• I moved to Italy 11 years ago and was initially uncomfortable with the slower pace of life.
• At first, I didn't understand how people could spend hours lounging and socializing.
• However, I've learned to prioritize rest and to stop apologizing for slowing down.

After getting my first job at 14 years old, I became hardwired to feel like my life would be a combination of school, work, and limited play until I retired.

That mindset followed me everywhere, including across the Atlantic, when my husband, children, and I moved from Cleveland to Rome in 2014.

After spending time in Italy's capital, we decided to move our family farther south to Mormanno — a quiet town tucked in the mountains with less than 3,000 people — and have been there since.

When we first moved, I expected to experience culture shocks in relation to the language, the food, and maybe even the fashion. What I didn't expect, however, was to come face-to-face with just how deeply American my relationship to rest really was.

I didn't realize how addicted I was to productivity as an American

For most of my life, being busy felt like my default setting. I genuinely believed that if I wasn't actively working toward something, I was falling behind.

I'd internalized the idea that a relentless work ethic was how you achieved the American dream.

So, when I moved to a place where people unapologetically paused their days — not just for vacation, but for lunch, coffee, or for no reason at all — I didn't know what to do with myself.

I'd watch my neighbors sit on their balconies for hours in the middle of a workday, chatting or doing nothing, and it drove me crazy on their behalf.

When I'd walk past cafés where people lingered over espresso, I'd feel a wave of unease, even though I had nowhere to be.

Trying to slow down made me question my self-worth

For the first six years after my move, I felt like I was having a mini identity crisis. I was 29 years old and still questioning my value if I wasn't actively being productive.

The tension started wearing on me. My body felt anxious, and my mind felt like it was always searching for the next task.

Meanwhile, the world around me wasn't rushing; it was inviting me to slow down. After years of resisting it, I finally started to let go.

The change started gradually and was mainly the result of other moms consistently inviting me to the local café for espresso. I didn't want to keep sounding rude by declining, so I gave in for the first time and found myself antsy making small talk at 10 a.m.

From there, I accepted more invitations to hang out with friends and started to learn to be OK with taking unscheduled breaks.

I realized I needed the rest

When I first started to slow down, I felt like failure. But then, something strange happened — I started to feel better.

Self-care, which I'd always deprioritized, started to become part of my routine. I began to give myself permission to take walks without listening to a podcast and sit in the town square with nothing but my thoughts.

I learned that "dolce far niente," the Italian phrase for the sweetness of doing nothing, isn't laziness. Rather, it's intention, presence, and an understanding that rest isn't something you earn, it's something you need.

Living in Italy hasn't made me less ambitious, but it has allowed me to measure success a little differently.

Yes, I still work hard, but happiness and peace of mind mean more to me now. After all, what good is the money if you're too busy to enjoy it with the people you love most?

At the end of the day, I know that I'm allowed to live my life — even when I'm doing absolutely nothing.

• Panasonic said on Friday it planned to cut 10,000 jobs this financial year.
• The Japanese company said in a statement that the measures were aimed at boosting its efficiency.
• The reductions will amount to about 4% of Panasonic's global workforce.

Panasonic will slash its workforce by 10,000 roles in an effort to boost efficiency.

The Japanese electronics manufacturer, which supplies batteries to Tesla through its subsidiary Panasonic Energy, plans to cut 5,000 roles in Japan and 5,000 overseas. That amounts to about 4% of its nearly 230,000-strong workforce.

In a statement on Friday, Panasonic said it planned to "thoroughly review operational efficiency … mainly in sales and indirect departments, and reevaluate the numbers of organisations and personnel actually needed."

"Through these measures, the company will optimize our personnel on a global scale," the statement added.

The cuts will take place this financial year, which ends in March 2026, "in accordance with the labor laws, rules, and regulations of each country and region."

The cuts are expected to incur costs of almost $900 million.

Panasonic shares closed 2% higher in Tokyo.

President Donald Trump's tariffs and trade war with China have made the global economic outlook more uncertain this year.

In January, Panasonic Energy said it wanted to curb its reliance on China for EV batteries.

"We do have some Chinese supply but we don't have a lot," Allan Swan, the president of Panasonic Energy of North America, said at the time. "And we have plans not to have some, as we go forward, and that has accelerated."

In 2022, Panasonic opted into the government-recommended four-day workweek in Japan, which aimed to reduce the number of employees country falling ill or even dying from overwork.

CEO Yuki Kusumi told investors at the time that the company "must support the well-being of our employees."

• Digital communication is handy, but can lead to problems with tone and misinterpretation.
• Feeling unheard can lead to team members disengaging and quiet quitting, says Skillsoft's VP.
• Managers need to figure out how their employees like to communicate — and how they do it best.

Digital communication has become the norm at work, especially in workplaces where staff are hybrid or completely remote.

That doesn't mean it works for everyone all the time. Those who find in-person meetings can provoke anxiety favor DMs on Slack or Teams. The problem with this approach is that text can make it far harder to decipher tone and meaning.

Leena Rinne, the vice president of Skillsoft Coaching, told Business Insider that managers should make it a priority to work out the best way for their team to communicate.

Otherwise, frustrations and feedback fall by the wayside, leading team members to feel overlooked. This only leads to disengagement and a lack of purpose, Rinne said, which don't help productivity.

"How important it is depends on how happy and engaged you want your people to be," Rinne said. "If you don't care, maybe it doesn't matter. But if you care about them being engaged, delivering good work, feeling loyal to your organization, and if you care about those outcomes, it has to be a priority."

Slack is quick, but not always helpful

Communicating through text, email, DM, and even voice notes has sped everything up. Rinne said it also gives people a chance to think before responding.

"You can be thoughtful about what you say back," she said. "If you have a big feeling, you're not on the spot to come up with an answer right then."

But for Gen Zers, the world's digital natives, this can lead to a "communication gap," Rinne said, because "they almost feel awkward talking to people" face to face. "This digital generation has never known life without devices, never known life without digital engagement."

Many Gen Zers also got their first full-time jobs during the pandemic and missed out on the early years of workplace socializing.

Anxious generation

"They went through some of their most formative years in their houses in the pandemic, when we may have developed social skills," Rinne said. "They had a different experience from me and many other generations."

As such, Zoomers are a particularly anxious generation and can develop conflict aversion if they only communicate digitally, Rinne said. They can't adapt to be agile in "these moments of rumble that happen all the time in a conversation," in her view.

Rinne thinks people shouldn't solely use more disconnected forms of communication in general. Younger generations are not the only ones using voice notes and texts now.

"We're all evolving our communication styles. There might be benefits for this new way of communicating, but there are some big gaps if we rely too heavily on it."

Communication via these means can be stunted and even misinterpreted. "The connectivity, that human moment, it's not the same," Rinne said.

She recalled a recent interaction with a colleague in which she was busy answering their DM in a very straightforward manner. The colleague assumed Rinne was being short-tempered or was annoyed with their question, which wasn't her intention at all.

At the same time, it's important to balance these needs and meet team members "where they're at," Rinne added, and not force communication styles that simply don't work for them.

"If you don't do that, you risk all those things that every organization is complaining about right now, which are the turnover, the disengagement, the quiet quitting — all of those things."

Middle managers are vital

The antidote to this is working to maintain a high-trust relationship — one where small lapses in concentration don't erode it.

"Building teams that are psychologically safe gives us a lot more latitude to stumble, either in our digital communication or even in our face-to-face communication where we are awkward and say the wrong thing," Rinne said. "If it's safe, that's fine."

