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When we return to work after the holidays, we tend to bring renewed energy, a laundry list of annual goals, and a few aspirational New Years resolutions. This is the year youre going to run the marathon. Though we arrive ready to hit the ground running, actual business momentum might tell a different story. I call it the Q1 paradox. Were prepared for a flurry of activity, but in reality, we experience a slower cadence. With GDP growth typically slower in Q1, consumer and business spending may lag. Demands feel less urgent. Phones are quieter. As CEO of Jotform, Ive found that the first quarter is the perfect time to lay the groundwork for the years success. Heres how my team and I make the most of this valuable window. Lead by example For leaders, the first order of business is getting your team to start projecting themselves and the organization into the following 12 months. When theyve just closed out 2025 and wrapped up year-end reports, that can be easier said than done. While getting your team into this mindset begins with clear directives, thats only half the equation. Modeling the behavior is just as important. Formal policies may attempt to create organizational culture and norms, but routinesthe way leaders and employees actually show up and functionare just as vital. As Harvard Business Impact notes, leaders uphold and demonstrate their character through the daily habits they follow and the decisions they make. Thats why leaders must model proactive behaviors that encourage forward-thinking across the team. At Jotform, for example, I start with a nudge in early January, sharing my objectives for the new year with the entire organization. I try to keep these big-picture, beginning with my most audacious goals, since those tend to be the ones that excite and inspire me. They keep the momentum going during inevitable lulls in motivation. Often, Ill include a brief road map outlining how we can reach each objective. Finally, I encourage employees to reach out if they have questions or ideas. And, of course, to think about what they most want to achieve in the year ahead. Modeling this forward-looking behavior can help employees rise above the busywork from day one and gain much-needed perspective on where were headed. Reflect and refine your strategies If the first step is looking forward, the second involves gazing back and taking stock of your current business strategies. In todays fast-changing world, where AI stands to reinvent workflows at breakneck speed, this is more vital than ever. At my company, I work with our teams to evaluate strategies, identify gaps, and determine which adjustments are needed to move toward our goals with confidence. With each department, we begin by reviewing their respective strategies and considering whether they serve our larger purpose: making users lives easier through automation. We then map out the processes and workflows that carry out those strategies, looking for weak spotsfor example, tasks that could be accelerated through automation without sacrificing the essential human elements, such as strategic judgment and creative thinking. Finally, we ensure that each workflow within a strategy has a clear human owner to oversee decision-making and step in when issues arise. As Ive found, this balance of reflection, automation, and human accountability helps ensure continued progress, year after year. Carve out time for experimentation If Ive learned one thing in two decades of entrepreneurship, its the importance of scheduling everything. If you dont deliberately carve out time for it, chances increase that youll kick it down the road. Thats why everything, including creativity, must be built into your schedule. When we do our first quarter strategizing, I urge our employees to create space for experimentation: to test new ideas, refine processes, tool around with new AI applications, and explore innovative approacheswithout the usual time pressure. On an organizational level, we hold demo dayswhere each team shares their latest ideas and projectsand regular hack weeks. These five-day creative sprints allow our product teams to laser-focus on a single idea, while completely putting aside their day-to-day to-do lists. Hack weeks have led to some of our biggest innovations, and we schedule them as soon as we return to work in January. With some proactive thinking, moments for reflection, and dedicated time for experimentation, the quiet first quarter can become less of a pause, and more of a launchpad for a year of meaningful progress.
Category:
E-Commerce
The one thing N. Lee Plumb knows for sure about being laid off from Amazon last week is that it wasnt a failure to get on board with the companys artificial intelligence plans. Plumb, his teams head of AI enablement, says he was so prolific in his use of Amazons new AI coding tool that the company flagged him as one of its top users. Many assumed Amazon’s 16,000 corporate layoffs announced last week reflected CEO Andy Jassys push to reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company. But like other companies that have tied workforce changes to AI including Expedia, Pinterest, and Dow last week it can be hard for economists, or individual employees like Plumb, to know if AI is the real reason behind the layoffs or if it’s the message a company wants to tell Wall Street. AI has to drive a return on investment, said Plumb, who worked at Amazon for eight years. When you reduce head count, youve demonstrated efficiency, you attract more capital, the share price goes up. So you could potentially have just been bloated in the first place, reduce head count, attribute it to AI, and now youve got a value story, he said. Amazon said in an emailed statement that AI was not the reason behind the vast majority of these reductions. These changes are about continuing to strengthen our culture and teams by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and helping reduce bureaucracy to drive speed and ownership, it said. Plumb is atypical for an Amazon worker in that he’s also running what he describes as a long shot bid for Congress in Texas, on a platform focused on stopping the tech industry’s reliance on work visas to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor. But whatever it was that cost Plumb his job, his skepticism about AI-driven job replacement is one shared by many economists. We just don’t know, said Karan Girotra, a professor of management at Cornell University’s business school. Not because AI isnt great, but because it requires a lot of adjustment and most of the gains accrue to individual employees rather than to the organization. People save time and they get their work done earlier. If an employer works faster because of AI, Girotra said it takes time to adjust a company’s management structure in a way that would enable a smaller workforce. He’s not convinced that’s happening at Amazon, which he said is still scaling back from a glut of hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic. A report by Goldman Sachs