• Hedge funds have been quick to use artificial intelligence to help their investing teams.
• The so-called smart money has also been quick to invest in the trend across public and private companies.
• Quant funds have used machine-learning techniques for years.

Artificial intelligence has already changed the way many industries operate, and hedge funds are no exception.

The $5 trillion field is diverse in the type of strategies different firms employ and the type of securities they invest in. But everyone wants to be the smartest manager in the world — or at least the best-informed.

To do that, funds have pumped resources into building out generative AI capabilities and use cases. Many firms, especially quantitative traders, are expanding initiatives they were already pursuing in areas such as machine learning. And nearly every firm is putting capital behind the trend that has dominated the public and private equity markets for several years now.

Business Insider rounded up how some of the biggest and well-known managers are leveraging and backing the development of AI. It's an extensive, but not exhaustive, rundown.

How funds are using AI

It is, first and foremost, about the data.

Hedge funds have spent countless hours and astronomical amounts of money to get more information than their rivals as fast as possible. Their insatiable appetite for new and unique data has created a thriving alternative data industry, which is filled with firms scouring the world for new information to sell.

As Umesh Subramanian, the chief technology officer of Ken Griffin's $69 billion Citadel, said at a Bloomberg event in October, the data firms like his are now consuming is in petabytes. A single petabyte is 1 million gigabytes and can store hundreds of millions of photos or hundreds of thousands of high-definition movies.

The only reason funds like Citadel are able to consume this amount of information without feeling overwhelmed is because of AI. And, given the hypercompetitive nature of the industry, even the slightest advantage over a competitor is worth the cost.

"It's an arms race to be able to consume the right kind of data in the right kind of way to be able to make the right decisions," Subramanian said.

$29 billion hedge fund Balyasny has built an AI bot that it believes will be able to do the grunt work that typically falls to senior analysts — a potential huge timesaver for investment teams. The manager told Business Insider in 2024 that roughly 80% of the firm's staff use its AI tools, which include the internal chatbot BAMChatGPT, and recently hired Matthew Henderey, one of the CIA's AI developers, as a data science executive.

Balyasny isn't the only firm that has its own chatbot. Man Group and Viking Global have also developed their own internal offerings.

Quant funds like D.E. Shaw, Bridgewater, and Two Sigma and proprietary trading firms and marketmakers like Jane Street, Citadel Securities, and Hudson River Trading have been at the cutting edge of AI and machine learning for years.

For example, Two Sigma's Mike Shuster, who is the head of the quant's core AI team, said at a Columbia University event in November 2024 that his firm had been using generative AI for more than five years at that point. Bridgewater launched a $2 billion fund in the summer of 2024 that is run by machine learning; the manager's CEO, Nir Bar Dea, said this year the strategy produces "a unique alpha uncorrelated to what our humans do."

To stay at the vanguard of a new technology, you need top talent. These firms have often been able to lure top technical talent with eye-popping pay packages, but AI companies have been able to match, and in some cases, surpass compensation offers.

As Business Insider reported, young quants drawn to the work AI startups are doing now "don't even have to take a pay cut" to choose Silicon Valley over East Coast trading floors.

How funds are investing in AI

One of the reasons AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic can afford hedge-fund talent is the tens of billions of capital that have been invested into them by big-name venture capital firms, as well as Tiger Cubs like Tiger Global, Coatue, and D1. Tiger Cubs are hedge funds with connections to the billionaire Julian Robertson and his firm, Tiger Management, that often focus on growth stocks in industries such as technology.

Stockpicking funds like the Tiger Cubs have increasingly turned their attention to the AI trend in the public and private markets. Stocks like Nvidia, AMD, and Korean chipmaker SK Hynix are often significant holdings in their public portfolios, alongside tech giants such as Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta.

Maverick, a smaller Tiger Cub run by Lee Ainslie, focuses less on picking the winners and losers among AI players and more on supporting the chipmaking ecosystem. The firm's private fund, Maverick Silicon, which invests in that space, is run by one of the firm's longtime investors, Andrew Homan.

Steve Cohen, whose $40.5 billion Point72 has dozens of teams that invest in equities, was so convinced by AI's potential that he created a standalone strategy in October 2024, named Turion, a play on the famous computer scientist Alan Turing's name, to invest in the space. Point72 rarely offers new funds outside its flagship.

Turion, which is run by portfolio manager Eric Sanchez, has outperformed the manager's flagship offering in 2025.

Where AI still falls short

While some firms have turned over investing decision-making to AI, other industry leaders are not yet convinced that the machines can outperform the market.

Citadel's Ken Griffin said at an October conference that AI can not yet beat the markets. Man Group's Numeric unit has created an internal "large language model-based workflow" called AlphaGPT that "still requires human oversight and strategic direction." Elliott's Paul Singer said in a podcast at the start of the year that AI's use cases are "way exaggerated."

There's no doubt that funds are using AI more than ever before and processing more data than ever imagined. However, human creativity remains important for investment giants, and, for the most part, AI is seen as a tool, not a replacement, for flesh-and-blood traders.

