• Shari Williams landed a full-time job by creating a dating app website for her target company.
• She marketed her website on LinkedIn, gaining attention from the company's creative director.
• She says her bold approach helped her land the job without extensive experience.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Shari Williams, a 41-year-old social media strategist based in Chicago. It's been edited for length and clarity.

In 2017, my four-month contract at an advertising agency was wrapping up with no word of a job offer or extension. I thought to myself, "I have to do something crazy to catch their attention."

My husband and friends were skeptical when I told them of my plan to create a dating-app style website to pitch myself as "the perfect match" for the company, but something told me it was going to work.

A few weeks later, I posted my website on LinkedIn and even passed out custom candy hearts with the URL to my coworkers. My post gained traction, even catching the attention of the company's creative director, and I was extended a full-time offer.

I learned it's always worth a shot to be bold.

I used my web development background to create the website

I had been working as a web developer for several years when I ended up pregnant and realized it wasn't the career path for me. I transitioned into social media and later went the freelance route, landing the four-month contract job at Burrell Communications to help with a campaign.

The office location was convenient, the people were cool, and the work was fun. I really liked working there and didn't want it to end.

I figured if I created my own website as a way to pitch myself to the company, it could be easily shared online to garner attention and get noticed by the company. My original inspiration was Nina Mulfeh, who was actually featured in Business Insider, for creating a website to land a job at AirBnB. Since I was working in advertising, I wanted to do something creative and attention-grabbing, so I decided to make mine have a dating-app look and feel.

Here's everything I put on my 'dating app' website

It probably took a few weeks to build ShariLovesBurrell.com, but most of that time was spent gathering information and planning out how I wanted it to look. The site had a pink background with hearts — it was one of those sites where content floats as you scroll.

I created a dating "profile" for Burrell and one for me, and wrote things like "I've never felt this way about a company before" and "I think we have something special."

Then I added a few sections including a portfolio of everything I had done at Burrell during my contract period, testimonials from coworkers, and an "about me" section for anyone who just happened to stumble onto the website.

At the end of the page, it said something like "I think we're a perfect match" and there was a Tinder-like graphic of Burrell and me "matching."

Some people liked my idea and others questioned it

I shared my website on LinkedIn and created custom conversation heart candies with my website's URL to pass around the office. If the company didn't come across the website online, they'd see the URL printed on this little package. I'm pretty sure I put those conversation hearts on everyone's desk.

People seemed to think it was super cute and creative, but they also were like, "Why are you doing all this for a job?"

Getting an advertising job is not easy, and there's a lot of competition. I knew it was a place I liked working, so I wanted to give it a shot. I just felt like I didn't have anything to lose. Even if they didn't hire me, my hope was that people would see it, share it, and something could come of it.

My website gained traction, and I got a full-time offer

The creative director at Burrell shared my LinkedIn post about my website with the caption "Shari, we hear you loud and clear," and Burrell later ended up extending me a full-time offer as a social content manager.

I took the job but ultimately didn't stay at the company for much longer. However, having a full-time role on my résumé helped me to land other jobs and escape the "contractor only" trap. Now I work at Northwestern Medicine as a lead social media strategist, and I learned a lot that I use now from my role at Burrell.

I learned to be bold if I want to stand out in the job market

My experience taught me that there are ways to stand out in the job market and compensate for a lack of experience, awards, or big company names on your résumé.

Jobseekers don't need to take my exact approach, but if there's a role you really want, it's worth a shot to be bold and put yourself out there to get noticed. If you're good at something, find a way to let people know.

• Natalie Holloway found her dream career on a burnout recovery trip, but later burned out again.
• She learned to manage burnout through making lifestyle changes and getting a life coach.
• This is the fourth installment of a five-part personal essay series, The Burnout Cure.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Natalie Holloway, a 37-year-old cofounder of Bala, based in Los Angeles. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

The first time I recognized I was experiencing burnout, my husband and I left our advertising jobs and traveled without any set plans. This trip got me out of the nonstop grind mindset I'd functioned in for too long.

I came back to corporate work refreshed and inspired in October 2016. Our company, Bala, was supposed to be a side hustle, creating cute wrist and ankle weights inspired by our travels. We never imagined it would take off the way it did. I went full-time on Bala in 2019, and my husband joined in 2020.

After building the business for five years, we had to lay off our entire team due to the post-COVID-19 fitness industry downturn. I felt immediate burnout knowing the work that was ahead of me, but this time, I couldn't take a year off to recover.

