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Markets are flat early Tuesday in holiday-thinned trading before head of the release of new data on how the U.S. economy fared in the third quarter.Futures for the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq are all essentially unchanged before the opening bell.Shares of the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk jumped more than 7% overnight after U.S. regulators approved a pill version of the blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy, the first daily oral medication to treat obesity. Novo’s Wegovy is a GLP-1 drug that works like widely used injectables to mimic a natural hormone that controls appetite and feelings of fullness.Again touching new records, the price of gold rose 1.2% early Tuesday to $4,523.30 an ounce, adding to its consistent gains throughout the year. Silver rose 1.7%, to $69.71 an ounce.Oil prices edged higher early Tuesday after jumping more than 2% on Monday when the U.S. Coast Guard said it was pursuing another sanctioned oil tanker in the Caribbean.U.S. benchmark crude added 4 cents to $58.05 per barrel. The price of Brent crude, the international standard, gained 7 cents to $62.14 per barrel.Even after five straight days of gains, oil prices are down about 19% since the beginning of 2025 with demand lagging. U.S. factory conditions are weakening with activity readings hitting five-month lows, according to S&P Global.Markets in the U.S. will close early on Wednesday and remain closed on Thursday for the Christmas holiday. Yet several economic reports during the shortened week could shed more light on the condition and direction of the U.S. economy.The government on Tuesday releases the first of three estimates on gross domestic product, a reflection of how the broader U.S. economy fared in the third quarter. Also, the Conference Board will offer results from its December consumer confidence survey.Wednesday will bring a weekly update from the Labor Department on applications for jobless benefits, a proxy for U.S. layoffs.In Europe at midday Germany’s DAX edged 0.1% higher, while the CAC 40 in Paris slipped 0.2%. Britain’s FTSE 100 was unchanged.In Asian, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 was flat at 50,412,87 and the dollar fell against the Japanese yen after officials in Tokyo warned they would intervene if the yen weakened further.The dollar traded at 155.95 yen, down from 157.04 yen late Monday. Instead of gaining after the Bank of Japan raised its key policy rate on Friday, the yen had weakened, drawing the usual objections from the Finance Ministry to larger than usual currency fluctuations.“The hint of currency intervention proved to be such a serious threat that the yen, which had been significantly oversold after the Bank of Japan meeting, rose from the ashes,” Alex Kruptsikevich of FXPro said in a commentary.The euro climbed to $1.1797 from $1.1762.Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gave up early gains to fall 0.1% to 25,774.14. The Shanghai Composite index edged 0.1% higher, to 3,919.98.South Korea’s Kospi added 0.3% to 4,117.32. Shipbuilder Hanwha Ocean’s shares jumped 12.5% after President Donald Trump said it would help build a new class of U.S. battleship at the Hanwha Philly shipyard.The S&P/ASX 200 in Australia jumped 1.1% to 8,795.70.In Taiwan, the Taiex advanced 0.6%, while India’s Sensex was nearly unchanged. Elaine Kurtenbach and Matt Ott, AP Business Writers
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E-Commerce
In the fall of 2024, six college students joined forces to start an AI company together. Five of them had met while studying computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The sixth, its CEO, was pursuing a degree in childhood and adolescent development at Sacramento State, with an eye on becoming a grade-school teacher. That wasnt the only thing that made him an outlier. He also happened to have been in the tech industry for well over 30 yearslonger than his fellow founders had been alive. The Georgia Tech students are Ian Boraks, Jacob Justice, Drake Kelly, Ella McCheney, and Abhinav Vemulapalli, all of whom happen to be 21. The Sac State student/tech veteran is Bill Nguyen, whose past startups amount to a guided tour of Silicon Valley trends over the years, from push technology to unified messaging to digital music to social networking to telehealth. Their new company, Olive.isOlive for shortis developing technology to make AI better at grasping the full meaning of spoken communications, as conveyed by elements, such as inflection and dialect, that current models may gloss over. It plans to offer its tech as a service for enriching AI-powered applications in education and other areas. Olives name references the companys ambitious hope of fostering better understandingan olive branch, if you willbetween humans and machines. Its still in the process of researching and developing its AI model, and has raised $5 million in seed funding from education-focused venture capital firm Owl Ventures and Georgia Tech. The unusual founding team was a selling point to Owl, which also backed one of Nguyens previous ventures, Hazel Health. As students themselves, the Georgia Tech founders are deeply connected