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From Shopify and Duolingo to Google and OpenAI, AI-first companies are now defining our era. And just about every designer Fast Company has talked to for the past three years has shifted from a deep-seated fear of AI to a steady adoption of these AI tools in some part of their workflow. But when analyzing 176,000 design job listings for our upcoming “Where the Design Jobs Are” report (out June 16), we were struck by a most surprising finding. Only 0.4% of design jobs asked for experience in specific AI tools, including ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney, and Runway. In fact, only 8% of all listings made any mention of AI at all. And even then the term was generally used in marketing speak, the kind that positions a company as being AI-powered.” After reaching out to a dozen major companies across industries to figure out why, we heard a somewhat unsatisfying, but also common, refrain: We arent asking for specific proficiencies with AI tools explicitly as part of the hiring process at the moment, wrote a Figma spokesperson in response to our request. That said, we tend to hire people who are curiously exploring and studying new tools that help improve their work . . . [and] it can be helpful to see how candidates get creative with AI, whether via side projects or for their core work. In other words, even when companies arent asking that designers have AI experience, theyre often preferring, or even expecting, that they do. Embracing AI tools is essential in the design world. Our designers use both internal and external AI tools in their workflows, said Joshua To, VP of product design, AR, AI, and wearables at Meta. The best designers naturally adopt these technologies, so we don’t feel the need to explicitly highlight them in our job listings. Why not just ask for experience with AI? However, if companies are bullish on the future of AI in design, we still find ourselves scratching our heads. Why not just ask that a designer is comfortable using Midjourney or writing prompts? Why not make it clear that you expect designers to work with AI? Figma says that one reason it isn’t more specific about the AI tools a candidate must know is that there are still few standards across the industry to even ground the question. We rarely mention tools in our [applications] unless they are specific tools/languages for specific roles (SQL for data science, languages like Python, platforms like Netsuite, etc.), a company spokesperson said. I could imagine if there are specific AI tools that could change. But I think saying ‘know how to use AI for xyz’ is a bit too generic to mention. We heard an almost identical take from Mattel, which isnt asking for AI experience but expects fluency in the evolving toolkit of the roleincluding AI, according to a spokesperson. We care more about how candidates think, adapt, and solve, rather than implicating AI tools, specifically.” Visa shares the same perspective. Its still early days to ask for experience in any specific AI tool, but we have the expectation that creative minds are leaning in and experimenting with the various tools coming online. Designers, researchers, and creative professionals should be exploring ways to move from requirements to prototypes faster, unlocking speed in the creative process, said Robb Nielsen, SVP of global design at Visa. He continued: What we care about is whether someone is learning by doing, using AI in their workflow in thoughtful, creative, even scrappy ways. Did they prototype something faster using GPT or Claude? Are they iterating concepts with Midjourney or Firefly? Great, tell us more! All being said, Im not looking for a certificate; Im looking for signs that candidates have been experimenting and show evidence of adaptability, curiosity, innovativeness, and a growth mindset. SharkNinja’s rationale for not listing AI proficiency in job descriptions is a bit different. The company worries that pushing too hard for AI fluency would overshadow the need for core design fluency, especially because the company is not using AI that deeply in the design process yet. We use AI as a tool for things like mood boards and imagery, but were not relying on it to actually design our products, a SharkNinja spokesperson said. Thats why it typically doesnt show up as a required skill in our design job descriptions. Its generally assumed that most designers have some experience with AI, but were cautious about attracting talent that might rely on it at the expense of strong foundational design skills. Navigating a lack of standards If theres any consensus among companies, it seems to be that AI experimentation is important for designers, but not so codified as a practice yet that AI proficiency should limit the applicant pool. Even the companies that are asking that designers have experience with LLMs and other AI tools are less interested in the platforms candidates know than in a more generalized comfort and experience with delving head-first into these nascent technologies. Dropbox, one of the few companies that does publicize that it wants all designers to have experience with AI tools, uses reasoning that actually mirrors that of the companies that dont. It explains that it cares about the way designers think, and that designers are open and flexible to evolving techniques. Because AI technologies are shifting so fast, being overly specific is a detriment to finding the right talent. We believe that AI-first companies need to do more than build AI technology into the products they sell. Every team at Dropbox leverages AI to accelerate and amplify their work, from engineering to design to finance, the company wrote. For example, each of our open design roles has a requirement, Success leading the thoughtful integration of generative design tools, LLMs, and computational design methodologies into creative workflows while preserving team autonomy and elevating overall design quality. So even if the next design job you apply for doesn’t ask for expertise in AI, the bottom line is that the skill is key to getting hired anyway. No need to master one particular piece of AI software. Just be comfortable, and even eager, to use the technology. And its not a bad idea to formalize AI samples into your portfolio, either.