At a London quant conference in October, the conclusion many systematic funds reached is that humans, not machines, are the edge required to beat the markets, Business Insider reported.

"Our key takeaway so far is that AlphaGPT doesn't replace human judgment but amplifies it. The most effective use of the system involves human researchers working alongside AI, with each contributing their unique strengths," a pair of Man Numeric executives wrote in a note on AlphaGPT from earlier in November.

"Numeric Humans provide strategic direction, market context, and final decision-making, while AlphaGPT handles the heavy lifting of data processing, hypothesis generation, and initial analysis."

• Miles Wu, 14, won a $25,000 award for his research project combining origami and physics.
• He measured the weight that Miura-ori origami patterns can hold across various benchmarks.
• Wu said the pattern could help improve deployable structures used in emergencies.

While most 14-year-olds are folding paper airplanes, Miles Wu is folding origami patterns that he believes could one day improve disaster relief.

The New York City teen just won $25,000 for a research project based on an origami fold called Miura-ori, which is known for collapsing and expanding with precision.

"I've been folding origami as a hobby for more than six years, mostly of animals or insects," Wu told Business Insider. "Recently I've been designing my own origami, too."

For his project, which won the top prize at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge in October, Wu spent months determining whether the strength-to-weight ratio of the Miura fold can be leveraged to improve deployable structures used in emergency situations.

Essentially, Wu tested how much weight the Miura fold could handle across different types of paper, parallelogram heights, parallelogram widths, and parallelogram angles.

Wu got the idea while learning about natural disasters, like January's wildfires in Southern California and Hurricane Helene, which hit the Southeast US in 2024. He also studied how people use origami in STEM disciplines, including the medical field.

"A problem with current deployable structures and emergency structures is, for example, tents are sometimes strong, sometimes they can compact really small, and sometimes they're easily deployable, but almost never are they all three, but Miura-ori could potentially solve that problem," Wu said.

"I found that Miura-ori was really strong, light, and folds down really compactly."

Wu tested 54 variations and underwent 108 trials

When using the Miura-ori, a sheet of paper is folded into a smaller area with repeating parallelograms.

To figure out the winning combination, Wu tested three different parallelogram widths, three different parallelogram angles, and two different parallelogram heights. He also tested three different types of paper.

That means Wu tested 54 hand-folded variations and oversaw 108 trials.

"After folding them with the help of a cutting machine for accuracy, I placed them between guardrails to keep my experimentation the same throughout my trials," Wu said. "Then, I placed a lot of heavy weights on top."

Wu would gradually place more weight atop each test variation until they collapsed. To his surprise, the origami variations were quite strong. He used every book in his home as a weight before having to ask his parents to purchase exercise weights for his research.

Wu believed "smaller, less acutely angled panels made of heavier material would yield a greater strength-to-weight ratio."

By the end of his trials, his hypothesis was partially correct. While small and less acutely angled panels showed a better strength-to-weight ratio, Wu found that copy paper — not heavier materials —had the strongest strength-to-weight ratio.

"The final statistic I got about the strongest Miura-ori that I tested was that it could hold over 10,000 times its own weight," Wu said. "I calculated that to be the equivalent of a New York City taxi cab holding over 4,000 elephants."

Wu took the top prize at the competition in Washington, D.C.

Taking top prize at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge is no small feat. To apply, middle schoolers must compete at local science or engineering fairs, where judges nominate the top 10% of projects.

Of the 2,000 or so applicants, judges select 300 before narrowing it down to just 30. Those 30 kids then travel to Washington, D.C., where they present their work and participate in challenges.

Those challenges play a role in how judges decide who will take home an award.

Maya Ajmera, the president and CEO of the Society for Science, which collaborates with Thermo Fisher Scientific to host the competition, told Business Insider that Wu excelled in those challenges.

"We're not only looking at their project. We're looking at do they deal with creative problem solving, how they deal with setbacks, how they bring everyone in a collaborative mode," Ajmera said. "Not only did Miles have an extraordinary project, but he shined as a leader in these challenges."

To Ajmera, introducing STEM education to young people is imperative.

"We're looking for the next generation of innovators," Ajmera said.

Ajmera said that many of the kids participating in the competition are considering careers in STEM fields.

"That is really important for global competitiveness as the United States, being the global leader of innovation and also solving the world's most intractable problems," Ajmera said. "I think we have a duty to really nurture the curiosity."

Wu said he and his parents decided to put the $25,000 award toward higher education. Although it's been nearly a month since Wu won, he's already thinking ahead about how to bring his vision to life.

"One thing I really want to look into is prototyping one of these Muira-ori to create a real emergency shelter that could be used in real-life situations and actually help people," Wu said. "But overall, I would love to keep working on origami-related research. Not only Miura-ori folds, but origami as a whole, and in other fields, too."

• Major retailers, such as Walmart and Target, are integrating AI into their shopping experiences.
• Retailers have partnered with AI companies, such as OpenAI, and developed their own tools.
• AI assistants can help with product recommendations, checkout, and customer service.

