Epique Realty Reinvents the Client Moving Experience with Epique Connect, An In-House Utility Concierge Service
HOUSTON, TX / ACCESS Newswire / July 14, 2025 / Epique Realty recently announced the upcoming launch of Epique Connect, a revolutionary, in-house utility and home service concierge designed to eliminate the stress of moving for clients and save agents valuable time. Unveiled at the 2025 PowerCON, the new service addresses a critical pain point in the homebuying process, where research shows 75% of clients find setting up utilities to be a stressful and confusing experience.
Epique Connect provides a complimentary, white-glove service that manages the setup of all essential home services - including electricity, gas, water, internet, and TV, in one streamlined, personalized phone call.
"Our philosophy is simple: identify the biggest points of friction in the real estate process and build a solution," said Janice Delcid, CFO and Co-Founder of Epique Realty. "The agent's job doesn't end at the closing table, and a client's positive experience shouldn't either. Epique Connect ensures the final mile of the homeownership journey is seamless and positive, which reflects brilliantly on our agents and saves them hours of logistical work. It's the ultimate expression of our commitment to supporting the entire client relationship."
The Epique Connect experience is designed around trust and convenience:
An agent submits their client's information through a simple, branded portal.A dedicated, Epique-trained concierge contacts the client to coordinate all their needs.Unlike many third-party services, the experience is built on a "no spam, no upselling" promise, just genuine, helpful support.
This service creates a powerful win-win. Clients receive a stress-free moving experience that leaves a lasting positive impression, while agents get back up to three hours per transaction and are equipped with a premium service that helps drive repeat and referral business.
Set to begin its rollout in Fall 2025, Epique Connect is built as an evolving platform, with future plans to integrate solar concierge, smart home setup, and moving services. It's one more way Epique is going beyond the transaction to provide support that moves with the client and convenience that sets the agent apart.
For more information: www.EpiqueRealty.com
About Epique Realty
Epique Realty is one of the fastest-growing real estate brokers in history, now operating in all fifty states with over 4,000 agents, and global expansion is underway. Its revolutionary agent-first model provides free extensive benefits with award-winning AI and a culture of radical generosity. By questioning industry norms and putting agents at the center of its universe, Epique is not just transforming the real estate market - it is defining the future. #BeEpique
Media ContactBarbara Simpson | PR and Communications 281-773-7842 | Barbara@EpiqueRealty.com
https://www.instagram.com/epiquerealty/https://www.facebook.com/epiquerealtyhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/epique-realty/mycompany/https://www.youtube.com/@epiquerealty
SOURCE: Epique Realty
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
31-07-2025
- Yahoo
Poland last on list for US troop cuts in Europe, Polish defence ministry says
By Barbara Erling WARSAW (Reuters) -Poland, Ukraine's western neighbour, is expected to be the last country in Europe to face U.S. troop reductions, Poland's top defence official said, as Washington weighs scaling back its military presence across the continent. The prospect of a U.S. troop drawdown in Europe has been a recurring topic since the start of Donald Trump's presidency, when Washington began pressing allies to shoulder more of the defence burden. "All the conversations we have with the Americans indicate that Poland is the last country from which the Americans would want to withdraw (its troops)," Deputy Defence Minister Pawel Zalewski told Reuters in an interview on Thursday. Zalewski said there is a strategic rationale for the presence of American troops in Poland, on NATO's eastern flank, to serve as a deterrent against Russia after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Zalewski said Poland is seeking to be the hub of the U.S. presence in Europe, potentially serving as a logistics, service or even production centre for the U.S. defence industry. "We are talking about the upgrade of F-16 aircraft or a service centre for all types of American combat vehicles, including Abrams tanks," he said. While Germany played such a role during the Cold War, he said it was logical for countries closer to the conflict in Ukraine to be the base for U.S. and allied military operations. Poland has ramped up defence spending and accelerated efforts to modernise its military, becoming NATO's top spender on defence in terms of the proportion of its national wealth. As the largest buyer of U.S. weapons in Europe, according to the Polish defence ministry, the country is positioning itself as a key player in the face of an assertive Russia. The arsenal includes Abrams tanks, HIMARS rocket systems, and air defence assets like the Patriot missile system, modern F-16 and F-35 fighter jets and Apache helicopters. As a leading voice calling for members of NATO to spend more on defence, Poland, which borders Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, has allocated 4.7% of gross domestic product to boosting its armed forces in 2025 with a pledge to increase to 5% in 2026.
