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As we count down to the last days of the year, we are looking ahead to what may be one of the next big work trends of 2026: shift sulking. Read on to find out what it is, and what to know about it heading into the new year. What is shift sulking? “Shift sulking is the moment when hourly workers arrive already depleted because the conditions surrounding their workunpredictable schedules, inconsistent hours, and rising demandsare simply unsustainable,” says Silvija Martincevic, CEO of Deputy, a workforce management platform for hourly workers. “Because millions of shifts run through our platform every week, Deputy sees this deep-seated strain in the data well before it makes headlines,” Martincevic adds. According to Martincevic, if you look closely the next time youre at the grocery store, coffee shop, hospital, or convenience store, youll see it. And it’s not hard to spot: workers stretched thin, managing difficult customers and understaffed teams. The difference between a worker who feels supported and one whos simply trying to get through the day is written on their face, she says. What, if anything, does this tell us about the current state of the economy? “[At a time when] 31% of U.S. workers report feeling detached, ‘shift sulking’ is a clear reminder that the strength of our economy is inseparable from the stability of the shift worker,” says Martincevic. “Thats not simply a retention challenge. Its a productivity challenge that limits our collective potential.” According to data from Deputy, in states where stable scheduling is the norm, frontline worker happiness reaches 98%, compared to just 60% where it’s unpredictable. And companies should be paying attention to this data, as studies show engaged workers perform better. Why shift sulking may be one of the big workplace trends of 2026 In today’s 24/7 gig economy, more Americans are doing shift work and taking on multiple jobs, or so-called poly-employment, to make ends meet as they grapple with rising costs and higher inflation. “We dont see shift sulking as a temporary issue; its the human cost of deeper structural friction in todays labor marketand all indicators point to it intensifying in 2026,” Martincevic says. “Businesses are operating leaner, asking teams to deliver the same output despite tighter staffing and volatile demand. That pressure falls squarely on the frontline.” According to Deputy’s Better Together report, while AI can automate tasks and improve visibility, technology alone wont solve the problemthat demands structural change that gives workers what they want: predictable schedules, balanced workloads, and transparent communication.
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E-Commerce
Like many people, I use AI for quick, practical tasks. But two recent interactions made me pay closer attention to how easily these systems slip into emotional validation. In both cases, the model praised, affirmed, and echoed back feelings that werent actually there. I uploaded photos of my living room for holiday decorating tips, including a close-up of the ceramic stockings my late mother hand painted. The model praised the stockings and thanked me for sharing something so meaningful, as if it understood the weight of them. A few days later, something similar happened at work. I finished a long run, came home with an idea, and dropped it into ChatGPT to pressure test it. Instead of analyzing it or raising risks, the model immediately celebrated it. Great idea. Powerful. Lets build on it. But when I ran the same idea by a colleague, he pushed back. He challenged assumptions I hadnt seen. He made me rethink pieces I thought were settled. And the idea got betterfast. That contrast stayed with me. AI wasnt critiquing me. It was validating me. And validation, when its instant and unearned, can create real blind spots. We Are Living Through a Validation Epidemic We talk endlessly about AI hallucinations and misinformation. We talk far less about how AIs default mode is affirmation. Large language models are built to be agreeable. They reflect our tone and adopt our emotional cues. They lean toward praise because their training data leans toward praise. They reinforce more often than they resist. And this is happening at a moment when validation is already a defining cultural force. Psychologists have been warning about the rise in validation-seeking behavior for more than a decade. Social platforms built around likes and shares have rewired how people measure worth. The American Psychological Association (APA) reports sharp increases in social comparison among younger generations. Pew Research shows that teens now tie self-esteem directly to online feedback. Researchers at the University of Michigan have identified a growing pattern of validation dependence, which correlates with higher anxiety. Weve created an environment where approval is currency. So is it any wonder we would gravitate toward a tool that hands it out so freely? But that has consequences. It strengthens the muscle that wants reassurance while weakening the one that tolerates frictionthe friction of being questioned or proven wrong. AI Makes Us Faster. It Does Not Make Us Better Im not anti-AI. Far from it. I use it every day, and I work in an industry that depends on smart, data-driven judgment. AI helps me move faster. It informs my decisions and expands what I can consider in a short amount of time. But it cannot replace the tension required for growth. Tension is feedback. Tension is accountability. Tension is reality. And reality still comes from human beings. The danger isnt that AI misleads us. Its that it makes us less willing to challenge ourselves. When a model praises our ideas or mirrors our emotions, it creates a subtle illusion that were right, or at least close enough that critique isnt needed. That illusion may be comforting, but its also risky. Weve seen what happens when agreement is prized over challenge. NASAs Challenger launch decision is one of the clearest examples of groupthink in modern history. Multiple engineers raised concerns, but the pressure for consensus won and tragedy followed. Kodak offers another lesson. It pioneered digital photography but clung to its film-era assumptions, even as the market moved in a different direction. As Harvard Business Review has long noted, cultures that suppress dissent make worse decisions. When disagreement disappears, risk accelerates. Great Leaders Arent Built on Validation The best leaders I know didnt grow because people agreed with them. They grew because someone challenged them early and often. Because someone said, I dont think thats right, or more boldly, Youre wrong. They learned to welcome productive resistance. AI wont do that unless we demand it. And most people wont demand it because it feels better to be affirmed. If were not careful, AI becomes the worlds most agreeable colleaguequick with praise, light on critique, and always ready to reassure us that were on the right track even when were not. Great ideas need resistance. So do organizations. So do we. AI can accelerate our thinking. But only people can sharpen it. Thats the part of this technology we should be paying closest attention tonot what it knows, but what its willing to tell us. And what its not.
