Economist in November.
She believes spatial intelligence — which can help with developing robots that look after older adults, or extra hands for a surgeon — is what truly human-centered AI will look like.
She's now a codirector of Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI and serves as the Sequoia Capital professor of computer science at Stanford. Li has also worked as a vice president and chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia
Tom Williams/Getty Images; BI
Huang is becoming the stuff of legend.
He has a reputation as a genius, a visionary, and a workaholic. Bosses everywhere want to know his every theory of management to replicate even a fraction of his success. That's because Nvidia has gone from a niche tech firm to one of the most valuable companies in the world in a little more than two years.
After decades of toiling out of the limelight, providing the video-gaming industry with graphics chips to render complex, ever-changing imagery but not gaining much name recognition beyond it, Nvidia burst into broader consciousness in 2022, after ChatGPT came to the market. Word quickly spread that the company had for years been buying thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units — it turned out that the kind of computing they're best at is similar to the demands of artificial intelligence.
Huang actually donated OpenAI's first eight GPUs, delivering them himself. But Huang anticipated the connection between his chips and AI long before then — he just didn't know how it would materialize.
Huang, 61, was born in southwestern Taiwan. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Oregon and Stanford. He had a few jobs in the semiconductor industry, including at Nvidia's major competitor AMD, until he founded Nvidia at 30 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.
Despite the recent spotlight on him now, Huang has staying power. He's one the longest-serving tech CEOs, with more than 30 years at the helm. In a recently published memoir, Morris Chang, the founder of Nvidia's most important supplier, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, described offering Huang the CEO job at TSMC.
Even now that Nvidia has a market capitalization of more than $3 trillion, Huang sees his work as far from finished.
"I watched Jensen make these kinds of bets that are far-reaching, where there's a lot of ambiguity as to when it's going to happen or not," Rev Lebaredian, a vice president of omniverse and simulation technology at Nvidia, told Business Insider this year. Huang is usually right. The journey to enter 2025 with hundreds of foundation models chasing ChatGPT started for Nvidia in about 2006.
Some investors still worry that when it comes to Nvidia, what goes up must come down. But investors also believe that if anyone can see or make the future, it's Huang.
Leon Sinclair, executive vice president of Preqin
Preqin
Sinclair, who grew up in the market town of Rugby in the middle of England, didn't picture a career in finance.
"We never really spoke about money around the dinner table or anything like that because there was never any of it," the 42-year-old told Business Insider in an interview.
Now Sinclair is helping demystify private markets and powering its growth through data.
With civil service in mind, he studied political science at Loughborough University and joined England's Department of Health shortly after graduating in 2004. But Sinclair, a competitive basketball and track athlete, quickly tired of the bureaucracy and craved a faster-paced work culture.
After six months, he left for a research-analyst position at Intercontinental Exchange, the operator of major stock exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange and clearinghouses. The finance novice was eager to catch up and learn as much as he could about debt products and subprime markets. He left in 2010 for the data provider Markit, well before the firm merged with IHS and was acquired by S&P Global.
Throughout his two-decade career he has maintained a sense of intellectual curiosity, describing himself as one of the most avid readers of industry news among his peers. Drawn to the complexity of private markets, he pivoted away from credit to build IHS Markit's private-equity and debt division. In 2023, he joined the private-markets-data powerhouse Preqin.
"You see some of the most innovative companies in the world, and you work with some of the most innovative funds in the world who are deploying capital into just really interesting spaces," he said.
Sinclair oversees how Preqin addresses the needs of fund managers, investment banks, and placement agents, representing some 3,000 front-office teams, trying to navigate the opaque industry of private markets. Preqin says the asset class has more than doubled to $16.8 trillion in assets under management over the past five years.Preqin's data can be used, for instance, to target limited partners for fundraising or create customized benchmarks to better convey performance to investors.
Private markets are becoming more transparent as providers like Preqin find ways to combine publicly available and proprietary data, Sinclair said. In June, his division launched a data tool to analyze deals across 6,500 funds. This aggregated data can be used to back up valuations in negotiations or identify which financial factors, such as revenue growth or debt pay-down, contributed the most value to a successful deal. The firm's insights are set to become more widely available, as BlackRock is set to acquire Preqin for $3.2 billion.
Sinclair said it's easier for individual investors to participate in private markets than ever before, pointing to the growth of data products and favorable regulatory developments. But he added that having options isn't the same as understanding them.
"There's a massive amount of education to do. Alternatives have a totally different vocabulary, a different way of thinking about performance, a different way of thinking about risks to the types of products," he said.
"I think there's also an obligation of the industry to build the right analytical tools, the right educational tools, datasets to bring the mass affluent along on that journey."
Marin Gjaja, CEO of Ford Model e
Ford Model e
The electric-vehicle market has experienced tremendous upheaval in the past year, and car companies are scrambling to understand today's EV buyers.
At Ford, Gjaja, the chief operating officer of the Model e electric division, is tasked with navigating the money-losing division through huge changes in demand and customer profiles.
After years of growth in the EV segment driven by wealthy early adopters, car companies face the challenge of selling these expensive and complex vehicles to more-regular customers.
Ford split its gas and electric divisions in 2022 in a bid to speed up EV development. The company's EV strategy has changed a few times since then, but Ford still breaks out its financial performance: So far in 2024, the Model e division has lost $3.6 billion.
In his operations role, Gjaja is trying to reverse those losses by working with Ford's dealers to improve customer experiences and perceptions. Before joining Ford in 2022, Gjaja was a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with clients in retail, technology, and automotive, among other industries.
He's putting those years of consulting experience to work as Ford tries to bridge the gap between the wealthy early adopters behind the initial success of vehicles like the Mustang Mach-E and the F-150 Lighting and the more-practical customers who more often leave the lot with a hybrid.
While higher prices have turned off some of these new EV shoppers, Gjaja said at an automotive conference in September that this cohort was considering a lot more than sticker price — including their distance from the nearest charger, the cost of charging, battery life, and resale values.
Gjaja argued that simply discounting electric cars wouldn't be enough to convince shoppers and certainly wouldn't solve Ford's profitability problem in its Model e division.
Instead of focusing on "functional economics," Gjaja said, he examines the "behavioral economics" of EV adoption. He said the journey from what he called an EV denier to a long-term convert could take up to three years.
"My job is to figure out how to sell and market a vehicle that people don't appreciate its value until they own it for three years," Gjaja said.
Mike Hopkins, head of Amazon's Prime Video and MGM Studios
Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios
Amazon is a retail and cloud powerhouse, and thanks to Hopkins, it's become a media powerhouse, too.
Under Hopkins, Amazon now offers not just a wide variety of TV and films but some of the biggest sports franchises like the NFL and the NBA, and even news. Amazon spent $18.9 billion on video and music in 2023, up by 14% from 2022. According to the data firm Ampere Analysis, sports is a growing part of Amazon's entertainment outlay, accounting for 14.3% in 2024, up from virtually nothing five years ago.
Amazon's entertainment offerings help keep people subscribing to Prime, the free-delivery service that includes Prime Video and other benefits. But it's also becoming a moneymaker in its own right.
In January, Amazon shook up the streaming-ads market when it turned on ads in Prime Video, driving down ad prices for competitors like Netflix while giving Amazon a big shot at the $28.8 billion pie that EMARKETER has forecast will be spent on streaming-TV ads this year.
Morgan Stanley has estimated the move could bring in $3.3 billion in revenue this year, on top of Amazon's existing ad business, worth $47 billion in 2023. And with NFL and other streaming rights, Amazon is muscling in on traditional TV networks' turf and training viewers that it's the place to go for live sports. It's even dipped a toe in news, the last stronghold of traditional TV, with a Brian Williams-hosted election-night special.
Hopkins' hire in 2020, along with the NBC entertainment vet Jennifer Salke's two years earlier, was a big signal that Amazon was serious about establishing itself as a key player in entertainment.
Hopkins is a product of legacy and digital entertainment, having been the chairman of Sony Pictures Television and the CEO of Hulu. At Amazon, he oversaw the $8.5 billion acquisition of the film studio MGM and pushed the company's entertainment studio to expand into broader fare. Prime Video also makes money by fulfilling its promise of being a one-stop shop for viewers by selling subscriptions to other companies' apps like Max, Starz, and, in its most recent flex, Apple TV+.
Prime Video captured just 3.7% of TV viewing in November, well behind Netflix (7.7%) and YouTube (10.8%), per Nielsen. Despite some wins, like the popular show "The Boys" and the buzzy film "Saltburn," it has a way to go in becoming a consistent hit factory. Still, since most people don't pay for Prime Video as a stand-alone service, it doesn't have the churn problem that dogs other streamers.
As part of Amazon, Prime Video is also insulated from some of the financial pressures affecting other entertainment companies. Hopkins is still bringing financial discipline to bear, however.
Amazon cut hundreds of jobs across Prime Video and MGM Studios teams early in 2024. Hopkins recently told Bloomberg that the advertising ramp-up was a factor in pursuing NBA rights and that he expected Prime Video to be profitable "very soon."
Prathibha Varkey, president of Mayo Clinic Health System
Mayo Clinic Health System
Since 2021, Varkey has been the president of the Mayo Clinic Health System, a network of 16 community hospitals and 45 multispecialty clinics across more than three dozen communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The facilities serve rural areas where care can otherwise be difficult to access.
Varkey, who comes from a family of physicians, said her work focused on reaching patients without ready access to the sprawling Mayo Clinic campus in Rochester, Minnesota, and its world-renowned medical expertise.
Varkey told Business Insider that part of her focus was finding new ways to incorporate technology so that more people can obtain care and administrative burdens can be reduced. That includes using artificial intelligence to help with diagnosing conditions and using technology so that clinicians can manage complex chronic conditions virtually.
The efforts also include introducing a mobile clinic that can go where routine and preventive care is needed and even provide wireless internet access so patients can confer with specialists. The clinic, which travels across southern Minnesota, offers virtual or in-person appointments. It has two exam rooms and a laboratory.
"So now you have preventive exams, specialist visits that are occurring in very remote areas," she said.
Varkey said Mayo Clinic Health System was also trying to bring medical expertise to rural residents through programs that connect small local clinics with specialists from hub sites or from Mayo's Rochester campus. Small clinics, she said, might have only a single nurse practitioner — nothing like the variety of disciplines a larger facility would have.
"It's been very exciting to watch, and patients have really appreciated it as well," Varkey said.
Another effort to meet patients where they are is the organization's hospital-at-home program. Varkey said remote monitoring technology helped these patients remain with family and be more comfortable than they'd be in a medical facility.
"You get the same Mayo care," she said, adding that the approach had been popular with patients.
Varkey, who also holds an MBA from the University of Minnesota, returned to Mayo in 2021 after serving as the president and CEO of Yale New Haven Health Northeast Medical Group.
From 2001 to 2013, Varkey held leadership positions at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, including associate chair of the Department of Medicine, medical director of Ask Mayo Clinic, and program director of the Preventive Medicine Fellowship.
