Managing a team with clashing personalities can be one of the toughest challenges for any leader, but it’s entirely possible to navigate interpersonal conflict and build cohesion among team members with different points of view. Here, experts in team management and organizational psychology offer proven methods for fostering collaboration and productivity among a group with differing personalities.
Create Ritual and Name the Storm
Conflict is not a red flag. In healthy, high-performing teams, it is a sign that people are engaged and care about the outcome. The real challenge is not avoiding conflict, it’s knowing how to move through it without damaging trust.
One of the most effective approaches we use is teaching leaders to create ritual and name the stormnot just more meetings or surface-level check-ins.
Ritual, in this case, means building a steady, predictable space on the calendar where teams can name what is working, what is hard, and what they need from each other. These moments become an outlet, a way to lower the pressure before it turns into resentment. They also create psychological safety and permission to tell the truth.
But ritual alone is not enough. Leaders also have to name the storm when it hits. That means calling out what is being felt, even if it is uncomfortable. If tension is building, say it. If something feels off, bring it forward. People do not need every answer, but they do need honesty, presence, and leadership that does not avoid the hard part.
In one team, two high-performing colleagues were consistently clashing. Their conflict was showing up in meetings, in Slack messages, and in how others tiptoed around them. We introduced a shared practice and helped them kick it off. Each person filled out three prompts:
What am I working on that you may not fully see or understand?
What do I appreciate about how you work?
What is the one thing that would help us work better together?
After a brief facilitated start to break the ice, they took it from there. There was no pressure to agree, just space to be honest. That first conversation shifted everything. The issue was not really personality; it was stress, misread intentions, and both of them feeling unseen. Once the story underneath the conflict was named, the energy changed.
The strongest cultures are not built on agreement. They are built on rhythm, repair, and the courage to face what is real. Ritual provides structure. Naming the storm offers relief. Together, they create the kind of trust that holds when things get hard.
And trust is not a soft skill; it is the foundation of every healthy culture and every company that intends to grow.
Lena McDearmid, Founder & CEO, Wryver
Use a 3-Step Process for Personality Clashes
I am very skeptical of personality testing, but I do think most people are self-aware of their own personality “types.” So, when my clients or teams have had persistent personality clashes, we resolve them in a three-step process.
The conversation is done in a group, but everyone knows the questions in advance. Each person answers a set of questions about themselves, their strengths, weaknesses, and triggers (see the list below). We all answer each question before going to the next so that at each step everyone dwells within that topic together.
Others in the group may ask questions during that process. They may also point out when someone is being dishonest (like by saying their weakness is working too hard or some other deflecting nonsense).
Then each person identifies a way in which they are likely to annoy or trigger someone else. This can be very specific and personal. One person may say, “I have a bad habit of interrupting. It probably annoys John.”
Next, everyone identifies a strategy for getting themselves “un-hooked” when someone else in the group annoys them. For instance, John from the example above might say, “I will allow the interruption and then finish my thought and point out that I prefer not to be interrupted.”
And finally, everyone commits to a specific strategy for reducing or stopping the behavior they have learned is most irksome to one or more peers. The person above might say, “I will focus on letting others complete their thoughts and catch myself before interrupting.”
The process works on lots of levels. Everyone learns more about each other and themselves. Plus, each person is equally vulnerable when they identify some trait of their own that is annoying or discourteous. That shared humanity creates more charitable feelings toward each other. And of course, the strategies to both be less annoying and less annoyed help with the ongoing conflicts.
Pretty soon, they are jumping in to help each other succeed in their behavior change goals. After all, most of us have annoying traits or habits. It’s easier to change yourself if everyone is working on their own bad habits with you.The questions to ask:
What is your greatest strength as a person and professional?
What are your greatest weaknesses personally and professionally?
What three behaviors (in others) most annoy or trigger you?
What habit or behavioral trait of yours is most likely to annoy or frustrate others?
Amie Devero, President, Beyond Better Strategy and Coaching
Apply Improvisation to Foster Team Cohesion
One of the most effective and unexpectedly transformative approaches we’ve found for navigating interpersonal conflict and strengthening team cohesion is applied improvisation. As a firm championing collaborative methods, we seek tools that foster deeper connections across diverse teams. Applied improv is an underutilized approach that consistently surprises leaders with its impact.
Unlike traditional conflict resolution strategies, improv invites team members to engage in low-stakes, playful activities encouraging listening, empathy, and trust. Through exercises rooted in “Yes, and . . .” thinking, participants suspend judgment, build on ideas, and stay presentskills that lead to effective communication and collaboration.
In one engagement, we worked with a leadership team where two department heads had long-standing tension. Rather than forcing another structured mediation, we led a short improv session exploring shared dynamics. One exercise where each person added a line to a spontaneous story shifted the atmosphere. Laughter replaced tension, and both leaders later reflected that it helped them “hear each other without the baggage.” From there, communication opened and collaboration followed.
The beauty of applied improv lies in its simplicity and emotional intelligence. It fosters psychological safety, invites creativity, and models inclusive behaviors that drive strong teams. In a world where diverse perspectives are a company’s greatest asset, improv helps people move past personal differences to co-create something greater.
For teams exploring this approach, it’s key to start with the right mindset. Improv in’t about fixing conflict; it’s about creating shared experiences that build trust. Framing sessions as a chance to play and grow together helps lower defenses.
Simple activities like collaborative storytelling or mirroring break the ice quickly. These aren’t about performance; they’re about presence, support, and attunement. What starts as laughter often uncovers deeper dynamics in a way that feels safe to explore.
Leaders should embrace discomfortit signals authentic engagement. When they model vulnerability and playfulness, others follow. Reflecting afterward on how the experience felt and what lessons apply to daily work helps cement lasting change.
In sensitive cases, a skilled facilitator ensures the space remains supportive. But in nearly any setting, applied improvisation offers something rare: a joyful, humanizing path to stronger teams.
Tyler Butler, Founder, Collaboration for Good
Leverage Group Activities to Bridge Generational Gaps
Leadership often tests you in uncertain ways. Clashing personalities within teams can be most challenging. It becomes even more complex when you factor in generational differences. Approximately 70% of our workforce is Gen Z, with the remaining 30% being millennials. Interestingly, we have talented young leaders heading entire teams.
Now, when it comes to differences in handling teams, Gen Zers tend to value immediate feedback, rapid decision-making, and direct communication. Millennials often prefer more structured processes and elaborate planning. For instance, when a 23-year-old team lead wants to pivot a product strategy based on user feedback, and a 32-year-old senior developer pushes for more comprehensive testing phases, you get real friction.
Most companies default to HR interventions or formal one-on-ones when these conflicts arise. But here’s what I’ve discovered: Those sterile conference room discussions rarely address the underlying issue, which is often just a lack of genuine understanding between different working styles. Instead, we’ve built our conflict resolution around sports and wellness. We often organize group runs and yoga sessions, and quarterly, we participate in marathons as a company. Here’s why this works better than traditional approaches.
