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It’s Q1 2026. Your chief financial officer is cutting innovation budgets by 20%. Your AI pilot showed 94% accuracy improvements. The LLM is yielding solid results. You’re getting defunded anyway. The reason? You solved a problem AI can solve. Your budget-holder needed you to solve theirs. Companies launch AI pilots that produce results, then stall at scale. The team’s diagnosis: “They don’t get it.” What’s really going on: These projects never earned budget-holder buy-in. Passing the budget-holder test requires three things pilot teams fall short on: analytic proof that you move their needles, execution confidence that scale is achievable, and relational trust that you have their back. As economic headwinds hit 2026, here’s how to know if your project will surviveand what to do about it now. Analytic ProofDo You Move Their Needles? Budget-holders don’t fund impressive technology. They fund solutions that move metrics they get credit for at bonus time. Your pilot team celebrates: “Our AI improves processing accuracy by 40%!” Your budget-holder asks: “Does that improve my customer retention rate? Lower my cost per acquisition? Move my net promoter score? Show me the math and where this shows up in monthly financial reports.” Most teams can’t answer. They proved the technology works. They got great feedback from customers. They didn’t prove it moves the drivers of financial outcomes that matter to the person holding the purse strings. One of the most challenging barriers I encountered in banking: We proved migrating customers to digital self-service generated huge impacts on customer segments aligned to product P&Ls. But accounting systems didn’t attribute these improvements to each P&L owner. They couldn’t “get the credit” in performance reviews. Without attribution in the system of record, results almost didn’t exist. P&L owners had no incentive to shift resources from familiar approaches to digital initiatives they wouldn’t get recognized for. You may prove improvements in metrics everyone claims to supportcustomer experience, innovation, digital transformation. But if those improvements aren’t attributable to line items on their scorecard, they won’t survive prioritization discussions. This requires analytic work most pilots skip: understanding what drives the budget-holder’s financial metrics, connecting AI outputs to those drivers with causation and magnitude, and confirming results will manifest in financial reporting. When the CFO asks “prove ROI,” showing AI accuracy improvements isn’t an answer. Showing how accuracy translates to their measured outcomes is. Execution ConfidenceCan You Actually Scale This? Your pilot worked in controlled conditions with a small team, friendly users, and tolerance for iteration. Your budget-holder knows what you might not: What you needed to test is totally different than what you need to scale. They’re assessing execution risk. Can you articulate what’s different about scaling? Have you anticipated the capabilities to address those differences? Four capability gaps erode budget-holder confidence. Strategic optionality: AI evolves faster than traditional planning cycles. If your road map locks the organization into today’s context, you’re creating risk. Human judgment integration: Edge cases that were 2% of your pilot become thousands of customer impacts at scale. Do you know where human judgment is essential, or will you create operational chaos? Quantitative versus qualitative reality: Your dashboard shows 85% adoption. But are users completing tasks because the experience works, or because they have no alternative? Sustaining motivation: Organizational anxiety about AI is realpeople fear being replaced. What’s your impact on the budget-holder’s team motivation to achieve 2026 targets? Budget-holders who’ve seen technology work in pilots but fail at scale won’t fund projects where execution risks aren’t anticipated and addressed. Relational TrustDo You Have Their Back? This is the most critical dimension. Your budget-holder is assessing: Do you understand my pain? Are you here to make me successful, or to pursue the latest “shiny object”? The gap shows up in how teams frame problems. “We can use AI to automate customer service” starts with what AI can do. “Your call center costs are 15% above target and customer satisfaction is droppinghere’s how we address both” starts with their problem. It shows up in how you treat pushback. If the budget-holder or their team are “obstacles” to what you believe should happen, you’ve already failed. Their messages are loaded with intelligence about what they need before they’ll get on board. A team I worked with spent two years trying to get a test file of customer names from an operations team to validate a hypothesis. They kept asking without diagnosing the real issue: colleague fear of a new approach that seemed implausible and raised risks to predictable results. It could be overcome only through trust-building and patience. Given anxiety about AI replacing jobs, are you building confidence or eroding motivation among the people who need to execute? Budget-holders fund teams they trust understand their reality. Active champions invest in your success. Passive tolerance means you’re first on the cut list. The MetroCard Lesson In 2006, my team at Citi partnered with Mastercard and the Metropolitan Transit Authority to prove contactless payments worked in subway turnstiles. The technology performed. User feedback was strong. But scaling required three complex organizations to align business models, priorities, cultures, and decision-making. The execution capability took two decades to build. Today’s AI leaders don’t have 20 years. You have until Q1 budget reviews. What to Do This Week Assess where you stand on all three dimensions: 1. Analytic ProofCan you draw a direct line from AI outputs to your budget-holder’s measured outcomes? Not “Our accuracy improved, but “Here’s how accuracy translates to the retention rate you’re accountable for and will show up in your results”? If you can’t make that connection, do that analysis before asking for scale funding. 2. Execution ConfidenceCan you articulate what’s different about scaling versus piloting? Have you identified execution risksstrategic optionality, human judgment integration, what dashboards miss, organizational anxietyand built capability to address them? If you think scale is just “bigger pilot,” you haven’t earned their confidence. 3. Relational TrustHonest assessment: Are you focused on making your budget-holder successfu, or on building impressive technology? Are you treating their concerns as intelligence or obstacles? What’s your impact on their team’s motivation? If they’re not actively championing your project, you’re at risk. The AI projects that survive 2026 won’t necessarily be the most technologically impressive. They’ll be the ones where teams built all three dimensions of budget-holder confidence. Economic pressure doesn’t care about your pilot. It cares whether you solve their problem or yours.