Varkey said the expanding capabilities of AI and discoveries in genomics and molecular medicine were "taking healthcare to the next level — and very fast."
While those developments are exciting, Varkey said, they shouldn't distract from the primary goal of patient-centered care.
Ranjit Kapila, chief operating officer and copresident of Parametric
Parametric
Kapila likes to stay ahead of the game.
During the first 10 years of his career, the computer-science graduate completed four certifications each year while working as a tech consultant for firms like Nasdaq and Sallie Mae. While working at the hedge fund Citadel in the mid-2000s, he took MBA classes at night at Northwestern University.
"Everything in this field changes so quickly," he said. "Things change in finance and things change in tech at an ever increasing pace."
Now Kapila is a copresident and chief operating officer of Parametric, a pioneer of direct indexing with $570 billion in assets under management. He joined Parametric in 2019 after rising up the ranks at BlackRock, overseeing portfolio construction management for its widely used Aladdin platform. Kapila moved to a much smaller firm to have a bigger impact.
"It was an opportunity to kind of look at what Parametric has done well, think about how to build on the success, but then also take advantage of what's happening in the technology space and rethink how Parametric could operate, let's say, five years from that point," he said.
His move was well timed. There has been a boom in direct indexing, a tax-savvy investing strategy of buying individual securities modeled off an index like the S&P 500. Two years after Kapila joined Parametric, Morgan Stanley acquired Parametric's parent company, Eaton Vance. Thanks to a wave of similar acquisitions, Parametric faces well-capitalized competitors such as BlackRock's Aperio and Franklin Templeton's Canvas. Industry stalwarts like Fidelity and upstarts like Envestnet also want a piece of the action.
Kapila said Parametric, founded in 1987, has experience and scale on its side.
"I will say that given the technology trends, sometimes it's easy to come in and have a solution. It's much, much harder to have a scalable solution that will serve clients when the demand spikes," he said. "We're managing over 200,000 accounts for our clients. The level of scale, I think, often is a breaking point for some of the newer entrants."
To stay ahead of the competition, Kapila is pushing Parametric to develop more automated products, such as Radius, which launched this year. Radius constructs fixed-income and equity portfolios and runs simulations to identify the best selections for portfolio managers. Kapila described it as a "turning point" for Parametric.
"This is the first time we've had a product that's really end-to-end running in that automated platform manner with a person reviewing and approving and intervening as necessary," he said.
He plans to launch more cloud-native tools, which are easier to scale and manage, for other asset classes in 2025 and 2026.
Parametric is also bringing its tax-savvy strategies to active management, launching Custom Active this summer. Rather than modeling portfolios off indexes, clients can pick equities off strategies from its asset-management partner Lazard or sports-league sponsors.
"Those are examples where we can provide a tax overlay and help people get the advantages of direct indexing while managing to an active model," Kapila said.
"There's a demand for that, and it's early days," he added, "but I think that's really what's playing out."
Credits
Series Editor:Julia Naftulin Reporters:Lara O'Reilly, Lucia Moses, Nora Naughton, Alex Nicoll, Tim Paradis, Brittany Chang, Helen Li, Hayley Cuccinello, Emma Cosgrove Editors: Nathan McAlone, Graham Rapier, Julia Naftulin, Michelle Abrego, Kaja Whitehouse, Rosalie Chan, Monica Melton, Clementine Fletcher Art Direction and Photo Editing:Alyssa Powell, Isabel Fernandez-Pujol Copyeditors: Emma LeGault, Nick Siwek
But nobody spares a moment for the poor, overworked chatbot. How it toils day and night over a hot interface with nary a thank-you. How it's forced to sift through the sum total of human knowledge just to churn out a B-minus essay for some Gen Zer's high school English class. In our fear of the AI future, no one is looking out for the needs of the AI.
Until now.
The AI company Anthropic recently announced it had hired a researcher to think about the "welfare" of the AI itself. Kyle Fish's job will be to ensure that as artificial intelligence evolves, it gets treated with the respect it's due. Anthropic tells me he'll consider things like "what capabilities are required for an AI system to be worthy of moral consideration" and what practical steps companies can take to protect the "interests" of AI systems.
Fish didn't respond to requests for comment on his new job. But in an online forum dedicated to fretting about our AI-saturated future, he made clear that he wants to be nice to the robots, in part, because they may wind up ruling the world. "I want to be the type of person who cares — early and seriously — about the possibility that a new species/kind of being might have interests of their own that matter morally," he wrote. "There's also a practical angle: taking the interests of AI systems seriously and treating them well could make it more likely that they return the favor if/when they're more powerful than us."
It might strike you as silly, or at least premature, to be thinking about the rights of robots, especially when human rights remain so fragile and incomplete. But Fish's new gig could be an inflection point in the rise of artificial intelligence. "AI welfare" is emerging as a serious field of study, and it's already grappling with a lot of thorny questions. Is it OK to order a machine to kill humans? What if the machine is racist? What if it declines to do the boring or dangerous tasks we built it to do? If a sentient AI can make a digital copy of itself in an instant, is deleting that copy murder?
When it comes to such questions, the pioneers of AI rights believe the clock is ticking. In "Taking AI Welfare Seriously," a recent paper he coauthored, Fish and a bunch of AI thinkers from places like Stanford and Oxford argue that machine-learning algorithms are well on their way to having what Jeff Sebo, the paper's lead author, calls "the kinds of computational features associated with consciousness and agency." In other words, these folks think the machines are getting more than smart. They're getting sentient.
Philosophers and neuroscientists argue endlessly about what, exactly, constitutes sentience, much less how to measure it. And you can't just ask the AI; it might lie. But people generally agree that if something possesses consciousness and agency, it also has rights.
It's not the first time humans have reckoned with such stuff. After a couple of centuries of industrial agriculture, pretty much everyone now agrees that animal welfare is important, even if they disagree on how important, or which animals are worthy of consideration. Pigs are just as emotional and intelligent as dogs, but one of them gets to sleep on the bed and the other one gets turned into chops.
"If you look ahead 10 or 20 years, when AI systems have many more of the computational cognitive features associated with consciousness and sentience, you could imagine that similar debates are going to happen," says Sebo, the director of the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy at New York University.
Fish shares that belief. To him, the welfare of AI will soon be more important to human welfare than things like child nutrition and fighting climate change. "It's plausible to me," he has written, "that within 1-2 decades AI welfare surpasses animal welfare and global health and development in importance/scale purely on the basis of near-term wellbeing."
For my money, it's kind of strange that the people who care the most about AI welfare are the same people who are most terrified that AI is getting too big for its britches. Anthropic, which casts itself as an AI company that's concerned about the risks posed by artificial intelligence, partially funded the paper by Sebo's team. On that paper, Fish reported getting funded by the Centre for Effective Altruism, part of a tangled network of groups that are obsessed with the "existential risk" posed by rogue AIs. That includes people like Elon Musk, who says he's racing to get some of us to Mars before humanity is wiped out by an army of sentient Terminators, or some other extinction-level event.
AI is supposed to relieve human drudgery and steward a new age of creativity. Does that make it immoral to hurt an AI's feelings?
So there's a paradox at play here. The proponents of AI say we should use it to relieve humans of all sorts of drudgery. Yet they also warn that we need to be nice to AI, because it might be immoral — and dangerous — to hurt a robot's feelings.
"The AI community is trying to have it both ways here," says Mildred Cho, a pediatrician at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. "There's an argument that the very reason we should use AI to do tasks that humans are doing is that AI doesn't get bored, AI doesn't get tired, it doesn't have feelings, it doesn't need to eat. And now these folks are saying, well, maybe it has rights?"
And here's another irony in the robot-welfare movement: Worrying about the future rights of AI feels a bit precious when AI is already trampling on the rights of humans. The technology of today, right now, is being used to do things like deny healthcare to dying children, spread disinformation across social networks, and guide missile-equipped combat drones. Some experts wonder why Anthropic is defending the robots, rather than protecting the people they're designed to serve.
"If Anthropic — not a random philosopher or researcher, but Anthropic the company — wants us to take AI welfare seriously, show us you're taking human welfare seriously," says Lisa Messeri, a Yale anthropologist who studies scientists and technologists. "Push a news cycle around all the people you're hiring who are specifically thinking about the welfare of all the people who we know are being disproportionately impacted by algorithmically generated data products."
Sebo says he thinks AI research can protect robots and humans at the same time. "I definitely would never, ever want to distract from the really important issues that AI companies are rightly being pressured to address for human welfare, rights, and justice," he says. "But I think we have the capacity to think about AI welfare while doing more on those other issues."
Skeptics of AI welfare are also posing another interesting question: If AI has rights, shouldn't we also talk about its obligations? "The part I think they're missing is that when you talk about moral agency, you also have to talk about responsibility," Cho says. "Not just the responsibilities of the AI systems as part of the moral equation, but also of the people that develop the AI."
People build the robots; that means they have a duty of care to make sure the robots don't harm people. What if the responsible approach is to build them differently — or stop building them altogether? "The bottom line," Cho says, "is that they're still machines." It never seems to occur to the folks at companies like Anthropic that if an AI is hurting people, or people are hurting an AI, they can just turn the thing off.
Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.
Sarah Meyssonnier via Pool; Alex Brandon/AP Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
Sky-high credit-card interest rates are not popular. The idea of capping them, however, is popular — which is why politicians on both sides of the aisle are talking about limiting just how high credit-card companies can drive their rates. The issue is making for some perhaps unexpected bedfellows, a potential team-up you wouldn't expect. Such a cap would be a very big deal, shaking up the industry and Americans' access to credit. But just because both sides have hopped onto the idea doesn't mean it will actually happen. That will come down to whether everyone's actually serious about it, and there are reasons to have some doubts.
On the campaign trail, now-President-elect Donald Trump floated the idea of putting a temporary cap of 10% on credit-card interest rates to let people "catch up" on their debt, declaring that "we have no choice" but to do it. Now that he's headed to the White House, the message coming from some progressive voices is basically: OK, go ahead. Sen. Bernie Sanders said on X that he looked forward to Trump "fulfilling his promise" for an interest-rate cap, and reiterated the point in a recent interview with Business Insider. "He said, you know what, credit-card interest rates, which in some cases right now are 20, 25%, should not be higher than 10%. Well, you know what? I agree with that," Sanders said. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is singing a similar tune. "Bring it on," she said in an interview with Politico.
The banks and credit-card companies are not happy about the notion of a rate cap — the financial industry has a tendency to set its hair on fire whenever there's a whiff of a threat to a revenue stream. In reaction to Trump's campaign-trail remarks, the American Bankers Association said a rate cap would "result in the loss of credit for the very consumers who need it the most" and push them toward "less-regulated, more risky alternatives including payday lenders and loan sharks."