During our weekend 10K runs, I’ve watched that same Gen Z team lead and millennial developer naturally start discussing their different perspectives. Without the pressure of deadlines or the formality of meeting rooms, they began understanding each other’s motivations. The younger lead realized that the developer’s cautious approach came from having seen rushed launches fail spectacularly. The developer understood that the lead’s urgency was driven by genuine user pain points.
Physical activity releases endorphins, reduces stress hormones, and creates positive shared experiences. People return to work having seen each other as humans first, colleagues second. What traditional team-building misses is that it’s still work-adjacent. The result? The two individuals now collaborate seamlessly, with the developer’s thoroughness balancing the lead’s speed. Real understanding beats formal intervention every time.
Anjan Pathak, Co-founder, Vantage Fit
Reframe Conflicts to Facilitate Team Understanding
Clashing personalities on your team can be a tough challenge for even the most experienced leader. The field of counseling and psychology can provide some insightful approaches to help navigate this often challenging team dynamic. One of the most simple yet powerful interventions that a leader can implement to help facilitate cohesion and respect is the ability to reframe.
All business leaders know that stories are immensely powerful; they can help you sell a computer, negotiate a contract, and build lasting relationships. Your ability to “reframe” an interpersonal conflict on your team allows you to take control of the narrative and create a picture that can offer more cohesion and assist your team as a whole.
I am a board member of a team that consists of a lead engineer and an attorney. Both are strong and opinionated personalities in their own right, and there was an instance where we were all on a fundraising call and the attorney was hesitant to answer a question, which left the engineer livid. After the call, the two of them went at itdismissing one another and criticizing the other’s approach. They were both telling themselves “a story” that the call was a disaster. It was evident to me that they were coming from two different perspectives and that all three of us were feeling the pressure to succeed.
I drew upon my experience as a psychotherapist and was mindful not to “split” or take sides and instead find a creative way to reframe this situation. So, I chose to reframe that instead of “being a disaster,” this interaction was exactly what the prospective funder needed to hear. I specified, “He needed to hear that our engineering team was on point and ready to roll, and that our legal team was a risk management superpower and that both voices were critical in ensuring trust, efficacy, and overall professionalism, even if the two perspectives were seemingly ‘at odds’ with one another.”
Although this reframe did not repair every emotion that they were experiencing, or create a Zen circle of transcendent bonding, it did allow both of them to come back to the table and continue creative problem-solving together.
Louis Laves-Webb, LCSW-S, LPC-S, Psychotherapist/CEO, Louis Laves-Webb, LCSW-S, LPC-S & Associates
Study Behavioral Patterns Beneath Personality Clashes
When people talk about “clashing personalities,” they’re usually describing something else. In my experience, it’s often a lack of shared language around pressure and power, and sometimes even belonging.
I tell others not to rush to resolve the tension but to study it. Look for the behavioral loops playing out beneath the conflict. Observe those roles people are unconsciously taking on (e.g., the protector, the performer, the fixer, or the ghost), and the threat they’re responding to. Once you see that, the clash becomes a pattern, and patterns can be interrupted.
One approach I’ve used is to pause the task and invite each person to describe how they’re experiencing the room but not what they think of each other. That alone shifts the dynamic from judgment to self-awareness.
Sometimes someone will say, “I feel like I’m being evaluated,” or, “I don’t know how to contribute without stepping on toes.” I tell them these aren’t personality traits. They’re more like survival strategies.
Cohesion isn’t built by getting people to like each other. It’s more often built when people stop performing and start participating. And that only happens when the system makes space for complexity and when leaders make it safe to be wrong, to not know, and to shift roles.
My mindset? If it feels messy, you’re probably on the right track. Clarity doesn’t come before discomfort.It comes after. That isn’t intuitive. It’s hard. But the best strategies usually are.
Stephen Belenky, Co-founder & Chief Solutions Architect, Hiddn LLC
Shift Focus from Ego to Shared Purpose
Managing clashing personalities isn’t just about resolving conflict but rather about unlocking collective potential. One approach I’ve found effective is shifting the conversation from “Who’s right?” to “What do we need to create together?” That small shift reframes the dynamic from ego to purpose.
A few years ago, I led a cross-functional, multicultural team in developing an extensive executive master class. None of us had worked together before, the project was brand new, the timeline was tight, and we were fully remote. Let’s just say the personality mix wasn’t smooth. The lead designer was fast-moving and visionary. The content strategist was deeply reflective and needed space to process. The graphics designer was opinionated and on their own creative clock. Tension wasn’t just expected; it arrived early and loudly.
I realized the risk wasn’t open disagreement, but one voice dominating and others retreating. So instead of pushing through or trying to fix personalities, I hit pause. We ran a no-nonsense values alignment session where each person named what they needed to do their best work. That surfaced something powerful. We all cared deeply about excellence and success, but had radically different definitions of what that meant.
From there, we co-created team agreements. These weren’t platitudes, but real, operational norms such as “share early, polish later,” “ask before assuming,” “silence doesn’t mean agreement,” and so on. Within two weeks, the friction transformed into flow. People understood each other’s rhythms, respected communication preferences, and trusted that everyone brought something vital to the table. We delivered ahead of schedule, but more importantly, we built a culture that didn’t just tolerate differences but thrived on them.
Diverse personalities aren’t a problem to fix; they’re the foundation of a thriving team. But diversity alone isn’t enough. Trust and respect must be earned, and that only happens when each person brings meaningful value to the table. When someone doesn’t contribute, it’s not a personality issue but a clarity and accountability one. The key is creating a culture where every voice is heard, every strength is activated, and everyone understands what we’re building together.
Maria Papacosta, Co-founder, MSC Marketing Bureau
Design for Friction in Team Dynamics
One thing I’ve learned is that you can’t fix personality clashes, but you can create conditions where they don’t get in the way of progress.
I manage both marketing and sales teams, which are typically driven by very different personalities, and once we had a situation where two team leads from those respective teams just fundamentally rubbed each other the wrong way. Every cross-functional sync became a turf war, even when they were both technically right.
Trying to mediate doesn’t always work on people. What worked instead was reworking the structure of how they interacted. We reduced direct one-on-one confrontation, shifted their collaboration into shared documents and asynchronous updates, and made KPIs [key performance indicators] the neutral ground. Instead of trying to get them to like each otherwe aren’t in elementary schoolwe focused on letting them work effectively despite the tension.
Over time, that asynchronization lowered the emotional temperature. Their styles never matched, but they could respect each other’s results. The team dynamic improved not because we solved the clash, but because we stopped forcing harmony and started designing for friction.
Andrew Byzov, CMO & HOS, AcademyOcean
Clarify Roles to Prevent Misunderstandings
One thing I do at the start of every project is have everyone write down what they think their job is, and then what they think everyone else should be doing. Then we sit around and read it all aloud. It sounds weird and awkward, I know, but how incredibly revealing it is totally compensates for everything.
I had one campaign a few months ago where a strategist and copywriter kept butting heads. She thought he was stepping on her toes, and he felt like she was micromanaging him. When we did this exercise, we found they both thought they were supposed to create the messaging framework. Nobody had ever actually said who was handling what, so they were both doing the same work and getting frustrated.
Once we talked it through, everything calmed down. We figured out who would handle the framework and who would execute it, and agreed to touch base after the first draft, instead of just passing documents back and forth with no real communication.