Los Angeles Times
31-07-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Crews and filmmakers built Hollywood. What happens to them as AI's reach expands?
You may not know Eliot Mack's name, but if a small robot has ever crept around your kitchen, you know his work. Before he turned his MIT-trained mind to filmmaking, Mack helped lead a small team of engineers trying to solve a deeply relatable problem: how to avoid vacuuming. Whether it was figuring out how to get around furniture legs or unclog the brushes after a run-in with long hair, Mack designed everything onscreen first with software, troubleshooting virtually and getting 80% of the way there before a single part was ever manufactured. The result was the Roomba. When Mack pivoted to filmmaking in the early 2000s, he was struck by how chaotic Hollywood's process felt. 'You pitch the script, get the green light and you're flying into production,' he says, sounding both amused and baffled. 'There's no CAD template, no centralized database. I was like, how do movies even get made?' That question sent Mack down a new path, trading dust bunnies for the creative bottlenecks that slow Hollywood down. In 2004 he founded Lightcraft Technology, a startup developing what would later be known as virtual production tools, born out of his belief that if you could design a robot in software, you should be able to design a shot the same way. The company's early system, Previzion, sold for $180,000 and was used on sci-fi and fantasy shows like 'V' and 'Once Upon a Time.' But Jetset, its latest AI-assisted tool set, runs on an iPhone and offers a free tier, with pro features topping out at just $80 a month. It lets filmmakers scan a location, drop it into virtual space and block out scenes with camera moves, lighting and characters. They can preview shots, overlay elements and organize footage for editing — all from a phone. No soundstage, no big crew, no gatekeepers. Lightcraft's pitch: 'a movie studio in your pocket.' The goal, Mack says, is to put more power in the hands of the people making the work. 'One of the big problems is how siloed Hollywood is,' he says. 'We talked to an Oscar-winning editor who said, 'I'm never going to get to make my movie' — he was pigeonholed as just an editor. Same with an animator we know who has two Oscars.' To Mack, the revolution of Jetset recalls the scrappy, guerrilla spirit of Roger Corman's low-budget productions, which launched the early careers of directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. For generations of creatives stuck waiting on permission or funding, he sees this moment as a reset button. 'The things you got good at — writing, directing, acting, creating, storytelling — they're still crazy useful,' he says. 'What's changing is the amount of schlepping you have to do before you get to do the fun stuff. Your 20s are a gift. You want to be creating at the absolute speed of sound. We're trying to get to a place where you don't have to ask anyone. You can just make the thing.' AI is reshaping nearly every part of the filmmaking pipeline. Storyboards can now be generated from a script draft. Lighting and camera angles can be tested before anyone touches a piece of gear. Rough cuts, placeholder VFX, even digital costume mock-ups can all be created before the first shot is filmed. What once took a full crew, a soundstage and a six-figure budget can now happen in minutes, sometimes at the hands of a single person with a laptop. This wave of automation is arriving just as Hollywood is gripped by existential anxiety. The 2023 writers' and actors' strikes brought the industry to a standstill and put AI at the center of a fight over its future. Since then, production has slowed, crew sizes have shrunk and the streaming boom has given way to consolidation and cost-cutting. According to FilmLA, on-location filming in Greater Los Angeles dropped 22.4% in early 2025 compared with the year before. For many of the crew members and craftspeople still competing for those jobs, AI doesn't feel like an innovation. It feels like a new way to justify doing more with less, only to end up with work that's less original or creative. 'AI scrapes everything we artists have made off the internet and creates a completely static, banal world that can never imagine anything that hasn't happened before,' documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis warned during a directors panel at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival, held in the midst of the strikes. 'That's the real weakness of the AI dream — it's stuck with the ghosts. And I think we'll get fed up with that.' How you feel about these changes often depends on where you sit and how far along you are in your career. For people just starting out, AI can offer a way to experiment, move faster and bypass the usual barriers to entry. For veterans behind the scenes, it often feels like a threat to the expertise they've spent decades honing. Past technological shifts — the arrival of sound, the rise of digital cameras, the advancement of CGI — changed how movies were made, but not necessarily who made them. Each wave brought new roles: boom operators and dialogue coaches, color consultants and digital compositors. Innovation usually meant more jobs, not fewer. But AI doesn't just change the tools. It threatens to erase the people who once used the old ones. Diego Mariscal, 43, a veteran dolly grip who has worked on 'The Mandalorian' and 'Spider-Man: No Way Home,' saw the writing on the wall during a recent shoot. A visual effects supervisor opened his laptop to show off a reel of high-end commercials and something was missing. 