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In 2015, in Gallups State of the American Manager report, then CEO and Chairman Jim Clifton made an assertion that startled many and quietly confirmed what others already suspected: Most CEOs I know honestly dont care about employees or take an interest in human resources. Sure, they know who their stars are and love thembut it ends there. Since CEOs dont care, they put little to no pressure on their HR departments to get their cultures right . . . Given the unique vantage point Clifton had into American business at the time, he offered a rather harsh and honest assessment. And, more than a decade later, the obvious question worth asking isnt whether Clifton was right then. Its whether top leaders are still operating as if he is right today. If you ask the average American worker whether they feel their employer genuinely cares about them and their well-being, the majority will say no. Recent research shows that fewer than one-in-four strongly agreea level roughly similar to pre-pandemic lowsand perceptions of care have steadily declined even as leaders insist they prioritize their employee experience. In my new book, The Power of Employee Well-Being, and in articles Ive recently written for Fast Company, Ive argued that companiesand their leadersmust make a transformational pivot by prioritizing employee well-being as a core driver of performance. Sadly, Ive received many messages from readers suggesting Im fighting a lost causethat despite mountains of evidence, the leaders they work have no inclination to change. More often than not, they treat employee well-being as a complete and utter distraction from the real work of hitting goals and meeting targets. Ive heard this lament so many times that I had to ask myself why my message hasnt gotten through. And my conclusion is that deep down, many leaders continue to fear that any support they give to their people will come at direct expense of productivity. Consciously or unconsciously, theyre convinced supporting well-being is a fools game. Rarely stated outright, this belief system influences leaders decisions every dayhow workloads are structured, how feedback is delivered, and how much time and energy are devoted to supporting employees in ways that make a difference. The problem is theres a mountain of evidence that refutes this very fear. We now have irrefutable proof that well-being is one of the primary conditions that makes achieving goals possible. Evidence Leaders Cant Ignore Well-Being Drives Key Performance Metrics:Drawing on 339 studies covering 1.8 million employees, a meta-analysis from the University of Oxfords Wellbeing Research Centre found a consistent and direct relationship between employee well-being and key business metricsones most leaders are directly on the line for: productivity, customer loyalty, employee retention, and profitability. Well-Being Predicts Performance: As separate reinforcement, a study in Population Health Management found that high employee well-being is a predictor of future productivity, lower absenteeism, reduced disability leave and lower turnovereven when controlling for other variables. Said another way, well-being doesnt merely coexist with strong performance, it precedes it. Investment Boosts Profitability: New research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) shows that organizations which meaningfully invest in employee well-being are four times more profitable than those that dontand are viewed far more positively by employees and job candidates. Well-Being Fuels Stock Growth Irrational Capital analyzed S&P 500 companies over 11 years and found firms in the top 20% for employee well-being outperformed the bottom 20% in stock performance by nearly six percentage points annually. Companies that intentionally offered competitively better pay and benefits alone outperformed by just two points. Why Resistant Leaders Are Wrong Leading a team of people, and being accountable for its results, can feel formidable at timesand its a common response for managers to believe that pushing harder and demanding longer hours is a justified action. But humans are not machines who can work endlessly without meaningful separation from work and adequate rest. When workdays feel endless, and people feel a lack of empathy and support, their capacity to focus, solve complex problems, and collaborate effectively nose-dives. Creativity stalls, mistakes increase, and high-level goals become harder to achieve. In short, neglecting well-being directly undermines the very outcomes leaders need to achieve. The High Cost of the Status Quo Despite many leaders vows to prioritize their employees well-being, the current reality in our workplaces is stark. Recent surveys show burnout has reached epidemic levels, nearly 60% of American workers report feeling stressed very oftenor always on the job. And burnout is the leading reason employees quit. Consequently, mental health struggles are widespread with one in five workers reporting symptoms of depression directly linked to their workplace conditions. And the stakes arent just emotionalignoring well-being hits the bottom line. Replacing a burned-out employee can cost 1.5 to 2 times their annual salary, while disengaged or over-stressed workers lower productivity, slow innovation, and increase errors. In short, neglecting employee well-being isnt just bad for peopleits bad for business. Leaders Wont Fix This Overnight, But Must Take The First Steps As the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, leaders must be realistic that they cannot solve all these conditions overnight. What they should do first is initiate support for their teams well-being by addressing the specific things people crave most: Emotional and Psychological Safety: Across multiple workforce studies, roughly 60% of employees say they want a culture where they can speak up without fear of negative consequences. Belonging: Around 55% report that feeling part of a cohesive, collaborative team that valuesthem personally is their top need. Meaningful Work: About 50% prioritize having work they know connects to a larger purpose or makes a tangible impact. Growth and autonomy: Neary half of employees48%seek support for skill development and more control over how they accomplish tasks. More than a decade later, Jim Cliftons jarring observation still resonates: many leaders have never cared because theyve never thought they had to. But, ignoring employee well-being today puts leaders in direct peril. Well-beingsomething 84% of all U.S. workers now say is their number-one priority in life isn’t a reward for hitting goals; it’s a condition for attaining them. Organizations (and leaders) that invest in it see higher performance, retention, innovation, profitability, and market value. Those that don’t will fall behind, no matter how competitive their pay or perks. The leaders who succeed in the next decade won’t choose between results and care. Theyll see this as a false dichotomy and embrace the new reality that thriving people sustainably produce uncommon results. If this resonates, share it with a leader who needs to hear it. Lead with care, and your organization will follow. Ignore it, and performance suffers. Its really an easy choice.
