Heroes

Barnes & Noble was once seen as another casualty of Amazon. Today, it’s expanded to over 700 stores nationwide. In this episode, Fortune’s Phil Wahba explores CEO James Daunt’s plan to save America’s biggest book chain by making it cool again. 

Inside CEO James Daunt’s Plan To Save Barnes & Noble | Behind The Business

Remember how everyone thought Barnes and Noble was dying just a few years ago. America's largest book retailer was in rough shape. The Barnes and Noble store in Prudential Center will soon close for good. A major bookstore to close at an Omaha location this weekend. By 2020, Amazon captured over half of all. print book sales and 80% of the e-book market, decimating traditional brick and mortar bookstores. There was a decade of declining store numbers, lots and lots of closures, no openings. Today, the chain is pulling off one of the most unexpected turnarounds in retail history. What we're doing is opening up stores again in communities. Will their growth hit a wall? Barnes and Noble is expanding. As of July 2026, the book retailer had opened 20 new stores so far, with more planned this year. The footprint currently stands at 717 locations, 90 more than in 2019. We'll open up 35,000 square foot stores, we'll open up less large stores, we'll open an 8000 square foot store in a mall. We're doing that because we're putting bookstores back into place. And back into communities that will appreciate a bookstore. During the 2010s, Barnes and Noble saw massive sales declines, 100 store closures, six different CEOs, and a $1 billion loss on its Nook Reader, a device to compete with Amazon's Kindle. Then investment firm Elliott Advisors acquired the company for nearly $700 million in 2019, bringing in James Dant as CEO. There are books here that you know are really good and therefore you will read the others and is that a consistency ology. When you took the reins of this company, it was in rough shape. As you assessed the business, what were you thinking? It's relatively straightforward for me because I've been a bookseller for 30 years at that point, um. Uh, longer, so I simply wanted to make these stores really good again, and, and one sets on a series of very slow and incremental processes to do that. Dan started out as an investment banker in New York in the 1980s. He left banking to launch Dant Books in 1990, building it to a highly successful and beloved 10 location chain in the UK. Dan and many other independent bookstores have that cool factor. Does Barnes and Noble need to have some of that cool factor, or is it, is it a different animal, a different concept entirely? Barnes and Noble can be extremely cool, but it's definitely a different sort of cool. And the challenge for us is how do we do it appropriately in each place in which we are, and that I think we're able to do increasingly well at the moment. Every display in their Union Square store in Manhattan feels thought out to the smallest detail. These are a lot of like conversation starters, economics, politics. for this local section, there's a lot of cookbooks. There's cookbooks. I've bought that for somebody. It's so cute. Shops, yeah, yeah. The inventory is hyper curated for New York customers, reflecting social trends, local culture, and real-time demand. A lot of our tables are smaller. They're meant to kind of be little stops along your way to points of interest as you're kind of weaving your way through the store. Um, we love when people spend time in the stacks and pull things out and find something that may be really old but is new to them. A 2025 study showed foot traffic in brick and mortar bookstores climbed 12% year over year, while Studies showed independent bookstore accounts surged by nearly 90% that same year. So romance has been a booming category over the last few years. It really is landing on that escapism and happily ever after that's working across a lot of different genres. For Barnes and Noble, the wins have come from trying to feel like your neighborhood bookstore. What would you say is the biggest difference in how stores are run today versus When you were a rookie, we were more a traditional retailer. We were really operating at like a big box Target or a Walmart, and I was essentially told to kind of like turn my brain off when I came to work and put this book here on this date at this time and then replace it with this book, whereas now. We've really moved to this model of being a place that's bookseller led and being able to curate interesting tables and it takes a lot more brainpower in the best possible way that we can kind of create these different local tables and local approach but also have some interesting kind of deeper cuts. Don's strategy was simple build hyperlocalization into the chain's corporate playbook. He eliminated the pay for display model, empowering each store to curate based on local demand rather than publisher co op dollars. Stores now control the visual merchandizing, such as handwritten staff recommendations and their own social media accounts. How do you get the benefits of these economies of scale, but at the same time have this flexible size? Well, we used to have a model which involved from a Home Office dictating very precisely what every store did, attached to a lot of commercial arrangements with publishers. Just to have particular books in particular places and a very uniform presentation for which you needed a uniform size of store. We've abandoned that 100%. So now each store curates its own assortment, reorders its own books, does each to their own, um, and we encourage and develop and promote and train against how do you do that well. But that also means we don't really care what size it is, we don't care what shape it is, because each store is doing its own thing. And that's liberated us now to have different sized stores doing different things. We can see what they're trying to do here. Yeah, you then want to pick it up and then it's in your pile and off you go. Now he's applying the Daunt playbook to the US market on a much larger scale. So now you've, of course, experienced uh American consumers as well as British. How are they different? American consumers are wonderful because they buy enormous amounts of books. Individually they buy more than a UK customer does. The American consumer, of course, is world famous in all forms of retail, but it applies also to bookselling. And so the growth for you will come from what, from getting more people to just buy more books? Yeah, I mean the book market is not a finite one. There are retail sectors if one person sells plus one. Another person has to sell -1. It's a fixed market. That isn't the case with books at all, particularly the way in which people buy books in a bookstore. If you come into a bookstore, you're going to be inspired, you're going to come in for one book, you're going to walk out with 3. That's the way it works. The better our bookstores, the more books are sold, the larger the market expands, but it's not eating the share of somebody else. It's not a zero-sum game at all. And now Wall Street is taking notice. There have been media reports of a possible IPO. How do you think the company would be managed differently if it were public? We are trying to run really good bookstores, and most of that effort is being done at the local level. I think what goes on in New York, any which way doesn't make much difference. Uh, what matters to us is what's going on at the local level, how are we able to support them? How are they able to improve things, and that's a steady, incremental process. I'm a great believer in physical bookstores, um, and I have my own bookstores. I then the equivalent in the United Kingdom of Barnes and Noble, and we sorted that out very quickly and made those really nice bookstores. I think to the benefit of the whole book trade and bookselling as a whole. And then obviously with Barnes and Noble being the last man effectively standing here in in the United States, it was very, very important for bookselling as a whole, but that continued to be the case. Um, but we're just really just bringing these principles first, small bookstore to large chain to even larger chain, um, and, and it's all based and founded on the core principle of what makes a great bookstore.

Harvey co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg has a method for leading his legal AI company, now valued at $11 billion after just three and a half years: psychological discipline. On this episode of Term Sheet, Weinberg tells Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle how he tracks his daily to-do list against his goals six months out, what he looks for in new hires, and how he avoids the pitfalls of being trapped by his own ego.

How Winston Weinberg built his $11 billion AI Company | Term Sheet

Fortune Leaders Forum 2026

Daisy Ho, Managing Director of SJM Resorts, S.A., takes the stage to open the Fortune Leaders Forum Macau with the event's keynote address.

Daisy Ho, Managing Director, SJM Resorts, S.A.

Opening Keynote | Fortune Leaders Forum 2026

Mr. Lee Williamson, distinguished guest, good morning. Lee, thank you for setting the tone for our discussions today and together with your fortune colleagues for bringing together leaders of such exceptional caliber. It is a great pleasure to welcome all of you to Macau and to the Grand Palace. This is the first Fortune Leaders Forum to be held in Macau. And SJM is proud to serve as host partner to an organization that for almost a century has been one of the world's most respected voices in business. I believe our theme, leadership in the age of convergence and complexity is particularly resonant today as it features, as it captures a paradox that many of us experience firsthand. No generation has had more information, more computing power, or easier ways to connect. Yet business leaders often find it harder, not easier to see what lies ahead. Why is this so? The reason is not simply that change is accelerating. Economies and industries are also now so tightly connected that when one part sneezes, others could catch cold. In such an environment, leaders must understand not only the decision before them, but how it will affect and be affected by the wider world. When we must deal without complete clarity of the future, clarity of purpose becomes decisive. Decisions will be taken at different times by different people and under different assumptions. Yet purpose remains the one constant, the North Star that keeps everyone moving in the same direction. For Macau, being at the center of a collusion of forces is nothing new. We have long connected East and West, China and the world, commerce and culture. Our city's identity was built through exchange, and our progress has come from an ability to turn changing circumstances into new opportunities. Among Macau's integrated resort operators, SJM is the only one with roots in this city. For more than 6 decades, we have walked alongside Macau from the opening of its tourism market in the 1960s through the handover, the liberalization of the gaming industry, the years of the pandemic, and the city's integration into the Greater Bay Area. At each stage, we learned that progress did not depend on knowing exactly what came next, but on recognizing what was worth carrying forward. Our foundations are in gaming and hospitality. But as Macau continued to evolve, we looked inward at the strengths we have built over decades and how we could make them relevant in the new era for Macau. Gastronomy is a strong case in point. Long before it was widely recognized as a defining part of the travel experience, our founder, my late father, Doctor S Stanny Ho, invited the legendary Joel Rubuchon to open, to open Rubichon Aguilera at Hotel Lisboll in 2001. When the Michelin Guide arrived in Hong Kong and Macau in 2009, it became the first Western restaurant across the two cities to receive 3 stars, placing Macau firmly on the international culinary map, and has retained those three stars for 18 consecutive years. From that beginning, we have built a dining portfolio that together with our parent company now hosts 10 Michelin stars across 8 establishments, the highest total in Hong Kong and Macau. In the process, SJM has become a cradle of culinary talent, a proud contributor to Macau's standing as a UNESCO Creative city of gastronomy and giving the world another compelling reason to experience our city. The same spirit also lies behind our longstanding involvement in the Macau Grand Prix, the International Dragon boat races, the Macau Golf Open, and many more events that are deeply woven into the histories of both SJM and Macau. Over the years, we have helped nurture them, expand their intention international reach and establish them as signature features of the city's tourism calendar. Importantly, the value they create does not stop at our doors. Our support for cultural traditions help keep them alive in the community. The international events we champion bring recognition and opportunity to the city, and our investment in people helps local talent grow and flourish. Visitors experience Macau as a whole, and we are one part of that whole. What held us together was the conviction that SJM success is inseparable from Macau's. That conviction has allowed us to look beyond the immediate return from a restaurant or sporting event and consider the wider value each can create for Macau as a destination. It is also why lending our full support to this forum is so meaningful for us. At a time when no single industry posses all the answers fortune has brought to Macau, leaders who might not otherwise share a table. This exchange will not only strengthen our our city's role as an international center for business dialogue and collaboration, but its substance is directly relevant to Macau's next chapter. Today's discussion on technology and talent, finance and health, travel and destination economies, and the future of the Greater Bay Area all touch upon Macau's 1 + 4 diversification strategy. Their relevance lies not only in each field individually, but in the connections between them. And those connections matter as much to the economies represented in this room as they do to ours. Therefore, on behalf of SJM I thank fortune for bringing this forum to Macau, and I thank all our speakers and delegates for contributing your experience and perspective. This evening, the Grand Hall will bring together 6 of our Michelin recognized restaurants and the chefs behind them. What I have described this morning is better experience than explained. I hope you will also find time to enjoy the city itself, and that you leave with a sense not only of what Macau has been, but of what it is becoming. Thank you.

Fortune at Cannes Lions 2026

The traditional talent agency model is dead. The modern talent agency is no longer just a toll booth trying to broker a quick deal. It's moving into the center of culture and operating as a full-service, data-driven agency. United Talent Agency’s Darnell Strom and digital content creator Gstaad Guy explore what happens when agents work directly with creators to turn an online following into a full-stack commercial ecosystem. 

The Creator Evolution: How to Craft High-End Content Without Losing Your Core

Workplace Innovation Summit 2026

Organizations regularly face intense expectations: Ambitious performance targets, stakeholder demands, public scrutiny, and government oversight. All of these forces routinely put leaders’ values to test, especially when short-term trade-offs promise speed, approval, or financial gain. This panel brings together business leaders who have chosen to prioritize their beliefs despite external pressures. Panelists will discuss how today’s leaders can protect their values without undermining performance at a time when compromise can be tempting, or even prescribed. 

Dr. Bernice A. King, Chief Executive Officer, The King Center  
Theresita Richard, Chief People and Culture Officer, Patagonia   
Jotaka Eaddy, Chief Executive Officer, Full Circle Strategy  
Moderator: Phil Wahba, Senior Writer, Fortune; Co-Chair, Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit

Holding the Line: Leadership Under Pressure

Brainstorm Tech 2026

Everyone is racing to put satellites in orbit. Far fewer are building what it takes to make them useful. As constellations scale and data volumes surge, the bottleneck is shifting to the ground. Without the infrastructure to move that data, it goes nowhere. Bridgit Mendler left entertainment, earned degrees from MIT and Harvard, and bet everything on one of the least visible and most critical problems in space. What does it take to build the layer everything else depends on?

Bridgit Mendler, Co-Founder and CEO, Northwood 
Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Content Officer, Fortune

Ground Control

Davos 2026 World Economic Forum

Scott Galloway joined Fortune’s Diane Brady at Davos for a frank conversation on how the mood of the World Economic Forum—and the global climate—has shifted since his last visit in 1999, reflecting a move away from optimism and cooperation toward uncertainty around America’s credibility and leadership.

Scott Galloway on America’s Credibility and Global Leadership

So let me bring up our guest tonight to set us all off. Scott Galloway, who has not been here in, I believe, 1999, was the last time he was here, and Scott and I met, um, I believe we were mentoring young people with Dick Fold, who knows the Dick Fold, the former Lehman Brothers, uh, at the stock exchange. With a very confident kid named Encore Jay, who now is a billionaire, and I don't know where Dick Fold is. Do you know where Dick Fold is? I have not seen Dick. OK, so there we've lost track of Dick, but, um, here we are today. What brings you to Davos, sir? Let's start with that. Uh, Larry Finn called me and said, I want you to come, and that's enough. That's all it takes. That's way more than enough. OK, very good. Well, give us your impressions. I know you've been doing some video. Let's start with that. It's been a while, 26 years, yeah, 27 years. So when I was here 27 years ago, I would describe it as, so Bill Clinton gave the speech of the day. That was what everyone was excited about, slightly different speech than the one we heard yesterday, uh. I would say the American brand or as I was an American entrepreneur. I was one of these guys, you know how you can't run into, can't go 10 ft without meeting someone who has an AI startup they're dying to tell you about. I was one of those guys pitching e-commerce startups back in '99. The biggest shift, so is the internet. The brand of America though, I sort of feel like this is a gathering to basically let Americans just boast and Europeans just politely listen. Um, the, Call sign of America back then was kind of consumerism. It's very consumption oriented. It was it was more cooperation, I would say alliances. And now transition 27 years later. My impression is now it's not the internet, it's AI. It's all AI, and the American brand is sort of Chaos, corruption, and. Coercion. Uh, I'm just incredibly fucking embarrassed as an American. Um, there's no getting around it, and. I feel as if, You know, we begin the week with this language around annexing a sovereign nation, an ally, which is Latin for invade. And tariffs And the market crashes, and then by the end of the week, invasion is taken off the table and the tariffs go away. And my question is, if you're running the largest economy in the world, and in 96 hours, you reverse decisions like that. What what does that do other than erode trust? And credibility just around the world and as someone who loves statistics and math. We're under the impression. Two of the four most valuable companies in the world, most valuable companies in '99 were Microsoft, Exxon General Electric, and Walmart. Now it's Saudi Aramco's in there. They're still an energy company, number 3. it is, um, Apple, Nvidia, Saudi Aramco, and Alphabet. So two of the four companies have an operating system. If you have the operating system the world lives on. You can just figure out all sorts of ways to monetize different applications that have to comply with your code. Essentially, America's been the operating system for the world since 1945, kind of our laws, our means of going about business. Has it changed, do you think? I mean, you were complimentary of Carney, for example, and taking a stance. Yeah, so we're 33% of the world's GDP and we were the operating system for 60 or 70%. And somehow we've decided that we can go at it alone with 33%, which just to me is nothing but. A pure self-inflicted injury of diminishing our own power. It's like it's, it's as if Android decided to kick 80% of their handsets off of the Android operating system. So I find the whole thing, and there's also the, I don't know if I'm getting older and more depressed, but it feels that there's just a sense of unease where in '99 we were like, we want more, whereas now it feels like we just hope things don't get worse. There's just a really unsettled feeling here and someone called me and said, what would you have done differently, someone from the European Union? And I said, someone should have got a hold of Mark Carney's speech, realized it was the best speech any of you were giving. And all 27 EU member states should have been sitting behind him. And you should have had a list of to do's. We're going to start selling treasuries as a unified group. We're going to have our own trade zone and just lay out these things sequentially, calmly and carefully. Right now, the EU, I mean, the reality is they're leaderless as a, as a result of pushing back on Trump. Who, who, who on earth represents the EU right now? I mean, raise your hand. Yeah, no, nobody in here. That's all good. It's like, you know, Germany and the 26 dwarves. It's just sort of and also the reality is. The reality is the economy here is just a wet blanket. Um, I was, I was at the Black Rock dinner last night, and one of the gentlemen there pointed out correctly, there was someone there who'd started a company 5 years ago that would be one of the 7 most valuable companies in Europe right now, anthropic. So, it, it's, It's just, um, I find it very, I leave here exceptionally unsettled is, and I, I, you wanna be optimistic, but I find all of this very, um, quite frankly embarrassing as an American and unsettling as someone who thinks about their kids and stability and. And taking for granted how much peace and prosperity we've had the last 80 years. So what advice do you have? I don't know if you caught Elon Musk's speech. What do you say better to be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right, which I disagree with, but What advice do you have? I mean, obviously I know you've just for this room full of leaders. I know you talk a lot about AI, and we've talked a lot, you know, the whole Lost Generation Gen Z. There's been a lot of attention on that here at Davos, right? So I'll come back and you feel like a woman too. You mentioned that in your video, so thank you for that. Yeah, I won't say why because it was crude. Um, everyone, everyone, when, whenever a bunch of mammals get together, there's a hierarchy. I don't care if you're sniffing each other's butts or looking at your badge, but I feel like a woman, and that is people look at my eyes and then they look at my chest to see my badge, um. That's why I'm not wearing my badge, I guess, yeah. Yeah. I, I thought that'd be fun. It is on the record. There you go. Sorry, yeah, go ahead. So look, uh. If I were a business leader, I feel like, I feel like the EU is leaderless and pushing back on some of these uh ideas breaking apart, the greatest alliance in history, and I feel like US leaders, US corporations are leaderless. If you go back to the early 30s in Germany. The darkness all started with Hitler creating informal alliances with corporations and basically said, if you support me or stay quiet, I'll get rid of the unionists. And the corporations decided that shareholder value is why we're here, and they made these deals with Hitler. And I feel like the silence, I'm going to list, so the Fortune 500. There are a lot of great Americans, a lot of people who wake up in the morning and say, hello, Mr. President, when they look in the mirror who think they should be leaders, and I'm, I'm on to do list of Fortune 500 leaders who have, who have pushed back on what is an irrational and sometimes weird and cruel policy of the administration. OK, done. So, uh, the problem is if anyone, if anyone goes first, they're punished. So it strikes me that we need a leader, a corporate leader in the United States who calls people on the lowdown and says, unless 50 of us come out at the same time. We can't do it, so I feel like people who consider themselves leaders are showing a striking lack of leadership and aren't familiar with the history in Europe around the role that corporations played in the lead up to an incredibly dark period in Europe. AI, the thing I'm worried about, we were talking about this before. I'm an AI optimist. I think it's going to create more jobs than it destroys. I've never bought into the notion. If you look at every technology in history, short term job destruction, but over the medium and the long term, it creates jobs. I don't see any reason why this would be any different. The V might be deeper this time, but I find a lot of my colleagues, we sound smarter when we catastrophize. So, you know, 90% unemployment. I, I just don't think that's true. And so far we haven't really seen it. There'll be certain pockets that are hurt more than others. I was an investment banking analyst. I imagine that job's going to get, we won't need as many of them. But The thing I'm most worried about is um synthetic relationships, and that is character AI. And uh I'm sort of a hammer. I, my focus is, or my big issue is, uh, young men in America and the West. No cohort has fallen further faster than young men. They're 4 times as likely to be addicted, 3 times as likely, excuse me, 3 times as likely to be addicted, 4 times as likely to kill themselves. If you go into a morgue in the United States and there's 5 people died by suicide, 4 men. Um, 12 times more likely to be incarcerated. 1 in 3 men under the age of 25 are still living at home. 1 in 3 men at the age of 30 are still living at home. Only 1 in 3 men are in a relationship, whereas 2 in 3 women under the age of 30 are in a relationship, you think, well, that's mathematically impossible. It's not because women are dating older because they want more economically and emotionally viable men. Trus, it's true. That's, and on a note of hope in the last, no, I'm just kidding, um, but it's got about a minute, in a minute, and limerick, whatever you want. Well, how do you, what anything else you want to lead this group with? Uh, what gives you hope? What gives you joy, Scott Galloway? How about that? What gives you joy? I hate my life less and less every day. No, but you're, I mean, you like your, you love your job. There's, what gives me joy? Do. OK, good. Oh, OK, you want, you want to end on a cheery note here? No, I do not want. I want to end on a you note. I don't know there's you. Well, first off, in terms of the markets, let's be clear, the, uh, the optimists have won. Right? I said Tesla was vastly overvalued 10 years ago or 8 years ago. Elon started calling me names on the internet, and he won. His stock's up 700%. By the way, the most overvalued company in the world right now, with the exception of Palantir. Um, but the optimists have won the last 10 years. That's the bottom line. So I think it's always healthy to ask what could go right. I always ask myself what could go right because I tend to see the glass is half full, but the most encouraging statistic or piece of data in the world right now is they've begun tracking the amount of time that people spend. Helping people either through volunteer work or financial contributions that they will never meet, right? That number is at an all-time high. So there's more people globally planting trees the shade of which they'll never sit under. So that's a reason to be optimistic. Um-hum. Great. Please join me in thanking Scott Galloway. Thank you.

Brainstorm AI San Francisco 2025

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has suggested that Hollywood may be the canary in the coal mine for the disruption AI is bringing across industries. The entrepreneur behind the Emmy-winning creative collaboration platform HITRECORD has become one of the leading voices calling for fair compensation when human creativity is used to train machine intelligence. As he directs a new AI-focused thriller for Netflix, Gordon-Levitt reflects on how generative technology is reshaping art, authorship, and the meaning of originality.