This takes extra time up front, but it prevents weeks of people working against each other. I’ve done it with design teams, SEO folks, and even video crews. It lets everyone get their expectations out in the open before things get stressful.
And the funny thing is, people are usually relieved when you do this. Everyone’s been wondering about the same boundaries, but nobody wants to be the one to bring it up.
Austin Heaton, Head of Content, Rise
Establish Minimum Viable Alignment for Progress
Minimum viable alignmentI borrowed this concept from Adam Grant, who insists that people don’t need to agree on everything. They just need to agree on what matters most.
Two of our content strategists couldn’t agree. One was obsessed with user data and couldn’t help keeping tabs on Google Search Console and Hotjar. The other was more instinctive. She cared more about the tone and wanted to rely on her gut feeling.
They had the same KPIs but completely different approaches. Monday meetings were passive-aggressive, and it started getting out of hand. I asked them, “If this project were to go south, what would you blame it on?” One said ignoring data. The other said over-optimizing. I asked them to give me a shared list of three non-negotiables.
Two months later, we got better content for our website. Yes, they still disagreed, but this time it was productive. Their list gave us the best-performing blog series we had ever published. Get people to agree on enough to move forward and leave the rest.
Andrew Juma, Chief Executive Officer, CustomWritings.com
Observe Unspoken Cues in Team Interactions
I always pay close attention to what is not being said. Reactions, subtle shifts, and silence often reveal what wods do not.
During a recent huddle, several issues surfaced at once. The project manager was trying to show initiative and push the team forward. The developer, who was new to the project, didn’t have space to speak and shut down. The manager jumped in and took over the conversation. That was the moment I stepped in and paused the meeting.
I brought everyone back to where we actually stood in the project. I asked the PM to explain why those features were important to her. Then I turned to the developer and asked directly for his perspective. When he got interrupted again, I stopped the conversation and said, “I asked for his opinion.”
That shifted the tone in the room. From that point on, the team communicated more openly and respectfully.
I stay emotionally present and aware. I watch how people react, not just what they say. When I sense tension or someone being shut down, I force a pause, set structure and boundaries, and make sure people have the space to contribute. That’s what creates clarity, safety, and trust.
Lila Diavati, Managing Director, Momencio
Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S., but a long-standing and effective anti-smoking ad campaign that brought that number down is now ending.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Tips From Former Smokers” ads will stop airing at the end of September due to a reorganization that eliminates or reassigns the agency’s work on chronic disease, according to CBS News, which first reported the ad campaign’s upcoming discontinuation. The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.
Launched in 2012, the “Tips From Former Smokers” public service announcements featured testimonials from real-life former smokers who shared their personal experiences. Their heartfelt calls to action encouraged viewers that they could quit too, like the message from Terrie, a North Carolina woman who spoke with the assistance of an electronic voice box. The former smokers in the PSAs opened up about health issues that resulted from years of smoking: cancer, gum disease, heart disease, HIV complications, and stroke. They were convincing.
[Image: CDC]
A rare combo: effective and universally liked
The first ads in the series aired for just four months, at a cost of $48 million, but they had a high return on investment. The CDC says about 1 million people successfully quit because of the campaign, making its cost only $480 per smoker who quit. The campaign was estimated to have saved $7.3 billion in healthcare sector costs and prevented 129,100 premature deaths by 2018.
The ads are also popular. An August Ipsos poll found 72% of Americans believe “television, online, and print advertisements aimed at reducing smoking or encouraging people to quit smoking are important,” though that varies by party affiliation. Democrats (82%) and Republicans (71%) are more likely to say they’re important than independents (67%). Still, a majority of those polled in each party agreed that such advertisements are important.
[Screenshot: CDC]
The Federal health system’s budget up in smoke
The end of the CDC’s anti-smoking PSAs will come amid major downsizing and reorganization at the agency, which is seeing layoffs, firings, and mass resignations over anti-vaccine policies under Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Former CDC director Susan Monarez was fired last week after opposing Kennedy’s vaccine policy changes, and other top CDC officials have resigned, too, saying Kennedy is endangering Americans’ health.
The end of “Tips From Former Smokers” isn’t the only thing the U.S. health system is losing under the second Trump administration. A new HHS budget makes cuts to primary care; care for mental and behavioral health, HIV/AIDS, environmental health, and maternal and child health; and the health workforce. And last month, the National Crime Prevention Council began selling “Take a Bite Out of DOGE” merch featuring McGruff the Crime Dog in order to raise money after Department of Government Efficiency cuts forced the nonprofit organization to put a public service announcement on hold amid an anti-fentanyl campaign.
The anti-smoking campaign’s end, though, is great news for tobacco companies. A study published in the Journal of Smoking Cessation in 2022 found “Tips From Former Smokers” wasn’t only good at convincing people to stop smokingit also helped former smokers from relapsing.
I remember a time when designing felt like speaking a secret language, a series of precise clicks and drags that, while powerful, felt more technical than fluid. Over the past three decades the evolution of design interfaces has been a journey from pixels to objects to conceptseach step abstracting away technical complexity and bringing us closer to pure creative intent.
For years, the drag-and-drop interface has reigned supreme, democratizing design in ways we could only dream of before. But we’re now at a fascinating inflection point where the very nature of designing is evolving and giving way to something even more profound.
Consider how a marketing manager can now type, “Create an Instagram story that captures the energy of our summer product launch,” and watch as AI generates multiple design directions in secondsthen continue the conversation to refine colors, adjust messaging, or explore different moods, all while collaborating with teammates who can contribute feedback in real-time.
AI isnt just saving time on edits, it’s ushering in a paradigm where intent becomes the primary input, and natural language is the key that unlocks your first draft. This shift liberates us from the minutiae of technical execution, allowing us to focus on the truly visionary and strategic aspects of our work.
This is what the researchers at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business call “generative synesthesia.” The harmonious blending of human exploration and AI exploitation to discover new creative workflows represents a fundamental shift in how we approach creativity. Analyzing datasets of over 4 million artworks, these researchers showed that text-to-image AI significantly enhances human creative productivity by 25% and increases the value of creative work by 50%.
Beyond Text Boxes and Chat Interfaces To the Human as Creative Director
While conversational interfaces are powerful starting points, the future of creative collaboration with AI goes far beyond text prompts. When you’re working with design, art, or music, it’s quite hard to think of the words to describe what you want to see, hear, or feelparticularly if you’re not skilled in those fields. Thinking of words for something you can’t even describe? That’s frustrating.
We’re already seeing this evolution in action. In design products today, you can click on individual elements within an image and AI automatically recognizes what you’ve selectedwhether it’s a background, a person, or a specific objectand offers contextual editing options without requiring any text description. This automatic element recognition is just the beginning of more intuitive design interactions.
That’s why I believe we’re moving toward hybrid experiences that blend conversation with direct manipulation. In practice, this might look like pointing at a section of your design and saying aloud, “Make this area feel more energetic,” while AI understands both the visual context of what you’re indicating and the emotional direction you want. You might start with natural language to establish direction, then use visual references to refine style, then return to conversation for iterations. The interface adapts to how creativity actually worksfluid, non-linear, and iterative.