Category:
E-Commerce
As the administration of President Donald Trump dismantles reforms enacted under Joe Biden, workers and management at a Fort Valley, Georgia, school bus plant are thriving because of the same policies. On Trumps first day in office, he signed an executive order that would freeze future spending under two Biden-era laws: The Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which authorized funding of more than $2 trillion. Under Biden, those grants often went to companies that supported worker unions, according to the Center for American Progress. Several workers at Blue Bird Corp., a school bus manufacturer with 1,500 union employees at its plant in Fort Valley, said that support transformed their workplace. They pointed to better job conditions under a union contract and said that the company has thrived under a grant and contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to federal support for electric buses. Observers, including former acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, said that Trumps actions could mean an abrupt end to successful government programs that have already improved the lives of workers across the country and added to companies bottom lines. Were making them school buses. Theyre making a lot of money. At first glance, Blue Birds story looks like its solely about the power of unions to improve a workplace. Like many workers in the Deep South, workers at Blue Bird had tried to organize a union without success since the 1960s. In 2019, they began to gain traction. The majority-Black workforce was fed up with starting wages as low as $13 an hour, no official pay scale, and the resulting unpredictabilityand rarityof raises. The factory roof leaked, and some parts of the job, like working with hazardous pressure systems, felt unsafe, they said. Whats more, the policy for time off was opaque: The company would give personal leave to who they want to, not when people might really need it, said Dee Thomas, a 12-year veteran of Blue Bird who serves as USW Local 697s executive vice president. Blue Bird officials declined repeated requests by Capital & Main for comment. Workers began talking among themselves about a union. One member knew someone who was in the United Steelworkers union, and soon employees were talking to union organizers, meeting in parks, local churches and public libraries. Blue Bird Corp. employee Dee Thomas [Photo: courtesy United Steelworkers] In 2022, workers heard that Blue Birdone of the countrys only bus manufacturers with electric vehicle expertisetold investors they expected to bring in at least $1 billion in federal incentives encouraging public school districts to switch to electric school buses. They wanted a fair share of the proceeds they were helping the company make. Were making them school buses, Thomas said. Theyre making a lot of money. When the union campaign went public in early 2023, Blue Bird fought it, workers said. The United Steelworkers union filed unfair labor practice complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that managers threatened to close the plant if workers voted for a union, surveilled employees as they talked with union organizers, and urged workers to vote against the union in mandatory employee meetings. (After the union election, the charges were withdrawn.) Guidelines under a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency helped the union organizing campaign, said Alex Perkins, a USW organizer and current staff representative for the Blue Bird union. The EPAs Clean School Bus Program, funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, required union neutrality at companies, banning them from using government funding to support or oppose union organizing activity. Activists said they reminded Blue Bird executives that the federal money theyd bragged to investors about might not be granted to union busters. In response, the company tempered its opposition, Perkins said. In early May 2023, Blue Bird workers voted 697 to 435 to authorize the United Steelworkers union to represent them. A boost from Biden The victory was only a first step: The union needed to negotiate a contract with the company before workers jobs would actually improve. Some of Blue Birds potential customers, as well as federal grants, gave preference to companies that committed to good faith contract negotiations with workers. Su, who was acting secretary of labor at the time, had made quick contract agreements a priority for the Department of Labor. Most employers, on the other hand, drag out initial contract talks, and most first contracts take more than 500 daysmore than 16 monthsto be ratified, according to a recent Bloomberg Law study. There is no penalty for employers who drag out negotiations or even fail to sign a contract. Nearly one-third of all unions that win an election do not have a contract within three years, with more than a quarter never getting a contract at all. Workers werent sure how Blue Bird would respond to negotiations, so they resolved to show the company that treating workers well could help its bottom line. In August 2023, with contract negotiations at Blue Bird in pocess, Melinda Newhouse, assistant to the United Steelworkers international president, called in to a Los Angeles Unified School District public school board meeting about its pending $80 million contract for 180 electric school buses. When public investment is made, it should be done in a way that takes into account more than just the bottom line, Newhouse told the meeting, referring to Blue Birds new union. The district, bound by law to accept the lowest responsible bid, chose Blue Bird. The companys then-CEO, Phil Horlock, called it the largest single order ever of EV school buses. The same summer, the Biden administration threw some weight behind union workplaces. When the Department of Energy issued its call for proposals for Domestic Manufacturing Conversion Grants, funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, it said that automotive applicants had to describe how their project would benefit their community with high-quality jobs and support for collective bargaining agreements. If Blue Bird wanted to expand production, a union could help it get grants to do so. As contract negotiations entered their 10th month, Su visited Blue Bird. A longtime labor activist before joining the government, Su