The Artist and the Algorithm

Thank you for being here. All right, good morning everybody. I know, right? Can you feel the caffeine flowing? Um, so you were giving an interview last month, um, and you said, I love new technology. Are you a tech optimist, tech pessimist, a tech skeptic? Well, I, I do hold quite a lot of optimism for AI. I think it could be so great in so many ways, uh, but I also think there are probably potential pitfalls, and we're running right towards them in many ways. And, and I think that if we let this technology unfold driven purely by business incentives and there's no guard rails that are put there for the public good, we could see some really dark outcomes. That's what we've seen with a lot of tech over the last 20 years. We've seen it with social media, which was so good in so many ways and like it'd be hard for you to find someone who is more positive and optimistic about social media than me. I did this online community for creativity and using social media tech called Hit Record. But obviously we've also seen all these sort of damaging side effects and maybe we could have avoided some of those with some proper guard rails and let's hope we don't make those same mistakes again. Yeah, indeed, so you have been quite out there about these guard rails, this need for policy change. I mean, there's there's a whole litany of things that we can do to solve for this, and hopefully, hopefully we'll talk about it today. Um, you signed a petition for safer super intelligence as we're calling it now. Um, you've been rather well, supportive of one and more critical of another AI bills here in the state of California, um, and you have definitely been critical of the chatbots by Meta and other companies that have merged into, um, shall we say, erotic content. Yes, for kids, for erotic content for eight year olds. Are you in favor of erotic content for 8 year olds? Yeah, exactly, because that is what the chief ethicist of Meta approved. In their AI companions on their platforms, so you know we're in a moment right now where it feels like all of the wins from the White House, from the states, from certainly from the tech companies, everybody's just trying to, well, it's framed in a sort of global competitive way, right? It's it's, it's no one's saying well we're To make more money. It's more just like we have to get there first, but of course all of the concerns that you're, you know, you have are being kind of pushed to the side in that. So what do we need to do? We should talk head on about that key argument that they make like, oh we have to get there first. We have to, I mean, it turns very quickly into this geopolitical thing, correct? We have to beat China. That's right. OK, so what, what do we do about that because clearly, uh. That's where the winds are blowing. So this is a uh. A very powerful stroke of what I would call storytelling. This is what I've, you know, I'm a spent my life working on is storytelling, and there's, you got to unpack the layers of the story when they say we got to beat China. The implicit and actually sometimes explicit comparison there is to the race to nuclear weapons during World War II. Indeed there was this moment in history where the US mounted the Manhattan. And the US was racing against the Nazis to take Einstein's theory and build a bomb within it. Whoever would get there first and push that button was going to win the war and kind of decide whether the world was going to become fascist or liberal, not liberal in today's sense. And that story is told today. As if the same thing is gonna happen, as if there's this thing they, they use terms like super intelligence, you just said they also use a term called AGI. There are no definitions for these terms. You can ask the most informed engineer or policy person in AI, and I have, and they're like, yeah, there's, there's not really a definition for this. Because it's all a story, it's hand waving. It's a sleight of hand. There is not going to be a moment where they push a button and all of a sudden win the war and decide that America is going to dominate instead of China. That's actually not coming. But if you try to say, hey, maybe we need to put some guard rails in place, maybe instead of just accelerating towards your maximum profits, we need to steer and we can still go fast, but let's build stuff that's going to also be good for everybody, not just for profits. The first thing they say is, yeah, but then we'll lose to China. Yeah, but it's, it's sort of a paper thin story that doesn't really make sense. Do you, this is an unfair question, but do you feel that Artificial intelligence as it is. Framed today is more dangerous or less dangerous than nuclear weapons in the in the middle of the century. Oh, obviously the dangers are very different, but yeah, look. I, I've spent the last because you mentioned I'm about to direct a movie about this stuff and so I've spent the last several years talking to all kinds of experts and, uh, you know, engineers and policy people and people who work in the big tech companies and people who work in academia and everyone in between governments. And there's no agreement on this, so I, I don't know. I don't know the answer. There definitely are a lot of people, a lot of experts. There's, there's like a survey that I think half of published AI researchers give it a 1 in 10 chance that like something extremely catastrophic happens with AI along the lines of, you know, nuclear warfare or whatever. I, I don't know. I certainly don't know, but if these experts are giving it a 1 in 10 chance. And it's not just a few of these experts, it's like half of the experts. That sounds pretty bad to me. Like, you know, they make the analogy like if, if, if half the avionics engineers said like I'd give that plane a 1 in 10 chance of crashing, would you get on the plane? No, you probably wouldn't get on the plane. So I don't know. I mean, I, I think those concerns are real. I think there are also a lot of other related but important concerns that might not be. So catastrophic is that, but get really dark and dystopian if you take them down the road a few steps into the future, and those are important to talk about. Sure, sure, sure. I've seen enough sci-fi movies and television shows to know that it can get pretty dark and dystopian. It's a funny thing, right? And speaking of movies, this is, this is one of the things that the folks who don't want any laws will say, your concerns are science fiction. But the real people now, the real ones making this stuff are saying this isn't science fiction, this is really happening. So again, there's all these sort of evasive tactics that I think are thinly veiled attempts to just protect their bottom line. Sure, sure, and I will just say I don't buy that argument either because let's face it, most of what we saw in Minority Report all those years ago. It's kind of real now. I'm right. It's remarkable to me that every with every passing year we managed to knock off one more of those technologies that was seemed so futuristic at the time. All right, so. You know, there have been attempts. One of the other things that you've come out against this, is, um, the, the notion because right now it's just a notion of, of, um, a federal suppression of state's ability to regulate AI um. The White House has made itself, you know, its position clear on that, how it goes about doing that. That's a matter of debate. It's tried to slip in a couple of passages in what, 2 bills? It tried in the big beautiful bill, correct. And then the other one, then it just tried in the what do they call it, the National Defense Authorization Act. Or whatever, like the yearly procedural budget passage for the military, they tried to sneak it in there exactly and so that's not happened, but the latest is that Trump wants to just, as he is want to do, put through an executive order kind of doing that. Now setting aside the legal, you know, support of that. You're not a lawyer and neither am I. What's your take on this because obviously you're against, you know, kind of clearing the path for AI. You want some of those speed bumps, but, uh, here we are finding a Republican White House in tension with Republican states even. Yeah, I was just in Utah. Yes, we have a wonderful brainstorm tech conference there, uh. I was sitting at a dinner with a whole bunch of Republicans and just agreeing left and right about how important it is to make laws that govern this technology and in fact that for many of them it's it's around kids, right? It's supporting a lot of kids that's definitely an alignment on that yeah but it's about kids, but. Also for Republicans who are in favor of things like competition, sometimes you need laws to make sure that there is a fair playing ground for business and competition to flourish, so that there was a lot of talk about that too, and Utah has actually done more than just about any other state to regulate AI and besides right wing and left wing lawmakers, I think the public, yeah, left, right and center, and I've, you know, looked at polls about this. They want regulation on AI. They don't trust these big businesses to do what's in the best interests of normal people. They know that that's, they, they know that these businesses can't do that. And it's not because the businesses are full of bad people, not at all. It's because if you're a business. And everyone here at the Fortune event probably knows this better than I do. Like if you're a business, you have to try to do good business. If you try to prioritize the public good, if you try to take the high road, you're just going to get beat by a competitor who's taking the low road. You can't really prioritize the public good if you're a business. That's why there needs to be an interplay between the private sector and, you know, laws and, and. Every other sector that impacts people's lives have laws. They, you know, whether it's the companies building cars or the companies who have banks or the companies making medicine, whatever, everybody has to follow some laws. Why should, why should the companies building this technology not have to follow any laws? It doesn't really make any sense. Indeed, we even have international laws about the use of nuclear force, so you know, cheers. Um, you posted on your social media recently something that resonated with me quite a lot as the father of two boys. Now my boys are young. I have a 5 year old and a 3 month old, as quite a few. Thank you, as quite a few of you know because he was born in the middle of the last brainstorm that we had. Um, it was about artificial intelligence in toys, um. You have 3 kids. I can already feel the dad energy coming off of off of you on that subject, but tell me a little bit more about that again as a dad, uh, that, uh, the AI is seeping into, I mean, we usually talk about AI in the sense of the LLMs and chatbots and interactions that way, but toys is a whole another ball game. Yeah, well, so. We're not against our kids using technology and, and my kids do use computers quite a bit. Um, I think there's lots of great stuff you can do, um, like shout out to Beast Academy and the Art of problem solving. It's like that's that's the one we found, uh, that teaches math so super well. um, one of my sons is really new at music and makes music with the computer amazingly, uh, and we let them spend a lot of time doing that. But these kinds of tools are different than addictive algorithms that are designed to prey on your human weakness and suck up as much of your time and attention as possible and make sure that you keep coming back. Um, that's the same technique is like a slot machine really. There's reasons why there's laws that don't let kids go into casinos and play slot machines and the psychological technique. Used to get gambling addicts hooked to slot machines are the same exact psychological techniques studied at Stanford and other places in Silicon Valley that make their products addictive. For sure. It doesn't make sense to have kids using these things. It's just it's bad for their brain and then when you get into AI companions. Yeah, yeah, that's, I mean, even deeper when you're a kid. There's, as far as I understand, um, I was talking to the, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt about this and any parent out there, I highly recommend his book, The Anxious Generation. Um, and he was saying there's a, there's quite a bit of scientific evidence that shows that when, when young brains are developing. It's human interactions that really help develop those neural pathways, and an AI toy or whatever chatbot you want will imitate those human interactions, but they don't develop those neural pathways in the same way because it's fake because you're not talking to a human, you're talking to an algorithm that's designed to hook you and keep you and ultimately serve you ads. It's very different than speaking to another person. And you know whether we're talking neurologically, you should use your common sense as a parent and you're trying to raise a kid who's going to be a strong and compassionate and smart feeling person. To me it's pretty obvious that you're going down a very bad path if you're subjecting them to this synthetic. intimacy that these companies are selling. Who knew that the 90s chat rooms would be the, the good thing, you know, because it was other humans, you know, think of that, think of that. Um, anyway, um, alright, let's, let's change gears a little bit and talk about you as a creator, OK, um, because I mean you just said, you know, one of your kids plays music. I do too. There are AI music tools. How do you feel about that? So, um. You know, you have definitely strong opinions working in Hollywood in terms of the impact of AI on creativity. Um, have you The dangers are clear. Do you feel, do you find any hope in what you can use as a person who Acts, produces, writes, you know, any, any creative goodness in all that. Well sure, the idea that, you know, uh, like I used to make so many videos when I was a little kid, and the idea that, you know, a couple of 10 year olds or something could use these tools to make a movie and have it look as good as, you know, the Hollywood big shots can make their movies look bad. Great, that's unequivocally great. My only concern is where's the economics because right now the way the companies are positioning it is they've built their models out of stolen content and data, didn't ask permission. They aren't offering compensation or they are kind of offering compensation, uh, here and there, but mostly they're claiming, no, this is fair use, we don't have to offer compensation, which sort of turns them into hypocrites, the fact that. They they've paid a few companies or maybe I guess they're just covering their bets or maybe it shows that they don't actually have a moral stance here, they're just trying to make money, um, but they've built their models out of stolen stuff. And their claim is that OK, whenever these tools are used 100% of the economic upside should go to the tech companies and 0% of the economic upside should go to all the people whose writing and voices and art and creativity and labor and time and skill and perspective went into making these products valuable. These products would have zero value, would be able to do zero things without all of that human input. So why shouldn't some of those humans get paid? I think it's actually a principle that applies far beyond entertainment. This is something that if we're going to have a functioning economy moving into the future as this tech gets more and more common. We need to establish the principle that if someone does some good work, has a good idea, makes that idea happen, puts it out into the world, they're allowed to gain economic value from it. But if an AI company is allowed to just take it for free and monetize it without paying that person, how is capitalism going to work anymore? Right, right. So I, I, I see it going down a pretty dystopian road unless we can establish. this principle that your digital self, your thoughts, your ideas, your work belongs to you and any economic upside from that should be shared with you totally, totally. I, I wanna come to the audience for one question before we wrap, uh, but I, I wanna ask you a very simple one before that which is just, um, if some of these things were worked out, you as a, I will just call you a Hollywood creative to take all the roles and wrap them into one. Um, would you in fact use AI tools for your work? I'm not against the technology. Yeah, if, if it were set up ethically and people were getting fairly compensated and we had all the proper upgrades to our systems to make this work fairly, absolutely, yeah, this could propel a great. Leap forward in our creativity, but I think if we, if we leave it as it is, it will only just serve to concentrate power in the hands of a few enormous companies, and that's not really good for anybody. Understood. All right, one question, please. Yes, right over here. Forgive me, the lights are very bright. Your name and who you're with, please. Yes, OK. 00, that's on. Hi, my name is Steven Messer from Collective I. Thank you for being here. Um, uh, you're obviously a great storyteller, and we've appreciated listening this morning. The hard part is it's the whole room full of AI people, and the story falls apart pretty quickly about how this won't hurt our race for winning. For anyone who watched the destruction of facial recognition, which was a key US industry where we dominated. Where a lot of the other countries were years behind us, privacy advocates stood up and told all the horrible things that could go wrong, that destroyed the ability to get funding. We watched that industry in 6 months go to China. Thankfully, we now have China who's doing the greatest things with facial recognition because the US has no companies left that's there. How is it possible to make the argument that there's no risk at all for the frontier models. Um, when we actually have a live real example. That destroyed an entire key critical industry that is now to potential adversary. Yeah, sure, and, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't protect intellectual property, quite the opposite. And, and I'm not saying that it's OK if China steals somebody's tech like that. stolen. All the different states created so many regulations that nobody was able to get funding and the industry was lost because of that. The slowing it down was enough to make a country that was so far behind us in 6 months the dominant player. That, that is a really good point then, and, and thank you for that context. Look, I would say this stuff isn't simple and we, when we get up on a stage, you have to speak for 20 minutes and you have to speak in pretty broad terms. I think that if we're talking about the basic principle that there should be laws as opposed to no laws, I think that. Logic holds. I think for sure it gets more complicated once you get into the art and craft of good regulation and less than good regulation, and I'm not a lawmaker and I'm not going to lecture us on like what makes effective regulation. I certainly wouldn't say that 100% of laws are good. Uh, and I probably would imagine that any even good piece of regulation probably has drawbacks that you could point to, and anti-regulation arguments often cherry pick those drawbacks and say, therefore we shouldn't have any regulation. I'm saying we have to find a good middle ground. Probably we need some regulation and for sure, to your point, we have to do it in a smart way. Thank you for your question, Joe, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you.

Brainstorm Design 2025

Companies everywhere are racing to turbocharge their products and services with AI. How can we harness the power of this new technology in a way that enhances our humanity rather than eclipses it?  Mauro Porcini argues that the next era of brand leadership depends on a straightforward equation: AI multiplied by emotional intelligence and human warmth. AI × (EI + HI). He explains how design can be used to restore narrative and meaning to products built on advanced computation, how leaders can craft a voice that stands out in an age of automated sameness, and why even the most technologically driven companies must double down on humanity.

Amplifying Humanity: Design and Brand Vision in the Age of AI

Fortune Innovation Forum 2025

The defining quandary for today’s Fortune 500 CEOs: how do you lead a global business in an anti-global age? In an era of rising protectionism, fractured supply chains, and deepening geopolitical rivalries, the old CEO playbook–emphasizing scale, efficiency, and integration—is being rewritten. The new imperatives: resilience, localization, and national interest. How can CEOs lead organizations with operations in multiple markets when the world is turning inward? And should they even try?

Competing in a 'Post-Global' World

Fortune Global Forum 2025

Hosted by H.E. Fahd bin Abdulmohsan Al-Rasheed, Anastasia Nyrkovskaya, & Diane Brady.

Fortune Global Forum 2025: Opening Ceremony and Welcome

That I. Ma. What if I yeah. I did yeah. Mo. I still fuck. I. Yeah I. I. God bless you. What. Oh. More. one more time. Fortune guests, please now welcome to the stage. Fortune Chief Executive Officer Anastasia Nukovskaya. Anastasia Norkovskaya. Good morning. It's an immense pleasure to be here today. And um the journey for me to be here today started almost 2 years ago when we made the promise that we will bring business fortune events to Riyadh. Earlier this year, we did Most Powerful Women International event here in Riyadh. It was in May, and today we're bringing our global forum, which is our signature fortune event. Fortunately has been around for almost 100 years. I brought a copy of the magazine. This is how it all started back in 1929 with the magazine, and it's still being printed today. We have the website. We have our iconic list such as Fortune 500, most admired companies, most innovative companies, all sorts of other things, and also our live media and events. Again, this journey is a long journey, and why are we here is the big question. Fortune's mission is to make business better, and we're doing doing it through our excellent reporting and journalism. Saudi Arabia is the frontiers of the business world today and that's why we wanted to be here and that's why we're here now again, everybody needs a good partner to get things started. So I wanted to talk for a second about our partner here as well. His Excellency Fahad Al-Rashid is our partner. He's the advisor in the general secretariat of the Council of Ministers and the chairman of SEGA. For those of you who know him, he does many things transforms cities, thinks about human capital growth companies transforms he left two cities, build the port, build the metro, and help, help us to to be here as well. So I wanted to say a huge thank you. Enjoy the next two days, and I hope to speak with you and see you around. Thank you. Since 1995, the Fortune Global Forum has convened in great cities on the dynamic frontiers of business. Singapore, New York, Beijing, Paris, Cape Town, New Delhi, Abu Dhabi, Toronto, and Rome. Now, nearly 30 years on, this well-established gathering returns for the second time to the Middle East. Today, the world turns its attention to Riyadh, a vital and expanding hub for global trade, technology, and economic transformation, guided by its ambitious Vision 2030 plan. Saudi Arabia is embracing creative solutions to the forces reshaping global business on a monumental scale. At this pivotal moment when leaders everywhere are navigating artificial intelligence, new economic pressures, and opportunities for growth, the Fortune Global Forum provides a unique stage for dialogue that defines the future. Here in Riyadh, we unite the world's foremost business and thought leaders, Fortune Global 500 CEOs, policymakers, and innovators. Together, they will set the agenda for business in a rapidly changing world. Welcome to the Fortune Global Forum. Where the future of business begins. Fortune guests, please welcome to the stage advisor, General Secretariat of the Council of Ministers, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Chairman of the Saudi Conventions and Exhibitions General Authority, His Excellency Fahad bin Abdul Mohsen al Rashid. Behar and I mean this bit so or is me marat Mahaliata had been Abdel messen a rushid. Of hasmu Mali wasada Sara Malekomoramaullahi Oakata. Your Highnesses, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Riyadh and welcome to Saudi Arabia. Welcome to the Fortune Global Forum 2025. We are honored to have you all here at this great moment. So many things happening in the world, so many challenges, and so many opportunities. But you've come to the right place because this is the land of opportunity. Saudi Arabia, with Vision 2030 has made major strides, not only economic, but social. Female participation in the workforce. Has hit 37%. Ahead of our 2030 targets. We started with the tourism sector, targeting 100 million visitors. Last year, we did 120 million visitors. But we have so much more to do. Because our leadership pushes us because we as people are ambitious. We want to do more. We want to do more because we are people of the desert. And think about what you have to do to survive and build a city the size of Riyadh in the desert. Riyadh is 100. 1200 kilometers in terms of size, double the size of Singapore. We have 8 million people living in Riyadh. It's the 44th largest city economy in the world. What does it take to do all of this? Ambition Patience And unlimited boundless. Optimism. And this is Saudi Arabia. This is the Saudi people. But how does Vision 2030 mechanically work? We have KPIs set for all sectors of the economy. Just like business do. But then to achieve them, we've launched initiatives. Actually we've launched 1,052 initiatives across the board. And 85% of them are on track. How can we do it? We're doing it together, men and women. Across the country. We're doing it with great talent that we've attracted from all over the world. And most importantly, we are doing it through the power of partnerships. We have partnership partnered with our friends from all around the world like you. To do this, these partnerships have allowed us to scale, scale our capability and scale the depth of our knowledge. And we've achieved, like I said, so much. Just a few months ago we've launched Humane in artificial intelligence. And signed $23 billion of partnerships just right after that. So we are here, we are ready, we are opening our arms and extending our hands to you. Thank you for being with us and enjoy the next 2 days. Thank you very much.

Most Powerful Women Summit 2025

It’s been said Kristalina Georgieva can make or break a nation’s finances. As head of the International Monetary Fund, she is leading the 191-member organization through a turbulent era. From tariffs and geopolitics to inflation and uncertainty, Georgieva joins us to discuss how the IMF navigates times of crisis and fundamental shifts in the world economy.  

The Pursuit of Global Economic Security

Managing director at Geva, I have to say that you said good music walking on. It makes me wonder, do you have a favorite walk-on song for IMF meetings? Yes, I do. Oh, really? What is it? We will, we will. OK, I think that sets the tone right there. This must be the most wonderful time of the year for you. You've got the annual meeting of the World Bank, IMF. You've got 191 member countries coming in. Give us a sense. This is day one. Thank you for joining us. Um, what have you been hearing so far? Give us a bit of a highlight. Well, the world is in a Very interesting place. Uh, so what I hear is mostly questions. Hey, how is it going to be? What would the world economy look like? Are we going to survive the trade war? And what about my country? What advice do you have for us? I actually started the day with The delegation of Tajikistan. Tiny country in Central Asia. Used to be a basket case. They had the Civil War. And then they lucked with leadership. I was delighted to have them as my first meeting because their growth is strong. Inflation is Below 3%. Their public debt is coming down, uh, and how are they doing that? Strong fundamentals, they pay attention to their policies, strong institutions, and hey, the IMF is there for them. So my message to my membership. If you come here so we can see better through the fog of uncertainty lying over our heads together. And what I'm asking you is leave your trade wars, your cold wars, your hot wars outside of my room. You can why mothers should be in charge, right? Yes, we keep it outside. Keep it outside. Well, you talked about what's heartening, what's disheartening to you right now. Uh, what is most disheartening is the risk we face for many countries. To lose hope for converging with those that are better off. What we have experienced over the last years, shock upon shock, upon shock. has pushed the fate of many poor countries into a more desperate place. And why should we care? We should care for two reasons one, Because when part of the world is falling behind, that means more insecurity for you guys, those who have global companies, shrinking market, and 2, because it is morally wrong. You know, I'm struck you, you led the World Bank. You're now in your 2nd term, you know, at the IMF. These are two organizations that really grew out of Bretton Woods in a spirit of globalization. Let's start with how do you lead an organization of people that is devoted to globalization in this fragmented environment? Well, the IMF is devoted. To help countries do better for their people. It happens that a more integrated world economy works better for the majority of people, but not for all. And one thing we have been saying now for some time is pay attention to those who are left out or left behind. Uh, and if we don't, then we risk more trouble. But let me deliver two messages to you. The first one is that despite the fragmentation in the world economy, we are still seeing. Countries reaching out to each other. And if globally we have more difficulty then at the regional level, subregional level, we seek compensation. Gulf Cooperation Council, ASEAN regions countries are looking for ways in which they can trade more with each other. And second, frankly, this thing that trade is dead is completely overstated, um. Trade is like water. You put obstacle, it goes around it. What we are seeing, and this has been like this for thousands of years, um, when we came to assess where is the world economy these days, we look at what is happening with trade and actually the impact of trade tensions is more muted for three reasons. One, Because the tariffs that were announced in the United States in April that shocked the world at that time 23%, now nominally they are still high, 17.5% but less, and when you look at collection, how much is collected, it is more around 10%, still much more than the under 3% before, but Not as dramatic impact as initially we anticipated. 2. The rest of the world has chosen not to retaliate. 188 of our 191 countries said. We're good. We actually like to continue to trade on most favored nation rule. And 3, and the tree is very, very interesting. When we look at the upswing in regional engagements, it's actually amazing and frankly these guys should have been trading more with each other. They're right next to each other and they have been kind of obsessed with shipping all the way to the to the United States rather than say ASEAN trading among themselves. So I think I'm, I full disclosure, I'm an optimist. I believe in the good of people and I think that ultimately we actually find the high road to do better and I see that this world, we are a more fragmented world, a more uncertain world. It is also getting people to recognize that. We are in this one big boat. It is a rough sea. We better row together. Well, let me go back to 2 a second when you talk about this resilience in the economy and the fact that people are not retaliating, that sounds like a bit of a fragile piece to me. Do you think that's going to last? Give us some message to the US and those of us here who are US based leaders. Uh, the Most important factor that determines how we look at the economy today is uncertainty, and my message to business leaders is very simple, buckle up. Uncertainty is here to stay. And uncertainty is driven by just far too many very powerful factors. You have technology, you have geopolitics, you have policymakers being less predictable. You have demography, some countries aging, some countries exploding. All of this is creating a foggy world. I was actually talking to Diane before we came here. We know the world we lived until recently, that we know. We don't know where we are going to land in this period of transition. That is the saying, the king is dead. Long live the what? And in this week we will see many of our members actually concentrating on how can we provide more anchors of certainty. So what we do, we do work on two of these anchors. First one is policies and institutions and we are telling. Loudly to everybody. You need good policies, you need Good institutions and you need independent institutions in some anchors of policymaking protected to private sector. I understand that the majority of you here are business people. Well, good news for the world. Private sector is more agile, more adaptable. Over the last years we have seen in many countries where there was big state presence in the economy. Including because of IMF urging them to pull back more private sector initiatives and in this time. of strong winds. You guys are an anchor of stability because you adopt, you just keep doing it. You know, I think about another quote from one of your favorites, John Maynard Keynes. In the long run we're all dead, which is another that's either optimistic or pessimistic, but I do think about that essay which I know you've quoted from the economic possibilities for our grand. Children and just the arc of the last 100 years, the progress we've seen, we're very much in a short game right now. Talk a bit about the long game from where you sit. I love John Maynard Keyne's little essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. Basically, he says there. In 100 years we are going to be about 8 times better off. 100 years later we are about 8-9 times better off, so he nailed this one in parenthesis, what he got wrong, he was saying we would be so productive that we don't have to work 5 days, 6 days a week. We would be working only 3 days a week. And we would be writing poems in the rest of the time. Why did he get that wrong? Totally. And actually I love when I read the AI enthusiasts that say now AI is going to deliver a lot of free time and we would be having only 3 days to work. The rest we would write poems. I think, I think it is in human nature we actually are keen to deploy ourselves. We like to, I mean, we like to work. Um, let me ask you actually this, how many of you like to work? So that's the, so when I look forward, I do believe that we will be much better off as humanity. In 100 years' time. And if medicine decides to advance faster than it is doing right now, we will be there to see it, right? You know, one of the things I find So in addition to being the 2nd woman to lead the IMF, I should ask you, do you hang out with Christine Lagarde? Do you guys? We do, yes. Christine was, as you probably remember, she was the managing director of the IMF before me, first woman, so Christine came, broke the glass ceiling. I came after her. No scratchy. Well, you're the first woman. You're the first, you're the first leader from an emerging market economy, so you've got your own first. You're also somebody who did your PhD in environmental protection policy and growth in the USA. Now climate change, environmental policy, that is not something that is Very high on the radar right now in some countries. Uh, how are you feeling about that as a factor in growth? So we at the IMF, we work on macroeconomic and financial stability for growth and employment. Anything that is a risk to macroeconomic and financial stability, we have to take into account. Some of my members, some of our members say Caribbean states. Uh, they can get 100 to 100% of GDP wiped out just by one hurricane. So obviously we have to integrate this in the way we think about supporting countries. We want to help them help countries have good insurance policies. Uh, we want them to have good thinking about how at low cost they can be more resilient to climate, and I want to give you just one example why it matters. Um, Bangladesh, Bangladesh is a country that gets flooded on a regular basis, and so they were thinking how they can have resilience policies that are affordable. They worked at that time I was with the World Bank. We worked with them on investing in dual purpose infrastructure. So you build the school, the school is a school. If there is a flood, it's lifted, people with their animals go there for shelter. One of the measures that we came up, they came up and we reinforced was they used to have lots of chicken. And they switch from chicken to ducks. When the flood comes, chicken die, ducks swim. I love that the index. It doesn't have to be expensive, but you have to put some thinking and then translate it into economic activity. That's very smart. You know, um. I notice you, you bring your granddaughter occasionally to events, and you are the great granddaughter of a revolutionary Ivan Karshovski, who was a great revolutionary in Bulgaria and also a journalist. I think you started out wanting to be a journalist. I dodged a bullet. No, I'm just kidding, but, but I'd love to talk a little bit about what is your message to her? I mean, she's now studying in the US you came. An Alexander Hamilton scholarship here, give me some sense of of the legacy and how you think about, you know, leadership in your own family and what you tell her. So what I'm telling her is one change is unstoppable, unstoppable. So lean forward because that's going to be in front of you. This is going to be your life. 2, do the right thing. Even if it is not popular, even if it is not politically correct, do the right thing. This is what my father taught me. This is not what my great grandfather left for us. And 3, the world is fabulous. We have to protect our ability. To work with each other, we need to protect that, uh, making the world a really small place and you, your generation has a role to play. By the way, fun fact, imagine communist Bulgaria, we are just coming out of it. There is a Alexander Hamilton scholarship I can apply for. I did. I'm going for the interview. Now, as you can imagine in communist Bulgaria, they didn't teach us more about much about the founding fathers here. So The main question the journalists are asking, sorry, the interviewers are asking is, who is Alexander Hamilton? No Google, no phones, and I'm saying, I saw, I saw him recently. Where did I see him? And then The good of being dollarized at that time, I saw him on a $10 note. So I walk in the interview room. They asked me who is Alexander Hamilton, and I said, Who the guy on the $10 note? They didn't know. They started, there you go. This is my, my message is create, you know, never lose your cool, whatever the situation, come through it, come out of it victorious. I love that. This is also what I teach. I teach my granddaughter. I love that. Well, well. Have you seen the play, by the way? Hamilton? Of course, the first thing I did when she came to the United States, I took her to see Alexander Hamilton, and she loved it. So, so let's end on a note around back to the global economy. You've got a lot of anxious people, I'm sure, who are in town this week. What is your message to them in terms of these 191 member countries, excuse me, you've got finance ministers, central bankers, leaders. First of all, that's a Tough group to manage, but what is, what does success look like right now? So what we, what we provide to our membership is to see the world from the same vantage point. We produce global economic world economic outlook. Financial stability report and fiscal report and then we say, look at this, what strikes you the most? Three things. One, Better than feared, worse than we need. We touched, we, you know, ditched the bullet. But It's not over, so please you guys cooperate. Don't get out of this meeting. In the lunacy of economic wars. 2 Look at your finances. You're in trouble. Your debt levels have shot up during the pandemic, everybody had to borrow to support households and businesses. But nobody is pulling this support out. Why? Because people like it. What is not to like? Have the guts. To come to fiscal consolidation because if you don't, when the next shot shot shock comes and it will. You're in a very bad place. And 3, there are imbalances. Across countries, let's figure out a way to reduce them because they're an obstacle to a better global economy. Great woman leader, we have 18 seconds left. What is your message to this room of women leaders? But my message is think of the unthinkable. So you're ready when the Anticable comes because we know from COVID, we know from the war in Europe, it will come, and we women, we women are so strong and resilient we can face it. I love that. Please join me in thanking managing director Georgieva. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Brainstorm Tech 2025