Consider a workflow where you upload a reference image, circle the part you like with your finger or cursor, and simply say “Apply this mood to my brand colors.” AI instantly understands the visual element you’re referencing and translates it into actionable design changes. These augmented tools let people work the way they think, not the way software traditionally demands.
With these improvements to the way we interact with software, more people can now become creative directors while AI handles technical implementation. When AI can generate a dozen design variations in seconds, humans can focus on the higher-order creative decisions: Which direction best serves the vision? How does this connect emotionally with the audience? What story are we trying to tell?
This shift mirrors how other creative industries have evolved. Film directors don’t operate cameras, they focus on vision, storytelling, and creative direction while specialized teams handle technical execution. AI is becoming that specialized technical team for visual creation and opening up a whole new world of possibilities for the 99% of the world who havent been able to access it before.
The result is a new kind of creative leverage. A single person with a compelling vision can now execute ideas that previously required entire teams. But more importantly, the barrier between having an idea and seeing it realized becomes almost transparent.
AI as Augmented Creativity
The most important paradigm shift for designers and anyone embracing visual communication will be the shift from design tools to design intelligence. Instead of simply assisting with a starting point or end refinement, teams will be able to leverage AI as an intelligent thought partner thats versed in what truly works.
Imagine how a tool thats trained on a vast database of brand assets will shape future design workflows. When coming up with a new campaign you can accelerate the foundational work of gathering existing brand assets, successful competitor strategies, and audience response data and verify your visual directions against that. Or rather than spending hours debating color palettes, AI will be able to instantly generate variations based on proven effectiveness for similar brands and audiences, using insights like “layouts with this visual hierarchy achieve higher engagement in B2B contexts” or “this color combination consistently builds trust with healthcare audiences.”
This intelligence will extend to scaling tactical design decisions. Instead of designers manually crafting numerous layout variations, they can use their tool of choice to generate multiple compositions based on successful patterns from their previous work or industry peers. When selecting typography, ather than scrolling through countless font options, AI will recommend specific typefaces that have performed well for similar messaging and audiences, explaining why certain letterforms communicate trustworthiness while others convey innovation.
The Collaborative Promise of Design Intelligence
There’s a desire to view creativity in black and white terms: either it’s AI-generated or human-made. But work exists on a spectrum, with varying degrees of AI influence, from completely human-generated content to fully automated production. Those tight collaborative loops will ultimately shape how we work in an AI-powered world.
The skills we need will evolve as well. A skill that a select few of us deployed yesterday now becomes crucial today: editing. As AI generates vast amounts of content, the human editor’s role is to fine-tune outputs, ensuring messaging is on-brand, culturally sensitive, and emotionally engaging. The editor’s experience and understanding of the audience plays a crucial role in transforming AI-generated content into something that truly resonates.
As AI continues to evolve, I see a future where every person has unprecedented creative agency and where having an idea and bringing it to life becomes part of the same fluid, joyful process. This future is where the tools we use are as intuitive as thought itself.
A client once confessed, At least half of every training dollar we spend is wastedwe just dont know which half.
This is a sobering reality. In 2024, research from the Association of Talent Development found that the average organization spent $1,283 per employee on workplace learning. From university programs to leadership courses, and customized programs to team retreats, it seems weve tried it all. Unfortunately, much of that investment fails to deliver, or worse, backfires.
Weve seen how this plays out. Whether that be mandatory DEI initiatives that trigger more backlash than inclusion, to mindfulness programs that only frustrate already chronically overworked employees, learning and development (L&D) programs can be a double-edged sword.
In a reality where companies have constrained training budgets and AI looms over the future of work, leaders are under pressure to upskill their teams (and quickly). However, another “flavor of the month” workshop isnt going to cut it.
So how do you create a training program that drives lasting change? First, we need to start by understanding why these programs so often fail. Here are six common reasons why, and what you need to do to get it right.
1. There is no strategic anchor
Training without a clear link to strategic objectives is just noise. You should have absolute clarity on what skills and knowledge are necessary for your people to achieve business-critical outcomes. A pilots or surgeons training is life-and-death. Can you say the same about your emotional intelligence workshops? If not, start by defining the mission-critical skills your leaders must master. Everything else is a distraction.
2. Leaders arent walking the walk
If senior leadership isn’t modeling the behaviors youre teaching, its going to create a credibility gap and kill adoption. If leaders preach one thing but their actions actually indicate otherwise, your training can do more harm than good. Thats why its important to ensure that leaders are active participants in training and the company holds them to the same (or higher) standards. Senior leaders need to model the way and visibly demonstrate desired behaviors, or they risk losing credibility.
3. Misdiagnosing the problem
Training wont solve systemic problems. Mindfulness in an understaffed healthcare system wont cure burnout. Leadership workshops wont help if there isnt a clear strategy. Diagnose before you prescribe. Get to the root cause first, asking: Is this a skills gap or a systems gap?
4. Culture kills content
Peter Drucker’s famous quote, Culture eats strategy for breakfast, applies here. If you dont align your training with performance management, promotion criteria, and daily operations, the old habits (which famously die hard) will persist. This is when culture often overrides training investments. To solve this, review and embed training goals into existing systems (like performance reviews and succession plans) so they stick.
5. Lack of clarity and consistency
Employees need a consistent and coherent framework with clear applicability to their on-the-job behaviors. Switching between “radical candor” one month to crucial conversation only serves to create confusion if you dont incorporate them in your daily routines. So pick a framework and identify behaviors that you can measure, then stick with it and build it into daily practices.
6. No ROI on impact
Measuring impact and behavior change is hard if you dont know what youre measuring. Without clear definitions and metrics, you cant see your training ROI. Understand before you launch what metrics will indicate program successis it engagement, retention, promotion readiness, improved team behaviors, customer outcomes? Get clarity, and start tracking from the outset.
What high-performing organizations do differently
High-performing organizations know that training is an ongoing system, not a one-off event. To do this, they align, act, and auditlinking training initiatives to strategic imperatives, ensuring these are delivering well and are well-embedded, and continue to measure training impact after completion of the program.
With the plethora of information at our fingertips, its easy to be swept up in the latest workshop hype. However, when it comes to sustainable behavior change, there is no such thing as a quick win. If you want workplace training that works, you need to focus on consistent and intentional alignment. And over time, your organization will start to reap the results.
Chipotle would like to be invited over for dinner.
The Newport Beach, California-based fast-casual chain is going DIY mode with “Build-Your-Own Chipotle,” a takeout, digital-only menu item meant to feed four to six people. For Chipotle, the build-your-own meal is about delivering value and speed at a time when competition over consumer dollars for out-of-home meals is fierce and getting fiercer, and it benefits from a base emotion: guilt.
The Build-Your-Own Chipotle meal comes with eight tortillas, two bags of chips, plus other toppings, as well as salsas, rice, and beans for about the price of six burritos. The chain says it can be ready to pick up in as little as 15 minutes. Customers can pick everything from their choice of protein to either guac or queso blancobut the BYOC meal is only available to order on the chain’s app or website.