Middle managers play a critical role in facilitating communication and understanding the needs of their teams. This "messy middle" can receive less investment in leadership development compared to frontline managers and executives, she said.

Companies that are "unbossing" the workplace and aiming to flatten organizations, such as Amazon, may find this strategy risky, Rinne said.

"The whole thing starts to unravel if you cut too far into that level. You better have something that fills in not just the functional skill gap, but the leadership gap of a middle level.

"Everyone left now has how many direct reports that you're supposed to be engaged with, know about, adapt to be agile in their styles? It's hard to do that with 10 people — try it with 30."

A few months ago, I began noticing an unusual pattern across my digital feeds. Wherever I scrolled, people kept telling me to play Tetris.

Aspiring thought leaders on LinkedIn touted the game as a tool for honing strategic thinking. On TikTok, it was promoted as a salve for workday anxiety. Reddit users sang its praises, saying it may help prevent flashbacks from traumatizing experiences, such as witnessing a stabbing at Grand Central Terminal or watching a surfer swallowed up by a deadly swell. In the past six months alone, dozens of Reddit posts have suggested Tetris to help with PTSD, accumulating thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments.

I was skeptical. But I quickly realized that I was late to the party. Studies on the game's potential to improve players' mental health and cognition date back to at least the early 2000s. Research on how the brain adapts to playing Tetris goes back even further. In recent years, amid the rise of social media and the modern cult of self-optimization, Tetris has gained new momentum as a better-living gambit. The game has shown up in enough personal development content that its self-help status has graduated from the ultrafringe to the almost mainstream. Somehow, while I was busy living my life, Tetris had become a life hack for business bros, wellness gurus, and plenty of others in between.

But how exactly does it work?

Tetris was created in 1984 as an arcade game in Soviet Moscow by the scientist Alexey Pajitnov. The concept was simple: Players pieced together descending multicolored puzzle blocks to form tidy rows that fell away to clear space for even more blocks, which tumbled from above at an ever-increasing speed — a hypnotic, quick-thinking race against a game-ending pileup. Players couldn't get enough. Within a few years, the video game creator Henk Rogers partnered with Pajitnov and secured a deal to bring Tetris to Nintendo's then new Game Boy devices, cementing the game as an international obsession and a staple of '90s childhoods.

It wasn't long before Tetris devotees began reporting a strange occurrence. The game's cascading blocks would follow them off their screens and show up against the walls of darkened rooms, when they closed their eyes to fall asleep, and even in their dreams. A 1991 study of Tetris players' brain scans found that their cognitive processing while playing the game became more energy-efficient the more they played, suggesting that as they grew their Tetris-playing skills, their brains became ever more primed toward solving the puzzle. Players were able to engage with the game so deeply that they stayed in the zone even after they'd finished playing, the study found, and without virtual Tetris blocks to maneuver, their brains conjured up imaginary ones. In 1994, Wired dubbed this the "Tetris effect."

Multiple studies went on to find that playing Tetris within a critical time window following a traumatic event might reduce the onset, intensity, and frequency of PTSD symptoms. A study published last year found that among 164 Swedish healthcare workers who faced work-related trauma during the pandemic, playing a single 20-minute round of Tetris immediately after focusing on the visual aspect of a traumatic memory led to an average 85.9% drop in intrusive memories five weeks after playing. Tetris players continued showing post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms at about half the rate of nonplayers in follow-ups three and six months later.

Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and mental health podcaster in the Florida Keys, says that the research on Tetris and PTSD aligns with a broader shift in the clinical understanding of how memory consolidation and trauma work together. Earlier in her career, Morin recalls, she was expected to coax patients "to process and debrief" in the aftermath of possibly trauma-inducing experiences, such as an act of violence in the workplace. Instead of helping people move past the event, this approach often made them feel worse, she says. She and her professional peers now recognize that diving headfirst into processing terrible moments right after the fact can exacerbate distress and give way to rumination, which is a known risk factor for developing PTSD.

Playing Tetris, on the other hand, has been found to have the opposite effect. "Tetris takes just enough brainpower that you have to be much more present and can't be worried about the future or rehashing something in the past," Morin says. "Your brain's kind of like a file cabinet, trying to decide which folder to put these memories into. And something about the way that Tetris works makes it so those things don't end up in the 'let's revisit this later' file." In other words, whether through neurocognitive trickery or the sheer force of distraction, playing Tetris may safeguard against locking in the kinds of memories that might become intrusive thoughts down the line. Morin is so enthusiastic about the therapeutic possibilities of Tetris that she recently devoted an entire episode of her podcast to the subject.

Other studies point to further applications for Tetris' magic. Richard Haier, the psychologist who first uncovered the mechanism behind the Tetris effect, found that the cerebral cortices of frequent Tetris players became thicker over time, which could lead to improvements in associated functions such as memory capacity and cognitive development. Another study, published in 2018, found that playing Tetris may help counteract anxiety by inducing a state of flow, or being able to focus deeply on a task. Further research has indicated that these brain changes aren't unique to Tetris, with gamers reporting Tetris effect-like hallucinations from other video games. Repetition and puzzle-solving alter your perception, whether you're fitting together a cascade of colorful blocks or mining for materials to slay the "Minecraft" dragon. But it's the simplicity and accessibility of Tetris that keep new generations of players discovering — and rediscovering — its hypnotic capabilities.

Will Padilla, a 28-year-old content creator and software-as-a-service sales rep in Scottsdale, Arizona, hadn't heard about any of this research when he discovered that playing Tetris helps him push through the trickiest parts of his workday. It was a happy fluke when Padilla decided, on a whim, to queue up the game to keep himself preoccupied one day during the first nerve-racking round of cold calls on the job.

"Cold calls make me really nervous — and everyone who has to make them — because you're calling someone out of the blue," Padilla tells me. "The person could be really rude to you. But it's part of the job." Padilla tried other means of distraction to ease the process, such as squeezing a stress ball, to no avail. With Tetris, he realized he'd found his ideal solution. "It helped me get over the initial 30 seconds of nerves," Padilla says. He went on to share the tip on TikTok with fellow SaaS sellers.

Padilla's explanation for why the game helped aligns with the research. "You're doing this stimulating thing that's not causing more anxiety but is making you think in a very calm and analytical way," he says.

Abhishek Shankar, the founder of a fertility-planning tech startup in Delaware, plays Tetris to clear his mind and sharpen his focus so he can code. "Its fast-paced decision-making gets me into a flow state that carries over to solving complex programming problems," Shankar, 39, tells me. He's even programmed a version of the game for personal use.

Katherine Yan, a 27-year-old engineering manager at Medium who's based in Los Angeles, similarly says that Tetris helps train her brain to quickly recognize patterns and make decisions under pressure. "It's a constant exercise in prioritization, spatial reasoning, and adapting to imperfect conditions — just like managing competing deadlines and priorities or untangling a legacy codebase." Yan, who began playing the game in high school, says she noticed over the years that after playing for even just a few minutes she would return to her work with more focus and faster decision-making capabilities.

Jamie Krenn, an adjunct associate professor of human development at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University's Teachers College, has students play Tetris in her classes every semester to demonstrate how some games can improve problem-solving, spatial reasoning, and working memory by forcing players to think fast and adapt on the fly. "The way Tetris makes you recognize patterns and plan ahead is basically a workout for your brain," Krenn says.

