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This months Must Reads we are unpacking the hidden shifts quietly rewiring business, tech, and culture: from the hidden costs of AI and algorithm-driven pricing to the rise of "zone-out" TV & how GLP-1s are fundamentally reshaping retail and business operations.

So, here is your all-signal, no-noise guide to getting smarter for the months ahead.

If you prefer video here is a explainer style video:

This isn’t really about a cute seal cartoon; it’s about how design tuned for one audience (kids) can accidentally unlock a whole new market in pet-calming, pet-entertaining media. This highlights a move to the future where content is increasingly optimised around sensory triggers (colour, motion, sound) and then discovered by algorithms and social video as “working” for unexpected segments, in this case cats and dogs. 

Expect: (i) more deliberate “ambient” content for pets and background viewing (ii) more experiments from streamers in micro‑niche programming, and (iii) more pet‑influencer moments that turn a throwaway kids’ show into a behaviour‑shaping tool. 

This is also a product choice: kids and pets want repeatable shows they can watch and rewatch; this was key to Disney for generations, this will be a tactic many try to exploit. 

For product, media, and advertising teams, this points to designing for multispecies households, bundling pet-calming streams into subscriptions, and rethinking what a “viewer” actually is when engagement metrics start including paws on screens.

→ Read An Example

A LOL Break

Algorithmically set wages and prices are quietly locking workers into “predetermined purchasing power”, where every action becomes data to justify paying them less and charging them more. It matters because it exposes how AI-driven personalisation isn’t just annoying dynamic pricing but an invisible system of discipline that converts precarity into a permanent, predictable condition of being poor.

In the near-future in which labour management, pricing, credit, and housing markets are all potentially synced through AI surveillance, turning “choice” into a thin layer over automated constraint unless regulators step in. 

There will be more pressure for bans or strict limits on surveillance-based wage setting and pricing, new organising frames for unions and worker groups, and early experiments by companies and policymakers to redesign pay, pricing, and data collection rules before this logic hardens into the default operating system of work and consumption.

→ Read An Example

Startups like Dumb.co forcing handwritten cover letters is a rebellion against AI sludge and a way to surface real intent in a saturated, low‑signal hiring market. It signals a near‑term future where “analog friction” becomes a deliberate feature of recruiting and product experiences, used to filter for genuine alignment, effort, and shared values rather than generic optimisation. For the next year, expect more companies (especially brand‑ and mission‑led ones) to add human‑heavy steps phone calls, references, work samples, even offline tasks to escape “AI talks to AI” loops in hiring. 

That will reshape candidate behavior (fewer, more targeted applications), hiring workflows (smaller but higher‑fit funnels), and how organizations design early‑career roles around culture and mission fit, not just credentials.

→ Read An Example

A.I. isn’t delivering the productivity boom we were sold because humans are now stuck babysitting its output, paying a growing “verification tax” in time, effort, and risk management. That’s the tell that we’re in an awkward transition phase where work shifts from doing tasks to orchestrating, auditing and correcting machines, a preview of a future where “quality control on A.I.” becomes a core skill and job category. I wrote recently about why the AI overhype is making us the editor of good enough (not even good, better or best in the traditional pyramid) 

I continue to predict more enterprises will formalise the botsitting roles, bake review workflows into tools, and quietly downgrade the wilder automation promises in favour of narrow, tightly supervised use cases. 

The winners will be teams that design systems where A.I. handles the draft work and humans own verification and accountability, turning this tax into an explicit, optimised part of the operating model instead of a hidden drag.

→ Read An Example

Probably the funniest playlist showing how bad AI slop is on JustEat (Takeaway.com) https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN9UCJVfcYnWu-WJJPe/

England’s approval of Tropic’s non-browning, gene-edited banana is a pivotal moment; it quietly normalises “precision bred” foods as waste-cutting infrastructure rather than sci‑fi GMOs. It's signalling a near-term future where CRISPR is used routinely to tune everyday crops for shelf life, yield, logistics and disease resistance, not just niche biotech experiments.

Its obvious more retailers and foodservice will aggressively pilot longer-lasting bananas, tweak procurement and cold-chain assumptions, and start pressuring suppliers for similar traits in other high-waste produce. The impact might well be how long they can stay on shelves for and what's the knock on from this? Regulators and brands will be forced to sharpen their positions on what “natural” means, while investors and growers redirect R&D and capital toward gene-edited traits like disease resistance that protect the $25B banana industry from shocks such as Panama disease.