said AI’s overall impact on the labor market remains limited, though some effects might be felt in specific occupations like marketing, graphic design, customer service, and especially tech. Those are fields involving tasks that correlate with the strengths of the current crop of generative AI chatbots that can write emails and marketing pitches, produce synthetic images, answer questions, and help write code. But the bank’s economic research division said in its most recent monthly AI adoption tracker that, since December, very few employees were affected by corporate layoffs attributed to AI, though the report was published Jan. 16, before Amazon, Dow and Pinterest announced their layoffs. San Francisco-based Pinterest was the most explicit in asserting that AI drove it to cut up to 15% of its workforce. The social media company said it was making organizational changes to further deliver on our AI-forward strategy, which includes hiring AI-proficient talent. As a result, weve made the difficult decision to say goodbye to some of our team members. Pinterest echoed that message in a regulatory disclosure that said the company was reallocating resources to AI-focused roles and teams that drive AI adoption and execution.” Expedia has voiced a similar message but the 162 tech workers the travel website cut from its Seattle headquarters last week included several AI-specific roles, such as machine-learning scientists. Dow’s regulatory disclosures tied its 4,500 layoffs to a new plan utilizing AI and automation to increase productivity and improve shareholder returns. Amazon’s 16,000 corporate job cuts were part of a broader reduction of employees at the ecommerce giant. At the same time as those cuts, all believed to be office jobs, Amazon said it would cut about 5,000 retail workers, according to notices it sent to state workforce agencies in California, Maryland and Washington, resulting from its decision to close almost all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores. That’s on top of a round of 14,000 job cuts in October, bringing the total to well over 30,000 since Jassy first signaled a push for AI-driven organizational changes. Like many companies, in technology and otherwise, but particularly those that make and sell AI tools and services, Amazon has been pushing its workforce to find more efficiencies with AI. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that 2026 will be when AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work. Were investing in AI-native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done, were elevating individual contributors, and flattening teams, he said on an earnings call. Were starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person. So far, Metas layoffs this year have focused on cutting jobs from its virtual reality and metaverse divisions. Also driving job impacts is the industry shifting resources to AI development, which requires huge spending on computer chips, energy-hungry data centers and talent. Jassy told Amazon employees last June to be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your teams brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams. Plumb was fully on board with that and said he demonstrated his proficiency in using Amazon’s AI coding tool, Kiro, to solve massive problems in the company’s compensation system. If you werent using them, your manager would get a report and they would talk to you about using it, he said. There were only five people in the entire company that were a higher user of Kiro than I was, or had achieved more milestones. Now he’s shifting gears to his candidacy among a field of epublicans in the Houston area looking to unseat U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw in the March primary. Cornell’s Girotra said it’s possible that increasing AI productivity is leading companies to cut middle management, but he said the reality is that those making layoff decisions just need to cut costs and make it happen. Thats it. I don’t think they care what the reason for that is. Not all companies are signaling AI as a reason for cuts. Home Depot confirmed on Thursday that it was eliminating 800 roles tied to its corporate headquarters in Atlanta, though most of the affected employees worked remotely. Home Depots spokesman George Lane said that Home Depots cuts were not driven by AI or automation but truly about speed, agility and serving the needs of its customers and front-line workers. And exercise equipment maker Peloton confirmed on Friday that it is reducing its workforce by 11% as part of a broader cost-cutting move to pare down operating expenses. Matt O’Brien, AP technology writer AP Retail Writer Anne DInnocenzio contributed to this report.
Category:
E-Commerce
An outbreak of Nipah virus outbreak in India is currently causing alarm for health officials and travelers across a number of countries in Asia. On January 26, health officials from India notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of two laboratory-confirmed cases of Nipah virus (NiV) infection in West Bengal State. No additional NiV cases have been detected. Following news of the outbreak, authorities in some Asian countries, including Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, have ramped up airport health screening efforts. However, according to Reuters, the screenings are more for “reassurance” than a tactic to stop the spread. The WHO says risk of spread at the national, regional, and global levels is low. The latest developments Both recent West Bengal cases involved healthcare workers who began showing typical NiV symptoms in late December 2025. The cases were confirmed by Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) testing, according to the WHO. Local health officials identified 196 contacts, all of whom tested negative for NiV and showed no symptoms. NiV is serious, but rare. It is a zoonotic virus, meaning it usually spreads from animals to humans. Fruit bats or flying foxes are natural hosts for the virus. However, the virus can also be transmitted through contaminated food and from person to person through close contact with an infected persons bodily fluids, such as saliva or urine. Person-to-person contact is less common, according to the National Emerging Special Pathogens Training & Education Center (NETEC). Person-to-person transmission is most commonly reported in hospital or healthcare settings. According to the WHO, the case fatality rate is estimated to be 40% to 75%. There are no licensed medications or vaccines for NiV infection, but early supportive care can improve survival. Additional details can be found in the WHO’s January 30 disease outbreak news report. A brief history of the virus NiV was first identified in 1998 in Malaysia during an outbreak among pig farmers. Since then, cases have been reported in less than a handful of countriesBangladesh, India, Malaysia, and Singapore. The most recent outbreak marks the third NiV infection outbreak reported in West Bengal.
Category:
E-Commerce
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