At least some of the surge in awareness over the science of playing Tetris comes down to simple SEO. In 2018, Rogers and a team of Japanese video game developers unveiled a spinoff of the game called "Tetris Effect" — a sly homage to the cognitive phenomenon. Google searches for the term predictably soared when the game came out, a process that repeated with subsequent releases for new gaming consoles over the next five years. It's all but certain that many of the gamers looking for news on the game stumbled upon the research behind the title.

But with growing interest comes expanded misunderstanding. Content creators and even journalists don't always have the scientific background to correctly interpret researchers' studies, which can lead to exaggerated or oversimplified claims, confusion, and backlash. "'Play Tetris' is the new 'Have you tried yoga?' for PTSD and I'm not having any of it," a frustrated Reddit user wrote a couple of years ago in a support channel for complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

It's a problem that spreads far beyond Tetris. "Once an idea that's overly simplistic takes root, it's really hard to challenge that, even if the broader research world knows that that's not true," says Peter Simons, a science journalist and the author of the online publication Mad in America who has written critically about this dynamic. "Once it's in the layperson's mind and culturally out there, everywhere we look, it's really hard for a researcher to say, 'Hey, actually, the literature doesn't support this at all.' Then it sounds like you, the researcher, are the person who has to prove an extreme point of view, even though it's the mainstream cultural view that's extreme and overblown." It's the same hive-mind instinct that feeds conspiracy theories and problematic health advice.

"We'll get interested in pop psychology, and we'll replicate the same error over and over again, spreading misinformation because we don't understand the complexity of what we're reading," he says. "But as we get more excited about it, we'll do it more and more. That, to me, is a societal ill, not a societal good."

Morin sees things differently. From where she stands, the calculus is simple: The research is promising, the game is fun, and, in many cases, it's free to download and play. There's little to lose in trying. "So many other treatments for PTSD come with risks, like medications and even therapy," she tells me. "But who hasn't played Tetris or some other, similar game? You're not out on anything by giving it a shot."

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

• An entrepreneur named Liane Agbi struggled with balancing her relationship and business.
• She hired extra help, used automated systems, and made her husband an accountability partner.
• These changes revamped her work-life balance and boosted her profits to over $190,000.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Liane Agbi, a 34-year-old entrepreneur in Jersey City, New Jersey. Business Insider has verified the profits mentioned in this article, which has been edited for length and clarity.

When I launched my web design agency in April 2021, I had some business acumen, but I really didn't understand how timelines or boundaries worked.

My fiancé, now husband, and I were both going to be working from home, so I figured we'd spend so much more time together and have the freedom to do fun midday activities. That wasn't the case.

Most days, I'd log on to my computer around 8 a.m. and work until 6 or 7 p.m. After having dinner and maybe watching a show together, I'd be back on my laptop, falling asleep on the couch with it in my lap.

A difficult conversation with my husband made me realize I wasn't living the life I wanted, and I had to make drastic changes to the way I navigated my business. After implementing three changes, I worked less, my relationship was stronger, and in one year I increased my productivity and grew my profits to $192,000.

The reality of entrepreneurship was not how I imagined

As time passed, I found myself cutting meals with my husband shorter, keeping interactions to a "hi" and "bye," and rescheduling date nights in favor of work. I didn't know how to shut off my work brain.

Around the end of 2021, my husband and I had just gotten married, and he sat me down for a tough conversation. He asked me if the way I was operating, sacrificing everything for my business, was the vision I had for our marriage and my life.

That simple question opened my eyes to the fact that my current lifestyle was unsustainable.

Setting boundaries with my work schedule has made a huge difference

I started with a 7 or 8 p.m. cut-off time for work and moved it earlier as I got more comfortable disconnecting.

Nowadays, I don't respond to clients after 4 p.m., and if someone tries to reach me in the evening, they might receive an auto-response stating I'm out of the office and will get back to them the next day.

For the longest time, I was too nervous to use an automated email message because I thought it would signal to clients that I was unresponsive, but this change has brought me a huge sense of relief by helping me turn off my work brain and be present with my partner.

Hiring people to help with my business grew my revenue

In 2020, I hired a $4,000 business coach for a seven-week program to help me create workflow systems for my emerging business.

The most lasting lesson she taught me was the power of leveraging automation, such as email scheduling, to get back time. Hiring a business coach was completely worth it for me, and I still have access to meet with her monthly.

Two years later, I decided to hire a part-time junior developer for $1,000 a month. I used to take pride in doing everything myself, but outsourcing support has given me time back to focus on the big parts of my business, like brand development and marketing.

My junior developer handles some of the most time-consuming parts of my business.

I made my husband my work accountability partner

My husband has helped me maintain my work-life boundaries by becoming somewhat of an accountability partner.

In the beginning, I would shut off my computer, but I still found myself checking emails on my phone. Then he'd step in to give me a friendly reminder.

If we were watching a show and I was on my phone, he'd pause the show and wait for me to come back from whatever email I was reading. It was one of those silent signals to me like, "Liane, we're supposed to be spending time together, and instead, you're retreating to work."

I boosted my productivity and sales

Since limiting my working hours, I became significantly more productive. I'd tell myself: "You only have six hours to work today. How are you going to use them?"

Boosting my productivity and sales has given me the confidence to take on bigger clients. I know how to operate within a timeline, set boundaries, and lean on my support system to get through it which helps me manage big projects without overwhelm.

If I could go back and tell 2021 Liane anything, it would be that it's not just OK to have boundaries; it's required for a successful and sane entrepreneur.

If you're an entrepreneur who made a lifestyle change that greatly affected your business and would like to share your story, please email the editor, Manseen Logan, at [email protected].

• Too much of a good thing, even ChatGPT, can be bad, according to research from OpenAI and MIT.
• Relying on it for common uses like advice, explanations, or ideas can foster dependency.
• The research asks whether it'll lead people to a "loss of agency and confidence in their decisions."

The former UK Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli — who lived and died in the 19th century and left a legacy in politics and literature —couldn't have predicted how AI would reshape the world. However, he may have grasped its implications better than some people today.

"Moderation is the center wherein all philosophies, both human and divine, meet," he's believed to have once said.

That advice might serve some ChatGPT users well given a new study that MIT Media Lab published in partnership with OpenAI on Friday. The researchers studied nearly 1,000 people on how they used ChatGPT over four weeks and found that some people overuse the technology — which could have repercussions on their sense of self.

Users who often turned to the bot for non-personal conversations, including seeking advice or suggestions, conceptual explanations, and assistance with idea generation and brainstorming — which is a common use case — had a higher likelihood of becoming emotionally dependent on it.

Those over-users were also more likely to engage in "problematic use," which the researchers defined as "addictive behaviors and compulsive use that ultimately results in negative consequences for both physical and psychosocial well-being."

These users were already primed to see ChatGPT as a friend, have a high level of trust in it and feel that the chatbot would be affected by and worried about their emotions.

The authors said future research could investigate whether this leads to a kind of "cognitive dependence where users increasingly rely on AI systems for decision-making and problem-solving rather than direct emotional support perhaps leading to loss of agency and confidence in their decisions."

A common refrain among AI researchers is that the technology will augment, not replace, human workers.

"Automation does not equal autonomy," Avijit Ghosh, an applied policy researcher at Hugging Face, previously told BI. "Repetitive tasks are being automated, but the idea of a fully independent AI workforce? That's still speculative at best."

The ideal is a meeting between humans and artificial intelligence that will produce something greater than the sum of its parts. But the race to adopt AI has posed a conundrum. Workers are worried they'll fall behind their peers if they don't use the technology enough. If they use it too much, though, researchers are worried they'll risk losing their sense of self.