Having experienced burnout in multiple stages of my career, I now understand what it looks like, and I can navigate it effectively with the right tools and tactics.

I fell into advertising and burned out quickly without realizing it

After college, I landed a job in advertising and fell in love with that career path. As my career progressed, I would often stay at the office late into the night and miss 9 p.m. dinner reservations. I felt creatively inspired by what I was doing, but the hours were so long that I began to wonder what the point was.

My husband, whom I had met at work and just started dating, suggested that we quit our jobs to recover and travel, and I said yes. We were both experiencing burnout, and I didn't even realize how bad it was until that moment.

We spent several months saving money and planning before leaving our jobs in March 2016.

We came up with the idea for Bala Bangles on our recovery trip

It was so freeing to leave with no real plan, but also scary. We didn't have jobs, we didn't have an income, and our résumés were not being built. But we did finally have the mental space to slow down, look around, and feel inspired.

One day, we were taking a yoga class in Indonesia, and the class was too easy; we wanted to work up a sweat. After the class, my husband, Max, had the idea for wrist and ankle weights that look like cute bracelets. We decided to try creating them when we returned.

This trip taught me that detachment is what helps the most when I'm feeling burned out, and that's the easiest to achieve through time away from the source of my stress.

We came back and our side hustle became our full-time jobs, but then we had to rebuild again

We got back and both got new jobs in advertising, but started working on Bala on the side. We never thought it would be our full-time jobs, but it started growing.

Once we were carried in stores and had enough orders coming in, we felt we couldn't keep up with both our corporate jobs and Bala. I left my advertising job first, and my husband followed a few months later.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and the fitness industry experienced a surge in demand. However, after the pandemic, the fitness industry experienced a decline, and we had to lay off our entire staff.

I was pregnant and felt like I didn't have enough stamina to take on the work of 30 people. It was a really demoralizing time, and the burnout hit me immediately because all of our hopes and dreams were on the line.

The second time I experienced burnout, I had to confront my mindset

I was determined not to let burnout destroy my health during my pregnancy. This time, I focused on and learned the value of how I speak to myself.

During my second experience with burnout, I learned that giving myself a mantra helps ground my anxiety. Sometimes it's something like 'I'm calm, present, and have an abundance of time.' Repeating this helps when I'm feeling overwhelmed and burned out.

I can't control when stress creeps in, but I can control how I talk myself through it because my head is my reality, and I'm trying to create a positive one.

When we started rebuilding the business, my husband and I decided that no matter how long it took for the company to recover, we were determined to see it through to the end. We had to prepare for a marathon, not a sprint.

We've started regrowing our team back to its original size.

These small changes have made all the difference

I started working with a life coach, and that's really helped. They're helping me understand what's on my to-do list that aligns with my values, which will give me energy, and what doesn't align with my values, which will deplete my energy.

Although we can't travel to cure burnout as we once did, I now take mini recovery trips, either for a weekend, a week, or a month, when I can. We sometimes visit Joshua Tree as a family to escape from LA, unwind, and mentally reset.

We also spend every July in Lakeside, Ohio. We don't make any plans. It's just our kids and us. We still do some work, but we're able to meaningfully downshift our lives in a way that recharges us.

I always have my mantras going now, and I've learned how to feel comfortable being kind to myself. I realized that burnout is inevitable, but it's about how I handle it. I try to prevent it by reminding myself that I'm working toward the long game.

• Air taxi makers have been vying for regulatory clearance for short commercial flights in the US.
• They're also developing gas-electric hybrid versions in hopes of winning defense contracts.
• They say air taxis could be used for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, or moving supplies.

US tech companies are hoping soon to gain clearance for flying taxis that make short commercial hops like Manhattan to LaGuardia Airport. Eyeing defense dollars, they're also equipping air taxies for the battlefield.

Air taxis have wings and propellers, allowing them to take off and land like a helicopter and fly like an airplane. You can't yet hail a flying taxi anywhere in the US, though those futuristic flights could be coming in the next couple of years.

Pentagon leaders have shifted their focus to the tech industry, arguing that traditional defense contractors can't deliver new weapons fast or cheaply enough to meet today's fast-changing global threats. The Pentagon has pledged to pour billions of dollars into new technology and has issued requests for information on hybrid, autonomous air taxis, also known as vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, or VTOLs.

