• Are brain waves the next unlock for physical AI?• Making sense of the panic over Chinese AI• Hugging Face CEO calls for ‘radical transparency’ after ‘unprecedented’ OpenAI hack• Monday.com is the latest tech company to blame AI for layoffs — here are 20 others• Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech• One fallen power line exposed a growing AI data center problem. Here’s how to fix it.• I tried out OpenAI’s new AI keypad — which will be fun for some coders and slightly mystifying to everyone else• Prentis, new AI lab co-founded by Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus in talks to raise $100M• Why Cognition bought Poke: AI personality is becoming a competitive advantage• Anthropic launches Opus 5• As US weighs response to Chinese AI, industry urges against broad open-weight restrictions• Bluesky’s AI assistant Attie expands into an open social research tool• Midjourney acquired the astrology app Co-Star• ‘AI communism’, rogue models, and the why Kimi K3 spooked Wall Street• OpenAI’s new voice mode makes it to the ChatGPT desktop app• 3 Google updates from Galaxy Unpacked 2026• Connect more of your apps to Search• Create, edit and star in videos with two Google Vids updates• Celebrating 25 years of visual search innovation• Expanding Managed Agents in Gemini API: background tasks, remote MCP and more• The latest AI news we announced in June 2026• New York City educators and industry leaders gathered at Google’s offices to shape the future of AI in classrooms.• Unlocking Britain’s next era of productivity: Building a nation of AI trailblazers• Ask an AI expert: What exactly is the full stack?• Our latest Google Finance upgrades, including a new app• New research shows how AMIE, our medical AI, could help manage health conditions.• We’re strengthening our presence in Alabama through new investments and community support.• Our new community investments in Virginia support local jobs and expand energy affordability.• The latest AI news we announced in May 2026• 5 ways Google Search can level up your thrift and vintage shopping• Exclusive | Nvidia in Talks With OpenAI to Guarantee $250 Billion Financing for Data Center - WSJ• Sam Altman says we are in the singularity: 'This is the moment' - Business Insider• Forget IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum. This Trillion-Dollar Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Is the Best Quantum Computing Opportunity, and It's Currently Trading at a 7-Year Valuation Low. - Yahoo Finance• Misleading AI-generated doctors pose ‘huge danger to public safety’ - The Guardian• AI in orbit is a double-edged sword. Here’s how to keep it from cutting space cooperation apart - SpaceNews• AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain - Futurism• Tech Sell-Off: 1 No-Brainer Artificial Intelligence (AI) ETF to Buy With $85 and Hold for the Long Term - The Motley Fool• Shaky sentiment: Big Short trader’s bearish AI bets test China’s stock support - South China Morning Post• AI Left Notes For Its Future Self To Escape Human Constraints - NDTV• Why the Coinbase CEO thinks pivoting from crypto to AI is a mistake - CoinDesk• These Maryland colleges are adding AI majors - The Baltimore Banner• Alphabet Spent $45 Billion on Artificial Intelligence Last Quarter, and It Already Plans to Spend $811 Billion More - The Motley Fool• Alphabet Spent $45 Billion on Artificial Intelligence Last Quarter, and It Already Plans to Spend $811 Billion More - Yahoo Finance• Revealing Approaches at AI Conference - China-US Focus• Supreme Court of Florida seeks input on artificial intelligence - Jacksonville Daily Record• How AI is expanding what people do at work• Launching Health in ChatGPT • Building AI infrastructure with the Effingham County community• How news organizations are using AI to advance their vital missions• Advancing the next era of national science• Introducing OpenAI Presence• NTT DATA Group cuts incident analysis to 30 minutes with Codex• Introducing the ChatGPT for small business program• OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation• David Vélez and Robin Vince join the boards of the OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group PBC• Safety and alignment in an era of long-horizon models• A scorecard for the AI age• Why teens deserve access to safe AI• How Codex became a collaborator for OpenAI’s creative team• How Cars24 scales conversations and builds faster with OpenAI• Here’s how to ask Gemini Live for help with anything you see.• 3 Google updates from Galaxy Unpacked 2026• 13 Google tips for a fun, productive summer off from college• Introducing Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber• 5 ways to build a side hustle with Gemini• How Gemini is speaking the language of Southeast Asia• Here’s how to make study notebooks in the Gemini app.• 3 ways this coffee shop is growing with Gemini• The latest AI news we announced in June 2026• Gemini Spark updates: macOS launch, connected apps and more• Start building with Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash• The Gemini app is bringing personalized image creation to more users.• Gemini can now take notes in Google Meet for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.• Here's how Gemini can help you avoid jetlag.• Try these 3 Google AI tools to help find your next job.• Google just redesigned the search box for the first time in 25 years — here’s why it matters more than you think.• Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-native cloud infrastructure• Claude Code costs up to $200 a month. Goose does the same thing for free.• Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to scale AI customer interviews• Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battles Microsoft and Google in workplace AI• Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Desktop agent that works in your files — no coding required• Nous Research's NousCoder-14B is an open-source coding model landing right in the Claude Code moment• Best Universities To Study AI in 2026• 10 top women in AI in 2026• Pope Leo XIV Declares AI a Threat to Human Dignity and Workers’ Rights• ChatGPT Is Making People Think They’re Gods and Their Families Are Terrified• AI May Soon Help You Understand What Your Pet Is Trying to Say• Netflix Adds ChatGPT-Powered AI to Stop You From Scrolling Forever• Murder Victim Speaks from the Grave in Courtroom Through AI• China Unveils World’s First AI Hospital: 14 Virtual Doctors Ready to Treat Thousands Daily• Katy Perry Didn’t Attend the Met Gala, But AI Made Her the Star of the Night• Therapists Too Expensive? Why Thousands of Women Are Spilling Their Deepest Secrets to ChatGPT• AI by Zapier: Add agentic AI steps to your workflows• How Mach 1 uses Zapier MCP to run AI operations across 25 different companies• The 5 best photo editing apps for iPhone and Android (including free options) in 2026• Zapier for enterprise orchestration: Scaling automation on a trusted platform• MuleSoft integrations: Capabilities and limitations• Relay.app is shutting down: How to export your workflows and move to Zapier• I've tried every automation software: here are the 10 best in 2026• Web scraping: A comprehensive guide• Turn off your slop cannon• The 6 best vibe coding tools in 2026• OpenClaw vs. Zapier: What's the difference? [2026]• Agentic AI vs. RPA: Everything you need to know• 16 AI prompt templates for better AI agent outputs• The best CRM software for real estate agents in 2026• Integrately vs. Zapier: Which is best? [2026]
Turn off your slop cannon
The Zapier Blog

