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Wendys announced plans to close a “mid-single-digit percentage” of its underperforming U.S. store locations, or 200 to 350 of some 6,000 locations, during its quarterly earnings call on Friday. The news comes as the fast-food giant reports third-quarter profits of $44.3 million and $549.5 million in revenue, beating analyst expectations by 2.71%. The company’s adjusted earnings per share (EPS) came in at 24 cents, versus expectations of 20 cents. International business delivered strong system-wide sales growth, with international net unit growth expected to come in over 9% in 2025. Shares in Wendy’s Co. (NASDAQ: WEN) were up about 2% in midday trading on Friday, after Wendys stock surged 11.66% in pre-market trading. On the earnings call, Interim CEO and CFO Ken Cook said the shutterings will begin this year and continue through 2026, but did not give a list of specific locations. (Reached by Fast Company, Wendy’s declined to provide a specific number or list of locations.) Cook said Wendy’s will approach underperforming restaurants on a case-by-case basis. He explained some current restaurants “do not elevate the brand” and are “a drag from a franchisee financial performance perspective.” The goal is to address and fix those restaurants by improving operations, through additional technology or equipment. In other cases, closing the restaurant “will put money back in franchisees pockets and enable them to reinvest both capital and resources in their remaining restaurants.” The bottom line: “Closures of underperforming units are expected to boost sales and profitability at nearby locations,” Cook said. One year ago, in November 2024, Wendy’s also announced it was closing 140 “outdated” restaurants.
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As artificial intelligence enters its dating era, it has taken on an increasing number of roles: cupid, wingman, even romantic interest. Where once peoples biggest concern was being unfortunately catfished by old photos and flattering filters, now if a person seems too good to be true, well, they might not even be human at all. Hily’s Dating App T.R.U.T.H. report surveyed 1,559 U.S. daters and found 82% of Gen Z and 87% of Millennials are already turning to AI in their dating lives. Up to 95% also plan to use it in the future. Just as in traditional dating, there are some double standards at play. For Gen Z, 62% say they’d be turned off if they discovered their match was using AI during the talking stage, despite being happy to use it themselves. This number increased to 70% for Millennials. As one Gen Z dater on Hily said: Id be less attracted. Its lazy and unnecessary. Demonstrates a lack of creativity and care. Another added: It feels less authenticand also a lot less fun. Isnt dating supposed to be fun, not an imitation of the weird arms race we see in work? The ick is understandable. It brings up questions like, if someone needs the help of AI to carry a conversation, are they even that interested? If they arent willing to put in the work, why should you? And ultimately, if you hit it off, are you falling for the person or the algorithm? The most common uses of AI are to generate a dating app bio based on information provided and to offer suggestions for conversations. If it generated their bio, thats fineif its accurate, one Millennial dater on Hily said. But not if it made things up or used misleading photos. Daters are burnt out from endless swiping, ghosting and a transactional dating culture. Chatfishing is one way to optimize and outsource some of the emotional labor of finding love (who said romance was dead?). After all, most have enlisted the help of the group chat in crafting a risky text or handed over full control to a friend to spice up a conversation. Some chatfishers take things a step further, having ChatGPT conduct entire conversations. A 2025 study from Norton found six in 10 people who use dating apps believe theyve encountered at least one conversation written by AI. Its also getting harder and harder to tell if the person youre messaging is human or bot. A 2025 preprint paper showed that human judges who spoke with both OpenAIs model GPT-4.5 and a human simultaneously, mistook the AI for a human 73% of the time. While AI can be an effective wingman when it comes to clinching a first date, when its finally time to meet face-to-face, problems arise. Of the daters Hily surveyed, 53% of Gen Z and 66% of Millennials say theyd feel less confident on a real-life date after using AI to communicate with a match. People tend to turn towards AI due to the fear that theyre not good enough and need to outsource to be better liked and well received, Dr. Sabrina Romanoff, relationship expert at Hily Dating App and Harvard-trained clinical psychologist, told Fast Company. This has a paradoxical effect as AI often white washes over the personality traits, uniqueness, and small touches that make them special. And if your AI persona is smarter, wittier, and funnier than you, you are only setting yourself up for failure.