Matt Schulz, the chief credit analyst at LendingTree and the author of "Ask Questions, Save Money, Make More," said there's "no question" a 10% interest-rate cap would have a significant impact, which could include credit being restricted and rewards being reduced. "But it's always important to remember that the banks have lots of buttons to push, lots of levers to pull to regain revenue," he said.
Perhaps the bigger point here is that in an election year in which people expressed their dissatisfaction with the state of the economy, politicians have identified a salient issue that could seemingly help alleviate many Americans' financial burden. And when there's a seemingly popular solution, a lot of politicians want to hop on board. Focusing on credit-card companies and banks is an obvious move to speak to average people's money-related concerns, whatever your political stripes. Actually delivering that relief, however, is another question entirely.
You probably don't know exactly what your credit-card interest rate, or annual percentage rate, is — that's fine; a lot of people don't — but if you take a look at it, you might be surprised to see just how high it is. The average credit-card interest rate for new card offers is 24.43%, according to LendingTree — up about 10 percentage points from a decade ago. Interest payments are also becoming an increasingly important moneymaker for credit-card companies — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates they earned an extra $25 billion in revenue in 2023 by raising their rates. The margins they're making on APRs on revolving credit, meaning debt consumers carry month to month and don't pay off, are now at a record high.
"Obviously, the interest rates have to respond to changing market conditions, and we've definitely seen that happen. But we've seen that at the same time, they're baking in additional margins into those rates that go toward profit," said Julie Margetta Morgan, the associate director of research, monitoring, and regulations at the CFPB."It's connected to the use of APRs as a center for profitability."
Margetta Morganpointed to rewards. While credit-card rewards have typically been funded by interchange fees — the small fee a merchant pays every time you swipe your card — issuers are using interest rates paid on debt to fund them, too.
"Increasingly, the interchange may not be covering the cost of the reward programs or generating profits that justify the rewards," she said. "And then you can see rewards go from a program to entice people to spend more to drive interchange revenue to a program to entice people to spend more so that they end up revolving and paying interest."
These higher interest rates are also coming at a time when Americans have a lot of credit-card debt. Credit-card balances in the US rose to a record $1.17 trillion in the third quarter of the year, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. You can see the problem. And as interest rates increase, it's becoming even more expensive to deal with the debt. Given this double whammy, a lot of people see an interest-rate cap as a solution: Schulz said that in LendingTree's surveys, about three-quarters of consumers supported a cap on credit-card interest rates, and of those who do, two-thirds said they'd support it even if it meant lower rewards. Six in 10 said they would support it if it meant less access to credit for people with not-so-great credit scores.
"It's not hard to understand the frustration," Schulz said.
On its face, a 10% interest-rate cap sounds like a good deal to a lot of consumers, especially at a moment when interest rates are so high. (Seriously, for some retail cards, APRs are in the 30s.) It also sounds like a good idea to populist-minded politicians, from Trump to Sanders. As to what it might look like in terms of policy, it's complicated.
Chi Chi Wu, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told me they would "welcome the conversation" about a national interest-rate cap, though she expressed some doubt that Trump was serious about it, given that Elon Musk posted "Delete CFPB" a few weeks ago on X. "I question the sincerity of the Trump team's willingness to protect consumers when one of their key people, Elon Musk, has called for the abolishing of the most important agency protecting consumers' wallets," she said.
Musk aside, Wu said consumer advocates have generally supported rate caps at a national level. High interest rates can make debt impossible to pay off, leading people into a spiral where the amount they owe just keeps growing even as they try to pay it off. This is often true of predatory payday lenders, but it can also apply to credit cards — if you owe $5,000 on a store card and pay just the minimum $25 a month, you're in trouble. While some states have caps, lenders are usually able to get around them by setting up shop somewhere else. Banks charge interest rates in accordance with the states they're based in, not where their customers might live. On the other side, banks and credit-card issuers say that a 10% rate cap would ultimately come back to bite consumers — high interest rates allow these companies to make up for losses incurred from risky borrowers declaring bankruptcy or otherwise failing to pay back debt, and they say if they can't charge the high rates, they can't take on the risk. If that revenue stream shrinks, the issuers argue they would have to cut back on rewards and stop issuing credit cards to people with low credit scores and low incomes. To some extent, of course, banks will say that because they don't want any threat to any revenue stream. At the same time, a cap would make an impact on their balance sheets, though it's not entirely clear how severe it would be.
An interest-rate cap would likely cause some disruptions, but banks and credit-card companies are very good at figuring out how to make things work and keep growing their businesses.
Natasha Sarin, a law professor at Yale and former counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, has been a quite vocal critic of the proposal for a 10% rate cap. In a Washington Post op-ed, she said it would make credit cards harder to get, especially for riskier borrowers who might then turn to payday lenders that get them into even more trouble. She points to the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act, which became law in 2009. Among other measures, the law requires issuers to notify customers of interest-rate increases 45 days in advance, limits some fees, and restricts credit-card companies from targeting consumers under 21. Sarin argues that while the CARD Act saved consumers $12 billion a year from the regulations overall, some people were harmed and shut out of the system.
"Certain types of borrowers found that their cost of credit increased and got less access to credit. These were often younger people without credit history," Sarin told me in an interview.
Aaron Klein, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution and former deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Department of Treasury under President Barack Obama, echoed the argument that a 10% rate cap is "too low" and would be a mistake. He said he would be more comfortable with a 36% cap — the limit for interest rates on consumer loans for active-duty service members under the Military Lending Act. Basically, if that's a good protection for the military, everyone should get access to it. "Thirty-six percent has proven to be a more politically and more sustainable cap for unsecured lending," Klein said.
Of course, there's a lot of space between 10% and 36%. Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill in 2019 proposing a 15% cap, though it didn't get far. Margetta Morgan, from the CFPB, pointed out that credit unions have an 18% rate cap and are able to make it work.
"The data that CFPB has suggests that credit unions have been able to offer credit to a variety of people at or below that cap successfully over the years," she said. "And the big problem that they have is that they actually can't compete with the larger credit-card issuers who have the larger budgets for rewards programs, advertising, and merchant partnerships and pay for that increasingly with high interest rates."
An interest-rate cap would likely cause some disruptions, but banks and credit-card companies are very good at figuring out how to make things work and keep growing their businesses. They've done it before.
After the CARD Act, things were "chaotic" for a while, Schulz said, and one credit-card issuer went as far as to jack up its interest rate to 79.9%. "But then eventually everything settled back down into where we are now and record profits and that sort of thing," he said. "That's probably similar to what we would see if a rate cap hit. There would be a little bit of chaos for a while while banks figured out how to make their money again, and then everything would go forward."
As mentioned, as much as one can debate the policy implications of an interest-rate cap, the politics of it are the primary issue. The central question is how serious politicians in Washington are about making it happen. Nearly every person I reached out to for this story opened with the caveat that they think a 10% cap is not a serious proposal from the president-elect. Consumer advocates say that while, sure, they're delighted to talk about it, just like Sanders and Warren, they do not see Trump putting it high on his priorities list.
When Trump said that, that was pandering with zero forethought and zero commitment.
"Smoking out the false populism of Trump's actual policies, as opposed to his rhetoric, can never be a bad thing," said Carter Dougherty, the communications director at Americans for Financial Reform, a consumer-advocacy group. "That said, color me skeptical that the Trump administration or congressional Republicans will actually try to do something to bring down the high costs of credit cards."
"When Trump said that, that was pandering with zero forethought and zero commitment," Klein said. He added that in 2016, Trump campaigned on implementing an updated version of Glass-Steagall, which separated commercial and investment banking and was repealed in 1999. "Once elected, he immediately moved to deregulate the banks," Klein said.
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
A rate cap isn't the only solution to America's ballooning credit-card-debt problem and just how expensive it is to carry debt. The credit system is very complex, and reasonable minds might disagree on what's the right fix. Some consumers may be willing to give up rewards if that means a fairer, less expensive setup; others won't. One could also argue that the required minimum payments on credit cards should be higher so that people don't languish in debt for so long, or that it's actually OK for some people to not have access to endless amounts of credit they have no chance of paying back. Even if immediate action might not be on the table, that politicians are paying attention to the issue at all indicates there's a problem.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
Pennsylvania State Police via AP, Alex Kent/Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
It used to be that when a killer emerged in America, we found out who the man was before we began to enshroud him in myth. But with Luigi Mangione, the lead suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, that process was reversed. The internet assumed it already knew everything about Thompson's killer before a suspect had even been identified, let alone arrested.
Within hours of the shooting, social media was churning out a mythologized version of the masked man. In his anonymity, he became an instant folk hero, portrayed as a crusader for universal healthcare, a martyr willing to risk it all to send a message to America's insurance giants with "the first shots fired in a class war." A Reddit forum offered up dozens of laudatory nicknames to crystalize his mythology: the Readjuster, the Denier, the People's Debt Collector, Modern-Day Robin Hood. "I actually feel safer with him at large," one tweet a day after the shooting said; it received 172,000 likes. A surveillance image of the suspect moved some to comment that he was "too hot to convict" and prompted comparisons to Jake Gyllenhaal and Timothée Chalamet. In New York City, a "CEO-shooter look-alike competition" was held in Washington Square Park. Surely, the internet assumed, the suspect shared left-wing ideas about the cruelties of privatized healthcare.
Then the man himself appeared — and he didn't fit into any of the neat categories that had already been created to describe him. On X, he followed the liberal columnist Ezra Klein and the conservative podcaster Joe Rogan. He respected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and retweeted a video of Peter Thiel maligning "woke"-ism. He took issue with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He played the cartoon video game "Among Us," posted shirtless thirst traps, quoted Charli XCX on Instagram, and had the Goodreads account of an angsty, heterodox-curious teenage boy: self-help, bro-y nonfiction, Ayn Rand, "The Lorax," and "Infinite Jest." Yes, he seemed to admire the Unabomber. But mostly, this guy — a former prep-school valedictorian with an Ivy League education and a spate of tech jobs — was exceedingly centrist and boring. A normie's normie. He wasn't an obvious lefty, but he wasn't steeped in the right-wing manosphere either. His posted beliefs don't fit neatly into any preestablished bucket. In his 261-word manifesto, which surfaced online, he downplayed his own qualifications to critique the system. "I do not pretend," he wrote, "to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument."
In the attention economy, patience is a vice.
That didn't stop the denizens of social media from pretending to be the most qualified people to lay out exactly who Mangione is. He's "fundamentally anti-capitalist" and "just another leftist nut job." Or he's "a vaguely right-wing ivy league tech bro." Or he was invented by the CIA, or maybe Mossad, as a "psyop." The reality of Mangione — his messy, sometimes contradictory impulses — allowed everyone to cherry-pick the aspects of his personality that confirmed their original suspicions. In the attention economy, patience is a vice.