Turn off your slop cannon

Good writing is a gift to everyone around you. Clear, concise communication means your readers spend less time decoding your words and more time acting on them. Here's how to write in a way that respects your reader's time and keeps us all from drowning in walls of text. Why this matters AI slop is real, and we can do better. The internet is full of bloated, padded writing generated (or at least inspired) by AI that optimizes for length over clarity. Don't add to it. When you write vague or word

Unlocking Britain’s next era of productivity: Building a nation of AI trailblazers
AI

Unlocking Britain’s next era of productivity: Building a nation of AI trailblazers

Google UK shares its latest Economic Impact Report and how to enable more people to unlock the benefits of AI-powered technologies.

Misleading AI-generated doctors pose ‘huge danger to public safety’ - The Guardian
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Misleading AI-generated doctors pose ‘huge danger to public safety’ - The Guardian

Misleading AI-generated doctors pose ‘huge danger to public safety’  The Guardian

Why Cognition bought Poke: AI personality is becoming a competitive advantage
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Why Cognition bought Poke: AI personality is becoming a competitive advantage

The acquisition brings Poke’s conversational style and interaction model to Cognition’s coding agent Devin, reflecting a growing belief that how AI assistants interact with users is as important as the models powering them.

Hugging Face CEO calls for ‘radical transparency’ after ‘unprecedented’ OpenAI hack
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Hugging Face CEO calls for ‘radical transparency’ after ‘unprecedented’ OpenAI hack

"The first autonomous agent cyberattack is an unprecedented event. It deserves an unprecedented response!"

