• Sol Rashidi has worked in AI for 15 years, scaling capabilities at companies like IBM.
• She said workers have to continue to use their brains to avoid intellectual dependency on AI tools.
• Rashidi uses it for acceleration, not replacement, and advises against copy and pasting responses.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sol Rashidi, a former tech executive at IBM, AWS, and Estée Lauder, who is based in Miami. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In the last 15 years, I have built and scaled AI capabilities, and I have over 200 deployments under my belt.

I went from being an individual practitioner to running IBM's enterprise data management practice. I was the chief data officer at Sony Music, the chief analytics officer at Estée Lauder, and the head of technology for AWS's startup division in North America.

All my experiences from 2011 on have led me to realize there's a real chance people will develop a codependency on AI. So I'm focused on workforce preparation and educating the masses.

Now I have my own company where I'm working on solving the problem of AI in the workforce by teaching enterprises how to prepare their workforce for the future, and how to use AI and automation to amplify the workforce instead of eliminating it. If you're going to use AI in your day-to-day, great — but you have to be conscientious, to outsource tasks and not your critical thinking. You need to avoid intellectual atrophy.

Intellectual atrophy is when you lose your cognitive ability to think critically because you're outsourcing that thinking to tech. Just like our muscles atrophy if we don't use them, so does our brain. The big thing that you've got to be careful of is making sure that generative AI doesn't make your thinking become generic, because everyone else is also using ChatGPT. You maintain your edge by using cognitive power.

Don't replace your work

As an individual, I use six to eight AI tools every day. I use AI a lot for data processing, so I can think about the patterns and insights and, from there, observe and spotlight frameworks and models.

But when using the tools, I always ask myself, "Am I using this to accelerate work I have to do, or am I using it to do the work for me?" It needs to accelerate the work so that the thinking is left to me. "This is making me faster, but is it making me more capable? This is making me more productive, but is this making me more valuable?" I use the tools to expedite and facilitate versus doing the work for me.

Part of what I do is communication, and I don't ever want to lose that edge. I don't use AI to write emails, keynotes, or personal interactions.

It's really important for me to be able to understand whether or not what I'm communicating is being perceived in the way I intended. That takes practice. Anything that comes from the heart or mind has to be sincere, expressive, and communicate the right messaging. It has to be organically generated by me — no exceptions.

Don't copy and paste

We live in a society right now that values convenience over competition and speed over substance. But the key to keeping up is actually slowing down, because there is no shortage of information coming to us. We're ingesting so many gigabytes of data every day through WhatsApp, Slack, email, LinkedIn, and Instagram. The way we used to handle the workload of the past cannot be replicated to handle the speed of today.

So we have to develop our discernment muscles, which is the ability to spot a signal from noise. A large percentage of content worldwide right now is AI-generated, and we have AI-generated content that is being cannibalized to retrain itself.

Moving forward, we're going to get to the point of diminishing return. Problem-solving skills are going to be so important, and it will be super important to discern, validate, and verify AI responses. You can use AI to author the first draft, but maybe don't copy and paste the output because it's often inaccurate. Think of it as a first draft always.

The last team that I managed was a data science team at a Fortune 500 company. I tasked my junior and senior data scientists to come up with an approach for the CMO for a new product. My junior scientist produced the same deliverable as the senior scientists but it took them less than half the time because they took the word of ChatGPT.

It sounded great, but they short-circuited the process of research and verification, so I had to make a new mandate that they cannot use AI to do the work for them, but only to help facilitate and accelerate the research.

I told my junior scientists and anyone highly codependent on AI, "I'm paying for your brain and uniqueness. I'm not paying you to copy and paste, because, quite frankly, a license for enterprise API from OpenAI is a lot cheaper than you."

It's so easy to ask ChatGPT a question and get an answer that sounds really good. But if you don't use critical thinking and depend on yourself to solve problems, you could be outdated within a few years.

How is AI affecting your work? Contact the reporter via email at aaltchek@insider.com or through the secure-messaging app Signal at aalt.19.

• Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said that reframing stress as positive has a "huge impact on your ability to manage it."
• "This is a gift, this is a learning opportunity, this is a growth opportunity," Spiegel said of stress on the "Grit" podcast.
• Spiegel said he manages stress via exercising, going to the sauna, and meditation.

Some call stress the silent killer. Evan Spiegel likes to reframe it as a gift and opportunity.

The Snap CEO has been in his fair share of stressful situations. He led Snapchat from its founding through a 2013 acquisition offer from Meta (he ended up rejecting it) and a 2017 IPO.

On the "Grit" podcast, Spiegel explained that he has come to take a more positive view of stress.

"How do we approach stress in our minds?" Spiegel asked. "Do we call it out as stress and something that's bad, or do we say, 'Actually, this is a gift, this is a learning opportunity, this is a growth opportunity.'"

Spiegel referenced research that suggested reframing stress as positive can have a "huge impact on your ability to manage it."

Stanford's Kelly McGonigal has led this line of research, publishing her book "The Upside of Stress" in 2015 about "getting good at" the condition.

A high-intensity job like the CEO of Snap isn't for the faint of heart. In September, Spiegel wrote in a letter to employees that company would restructure into smaller, startup-like "squads" as it faced a "crucible moment."

Spiegel said that being CEO for a long time made him "better at managing" the stress.

"Once you're just in a rhythm of dealing with stressful events all the time, it becomes very normal, and stress is about a response to something unusual," he said.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the job had a different psychological effect: anxiety. On a recent episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience," Huang said that he was driven by a "fear of failure."

"I have a greater drive from not wanting to fail than the drive of wanting to succeed," Huang said, adding that he's "always in a state of anxiety."

Dustin Moskovitz, the Facebook cofounder and former CEO of Asana, told Stratechery that he found the top leadership gig "exhausting."

"I had to just kind of put on this face day after day, and then in the beginning I was like, 'Oh, it's going to get easier, the company will get more mature,'" Moskovitz said. "Then the world just kept getting more chaotic."

For Spiegel, stress isn't just a response to reconsider; it's a part of his job description. On the podcast, he said that part of his role was absorbing the team's stress — and not unloading it on the people around him.

"I've tried to find my own ways, whether that's exercising or going in the sauna or just taking time to meditate," he said. "But, in my family and in my job, I want to absorb that stress, right? I don't want to unload that onto people that I care about, whether that's our team or family or my wife."

Your mileage may vary on Instagram's recent corporate culture updates (to the extent you care at all). Fewer meetings: excellent. Faster decisions: great. Return-to-office five days a week: woof, but such is life. Return-to-office five days a week when there aren't enough places for people to sit: What??? At least Instagram chief Adam Mosseri is aware of the issue — in a memo to staff, he said New York employees get a pass on the butts-in-seats mandate until the company figures out where all those butts will go. The timeline is TBD.

After the pandemic-driven wave of remote work, many employees are being dragged, kicking and screaming, back into the office. For workers at companies such as Amazon, JPMorgan, and Starbucks, the perpetual workday-in-your-pajamas party is over. The odd wrinkle is that in some cases, it's not just employees who aren't ready to be back at work every day. Their employers aren't ready for it, either, at least logistically. They're telling people to come to the office without having the actual space for them to be there. So, workers are competing for desks, setting up shop in common areas, or refusing to show up altogether until their employers have a more well-thought-out plan. It's emblematic of the broader issues surrounding RTO mandates: Many companies are implementing them without a solid logic as to how or why and alienating their employees — intentionally or not — in the process.

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Multiple big-name companies have had some small-time whoopsie daisies on back-to-office space constraints.

In late 2024, AT&T acknowledged in a memo to employees that they would not offer "one-for-one seating per employee" as they were called back in. At the time, employees told Business Insider that workers were filling up hallways or hanging out in the cafeteria in order to check the attendance box. Around the same time, Amazon wound up delaying its RTO ask for some employees because their spots weren't ready. Not only were there not enough desks, but workers also complained that offices and meeting rooms were lacking in chairs.