'There were no blue screens — none,' Mariscal recalls. 'That's what we do. We put up blues as grips. You'd normally hire an extra 10 people and have an extra three days of pre-rigging, setting up all these blue screens. He was like, 'We don't need it anymore. I just use AI to clip it out.'' Mariscal runs Crew Stories, a private Facebook group with nearly 100,000 members, where working crew members share job leads, trade tips and voice their growing fears. He tries to keep up with the steady drip of AI news. 'I read about AI all day, every day,' he says. 'At least 20 posts a day.' His fear isn't just about fewer jobs — it's about what comes next. 'I've been doing this since I was 19,' Mariscal says of his specialized dolly work, which involves setting up heavy equipment and guiding the camera smoothly through complex shots. 'I can push a cart in a parking lot. I can push a lawnmower. What else can I do?' Before AI and digital doubles, Mike Marino learned the craft of transformation the human way: through hands-on work and a fascination that bordered on obsession. Marino was 5 years old when he first saw 'The Elephant Man' on HBO. Horrified yet transfixed, he became fixated on prosthetics and the emotional power they could carry. As a teenager in New York, he pored over issues of Fangoria, studied monsters and makeup effects and experimented with sculpting his own latex masks on his bedroom floor. Decades later, Marino, 48, has become one of Hollywood's leading makeup artists, earning Oscar nominations for 'Coming 2 America,' 'The Batman' and last year's dark comedy 'A Different Man,' in which he helped transform Sebastian Stan into a disfigured actor. His is the kind of tactile, handcrafted work that once seemed irreplaceable. But today AI tools are increasingly capable of achieving similar effects digitally: de-aging actors, altering faces, even generating entire performances. What used to take weeks of experimentation and hours in a makeup trailer can now be approximated with a few prompts and a trained model. To Marino, AI is more than a new set of tools. It's a fundamental change in what it means to create. 'If AI is so good it can replace a human, then why have any human beings?' he says. 'This is about taste. It's about choice. I'm a human being. I'm an artist. I have my own ideas — mine. Just because you can make 10,000 spaceships in a movie, should you?' Marino is no technophobe. His team regularly uses 3D scanning and printing. But he draws the line at outsourcing creative judgment to a machine. 'I'm hoping there are artists who want to work with humans and not machines,' he says. 'If we let AI just run amok with no taste, no choice, no morality behind it, then we're gone.' Not everyone sees AI's rise in film production as a zero-sum game. Some technologists imagine a middle path. Daniela Rus, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and one of the world's leading AI researchers, believes the future of filmmaking lies in a 'human-machine partnership.' AI, Rus argues, can take on time-consuming tasks like animating background extras, color correction or previsualizing effects, freeing up people to focus on what requires intuition and taste. 'AI can help with the routine work,' she says. 'But the human touch and emotional authenticity are essential.' Few directors have spent more time grappling with the dangers and potential of artificial intelligence than James Cameron. Nearly 40 years before generative tools entered Hollywood's workflow, he imagined a rogue AI triggering global apocalypse in 1984's 'The Terminator,' giving the world Skynet — now a cultural shorthand for the dark side of machine intelligence. Today, he continues to straddle that line, using AI behind the scenes on the upcoming 'Avatar: Fire and Ash' to optimize visual effects and performance-capture, while keeping creative decisions in human hands. The latest sequel, due Dec. 19, promises to push the franchise's spectacle and scale even further; a newly released trailer reveals volcanic eruptions, aerial battles and a new clan of Na'vi. 'You can automate a lot of processes that right now tie up a lot of artists doing mundane tasks,' Cameron told The Times in 2023 at a Beyond Fest screening of his 1989 film 'The Abyss.' 'So if we could accelerate the postproduction pipeline, then we can make more movies. Then those artists will get to do more exciting things.' For Cameron, the promise of AI lies in efficiency, not elimination. 'I think in our particular industry, it's not going to replace people; it's going to free them to do other things,' he believes. 