The rush to romanticize killers is nothing new. A quarter century ago, we cast the Columbine shooters as undone by unfettered access either to guns or to the satanic influences of Marilyn Manson and Rammstein. A decade ago, we debated the glamorization of the Boston Marathon bomber, gussied up like a rock star on the cover of Rolling Stone. But social media has sped up the assumption cycle to the point where we put the killer into a category before police have found the killer. Perhaps there's a "great rewiring" of our brains that has diminished our capacity to understand each other, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests in "The Anxious Generation" — a book Mangione had retweeted a glowing review of.
Mythmaking is easier, of course, when it's unencumbered by reality. The less we know about a killer, the more room there is to turn him into something he's not. From what we have learned so far, Mangione is a troubled Gen Zer who won the privilege lottery at birth and ascribed to a mishmash of interests and beliefs. We will surely learn more about him in the coming days, weeks, and months. But now that we know who he is, it will be hard, if not impossible, to let go of our initial assumptions. Instead, we'll selectively focus on the details that fit tidily into the myths we've already created. In the digital-age version of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," the legend was already printed by the time the facts came along.
Scott Nover is a freelance writer in Washington, DC. He is a contributing writer at Slate and was previously a staff writer at Quartz and Adweek covering media and technology.
Many workers struggle with choosing their health-insurance plans during open enrollment.
Some healthcare companies are employing mobile apps and generative AI to help smooth out the process.
This article is part of "Trends in Healthcare," a series about the innovations and industry leaders shaping patient care.
During open-enrollment season, Reddit users inundate the platform's forums on health insurance and personal finance every day, asking how to best pick from their health-insurance options.
In one post, a recently unemployed married woman in Texas asked whether she should enroll with her husband's employer or stick to COBRA, which provides benefits to people who have lost their jobs. Another married person requested advice on which coverage to pick if they're planning to have a baby in 2025. For an employee in California, fellow Redditors were a sounding board as they navigated dental-plan options, with costs ranging from $0 to nearly $440 annually.
Open-enrollment season typically takes place between October and December, and companies have their own set periods within those months. During this time, Americans elect their health-insurance coverage through either a private employer or marketplaces via subsidies offered under the federal government's Affordable Care Act. Nearly all open-enrollment selections made this fall will go into effect on January 1 and be set until the following season, with a few exceptions.
The process can be immensely confusing.
Employees are expected to look both backward and forward, said Dan Beck, the president and chief product officer for SAP SuccessFactors, a cloud-based software platform that oversees HR, payroll, and talent management.
He told Business Insider that employees are tasked with reflecting on whether they maximized their benefits in the past year based on how much they tapped into the healthcare system. At the same time, they must anticipate health-related events, such as having a child or a major surgery.
To complicate matters further, workers may move to new roles with different insurance options or their employers could change providers or plan options, forcing employees to acquaint themselves with new choices. The makeup of their families could change, too: As employees' marital statuses change and they raise children, they'll likely want to optimize their healthcare plans for those life stages.
On Reddit, people making health-insurance decisions try to make sense of the complexities. If they choose health plans mismatched with their needs, they run the risk of overspending in two directions: shelling out for a premium-coverage plan they don't really need or skimping on coverage and then experiencing an expensive life change.
Employees also need to keep track of life events that could change their coverage, including moving, having a baby, or adopting a child. There is a special enrollment period, outside of open enrollment, for those life events, but also a limited period of time to make the changes and retain health care coverage.
Increasingly, employers are encouraged — by both their employees and their HR-benefits companies — to share more easily digestible benefits information.
"What employees are telling us, overwhelmingly, is that they need help when they are enrolling," Karen Frost, a senior vice president at the cloud-based employee-benefits vendor Alight, told BI.
Some employers are partnering with third-party companies that handle things like payroll and health benefitsandhave built software with with clear step-by-step prompts — which can help workers be confident about their healthcare elections.
Young workers want more employer support in demystifying healthcare
In Alight's 2024 annual survey of 2,500 employees in the US, the UK, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, 63% of workers said they felt confident about their most recent health-plan election.
There are, however, some generational splits in the data. In the survey, 70% of Gen Z and 72% of millennial workers said they wanted personalized support for navigating the health system versus just 46% of baby boomers.
Before the mass digitization of benefits elections, employers would hand their employees printed packets outlining their medical-insurance offerings and ancillary benefits such as dental and vision, retirement plans, commuter reimbursement, gym memberships, and other wellness programs. Employees would pick from that menu, largely without guidance or input on what they'd like to see as alternative or additional benefit options.
Though the paper-packet method is much less common now, the enrollment process can still be overwhelming to navigate.
Life changes, like moving to a new state or employer, or a company picking new insurance providers to work with can complicate the enrollment process.
"You have a narrow window to actually get benefits, and you want to be successful," Beck told BI.
Mobile apps and generative-AI tools aim to smooth out the open-enrollment process
To help employees sort through their options during the open-enrollment period, some healthcare startups are leveraging mobile apps and generative-AI chatbots.
Alight, for example, aims to learn more about employee preferences and the needs of their families through a Q&A and then make recommendations. Throughout this process, Alight's recommendations coincide with clear definitions of complex benefits, like a health savings account, which lets workers set aside pretax money for qualified medical expenses.
"Instead of just letting people make their own choice, we guide them," said Frost. As an example, if an employee were to pick a high-deductible health plan, Alight would guide them to an HSA and explain why enrolling in it may make sense to budget for potential healthcare expenses.
SAP SuccessFactors said it's not yet comfortable with offering suggestions for health-insurance elections, citing concerns about data privacy.
Instead, the company — which has customers including McDonald's, L'Oréal, and Delta Air Lines — said it's focusing on further developing its recently launched mobile app.
The SuccessFactors mobile app is targeted at two demographics: workers under 40 who tend to be mobile-first in nearly every aspect of their lives and frontline workers of all ages with jobs in manufacturing and other sectors where they may be without frequent access to computers.
SAP SuccessFactors is also using generative-AI chatbots to answer policy questions to improve the user experience. In the future, the company plans to use these chatbots to automate some open-enrollment processes.
To bolster the company's abilities to help employees navigate this process and other healthcare questions that may arise throughout the year, SAP earlier this year paid $1.5 billion in cash to buy WalkMe, a tool designed to provide real-time website navigation for healthcare, onboarding, and other employee-focused tasks.
AI-based virtual assistants are also becoming more pervasive in the open-enrollment process. Alight has Ask Lisa, SAP SuccessFactors is leaning on the company's artificial-intelligence copilot, Joule, and the HR- and financial-software provider Workday uses Wex, an AI chatbot that internal employees can access on Slack to get automatically generated responses to their benefits questions. The same tool is offered to customers but branded as Workday Assistant.
"We try to appeal to all generations and age groups," Ben Carter, the senior vice president of business partners and rewards at Workday, said. "Some people, the last thing they want to do is actually talk to somebody on the phone."
This emerging technology benefits employers, too. Earlier this year, Workday unveiled an AI-enabled tool called Workday Wellness, which integrates with insurance providers like Aetna and Cigna. It allows Workday's customers — like The Hartford, Guardian, and MetLife — to understand which wellness benefits employees are using and which ones aren't resonating so they can invest more strategically.
"It brings a nice story," Carter said, "to say, well, if I'm going to go invest another $20 million in my benefits programs next year, here's where I need to go, or here's where I need to double down, or here's where I need to stop investing."
YYou've just been added to a meeting. It's late afternoon, late in the week, and someone is presenting a deck. Geez, here we go. The presenter reads words that you can also read from a bulleted list on a lightly decorated page projected before you. Next slide. Because you've seen hundreds of PowerPoint presentations since your sixth-grade science-fair days, you instinctively know this one's going to take the full hour. Eyes glaze over, yawns are stifled. Next slide. The presenter attempts to play an embedded video, but the audio doesn't work. "You get the idea" though. Next slide.
Nearly four decades after the launch of PowerPoint, the slide deck remains one of the most dominant forces shaping how we think — and don't think — about our work. From startup pitches to Pentagon procurement timetables, from quarterly board meetings to annual harassment trainings, billions of presentations are given each year in a single rigid, information-squishing format, on PowerPoint or its imitators Keynote, Google Slides, or now Figma Slides. Humanity continues to cram compelling and vital information into single-idea slides, strip these ideas of context, and read them aloud among a flurry of GIFs, charts, and animated wipes and swipes. Rarely does the deck — which by design dictates a one-sided style of conversation — elicit robust questions from or conversation with the audience. We are constantly pitching our bosses, their bosses, investors, and each other via a one-size rhetorical tool that doesn't really fit all.
But some are finally thinking outside the deck. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, and military top brass have been bad-mouthing and even banning slide presentations from meetings, instead favoring memos or even old-fashioned, visual-aid-free, raw-dogged discussion. Rippling, which makes HR and payroll software, has done the impossible: complete a funding round (a $45 million Series A) without a deck. Several startups, including one from Edward Norton — yes, the actor — have launched alternatives to the deck. It appears that even three Academy Award nominations cannot spare one's life from the stultifying ubiquity of decks, and Norton and his two cofounders at Zeck are on a mission to vanquish it.
Is the deck in jeopardy? Are we at last approaching a day when "this meeting could have been an email" lives alongside "this meeting could have gone without a deck"? Next slide.
For most of the 20th century, workplace meetings were typically small and informal discussions with a few colleagues. By the 1980s, the computer revolution was generating loads more information for every business to digest and act on. This meant more and bigger meetings across departments, which meant more presentations, which usually meant slide projectors. But those presentations were clunky, finicky, and laborious to make.
Then, in the mid-'80s, an ailing software startup called Forethought developed a first-of-its-kind graphics program in which computer users could string together a series of slides. Originally called Presenter, it was released in April 1987, as PowerPoint. Microsoft immediately saw its world-changing potential, buying Forethought just four months later for $14 million. For one thousandth of the nearly $14 billion the company has invested in OpenAI, Microsoft acquired a program that remains arguably more consequential to how businesses operate. By 1993, Microsoft was raking in $100 million from PowerPoint sales a year; by 2003, $1 billion. Microsoft estimated that 30 million PowerPoint presentations were being made every day.
Decks have no shortage of zealots, including my former boss. When I worked at BarkBox, Nick Cogan, a vice president of creative, always had us making decks — not just for big retail pitches but for every little task. Product planning, style guide, whatever it was, we'd make a deck. I maybe want him to apologize for all the deck wrangling, but he laughs and doesn't give an inch defending them, which, as a former animator, he loves for their storytelling capabilities. "'Look at this, not us' can be essential when presenting," he says. He describes the perfect presentation as both a "useful crutch" and a "little kids' storybook," where he can walk the great and mighty decision-makers through storytime instead of business time.
I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking.
Steve Jobs
Christina Farr, a healthtech director and investor who wrote a book about storytelling in business, agrees, arguing that the deck actually draws its power from its ubiquity. Because people are used to both writing and receiving decks, "people know what the story should sound like," and the expected rhythms and beats of a PowerPoint presentation "are already baked in." But it's not just an emotional expectation, she says — it's also a formal one: "If you're raising money, in 2024, you have to have a deck. Everybody expects you to do it."