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Hello again, and thank you for reading Fast Companys Plugged In. In 2013, David Min came to Disney CEO Bob Iger with a big idea. Min, a founding partner at Disneys investment arm, Steamboat Ventures, was now head of innovation for the entire company. He had concluded that something fundamental needed to be done about Disneys relationship with the tech industry. Wemeaning The Walt Disney Companydidn’t really have a very good reputation at the time for working with startups, he remembers. Tech accelerators such as Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Techstars were changing how high-potential concepts got their shot at becoming thriving businesses. Min thought Disney might learn something by investing in such an accelerator. Igers take: That idea wasnt big enough. His response to me was like, Why would we do that?we should just do it ourselves, remembers Min. So Disney did. The entertainment and media behemoth launched its own accelerator, partnered with Techstars to get it rolling, and gave it the most logical possible name: Disney Accelerator. In 2014, it unveiled its first cohort of 11 startups. Eleven years later, corporate accelerators within large companies are no longer such a daring notion. Actually, theyre quite common. But Disneys take on the idea has had time to grow well beyond its origin as an exercise in reputational repair. On Wednesday, Disney Accelerator held its 2025 demo day on the Disney studio lot. The event served to introduce this years cohort of four startups: animation studio Animaj, microdrama producer DramaBox, 3D printer Haddy, and 3D projection company Liminal Space. Bonnie Rosen and David Min [Photo: Courtesy of Disney] The Disney employees who gathered at the studios Main Theater to watch a video presentation about this years cohort and then mingle with this years startups and alumni companies in person came from across the companys myriad enterprises, including movies, broadcasting, theme parks, cruise ships, consumer products, and beyond. They represented a fraction of the almost 600 staffers who now engage with the accelerator program year-round. We had people all the way from facilities and maintenance to the chairman of that division coming in for this one particular company, says Disney Accelerator general manager Bonnie Rosen, whose résumé includes time at Techstars as well as a startup that was part of Disneys 2015 cohort. Those types of vertical conversations happen within each division. More than any other long-lived Hollywood titan, Disney prides itself on being innovative to its core. Its an understandable badge of honor given that Walt Disney himself embraced advances such as the talkies, Technicolor, and TV as they came along, making each fundamental to the way his namesake company entertained the world. Today, its usually no mystery why Disney was intrigued by any given company among the 60-plus that have been through its accelerator program. At demo day, for example, Liminal Space showed off its technology in the studios Stage One building, where the original Mouseketeers filmed The Mickey Mouse Club in the 1950s. It projects particularly crisp, vivid 3D video that can be viewed using simple polarized glasses. It can also be interactive: One of the demos involved The Guardians of the Galaxys Rocket Raccoon bantering with attendees. Liminals system isnt currently in use at Disneys parks, but it seems like a natural. Liminal Space’s 3D projection technology is far more impressive in person than in a flat image like this. [Photo: Harry McCracken] As for Animaj, its what Disney itself was in the beginning: a small but ambitious animation studio. Like Toonstar, which I recently profiled, the Paris-based company has built its own software platform that uses AI to help creators figure out which stories will resonate with audiences and then expedite the process of turning them into animation. In this case, theyre stories for little kids. Paris-based Animaj produces kid-friendly animation using its own software platform. [Photo: Courtesy of Animaj] The vision that we have with all of our properties is to turn them into global franchises with all the different layers, Antoine Lhermitte, the companys CTO, told me. So we start on YouTube. Then we create a premium production [version] to sell to linear platforms, digital platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, etc. Then we layer in consumer products, and then, if the traction continues, the idea is to go to theaters. Lhermitte says hes hopeful the accelerator might lead to Animaj and Disney creating content together; the startup doesnt want to be a service provider that just licenses its software to other studios. Then theres Haddy. At first blush, it might seem a bit of an outlier in the Disney Accelerator portfolio. The Florida-based company counts military, maritime, and furniture among the verticals its pursuing for its 3D printing technology, which tariffs have made newly enticing as a way to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. But the same factory that can crank out a 3D printed boat can also produce a full-size, real-world replica of King Louies throne from The Jungle Bookand has, as an experiment for Disneys