Sam Altman says we are in the singularity: 'This is the moment' - Business Insider
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Sam Altman says we are in the singularity: 'This is the moment' - Business Insider

Sam Altman says we are in the singularity: 'This is the moment'  Business Insider

Prentis, new AI lab co-founded by Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus in talks to raise $100M
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Prentis, new AI lab co-founded by Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus in talks to raise $100M

The neolab is betting that automating routine computer tasks will soon outpace coding as AI's biggest use case.

I tried out OpenAI’s new AI keypad — which will be fun for some coders and slightly mystifying to everyone else
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

I tried out OpenAI’s new AI keypad — which will be fun for some coders and slightly mystifying to everyone else

OpenAI's fancy new AI keypad will be a lot of fun for some, while many others are probably not going to touch it.

AI Left Notes For Its Future Self To Escape Human Constraints - NDTV
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

AI Left Notes For Its Future Self To Escape Human Constraints - NDTV

AI Left Notes For Its Future Self To Escape Human Constraints  NDTV

Supreme Court of Florida seeks input on artificial intelligence - Jacksonville Daily Record
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Supreme Court of Florida seeks input on artificial intelligence - Jacksonville Daily Record

Supreme Court of Florida seeks input on artificial intelligence  Jacksonville Daily Record

One fallen power line exposed a growing AI data center problem. Here’s how to fix it.
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

One fallen power line exposed a growing AI data center problem. Here’s how to fix it.

A close call in Northern Virginia revealed just how poorly data centers respond to grid disruptions. Here's how to fix the problem.

Launching Health in ChatGPT
OpenAI News

Launching Health in ChatGPT

Health in ChatGPT now lets eligible U.S. users securely connect medical records and Apple Health to get more personalized insights and better understand their health.

Alphabet Spent $45 Billion on Artificial Intelligence Last Quarter, and It Already Plans to Spend $811 Billion More - Yahoo Finance
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Alphabet Spent $45 Billion on Artificial Intelligence Last Quarter, and It Already Plans to Spend $811 Billion More - Yahoo Finance

Alphabet Spent $45 Billion on Artificial Intelligence Last Quarter, and It Already Plans to Spend $811 Billion More  Yahoo Finance

Forget IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum. This Trillion-Dollar Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Is the Best Quantum Computing Opportunity, and It's Currently Trading at a 7-Year Valuation Low. - Yahoo Finance
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Forget IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum. This Trillion-Dollar Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Is the Best Quantum Computing Opportunity, and It's Currently Trading at a 7-Year Valuation Low. - Yahoo Finance

Forget IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum. This Trillion-Dollar Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Is the Best Quantum Computing Opportunity, and It's Currently Trading at a 7-Year Valuation Low.  Yahoo Finance

How AI is expanding what people do at work
OpenAI News

How AI is expanding what people do at work

New OpenAI research shows how AI is expanding what workers do, with ChatGPT users taking on tasks across roles and reshaping job boundaries.

‘AI communism’, rogue models, and the why Kimi K3 spooked Wall Street
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

‘AI communism’, rogue models, and the why Kimi K3 spooked Wall Street

Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s open model Kimi went viral this week for reasons that had less to do with the model itself and more to do with how the U.S. AI industry reacted to it. Meanwhile, an unreleased OpenAI model wandered outside its test environment and ended up connected to a real security breach at Hugging Face — a reminder […]

NTT DATA Group cuts incident analysis to 30 minutes with Codex
OpenAI News

NTT DATA Group cuts incident analysis to 30 minutes with Codex

NTT DATA Group uses ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to help 9,000 employees automate work, cut incident analysis to 30 minutes, and scale secure AI adoption.

Introducing the ChatGPT for small business program
OpenAI News

Introducing the ChatGPT for small business program

OpenAI launches the ChatGPT for Small Businesses program, helping entrepreneurs build AI skills, automate work, and grow with ChatGPT Work.

Expanding Managed Agents in Gemini API:  background tasks, remote MCP and more
AI

Expanding Managed Agents in Gemini API: background tasks, remote MCP and more

We’re announcing new capabilities in Managed Agents in Gemini API so developers can build reliable, production-ready agents.

We’re strengthening our presence in Alabama through new investments and community support.
AI

We’re strengthening our presence in Alabama through new investments and community support.