Whether it's divine or simply the next technological frontier, moderation is still a virtue — even in the AI age.

• Bosses are increasingly watching what their employees are doing during the workday.
• Demand for employee surveillance software rose 54% from March 2020 to June 2023, a study found.
• Pressure is on for bosses to cut costs and root out unproductive workers, sources say.

If you're reading this during your workday, there are pretty good odds that your boss knows.

Employers have monitored workers for a long time, but companies now have more sophisticated ways to watch what employees do while on the clock.

Bosses are increasingly deploying tools that can track screen time, log keystrokes, and take videos and screenshots to keep tabs throughout the day.

These gadgets, which exploded in use when remote work took off during the pandemic, are part of a broader workplace trend aimed at cutting costs and reducing head count, something execs think can be done more effectively by rooting out less productive workers, sources told Business Insider.

Between March 2020 and June 2023, demand for employee surveillance software grew 54%, according to research from Top10VPN, a virtual private network comparison site.

Meanwhile, 73% of employers said they used recordings of calls, emails, or other messages as a factor in performance reviews, while 37% said they used a recording to fire an employee, a separate survey from ExpressVPN study found.

Five employee monitoring software providers told Business Insider they had seen significant growth in the last year, with four of them reporting that they had scaled their clientele by more than 25% in 2024.

Insightful, which makes monitoring software that allows employers to keep tabs on worker productivity through features like screenshotting, says it saw a 45% increase in customers last year. The firm is already on track to see its client base jump by 70% this year, Alexandra Alexin, Insightful's head of demand generation, said.

Alexin attributed the increased interest to employers wanting to keep workers accountable, adding that some companies said they were looking to enforce certain policies.

"It's been fantastic from a business perspective," Alexin told BI, noting that 2024 marked the company's best year on record. "I think that the real focus they have is, if those policies are being enforced, are they seeing more productivity and more efficiency from their workforce or not?"

Time Doctor, another performance-tracking software firm that assigns productivity ratings and alerts employers of worker inactivity, said client interest increased by around 50% in 2024. Based on numbers over the last several quarters, the firm expects to see a similar increase in 2025.

Liam Martin, the co-founder of Time Doctor, told BI he attributes the uptick in interest in employee monitoring tools to the rise of remote work, though cost-cutting has also come up in conversations with customers.

"Every single employer that I've spoken to, and I've asked them, 'is your head count going to go down due to AI?' Pretty much everyone has said yes," Martin said, adding that he believed workers who were able to become more productive by using AI were not going to be let go.

Controlio, an employee monitoring tool that can rank employees on a scale from "Very Productive" to "Very Distracted" through features like keylogging, video recording, and surveying file activity, says it's seen a 30% increase in clients using its platform.

Moath Galeb, an account manager at Controlio, said employers using Controlio are frequently shocked by how unproductive some employees are. He added that some employers have used the technology to determine which employees to let go.

"A lot of our customers use it solely to have the ability to make decisions," he said.

Layoff announcements by companies rose 28% in January, according to a report from Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

Meanwhile, a third of business leaders said that reducing costs was their top priority in 2025, according to a survey conducted by Boston Consulting Group. Approximately 86% of executives said they planned on investing in AI or advanced analytics in 2025, BCG found.

While employers may be flocking to such tools, workers are less enthused about the prospect of being monitored at work.

About 56% of workers who are monitored at work said they felt tense or stressed out, according to the American Psychological Association.

Time Doctor's Martin says fewer employees push back against the technology once they understand how it works, adding that he believes the heightened transparency is necessary for remote work to succeed.

An app that helps people and teams in the working world simplify their to-do lists — ideally by organizing and doing some of the work for them — has remained one of the unsolved goals in business technology. Leaning into AI, on top of battle scars from once building Google Wave, a startup called Tana […]

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• Workers in the future may face longer hours, more years of labor, and more productivity pressure.
• A McKinsey report said future generations would pay for low birth rates and people living longer.
• Elon Musk and Jeremy Grantham have both warned that population decline is a huge threat to humnity.

As declining birth rates lead to a youth shortage and a surfeit of older people, future generations of workers face longer hours, more years in the labor force, and more pressure to be productive.

"Absent action, younger people will inherit lower economic growth and shoulder the cost of more retirees," reads a McKinsey Global Institute report published Wednesday that examines the demographic time bomb.

The authors said a combination of more workers, more hours of work, and higher productivity would likely remedy the problem. They also touched on lengthening people's working lives as part of the solution.

They estimated that a German worker would have to work an extra 5.2 hours a week to keep the nation's living standards rising at the same rate as it has since the 1990s, assuming labor force participation doesn't rise.

Working-age populations have historically powered their nations' economic growth and borne the costs of caring for older generations. That balance is becoming more and more lopsided in many advanced economies as people have fewer children and live longer.

Baby bust

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been one of the loudest voices on the subject of demographic doom.

"Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming," the world's richest man posted on his X platform in August 2022.

"Just have kids one way or another or humanity will die with a whimper in adult diapers!" he said in a post last May.

Jeremy Grantham, asset manager GMO's cofounder and long-term investment strategist, sounded the alarm during a Rosenberg Research webinar this month.

He pointed to Japan, where nearly 30% of the population is over 65, and the birth rate slumped in 2023 to a record low of 1.2 children per woman — far below the replacement rate of 2.1. Grantham described the decline as "cataclysmic."

Grantham also said South Korea's birth rate of 0.7 leaves one grandchild to support eight aging grandparents. "It does not compute, as you can see."

He added that population decline put the stability of human civilization at risk, and he agreed with Musk that it's "a very big threat, and it's in the data, and it's not to be denied."

Regardless of how 2024 went for you, 2025 is another chance for all of us to make the new year better than the one that came before it. New Year’s resolutions are usually set with the best intentions, but it’s no secret many people fail after just a few weeks — old habits die hard. It’s important to have a support group, people who can cheer you on during those particularly hard days. But it’s also important to have the right tools to make achieving your goals easier. Whether you’re trying to get healthy, be more organized, read more or anything in between, there are tech tools that can make your journey smoother and more enjoyable.

Fitness tracker

If you’re attempting to turn over a new, healthier leaf, you’re not alone. Fitness trackers (and their companion apps) are highly sought after this time of year because they can help you stick to those new movement, hydration and sleep habits you’re trying to build. The Xiaomi Mi Band 8 is a good option, not only because it’s affordable at $50, but because it does pretty much everything a beginner needs. It tracks daily steps, calories, sleep and more, and it has a two-week battery life so you can keep it on all the time and rarely have to remember to charge it.

If you’re already a runner or a cyclist (or want to be one), we recommend upgrading to the Fitbit Charge 6 instead. You’ll get all of the basic fitness tracking features you'd expect like daily step, sleep and activity tracking, along with onboard GPS for mapping outdoor workouts and Fitbit Pay for contactless payments. That way you’ll be able to go for a run in the morning and stop to grab a coffee without bringing your phone or your wallet with you.

Smartwatch

If you’d rather invest in an all-purpose wearable that also has serious fitness chops, the Apple Watch SE is a good choice. While it doesn’t include all the bells and whistles that the pricier Series 10 does, it still offers the same core experience. It tracks all-day activity and heart rate, and watchOS finally offers basic sleep tracking, too. In addition to built-in GPS for outdoor workouts, it tracks dozens of exercises and supports fall detection, as well as high and low heart rate alerts. It’s also quite good at automatically recognizing when you’re working out and prompting you to start tracking your efforts. On top of all that, the Apple Watch excels when it comes to table-stakes smartwatch features: You’ll be able to send and receive text messages from the device, as well as control music playback, smart home devices and more.