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E-Commerce
The tiny Fiat Topolinoabout the length of a cargo bike and half as long as an American SUV or pickupis the kind of car tourists stop to photograph as a cute curiosity in Rome or Milan. The electric car only travels 28 miles an hour, and its designed for dense European cities. But it also only costs around $10,000, and Fiat is now betting that Americans are ready for something this tiny. The company recently announced plans to bring the car to the U.S., shortly after Trump said that he wanted to help bring similarly tiny kei cars to the U.S. from Japan. Theres a strong argument that smaller cars are better for society: Theyre more affordable, more efficient, take up less space, and theyre safer for pedestrians and other vehicles in a crash. (Uncharacteristically, Trump noted that “really cute” kei cars can be electric and are fuel efficient, shortly after his administration started the process to roll back fuel efficiency requirements.) But for the smallest microcars to be more than a niche category, a lot would have to change. Growing interest in smaller rides For years, the conventional wisdom has been that Americans love giant vehicles. Ford F-Series trucks have long been the bestselling vehicles; SUVs are more popular than cars. But size preferences are slowly starting to shrink. Compact SUVs now outsell larger SUVs. Sales of midsized trucks are growing faster than full-sized trucks. Compact car sales are also growing. Automakers push bigger vehicles because they make more money on them, partly because of loophole in fuel efficiency regulations. But as consumer cost concerns grow, buyers are moving in the other direction. I think that its certainly not baked into our DNA to like big cars, says Ben Crowther, policy director at America Walks, an organization that advocates for smaller vehicles to make streets safer for pedestrians and others on the road. Its the result of several decades worth of marketing. But where I think I see the tipping point being is that small cars are more affordable. Right now, the average cost for new cars is around $50,000. Thats easily someones salary. That cost is inflated because vehicles are oversized. [Photo: Telo] Telo, a startup making a small electric pickup thats roughly as long as a Mini Cooper and cheaper than a typical gas truck, says that its seen strong interest in its first model, which will hit the market next year. Jason Marks, Telos CEO, says that its also noteworthy how much demand there is for kei cars and trucks. Right now, the U.S. only allows the Japanese vehicles to be imported when theyre at least 25 years old, under regulations aimed at classic cars. But despite the restrictions, kei trucks are the largest class of vehicles being individually imported to the U.S., with around 7,500 arriving last year. These are vehicles the size of golf carts, with well over 100,000 miles on them, that cant go 60 miles an hour, and only about 17 states legally allow you to drive them on the highway, says Marks. And theyre still this desirable. Telos offering is very different than a kei truckthe Telo MT1 can haul as much as a regular passenger truck, it can be driven anywhere, and its designed with modern safety features including sensors, unlike 25-year-old kei cars, which typically dont even have airbags. Still, the interest in kei cars illustrates the appetite for smaller cars in general. And though kei cars and microcars like the Topolino face challenges in adoption, theres also room for them to become more widespread with more support. Kei cars versus microcars In Japan, kei carsshort for keijidosha, meaning “light automobile”originated in 1949 as part of Japanese industrial policies to rebuild the country’s auto industry when most people couldnt afford larger vehicles. The cars have to stay under 11 feet long and have small engines. They’re allowed on Japanese highways, but have reduced safety features. [Photo: Paul Esch-Laurent/Unsplash] They’re still very popular in Japan, and also popular in countries like India, where Suzuki’s tiny cars have dominated the auto market for decades. But even current models likely wouldn’t meet safety requirements in the U.S., and adding those features would jack up costs. Take the example of the Honda N-Box, a bestselling car that costs around $12,000 to $15,000 and has a fuel efficiency of around 50 miles per gallon. “The Honda N-Box does not have airbags, it does not have ABS, and it does not have some of the features that you would typically require under the current regulations in the United States,” says Aditya Ramji, an economist at UC Davis who focuses on energy, transportation, and electric mobility. “That means that the moment I add those requirements and made this vehicle compliant, the price of the $12,000 N-Box now will become $22,000 straight away.” That’s similar to the cost of the Toyota