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On Friday, shares of U.S. rare earth stocks rose after President Donald Trump accused China of strict export controls and threatened a massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products” once againhowever, the comments ended up triggering a market sell-off. At issue: China imposed stricter export controls on critical rare earth minerals that the U.S. technology industry depends on for electronics, robotics, and electric vehicles, which are also critical for the defense industry, per CNBC. The news network also reported China will now require foreign entities to obtain a license to export products that contain rare earths worth 0.1% or more of the goods value. I will be forced, as President of the United States of America, to financially counter their move, Trump said on Truth Social, his social platform. There are many other countermeasures that are, likewise, under serious consideration. Stock market effect After Trump announced his plans to raise Beijing’s tariffs, a number of rare earth stocks went up: USA Rare Earth surged 19%, Energy Fuels rose 10%, and MP Materials gained 15%, CNBC reported. By the end of the day, those stocks had lost some of those gains, with USA Rare Earth up only 6%, Energy Fuels up just 4%, while MP Materials maintained its position, up 10%. On the other hand, the global cryptocurrency market lost nearly $125 billion within hours. The total global crypto market capitalization was at $4.05 trillion, down 3.94% in the last 24 hours, marking a 83.68% change from one year ago. Bitcoin’s (BTC) market cap was at $2.32 trillion, representing a Bitcoin dominance of 57.23%. Meanwhile, stablecoins’ market cap was at $310 Billion, with a 7.66% share of the total crypto market cap, according to CoinGecko. The sell-off spread to the stock market as well, where the S&P 500 lost 2.71%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the day down 878.82 points (1.9%), and the Nasdaq Composite fell 3.56%, CNBC reported. That sell-off included Nvidia (NVDA), which was down almost 5% at the close of the market.
Category:
E-Commerce
Customer experience is entering the sci-fi age: knowing and understanding customers on an individual level, providing personalized service, and dedicated moments. All of this is becoming possible thanks to technological innovation. And as it shifts, were moving beyond the age of reactive service, where customer satisfaction was measured by stale, bi-annual surveys. Were entering an era of proactive, predictive customer care. Companies missions today should be to transform every interaction into a moment of loyalty and growth, a goal we are working to achieve through our latest in-house innovation: the Customer Experience Index, or CXI. While many companies talk about focusing on customer experience, we wanted to move beyond buzzwords and create a framework that allows for proactive, real-time management of our customer relationships. Traditional methods of measuring customer satisfaction, like the bi-annual surveys mentioned earlier, often fall short. They only provide a snapshot in time, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of daily customer sentiment and needs. To truly drive change and speak to our customers on their current standing, we needed something morea tool that could provide real-time, actionable insights at a massive scale. UNDERSTAND THE EXPERIENCE WITHOUT ASKING THE QUESTION This is where the Customer Experience Index comes in. It is an AI-powered, real-time measurement framework that transforms raw customer sentiment into predictive, actionable insights, which in turn works to enhance loyalty, reduce churn, and drive business growth. Its not just a metric; its a predictive engine built on over 200 AI/machine learning models and generative AI insights. The CXI evaluates a wide range of factors, including customer behavior, network performance, service interactions, and even external market signals like mergers and acquisitions. With a 98% accuracy rate compared to traditional NPS surveys, CXI gives us near instant, account-level insights that allow us to anticipate and address issues before they escalate for our business customers. The ability of CXI to understand the experience without asking the question, is a game changer. It enables us to shift from a reactive to a proactive customer experience model. For example, our service teams no longer just react to inbound service calls. Instead, an AI-powered tool called “Right to Sell,” fed by CXI data, provides real-time guidance to agents during a service call. A green light might signal that a customer is satisfied and an agent can suggest a new product or service, while a red light indicates the customer is frustrated, and the agent should focus on resolving their issue and building brand loyalty. This allows our service team to transition from a cost center to a value-driving part of the business. This shift also frees up our dedicated sales teams to focus on more strategic selling opportunities. This approachs impact is already clear. In the first half of 2025 alone, around 20% of our accounts saw an improvement in their CXI scores. These customers are more likely to stay with us, buy more from us, and even become evangelists of our services. These results demonstrate how we are translating customer insights into tangible business outcomes. PERSONALIZATION MATTERS Beyond the numbers, the CXI represents a deeper, more empathetic understanding of our customers’ journeys. By integrating conversational intelligence that analyzes interactions across all communication channels (with the customer opting in)including phone calls, chat, and emailwe can score customer sentiment and track our commitments in real time. This allows our specialized teams to proactively engage with customers, sometimes even before the customer is aware of the problem, and provide a higher level of care. Ultimately, our ability to deliver winning customer experiences is tied to this level of personalization. By understanding our customers both rationally and emotionally, we can anticipate their needs, offer proactive solutions, and provide a seamless, intuitive experience across all touchpoints. Our work with CXI is not just about tracking satisfaction; it’s about actively shaping a future where every interaction strengthens customer loyalty and fuels growth, propelling us toward our customer goals and solidifying our position as a leader in customer experience. Iris Meijer is chief product and marketing officer of Verizon Business.