and have a lot of recency with the ideal cohort of potential users that are going to benefit from all this technology, says Owls Lyman Missimer. But Bill is giving this team the full kind of Silicon Valley hustle out in the middle of Atlanta. More than words can say When I first met Nguyen in 2006, he was already a Silicon Valley vet and burbling with enthusiasm for a company hed founded called Lala, which helped people trade CDs through the mail. (It later moved into music streaming and was acquired by Apple in 2009.) His knack for high-energy pitchmanship helped his next company, the location-based, photo-centric social network Color, raise $41 million from firms such as Sequoia. It was ultimately best known for crashing and burning, as detailed in a 2011 Fast Company feature by Danielle Sacks. Today, Nguyen is as exuberant as ever when discussing Olives goals and origin story, and doesnt seem to have aged nearly 20 years since our earliest encounter. As he explains it, AI models for turning speech into text, such as OpenAIs Whisper, have gotten uncannily good at correctly transcribing the literal meaning of what they hear. Yet the words we choose hardly convey our intent all by themselves. Elements such as inflection matter, tooand are sometimes absolutely crucial to understanding what someone is trying to say. There’s definitely a lot in human conversation that gets chopped off by LLMs, says Nguyen. For example, if you ask me a question and I go, Yeeeeeees?he infuses the word with uncertaintyit’s not really a Yes. But an automated speech recognition system will basically truncate all that nuance, get rid of it, and just put it as a Yes. If existing LLMs struggle with some of the subtleties of how we talk to each other, its at least in part because theyve been trained on material thats publicly available in vast quantities, such as podcasts. Such recordings probably sound really, really clean and they’re great audio, says Nguyen. But that’s not how we actually converse. Nguyens interest in this current limitation of AI is intertwined with his long-standing passion for education. Years before he went back to school to become a teacher himselfhes halfway to earning his degreehe cofounded a public charter school near Lake Tahoe. As a result, he learned that few doctors in the area accepted Medicaid, greatly limiting student access to healthcare. That helped catalyze Hazel Health, which provides telehealth services through K-12 schools. It now serves 5,000 of them in 19 states. Bill Nguyen and Ella McChesney, two of Olives six cofounders. [Photo: Olive.is] The Hazel experience left Nguyen attuned to the real-world challenges schools face as they adopt technology. He provides an example relating to speech recognition. In a school district, one of the things that they have to focus on is the ability to understand when to do an intervention for a student around reading, he says. In theory, AI might help by analyzing audio of them speaking. But only if it understands what theyre saying, regardless of whether a student has a Mexican-American vernacular, African-American English vernacular, or Hawaiian vernacular. To complicate matters, Children are especially hard [for AI to understand], because they have very limited vocabulary, says cofounder McChesney. So in order to express themselves, they find more creative ways to use words. And so what we’ve seen is that that can mean that models misinterpret them more, which can have negative consequences, especially when teachers are trying to leverage these tools to help them bring better experiences to the classroom. The glimmer of opportunity in the idea of training AI models using audio that reflects how real people talkespecially studentsled to Olives founding. How Nguyen, based in Tahoe, ended up collaborating with a bunch of young techies in Atlanta is a story in itself. At first, he noodled on the idea with Justice, who is his son as well as a fellow Olive founder. As they forged ahead, the project expanded to include more people from Justices social circle. McChesney, whose credentials include high-school work at the Department of Defense and four years interning at Lockheed Martin, hadrecently returned from a study trip to Korea when she joined the effort, right as Nguyen was prepping to pitch the company to investors. I got a text while I was in Costco from Drake, and he’s like, Bill wants your résumé, send it in the next 10 minutes, she remembers. Which would’ve been great if I wasn’t in a Costco with my phone at 5% and no cell service, because Costco is a giant steel box. She Airdropped her CV to a friend, who sent it to Nguyen just in time. Olives iPhone app, as seen in the process of analyzing audio. [Screenshot: Olive.is] The Atlanta-based cofounders do much of their partnering with Nguyen over Discord, though they quickly ran into the limitations of typed messages as a form of collaboration. In their minds, that only underlined the richness of verbal communications and the importance of teaching AI to comprehend it. We’d always end up doing late-night calls, because that was the easiest way to communicate amongst ourselves, and the easiest way to really get our ideas across and understand what people are saying, says McChesney. There’s