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Tag: Morning Brew

  • To ease recruiters’ fears of being replaced by AI, Zillow experimented with ‘prompt-a-thons.’ Now the real estate giant has 6 new recruitment tools | Fortune

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    Recruiting teams are, in many ways, ground zero for AI disruption. A plethora of tasks historically performed by recruiters can now be performed by AI technology. But…with a world of possibilities at one’s fingertips, it can be difficult to know where to begin.

    Real estate tech giant Zillow has launched several AI tools for recruitment since it began experimenting in late 2023. HR Brew recently sat down with Roz Harris, Zillow’s VP of talent acquisition, engagement, and belonging, to discuss how her recruitment team has identified and adopted AI solutions.

    Where to begin? In November 2023, Harris’s team started looking into how AI could be used by recruiters.

    “We started looking at the possibility of AI. And what we found was, when you look at the role of a recruiter and what they do, about 80% of our jobs were what you would hear in the conferences about the mundane tasks” that AI could replace, she told HR Brew.

    To help ease recruiters’ fear of being replaced by AI, Harris and her team experimented with AI with prompt-a-thons.

    Zillow already used hackathons to develop consumer-facing features and products; Harris’s team adopted the practice for its internal AI use. For example, prompt-a-thon teams expressed a desire for more coaching on having difficult conversations with hiring managers. They devised a prompt that could be used on ChatGPT, including capturing details about the issue, as well as emphasizing soft skills like maintaining a rapport or trust with hiring managers. The result: solutions devised by recruiters themselves, not a top-down edict from leadership.

    “The problems that they would go to tackle were ones that, I think, if I had to put my leadership team in a room and say, ‘Let us go do this,’ we wouldn’t have come up with the same questions and challenges at all,” Harris said.

    After identifying the problems and solutions, Harris would bring in, what she called, the cavalry—the legal, enterprise tech, engagement and belonging, and TA teams—to assess the tools and determine usability.

    Prompt-a-thons have so far resulted in six AI recruitment tools, Harris said. Some were developed in-house, but most are vendor tools that Harris’s team were either early adopters of or helped develop. Harris said she hasn’t yet been told “no” by the cavalry, largely because she has followed their best practices, such as avoiding decision-making tools and personal identifiers (like race, gender, or identifying keywords) to assess candidates.

    “Luckily, I’ve been around for a while, and so has my leadership team. We kind of always knew we didn’t want AI to make decisions,” she said. “We stayed away from tools and things that did that.”

    Measuring success. The tools used by Harris’s team focus both on assisting recruiters and improving the candidate experience.

    On the job-seeker side, Zillow’s AI tools include assistants that help candidates find and apply to roles, and schedule and prepare for interviews. On the recruiter side, recruitment marketing software or LinkedIn Recruiter help source high-quality candidates, while another tool analyzes and provides feedback on interviews.

    “If you’re applying to a job at Zillow, you can have assistance in helping you do that, and it’ll help match you to some roles as well. We also then use AI to help the recruiter,” Harris said.

    Zillow’s AI-powered interview scheduler is intended to speed up hiring and alleviate recruiters’ workloads, which are huge; some roles, such as sales or marketing specialists, receive 4,000+ applications within a day of being posted.

    “As someone who started their career as a recruiting coordinator, I think it’s the scheduling tool that’s actually my favorite,” Harris said.

    In the past, Harris said recruiting coordinators would spend over a week coordinating schedules for interviews. Now, candidates receive a text or email with a link that shows the interviewer’s availability, and schedules a meeting, which has cut time spent scheduling an interview to 30 minutes—a 97% reduction saving recruiters as many as 450 hours per month.

    For any recruiting coordinator sweating at the sight of that stat, Harris shared good news: “They’ve upgraded their skills. They all still work at Zillow.”

    Many former coordinators now work in Zillow’s employee service center, or in executive assistant or program manager roles; others help manage the scheduling tool. (And, when the October AWS outage crippled the internet, those former coordinators helped manually schedule interviews.)

    Zillow has also leveraged AI to recruit candidates from a wider geographic area.