Flying-taxi makers including Archer Aviation, Joby Aviation, and Beta Technologies say that gas-electric hybrid vehicles reminiscent of "The Jetsons" could carry military cargo more cheaply and quietly than helicopters. Some of the designs under development for the battlefield incorporate autonomous technology that could detect and avoid threats. The aircraft could be used for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or moving supplies and equipment, these companies say.

American air-taxi makers are racing to develop cutting-edge technology as Chinese companies like EHang do the same. The VTOL industry is still young, and China hasn't yet cornered the air-taxi market as it has for smaller, aerial combat drones.

"When we can fundamentally go further and faster than a helicopter, then we have a tool that's more powerful than what the Chinese are going to bring to the fight," said Beta's CEO, Kyle Clark.

Commercial air-taxi designs are typically electric. Swapping the electric battery for a hybrid engine will help the aircraft carry more weight and travel farther, a key consideration for the Pentagon, executives from Joby and Beta told Business Insider.

Archer, Joby, and Beta are all developing military VTOLs that can fly autonomously. In Beta's battlefield version, a human must plug in destination coordinates for the aircraft, and artificial intelligence can help it navigate to the destination, said Clark. Configuring the aircraft to operate without a pilot makes it lighter than a commercial air taxi, since it doesn't require seats or the safety and avionics systems that are necessary when transporting people, Clark added.

Clinching coveted contracts from the Pentagon would add air-taxi manufacturers to a growing list of dual-use companies that sell to commercial clients as well as to the government. Joby is collaborating with traditional defense firm L3Harris on a military VTOL and test-flew a prototype in November. Archer is developing one with Anduril Industries for the US, according to Archer's CEO, Adam Goldstein. Anduril is also developing a military VTOL called Omen in a joint venture with Emirati defense giant Edge Group.

Permission to fly

One of the air-taxi makers' biggest hurdles to commercial adoption is securing Federal Aviation Administration certification, though the Trump administration is attempting to make it easier. In September, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced an FAA program that permits VTOL companies to test-fly piloted and unmanned aircraft before receiving federal certification.

Joby is leading the pack in the certification race, having cleared four of the five stages for commercial clearance. Archer and Joby hope to fly commercially as early as 2026.

For defense adoption in the US, the companies would need the Defense Department to deem their VTOLs ready to fly, Goldstein said.

Taylor Rains contributed to this story.

• Adtech company Fluency automates the process by which agencies and brands run digital ads.
• It provides a streamlined workflow to manage campaigns across Meta, Google, TikTok, and more.
• The startup just raised a $40 million Series A investment, led by Integrity Growth Partners.

Adtech company Fluency has built a platform that helps brands and agencies automate their campaigns across Meta, TikTok, Google, and other platforms. Now, it aims to introduce AI agents to the mix.

Large brands and agencies typically manage campaigns across multiple platforms and ad buying tools, known as demand-side platforms, each with separate logins and interfaces.

Founded in 2017 in Burlington, Vermont, Fluency created what it describes as a digital advertising operating system. It connects to the various platforms' application programming interfaces (APIs) and lets its customers manage their digital ads using a single workflow.

"It takes a lot of people, and hours, and button clicking to be able to effectively execute your advertising," Fluency CEO Mike Lane said in an interview with Business Insider.

He added that Fluency wanted to "help simplify and streamline that, much like HubSpot or Salesforce" did in the customer relationship management (CRM) space. Fluency's competitor set includes other campaign management and ad automation tools, such as Hootsuite, Smartly, and Sprinklr, though these companies tend to cater to larger advertisers and agencies.

The company said it manages around $3 billion in annual ad spend for brands and agencies, including Cox Automotive, Innocean, and The Johnson Group.

Fluency is set to announce on Tuesday that it has raised a $40 million Series A investment round, led and fully funded by Integrity Growth Partners.

Fluency said it plans to invest the funds in enhancing its agentic AI capabilities, which can autonomously oversee marketers' digital ad campaigns. This could mean AI agents automatically swapping out ad creatives or copy with better-performing versions, for example.

Fluency mostly uses Amazon's Bedrock generative AI models, as well as Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini, the company said.

Lane said that for agentic AI to work effectively for a marketer's digital advertising, the AI needs robust frameworks and structures to operate within, connections to all major media platforms, and for everything to be integrated into a single system.