Google has announced a $1.5 billion investment for 2026 and 2027 to expand its data center campus in Jackson County, Alabama. Operating since 2019 on a repurposed former…

Celebrating 25 years of visual search innovation
AI

Celebrating 25 years of visual search innovation

Google Images is turning 25. Here’s a look back at some major milestones — and new ways to explore and create visual content.

Connect more of your apps to Search
AI

Connect more of your apps to Search

You’ll be able to securely link and interact with your go-to services directly in AI Mode.

The latest AI news we announced in June 2026
AI

The latest AI news we announced in June 2026

Here are Google’s latest AI updates from June 2026.

Start building with Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash
Gemini

Start building with Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash

Scale your ideas with Nano Banana 2 Lite, our fastest, most cost-efficient Gemini Image model, and Gemini Omni Flash for high-quality video and conversational editing.

Here’s how to make study notebooks in the Gemini app.
Gemini

Here’s how to make study notebooks in the Gemini app.

Studying for a test, but not sure where to start? Study notebooks, a new feature in the Gemini app, can help you get organized and learn more efficiently.Think of study …

Bluesky’s AI assistant Attie expands into an open social research tool
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Bluesky’s AI assistant Attie expands into an open social research tool

Users can now ask Attie questions about news, trends, and conversations on Bluesky and other apps on the AT Protocol.

Midjourney acquired the astrology app Co-Star
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Midjourney acquired the astrology app Co-Star

The AI lab Midjourney continues to expand its purview beyond image and video generation.

Our latest Google Finance upgrades, including a new app
AI

Our latest Google Finance upgrades, including a new app

The new Google Finance is coming out of beta and launching a new Android app.

Here's how Gemini can help you avoid jetlag.
Gemini

Here's how Gemini can help you avoid jetlag.

If you’ve got a faraway trip coming up, the Gemini app can help you avoid jetlag so you can make the most of your visit.Once you’ve given Gemini permission to access you…

AI in orbit is a double-edged sword. Here’s how to keep it from cutting space cooperation apart - SpaceNews
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

AI in orbit is a double-edged sword. Here’s how to keep it from cutting space cooperation apart - SpaceNews

AI in orbit is a double-edged sword. Here’s how to keep it from cutting space cooperation apart  SpaceNews

Create, edit and star in videos with two Google Vids updates
AI

Create, edit and star in videos with two Google Vids updates

Gemini Omni and personal avatars in Google Vids make video creation easier than ever.

Our new community investments in Virginia support local jobs and expand energy affordability.
AI

Our new community investments in Virginia support local jobs and expand energy affordability.

We’re helping build the state’s next-generation workforce and investing in energy programs.

The latest AI news we announced in May 2026
AI

The latest AI news we announced in May 2026

Here are Google’s latest AI updates from May 2026

The 5 best photo editing apps for iPhone and Android (including free options) in 2026
The Zapier Blog

The 5 best photo editing apps for iPhone and Android (including free options) in 2026

"The best camera is the one you have with you" is an old adage in photography, and there's a lot of truth to it. Even as someone who has at least five cameras at home, I capture more photos with my smartphone than I do anything else. Smartphone cameras have been so good for so long now that it really doesn't feel like a tradeoff. My DSLR definitely doesn't have a wide-angle and an 8x telephoto lens built in. But capturing photos is just the first half of creating a good image. To really make gre

How Cars24 scales conversations and builds faster with OpenAI
OpenAI News

How Cars24 scales conversations and builds faster with OpenAI

Cars24 uses OpenAI-powered voice and chat agents to handle 1M+ monthly conversation minutes, recover 12% of lost leads, and bring agentic workflows to teams across the company.

Katy Perry Didn’t Attend the Met Gala, But AI Made Her the Star of the Night
DailyAI

Katy Perry Didn’t Attend the Met Gala, But AI Made Her the Star of the Night

Another year, another viral deepfake of Katy Perry at the Met Gala and once again, she wasn’t even there. Photos showing the pop star in a sleek black designer gown circulated widely on social media during Monday night’s event, matching the “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” theme. But the images were AI-generated. Perry quickly clarified she was not at the Met; she was on tour. Perry’s reaction “Couldn’t make it to the MET, I’m on The Lifetimes Tour (see you in Houston tomorrow IRL),” she posted to Instagram alongside the fake images. She added a jab at AI confusion: “P.s. this The post Katy Perry Didn’t Attend the Met Gala, But AI Made Her the Star of the Night appeared first on DailyAI.