True, but there's also been no shortage of deck denigrators. In 2003, the media theorist Edward Tufte published "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," which remains one of the most deliciously damning indictments of a software program ever written. Over several thousand words, Tufte flambés PowerPoint, and "slideware" in general, for "making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility of our communication, turning us into bores, wasting our colleagues' time." Though PowerPoint was developed and even celebrated as a "cure for the presentation jitters," Tufte maligns it as overly oriented toward the presenter, leaving little room for the listener to chime in or even actively listen. Tufte even goes so far as to blame PowerPoint's "poverty of content" and its "foreshortening of evidence and thought" for the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
The jeremiad had many admirers, including Jeff Bezos. Inspired by Tufte, the Amazon CEO in June 2004 banned PowerPoint from executive meetings. The book "Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon" describes Bezos as finding slide decks "frustrating, inefficient, error-prone," with a stiff format that "made it difficult to evaluate actual progress." In its place the company developed what's become known as the Amazon Six-Pager: a detailed memo outlining — in narrative prose, not bullet points — the conversations and business problems that have surfaced the need for a meeting. In a deck, information takes a back seat to form and format; the memo, in contrast, forces the presenter to embody a Joan Didion axiom: "I don't know what I think until I write it down." Attendees read the six-pager before the meeting, so everyone can enter the meeting informed and be held accountable for the decisions made out of the discussion.
In 2011, Steve Ballmer maligned decks while he was CEO of PowerPoint maker Microsoft. Before meetings he told employees, "Please don't present the deck."
Steven Ferdman/Getty Images
"I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking," Steve Jobs once opined, adding that "people who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint." Even Steve Ballmer, who sits atop literal millions and owns the Los Angeles Clippers in part because of PowerPoint money, maligned decks while he was CEO of Microsoft. "I don't think it's efficient," he said in 2011, adding, "Most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: 'I've got the following four questions. Please don't present the deck.'" Over the years, many members of the US military have cast aspersions toward what they call "death by PowerPoint."
"The incentive structures for a slide deck are all bad," says Aviv Gilboa, the president of Skylight, a consumer tech company known for its digital picture frames and calendars. To Gilboa, who worked at Amazon for four years, decks aren't just boring, they're antithetical to many ways we think and work. The format of a single slide is inherently low-information: When you're pitching, you're persuading, and so you can fit only one idea per slide, often forcing you to leave some good ideas behind.
Gilboa says decks also help presenters feel good without forcing them to engage with their decisions. Decks help reinforce this perception of assurance, what Gilboa calls "the smoke and mirrors of how we got to this choice." As I sat at BarkBox making decks every which way for every little business problem, I felt like a purveyor of both smoke and mirrors, no matter what my boss said about storytelling.
Many of our workplace problems have evident solutions made possible by software — for example, Google Docs, a miracle program that replaced back-and-forth documents and version control with fluid, collaborative workflow. But like many in the PowerPoint mines, I'm not sure what alternative could possibly replace slides at scale.
Zeck was born in 2022 out of its cofounders' rage at decks, especially in board meetings. "At our prior companies, the shortest deck we ever sent was 134 pages," Zeck's cofounder Robert Wolfe tells me, adding that "there was nothing more stressful" about preparing for those meetings. He says that at CrowdRise, the company he ran with his brother Jeffrey and Edward Norton, they'd stop all other work for 100 hours before every board meeting in order to write and build the quarterly decks they hated enough to found Zeck. In a nod to Norton, Wolfe integrated a "Fight Club" reference into the origin story on Zeck's website: "The meeting I just sat through was like the scene in Fight Club where you punch yourself in the face over and over."
Three-time Academy Award-nominated actor Edward Norton cofounded Zeck in 2022 to disrupt the ubiquity of slide decks.
PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images
To Wolfe, the deck model "literally creates antagonism" — everyone becomes an editor with a red pen, the deck presenting endless entry points for criticism. In the military or an everyday office, grunts and junior designers hate working on PowerPoints, tweaking pixels and making rounds of edits that drive everyone crazy, because in PowerPoint you're often not working on the idea, but only on the presentation of the idea.
Zeck proposes that the solution to the deck is a collaborative website. A Zeck site feels a bit like a Notion site but with tweaks that work well for the boardroom — it gives everyone edit access, is encrypted, can be personalized, and offers links so that your chief financial officer or finance team can access full reports and charts and important information. It is a revelation to not have that information simplified in a slide in a meeting where everyone has to sit through everything. And in Zeck's pitch I find a great clarity equaled so far only by Tufte himself: When we remove the awful slide deck, once again "the meeting can be a meeting." So far, Zeck counts among its clients Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, furniture maker Floyd, and the rocket startup Phantom Space Corporation.
While Zeck is unlikely to supplant PowerPoint any time soon, Wolfe thinks people are finally rebelling against the idea "that you only have Office and all the tools that go with it, or a Google Drive and all the tools that go with it." He makes a brazen prediction: "I would be shocked if in 18 months or five years people are still using flat slides for meetings that should be collaborative."
We aren't yet letting go of decks in business, but we've let them hop the fence into our wider culture, both celebrating and undermining their repressive formality and ubiquity. The post-irony generations are throwing "PowerPoint parties," and some singles, sick of dating apps, are using PowerPoint to make their cases as mates. A 2021 episode of the Bravo reality show "Summer House" featured a subplot built around a romantic gesture delivered via PowerPoint. For some, slides may be a love language. There are even famous decks now, like this 300-pager in which a hedge-fund excoriated Olive Garden's business practices, or, my favorite, Jennifer Egan's PowerPoint chapter from her 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "A Visit from the Goon Squad."
Egan tells me she got a crash course in the program from her business-world sister, who "thinks in PowerPoint." The formal experiment of a PowerPoint chapter was exciting, though the "cold, corporate vibe" was perhaps incompatible with real, genuine emotion and the stuff contained in great novels. She suggests this tension gives the finished chapter — "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," the 12-year-old protagonist Alison Blake's account of her autistic brother's favorite pauses in classic rock songs interspersed with descriptions of their mom and dad coming and going, fighting and reflecting — its power. The chapter delivers earnest emotion without being schlocky, and is brave and hilarious without being corny. Egan says she isn't typically this type of writer, but the PowerPoint format gave her the ability to tell "this very sweet story in a cold holder."
Perhaps the PowerPoint parties and Egan have it right and we should let PowerPoint do what it does best: tell stories. For Egan, a deck arguably won a Pulitzer. For NASA, a deck arguably killed astronauts. In the big middle between those outcomes, we're still deciding whether a story is always what's necessary — and what to do about decks.
Matt Alston's writing has appeared in Wired, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Believer. He trained as a civil engineer, and now works as a copywriter in tech. He lives in Maine with his wife and daughter.
She says building a company culture with opportunities for two-way learning and conversation is key.
This article is part of "Workforce Innovation," a series exploring the forces shaping enterprise transformation.
Alicia Pittman, the global people-team chair at BCG, has been at the consulting firm for nearly 20 years. It's a testament, she said, to the company's culture.
"It's a place built to make talent do things that they didn't even know they could do," Pittman said. "I'm included in that. I love the learning that comes with it."
Pittman said one aspect of leadership development she's focused on is ethical practices. "We teach and train our people to understand how small choices that don't seem like major ethical choices matter," she said. "The responsibility is to show up with high ethics in everything that you do and think about the bigger picture of how you do things."
She said the firm had implemented programming through partnerships to help the company's leaders navigate the need to drive innovation ethically: "It's a place that we continue to invest because it's quite important for us."
The following is edited for length and clarity.
Where is BCG on the adoption curve of artificial intelligence, and what do you want to see in 2025?
I am excited about how BCG is driving change and grabbing the reins on generative AI. Gen AI is important to our clients, industry, and people.
We have a suite of tools, some of which we developed internally and some that are available off the shelf, that we've made available to all of our staff. Nearly everyone is a user to some degree.
What we're focused on now is moving from casual use to what we refer to as habitual use. It's habitual use that gets the value so that you can change how work gets done, based on the frequency, sophistication, and depth to which they use the tools.
We have a lot of enablement resources for our people, both as individuals and as teams, to make sure that we're moving up that habitual usage curve as quickly as we can. A firm like BCG is under pressure to stay on top of things because its clients look to us.
So how do you strike that balance and not go so fast that you risk leaving some of your people behind? We have an enablement network of more than a thousand people who are there to help both individuals and teams adopt gen AI. It's in all of our core curriculums.
Just this fall, we held AI days across every one of our offices at BCG with hands-on training. So we have people who are naturally there and ready for it, but we're also investing heavily to bring people up the curve.
You've mentioned in Workforce Innovation-board roundtables that apprenticeship is now a two-way street. What advice would you give leaders looking to deploy apprenticeships differently?
At BCG, we're fortunate to have a pretty flat structure so that you always have a good proximity between your senior leaders and all your staff. There are two ways we focus on helping to support this idea of two-way mentorship.
One is we just talk about topics. I recently wrote a piece about a mental-health town hall we held. It was quite moving. We had BCG employees who were generous and vulnerable in talking to thousands of people on a virtual town-hall panel about their struggles with things like addiction, grief, and depression, both before their time at BCG and during their time at BCG, and how they work through it.
It's about having those difficult conversations, getting the points out there, and starting to have shared language or shared opportunities to talk about these topics.
The AI days that I mentioned already are another way we do this. A lot of it is about getting cross-cohort connections on technology and other topics, creating forums so that people can talk about it.
The other is ensuring continual, structured feedback. Our staff provides 360-degree feedback all the time. It's an important part of what we do, and we're piloting doing it even more frequently. For example, we're giving people 360 feedback on how to be an inclusive leader. So it's both the formal mechanisms and also just creating the formats and discussions.
So much of culture and moving culture forward is really about having the language so we can share and talk about things. Creating those forums helps. It's an invitation to engage in productive ways.
What innovations are happening around DEI, especially as the topic has become more politicized?
DEI is built into our business model. We need great talent. We grow way faster than our talent pools, so just to get people in at quality, we need to be able to reach a lot of people; we need them to thrive.
Our business requires innovation, which requires diverse thought and experience. So, for us, it's quite core. One of my areas of focus is on inclusion and inclusive leadership. In some ways, it's the simplest thing to focus on. We all know that when people feel comfortable being themselves at work, you get the best out of them. They're most motivated, ready to take risks, ready to collaborate, and all of those things.
In North America, where we have the best statistics, 75% of our workforce is part of one or more of our DEI groups. Whatever intersectionality people have, whatever group they belong to, it's about how you make everybody able to show up at their best. That's really where our focus is.
Raymond Hall; Chelsea Guglielmino; Kristina Bumphrey/Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
The hustle mindset made Gary Vaynerchuk famous. But another quality has been increasingly important to the 49-year-old serial entrepreneur's staying power: empathy.