    After embracing its remote-first work model, called Cloud HQ, Zillow found it wasn’t a well-known employer in some cities. Harris’s team used tools, including newsletters and targeted actions to drive applications, as well as LinkedIn Recruiter to save time sourcing better candidates, Appcast, a recruitment advertising technology provider that Zillow said helped recruit across regions. Using those three channels, 558 hires were made in 2025 through mid-December.

    “We had a reputation in those areas where we had offices. Well, when you flip that on the head and say, we’re going to be a Cloud HQ and we’re going to be able to hire across the country, we don’t have a reputation everywhere,” she said. “AI helped us build reputation.”

    This report was originally published by HR Brew.

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    Paige McGlauflin, HR Brew

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  • Asking employees to come back to the office like the old days is the same as trying to ‘jam the toothpaste back in the tube,’ workforce expert says | Fortune

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    Return-to-office mandates continue to feel like high-level math equations that even the business world’s brightest can’t solve.

    Amazon, JPMorgan, and AT&T are among the most recent companies to require a full-time RTOs. But some of these mandates have faced obstacles, including a lack of office space and dissatisfied employees.

    Amazon, for example, said in September, it wanted its 350,000-person workforce in the office by early January. As of February, many of their offices didn’t have enough desks to accommodate the return, leaving many employees continuing working from home. AT&T had a similar issue. In response to JPMorgan’s RTO mandate, employees expressed their outrage on an internal platform. The company then disabled comments. Some JPMorgan and Amazon workers have also signed petitions protesting their employers’ requirements.

    What’s missing from some of these RTO plans is the recognition of a cultural change, said Jennifer Moss, workplace strategist and author of Why Are We Here?: Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants. The post-pandemic workplace should combine lessons from the pre-pandemic and pandemic-era models, she said.

    “When we’re trying to get people back into the office, we still are executing the office in the same way that it used to be,” Moss told HR Brew. “We just can’t jam the toothpaste back in the tube.”

    Recognize the new environment. Improved collaboration, culture, and productivity are often cited as reasons for an RTO, Moss said, but being in the office won’t necessarily help employees achieve these goals.

    “People are going into the office, unfortunately, it feels very much like what it feels like to be at home,” she said. “You’re still on Zoom, and you’re still spending your day doing the exact same things you could be doing at home. It feels very arbitrary.”

    To facilitate this new era of work, employers should embrace a model Moss called “the third office.” Instead of “pushing” for employees to go back to pre-pandemic norms, she said, employers should consider how they can incorporate the benefits of remote work, like autonomy and flexibility. To that end, a hybrid approach, she said, typically works best.

    Moss also urged mindfulness around how the physical office space can affect employees. If a company doesn’t have enough desks, for example, she said HR leaders should rethink how employees work in the office, and create quiet or collaborative spaces outside of the open floor plan.

    “The [third office] is a place where you have challenging discussions, where you learn to network, develop soft skills, be able to have team building, build up that social energy and that cohesion,” she said, adding that these activities were undervalued pre-pandemic and lost during the pandemic, and should be part of this new era.

    Eventually, however, companies that require five days in the office should offer employees their own dedicated workspace, Moss said. It may seem simple, but being able to personalize a desk is something that, she said, may help employees feel more connected to their workplace.

    Identify and communicate the play-by-play. Some executives want RTO to alleviate their own “trust issues,” without considering how it might affect employees, according to John Frehse, the global head of labor strategy at consulting firm Ankura.

    “You only trust me when I’m in the office. You don’t trust me when I’m at home. What kind of a worker and employer relationship are we dealing with?” Frehse told HR Brew.

    Sujay Saha, an employee experience strategist and founder of consulting firm Cortico-X, emphasized the need for a plan. “Don’t make the decision and then try to figure it out, how do I make that decision happen for people…that is the biggest problem in a lot of this,” Saha said. He suggested HR start by identifying employees’ “personas,” like whether they’re working parents or belong to the sandwich generation. This can give HR a sense of employees’ needs and schedules, which can help inform what kind of RTO might make sense.