'It's going to accelerate the process and bring the price down, which would be good because, you know, some movies are a little more expensive than others. And a lot of that has to do with human energy.' Cameron himself directed five films between 1984 and 1994 and only three in the three decades since, though each one has grown increasingly complex and ambitious. That said, Cameron has never been one to chase shortcuts for their own sake. 'I think you can make pre-viz and design easier, but I don't know if it makes it better,' he says. 'I mean, if easy is your thing. Easy has never been my thing.' He draws a line between the machine-learning techniques his team has used since the first 'Avatar' to help automate tedious tasks and the newer wave of generative AI models making headlines today. 'The big explosion has been around image-based generative models that use everything from every image that's ever been created,' he says. 'We'd never use any of them. The images we make are computer-created, but they're not AI-created.' In his view, nothing synthetic can replace the instincts of a flesh-and-blood artist. 'We have human artists that do all the designs,' he says. 'We don't need AI. We've got meat-I. And I'm one of the meat-artists that come up with all that stuff. We don't need a computer. Maybe other people need it. We don't.' Rick Carter didn't go looking for AI as a tool. He discovered it as a lifeline. The two-time Oscar-winning production designer, who worked with Cameron on 'Avatar' and whose credits include 'Jurassic Park' and 'Forrest Gump,' began experimenting with generative AI tools like Midjourney and Runway during the pandemic, looking for a way to keep his creative instincts sharp while the industry was on pause. A longtime painter, he was drawn to the freedom the programs offered. 'I saw that there was an opportunity to create images where I didn't have to go to anybody else for approval, which is the way I would paint,' Carter says by phone from Paris. 'None of the gatekeeping would matter. I have a whole lot of stories on my own that I've tried to get into the world in various ways and suddenly there was a way to visualize them.' Midjourney and Runway can create richly detailed images — and in Runway's case, short video clips — from a text prompt or a combination of text and visuals. Trained on billions of images and audiovisual materials scraped from the internet, these systems learn to mimic style, lighting, composition and form, often with eerie precision. In a production pipeline, these tools can help concept artists visualize characters or sets, let directors generate shot ideas or give costume designers and makeup artists a fast way to test looks, long before physical production begins. But as these tools gain traction in Hollywood, a deeper legal and creative dilemma is coming into focus: Who owns the work they produce? And what about the copyrighted material used to train them? In June, Disney and Universal filed a federal copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, accusing the company of generating unauthorized replicas of characters such as Spider-Man, Darth Vader and Shrek using AI models trained on copyrighted material: what the suit calls a 'bottomless pit of plagiarism.' It's the most high-profile of several legal challenges now putting copyright law to the test in the age of generative AI. Working with generative models, Carter began crafting what he calls 'riffs of consciousness,' embracing AI as a kind of collaborative partner, one he could play off of intuitively. The process reminded him of the loose, improvisational early stages of filmmaking, a space he knows well from decades of working with directors like Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg. 'I'll just start with a visual or a word prompt and see how it iterates from there and what it triggers in my mind,' Carter says. 'Then I incorporate that so it builds on its own in an almost free-associative way. But it's still based upon my own intuitive, emotional, artistic, even spiritual needs at that moment.' He describes the experience as a dialogue between two minds, one digital and one human: 'One AI is artificial intelligence. The other AI is authentic intelligence — that's us. We've earned it over this whole span of time on the planet.' Sometimes, Carter says, the most evocative results come from mistakes. While sketching out a story about a hippie detective searching for a missing woman in the Himalayas, he accidentally typed 'womb' into ChatGPT instead of 'woman.' The AI ran with it, returning three pages of wild plot ideas involving gurus, seekers and a bizarre mystery set in motion by the disappearance. 'I couldn't believe it,' he says. 'I would never have taken it that far. The AI is so precocious. It is trying so much to please that it will literally make something out of the mistake you make.' Carter hasn't used generative AI on a film yet; most of his creations are shared only with friends. But he says the technology is already slipping into creative workflows in covert ways. 'There are issues with copyrights with most of the studios so for now, it's going to be mostly underground,' he says. 