Retail is becoming a major battleground in the artificial intelligence arms race.

Since the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, AI chatbots have had a meteoric rise in popularity. This year, more major retailers got in on the hype, unveiling plans to offer AI tools that can make shopping easier for consumers.

They're investing time and money in partnering with AI companies like ChatGPT maker OpenAI, or building their own large language models to create shopping assistants or simplify the checkout process.

Shoppers are already using AI. In an October survey from PwC, more than half of the respondents said they planned to use AI for price checks, trip planning, or writing messages this holiday season.

And the retailers aren't the only ones building AI-powered shopping experiences. OpenAI is bringing e-commerce to ChatGPT with its Instant Checkout feature, where users search and purchase items from some retail partners right in their chats.

Here's what seven major retailers have said publicly about how they're using AI to transform the way we shop.

• Retailers are marketing affordability and value to attract increasingly cautious consumers.
• Consumer sentiment is at historic lows, driving demand for lower prices and essentials.
• Retailers are adjusting their promotional strategies and messaging to encourage spending.

Retailers are responding to the affordability crisis this holiday season.

In recent earnings calls, Target, Walmart, and Sally Beauty Holding addressed the cratering consumer sentiment and discussed their pricing strategies as the busiest time of year for shoppers approaches.

Consumers are feeling the pinch. According to the University of Michigan's survey of consumers, sentiment dropped to 51 points in November, which is the second-lowest score the index has ever recorded since 1952, narrowly topped only by a score of 50 in June 2022.

Mark Cohen, the former director of retail studies at Columbia Business School, said that retailers are responding by investing more in lower-priced items and "adjusting their assortments" to give their customers the opportunity to buy from them at a lower price.

"Retailers have been getting more and more promotional for years in the main, but now they're doing it with their feet standing on thin ice because they don't know what to expect," said Cohen. "The last thing they want is to have overhang inventory for the holidays when the season is over, so they have been discounting frantically."

In Target's third-quarter earnings call, Rick Gomez, the executive vice president of Target, said that because consumer sentiment is "at a three-year low amid concerns about jobs, affordability, and tariffs," shoppers are looking to "celebrate with loved ones without overspending."

"Guests are choiceful, stretching budgets and prioritizing value," said Gomez. "They're spending where it matters most, especially in food, essentials, and beauty, while looking for trend-right deals in discretionary categories."

"Given our focus on affordability, we recently lowered prices on thousands of everyday food and essential items to help families further manage their budgets," Gomez added.

Target is struggling with declining sales and had to cut its profit guidance for the end of the year, but companies that are faring better have similar concerns.

In their respective Q3 earnings calls, Home Depot said that "consumer uncertainty and continued pressure in housing" is driving down demand for larger home improvement projects, Lowe's is expecting comp sales to remain "roughly flat" due to "a cautious consumer," and Sally Beauty Holdings said it saw shoppers "leaning into value a bit more," especially for those with low-income.

"The disparity in wage growth between those cohorts was as large as it's been in almost a decade," said John David Rainey, CFO of Walmart, during the company's Q3 earnings call in reference to the relatively stagnant wage growth for low-income households.

"If pocketbooks are being stretched and consumers are being choiceful and value seeking, it stands to reason, if there's more pressure on the consumer, they're only going to become more so," Rainey added, citing the value Walmart provides as a reason why the company is gaining market share in this economic environment.

The Federal Bank of New York wrote in its latest report that total household debt has reached a record high this year, totaling $18.59 trillion from July through September. Compared to the end of 2019, before the pandemic, overall debt levels have increased by $4.4 trillion.

Not every retail company is feeling equally cautious this holiday season. Best Buy hiked its sales forecast on "better-than-expected" sales in the third quarter because of strong results across computing, gaming, and growth in wearables. Gap Inc., in its Q3 earnings call, said that external data points to "macro pressure on the low-income consumer," but the company raised its full-year guidance.

A change in messaging

Dax Dasilva, the CEO of Lightspeed Commerce, a retail analytics company, told Business Insider that shoppers now are "highly price-savvy" and drawn to transparency in pricing and offers that are easy to understand.

A consumer sentiment survey from Lightspeed Commerce found that of the 1,500 respondents in the US market, almost one in four of the surveyed individuals said they will use Black Friday only for everyday essentials, such as groceries and household basics, while 13% said they weren't planning to spend at all.

"The brands winning right now are those showing empathy, not extravagance," said Dasilva. "Messaging that celebrates practicality like 'shop smarter,' 'stretch your dollar' resonates far more than indulgent tones like 'treat yourself.'"

Dasilva added that despite low consumer sentiment, sectors like bike, outdoor, sports, and self-care are still performing resiliently, which gives some indication toward what consumers are currently willing to invest in.

Jean-Pierre Dubé, professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said that retailers are developing strategies to offer deals without permanently lowering prices, in fear that this may "recalibrate consumer price expectations" to be lower.

"Retailers like promotional discounts because they are temporary in nature, facilitating a necessary price reduction without leading the consumer to expect the lower price to persist," said Dubé.

