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If youve spent any time on the kids birthday party circuit in the past few years, youve likely logged more than one Saturday at a trampoline park amid packs of children freed from the tyranny of indoor voices. Parents of yore in search of movement-focused venues had to settle for Chuck E. Cheese or the ball pit at McDonalds. Today, chains like Sky Zone, Altitude, and Urban Air are competing to earn the loyalties of energetic children everywhere. With a mix of acrobatics, rock climbing, and foam pits, these venues prioritize exercise over technologyand their recent success challenges common assumptions about modern parents tolerance for risk, if only for the length of a childrens party. Or perhaps theyre just thrilled by the absence of smartphones. We hear a lot from our customers about screen time, says Shawn Hassel, CEO of Sky Zone, the trampoline park sectors dominant player. We focus on that analog experience, where kids can just be kids. [Photos: Evan Jenkins] [Photos: Evan Jenkins] Sky Zones 251 locations in North America, almost evenly split between corporate owned and franchises, collectively hosted 300,000 birthday parties in 2024. The company saw $435 million in corporate revenue, $80 million of which Hassel says will go toward expanding to 500 locations by 2027, mostly via franchises. Fueling its growth is a shift to targeting experienced franchisees; the company recently closed a 10-pack deal in the Dallas and Oklahoma City markets with a family that owns several McDonalds locations. On the customer side, Sky Zones membership program, with 800,000 active members, continues to grow, driven byyou guessed itbirthday partiers. Every time, they bring 9 or 12 of their friends, Hassel says. It pretty much sells itself.
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E-Commerce
Creativity has been heralded as our last irreplaceable skill, the one thing machines could never touch. Yet in offices everywhere, teams hit the same walls: blank screens, stale ideas, the exhausting churn of brainstorming sessions that go nowhere. The promise of human ingenuity feels increasingly at odds with the reality of modern work, where the demand for fresh thinking has never been higher, but the conditions for producing it have never been worse. Its awkward to admit, but were not brainstorming the way we used to. Its not that weve lost the ability. Creative thinking remains the lifeblood of everything from product development to marketing campaigns. But the uncomfortable truth is that we no longer have the luxury of time for the classical creative process. The slow simmer of ideas, the meandering discussions, and the trial and error that once defined innovation have been compressed into frantic sprints. We’re still creative, but we’re drowning in the busywork that keeps us from accessing that creativity when we need it most. Were in the decade of the creative bottleneck For years, innovation has unfolded at a breakneck pace, but the evidence suggests things are slowing. The low-hanging fruit of the digital revolution has been picked, and the next wave of breakthroughs requires more than incremental tweaks. Yet the very systems meant to foster creativity have become clogged with bureaucracy and inefficiency. Consider the latest estimates on how knowledge workers spend their time: they waste 3.6 hours each week managing internal workplace communication, another 2.8 hours searching for or requesting information they need to do their jobs, and an additional 2.2 hours trapped in unnecessary or unproductive meetings. Thats nearly a full day every week lost to process rather than progress. White-collar workers, especially in tech, were supposed to be the disruptorsthe ones breaking old models and inventing new ones. Instead, theyve become administrators of their own stagnation. We cant create more time, but we can rethink what creativity actually is At its core, creativity isnt the romanticized lightning strike of inspirationits a grueling, mechanical process. It requires grinding through bad ideas, hitting dead ends, and enduring countless revisions before arriving at something worthwhile. The hardest part? Ideationthe raw generation of new concepts. Humans arent wired to produce fresh ideas on demand. Our brains cling to familiar patterns, get stuck in ruts, and freeze under pressure. But this is precisely where AI excels. Where we see a blank page, an AI sees infinite permutations. Where we fatigue after a dozen iterations, an AI can generate thousands without losing focus. Heres the real opportunity: if improving an idea by 5% used to take two weeks of human deliberation, what happens when AI can deliver that same 5% gain in 30 minutes? Suddenly, those incremental improvements compound exponentially. The bottleneck isnt the quality of our thinking; its the speed at which we can cycle through possibilities. AI is actually very good at the creative process Where AI thrives is