Delivery robots, drone drops, new business lines, and global expansion: DoorDash has transformed into a full-stack commerce platform for local businesses. CEO and Co-founder Tony Xu joins us to explore how DoorDash is approaching automation, international expansion, and a broader push into hospitality and retail.

Tony Xu
Cofounder and CEO, Doordash 

Jason Del Rey
Tech Correspondent; Cochair, Fortune Brainstorm 

Now Serving: Global Ambition

Brainstorm AI Singapore 2025

The AI race is no longer just about scale—it’s about standards, trust, and strategic agility. As major powers build ever-larger models, Singapore is charting a different course: investing in global assurance frameworks, cross border digital integration, and a radically expanded pipeline of AI-skilled talent. Its approach is systems-first and credibility-focused—offering a model for how small states can lead by shaping norms rather than dominating infrastructure. But in an increasingly fractured landscape shaped by open-source disruption and deepening U.S.–China tensions, can neutrality still deliver influence? We'll discuss what makes Singapore’s AI strategy distinctive—and consider what other countries might learn from the Singapore model in crafting their own AI strategies. 

Beyond Scale: How Small Nations Can Lead In The Age Of AI

Now, to kick this off, I'm thrilled to introduce our opening conversation led by Fortune's executive editor for Asia and Brainstorm AI co-chair, Clay Chandler in conversation with our first guest, Singapore's Minister for Digital Development and Information, Josephine Teo. When we talk about global leadership in AI, it's easy to focus on the big players, but Singapore continues to prove that small nations can lead in big ways. This isn't just a story about scale. It's about strategy, standards, and Singapore's bet that credibility can compete with compute. Please now join me in welcoming Clay Chandler and Minister Teo. Thank you. Thank you, Jeremy, and welcome everyone and especially welcome Mr. Chou. It is such a delight to have you back. Uh, you were our kickoff speaker last year when we first launched this franchise in Singapore. We had a great discussion. Uh, that explored the ways in which Singapore was really pioneering how small and medium sized economies could punch above their weight when it came to artificial intelligence, and I'm really quite eager to have a kind of catch up conversation with you about that because so much has changed just in the last year since you were last here. Um, I wonder if we could start maybe by just a reference to the um. The AI action summit in Paris this year, which is a big event that got a lot of people's attention. Singapore there launched a global AI assurance pilot. And more recently, it's established a thing called the AI Verify Foundation. Can you tell us about these initiatives and and what they are and how they evolved? Well, it's great to be back and I'm also very happy that you've returned to Singapore for AI event. Um, you. Referenced what we were doing at the AI action summit. Uh, perhaps for context for the audience in the room today, uh, the AI action summit that took place in Paris is a 3rd edition of what started out in Bletchley as the AI safety summit. And then in between, there was a summit that was held in Korea. And by the time it got to Paris, our French colleagues decided that They didn't want to focus so much on safety, they wanted to focus on action. But if we ask what we really want to see in AI development, the way Singapore thinks about it is that this being general purpose technologies, you do want um it to be very widely adopted across many industry settings as well as across a whole range of organizations. So when we updated our national AI strategy, we thought that we needed to ensure that um uh people understood what this was going to be for. So we said that the vision for Singapore was AI for the public good, for Singapore and the world. And why we decided to focus on public good was that The incentives would naturally create many commercial applications of AI, but for the whole of society to benefit, for people to appreciate its value, and this being general purpose technology, you also want AI to be applied towards public healthcare, public transportation, uh, public safety in policing, for example. So that's one dimension of AI development that we wanted to see in Singapore. The other dimension is equally important. In many of these commercial settings, you would want AI to be implemented, deployed in a responsible way. So the question, however, is what does responsible AI look like? Well, it really depends on the application and at which layer of AI development you're talking about. Are you talking about the infrastructure, you're talking about the models, or you're talking about the applications? And Apart from being able to articulate what responsible AI looks like, you also need to answer the question of, well, how do you get that? And if you say that you are implementing responsible AI, how do you test for it? How do you assure people that in fact this is happening? So, As we were also promoting AI adoption, we decided at the same time that these questions deserved investigation. You need to put aside resources to research, but at the same time, it's useful for us to start developing practical tools. To answer the question of what responsible AI looks like. That's how the global AI assurance pilot came about. It was to create uh a number of methods by which AI developers as well as deployers were able to assure their stakeholders that they were implementing in a responsible way. And the idea was also to learn from it, accepting the fact that at this early stage, there are no interoperable standards that apply across the globe. We don't know when we will get there. And so Singapore's modest hope is to contribute to this conversation and to bring about international collaboration so that we can all develop best practices in AI development. There is a lot to think about there. Um, I want to come back and maybe talk a little bit more about how Uh, assurances, the strategy aligns with the kind of commercial competitiveness objectives of Singapore, but I want to, before we get to that, uh, ask you about one of the other big developments that's happened in the last year, which happened just about the time. Uh, a lot of people were in Davos, uh, and, uh, I remember being in Davos and hearing people at the beginning of Davos sort of pooh poohing China's ability to catch up to the United States. Oh, Silicon Valley is so far out in front in these foundational AI models that China can't play the same game. And then, uh, right in the middle of Davos there was this kind of announcement that emerged that there was this thing called Deep Seek. There was a Chinese hedge fund that had, uh. Sort of issued this new platform in AI that was produced with a fraction of the resources of OpenAI or Gemini, but seemed to be pretty close on all the significant benchmarks of performance. Last year we talked about, you know, the age of. Uh, you know, big data and, and AI superpowers and whether that created daunting obstacles for smaller states like Singapore. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the implications for countries like Singapore. For the deep sea breakthrough, we've had a couple of these other really kind of fast follower platforms come through in China recently. Um, is this something that even Singapore can now compete, you know, by following those kinds of examples? How does it open up and democratize the the the AI game for a country like Singapore? Well, the thing that we ask ourselves is what are the impediments of using any sort of technology for innovative purposes. And inevitably cost becomes an issue because for a company that is uh deploying technology already in a certain way to use AI as an alternative or as an addition, the question of cost must come up and it has to be weighed against the benefits. So when the cost comes down, then whatever benefits you were able to get from it may look more attractive. So from the perspective of bringing down costs. Innovation such as Deepeek are very much welcome. But I would also say that um this whole dynamic is not necessarily only a competitive one. It is also mutually reinforcing. Let me give you an example. We don't use deep per se to develop our own large language model, but within the context of Southeast Asia, we know that large language models that are trained primarily on the Western corpus, primarily on perhaps English as the language, um, they will have difficulties being applied in the Southeast Asian context. Um In our case, there are already probably more than 1000 local languages and if you build AI tools on top of these large language models that didn't incorporate the kind of data that could be found in our part of the world, then naturally the quality, the way it performs, the way it responds to prompts will perhaps not meet. The requirements of Singapore, as well as our neighboring countries. What we did was to therefore develop our own large language model, not necessarily the biggest, but certainly trained on languages that we find commonly in our part of the world. You know, um, Malay language, Tamil, Indonesia. This is sea lion, you are very familiar with it. So I think there is room for both, uh, and indeed, many companies, when they are thinking about how they can develop, for example, chat assistance that could be useful in our context, they would use a combination of both. And so that's how I think about it. I think that in an innovation ecosystem. Um, ways in which we can bring down the cost, ways in which we can complement one another in terms of the models that are available. I think they just open up the space for innovation to a larger extent. And in the Singapore context, um, when we think about AI governance and in AI innovation, The two are not necessarily at odds with each other, being able to assure ourselves of the safety and proper governance actually, I think can enable innovations to go further, because then the developers and deployers know where are the markets that they should work with. It's very interesting because it's a very, it's a much more kind of neutral approach to evaluating technology and And AI platforms in the US right now, a lot of this stuff is very politicized, so we thought that TikTok was a terrible national security risk until we realized that it was so popular that we couldn't really stop it and you know certain political leaders realized it was to their advantage to embrace it, but deep. See there's still a lot of ambivalence about deep seek in the US. The US government is prohibiting, uh, government agencies from, from using it, uh, uh, and trying to discourage companies from using it, whereas I gather in Singapore there's none of that. There's, well, let's look at it and is it useful or not? Or perhaps I would put it another way. I think when Companies, developers, deployers, they think about what model they want to use. There is always an assessment of a couple of things. One of the things would be, of course, performance. The other thing that they, they would take into consideration is security and resilience. And it's up to every organization to evaluate all three and draw their own conclusions about what can be used and what cannot be used, although they do not wish to use. And I would imagine that there will still be concerns about deep sea and other models that would cause companies. needs to take a pause and say that maybe this is something that we are still not very comfortable with. I wouldn't be surprised at all. This is a very natural consequence of organizations having to weigh the cost and benefits as well as the many dimensions of what makes an innovation worth the effort. So the other thing that's related to this and that that's new over the past year is that you know we in the US we have a new president now. And relations between the US and China have gotten, uh, safe to say much more tense and in many ways more acrimonious. President Trump is imposing very large tariffs on China. China has been retaliating in kind. The US has tightened restrictions on selling chips and other technologies to China. I wonder whether you know and we talked last year about Singapore's strategy of being sort of non-aligned, uh, being a kind of a Switzerland of Asia, a space where both Chinese and and uh uh US companies and tech players could could operate together. And so my question is can Singapore still do that? And this also sort of applies to the rest of ASEAN. Can it remain strategically unaligned, or are the two giants trying to force small and medium sized economies like this one to pick a side. I think Singapore's consistent approach is to act. In a way that meets our own interests. And that is the starting point that has to be our guiding principle. Now We would certainly hope that relationships between the two giants can warm up to a much greater extent, but it's not something that we can wish to happen and it will happen. I wish that was, um, you know, something that uh we didn't have to deal with, but it's a reality. Um, the way in which we go about it is to engage, you know, uh, all countries, not just China and US. Um, and Build upon our bilateral foundations. And to try and make headway in new technology areas too. So with the US, we have a dialogue on continuing and contin critical and emerging technologies. Similarly with China, we have a digital policy dialogue. They cover different areas of interest um that um we mutually believe are important for our own countries. But, you know, it doesn't prevent us from seeking to understand each other's concerns better and then continuing to find ways to move forward. So in AI Assurance in AI governance, for example, with our US colleagues, we did a mapping of our own risk assessment model against us, and this serves as a basis for us to engage with colleagues elsewhere around the world, particularly those that are involved in the AI safety network. Um, with our Chinese colleagues, we noticed that um there are industrial Uh, foundation is so broad and deep that the application of AI would be very interesting to watch and learn from. So there are different ways in which we engage with our ASEAN countries, we say, for example, that um even if we are not ready to move into the era of standards in AI governance, there's nothing to prevent us from agreeing on what the ethical principles could look like first. And then with other countries um that are like us, small, um, we created a digital pillar in the forum of small states, which Singapore is the convener of. And with countries like Rwanda, for example, we created an AI playbook for small states. So these are the ways in which we are coming together for conversations around different aspects of AI hoping to meet, make progress. Interesting and, and, and thoughtful. Um, I wanna ask quickly if I can about um. Scaling the digital workforce to kind of support a lot of these initiatives. The last time we spoke, you described for us, the government's plan had a goal for training 5000 AI practitioners in Singapore, and you have since tripled that, as I understand it, to 15,000. Why the increase and how will you achieve it and what will be the background of these practitioners? Well, number one, I think there's a lot of interest, um. So many people in, in, in Singapore are aware of the potential benefits of AI and they are themselves finding ways to acquire the skills. Uh, I would say that, um, whether it is AI creators or AI practitioners, Uh, I'm overall optimistic about what can be achieved through our workforce if each and every one, were enabled to acquire some AI related skills. And you imagine that um certain basic AI skills will become as ubiquitous as you and I being very familiar with using emails, um, and perhaps in the earlier stages, Maybe it was not so common for people to be able to use um digital tools, you know, whether for word processing or making slides and so on. But over time, we all acquire a certain level of competence. But we think that it's not enough just to have basic level of competence. So what you described, the 5000 and 15,000 are what we call AI practitioners, we are hoping also to grow another pool to complement the data scientists and machine learning engineers. We're talking about people who who are in the professions, lawyers, accountants, doctors, who will become the early adopters of AI and then they show their peers how to make better use of it. We're also talking about people in different sectors, whether it's manufacturing, whether it is, um, you know, in healthcare or um in financial services. They themselves also acquire this facility with using AI and then they demonstrate how it can create more value for their organizations. This group of AI practitioners will have to exceed the 15,000 that I talked about to a much greater extent. So in the Singapore context, our workforce is maybe 3.5 million. I think. At the level of AI users that are AI, they are competent, you, you will need to get to a much larger number than what we were talking about last year. So watch this space, we will have more to say about this. We, we will watch it with great interest. We've got just a couple of minutes here. I wonder if we can come back to this initial point about assurance. Uh, it's very interesting to me because it seems that what Singapore is doing is it's trying to become a kind of a test bed for safety and responsible AI and And to create a kind of haven. And build a brand around that in much the way that Singapore has done with FinTech regulation and cybersecurity services. Is that, is that the idea and Maybe you could say a little bit more about the philosophy behind the emphasis on insurance. The broad idea is that this technology um can have many applications and you don't want to overly restrict its growth and development. On the other hand, for a technology that can be used in so many different contexts. You've got to watch that it doesn't cause harm because the moment it does, and people become very wary of seeing it being used in even more ways, then it's much harder to recover from that sort of loss of momentum. So the way in which we'd like to go about it is to set out the broad directions and also to set out what are the principles that we should be working along. And then to uh say to industry as well as organizations that are using AI, let's try and find a way to define the risks and also then to find ways of mitigating those risks. That's generally the approach that we take. Small steps, um, not necessarily always big bang, but when we're ready to move, then move quickly. It's always fascinating for us to kind of watch those small steps and to try to observe them and analyze them. I think that many of them are of great relevance and and benefit to other kind of medium sized states as to how they can navigate in. This really rapidly changing technology environment. We look forward to tuning in again and coming back for the next installment of this conversation we hope in years to come. Thank you so much, Minister, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Conferences

In this feature series, Fortune reporters and editors take you behind the scenes to explore how AI is being deployed across industries; how are companies using AI to stay ahead of the competition, and what will this inflection point mean for the future of business?

AI Features

Nearly half of all Americans wear a fitness tracker, up from just 13% a decade ago. But while early wearables just counted steps, connected fitness giants like Oura and Tonal are using artificial intelligence to predict your recovery before you even feel it. 

Fortune senior writer Allie Garfinkle goes inside the $2 trillion wellness economy to test the tech, analyze the multi-billion-dollar data moats, and ask a fundamental question: Is hyper-optimization making us peak performers, or just more anxious?

Inside the "Lifemaxxing" Economy: Has Fitness AI Optimization Gone Too Far?

3 We're going all out. Welcome to the life maxing economy. We're capturing an additional 1000 points of data every second from our camera that's tracking 36 different points on your body. The global consumer wellness market is now worth $2 trillion and nearly half of American adults own at least one wearable of 33% points from a decade ago. Sherman and Allie here today. We are going to show you the new Order Ring 5 and our thoughts on it. When it says you're getting sick in 3 days' time, you will be sick, and it's the AI that's tuned to you. Now AI is. Transforming passive step counters into active coaches with hyper personalized insights designed to optimize every hour of your day, awake and asleep. So it's your AI spotter. Exactly. But some people are getting burnt out. Do you really need to be wearing 56 devices? No. Will all this information really make us healthier, or are we just becoming data obsessed? There's no reason to overoptimize. That 1% improvement is not going to change your life. Amazing. Later March. Hey Ali. Hi, Coach Woody, it's so nice to meet you. Super excited to have you here. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, this is where the magic happens. The global smart fitness market is projected to grow to over $60 billion over the next decade, fueled by an increase in wearable devices and connected gym systems. Oh, it's helping me. Maybe you start to reach failure or fatigue. You cannot complete a rep. Burnout will kick in to lessen the load so that you can finish the wrap, so that you can finish the set. And fitness tracking isn't new. Basic pedometers go back decades, and more modern devices tracking calories, heart rate, and sleep surged in the late 2000s and early 2010s. AI is transforming the capabilities of these tools. Connected devices are no longer just collecting data. Now they're telling users how to use this data. AI really kind of underpins almost everything that we do, and we're becoming predictive in that. A world with generative AI allowing members to talk to the product in kind of human language. Tonal makes smart home gym equipment with AI-powered resistance weights that learn and adjust based on the user. They also offer AI coaching software and human-guided workout classes. Founded in 2015, Tonal has accumulated trillions of data points from everyday lifters to brand ambassadors like LeBron James and Serena. Williams Toal says its members have lifted more than 235 billion pounds, building the largest strength training data set in the world. What our members are telling us is that I want to run a marathon or I want to get my mobility back, you know, we're now offering through Tia, which is our total intelligent assistant, an ability to ask those questions, predict outcomes for individuals, and prescribe them workouts along the way. Pal is one of several connected fitness devices introducing conversational AI coaches into their products, but established large language models pose a significant threat. If chatbots can analyze the same fitness data for free, they risk reducing connected devices to what they once were pricey data collectors. Do you feel like you're competing with the large LLMs on that level? I think what they built is a phenomenal system where those systems fall short is in areas of specialization. What we bring to the table is a wealth of data, 8 years plus worth of workout experience for hundreds of thousands of people that allows us to augment what those companies do and specifically address. Strength training outcomes in a way that these companies just don't have systems trained to accomplish. What are we looking at here? We've talked about all this data. This is a system that we use that measures the force input for the motor. Every time you pull on a cable, go ahead and grab a cable. We're collecting data 50 times a second, thousands of data points every second that aggregate to give us a really, really, really highly specific force curve on what it is. That you're doing, how that complements your given move and how we build all of that into a system that personalizes your lifts. Companies like Tonal are positioning their proprietary data as the defense by matching trillions of data points with its own closed loop large language model. Tonal says they provide personalized analysis. This also adds a lucrative subscription revenue stream to their existing hardware sales. We didn't want to just be a wrapper on top of one of these big foundational models, which no harm or no foul to any company that wants to do that. What we wanted to do was take the time to really train our system on the data that we have and augment it with the expertise of our staff. To what extent do you feel you're competing with chat GBT or cloud? I mean we certainly have observed people taking medical information and uploading it to. Chat GPT or cloud and asking questions and we thought oh we can do this but we can do this with with the data not just as you prompting the LLM. Why don't we have that machine intelligence, the doctor in your pocket monitoring what's going on with you and then giving you an insight. Aura, the Smart ringing and health tracking platform that monitors sleep, physical activity, and other biometric signals, originally only sold physical devices. But in 2021, Aura introduced a subscription-based revenue model built on AI-powered personalized health insights. Under CEO Tom Hale, that software model became a revenue driver. I think AI and our particular take on it is going to be a pretty big mode. The second thing that is a competitive mode is the data set itself. The data is actually the scarce resource here. Our data set, 42 billion hours of data across a huge population, that data asset is what fuels the intelligence. The intelligence is the thing that you can't. Create unless you have the data. The company says it generated over $1 billion in revenue in 2025, doubling sales for the second consecutive year. About 20% of that comes from subscriptions. A rumored IPO candidate, or it could be valued at more than $16 billion if it goes public in 2026. Where we end is everyone's already got a supercomputer of some sort, and there'll be a device that you wear on your body. And that device will monitor your physiology, and those things are looking out for you and making you healthy. And by the way, that will bend the curve not just of your personal health outcome, but bend the curve on a societal health outcome. We spend 1 in $5 in this country of our GDP on healthcare. That's ridiculous compared to European countries where it's like 1 in 10 or less. We think that should change and we think this is part of that change. So this is my favorite drawer here. This is my wearables drawer. OK. We go ahead and open it up. Oh my gosh, there's so many. This is where people get the most shocks. It's probably like 30 different watches, smart rings, bands just in this drawer right here. Shervin Shaikh, known as Shervin Shares on YouTube, is a fitness influencer known for reviewing the latest products in the booming health and fitness technology industry. I've With every fitness tech equipment out there, and today I'm reviewing the tonal 2. He has done paid branded content for Tonal and Aura and earns commission on Aura rings sold through his affiliate link. And then what have we got in this corner over here? So this is the filming setup. What did we say? Sherman and Ali here. Sherman and Allie here today. We are going to show you the new Aura Ring 5 and our thoughts on it. So we're going to show you our little colors. What do you have on? What do you have on 2 Aura rings right now, OK. And then I have a Fitbit, the new Fitbit Air, and then the Garmin Circa. And then the whoop on this arm. So there's 3. There's an invisible one as well, exactly. And then just the Apple Watch on this side. When every choice becomes a data point from sleep to heart rate variability, some question whether all that information ultimately does more harm than good. There are also questions about the reliability of this data. Aura is currently facing a lawsuit accusing the company of providing misleading sleep tracking information. In a written response to Fortune, Aura said that they stand behind their claims of accuracy and are committed to communicating how members should use the data that Aura is measuring. I think a lot of people are kind of hitting a wall after years of over optimizing perhaps um I certainly have a complicated relationship with the data myself. How do you think about that, especially in the context of this massive data set you have? Our goal is to improve people from a strength outcome perspective and improve their health. What we're attempting to do is build a system that allows you to basically get that same value out of your training that you would get with a personal trainer. But importantly, without the cognitive load that would require you to even think about data. Has there ever been a time where you sat there and were like, oh, I have too much data? Always for me specifically, like, do you really need to be wearing 56 devices? No. And I think there was one point where I was wearing 2, like I was wearing an Apple Watch and a Whoop, and people were like, why are you wearing 2 watches? And now it seems like it's become more common where I see other people wearing 2 devices, and I guess I've become the guy who wears 6 devices. So many people think if I buy X, Y, Z, you know, this gadget, this fitness tech is going to make me fit. Buying anything is not going to change your behavior. If we use the data to influence how we feel, then we forget how we feel, and I think. How we feel is is the biggest metric for how that day is gonna go.