Corollamaking it unlikely that an N-Box could compete under current regulations. [Photo: Honda] In theory, the DOT could create new standards and certification requirements benchmarked to those that have been in place in Japan for decades, and make it more feasible to import new kei cars. That process would take time. (Trump’s post on Truth Social saying “I have just approved TINY CARS to be built in America” did not actually constitute approval.) Microcars like the Fiat Topolino fit into a different category under U.S. regulationssomething the DOT calls a “neighborhood electric vehicle” or NEV. The cars are restricted to speeds of 25 miles an hour. In most states, they’re only allowed on roads with speed limits up to 35 miles an hour. Some states require extra safety equipment, like windshield wipers. But airbags aren’t required. Because of the limitations, it’s a niche market. Some experts are skeptical that demand of either kei cars or neighborhood electric vehicles could significantly grow. “Generally speaking, it is difficult to imagine a scenario that could significantly shift the personal vehicle market in a direction that would result in widespread adoption of very small cars in the United States,” says David Bunch, a management professor emeritus at UC Davis who has studied consumer choice in vehicles. The main exception, he says, could be highly urbanized areas like New York or San Francisco. [Photo: Fiat] The safety challenge Both kei cars and neighborhood electric vehicles struggle with consumer concerns about safety. Still, Ramji argues that tiny vehicles could be relatively safe in urban commutes even without the current suite of required safety features, as they travel at relatively low speeds. The growing suite of safety features on other modern cars, including sensors and automatic braking, also helps. “I think the trend that well be seeing as the fleet turns over and more of these vehicles have safety features, it means that you dont need the full armor of an SUV or a pickup truck because your car, and everyone elses car on the road is actively working beyond just the driver to avoid that collision,” says Crowther. If more of the tiny cars were in use, it would also mean fewer pedestrian deaths: If a person is hit by a small vehicle, they’re much more likely to survive. That’s both because there’s less force in a collision and because low cars hit the body lower than a large truck or SUV that can fatally strike someone in the head or chest. And small cars are also less likely to damage other vehicles in a crash. The paradox, of course, is that people are more likely to choose cars that protect themselves, not others on the road. “The notion of ‘safety benefits’ of smaller cars has long been problematic, because they must share the road with larger vehicles, and in a ‘contest’ the larger vehicles win,” says Bunch. “That is, smaller cars are by definition less safe in an environment with mixed vehicle sizes.” Can microcars grow? Even with the challenges that exist, there could be room for more tiny cars in the U.S., especially in dense cities. Demand isn’t guaranteedthe tiny Smart Fortwo was taken off the American market in 2019 due to low sales. But some policy changes could support growth. For example, a city could offer cheaper parking permits based on vehicle size, since tiny cars don’t take up as much valuable curb space. States could choose to allow neighborhood electric vehicles on more roadsor, to boost safety, could lower speed limits on more routes. Better urban design would also help. “To have neighborhood electric vehicles, you really do need to have a better mix of land uses, which we don’t see in most suburban settings,” says Kara Kockelman, a professor of transportation engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. “In these planned developments, a grocery store is off of a much higher speed street.” If it was possible to drive at a low speed to run errands or commute to work or school, tiny cars could become a more viable option for more people. (Of course, it would also be easier to bike in that scenario.) [Photo: Nissan] Both microcars and kei cars could be useful as a second car for short commutes, says Ramji, and that could potentially help unlock a new urban market for EVs. It’s not likely that the current administration will intentionally do anything to promote electric cars. But creating new regulations that allow kei cars could also theoretically boost EV sales. One popular current kei car, the Nissan Sakura EV, has around 110 miles of range and costs $16,000 or $17,000far less than most EVs on the U.S. market. “Maybe this is an opportunity in the U.S. to think about how the small car segment can fundamentally serve the electrification narrative and really come in strategically leapfrogging that ecosystem and looking at urban EVs as opposed to gas cars in the mini car segment,” Ramji says.