had made it her mission to urge companies to adopt contracts within one year. Too often workers who choose a union face significant delays in getting a first contract, Su told Capital & Main. And that delay is not accidental. In Fort Valley, Su urged Blue Bird executives and workers alike to ratify a contract before the first anniversary of the successful union vote. To their credit, Blue Bird took it on, Su said. Management checked in with her regularly about the progress of bargaining, which Su saw as a strong sign of their good faith and collaboration, she added. Workers came to feel that Blue Bird was collaborating with them, too. We worked together, the company and the union, said Perkins, who was also on the bargaining committee. In May 2024, just shy of the one-year deadline, Blue Bird and the union agreed to a three-year contract that went into effect the following July. The agreement raised the lowest-paid workers wage to around $22 an hour, standardized the retirement plan, established a profit-sharing agreement and created a health and safety committee with trained staff. It also formalized the collaboration that had evolved between Blue Bird and workers over the course of negotiations and established regular meetings among worker representatives, management and the CEO to discuss concerns in the workplace and ideas for improvement. A union relationship is a partnership, Horlock said at the official signing of the union agreement. [Secretary Su] explained that to me, and Im grateful we listened and we did it. We got it done. The same month the union contract went into effect, Blue Bird got a Domestic Manufacturing Conversion Grant worth nearly $80 million to expand electric bus productionand with it, union jobs. In the companys grant application, Blue Bird highlighted its efforts to work jointly with the United Steelworkers and touted its commitment to good faith negotiations with the union. USW also sent a letter of support with the application outlining how the company and union would work together. Today, workers say the union has made their jobs better with raises, improved safety and lower turnover. Public records suggested that the unionization effort has continued to pay off for Blue Bird, too. During the first quarter of 2025, Blue Bird reported near record quarterly profits, Horlock said in the companys February earnings call. Horlock attributed the companys performance to its investments to upgrade facilities, develop new products and continu[ing] to enhance the plant working environment for employees. Horlock stepped down as CEO in February but remains on the board of directors. Blue Birds experience under Biden-era policies provides a prime example of how companies can actually benefit from unions once they stop fighting them, said Arthur Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell Universitys School of Industrial and Labor Relations. There are a lot of common interests between the union and the company, he said. The union can benefit the company by giving management workers insights, gained from firsthand experience on how to solve problems, he added. And, as with the Steelworkers, many unions have connections with elected officials who can shape policy to create additional jobs and more stable employment. It only helps the Steelworkers to have Blue Bird get more funding, Wheaton said. All of that reflects the Biden administrations strategic and intentional support of unions, said Ian Elder, national director at Jobs to Move America, an advocacy organization that works to lift labor standards. The previous administration was enacting a form of industrial policy [with] an intention to cultivate industries that create good, sustainable careers while addressing climate change, protecting the environment, and protecting communities from environmental harm, Elder added. Funding freeze Today, Blue Bird and its workers enjoy a kind of success thats likely to become rare as the Trump administration ends the kinds of policies that made Blue Birds collaboration possible. The contract at Blue Bird was a seed of the kind of change that is possible, Su said. That is even more important than ever now, when we have an administration that speaks about being pro-worker, but does things that are horribly anti-worker. Indeed, Trumps sweeping funding freeze hit the Clean School Bus Program and its provisions rewarding good faith contract negotiations leaving its remaining $2 million in funding unspent. The EPA has made no announcement of new funding, though existing awards are still being paid out. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has issued orders to begin eliminating new emissions standards that favor electric vehicles, consumer subsidies for buying them and federal funding to support their development. In a similar vein, the Domestic Manufacturing Conversion Grants that paid off for Blue Bird have been spent, with no additional funding or a program to replace it in sight. Sus replacement as secretary of labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, was initially lauded as a pro-worker Republican, but she has yet to promote policies in support of unions. Although Chavez-DeRemer has posed for multiple photo ops with workers, she has also recanted her support for the PRO Act, the pro-union bill backed by the Biden administration, and declared her support for right-to-work legislation that is widely understood to be anti-union. She also endorsed a Trump agenda that includes effectively canceling project labor agreements with unions for federal construction work; eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; and removing union inputfrom registered apprenticeship programs. The Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and Department of Labor did not return requests for comment. Meanwhile, the Blue Bird unions officers remain optimistic that their collaboration with the company will survive Trumps changes. There are nearly two years left on their current contractenough time, they think, to prove to Blue Bird that companies and workers do better when they work together. The culture is changing at Blue Bird, Thomas said, pointing to their ongoing advice to management and other contract wins. Management will be changing as well. . . . They are going to get it right. Kalena Thomhave, Capital & Main This piece was originally published by Capital & Main.