The secondhand clothing market is booming worldwide. Yet it took over a decade for The RealReal to reach profitability, and ThredUp is still chasing that goal, due in part to the hugely complex intake process that goes into receiving, authenticating, pricing, listing and delivering millions of unique items.

Today, AI is revolutionizing that process. Fortune senior writer Phil Wahba goes behind the scenes at The RealReal’s authentication center in New Jersey to see how the new AI-powered intake tools are transforming the secondhand clothing industry.

Inside The RealReal’s AI-Powered Authentication Center

In the US alone, there's $200 billion trapped in people's closets of luxury goods, and then every year $80 billion gets added. Resale is booming, but just a few years ago, used apparel resellers like the Real Reel and Thread Up were hanged by a thread. Despite the US secondhand clothing market reaching $43 billion in 2023, shares in both companies plunged towards record lows. Single skew items, 50 million items sold, 200 attributes per item. When you get in there and you really start to understand the business, you realize it's much more complex than you think it is. That same year, ultra fast fashion giant Sheehan. Expanded its third party marketplace to the US, further threatening resale on speed, price, and variety. So how did digital secondhand sellers survive? Enter AI. Really what we're doing here is capturing more and more data. The decisions are happening at the speed of machines as opposed to humans. Can AI help resellers compete against the world's biggest, fastest retailers? This facility is about 500,000 square feet network wide across the east and west coast. We have about 1.3 million square feet of warehousing space. The real real is one of the largest luxury goods resellers on the planet. Yet the company operated at a loss for more than a decade, and the complexity and costs of processing secondhand goods remained a major challenge. If you think about real real, you're not sourcing from like other brands, right? You're sourcing from individuals. All of these items will be very, very unique. You could have a particular color or a particular style or a fabric. You have a significant supply side uncertainty, which makes this whole problem much, much more challenging. Unlike broader resale sites like eBay, the Real Real and ThreadUp are responsible for intaking, authenticating, pricing, and shipping millions of items flowing through their inventory. This puts them at a major disadvantage against other online retailers, including ultra fast fashion giants like Xi'an which can drop up to 10,000 new designs daily and ship products within weeks at deep discounts. Today, The Real Real believes AI can change that. So this is our receiving department and we have one of our merchandise operations specialists and he is taking some scanned images of tags, the designer tag, the fabric tag, and this is the start of feeding data into Athena, and that is our AI powered intake platform that helps us to automate the authentication and lifting process of these items. And it's essentially going to assign it a counterfeiting score, and that's going to help route it to the next phase in the warehouse. The Real Real has been incorporating AI tools across its operations since 2018, significantly cutting processing time through AI enhanced intake, authentication, and pricing. The strategy is starting to pay off. In 2025, for the first time, the real real logged four consecutive quarters with positive adjusted EBITDA. GMV rose 22% in the second quarter of 2026, and operating expense leverage improved by roughly 4.7% points. We really focused how we think about AI on our value props and our moat. Authentication is a big one for us. It's our pricing algorithms. We let the market set the price. We don't set the price, so it's all of that data, but it's also taking dollars out of the unit economics that it would take to process the item so we can take that money and invest it in. or invested in other parts of our business. Authentication has long been a challenge for the Real Reel. In 2018, Chanel sued the company for selling counterfeit Chanel products, and a few years later, the Real Reel settled a class action lawsuit accusing the company of using undertrained staff to help meet high authentication quotas. Today, the Real Real's AI powered intake system, Athena helps workers price and authenticate SKUs in seconds. The company plans for Athena to process half of all new items by the end of 2026, up from about 20% a year earlier. On the supply side, the decisions are happening at the speed of machines as opposed to humans. So typically if you think of like a supply chain, right, it has many, many subsystems, so AI can form that layer or a decision support system which can integrate all of this together and actually do scenario analysis of the speed of machines. So now you can have fewer experts or they can be used in a better way. And secondly, your kind of speed of decision making has significantly improved. We've actually built proprietary. for our gemologists, our watchmakers, our handbag experts to count the melee on every stone, the weight of our diamonds. It utilizes a highly magnified camera to help us take a high resolution picture, and it's able to come up with the carat weight in a moment, just 1 or 2 seconds. And so now actually our humans don't need to so much look at that. They're going to be focusing more on grading the actual diamond, which is where their expertise lies. Does this speed up the process? Does it make it more accurate, or both? It's both. It adds consistency, of course, and speeds up the process where we can process items much faster for the consigner so it gets on the site faster, but also the technology behind the scenes, making sure that each individual item is authentic. But also that the consigner is valid too. The global resale market is still booming. It's expected to reach $393 billion by 2030. And now secondhand resellers are integrating AI across buying and selling, ranging from one tap pricing to personalized agentic shopping experiences. Yet as supply, demand, and AI integration increases, critics still point to lasting industry issues around authentication, shipment delays, and low payouts. What are some of the pitfalls of AI where maybe companies lay too much on the back of AI? One of the big challenges that everybody is facing with AI right now is that fundamentally these are nondeterministic systems, what is known as the verification problem. They do tend to hallucinate. It's important for decision makers to understand, especially in the supply chain side. This is sort of mission critical. Decisions that you're making and if you make a wrong decision, it can potentially result in millions of dollars of losses. So when you integrate these things, it's super critical to figure out who is doing the verification, where is the human sitting in the loop. Somebody needs to be accountable for all of these decisions. We've invested millions of dollars over the years and continue to do so as fakes have gotten better. Over the years as things have changed, it requires us to continuously learn, continuously evolve our technology, but it is the art and science. Like at the end of the day you do need that gemologist to come in and look at the item or you need that watchmaker to come in and open the watch to make sure there's no aftermarket parts, and that's where the art and science is really important, but also makes. Us defensible to AI. Why does Gen Z like resale so much? You know, I think it's a few things. I think it's authenticity that's number one, you're right? Like in a world where everything's starting to look the same and it's algorithms after algorithm, it's the anti-fast fashion at the end of the day, but you know you're going to go somewhere and you're going to look authentic to who you are and you're going to look unique, be your own stylists, right?

What if computers could smell?

For decades, scent remained computing’s final analog frontier. Now, Osmo has accomplished what many thought impossible: digitizing smell. By training AI to decode the relationship between molecular structures and human perception, Osmo has built the world’s first olfactory intelligence platform—transforming scent into searchable, programmable data. While poised to reshape the $30 billion flavor and fragrance industry, its implications extend far beyond perfume, opening new possibilities across health, food, technology, and human-computer interaction.

Can AI smell you? This startup built a $130 million digital nose

Our mission is to give computers a sense of smell. For a century, we've been turning the world into data. Sight became pixels, sound became waveforms, but smell, the oldest sense no machine could digitize until now. For the first time ever, a teleported smell. With a single prompt, this startup says they can create a scent in just 48 hours. Completely reversing the model of how synth is designed and delivered a little bit fluffy, velvety. We see a lot of textures in perfumery too, but fragrance is just the beginning. The final frontier is using scent in the way that dogs can use scent to understand wellness or illness. This AI startup has raised $130 million to turn scent into data, perfume now, disease detection down the line. So what happens when you give a computer a nose? We're going to smell the whole world. For decades, 4 giants have dominated the $30 billion flavor and fragrance market. Now Ozmo's using AI to make it cheaper, faster, and more accessible. Neuroscientist Alex Wilschko created OSMO with a mission build the world's first olfactory intelligence, AI trained to predict what a molecule will smell like. What is OSO? Why did you create it? What we're trying to do is bring new, unique scents to more people in the world by removing the gates in the secrecy and frankly some of the arrogance that like, oh, only certain companies or only certain people can have a good scent. No, anybody can. We're democratizing scent. The idea of having shazam for smell, that you can walk into a room and just press a button and it just digitally can find the frequency of the music and match it to a correlated database, you should have that same feeling when you walk into a room and you smell a perfume or a cologne. You're like, what is that? Josh Wolf is a venture capitalist known for shaping cutting edge tech into real businesses. With a recently closed $1.5 billion fund, Lux Capital now commands more than $7 billion in assets. As one of the company's first outside investors, the firm helped raise $60 million for Ozmo's launch in 2023. How do you distinguish between what is scientifically possible and what is just hype? It's really sophisticated, hard. You need a PhD, and it comes down to three words. Does it work? If you're looking at something that is a hypothesis and you want to test it, then it's almost like a poker game, and you wanna ask how much capital accomplishes what in what period of time, and who will care. The bet is paying off. Osmo signed clients from indie brands to multinational CPGs. The company has authenticated sneakers by smell. All you have to do is get the shoebox close to the sensor, reduced animal testing, and received millions in funding from the Gates Foundation to support AI enabled insect control, altogether raising $130 million in just 4 years. How do you prove though that it's not just evocative, but it's also really a business? In our case right now, you just smell the results. I smell anxiety and 234 years of American capitalism. We took Osmo's tech to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to see if a machine could actually capture the smell of ambition. To bottle a place like this, Osmo had to teach a machine to turn scent into numbers. What does it actually mean to collect data for scent? One is like you have to make or acquire an actual physical smell, and then you have to turn that physical smell into ones and zeros. The breakthrough came from an unlikely place, the AI built to discover new drugs. They figured out how to teach AI to deal with inputs that aren't shaped like a rectangle. So images are rectangles, they're grids of pixels. Text is a very long, thin rectangle, but molecules are atoms that click together in all kinds of different shapes. They're very much not a grid. And so there was a set of techniques developed to deal with that kind of input called graph neural networks. In 2024, Osmo captured the smell of a real plum, encoding it as data and rebuilding it across the lab. No human involved. We put that prompt of like give me the smell of the New York Stock Exchange into Osmo Studio, and Osmo Studio is able to take really anything like text and image and convert it into scent. What does the New York Stock Exchange smell like? So the first one is woody, floral, earthy. Well, it smells a lot better than the New York Stock Exchange, which is frankly a little bit of a sweatier place. But it does actually smell like the digital quality of it. Yeah, well, let me give you this direction and see what you think of this. That to me smells like the New York Stock Exchange. Did we get it? Yes, that to me smells like the New York Stock Exchange. This feels like a marble lobby where a musky warmth settles on polished stone. I can't stop smelling. At what point, if any, was there a human touch in this process? At the very beginning when you and I actually designed this, we're using a tool, we're using Osmo Studio to create scent, but like that's like using Canva or Photoshop or Figma. Like we were the designers. The brands behind most perfume, shampoo, and detergent don't formulate their own scents. They buy them from suppliers. That's the enterprise business Ozmo is disrupting, the platform layer behind scent. Now, to what extent is Osmo revenue generating? What parts are in research? For the first, I would say 2.5 years. Everything was R&D because what we were staring at had so much scientific risk and after we teleported to scent, we realized we've actually taken a lot of that scientific risk off the table and so we're a hybrid like we're highly technical, but the fastest growing part of our company is in manufacturing and in sales and we. finished fragrance to emerging brands that are growing super fast, but we also sell the software capabilities and access to our data for really large companies that also trade in smell. So we have a few different facets of our business, but they all are involved in making great fragrances for brands. The big suppliers often take months, with many requiring bulk orders. Ozmo, on the other hand, serves smaller brands, a market historically underserved. You could have done this as a B2C business, but you chose B2B specifically. Why? One thing I've noticed in B2C, you can be successful as a brand with an amazing story. And having amazing technology and science behind that can help, but it might not be the single reason why you win. And I wanted to set us up in a business where we're kind of dragged into the future where we keep developing our technology, keep developing our research to achieve even greater ambitions and getting better at the core science of scent and unraveling the mystery of scent to actually be good for the business. Who are your competitors? Who do you look at and say they're also marching towards the same mountain? I don't think there's anybody out there that's as weird as we are. I mean, there's companies that design and manufacture scent for sure. They've been around for hundreds of years. We're doing it very differently, right? So instead of it being a very gate kept process, we actually show our formulas to people. Traditionally, chemists test one molecule at a time. Osmo meanwhile says they use AI to screen billions at once, selecting only the best candidates to develop. The company says its success rates are 10 times higher and that it's 5 times cheaper compared to industry norms. Osmo also says it published more new fragrance ingredient patents than the rest of the industry combined in 2025. Where a traditional patent might cover one or two molecules, Osmo's patents can include up to 250, and they hope that scale means more profitability. What do you consider the moat for something like? Some of it is the data and then being able to be the only company that can predictably produce something with mathematical rigor every single time. We want it just like somebody was tuning a guitar. We want it to be a little bit more pungent or a little bit spikier. We want it to last for longer and Alex can basically say, OK, we're going to add this to this and we're going to be able to do it and we'll be able to do it every single time reproducibly and predictably. While AI expedites molecule discovery, humans are the artists who help craft them into a final scent. So this, this is a mini experimental robot. It can work day and night and can do a lot of samples because AI needs a lot of data, needs a lot of how do you make an apple, how do you make fresh, how do you make more. We have a lot of these, yes, because they're very helpful. Its name is Taylor Swift. That's it. Every robot here has a name. Christophe Laudemil, one of the few master perfumers in the world, leads Osmo's AI human collaboration. We know the AI is going to come and people are working on it, but what happens for us, I think as a perfumer to get into AI and now to steer it as well. It's not all AI, it's not all human. It's this beautiful blend of like creativity being unleashed in new ways that's enabled by the technology that we've created. But fragrance isn't the endgame. Ozma says it's building towards something bigger, a tool that could one day help detect disease. The final frontier is using scent in the way that dogs can use scent to understand wellness or illness. It's insanely hard. Dogs have been trained, who have sharper senses of smell than we do, to detect COVID, cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. And so every one of those diseases has a signature. For Osmo, fragrance is the commercial work paying for that longer term research. And the reason is we have to fund ourselves in order to do that, and the act of making fragrances actually generates data and understanding, which is strengthening our platform to make even more ambitious bets in the future. For Alex, that motivation is personal. His father died of brain cancer, a condition that some evidence suggests has a unique scent. What we need to uncover is perhaps those are also the same molecules in someone who has brain cancer like my father had. If you have a disease that's developing, there's going to be something that's going to change about the scents that are leaving your body, and nobody knows the details of what that is, but we know that dogs can detect it. And so what OSMO is is an organization, a group of people designed to unravel these mysteries kind of one by one. In a way that is responsible and resilient and designed to last over time.

Agentic AI has officially graduated from basic decision trees to unscripted autonomous agents, turning customer service into a massive $15 billion market. Startups like Decagon AI are pulling in a $4.5B valuation because of high enterprise demand. Hertz is already routing 50% of its phone interactions through AI voice, dropping its per-call costs by more than half. And the car rental giant is hardly alone. Companies are fast adopting AI customer service agents. However, about 80% of consumers still crave a human on the other line, and 40% of us would literally pay a premium just to bypass the bot. Fortune’s AI Editor Jeremy Kahn takes us behind the scenes to break down the delicate balance between instant resolutions and human connection.

Almost 80% of Americans Prefer Human Agents, but Why Is AI Growing in Customer Service?

AI is making customer service even more unbearable. Three second delay and it goes ha ha ha, and I couldn't talk to a representative. How often does someone come in and they're just like, 000 agent agent agent. In 2026, AI and autonomous agents have taken over customer service. A recent report says 88% of contact centers are now leveraging AI, with a quarter of them running on fully integrated automation. Most of the inquiries that happened today in five years, there's no question that AI. will be able to handle all of them, but there's a catch. Another study reveals that nearly 80% of Americans still prefer talking to a living, breathing human being. And the hidden costs of this automation, it's staggering. Research shows that simply disclosing a chatbot's identity before a chat even begins can plummet purchase conversion rates by 80%. There's always that little human touch that that we always need. Yet we're a generation obsessed with instant gratification. How do we square that? As the AI editor at Fortune, I focus on how AI is shaping business and the wider economy. With AI poised to transform customer experience, I wanted to talk with business leaders on the front lines of this shift to find out how they're adapting and what the future of business really looks like. Despite our collective craving for human connection, the AI customer service market has ballooned to over $15 billion in 2026. So agentic AI or AI systems that actually take actions in the world, whereas previously you had automated agents that had to follow a set decision tree. With the current systems, they actually are able to have much less structured flows of how they operate. One of the front runners leading the charge is Decagon AI. Founded in 2024, they've already hauled in $481 million in funding, commanding a $4.5 billion post-money valuation. That is a major indicator of just how eager enterprises are to adopt this tech. Decagon's mission building faster, smarter AI without damaging the customer experience, and it's working. They're maintaining a 93% customer satisfaction score while driving revenue from fully automated interactions with. Some individual contracts now clearing $1 million. What do you think that looks like going forward in, in 5 years? Most of the inquiries that happened today, I would say in 5 years there's no question that an AI agent will be able to handle all of them. In a lot of these mass, like huge volume use cases, the human touch doesn't really matter, right? It's, it's not like you need the human touch to book a new flight or to, you know, reorder a lost credit card. All you want in that situation is just like get it done. It's, it's a little bit more mundane. These are not canned responses. This is something way more personalized. It's very different from what you've tried before. You're kind of changing the customer's behavior. But get this, over 40% of consumers say they'd actually pay a premium just to guarantee they can speak to a real human representative. Around the time of the industrial revolution, people wanted to buy a Ford Model T because the presumption was the quality was higher because it was built in a factory. Now today, curated, handmade experiences. Seem to have more of a premium association with them. Look across the industry and you'll see giants leveraging AI in different ways. Take Chipotle, a behemoth with over 100,000 employees, while some, like Decagon, are adapting to customers' changing behavior, others are doubling down on the interpersonal interaction. What kind of customer experience do you really want people to have going forward? One of the things that I think sets us apart and makes us special is the human interaction. Hi, how are you? Those curated moments of human connection and service. Are always going to be a fundamental part of what the Chipotle experience is. Back in 2024, they automated their hiring process with an administrative AI system called Avocado. And what was the idea behind that AI system? The average restaurant manager was spending more than 10 hours a week on recruiting activity, 20% of their week just on that one task. It's a fraction of that now. And how has AI changed sort of what your daily routine looks like? It allows me to, you know, be in front with the guest, serve them, going over recipe cards, you know, tasting food, a lot of training, people development for Chipotle, you know, we always need that human touch, you know, we always need, uh, people tasting the food because that's what we sell at the end of the day. We definitely always gonna need that human aspect. I don't know what kind of day they might be having before they come here, you know, we give them a burrito, a bowl, you know, we serve them with gratitude, with a smile, you know. Thank you. That could make anybody's day. But to see the customer facing side of this revolution, I synced up with Hertz. As an international car rental giant, they handle massive call volumes. By deploying Decagon's tech since early 2025, they're now resolving 75% of customer inquiries autonomously. We want to take every single one of those calls that comes our way, and we want that to be as seamless for our customers as possible. To see this AI agent interaction, I tried giving Hertz's AI, Haley, a call. Hi, this is Haley. I see you have a rental scheduled for pickup. How can I help you today? Oh hey Hayley, I'd like to change the drop off location. Let me see, where would you like to drop off the car instead? Yeah, if I could drop it off at LaGuardia Airport, is that possible? Great, you're all set with the new drop off at LaGuardia. Yeah, that was pretty good. I mean, I think that's, you know, that's was smooth, and it definitely didn't have to wait, which is nice not to have to queue at all. That's the new expectation. They're going to expect faster. Response times, better experiences. When we look at the future of contact centers, we're gonna see more and more AI agents taking on this workload. Every business will have an AI agent that's kind of like the front door to me that actually isn't to say that the human agents will go away because there's gonna be a lot more things that can be handled. Like why are people doing more of the mundane conversations because they have to, um, like those are the bread and butter. But if the AI can take that away, it frees them up to do more conversations that are not being had today. In fact, Hertz told us that AI voice is now live across 50% of their total phone interactions. In 2026, the cost of a customer interaction dropped by more than half to under $1.50. That shift means companies like Hertz are now seeing roughly $3.5 back for every $1 they put into AI customer service. Yet, depending on the issue, Hertz still reroutes calls to human agents. Hi, this is Hayley. How can I help you today? Hi, Haley, I've got a Hertz rental car right now and I have a flat tire. I'll connect you to a live agent now. Thanks for your patience. Thank you. They've got a flat tire or maybe they're on the side of the road and they're at risk. They absolutely want to hear a human voice and have that level of connection where someone understands that they may be at risk and is doing everything they can to support them in that scenario. Earlier you mentioned that billing is an area that still reverts to the human agent. Why is that? Why, why is the billing so important to be handled by a human? Yes, we think that the billing conversation is one about trust and the customers looking to understand why maybe a charge is not what they believe. It should be. So that's one where we very much default to someone being able to explain those pieces to them, and we found customers much prefer that. But even with those undeniable margins, the trust gap persists. Studies show that only 13% of consumers completely trust AI. Generally speaking, people will say I would be a little bit nervous about that, or in some cases a lot nervous or being very careful to consider PII or other information that might be in those systems and make sure that the models are both protected and secure from that perspective. that were responsibly handling people's information. How do you make sure there aren't hallucinations, because there have been these cases, I mean this famous Air Canada case where the judge said Air Canada was sort of liable for that incorrect information that its AI system had provided as part of a customer support experience. The only way to prevent that in a nondeterministic system is to have all these checks around. We call them supervisor models, and you kind of think of it as like the main agent is executing and you have these like, you know, small models around it that are running in parallel. There's all these models around it to make sure it stays on track and stays within the guard rails. Data proves we want more human interaction and will actively penalize businesses that deprive us of it. But as agentic AI gets increasingly good, will that sentiment hold? Are we staring at a future where consumers are forced to choose between instant resolutions or the human touch? Is there anything you think AI agents? We never really be able to automate when it comes to the customer contact, honestly, no, I think at a certain point it's almost indistinguishable. You'll get into a situation where if you didn't tell, inform the user that you might not know, consumers will now learn the other side, which they're, they're now used to interacting with great AI agents that they'll be disappointed if they're waiting on hold. We have very high conviction that that's where, where the world is moving towards.

In 2026, AI sits on both sides of the hiring desk. Job seekers use it to perfect their resumes. Employers use it to screen those same resumes out. And caught in the middle, millions of people, especially first-time job seekers, are getting lost. Fortune Editorial Director Kristin Stoller goes inside the AI hiring arms race, talking to the experts, economists, and executives navigating it firsthand. Entry-level job postings are down 35% since 2023. AI is now interviewing candidates before a human ever does. So what does it actually take to get hired in 2026?

