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In 1967, a man named George Maciunas purchased a cast-off building at 80 Wooster Street in New York City. It had once housed light manufacturing, but by the late 1960s, it was empty, like much of SoHo. Maciunas was an artist and a bit of a provocateur. What he wanted to build wasnt a home or studio. It was a community. And within a few years, 80 Wooster had become a nerve center for Fluxus, the revolutionary movement that fused performance art and design. You could argue that much of SoHos creative explosion, and the contemporary art market that followed, traces back, at least partially, to that one building. But the real lesson of SoHo isnt about one building. Its about what happens when people live and work and think together, in close proximity. Its about density. Shared space. Its about what Maciunas stumbled upon and what Jony Ive, half a century later, is trying to design deliberately in San Francisco. During the pandemic, we collectively adopted a belief: that physical place doesnt matter anymore. That knowledge workers could work from anywhere, that Slack could replace the hallway conversation, that Zoom could replace the studio. But in shared spaces, powerful ideas emerge from the combustion that happens when thinkers and doers comingle. You see someones sketchpad. You hear someone pitch a prototype. You walk out of a gallery and into a conversation. Communities have always been engines of creative cross-pollination and acceleration. And they still are. Lets look at the evidence. Proximity Shapes Behavior When the Bauhaus school moved to Dessau in 1925, its new campus was a compound: a deliberate arrangement of workshops, student housing, dining areas, and design studios, all connected by a spatial logic that encouraged flow and interaction. Masters and students worked together, ate together, debated design over dinner together, and crossed paths in shared hallways and courtyards. The schools interdisciplinary breakthroughs (think of Breuers tubular steel chairs or Moholy-Nagys experiments in photography and metalwork) didnt come from curriculum alone. They emerged from proximity. The architecture itself, featuring transparency, openness, and connectedness, was a catalyst for creative exchange. We know from research that proximity changes behavior. MIT professor Thomas Allen found that communication between engineers dropped off sharply once they were more than 10 meters apart and declined even further across floors or buildings. Weekly collaboration often disappeared entirely. The closer we are, the more we interact. And the more we interact, the more likely we are to spark something new. So, what does that mean for the world we live in now? Renewal in San Francisco and Detroit Jackson Square in San Francisco, once a lively mix of galleries, boutiques, and creative firms, hollowed out after the pandemic. Office vacancy topped 35%, and much of downtown lost its pulse. But Jony Ive saw possibilities where others saw decline. Rather than lease a studio, he began acquiring and renovating a cluster of adjacent historic buildings. Why? Because he was, and is, on a design mission: how do you build a space that invites creativity, not just from your team, but from your surroundings? He called the resulting courtyard the Pavilion. And its not an office amenity. Its a place for open-air meals, impromptu conversations, private concerts, and more. Yo-Yo Ma has played there. Artists, technologists, and musicians mingle without an agenda. Conceivably a typographer might walk out of a meeting and stumble into a sound check. A hardware engineer might trade notes with a novelist over espresso. This is cross-pollination by design. Ive is building a creative ecology: a space where disciplines intersect, where proximity builds trust, and where inspiration moves laterally, not from the top down, but from the courtyard across. A contemporary answer to an old truth: ideas need neighbors. Jackson Square is not the only place where revitalization is happening through the communal sharing of ideas. Detroits Newlab anchors the citys 30acre mobility innovation district. Its built around the newly reopened Michigan Central Station, hailed as a symbol of Detroits creative revival. Since opening in April 2023, Newlab has housed more