Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways AI now creates the first impression of your brand. Customers, investors, employees and partners are turning to AI before they schedule a meeting, apply for a job or make a purchase. Generative models synthesize signals from across the digital ecosystem: news coverage, analyst reports, reviews, social media, Wikipedia and countless other third-party sources. Old stories can continue influencing AI long after people have stopped talking about it. Without deliberate intervention, yesterday’s controversy can quietly become tomorrow’s first impression. Reputation management must become proactive. Priority number one is investing in and…
Author: Staff Writer
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Many small business owners looking to save time and conserve resources believe keeping marketing in-house is the right move. But that will only get them so far before their needs outgrow their capacity. Digital marketing is as much a science as an art and requires quite a bit of technical knowledge that most business owners don’t have the time to learn. Outsourcing the more technical aspects of digital marketing to an agency can exponentially increase results. It allows you to focus on generating new ideas, planning events and keeping up…
Friction with others can mean conflict. It can also be a dynamic that helps spark ideas, in which new thoughts and approaches bloom, solutions are found, and loopholes are closed. But most of us try to avoid friction—especially in the workplace. We tend to gravitate towards situations and people that look agreeable, rather than stand out with a possible alternate thought or view that could lead to friction, and thus, conflict. Yet disagreement over ideas “is where creativity shines,” says Roni Reiter-Palmon, psychologist and professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and director of its Center for Collaboration Science. We may believe…
Just in time for the last days of summer, Taco Bell is rolling out a taco made for the heat—alongside another frozen treat. Taco Bell and ice cream makers Salt & Straw are coming together once again, bringing a new version of their viral ice cream taco—the tacolate— which sold out during its launch weekend last year. “The response completely blew us away—and our guests made it clear they wanted it to stick around,” Tyler Malek, co-founder and head ice cream maker at Salt & Straw, said in press statement. He added, “When we had the chance to take the…
Oil giant Chevron confirmed that it will expand its operations in Venezuela, just days after President Donald Trump announced an ambitious deal to develop the nation’s oil reserves and give the Pentagon a stake in the profits.Chevron, the only U.S. oil company that has a major presence in the country, said Wednesday that it has been assigned additional acreage in the Orinoco Belt, where the company has an established position. Joint venture plans include investing more than $7 billion over the next five years, more than doubling production to approximately 600,000 barrels a day compared with 2026.“Chevron’s history in Venezuela…
Visitors to Costco Next have been met with confusion and consternation over the past several days after the wholesale giant’s curated marketplace for select third-party goods appears to have abruptly shut down without notice. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Earlier this week, visitors to CostcoNext.com noticed the website appeared to be offline. The website was the home of Costco Wholesale Corporation’s third-party marketplace, which has operated since 2017. With no clear explanation for why the site was unavailable, customers turned to social media for answers. Multiple Reddit threads have reported that Costco Next ceased operations over the…
It’s the first week of September which means, cue Seinfeld’s George Constanza, we’re “shifting into soup mode.” Panera Bread is right there with us, rolling out its new fall menu today. The seasonal offerings include the return of two soups: rustic baked potato soup and autumn squash soup. The fast-casual chain is also adding a three-cheese lasagna soup to its menu for the first time. The soup has a ricotta tomato broth with Italian-style sausage, lasagna ribbon pasta, parmesan cheese, and asiago cheese. Then there’s the ciabatta dippers for, as the name suggests, dipping into your hearty soups. You can…
Ruba Borno leads AWS’s Global Specialists and Partners organization, working with companies that use Amazon Web Services to turn AI advances into business impact. To help make the case, she’s also turned her own AWS Marketplace engineering organization into a unit where humans define the requirements and artificial intelligence generates the code, backed by autonomous agents that triage incidents and deliver fixes without waiting for a prompt. As a result, the group increased its shipping throughput by 88%, improved time to production by 21%, and maintained steady rollback rates. More than 76% of the code that goes into production is…
Bad AI-designed posters have become so prolific that actual, human graphic designers are redesigning them on their own just to show the value of a living, breathing designer’s touch. AI-designed posters have a particular look. In addition to their unnatural sheen and patterns, the yellowish hue of their imagery, and the inconsistent details, they’re also information dense, populated with lots of copy and icons. Instead of a layout that’s optimized for the human eye, it’s a layout optimized to include all the information a chatbot was given in a prompt. AI output is especially bad for restaurants since AI-generated imagery…
Furniture brand Lovesac, best known for its premium cloud-like oversize beanbag chairs, is receiving backlash online after it attempted to create a cultural moment on social media. Last week, Dallas-based social media creator and comedian Deric Cahill posted a video about his latest delivery and assembly of a Lovesac “sactional,” or sectional couch. What happened In the video, posted on August 18, Cahill jokingly referred to the delivery of the unassembled modular couch, which he told Inc. made up a total of 24 boxes, and its time-consuming assembly as “corporate terrorism.” Much of the assembly of the modular components involves…