Dubé pointed to the rise of the "everyday-low-price" model, now widely used by chains like Walmart and T.J. Maxx, which he said is experiencing surprisingly good results because of the guarantee of consistent low prices within a specified period, without needing to wait for a big annual sale.

"Depending on how much inventory retailers acquired for the holiday season," Dubé added, "I anticipate some exceptionally aggressive discounts and promotions."

• Ben Tye is the CEO and managing partner of a business consultancy.
• He is also a qualified and practicing psychotherapist, who sees private clients every Monday.
• When negotiating a four-day week, he argued that stepping away from work would give him a fresh perspective.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 55-year-old Ben Tye, the CEO of Gate One, who is based in London. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

My late 30s and early 40s were a difficult time. I had a successful career in management consulting, yet I was struggling with what I now know was depression and anxiety.

When I was 41, I started seeing a psychotherapist who recommended a book called "The Middle Passage" by James Hollis, which is about making the second part of your life, after your 40s, richer and more meaningful.

It really spoke to me and helped me to understand that, for some, midlife is a time of necessary suffering in order to prompt questions like, "who am I really?" and "what does my life want from me?" rather than, "what do I want from life?" It's really quite profound and far from any "self-help" manual.

Six years later, in 2017, I began studying and training during the evenings and on weekends to qualify as a psychotherapist. It involved a one-year foundation certificate, a four-year post-graduate diploma, and a two-year research component.

All the while, I continued having my own therapy sessions on Tuesday evenings. That was while I was also running my own consultancy business.

The psychotherapy training took six and a half years and over 700 hours of supervised client contact time.

I pitched my four-day week as a way to get a fresh perspective on the business

I joined Gate One in 2018, and in 2021, when I was a partner, I was given permission to work a four-day week and run my own therapy practice on Mondays. We have a very flexible working policy so the negotiation I had with the company owners and other leaders wasn't difficult.

I pitched that stepping out of the business a day a week would give me a fresh perspective and clearer headspace when I returned to work the next day. I recommend people who work a four-day week to have Mondays off, because it's easier to start the week doing something else than it is to finish.

I typically see five clients a week out of a room in a beautiful building in central London's Little Venice, overlooking a canal.

Little Venice is considered upmarket, but it's a very mixed area socioeconomically, and clients bring a range of issues to sessions related to bereavement, addiction, relationships, work, their sense of self, and body image. I had experienced or known close friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances who had experienced several of these issues.

My fee is £90 ($118) an hour, but I ask my clients to pay what they can afford. Even if it's a symbolic amount, it represents an investment in themselves.

Mine and other people's boundaries are clearer now

It's been going well at work, as I make sure everyone knows what they should be doing when I'm off. The ability to delegate and trust people to do their work is a key leadership skill.

I received many in-person comments from colleagues, particularly women, who have said that they appreciated seeing a man in a senior role adopt a flexible working style. The policy has been in place for many years, but perhaps people felt it gave them "permission" to take advantage of it.

Balancing a third element of life alongside work and personal commitments brings boundaries more clearly into focus: yours and other people's. There's something really positive about having a better awareness of how one is spending one's time, what one is working on at any given moment, and making sure things aren't getting dropped or one isn't taking too much on.

Completely separating myself from my work environment each week puts me in a very different headspace, which has helped me step away from the day-to-day business of being a leader. I'll check my emails on a Monday evening after I've finished with my clients, and return to work on Tuesday with a fresh perspective.

I can't give advice as a therapist, but I have to be direct as a CEO

But I do have to make sure I'm separating my two roles of psychotherapist and CEO.

Being a psychotherapist certainly makes you a good listener, gives you patience, and the ability to be curious and appreciate where others might be coming from. Work-wise, you also develop an understanding of group dynamics and the unconscious roles that people play.

As a leader, you have to be authoritative and direct, while a therapist shouldn't tell people what to do or give direct advice. There's no way I would ever slide into therapist mode with colleagues or professional clients, because that boundary needs to be maintained really carefully.

I hope I can be a therapist for longer than I'm a business consultant

I haven't considered going full-time as a psychotherapist, as I'm quite senior in my business career and like to think I can add a lot of value.

But I am 55 and heading toward that final furlong of my work life. One of the reasons I became a therapist is to work longer than I might ordinarily be able to do as a business consultant.

Since training as a therapist, I have also done a two-year psychodynamic executive coaching program. That takes the theories and practices of psychoanalytics and psychotherapy and applies them to coaching. That's the third leg that sits between what I do as a psychotherapist, and what I do as a consultant and a business leader.

After I hand over the baton to Gate One's next leader, I anticipate I will do a mix of executive coaching, leadership development, and psychotherapy.

Therapy has given me a nice pathway for the last third of my life, allowing me to extend my career and do something really interesting and fulfilling, as I begin to dial down my other commitments in years to come.