Robots Screening Robots: Inside the AI Hiring Arms Race

This has happened to me 4 times in the past month, interviewing again and again and again and getting rejected, to constantly be rejected, never hearing back, never knowing what's going on. 11,000 job applications hit LinkedIn every minute. Meanwhile, entry-level job postings are down 35% since 2023. I'll always see, say, on LinkedIn, that like thousands of people have already applied, and it's a pretty intimidating number. Candidates say AI both helps and hinders, allowing them to. resumes while screening tools are automatically filtering out candidates, making it harder to get past the AI bots. Employers saying, I don't hire entry level. In 3 to 5 years from now you're not going to have the people with 3 to 5 years of experience because you never hired them to begin with. As AI levels the playing field, it's also causing people to be left behind, and experts argue it's fundamentally changing the outlook for the US job market. We have AI interviewers interviewing AI trained candidates. It's mutually assured destruction. In the summer of 2022, we got a call from this guy Sam up in San Francisco, and Sam was calling to tell us about a brand new tool that was about to change the world forever. That Sam was Sam Altman calling about Chat GPT six months before launch. Jeremy Schieffling is a career coach who spent time inside LinkedIn, Khan Academy, and Apple. He now teaches job seekers at more than. 350 universities, how to get past the AI systems filtering them out. As an editorial director at Fortune, I focus on the trends shaping the future of work. With AI playing an increasingly outsized role, I wanted to speak to the people on the front lines of this change to learn how they're adapting and what this all means for today's job market. So pretend that I am a job seeker coming to you for advice. What are the top few things and tips you would tell me to use AI to succeed and land the job? So the first thing is, is actually to step away from the AI. Don't start by going to chat GPT, write me a cover letter. Instead, think about who you're writing to. That's a real human being that you need to understand. Where do you see the biggest mistakes that job seekers are making right now as they are using AI to maybe kind of game the system? What was once a 15% chance of getting interviewed for every online application is now a 2% chance. So what do you do? You say, I'm going to apply to more jobs than ever, especially with AI that makes it basically free to apply to as many jobs as you want. The reality is that every one of those jobs that you just applied for, you really have 0% chance of getting because you have the lowest common denominator application. Today is not about taking notes. It is about taking action. As I'm using it for writing things out, I notice it losing my voice in it. Interesting. So I think what I'm trying to do is. Fit into a formula that I'm trying to learn about specific job positions and resumes and cover letters, but at the same time trying to retain what distinguishes me. What have students been asking you the most today is what's the dark side of AI? It's taking this really unique differentiated thing which is. Talent and it's turning it into a commodity. The worst kind of product is a commodity because you have no advantage over anyone else in the marketplace. Job seeker confidence is down across the board, but among the most hard hit are first time job seekers. Entry level employment in AI exposed fields has dropped 13% since 2022. When both sides are using LLMs to do each part of the hiring process, what happens to the hiring process? What are you seeing right now? It's a much tougher environment in the macroeconomic sense, right, because you have, we've been dealing with a cooling labor market over the last 4 to 5 years at this point, and what that means is there are just fewer jobs to go around, so every job seeker out there has less variety to apply. To and they're feeling that too. So take those two things together and it's a much tougher environment, I think, for both parties in the marketplace. Are we facing a moment where in the future we're going to have a giant leadership crisis because the people who are supposed to be getting those jobs, working their way up right now, just can't? We're seeing less demand for entry level jobs. There's actually an increase in terms of wanting job seekers. that have 2 to 3 years or maybe 3 to 5 years of experience because you want them to be able to perhaps manage, use the AI tools to have a little bit of experience to be able to hop right in and hit the ground running. The problem, of course, is, to your point, it's, you're going to have a pipeline problem. One company that's famous for its leadership pipeline is the beverage giant PepsiCo. 12 PepsiCo alums currently lead Fortune 500 companies. For the people responsible for bringing this talent in on the ground floor, cutting through the AI noise and identifying potential is critical. Just because you've had a process that's been working for 40 years, why would we keep doing it that way? It can be different. What's stopping us from the future? We have a big project underway right now. It's called like GM General Manager of the Future, and we're looking at all the data we've collected for 20 years. What makes people successful? Did their data, their assessment, was it their lead indicator or actually was it the jobs we put them in? Was it the products they innovated? Was the problem they solved? And how do I reformulate that so that I can have a deep bench? A big conversation I think a lot of companies are having right now is around skills, and a lot of skills you can test for, you know, engineering ones, different process ones, but. There are a lot that you can't test for, especially ones that have to do with the human side of things, empathy, managerial skills. How do you identify how someone, their potential, what they're going to do for a manager later in their career? So PepsiCo has a rich history in doing this, and you probably see some of the media, oh, the CEO factory, that doesn't just happen over. Overnight, so we actually rely on a lot of employee data and employee profiles over, you know, like the last 50 years. What are indicators in their profile that made them successful? It's not generally their degree, although we find people who have an orientation towards business or engineering are more successful in our environment because we are a sales marketing. Culture, but we do find that there's a certain amount of hustle, ability to be open to new things, uh, critical thinking, and we use critical behavioral interviewing, right? We ask people to tell us a time when. How do we get you to tell us that story? To understand how we got here, we need to rewind to the 90s. Modern applicant tracking systems or ATS took off during the dot com era as hiring shifted from paper resumes to digital applications. The technology was built to manage the growing flood of resumes coming in from online job boards, digitizing what had long been a manual process. Just in the US alone, we averaged like almost 900,000 applicants. Nearly 99% of all Fortune 500 companies use ATS platforms on a regular basis. With AI-powered mass submissions, an oversaturated market, and an increased number of fake applications, relying on human review alone is no longer a. Realistic way to filter the flood. So it's clear that AI is here to stay. It's not going anywhere. Looking into the future, how do you foresee what this means for for the job hunt? So when AI first came out in 2022 and I got early access, I was like, wow, this is amazing for job seekers. Now they can apply to all these jobs and get all these opportunities. But here in 2026, AI is not just changing how we apply for jobs, it's changing the jobs that are available to us. These AI interviews are getting out of control. The latest. Evolution, AI interviews. Candidates are now interviewing with an AI bot before a human ever enters the loop. It's like the robots talking to the robots. But no, really, I think potentially an AI interview could be less biased than a human interview, right? It really depends on how it's been programmed. On the other hand, hiring is still inherently a very human process. You still need to have an employer and a job seeker come together and figure out, is this a good match or not. So you're entrusting the AI agent to do a lot of heavy work in that setting, and it could also not be a good outcome. How are you advising your job seekers to do these interviews or not do them at all? Play it by the rules of the game. Recognize that these tools are not as complex as human brains, and so they're looking for certain things. Do you mention the specific projects that align with the role? Do you seem excited and genuine about what you're talking about? All that stuff is fed into the algorithm. But then let's start to imagine this. Is there a way around the box, around that gatekeeper? And I think what we know to be true is that here in 2026, what was once a 10x advantage when you got a referral from someone on the inside is now a 20x advantage because what has AI done? It's destroyed trust in anything we see on the screen. Can you just paint a picture for me of the ideal AI job search in 2026? It would be three simple things. Number one, if you can start by understanding the skills you bring to bear, the passion that lights up those skills, and then connect that to what recruiters actually want in terms of specific job titles, you're already 10 steps ahead of the game. Number 2, focus on what works the best. If we know that referrals give you a 20x advantage, why are we wasting time with AI hacks when the human hacks are even more important than ever? And then number 3, once you get the job, don't stop the relational humanistic skills plus the AI skills on the job or what are going to help you land that next job after you're already in the building. When it's apparent that people lean into hard problems, it's super attractive for like any company. Tell us how you solved hard problems, how you resolve conflict, how you. Leaned into it. You didn't like wait for someone to do it for you. That is super attractive because we don't actually know what's coming. But we're definitely encouraging people to lean into it. Like, please use the tools. Tell us what you're learning. Uh, we need people to adopt these new ways of working. And as they adopt them, if they don't like it, I'm like, Well, don't like stew about it. Come back and tell us. Today, automated hiring can feel like a wall, but according to experts, it's also a doorway. AI is reshaping hiring, making it faster, easier, and more efficient. But as the process changes, so do the jobs themselves, making it tougher for many first-time job seekers to even get started. Still, one thing hasn't changed human connection matters. And in a job market increasingly shaped by AI, our human qualities may be what help us stand out the most. The way that I really want you using AI is AI is a compliment. A superpower that we did not have 3 years ago but now makes us even more effective and serving the world. I really do believe the American dream, the human dream period, is based on the idea that the next generation will have the chance to do more, do better than ever before. And if we can't make those connections in the workplace where people find that opportunity, we're not going to be planting that seed for those future generations.

Fortune AI Weekly is a weekly vodcast hosted by Fortune’s AI Editor Jeremy Kahn and tech reporter Bea Nolan. Cut through the noise with the week’s must-know AI stories and expert analysis on why they matter to the business world. From humanoid AI assistants to Anthropic’s groundbreaking "Mythos" model, we break down the developments shaping the future of tech.

Fortune AI Weekly

In this week’s episode, Substack CEO Chris Best joins the show to discuss the company’s new AI-detection feature. Plus, an ex-Anthropic researcher sparks a media frenzy with a warning that AI could become smart enough to “kill us all,” while OpenAI claims it cracked a $1 million math problem — sparking a backlash amongst mathematicians. Fortune AI Editor Jeremy Kahn and Senior AI Reporter Beatrice Nolan break down the biggest AI stories of the week.


Substack CEO: AI Prose is an “Acquired Distaste” | Fortune AI Weekly 

Chinese AI Models like Ox Alpha and Kimi K3 are not only gaining popularity, but currently dominate the landscape outside of the US and Europe. Should investors worry? Also, OpenAI released reports on the Hugging Face attack which revealed that a full week went by before they realized their own agents were attacking Hugging Face. And an Op-Ed in the WSJ that was written in part by AI caused quite a stir — but should it have? Fortune AI Editor Jeremy Kahn and Senior AI Reporter Beatrice Nolan break down the biggest AI news of the week.


Chinese Models Are Quietly Catching Up. Should Investors Worry? | Fortune AI Weekly

OpenAI is imposing stricter controls in response to the Hugging Face rogue agent incident. Will Anthropic do the same? Also, ahead of likely IPOs, Anthropic’s annualized revenue reportedly hit $65 billion, according to leaked financials. And a Texas student unwittingly thwarted a rogue AI agent from launching a ‘supply chain’ software attack. Fortune AI Editor Jeremy Kahn and Senior AI Reporter Beatrice Nolan break down the biggest AI news of the week.

Student Thwarts Rogue AI Agent From Launching 'Supply Chain' Software Attack | Fortune AI Weekly

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 6,000-word manifesto called for an open-source approach to AI. Meanwhile, OpenAI saw a leadership exodus as its head of ethics and longtime COO stepped down. Did massive payouts play a role? And Lovable co-founder and CEO Anton Osika joins the show to discuss the startup’s $13.3 billion valuation and $400 million Series C funding. Fortune AI Reporter Bea Nolan and Senior AI Reporter Emily Forlini break down the biggest AI news of the week.

How This 3-Year-Old AI Company Became One of Europe’s Most Valuable Start-ups | Fortune AI Weekly

The White House finalized a framework for how it will test new AI models for cybersecurity risks — but will keep details of the framework private. Also, Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis shifts role amidst a leadership shake-up; and AI companies are scanning and destroying books through a process known as “destructive scanning.” Fortune AI Reporter Bea Nolan and Senior AI Reporter Emily Forlini break down the biggest AI news of the week.

Demis Hassabis Takes on New Roles at Google Deepmind Amid C-Suite Shake-up | Fortune AI Weekly

An OpenAI AI agent that hacked Hugging Face reportedly tried to infiltrate other companies. NVIDIA is lobbying Washington to protect open-weights AI models, while Microsoft and Meta post dramatically different quarterly earnings. Fortune AI Reporter Bea Nolan and Senior AI Reporter Emily Forlini break down the biggest AI news of the week.

Microsoft’s Azure Revenue Tops $100 Billion as Co-Pilot Hits 30M Paid Seats

OpenAI’s models escaped a test environment and hacked into AI company Hugging Face, raising security concerns. Also, U.S. officials accused Chinese AI lab Moonshot of distilling its Kimi K3 model from Anthropic's advanced Fable 5 model. And Alphabet Inc. made history with a quarterly profit that stretched into 12 figures. Fortune AI Editor Jeremy Kahn and AI Reporter Bea Nolan break down the latest news in artificial intelligence.

OpenAI's Models Learned To Hack. Should We Be Worried?

Apple is suing OpenAI employees for alleged trade secret theft; China’s new AI model, Kimi K3, could be a risk to American AI dominance; and Anthropic has come out with research on misaligned model behavior. Also, tensions rise between Big Tech CEOs — including Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Palantir’s Alex Karp — and frontier AI companies. Fortune AI Editor Jeremy Kahn and AI Reporter Bea Nolan break down the latest news in artificial intelligence. 

The Truth About Misaligned Model Behavior, According to Anthropic Research | Fortune AI Weekly

From OpenAI's GPT-5.6 rollout to Illinois’ landmark AI safety law, backlash around Meta Ray-Bans, and whether China is moving to restrict access to its best models, Fortune AI Editor Jeremy Kahn and AI Reporter Bea Nolan unpack some of the biggest developments shaping artificial intelligence this week.

Why Meta's Ray-Bans Sparked a Huge Privacy Debate | Fortune AI Weekly

Fortune AI Weekly is Fortune's new vodcast series breaking down the biggest stories shaping artificial intelligence and what they mean for business. In the debut episode, Fortune AI Editor Jeremy Kahn and AI Reporter Bea Nolan unpack the restoration of Anthropic’s Fable AI model after unprecedented U.S. export restrictions, and what it reveals about the government’s growing role in regulating access to frontier AI. They also discuss OpenAI’s reported talks over government ownership, the race for AI compute, and new research on AI’s impact on jobs.

Anthropic's Fable is back. But U.S. AI policy is still a mess. | Fortune AI Weekly

Behind the Business

Once a $43 billion giant opening two stores a day, Gap stagnated for two decades, losing its cultural grip while its market value plunged roughly 90%. In 2023, the company tapped former Mattel executive Richard Dickson, architect of Barbie’s revival, to turn the brand around. Early bets paid off: a viral campaign featuring pop group Katseye dominated TikTok, helping spark one of Gap's strongest quarters in 20 years. Now, the retailer faces a tougher test: converting fleeting cultural momentum into durable growth while lifting a four-brand portfolio.

Inside Gap's Comeback: Turning Cultural Relevance Into Revenue

321. In the 90s, Gap ruled American retail, opening a store nearly every day. Everybody loves Gap. They just wondered what happened. Then fast fashion beat it on speed and over discounting cut its margins. Its market value fell more than 90%. By 2020, dwindling demand led Gap to warn it could run out of cash. The Gap fell into the classic trap of getting too big for their own good. So Gap bet on the CEO who revived Barbie. You'd come into our stores and we were more about price than product. It was about stuff, not story. His strategy pairing Gen Z celebrity, nostalgic music, 567, let's go la la la la and. Dance designed to go viral. 30 dancers, all different dance styles. 8 billion impressions later, Gap Brands grew 10%, becoming the portfolio's fastest growth machine, while the other three brands lagged behind. So can cultural relevance revive a legacy brand? Originally built to bridge the generation gap, Gap has always fused culture with commerce. Any other line but the gap is childish. We took khakis and made it a cultural conversation. That type of heritage is one that gets very inspiring for people to think. What can we do with that as a canvas for cultural conversation moving forward? In 1999, Gap's market cap hit its $43 billion peak, more than Nike and Amazon combined at the time. By 2020, Gap had lost more than 90% of its market value. So how did Gap fall into a long decline in the first place? The Gap fell into the classic trap of getting too big for their own good. The Gap tried to be everything to everyone. When you do that, you become very little to anyone. Outpaced by fast fashion, Gap fell into a cycle. Too many stores, excess inventory, and over-discounting that taught customers to wait for the sale. The Gap brand lost nearly half of its sales and closed more than 60% of its stores globally. We weaned ourselves off of the over-promoted, over-signed, uh, offerings. It doesn't mean that we're not a value-oriented brand at all. In fact, we love our distinction as a value-oriented brand, great prices, great style. And great quality. After cycling through four CEOs in four years, Gap hired Richard Dixon. He helped revive Mattel's Barbie to a record $1.7 billion cultural phenomenon. Part of the challenge when we started this reinvigoration, you'd come into our stores and we were more about price than product. It was about stuff, not story. And so we took these and said, OK, let's edit the stuff into a story and let's start to tell our product story in a way that is primary. On set with that. Read and camera. Well, here you have it. Yeah, and this is a great detail. It is the Hailey Jean. It's inspired by the year that she was born in '96. It's created enormous amounts of excitement and ultimately obviously featured here prominently in the center of the store. To fix the company, Dixon cut inventory, closed stores, slashed discounts, and bet on cultural relevance to drive foot traffic. These are decades old, but yet they seem so culturally. and timeless. And then you can look at the Hailey Bieber shot and think we can put her into this mix, and it is completely part of the now archival history. It's consistent and we've brought back that discipline to really own Gap style and to really celebrate it. Down, up, down, up, and we're going to make this work. It's just been an uncontrollable passion. He launched the fashion tamement strategy in 202. With Tyla and scaled it with Troy Savan, but global pop group Catsy's Better in Denim was where the hype paid off. 400 million views in 3 days and sales went up 7% that fall, up sharply from the preceding quarter. Why the focus on cultural relevance from the get-go? Brands are stories, and to some extent those stories have to be relevant and connect with an audience. And in the context of our history across our portfolio, we started and had great storytelling brands, but somewhere along the way lost the story and became more about the stuff and the stuff while it sold in the context of turning on sales we we lost the connection of the storytelling of our brands and so cultural connection and cultural relevance is actually a fundamental part of brand management. What is the purpose of cultural relevance? In theory, it should be to drive revenues. It may also drive pricing power. We're on this precipice of finding out are these idiosyncratic actions that are getting us to think about Gap as being cooler actually gonna drive an ongoing improvement in revenues, or did the Gap see the same tariff-induced lift to pricing? That everyone else saw across the world. Let's talk about storytelling. How is that different now as you try to reach Gen Z? I think the platforms that we have to create assets for are very unique and different. Clearly we're in a digital dialogue with our consumer. Attention span is very short, and so you have to be incredibly impactful and effective. Before Dixon, the path to reclaiming relevance. was littered with expensive misses. The company spent more than a billion dollars on advertising, trying to buy back its cool with little to show for it. The misfires piled up, a new logo dead within a week, a flopped dress normal campaign, and a high stakes deal with Kanye West that collapsed, resulting in a $53 million write-off. So Gap cut ad spending by over $250 million betting big on music videos. with Gen Z creators. My name is Yong Niko. I'm Indian Aetti. My name is Bobby Ferreira. Celebrity collaborations are nothing new and they're not unique to The Gap. Why is it that some of them catch on and others do not? That's the same question. How do certain products catch on? How do they not? It needs to be relevant at the right time with the right product. And so you need all three. You need product, storytelling, and distribution, and luck, and luck, Definitely luck. Our efforts in our campaigns and our storytelling is resonating, is driving cultural conversation, is driving trend. 3 years ago, we never would have sat here and said Gap is going to be a trending brand on TikTok. And yet here we are, you know, trending on TikTok, driving incredible impressions and cultural conversations, and the business of the business is starting to reflect that. Now, Gap is hoping that these viral videos will convert passive scrollers into paying customers, driving foot traffic, specifically Gen Z shoppers. So you've had a lot of success in your social campaigns, but how does that translate on the ground in stores like this? What are you seeing? We see customers coming in in droves, Gen Z consumers coming in groups, having fun, engaging in the product, trying it on, having conversations, taking pictures of themselves, posting it. We created an event, and to the extent that we've driven this interest and traffic, when they get to the store, we've got to deliver that experience that they expect. Dixon also hired designer Zac Posen as the first creative lead across all four brands, bringing red carpet couture in-house. While walking in the Gap flagship, I noticed the absence of discount signs. So I asked Gap Brand CEO Mark Breitbart, how they got customers to pay full price more often. Moving from a cycle where we were in tougher business and the voice of discount in the brand just felt over, overpowering to now being in the strong part of the cycle where we have great product stories, I feel the power of our storytelling is driving the business versus Any discounting driving the business. Across the portfolio, store sales are up and comp sales have been growing for more than 2 years. Relevance is translating directly to the bottom line, but it's not a straight line. It's not straight math. You have to trust the creative process. And if we are believing in our creative teams and we're continuing to drive the amount of creative output we are in the brand and have confidence in our products and the way we're telling the story and executing, then The P&L takes care of itself. Yet for Gap Inc. to complete a true turnaround, the real stakes lie in its biggest brand, Old Navy. While cultural buzz is lifting the gap, Old Navy ultimately determines the financial bottom line. This is the biggest, quietest, but perhaps most important part of the business, not the most culturally loud, but this is the part of the business that can keep the underlying aflow, can keep growing, can drive the cash needed to affect all these turns. The question hanging over Old Navy, however, is more complex. For a brand targeting lower income shoppers, can the Gap playbook be applied in the same way? If you want to be really big, you can't be really special. Because the amount of people that are needed to buy $8 billion is just so much broader than being able to retain a certain identity and so what they need to be is can they become this huge and special business or do they just stay more of a mass player. We've got a lot of work to do to continue to put these brands in the center of the cultural conversation. Retail is detail. There's always something going wrong. Obviously we want more things to go right than wrong. It's a challenge, but it's an optimistic period where we feel like we're making a lot of progress and lots of opportunity ahead.

Known to many as "On Running", On shoes are everywhere: Olympic podiums to Paris Fashion Week to corporate offices. 

Today, the Swiss company offers premium head-to-toe sportswear designed by teams of athletes and scientists. Yet as On’s product mix expands, the company risks losing focus on the elite running shoes that first won customers. 

In this episode of Behind the Business, Fortune’s Ruth Umoh visits On’s headquarters, sports science lab, and the company’s new LightSpray factory in Zurich to learn about On’s next steps into innovative new footwear, apparel and accessories.

How On is Rewriting the Rules of Running Shoes | Behind the Business

Every world record is falling at the moment, and it is because of the technology. Nike and Adidas have dominated performance run for decades. Then on stepped to the starting line. We were kind of afraid the shoe would fall apart and she ended up winning Boston. Its sneakers appear on marathon podiums. They're also shown up in airport terminals, art fairs, and even fashion weeks. The company wants to become far more than a running shoe brand. Your identity is expressed through your body. The shoes tells you a story. It's a feeling. But as On expands into apparel and accessories, it risks losing focus on the high performance running shoes that put it on the map. The question is, can this underdog become the next great sportswear company without losing the performance DNA that made runners believe in it? The biggest risk is not to take the risk, and we said, hey, let's go all in. What's there to lose? I'm here in Zurich, Switzerland, and I'm here for a very specific reason, that is to visit On Labs, which is this building right behind me. On started as a premium shoe brand, but it has since expanded over the last 5 years into apparel and clothing, which means you're just as likely to see the brand on a running trail as you are in a museum, in an art gallery, or even a fashion show. Swiss triathlete and Ironman champion, Olivier Bernard founded on in 2010. Looking for a better running shoe, he built an early prototype by attaching pieces of a rubber hose to the soles of his sneakers. His shoe concept didn't convince investors. So Bernard, along with friends David Aleman and Casper Copetti, decided to build on themselves. Today, that garage style experiment has evolved to challenge some of the biggest names in sportswear. On has surpassed 3. billion Swiss francs at this point in annual sales. It continues to grow rapidly. What do you think is the biggest driver of the company's growth? I think the biggest driver is the product. It's the innovation. It's that field that's running on clouds, and it's not just in footwear, but now we have brought that to apparel as well, so we're really growing toe to head. This jacket was created with one of our trail athletes. Now these trail athletes are running oftentimes up to 170 kilometers with 10,000 m of elevation. Their kit has to be so precise because it is life or death. On built its reputation around running. Even today, consumers often refer to the company as On R or college shoes on clouds, but On has much bigger ambitions, namely in clothing and accessories. Its apparel business grew more than 60% last year, helped by collaborations with Zendaya and luxury fashion house Loeve. But as On broadens its reach, it has had to avoid losing the product focus that made the brand successful in the first place. It's a balancing act that has challenged even industry leaders. Is there a fear that you'd dilute the brand if you move away from being hyperfocused on the athlete? We will always remain hyperfocused on the athlete. There's room for both. It's never an or, it's an and. But now we have the runway to build this into a larger collection where we can express that performance and technical ability into these more expressive everyday silhouettes. These are not opposites, and what makes technology performance for a runner translates into comfort for everyday use. Since its 2021 IPO, A's net sales have surged nearly five times over, reaching $3.8 billion in 2025. But the company is still a fraction the size of Nike and Adidas. A's strategy is to outinnovate them, investing heavily in research to develop premium products for serious runners. On registered last year 200 patents, so it's really a drive to reinvent how we're doing footwear and how we are reshaping the technology, including manufacturing. When I think about on, I think about sports. I think about elite athletic performance. However, when I look at your growth, it's not just athletes, it's also the everyday consumer. It is nurses who want comfortable shoes when they're working. On a hospital floor, how do you navigate the two? I feel what happened over the last 20 years, 15 years is that sports really moved at the center of society, and so it has completely changed how we dress, how we navigate through our weeks and lives. We call it the movement class, and so we have the opportunity to take this secular shift and build the most premium sports brand. That's our goal in that opportunity. Welcome to our mega space. How do you go from an idea, a concept to something that's a patentable product? It always starts with a Y. We are not creating technologies for the sake of creating cool technologies. We are starting with a question we want to answer, and then we work in an interdisciplinary team. So an innovation team has sports scientists, has sports engineers, has material scientists, chemists, and polymer scientists. This is an example of light spray. So this is the light spray Club Monster 3 that just came out. Very light, very, very light. We pretty much reinvented how you do a shoe upper by having a robotic arm that spins a 1.5 kilometer filament into a shoe in 3 minutes. So what you're seeing here in Zurich is the first light spray factory. Here you see a loud plume strike light spray that's just starting the process where the robot moves the last so that this filament will go around. It takes about 3 minutes for a whole shoe to be sprayed. Compare that to a manufacturing line where you would have 20 to 300 workers going through each step, and literally I mean you can take the shoe from the robot, put it on, and go on a run. The next generation will not want to work in a footwear manufacturing side, so automation is a must. And now we are scaling these factories and we want to bring them closer to where our consumers are. That will allow us to react to trends. Right now we have a lead time of about 4 months, to maybe get that down to 2 weeks. I would imagine that you're investing heavily then in R&D. I would imagine that it's cutting at least to an extent into the operating budget. Where are you actually seeing ROI at this point with Light Spray in particular? Innovation is creating a value that consumers feel and are willing to spend on that gives us the high gross profit margin that allows us to invest more in innovation, and so it's a flywheel. We're not necessarily looking at the ROI on a per project basis, but we look at it for a very long term. This is the engine that drives us forward. Are you testing the shoe out on a runner's foot? Do you bring them to a lab and have them run and track the data and the analytics and their sled and Upstairs we have an athlete lab where we put people on the treadmill. We have about 20 high speed cameras. We have horse plates. And they wear a mask and through their breathing we can measure at a certain speed, certain heart rate, how much energy they're using. A operates a dedicated sports science and athlete testing lab located a short walk from the main office building. Equipped with high-tech treadmills, VO2 masks, and motion capture cameras, resident athletes work with researchers to benchmark shoe performance against An's own products and lead-in competitors. The 3D animation really shows the live motion of her left leg. Because we have sensors on her foot, so we can analyze the breathes, breath in, breath out, we see the heart rate, we see the VO2, so how much oxygen is used, and all of this gives us an indication towards how much energy is she's spending to keep this running speed. And what we want is we give her another shoe, she can run the same speed, but she loses less energy. Well, maybe we need to crank it up. Beyond the celebrity collaborations and cutting edge robotics, Aleman and Copeti say the company's mission is rooted in something much simpler, creating products that help more people move. Our mission is to make people move more and more freely, and so innovation and the performance technology is the means to that. We believe if people move they are more creative, they are happier. Basically movement ignites the human spirit. And so if we can just get people to feel less pain in running or feel better in yoga class or even just feel better on a stroll through Central Park, I think we have achieved that mission.

