Below, Joanna Stern shares five key insights from her new book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything.

Perhaps by now you have seen, somewhere on social media, a drink made by Crumbl that half the internet seems convinced could be a biohazard.

Called the Crazy Cousins, it mixes a base like Sprite or Mountain Dew with a full can of Red Bull, strawberry purée, pineapple syrup, and a serious glug of coconut milk. The 32-ounce version delivers 186 grams of slurpable sugar.

“Almost half a pound of sugar, or five cans of Coke” is how Itay Shechter, a wellness influencer with more than a million followers, explained it in a post that went viral. “I had to stop everything and go make that video,” Shechter told me last week. “My job is making a number like that impossible to scroll past.”

Physician Mark Hyman declared it “the equivalent of eating 19 Krispy Kreme donuts” and said it “should be illegal.” Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer joked that he’d stir in Ketel One. The betting app Polymarket got creative—“JUST IN: Crumbl cookie company releases drink with 186,000mg of sugar,” making it sound even more like a toxic threat.

A drink containing nearly four times the recommended daily limit of sugar might seem like reaching rock bottom for Crumbl. But in the eight-year-old Utah company’s push beyond cookies into the colorful parade of turbocharged sweets it’s rolled out lately, betting that it can’t go any lower may be premature.  

Somewhere between the following drops . . .

Wharton joins a growing number of groups sounding the alarm on Social Security, who say the program’s disappearing retirement trust fund is estimated to run out of money in the next few years. The only debate is when.

Going from unemployed to full-time consultant was a welcome reprieve. And learning I had time to receive unemployment while trying to figure it out was exactly what I needed. 

Anthropic recently posted a job opening for a Head of GTM Narrative. Not a content lead. Not a brand director. A go-to-market narrative strategist. The company that has spent years building some of the most capable AI in the world decided that the thing it needed a human to own was the story. 

A few months ago, I sat across from a CEO who was genuinely proud. He had just implemented an AI-powered people analytics platform: real-time sentiment data, predictive turnover scores, and engagement dashboards. Beautiful system. His HR team had been cut by a third. “It does what they used to do,” he told me.

When done right, brand activations can bring real-life awareness and connect a company with its customers. When done poorly, they can turn sour quickly, bringing the opposite effect to a brand—as activewear giant Lululemon recently discovered.

Get ready to break some bread in Texas this summer.

From shoes to AI to . . . Smartbird? 

When it comes to fast food, Chick-fil-A has a reputation for outstanding customer service. The chicken franchise is known for letting patrons know it’s a “pleasure” to serve them, and it’s paid off in terms of customer satisfaction: Chick-fil-A has topped the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) in the quick-service restaurant category for 11 years straight—until this year, when a new contender knocked the chain off its throne.

Earlier this year, I was in a room with a group of CEOs in Istanbul. A few weeks later, on a call with board members from a European grocery chain. A month later with investors in Australia, then another call with investors from North America. And most recently, an operating team in the U.S. Different markets, different competitive pressures, different stages of AI maturity. Same conversation every time.

Claude Design, Anthropic Lab’s AI design tool, launched in April to a crowded market of vibe coding design programs. Now, after a few months in the hands of designers, Anthropic is launching a big update to Claude Design that addresses their biggest pain points.

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Lately, I’ve seen a specific pattern emerge as organizations make AI claims. “We’re AI-first.” “We’re AI-native.” “We’re agentic.” The language is confident, forward-looking, and nearly universal.

Financial crises rarely appear overnight. The warning signs are already there, hidden in mountainous volumes of data that regulators—or really any human—struggle to interpret.

Your organization’s culture is like a six-pack. It’s hard to get, and even harder to keep.

Everyone wants culture. Most companies have posters about it, Slack emojis, and a “people-first” deck. But instead of culture being an announcement, it is a daily practice of how people are treated and empowered, especially when deadlines stack, budgets shrink, and the client’s “quick edit” turns into a rewrite.

What kind of pool-cleaning gear does $14.2 million buy? According to the Department of the Interior, who oversaw recent renovations to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, it’ll get you “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology,” which may or may not be as impressive as it sounds.

The sustained attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have left corporate America hesitant to speak out forcefully on LGBTQ+ issues—and that silence has not gone unnoticed. 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — whose work helped propel artificial intelligence — stressed in an Associated Press interview Tuesday that society needs to change with the advent of AI, arguing that a fuller embrace of the technology would improve people’s lives.

Huang has been optimistic about AI’s potential to rapidly transform society, creating faster economic growth and more scientific breakthroughs. But as the head of a computer chip company now developing AI systems, he and others are confronting a public increasingly concerned about the potential harm the technology might bring. Huang has felt obligated to respond to critics who warn of job losses and threats to humanity itself.

“We need to create new social norms,” Huang said in an interview. “I would advocate that everybody use AI. Just go engage it.”

Huang made his case as AI has emerged as a political flashpoint, with objections to plans to build more data centers and fears that the speed with which it’s being adopted could spur the layoffs of workers who might not have a safety net. Such questions have threatened public support of the technology at a time when a race has kicked off with China, a contest Huang believes can best be won by a U.S. that is open to competing globally in AI.

His close relationship with President Donald Trump also has been a source of criticism among Democrats, even as he emphasized that the computing power created by AI is vital to adding the factory jobs that have been promised for decades without much enduring success. It was an argument delivered by a 63-year-old man who has watched the technology develop and described himself as “boring” because his own life revolves mainly around work and his family.

Huang disclosed during the interview some personal details, saying his favorite movie is “Kingdom of Heaven,” the 2005 epic about the 12th century Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. He said he had watched the movie “Project Hail Mary” three or four times and “I think we might watch it again this weekend.”

Huang said the ability of AI to design a website, analyze complex documents, guide advanced research or even plan a kitchen remodeling has helped to close the technological divide in America. People can now do advanced work on computers without having to know how to program or write software, he added.

Huang contended that there is a need for some government regulation and safety standards for AI, emphasizing that national security also needed to be a priority for the technology that has been powering stock market gains and U.S. economic growth in recent years.

Huang said society will adapt to AI just as it did to automobiles. He said cars were once portrayed as killing children, but the world changed its norms by having sidewalks and crosswalks and stopping kids from playing in the streets.

The marketing pitch for enterprise AI’s autonomous agents has started to sound almost like a fairy tale: Hand one a task or objective, walk away, and it figures out the rest. It runs on its own, reasons through changing conditions, adapts as circumstances evolve, and delivers results before you think to ask. The promise of software that functions like a digital colleague has been seductive.