• Richard Detty has driven for Uber and Lyft in Honolulu since 2017.
• Detty says it's a flexible side hustle, but Hawaii needs laws protecting drivers' pay.
• Some ride-hailing drivers have said their earnings have fallen over the past few years.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Richard Detty, a 58-year-old ride-hailing driver for Uber and Lyft in Honolulu. Business Insider verified Detty's earnings through screenshots he provided of his payments. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A Lyft spokesperson told Business Insider that "ensuring driver success is vital to our mission, and we're continually looking to increase driver pay in smart, deliberate ways." For example, the company has pledged that drivers will make at least 70% of the weekly rider fares after external fees, and has recently started paying drivers for the time they wait for a rider, starting after one minute.

An Uber spokesperson said, "We're committed to policies that support flexible work and sustainable earnings without reducing opportunities or raising costs for riders." Most Uber drivers drive for the app part-time, the spokesperson said.

Rideshare is my side hustle.

I grew up on Kauai, Hawaii, and spent years on the US mainland. In 2017, I moved to Honolulu. My main business is selling products from Hawaii, such as mochi crunch cookies, on Amazon. When I'm not doing that, I drive for Lyft and Uber.

Tourism is a big industry here, and there are plenty of rides to take. I often drive between the airport, Waikiki, Pearl Harbor, and other places that tourists want to go. I feel safer driving here than on the mainland, where you never know who you're going to pick up.

There are also some unique challenges. I can't tell you how many times I've picked up riders with wet bathing suits at the beach and had to dry out my seats before my next ride.

When I was in college here in 1991, I drove a cab part-time two or three times a week. I would give the guy who ran the taxi yard $35, and I could drive from six at night to six in the morning. I paid for the gas, but the taxi company covered everything else, including maintenance.

Back then, a ride from Waikiki to the Honolulu airport paid up to $25. Now, Lyft and Uber are offering me up to $12 as the base rate for the same ride. When I first started driving for the apps here, that same trip would've paid $18. Without tips, I'm dead in the water.

I wouldn't mind some of these rates if Uber and Lyft provided me a car. But I'm now responsible for all the costs. I have to handle all my maintenance, and if my car breaks down, I'm out of luck.

What makes the pay harder to shoulder is that Hawaii is an expensive place to live. Everything costs more here than on the mainland because everything has to be shipped here. I've paid more than $4 a gallon for gas at Costco, and I've seen milk here for around $8 a gallon. The base rate for rideshare drivers needs to go up here.

Driving for Uber, Lyft full-time didn't work

When I moved back to Hawaii eight years ago, Lyft and Uber advertised that drivers could make up to $35 an hour. That was very easy to do at the time.

Now, they advertise that drivers make $27 an hour, yet if anything, the fares I've seen seem to have gone up in that time. Where did the other $8 go? For me, it's been one pay cut after another.

In 2022, I worked full-time for Lyft and Uber. I did it for 10 months because I wanted to save money to invest in my Amazon business.

Around that time, I started to notice that the payments I got were falling. I found that doing this full-time wasn't livable, so I went back to doing it as a side hustle. I drove 30 and 40 hours a week and put close to 1,000 miles on my car each week.

The only thing that keeps me coming back to Uber and Lyft is the flexibility. I can go in and out when I want. I think Uber and Lyft count on that: It seems like they want people to be part-time drivers.

I'm lobbying the Honolulu city council, the mayor, and the state legislature to do something about the pay situation for ride-hailing drivers. We need laws similar to those that gig workers in Minneapolis or Seattle have, which promise a minimum wage and provide other protections. I could make a decent living getting paid like that. In Minneapolis, drivers are being paid at least $1.28 a mile and $0.31 a minute. That's close to double what I make.

We need a pay rate that's fair. So many costs that have gone up. We need to be able to make a living.

Do you have a story to share about Uber or other gig work? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or 808-854-4501.

• Jim Kukral, a cancer survivor, quit his sales job last month to feel alive again.
• He's launching a party boat business in Cleveland to bring people together for screen-free connection.
• This is the third installment of a four-part personal essay series, Quitting Without Regret.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jim Kukral, who resigned from his sales job in early October to start a party boat business called Cleveland Floaters at age 54. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

I've been building my own brand by speaking and writing books for over 25 years, but I took a sales job at a coaching company in 2019 because I needed some stability, income-wise.

For four of those years, I was the top sales rep, and then for two and a half years, I was the director of sales. I actually liked the job, but I quit because I really just stopped feeling alive in it. I just said 'thanks very much,' and gave two weeks' notice. They were cool with it.

I recently beat cancer. I have everything. I'm not rich, but I've got a great family. I've had a really good life, but after COVID and the existentialism of beating cancer, I felt like I was slowly disappearing. I was tired of performing.

I'm guessing most people quit their jobs out of frustration, but for me, it was quitting out of hope. I'm hoping the joy isn't gone with humans. Maybe it's all just hiding under social media and phones and all that stuff.

I grew up in the '70s and '80s. Somewhere along the way, the last couple of years, we've started to do things like trade experiences for content. I feel like we've optimized ourselves into oblivion.

The thing that I'm building, and the reason that I want to build it, is to get real humans together, sweating on a boat, singing, dancing. We've got to reclaim what the screens stole from us.