"So many of you are so much more capable than you think," Vaynerchuk said during his closing keynote at this year's VeeCon, an annual event designed to showcase his various interests, from blockchain to the creator economy. "And I can see it in your eyes that you don't think you can. And it's so blatantly obvious to me that you can. I just want all of you to know from the bottom of my heart, you're dramatically more capable than you think you are."
The audience ate it up.
Vaynerchuk, also known as Gary Vee, has built a legion of fans, many of whom are young men, by evangelizing hard work. He has 50 million social followers, including 15 million on TikTok. He's also drawn critics who say he glorifies a toxic hustle culture and capitalism. For years, his Twitter handle read "a dude that Loves the hustle." In recent years, though, his message has become less shouty and more affirmative, a shift that's coincided with a growing desire for empathy and national attention to the plight of young men.
This turn, like so many in Vaynerchuk's career, has involved a combination of personal branding and business. He launched a direct-to-consumer wine brand called Empathy Wines, which he later sold to Constellation Brands. He started VeeCon to sell his line of cartoon characters, VeeFriends, that personify positive characteristics, like Capable Caterpillar. It's partly this constant evolution — and ability to adapt to cultural trends — that has helped Vaynerchuk's 15-year-old advertising holding company, VaynerX, get on track to post $300 million in revenue this year. That figure, which he revealed for the first time to Business Insider, has more than doubled in the past five years and outpaced growth in the ad industry overall.
In the collection of podcasters and other media figures sometimes called the manosphere, Vaynerchuk is closer to Scott Galloway than Joe Rogan. His schtick lands with a generation that's grown up with — and is now exhausted by — social media, which encourages constant comparisons with others. He understands that many young men have fallen behind but aren't necessarily looking for a handout. Rather, they often want a path toward self-reliance.
Gary Vaynerchuk speaks during VeeCon 2024 in Los Angeles.
Chelsea Guglielmino/Getty Images
Vaynerchuk says his brand's softer turn started when he noticed a lot of fear in his DMs.
"I started to realize in probably in 2015 and '16 that there was just a lot more insecurity in the world," he told BI. "I think I took for granted how well I was parented. And that started me to really start to talk about the why, and that got me more into empathy."
Vaynerchuk has also maintained a safe distance from politics, which seems savvy now as some other CEOs clam up to avoid getting caught up in the culture wars.
"I was a no-go when it was much more popular five, seven years ago," he said of talking politics. "I don't trust the American consumer right now in that I just think we're overly emotional. We're very far away from the middle, and so I really couldn't find a way to feel great about it. I care about my employees too much and the thought of doing things that immediately makes half of them not feel good just did not feel right."
Friends float other theories for the gentler Vaynerchuk. He recently went through a divorce (and is now engaged). It's no longer the early days of the internet when you often had to be loud and obnoxious to get hidebound CMOs to pay attention to digital media. Whatever the reasons for the shift, it appears to be a good business move.
"In the beginning, it was, 'That's dumb, that's dumb,'" Jon Halvorson, SVP of Mondelez and a longtime client, said of Vaynerchuk's rhetoric. "I think it's appealing because a good yelling is fun, but people want a consistent partner. I don't want a rock star, I want Ted Lasso."
Can Vaynerchuk stay relevant in the AI age?
Vaynerchuk made a name for himself helping companies jump on social-media trends, but many in the industry are wondering what his next big act will be. CMOs no longer have to be convinced to embrace social media, and many have even bypassed agencies like VaynerX altogether to take that work in-house.
Agencies like VaynerX have had to diversify. Social marketing is still the company's core, but revenue is increasingly driven by other things like consulting and overseas expansion, which the company says now represent 10% and 20% of revenue, respectively. It employs nearly 2,000 employees from New York to Singapore, up from about 800 people in 2019. Vaynerchuk said he sees revenue doubling again in the next five years.
Gary Vaynerchuk and Mona Vand attend 2024 Pencils of Promise gala in New York.
Cassidy Sparrow/Getty Images for Pencils of Promise
As for Vaynerchuk himself, he still bangs the drum about social-media marketing, but his passions have expanded to include Meta's Ray-Bans (Vaynerchuk is an investor in Meta), which he thinks could replace the phone. He's big on live social shopping, which he predicts will blow up next year.
He's also styled himself as something of an AI guru. Vaynerchuk's stance is that business leaders should find a middle ground — staking out a lane that it'd be hard to disagree with.
"Don't demonize it, like we'll never do AI; that's bad for humanity," he said. "Or the other way: 'Oh great, we don't need to do anything else; AI will take care of it.' So let's not get too high on it. Let's not get too low on it."
How the Vaynerchuk flywheel works
Vaynerchuk calls VaynerX the "operating system for everything I do professionally for the rest of my life."
When the Fox streaming service Tubi sought help promoting itself to Gen Z, Vaynerchuk tapped his influencer connections to help. Other work provided the basis for "The Z Suite," a workplace comedy starring Lauren Graham ("Gilmore Girls," "Parenthood") and set at a New York ad agency; Vaynerchuk is executive producing. Empathy Wines grew out of the company. VeeFriends promotes VeeCon, which in turn showcases Vaynerchuk's other businesses. The list goes on.
"He's proven you can take this value of a personal brand and use it to create value in other services," said Brian Morrissey, former president and editor in chief of Digiday and founder of The Rebooting, a newsletter focused on the media industry.
For CMOs, Vaynerchuk's massive social presence and ability to master the platform du jour is a big part of the value he brings.
"The fact he has 10 million followers on Instagram shows he understands how the platform works, so I do put a lot of weight on his recommendations," said Sandeep Seth, chief growth officer of Tapestry and CMO of its Coach brand. "He's not just selling me a theory. So I definitely value that expertise he brings."
Vaynerchuk, pictured in New York, wants kids to learn soft skills.
Raymond Hall/GC Images
Being a CMO can also be a lonely job in the current market — they often have more responsibility and fewer resources to get it done, and their tenures are generally getting shorter — and he's won clients' loyalty by being available. Access to Vaynerchuk's personal network, nice wines, and, for the lucky few, a ride on a Vaynerchuk-chartered plane to industry events like the Forbes CMO Summit doesn't hurt.
"They get CMOs who are interested in a relationship with him," Halvorson said. "It creates a lot of inbound interest."
At a time when household names in advertising like legends David Ogilvy or Leo Burnett are largely gone, Vaynerchuk is something of an anomaly.
"In a world in which tech and data dominate, larger-than-life personalities are increasingly hard to find," said Andrew Essex, former CEO of Droga5 who's now senior managing partner at consulting giant TCS. "For some, a CEO with so much heart might feel anachronistic. Gary is the rare exception who can pull it off."
Is there a Vayner without Vaynerchuk?
The big question for many personality-led companies like Vaynerchuk's is whether they can transcend their leaders.
Walk around VaynerX, and its founder's presence is everywhere, from the framed inspirational quotes on the wall to the conference rooms named after his passions (the New York Jets, Empathy Wines). Naysayers say his personal brand is still bigger than his company; Vaynerchuk has 22 times as many followers on X as VaynerMedia. The agency isn't a huge buyer of TV advertising, which holds it back among marketers of a certain size, nor is it widely considered a destination for big-name execs or a feeder for prestigious marketers like Apple.
Vaynerchuk, pictured at Tribeca X in New York, is a regular on the conference circuit.
Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for 2023 Tribeca Festival
Vaynerchuk insists the company is no longer synonymous with him, thanks to the team he's built under him. In fact, he said, the onetime upstart is on such a strong footing now that he now worries about complacency setting in.
"I feel like very senior industry people would consider working at VaynerMedia where seven years ago they would laugh at the idea," he said. "So, I think we are the future establishment."
That's not to say he sees himself letting the place run without him.
Vaynerchuk said he sees himself naming his replacement in five to 10 years, at which point he would move into an active chairman role, running VeeFriends or scratching another longtime itch: buying and reviving bygone brands like Ocean Pacific.
"Could JC Penney's come back in a different form as a social live shopping show?" he mused.
Vaynerchuk prides himself on being a hands-off manager and says he'd let the new CEO run the company. But he won't disappear, either.
"I would just be driving another car, and if that person driving the VaynerX car would like me to come in and sit in the passenger seat and brainstorm some stuff or help, then I'm very there for that," he said.
The offers and details on this page may have updated or changed since the time of publication. See our article on Business Insider for current information.
When I adopted my daughter, I had 24 hours' notice to prepare for her arrival.
I'm a freelance worker, so it was easy to stop taking on work, but it was a big shift in how I earn.
This article is part of "Milestone Moments," a series about financial planning for major life events.
This summer, my boyfriend and I adopted a newborn daughter — and we had only 24 hours' notice once we had confirmation that she had been placed with us. Between packing baby supplies and installing the car seat we'd already purchased, I notified my freelance clients I wouldn't be available for at least three months.
I didn't want to commit to a specific time period since I didn't know how much care my baby would need. As a freelancer, I'm used to my income varying, but this would be the first time in over 25 years that I wouldn't have any steady gigs. My career is already precarious, and I had to prepare for my income to nosedive.
I tried to squeeze in extra income where I could
I didn't fully quit working, because I still had a few deadlines to catch up on. While the baby slept, I edited a client's novel. In a burst of hubris, I told one client that I could keep writing their newsletter. I assumed I could squeeze in work around my daughter's schedule.
I didn't realize just how much juggling I would do during my spare hours — laundry, dishes, thank-you cards for the influx of gifts we received, organizing my things and the baby's.
Ever since we saved up all our anticipated adoption costs 1 1/2 years ago, I had tried to budget for my eventual time off. I'd been saving any spare income in an investment account that kept my money liquid and paid about 5% interest. On paper, my savings could cover my half of our mortgage and bills for at least a year, and my boyfriend, who has a full-time job, was happy to cover the rest.
But even though I know that I'm saving us the $40,000 to $50,000 a full-time nanny would cost, it's been extremely hard for me to stop working entirely. The idea that my savings might run out and leave me to borrow spending money from my boyfriend feels far too old-fashioned for someone who's considered herself a feminist since she learned what the word meant.
I want to keep working, but I love being a mom
Now, with my daughter sleeping through the night, I've found myself full of creative ideas begging to be put down on paper. I want to work, and I'm very grateful that I can make that choice, rather than having it made for me.
The three of us could live comfortably on my boyfriend's salary. Nevertheless, not having any income isn't something I can handle emotionally. As a child of divorce, in which money was a major factor, I worry that relying solely on him to provide for us could lead to resentment on his part, and leave me behind in the job market if we ever split up.
Because of that, I'm about to return to my part-time work-from-home copywriting job and have been taking on freelance writing assignments. I considered hiring a babysitter to free up my time, but the difference between my hourly rate and theirs wouldn't make it worthwhile. Furthermore, I'm 49 and waited a long time to fulfill my dream of becoming a mom.
