The word “agentic” is being pushed by every AI company right now, and—for the most part—it’s unclear what “agents” can do. I’ve seen ads for things like “sales agents” (automating outreach) or “coding agents” (deploying software bug fixes). To a solopreneur, that type of agentic work seems irrelevant. Part of the confusion is that many of the examples are targeted at enterprise companies. The messaging paints a picture of hundreds of autonomous agents working around the clock. But an agent can be much smaller than that. It can handle a specific task, in the background or on a schedule, while…
Author: Staff Writer
Jack in the Box is continuing to close stores this year as it reports another quarter of declining same-store sales. Alongside the release of its third-quarter earnings report this week, the fast food burger chain shared that it has shuttered 40 restaurants so far in 2026, with another 10 to 20 set to close during its final quarter. Is Jack still on track? The update on restaurant closures comes over a year after the company announced “Jack on Track,” a financial plan that included closing 150 to 200 “underperforming” restaurants. However, in a post-earnings call, Jack in the Box CFO…
In the current landscape of corporate reputation, the old playbooks are failing. After two decades of falling trust in institutions, government, and companies, AI has accelerated this trend and traditional measurement metrics like “trust” aren’t measuring the full impact. Bully Pulpit International’s second annual Reputation Resilience Index reveals a sobering reality. The onset of artificial intelligence is posing two threats to corporate reputation. As AI increases the prevalence of misinformation, consumers are more mistrustful than ever, making positive brand stories harder to drive. Furthermore, every employer is suspected of using technology to replace workers and disempower consumers. The result is…
Hello again and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Most obsolete technologies are gone forever, and thankfully so. I will never again buy a new computer with a floppy disk drive, CRT display, or FireWire, and neither will anyone else. We’re all better off for it. But there’s something about tiny, plasticky, defiantly tactile keyboards that speaks to a dedicated minority of smartphone users. In theory, their countdown clock to irrelevance started the moment the iPhone arrived almost 20 years ago. But they’ve refused to die altogether. At any given moment, there have been a few Android phones with…
You might think that the information-security professionals who show up in August at the annual Black Hat conference in Las Vegas would know to bring their A game to that gathering. But every year, the administrators of the show’s Network Operations Center (NOC) see a different, messier reality play out over the conference Wi-Fi. And at last week’s Black Hat, AI played an even larger part in that drama—as a tool and a threat. Agentic triage AI has delivered the biggest overall boost to NOC staffers in threat assessment, both by spotting suspicious behavior on the network and by helping…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Change is what happens externally. Transition points to how you feel about an upcoming change. It’s defining your relationship to the change that has or is about to happen. The leadership goal when implementing change is to move an organization forward, but that can’t happen while teams are still in transition. It can be hard to wait and let people adapt, but it is a necessary step towards the neutral zone — or the place where there’s no longer any intense pushback or resentment. Guiding teams through the neutral zone…
Germany has spent more than a decade lecturing everyone about the supposed moral virtue of opening the borders, and now the numbers coming out of its own prisons are becoming impossible to conceal. According to figures obtained from all 16 German state justice ministries, roughly 27,000 of the 60,408 people held in prisons or pretrial detention in March 2026 were foreign nationals. That is 44.8% of the entire prison population, compared with roughly 30% in 2015. Foreign nationals represent less than 17% of Germany’s overall population, yet they account for nearly half of those behind bars. Think about what that…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Founders point AI at the tasks they’re already doing and ask if it can make them faster or cheaper. But if you’ve shelved a project because the cost or time never added up, that’s the more interesting question AI just reopened. Before you point AI at your next task list, consider which of the things you decided not to do are worth doing now that the cost of trying has dropped. The instinct with AI is to look at something you’re already doing and ask whether it can be done…
Wholesale prices were unchanged in July, coming in below expectations for a 0.2% increase. The Producer Price Index was flat after a revised 0.1% decline in June, while the annual rate fell sharply to 4.7% from 5.5%. Wholesale prices are still 4.7% higher than a year ago, and beneath that flat headline number there are several very different forces moving in opposite directions. The primary reason July looked so tame was goods, and particularly energy. Final-demand goods prices declined 0.7%, with energy falling 3.1% and food dropping 0.9%. This follows the enormous energy shock earlier this year when final-demand goods…
Key Takeaways Former Microsoft executive Rob Collie says that one tactic is the best way to AI-proof your career. Collie says that workers should not wait to see what AI does to their jobs. In his view, no one can reliably predict which roles will change most or how quickly. His simple test could tell you if your job might be vulnerable to AI. Rob Collie spent 13 years at Microsoft helping lead business intelligence work in Excel. Even with that technical background, he says that AI initially scared him. “I wasn’t immune to that,” Collie says in a new…