no ambiguity, the way there is in a lot of these text messages, and we can iterate faster. That really inspired what we’re trying to do here. Its all in the data To overcome current AI models limitations when it comes to capturing how humans express themselves verbally, Olive had to start with better data. More specifically, it had to start with raw audio of people talking to each other in unscripted situations. Our whole idea was if we can get really clean data sets, if we don’t remove any of the information, if we train a model that actually retains all of this context, then we can solve these mission-critical cases, says Nguyen. More specifically, it decided to start with audio recordings of students engaged in conversations with professionals such as teachers and therapistsrecorded, it stresses, with the participants permission and awareness that they could be used for training. As the company was finding sources of such material, Nguyens background at Hazel Health came in handy. We worked with school districts, we worked with universities, he says. The data set is pretty extensive now. Its north of 40,000 hours. The company also built an iPhone app of its own, which I tried in pre-release form. Taking advantage of the beefy AI capabilities of Apples newest smartphone chips, it builds an understanding of the users needs by applying Olives models to verbal input. All processing is done on the phone, and input isnt used for training purposes. Olive doesnt see this app replacing other AI tools so much as enhancing them. For instance, you could talk into the Olive app at length about an app youd like to create, then have it turn your verbal meanderings into a product requirements document to feed into a vibe-coding platform. Youre using your voice to have a more engaging conversation and actually hash it out, says McChesney. That’s what makes this so cool. However, Olive isnt building its business around this iPhone app. Nor does it intend to provide fully-baked applications based on its technology. Instead, it plans to offer its AI model as a cloud-based service. Other companies will be able to use it as a technological layer in their own creations, providing them with a deeper understanding of speech than theyd get by relying entirely on existing voice models. Along with possible uses in educationranging from tutoring to helping scale up college counselingOlive is targeting hiring, healthcare, and finance as areas where it hopes to find customers. These are all high stakes, and theyre all regulated in terms of what you can do, says Nguyen. Theyre also all places where the limitations of existing AI may introduce harm that Olive hopes to overcome through better, fairer comprehension of a wider range of communications styles. You want AI access to be more equitable, says McChesney. You want everyone to be able to leverage these tools, because these tools are inherently part of our workforce. The companys home page is currently devoted to a sobering blog post, Covert Racism: The Voice Inside the Machine. Heavily footnoted, it cites research that shows how prejudices are baked into AI in ways that can be difficult to detect even if its creators are actively trying to combat bias. The part of it that’s mind-blowing to me is people are not getting jobs, Nguyen says. People are getting declined on loans. People are having adverse health effects. And no one knows why. Olives potential to steer AI in a better direction might be particularly relevant in education, where the technology is still in the process of finding applications and the company has a shot at being foundational. Every major new technological shift is developed, built, and scaled, and then 10 years later it finally finds its way into education, says Owl Ventures Missimer. When we saw what Bill and team were building, we knew that the edtech market couldn’t wait 10 years for this type of technology, especially in a time where voice is becoming such a larger part of the technological stack. With that in mind, Owl is helping to introduce Olive to other companies in its portfolio of education startups. They include Amira Learning, a 2025 Fast Company Next Big Things in Tech honoree that offers a suite of AI and neuroscience-based reading aids. Given that Olives strategy is to provide its AI model as an ingredient for other companies products, those kinds of relationships have everything to do with its long-term fate. For now, it remains tiny, though its already grown to nine people. Nguyen says hes reveling in the hands-on experience of running something so tiny. At his previous, larger startups, I, as the founder, was pretty separated from the actual engineering process, says Nguyen, who is not an engineer by background. But now Im not. I’m in the code base. I check it every day. I know what’s happening with it. Once again, he exudes enthusiasm. Once again, hes working on something that taps into the tech industrys current obsession. Nguyen, who dubbed himself the Don Quixote of startups in Sacks 2011 article, may not be destined to run Olive forever. (Did I mention his intention to become a grade-school teacher?) But if this startup takes flight, having helping his youthful cofounders get it off the ground will be a legacy in itself.
