Author: Mike Nova

• CEOs are integrating AI into their personal and professional lives.
• Nvidia’s Jensen Huang uses AI as a tutor, while Apple’s Tim Cook organizes emails with the tech.
• The AI market is projected to hit $4.8 trillion by 2033.

It seems like artificial intelligence is everywhere these days. CEOs seem to like it that way.

The technology continues to impact numerous sectors across the global market, including education, healthcare, and entertainment. By 2030, AI could contribute around $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, according to consulting firm PwC.

From Jensen Huang to Tim Cook, here’s how seven CEOs are integrating AI into their daily lives.

Four people were killed and 10 wounded on Saturday during a shooting at a family event in Stockton, in what authorities say appears to have been a targeted attack.

• Jugal Bhatt struggled to land tech interviews before rethinking his job search strategy.
• He made a list of over 100 target companies and tried to connect with recruiters and employees.
• He said the shift helped him land a software engineering job at Amazon.

This ‘as-told-to’ essay is based on a conversation with Jugal Bhatt, a 24-year-old software engineer at Amazon based in Phoenix. Business Insider has verified his employment with documentation. This essay has been edited for length and clarity.

Eight months before graduation, I began searching for a software engineering role. I thought my job search approach was solid, but in hindsight, it was holding me back.

In 2024, I moved to the US from India to pursue a master’s in computer science at the University of Illinois. I kicked off my job search that September — not just to give myself time before my May 2025 graduation, but because I’d heard that August, September, and October were peak hiring months.

I struggled to gain traction, and for the first few months, I didn’t land any interviews. Slowly but surely, I realized I needed to make a change.

After implementing a new approach that incorporated Boolean search techniques, strategic networking, and targeted LinkedIn posting, I began receiving interviews. My strategy eventually helped me land a software engineering role at Amazon.

My initial approach was flawed

At the start of my job hunt, I was mostly cold-applying for software engineering jobs — whatever I could find of interest on company websites and job platforms. I didn’t ask many connections for referrals or reach out to many recruiters, and I used the same résumé for every application.

My strategy shift began around the end of last year. One of the new things I focused on was making connections with recruiters, hiring managers, and employees at companies of interest in the hopes of giving my application an edge.

I got strategic with Boolean searches and networking

I started by making a list of 100 to 150 companies I wanted to work for, a mix of startups and larger tech firms. Every morning, I’d spend time searching for people from these companies on LinkedIn. I did so in part by using Boolean search techniques — searching terms like “recruiter” or “hiring manager” in quotation marks, along with the company name.

I’d identify more than a dozen people from each company and try to connect with or follow them. Once I found them, I’d comment on their LinkedIn posts to get on their radar — and eventually reach out about roles of interest. I think the comments served their purpose because conversations seemed to flow more naturally when they were familiar with me.

When it came to my résumé, I started tailoring it to each role I applied for.

Being active on LinkedIn and GitHub helped me land my first job offer

I also started writing a lot more posts on LinkedIn — sharing my projects and thoughts on different startup products. After doing that, I started getting more messages from recruiters.

But I didn’t just work on my own projects. Some startups had publicly available repositories on GitHub, and I began contributing to them to increase my visibility.

My efforts eventually started to pay off, and this strategy helped me land my first job interviews, including one for a founding software engineer role at the startup LiteLLM. I had commented on LinkedIn posts of the company’s founder and contributed to their GitHub repository, and someone from the company reached out and asked if I’d be interested in interviewing for a role I hadn’t applied for.

I later accepted an offer with them to start full-time after graduation.

A connection with an Amazon recruiter helped me land a job

When I accepted the offer at LiteLLM, I was still being considered for other roles, including a software engineering position at Amazon.

That opportunity began when an Amazon recruiter reached out to me via email about a role that typically required more than three years of experience, which I didn’t have at the time. I asked if there were any more junior-level openings, and they told me to keep an eye out and reach out if I spotted any good fits. It sounded like they might be able to help get my résumé a closer look.

Around the end of March, I spotted three or four roles that seemed like a good fit and emailed the recruiter. I was asked to complete an online assessment for a software engineering position before participating in a series of interviews.

In July, I received an offer from Amazon and resigned from LiteLLM.

My advice for Amazon applicants

I believe my connection with the Amazon recruiter gave me a competitive edge in the application process. Now that I work at Amazon, I’ve seen how recruiters can flag promising candidates and help their applications stand out.

My top advice for anyone looking to land a job at Amazon is to identify the recruiters and hiring managers involved in the decision-making process, whether through LinkedIn searches or connections within Amazon.

Additionally, I recommend you take ample time to prepare for the company’s interview process. Reflecting on my time at Amazon, the work has definitely been challenging — but in some ways, the interview preparation was harder than the job itself.

• Several major fashion brands and retailers have filed for bankruptcy in 2025.
• Economic challenges, tariffs, and competition from fast-fashion brands like Shein hurt sales.
• Store closures and shifting consumer spending patterns continue to impact the fashion industry.