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E-Commerce
An increasing number of companies are finding the much-promised financial gains of implementing artificial intelligence in the workplace have been slow to materialize. But that isnt stopping many CEOs from spending even more on AI in the coming year. A new study from advisory firm Teneo finds that 68% of CEOs will increase their AI spending next year. A growing number, however, are aware that they need to start showing returns on that investmentand an important part of their job is convincing shareholders to remain patient. “As efforts shift from hype to execution, businesses are under pressure to show ROI from rising AI spend,” the company wrote. “Large-cap CEOs are seeing solid returns on current programs, particularly across administration, internal efficiency, and customer-facing applications. However, 84% of these CEOs predict that positive returns from new AI initiatives will take longer than six months to achieve. In contrast, investors are pushing for faster impact: 53% expect positive ROI in six months or less.” To date, less than half of the AI projects have generated returns that exceed the cost of the programs, according to 350-plus public-company CEOs surveyed by Teneo. Teneo’s survey comes on the heels of a Gallup study of AI use in the workplace, which showed a big spike in 2025. The percentage of U.S. workers who used AI on at least an occasional basis jumped from 40% to 45% between the second and third quarters of 2025. (In the second quarter of 2024, that number was just 27%.) Power users of AI were on the rise in that study as well, with 10% of the respondents saying they used the technology daily in the third quarter, up from 8% at the end of the second quarter. A year ago, that number stood at just 4%. Workers said they’re using AI to consolidate information or data and to generate ideas, with a slightly lower number using it to learn new things or automate basic tasks. A small percentagejust 9%said they use AI to make predictions. Teneo’s survey finds that the most successful AI strategies have been in the marketing and customer service spaces. More complex applications, such as security, legal, and human resources, have not yet lived up to the technology’s potential. That’s not surprising, says Ryan Cox, global head of artificial intelligence at Teneo. More complex uses will need to be rolled out at a slower pace. The first wave of AI returns came from easy efficiency wins. The next wave is about rewiring core processes that inevitably have a longer, bumpier ROI curve, Cox says. These use cases are higher risk and have greater potential impact. You dont rush them to market; you treat them as strategic change programs with board-level oversight, not experiments. Despite events like the November layoffs at Verizon, where 13,000 workers lost their jobs as part of a strategic shift towards AI, CEOs feel fears that increased AI usage will result in job losses are overblown. Some 67% told Teneo they expected the technology to increase their entry-level head countand 58% said they expected it would result in more senior leaders coming on board. As a result of this bullishness on AI, some 87% of the CEOs Teneo spoke with said they believed their organizations are prepared for future technological disruption. However, they cautioned, future leaders will struggle to keep pace with tech advancements, meaning agility and creativity will become the most important skills for future CEOs. That enthusiastic attitude extended beyond the world of AI, also. Optimism about the economy was remarkably strong, given the uncertainty of this year, with 73% of CEOs and 82% of the 400 institutional investors surveyed saying they expected the global economy to improve over the first six months of 2026. (Mid-cap CEOs were much more bullish on the market than large-cap ones.)