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E-Commerce
An Olympic torch is a small, flaming time capsule. Since the start of the modern Games in 1936, the torch has been passed by thousands of runners in a relay that goes from Olympia, Greece to the host city’s stadium. It’s a feat of engineering, since it needs to be durable enough to resist wind and rain, while keeping the Olympic flame arrive. But torch designers also imbue them with symbolic meaning. 1936 Berlin [Photo: IOC] The Berlin 1936 torch was engraved with the Nazi iconography of an eagle. The Sapporo 1972 torch was a thin, cylindrical combustion tube that was a marvel of Japanese engineering. The Rio 2016 torch featured rippling blue waves celebrating the country’s natural beauty. 1972 Sapporo [Photo: IOC] What kind of torch represents the world we now live in? Carlo Ratti, the Italian architect and designer tasked with creating the torch for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, pondered this question for a long time. Ratti’s work largely explores the future of cities, particularly as global warming looms. For him, the biggest issues of our time are climate change and political polarization. Three years ago, he began the process of making a torch that captured these big ideas. 2026 Milan Cortina [Photo: IOC] His torch is perhaps the most sustainable one we’ve seen. It is made of recycled materials and it is designed to be refilled, so it can be used up to 10 times. It is minimalist to a fault, meant to fade into the background so that the world focuses on the flame within it. The flame, he says, is a powerful symbol of our joint humanity. At this time of deep polarization and divisions, he says, we tried to strip down most of the things from the torch and really let the fire speak. Fire, after all, predates every nation that now passes it along. Its one of the first technologies of mankind, Ratti notessomething ancient, sacred, and shared long before borders existed.” A Lineage of Torch Makers Before sketching a single form, Ratti traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland, where every Olympic torch is preserved at the Olympic Museum. Seeing them in person, rather than online, made the pattern unmistakable. Everybody somehow tried to capture the moment of their time, Ratti says. Each torch, he observed, follows the same basic logic: a burner at the core, wrapped in a designed shell meant to convey meaning. Like car design, he explains, the engine is hidden beneath an eye-catching exterior. And then the second thing is capturing the momentconnecting with local motifs. 1992 Albertville [Photo: IOC] Early torches, beginning with the relay introduced at the Berlin 1936 Summer Olympics, leaned heavily on classical references. The London 1948 torch resembled a chalice, while the Rome 1960 torch was designed to look like a column. 1994 Lillehammer [Photo: IOC] Toward the end of the 20th century designs were more sculptural and declarative, often mirroring national ambition. The 1992 Albertville torch, designed by Philippe Starck, was in the shape of an elegant curve and was meant to reflect French modernism. The 1994 Lillehammer torch had a distinct Viking aesthetic. 2000 Sydney [Photo: IOC] In the 21st century, the emphasis shifted again to focus on technological innovation. The torch for Sydney 2000 famously combined fire and water. Beijing 2008 engineered its torch to survive the winds of Mount Everest. 2008 Beijing [Photo: IOC] A Radical Shift Against that backdrop, Rattis instinct was to do something quietly radical: design the flame, not the torch. That idea led to an inversion of the usual process. Rather than starting with an expressive exterior, Ratti and his team began with the burner itself, shaping only the minimum structure needed to hold and protect it. The result is the lightest Olympic torch ever producedsmall, slender, and almost an afterthought in the runners hand. We just start from the inside, Ratti says, and we do the minimal shape around the burner. [Photo: IOC] The effect is intentional disappearance. In photographs, the torch nearly dissolves into its surroundings, reflecting sky, snow, or cityscape depending on where its carried. The runner and the flame take precedence; the object recedes. Ratti describes the earliest sketch as a runner with a flame in her or his hand instead of the torch itself. 1964 Tokyo [Photo: IOC] There are a few earlier torch designers who had similar instincts. Ratti points to the torches designed by Japanese industrial designer Sori Yanagi for Tokyo 1964 Summer Olympics and Sapporo 1972 Winter Olympics as key inspirationsboth exercises in restraint. What has changed, he argues, is technology. Today, advances in aerodynamics, materials science, and fuel systems make it possible to minimize the object without compromising the flame. That same logic extends to sustainability. Milano Cortinas torch is not only smaller but engineered to be refilled and made largely from recycled aluminum. For Ratti, this approach is part of his broader philosophy. He argues that any designer working today must consider the environmental impact of their work. This applies to his work as an