Android users should consider the Fitbit Versa series of smartwatches. The latest model, the Versa 4, has many of the same features as Apple’s most affordable wearable including all-day activity tracking and heart rate monitoring, built-in GPS and even more advanced sleep tracking capabilities. It also has a lot of features you won’t find on an Apple Watch like Alexa voice control, Google Maps and Wallet integration and a days-long battery life (up to six days to be precise). There are smart alerts as well, so you’ll get notified when your phone receives calls and texts. At $200, the Versa 4 is decently priced on a regular day, but you can often find it on sale for close to $150 — that could make it a good options for anyone on a budget, not just those with Android phones.

Workout classes

Finding exercise classes that you actually enjoy can make working out feel like less of a chore. You may prefer going through your local gym — that push to get out of the house and into a dedicated exercise space can be really effective for some — but there are plenty of on-demand fitness classes as well that you can participate in from the comfort of your living room.

I’ve tried my fair share of these services and my favorite has been Peloton. No, you don’t need one of the company’s expensive bikes or other machinery to take advantage of their classes. Access to the app-only version costs $13 per month and it lets you take HIIT, strength, yoga and even outdoor running classes, many of which require little to no equipment. If Peloton isn’t your speed, Apple Fitness+ is a good alternative, especially now that anyone with an iPhone can subscribe and take classes, regardless of whether they own an Apple Watch. Alo Moves is another good option for those who prefer yoga and pilates workouts.

If you can’t afford another monthly subscription fee, the internet has tons of free exercise resources — you just have to work a little harder to find the ones you jibe with most. I highly recommend Fitness Blender, a free website where you can watch hundreds of workout videos and even set a schedule for yourself, assigning routines to specific days of the week. I like the quality and consistency of their videos, but you may connect more to YouTube workouts if they’re taught by instructors you like; Heather Robertson and Move with Nicole are two personal favorites.

Habit tracker

Accountability is key when you’re trying to build new habits, so keeping track of your progress is crucial. While you could go deep down the bullet-journal rabbit hole, a habit-tracking app is probably the easier option. Done and Strides are two iOS options that let you log when you’ve completed a new habit you’re trying to build or when you avoided a bad habit that you’re trying to break. You can get pretty granular, customizing how often you want to do a task, set reminders to log, review stats and more.

Both apps have paid tiers you’ll be asked to subscribe to after you create a few trackable habits. If you’d rather avoid yet another subscription, consider an app like Streaks, which can be all yours for a one-time fee of $6. As for Android, there’s Habitica, which turns habit tracking to an 8-bit RPG game where you level-up your custom avatar by checking things off your list.

To-do list apps

The new year provides an opportunity to get back on track, and one way to do that is by finding organizational tools that work for you — and making sure they’re as uncomplicated as possible. The worst thing that could happen is that your to-do list or note-taking system ends up being so cumbersome that you avoid using it. Keeping all of your necessary tasks in your head may work on easy days, but it can quickly get overwhelming when you have a million things to handle in both your personal and professional life. I’m a fan of Todoist and Things (the latter of which is for iOS and macOS only) because both are detailed enough for big work projects, but simple enough for personal tasks. Both also have a Today view, which will show everything across all of your projects that need attention immediately.

While Todoist has a free tier, you’ll pay $80 to get Things for iOS, iPadOS and macOS. Microsoft’s To Do is an alternative that, while less involved than Things, is free and works on almost every platform including Windows, iOS and Android, among others. You can keep it simple and just have a task list and a grocery list, or you can go deeper and add due dates, sub-tasks and even share lists with family members.

If you don’t want to bother with another service, you can always opt for the reminders app that (most likely) came preinstalled on your phone. That would be Reminders for iOS users and Google Keep for Android users. Google Keep also doubles as a note-taking app, which will be a better solution if you’ve been jotting down ideas for new projects on Post-It notes you inevitably lose. Apple Notes is the default option for this on iOS devices, and it’s come a long way in recent years with new features like interlinked notes, inline and annotatable PDFs and native support for scanning documents using the iPhone’s camera.

Password manager

If you’re looking to up your digital security game in the new year, a password manager is a great place to start. I’m partial to 1Password (as are we as a whole at Engadget), but there are plenty of other options including Bitwarden, NordPass and Dashlane. After saving all of your passwords for various accounts, you only need to remember one (hence the name) to log in to your 1Password account and access all of the others. The service has browser extensions Chrome, Edge and others that will let you seamlessly log in with just a few clicks, and 1Password has apps for most platforms including iOS and Android, so you can use it on all of your devices.

The Password Generator feature helps you create a new, secure password whenever one of yours has expired. LastPass has this too, and Dashlane even has a free tool that anyone can use to make more secure passwords. Not only does this take the onus of coming up with a strong key off your shoulders, but it also makes it easy to override old credentials with new ones.

Cable and accessory organizer

One of the consequences of the past few of years is the dual-office life. Many of us now work both from home and from an office, and the last thing you want to do when you arrive in either place is rummage around your backpack only to realize that you’ve left your mouse, charging cable or dongle at your other desk.

An organizer bag can prevent this before it happens — we recommend BagSmart tech organizers thanks to their utilitarian, water-repellent designs and their multiple pockets and dividers. They also come in different sizes, so you can pick the best one for your commuter bag. If you want something a bit more elevated, Bellroy’s Desk Caddy is a good option. It’s pricier but for the money you get a more elegant silhouette, higher-quality materials and a design that sits upright when full and has a front panel that fully folds down to give you a good view of what’s inside.

Computer docking station

It’s all too easy for your work-from-home setup to get really messy really quickly. When you’re going through your busiest times at work, the last thing you’re thinking about is cable management, but dedicating a bit more effort to tidying up your workspace can make your day to day more efficient and more enjoyable.

We recommend some sort of docking station to keep your laptop, monitors, accessories and the like in check. There are plenty of options out there, regardless of if you use a macOS or Windows machine, or even a Chromebook. We like Satechi’s Dual Dock for MacBooks thanks to its unique design that allows it to sit under your laptop, and the fact that it plugs into two USB-C ports at once. This means you can connect to two external displays (provided you have an M2-powered MacBook or later), which will be handy if you have an elaborate workstation on your desk. Kensington’s Thunderbolt 4 dock is a good all-purpose option for other non-macOS laptops.

There are also USB-C hubs and adapters out there that can give you similar organization while on the go, albeit in a less elegant package. UGreen's Revodok Pro is an affordable solution that includes an HDMI port, microSD and SD card readers, an Ethernet slot, two USB-C connections and three USB-A sockets. It also supports 100W power pass-through, so you can charge your laptop through the hub while using it.

Multicookers and air fryers

Eating healthier, or even just avoiding takeout multiple times a week, can be challenging in part because it usually means cooking more at home. This can be hard to even start if you’re not used to cooking for yourself and don’t have the basic tools to do so. On top of that, cooking takes time — much more time than ordering a meal from an app on your phone. But tools like an Instant Pot can cut your active cooking time down drastically. You can find a plethora of recipes where you simply throw a bunch of ingredients into the pot, set it and forget it until it’s time to eat.