He said these factors make Fluency well-positioned to be "the premium platform for agentic" AI in the digital ads space.

Check out the pitch deck Fluency used to secure its $40 million Series A investment, shared exclusively with Business Insider. Some of the slides have been omitted or redacted.

Fluency describes itself as the 'digital advertising operating system.'

Its platform uses artificial intelligence to help agencies and brands manage digital ads.

Fluency says it manages around $3 billion in annual ad spend.

Fluency says it's well-positioned in the digital ad market.

Fluency says marketer budgets are shifting from analog to digital. There's also a proliferation of new channels, although spending is concentrated among the major platforms, such as Google and Meta.

Complexity creates challenges for marketers.

Fluency says marketers often use "point solutions" that don't interact with each other, which can also bring in issues around compliance and performance.

Fluency further outlines the challenges.

Fluency says ad strategists often have to cobble together several different tech solutions to handle tasks like targeting or reviewing campaign performance.

Fluency explains how it addresses the challenges.

Fluency's platform aims to address these concerns as a kind of "one-stop shop" across various channels.

Fluency says its platform makes marketers' digital advertising more efficient.

Its founding team built an in-house adtech solution for their first company, Dealer.com.

Dealer.com was acquired by Dealertrack Technologies in 2014 for approximately $1 billion.

Fluency lists some of its key attributes.

Those attributes include a blue-chip client base and high customer-retention rates.

Fluency outlines the size of the digital ad market.

Global ad spend is expected to cross $1 trillion in 2027, according to the consulting firm Winterberry Group.

Brands are shifting more of their digital advertising in-house.

Fluency describes the evolving agency landscape.

There's been a shift in budgets from big agency holding companies to independent agencies, though smaller firms have constrained resources, Fluency says.

Fluency outlines the market opportunity.

Fluency says its "serviceable addressable market" is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11%, reaching $6.4 billion by 2028.

This slide compares Fluency to other adtech.

Fluency says its platform serves agencies and brands better than agency-developed tech, in-house channel management, legacy omni-channel tools, and point solutions.

Fluency describes how its operating system connects.

The slide showcases how the Fluency platform integrates a marketer's own data, big media platforms, and DSPs using AI automation to manage campaigns and assess their performance.

Fluency says its platform delivers returns for clients.

Fluency says its tools can save customers time, improve ad performance, and boost their revenue.

• Shiloh Luckey founded a tax-compliance startup and has a popular TikTok channel where she gives financial advice.
• She raised a $5.5 million seed round led by Craft Ventures, the VC cofounded by investor and White House advisor David Sacks.
• Luckey is under federal criminal investigation for alleged fraud and is also being investigated by the SEC.

Shiloh Luckey, founder and former CEO of ComplYant, a Los-Angeles-based tax-compliance startup that raised more than $13 million from top venture capitalists, is under federal criminal investigation for alleged securities and bank fraud, according to court filings.

In a civil complaint, the SEC has charged Luckey with violating securities laws for using millions of dollars of company funds to pay for her home, Super Bowl tickets, and a destination wedding in the Caribbean. The SEC alleges she painted a rosy picture of the company's booming revenue when ComplYant never brought in more than $620 in monthly revenue.

Reached by telephone, Luckey said, "I don't have anything to offer you," and hung up.

Startups face far less regulatory scrutiny than public companies, and founders sometimes present overly optimistic growth stories while VCs rush to fund hot companies with limited diligence. After high-profile scandals like Theranos and FTX, regulators have taken a tougher line.

"Startup founders cannot fake it until they make it by falsifying revenue metrics," SEC regional director Monique Winkler warned in a statement. Recent cases, including the seven-year prison sentence for Charlie Javice and fraud charges against Mozaic Payments' former CEO Marcus Cobb, show that regulators are increasingly willing to pursue criminal and civil penalties for these founders.

Luckey, who formerly went by Shiloh Johnson, founded ComplYant in 2019 to help small businesses navigate the labyrinth of tax regulations from state to state. In 2022, the company closed a $5.5 million seed round led by Craft Ventures, the San Francisco venture firm cofounded by the investor and White House advisor David Sacks.

A spokeswoman for Craft did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI and SEC declined to comment.

Luckey hired more than 50 employees, and when ComplYant abruptly shut down last year, she severed contact with them. It took seven weeks for all employees to get their final paychecks and some discovered 401(k) contributions were missing, as Business Insider previously reported. Luckey was informed in April of this year that she was under federal criminal investigation by the FBI and the United States Attorney's Office for securities and bank fraud, according to a recent petition she filed to pause the civil case against her.