→ Read An Example

Scarlett Johansson’s The Outset is shutting down and is another data point that celebrity alone can’t overcome saturated shelves, rising CAC (customer acquisition costs), and a crowded “clean, minimal” positioning that fails to feel truly necessary. 

It shows the future where beauty brands must be distribution and community-native (owned channels, retailer fit, performance proof) rather than just celebrity-native, with fame as the accelerant, not a foundation. Celebrity brands only work with huge investment or good products that are sold by the celeb and their army of fans!

Expect investors and retailers to tighten the bar on celeb-led launches, pushing for clearer white space, sharper hero products, and evidence of pull towards the brand and product via purchases, not just push. Brand founders are now forced to rethink launches around resilience pricing power, differentiated science (imagine a better, different product, not just another), and durable audience relationships, rather than assuming attention and follower counts will convert to sustainable demand. Expect many more celebrity brands to cease trading and ripple through who’s product passes the product is good test.

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Following on from the last months theme of podcast power, this article cemented why podcasts are winning. Video podcasts like Amy Poehler’s Good Hang are not so quietly replacing late-night TV as the default place where culture, celebrity, and “serious” conversation now happen. 

This marks a clear move to the future because distribution power is shifting from broadcasters and time slots to platforms, feeds, and hosts who can win attention in an always-on, video-first internet. 

More A‑list talent and legacy media brands will shift their talent around YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix-style video pods, redesigning formats for clip-ability, feed-driven virality, and parasocial intimacy rather than traditional ratings. We are seeing a reshaping of ad models, talent contracts, and newsroom/org structures around creator-led franchises instead of network-led shows, accelerating the decline of classic TV talk formats. TV will always have an important role to play, but video podcasts are the interactive format many have craved. 

→ Read An Example

Here’s a good podcast snippet from a pod, the difference between HR and people, often it is company culture and community -

For every movement, there is the “anti” and counter-movement. Tradwives had 3-4 years of popularity on social media; it was more than a trend it became a movement, it influenced how a lot of people thought about a traditional culture. This main example of tradwife-influencer-turned-ex-tradwife Bernadine Bluntly breaks down how performative “traditional femininity” can trap women in abusive dynamics while simultaneously being monetised as lifestyle content, making this a story about the collision of ideology, safety, and creator economics. 

Her reversal signals like so many who spearhead countermovements a future where authenticity beats dogma: creators will be forced to interrogate the real-world consequences of the roles they sell, and audiences will become more suspicious of ideological personal brands. 

In the coming months, we will see a “deconversion arc” from niche ideological influencers, new creator niches built around unpacking belief systems, and brands becoming more cautious about aligning with extreme narratives. This will shape platform recommendation logic, how brands want to sponsor these types of influencers inside of movements, and reshape the way online communities talk about life moments like marriage, faith, and gender, likely shifting from purity tests toward safety, nuance, and lived experience.

→ Read An Example  

This is an important listen and hugely concerning:

Have you heard of the fireplace guy who made millions from one video on his YouTube channel? Its a fireplace recording that loops for 12 hours. Its led to a new arbitrage ambient tv, aka “zone-out” TV and it is quietly becoming a big-money ad product, turning background noise or slightly changing screens into premium, high-margin inventory on smart TVs. 

It ties into the core shift, TV is changing from appointment viewing (that show at 730pm) to always-on mood infrastructure, where hardware makers, streamers and creators monetise passive attention with personalisation layers like Samsung’s interactive fireplaces. 

There will be a tonne more ambient channels, which will be monetised by heavier ad loads and likely new shoppable or branded integrations built directly into these loops, especially on FAST and smart TV home screens. In this month's newsletter, it follows the next wave of change that is reshaping content strategies, media plans and partnerships, where device makers and platforms will want to own more content and more partners' ad plays, and the battle, rather than for programming, is becoming a fight to control the idle screen, not just the shows.

→ Read An Example

GLP‑1s are quietly rewiring retail economics, forcing brands to rethink everything from operations, from sizing discipline to returns policy as customers delay purchases, drop multiple sizes and bracket orders while their bodies change. 

The future has to rethink how fast a new health technology can reshape shopper journeys, store layouts, inventory strategies and even the emotional contract between brand and customer. 