We recommend the Instant Pot Duo for beginners because it’s relatively affordable and combines seven different cooking methods into one appliance, including rice cooking, steaming, pressure cooking, slow cooking and more. If you’re primarily cooking for yourself and a partner, the three-quart model will serve you just fine, but we recommend the six-quart model if you’re routinely cooking for four or more.

Whereas the Instant Pot and multicookers as a whole had their moment a few years ago, air fryers are the big thing now thanks in part to the fact that they let you cook so many different foods quickly and with less oil or other fat. The best air fryers come in all shapes and sizes (and from many companies), but our top pick also comes from Instant Brands. The Instant Vortex Plus air fryer doesn't take up too much space on a countertop, includes six cooking modes and it comes with an odor-removing filter that prevents too much of that cooking smell from wafting out of the machine as it runs. We also appreciate that, unlike most other air fryers, this one has a window that lets you see into the machine during cooking so you can keep an eye on the doneness of your food.

Recipe organization

One of the best things about cooking at home is finding recipes that you love so much that you want to make over and over again. You’ll want to keep those recipes safe and readily available so you can refer to them when you need a quick weeknight meal or a dish to bring to your next family reunion. Recipe cards are a great way to do this, and you’ll build up your rolodex of delicious meals over time. If you’d rather have a cookbook of sorts that you fill in yourself over time, opt for a recipe book instead.

If you’d rather keep your arsenal of recipes accessible at any time, anywhere from your phone, Paprika’s recipe management app is the best solution I’ve tried. The $5 app basically acts as your digital recipe box, allowing you to enter your own as well as save them from the internet. You know those hundreds of words that precede online recipes, in which the author divulges their entire life story before telling you their secret to making deliciously moist cornbread? Paprika strips all of those unnecessary bits out and only saves the ingredient list and the instructions. You can also make grocery lists and keep track of pantry staples in the app, so don’t be surprised if it quickly becomes one of your most-used kitchen tools.

Reading apps

Don’t take your habit of doom-scrolling into the new year. You could instead use the internet to find other things to read and the free Libby app is a good place to start. Powered by Overdrive, it connects you with your local library’s digital collection, allowing you to borrow and download all kinds of e-books, audiobooks, magazines, graphic novels and more. Libby also has a tag system that you can use to “save” titles for later without actually putting a hold on them (although you can do that in the app, too). If you find a bunch of audiobooks you eventually want to get to, you can give them all a “TBR” tag so you can quickly find them and borrow one when you need new reading/listening material.

As someone who uses Libby on a regular basis, I love how easy it is to borrow from my local library without leaving my home. However, there have been numerous times in which my library doesn’t have a title I’m looking for. If that happens to you often, you may want to consider a subscription service like Kindle Unlimited or Everand (formerly Scribd), both of which give you unlimited access to a wide library of e-books for $10 per month. And for audiobook lovers, your options are Amazon’s Audible or Libro.fm, the latter of which lets you choose the local bookstore you want to support with your purchases.

Ereader

Ereaders are still around because so many people recognize how much better it can be to read e-books on a dedicated device — especially one with an high-contrast, e-paper display. Sure, you could read on your smartphone or a tablet, but staring at those screens all day long can be tiring for your eyes. An ereader like the Kobo Clara Colour or the Amazon Kindle is a better choice not only for its more comfortable display, but also because it focuses your attention on reading. (If you’ve ever picked up your smartphone intending to finish a chapter only to be distracted by email or Facebook, you know how crucial this is.)

The Clara Colour is our current top pick in our best ereader guide, thanks to its 6-inch color E Ink display, adjustable brightness and temperature, weeks-long battery life and handy Overdrive integration for checking out digital library books. But if you already get most of your e-books through Amazon, the latest Kindle is the best option. You can listen to Audible audiobooks, too, if you connect a pair of wireless earbuds to the ereader. Kobo’s device primarily gets books via the Kobo Store, but it also supports various file types like EPUB, PDF and MOBI.

• AI tools can help reduce the need to attend some work meetings and boost productivity.
• These apps can summarize meetings, answer workers' questions, and train employees.
• This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.

Matt Martin knows about meetings run amok.

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."

• A few months ago, I started using an AI notetaking app, Granola, in meetings.
• I take notes and then after the call, the AI builds a more fulsome outline of the conversation.
• Taking notes on what's most important helps us get more from meetings, Granola's CEO said.

A few minutes after I'd hopped on a call with a tech founder, he mentioned that he'd started using an "amazing" AI notetaking app.

It was helping him capture the various decisions and to-do's that came up in the many meetings that punctuated his calendar.

I was intrigued. I'd tried artificial intelligence tools for summarizing interview notes and transcripts. The results were often great at capturing themes, yet the AI tended to sweep past the details, pithy comments, or intriguing ideas I would tend to highlight.

It was like getting a book report from someone who'd only skimmed the reading.

Not long after my call with the tech founder, I downloaded the app, which is called Granola, on my Mac. It's a desktop tool, for now. An iOS version is on its way and Windows after that.

I've been using Granola since midsummer, and it's changed my meetings. To be clear, I also use a different app to get a full recording of the call to ensure my reporting and quotes are accurate. But what delighted the founder who tipped me off to Granola is also what I like best: I get to shape the outline for the notes that the AI generates.

My kind of notes

When I began using it, I allowed Granola to synch with my calendar. A few minutes before, I get a prompt to join a meeting. When the call begins, I then get permission from whomever I'm talking with to record the conversation. (Granola also has a prompt that pops up at the bottom that reminds users to get the OK to transcribe calls.)

The notetaking window in Granola is pretty much a blank page, which I like because it's a clean UX. I can drop in a title or use the one populated by what's on my calendar.

Once things begin, I only type what's most important, and the AI follows my lead. I can type just a few words and know that, after the call, with a click, Granola will build an outline around the points I flagged.

That's a huge help and different from the summaries I often get from other AI tools. Plus, I also always look back at the untidy notes I took in case something in the AI version feels off.

If I take no notes at all — which is rare — Granola will still deliver a pretty sharp summary complete with subheads and bullets.

The biggest benefit for me is that I worry less about scribbling down each thing that I might later deem important. In essence, I can be more present.

That's a frequent comment from users, Chris Pedregal, Granola's CEO, told me over a call in which we each took notes with the app.

In fact, given the whac-a-mole way many of us work — quickly triaging the messages that bombard us throughout the day — AI notetaking apps could have our back.

Pedregal said he was surprised when the company began hearing from users that they'll often zone out during a meeting to respond to an urgent Slack or WhatsApp message, then go back to Granola and pop up the transcript to read what they missed.

That's notable, in part, because in a recent survey, 57% of Granola users reported being in leadership roles. Pedregal said that supports the narrative that many top execs might be more excited about AI than some rank-and-file workers.

Pedregal, 38, cofounded Granola in March 2023. He's from the US, though he and the company's staff are based in London. Granola is focused on the American market and has US investors, he said. The company recently completed a $20 million Series A round. Google acquired Pedregal's prior startup, Socratic, in 2018.

Finding the sweet spot

The benefit of having an AI notetaker, I've found, is more than knowing I don't have to worry as much about details in the moment (though I'll always double-check afterward). Pedregal said the reason the app doesn't record audio is to make it less invasive.

The things I type are often the points that stand out because they're unique — or questionable — and that I want to think or ask more about.

Pedregal says jotting down a few notes during a meeting — but not being slavish about capturing everything — is the sweet spot. Unless we're trying to multitask, that middle path often enough, he said, to keep us tethered to the conversation and engaged with what speakers are saying.