Building on what works
The menu item aligns with Chipotle’s future plans to iterate on what’s already working. In the company’s July earnings call, the chain reported quarterly revenue of $3.1 billion, a growth of 3% year over year. But it also saw a 4% drop in its comparable sales and expects comparable sales to be flat for the rest of the year due to consumer volatility. In other words, the company is adding stores and growing, but existing stores are seeing sales fall.
[Photo: Chipotle]
The value of faster food at home
Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright said on the earnings call that the company’s value proposition of a burrito or burrito bowl that sells for less than $10 before taxes and fees in most markets was something they would build on. “Going forward, we will roll out new and creative ways to emphasize our value proposition while improving the benefit of our offering through better execution, menu innovation, and amplifying our rewards program,” he said.
The chain’s new offering might create increased sales from existing customers by convincing someone who orders Chipotle for lunch once a week to pick it up for dinner, too.
But the strategy here is about more than just the price. The DIY model also might make this takeout meal easier on the conscience. Just as Betty Crocker saw cake mix sales rise after requiring customers to add an egg, Chipotle might be able to sell even more burritos if it offers some as BYOC kit ingredients instead of a ready-to-eat product. It doesn’t feel like fast food if you make it at home. It’s family dinner.
Good news for Donald Judd fans: The renovation of his Marfa, Texas, architecture office is now complete.
The two-story brick building built in 1907 looks almost exactly as Judd left it when he died in 1994, but now it features environmentally conscious building methods, some contemporary and some traditional, including energy-efficient windows, rooftop solar, and a passive cooling technique called night flushing.
Designed by the Houston-based architect Troy Schaum of Schaum Architects and the Donald Judd Foundation, the project illustrates how historic preservation and honoring an artists legacy intersect with the realities of climate change. This is a locally responsive based system of conservation, Schaum says.
[Photo: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation]
A Desert Town Dedicated to Art and Architecture
After moving to Marfa in the 1970s, Judd purchased 22 buildings in the small Chihuahua desert town and transformed them into spaces to live, work, and display art. Among them are a former military complex turned residence and galleries for his large-scale pieces, an adobe house for his paintings and collection of antique Swedish and Shaker furniture, and an old Safeway for his art studio.
Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas. 1993. [Photo: Laura Wilson/courtesy Judd Foundation]
As the towns economy declined and more spaces went up for sale, he purchased them in order to realize his vision of a city where art was everywhere and accessible to anyone. This is what led him to the 5,000-square-foot, brick building he renovated into his architecture office in 1990.
As with most of his architectural work in Marfa, Judd exercised a light touch with his renovations. He sandblasted paint from the exterior, removed anything inside that wasnt original to the building, then brought in tables and desks he designed. The ground floor storefront became a place for him to display architectural drawings and models and receive clients (his architecture studio was in a former bank building across the street); the second floor held apartments.
[Photo: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation]
This was an office with no telephone, no fax, no computerjust a place to look at things on tables, says Flavin Judd, Judds son and the artistic director of the Judd Foundation. While most of Judds work in Marfa was about the town itself, he used this space for European projects he had hoped to build, but never realized like a train station in Basel, Switzerland.
Its a very simple space and it was right next door to the office where his assistants were, Flavin says. The interior wall is brick and you don’t really hang art on a brick wall, so that would indicate the building needs to be for something else. And using it as an office makes a lot of sense.
Historic Preservation with Contemporary Considerations
In the years after Judds passing, the building deteriorated. The structure was boarded up and had a leaky roof that led to significant interior damage. The brick facade had cracked. In his will, the artist left instructions to maintain his properties as he had left them and to open them to the public. But the Judd Foundation recognized that for the long-term health of the building, and greater sense of environmental responsibility, they couldnt just reconstruct everything exactly as it was. Instead, they interpreted what low-impact design means in the context of today.
We’re basically just continuing in a certain sense what Don was doing, says Flavin. The overall kind of ethic for both us and Don and originally was being responsible to past energy spent on building something, to the planet, and for the future.
[Images: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation (photos), John Chamberlain/Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society, New York (artwork)]
The initial work involved retracing Judds steps, then figuring out where to go from there. Fortunately, Schaum and the Foundation had a lot of historic documentation of the building to work with, including photographs from the artists archives as well as from the state of Texas and Marfa Public Library.
Schaum was familiar with the building. He visited the town for the first time in the 1990s and began working with the Judd Foundation on other restoration projects in Marfa in 2013. But working with Judds architecture in the context of restoration led him to more intensely study what made it unique. One of the first things he noticed was how Judd treated the bricks as distinct forms. In addition to sandblasting the paint from the facade, he also raked the mortar between the bricks.
You see a shadow between the brick instead of seeing mortar between the brick, Schaum says. The facade is a series of individual elements of brick sitting next to each other with a shadow in between, which is, in my opinion, a very Judd way of thinking about composition and assembly in that you have one part sitting next to another.
Then, inside Judd had removed plaster from an interior wall to reveal the brick behind it. He left the tin ceilings and wood floors as they were.
[Photos: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation]
Judds practice was one of restraint, of erasure and revealing strategies that opens up the building rather than adding a lot of things to a building, Schaum says. This conceptual underpinning informed Schaums interventions. So how do you restore something without covering up that or without getting in the way of that very subtle revealing that Donald Judd was engaged in his architecture?
Schaum and the Foundation decided to keep as much of the original architecture as they could, working with masonry consultants to repoint the brick to Judds style. But the realities of Texass climate becoming warmer each year led to some modifications. They kept the single-pane storefront windows because of their distinctive hardware and because integrating double-paned glass would have been too big of a departure from the original building. They then applied a low-e coating to block heat from the sun. They also reconstructed the damaged mahogany frames out of Accoya, a responsibly forested engineered wood to avoid using tropical hardwood.
To further protect the storefront from the sun, they added a metal awninga detail that wasnt present during Judds tenure but had existed in previous years. Since the building is in a prominent downtown location and there are larger historic preservation efforts happening in the city of Marfa itself (the National Parks Service listed Central Marfa on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022 and designated a Donald Judd Historic District in the city this year), the design team deemed the addition appropriate.
This [building] is from a time before air-conditioning when if you had big windows in the desert, they were shaded, Flavin says. You didn’t have plate glass, you didn’t have reflective glass, you didn’t have glass buildings. So that simply makes sense.
[Image: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation (photo), John Chamberlain/ Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society, New York (artwork)]
A Climate-Informed Approach
The Judd Foundation experimented with passive cooling strategies to keep the building comfortable instead of relying on artificially cooled air. In the high desert, temperatures reach into the 90s during the day but drop down to the 40s at night. Using the buildings thermal mass and a technique called night flushingwhich floods the interior with cool air at night and vents hor air during the day with fansthey hope theyll be able to keep the interiors cool.
Its an attempt to go back to 19th-century cooling methodswith an eye toward 21st-century apocalypse, Flavin says.
[Image: Matthew Millman/ Judd Foundation (photo), John Chamberlain/Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society, New York (artwork)]
The Foundation will use the upstairs apartments as accommodations, and they decided to install air-conditioning on that level just in case someone needs it. But downstairs, in the spaces that are reserved for Judds work, its all naturally ventilateda departure from conventional conservation practices that typically call for an environment that remains at a stable temperature.