Category:
E-Commerce
The cracks in postmodern economic theories are visible. Theyve spilled into politics, with governments slashing budgets worldwide. The spark came from Richard Thaler (Nudge) and Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow), but the roots run deeper. In 1978, Herbert Simon won the first Nobel Prize for behavioral economics. Thaler later brought the field into public view with his anomalies articles in the Journal of Economic Perspectives between 1987 and 1990. The message was clear: People act based on their environments. Psychology had already demonstrated this in clinical practice; economics eventually followed. With that, homo economicusthe hyperrational actor of industrial modernitydied. Along with him went the playbook of meritocracy, technical determinism, and cold rationality. In his place rose concepts like culture, institutions, purpose, inclusive HR, gender equality, quotas, and languagesocial dynamics grounded in behavioral insights. As service economies expanded, requiring soft skills more than industrial hard skills, behavioral economics spread. But the field made a major oversight: It never invited accounting to the conversation. THE ACCOUNTING BLIND SPOT Accounting frameworks from FAF and IFRS are still designed for industrial modernity: Only positive, immediate cash flows count as value. Everything else is classified as a cost. That means the way a company treats suppliers, employees, communities, and the environment is booked as a loss, disconnected from value creation. Even ESG initiatives are paradoxically punished by the very systems that claim to encourage them. Consider a practical case: a company with 10,000 Google reviews averaging 4.6 stars. From a statistical perspective, this dataset holds weight. It is large enough to fall under the law of large numbersvalid, representative, and statistically significant. It is a voluntary response sample with real-world significance, combining quantitative and qualitative depth. Most importantly, it suggests correlation with causation: Employees, suppliers, and communities are treated with respect and professionalism. That number is not just a reputation score. Its a direct indicator of ESG performance and long-term value creation. It also signals that leadership is competent and that the company is likely to sustain future cash flows, impacting valuation itself. Yet none of this is captured on the balance sheet. FROM BEHAVIORISM TO HYPER-MODERNISM We are entering what could be called hypermodernism, a necessary blend of behavioral insights and rationalist rigor. But the dialogue has barely started. Take HR practices, or todays people analytics. Some companies still measure screen time as a proxy for productivity. Few integrate stakeholder feedback on employee well-being, family quality of life, or the actual value of deliverables. Meanwhile, technology has already solved problems of scale. Large language models like ChatGPT process data in ways far more complex than corporate metrics. A simple 10-word sentence is represented by around 257,000 parameters, calculated in hundredths of a second. Training involves millions of such sentences, across billions of parameters. If AI systems can process that complexity, organizations can certainly design models with 100-200 parameters to identify talent, monitor well-being, and measure real performance. They can even share these benchmarks across industries, just as the scientific community shares open datasets. With web scraping, API mining, sentiment analysis, metadata extraction, and time-series tracking, organizations can measure behaviors and relationships with a precision unavailable to earlier generations. MEASURE WHAT TRULY CREATES VALUE This is the opportunity: to move beyond the hard-line modernist models built to exclude unexplainable asymmetries from the balance sheet, and instead bring those very asymmetries into view through multiparameter models. If we genuinely want to assign value to diversity, inclusion, and the social dynamics that generate wealth, we must measure these effects, not dismiss them as expenses. That requires accounting to catch up, and for Nobel-winning thinkers to help rewrite the rules. FURTHER READINGS This debate isnt isolated. Harvards Impact-Weighted Accounts Project is working to embed social and environmental externalities directly into financial statements, while frameworks like Context-Based Sustainability argue that performance should be judged against ecological and social thresholds. At the same time, critiques of ESG ratings reveal how fragmented and inconsistent todays measures are. New approachesranging from relational metrics of trust and community well-being to AI-driven sentiment analysisare emerging. All point to the same conclusion: Accounting must evolve to treat culture, relationships, and impact not as costs, but as core drivers of long-term value creation. Rodrigo Magnago is researcher at RMagnago Critical Thinking.
Category:
E-Commerce
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