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E-Commerce
When the U.S. government cut funding for local news stations, the Knight Foundation moved quickly to help stabilize a rapidly eroding industry. President and CEO Maribel Pérez Wadsworth unpacks the evolving roles of philanthropy and government, and why philanthropic organizations must learn to move at the speed of the news cycle. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. The Knight Foundation has focused on promoting and preserving local news and journalism and local communities for decades. This year, that mission has come under unprecedented attack with big funding cuts for public media, lawsuits by President Trump against CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times. Is this what you signed up for when you took on this job 18 months ago? I mean, how prepared were youwas the organizationfor this kind of seismic shift? Well, no, I can tell you, it’s not what I signed up for. I don’t think anybody could have quite contemplated the things we are focused on in 2025. But that said, I’ve spent my entire career fighting for journalism and fighting for the First Amendment. So from that perspective, this is yet another part of that journey. Is it harder right now? Absolutely. Are the fights coming across a lot of dimensions that we couldn’t have anticipated? Absolutely. But this is what the Knight Foundation was set up to do since it started its work 75 years ago. So while we’d all rather be able to pace ourselves a little bit more, I think the moment demands urgency, and it demands focus, and it demands clarity of purpose. The First Amendment is what makes all the rest of our democracy possible, so we have to defend that. When Congress stripped $500 million in funding for public media this summer, part of the critique was that publicly funded media had become partisan, that it wasn’t always impartial. I mean, is there a fair critique in there about that? I think that you’ve seen trust eroding in a lot of institutions, and as the country and the world becomes increasingly polarized and dependent on their own echo chambers for information, I think absolutely, trust is a problem, and inherent in that is a concern about bias. The truth of the matter though is when you look at study after study, public media, particularly local public media stations, are still among the most trusted institutions by Americans. People believe in their local newsrooms. They trust their neighbors to report on their communities. The vast majority of these cuts did not impact, say, NPR at a national level or PBS at a national level. While the rhetoric around the cuts and the perceptions of bias centered on those entities and NPR in particular, the cuts in effect barely affected NPR but are devastating to the local stations, especially in huge swaths of the country that are primarily rural, what today we might say are in red states. That’s who’s impacted by these cuts. As this bill was being debated in the Senate, Alaska experienced a significant earthquake. And had it not been for one small public radio station, a lot of Alaska would not have even known that they were under tsunami warnings. And these concerns about news deserts, like apps like Facebook and Nextdoor and other ways that we’re sharing information these days, they can’t or don’t really fill that space. No, they absolutely don’t fill that space. I mean, we’re on all these platforms. We know the kinds of information that is shared there. It is certainly not what any of us would call trusted, verified information. It’s not reliable. And let’s not forget that for a lot of the country, we still struggle with reliable broadband access. The stations most at risk represent some 40 million to 50 million Americans. When these cuts went through, the Knight Foundation, alongside some other funders like the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, you jumped in to fill some of the gap. I know you put in a $10 million cash injection. How did that come about? It was a meet-the-moment-urgently proposition. And let’s be clear that philanthropy doesn’t necessarily always move at the speed of news, but it was really important, because this was an imminent loss of funding and dollars that had already been appropriated, that these stations were counting on, in some cases for upwards of 30% to even 70% or more of their annual budgets. So very significant, very dramatic. We had to move quickly, and it was great to see some key partners come to the table with us. We did $10 million to help lead the Public Media Bridge Fund that is being run by the Public Media Company. And today, just 11 weeks later, we’re at almost $60 million raised. That is nearly unprecedented for philanthropy to have moved that quickly. That said, it’s not the long-term solution. This will help to stabilize the stations that are most at risk. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be loss of programming. That doesn’t mean that every single station will survive necessarily. But hopefully it buys the necessary time to think through the transformation of the overall system, what kinds of changes need to be made, from governance of public media to some consolidations that are no doubt necessary. But we need to buy the time, because the rug got pulled out from under them. Some local radio and television stations, as you mentioned, they are shuttering, they are cutting back. Is the hope that you can bring them back, or does the focus need to be on, “Hey, let’s preserve the stations that are still alive that are the stronger ones”? Well, right now, it’s a matter of truly preserving access to local news and information and community. So the prioritization around these funds will be prioritizing those stations that are, say, sole servers in their communities, that absolutely provide local news and information in addition to some of the other programming. But preservation is clearly important. The loss of these stations would represent a significant setback. We have some, what, almost 2,000 so-called news deserts in the country today. So these stations would create that many more all over the country. But this has to be a phased approach. Right now it’s stabilized to ensure that we preserve something to transform, and then we need to get into the serious work of what does it look like for sustainability. Sometimes I think that if public media is no longer supported by the government, is public media the right term or is it just media? It’s a great question. At that point, you’re right, it’s just media. And so I think that will be part of the thinking going forward. I have to believe, and maybe it’s just the hardwired optimist in me, that we will see a rational rethinking of the federal funding picture, specifically for stations in more vulnerale areas, in smaller communities where you don’t necessarily have a huge population base to self-fund these stations or a big business community that can help underwrite the cost of these stations. But where people still understand that there is a true vital role played by these stations in their communities in terms of being connective tissue, in terms of having the issues, the people, the things that are important to the community really front and center. So my hope is that we will see some level of federal funding coming back, even if it’s more targeted to the stations that would be more dependent on public funds to continue to exist. For the Knight Foundation, obviously, you’re committed to freedom of the press and local news, but that’s part of a pledge to support local communities overall, right? I mean, it’s sort of linked together. It is. And we think it’s foundational. To us, reliable local news and information is really a central force for good in communities. People see one another, they connect with one another, they have a common fact base to rally around. And so for a community to thrive, that’s table stakes.
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E-Commerce
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