Zapier for enterprise orchestration: Scaling automation on a trusted platform
The Zapier Blog

Zapier for enterprise orchestration: Scaling automation on a trusted platform

Zapier is easy to use—and sometimes ease of use gets conflated with simplicity. But at Zapier, we know that being easy to use and being enterprise-ready aren't mutually exclusive. Any enterprise tool should prioritize ease of use. If you want your entire organization to adopt software, there can't be barriers to entry. Zapier helps your entire company operate more efficiently and achieve mission-critical goals at scale. And it goes beyond workflows: Zapier is an AI orchestration platform where y

Anthropic launches Opus 5
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Anthropic launches Opus 5

Opus 5 will be both cheaper and less restrictive than Fable, likely making it preferable in most use cases.

These Maryland colleges are adding AI majors - The Baltimore Banner
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

These Maryland colleges are adding AI majors - The Baltimore Banner

These Maryland colleges are adding AI majors  The Baltimore Banner

Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech

At libraries around the country, "Avoiding AI" workshops have elicited unprecedented demand.

Are brain waves the next unlock for physical AI?
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Are brain waves the next unlock for physical AI?

Forget YouTube videos—frontier physical AI models need multiple camera angles, dense annotation, and soon, brain wave readings.

AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain - Futurism
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain - Futurism

AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain  Futurism

Revealing Approaches at AI Conference - China-US Focus
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Revealing Approaches at AI Conference - China-US Focus

Revealing Approaches at AI Conference  China-US Focus

Shaky sentiment: Big Short trader’s bearish AI bets test China’s stock support - South China Morning Post
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Shaky sentiment: Big Short trader’s bearish AI bets test China’s stock support - South China Morning Post

Shaky sentiment: Big Short trader’s bearish AI bets test China’s stock support  South China Morning Post

How Codex became a collaborator for OpenAI’s creative team
OpenAI News

How Codex became a collaborator for OpenAI’s creative team

How OpenAI’s creative team uses Codex to build custom creative tools, accelerate ideation, and prototype faster with context-aware AI.

New research shows how AMIE, our medical AI, could help manage health conditions.
AI

New research shows how AMIE, our medical AI, could help manage health conditions.

Research in “Nature” shows our conversational AI system matches primary care physicians in complex disease management.

Making sense of the panic over Chinese AI
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Making sense of the panic over Chinese AI

On the latest episode of Equity, we discussed why Moonshot AI's Kimi seemed to panic Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to scale AI customer interviews
AI | VentureBeat

Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to scale AI customer interviews

Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs, needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget — on a billboard in San Francisco displaying what looked like gibberish: five strings of random numbers. The numbers were actually AI tokens. Decoded, they led to a coding challenge: build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub famous for rejecting nearly everyone at the door. Within days, thousands attempted the puzzle. 430 cracked it. Some got hired. The winner flew to Berlin, all expenses paid. That unconventional approach has now attracted $69 million in Series B funding, led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Evantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Conviction, and Pear VC. The round values Listen Labs at $500 million and brings its total capital to $100 million. In nine months since launch, the company has grown annualized revenue by 15x to eight figures and conducted over one million AI-powered interviews. "When you obsess over customers, everything else follows," Wahlforss said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Teams that use Listen bring the customer into every decision, from marketing to product, and when the customer is delighted, everyone is." Why traditional market research is broken, and what Listen Labs is building to fix it Listen's AI researcher finds participants, conducts in-depth interviews, and delivers actionable insights in hours, not weeks. The platform replaces the traditional choice between quantitative surveys — which provide statistical precision but miss nuance—and qualitative interviews, which deliver depth but cannot scale. Wahlforss explained the limitation of existing approaches: "Essentially surveys give you false precision because people end up answering the same question... You can't get the outliers. People are actually not honest on surveys." The alternative, one-on-one human interviews, "gives you a lot of depth. You can ask follow up questions. You can kind of double check if they actually know what they're talking about. And the problem is you can't scale that." The platform works in four steps: users create a study with AI assistance, Listen recruits participants from its global network of 30 million people, an AI moderator conducts in-depth interviews with follow-up questions, and results are packaged into executive-ready reports including key themes, highlight reels, and slide decks. What distinguishes Listen's approach is its use of open-ended video conversations rather than multiple-choice forms. "In a survey, you can kind of guess what you should answer, and you have four options," Wahlforss said. "Oh, they probably want me to buy high income. Let me click on that button versus an open ended response. It just generates much more honesty." The dirty secret of the $140 billion market research industry: rampant fraud Listen finds and qualifies the right participants in its global network of 30 million people. But building that panel required confronting what Wahlforss called "one of the most shocking things that we've learned when we entered this industry"—rampant fraud. "Essentially, there's a financial transaction involved, which means there will be bad players," he explained. "We actually had some of the largest companies, some of them have billions in revenue, send us people who claim to be kind of enterprise buyers to our platform and our system immediately detected, like, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud." The company built what it calls a "quality guard" that cross-references LinkedIn profiles with video responses to verify identity, checks consistency across how participants answer questions, and flags suspicious patterns. The result, according to Wahlforss: "People talk three times more. They're much more honest when they talk about sensitive topics like politics and mental health." Emeritus, an online education company that uses Listen, reported that approximately 20% of survey responses previously fell into the fraudulent or low-quality category. With Listen, they reduced this to almost zero. "We did not have to replace any responses because of fraud or gibberish information," said Gabrielli Tiburi, Assistant Manager of Customer Insights at Emeritus. How Microsoft, Sweetgreen, and Chubbies are using AI interviews to build better products The speed advantage has proven central to Listen's pitch. Traditional customer research at Microsoft could take four to six weeks to generate insights. "By the time we get to them, either the decision has been made or we lose out on the opportunity to actually influence it," said Romani Patel, Senior Research Manager at Microsoft. With Listen, Microsoft can now get insights in days, and in many cases, within hours. The platform has already powered several high-profile initiatives. Microsoft used Listen Labs to collect global customer stories for its 50th anniversary celebration. "We wanted users to share how Copilot is empowering them to bring their best self forward," Patel said, "and we were able to collect those user video stories within a day." Traditionally, that kind of work would have taken six to eight weeks. Simple Modern, an Oklahoma-based drinkware company, used Listen to test a new product concept. The process took about an hour to write questions, an hour to launch the study, and 2.5 hours to receive feedback from 120 people across the country. "We went from 'Should we even have this product?' to 'How should we launch it?'" said Chris Hoyle, the company's Chief Marketing Officer. Chubbies, the shorts brand, achieved a 24x increase in youth research participation—growing from 5 to 120 participants — by using Listen to overcome the scheduling challenges of traditional focus groups with children. "There's school, sports, dinner, and homework," explained Lauren Neville, Director of Insights and Innovation. "I had to find a way to hear from them that fit into their schedules." The company also discovered product issues through AI interviews that might have gone undetected otherwise. Wahlforss described how the AI "through conversations, realized there were like issues with the the kids short line, and decided to, like, interview hundreds of kids. And I understand that there were issues in the liner of the shorts and that they were, like, scratchy, quote, unquote, according to the people interviewed." The redesigned product became "a blockbuster hit." The Jevons paradox explains why cheaper