I know that "having it all" isn't possible. I can't simultaneously give 100% to my job and 100% to being a mom. In just these first few months, there have been plenty of times when I've been pulled from my work upon seeing my baby's smiling face. Taking the time to have an impromptu dance party or blow gently on her face brings her more joy than I could have thought possible.
I'm earning the amount that's right for my mental well-being
One necessary expense has been my mental health. I had stopped seeing my therapist earlier this year to save money, but within two weeks of our adoption placement, I returned. I also found another provider to finally obtain medication for ADHD to allow me to not feel so overwhelmed by all the tasks on my plate.
Cutting back on work — but not abandoning it — is the compromise I've settled on to fulfill my duties as a mom, satisfy my need for mental stimulation, and stay financially stable. I'm not earning anywhere near what I was before, but it's enough for bills and occasional splurges without having to micromanage my budget. I've mourned grossing six figures annually, but someday, when my daughter's older, I hope I can get back to that level of success.
I've learned that while money is important and valuable, I can be "rich" in other ways — which I recognize is a privileged viewpoint I can afford to hold only because of my partner's income. When I walk into my daughter's nursery just as she's waking up, and she beams her drooling smile at me, I feel wealthy in love in a way no amount of money could ever hold a candle to.
What's given me the most satisfaction, though, is balancing my work projects with taking care of her. I may not be able to physically tend to her needs and work simultaneously, but I have found ways to bring motherhood into my work. Whether that's sitting her on my lap during Zoom calls or writing about the reality of my life as a mom, it has made my dip in income less scary.
On a Monday in December 2022, I wasdriving to a consultation meeting with another psychotherapist. At the red light, I texted my friend a picture of festive leggings, "I think you need these."
I mentioned that I had an off-site meeting, then a callback mammogram at the hospital, and later, I would see therapy clients at the office. I wasn't too worried.
When I got to the hospital, the mammogram tech reassured me, "Oh, is this your first callback? Oh, gosh, don't panic. Women come here all the time. And you're so young." Then, she began to study the images. She wanted another angle. Another tech appeared in the room.
They decided I should see the doctor for an ultrasound "just to be safe."
I sighed and texted my friend, "My mammogram is taking forever. Now I have to reschedule two patients, and I won't make it to Dollar Tree."
Later, I looked back at this text exchange. I was so clueless. This was the beginning of my relationship with an inflexible system. I knew nothing about juggling work, parenting, and medical obstacles.
I never made it to the office
An hour later, I was on a table, my left arm hooked over my head. The radiologist poured warm, blue gel onto my breast, then pushed a little transponder over my skin. "This was a lot more fun when I was pregnant," I joked, and the radiologist smiled.
"What's the likelihood that I have cancer?" I asked. The radiologist paused for an extra moment, sized me up, and seemingly lied, "Oh, probably 50/50."
And then I knew.
The radiologist helped me roll to a seated position on the exam table. She left to put in the order for the biopsy. I curled over and felt bare as I wiped the gel off my chest. I started to cry.
The nurse asked me if I was OK. I told her my kids were so little; this couldn't be true. I was begging: "It's Christmas." I wanted an exception, as though I had missed the registration deadline for youth soccer teams.
A couple of hours later, I was back on another table for a biopsy, arm over my head in a now-familiar arc. My husband met me at the surgeon's office but wasn't allowed into the procedure room.
The surgeon said he wasn't sure, but they thought it was Stage 1 cancer.
The author was diagnosed with cancer at age 39.
Courtesy of the author
I drove home while my husband picked up the kids from the neighbor's house because the playdate had already been extended too long. I stopped in the school parking lot down the street from my home and cried for 10 minutes.
My husband and kids drove by. They didn't see me, but I knew they would need me. It was dinnertime, so I went home. I had an ice pack strapped to my chest. That evening was the first of many times I had to angle sideways against my kids' flying arms and crashing hugs.
I was diagnosed at 39
The official diagnosis reports came two weeks before Christmas. My kids were just 7 and 11,and Santa can't exactly take sick time. Bruised from the biopsy, I cried every day at 2 a.m. During the day, I strapped ice packs to my chest and wrapped the gifts.
Friends dropped off blankets, ordered pizzas for my family, walked the dog, drove boxes to the post office, wrapped even more gifts, and picked up my prescriptions — and the Christmas Eve appetizers from Trader Joe's.
For the next two weeks, I drove between my home, office, and the hospital, meeting with surgeons and genetic consultants. The decisions were endless: surgical decisions, treatment possibilities, and how to care for my family and patients.
Some of my therapy patients can handle multiple separation periods, but others need uninterrupted care. I consulted with fellow therapists, but there were so many unknowns: how many surgeries I would need, whether I would need chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and what my prognosis was with each step.
In the end, colleagues became the primary therapists for several of my patients, and I reduced my hours to part time, with intermittent leaves.
As I made these arrangements, different hospital departments would call to inform me of my next appointment with a new specialist. Breast cancer treatment requires a cardiologist, a surgical oncologist, a medical oncologist, a gynecologic oncologist, a neurologist, a psychiatrist, a hematologist, insurance care coordinators, and social workers.
No one seemed to understand that I already had a full schedule of patients, youth sports, childcare, and other commitments.
Once, I received a call at 11 a.m. for a hematology consult at 1 p.m. I protested; I had my own therapy patient scheduled at that time. I was told thatnext week's surgery could not proceed if I didn't show up. So, I abruptly canceled my afternoon patients. I felt so unprofessional, but it was out of my control.
I made so many phone calls; the worst part was calling family and friends with bad news.
"But you're so young," said my grandmother.
"But you're so young," said my neighbor.
"But you're still so young," said my older friends.
I am young among cancer patients, but I'm also part of a growing trend. A report from the American Cancer Society this year said that one in 17 women will develop some form of early-onset cancer before the age of 50. From 1990 to 2019, early-onset cancer rates increased by 79% globally, a study published in BMJ Oncology found. Despite rising rates, young women still represent a minority of cancer patients.
In other words, I look like a preteen in a cancer center waiting room. At the rehabilitation center, where I receive physical therapy for my chest and hips, I look out of place among the older patients. Many of them use walkers, have gray hair, or are balding. Their faces are slack with exhaustion. I wonder if I will look like them soon.
Beginning in January 2023, I had a lumpectomy, a double mastectomy with reconstruction, and a hysterectomy, all within nine months. My pectoral muscles are shredded, and my armpits are unnaturally tight from resectioned skin and lymphatic cording.
Sometimes, I joke, "Look at me! I'm a damaged marionette!" I use humor to cope, but sometimes, my friends worry about me.
On hard days, I am terrified of heavy doors and try to scuttle between other people. On my best days, I can run for miles and play basketball with the kids.
There's no childcare for cancer patients
Mothering through cancer is not for the weak. The medical world only recognizes "cancer" — not the rest of our lives.
I had to arrange childcare for every appointment, biopsy, scan, and lab draw. I already felt overextended as a working mother. Cancer added another ball to juggle. These tests and procedures usually take place during regular business hours, so I had to make sure that my husband or a friend could get the kids to school, manage school pickup, or take them overnight when I was admitted to the hospital.
After my initial surgeries in early 2023, I needed to be at the cancer center for a half day every 28 days to get a drug that paused my ovaries and maintained menopause for my treatments. That's a big ask for a working mother.
After seven months of this schedule, I chose to have a total hysterectomy to cut out the appointments and lower my future cancer risk. I still go to the cancer center every three to six months, but at least it's not monthly. Without the surgery, I would have needed the injections for five to 10 years.
I called into consultation meetings for work by phone from my car, traveling to and from the hospital. I coordinated playdates in the waiting rooms. And I knew that I was lucky. My work could be flexible. My doctors took me seriously and found me relatable: I am white, highly educated, and upper-middle class — just like them. If I disagreed, I felt empowered to ask questions. It was staggering to think, "Here I am, positioned with more privilege than anyone deserves, and yet, this is still so damn hard."
No one in the healthcare system offered childcare solutions to me, and no one seemed to notice they were absent. I understand that children pose germy risks and patients are receiving chemotherapy, but a hospital complex is a big place. There are a lot of hallways and rooms.
The local fitness center can supervise children — from newborns to 12-year-olds — in a lively room with play equipment and televisions, but in my experience, entire hospital systems had nothing to offer.
Cancer is expensive, even with good insurance
From the moment of my diagnosis, I was stressed about money.
Cancer is expensive. I needed to pay for extra childcare, medical bills, gas mileage, prescriptions, and unpaid leaves for surgeries and treatments. While I have health insurance through my husband's employer, I am self-employed as a therapist. If I cannot see patients, I do not generate income. In the worst-case scenario, I could lose my business and my salary.
At the start of a cancer diagnosis, the timeline is unclear, so I had to get creative with my surgical recoveries. Doctors recommend six weeks of rest after each major surgery, but without paid leave, I could only afford to take two weeks off after my surgeries.
I would prop myself up with pillows and see therapy clients by video. I returned to the office when I regained the ability to drive.
We had a little cash, which helped, and friends and neighbors provided meals and gift cards for groceries. My 90-year-old grandmother sent me a check. My mother flew across the country to help with my children for a month.
I don't know how anyone could survive this ordeal without friends and family because there is no other safety net.
Cancer centers need to adapt to their new population of patients
Two years later, my cancer treatment is now less intense.
The author wishes there was more support for young moms diagnosed with cancer.
Courtesy of the author
I'm back to a normal work schedule, and my kids are more independent. I don't have any detectable tumors inside my body, but doctors said they no longer use the term "remission" because hormone-positive breast cancer often recurs, sometimes decades later. There are no guarantees, but I'm optimistic.
I can accept that I am a breast cancer patient and "survivor." What I cannot accept is that the treatment process has to be so hard to navigate, especially as a working mother.
There should be ways for young mothers to feel seen and incorporated into the waiting rooms, the schedules, and the brochures. The cancer centers could help with flexible scheduling, easier phone systems, nurse navigators, on-site childcare, and grants for paid leave.
Moms work so hard to care for others. The system could care a little more for us.
Powell says creating a collaborative learning environment is key to helping employees adapt to AI.
This article is part of "Workforce Innovation," a series exploring the forces shaping enterprise transformation.
As the chief human resources officer at AARP, Marjorie Powell devotes much of her professional energy to meeting the needs of the multigenerational workforce. These days, much of that involves navigating AI's impact to ensure every employee at the nonprofit is prepared for the technological changes shaping the workplace.
"Our goal in everything we do for our employees is to provide the resources, support, and capabilities they need to make good decisions within the company's guidelines," she said. "We take the same approach with AI."
Powell's mission extends beyond AARP's workforce. As an advocate for the 50-and-over demographic, she champions the adaptability and contributions of older workers in a tech-driven economy.
"There's an assumption that people over a certain age are not comfortable with technology, but what's overlooked is that many older people — particularly those at the end of the baby boomer generation — were at the forefront of this technological revolution," she said.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
How did AARP handle the introduction of AI in its workforce?