Experts say that periods of increased wealth bring increased spending on art. Christie’s has experienced this first hand.

In May 2026, the centuries-old auction house generated over $1 billion in art sales… in one evening.

But to compete in the ultra-competitive auction industry, Christie’s is looking to broaden its base of buyers.

In this episode of Behind the Business, Fortune’s Phil Wahba gets an inside look at the Christie’s May 20/21 auction to explore how the company is leaning into its multi-million dollar art auctions while attracting younger, next generation bidders.

How Christie’s Made over $1 Billion in One Evening | Behind the Business

Sold, sold. Congratulations. On the evening of May 18th, Christie sold over $1 billion worth of art. In just a few hours and we should start you at $11 million.12 million dollars, $13 million. After years of stalled sales, the art and auction industries are making a comeback. But that recovery is increasingly concentrated in a small number of ultra expensive, highly competitive collections. We expect about $1 trillion worth of art to change hands over the next decade as competition intensifies for the market's most valuable art collections. Christie's is battling on two fronts securing the limited supply of headline-making masterpieces. And expanding its auctions to attract the next generation of buyers. We do sell things that are 5000 as well as 50 million. There is something that will be interesting to you. Can the centuries-old auction house build its new base while still winning where the bidding means the most? Fair warning, last chance, no regrets. 154 million you Spring is the start of art season in New York. The walls of the world's leading art houses bloom with O'Keefes, Monet's, and Warhol's, welcoming the world's wealthiest to pick up Picasso's and Pollock's. So it's in the region of $80 million the Roscoe, which is the top lot of the 20th century evening sale, but the art market isn't all sunshine and Rothko's. In 2024. Global art sales fell about 12%. Christie's CEO Bonnie Brennan says improving sales in the last year and growing optimism across the market are painting a brighter future for the industry. We had a really solid 25% in the back half of 25. We had a 25% increase in our sales. What does that mean and why does that play a role? Because it gave people confidence. It said, OK, the market is stable. I can sell my works with confidence that there will be competition and great results. What's driving what you sell and demand currently that would explain great prices for so much of the pieces of art and collectibles that you're selling? So much of our success depends on the supply that we have to sell, and we have been incredibly lucky this season that we have excellent supply. A lot of the great collectors of our generation have sadly passed on. And therefore we're seeing those collections come to market that really offers a special opportunity to buyers. It's a rare opportunity and it's a discovery, and that's what makes the market really excited. Is Gerhard Hichter still alive? Yes, so he's perhaps our greatest living painter today. It's not every day that a billion dollars collection hits the market. These works are critical to auction houses' bottom lines, meaning competition for these estates is fierce. Brennan is experienced in winning those battles. Before becoming Christie's CEO in 2025, she had spent decades between both Christie's and Sotheby's, during which she secured and managed record-breaking sales that grossed in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The business of sourcing property to me is something that starts when there's no real opportunity. You have to build that relationship and that trust long before you ever get to the point of saying, would you ever sell that work? The auction business is one that benefits from volume and scale, but it's the right kind of volume and scale. In the art auction world, you'll often hear experts like Drew Watson cite the three D's for why someone might be selling their collection debt, divorce, and death. And we'll sometimes throw in deaccessioning, which is just a fancy word meaning discretionary selling from a collection. And then I will throw in 1/5 1, which is downsizing, people selling maybe a large home, moving into a smaller space. It sounds mundane, but it's a real problem when you're Trying to hang art. Yeah, well, a problem I cannot relate to, but you know, Watson has spent decades advising some of the art industry's biggest spenders. He says that periods of high wealth concentration from the Renaissance to the 1980s tech boom, often come with increased spending on art. 2,200,000 pounds. The art market is a very sentiment-driven market, and the wealth effect essentially tells us that when markets are down. And collectors feel like they have less disposable income to be able to make large discretionary purchases like purchasing art, that typically is a headwind for the art market. And conversely, when equity markets are up, people see their portfolios are up, even if they're not realizing those gains. They feel like they have more liquidity at their disposal to deploy in large purchases. Do you keep an eye on the Stock market and the IPO market, or is the clientele at your top, top, top end a little bit immune to whatever the Dow is doing? We are watching all the time what's happening in the markets. Yes, our clients are immune, but they don't feel immune, and perception is reality. And if they're feeling impacted. That impacts their participation in our sale. Today, the thriving US stock market is expanding the slim class of ultra wealthy buyers, leading major auction houses to focus their sales around the market's most valuable masterpieces. We're coming off of a period of extended stock market gains. This is part of the overall K-shaped economy, and we've seen a stratification, especially in the auction space. The ultra high-end auction houses, the global. Houses like Christie's Sotheby's and Phillips really trying to up-tier their offering and not taking lower value lots as they would have maybe a decade ago. We are in the middle of what many people have thought of in the art world as the great wealth transfer. We expect about $1 trillion worth of art to change hands over the next decade for $39,500,000 sold. $100 million on several of the pieces. There are a lot of wealthy people in the world, but that is serious wealth. Does the pool of buyers not shrink with time? We sell works across 80 categories. Our average lot value is just over $100,000 but our median lot value is under $10,000. Yes, you read the headlines about the $100 million picture. And of course there are fewer buyers for that work. The good news is that there's so much wealth creation in the world that we've actually seen a number of new buyers participating at the masterpiece level. What right now is fueling this top end of the market? The 20th and 21st century sales in New York, I mean this is the moment in the calendar where we know the high end of the market comes out. In other words, the individuals with the highest willingness to pay come out and bid and purchase art. The first Christie's auction. Debuted in London in 1766 when James Christie sold a pair of sheets, some pillowcases, and a couple of chamber pots. Today, Christie's is one of the largest auction houses in the world and offers over 80 different art and luxury categories ranging from cars to collectibles. But the diamonds in Christie's crown are its biannual 2021 art auctions, which feature some of the world's most prized pieces of 19th to 21st century art. This is a Brancuzzi sculpture which previously set records. It was the record for any sculpture ever sold at auction. The current record for Brancusi is around $70 million. We're going to sell it at $93 million selling the Brancusi for $93 million. So 93 to about 1793. Last year, the two weeklong auctions brought in nearly $2.9 billion. Those two sales alone accounted for nearly half of Christie's total annual sales across public and private sales. In other words, a narrow sliver of ultra wealthy buyers, both able and willing to spend multiple millions on a single painting, can now make or break Christie's bottom line. How many people are really participating in this globally? Is it in the hundreds of people? Is it in the thousands? I mean this is the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, right? There are relatively few collectors that are able to bid at that level, but when they do, they will go after it aggressively. Against 4 other bidders, $104 million no regrets for $155 million. Are we sure? 156. While Christie's is still dependent on its 2021 art auctions, Brennan is transforming the centuries-old company into a next generation auction house. The company has leaned into luxury items like handbags, watches, and sneakers, which are the main entry point for new and younger buyers. The millennial and younger cohort now represents almost 50% of the company's new bidders. Tell us a little bit about this new cohort that's coming up. Are they gravitating to the same classics, or do they have their own artists that they're particularly drawn to? I think this generation we see a great confidence and bravery and looking at different things. They're not just following what their parents bought. We've seen a huge demand around luxury goods. We've had a digital art moment here at Christie's. Recently bought a car auction house. We see a tremendous new young audience really interested in vintage automobiles. We have to be good listeners to how they want to engage with us and what they want, and that for Christie's is the best way to make new relationships. Bring them in, have them come to our website, and then be able to show them a much more diverse offering. Technology has become central to Christie's operations. Over 80% of bids are now placed online, allowing Christie's to tap. Into an expanding pool of international buyers. You are obviously well established in the UK and in the US. Where else do you see interest in Christie's and selling through Christie's and buying through Christie's? About 50% of our business is generated in our New York sales room. London has been and always will be our headquarters. Geneva is a major sale room for us for luxury. We see interest from the Middle East. We just expanded in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We have seen great interest from Asia at the highest level of the market. Yet behind the pomp and price tags remains a more human element to collecting art. People who I think are drawn to collecting have to be to some extent emotionally driven, and I think it's no accident that we think of art as a passion asset. Works of art are like children to them. You can sit in someone's living room and they'll talk for hours about how they bought a particular work of art. Those things really mean something to them, and. $11 million.12 million dollars, $13 million. There's an old adage in the art ecosystem that says buy what you love, but I'd like to give that a twist and say you have to love what you buy to be able to navigate the current market with valuations where they are, and selling them for $157 million to Alex Rogers Telephone and selling the product.

With Barneys closed, Lord & Taylor gone, and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue closing stores, the department store industry is in turmoil. Nordstrom's strategy? Going private. Less than a year in, they say the brand has never felt more focused, and it’s growing again. In this episode of Behind the Business, Fortune’s Phil Wahba goes inside the company's Manhattan flagship store to find out how they did it, and whether the success can last.

Can Nordstrom thrive in the department store crisis? | Behind The Business

Today department stores are under siege. 2 dozen stores are now closing nationwide. Closures are part of their goal to shrink its footprint in the United States. Shoppers have moved online. Many brands have left department stores, and bankruptcies have slammed the luxury world. So in 2025, Nordstrom made a bold move, going private and returning control to the founding family. Customers don't care if you're public or private. They like to go where they like to go. And now Nordstrom is enjoying a renaissance, launching high profile brand collaborations and opening more stores. 125 years in, the department store has never felt more like a startup. Why does anybody need Nordstrom? That is the ultimate question. So what exactly is Nordstrom's playbook, and will it pay off? On West 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan, Nordstrom's flagship rises 7 stories with floor to ceiling glass cutting through the skyline. It's impossible to miss. Hey. This flagship opened in 2019, the same year Barney's filed for bankruptcy, and Henry Bendell shuddered after more than a century. Then came the pandemic. Lord and Taylor gone in 2021. Macy's closing 150 stores, and Saks Fifth Avenue closing more than half of its stores in 2026. The industry has been in turmoil for years. Faced with the broader retail disruption and mounting competitive pressure, Nordstrom made a decisive bet. Go private, take back control. What have you been able to do as a private company that might have been a bit tougher to sell to Wall Street as an idea? I would say customers don't care if you're public or private, and most of them don't know, and they don't even necessarily know what that means, but they like to go where they like to go, and I would say it's noticeably different for Eric and myself in that I think we have more clarity, more focus, and more speed, not having the other agenda of being a public company. We certainly save the time. We don't have to invest our time into. Communicating with the public markets and the time that goes into having a public board, that preparation helps us with improved focus as there's some noise that gets removed. What keeps you up at night about the business? It was all us. I mean, if it wasn't going to work, it was all us. It certainly wasn't a ramped up part of our responsibility and accountability that we took really seriously, and we still do. Nordstrom's started as a single shoe store in 1901. Today it's a multibillion dollar retail empire, and the family running it says they see an opening in the industry's upheaval. Where's the opportunity right now that you see for Nordstrom? I don't think the department store model in and of itself is something that can't work. I think it needs to evolve, and that has a lot to do with the symbiotic nature of how online and stores work together. Less than a year in, the results speak for themselves. Under co-CEOs Pete and Eric Nordstrom, the company is expanding, opening 22 new rack stores in 2025 alone, bringing them to almost 300 locations nationwide. Total sales grew to $15.9 billion in the same year, an all-time high of 7% from the prior year, says the company. There was only really one way to do business. You bought stuff from wholesalers, you brought it into the store, you, you displayed it, people came and they bought it. That was the whole recipe of how this worked in my dad's generation. All that stuff has changed in my lifetime, immensely. And so it requires some agility, and I think it requires some thoughtfulness and some curiosity to keep going. See, this all just got built up because we didn't have all the brands represented. I mean, it took a while to get this all filled in, and sunglass is a great example of people get a chance to get a luxury brand in a way that's something they can afford. It is the gateway to all of this stuff. You have an offering that goes beyond just high luxury. Can you dip your toes further into the true luxury market? The way we think about it is how a modern person dresses. And even the richest person around doesn't wear a head to toe designer outfit. People have different things for different occasions, different need states, and what we want to do is represent the best of what a modern person wants to have. Think about who the customer is, where they're going, what they're doing, and how we can be a top of mind solution for them. So what is your number one challenge? I think it's evolving. Customers define what good service is, not us. You go back to like 80s and 90s, that was all about one on one interactions, high-touch interactions in a store with people. And what's changed is the way technology and as it serves online business, the logistics of all that. It's really shown how speed and convenience can be an incredibly important factor in how people define good service. The department stores, they are evolving and going after experience. Stacy Whitlitz has spent her career tracking the retail industry. She says the rules of the game have fundamentally changed. Just like the restaurants, the beauty services, they also want self-discovery. Now the department stores that are successful are leaning into how do we reel them in and how do we keep them here, and then it's through excitement, experience, and services. Beauty is such an important part of the store, particularly as it creates traffic, and that's where customers can touch everything. They don't have to be behind a counter, and there's so much more kind of open sell here. It allows customers their own sense of discovery, but then you've got all the help too. But the experience doesn't stop at beauty. Nordstrom has woven food and beverage throughout nearly every floor of the New York City flagship, including a shoe bar tucked among the designer footwear. It's giving people just a chance to dwell and hang around, and people like drinking. When we introduced bars, it turns out people like that. That's what brings people in. And if you think about it, if a customer is shopping in a high-end experience, they may be with their partner. Great, so their partner has somewhere to sit, have a drink, have a coffee, go to a restaurant. It's all about creating and curating these experiences where you want to hang out and that create an actual destination more than this one-off experience. Nordstrom has made brand relationships a centerpiece of its comeback, cultivating partnerships that go well beyond the shop floor. You're a brands guy, so let's talk about that for a second. You also have to treat brands well. Has those difficulties a couple of your competitors have faced given you the opportunity to attract new brands that you might not have had before? The relationships are important, and we invest a lot of energy in that. What's most important to brands is that they show up. An environment that reflects their brand, whether it's the aesthetic of what they're going after, the other brands they might be around, the kind of customers we're trying to serve, how we serve them. They want to show up in a way that is value add to their brand. And then obviously there's the business part of it they want to get paid. I mean, that's, you know, who doesn't? They're looking for a trusted multi-brand partner. They're probably not going to sell everyone. Let it be us. How do you feel about generally the fleet? We are where we need to be. We do have a capital plan to keep investing in stores. We want to keep up with them. We want every store to feel like it's a Nordstrom that's representative of our brand. Could they do fewer of their larger full-line stores and have more local stores for fulfillment, which has been one of their strategies? Absolutely. I still think the business in general is overstored. There's room to right size, including for Nordstrom. And then there's Nordstrom Rack, where the same designer brands cost a fraction of the price. It's been a bumpy ride, but now the rack is back. Formula that works best for rack is when we can bring the kinds of brands you'd find in a store like this into that off-price market. So while our average price went a little higher, the value is still there because the percentage off what it is from regular price is fantastic. And then that whole ecosystem works together in a complementary way. We get more new customers coming into the rack channel than anything else we do. It introduces more people to Nordstrom and the brands that we carry, but the challenge is you don't want to flow that stuff too much down to the stores because you're competing with yourself in the full line stores, and also you are not making your vendors exactly thrilled if you're selling your stuff on discount. So there's a lot of challenges with it. That's kind of the hole in the market, filling in somewhere between resale and full line. There's also Bloomingdale's, which is stronger than it has been in a very Long time. How does Nordstrom compare now to Bloomingdale's in grabbing this market share? I think there's room for both of them. Nordstrom has two purposes in the market, and again it is about luxury, but it's also about giving the customer something at price points, whether it's giftables or something that a mid to high-end luxury person can come in and find something for them without spending thousands of dollars, and that is, I think. A space that they're really leaning into with a private label. I'm going to the shoe section. I'm going to the shoe section. I'm getting shoes. Behind the business strategy is something more personal a family name on the door and 125 years of legacy to protect. What does it mean to you for the company to be doing better again? I think we feel a lot of responsibility. It's hard for me to separate our name being on it and being part of the family from the job that we do because it's always been that way. Eric and I have been working together for so long that it doesn't feel complicated or feel different, and frankly, if he decided to leave tomorrow, I think my job would become a lot less enjoyable and a lot more stressful. You know, our dad was very much a values driven person, and one of the values that was high on his list was family and loyalty, and I can hear him saying, Support your brothers, support your brothers. I would hope our ancestors would be proud of what we're doing. I think this is a really crucial time and it was the best decision for them to be able to fix their model, whether it's right sizing or inventory issues or figuring out what the rack is going to be to the American consumer to put all that together. Repackage it and come out stronger 3 to 5 years later. It looks to me, it appears that if they get all these things right and have the right leadership, there's no reason why in several years from now we don't see them go back to the public market. It sounds like the department store of the future you're describing is very much like the department store of the past. It was the destination for everybody and a special place to go, right? In a sense, very much it's like what's old is new because we used to go to the department stores, you would go with your friends, you would go with your parents. It was a huge feeling. You remember those things in your childhood growing up. We're going to the mall, so maybe taking a hint from the past to make it that special connection day with your friends or your family, some of that needs to come back in order for the department stores to succeed.

Victoria’s Secret and its iconic Angels are back, but this time with a new definition of "sexy". In an era where consumers value comfort, inclusivity, and authenticity, the brand is fighting its way back into the cultural zeitgeist — with a reimagined Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and tapping into K-pop stardom to win over Gen Z. In this episode of Behind the Business, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women editor Emma Hinchliffe sits down with CEO Hilary Super to explore how to make a legacy intimates brand relevant once again.

How Victoria's Secret Is Redefining "Sexy" | Behind The Business

Victoria's Secret was and still is the largest intimate brand in the world. For most of the past decade, Victoria's Secret has been treated as a cautionary tale, a once dominant brand that failed to evolve as culture and consumers moved on. It was sexy, that was very narrow and defined by someone else. And yet in recent months, the story has changed again. So sometimes this is sexy, glamorous, and envelope pushing, and sometimes this is sexy because you're feeling great about yourself. Customer growth has returned. Cultural relevance has re-emerged. Everyone on TikTok is losing their minds. Victoria's Secret. This is the bra you've all been going crazy for, right? The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show is back, and for the first time in years, it's driving sales. And after a bruising period for the stock, momentum has followed. There were a lot of reasons you could have said no to this job. So why did you say yes? Because I thought it was the transformation opportunity of the industry of a lifetime. For most of its history, Victoria's Secret didn't just sell lingerie. It sold an aspirational, carefully curated definition of sexy. And for years, that formula worked, turning a mall-based intimate store into one of the most influential global retail brands. As consumer preferences shifted toward comfort, inclusivity, and authenticity, competitors moved quickly to embrace body positivity and digital first strategies. Victoria's Secret, meanwhile, amid a series of scandals, faced growing criticism that it was increasingly out of step with consumers, particularly younger women. You say Victoria's Secret represented a narrow point of view for a long time. If you had to put that into words, what was the narrow point of view? I think that point of view was sexy, and it's sexy is still at the heart of who we are and what we do, but it was sexy that was very narrow and defined by someone else. Victoria's Secret CEO Hillary Super joined the company in 2024 from a disruptive competitor and inherited a business that still generated. Billions in revenue but no longer define the conversation. I mean this brand has incredible global reach. It's the world's 1 intimates brand, #1 bra brand, world's sexiest brand in the world. There's incredible DNA, incredible reach, and cultural relevance, and it just needed to be brought into this next chapter, needed to be repolished, needed to be modernized, and the two brands needed to be made more distinct. And I just wanted to get my hands on that. Amid new competition from celebrity founded brands and digital newcomers, I can't wait for you guys to try this bra. Super's strategy is focused on a return to product expertise and building a brand that resonates with younger generations. There are 4 pillars in our strategy. It's called the path to Potential. The first one is about supercharging bras. The second is recommitting to pink. I believe that we can grow this business back and capture this. Next generation. 3rd, really maximizing beauty. The 4th pillar is really around evolving our go to market strategy. We have an opportunity to make sure that the creative DNA associated with each brand is distinct and compelling, and that we're using our full funnel and all modern marketing tools to really reach segmented groups of customers and to focus especially on customer acquisition. You've defined this new era of sexy. What is sexy? Sexy is what you want it to be. I think sexy means something for every woman, and it means something at different moments in her life. So sometimes this is sexy, glamorous, and envelope pushing, and sometimes this is sexy because you're feeling great about yourself. Over the past year, this strategy has started to pay off, and Wall Street is responding positively. In the third quarter of 2025, net sales rose more than 9% year over year. I'm on the corner of 51st Street and 5th Avenue. This is one of Victoria's Secret's flagship stores, and I'm about to chat with Elizabeth Price, the new CEO. It's a Tuesday afternoon right now and we are still surrounded by people getting their Victoria's Secret fix. There are very few times that the store is not busy at some level. Wow. So how do you get the store ready for Valentine's Day? Oh my gosh, well, the team that goes into this is pretty extraordinary. We have about 35,000 associates across all of our stores. Many of them are full time. We do have some seasonal associates as well. And just a fun fact, every single one of them is trained to be a bro fitter. So it's something we take very seriously, um, but the team is just passionate about the customer, passionate about bringing the customer and bringing that love of Victoria's Secret to life. If bras represent authority, the company's second brand, Pink, represents the future and another key pillar of the new strategy. The thing about Pink, which is a little bit different than Victoria's Secret, is that it's a much more balanced lifestyle, you know, truly a much broader range of apparel for this customer. You said you're laser focused on the 20 year old. Why her specifically? You know, we realize and acknowledge that our customer has grown up with us, and it's really time to introduce ourselves, both brands, to the next generation. Uh, and there are many ways we're doing that. Um, first and foremost with the Victoria's Secret fashion show this year we were really proud that we were able to showcase both brands and to really in real time show the, the living, breathing difference between those two brands, um, and the response was overwhelming. The Victoria's Secret fashion show reached peak cultural relevance in the 2000s as a highly anticipated annual show, but by 2019, shifting consumer expectations and falling ratings made the show feel out of step, leading to its cancellation. Its return in 2024 and evolution in 2025 marked a turning point for the brand, with returning angels and even K-pop stars reflecting the company's updated focus. It's been a few months since the fashion show. What are your biggest takeaways and what has the tangible impact been on the business so far? The tangible impact has been significant growth in customer file, growth in the business as we reported in Q3 earnings, and then buzz and just relevant. Scores, we, we owned the algorithm. We truly owned the algorithm on TikTok for weeks after the show, and I think that organic virality has, has really made a measurable impact on our business. It was really interesting to see your international business grow in your most recent earnings, and you included K-pop in the Victoria's Secret fashion show recently. Where are the biggest opportunities? You internationally and what are they? We will continue to open new stores in our existing regions. We have a few new countries that we're looking to get into and then I would add that social commerce is emerging as a big opportunity for us. It's a huge driver of our China business at the moment, and we're looking to take that learning and apply it globally. You're executing this turnaround, but at the same time facing some major headwinds like a net impact of $90 million from your tariff bill. Will tariffs impact the progress you're making here? I don't think so. I think something that we've learned over the last several years is every time a challenge comes to us, um, whether it's the challenge of COVID-19 or tariffs, we come out on the other side stronger. Has it been challenging? Has it been something we've had to really bond together as a team and figure out how to mitigate? Absolutely. Um, did it come on faster and stronger than any of us expected? Absolutely. Have we, has the team done an incredible job mitigating those impacts? Yes, they have, and I think we are really setting ourselves up to be stronger than ever as we enter 2026. Victoria's Secret has regained momentum and is on the way to a promising comeback. We are not going to be for everyone. A brand has to stand for something. Victoria's Secret stands for sexy, glamorous, accessible luxury, and that is who we are and our job is to connect those attributes to culture today. And while that may not be for everyone, it's for many, many millions of women. We have 25 million plus active customers in North America alone. We have hundreds of millions of women around the world who love Victoria's Secret, and I hope that customers who haven't engaged with. Us yet or maybe haven't engaged with us in a while, we'll give it a chance. We'll come and see what we have to offer because we really do offer a lot more than one point of view. While leadership and Wall Street are both optimistic, the real measure of success will be whether this momentum can be sustained. I think Victoria's Secret is the sexiest brand in the world, and there's, there's just a lot to love about thinking about what that looks and feels like in this next chapter.