Having insufficient seating is all part of the plan.

Earlier this year, JPMorgan employees required to come back found themselves in a sort of Hunger Games situation for spots, showing up extra early and leaving behind possessions to mark their spots and signing on from vacation to try to book scarce desk space. On Reddit, some employees described the situation as "pure chaos," and complained of being unable to accomplish work because "half the morning is spent on desk f***ery." One JPMorgan employee told me that they often find themselves seated far away from the rest of their team because someone else reserved their regular spot, and there are often lines for the women's bathroom at the New York office where they work.

How much office space is needed and what to do with it is a perpetual conundrum. Just look at all the hate for open-office floor plans. But the pandemic added more complications to an already complicated situation. As the RTO wave has picked up momentum, space has become a significant issue at many companies, both large and small, including giant federal agencies. So what gives?

Some of it is simply a result of poor planning, explains Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who studies remote work. Decisions are made at the executive level without proper consultation with facilities personnel, who have detailed information on desks and seating. "It's not as easy as adding up people and comparing to desks, as it matters which cities and offices they are in," he says in an email. "Kind of like airlines that some flights may be overbooked and others half-empty."

Some of the shortages may be on purpose. Strict RTO mandates are often viewed, at least in part, as a soft layoff — companies expect some level of attrition when they force people back, even if they won't openly admit it. "Having insufficient seating is all part of the plan," Bloom says. "If you want a 10% head count reduction, you only need seating for 90% of the folks."

Brian Elliott, the CEO of Work Forward, a future of work think tank and consultancy, says that when executives started to think about bringing people back to the office in about 2021, many were surprised to learn how low the percentage of their workforce actually showing up on a given day had been pre-2020, because of sick time, vacations, workers visiting customers, etc. "So your average CFO looks at this and goes, 'It's a 60% utilized asset on average. Why am I doing assigned seating? Why not go to hoteling and hot desking?'" Elliott says. Add in the belief that at least some sort of remote work would stick around (especially as companies offered it as a perk to attract workers in a tight labor market), and many companies decided to downsize their overall office footprint to save some cash. Now, as businesses decide they want everyone back in full-time, they're realizing they axed too many desks.

However you feel about hotel desking, you might want to get used to it.

Some companies are moving in the other direction, and are on the hunt for more spacious offices. But that process takes time, and economic uncertainty has leaders nervous to go too big. Commercial real estate services and investment firm CBRE says economic jitters, high interest rates, and slow growth in in-person jobs has been somewhat of a drag on office leasing activity this year, but the overall trend is up: A growing majority of its office occupants expect to maintain or expand their space over the next three years, while the share anticipating downsizing is steadily decreasing.

"Companies are taking more spaces, so clearly, they are very comfortable in expansionary mode," says Henry Chin, global head of research at CBRE.

That doesn't mean employees should expect to be drowning in spacious offices anytime soon — businesses are driving toward higher people-to-desk ratios, not lower. So instead of a single assigned desk for every person, there are multiple people sharing. Per CBRE, the most common ratio today is 1-1.49 employees per seat, and the plan is to up it. "Ultimately, they want to have the higher ratio, that two or three people share a desk," Chin says.

In other words, however you feel about hotel desking, you might want to get used to it.

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The RTO battle in America is proving to be quite the push-and-pull. Remote work is falling, but it hasn't gone away: According to Bloom's tracker, about 25% of work is being done from home in the US, compared to 62% in the spring of 2020, the height of the pandemic, and well under 10% prior to the lockdowns. And just because companies ask workers to come back doesn't mean they're all complying — there's a delta between what employers are asking, and employees are giving, RTO-wise. As the job market weakens, employees may be inclined to give in and commute more. You want your boss to see you enough that they at least feel a little guilty when they fire you.

