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Harnessing Technology to Reimagine What You Do
According to Mike Walsh, author the recent HBR article, “AI Should Change What You Do – Not Just How You Do It,” these views are limiting. Instead, Walsh believes that AI and machine intelligence provide the ability to fundamentally reimagine the customer experience, reinvent how organizations work, and rethink how to solve problems more effectively.
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How GenAI Could Accelerate Employee Learning and Development
While in a nascent stage, generative AI promises to have a major impact on learning and development. It will personalize learning pathways; continuously update materials; create highly realistic, varied training simulations; identify and address skill gaps; and offer a more interactive and responsive feedback than conventional approaches.
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Musk-Led Group Makes $97.4 Billion Bid for Control of OpenAI
A consortium led by Elon Musk offered $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, months after the billionaire sued the artificial intelligence startup to block it from transitioning to a for-profit firm.
The two are already embroiled in an ongoing lawsuit. Musk criticized a massive, $500 billion OpenAI-led project called Stargate announced with great fanfare at the White House just after President Donald Trump returned to office, suggesting the investors involved lacked the funding for the project.
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Salesforce's AI Energy Score Rates the Energy Consumption of AI
"AI models vary dramatically in terms of their environmental impact, from big general models to small domain-specific models," says Boris Gamazaychikov, Head of AI Sustainability at Salesforce. "What the AI Energy Score is aiming for is to develop a standardized way to actually start measuring these things."
AI Energy Score, launched Monday by Salesforce in collaboration with Hugging Face, Cohere, and Carnegie Mellon University, assigns a star rating to assess the energy efficiency of various AI models, relative to other models. The ratings are available for 10 distinct tasks from text and image generation to summarization and automatic speech recognition. A five-star rating is the most energy-efficient, whereas a one-star rating is least. It also shares a number estimate of the quantity of GPU energy consumed per 1,000 search queries in Watt hours.Â
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How Strava Helps Make City Streets Safer for Cyclists
To the uninitiated, Strava can be tough to comprehend. In some ways, it resembles a pretty conventional social-media app, with a central feed that's populated by user-generated text and photos. It's also a workout aid, allowing its users to track their biometrics and performance across 50 different types of activities, including running and biking.Â
But at its core, Strava is really just a database of mapped movement. So it is unsurprising that for over a decade, its data has been used by not-for-profit agencies hoping to understand pedestrian and cyclist activity in their communities.Â
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Use The TALK Method to Go From Small Talk to Meaningful Conversations
Small talk has its uses, especially in the business world. It can help us suss each other out, establish a basic level of trust, or just fill the time while weâre waiting in line. But letâs be honest, itâs also pretty boring. According to science too much small talk robs us of not only more meaningful conversations, but also deeper levels of connection and happiness.Â
For a recent study psychologist Matthias Mehl wired up nearly 500 volunteers and recorded 30 second snippets of their conversations throughout the day. After sorting through all the data, a clear pattern emerged. The more substantive, meaningful conversations a person had, the happier they were likely to be.Â
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Waterlily Raises $7 Million to Help Aging Americans Plan for Care
A whopping 80 percent of older Americans do not have the financial resources to cover long-term care, a 2024 analysis by the National Council on Aging and researchers at UMass Boston found. But Waterlily can help families prepare. The companyâs artificial intelligence model considers health care costs, insurance policies and caregiving trends alongside usersâ personal health and financial data to predict when long-term care will be needed and estimate the price. Â
The Bay Area startup announced the closing of a $7 million seed round on January 29. John Kim, founding partner of Brewer Lane Ventures, led the funding, and Genworth, Nationwide and Edward Jones participated. Waterlily previously raised $2.2 million in a pre-seed round.
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If You're Smart Enough to Work These 4 Steps, Your Self-Leadership Skills Are Better Than Most
If this data is reflective of ongoing trends, employees canât afford to wait for their managers to empower them and need to take matters into their own hands. Simply put, self-leadership is more critical than ever before.
We often find ourselves waiting for permission to lead our own growth, unsure of how to advocate for ourselves or navigate moments of ambiguity. Most people chase goals, routines, and productivity hacks â but real growth isnât about doing more; itâs about unlocking whatâs already inside.
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Who Should Tell Employees About Raises?
Iâve been a manager at my company for 13 years. I have a team of five direct reports and meet with them for one-on-ones every one to two weeks. We review projects, develop strategies for hurdles, discuss whatâs working and whatâs not, and where they would like to see their careers go. Recently we had our annual reviews where I create their annual development plans. These reviews are quite involved and build on conversations weâve had throughout the year. At the conclusion of the reviews, a formal letter from HR is drafted with the annual salary increase and general âhappy to have you hereâ language. HR always drafts these letters and the direct supervisor signs and hand delivers to each person.
This year, my own managerâwho is newâtook the letters from HR and signed and delivered them herself, and I found out after it had been done. I was shocked and feel like Iâve been cut out. Iâve been working with each of these folks all year, asking questions, diving for answers, developing plans, having hard conversations when needed. I think that I had the right to deliver the good news. Am I wrong?
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Why Trump and Google Are Paying Employees to Quit—And What It Means for Your Business
What unexpected thing do both President Donald Trump and Google have in common? They both offered âbuyoutsâ to current employees for the same reasonsâto cut headcount and strengthen company and agency mission alignments.
Trumpâs âForkâ memo offered federal employees the chance to resign between January 28 and midnight, February 6 (with an extension added by court order until February 10), in exchange for being paid until September 30, without working. People who took the offer would also accrue benefits in addition to their paychecksâeven if they took another job.
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Tuesday 11th February 2025
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