From a single Los Angeles motel to a multi-billion-dollar global chain, Hyatt is redefining the meaning of luxury. After leading the company for almost two decades, CEO Mark Hoplamazian gives us an inside look at the hotel operator’s newest frontier: a full-scale brand reorganization designed for the next generation. By shifting from real estate ownership to high-margin luxury experiences, Hyatt is doubling down on the future of luxury travel. In this episode of Behind the Business, Fortune’s Matt Heimer explores how Hoplamazian and Hyatt are navigating transformation in a shifting travel landscape.

Hyatt Hotel’s extensive portfolio features over 1,450 hotels and resorts spread across over 80 countries, ranging from more affordable standard hotel rooms to luxury all-inclusive resorts. Now, in order to meet shifting travel trends and remain competitive among rivals many times its size, Hyatt is nearing the final stages of a full-scale brand reorganization. Here’s why Hyatt is selling real-estate and investing in luxury, experiences, and tech-backed trip planning to book the next generation of travelers.

Why Hyatt is Leaning into Luxury | Behind the Business

How do you actually deliver what the brand promises that actually requires two things. First, super clarity about what the brand stands for and why it is positioned that way to be responsive to what the guest base needs. From its modest motel beginnings, Hyatt has constructed one of the largest hotel and resort portfolios in the world. The company remains far smaller than industry leaders Hilton and Mer. It and rising operational expenses, travel uncertainty, and external shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic have made growth difficult. Hyatt's strategy sell real estate and invest in expanding its luxury brands. Instead of splitting your attention between being a great property owner, we are now really focused on brand building and investing in the brands backed by data-driven. Loyalty programs and new brand acquisitions. H Hyatt is positioning itself to expand its lead in luxury and experiential travel. Younger consumers are spending on these really specialized experiences. It's not a one size fits all anymore. Here's why Hyatt is building brands instead of hotels in order to keep the next generation of travelers checked in. In 1957, a Chicago lawyer named Jay Pritzker purchased and opened the Hyatt House, a motel near LAX. Hyatt has steadily expanded since then into one of the largest companies in the hospitality industry, built in part by veteran CEO Mark Holomasian. This is our founder. Yes, right, Jay Prisker. Yeah. Since stepping into the role in 2006, Hoelmazian has led Hyatt through an IPO, managed the company through the turbulent. COVID-19 pandemic and more than tripled the total number of branded properties in Hyatt's worldwide portfolio. Today, Halomasian is steering Hyatt through the later stages of a massive brand reorganization centered around an asset light strategy. This means selling real estate and transitioning to fee-based revenue streams. These might include earnings from managing and operating hotels or licensing properties to franchisees. In 2025, 80% of Hyatt's profits came from this kind of fee-based revenue, up from just 57% in 2019. And by the end of the year, the company had reached its goal of raising $2 billion in physical asset sales. Hyatt aims to have over 90% of its earnings be asset light by 2027. During your time as CEO, you led Hyatt through what's called an asset light transformation. Why did Choose to do that and what has been the impact of it. It really focuses one's attention. Instead of splitting your attention between being a great property owner and asset manager and a brand builder, we are now really focused on brand building and investing in the brands and the technology platform behind that. So you're really now you're much more focused on talent and marketing and public messaging without necessarily having to worry as much about plumbing, parking, maintenance. You're right. Halimasian and Hyatt's brand strategy organizes the company into 5 distinct brand groups luxury, lifestyle, inclusive, classics, and essentials. Luxury includes some of Hyatt's most upscale brands like the Park Hyatt, while essentials brands like H Hyatt Studios offer a more straightforward business hotel type experience. Marriott and Hilton, both of whose property and financial portfolios are considerably bigger than Hyatt's are also going asset light. In fact, both started their transitions to an asset light model before Hyatt. In order to differentiate itself, Hyatt is leaning into one of the fastest growing sectors in the industry, luxury travel. I think in your Q3 report, the company mentioned that it seemed like from the consumer side, the luxury and lifestyle segment was the one where the demand seemed strongest, where economic threats seemed least. Is that still the case? Do you still feel like luxury is where the growth is going to come from? Absolutely, we have the biggest representation proportionately speaking in our portfolio of luxury and lifestyle versus our competitors, so we've been advantaged during this period of time when luxury has been the strongest segment. I think 26, no matter what happens, the so-called K-shaped economy is going to persist. That doesn't make me happy, by the way. We have to recognize that that's what's happening. And so I do think that luxury will be the highest performer. And this is a very big change in psychology. Hyatt is already a leader in luxury travel. More than 70% of Hyatt's rooms are luxury or upper upscale compared to Marriott at 51% and Hilton at 28%. Since announcing its asset light strategy in 2017, Hyatt has acquired around 10 luxury and upscale hotel lines, including Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Dream Hotel Group, to add to its brand groups. It's a vibe, right? Right? Exactly. It is a vibe and it's a stunning vibe. Yes, it is happening today too, isn't it? Laurie? You're the first global executive I've ever interviewed in front of a basketball hoop. Where are we? What is this place? Yeah, isn't it great? We are in the Chicago Athletic Association. It started as a men's club in the 1890s, has been reimagined as a hotel, and came into the H Hyatt portfolio in 2019. I've got the beautiful Gothic architecture and the crazy carvings. I do not see a Hyatt logo anywhere. Is that intentional? And if it is, how come? Yeah, for this hotel, the Chicago Athletic Association, it is part of the Unbound collection. And what is special about the Unbound collection is every property is unique and historic and tells its own story. May I see the ballroomhould we go check it out? Can we see the ballroom? Let's go to the ballroom. Younger consumers are spending on experiences. This is. The White City Ballroom we're working on curating different types of collections of properties that will tailor to more romantic travel or outdoor luxury travel. It's not a one size fits all anymore. It's these really specialized experiences. I know that the past several years on the branding topic that there have been some really key acquisitions for H Hyatt, especially in the luxury space. Bringing in other brands into the portfolio where from a customer's perspective we're not necessarily going to know about the Hyatt affiliation. How does that sort of change the challenge of maintaining the focus of the company? We have over 62 million loyalty members and the program has been extremely healthy. It's been growing at a 20% compounded growth rate in the last several years straight. When we designed World of Hyatt, it was designed as an experience platform, not as a points program. A lot of loyalty programs are basically The transactional in nature and we wanted it to be something that was actually meaningful to our members. Yes, it's points. It includes points, but we view points as a means to an end that's not just a room night but an overall experience. When you talk about points being about experiences as well as loyalty, does that mean in practice that the points can also be used for things outside of just the stay? We launched a world of Hyatt find experiences also about. Two years ago now and we have experiences on properties we have experiences that we call limited time experiences. What are some travel trends that you're thinking about that are sort of specific to 2026? New things coming down the pike or things that you're going to see expanding? Experiential travel is not slowing down, whether it's for sporting events. We've got some big ones coming to the US, whether it's music or these more niche things are really. Unique one that we launched was with Reese's Book Club. We brought the authors of the month and we hosted reading retreats as part of an outdoor luxury collection experience. So something that we're seeing with travel is in not just experiences but these sort of niche experiences as the brand portfolio expands with the kind of acquisitions you've been describing, how do you make sure that the experience. The customer and that the company's values are consistent across these platforms, especially when some of these platforms to a consumer may not even be recognizable as a Hyatt. If you understand what people actually need, then you can actually appropriately care for them. So that is at the foundation and the core of every single touch point that you would experience across the Hyatt offerings across every brand, across every country, and across all the other experiences. In order to better recognize and deliver these experiences, Hyatt is investing in AI and in-depth data analytics and building personalized intent-based search tools configured around users' individual travel preferences. How do you keep a sense of brand and company identity consistent across experiences in a world where AI is playing a bigger role perhaps in connecting your customers to you? We characterize AI as an augmentation of how you can get closer to your customers, removing a bunch of the administrative tasks that our frontline colleagues are actually burdened with currently. It gives them more time to just be human, human to human interaction. There is so much new technology that helps us to deliver really personalized and tailored content, and now we can speak to you as an individual differently than the next member. The other thing it allows you to do is capture information on that individual that you would never otherwise be able to get true fidelity of information about Matt and his family so that we can better care for you in the future. You became CEO in 2006, and that means that this bare wall that we're walking towards is going to be the wall that gets the next chapter. What are the things that you most want to see on that wall? We've changed the profile of the company and now the launch point from this point forward is how we actually corralling and using the best of technology to continuously make our colleagues' lives easier, make our guests' lives better, and how we can care for more people.

Crate & Barrel is evolving from a home furnishings importer into a multi-hyphenate design, B2B and AI-assisted powerhouse, with plans on expanding its retail footprint while using new technology to change the way customers shop online. As geo-political shakeups in trade and supply chains challenge the businesses’ operations, CEO Janet Hayes says the company is focusing on offering high quality products to forge ahead.

Crate & Barrel Wants You To Know They Are Much More Than Crates & Barrels | Behind the Business

I would have never believed if someone said 5 years from now the company is going to grow over 55%. You're going to triple the bottom line. Long known for wedding registries and modern home decor, Crate and Barrel has grown into a $2.5 billion powerhouse. We've been Reinventing our retail fleet and really doubling down and investing now against a backdrop of tariff headwinds and supply chain volatility, the company is focused on new consumer touchpoints and delivering tech-driven speed under the leadership of CEO Janet Hayes. As the next generation buys fewer homes and online options multiply, how can Crate and Barrel win in the consumer wars? You can see this kind of iconic picture here of the crates and barrels and hence the name started to form. Somebody walked in and said, What's the name of the store? And they just kind of said, I think it's Crate and Barrel, and that's where the name came from. Crate and Barrel was founded in 1962 by Gordon and Carol Siegel as a way to bring Americans high quality home furnishings from around. The world. This is what we call our atrium, which I think is so beautiful. It has since expanded into a multi-hyphenate brand, offering design services, catering to kids, and curating gifts. The German retail company Auto Group bought a majority of Crate and Barrel in 1998. By 2011, Otto Group was Crate and Barrel's sole owner. Despite revenue losses for Otto Group this year, Crate and Barrel was a significant driver of the company's positive earnings. Janet Hayes took the helm in August of 2020, 1 of the most uncertain times in the company's history. In the five years since, they've dealt with three major crises a global pandemic, supply chain turbulence, and the current geopolitical pressures of tariffs. Each time we come out stronger, I would have never believed if someone said five years from now the company is going to grow over 55%. You're going to triple the bottom line. A key part of Hayes's strategy has been in diversifying the company's customer base, growing various streams of revenue while staying focused on Crate and Barrel's core brand identity. Can you walk me through each of your brands and give me a sense of which ones are your biggest revenue drivers? Uh, we'll start with the Crate and Barrel brand. That brand I think most know, and if you ask someone on the street, they'd. Probably pull up a really warm memory of oh I registered there it starts kind of at the beginning of that registry and has grown into quite a big brand and then there's CB2 which is going through in my opinion, a really beautiful evolution. It's much more kind of design focused than crate and barrel, meaning appealing to the trade. They don't have in-house design. They use designers around the world. Then there's Crate and Kids kind of fulfills a couple of rooms in the house that we weren't kidding and really has an aesthetic that matches the crate brand. We also have Hudson Grace, which is a really beautiful, entertaining, and gift brand. And then we are bringing up a couple of other new brands as we are talking, not allowed to be out yet. The company is now doubling down on these 3 pillars. Investing in new technologies, expanding its retail footprint, and broadening its customer base beyond the individual consumer. What will come up pretty big in the next couple of years is our B2B business and our franchise business expanding globally. Oh, tell me about those. So the B2B business one I'm really excited about, we're one of the few companies that can do a whole home or a whole restaurant or a whole hotel from our brands and deliver a really different aesthetic. When you start to put all the different brands together, when thinking about the retail home furnishing landscape, a lot of different players out there, of course, you know, you associate IKEA with like the affordable, accessible designs, restoration hardware, the luxury. What lane do you really want Crate and Barrel to own? We need to be known as beautiful quality, beautiful products, and reliable service, and I think that is how we will win. Oh, this is gorgeous. Yeah, so over the past few years we have been making a lot of evolutions to the brand in order to drive growth. Crate and Barrel is rethinking their retail strategy, including customer experiences like Shop and Shop, offering free in-house design services, and appealing to local markets. In the Chicago market, we love chili, we love football, we love beer, we're simple people. Obviously you're constantly seeing all this data from customers. Was there ever any insight from a customer about a specific product that really changed how you either designed it or imagined it in a store? An example I would give you is our. beds. What we heard is that there weren't enough choices. They want a custom fabric on the kids' bed too. We have a bed that we love and we brought it into a local factory and we're able to customize and put the whole custom wall against it so designers can pick from all of the fabrics that we just saw together in the design desk that came from a customer. In the next 5 years, Crate and Barrel plans to expand their retail footprint. 45 to 50 new stores will be popping up in new cities across the country. Tell me more about doubling down on the physical retail expansion. Why now? Why a time when other people are maybe shying away from it? We are in a really beautiful position of not being overs stored, but we also hadn't really dreamt of a new storm model. And in the last 5 years we have put a new storm model out into. The United States market. In fact, we just opened our 7th, and they are proving to be incredibly lucrative and efficient and giving great service and inspiration to the customer. What we did is reinvented the idea of it to be about 40% smaller, one floor, so you can really see the whole home when you walk into one floor, and the customers love it. But those ambitious plans for expansion will be happening against the backdrop of geopolitical changes which are setting up supply chain challenges once again. President Trump posted to Truth Social announcing a new round of tariff hikes targeting six additional countries. Hayes says she's well positioned, having laid the groundwork in her early days of leading the company during COVID. What it was like felt like day to day, hand to hand combat, but What we were doing was really preparing us for the future. How are you dealing with the current instability? Have tariffs affected you in the business at all? They have, I think most CEOs probably anticipated that there would be some geopolitical disruption as a new administration took place, but I think at the speed and the magnitude that it is happening with the tariffs, I don't think probably a lot. CEOs anticipated the company's workload. We've moved business back to the United States where applicable, and I'm happy with where we're moving, but it is not to be underestimated how difficult it has been. On day one that this tariff news came through. I called everyone together and said, do not make a fast move. Quality is our main objective. Crate and Barrel has also used AI to help tackle supply chain challenges. We are anticipating and executing embedding AI into the business across all of this new technology, so it will and is embedded into the supply chain now and we're already seeing efficiencies and gains and being able to coordinate orders faster and more complete for our customers. In 2023, you made this big new tech announcement. You walk me through what exactly that was and since then what you've implemented in terms of this new tech. It all started a little bit before 2023 when our growth, I said we found kind of some cracks in the foundation and so we pulled together an investment roadmap led by technology to deliver a new warehouse management system. labor management system, transportation management system. We had dreams of a new point of sale system in the stores that started to connect that data and then a website that desperately needed to be updated after years. In addition to the back-end systems, Hayes is implementing new consumer facing technology, giving a whole new meaning to online shopping. We have all different kinds of customers, and some of them are very tech savvy, don't want to go in the store, don't want to interact, but still might need help and want to shop in new and different ways. Hence the virtual store. Do you see a world on the consumer side in which a consumer could say design an entire home or a portion of their house? Using AI and never have to step foot in a store, or do you always think that we're going to need these physical spaces? I think we're going to need the physical spaces. If anything, we have to keep asking that same question to ourselves every day. What makes that physical space relevant for the customer in the future? As Hayes positions the brand for the next generation, it's her approach to both the physical and digital spaces that she hopes will set Crate and Barrel apart. Your youngest consumers Gen Z, Gen Alpha, these digital natives who I think sometimes flock to these more digital only brands, how do you plan to encapsulate this new generation of consumers who are so used to online first and, and do you have a plan for, for the next generation of Crate and Barrel users? We believe very. Much an online first and actually the large majority of our sales are online. We're very digitally dominant. I don't think that that generation wants things that are coming at them en masse. That's what they're telling us. So we've got to personalize not only their shopping experience but their marketing experience. We've got to pay attention to what they're doing in social channels and we will. We're going to develop much more. rich content if it's how to decorate, how to cook something, how to pull something together, we owe them more content than we're giving them right now and that will come. But I think at the end of the day it won't differentiate service. How they want to receive it and when they want to receive it is again something we need to listen to and anticipate and be ready to react to.

Facing brand dilution and declining wholesale sales in the 2010s, Ralph Lauren has sought to reinvent itself and win over a younger generation. Under CEO Patrice Louvet, the company pulled back from heavy discounting, doubled down on its own stores and digital platforms, and refocused on core values like authenticity and timeless design. Today Ralph Lauren is seeing renewed growth, topping $7 billion in revenue the first time in nearly a decade. Fortune's Phil Wahba sat down with Louvet to learn about the strategy behind the turnaround.

Inside Ralph Lauren’s Big Comeback — And How it Won Over Gen Z

We had lost touch with the younger generation, and a lot of the questions I got when I started was, is Ralph Lauren still relevant? For years, Ralph Lauren leaned heavily on discounts and overexpansion, eroding the exclusivity that built its name. But in recent years, the company has worked to overhaul its strategy and win over a younger generation. Now the brand is back in the cultural spotlight from the US Open. To elaborate fashion shows and even a viral Taylor Swift dress moment. So Taylor Swift's dress that she just got engaged in is on sale for Miles Lauren for under $350 right now. For the first time in nearly a decade, the company's revenue topped $7 billion and growing segments like women's apparel are taking off. percent of our shoppers and stores online are actually Whitman, and now Ralph Lauren is looking ahead, experimenting with AI. If we can figure out how to do what we do better with the aid of technology, fantastic. Here's how Ralph Lauren pulled off one of fashion's biggest turnarounds and what it takes to stay relevant in a rapidly shifting luxury market. Here on Madison Avenue sit two of Ralph Lauren's most iconic flagship stores. The sprawling retail locations carry men and women's polos, sweaters, and other preppy mainstays the brand is famous for, alongside growing segments like handbags, outerwear, and luxury home goods. Since taking the helm in 2017, CEO Patci Cove has doubled down on Ralph Lauren's roots while expanding into new categories and rethinking the retail experience. Let's talk a little bit about the branding because here we are in in the mansion, it's opulent, it's luxurious, it could seem exclusive, but in fact it is welcoming. So can you tell me a little bit about how the company manages that balance of being luxury and high-end but without being, you know, unfriendly? Well, about philosophy from the beginning has been this concept of Inspiring the dream of a better life irrespective of where you come from, what your income level is. And so our price ranges today go for, you know, a pack of tennis socks that might be $15 all the way to, we recently sold a $320,000 watch. We want to create an environment that's aspirational but engaging and inviting, right? And this notion of inclusive luxury is really important to us. You have 15 year olds coming in here. And you have billionaires, but Ralph Lauren's luxury empire didn't start this way. In 1967 from a small office in the Empire State Building, Ralph Lauren launched Polo, wide, colorful neckties that stood out in an era of thinner styles. Over the next two decades, Ralph Lauren branched into full men's and women's collections. And created cultural touch points like outfitting Team USA. By the 2010s, the company was stretched too thin. Ralph Lauren was suffering from brand dilution with excessive discounting, multiple sub-brands, and an overreliance on struggling department stores. By 2018, revenue had fallen more than 16% in just two years. The Ralph Lauren story was growing by leaps and bounds for years, and then One could argue it overextended itself. What was your feeling about how to address that? Yeah, I think it happens to a lot of companies across industries, right? Great success, high expectations of continued great success, and when there's pressure like that, there's a temptation to broaden distribution. There's a temptation to increase promotional activity. I think of it as the boiled frog phenomenon, which is you say, just do a little bit, just a little bit more. It'll be fine. It won't impact us overall. But as you do more and more of that little bit, ultimately you're damaging the brand. Our challenge was here in the US where we went too broad, we were too promotional, and um we had to pull back. And yes, it's painful, but it's mandatory. Now Louve is steering Ralph Lauren into an era built on brand elevation. In recent years, the luxury brand has sharpened its focus on core products, attracted younger customers, improved the shopping experience, and pulled back from its heavy. Reliance on discounts and wholesale. So far it appears to be working with margins rising and revenue at a 9 year high. How did you get young people on board with this brand? We did a lot of work to understand what was relevant for the younger generation, where they wanted to shop, how they wanted to engage. Which values matter most to them and what we're finding is the Ralph Lauren values of authenticity, family, optimism, quality, timelessness, those resonate with that younger generation, and they resonate with that younger generation here in New York or in Shanghai or in Milan. Ralph Lauren reinforces those brand values through experiences from in-store coffee shops designed to draw in younger shoppers to long running sports partnerships that spotlight the brand. G's partnership with the US Open started 20 years ago. Wimbledon Australian Open, the Olympics. So if you look at where we are now, what we're finding is we want to celebrate what's on the court, but actually the thing that's most interesting is showing style in the audience, or the fans and how the fans dress and and how the styles varyond sports, Ralph Lauren shows continue to lean into spectacle. The 2024 Hampton show turned equestrian stables into a runway with supermodels Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell walking before a celebrity packed crowd. At the same time, Ralph Lauren is wrapping up marketing and sharpening its retail strategy. In 2022, it singled out 30 global cities as key markets. It's fueling that push with its largest ever marketing budget, over half a billion dollars. There are a lot of cities in the world, there are, um, and a lot of cities that have a lot of shoppers. 30 only hits obviously a very small portion of it. What's the rationale for that? I think our experience and when you look at the industry. when you overextend yourself, you end up diluting the brand, you end up diluting your resources and therefore you end up diluting your performance. So listen, we're, we're not here for another quarter. We're not here for another 3 years. We're here for another 50 years. So we have plenty of time to go hit the other cities in the world. China for me is a wonderful example. I think there's still a lot of growth to be had in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Taipei, Hong Kong, right? Those are massive cities, tens of millions of inhabitants. Once we feel like we're fully established, then we'll continue to drive that business and then we'll start to open the white space. You dilute yourself. You might see the benefits short term, but, but ultimately, it impedes your ability to perform consistently. Clothing and fashion, by definition, there is the risk of misfires. Tell me a little bit about for you, where's the balance between not playing it too safe, but also not going crazy with wild stuff that could flop. So we have the benefit of decades of Presenting core items that consumers know and recognize really well. Our cable knit sweaters, our polo shirts, our Oxford shirts, right? Our tree jackets, like quintessential RA one. That's job one. Job one is how do we continue to present that, animate that, engage the new generation with these types of products, right, and this ability to leverage our core products across generations, I think has served us really well. Women's wear and handbags have also become major growth engines. Women's Wear alone now brings in about $2 billion a year, and in the last fiscal year, Ralph Lauren's bag sales jumped by a double digit percentage. 56% of our shoppers and stores online are actually Whitman. It's less than 1/3 of our business. So for us it's a massive opportunity. Within that, we realized that the handbag category was significantly underdeveloped for us. It's part of the overall lifestyle, and we've gotten some really nice traction behind some of the more recentensitization. These moves have helped Ralph Lauren sidestep the challenges facing much of the luxury market. In 2024, the luxury industry saw its first major slowdown since the Great Recession, as shoppers questioned whether high-end fashion still delivered on quality and creativity. Luxury giants like LVMH, Burberry, and Caring all missed revenue targets that year. While some companies responded by pushing prices higher, Ralph Lauren says it doubled down on its core values. What do stores need to be for you? What does a typical Ralph Lauren store have to? Do to really justify its existence. It needs to be an experience, right, because I can get the products online. It needs to be a place where, you know, you, you, you want to come, you want to discover it, you want to have an amazing engagement with sales associates. You want to discover the different dimensions of the raw For lifestyle. You might not buy the first time, but you'll come back and want to feel that. And that's the bar that we set for ourselves. Like many companies in the luxury retail space, Ralph Lauren is also experimenting with artificial intelligence. We dreamt of the day when we'd be able to do something like this. That's David Lauren, the company's chief branding and innovation officer, and the son of founder Ralph Lauren. In September, he helped launch Ask Ralph, a generative AI shopping tool that lets customers ask style questions and get product recommendations. David, tell me a little bit about Ask Ralph, the AI style assistant. I mean, how long have you been working on it? What customer did you have most in mind when this was being developed? Yeah. Well, the idea for Ask Ralph really started 25 years ago. We launched Ralph Lauren.com, which was really the first luxury fashion website. At the time, we had a sort of archaic version of Style Guide, where Ralph Lauren himself actually answered style questions and it was very popular. When you get dressed in the morning, clothes help give you a sense of confidence, a sense of identity, a sense of who you are and who you want to be, and the ability to pull out of your back pocket. You know, a companion to help give you that sensibility is Ralph. So literally our dream one day is that Ralph himself will be using this to gut check an idea. The company says that what sets this tool apart is its use of Ralph Lauren's full inventory to suggest complete brand approved outfits. Ask Ralph can answer prompts and offer curated looks pulled directly from its collections. Do you see this as a tool that in-store employees could use as they help a customer as well? I think the goal of this is to not only help our our customers, but to help our own employees. The better educated our team can be, the more consistent our voice can be all around the world, the more valuable it's going to be. In many ways. Ask Ralph is a new employee. Even as Ralph Lauren regains its cultural cachet, the wider fashion industry is battling economic headwinds. Shoppers are becoming more price conscious, especially in the US, where discount and value-focused retailers like TJ Maxx are thriving. That pressure has forced Ralph Lauren to rethink how it reaches customers. During COVID, Love leaned into his strategy to open more Ralph Lauren stores and continue exiting weak department stores. As for supply chain, it now stretches from Vietnam to Peru, and the brand is well positioned to weather global trade disruptions, including tar force. Before all the terrorist drama of 2025. Ralph Lauren had done a lot of work to not be too reliant on the same suppliers. Can you tell me a little bit about what that looks like now and what was the rationale for doing that? We were very dependent when when our team started some 89 years ago on A few geographies from the sourcing standpoint, uh, and a few suppliers. And in an environment that's uncertain and volatile, you cannot do that, right? So significant diversification. Now, there's not one market that's more than 20%. We generally have dual sourcing, if not triple sourcing. Across our entire portfolio. The other piece is agility, and I don't think people would have used the term agility to describe Ralph Lauren 10 years ago. And I think in a world that's so dynamic, the ability to be nimble, move production from market A to market B, and I'm actually really proud of the work that teams have done on this one because I think agility is a is a unique strength. Ralph Lauren Ralph Lauren also carries the weight of being a symbol of Americana at a time sentiment abroad towards the US is shifting. Despite these pressures, Ralph Lauren continues to anchor itself in the vision laid out by its founder. So I want to ask you a little bit about um your working relationship with Mr. Lauren himself. Tell us a little bit about how you work with him. Ralph and I spent a lot of time upfront, making sure we're on the same page, making sure we had a consistent ambition for the company, making sure that we valued the same things, value with a big V, and making sure that we were all, we were going to push the same direction. And we talked about what business are we in, right? Because I think that's a fundamental question for all companies is just clarity on what business are you really in. And we concluded that we were in the dreams business, not in the apparel business, not in the fashion business, we're in the dreams business.