These space-related headaches are reflective of broader questions about where and how it's best for people to work, and what sort of planning needs to be put into it. Some executives seem to be knee-jerk demanding people come back in without considering whether that's how their teams work best, or whether the infrastructure can handle it. A five-day-a-week office mandate isn't super helpful if teams are located all over the country and everyone's just sitting on video calls all day. Some companies are discovering they need more small meeting rooms, not just a few large ones, so people can gather if they are in the same place. And some are falling short on basic blocking and tackling — having working WiFi, or supplying sufficient monitors and equipment. In the internet age, it's a little tough to get work done when you don't have the internet itself, or a keyboard or a mouse.

Employers may be "conflating productivity and effectiveness with proximity" in insisting people show up full-time, explains Melissa Daimler, a corporate culture consultant. "If I can see you and I know that you're working, then I feel good about how productive we are as a company." Much of the issue comes down to trust — businesses feeling confident that their people will get the work done when they're in the office collaborating and when they're at home for the day. "It takes an extra kind of set of planning skills and a system that you put in place as a company and a team," she says.

The space problem is one that companies should fix, whether they actually will is another question. Your employees aren't going to love the return of long commutes and sad salad desk lunches, whatever you do, but they're probably going to be even more annoyed if, at the end of that commute, they find themselves eating that sad salad on the floor in the hallway, seated next to their laptop.

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Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

• Ford is pulling back on its electric vehicle production, a move that will cost it close to $20 billion.
• It's switching gears to hybrid vehicles, saying it was seeing a spike in demand for hybrid vehicles.
• Ford's CEO said the change came from "the customer changing their decision."

Ford is switching gears, away from some electric vehicles.

In a news release on Monday, the company announced several changes to its EV production, saying it is deprioritizing fully electric large vehicles, which were not making it money.

"Ford no longer plans to produce select larger electric vehicles where the business case has eroded due to lower-than-expected demand, high costs and regulatory changes," Ford said in the release.

The company also plans to stop the production of electric commercial vans it had planned to release in the US and Europe.

Instead, it's boosting its hybrid car pipeline.

"By 2030, about 50% of Ford's global volume will be hybrids, extended-range EVs and electric vehicles, versus 17% today," the company added.

Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a Monday Bloomberg interview: "It was really the customer changing their decision."

Farley said that in November, Ford saw a 30% increase in its hybrid sales. On the flipside, it saw a slump in its more expensive EVs, while its more affordable EVs performed better.

"The EV market in the US went from 12% of the industry to only five, and that really, in the end, was the big decider for us," he said to Bloomberg.

Instead of large EVs, the company said it will produce a "high-volume family of smaller, highly efficient and affordable electric vehicles," starting with a midsize pickup truck in 2027.

Ford estimates that changing EV production plans is going to cost the company about $19.5 billion. The company said it will take a majority of the hit this quarter.

Ford's stock price remained largely flat after the announcement. It's up about 38% since the start of the year.

The Trump administration has rolled back incentives that boosted the EV sector, such as ending the $7,500 tax credit for EVs in September.

The change in Ford's EV plans comes less than two months after the company announced in October that it would double down on its F-150 pickup truck production. The company said that it wanted to increase production of the F-150s by 50,000 units in 2026, and would move some of its EV workers over to meet this goal.

Ford also said that it would pause the production of the F-150 Lightning — the electric counterpart of its bestseller truck — to prioritize gas and hybrid vehicle production.

• Tech mogul Elon Musk has an estimated net worth of $638 billion.
• His estimated fortune reached $638 billion in December 2025 after a major SpaceX valuation.
• Musk often trades places with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison for the title of world's richest person.

Elon Musk has a net worth of around $638 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.

His net worth is closely tied to Tesla's share price, but the tech mogul's wealth comes from several sources and often fluctuates. He crossed over the $600 billion threshold in December following an $800 billion valuation of SpaceX.

That means Musk regularly trades places with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison for the title of world's richest person.

How has Musk's net worth changed over time?