Category:
E-Commerce
It’s become increasingly common for people to devote two to three hours to email per day. Reducing that burden has been a 15-year mission for Aye Moah, cofounder and CEO of Boomerang. Since Gmails early days, she and her team have helped nearly 1.5 million businesses streamline their inboxes using Boomerangs triage tools, including a popular “pause” button for emailall to the tune of about $8 million in annual revenue. Now, the company is expanding its reach with its acquisition of GQueues, a to-do list and team task manager designed to tackle other forms of digital distraction. Moah spoke with Fast Company about managing information overload, protecting work-life boundaries as a fully remote team, and why simply processing emails differently can reduce anxiety by 10%. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. How do you structure your week to minimize the context-switching that plagues remote work? I use a weekly cadence for what I do each day. Monday is all one-on-ones with people I manage and my CEO coaching. Tuesday is for external vendors, managing contractors and marketing agencies. Wednesday has light meetings in the morning, and then the afternoon is maker time for the whole company. We don’t have company meetings then, and everybody is supposed to turn off everything and have a three-to-four-hour block of maker time. That’s where I do a lot of deep thinking, strategy, and planning. Thursday is our weekly meeting dayall our company meetings happen together. Its kind of exhausting because I go from one weekly meeting to another, making a lot of decisions, but it really helps not having to switch contexts. Friday I have two maker time blocks, and Friday afternoon I leave for entrepreneurs that want to network or want advice. You created Inbox Pause to free us up from after-hours email. How do you personally manage work-life boundaries? My inbox is paused at 6 p.m. every night and over the weekend. Only at 8 a.m. on Monday do I get all the email from Friday afternoon through Monday morning. The first few days, maybe even up to a week, my brain didnt quite recognize that pattern. I would check my work email on my phone. But after three or four days where you don’t see anything new, your brain kind of reprograms itself. It stops looking for that dopamine hit and you stop checking. Its automated so I don’t have to spend willpower to say Im going to shut it off and step away. It does it for me, and then, when it becomes a habit, I dont even notice anymore. What if there’s a true emergency? How do you handle that while still protecting your boundaries? I’m speaking from a position of privilege. I am the CEO. I set the company culture. For people who really need to get to me during server outages or some crisis, we still have exceptions. You can set exceptions like this email is from my boss, put it through. So general nonessential stuff is not bothering you. Your brain holds onto anything with open loopsthe Zeigarnik Effectwhere anything you didnt put away will give you more anxiety and less good sleep. Your coworker might send you an email Sunday afternoon without meaning for you to get back to them, but just reading it can ruin your Sunday movie night with your kids because its in the back of your mind. By not seeing it until Monday morning, you’re protecting yourself from that Sunday night anxiety. I put my personal cell phone number in my away message. If its really urgent, you must text me. Or you could set up a separate email address that forwards to your mobile phone for emergencies. You mentioned your team is fully remote. How do you keep meetings engaging and efficient? We have one all-team daily meeting. It’s 11 minutes; we set it for 10:40 and it has to end before 11 a.m. Thats the only meeting we require video for. We know video fatigue is real, so for weekly meetings and status meetings, we dont require people to have video on. We also have very few meetingsan average developer on our team will have three to four meetings a week. If we need to talk live, we just do a quick huddle for a specific topic and get the question answered right away. Those are three to four minute conversations rather than long meetings. We’re also very good about canceling meetings if we don’t think the week requires actually talking through something. We can all just leave feedback and comments on the Google doc. Scheduling meetings takes a huge amount of time. How has Boomerang approached this problem? We tried to make the recipient experience as good as the sender experience because there’s a weird power dynamic with scheduling links. I send you a calendar link, and you have to go look on there, look at your calendar, type in your name, type in your email address, book itthat starts everyone on the wrong foot. To change that we push technology to generate a live image in the message of the schedule of the person proposing to meet. If you’re the recipient and have Boomerang, you don’t even have to leave your email. You can overlay your own schedule and book it. You don’t have to click over and go type in a form like you’re their secretary. We have a customer who took a list from a conference, split it in halfone side got a standard scheduling link and one side got our image in the email. He booked 120% more meetings when he sent the image. What keeps you motivated after 15 years with the same company? We talk to our customers a lot and fill our product road map from their needs. Customer conversations give me a lot of my energy because you see their problems and then when you’re showing something in beta, they say Oh my god, I can’t believe this! We’re just launching a Doodle alternative for group polling or meeting polling, and during user testing they’re saying I can’t wait to get my hands on this. Hearing about peoples real problems keeps me super motivated and energized. Adding GQueues has been fun. We haven’t really been in the to-do list and team management space before. It helps that all of us are productivity geeks, so for us, these are the things we want to tinker with. We get to fix things we aren’t happy with in existing tools. We’re solving our own problems while talking to real people whose problems we’re solving. That’s what keeps me motivated.
Category:
E-Commerce
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