in the parts of creativity that humans find most draining: the relentless generation of variations, the cold-eyed evaluation of options, the pattern recognition across vast datasets. These are the unglamorous foundations of innovation, the behind-the-scenes work that makes the “aha” moments possible. Think about it. Humans can run at 15 mph tops; cars can go 200 mph. We dont insist on sprinting everywhere just to prove our legs work. We use technology to extend our natural capabilities. Why should thinking be any different? Humans simply arent built to crank out a hundred versions of a logo, or a thousand variations of a marketing message, then dispassionately select the strongest. Our attention falters, our judgment clouds, our patience wears thin. But for AI, this is trivial. It doesnt need coffee breaks or pep talks. It doesnt get attached to pet ideas or succumb to groupthink. It just generates, analyzes, and iteratesexactly the skills needed to break through creative logjams. This isnt about replacing human judgment. Its about augmenting it. The real value of AI lies in its ability to handle the brute-force labor of creativity, leaving us free to focus on what humans do best: refining, contextualizing, and applying ideas with taste and strategic insight. Its the difference between digging a foundation with a shovel and using an excavator. The end goal isnt the tool its the building. We dont have to cede complete creative control To be clear, this isnt about surrendering creativity to machines. AI lacks our intuition, our cultural awareness, our understanding of human nuance; the very qualities that make our best ideas resonate. The breakthroughs of the next decade wont come from AI working alone, but from humans wielding AI as the ultimate creative accelerator. The real paradigm shift is recognizing that AI isnt here to replace human creativity, but to unstick it. For years, weve treated brainstorming as a sacred ritual, as if the magic were in the method rather than the outcome. But what if the magic is actually in removing the friction between thought and execution? We need to let machines do what they do best (generating and sorting possibilities at superhuman scale) so we can focus on what we do best (selecting, shaping, and elevating the best ideas). The next big idea might be waiting in iteration #387and thanks to AI, we might actually have time to find it.
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E-Commerce
Dearest reader, I hope this article finds you in good health. I deeply desire also that if you use generative AI to boost your productivity at work, that you, for all that is good and holy, review everything it produces, lest it hallucinate data or quotes or address your boss by the wrong nameand you fall on your face and embarrass yourself. Sincerely, Your unchecked AI results AI is taking the workforce by storm and stealth, as the rules for how to use it are still being written and employees are left to experiment. Many employees are under pressure to adopt AI: Some companies such as Shopify and Duolingo are requiring employees to use AI while others are ratcheting up productivity expectations so high that some workers may be using it just to meet demands. This creates an environment ripe for making mistakes: weve seen Grok spew hate speech on X, and more recently an AI agent deleted an entire database of executive contacts belonging to investor Jason Lemkin. Funnily enough, no one wants to share their own AI-induced flub but they have a story to tell from someone else. These AI nightmares range from embarrassing to potentially fireable offenses, but together they reveal why there always needs to be a human in the loop. The Email You Obviously Didnt Write Failing to review AI-generated content seems to be the most common mistake workers are making, and its producing errors big and small. On the small side, one worker in tech sales who asked to remain anonymous tells Fast Company her colleague used to ask ChatGPT to write natural-sounding sales emails, then contacted clients with Dickensian messages that began, I hope this email finds you in good health. The Slackbot Gone Awry Similarly, Clemens Rychlik, COO at marketing firm Hello Operator, says a colleague let ChatGPT draft Slack replies largely unchecked, and addressed him as Clarence instead of Clemens. When Clemens replied in good fun, calling his colleague the wrong name too, their reaction was, of course, guilt and shameand the responses after that were definitely human. The Inappropriate Business Recommendation On the larger side, some people are using AI to generate information for clients without checking the results, which compromises the quality of their work. Alex Smereczniak is the CEO of the startup Franzy, a marketplace for buying and selling franchise opportunities. His company uses a specially trained LLM on the back end to help customers find franchises, but Smereczniak says their clients often dont know this. So