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E-Commerce
The hottest AI tool on the market today isnt a powerful frontier model from the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic. Rather, its a kludgey, wildly complex, open-source platform thats already provoked a trademark dispute, multiple corporate bansand fawning praise from developers around the world. Its OpenClaw, and its specifically designed to build AI agents. I set it up, built an agent of my own, and promptly trained it to do my job for me. Heres what happened. Beware the Claw For more than a year now, Big AI companies have promised us an agentic AI future. AI wouldnt simply answer our queries or help us shop for a toaster, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic assured usit would actually do useful things. Turns out, the AI giants are generally too squeamish and cost-sensitive to actually release such a tool. Because AI agents can take actions on behalf of a user, they can easily cause harm or make mistakes at scale. As well see, theyre also blindingly expensive. Both those things scare Big AI firms with reputations and valuations to protect. Therefore, theyve largely given users neutered versions of agentic AI. Todays agents come with strict guardrails and perform very specific, bounded functions (like writing code or performing research). Theyre engineered to be unlikely to escape their cages or run up the compute bill. OpenClaw is different. The system is open source and model agnostic. That means it can leverage the best LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, or any other company. Developers install OpenClaw on their local server or computer, giving it broad permissions. This combination of unfettered access to hardware and tie-ins to the worlds most powerful LLMs is a potent one. It allows OpenClaw to do things that other agents cant, spending minutes or hours acting on its users behalf, crawling the web, signing into external platforms, and even controlling cameras and local hardware. The developers behind OpenClaw originally named it Clawdbot, a clear shot at Anthropics Claude system. Anthropic didnt take kindly to that provocation, and threatened a trademark lawsuit. OpenClaws creators briefly named their tool MoltBot, before pivoting to the current, lobster-themed moniker. And thats not the only trouble OpenClaw has gotten into during its brief tenure on the planet. Because the bot has such broad access to users hardware and data, multiple security experts have warned that its a potential data security disaster. Meta and multiple other Big Tech companies have already banned their own developers from using the bot, ostensibly on privacy and security grounds. Those bans just made me want to try OpenClaw even more. So I went to my hosting provider, found a reasonably safe way to install the bot, and set about training its agentic AI to make me obsolete. A Steep Curve To begin experimenting with OpenClaw, I used a Virtual Private Server from Hostinger to create a new OpenClaw instance. Basically, this keeps the bot contained within its own dedicated pretend computer, where it can do minimal damage. I immediately discovered that OpenClaws learning curve, especially for nonprogrammers, is extremely steep. I know my way around a Linux terminal, but it still took me several hoursand lots of back and forth with ChatGPT as my guideto get OpenClaw successfully set up and ready to use. Once it was active, I paired it with my OpenAI credentials, set it up to use OpenAIs flagship models, and set about building an agent. My goal was simple: I wanted an agent that I could unleash on the open internet, and that would do my job as a Fast Company contributing writer for me. Specifically, I wanted my agent to research everything happening in the world of AI, find a compelling news story, hunt down all the relevant details, write up a snappy and blindingly clever (but factual) piece in my writing style, add inline citations, craft a strong headline, and deliver the whole thing back to me. Unlike traditional chatbots, OpenClaw allows users to configure the system deeply. To build my agent, I gave OpenClaw specific instructions about my research process, as well as multiple samples of my prior Fast Company stories. That allowed the system to learn the nuances of my writing style and determine exactly what I wanted. After several hours of maddeningly complex configuration work, I had my OpenClaw doppelgänger ready to go. I named it AI News Desk. Then, I set it to work. Replace Me! Although configuring OpenClaw isto put it in technical termsa pain in the ass, using my AI News Desk agent is extremely easy. All I need to do is fire up a Linux terminal connected to my OpenClaw instance and tell my agent to work its magic. The first thing that struck me was how long OpenClaw spends doing its work. OpenAI users pay the company a flat monthly fee. That gives the company an incentive to do as little work as possible in responding to user queriesthe more work and thinking ChatGPT does on a given query, the more OpenAI has to spend on computing power, and the less profit it makes from the users fixed monthly fee. OpenClaw, in contrast, doesnt care about costs or profit. Its content to blithely burn through tokens to do the best possible job fielding your request. When I asked my agent to research and write an article for me, it often took as long as 20 minutes to produce a response, blowing though $2 to $3 worth of OpenAI API credits in the process. Thats not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but its way more than even a Blitz-scaling OpenAI or Anthropic would devote to a single query. With all that work and thinking, though, OpenClaws responses were quite good. In one test, the system successfully found a relevant piece of juicy AI news (Anthropics decision togive free users access to its powerful new Sonnet 4.6 model), researched more than 50 sources, chose a solid