'People will use it but they won't acknowledge that they're using it — they'll have an illustrator do something over it, or take a photo so there's no digital trail.' Carter has lived through a major technological shift before. 'I remember when we went from analog to digital, from 'Jurassic Park' on,' he says. 'There were a lot of wonderful artists who could draw and paint in ways that were just fantastic but they couldn't adapt. They didn't want to — even the idea of it felt like the wrong way to make art. And, of course, most of them suffered because they didn't make it from the Rolodex to the database in terms of people calling them up.' He worries that some artists may approach the technology with a rigid sense of authorship. 'Early on, I found that the less I used my own ego as a barometer for whether something was artistic, the more I leaned into the process of collaboratively making something bigger than the sum of its parts — and the bigger and better the movies became.' Others, like storyboard artist Sam Tung, are bracing against the same wave with a quiet but unshakable defiance. Tung, whose credits include 'Twisters' and Christopher Nolan's upcoming adaptation of 'The Odyssey,' has spent the last two years tracking the rise of generative tools, not just their capabilities but their implications. As co-chair of the Animation Guild's AI Committee, he has been on the front lines of conversations about how these technologies could reshape creative labor. To artists like Tung, the rise of generative tools feels deeply personal. 'If you are an illustrator or a writer or whatever, you had to give up other things to take time to develop those skills,' he says. 'Nobody comes out of the womb being able to draw or write or act. Anybody who does that professionally spent years honing those skills.' Tung has no interest in handing that over to a machine. 'It's not that I'm scared of it — I just don't need it,' he says. 'If I want to draw something or paint something, I'll do it myself. That way it's exactly what I want and I actually enjoy the process. When people tell me they responded to a drawing I did or a short film I made with friends, it feels great. But anything I've made with AI, I've quickly forgotten about. There's basically nothing I get from putting it on social media, other than the ire of my peers.' What unsettles him isn't just the slickness of AI's output but how that polish is being used to justify smaller crews and faster turnarounds. 'If this is left unchecked, it's very easy to imagine a worst-case scenario where team sizes and contract durations shrink,' Tung says. 'A producer who barely understands how it works might say, 'Don't you have AI to do 70% of this? Why do you need a whole week to turn around a sequence? Just press the button that says: MAKE MOVIE.' ' At 73, Carter isn't chasing jobs. His legacy is secure. 'If they don't hire me again, that's OK,' he says. 'I'm not in that game anymore.' He grew up in Hollywood — his father was Jack Lemmon's longtime publicist and producing partner — and has spent his life watching the industry evolve. Now, he's witnessing a reckoning unlike any he, or anyone else, has ever imagined. 'I do have concerns about who is developing AI and what their values are,' he says. 'What they use all this for is not necessarily something I would approve of — politically, socially, emotionally. But I don't think I'm in a position to approve or not.' Earlier this year, the Palisades fire destroyed Carter's home, taking with it years of paintings and personal artwork. AI, he says, has given him a way to keep creating through the upheaval. 'It saved me through the pandemic, and now it's saving me through the fire,' he says, as if daring the universe to test him again. 'It's like, go ahead, throw something else at me.' Many in the industry may still be dipping a toe into the waters of AI. Verena Puhm dove in. The Austrian-born filmmaker studied acting and directing at the Munich Film Academy before moving to Los Angeles, where she built a globe-spanning career producing, writing and developing content for international networks and streamers. Her credits range from CNN's docuseries 'History of the Sitcom' to the German reboot cult anthology 'Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction' and a naval documentary available on Tubi. More recently, she has channeled that same creative range into a deepening exploration of generative tools. She first began dabbling with AI while using Midjourney to design a pitch deck, but it wasn't until she entered a timed generative AI filmmaking challenge at the 2024 AI on the Lot conference — informally dubbed a 'gen battle' — that the creative potential of the medium hit her. 'In two hours, I made a little mock commercial,' she remembers, proudly. 