Are we going to see more clothes rentals or are we going to see more “fit guarantees,” flexible tailoring and sizing tools? I am betting on richer product data and video on (product pages) PDPs, and tougher internal pressure to standardise fits to cut return costs. Retailers that design around this “body transformation economy” will shift focus toward data, operations, and customer care integration, while laggards will bleed margin through mounting reverse‑logistics and lost lifetime value. GLP-1’s are here to stay and many are becoming less expensive and more accessible in non-injectables, meaning more businesses are going to be impacted by the rewiring. 
→ Read An Example

Coffee culture is huge, but it rarely gets better at home. There’s a new wave about to hit. Keurig has a new plastic and aluminum-free Alta system. They are reinventing the pod format with fully compostable AltaRounds, it’s built for the eco-conscious consumer where the future “single-serve” and “planet-damaging” are no longer synonymous. 

The question remains: will this move be a driving force for the rest of the category to follow or will it be ignored? I suspect many will be following this trend as the pressure in the industry is to become more eco-friendly and drive change. Expect retailers and hotel chains to start demanding lower-waste systems, and competing coffee brands to accelerate their own materials and packaging overhauls to avoid looking obsolete. Nespresso machines were one the ultimate growth hack now it looks like it might be time for another business move.

This will ripple into new supply chains, new certification and composting partnerships, and a reframing of how coffee makers market value: taste and speed, but also visible, measurable waste reduction. 

Here’s another warning that AI-generated “creators” are now stealing famous and non famous standup sketches aka industrialised joke thieves, extracting value from human work while platforms quietly cash in. It shows the future tilting toward synthetic personalities optimised for engagement, not originality, with algorithms rewarding volume and virality over craft or consent. 

AI influencer farms, cloned comedians, and recycled bits will spike, forcing real creators to lawyer up, lean into niche communities, or be drowned out by slop. Platforms will face mounting pressure to build provenance, rights, and revenue-sharing systems for human-origin content or double down on engagement-at-all-costs and accelerate the enshittification cycle.

With so many personal agents (like Muse, Instinct, Town etc), there will be a load more theft that happen in the dark and in chat apps…

I went on a rant last Wednesday morning against everyone saying every big company is going to work inside Claude and ChatGPT, etc. My piece cuts through the hype to say: MCP and “universal agents” won’t win until power and incentives change, because merchants and software platforms will not voluntarily become dumb pipes for headless agents. It points to a future where agentic systems flourish only in domains that are already API-first and automation‑native, while consumer and enterprise platforms fight to stay “the main character” rather than a background function call. Amazon etc won’t give up owning the user and its highly optimised interface, site and app. 

Leaders should expect pockets of magical agent workflows surrounded by a lot of brittle, human have to be in the loop experiences, plus growing friction from rate limits, CAPTCHAs and guarded APIs. Practically, product, marketing, and ops teams will have to design for “you are the editor” workflows, invest in maintaining integrations, and rethink business models and org structures around where they can safely hand power to agents and where they must keep control.

Agents and agentic AI are being blocked at a rapid rate, although it sounds (upside) like its got huge potential and (downside) scary, the big players are already controlling what does and doesn’t happen…

https://dannydenhard.com/power-wins-over-plumbing-the-realistic-truth-about-mcp-and-universal-ai-agents/ 

Are we seeing coastal protection shift from brute-force, destructive sand dredging to adaptive, AI-guided, nature-positive infrastructure that quietly rebuilds beaches and ecosystems at the same time? Likely, we are seeing a future where climate adaptation is hyper-local, data-driven over 10+ years, and modular enough to tune like software as wave patterns, development, and tourism needs change. 

For the foreseeable future, we will likely see resorts, coastal municipalities, and insurers to pressure-test similar “living infrastructure” pilots as cheaper, brand-safe alternatives to endless dredging and sea walls, and for startups like Coastal Assembly to position themselves as must-have partners for beach-dependent economies. 

Practically, that means budget lines moving from maintenance dredge contracts to predictive modeling and modular reef systems, new standards for “eco-certified” coastal developments, and early signals that climate resilience will increasingly be sold as a productized, AI-optimised service rather than a one-off engineering project.

→ Read An Example

Got any questions or comments on any of the Must Reads shared today, hit reply or email me on [email protected]