headline (Anthropic just moved its best everyday Claude into the cheap seats), and wrote a piece thats factually accurate and quite polished. Functionally, the Sonnet tier just cannibalized a lot of work that used to force teams onto Opus, OpenClaw opined in the article. I could see writing that. Human sacrifice metaphors in a business story? Thats my jam! OpenClaw writing an article OpenClaw even captured my propensity for including data and stats in my articles. Internal evals show developers prefer Sonnet 4.6 over 4.5 about 70% of the time and even choose it over last falls Opus 4.5 in nearly six out of ten trials, the bot wrote, citing a blog post from Anthropic. Overall, OpenClaw did a surprisingly good job following journalistic best practices. It has a strong sense of whats newsworthy, cites a mixture of sources (including company announcements and external analysis pieces), and keeps things compelling without embellishing facts or hallucinating. Sometimes it drones on about technical things. But then, so do I! In short, its a decent journalistif not, Id like to think, a real replacement for yours truly. Agents for the Win? To be clear, I would never use OpenClaw to actually write a Fast Company article for me. But based on my experiments, the system is a compelling and powerful tool. I spent most of my time on the basics. But with more time spent tweaking and improving its instructions and training data, I could likely improve its output even more. I could also give the bot more capabilities beyond just writing. Because OpenClaw allows deep integrations with other tools, I could train the bot to put its articles into a Google Doc, fact-check them, and even send them directly to my Fast Company editor. Other developers have trained the system to create videos for them, control their smart home devices, build entire iPhone apps, and clear their inboxes by responding to hundreds of emails on their behalf. Beyond the specifics of my experiment, using OpenClaw showed me the real potential of agentic AIas well as its drawbacks. OpenClaw bills itself as The AI that actually does things. Thats true, and refreshing. Its also expensive. In a day of using OpenClaw, I can easily spend $10 to $15. Companies like OpenAI are already burning through hundreds of billions just fielding basic ChatGPT queries. Theres no way theyd let everyday users access such a pricey technology. That means until frontier AI models get far cheaper, agentic AI will be the purview of big enterprises that can build their own bespoke agents, and the crazy few who are devoted (and deep-pocketed) enough to implement tools like OpenClaw for themselves. In short, based on price alone, you can ignore promises of powerful AI agents for the masses. Model prices will come down, though. And when they do, even consumer-friendly tools will be able to pull the same magic as OpenClaw. The agentic future will arrive. But not until its profitable.
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E-Commerce
“AI;DR” is new internet speak for AI-generated slop posts have just dropped. It is a riff on the initialism TL;DR (too long; didnt read), which is often wielded as a criticism of a piece of writing simply too long or confusing to be worth the time it takes to read. The AI slopification of LinkedIn, X, and other social media platforms has been much discussed. A 2024 study found that more than 50% of long-form LinkedIn posts are likely AI-assisteda surprise to exactly no one who has spent more than a few minutes scrolling the feed. That number has likely only increased in recent years, as AI becomes more embedded in our daily processes. Were now entering the era of “AI unless proven otherwise.” Often the intent behind these AI-slop posts is metrics and engagement at the expense of quality writing. LinkedIn’s algorithm slurps it up, so everyone keeps churning out more of it. Now, internet users are refusing to give the slop machines what they want, calling out clearly AI-generated posts with the declaration ai;dr (artificial intelligence; didnt read). Because why bother reading something someone else couldn’t be bothered to write? This is not the first anti-AI term to enter the lexicon. Google Trends data showed a spike in searches for clanker (a Star Wars-inspired insult used to mock robots and AI systems) in mid-2025. On an X thread, suggestions for what to call users of Xs AI chatbot Grok included Grokkers, Groklins, and Grocksuckers. Meanwhile, on TikTok, someone came up with sloppers to describe people who are becoming increasingly overreliant on ChatGPT. The actual word of the year for 2025, as crowned by Merriam-Webster, was slopsumming up the general mood. AI;DR was coined on Threads by developer David Minnigerode in response to AI safety researcher Mrinank Sharmas resignation letter from Anthropic. Sorry, that is definitely tl;dr. But also kinda ai;dr. Some of those sentencesyeesh, Minnigerode wrote. The new term was taken up with enthusiasm in the replies. You just coined something bro, one of those now that I see it I cant believe it took this long to come up with, which is the best kind of discovery, one Threads user responded. We all need to adopt that right quick, another user on Bluesky said. The call to arms is at a time when anti-AI sentiment is growing. Concerns about AI among U.S. adults have escalated since 2021, according to the Pew Research Center. More than half (51%) say they are more concerned than excited about the technologys rise. From the SaaSpocalypse to Hollywoods freak-out over Seedance-generated blockbusters, AI is moving in fast on a range of industries, leaving a trail of “workslop” in its wake. Next time you come across a clearly AI-generated chunk of text, instead of, Grok, what is this about?, hit them with an “AI;DR”it’s a small victory in clawing back our shared humanity.
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E-Commerce
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