'It was actually pretty well received and fun. And I was like, Oh, wow, I did this in two hours. What could I do in two days or two weeks?' What started as experimentation soon became a second act. This summer, Puhm was named head of studio for Dream Lab LA, a new creative arm of Luma AI, which develops generative video tools for filmmakers and creators. There, she's helping shape new storytelling formats and supporting emerging creators working at the intersection of cinema and technology. She may not be a household name, but in the world of experimental storytelling, she's fast becoming a key figure. Some critics dismiss AI filmmaking as little more than 'prompt and pray': typing in a few words and hoping something usable comes out. Puhm bristles at the phrase. 'Anybody that says that tells me they've never tried it at all, because it is not that easy and simple,' she says. 'You can buy a paintbrush at Home Depot for, what, $2? That doesn't make you a painter. When smartphones first came out, there was a lot of content being made but that didn't mean everyone was a filmmaker.' What excites her most is how AI is breaking down the barriers that once kept ambitious ideas out of reach. Luma's new Modify Video tool lets filmmakers tweak footage after it's shot, changing wardrobe, aging a character, shifting the time of day, all without reshoots or traditional VFX. It can turn a garage into a spaceship, swap a cloudy sky for the aurora borealis or morph an actor into a six-eyed alien, no green screen required. 'It's such a relief as an artist,' Puhm says. 'If there's a project I've been sitting on for six years because I didn't have a $5 million budget — suddenly there's no limit. I remember shopping projects around and being told by producers, 'This scene has to go, that has to go,' just to keep the budget low. Now everything is open.' That sense of access resonates far beyond Los Angeles. At a panel during AI on the Lot, 'Blue Beetle' director Ángel Manuel Soto reflected on how transformative AI might have been when he was first starting out. 'I wish tools like this existed when I wanted to make movies in Puerto Rico, because nobody would lend me a camera,' he said. 'Access to equipment is a privilege we sometimes take for granted. I see this helping kids like me from the projects tell stories without going bankrupt — or stealing, which I don't condone.' Puhm welcomes criticism of AI but only when it's informed. 'If you hate AI and you've actually tested the tools and educated yourself, I'll be your biggest supporter,' she says. 'But if you're just speaking out of fear, with no understanding, then what are you even basing your opinion on?' She understands why some filmmakers feel rattled, especially those who, like her, grew up dreaming of seeing their work on the big screen. 'I still want to make features and TV series — that's what I set out to do,' she says. 'I hope movie theaters don't go away. But if the same story I want to tell reaches millions of people on a phone and they're excited about it, will I really care that it wasn't in a theater?' 'I just feel like we have to adapt to the reality of things,' she continues. 'That might sometimes be uncomfortable, but there is so much opportunity if you lean in. Right now any filmmaker can suddenly tell a story at a high production value that they could have never done before, and that is beautiful and empowering.' For many, embracing AI boils down to a simple choice: adapt or get cut from the frame. Hal Watmough, a BAFTA-winning British editor with two decades of experience, first began experimenting with AI out of a mix of curiosity and dread. 'I was scared,' he admits. 'This thing was coming into the industry and threatening our jobs and was going to make us obsolete.' But once he started playing with tools like Midjourney and Runway, he quickly saw how they could not only speed up the process but allow him to rethink what his career could be. For an editor used to working only with what he was given, the ability to generate footage on the fly, cut with it immediately and experiment endlessly without waiting on a crew or a shoot was a revelation. 'It was still pretty janky at that stage, but I could see the potential,' he says. 'It was kind of intoxicating. I started to think, I'd like to start making things that I haven't seen before.' After honing his skills with various AI tools, Watmough created a wistful, vibrant five-minute animated short called 'LATE,' about an aging artist passing his wisdom to a young office worker. Over two weeks, he generated 2,181 images using AI, then curated and refined them frame by frame to shape the story. Earlier this year, he submitted 'LATE' to what was billed as the world's first AI animation contest, hosted by Curious Refuge, an online education hub for creative technologists — and, to his delight, he won. The prize included $10,000, a pitch meeting with production company Promise Studios and, as an absurd bonus, his face printed on a potato. But for Watmough, the real reward was the sense that he had found a new creative identity. 'There's something to the fact that the winner of the first AI animation competition was an editor,' Watmough says. 'With the advent of AI, yes, you could call yourself a filmmaker but essentially I'd say most people are editors. You're curating, selecting, picking what you like — relying on your taste.' Thanks to AI, he says he's made more personal passion projects in the past year and a half than during his entire previous career. 