 |
|
|
|||||
So long, nine-to-five. There’s a new work schedule that’s taking over. The grueling “996” schedulewhich stands for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a weekis gaining momentum across the U.S., especially in certain industries. If a 72-hour work week sounds all-consuming, that’s precisely the point. The 996 schedulewhich became popularized in China, eventually leading to protests and even claims that it led to a handful of worker deathsis meant to foster a eat-sleep-work lifestyle. Keith Spencer, a career expert at FlexJobs, told Fast Company that the trend is most commonly being seen across AI startups that “are embracing this approach to accelerate growth and remain competitive on a global scale.” While the intense work ethic sounds overwhelming, Spencer says that some young and hungry workers may actually be drawn to it. “Certain employees, especially younger workers, may even welcome this level of intense dedication, particularly when additional pay or incentives are offered,” he explains. That may be especially true as the rise in 996 culture has been touted by major tech leaders like Elon Musk, who have long promoted a work ethic that asks employees to make some major sacrifices. Musk opened up about the need for increased time commitments on X back in 2018 in a tweet promoting working for his companies as being revolutionary, but requiring immense dedication. “There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week,” Musk wrote. When a commenter asked the Tesla CEO what the right number of hours a week was, he replied that it “varies per person, but about 80 sustained, peaking above 100 at times. Pain level increases exponentially above 80. With that same hardcore work ethic in mind, companies embracing the lifestyle seem only to be interested in hiring employees who are “obsessive,” a word that appears on New York City-based AI startup Rilla’s career page to describe those who work there. Rilla explains on its applications that candidates who aren’t “excited” about working “70 hrs/week in person with some of the most ambitious people in NYC” should not apply. Will Gao, the companys head of growth, previously told Wired about the benefits of the schedule. There’s a really strong and growing subculture of people, especially in my generationGen Zwho grew up listening to stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, entrepreneurs who dedicated their lives to building life-changing companies, Gao explained. Kobe Bryant dedicated all his waking hours to basketball, and I dont think there are a lot of people saying that Kobe Bryant shouldnt have worked as hard as he did. At Cognition, a San Francisco startup that is building an AI software engineer, the mansion workspace has living quarters for employees who don’t have time to go home. The company’s CEO Scott Wu explained what’s expected on X. “Cognition has an extreme performance culture, and were up-front about this in hiring so there are no surprises later,” Wu wrote. “We routinely are at the office through the weekend and do some of our best work late into the night. Many of us literally live where we work.” The 996 trend seems to be taking off in the U.S. at a time when burnout is already at an all-time high. A 2025 report from online marketplace Care.com found that burnout was more impactful than employers thought. Companies believed 45% of their workers were at risk of burnout. But a staggering 69% of employees said they were actually at moderate to high risk. For that reason, Spencer warns that companies should “exercise caution” when leaning into the 996 schedule. In addition to burnout and overwhelm, Spencer says that overworking can even trigger “a quarter-life career crisis” when employees feel disconnected with their career as a result of overworkingwhich isn’t great for the employee and doesn’t serve the company either. Winter Peng, founder and CEO of Silveroak Capital Academy, an elite career coaching and mentorship firm, agrees that the hustle culture can backfire. She tells Fast Company that it “destroys the creativity that drives real innovation.” Peng continues: “U.S. startups adopting 996 are trading innovation for compliance” and says that ultimately, “their best talent will simply leave” in favor of companies who believe in work-life balance.