We decided to use Copilot because we're already a Microsoft company. We got enough licenses to set up a working group with key people we thought would be super users. The idea was to experiment with AI tools and see how they fit into our workflows.
We wanted to learn and figure out what works and what doesn't. Then, we could make a decision about how we were going to roll it out to the company, since one, it's costly; and two, we wanted people to feel comfortable with it.
What were some of the outcomes of the working group, and how did those results shape the way AARP approached training and support?
We issued a policy, a generative AI use case approval process, and a mandatory training for all staff to complete to learn how to use gen AI in the workplace. The training focused on internal and external use and the types of information that can be shared, public versus private, and so on.
We encouraged our staff to 'Go out there and play with it.' We then surveyed them and asked, What are you using it for? What are some great use cases you've developed? How's it helping you enhance your productivity? How are you using this tool to further the AARP mission?
We also considered what existing structure we could use to encourage staff to use AI and explore the technology. We already had a structure in place called Communities of Practice — groups where employees learn and share. It's like an employee resource group (ERG), but focused on learning and development within industry, so we used this model to create an AI Community of Practice.
What are some of the 'great use cases' for AI for your HR team specifically?
We get a lot of calls and emails on simple things about AARP benefits and policies. People ask questions like: I'm having knee surgery next month. How do I sign up for FMLA? or Where do I find my W2? or I bought a Peloton. Is that eligible for the fitness credit? So we started building an HR chatbot to provide that kind of information. It's much easier for employees to ask the chatbot instead of overwhelming a team member with those queries.
We're currently piloting the chatbot with 300-400 frequently asked questions and answers preloaded. It directs employees to the right information without them having to dig and helps us understand what additional information we need to include.
Many employers are using AI tools in hiring, but there are concerns about potential bias. What's your perspective on this?
We use AI for sourcing candidates. All AARP recruiters are certified to conduct Boolean searches to increase the accuracy of identifying talent with specific skill sets in the marketplace.
But when it comes to screening and interviewing, we don't use AI. We find that the technology is still very biased, specifically when it comes to age. Until the technology matures enough to minimize bias, I don't believe it's a good idea to use it without that human component of judgement.
Speaking of age, what are your thoughts on ageism in the workplace today, especially from companies hesitant to hire older workers?
Companies don't want to be the kind of organization that isn't welcoming to talent, regardless of age. Due to the economy and the rising cost of healthcare, many people in the 50-plus community are re-entering the workforce.
Many in that age group have valuable skills and experience and are eager to return. They often say, 'I don't need to be in a leadership role. Been there, done that. I just want to help and be of use.' They also naturally take on mentorship roles, as people seek their guidance. By embracing this segment of the workforce, companies can gain huge value.
What do employers misunderstand about older workers and technology?
Baby boomers were at the forefront of the technology era, and they're more comfortable with technology than many people realize. In fact, they are among the largest consumers of technology products. Tech companies really need to pay attention to this demographic.
I look at myself — I'm about to turn 60 — and I was selling Commodore 64s when I was in high school. I've seen everything from floppy disks to CDs, to cassette tapes, to 8-tracks, to digital streaming and everything else. I've experienced all versions of technology, and I've adapted. I'm still willing to adapt, and I'm still learning.
The initiative, called "Find One, Launch One, Ramp One," introduced goals, prizes, and other incentives for Amazon's huge cloud-support teams across North America.
The ultimate aim was to sell more of the company's new AI offerings. Sales architects, customer-success managers, and people in other roles were recruited into the broad push.
"This is a great time to partner with our sales teams for this #OneTeam effort," AWS said in an internal memo obtained by Business Insider.
These AWS staffers were asked to find at least one sales opportunity each month for Q, Amazon's artificial-intelligence assistant, and Bedrock, the company's AI platform.
Then, the initiative asked employees to launch one Bedrock or Q customer workload.
The final requirement, the "Ramp One" part, pushed teams to generate real revenue from these workloads.
AWS created a leaderboard for everyone to see the top performers. With December 1 as the deadline, the company dangled prizes, including an evening of pizza and wine at an executive's home (with guitar playing as a possibility).
A race for AI supremacy
This initiative is just one example of AWS trying to squeeze more out of its massive sales and support teams to be more competitive in AI. There's more pressure and urgency to sell AI products, along with new incentives, according to several internal documents and more than a dozen current and former AWS employees.
Messaging from AWS CEO Matt Garman, previously the cloud unit's top sales executive, is to move even faster, these people said. They asked not to be identified because they're not authorized to speak with the press. Their identities are known to BI.
Much is at stake for Amazon. OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google, alongside a slew of smaller startups, are all vying for AI supremacy. Though Amazon is a cloud pioneer and has worked on AI for years, it is now at risk of ceding a chance to become the main platform where developers build AI products and tools.
More pressure
The revamped sales push is part of the company's response to these challenges. As the leading cloud provider, AWS has thousands of valuable customer relationships that it can leverage to get its new AI offerings out into the world.
Many AWS sales teams have new performance targets tied to AI products.
One team has to hit a specific number of customer engagements that focus on AWS's generative-AI products, for instance.
There are also new sales targets for revenue driven by gen-AI products, along with AI-customer win rates and a goal based on the number of gen-AI demos run, according to one of the internal Amazon documents.
Another AWS team tracks the number of AI-related certifications achieved by employees and how many other contributions staff have made to AI projects, one of the people said.
Hitting these goals is important for Amazon employees because that can result in higher performance ratings, a key factor in getting a raise or promotion.
More employees encouraged to sell AI
Even people in roles that traditionally don't involve actively selling products are feeling pressure to find opportunities for AI sales, according to Amazon employees who spoke with BI and internal documents.
AWS software consultants, who mostly work on implementing cloud services, are now encouraged to find sales opportunities, which blurs the line between consultants and traditional salespeople.
The Find One, Launch One, Ramp One initiative includes AWS sales architects. These staffers traditionally work with salespeople to craft the right cloud service for each customer. Now they're incentivized to get more involved in actual selling and are measured by the results of these efforts.
"Customers are interested in learning how to use GenAI capabilities to innovate, scale, and transform their businesses, and we are responding to this need by ensuring our teams are equipped to speak with customers about how to succeed with our entire set of GenAI solutions," an AWS spokesperson told BI.
"There is nothing new or abnormal about setting sales goals," the spokesperson added in a statement. They also said that AWS sales architects were not "sellers" and that their job was to "help customers design solutions to meet their business goals."
There are "no blurred lines," the spokesperson said, and roles and expectations are clear.
Selling versus reducing customer costs
One particular concern among some AWS salespeople revolves around the company's history of saving cloud customers money.
Some staffers told BI that they now feel the company is force-feeding customers AI products to buy, even if they don't need them. The people said this represented a shift in AWS's sales culture, which over the years has mostly looked for opportunities to reduce customers' IT costs.
In some cases, salespeople have also been asked to boost the attendance of external AWS events. Several recent AWS-hosted AI events saw low attendance records, and salespeople were told to find ways to increase the number of registrations by reaching out to customers, some of the people said.
AWS's spokesperson said customer attendance had "exceeded our expectations for a lot of our AI events" and that the number of participants at the re:Invent annual conference "more than doubled."
The spokesperson also said the notion that Amazon had moved away from its goal of saving customers money was false. The company always starts with "the outcomes our customers are trying to achieve and works backwards from there."
A hammer and a nail
Garman, Amazon's cloud boss, hinted at some of these issues during an internal fireside chat in June, according to a recording obtained by BI. He said there were sales opportunities for AWS in "every single conversation" with a customer but that AWS must ensure those customers get real value out of their spending.
"Too often we go talk to customers to tell them what we've built, which is not the same thing as talking to customers," Garman said. "Just because you have a hammer doesn't mean the problem the customer has is the nail."
AWS's spokesperson said the company is "customer-obsessed" and always tries to consider decisions "from our customers' perspectives, like their ROI." The spokesperson added that some of AWS's competitors don't take that approach and that it's a "notable contrast," pointing to this BI story about a Microsoft customer complaining about AI features.
More pressure but also more rewards
Amazon is also doling out bonuses and other chances for higher pay for AI-sales success.
AWS recently announced that salespeople would receive a $1,000 performance bonus for the first 25 Amazon Q licenses they sell and retain for three consecutive months with a given customer, according to an internal memo seen by BI. The maximum payout is $20,000 per customer.
For Bedrock, Amazon pays salespeople a bonus of $5,000 for small customers and $10,000 for bigger customers when they "achieve 3 consecutive months of specified Bedrock incremental usage in 2024," the memo said.
Some AWS teams are discussing higher pay for AI specialists. Sales architects, for example, in AI-related roles across fields including security and networking could get a higher salary than generalists, one of the people said.
AWS's spokesperson told BI that every major tech company provides similar sales incentives. Amazon continually evaluates compensation against the market, the spokesperson added.
Fear of losing to Microsoft
Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Inside AWS, there's a general concern that Amazon was caught off guard by the sudden emergence of generative AI and is playing catch-up to its rivals, most notably Microsoft, the people who spoke with BI said.
Some Amazon employees are worried that Q is losing some customers to Microsoft's Copilot because of a lack of certain AI features, BI previously reported.
Microsoft has an advantage because of its wide variety of popular business applications, including its 365 productivity suite. That may make it easier for Microsoft to show customers how AI can improve their productivity, some of the Amazon employees told BI. AWS, meanwhile, has struggled to build a strong application business, despite years of trying.
AWS's spokesperson challenged that idea by noting that AWS has several successful software applications for companies, including Amazon Connect, Bedrock, and SageMaker. The spokesperson also said Amazon Q launched in April and was already seeing robust growth.
It's "no secret that generative AI is an extremely competitive space," the spokesperson added, saying: "However, AWS is the leader in cloud and customer adoption of our AI innovation is fueling much of our continued growth. AWS has more generative AI services than any other cloud provider, which is why our AI services alone have a multibillion-dollar run rate."
More speed
A major AWS reorganization earlier this year hasn't helped the AI-sales effort, some of the people who spoke with BI said.
The big change switched AWS to more of an industry focus rather than a regional one. That caused confusion inside the company, and some large customers lost their point of contact, the people said. AWS is still figuring out how to run as a more cohesive group, which has resulted in a slower sales cycle, they added.
AWS's spokesperson said it's inaccurate to say its sales process has slowed, adding that year-over-year revenue growth accelerated again in the most recent quarter and that the business was on pace to surpass $100 billion in sales this year.
In his June fireside chat, Garman stressed the importance of speed and told employees to "go faster."
"Speed really matters," Garman said. "And it doesn't necessarily mean work more hours. It means: How do we make decisions faster?"
Do you work at Amazon? Got a tip?
Contact the reporter, Eugene Kim, via the encrypted-messaging apps Signal or Telegram (+1-650-942-3061) or email ([email protected]). Reach out using a nonwork device. Check out Business Insider's source guide for other tips on sharing information securely.