than 100 startups in mobility, climate tech, and hardware innovation, providing access to stateoftheart prototyping labs, fabrication workshops, and pilot zones designed to facilitate realworld experimentation. Newlab is both a workspace and a community. In June 2025, Michigan Central and Newlab launched a Creative Residency funded by the Knight Foundation, placing artists alongside technologists to explore projects at the intersection of art, science, and mobility. Fellows and Cohort members engage in crossdisciplinary prototyping, installations, and public dialogues, weaving creative practice into the heart of criticaltech innovation. On-site facilities like textile, CNC, robotics, and metal labs mean that a sculptor can dart between a fabrication session and a conversation with a batterydesign engineer. These are unplanned collaborations that spark fresh ideas. That creative density scales into impact. Through Detroits Advanced Aerial Innovation Region, startups like Lamarr.AI use drones and AI to audit city-owned buildings, capturing thermal inefficiencies and structural data for retrofit in days, not weeks. The project demonstrates how shared infrastructure and pilot zones accelerate meaningful collaboration between companies, municipal agencies, and innovators all within walking distance of Newlabs shared hub. What This Means for Businesses This isnt just about San Francisco and Detroit. Any business that depends on ideas should care where those ideas come from, and the lessons we can learn from the power of place. Talent Clusters Deliver. Designers in Barcelona. Engineers in Boston. Founders in Austin. When talent lives near other talent, new work gets made. The people who shape culture still gather in physical places. Cities with culture, density, and walkability will continue to pull ahead. Creative Adjacency Is a Multiplier. You dont need to be in the same company. You just need to be in the same neighborhood. Thats why companies moving into innovation districts perform well. The serendipity is built in. Participation Is More Powerful Than Presence. Renting office space in a city isnt the same as showing up for its cultural life. Businesses that attend local shows, sponsor creative spaces, or mentor local talent become part of the ecosystem. Thats how you stay relevant, by being part of the local rhythm, not just watching it. Dont Mistake Remote for Rootless. Remote work lets people live anywhere. That doesnt mean they live everywhere. Creative people still gravitate toward vibrant places, and businesses that want to hire or partner with them need to think the same way. If you want to find the next generation of storytellers or technologists, look for the places where ideas are already in motion. Culture Is Not a KPI. You cant track the power of culture on a dashboard. But you know when its there. In the right place, ideas sync faster. Instinct sharpens. Teams move with more confidence That matters, especially for work that doesnt come from templates like good brand work, new product ideas, original strategies. These things dont arrive fully formed in a shared doc. They emerge from conversation, curiosity, and experience. All three live in places with creative density. The Texture of Innovation In business, we often talk about innovation as if its a matter of systems: of process, of capital, of talent deployed efficiently. But that language leaves something out. It misses the texture of innovation, the way it moves through a neighborhood, picks up influence, and reshapes itself in conversation. It forgets that the most important ideas emerge, slowly, from an atmosphere. From a shared block, a corner café, a sunlit studio, a courtyard where someone plays cello in the afternoon. If companies want to matter, not just to markets, but to culture, they need to rethink place as something more than a backdrop. It is not a container. It is an ingredient. A brand built in isolation may be polished. A product designed in a vacuum may be efficient. But timeless relevance, the kind that resonates, that sticks, that spreads, comes from being in the world with others. The real opportunity in front of us is not a return to offices. Its to ask better questions about what kind of places we want to build around the work we do, and what kind of work becomes possible when we do.