Category:
E-Commerce
E-commerce continues to eat up ever-increasing share of the U.S. retail market: Americans bought more than $3.3 billion of items online every day in the second quarter of last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Online retails share of spending is increasing with every year that passes. Traditionally, thats meant typing a term or phrase into a search bar and clicking through to a shopping basket. But the AI revolution is poised to swamp online retail, too, with agentic AI set to shop on behalf of customers. The e-commerce sector is rapidly preparing for whats about to comean influx of non-human customers acting on behalf of humans. We avoid hype around technology, but AI agentic shopping could bring huge changes to retail if it is widely adopted, says Clare Walsh, director of education at the Institute of Analytics, a professional body for data analytics experts. The usually staid professional organization is full-throated in its belief that agentic AI shopping could change society. AI-empowered agentic shoppersrobots that learn your shopping needs and preferences and then shop for youhave the potential to be as disruptive for e-commerce as moving bricks and mortar retail online, Walsh says. Those within the retail sector are equally enamored with the concept of AIs arrival. For many years now, eCommerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses,” Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, said in a statement announcing his retailers partnership with OpenAI to enable shoppers to buy things directly through ChatGPT with the aid of AI agents. That is about to change. The early data suggests that the reality is matching the hype. AI-driven traffic to retail sites was up 4,700% in the U.S. in the last 12 months, according to Visa. The future isnt coming, its already checking out, says Rubail Birwadker, global head of growth at the credit-card company. Shoppers want AI to help them, according to Birwadker, who points to research that 85% of shoppers say AI agents improved their experience. Separate research, provided to Fast Company by consumer insights company GWI, suggests one in five people are comfortable receiving product recommendations from AI agents. Data from consultancy Kearney indicates 60% of consumers plan to use AI agents to shop in the next year. But ensuring those shopping interactions are secure is trickier. Investment in cleaner data In mid-October, Visa launched its Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP), a framework that would allow AI agents to share and access data that would ensure it can protect against fraud and bot activity. This enables merchants to avoid blocking legitimate transactions and degrading user experience, says Birwadker. For now, TAP applies only to the Visa network. But having established it across their payments system, the massive payment processing giant intends on broadening its use. Enabling agents to safely and securely act on a consumers behalf requires an open ecosystem-wide approach and we will look to extend Trusted Agent Protocol to be compatible with other payment networks and methods in future phases, says Birwadker. The behind-the-scenes transfer of data is where most within the e-commerce sector are rushing to catch up to what they predict is coming with the advent of agentic AI shoppers, says Robin Anderson, head of product management at Tribe Payments, a global paytech company. Were seeing investment in cleaner data, faster checkouts, stronger fraud controls and tighter integrations between systems, he says. This is because an AI agent will make a buying decision in seconds, and if theres frictiona payment fails, a price isnt clearthe sales gone. Anderson believes the arrival of AI shopping agents is going to change e-commerce in quite a fundamental way. An agent-to-agent future The future of shopping is agent-to-agent, agrees Bernadette Nixon, CEO of Algolia, an AI search company. The transaction will happen on the back end, she says. It won’t be a series of blue links. It won’t be a product listing page or a product detail page. It’ll be the transaction. And for that reason, it needs to be seamless. That requires accurate datawhich means public data scraping wont suffice. Just scraping brands or retailers websites doesn’t yield the necessary information to provide a good user experience, she says, because they don’t have accurate pricing. They don’t have accurate inventory. Protocols and the companies behind them are therefore crucial. Visa is far from the only company in the space: online payments company Stripe has its own Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard developed in conjunction with OpenAI. It all opens up new opportunities for businesses, says Daniel Ruhman, CEO and co-founder of Brazilian fintech Cumbuca, where early AI agent adoption has run ahead of other countries. You could ask ChatGPT or Claude to find me a handbag, navigate checkout pages, and have your agent handle the payment for you, all with your consent, he says. Thats standard, but agentic AI could go further. Through this, agents can even access your financial data to offer spending insights or advice, he says, what we call agentic open finance, where an AI agent connects to your bank accountwith your permissionto help you understand and manage your money.
Category:
E-Commerce
The Federal Reserves influence on the economy is immense, and often misunderstood. President of the San Francisco Fed Mary Daly gives an exclusive, firsthand look into the central banks daily decision-making, explaining how the Feds policies, at both the regional and national level, ripple through society. From housing prices to immigrations impact on labor, Daly weighs the major factors shaping the U.S. economy. As political and market pressures mount, she reflects on what it means to lead with discipline and data, and what every business leader can learn from the Feds balancing act. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You run one of the Fed’s 12 regional banks. Your district covers nine Western states, plus Guam, American Samoa, The Mariana Islands. Can you briefly describe the role of your office, and how it relates to the Fed overall? When we hear Fed Chair Jerome Powell announcing a change in interest rates, are you feeding into that? How does all this work? In 1913, when the Fed was formed, there was a decision that we shouldn’t be Washington-centered. That having a presence in Washington with the Board of Governors was important, but having 12 regional reserve banks was equally important so that we could balance out the decisions about the economy across the country, not just in DC. So I lead one of the 12 reserve banks, and those reserve banks do feed into monetary policy. We go to each and every FOMC meeting. We are rotating on votes, but we’re always participating. We’re thinking about how our districts with the lived experience in the economy is and how that matters when we make monetary policy. Monetary policy, the misnomer is it’s all about numbers and markets, but it’s actually about people and lived economy experiences throughout the nation. And so that’s the role of reserve banks, in addition to managing all the operational duties that our teams have, including making sure you have cash when you need it, that your bank can get it and distribute it, making sure the banking system is safe and sound. You’ve said there’s no politics in the Fed. You’re not funded by the federal government, so a shutdown doesn’t affect you, but everybody tries to influence you guys, policymakers, the White House, investors. How do you keep that politics and that pressure out of what you do? The founding of the Federal Reserve 1913 had two elements to it that I think have been durable over time and led the way for central banking across the globe. First was that you had to have a regional voice and the second was that you had to be independent. Because monetary policy is made for the longer run and the decisions we make on where to put cash depots and how to distribute our supervision, that’s all got to be done no matter what administration is in place. So to be durable, especially on the monetary policy part, Congress said let’s make these individuals independent of political persuasion and really thinking about the goals we gave them, and in our case, it’s price stability and full employment, making sure inflation is at 2%, making sure that the economy is not producing lots of unemployment or running so hot, so un-sustainably that inflation should go up. So those are the goals we have. You asked how do you maintain that? How do you not get influenced? Ultimately, who we work for is the American people. Of course, individuals have points of view and we have to consider those because otherwise we’d just be in an echo chamber. But there’s a difference in listening to understand and listening to be persuaded. And when the President tries to remove a Fed Governor, as President Trump has done with Lisa Cook, how distracting is that from It’s really not distracting from the task at hand. Let me just speak about myself. We’re fiduciary stewards of public trust and public responsibilities, and so that’s where I have to attend. Now, I think about not just what’s right in front of me, but ensuring that the American people have a stable and healthy economy over the long term and that the independence of the Fed is preserved not just for the next two months or two weeks, but in fact over the time period, passing that baton to the next generation of leaders. There’s been so much disruption this year in 2025. Are there particular economic indicators that you are most focused on right now? So I think about it as a three-legged stool. So the first component is the public data, the things we get from the government, the things that we get on a regular basis. They’re very, very important, but they’re only one part of our overall data collection. We also get data from the private sector. One of the more critical components of that three-legged stool, which is underappreciated in my opinion, is the time that the reserve bank Presidents in particular spend talking to people, to CEOs, small, medium and large businesses, to community members, civic leaders, unions and workers thinking about not just what were they doing last week, but what are they doing going forward. So right now, I’m very focused on that third leg. And the reason is because when you get to a point where the economy is changing, you have to rely on people who are telling you not what they were doing last week, but what they are doing next week, the next month, the next quarter and ultimately, the next year. And we take that valuable information back to the FOMC meeting. It’s really a robust process and one that I think is critical at these moments. Obviously, the economy is always changing to some extent, but it certainly feels like we’re at a certain kind of inflection point. I know you’ve rated the sentiment of your region as cautiously optimistic, which is a little incongruous with an economy that seems like it’s moving to something we’re not quite sure where it’s going to go. Can you address that disconnect and maybe explain how and where you see the economy moving? Absolutely. So there is quite a bit of uncertainty still, not as high as earlier in the year. The uncertainty really spiked after April 2nd, after Liberation Day. There was just so much uncertainty people didn’t know if they were going to be able to buy their smartphone or if they should buy it right away or if they should wait. Consumers were uncertain. Businesses were uncertain about what’s this going to mean. But at this point, I think those things have settled, and the economy weathered that fairly well. The unemployment rate has gone up a little bit, but not that much. Inflation has gradually come down except in the tariffed sectors. So the only places where you see prices rising are in the ones direcly affected by tariffs. And so people think of that increasingly as a one time price level adjustment and then they’ll be okay. Another thing that I think is important is pick a basket of goods that you like to purchase. Put them in a cart at one of your favorite online retailers and then check what has happened to that basket of goods over time. And what you’re seeing is that while certain items have gone up, other ones are being deeply discounted, so people feel like they’re not losing the kind of ground they lost in the big inflation rise after the pandemic. So I think that gives people some confidence. Recession indicators were quite high and rising earlier in the year and now they’re not really predicting it at all. Consumer sentiment has gone back up after falling, business sentiment has gone back up after falling. So I think that’s where I get the cautious optimism. I was at University of Utah a couple weeks ago and the students are optimistic, and I was really encouraged by that because that generation is like a bellwether. They see that if they learn these new skills, AI, et cetera, they can really make a dent in the economy. So what is the new economy going to look like? The truth is no one knows, but we do know what the elements will be. Certainly, artificial intelligence is making its way. Is it going to be transformative? Is this going to be the new steam engine or electricity? I don’t know. But it is making a contribution to people’s ability to do things faster, better, cheaper and hopefully, will also make a contribution to us doing things that we never imagined were possible.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||