Category:
E-Commerce
In December 2024, our survey with Harris Poll asked B2B marketers to share their top areas for investment in 2025. Artificial intelligence tools were at the top of the list. It also wasnt surprising to see the AI architects named Time magazines Person of the Year as the ripple effects of the technology continue across every sector. And in 2026, we will see B2B decision makers do something new: return to basics andembrace AI to reimagine whats possible. This approach reveals a compelling duality in how marketers are planning for 2026. Theres a return to what weve always known while also betting big on AI as a force not only reshaping work, but rewriting todays B2B marketer and modern buyer playbook. According to our most recent Harris Poll survey, next year will bring a clear acknowledgement that while the fundamentals of marketing havent changed, the way we execute these absolutely will. THE PENDULUM SWINGS BACK For years, marketers have chased the next shiny object: new formats, new platforms, new channels. But the pendulum is swinging back. According to the survey, leaders say their biggest 2026 investments will focus on customer experience and brand buildingnot the newest social platform or the latest ad tech novelty. Theres a collective realization happening. In an environment of AI-enabled disruption, the brands with the strongest emotional equity and deepest buyer trust will win. By doubling down on loyalty, automation, and reputation, organizations can differentiate and ensure that every marketing dollar contributes to sustainable, long-term growth. Loyalty isnt a metric anymore; its a moat. But this return to what works doesnt necessarily mean a return to traditional tactics. AI ISNT REPLACING STRATEGY More than half of marketing decision-makers (55%) expect AI to reshape both the development and execution of marketing strategies. Thats not a subtle shift. It means strategy will move from something built in quarterly cycles to something that updates dynamically based on behaviors, signals, and real-time learning. This shift requires marketers to embrace AI, not fear it. When positioned as a strategic input, AI enables strategy to evolve with the market and puts leaders in the strongest position to reach todays modern buyer at the right time and place. AI becomes the connective tissue unifying audience data, creative insights, content intelligence, and activation. Audience understanding becomes dynamic as AI continuously interprets signals and behaviors to identify whos truly in-market. Content and messaging adapt in real time as AI learns what resonates across channels. Orchestration becomes predictive, determining where buyers are most likely to engage next and routing the right message to the right surface. Measurement shifts from backward-looking to forward-driving, surfacing early signals that guide creative, budget, and activation decisions. The strategy itself becomes fluid, evolving, and continuously optimizing. Instead of asking, Is my strategy right? marketers will ask, Is my strategy learning fast enough? ZERO-CLICK IS RESHAPING BRAND COMPETITION Nearly half of marketing leaders (45%) believe AI-powered search and assistants will dramatically change how customers discover brands. That means marketers are beginning to understand a new reality: In 2026, competition happens before the click. In a zero-click environment, the buyer journey is no longer linear. People are forming opinions inside AI Overviews, chat assistants, recommendation engines, and result pages that summarize expertise without ever sending traffic your way. The search click read evaluate journey marketers built their strategies around has been replaced by one where discovery and evaluation happen simultaneouslyoften without a website visit. Buyers may never land on your page, yet theyve already developed a perception of your credibility, authority, and relevance. This shift demands a fundamentally different approach to visibility. Its no longer enough to create great content; brands must create signals. Reputation, authority, and consistency become the new KPIs, because AI systems rely on patterns across the broader ecosystem, not just what lives on your domain. Zero-click environments reward brands that show up with clarity and coherence across every channel, not just the ones they own. The brands that win are the ones influencing the answer long before a user ever reaches a brand webpage. This isnt a retreat from brand building; its an evolution of it. AI DOESNT REPLACE THE BASICS, IT AMPLIFIES THEM The survey findings tell a clear story: AI doesnt exempt marketers from doing the hard work of brand building; it makes that work even more essential. Rather than overshadowing fundamentals like loyalty, reputation, and customer experience, AI deepens their impact. It enables personalization at a level previously impossible and transforms audience understanding by replacing static personas with living intelligence. With AI orchestrating channels dynamically instead of treating them as disconnected tactics, the longstanding divide between brand and performance marketing collapses. The two disciplines become interdependent, each strengthened by AIs ability to learn, predict, and adapt across the entire customer journey. But recognizing AIs potential and operationalizing it are two very different things. The real competitive advantage in 2026 wont come from experimenting with a handful of tools; it will come from embedding AI across the full lifecycle, including strategy, creation, activation, measurement, and optimization. Marketers already feel this shift coming. AI is becoming the operating system of modern marketing, not an accessory. The question for the year ahead isnt whether marketers will use AI; its whether they will scale it in a way that elevates the core principles that have always distinguished the strongest brands. BACK TO BASICS, BUT SMARTER The headline for 2026: AI is making the basics matter more. Marketers are rediscovering that trust, loyalty, and brand still determine winners, while embracing AI to execute those fundamentals with far greater intelligence, speed, and impact. And next year, the brands that thrive will be the ones that combine timeless principles with transformative technologygoing back to basics, but this time with an engine powerful enough to take them further than ever before. Great marketing and advertising have always been an art. AI doesnt diminish that; it simply elevates it. Keith Turco is CEO of Madison Logic.
Category:
E-Commerce
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