Working with the Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Schaum and the Foundation modeled four-hour intervals of indoor temperature to determine if the archival materials would remain protected even if there were swings into red zones that might negatively impact preservation.
What we’re trying to do is end up in the red zone as little as possible, but not necessarily have perfect stasis, Schaum says. Its a shift in thinking that acknowledges were in a precarious environment. Hes also exploring what passive systems for museums hes working on in New Orleans and India could look like, predicting that the buildings might be affected by power loss due to storms and might have to be self-sufficient for periods of time.
Looking ahead at where the climate’s going, its saying maybe a consumption-based model of conservation is not totally sustainable, Schaum says.
And to cap the project off: The Foundation added rooftop solar to power the building.
In a 1993 interview, Judd said that a good building should embody a certain wholeness, consistency, coherence, attention to the function, attention to what the building is supposed to be for, consideration for the people who work in the building or use it, he said. The restoration and adaptation of the architecture office keeps true to these values in perpetuity. What this work has taught me, and what I always say Donald Judds work teaches me, is a mature architects lesson, Schaum says. It teaches me about restraint and about care.
When Stephanie Downs, cofounder of Uncaged Innovations, a biomaterials startup creating alternatives to animal leathers, learned about the tariffs earlier this year she was forced to add manufacturing outside of the U.S. Since less than 2% of fashion goods are produced in the U.S., all of Uncaged customers are overseas and now enduring a price hike.
Like many startup founders, Downs has had to react and adjust operations and business plans based on geopolitical and economic shifts. Over half of small business leaders report negative impacts of changing tariff and trade policies as of this July, according to the WSJ/Vistage Small Business CEO Confidence Index.
Just as the pandemic forced massive shifts across sectors, todays founders are navigating a new wave of disruptions: tariff uncertainties, declining federal grants, and changing customer behavior. The same index found that two out of five business leaders are reporting delayed orders, as well as longer sales cycles and a more carefully examined buying process. Downs has experienced similar challenges at Uncaged, with some customers canceling orders due to tariffs on materials shipping into China.
Tack and shift
These shifts arent always within a founders controlbut how they respond to them is. Companies that simply freeze in uncertainty often dont survive. Those that tack and shift their approach can manage though, and even take advantage, of the changes.
At Golden Seeds, after two decades of experience investing in early-stage women-led companies, weve come to view this as swerving and its just as criticalif not more sothan the dramatic course corrections that pivots imply.
The art of adapting isnt a one-time decision. Its a continuous process of listening, learning, and iterating. Its important to distinguish between the two concepts.
Think of a swerve as proactive responsiveness. Its when startups pick up on early signalslike customer feedback, market shifts, or changes in funding sourcesand adjust accordingly. They are often smaller, tactical shifts that respond to new data. A pivot, in contrast, usually emerges when the product market fit hasnt been clearly determined or the product is no longer viable. Its a deliberate, and often high-stakes, decision to fundamentally change the product, business model, or target market.
Why Swerving MattersMaybe More Than Pivoting
Every startup swerves. Or at least, every successful one does.
It might not be flashy. It doesnt always make headlines. But its the everyday work of managing a company: testing assumptions, talking to customers, analyzing sales patterns, and adjusting accordingly. Its also what investors are often really betting onnot just the initial idea, but the founders judgment and willingness to adjust when reality doesnt match the original vision.
Failure to swerve can be fatal. Companies that rigidly stick to the original plan, even when its not working, tend to burn through capital and fade away. Remember, hope is not a strategy. If the company isnt making sales targets, find out exactly why.
When the Pivot Is Necessary
Still, sometimes swerving isnt enough. When a startup realizes the product isnt viable or the market has evaporated, its time for a true pivot.
Take BentoBox, for example. Originally a marketing services platform for restaurants, the company saw opportunityand urgencyduring the pandemic. As dining rooms closed, restaurants needed digital tools for online ordering and payments. BentoBox made a do-or-die shift to become a payments and e-commerce platform, ultimately selling for over $300 million.
Lark Health is another notable pivot. Initially a consumer sleep device company, it evolved into an AI-driven nurse platform treating millions of patients struggling with chronic conditions on behalf of health insurers, employers, and PBMs. That transformation didnt happen overnight, but it was a full reinvention that unlocked significant market potential.
These examples highlight another common thread: successful pivots often come from companies that were already good at swerving. They were listening, learning, and adapting all alongso when the time came for a bigger move, they were well positioned to act quickly.
Great founders and teams are constantly testing, refining, and asking hard questions. They sit in on sales calls. They ask why a customer said no. Is it a product issue? Is onboarding taking too long? Does it require too much manual intervention? Is it too expensive? They look for patterns in whats working and whats not. They make small bets, try new features, and critically, know when its time to either double down or switch gears entirely.
They also know how to test demand. In hard tech, for instance, that might mean getting a customer to fund development of a new featurenot just waiting and hoping a sale materializes. That kind of resourcefulness and discipline is what gives a company options when the winds shift.
Advice for Investors and Founders
For angel investors and board members, supporting a startup goes far beyond capitalit’s about recognizing when a company is at an inflection point and helping the team navigate it with clarity and confidence. That means staying close to the business, asking probing questions, and encouraging founders to test their assumptions early and often.
Swervesthose smaller, iterative shiftsshould be a regular topic at the board table, not just in times of crisis. This type of creative and adaptive thinking should be a part of every board meeting. Great investors and advisers recognize that swerving is simply managing a company, its not a sign of failure.
And when a pivot becomes necessary, investors can play a critical role in helping leadership assess whether the product, market, or business model needs to changeand how to communicate that shift to employees, customers, and future funders. Great board members challenge, guide, and help founders course correct before the runway runs out.
Ultimately, whether you’re advising a tactical swerve or leading a company through a full-scale pivot, the goal remains the same: stay aligned with the market, respond to what the data and customers are telling you, and keep moving forward. In the world of startups, and most specially in this current economy, resilience is importantbut adaptability is essential. The companies that endure and thrive are the ones that listen, learn, and evolveover and over again.
This year, global EV sales are expected to jump almost 25% compared with 2024. As the demand for electric vehicles soars, theres a looming concern for industry experts: figuring out the best way to repurpose the several-hundred-pound batteries that power these vehicles.
According to a 2023 study by McKinsey, the global supply of EV batteries for recycling is steadily increasing and is expected to hit a whopping 7,850 kilotons in 2035. That same year, McKinsey projects that EV battery recycling will be a $7.2 billion industry in the U.S. Currently, though, experts are still trying to find the best way to actually scale the recycling process. The prevailing strategy is a technique that essentially involves shredding EV batteries into a superfine powdera process that has proved costly, complicated, and inefficient.
Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have published a study showing a new way to potentially bypass the shredding step altogether. According to Yukio Cho, lead author on the study and a Stanford energy postdoctoral fellow, the team has developed a new way to build a battery that makes it much easier to separate its component parts, leaving them ready for recycling.