I admit I've felt good while in meetings on busy days knowing that the safety net is there.

Not every app or service wants to monetize your personal data. Here are some of our favorite alternatives to popular apps.

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

This article is part of "CXO AI Playbook" — straight talk from business leaders on how they're testing and using AI.

The future of software-development jobs is changing rapidly as more companies adopt AI tools that can accelerate the coding process and close experience gaps between junior- and senior-level developers.

Increased AI adoption could be part of the tech industry's "white-collar recession," which has seen slumps in hiring and recruitment over the past year. Yet integrating AI into workflows can offer developers the tools to focus on creative problem-solving and building new features.

On November 14, Business Insider convened a roundtable of software developers as part of our "CXO AI Playbook" series to learn how artificial intelligence was changing their jobs and careers. The conversation was moderated by Julia Hood and Jean Paik from BI's Special Projects team.

These developers discussed the shifts in their day-to-day tasks, which skills people would need to stay competitive in the industry, and how they navigate the expectations of stakeholders who want to stay on the cutting edge of this new technology.

Panelists said AI has boosted their productivity by helping them write and debug code, which has freed up their time for higher-order problems, such as designing software and devising integration strategies.

However, they emphasized that some of the basics of software engineering — learning programming languages, scaling models, and handling large-scale data — would remain important.

The roundtable participants also said developers could provide critical insight into challenges around AI ethics and governance.

The roundtable participants were:

• Pooya Amini, software engineer, Meta.
• Greg Jennings, head of engineering for AI, Anaconda.
• Shruti Kapoor, lead member of technical staff, Slack.
• Aditi Mithal, software-development engineer, Amazon Q.
• Igor Ostrovsky, cofounder, Augment.
• Neeraj Verma, head of applied AI, Nice.
• Kesha Williams, head of enterprise architecture and engineering, Slalom.

The following discussion was edited for length and clarity.

Julia Hood: What has changed in your role since the popularization of gen AI?

Neeraj Verma: I think the expectations that are out there in the market for developers on the use of AI are actually almost a bigger impact than the AI itself. You hear about how generative AI is sort of solving this blank-paper syndrome. Humans have this concept that if you give them a blank paper and tell them to go write something, they'll be confused forever. And generative AI is helping overcome that.

The expectation from executives now is that developers are going to be significantly faster but that some of the creative work the developers are doing is going to be taken away — which we're not necessarily seeing. We're seeing it as more of a boilerplate creation mechanism for efficiency gains.

Aditi Mithal: I joined Amazon two years ago, and I've seen how my productivity has changed. I don't have to focus on doing repetitive tasks. I can just ask Amazon Q chat to do that for me, and I can focus on more-complex problems that can actually impact our stakeholders and our clients. I can focus on higher-order problems instead of more-repetitive tasks for which the code is already out there internally.

Shruti Kapoor: One of the big things I've noticed with writing code is how open companies have become to AI tools like Cursor and Copilot and how integrated they've become into the software-development cycle. It's no longer considered a no-no to use AI tools like ChatGPT. I think two years ago when ChatGPT came out, it was a big concern that you should not be putting your code out there. But now companies have kind of embraced that within the software-development cycle.

Pooya Amini: Looking back at smartphones and Google Maps, it's hard to remember how the world looked like before these technologies. It's a similar situation with gen AI — I can't remember how I was solving the problem without it. I can focus more on actual work.

Now I use AI as a kind of assisted tool. My main focus at work is on requirement gathering, like software design. When it comes to the coding, it's going to be very quick. Previously, it could take weeks. Now it's a matter of maybe one or two days, so then I can actually focus on other stuff as AI is solving the rest for me.

Kesha Williams: In my role, it's been trying to help my team rethink their roles and not see AI as a threat but more as a partner that can help boost productivity, and encouraging my team to make use of some of the new embedded AI and gen-AI tools. Really helping my team upskill and putting learning paths in place so that people can embrace AI and not be afraid of it. More of the junior-level developers are really afraid about AI replacing them.

Hood: Are there new career tracks opening up now that weren't here before?

Verma: At Nice, we have something like 3,000 developers, and over the last, I think, 24 months, 650 of them have shifted into AI-specific roles, which was sort of unheard of before. Even out of those 650, we've got about a hundred who are experts at things like prompt engineering. Over 20% of our developers are not just developers being supported by AI but developers using AI to write features.

Kapoor: I think one of the biggest things I've noticed in the last two to three years is the rise of a job title called "AI engineer," which did not exist before, and it's kind of in between an ML engineer and a traditional software engineer. I'm starting to see more and more companies where AI engineer is one of the top-paying jobs available for software engineers. One of the cool things about this job is that you don't need an ML-engineering background, which means it's accessible to a lot more people.

Greg Jennings: For developers who are relatively new or code-literate knowledge workers, I think they can now use code to solve problems where previously they might not have. We have designers internally that are now creating full-blown interactive UIs using AI to describe what they want and then providing that to engineers. They've never been able to do that before, and it greatly accelerates the cycle.

For more-experienced developers, I think there are a huge number of things that we still have to sort out: the architectures of these solutions, how we're actually going to implement them in practice. The nature of testing is going to have to change a lot as we start to include these applications in places where they're more mission-critical.

Amini: On the other side, looking at threats that can come out of AI, new technologies and new positions can emerge as well. We don't currently have clear regulations in terms of ownership or the issues related to gen AI, so I imagine there will be more positions in terms of ethics.

Mithal: I feel like a Ph.D. is not a requirement anymore to be a software developer. If you have some foundational ML, NLP knowledge, you can target some of these ML-engineer or AI-engineer roles, which gives you a great opportunity to be in the market.

Williams: I'm seeing new career paths in specialized fields around ML and LLM operations. For my developers, they're able to focus more on strategy and system design and creative problem-solving, and it seems to help them move faster into architecture. System design, system architecture, and integration strategies — they have more time to do that because of AI.

Jean Paik: What skills will developers need to stay competitive?

Verma: I think a developer operating an AI system requires product-level understanding of what you're trying to build at a high level. And I think a lot of developers struggle with prompt engineering from that perspective. Having the skills to clearly articulate what you want to an LLM is a very important skill.

Williams: Developers need to understand machine-learning concepts and how AI models work, not necessarily how to build and train these models from scratch but how to use them effectively. As we're starting to use Amazon Q, I've realized that our developers are now becoming prompt engineers because you have to get that prompt right in order to get the best results from your gen-AI system.

Jennings: Understanding how to communicate with these models is very different. I almost think that it imparts a need for engineers to have a little bit more of a product lens, where a deeper understanding of the actual business problem they're trying to solve is necessary to get the most out of it. Developing evaluations that you can use to optimize those prompts, so going from prompt engineering to actually tuning the prompts in a more-automated way, is going to emerge as a more common approach.

Igor Ostrovsky: Prompt engineering is really important. That's how you interact with AI systems, but this is something that's evolving very quickly. Software development will change in five years much more rapidly than anything we've seen before. How you architect, develop, test, and maintain software — that will all change, and how exactly you interact with AI will also evolve.

I think prompt engineering is more of a sign that some developers have the desire to learn and are eager to figure out how to interact with artificial intelligence, but it won't necessarily be how you interact with AI in three years or five years. Software developers will need this desire to adapt and learn and have the ability to solve hard problems.

Mithal: As a software developer, some of the basics won't change. You need to understand how to scale models, build scalable solutions, and handle large-scale data. When you're training an AI model, you need data to support it.