architect, creating a floating plaza in the Amazon River where people can experience the impact of climate change to turning a former railyard in Italy into a logistics hub featuring a renewable energy plant. The first step in order to adapt is to use less, to use less stuff, he says. [Photo: Andrea Amato/NurPhoto/Getty Images] Looking back at Olympic history is bittersweet. Earlier generations didn’t have to focus as much on sustainability because the climate hadn’t yet been so damaged. But today, it is impossible to design a torch without thinking of its environmental impact. For Ratti, it was important to imbue the torch with a clear message because the passing of the torch is seen by millionspossibly billionsof viewers around the world. By designing a torch that fades into the background, Ratti is making the case that we should pull back on overconsumption and excess, and focus our energies instead how we can work together to keep thriving as a species. Maybe humanity will lose interest in oversized ballrooms and gilded pastiche, he says.
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E-Commerce
Laying people off takes its toll. Going back 25 years plus ago, I can still remember every situation that I had to do it in, says Robert Kovach, a work psychologist and former corporate executive. The experience sticks with you, he says. Because its not just about operational stress: Have I filled out the forms? Made the calls? Its also filled with moral stress, he adds. Even when the decision is necessary, it can feel like a violation of your own personal values. People laying off their coworkers often feel a clash between their responsibility to their company and their responsibility to be a good person to the people theyre laying offparticularly because layoffs are about a company needing to downsize, not always about the individual employees poor performance. These feelings have been coming up a lot lately, with layoffs reaching a high in 2025, and 2026 already being off to a layoffs-filled start, with Amazon, Pinterest, UPS, Home Depot, Dow, and others announcing cuts so far. While getting laid off can of course be devastating, theres a big emotional challenge for the people who must do the laying off, as well. How do you [show] respect [for] someone when you know you’re about to mess up their life? Kovach asks. Though you may get feedback from higher-ups that you shouldnt feel bad for letting someone go because its just business, you know deep down, that its not. Its all very personal, Kovach says. Fast Company spoke with several mental health experts about the psychological underpinnings of having to lay someone off at work: the anxiety leading up to the event, the language to use during the moment of truth, and the guilt-provoking aftermath. Maintaining composure throughout is keybut how do you? Like Kovach says: Youre about to mess up someones life. Prepare Being the person who has to deliver the news can be deeply distressing, says clinical psychologist Melanie McNally. Psychologically, many people experience anxiety, guilt, and even a sense of grief. Approach a layoff meeting with a clear idea of how you want to handle it, says Victor Lipman, a Psychology Today contributor who provides coaching on mindful management at work. This doesnt necessarily mean having a script ready, as that can come off robotic or impersonal, but lay out some key talking points you need to hit during the conversation. These might stem from organizational obligations. Consult with the appropriate powers that be, says Lipman, whether thats human resources or the companys legal department. You may be obligated to make certain statements about severance or explain the reason for layoffs in a certain way. Its worth making sure those points are covered not just to fulfill the duties to your organization, but also to add some predictability to an otherwise unpredictable situation. You may also want to turn to colleagues for moral support. Preparing emotionally might involve talking with a trusted colleague or supervisor, says McNally. HR and mental health providers might also be available at your company to help with layoff prep. Ultimately, to go into a layoff meeting prepared, its important to acknowledge and validate your own feelings first, says McNally. One way to do that, says Kovach, is to name that this is going to be tough. Dont pretend that youre a robotaccept the emotional component and choose to lean into the empathy that comes with it. Be direct Everyone knows that there is a wrong way to lay someone off. When former Google employee Vivek Gulati prepared for a meeting one morning in January 2023, he checked his email to find an announcement that the company would conduct 12,000 layoffs. (At least this email was sent on purposejust last month, Amazon accidentally sent employees an email announcing a round of global layoffs, which they later confirmed would indeed take place.) The next email in Gulatis inbox contained his personal layoff notice. In a story he wrote about this experience for Harvard Business Review, Gulati also shares how his manager learned about his layoff. He had tried to enter an office building, and his badge didnt