
The Verge hires Hayden Field as senior AI reporter
'AI has the potential to be a fundamental shift in how we interact with technology and what we think computers can do,' said Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge. 'Hayden's reporting has consistently delivered insightful coverage of AI's most pressing developments, and her deep sourcing and sharp analysis will be vital as The Verge continues to expand its AI coverage.'
During her time at CNBC, Field reported on a wide array of topics, from corporate developments and regulatory scrutiny to ethical considerations and technological advancements. She's covered Elon Musk's xAI and its ambitious plans to raise billions to build a massive AI infrastructure powered by Nvidia hardware, analyzed the FTC's inquiry into major AI firms like OpenAI, Amazon, and Microsoft, and investigated internal challenges at OpenAI, including employee concerns over equity donations amid the company's soaring valuation.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Fast Company
17 minutes ago
- Fast Company
How to create an out of office plan so you can go on vacation guilt-free
Effective planning before you go on vacation can make your time off more relaxing and enjoyable. Unsurprisingly, research reveals that vacations are beneficial for your mental and physical well-being and most employees return more creative and productive. However, to maximize your chances of having a restful vacation, it's helpful to have a game plan in place to make sure your responsibilities are covered when you're gone and you're setting yourself up for an easy return. 'To truly relax, professionals need thoughtful preparation, which helps them offload details from working memory and relax,' says Anita Williams Woolley, professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh. Here's what experts suggest. Determine your goals Take the time to delve into both short-term goals and long-term objectives you're responsible for managing. Woolley suggests these action points regarding work goals to address before signing off for your PTO. Clarify and prioritize immediate tasks to complete before you leave—be realistic about what you can get done. Confirm what your team should handle (or ignore) during your absence. Outline your return plan, including contingencies in case of delays. Create an alignment plan Before your absence, create a plan to help your team handle your responsibilities while you're gone. Woolley advises including strategies for obstacles or issues that may arise while you're away. Here's what she recommends: Clearly assign responsibilities. One suggestion is a vacation task list, where your specific duties are divided up among other team members. Make sure everyone understands what they are responsible for. Agree on which issues are urgent and warrant contacting you, empowering your team to handle everything else. Identify critical risks and provide explicit guidance on how to handle emergencies without you. Notify your team Be sure to let your colleagues and clients know when you will be out of your office. Woolley says: Be proactive. Alert your team you're going to be on vacation instead of a colleague or client receiving a bounce-back email announcing you're out of the office. Inform everyone who needs to know about your absence. Select a trusted 'gatekeeper' who's someone who decides when to contact you and serves as a central reference for others. The day before your vacation Although you're excited for your break, be sure to wrap up any loose ends. Annie Rosencrans, people and culture director at HiBob in New York, provides these tips: Send final follow-up emails, close out minor tasks, and tie up easy wins. Avoid pushing nonurgent new work to others right before you leave, and instead table them for when you get back. Cancel, decline, or reschedule meetings on the calendar for your time away. Set up your out of office (OOO) messages on email, Slack, and other communication platforms. Set yourself up for an easy return Establishing a plan before you leave for vacation can reduce pre-trip anxiety and ensure that you and your team are set up for success during your time away, says Rosencrans. 'A structured plan gives employees time to transition both practically and emotionally out of work mode,' she continues. 'When executed well, this approach creates clarity, accountability, and space to truly disconnect. It also offers teammates confidence that nothing will fall through the cracks in your absence.' Woolley at Carnegie Mellon advises organizing your workspace and priorities ahead of time, ensuring your goals guide your first days back, rather than an overflowing inbox. She recommends setting yourself up for an easier return: 'Park on a downhill slope.' Be assured, with some mindful planning, you can enjoy your vacation with less anxiety. Rosencrans asserts how time off isn't just a perk, it's a performance strategy. 'The more intentionally we approach it, the better we protect well-being and long-term productivity,' she explains. 'And no one should feel guilty for unplugging. If we normalize structured, respectful pre-vacation planning, we make space for real rest and that's something every employee deserves.'


