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TikTok has signed agreements with three major investors Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to form a new TikTok U.S. joint venture, ensuring the popular social video platform can continue operating in the United States.The deal is expected to close on Jan. 22, according to an internal memo seen by The Associated Press. In the communication, CEO Shou Zi Chew confirmed to employees that ByteDance and TikTok signed the binding agreements with the consortium.“I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued dedication and tireless work. Your efforts keep us operating at the highest level and will ensure that TikTok continues to grow and thrive in the U.S. and around the world,” Chew wrote in the memo to employees. “With these agreements in place, our focus must stay where it’s always beenfirmly on delivering for our users, creators, businesses and the global TikTok community.”Half of the new TikTok U.S. joint venture will be owned by a group of investors among them Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX, who will each hold a 15% share. 19.9% of the new app will be held by ByteDance itself, and another 30.1% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors, according to the memo. The memo did not say who the other investors are and both TikTok and the White House declined to comment.The U.S. venture will have a new, seven-member majority-American board of directors, the memo said. It will also be subject to terms that “protect Americans’ data and U.S. national security.”U.S. user data will be stored locally in a system run by Oracle. The memo said U.S. users will continue “enjoying the same experience as today” and advertisers will continue to serve global audiences with no impact from the deal.TikTok’s algorithm the secret sauce that powers its addictive video feed will be retrained on U.S. user data to “ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” the memo said. The U.S. venture will also oversee content moderation and policies within the country.American officials have previously warned that ByteDance’s algorithm is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect.The algorithm has been a central issue in the security debate over TikTok. China previously maintained the algorithm must remain under Chinese control by law. But the U.S. regulation passed with bipartisan support said any divestment of TikTok must mean the platform cuts ties specifically the algorithm with ByteDance.The deal marks the end of years of uncertainty about the fate of the popular video-sharing platform in the United States. After wide bipartisan majorities in Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed a law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. if it did not find a new owner in the place of China’s ByteDance, the platform was set to go dark on the law’s January 2025 deadline. For a several hours, it did. But on his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep it running while his administration tries to reach an agreement for the sale of the company.Three more executive orders followed, as Trump, without a clear legal basis, continued to extend the deadline for a TikTok deal. The second was in April, when White House officials believed they were nearing a deal to spin off TikTok into a new company with U.S. ownership that fell apart after China backed out following Trump’s tariff announcement. The third came in June, then another in September, which Trump said would allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States in a way that meets national security concerns.TikTok has more than 170 million users in the U.S. About 43% of U.S. adults under the age of 30 say they regularly get news from TikTok, higher than any other social media app including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, according to a Pew Research Center report published this fall.Shares of Oracle jumped $9.07, or 5%, to $189.10 in after-hours trading. Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology Writer
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E-Commerce
Thank you once again for reading Fast Companys Plugged In. A quick programming note: We will be taking the next two Fridays off. Happy holidays to all, and I look forward to resurfacing in your inbox next year. For any number of reasons, 2025 has hardly been my favorite year. But if I were to make a list of things that went well, my relationship with AI would be on it. This was the year I went from being an AI dabbler to a daily user. And while some of that usage still amounts to messing aroundhello, Sora!even more involves tasks that make me more productive. More importantly, it brings me better results, a goal I hold dear. (Sadly, not every AI enthusiast agrees.) Here, then, is a look at how Im using AI as 2025 winds down. I covered some of this ground in a September Plugged In. But since I wrote that, the technology has become even more core to my workflow, and my AI A-team has shifted pretty dramatically to Google products for the first time. So a year-end update seemed worthwhile. First, Ive finally figured out how to use chatbots such as OpenAIs ChatGPT, Anthropics Claude, and Googles Gemini as research tools. I remain wary of accepting anything they say as the truth, since AI still has a devious knack for hallucinating fantasies that sound like fact. But its dawned on me that I dont need to take AI at its word. Starting a research quest with a detailed AI prompt is often more effective than trying to boil it down into keywords of the sort I would have typed into a search engine in the past. And every self-respecting chatbot now provides citations for its work, at least when I ask for them. They lead