work, Gulati writes. It was a rough way to find out. This is why mental health experts recommend conducting layoffs in person. Employees deserve personal communication, says Lipman. Laying someone off face-to-face exhibits emotional maturity in a companys leadership. For the person conducting the layoff, however, the temptation to do so at a distance is understandable. By using text or email, you wont have to see the person break down; you wont be faced with trying to comfort them in a situation where you cant provide much assurance. Kovach compares these at-a-distance layoffs to the studies from the 1960s where participants were told they were tasked with administering electric shocks to people they couldnt see in another room. It was much easier to knowingly cause someone harm when the administrator didnt witness it. While you should be physically present to lay someone off, its best if no one else is. Ideally, layoffs should be conducted in a private, neutral space, like your office or a quiet meeting room, says McNally. Be clear and direct. McNally suggests avoiding euphemisms, which might confuse or minimize the situation. For instance, you might feel compelled to cushion the blow with something like, Were going through a rough time financially now at the company, but if things turn around, Id love for you to get your job back. That likely doesnt represent a promise you can keep. You want it to be an efficient meeting, Lipman says, one that doesnt heighten existing emotional distress or provide false hope. Zoom can constitute such a private, neutral space if its facilitating a one-on-one meeting. This work for layoffs when thats the usual way you communicate with an employee, but if youre both working at a physical office, its best to eschew video calls in this tense moment. (And of course, mass firings over Zoom never go well, yet continue to be part of many big firms MO for laying people off.) Also: dont bash the company. Youre still management, Lipman says, and need to act professionally. Lipman suggests saying something like, I’m sorry to see you go. I’ve enjoyed working with you, but this is just something that has to be done. While Kovach acknowledges certain enterprises might offer scripts to ensure everyone losing their jobs get treated the same (for legal and/or policy reasons), its okay to massage that script into your own words for a personal touch. At the organizational level, companies should give transparency about why the layoffs are taking place: was a particular department underperforming? Did a new product fail to meet revenue goals? Companies can also offer mental health resources for employees conducting layoff, whether that’s in-house or via referrals. Also, the timing of layoffs should be well thought out and diligently coordinatedno one should find out theyre jobless because their key card suddenly doesnt work. Ready for reactions Calmness can be contagious, as can agitation, Lipman says. Bad reactions to getting laid off run the gamut, says Kovach. From tears to physical outbursts to even suicidal ideation, responses reflect the fact that losing a job is a massive, detrimental shakeup to someones life and well-being. It can fuel what somebody already believes about themselves, so they can slip into a narrative of I just wasn’t worth keeping, says social worker Yvonne Castaeda. This is why an explanation of its not you; its the company can be so important. When encountering emotions from employees like shock, anger, sadness, anxiety, or even relief, McNally suggests, the best practice is to allow space for these emotions and dont try to fix them right away. Thats because you wont be able to. Instead, take the time to listen to the employee, and validate their feelings in that moment. Provide support resources where you can, either from within your company or an outside trusted job placement organization, and give concrete details about severance packages. You can also encourage those whove been laid off to reach out to family, friends, or mental health professionals, McNally says. Not everyone handles these emotions calmly, even if you exude calm while conducting the layoff. People are very capable of making a scene in a layoff situation, says Lipman. You want to be sure you have some backup in case anything goes wrongsecurity, if it comes to that. Then theres dealing with your own guilt for having to lay off a coworker. Maybe this persons also a friendsomeone with whom youve shared successes and failures at work, and whose families youve maybe barbecued with on Sunday afternoons. Its normal to feel guilt, sadness, or even anger after laying someone off, McNally says. Reflecting on what took place, either alone, with friends, or with a mental health professional, can help process these emotions, as can generally practicing self-care, like getting enough sleep and exercise. At the end of your day, reassure yourself that this was something you had to do in the management role that you were in, Lipman says. If you offered empathy and clarity during a layoffthen its better you conducted it, than someone who considered it just business.
Category:
E-Commerce
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