When done right, brand activations can bring real-life awareness and connect a company with its customers. When done poorly, they can turn sour quickly, bringing the opposite effect to a brand—as activewear giant Lululemon recently discovered.
What kind of pool-cleaning gear does $14.2 million buy? According to the Department of the Interior, who oversaw recent renovations to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, it’ll get you “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology,” which may or may not be as impressive as it sounds.
On July 4th, America will celebrate 250 years since the dawn of its creation. But according to a new Reuters/Ipsos survey, many Americans aren’t feeling very hopeful about the nation’s future.
From shoes to AI to . . . Smartbird?
Before Disneyfication, fairy tales were terrifying, designed to teach kids about dangerous aspects of the world.
A few months ago, I sat across from a CEO who was genuinely proud. He had just implemented an AI-powered people analytics platform: real-time sentiment data, predictive turnover scores, and engagement dashboards. Beautiful system. His HR team had been cut by a third. “It does what they used to do,” he told me.
At Google DeepMind, Lila Ibrahim occupies a role that didn’t previously exist: chief AI readiness officer, focused on how to prepare the world for rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. She helps governments think about policy, boosts public understanding of AI, and works to ensure that Google deploys AI responsibly.
Cameron Stanley, a Pentagon veteran who returned to government after a stint at Amazon Web Services, is pushing to make the Defense Department an “AI-first organization,” from back-office logistics to the battlefield. Speed is the edge: “The right decision, the fastest” wins, he says.
I’m not a fan of AI used for actual creative work, but the new agents for Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Premiere are a completely new twist to Adobe’s approach to AI. And it’s that every creative person can get behind because it is truly focused on fully automating the most tedious tasks of their work. I found myself in awe as I watched someone using an agent to set up a Premiere project.
Financial crises rarely appear overnight. The warning signs are already there, hidden in mountainous volumes of data that regulators—or really any human—struggle to interpret.
Lately, I’ve seen a specific pattern emerge as organizations make AI claims. “We’re AI-first.” “We’re AI-native.” “We’re agentic.” The language is confident, forward-looking, and nearly universal.
When Swami Sivasubramanian joined Amazon as a technical intern in 2005, cloud computing was just getting off the ground as a concept. Thanks to Amazon Web Services, it grew into one of technology’s most essential ingredients—and Sivasubramanian, who kept rising through the ranks, helped drive that change. In 2017, he became AWS’s VP of AI.
The NBA is officially in its off-season, but the Golden State Warriors are making moves. For the past nine years, the Bay Area team has partnered with Japanese online retail marketplace Rakuten as its official badge partner. Now, that partnership is changing.
AI-powered apps can’t always afford to serve their customers. “Product market fit does not equal a viable business,” says Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks AI.
The funnel is dead. Not evolving. Not disrupted. Dead.
AI agents come with real risks: The more autonomous they are, the more likely they are to violate data privacy rules or international SPAM rules, and the easier they become for hackers to attack. But until recently there was no standard for measuring these risks and no entity to insure against them. Meanwhile, enterprises will increasingly need to trust AI agents to do real work.