The idea for my business, Cleveland Floaters, is to get people together to connect authentically and to exist fully in the moment. You have to have them put their phones in their pockets and put them in a room together — or in this case, on a boat — and entertain them. I think that's where things are moving.

I'm betting really heavily that over the next 20 to 30 years, we're going to see a real big push back to live experiences and human connection. I just really feel strongly about that, and that's what I want to champion.

We will start selling tickets for our first cruises in the spring. We're working really closely with Destination Cleveland, the Ohio Tourism powerhouse. It's very, very real. It's so real, it's kind of scary at this point. I haven't drained my 401(k) yet, but I'm about to start writing some checks.

This is all me. It is a private venture. It is really about creating something that makes people feel human again, and that's the journey I'm on, too. After 25 years of internet marketing and staring at a computer screen, I'd much rather bring together people on a boat.

It is going to be controlled chaos, so dancing deckhands, DJs, comedy, and improv. It will have a very Cleveland tone to it. We want to put Cleveland on the map. It's one of those flyover places. They fly over us and look down on us, but we're pretty awesome here. I want to build something that someone from Japan will get on a plane for and say I'm going to Cleveland, not New York.

Starting this business is extremely frightening. It's a ton of imposter syndrome because it is such a big swing out of my comfort zone. I have a lot of ups and downs. One minute, this is the greatest idea I've ever had, and then the next morning, this isn't going to work. I'm an idiot.

I think what stops most people from taking the leap is that they're scared of losing their income and insurance. But if I don't do it, I feel like I can't break free from this matrix of a world that we've created for ourselves.

My kids are grown. They're used to me being an entrepreneur, so they're like, "Great job, Dad, can't wait to see you pull it off!" My wife has a little more trepidation. It's our retirement at stake.

It's a tough time out there. Inflation's bad, people are scared, and not spending as much money. But I believe that people will spend money on experiences that bring humans together, and I'm going all in on that.

• Severe burnout led Audrey Wang to experience chronic hives and health issues.
• The high-pressure demands of her luxury estate management career were a trigger.
• Wang recovered by prioritizing health, shifting to coaching, and embracing intentional living.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Audrey Wang, a 42-year-old business and executive coach in LA. Business Insider has verified Wang's employment history with documentation. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I burned out so severely in my last job that I broke out in hives that lasted six years. The baseline was all over my body, from head to toe. On my face, it started as a small hive on both cheeks and gradually grew to the point where my entire face was swollen.

They would peak for one whole week. Then it would take three weeks to return to normal and start up again in the fourth week. The hives on the rest of my body moved around aggressively.

I worked in high-end estate management, overseeing multiple luxury properties, managing household staff, and handling a wide range of requests.

I had to quit, and now I'm a business and executive coach. Once I got my stress levels under control, my hives went away.

My first job in 2010 was incredible

I managed a 20,000-square-foot estate in Santa Monica and continued to take on additional clients. Everything grew through word of mouth. It's a high-turnover space, and private professionals are always in demand, especially those who can step in quickly and handle high-pressure environments with discretion.

As I moved on to larger and wealthier clients, the demands got more extreme. One client was a die-hard U2 fan and wanted to charter a helicopter from Santa Monica to the Inglewood stadium. He insisted I find a way for his helicopter to fly directly over LAX, which is a no-fly zone. It was absurd and obviously impossible.

I worked for two families, including one from the UAE

I would spend two to three months a year living in the UAE to work for them. They were essentially government officials and highly discerning, and their escalating requests were so constant that there was barely time to sleep or eat.

The remainder of my year was spent working full-time with another family, based mainly in LA, from about 2013 to 2016. In 2015, the work environment became very difficult to manage. I was also getting married soon, and I was so stressed that the hives started.

That's when I hit my breaking point

My face was so swollen and disfigured that I couldn't be seen in public. I was in tears daily. Thankfully, I'd saved enough to take a year or two off to recover.

In 2016, I moved back to Playa Vista, but my hair started falling out. Doctors told me I probably had severe adrenal fatigue or even possibly cancer. It forced me to ask myself: Do I really want to keep doing this for the rest of my life?

The money was amazing, but was I willing to die for an early retirement?

During that break, I leaned into things I actually loved, like organizing

I discovered Marie Kondo's KonMari method. I wondered if my health issues were caused by allergies, so I started giving away everything and stopped buying anything new. It felt meditative. I helped friends declutter, and sometimes they paid me for my help.

The hives continued at first. Doctors put me on steroids because they believed it was stress-induced, but nothing helped. I didn't work for three years because my skin was so unpredictable. One month it'd clear up, and the next I'd have a lupus-like rash.

I was eventually diagnosed with chronic idiopathic urticaria and angioedema. Sometimes when I bit into something, my lips or eyes would swell, so I carried an EpiPen everywhere.

I concluded that the root cause must be internal

I'd tried everything in Western and Eastern medicine, so I enrolled with the Nutritional Therapy Association. Their clinical partners tested my deficiencies and confirmed I had adrenal fatigue and sky-high cortisol.