to web pages written by actual humans, which are far easier to assess than wordage extruded by an LLM. After spending most of 2025 weaving between ChatGPT and Claude as my chatbot of choice, I was (mostly) wowed by the new Gemini 3 Pro-powered version of Gemini that debuted in November. Its become my default bot. But the frenzied pace of competition in the category argues against long-term loyalty: I need to spend more time with the new GPT-5.2 version of ChatGPT, which arrived last week. More than any garden-variety chatbot, I have found Googles NotebookLM utterly essential this year. Instead of trying to be an expert on human knowledge in its entirety, it just digests files you feed to it. Then it lets you ask questions about them and responds with startlingly useful summaries and citations. They frequently lead to insights I wouldnt have managed if left to my own devices, and have never mischaracterized anything or otherwise led me astray. For me, NotebookLM is most valuable as I spelunk through transcripts of the interviews that provide raw ingredients for articles I write. (In the case of our five-part oral history of YouTube, there were dozens of them, about 168,000 words in total.) For you, the source material might be internal documents, white papers, or something else relating to whatever youre working on. Either way, this free tool, like most of historys best software, is a bicycle for the mind. (Disclaimer: Im not talking about NotebookLMs best-known featurepodcast-like audio overview synthetic conversations based on your sources, which are an astounding magic trick but have never left me feeling smarter about a topic.) Finally on the AI good news front, theres vibe codingcoming up with ideas for apps and having AI do nearly all the work of turning them into functioning software. When 2025 started, it didnt even exist as a thing, at least under that name. Now I cant imagine working without it. That started back in April, when I used a vibe coding tool called Replit to build the note-taking app of my dreams. The project required dozens of hours of effort and hundreds of dollars in usage fees. But eight months later, I use the app I created every day, and it still makes me unreasonably happy. Lately, I have been vibe coding with Googles AI Studio, which is powered by Gemini 3 Pro. So far, the results have been less quirky and buggy than Replits sometimes are, making whipping up my own apps even more irresistible. Case in point: Last month, I bought a ScanSnap document scanner and soon discovered that its cloud service gave the resulting PDFs incomprehensible names. With Geminis help, I constructed a smart PDF-naming utility. It reads the files and renames them with clearer descriptions than Id write myself. Problem solved, in about 20 minutes. Too much AI in all the wrong places For all the ways AI speeded my work in 2025, its been far from an unalloyed blessing. Notably, all the tools I praise above are newish and AI-first. When existing products are retooled to emphasize AI, the technology often feels bolted on. Its not just that it isnt dependably helpful; sometimes, its an obstacle to progress. For example, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Gmail, and Outlook would all be delighted to compose text for me, a feature that has become as prominent an element of their user interfaces as the 58-year-old blinking cursor. I have no interest in turning that job over to them. And yet I cant ignore the various icons, widgets, and promos dedicated to these tools, which stare me in the face every time I sit down with these products. Its an ongoing mental tax levied for alleged benefits Id prefer to avoid. In other cases, its obvious that AI features have been rushed to market without sufficient quality control, as if the bragging rights for havng shipped them were all that mattered. I have learned to tamp down my expectations, or even assume that new functionality will perform as advertised at all. In August, for instance. I discovered that ChatGPTs new Agent feature couldnt perform some of the tasks in its own list of things I should try. It was also incapable of reliably determining the current date. A month later, I was intrigued enough by Perplexitys Email Assistant to briefly spring for a $200-per-month Perplexity Max account. I never got it up and running, in part because Perplexitys own explanation of its new tool was notably short on, you know, explanation. I might have felt less lost if it had just included a screenshot or two. Whether or not theres an AI bubble, the industry responsible for the technology is still in the process of confronting its legacy of overpromising and underdelivering. But with the good stuff getting really good, anything that fails to live up to its own hypeor simply meet reasonable standards of utilitywill only look more ridiculous. May the momentum recently seen in AI productivitys best products continue in 2026 and beyond. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company These sites and apps will help you assemble the perfect holiday reading listEven in the AI era, bookstores and online reading communities still rely heavily on human expertise and personal recommendations. Read More The Warner Bros.-Netflix merger could doom Hollywood film workersFor media moguls, maximizing shareholder value is the only metric that counts. Read More With Apples help, storytellers are figuring out Vision ProThe headset opens up immersive new opportunities for dramas, documentaries, music videos, and beyond. Some filmmakers and developers are diving right in. Read More Robinhood knows you want to trade on everythingPrediction markets boomed in 2025. Now Robinhood wants to cash in. Read More This guys obscure PhD project is the only thing standing between humanity and AI image chaosA virtual watermark thats nearly impossible to remove. Read More Deepfakes are no longer just a disinformation problem. They are your next supply chain riskMost companies are woefully unprepared, and the traditional cybersecurity playbook isnt enough. Read More