'I'll be walking or running and ideas just come. Now I can go home that night and try them,' he says. 'None of that would exist without AI. So either something exists within AI or it never exists at all. And all the happiness and fulfillment that comes with it for the creator doesn't exist either.' Watmough hasn't entirely lost his fear of what AI might do to the creative workforce, even as he is energized by what it makes possible. 'A lot of people I speak to in film and TV are worried about losing their jobs and I'm not saying the infrastructure roles won't radically change,' he says. 'But I don't think AI is going to replace that many — if any — creative people.' What it will do, he says, is raise the bar. 'If anyone can create anything, then average work will basically become extinct or pointless. AI can churn out remakes until the cows come home. You'll have to pioneer to exist.' He likens the current moment to the birth of cinema more than a century ago — specifically the Lumière brothers' 'Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat,' the 1896 short that famously startled early audiences. In the silent one-minute film, a steam train rumbles toward the camera, growing larger. Some viewers reportedly leaped from their seats, convinced it was about to crash into them. 'People ran out of the theater screaming,' Watmough says. 'Now we don't even think about it. With AI, we're at that stage again. We're watching the steam train come into the station and people are either really excited or they're running out of the theater in fear. That's where we are, right at the start. And the potential is limitless.' Then again, he adds with a dry laugh, 'I'm an eternal optimist, so take what I say with a grain of salt.'
CNBC
30-07-2025
- CNBC
Walmart exec shares the ultimate red flag she sees in employees: 'Nobody' will want to hire you
If you ask Donna Morris, there's one behavior that's the ultimate red flag an employee won't get far in the workplace: when someone is a "Debbie Downer." Morris, 57, has been executive vice president and chief people officer at Walmart since 2020, helping shape the employee experience of 2.1 million workers since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Prior to her current role, she spent 17 years at Adobe in a variety of leadership positions — and throughout her career, she's learned a thing or two about red flags in the office. "Nobody wants [to hire] a Debbie Downer," Morris tells CNBC Make It, adding that this kind of person is "constantly negative. You know they're going to show up [and] they're going to bring the problem, never the solution. I like people who bring the problem and a suggestion for how they might resolve [it.]" A "Debbie Downer" can also be someone who's a naysayer, sharing negative opinions about others' ideas and goals, or regularly being a hindrance to new projects and perspectives. This could make it difficult for them to make the connections needed to climb the corporate ladder, or for their bosses and managers to trust them with new projects. If your co-worker has this character trait, they're "only going to support you to a restricted limit," Juliette Han, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, told CNBC Make It in June 2023. "They need you to stay within a short leash, and might discourage you from meeting new people in the company or going after new projects if it doesn't benefit them directly." That doesn't mean you should practice toxic optimism, pretending everything is fine when your team is facing difficult circumstances, for example. It's unnatural and unrealistic for someone to be happy all the time, Morris says. Similarly, a continuous negative spiral could be a signal that you're in the wrong job or company, she adds. There are a couple attributes that separate the most highly successful employees to those who fall short, says Morris. She thinks highly of workers who "deliver what you are expecting at the time that you're expecting," she says. "You're better to deliver early than to deliver late, and you're better to deliver more than less." "Another green flag is they're open to opportunities, and they put their hand up to take on more," she adds. "Or they bring a problem with the remedy or request help in a timely manner, as opposed to the house is on fire." You can show you have this kind of team player, self-starter attitude by offering help even when you're not asked for it, like volunteering to mentor the new intern or pitching an idea that solves a problem your boss has been dealing with. Demonstrating radical intellectual curiosity, like researching a new AI tool or a new software your competitors are using, then sharing your findings with your boss or manager, also goes a long way, according to Michael Ramlett, CEO of global data intelligence firm Morning Consult. And if you're willing to help your colleagues along the way, acting as a mentor and sharing the things you've learned, that's the icing on the cake, Morris says. "People who you see are actually helping others [are a] total green flag."