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E-Commerce
The English Premier League, the worlds most popular soccer league, kicks off this weekend to a global TV audience of around one billion people across nearly every country. Alongside the action on the pitch, millions more will be selecting their fantasy football teams for the weekends fixtures. Fantasy sports bring together friends and colleagues, adding a competitive edge that some take to extremesporing over data and acting as armchair analysts. But a new initiative by the Premier League could change that dynamic: an AI chatbot integration that allows users to ask for team-picking advice. Instead of choosing their own squads, players will now be able to ask Microsoft Copilot to do it for them. There will be much more conformity and far less diversity of teams if AI chooses the lineups. It doesn’t come with our partisan opinions, says Simon James, head of data science and AI at Publicis Sapient, and a fan of Plymouth Argyle, who play in the third tier of English soccer. That can be both a blessing and a curse, he admits, but it risks ironing out the quirks that make fantasy football unique. Football is fundamentally about opinions, and fans are naturally more inclined to pick their players over rivals, he says. You’ll never see a Chelsea fan choosing Solanke over Joao Pedro, but the AI might. AI seeks the path of optimization, but that removes the tribal element that makes fantasy football so engaging. For James, the fun part is choosing the unknown in fantasy sports. Can AI truly account for all these variables and gut instincts? he asks. Probably not. On the one hand, I am worried about overuse, says Joanna Bryson, professor of ethics and technology at the Hertie School in Berlin. Im particularly worried about peoplethat somehow its combined badly with imposter syndrome. But on the other hand, I mean, weve had Google forever, right? Some fantasy players treat the game with near-professional seriousness, devoting hours to research that separates them from casual competitorsan effort that becomes easier with AI advice. Others who lack the time often copy picks from online analysts, with a cottage industry of human advisers already reducing the role of guesswork. Bryson, however, worries that AI could push this trend too far. Theres just so many different ways to have fun, but that one might be over, she says. Not so, argues Joe Lepper, host of the Fantasy Football Scout YouTube channel. There is a lot of debate in the fantasy community about this, he says. Some people dont like it at all. They think its going to destroy the game. And some people really like it. Where you land depends on your personal opinion, and on how you and others use AI. Following its advice blindly is obviously going to take the fun out of it, says Lepper, but if you use it to just give you information to then feed into your own decision-making, then the fun is retained. The move reflects the broader shift toward analytics in sports after Moneyball. Some welcome the precision; others believe it flattens the unpredictability that makes sport compelling. People can choose to ignore it. People can choose to embrace it. But it’s not a case of man against machine. It’s more of a case of machine helping that, says Lepper. In the end, the debate mirrors the wider conversation about AIs impact on our lives. As James puts it: Just like in business, AI is excellent for automation, but the jury is still out for inspiration.
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E-Commerce
While AI features have been creeping into pretty much every popular browser for the past couple of years now, most of them don’t actually change how you browse the web. You might, for instance, have Safari summarize a web page, or chat with Microsoft Edge’s Copilot in a persistent sidebar, but you’re not accomplishing anything that ChatGPT couldn’t do in a separate browser tab. These AI features are little more than window dressing. Perplexity’s Comet browser is the first AI browser I’ve tried that feels different. Instead of just providing glorified shortcuts to existing tools, Comet uses AI to automate the browsing process itself. This opens up a bunch of interesting scenarios that aren’t possible with other AI browsers. Perplexity Comet can browse for you Comet currently requires either a $200 per month Perplexity Max subscription or sitting on a waitlist; the latter is how I accessed it. At first, Comet looks a lot like other AI browsers, with a new tab page that prompts you to use Perplexity’s AI search engine instead of a standard Google search. There’s also an “Assistant” sidebar for chatting about the current page and a button to quickly summarize its contents. [Screenshots: Jared Newman] But Perplexity Comet does a couple of things that I haven’t seen in a browser yet: It can open and close browser tabs on your behalf, and then access information within those tabs. It can also directly interact with web pages on your behalf. Much like AI in general, it’s still on you to figure out interesting use cases, but here are some examples of how I’ve used it: After logging into my Clear traveler program account, I asked Perplexity to cancel my subscription. It navigated to the cancellation page and went through the mandatory customer support chat on my behalf. To start planning for next summer’s vacation, I had Perplexity search across several flight deal sites for the best prices on destinations abroad. It then opened the results from Kayak and Skyscanner in separate browser tabs. Because I was curious