Imagineering theme-park designers. (It took about 20 hours to print.) Furniture 3D-printed in Haddys factory [Photo: Courtesy of Haddy] Haddy was already working with Disney when it was invited to join this years accelerator program. The company has networked with around 200 Disney executives as a result of this association, and has found that the experience redounds to the benefit of its other businesses, and vice versa. You’re always learning, says head of sales Erin Smith. A boat that we print for Brunswick boats, for example, makes us more experienced and smarter when we print a boat for the Disney Jungle Cruise. The fact that Haddy is well down the path of applying its technology to fields not at all tied to its Disney association reflects the accelerators investment strategy, which has evolved over time. At first, it focused on early-stage startups and offered each one a standard $120,000 investment (the same figure once offered by Y Combinator). Eventually, however, Disney concluded that it was better off striking bespoke deals with growth-stage startupsones whose future wouldnt be overly skewed by Disneys stake and the potential to sign up the company as a customer. These further-along businesses arent reliant on Disney for the health of their business development pipelines, says Min. Disney is a pillar of what they’re trying to accomplish, but it’s one of many things, and we encourage that. Which is not to say that even startups that are already booming cant benefit from being well-connected at Disney. ElevenLabs is best known for its ability to turn real peoples voices into uncannily accurate synthesized speech. When it joined the accelerators 2024 program, it had fewer than 100 employees but was already a unicorn. Now its at 350 people and is still hiring, and the contacts its made within Disney remain valuable. Sports, film, TVwe’re talking to all of them, because each of those divisions could use our product in so many different ways, says head of partnerships Dustin Blank. The conversations are always super interesting. In one case, the accelerator welcomed a company was already a venerated institution, an unorthodox arrangement that seemed to have worked out well for all involved. When Epic Gamesthe creator of Unreal and the game development platform based on itjoined the 2017 Disney Accelerator program, it was more than 25 years old and on the cusp of releasing something called Fortnite. The massive multiplayer game went on to truly epic success. In 2024, the two companies announced a partnership involving Disney taking a $1.5 billion stake in Epic and collaborating with it on new games based on Disney franchises. Like anyone investing in startups, Disney aims to see a financial return from its accelerators portfolio. It also clearly sees the potential to apply some of the technologies it learns about to keep its many businesses growing. (CFO Hugh Johnston spoke as part of the demo days video, during a presentation that name-checked the companys cofounder and original bean counter, Roy O. Disney, almost as often as his younger brother.) Mins original goal of bolstering the companys perception among techies remains crucial as well. Yet another goal is allowing Disney to help shape the future of technology. Consider robotics, a hot topic at the moment that Rosen mentions when I ask her about emerging technologies that Disney Accelerator cares about (besides AI, of course). She notes the challenges a free-range Disney bot faces, such as safely weaving its way around theme-park visitors and food carts. But she also says the company might make a contribution to figuring out how to make robots more personable. It’s that personality part where Disney creatives are uniquely positioned to [initiate] a real momentum shift in how robotics are thought about, she says. Those are areas that are very exciting, and we wouldn’t look at them in the same way that the broader market is. Given that the company happens to have more than 60 years of eperience in getting humans to bond with robotsdating to when Disneyland got its Enchanted Tiki Room and Mr. Lincoln first read the Gettysburg Address at the 1964 New York Worlds Fairits not an idle claim. And its one no mere stripling of a startup can match. 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 Forget AI companions. This $249 AI ring lets you talk to yourselfStream believes the future of AI might live on your finger. Read More New court docs put Sam Altman’s honesty in spotlight againA lot is riding on the AI industry’s ability to apply AI productively and safely in business and personal life in the next decade. Trust is a major factor. Read More Nintendo wins suit against streamer who flaunted pirated gamesCrossing the gaming giant can be an expensive proposition. Read More Paul Allen’s AI nonprofit unveils satellite data platformAi2 wants OlmoEarth to help nonprofits and governments without the resources for state-of-the-art geospatial AI work. Read More Oops, I got emotionally attached to this $429 AI petCasio’s Moflin is perhaps the first AI ‘companion’ to deliver on its promise. Read More Here are the best mobile AI appsPrompt, research, design, prototype, and moreall from your phone. Read More
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