The current state of EV recycling
The two main ways that EV batteries are diverted away from landfills are through reuse and recycling. Some companies are finding ways to repurpose EV batteries after theyre no longer fit for driving. One startup is using retired EV batteries to power up an entire data center in Nevada, for example, while another is repurposing old batteries to run new EV charging stations.
Others are searching for ways to break these batteries down and reuse their valuable components. The current industry standard is to shred the batteries into a fine powder called black mass, which has to be sorted into salvageable metal parts. The sorting process is messy, complicated, and often requires specialized facilities in advanced recycling markets like China to actually make the metals usable. Even then, Cho says, the acids used to sort out the metals can pose an environmental riskand, to top it all off, the whole process is expensive.
Elemental components are so complicated, Cho says. Once youve generated this black mass, it’s really difficult to make recovering the critical materials cost-positive.
Cho says theres not much consensus among experts today on how many EV batteries are actually getting recycled and how many are being diverted to landfills. What is clear, though, is that theres plenty of motivation to turn EV manufacturing into a more circular economy. To start, siphoning e-waste into trash heaps poses the risk of leaching hazardous materials into soil and water. From an economic perspective, EV batteries also contain valuable metals like nickel, cobalt, manganese, and lithium, which can be harvested and reused to prevent more expensive and polluting ore-mining operations.
Imagine an EV battery like a ham sandwich
To skirt around the issue of black mass entirely, Cho and his team decided to take a totally novel approach to EV battery design.
So far in the battery industry, weve focused on high-performing materials and designs, and only later tried to figure out how to recycle batteries made with complex structures and hard-to-recycle materials, Cho told MIT News in an interview. Our approach is to start with easily recyclable materials and figure out how to make them battery-compatible.
A rendering shows (left) the mPEGAA molecule designed by researchers, (middle) how the molecules self-assemble into nanoribbons, and (right) how the molecules are used for the battery electrolyte. [Image: courtesy of the researchers]
EV batteries are made of three main parts: the positively charged cathode, the negatively charged electrode, and the electrolyte that shuttles lithium ions between them. Typically, EV batteries are sealed so tightly that, in order to take them apart efficiently, shredding them becomes the best way to recycle them. The novel innovation from the MIT team is a new electrolyte material which, when soaked in an organic solvent, just dissolves like cotton candy, easily separating the batteries parts.
Cho compares the innovation to a hypothetical ham sandwich. Imagine that the sandwich has been glued shut, and in order to retrieve the bread, lettuce, and ham, it has been shredded and must be sorted by minute particles. Now, imagine that the sandwich was held together by mayo instead: You could easily separate all of the sandwiches compoents. Thats essentially the difference between the black mass recycling step and the electrolyte process that his team is working on.
Chos team created a solid-state battery to test the material, finding that it held up against the batterys demands. Then, once the battery was treated with an organic solvent, the material dissolvedcutting out the necessity of a shredding step entirely.
A depiction of batteries made with MIT researchers new electrolyte material, which is made from a class of molecules that self-assemble in water, named aramid amphiphiles (AAs), whose chemical structures and stability mimic Kevlar. [Image: courtesy of the researchers/edited by MIT News]
Whats next
There are a few shortcomings with the current dissolvable prototype. To start, Cho says the test batterys performance was well below that of todays gold-standard commercial batteries.
The performance is at a level that the industry will never think aboutif you have an iPhone 13, youll never think about swapping that for an iPhone 4, Cho says. Matching the performance to the current state-of-the-art batteries is definitely a challenge we haven’t demonstrated yet.
Part of that performance deficit, Cho says, likely comes from the fact that his team built its battery from the ground up. While it will be at least several years before this new material might be commercially viable, he believes it could be swapped into future EV batteries without too much hassle on manufacturers parts.
I think in the future, we can integrate this material as a part of the battery, Cho says. If you imagine that it dissolves like cotton candy, it can just be a very thin layer somewhere in between the component parts. That will serve the purpose of opening the battery in an autonomous way.
Weve spent several years now obsessing over models and assistants, but heres a new interesting truth: the next competitive edge in AI wont be another benchmark, but electrons. And not just any electrons, but cheap ones. As the AI wars heat up, the winners wont simply be those with the best UX or the most compute. Theyll be the firms that can secure abundant low-cost power at scale, hour after hour, year after year.
Thats where AI is colliding with the physical world, and where the story stops being about software and starts being about grids, turbines, and price curves. Most recent analyses show that AI-driven data centers are now a visible driver of U.S. electricity demand and are starting to send retail prices higher, a clear signal that the constraint is shifting from graphics processing units (GPUs) to kilowatt-hours.
Then theres also a lot of insistence about water, and it deserves some observations. In fact, the problem is that water use is often confused with water consumption. In data centers, much of the water involved in most cooling systems is withdrawn, then used to absorb heat, and later returned. Warmer, yes, but reentering the water cycle after discharge is brought back within permitted temperature ranges. Only some designs (notably evaporative cooling) consume water through vapor losses; others trade water for electricity by leaning on air-cooled chillers or direct-to-chip liquid loops that dramatically cut onsite withdrawals.
Think local
The right way to think about the problem is local: Water stress is a catchment-level issue, not a global one, and the risk depends on where you site the load and which cooling technology you choose. In short, the headlines often overstate a universal thirst that the engineering and the definitions dont support.
None of this, of course, minimizes communities that are water-stressed, where a single facility can matter. Investigations have shown clusters of data centers in arid regions, prompting scrutiny and new local rules. Thats the right debate: match technology choices to basin realities, and stop treating water for AI as the same problem everywhere. In places with abundant non-potable or reclaimed water, or with dry/thermosyphon cooling, the footprint can be managed; in stressed watersheds, it becomes a siting decision, not an engineering afterthought.
Electricity is different. There is no local workaround if the price is structurally high. And on cost, the market is brutally clear. The latest Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy+ (LCOE+) report again shows utility-scale wind and solar at the bottom of the price stack, with new gas combined-cycle plants rising in cost and nuclear still the most expensive new build in rich-country conditions. If youre trying to run large training runs or always-on inference, the delta between clean, cheap power and legacy generation is not a rounding errorit is the margin that decides where you build and whether the unit economics make sense.
Consider nuclear: Georgias Vogtle expansion finally went online, but only after historic cost and schedule overruns that translated into material rate hikes for customers. If AIs advantage is speed and scale, its hard to square that with technologies that arrive late, over budget, and with levelized costs that sit at the wrong end of the curve. The physics is fine. The economics, today, are not.
This is why the new moat isnt access to energy in the abstract: Its access to cheap energy, reliably delivered. The firms that can lock in 24/7 low-cost supply, time-shift non-urgent workloads into off-peak windows, and colocate compute with stranded or overbuilt renewables will win. Everyone else will pay retail, and pass those costs on to users or investors. We are already seeing utilities, grid operators, and tech companies negotiate curtailment and flexibility, and the International Energy Agency’s (IEAs) modeling makes the near-term picture obvious: AI-related demand is rising, and it will test systems that were not designed for this kind of always-on compute.
