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One of my Bentley University students put it plainly the other day: AI taking entry-level jobs is a when, not an if. But in venture capital, 70% of the decision is reading the founder and teamand thats something AI cant do. That simple breakdown , 70% people, 30% productflips the usual narrative about finance. For decades, finance was defined by numbers. Analysts lived and died by the spreadsheets. Today, AI can run discounted cash flows, parse a term sheet, and size a market faster than any junior associate. But if you talk to people in venture capital, theyll tell you the math has never been the most important part. The numbers matter, of course, but the difference between betting on a future unicorn and losing it all is whether you can read the humans across the table. AIs takeover of the crunching jobs Students see whats coming. The entry-level finance roles that once trained armies of analysts are increasingly exposed to automation. AI models can scan thousands of comparable companies in seconds, build slide decks, even flag anomalies that a first-year hire would have spent a weekend catching. In fact, McKinsey estimates that nearly half of finance tasks could already be automated by existing AI tools. What was once seen as a rite of passagethe long hours bent over Excelmay soon look as outdated as typewriters in an accounting office. Thats why many students I teach dont just worry about if AI will change their jobs. They assume it already has. The conversation now is how to build careers in finance when machines are better, faster, and cheaper at the very tasks that used to get you in the door. The venture capital exception Venture capital, especially at the earliest stages, offers a counterintuitive lesson. The math can only take you so far. Market sizing, revenue projections, even technical due diligenceall of it is valuable, but none of it predicts success the way the founder does. Investors Ive spoken with put it bluntly: youre betting on people, not just products. Thats the essence of the 70/30 rule my student repeated: 70% of the investment decision is about the team. Only 30% is about the idea. Surveys of venture investors back this up. First Round Capital, for example, has consistently found that founder quality outranks product or market sizing in early-stage decisions. You want founders with resilience, persuasion, and the grit to pivot when the idea inevitably changes. AI can tell you the addressable market. It cannot tell you if this particular founder has the charisma to convince skeptical investors, the judgment to hire the right people, or the sheer stubbornness to keep going after three failed prototypes. As one early-stage investor told me recently, AI can show me a founders track record in five seconds, but it cant tell me whether they can read a room or take a punch. Thats still my job. Why Gen Z gets it What strikes me is how quickly students are internalizing this. Rather than seeing their careers in finance as doomed, they are recalibrating. They want to be the people who can build relationships, persuade others, and trust their instincts. Theyre preparing not to be number crunchers, but decision-makers. In class discussions, they talk about internships where AI already plays a role in screening deals. Their takeaway isnt despairits clarity. They see that the irreplaceable part of the job is not working the models but reading the room. They know AI may one day suggest which startup should succeed, but it wont sit across the table from a founder at 11 p.m., hear the quiver in their voice, and know whether thats nerves or conviction. Gen Z, often criticized for being too soft, may be better positioned than we think. Theyve grown up digital. They understand the strengths of machines, but they also see the limits. Theyre comfortable letting AI do the heavy lifting if it means their human skills rise in value. Lessons for the future of work This shift should force us to rethink not only finance, but the future of work itself. If venture capital is a case study, the lesson is that industries once defined by quantitative rigor may end up placing even greater value on qualitative judgment. Harvard Business Review has made a similar point, noting that as AI scales technical analysis, soft skills are fast becoming the hardest skills to replace. The irony is rich: the most number-driven fields may be the ones where numbers matter least. And if thats true, Gen Z might just be the generation that restores humanity to the financial worldnot by rejecting technology, but by mastering what machines cant. Back to the 70/30 rule That brings me back to my student. Their comment wasnt just about venture capital. It was about what comes next in finance, and perhaps beyond. If AI eats the numbers, the real work will be reading people. AI owns the math. But the gutthe judgment, empathy, and intuition that turn data into decisionsstill belongs to us. In the end, the algorithms will get faster, but the best investors will always pause, look across the table, and trust what no machine can calculate: the human pulse of possibility.
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E-Commerce
Hello again, and thank you, as always, for spending time with Fast Companys Plugged In. Apple is legendary for figuring out what people want before they realize they want it. But since 2021, its MacBook Pro hasn’t been like that at all. Instead, this venerable laptop’s recent design has reflected Apple’s willingness to trust its customers’ judgmenteven when it’s been at odds with the company’s own instincts. In part, that’s because of a 2016 reimagining of the MacBook Pro that didn’t stick. Atypically, Apple then went on to reverse many of the changes it had made. The fancy function-key replacement known as the Touch Bar went bye-bye. And several mundane-but-useful features Apple had axed came back, including the MagSafe power connector, HDMI port, and SD Card slot. The result was a computer that was noticeably chunkier than the MacBook Air. But it was also particularly well tailored to the needs of people who prize sheer usefulness above all else. It was a workhorseyou know, professional. The newest 14-inch MacBook Pro, which I’ve been using for a little less than a week (the company provided a unit for review), retains that vision. Actually, it retains everything about its immediate predecessor except the chip. A classic example of a “speed bump” upgrade, the machine is now powered by Apple’s next-generation M5 processor. So are updated versions of the iPad Pro and Vision Proan unusual example of disparate Apple products shipping with the same new chip all at once. In another break from recent years, Apple isn’t immediately rolling out the new MacBook Pro in multiple variants: fast, faster, and fastest. Only the entry-level 14-inch model is getting a new chip. Higher-end Pros (including the 16-inch version) are still equipped with last year’s M4 Pro and M4 Max chips, leaving the MacBook Pro lineup in transition. For now, the M5 MacBook Pro, with a starting price of $1,599, occupies a middle ground among Apple laptops. Many people will be delighted with the cheaper, lighter, thinner