Fast Company
17 minutes ago
- Fast Company
How to foster innovation at work
When Piyush Gupta took over as the CEO of DBS Bank in Singapore in 2009, he said DBS needed to think of itself not as a bank, but as a technology company providing banking services. Gupta challenged his entire workforce to raise their innovation game. Gupta and his team invested significantly in technology, restructured to improve collaboration, and, most critically, drove a series of cultural interventions to encourage innovation friendly behaviors. Over the next 15 years DBS Bank transformed from an under performer in its local market to the best performing bank in the world. How did Gupta and other leaders who look to foster innovation do it? As a researcher, advisor, (DBS was a consulting client of mine from 2017 to 2019), executive, and now teacher, I have spent 25 years practicing and studying disruptive change. Here are some essential takeaways for nurturing disruptive teams. Recognize the importance of teamwork Innovation stories typically celebrate charismatic leaders like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos. That sometimes leaves leaders thinking they have to carry the reins of disruption, or need to find a lone genius to drive disruption. Innovation isn't the job of the few. It's highly dependent on teamwork. For example, in the 1960s, Procter & Gamble launched Pampers disposable diapers, which went on to become the first brand in P&G's storied history to cross $10 billion in revenue. Vic Mills (a decorated scientist) chartered a team led by Bob Duncan (whose grandfather played a key part in the development of Tide laundry detergent) that included researchers like Harry Tecklenburg, who went on to have a 30-year career at P&G and wrote a wonderful retrospective about the launch of Pampers in 1990. The job of the leader isn't to be charismatic and do the work alone, it is to create conditions that enable teams to do disruptive work. Embrace uncertainty One key to success is to recognize that disruption is predictably unpredictable. Julia Child's 1961 book Mastering the Art of French Cooking enabled a broader population to enjoy French dishes. Her pioneering cooking shows on television further brought cooking to the masses. Her story echoes every disruptive journey I have studied. Most notably, success required overcoming false starts, fumbles, and failures. She started working on Mastering the Art (with coauthors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle) in 1951. The goal was to publish the book in 1953. It took an extra eight years, two publisher switches, and one stinging rejection in 1959 that almost killed the project. While you can't predict the specific path a disruptive innovation will follow, you can predict there will be twists and turns along the way. That means that leaders need to make sure that their environments accept and encourage the kind of intelligent failure that accompanies disruptive success. Celebrate failure Disruption's predictable unpredictability also means leaders need to make sure that their environments accept and encourage the kind of intelligent failure that accompanies disruptive success. One technique that can help is to have a formal ceremony to celebrate failure. That's what Finnish gaming company Supercell does. Every time a team successfully launches a new game, everyone gets together, and cracks open a beer. Every time a team admits defeat and decides to shut down a project, everyone gets together and pops a bottle of champagne. The 'reward' for the failure is greater than the reward for success. Saying cheers to failure has two clear benefits. First, it shows that a good, not bad, thing has happened, encouraging other teams to continue to push frontiers. Second, it shows that the effort is finished. Many organizations suffer from what I call 'zombie projects.' The walking undead. Projects that everyone knows will not move the needle but they shuffle and linger on, sucking all of the life out of the organization. Zombies exist because failure carries such a stigma that organizations avoid killing projects. Saying cheers to failure stops zombies from ever spawning and allows teams to move onto the next project—which might actually be the disruptive innovation for which your company has been searching. Accept risk Pursuing disruption is risky. The first reference to gunpowder appears in the book The Kinship of the Three in 142 CE. Its development over the centuries involved alchemists, blacksmiths, peasants, gunners, philosophers, and scientists. There were farmers and fighters experimenting with different uses. There were leaders allocating time and money and directing work. As one historian noted, success required the work of 'daredevils, visionaries, madmen,' many of whom found 'not fortune but disfiguring burns and death.' The burns are more metaphorical today—doubts from colleagues, the pain of a hypothesis proved wrong, the discomfort that always accompanies doing something new—but they still sting. Doing new things is hard. Having things not work out as expected is painful. Disruptive innovators question the status quo. Some people inside organizations love it, some are indifferent to it, some actively seek to subvert or sabotage it. Disruption casts a shadow. When you see someone in your organization who is pushing disruption, encourage them. Celebrate their courage, and tell them how much you appreciate their work. It's a small thing, but big things come from a collection of small things.