The China factor
This brings us to the comparison nobody in Silicon Valley likes to make out loud: China. Look past the coal headlines for a moment and follow the build rates. China hit its 2030 wind-and-solar target in 2024, six years early, and added roughly 429 GW of net new capacity to the grid in 2024 alone, the vast majority wind and solar, backed by massive investment in transmission. Pace matters, because marginal megawatt-hours from ultra-low-cost renewables set the floor for training and inference costs. Chinas grid still has big challenges (curtailment among them), but if youre simply asking Who is manufacturing cheap electrons at scale the fastest? the answer today is not the United States.
That doesnt mean resignation; it means focus. If the U.S. wants to stay competitive in AI economics, the priority is not another model announcement: Its a buildout of cheap generation and the wires to move it. Anything that delays that, be it doubling down on gas price volatility, pretending coal is cheap once you factor in capacity payments and externalities, or dreaming of next-gen nuclear that wont arrive on time, will keep AI sited where the power is inexpensive and predictable. In a world of location-aware workloads, electrons decide geography.
The takeaway
The practical takeaway for companies is straightforward: If you are spending real money on AI, your CFO should now know your blended cost of electricity as intimately as your cloud bill, and should be negotiating for both. Favor regions with abundant wind and solar and strong transmission, insist on time-of-use pricing and demand-response programs, push your vendors on 24/7 carbon-free energy rather than annual offsets that do nothing for peak prices or local loads. None of this is environmental, social, and governance (ESG) posturing. Its cost control for a compute-intensive product line whose unit economics are married to energy markets.
On water, keep the conversation precise. Ask for cooling designs, not slogans. Is the system evaporative or closed-loop? Whats the water-use effectiveness and the discharge temperature profile? Where does the site sit on the World Resource Institute’s (WRIs) aqueduct map today and under climate-adjusted scenarios? If your supplier cant answer those basics, theyre not ready to build where youre planning to grow. But dont let the AI is drinking the planet meme obscure a simpler reality: With the right technology and siting, the binding constraint is cheap electricity, not moisture in a recirculating loop.
The narrative arc is changing. The first phase of the AI boom rewarded companies that could raise capital and buy a lot of GPUs. The next phase will reward those that can buy electrons cheaply, cleanly, and continuously. If you want a preview of who wins the assistant wars, dont look at the demos. Look at the interconnection queues, the power-purchase agreements, and mostly, the maps of wind and solar buildoutsthe cheapest energy available. Software is glamorous, but power is destiny.
In business, the art of the pivot is a delicate thing, difficult to get right. That’s why it doesn’t happen that often; you only do it when you’re convinced the alternativecontinuing down a path that isn’t workingwill be worse.
I have to think this is the basic logic factoring into Perplexity‘s recent relaunch of its revenue-sharing program with publishers. Quick recap: Perplexity announced a new kind of subscription called Comet Plus. Users can pay $5 a month to access content from Perplexity’s publisher partnersthat is, those who sign up to participateand Perplexity passes on most of the revenue to them. It’s already set aside $42.5 million to kick-start the program, according to CEO Aravind Srinivas.
Although the program is named after the company’s new Comet web browser, users can use any browser to access the content via Perplexity. However, using Comet means you’ll also be able to use the Comet Assistantmore on why that’s important in a minute. And if you already have a Pro or Max subscription, Plus is part of the package.
{"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}}
The thing is, Perplexity already shares revenue with publishers via the Perplexity Publishers’ Program. Launched last summer, the PPP is an ad-based program; when a partner’s content is featured in an answer, revenue created from ads in that answer (typically a sponsored question) is shared with that partner. Perplexity isn’t sunsetting the PPPGannett just signed up for it. Still, it’s hard to see Comet Plus as at least a partial admission that the PPP wasn’t a great answer to building a business around AI search, at least not one that excites publishers.
It didn’t shield the company from their ire either. News Corp sued Perplexity last year over alleged copyright violations, simultaneously praising OpenAI for its willingness to sign up-front content licensing deals instead of experimental revenue-sharing models. Perplexity’s recent bid to get the case dismissed failed, and Japanese publishers Nikkei and The Asahi Shimbun Co. sued around the same time.
Getting that agent money
Comet Plus is a different tack on a revenue model, but it’s also an opportunity to reset the conversation around monetization, copyright, and the lawat least a little. While competing AI search engines have been slowly migrating toward either licensing deals or “pay per crawl” models that charge bots in the moment they access content, Perplexity has so far been resistant to an approach that involves them (or their bots) paying up front for content.
Instead, they’re going to monetize when others payeither advertisers or usersand share the money with publishers. With respect to Comet Plus, Perplexity says it’s going to share 80% of that money, with the other 20% going to compute costs. A key part of the structure is that it plans to apportion the money based on three different types of traffic: human engagement, search indexing, and agent activity (i.e. bots).
That in itself is interestingI’ve written before about the rise in bot traffic and the opportunity it represents for publishers to provide context for those bots. This is where the Comet Assistant factors in: it’s the agent in Comet Plus’s three-part revenue plan (obviously, Perplexity can’t track and monetize agent bots it doesn’t control). Credit to Perplexity for creating a way to make money from the activity that its own Assistant creates.
In fact, it might be the only one who could. That’s because Perplexity is one of several AI companies that gives its user agents permission to bypass a site’s Robots Exclusion Protocol (the internet standard for blocking bots). So rather than partnering with others on an existing “pay per crawl” program (by, say, paying TollBit or Dappier when its bots want access to content), Perplexity is effectively building its own system, and setting the price of that activity itself.
That seems like an obvious conflict. Although a Perplexity spokesperson told me it provides “robust and transparent” visibility to publisher partners about how their content is performing, agent activity is largely uncharted territory. Perplexity promises to compensate publishers based on it, but they also control it. The company is adamant that its search engine will surface only the answers that best answer a query, but exactly how agents make queries could end up being a subject of great interestespecially to media companies who start to make money off it.
How much for just the scrape?
Comet Plus also exposes the central contradiction of how the AI companies value content, but in a different way. Since the program is charging users to access certain content, that content is by definition valuable. But Perplexity doesn’t treat “free” content differentlyit will still surface the best content to answer a user query regardless of whether or not the publisher is part of Comet Plus. The onus is on the publisher to erect defenses (block crawling via either robots.txt, Cloudflare, or some other means) to prevent that.
Put another way, Perplexity is essentially saying, “We’re happy to share revenue ith you if you join our program, but if you don’t we’ll ingest and surface the content anyway, unless you tell us not to.” This approach is certainly more legally dicey, but since Perplexity’s business model depends on being able to access the entire internet, it’s clearly decided that the ambiguity is worth the risk.
And to be fair, Perplexity is hardly the only AI company with this de facto stance. It’s not like ChatGPT will ignore sites that don’t have a deal with OpenAI. “Ingest first, sort it out later” has essentially become an operational standard in the AI world. How that shakes out will ultimately be answered by the courts.
Will users pay?
In the meantime, the media world will be watching Perplexity’s new, three-pronged revenue model with great interest. Monetizing user agents and AI search activity are new ideas, but whether they succeed ultimately depends on if users think Comet Plus is an experience they want to pay for. Because if they don’t you can bet a different revenue model will rise to take its place: advertising.
{"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}}