when one client asked to see opportunities for wellness-focused franchises, and the account manager recommended she open a Daves Hot Chicken, she was less than pleased. Smereczniak says the employee came clean and told the customer he had used AI to generate her matches. We took a closer look and realized the model had been weighting certain factors like profitability and brand growth too heavily, without enough context on the prospects personal values, says Smereczniak. We quickly updated the models training data and reweighted a few inputs to better reflect those lifestyle preferences. When the Franzy team fired up the AI again, the model made better recommendations, and the customer was happy with the new recommendations. At a startup, things are moving a million miles a minute, Smereczniak says. I think, in general, its good for us all to remind ourselves when we are doing something client-facing or externally. Its okay to slow down and double checkand triple checkthe AI. The Hallucinated Source Some companies have used AI mistakes to improve their work processes, which was the case at Michelles employer, a PR firm. (Michelle is a pseudonym as shes not technically allowed to embarrass her employer in writing.) Michelle tells Fast Company that a colleague used Claude, Anthropics AI assistant, to generate a ghostwritten report on behalf of a client. Unfortunately, Claude hallucinated and cited imaginary sources and quoted imaginary experts. The quote in this piece was attributed to a made-up employee from one of the top three largest asset management firms in the world, she says. But the report was published anyway. Michelles company found out by way of an angry email from the asset management firm. We were obviously all mortified, Michelle says. This had never happened before. We thought it was a process that would take place super easily and streamline the content creation process. But unfortunately, this snafu took place instead. Ultimately, the company saved face all around by simply owning up to the error and successfully retained the account. The PR firm told the client and the asset management firm exactly how the error occurred and assured them it wouldnt happen again thanks to new protocols. Despite the flub, the firm didnt ban the use of AI for content creationthey want to be on the leading edge of technor did it solely blame the employee (who kept their job), but it did install a series of serious checks in its workflow, and now all AI-generated content must be reviewed by at least four employees. Its a mistake that could have happened to anyone, Michelle says. AI is a powerful accelerator, but without human oversight, it can push you right off a cliff. The AI-Powered Job Application AI use isnt just happening on the job, sometimes its happening during the job interview itself. Reality Defender, a company that makes deepfake detection software, asks its job candidates to complete take-home projects as part of the interview process. Ironically its not uncommon for those take-home tests to be completed with AI assistance. As far as Reality Defender is concerned, everyone assumes, and rightfully so, that AI is being used in either the conception or full on completion for a lot of tasks these days, a rep for the company tells Fast Company. But its one thing to use AI to augment your work by polishing a résumé or punching up a cover letter, and another to have it simply do the work for you. Reality Defender wants candidates to be transparent. Be very upfront about your usage of AI, they said. In fact, we encourage that discretion and disclosure and see that as a positive, not a negative. If you are out there saying, Hey, I did this with artificial intelligence, and its gotten me to here, but I am perfectly capable of doing this without artificial intelligence, albeit in a different way, you are not only an honest person, but it shows your level of proficiency with artificial intelligence. Personally, I dont think its necessarily bad to use [AI] to some extent, but at th very, very least, you want to check whats being written and reviewed before we share it, says Rychlik at Hello Operator. More broadly, I ask everyone to pause regularly on this because if your first instinct is always ask GPT, you risk worsening your critical thinking capabilities. Rychlik is tapping into a common sentiment we noticed. On the whole, companies are trying to use mistakes as a learning opportunity to ask for transparency and improve processes. Were in an age of AI experimentation, and smart companies understand mistakes are the cost of experimentation. In this experimental stage, organizations and employees using AI at work look tech-savvy rather than careless, and were just finding out where the boundaries are. For now, many workers seem to have adopted a policy of asking for forgiveness rather than permission.
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E-Commerce
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