Musk, who was born in South Africa, moved to Canada and dropped out of a Ph.D. at Stanford, became a millionaire before he hit 30. Musk started Zip2, a website that provided city travel guides to newspapers, with his brother Kimbal Musk, and sold it to Compaq for more than $300 million in 1999. Musk, then aged 27, is believed to have got $22 million from the deal.

He went on to cofound online bank X.com in 1999. It soon merged with Peter Thiel's Confinity to become PayPal, and the company was bought for $1.5 billion by eBay in 2002. Despite having been ousted as CEO, Musk walked away with around $165 million. 

Musk cofounded space-exploration company SpaceX in 2002. In 2004, he became an investor in and the chairman of EV company Tesla.

During the financial crisis in 2008, he saved Tesla from bankruptcy with a $40 million investment and a $40 million loan. That same year, he was named Tesla's CEO.

Musk said 2008 was "the worst year of my life." Alongside problems in his personal life, Tesla kept losing money and SpaceX was having trouble launching the first version of its Falcon rocket. By 2009, Musk was living off personal loans.

Tesla went public in 2010, though, and Musk's estimated net worth steadily climbed. In 2012, he debuted on Forbes' Billionaires List with an estimated wealth of $2 billion. 

In 2016, Musk set up the tunnel-digging business, the Boring Company.

The next year, he founded the neurotechnology startup Neuralink.

Musk's net worth began a rapid ascent at the start of the pandemic as Tesla stock prices soared. Musk started 2020 with an estimated net worth of just under $30 billion and was worth around $170 billion just a year later — a more than five-fold increase in just a year. His estimated fortune peaked at around $340 billion in November 2021.

Musk also bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, serving as its CEO until he stepped down in early June 2023.

The stock is known to be volatile and has had its ups and downs since then.

The morning of Trump's reelection on November 6, 2024, which Musk heavily campaigned for, Tesla's stock was up about 15%, for instance.

Following an insider share sale at SpaceX, which boosted the startup to a $350 billion valuation, Musk's wealth surged again in December 2024 by about $50 billion in one day, making Musk the first billionaire to reach the $400 billion mark.

But in the months following its election highs, Tesla's stock dropped by over 50% following a number of factors, including a vehicle sales slump, a rising Tesla boycott movement, and Musk's stint in the US government, which some investors felt took him away from his day-in-day-out Tesla CEO duties.

Tesla's stock rose back up following the CEO taking a step back from his role in the Department of Government Efficiency, but it continues to have big swings. Musk had one of his single-day highest net worth losses in June 2025 following a public spat on social media with the President, in which Trump floated the idea of having his government contracts revoked, and Musk repeatedly criticized Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill."

The stock has since rebounded and was up over 25% in 2025 as of December.

Musk's net worth reached unprecedented heights in December 2025, as Musk confirmed SpaceX was planning an IPO. After an insider share sale valued the private company at $800 billion, Musk's estimated net worth surpassed $600 billion.

Musk was the first billionaire to have reached a net worth of over $500 billion, according to Forbes, making him one step closer to becoming the world's first trillionaire.

Where does Musk's fortune come from?

Musk's wealth is largely dependent on Tesla shares. Though he takes no salary from Tesla, he's awarded stock options when the company hits challenging performance metrics.

Musk's previous $55 billion compensation plan was voided in January 2024 on the grounds that Musk had undue influence over the package and its approval due to close ties with several board members. At its annual shareholder meeting in 2024, investors voted to approve Musk's pay package. However, the judge upheld the original ruling, and the company has since appealed the decision.

A compensation package Tesla proposed for its CEO in September 2025 could turn Musk into the first trillionaire. The unprecedented plan included a new set of 12 milestones to be completed over a 10-year period, such as boosting the company's valuation to $8.5 trillion, selling 12 million cars, getting a million robotaxis on the road, and coming up with a succession plan.

A large part of Musk's net worth comes from Tesla shares, while roughly over 20% comes from SpaceX stock.

The rest of his wealth comes from shares in Twitter and The Boring Company, as well as other miscellaneous liabilities.