Forbes
19 minutes ago
- Forbes
How Workplace AI Is Both A Lifeline And A Landmine For Disabled Employees
In 2025, artificial intelligence is transforming the workplace for everyone, regardless of ability, but for workers with disabilities, the critical stakes governing both threats and opportunities remain, as ever, unique and highly personalized. First, the good news. AI has the potential to transform working life for disabled staff in several important ways. The core promise is enhanced accessibility. Though not yet at a level where it can operate entirely independently from human oversight, AI holds the potential to remediate on an industrial scale vast swathes of material that are inaccessible to workers with disabilities. This might include websites and documents that were previously indecipherable to screen readers or videos that lack captions for the hard of hearing. Those with sensory processing differences arising from neurodiversity and dyslexia can use AI to create highly personalized content such as concise, easy-read summaries or customized fonts, spacing, and colors. Though this is an opportunity that exists across the board, not just for employees with disabilities, new technologies such as agentic AI, which is now being rolled into everyday platforms like OpenAI's ChatGPT, are fostering an important workplace skills reset. In short, over the next few years, employees with the highest level of proficiency in deploying AI tools stand to gain the most. Why this might matter to employees with disabilities is that such individuals are often natural productivity hackers. Innovating through devising shortcuts and alternatives is often a key requirement of life with a disability, as is an appetite for identifying and becoming early adopters of technologies with the potential to make life that bit easier. Being watched Sadly, on the flipside, there is a much darker side to workplace AI for people with disabilities. This can be seen in the disproportionate impact that the growing proliferation of productivity surveillance tools has on this population. Undoubtedly buoyed by a wave of post-pandemic return-to-office mandates, including a directive from U.S. President Donald Trump for federal employees to cease working from home shortly after he returned to office, the workplace surveillance market is expected to grow to $4.5 billion by 2026. Algorithmic and AI-based workplace tracking tools can include anything from keystroke and mouse movement monitors to video monitoring software that can not only provide snapshots of an employee's computer screen but also a live video feed of the person at their desk. Additionally, some tools can track a person's exact location in the office, and there are those that measure physical output in environments such as warehouses. Nowadays, this type of tech has become so pervasive that it can also monitor a worker's bodily functions directly through health and well-being apps that are offered by the employer, often within a wrapper of employee benefit packages. Such technologies are not on the periphery either but are now, under the guise of employers needing to make data-driven decisions to boost both profits and employee productivity, being deployed by many renowned brands such as PWC, UnitedHealth Group and Elon Musk's AI startup xAI. Although many employees may somewhat justifiably have concerns, a 2023 Pew Research study found that 56 percent of U.S. workers are against the use of AI tools that track employee location, while 61 percent oppose monitoring employees' movements. However, it is potentially those workers with disabilities who have the most to lose. That's because the data that has been used to build the tools themselves uses metrics such as the typical output that might be expected of a non-disabled worker. These might include aspects like how many bathroom breaks an employee might have throughout the day. How long an individual should be able to remain seated at their desk for a single session could be another criterion. Unfortunately, workers with disabilities often fall outside of these 'norms' and therefore risk being flagged by AI systems for indiscipline or review by senior management. Writing for the American Bar Association last month, Ariana Aboulafia, Project Lead, Disability Rights in Technology Policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, posited, 'Worker surveillance issues are inextricably tied to disability rights. These tools are often used in many different employment contexts and to the detriment of the privacy and civil rights of workers. Even though they seem like something out of dystopian fiction, they may very well be used by your employer right now or by your next employer. It is vital that workers are aware of the potential presence of these tools and that employers are aware of their impacts so that they can mitigate harms—or even choose not to use these tools at all.' Common sense might dictate that something as simple as disability disclosure from the employee might be the way out of this trap. That way, the employer would be able to take the disability into account when considering the surveillance metrics. The reality is, however, in today's competitive workplace, if an employee has the option of not revealing their disability status to their employer, they may well be inclined to remain tight-lipped for a whole host of reasons. Not least a fear of discrimination and negative attitudes from management and colleagues. Equally, in 2025, it's no longer far-fetched to believe that individuals of all abilities are becoming increasingly fearful that agentic AI may be set to take their jobs in the near future and will therefore do everything they can to avoid being perceived as risky or less valuable to the organization. In this context, it would seem like workplace AI surveillance is here to stay, with the next best option being to build as robust a framework as possible for how to use the tools responsibly and to recognize the types of cases where they might not be telling the employer the whole story.