It’s been a busy year for corporate bankruptcies, and fashion brands and retailers aren’t immune.

An uncertain economic environment has led some consumers to be more selective about where they spend their money. As a result, some are reaching for cheaper styles — fast-fashion retailers like Shein took market share from competing brands in 2024, according to data and analytics company GlobalData — or buying secondhand clothing.

Many retailers and restaurants, such as baby apparel brand Carter’s and department store chain Macy’s, have been shuttering stores. More than 3,700 stores have closed across the US in 2025, by Business Insider’s count.

President Donald Trump’s tariffs have also created new challenges for fashion brands, from Abercrombie & Fitch to Nike, some of which have said they’re raising prices or altering their supply chains to minimize the financial impact.

However, other companies haven’t been able to bounce back from waning traffic, tariffs, and more. These apparel brands filed for bankruptcy protection in 2025.

Forever 21

Forever 21 was once a mainstay in fast fashion for young women shopping at the mall. The past six years have been marked by financial losses, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection twice.

The rise of online fast-fashion brands like Shein and Temu, which typically offer styles at a lower price than Forever 21’s already budget-friendly offerings, has hurt the brand in recent years.

In a March 2025 bankruptcy filing, the company cited the “de minimis” rule, which had permitted shipments valued under $800 to enter the US without tariffs, as a key factor that weakened its ability to compete on price with foreign online retailers.

Authentic Brands Group, the owner of Forever 21’s intellectual property, said in September that it found new partners to renew the US business and transform it into a digital-led brand.

Ssense

Online retailer Ssense is known for selling niche luxury fashion brands. In August, the marketplace filed for Canada’s equivalent of bankruptcy protection in the Quebec Superior Court.

Business of Fashion reported that Ssense CEO Rami Atallah blamed the company’s downfall on the Trump administration’s trade policy, in an email sent to staff. Canada faces a 35% tariff on goods that are not covered by a free trade agreement between the nations.

Liberated Brands

Liberated Brands, which operated Billabong and Quicksilver, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February. The case was dismissed in May, and the company has shut down its US and Canadian retail operations.

In February court filings, Liberated Brands said it had been hit by macroeconomic pressures, supply-chain disruptions, and declining profits.

Sneakersnstuff

The popular Stockholm-based sneaker retailer filed for bankruptcy in January, as Swedish outlet Ehandel first reported. It was confirmed by Sneakersnstuff cofounder Peter Jansson in a now-deleted Instagram post.

The company was acquired by German investment company Reziprok Ventures in February.

• A University of Texas professor says AI didn’t break college — it revealed how broken teaching was.
• Steven Mintz said that mass lectures and formulaic essays dehumanized education long before AI.
• He said that schools must automate rote learning so humans can focus on thinking and mentorship.

When Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, opened 400 essays from his students, he noticed something uncanny. The sentences were the same. The structure was the same. Even the conclusions matched.

In a LinkedIn post, Mintz said this wasn’t a cheating crisis but a pedagogy crisis.

For years, he said, universities have operated like factories: mass lectures, standardized prompts, and rubric-driven grading handled by what he described as overworked teaching assistants.

Professors have called this mentorship, he said, but it’s really “industrialized education,” he wrote in a more detailed Substack post on the topic. And AI, he believes, has simply revealed how hollow that model had become.

“Machines can already do most of what we ask students to do — and often do it better,” Mintz wrote on LinkedIn. “When 400 students can generate identical essays in 30 seconds, the problem isn’t the students. The problem is the assignment.”

The death of the take-home essay

In an email to Business Insider, Mintz said the traditional take-home essay is obsolete because it tests exactly what AI now excels at — research, understanding context, and constructing and developing an argument.

“AI can now do all that,” he said.

As a result, he said he has moved away from essays done outside class and toward forms of assessment that demonstrate visible learning, including in-class writing assignments, oral presentations without detailed notes, and student-led discussions.

There should be “no outside of class graded assignments. Assessment will be based exclusively on activities that can be observed in person,” he said.

Mintz envisions a system where AI handles what he called “mastery learning” — basic facts, chronology, and conceptual frameworks — freeing students to focus on what he described as “inquiry learning”: asking students to pose questions and construct complex arguments.

He believes schools should double down on timeless literacies — research, writing, numeracy, and critical reading — but in ways that demand creativity and independent thought.

“We must ensure that students graduate with the ability to conduct research, write and speak clearly and analytically, read closely and critically, be numerate, culturally literate, and well prepared for their future career,” he said.

If universities continue with “business as usual,” he said, public faith in higher education and the value of a degree will “wither.”

A final reckoning for higher ed

For Mintz, AI is a mirror, showing universities how deeply they’ve relied on mechanical learning, and how far they’ve drifted from the roots of education.