Kapoor: Knowledge of a programming language would be helpful, specifically Python or even JavaScript. Knowledge of ML or some familiarity with ML will be really helpful. Another thing is that we need to make sure our applications are a lot more fault-tolerant. That is also a skill that front-end or back-end engineers who want to transition to an AI-engineering role need to be aware of.

One of the biggest problems with prompts is that the answers can be very unpredictable and can lead to a lot of different outputs, even for the same prompt. So being able to make your application fault-tolerant is one of the biggest skills we need to apply in AI engineering.

Hood: What are the concerns and obstacles you have as AI gains momentum? How do you manage the expectations of nontech stakeholders in the organization who want to stay on the leading edge?

Ostrovsky: Part of the issue is that interacting with ChatGPT or cloud AI is so easy and natural that it can be surprising how hard it is actually to control AI behavior, where you need AI to understand constraints, have access to the right information at the right time, and understand the task.

When setting expectations with stakeholders, it is important they understand that we're working with this very advanced technology and they are realistic about the risk profile of the project.

Mithal: One is helping them understand the trade-offs. It could be security versus innovation or speed versus accuracy. The second is metrics. Is it actually improving the efficiency? How much is the acceptance rate for our given product? Communicating all those to the stakeholders gives them an idea of whether the product they're using is making an impact or if it's actually helping the team become more productive.

Williams: Some of the challenges I'm seeing are mainly around ethical AI concerns, data privacy, and costly and resource-intensive models that go against budget and infrastructure constraints. On the vendor or stakeholder side, it's really more about educating our nontechnical stakeholders about the capabilities of AI and the limitations and trying to set realistic expectations.

We try to help our teams understand for their specific business area how AI can be applied. So how can we use AI in marketing or HR or legal, and giving them real-world use cases.

Verma: Gen AI is really important, and it's so easy to use ChatGPT, but what we find is that gen AI makes a good developer better and a worse developer worse. Good developers understand how to write good code and how good code integrates into projects. ChatGPT is just another tool to help write some of the code that fits into the project. That's the big challenge that we try to make sure our executives understand, that not everybody can use this in the most effective manner.

Jennings: There are some practical governance concerns that have emerged. One is understanding the tolerance for bad responses in certain contexts. Some problems, you may be more willing to accept a bad response because you structure the interface in such a way that there's a human in the loop. If you're attempting to not have a human in the loop, that could be problematic depending on what you want the model to do. Just getting better muscle for the organization to have a good intuition about where these models can potentially fail and in what ways.

In addition to that, understanding what training data went into that model, especially as models are used more as agents and have privileged access to different applications and data sources that might be pretty sensitive.

Kapoor: I think one of the biggest challenges that can happen is how companies use the data that comes back from LLM models and how they're going to use it within the application. Removing the human component scares me a lot.

Verma: It's automation versus augmentation. There are a lot of cases where augmentation is the big gain. I think automation is a very small, closed case — there are very few things I think LLMs are ready in the world right now to automate.

• The office — and the role it plays in companies — is at the center of workforce change.
• Neil Murray, a Workforce Innovation board member, discussed workspace purpose, leadership, and AI.
• This article is part of "Workforce Innovation," a series exploring the forces shaping enterprise transformation.

Commercial real estate has experienced a tumultuous few years, with pandemic-related office vacancies and high interest rates. The sector is also at the epicenter of significant changes to the global workforce.

"It is the most incredible time to work in this industry," said Neil Murray, the CEO of Work Dynamics at JLL. "We are at the center of some really important strategic conversations about the very nature of work."

Work Dynamics is a division of the global real-estate corporation that collaborates with corporate clients on technology, employee experience, and design strategies. Murray says its goals are to help client companies attract and retain employees and foster productivity.

In its annual global Future of Work survey, which involved 2,300 corporate real-estate and business decision-makers, some 64% of respondents said they expected to increase their head counts by 2030.

JLL's third-quarter earnings beat estimates — it reported revenue of $5.87 billion, an increase of 15% from the same period in 2023.

Murray talked about companies mulling the purpose of the office, how leaders can incentivize employees to willingly go into their workplaces, and how to harness AI for concrete breakthroughs.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

How have the priorities of your clients changed in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the changes that brought to office life?

What we do for a living changed dramatically through the pandemic. Previously, corporate real estate may have been seen as a sort of factor of production. We weren't intentional about why we had space and where we had it, what we wanted that space to do, and its function. Is it a cost line, or is it an investment?

Suddenly every chief executive in the world had a view on real estate. It brought much more intentionality about its function within the organization and its ability to contribute to broader organizational goals.

Our business now is about helping our clients navigate that complex situation where they're planning to grow their workforce over a number of years, balancing what that might look like in the macro environment we're living in. It's a very complex environment for leaders to think through.

What's the state of return-to-office you're seeing among your clients?

There's a fairly even split between companies that are embracing some sort of hybrid policy and those that want their people back full time.

In our Future of Work survey, we found that 85% of organizations had a policy of at least three days of office attendance per week, and 43% expected the number of days in the office to increase by 2030.

It's still very much an evolving scenario. The metrics of productivity that we've relied upon to make database decisions don't always capture the challenges that businesses are facing. The time people spend doing emails or logged in doesn't necessarily translate to productivity.

One client, for example, has found that while their productivity metrics looked just fine, the number of patents had fallen off a cliff from prepandemic levels.

That led to this notion that what we're missing is, as the phrase goes, people painting on the same canvas at the same time.

Now we've seen some high-profile companies coming out, wanting more time spent in the office, saying there's something lost around culture and the collective sort of personality and purpose of an organization because of remote working. Companies are finding it really difficult to balance that.

What aspects of the workplace are most effective for enticing workers to return to the office?

The overwhelming evidence is that it's not a single amenity but it's other people — and, in particular, leaders. Companies that are intentional about their leaders being present have seen the greatest results in terms of people coming back.

What people crave is proximity to leadership for personal development. So without getting leaders back into the office, you can add whatever amenities you want and you'll still have significant challenges.

Clients that enacted three-days-a-week mandates but didn't focus on leadership presence have exactly the same attendance as those who didn't have three-day mandates.

Could that be attributed to people just wanting to be visible when the boss is around?

I wouldn't purport to understand entirely the psychology of humans, but I do believe that our research and my own experience is that people enjoy other people. The most important amenity in any workplace is that notion of community and other folks to chat to.

The notion of apprenticeship in all aspects of what we do is very real. The ability to learn from others, to absorb how things are done or navigate the complexities of an organization, is really difficult to do among 30-minute slots. You don't get to sort of naturally observe through osmosis what's happening in the world around you.

You mentioned in one of our roundtables that companies need to focus on consistent, breakthrough innovation across the organization as opposed to incremental innovation from a centralized department or team. Why is that important, and how can leaders work toward that goal?

When you centralize innovation, you can get stuck in the paradigm of trying to incrementally improve a particular way of working. But the technology breakthroughs mean that it's fundamentally shifting how we do business.

In my business alone, the rapid adoption of AI tools in daily business use has surprised us all. We are an organization with 250 years of data on everything from how buildings are occupied and used to what they cost to run to their utilities to their capital values.

The tools available to us now to cut and splice and curate and make connections in that data, which we were never able to make before at scale, are driving us to think about the business in completely different ways.

Breakthrough innovation comes about when you use a large language model to interpret multiple data sets and then you start to ask the second, third, and fourth questions, going deeper and deeper into a particular topic. You find things that you could not have possibly seen or connected otherwise.