about Samsung Galaxy Fold7 reviews, I had Perplexity open several of them in separate browser tabs, then I had it summarize points of agreement and unique takeaways from each. After reading through, I asked Perplexity to close all of the tabs that it opened. While looking at an email about an upcoming subscription renewal, I had Perplexity put a reminder on my Google Calendar. After posing a question to Perplexity’s AI, I had it ask the same question of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Proton Lumo to see how the answers differed. Perplexity isn’t the only company working on AI agents that can browse the web for you. OpenAI, for instance, has ChatGPT Agent, and Google has announced an “Agent Mode” for its Gemini assistant. But having these capabilities built into a web browser feels more natural, because you can invoke the assistant as part of your normal browsing. It can act on pages you’re already looking at, open new pages you’d rather view on your own, and let you take over on any pages it’s working on. Would I pay $200 for this? Not a chance. But if Perplexity can sustainably offer its browser at a more normal subscription priceand it gets with the times on vertical tab supportI might consider it. With rumors that OpenAI is building its own browser, I suspect we’ll also see alternatives before long. Other AI browsers Microsoft Edge: A work in progress Out of the box, Microsoft’s browser offers a persistent Copilot sidebar with shortcut buttons for summarizing the current page or looking up related info. There’s also an “Add Tabs” function, which allows Copilot to gather info from multiple open pages at once. More interesting, though, is Edge’s optional and experimental “Copilot Mode.” Activate it through this page, and a bunch of things will happen: The new tab page will switch to a blank Copilot prompt, and the Copilot button mves from the sidebar to a pop-up in the address bar (though you can hit the “Pin” button to move it back). Clicking the microphone activates “voice navigation” mode for conversing back and forth with Copilot. While you’re talking, it can load web pages, click on links, and answer questions about whatever you’re looking at. Selecting “Actions” in the chat window will invoke an AI agent to browse the web on your behalf, doing things like filling out restaurant reservations and adding events to your calendar. Microsoft gets credit for trying to rethink Edge without scaring away existing users, but Copilot Mode doesn’t feel cohesive enough. Its Actions are sluggish, and the responses in voice navigation mode can be long and meandering. On the upside, it doesn’t cost $200 per month. Dia by The Browser Company: Polished, but limited Dia feels like the AI browser Google might have built if it were starting from scratch today. Instead of a standard new tab page, you get a blank text prompt, and depending on what you write, Dia will either search the web or ask AI for an answer. Once you’ve opened some tabs, Dia has a neat way of letting you search across them using @ mentions. You can also highlight text in any input field to get editing suggestions in Dia’s chat sidebar. Its funkiest feature is a “Skills” storefront that essentially provides one-click AI prompts for things like summarizing your day’s browsing history or evaluating the worthiness of a product on shopping sites. None of this amounts to a radically different browser, but presentation and execution help Dia feel fresh anyway. (Dia is currently invite-only, but if you install The Browser Company’s earlier Arc browser and create an account, you can jump the waitlist.) Google Chrome: Surprisingly unambitious Given Google’s zeal to bring AI into its search engineeven at the expense of accuracyyou’d think Chrome would be at the forefront of AI adoption. Instead, the AI features that Google offers are pretty modest. Its best feature isn’t even entirely about generative AI: Clicking “Google Lens” in the sidebar brings up a selection tool to get details about images, explain or translate selected text, turn text snippets into screenshots, and extract text from images. It’s only an AI feature in that Gemini generates some of the responses. Beyond that, Chrome lets you quickly access Gemini by typing “@gemini” in the search bar, and you can right-click any text field to use a “help me write” tool. There’s also an experimental AI history search feature that was hit or miss in my experience. More browsers with AI features: Safari: Apple’s browser can generate brief summaries when you enter the “Reader” view for a web page. Brave: The built-in Leo assistant can answer questions about web pages (including YouTube videos), process documents, and respond to general queries. DuckDuckGo: There’s a button in the address bar for opening a chat with Duck.ai, DuckDuckGo’s private AI assistant, though you can also type “duck.ai” into any browser for the same result. Firefox: The left sidebar menu offers access to ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, or Mistral’s Le Chat, but they don’t interact with page content in any way. Deta Surf: This emerging browser has some really clever ideas about bookmark management, though its AI features feel disjointed. Opera: This browser’s Aria assistant is available through a sidebar menu or pop-up menu, and can summarize pages and answer free-form queries. (Opera is also working on a separate browser with agent features called Neon, but it’s not available yet.)
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E-Commerce
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