“AI doesn’t threaten to dehumanize higher education,” he wrote on Substack. ” It reveals how thoroughly we’ve already dehumanized it — and offers us one last chance to recover what we’ve lost.”

Looking ahead, he told Business Insider that the next five years must be a period of reinvention.

“We must reinvent assessment,” he said, and offer courses that center on “slow reading, deep questions, ethical dilemmas, historical reasoning, data fluency, and creative problem-solving.”

“We must invest in seminars, mentorship models, undergraduate research, and experiential learning,” he said.

Now, colleges face a choice: double down on surveillance and standardization, or rebuild around what machines can’t replicate.

“This is our moment to redesign — not defend — the future of learning,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

• Employees who reshape their jobs around AI report higher engagement and motivation at work.
• Multiverse found that “job crafting” with AI cuts down on low-effort, low-quality “AI slop.”
• Deeper AI collaboration links to higher focus, energy, and commitment, the researchers said.

Tired of “AI slop“? A team of learning scientists at AI skills platform Multiverse says there’s a fix.

Employees who take the initiative to reshape their roles around artificial intelligence — rather than simply using it to speed through tasks — are more engaged, motivated, and creative at work, according to new research from Multiverse, the upskilling platform for AI and tech adoption.

The study, conducted in June and July, analyzed 295 UK full-time professionals across industries, including finance, government, and technology, all of whom had used generative AI for at least six months.

It found that those who actively “job craft” — redesign their tasks and workflows to integrate AI — experience significantly higher engagement than those who use the technology passively.

“Job crafting essentially means reexamining the components of your role and reshaping them to suit the needs of the task at hand,” Barry Goulding, an organizational psychologist at Multiverse, told Business Insider.

“So moving from ‘this is my job’ to ‘this is how I could do my job better.'”

‘AI slop’ comes from low engagement

The Multiverse team sees “AI slop” — the flood of low-quality, generic output produced by generative AI — as a symptom of disengagement rather than a flaw of the technology itself.

“AI slop is a function of employees not properly engaging with the tech,” Goulding said.

“Copy-pasting a report written by AI without reviewing or revising it isn’t an indicator of a highly engaged employee, nor does it suggest that they are deeply collaborating with the AI tool they’re using,” he added.

Job crafters, on the other hand, he said, are the ones who “catch errors, question the AI’s logic, and ultimately ensure the final product is high-quality.”

By training employees to think critically about how AI fits into their role, companies can curb sloppy output and foster higher-quality work, he added.

AI engagement isn’t automatic — it depends on intent

The findings also challenged a popular narrative that AI reduces cognitive engagement.

While some studies, including OpenAI and MIT’s research on ChatGPT and Oxford University Press’s study on AI tools, have found that AI can cause people to think less deeply, Multiverse’s data suggests that when used intentionally, AI can actually increase focus and dedication.

“If the intent is low-effort automation, you’ll no doubt see low cognitive and employee engagement,” Goulding said.

“But our data shows that when employees use AI with intent, and proactively reshape their job around it, their absorption, dedication, and vigor (the factors that make up employee engagement) increase.”

Goulding said this proactive mindset helps employees move from a passive to an active relationship with AI.

He cited a customer service manager, for instance, who could go beyond answering tickets one by one and instead use AI to analyze trends and recommend process improvements.

That kind of mindset shift, he added, “can provoke a real uptick in work engagement.”

How leaders can make ‘job crafting’ part of their AI strategy

To harness these benefits, Goulding said AI adoption needs to go beyond rolling out new tools.

“Handing out licenses to AI tools without training employees in how to use them is pretty much guaranteed to ensure lower-quality outputs, low engagement, and negligible impact on productivity,” he said.

He recommends embedding training within broader AI strategies, measuring outcomes, and giving employees space to experiment.

Leadership, he added, plays a crucial role in setting expectations and modelling the right behaviour.

“Give employees the agency to reshape their roles and the licence to experiment within guardrails,” Goulding said. “Lead from the front.”

He pointed to the consulting firm Capita as an example of a company that has made AI adoption a strategic transition, rather than just a tech rollout.

One employee there, after being trained in AI, built an “Ask Me Anything” assistant that has already handled more than 70,000 queries across the firm, he said.

Don’t track job crafting — track what it drives

Rather than trying to measure “job crafting” directly, Goulding advised leaders to focus on the outcomes it’s meant to drive.

“You won’t see value if you’re just trying to track a behavior,” he said.

“It’s more important to measure the output and impact you’re after: is productivity improving? Are employee engagement scores going up?”

He added that training people to use AI effectively within their context naturally leads to curiosity, problem-solving, and higher-quality collaboration with the technology.

Goulding said he believes job crafting will soon become a core competency for the AI era.

“AI will change how we all work,” he said. “Those who grab hold of the reins will win quicker and win bigger than those that don’t — and the benefits will multiply at an organizational level if you can embed these behaviours through tech training.”