MacBook Air, an exemplary laptop in its own right. Others whose jobs involve particularly computationally intensive work, such as heavy-duty video editing, might opt for the M4 Pro or M4 Max versions of the MacBook Pro, or wait for M5 Pro and M5 Max ones. Apple itself described the M5 chip as suitable for “college students, business users, and aspiring creators,” a pretty concise way of encompassing the M5 MacBook Pro’s sweet spot. Still, even though I’m a happy owner of a 15-inch MacBook Air, spending time with the new MacBook Pro made clear to me why some people would gladly pay a premium for it. For starters, there are several fundamental ways in which the MacBook Pro is enough better than the MacBook Air to matter. That starts with the screen, which has brighter Mini-LED lighting and, thanks to ProMotion technology, smoother scrolling. The $150 Nano-texture display option, which Apple included on my review unit, does the job when it comes to the promised glare reduction: I felt more like I was reading off paper than a shiny LCD. The Pro’s six-speaker audio system, with a subwoofer, is a significant upgrade over the Air’s. Its claimed battery life is longerup to 24 hours of video streaming versus 18 for the Air. Yes, that’s an upgrade from impressively long to remarkably long, but anything that reduces a portable computer’s reliance on chargers and AC outlets is a blessing. Buy a MacBook Pro, and you may also be able to avoid dealing with the dreaded, easy-to-misplace adapters known as dongles. It has three USB-C ports versus the Air’s two, and they’re divvied between the left and right sides, letting you plug in cables any which way without having to snake them around. As for the built-in HDMI and SD Card slot, their survival in 2025 is miraculous given that Apple tried to eliminate them almost a decade agobut I, for one, would use the SD slot all the time to transfer photos and videos from my Fujifilm camera. Okay, how about that new M5 chip? Apple emphasizes its improved performance in AI-intensive tasks such as applying filters to video and running local LLMs. Jason Snell of Six Colors benchmarked the new MacBook Pro and found it substantially quicker than the MacBook Air. His charts also show MacBook Pro models with M4 Pro and M4 Max chips remaining faster still, because they have more CPU and GPU cores than the M5. In my informal experiments with tasks such as editing images in Photoshop and outputting video projects from DaVinci Resolve, the M5 MacBook Pro was a rocket. But with the exception of epoch-shifting moments such as Apple’s 2020 transition from Intel chips to ones it designed itself, the launch of a new processor is rarely a reason to rush out and buy a new computer. Instead, most people should hold off on springing for a new machine until their current one is showing its agea buying strategy Apple tacitly acknowledges in its marketing for the M5 MacBook Pro by comparing its performance to its M1 ancestor, which dates to 2020. The best reason to get a new computer is as an insurance plan against future obsolescence. The M5 MacBook Pro is just a faster version of a familiar laptop. But it’s well positioned to stay useful even as AI becomes a more pervasive element of MacOS and Mac apps. Apple certainly won’t leave the MacBook Pro feeling so familiar forever. Last week, Bloombergs Mark Gurman reported that the company is currently working on a thinner, lighter version with an M6 chipand the Mac line’s first-ever touchscreen. Here’s hoping that no matter how much the MacBook Pro evolves, it retains the quiet emphasis on straightforward, well-appointed productivity that defines it. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at
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E-Commerce
Meta is working to make its apps better for boomers. This week the company announced new UX features designed to deter scammers and make Meta’s apps safer for older adults. Scammers today use all kinds of tricks to part people from their money, like soliciting personal information under the guise of fake government benefits, brazenly pretending to be customer service support, and chatting up unwitting people in the comments section of a real businesss social media page to lure them to another page. [Image: Meta] New features for older users Meta says its new in-app warnings are meant to combat that type of behavior, and will be triggered by suspicious activity. On the chat app WhatsApp, users who attempt to share their screen with an unknown contact during a video call will get a warning that says “Only share your screen with people you trust.” The pop-up notes that sharing your screen lets those you share it with “see anything you display on your screen, including sensitive details like your banking info.” On Messenger, Meta says it’s testing more advanced scam detection in chats. The company says that when scam detection is enabled, suspicious chats will trigger a warning that prompts users to request an AI review, which will explain why the message was flagged, plus provide tips for staying safe online. The feature can be toggled off or on by going to privacy and safety settings and tapping scam detection. [Image: Meta] An example AI review Meta shared of a flagged suspicious message notes common scam signs such as job offers promising fast cash or the ability to work from home for a job that cant be done remotely. The AI review goes on to suggest the recipient of the message ignore job offers that seem too good to be true and never agree to send gift cards, a wire transfer, or other forms of payment to a stranger. That includes strangers who are famous. Scamming is on the rise Scammers have faked the likenesses of public figures such as Taylor Swift to make it appear as if the pop star is promoting a cookware set giveaway, and actors like Helen Mirren and Jamie Lee Curtis have in recent months warned fans about scammers using their likeness on Instagram. Meta, which was hit this month with a class-action lawsuit that alleges it profits off of impersonation scam ads, announced it’s investing in cracking down on celebrity scams in the EU, U.K., and South Korea by using facial ID technology and AI. [Image: Meta] Online scams are a real problem for Meta and other companies. Meta says since the start of year, it’s disrupted nearly 8 million Facebook and Instagram accounts associated with criminal scam centers, and these and other scams have proven costly for victims. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Report, in 2024 people ages 60 and older lost a total of $4.8 billion to fraudmore than any other group. That’s up from more than $3 billion in 2023. Best practice for designing digital products for an aging population often calls for features like bigger fonts and intuitive design, but it also means making it safe from scammers and fraudsters who target older individuals. As Meta attempts to shore up online safety for young people by launching teen accounts with heightened parental controls, it’s clear the company also has work to do for its users at the other end of the age spectrum.
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E-Commerce
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