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AI coaches are everywhere. Theyre training marathoners and coaching leaders, and even billionaires Ray Dalio created an AI clone to serve as a digital mentor. In the past few months, searches for AI coaching have gone through the roof. And its easy to see why. AI coaches are available 24/7, cost less than a gym membership, and can recall every word youve ever said. Research even shows they can match human coaches in helping people reach their goals. Ironically, people often tell AI things theyd never tell another person. Studies show chatbots reduce our fear of judgment, making them surprisingly effective at uncovering whats really going on. And with 94% of employees saying theyd stay longer at a company that invests in their growth, AI coaching seems like the perfect solution, at least on paper. Im a coach and I use AI. But after a decade of coaching more than 4,000 people, heres what Ive learned: AI moves the needle 90%, sure. But for the life-changing 10%, you still need a human. Why AI coaching falls short Last month, a client told me she wanted to readjust her focus. If shed asked an AI coach, she wouldve gotten a list of productivity hacks. But when I heard her say it, I noticed something felt off. Did you notice how your energy dropped when you said that? I asked. That question opened the real issue. She wasnt struggling with priorities; she was afraid of leaving her comfort zone. Changing her focus was a protective strategy that wouldve kept her stuck. Thats the 10% AI cant identify. Science backs this up. Our brains sync through mirror neurons, a process called emotional contagion. Its how a coach can sense when your energy dips, even before you speak. Humans also co-regulate each others stress responses, a process thats essential for change. Thats why, in psychotherapy, the relationship itself predicts outcomes as much as any treatment method. The same holds true for coaching. Finally, clients often tell me they chose to work with me because of my story. Im the child of immigrants who became a Princeton-trained engineer before walking away from corporate life. Im also an introvert whod rather watch Netflix than network. That shared humanityseeing someone whos been where they arebuilds trust and makes them realize: If she can do it, maybe I can too. The smarter way forward: 3 ways to use hybrid coaching Still, Im not saying AI coaching doesnt work, because it does. But the smartest coaches and clients wont choose between humans and AI. Theyll use both. Heres how to combine them for the best results: 1. Be consistent Use an AI tool like ChatGPT to stay accountable every day. Prompts like Based on my reflections this week, what patterns or habits keep showing up? or Highlight one recurring theme in my journaling that might be holding me back help you track growth between sessions. 2. Dig deeper AI can help you surface patterns faster. One of my clients uses AI to journal every morning. By the time she shows up to our call, she has already identified her blocks, so we can focus on getting results faster. Try prompts like: How would an executive or business coach advise me on this? 3. Define actions After each session, use an AI transcription tool like Otter.ai to turn coaching insights into concrete steps. Use prompts like: Based on this call, what actions do I need to take in the next week/month? and Turn this call into a simple weekly action plan. Thats how AI helps you move fasterwhile your human coach makes sure you move in the right direction.
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E-Commerce
Year-end giving can be a moment of reflection, but for businesses and philanthropy alike, it should also include looking forward and asking the question, whats next? One throughline from this past year is uncertainty. Uncertainty has rewritten how we work, live, and lead. Yet, one thing that still holds true is we share a responsibility to keep systems strong so no one is left behind, especially children. Ive seen firsthand how instability isnt just economic, its deeply human. Ive seen it in a mother whose babys survival depended on something as small as a packet of therapeutic food. In that moment, you understand that systems created as large scale solutions change lives. GO DEEPER ON PURPOSE Purpose has become one of the most overused words in business, but the leaders who will define whats next are treating it differently. Theyre going deeper. The smartest changemakers are cutting through tokenistic giving and refocusing on whats core to their mission. Theyre aligning personal and corporate philanthropy not around optics, but around outcomes that truly matter like health, equity, sustainability, and opportunity. STRENGTHEN WHATS STABLE, TO WITHSTAND WHATS NOT If recent years have taught us anything, its that the systems we depend on are only as strong as the most vulnerable people within them. Business leaders understand this intuitively. A 2024 survey showed that 45% of global CEOs expect significant business model disruption within three years. Social trust and resilience are key to future competitiveness. Trusted companies can be worth up to four times more than their competitors and 89% of business leaders identified resilience as a major priority in their organizational strategy. Put simply, future-proofing your business means building stronger systems that will support future generations. Your future workforce, customers, and investors are todays children and adolescents. When children thrive, societies stabilize and markets follow. NOT JUST A NUMBER When global supply chains break