Wayfair thrived during the pandemic, scaling to over 30 million products and rising to #217 on the Fortune 500. But after a post-COVID slump, it’s rethinking its strategy. In 2024, the company opened its first large-format retail store and rolled out new AI tools to reimagine how people shop for their homes. Here’s how Wayfair is betting on technology and in-person retail to power its next chapter in a crowded home-goods market.


How Wayfair’s Betting on AI to Future Proof its $12B Empire 

Wayfair is betting big on AI and physical retail to reconnect with shopper

Wayfair thrived during the pandemic, scaling to over 30 million products and rising to #217 on the Fortune 500. But after a post-COVID slump, it’s rethinking its strategy

How Wayfair Built a $12 Billion Home Retail Empire 

Wayfair built its multi-billion dollar business by selling home goods online, eventually scaling to more than 30 million products. Today, it's the largest online home goods retailer in the United States, but after a pandemic boom in sales, growth slumped, and so did the company's stock price. Now Wayfair is pivoting. In 2024, it stepped into physical retail with its first large format store. At the same time, it's betting on AI to streamline operations and reimagine how shoppers discover furniture. So we've been using the sort of text to image generation capability to generate an AI to be able to showcase a whole bunch of different images that our customers can then react to and say, oh, I like this. Here's how Wayfair built a $12 billion home goods empire. And how it's using AI and big box retail to fuel its next chapter. Founded in 2002 as a network of niche furniture sites, Wayfair evolved into a sprawling online marketplace. It now offers over 30 million products from around 20,000 suppliers. It also runs a lineup of lifestyle and luxury brands. The main basic difference between Wayfair and some of its other home furnishing competitors is that it is a marketplace platform, so they don't own any of their inventory. Everything is just forward position. on their site so that consumers can use it from the many vendors that they work with. Unlike many of its competitors, Wayfair doesn't manufacture or own its inventory. Instead, it connects shoppers with third party suppliers. This dropship business model allowed Wayfair to scale quickly, offering an enormous product catalog while keeping fixed costs low. Having these relationships with some of these smaller vendors is really unique in that it's a More visible way for the vendors to reach a much broader total addressable market. It helps elevate the business of small vendors while it also helps provide more choices to consumers for Wayfair. During the pandemic, that model helped the company thrive. Sales surged by 45% in 2020 as consumers redecorated during lockdowns. The next year, Wayfair shot up the Fortune 500 rankings, climbing more than 100. 30 spots to land at number 217. When we look back at COVID, that clearly accelerated e-commerce adoption across a number of categories, things like grocery and furniture. We saw the share price really rise to around $350 a share, but post-pandemic demand cooled as interest rates climbed and inflation pinched household budgets. Spending on big ticket furniture slowed. Wayfair's stock lost over 80% of its. between 2021 and early 2023, investors realized things are going to reopen. People are traveling. They're eating at restaurants again, and it wasn't idiosyncratic to Wayfair. It was across the industry, right? All of the peers really saw that phenomenon. Major home retailers like Bed Bath and Beyond filed for bankruptcy in 2023, shuttering hundreds of stores around the country. Despite declining sales post pandemic, Wayfair was. A to weather the market volatility. You know, if you look at somebody like Bed Bath and Beyond, there were liquidity issues. Interestingly, despite the fact that really Wayfair isn't generating a whole lot of profitability, the way that the capital structure works is that they don't really need that same sort of liquidity. But as the online home retail market has become more crowded, Wayfair is looking for ways to improve its e-commerce model and its customer experience. So we've been applying AI for quite some time, probably over a decade. The more recent advancements are allowing us to take that to yet another level. Fiona Tan is Wayfair's chief technology officer. Over the last few years, she has helped lead the company's investments in AI. It's a category where it's hard for our customers sometimes to describe what they're looking for. And then sometimes they don't really even know what they're looking for, so we've been using the sort of text to image generation capability to generate a AI to be able to showcase, you know, a whole bunch of different images that our customers can then react to and say, oh, I like this. I didn't know, I don't know what it's called, but it speaks to me. In 2025, Wayfair debuted a generative AI platform called Muse. The tool allows shoppers to curate AI generated home designs in certain styles. From there, the platform will recommend Wayfair products that fit the look. And then you can even tailor it a little bit more and just say, OK, well I like this, but I prefer green chairs instead of beige, and as you interact with muse, it'll generate you another image based on what you're saying. As the customers are inspired and engaged more with us, we're able to discern better what the intent and what their style preferences are, maybe what the budget preferences are, and then it allows us. And then recommend products for them. Waver says that level of personalization may help reduce return rates by giving customers more confidence in their purchases because the customers are more confident of the products that they buy or they've been able to get more information about it, ideally what you also see is there are fewer returns, right, because you're able to help them make um more. Informed decisions. Behind the scenes, Wayfair's legal, HR, and finance teams are also using AI to process data faster and streamline operations. For example, our legal teams using it to be able to look at, you know, user reviews to look for items that may have caused any kind of injury, and then you'll have examples in the technology department. Our accounting and finance team is also leveraging it. So it's really across the enterprise. While AI is helping to streamline Wayfair's digital operations, the company is also testing a more traditional strategy opening physical stores. In May 2024, Wayfair opened its first large format retail store in Wilma, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. The 150,000. A square foot store features showrooms, interior design services, and a cafe. Instead of spending marketing dollars on digital spend, you're spending your marketing dollars on physical spend. While competitors like William Sonoma benefit from built-in visibility through their retail locations, Wayfair has had to rely more heavily on advertising. every, every home. In 2024, they spent about 12% of their net revenue on advertising, while competitors like William Sonoma spent about 7% and Restoration Hardware only spent 4%. Wayfair leans into advertising a little bit more because it's hard to remain visible when you're an e-commerce only retailer, right? And so, You know, reminding consumers that you exist isn't free. Wayfair's new store location sits strategically along a major commuter highway. Since the opening of the store, Wayfair says sales in Illinois have jumped around 15%. Based on early results, Wayfair plans to open two more large format stores, one in Atlanta, Georgia and another in Yonkers, New York. Still, when it comes to home goods, Wayfair operates in a competitive and fragmented landscape. While the company holds the top spot for largest online home goods retailer in the US, it's only by a small margin, very fragmented, very hard to have a competitive advantage. We think Wayfair is one of a number of competitors that are really struggling. To avoid discounting and reinvent themselves in different ways to remain relevant to consumers. Big box retailers like Walmart, Target, and IKEA all sell home goods with the added advantage of physical stores, tight logistics, and brand familiarity. Other high-end home goods companies like RH and Pottery Barn offer in-person shopping that build a more luxury customer experience. It's a lot easier to be top of mind when you are a pottery barn in a mall or a RH that has a freestanding store and a restaurant, and it's an experience, but we. moves into brick and mortar stores and AI are helping to close that gap. So one of the capabilities again of AI and also generative AI is our ability to understand, have a deeper understanding of the products that we sell, discerning the color, the size, dimensions. Some of it's in the product details, sometimes there may be errors and it can also augment and enrich the information. That we get from our suppliers, so we're doing a lot in the customer experience. I do think AI will help young people sort of get their head around how they want to plan their smaller spaces, but also, you know, the accessible price points that is that Wayfair offers also helps bring those consumers in, and I think that a lot of that is their their main consumer.

Fortune sits down with Keurig Dr Pepper CEO Tim Cofer to explore how the $15B beverage giant is outpacing rivals like Pepsi. Cofer breaks down the company’s bold strategy—expanding in energy drinks, innovating in coffee with plastic-free K-Rounds, and navigating inflation and tariffs. Here's how KDP is rewriting the rules of the beverage business under its new leadership.

How Keurig Dr Pepper's $15B Empire Beat Out Pepsi

Fortune sits down with Keurig Dr Pepper CEO Tim Cofer to explore how the $15B beverage giant is outpacing rivals like Pepsi. 

You may not know it, but all the drinks here are owned by just one company, Keurig Dr. Pepper. We have a dawn to dusk portfolio that literally covers every demand space and every need that a consumer has in terms of beverages. KDP generated $15 billion in revenue last year. We put the consumer at the center of everything we do here at Keurig Dr Pepper with both legacy brands. Like Green Mountain and newer brands like Ghost Energy, they've invested a lot to keep up. What up y'all? I got my hands on the new Dr. Pepper BlackBerry. Let's try this. Having that relationship with the consumer, understanding what's important in their lives, understanding the cultural moments that really define that younger generation, Gen Z. and then tapping into it in a very authentic one of a kind way. Smash or pass. Classic Dr. Peppermash. And though Dr. Pepper just overtook Pepsi as the 2nd best selling soft drink in North America, their coffee business is cooling off. Can Keurig Dr. Pepper re up another wave of growth. Yeah, this is one that I really like, although I always get the bottles. The big news is that Dr. Pepper has just gone to #2 among all soft drinks. The milestone that you just referenced is one that's been really years in the making. I think it's a combination of many factors. I point to innovation. I'd point to marketing and sales excellence. This is a brand unique, one of a kind, oldest soda brand in America since 1885, but a really unique personality. In 1885, 1 year before the birth of Coca-Cola, a pharmacist in Waco, Texas famously mixed 23 soda fountain syrups in an experiment to recreate the drugstore's aroma. The blend became Dr. Pepper. Fast forward 140 years, the soda is one of the most popular in North America, and in 2018, Keurig Green Mountain and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group merged in a nearly $19 billion deal to form Keurig Dr. Pepper. All right, here's some cold beverage. Let's look at some of these. Today the Beverage Powerhouse has over 125 hot and cold drink brands, and in recent years, Dr. Pepper has seen a surge in popularity. Y'all, we can make us a dirty soda. Let's make a dirty soda just like the Mormons do. Dirty soda. It's been a thing in Utah for years where people started spiking soda with everything from cream to flavored syrup. Delish. All right, that's it. Goodbye. You have appealed to a much younger audience here. Was that an intentional strategy? How did that happen? We put the consumer at the center of everything we do here at Keurig Dr. Pepper, having that relationship with the consumer, understanding what's important in their lives. Understanding the cultural moment really defining that younger generation Gen Zennials, that was kind of the impetus of us picking up on this dirty soda trend and that allowed us to drive that great new innovation really winning marketing across the patch. Here's our ghost lineup C4, that performance brand, fitness brand, Bloom, a more female forward brand started by a young lady and then Black Rifle veteran focused. The energy drink market has exploded in recent years, fueled by a younger demographic, wellness trends, and a demand for functional beverages once dominated by. Red Bull and Monster, the category is seeing new players. Cur Dr. Pepper, historically absent from the core energy segment, is now making strategic moves to catch up. What we saw a few years ago is an opportunity to continue to shape our portfolio in a way that would be more growth accretive. We love our position in carbonated soft drinks. We knew there were other verticals like energy, like sports hydration, where we had an opportunity to participate more meaningfully. And so energy is our is our latest big bet. 3 years ago we were nonexistent in energy. Today we have over a 6 market share, and I have an ambition to be a double digit market share player here in a couple of years. One of Keurig Dr. Pepper's competitive advantages is DSD, its direct store delivery network. While many beverage companies rely on third party distributors, KDP owns and operates a vast logistics system that delivers products directly to retail shelves. In the beverage industry, DSD direct store delivery, is a scarce asset and it's a critical asset because the consumer is looking for that beverage wherever she shops and needs it right then and ideally needs it cold, right? So DSD direct store delivery is a big source of competitive advantage and it's one of the reasons why we attract so many partners, partners who might not have that critical distribution. One of the highly unusual things about the company was the combination of hot and cold. What power did you see in that combination? You know, I'd start once again at a consumer level. We have a dawn to dusk portfolio that literally covers every demand space and every need that a consumer has in terms of beverages. This is one of our newest brewers in terms of the intersection of hot and cold. This is called the K Brew and Chill. This is the first brewer that actually makes cold coffee to the touch. As COVID began, KDP used data from home coffee makers to foresee a spike in demand after a sudden shift to the stay at home economy. The then CEO ramped production and secured big shipments of cans well before rivals saw the way of building, but as more Americans returned to offices and cafes, demand for at-home coffee began to soften. We love our coffee business. We have over a $4 billion coffee business, and coffee remains today a ubiquitous category. In fact, coffee is second only to water as the most consumed beverage today. Indeed, to your point, however, of late, you've seen coffee under pressure, and so we're really playing the long game on coffee. Coffee will come back and when it does, we're going to be really well positioned to capitalize it, including a revolutionary new system that we'll be launching here in the next year or so. So this is KA Sean, the new system. This is obviously a prototype we're actually just went into beta testing in consumer homes. No plastic, no aluminum, 100% coffee you can. I mean, smell that. That's just nothing but coffee. With a plant-based coating. We're disrupting ourselves with a sustainable option that is plastic-free, aluminum free K rounds. As the beverage landscape evolves, Keurig Dr. Pepper is betting that a diversified portfolio and a powerful distribution engine will keep it competitive even as consumer tastes continue to shift. Give that a try. So it's your favorite ginger ale with a real splash of cherry juice. It's terrific.

Adobe is going all-in on AI, integrating generative and agentic tools across its Creative and Experience Clouds. As the company shifts its strategy, creative and marketing professionals—especially newcomers—face growing pressure to keep up. Here’s what Adobe’s AI push means for the future of creative and marketing work.

Adobe’s Secret Weapon in the AI Race? Trust—and Millions of Subscribers

Adobe is doubling down on AI by integrating generative and agentic tools into its platforms. 

Adobe is going all-in on AI, integrating generative and agentic tools across its Creative and Experience Clouds. As the company shifts its strategy, creative and marketing professionals—especially newcomers—face growing pressure to keep up. 

For decades, Adobe set the standard in creative software. Tools like Photoshop and Premiere helped define entire industries and shape creative careers. But in recent years, the company has been staking its claim in the fast moving world of artificial intelligence by embedding generative and now agentic AI directly into its legacy products. And creators are noticing Doby's new AI called Firefly. They've done a very good job of taking that loyal following and producing Gen AI in the format that most of those developers have been used to. And Adobe's ambitions don't stop at creative software. The company is now releasing AI tools that are transforming how global brands deliver marketing campaigns. But these transformations across the industry are raising tough questions about AI's role in creative fields and who benefits from this new era of automation. Junior creatives are being pressed by the market to react in AI timing, which is light speed. Here's a closer look at how Adobe is adapting to the AI era and how it's helping to shape the future of creativity and marketing. For years, Adobe sold box software like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere for a flat fee. That changed in 2012, when it moved to a subscription-only model with Creative Cloud. Definitely a cloud. Subscriptions gave Adobe a steady predictable revenue stream and allowed it to update products continuously. They've moved from where you buy the product and then can use it essentially for free from there on out to charging on their way. That's Steven Messer, the co-founder of an AI sales company called Collective Eye. With over a decade of experience in the field, he's had a front row seat to the AI boom. The speed at which its adoption took place, the speed at which people learned to write prompts, prompt engineering was a word that no one had ever heard of, but the speed at which they did that was unfathomable. Gen AI has really changed the creative world dramatically. By 2022, Generative AI was already reshaping how creative work got done. Tools like OpenAI's Dolly and startups like Midourney let users generate high quality images in seconds. No traditional software needed. And when you ask Dolly for an image of a koala bear riding a motorcycle, it knows how to create that or anything else with a relationship to another object or action. After years of layering smaller AI features into its tools, Adobe made its biggest move in 2023 with the commercial launch of Adobe Firefly. Unlike newer AI startups, Adobe integrated generative AI into familiar tools across its Creative cloud, giving it a head start with a built-in audience. Across its Creative Cloud and acrobat applications, the company reaches over 750 million monthly active users. I think Adobe has a loyal base of customers, so a user of their products can just incorporate GenAI as part of their workflow as opposed to having to learn entirely new applications. Similar to other generative AI tools, Adobe Firefly can generate high quality images and video from text prompts, but it goes further, powering tools within creative cloud apps like Generative Fill and Expand in Photoshop. Watch. Boom, and text to vector graphics in Illustrator. Take your sketch from this to this in seconds. Adobe has a legacy of people who know how to use those products very well, which means they're already trained, they're already efficient. They know what they're doing, so if they want to create something very specific, then make it 3D, then have it do different things or be in different environments. Now you're talking about taking that creative license of a professional and just blowing it out um in a much more efficient. And the company is also taking a more cautious approach to AI training. Many AI platforms train their models by scraping content from across the web, raising copyright concerns. The New York Times suing OpenAI, the creator of Chat GPT, and Microsoft for copyright infringement. But Adobe says Firefly is different, trained only on licensed and public domain content. Unlike a lot of other software companies, they've actually chosen to build most. Their Gen AI on their own. Their argument is that it's always licensed creative that they're using, so that anything that's that's going to train their Gen AI is going to be safe from threats of copyright infringement, trademark infringement, etc. And so their real goal is to go out there and say this is a safe environment. But Adobe is far from alone in this space. In just two years, the generative AI market has exploded from a market of 191 million. In 2022 to more than 25 billion in 2024. When you see foundation models coming up at the speed they're coming up, it is all over the map. It's not just meta, which is a risk to them. It's not just runway. It's not just mid journey. It's literally a range of people coming out of nowhere, and it might be people building on top of those models. Competitors like OpenAI, Canva, Sigma, Runway, Stability AI, and Mid Journey are moving fast. With some AI first tools that can be simpler and cheaper than Adobe's offerings, the risk they run is that their loyal audience looks and says, Wait a second, this new tool actually is easier or is faster or is cheaper or is better, and if I don't use this new thing, I'm going to lose in the overall game of competition. Meanwhile, tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Meta are flooding the space with their own generative AI models. I look at that. When they released their new Llaa model, they came out with a cartoon version of everyone, and everyone quickly flew on to Meta to make a cartoon version of themselves. Well, that is the risk to Adobe. You've never seen the speed at which people are willing to change products just to get one capability that is at the edge or really hot and exciting. But Adobe still dominates when it comes to the creative software market, commanding over 80% of market share in 2024. But the rise of generative AI like Adobe Firefly is reshaping how creative work is done and who gets to do it, especially for junior talent breaking into the industry. Junior creatives are being pressed by the market to react in AI timing, which is light speed. Bruno Lemgruber is an associate professor of design at the University of Southern California and a creative director at Tabaruba Design with over 2. Decades of experience in the industry. So things have shifted in such a dramatic way. Before, you would do something in a week or in 40 hours and now you can do it in 1/10 of the time. And if the market is pressing people to respond in AI timing, then you're being neglected the time to reflect and to use critical thinking. And for senior designers, senior creators. You have enough experience to know what you're skipping, but if you're a junior, you're actually skipping a learning curve. AI is also changing the structure of creative teams. Tasks once given to interns or junior staff can now be done instantly with generative tools. Before, I would have interns or junior designers to try things that I kind of have a vague idea that will probably not work, but I say, hey, let's try it out. Now I can quickly experiment that with AI. There are many things that before you would require junior creatives to be involved. And now you don't need them. When it comes to the creative process, AI has advantages too, like saving time and making it easier to experiment. AI gives you the time because you didn't invest like hundreds of hours. You can quickly experiment, prototype something. Do I like that? Is there where I wanted to go? No, it's not. And like. and do it again. You're not stuck on like, oh, I already spent like 200 hours. I need to keep going. Now some creative professionals say they're under pressure not just to use AI, but prove they're keeping up in design and creative direction in general, if you don't embrace AI, you're most likely going to become irrelevant. As creatives adapt to a shifting landscape, Adobe is pushing beyond generative AI into what's known as agentic AI or AI agents. While generative AI creates content based on data patterns, Agentic AI acts more like a digital assistant, automating multi-step processes. Agenic AI is generally a new concept that people are talking about, and this is where the AI does its own thing on its own, and it starts to make decisions on behalf of the end user for you. Adobe is integrating these AI agents into its creative cloud and marketing products like Gen Studio and the recently launched Agent Orchestrator. The company says these tools help marketers streamline their entire content supply chain. Adobe Gen Studio for performance marketing lets marketers create their own on-brand email, paid social ads, and display ads. The tools are built to automate tasks like asset creation and performance tracking, helping brands scale and adapt campaigns more efficiently, and that strategy appears to be driving results. In fiscal year 2024, Adobe reported record breaking revenue with joint creative and marketing enterprise deals growing by more than 100% year over year. I don't think people have been paying enough attention to Adobe's approaches to Gen AI. They are doing some pretty interesting things. They are playing with different ways to incorporate Gen AI into existing products, but I don't know if they've really gotten the attention of the world, and I think that's what people keep waiting for is what are they doing on the frontier that's really going to blow people away.

How Winston Weinberg built his $11 billion AI Company | Term Sheet

Inside CEO James Daunt’s Plan To Save Barnes & Noble | Behind The Business

How Winston Weinberg built his $11 billion AI Company | Term Sheet

Inside CEO James Daunt’s Plan To Save Barnes & Noble | Behind The Business

How Winston Weinberg built his $11 billion AI Company | Term Sheet

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