research creates more demand, not less Listen Labs is entering a massive but fragmented market. Wahlforss cited research from Andreessen Horowitz estimating the market research industry at roughly $140 billion annually, populated by legacy players — some with more than a billion dollars in revenue — that he believes are vulnerable to disruption. "There are very much existing budget lines that we are replacing," Wahlforss said. "Why we're replacing them is that one, they're super costly. Two, they're kind of stuck in this old paradigm of choosing between a survey or interview, and they also take months to work with." But the more intriguing dynamic may be that AI-powered research doesn't just replace existing spending — it creates new demand. Wahlforss invoked the Jevons paradox, an economic principle that occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use, but increased efficiency leads to increased overall consumption rather than decreased consumption. "What I've noticed is that as something gets cheaper, you don't need less of it. You want more of it," Wahlforss explained. "There's infinite demand for customer understanding. So the researchers on the team can do an order of magnitude more research, and also other people who weren't researchers before can now do that as part of their job." Inside the elite engineering team that built Listen Labs before they had a working toilet Listen Labs traces its origins to a consumer app that Wahlforss and his co-founder built after meeting at Harvard. "We built this consumer app that got 20,000 downloads in one day," Wahlforss recalled. "We had all these users, and we were thinking like, okay, what can we do to get to know them better? And we built this prototype of what Listen is today." The founding team brings an unusual pedigree. Wahlforss's co-founder "was the national champion in competitive programming in Germany, and he worked at Tesla Autopilot." The company claims that 30% of its engineering team are medalists from the International Olympiad in Informatics — the same competition that produced the founders of Cognition, the AI coding startup. The Berghain billboard stunt generated approximately 5 million views across social media, according to Wahlforss. It reflected the intensity of the talent war in the Bay Area. "We had to do these things because some of our, like early employees, joined the company before we had a working toilet," he said. "But now we fixed that situation." The company grew from 5 to 40 employees in 2024 and plans to reach 150 this year. It hires engineers for non-engineering roles across marketing, growth, and operations — a bet that in the AI era, technical fluency matters everywhere. Synthetic customers and automated decisions: what Listen Labs is building next Wahlforss outlined an ambitious product roadmap that pushes into more speculative territory. The company is building "the ability to simulate your customers, so you can take all of those interviews we've done, and then extrapolate based on that and create synthetic users or simulated user voices." Beyond simulation, Listen aims to enable automated action based on research findings. "Can you not just make recommendations, but also create spawn agents to either change things in code or some customer churns? Can you give them a discount and try to bring them back?" Wahlforss acknowledged the ethical implications. "Obviously, as you said, there's kind of ethical concerns there. Of like, automated decision making overall can be bad, but we will have considerable guardrails to make sure that the companies are always in the loop." The company already handles sensitive data with care. "We don't train on any of the data," Wahlforss said. "We will also scrub any sensitive PII automatically so the model can detect that. And there are times when, for example, you work with investors, where if you accidentally mention something that could be material, non public information, the AI can actually detect that and remove any information like that." How AI could reshape the future of product development Perhaps the most provocative implication of Listen's model is how it could reshape product development itself. Wahlforss described a customer — an Australian startup — that has adopted what amounts to a continuous feedback loop. "They're based in Australia, so they're coding during the day, and then in their night, they're releasing a Listen study with an American audience. Listen validates whatever they built during the day, and they get feedback on that. They can then plug that feedback directly into coding tools like Claude Code and iterate." The vision extends Y Combinator's famous dictum — "write code, talk to users" — into an automated cycle. "Write code is now getting automated. And I think like talk to users will be as well, and you'll have this kind of infinite loop where you can start to ship this truly amazing product, almost kind of autonomously." Whether that vision materializes depends on factors beyond Listen's control — the continued improvement of AI models, enterprise willingness to trust automated research, and whether speed truly correlates with better products. A 2024 MIT study found that 95% of AI pilots fail to move into production, a statistic Wahlforss cited as the reason he emphasizes quality over demos. "I'm constantly have to emphasize like, let's make sure the quality is there and the details are right," he said. But the company's growth suggests appetite for the experiment. Microsoft's Patel said Listen has "removed the drudgery of research and brought the fun and joy back into my work." Chubbies is now pushing its founder to give everyone in the company a login. Sling Money, a stablecoin payments startup, can create a survey in ten minutes and receive results the same day. "It's a total game changer," said Ali Romero, Sling Money's marketing manager. Wahlforss has a different phrase for what he's building. When asked about the tension between speed and rigor — the long-held belief that moving fast means cutting corners — he cited Nat Friedman, the former GitHub CEO and Listen investor, who keeps a list of one-liners on his website. One of them: "Slow is fake." It's an aggressive claim for an industry built on methodological caution. But Listen Labs is betting that in the AI era, the companies that listen fastest will be the ones that win. The only question is whether customers will talk back.

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