• Chris Hemsworth says he's turned down work to spend more time with his father after his Alzheimer's diagnosis.
• "I know I'm not going to get 10 years down the track and go, 'I'm glad I did those extra three or four films,'" he said.
• The actor said he's also become acutely aware of how quickly his three kids are growing up.

Chris Hemsworth says his father's Alzheimer's diagnosis has reshaped how he thinks about family.

On Tuesday's episode of Jay Shetty's "On Purpose" podcast, the actor spoke about navigating his dad's diagnosis and filming "A Road Trip to Remember" with him, a documentary that follows their motorbike trip across Australia to revisit places from Hemsworth's childhood.

Hemsworth first found out he carries two copies of a gene that has been linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer's while filming the National Geographic longevity documentary "Limitless" in 2022.

On the podcast, Hemsworth recalled how his father first reacted when the actor learned he was at high risk for Alzheimer's — and how things changed once his dad received his own diagnosis.

"I remember vividly that conversation of him sort of telling me not to be concerned about it. And then about two or three years later, my mom saying to me, 'I think we've got to get dad checked because there's these signs and things I'm concerned about,'" Hemsworth told Shetty.

Tests revealed that both his parents also carried two copies of the same gene, and Hemsworth said he was "immediately hit with the reality of what that meant" for his dad.

He'd pushed aside his own results as a distant concern, but seeing his dad's diagnosis "right in front of us" was "incredibly confronting," especially as his condition "began to get worse."

Hemsworth said filming the documentary with his dad allowed them to have conversations that they hadn't had before.

"He says it in the documentary, but his biggest concern was being a burden. And that was heartbreaking to hear and consider," Hemsworth said. "And I had never even, up until we shot the documentary, I didn't know even how he felt about it, you know, because I hadn't asked him."

The actor added that he was thankful for the chance to connect with his dad through the documentary, adding that it "ignited something" in his family to be more proactive, more present, and more connected because "we're watching memories disappear in front of us."

Hemsworth said he and his brothers also try to offload the caretaking burden from his mom, adding that his dad's condition has prompted him to reevaluate his priorities in life.

The experience has forced him to slow down, and while he has films lined up for next year, he has "turned down a lot of things" so he can spend more time with his father, he said.

"I know I'm not going to get 10 years down the track and go, 'I'm glad I did those extra three or four films.' I'm going to say, 'I wish I spent more time with him, and with my mom, and with my brothers, and my wife, my kids, and family, and friends,'" he said.

That has also reshaped his priorities as a father. Hemsworth has one daughter and twin sons with his wife, Elsa Pataky.

"It's attention, you know, they want your presence. They want your space. They want your focus," Hemsworth said of his kids. Regardless of the experiences and material things that money can offer, at the end of the day, kids "just want your time," he added.

"And that for me has been terrifying at times, realizing how quick it's gone. I think I'll get to that, and then a year goes by, and I've done a couple of films or whatever and gone, 'Oh, wow, which part of their, you know, brief childhood have I missed?'" Hemsworth said.

He added that he's become acutely aware of how quickly his children are growing up.

"They've taught me a greater awareness around the importance of this moment, because their personalities change every second and every day and every week and every month, and you kind of, you're mourning a version of that child every month because they're gone," he said.

Hemsworth isn't the only Hollywood star who has spoken about navigating a loved one's diagnosis.

In September, Emma Heming Willis said she mistook Bruce Willis' early symptoms for marital problems, and that his dementia diagnosis later gave her clarity.

"There was relief in understanding, 'Oh, okay, this wasn't my husband, it was that this disease was taking parts of his brain,'" she told People. "Once you hear that, I just softened."

In November, Jay Leno said caring for his wife amid her dementia diagnosis "isn't work," but simply another chapter in their life together.

"There are going to be a couple of years that are tricky. So, the first 46, really great. But it's OK. It's not terrible. I'm not a woe-is-me person. I'm just lucky that I am able to take care of her," Leno told People.