In that case, filed in October, the SEC alleges Luckey routinely misled investors.

"Luckey painted a rosy picture for investors of ComplYant's business performance, allegedly telling investors that ComplYant's monthly revenues had grown from around $2,500 in November 2020 to over $250,000 by September 2022, and that the company was bringing in dozens if not hundreds of new paying subscribers each month," the SEC said in a statement. "However, ComplYant only generated on average monthly revenues of about $250 during roughly the same time period and averaged fewer than four new subscribers each month."

Luckey also represented herself as a CPA, but there is no record of her ever having the accreditation, according to the complaint.

The SEC says she allegedly siphoned off $2.2 million for trips to Aspen, Miami Beach, Turks and Caicos, and Lisbon, and used the funds to pay for her Caribbean wedding, her car, and house.

Luckey, who is representing herself in court, has not responded to the SEC allegations.

Since ComplYant shut down last year, Luckey has continued to post instructional videos with advice for taxes and accounting on her TikTok channel with nearly 24,000 subscribers.

In October, records show, she launched a new startup called HabitLoop, which she describes as a digital financial assistant to help people manage their money.

"I grew up with very poor financial habits," Luckey said in a video introducing her latest company as inspired by a lifetime of spending beyond her means.

"This is something I built on hard lessons," she said.

• Howard Marks warned that the AI hype is fueling risky "moonshot" bets on startups with no profits.
• He says most AI newcomers will fail — and prefers tech giants that can absorb the shift.
• The Oaktree Capital cofounder added that new tech rarely guarantees profits for investors.

Legendary investor Howard Marks has seen enough manias to know when a bubble is brewing.

On the "We Study Billionaires" podcast last Saturday, the billionaire and cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management said he is alarmed by how many investors are piling into speculative startups in hopes of landing the next trillion-dollar winner.

"Do you want to have a novel entrepreneurial startup pure play which has no revenues and no profits today, but could be a moonshot if it works?" he asked.

"Or do you want to invest in a great tech company, which is already existing and making a lot of money where AI could be incremental but not life-changing? It's a choice."

Too many investors, he said, are treating AI like a lottery where the slim chance of a jackpot overshadows the far greater likelihood of failure.

"People say, 'Well, they have a low probability of success, but maybe a big payoff, so I should buy it.' That's what I call lottery-ticket mentality," he said.

A familiar bubble pattern

Marks has been sounding this warning for months.

In a 2023 conversation with financial historian Edward Chancellor on Oaktree's "Behind the Memo" series, he put it bluntly: "AI will change the world," he said, predicting that most of the companies that people are investing in today for AI purposes "will end up worthless."

On the "We Study Billionaires" podcast, Marks said he sees echoes of the dot-com era: a groundbreaking technology, sky-high expectations, and a growing assumption that early movers will inevitably dominate.

"Most bubbles are around something new," he said, pointing to the growth-stock boom of 1969, the subprime-mortgage mania of 2006, the dot-com bubble in 1999, the 1720 South Sea Bubble, and even the Tulip Craze of 1636 in the Netherlands.

Such moments, he added, arise because "the imagination is untrammelled, and it can go off in a flight of fancy."

In reality, he said, most early-stage companies don't survive the transition from promise to profitability.

"On the AI, I'm led to believe that you can make binary bets in companies that have nothing else going on, which will be sink-or-swim bets, or you can invest in pre-existing great tech companies, which will get moderate benefits from AI if they're successful."

Why Marks prefers tech giants over AI pure plays

Rather than gamble on moonshots, Marks said he'd rather own stocks in established tech titans that are already generating profits — companies that can integrate AI as an incremental advantage rather than a life-or-death proposition.

He contrasted those firms with the fragile AI startups drawing hype, saying that Big Tech is positioned to reap some benefits from AI, even if the technology rolls out more slowly or unevenly than hoped.

But a breakthrough in productivity doesn't automatically translate into investment gains.

"Change the world and investors making money are not the same thing."

Marks echoed a warning Warren Buffett issued at Berkshire Hathaway's 2000 annual meeting, when Buffett warned that the internet stock mania had detached valuations from underlying profit potential — a mistake he believes investors are repeating with AI.

"I think the same is true of AI," he said.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.