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E-Commerce
Pricing is one of the most powerful growth levers a business has, yet it is still one of the most overlooked. While teams spend months refining product and brand, pricing decisions are too often rushed, emotionally charged, or guided by instinct rather than insight. Under the pressure of rising costs and competitive pressures, many leadership teams resort to the fastest fix: promotions to meet short-term targets or price increases to plug a margin leak. The companies that consistently outperform take a different approach. They treat pricing as a strategic, evidence-led discipline. They ground pricing in how customers perceive value and make decisions to deliver growth that lasts. Take two companies facing the same rising costs. One applies a uniform 10% price increase to protect margin. It works briefly, until customers notice and push back. Sales slip and the business reacts with discounts that instantly undo the uplift they were counting on. The other takes a more thoughtful approach. They identify where value is strongest, redesign how options are packaged and presented, and adjust prices selectively. A year later, revenue and gross margin are up, and customer trust remains intact. This is what happens when pricing becomes a strategic capability rather than a quick fix. Here are six levers business leaders can use to make pricing a sustainable engine of growth. 1. Position: Where do you sit in the market? Positioning shapes how customers view your product or service when compared to the alternatives. That may be another version of your offer, a competitor offer, or a completely different option that your customers believe can get the job done. Where you sit among those options shapes what customers are willing to pay. Is your offer seen as premium or budget? A “want to have” or a “need to have”? Make your positioning clear by finding out why customers choose you over the alternatives, and what role price plays in that decision. 2. Perception: How do customers assess value? Perception is how customers judge the value of your product or service. Its how your solution meets their needs, solves a problem, or brings a moment of ease or delight. That perception forms before they buy through brand cues, third-party reviews and how clearly the benefits are communicated, and it continues to evolve based on how well the product performs in use. The mistake teams make is assuming customers see the value as clearly as they do. Instead, listen carefully to your customers to understand what they value most, and what they are willing to pay for that value. Use these insights to refine how you communicate value at every stage of the purchase journey. 3. Packaging: What choices are you offering? Packaging is the structure behind the choices you offer to customers: whats included, how different features are bundled together, and how customers compare options. For example, streaming services use goodbetterbest packaging, with tiers ranging from a basic with ads plan up to a premium option. Give customers too many choices, and its overwhelming. Give them too few, and it becomes a question of should I buy? rather than which should I buy? Guide customers toward better decisions by making options intuitive, with clear trade-offs and visible benefits as they move to more premium options. 4. Presentation: How is your offer presented? Presentation is how your prices are visually communicated. Customers rely on subtle cues such as color, size, language, and layout to interpret value and compare choices. Each of these cues implicitly shapes how the price feels and can nudge customers toward one choice over another. Test and refine how pricing information is framed and displayed to build confidence and improve conversion. Experiment to measure which changes drive the best outcomes. 5. Price: Are you charging the right amount? Price is the number customers see, but it should not be the starting point for pricing decisions. When companies skip straight to the number, they end up debating numbers, not value. The price needs to align with everything that comes before it: positioning, perception, packaging, and presentation. When customers see a price that mirrors the value they feel, it strengthens trust, confidence, and conversion. Think about your price point. Is it aligned with your value, your position in the market, and the choices on offer? 6. Promotion: When and how should you discount? Promotion is the lever you pull to spark a specific behavior: trial, urgency, repeat purchase, or upsell. The challenge is that discounts are often used to chase short-term targets, which risks eroding margins and teaches customers to wait for a deal. Discounts and promotions work best when they are intentional and anchored in a clear pricing strategy. Use promotions to drive specific customer behaviors without undermining value or long-term profitability. Shift the question from How much should we discount to hit this months number? to What behavior are we trying to drive, and is a discount the right lever to do it? Under pressure, leaders face a choice: rely on reactive decisions or treat pricing as a strategic capability. By pulling a broader set of levers and grounding decisions in real customer value, you turn pricing into a tool that can shape demand, signal value, and lead to sustainable growth.
Category:
E-Commerce
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