They gave me hormone-balancing supplements. I thought, Really? Vitamins? But I had no other choice, so I stuck with it.

A few weeks later, my hives improved. Three months in, they were completely gone. My blood pressure dropped. I felt like a different person.

I knew I could never go back to estate management

Instead, I grew my home-organizing work into a full-time business. Word spread, and I found myself back in some of the same mansions organizing people's lives, again. That evolved into motivational coaching and eventually high-performance coaching.

I teach that less is more. My work at Invitation to Succeed bridges the KonMari method with high-performance habits. But high performance isn't what people think it is. It's not about hustling so hard you sacrifice your health and relationships. It's about doing what truly matters and brings you a life worth living.

If you think being productive means working nonstop, you've got it twisted

Real high performance is intentional. It means analyzing what really matters — your health, relationships, and joy — and aligning your life around them.

If I could do things differently, I would've quit the minute a client disrespected me. I'd tell my former self: Your integrity is your compass. When you start betraying it to keep the peace, you've already lost yourself.

Self-respect is the quiet decision to choose yourself, even when it means sacrificing comfort or approval. The moment I got hives, my body was speaking the truth my mind was trying to rationalize. That was my wake-up call, a physical boundary screaming, "Enough."

Today, I protect my peace like a non-negotiable. Integrity, self-worth, and self-respect are the foundations of every decision I make now.

• Michael Permana was placed on a performance improvement plan by Amazon.
• He worried his software engineering job was at risk, so he took paternity leave.
• He said he did it to protect his finances and buy himself time to find a new role.

When Michael Permana learned that his time as a software engineer at Amazon might be running out, he made an interesting decision: he took paternity leave.

In late February 2023, Permana was placed on a PIP.

"I was desperate because from what I'd heard, once you are in a performance improvement plan, you are on your way out at Amazon," said the 47-year-old, who lives in Fremont, California.

He began applying for jobs right away, but knew it could take a while to land something new. He had a mortgage to pay, so he decided to buy himself roughly two months of breathing room by using the remainder of his paternity leave from when his daughter was born.

By temporarily stepping away from work — and the scrutiny that came with being on a PIP — he figured he could prolong his employment at Amazon while he searched for a new role.

"I took the opportunity while I could to delay time," he said.

Permana is among the Americans who have taken steps to prepare for unemployment in a corporate landscape where, for some, job security feels less dependable than it once did.

Business Insider has spoken with dozens of workers laid off by large corporations that are implementing strategic changes — including eliminating management layers, shifting investments toward AI, letting go of underperforming employees, and cutting costs across the board. While some workers had a sense their roles might be eliminated, others said they were caught off guard — pointing to their tenure, clean performance records, and the financial strength of their employers.

Permana shared how he landed a new role after a challenging search — and offered advice for others facing performance pressure.

When reached for comment, Amazon said that it regularly reviews its performance evaluation process to ensure it best supports the growth and development of its employees.

Job searching during paternity leave and getting a 'collection' of rejection emails

Rather than simply working hard and hoping for the best, some workers have prepared for the worst — deploying strategies such as applying for jobs before trouble strikes, launching side businesses, or secretly juggling multiple jobs.

In Permana's case, at least he had some warning, and paternity leave bought him some time to look for his next gig. That doesn't mean his job search was easy.

His two main search strategies were applying to software engineering roles on LinkedIn and exploring opportunities through recruiters he connected with on the platform. Permana landed a few interviews at Meta, Instawork, and HubSpot, but was ultimately rejected from all of them. He said he tried applying to the software company SnapLogic, where he'd worked more than a decade previously, but was denied there as well.

"It was very hard," he said, adding that he still has a "collection" of rejection emails he's compiled for tracking purposes.

By the time Permana returned from paternity leave in May, he still hadn't landed a new job, and he continued to feel that his performance was under scrutiny. However, he soon advanced in the interview process for a software engineering role at the mobile game developer MobilityWare. A friend who worked there referred him for the position, which he believes helped him get an interview.

In late May, Permana received an offer. In June, his tenure at Amazon came to an end, and he began the new role — a remote position that offered the flexibility he was looking for.

Permana said he enjoyed the job but recently left for a software engineering role at the mobile messaging platform Attentive, citing higher pay as a key reason for the switch.

How to navigate a PIP and land a software engineering role

When it comes to navigating a performance improvement plan, Permana said his best advice is to communicate openly with your manager and focus on doing exactly what they're asking of you. However, he also believes it's wise to assume things might not work out — and to start applying for jobs elsewhere.

As for advice on landing a software engineering role, Permana said his two biggest tips are to seek out referrals whenever possible and to dedicate significant time to interview preparation.

He recalled that Meta's interview process, for example, included coding questions that required extensive prep. One question, he said, touched on a concept he hadn't thought about in the last two decades of his career. Permana believes the questions were so demanding that it would be difficult for any working professional to find enough time to prepare properly.

"You'd have to study for a few months to be able to do those questions," he said.

Reviewing questions on LeetCode, a coding interview prep website, helped him prepare for interviews at Meta and elsewhere — but he said it still required a significant time investment.