down, its not just balance sheets that suffer; the livelihoods of entire communities feel the impact. Too often, those disruptions get reduced to numbers on a page like drops in GDP and productivity losses, but whats really at stake is livelihoods. And sometimes the clearest illustration of why stability matters comes down to a single moment. When I was a new mom, I met a Sudanese mother in a refugee camp in Ethiopia near the Sudan border. The woman was holding her baby, who was severely underweight but just beginning to show signs of alertness. She was feeding her child a small packet of ready-to-use therapeutic food, a peanut-based paste that treats severe acute malnutrition. Its a simple, scalable solution with life-changing impact. Malnutrition remains one of the most pressing yet solvable challenges in global health. Addressing it requires the kind of smart, forward-leaning, systems-level innovation UNICEF and its partners are scaling across the world. MAKE GENEROSITY A YEAR-ROUND STRATEGY Uncertainty shouldnt stop you from leading or giving. Support from the private sector can be pivotal for nonprofits, but the greatest impact requires relationships, not just transactions. It requires companies that cocreate with nonprofits, sharing expertise, networks, and long-term commitment to help unlock lasting and innovative solutions. WHATS NEXT The future will be shaped by those who act now. Heres how to do that. Invest in stability. Give toward systems that protect children and strengthen communities. These are the same systems your business relies on for a stable workforce, market, and future. Collaborate with intention. Align your business and your values. Strategic giving builds trust, reinforces brand purpose, and connects you with the partners and consumers who share it. Give forward. Treat generosity as leadership strategy. Its how you future-proof impact for your company, your community, and the world your business depends on. As you take a moment of gratitude during this holiday season, give to whats urgent now and what will define whats next. Michele Walsh is executive vice president and chief philanthropy officer of UNICEF USA.
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E-Commerce
OpenAI on Thursday released its answer to Googles impressive Gemini 3 Pro modelGPT-5.2and by the looks of some head-to-head benchmark test scores, it looks like a winner. The new model took the highest score on a number of benchmark tests covering coding, math, science, tool use, and vision. (Benchmarks should, of course, be combined with real-world use to tell the whole story. But still . . .) OpenAI says GPT-5.2, which is a reasoning model, achieved expert-level performance scores on its own GDPval benchmark, which evaluates performance on 44 real professional tasks including things like spreadsheet creation, document drafting, presentation building, and more. GPT-5.2 topped Gemini 3 Pro on the SWE-Bench Pro benchmark (software engineering tasks) with a score of 55.6% (versus Gemini 3 Pros 43.3%). It achieved an 86.2% on the ARC-AGI-1 abstract reasoning benchmark, compared to Gemini 3 Pros 75% score. It scored a 92.4% on the GPQA Diamond benchmark (science questions), compared with Gemini 3 Pros 91.9% score. The new model comes in three variants. GPT-5.2 Instant is good for seeking information and how-tos, skill-building and study, and career guidance. GPT-5.2 Thinking is good for harder professional tasks like spreadsheet formatting and slideshow creation. GPT-5.2 Pro, the company says, takes longer to generate answers but is its smartest and most trustworthy model for generating accurate answers in complex domains like programming. For the many developers that are now developing agents, OpenAI says GPT-5.2 with reasoning is its strongest offering yet, bringing significant improvements across general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision.OpenAI reportedly pushed to release GPT-5.2 before the end of the year so that it could counter the release of Googles Gemini 3. The company released GPT-5 in August, heralding it as the next major leap forward in its AI research. GPT-5 was a system of models, using a router to direct the right queries to specialized models. Its referring to GPT-5.2 as a unified system that automatically chooses how to respond based on task complexity. The GPT-5.2 models increased capacity for processing and reasoning about multi-modal input (audio, video, images, text, etc.) is significant, because Google Gemini 3 does this very well. For example, the new model was asked to analyze the features of an image of a circuit board and then identify and label all the small components. OpenAI says GPT-5.2 did this with far more detail and accuracy than its earlier GPT-5.1 model could. When reasoning is introduced, the model may be able to diagnose problems in mechanical systems by recognizing the visual signs. All three variants of GPT-5.2 are available in ChatGPT today, starting with paid subscribers and available to developers through the API. Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, says its bringing GPT-5.2 to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio users worldwide today. In related news, OpenAI also announced that it had struck a licensing deal with Disney that will allow Sora 2 users to use Disney characters in images they generate and share using the app. In addition, Disney will make a $1-billion equity investment in OpenAI, with an option to purchase more equity in the future.
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E-Commerce
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