Permana's advice: Find ways to carve out enough time for your job search — even if it doesn't involve taking paternity leave.

• Peak TV was great, and Kevin Reilly had a great seat during the Peak TV era.
• Reilly steered programming at networks including NBC, Fox, and FX during the boom, which was fueled first by cable, and then by competition from streaming.
• That era is over, and it's not coming back, Reilly says. Which helps explain why he's in AI now.

TV is an endangered species. People aren't watching it, and don't want to pay for it. And the companies that own TV networks are trying to find someone — anyone — to buy them.

But not that long ago, lots of us were reveling in the "Peak TV" era — a time when inventive TV programming was plentiful and, crucially, popular. A time when you could watch "The Sopranos" on HBO, "Friday Night Lights" on NBC, and "The Shield" on FX.

This was also a time when Kevin Reilly had great jobs in TV, where he steered programming at networks including NBC, FX, Fox, and Turner — and had his hands on all the shows I just mentioned. That run ended in 2000, when Reilly was re-orged out of what was then called WarnerMedia.

Today, Reilly is in AI, of course: He recently became CEO of Kartel, a startup that's supposed to help big brands use the tech.

But in a recent episode of my Channels podcast, I talked to him about life during TV's latest (and possibly last) golden age — and whether he thinks it will ever come back. (Spoiler: There's a reason he's in AI now.)

You can read an edited excerpt from our conversation below, and listen to the whole thing here.

Peter Kafka: You got to be a TV executive in what we now call the Peak TV era. What was that like?

Kevin Reilly: When I got to network television, there were still these rules, like "the good guy always wins" and "people don't want to watch depressing things on television."

And then cable, when I went to FX, that was really one of the most fun chapters of my career because it was the very early days of basic cable. All of a sudden, we started doing "The Shield" and "Nip/Tuck" and doing these things that the press had labeled "HBO for basic cable."

Prior to this, basic cable was mostly infomercials and reruns.

Kevin Reilly: I was sitting there talking to great creators, and I was telling them we were HBO for basic cable. And on the monitor above my head was "Cops" running 24 hours a day, keeping the lights on.

I was like, "Don't look at the monitor."

But all of a sudden, we were able to do stuff that really wasn't fit for broadcast by being very particular and being a little bit more forward.

Around the same time, streaming popped up, and Netflix debuted "House of Cards" in 2013 as an explicitly HBO-style show. There was a lot of fascination with streaming but also dismissiveness: Jeff Bewkes, who was running Time Warner at the time, famously dissed Netflix as "the Albanian army." Did you believe that back then?

I think Jeff is an extraordinary leader, and I loved working for him. At the time, though, I think he had to do what he needed to do.

You don't think he was really dismissive of Netflix? It was just something he had to say?

I think at that point, throughout the entire business, everyone was dismissive of Netflix. "We're picking these guys' pockets. They're gonna go out of business. We're selling them all the stuff that we can't sell. They're idiots."

But at the same time, Netflix was all anybody was talking about, all day long. I remember flying to Detroit to talk to a big [advertising] client for one of our series. It was going to be a $50 million, $60 million transaction. And all they were talking about was Netflix.

They were buying advertising, and then telling me how all their kids are only watching things on their phones all day long. And I was like, "Isn't this ironic that you, an advertiser, are talking about a non-advertising-based service and how your kids don't watch TV anymore?"

What did you think?

I thought they would experiment and do stuff, but maybe not at scale. I mean, they don't have the system for that, and it's really hard. Well, first of all, they did what we did (at FX) — they took a page out of the HBO handbook: Fire the money cannon and say, "Hey, we'll just dream. Bring us in your dreams. Do what you wanna do."

Your last job in TV was at what was then called WarnerMedia, which had been purchased by AT&T, and there were a bunch of different justifications for that deal, but the real one turned out to be "maybe Wall Street will give us a Netflix stock multiple," which never happened. Did you think that combination was going to work?

I mean, the product itself works and has been a success. But to take the entirety of Time Warner, and then it was going to be a one-product system that we would single-handedly launch and build an ad play around it, and all of a sudden compete with Google and Netflix …

I don't know that even Wall Street ever bought that narrative, no matter how hard we sold it.

Two of your former employers — Comcast and WBD — are bidding for Paramount. Netflix is bidding too. There's going to be some kind of consolidation no matter what. Do you think that when all of this gets done that there's a future for traditional television, or do you think it becomes, in the end, a subset of a bigger tech platform?

I'd love to be able to just give you the knee-jerk answer, "Of course, there'll always be traditional television." I think unfortunately, everybody waited too long to figure out how we were going to prop it up.

So will it have a very long tail on it, like radio? The heyday of radio went away and we still have radio. I believe it will be around in some fashion. And as some of these assets get shed or reinvented — yeah, they might end up having a little bit more life in some ways than we thought they did.

And radio became podcasts…

Exactly. So there's always new expressions of it.

But retooling traditional businesses, especially while you've got to pull the profit out from underneath, is really difficult.