    “There are pros and cons in all of this, so the most important thing that we can tackle is how we do it,” Saha said. “Maybe there is a pace at which you could do it…Reduce the pace and give people that mental adjustment time that is needed genuinely, to take care of their lives before you change [their lives].”

    Frehse also advised against focusing an RTO announcement on the enforcement and repercussions of not following the mandate. Instead, communicate the steps and value-add for professional growth.

    “It’s both culturally and intellectually lazy to announce a certain number of days of return to office each week, without listing in heavy detail the reasons why—not just benefits for the business, but the benefits for the employee,” he said.

    Saha agreed. “Don’t do it, just for the heck of doing it…Be clear about why you’re doing it.”

    This report was originally published by HR Brew.

    A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on February 28, 2025.

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    Mikaela Cohen, HR Brew

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  • Amazon is experimenting at Whole Foods by selling mainstream brands like Pepsi, Kraft, and Chips Ahoy—and some will be hand-delivered by robots | Fortune

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    The Everything Store is looking for a more organic way to sell you junk food. Enter Whole Foods, the grocery chain that built its name on natural ingredients.

    Having its Berry Chantilly Cake and Little Debbies, too: Amazon, which bought Whole Foods in 2017, doesn’t want to sully the chain’s clean-living reputation, but it also doesn’t want to miss out on Americans spending on groceries.

    So, it’s experimenting with ways to introduce mass-market brands, like cordoning them off to their own special section. According to the Wall Street Journal:

    • In one Philadelphia-area store, if customers crave something they can’t find, they can order it on the Amazon app, and a team of backroom robots will get it to them.
    • In Chicago, one store’s coffee shop and seating area were replaced by an “Amazon Grocery” kiosk reminiscent of a convenience store.

    More is in store: Amazon, which has been working to more closely integrate its operations with Whole Foods, hasn’t said whether it’ll expand the experiments, but it’s definitely not done tweaking its grocery game. Amazon plans to launch its own private label grocery brand and expand same-day delivery of perishable food items to 2,300 cities by 2026.—BC

    This report was originally published by Morning Brew.

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    Brendan Cosgrove, Morning Brew

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  • Rivian’s CFO hints the end of EV tax credits means manufacturers are being forced to finally make more affordable electric cars | Fortune

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    As the EV market enters choppy waters, legacy automakers are pulling back on electrification plans, delaying EV launches, and cutting production at EV plants.

    That’s not an option for pure-play EV makers like Rivian. Instead, the Irvine, California-based manufacturer has its sights set firmly on the launch next year of its second-generation product: a midsize SUV called the R2 that’ll start at $45,000.

    “One of our core strategies and approaches to offset some of the impacts of the…elimination of some of the credits for consumers is to bring a product to market that opens up the addressable market of consumers that can now say yes to a Rivian,” Claire McDonough, Rivian’s CFO, said during a Reuters automotive conference in Detroit on Wednesday.

    Goodbye, tax credits: President Donald Trump’s tax and budget bill ended tax credits of up to $7,500 on eligible EV purchases as of Sept. 30, and EV demand is expected to cool without federal incentives. Rivian recently cut 4.5% of its workforce, or about 600 workers, The Wall Street Journal reported.

    “With the changing operating backdrop, we had to rethink how we are scaling our go-to-market functions,” CEO RJ Scaringe wrote to employees, per the WSJ.

    Pricing starts above $70,000 for the EV maker’s current passenger vehicles.

    “It meant that we needed to reduce our costs in our vehicle roadmap,” McDonough said of the end of the EV tax credits. “And the key strategy for us is to bring to market a more mass-market-priced product, which is coming out next year.”

    R2: Rivian employees have been building R2 prototypes in California, and the vehicle is now going through various validation and durability tests, McDonough said. The manufacturer has added a 1.1 million-square-foot expansion to its Normal, Illinois, plant to support R2 production. The company remains “on track” to launch production in the first half of next year, according to McDonough.

    “As we look at R2, that’s where we’re opening up a much larger aperture of potential new customers into the brand and business,” McDonough told reporters at an earlier event. “We’re really excited about the opportunity to take younger consumers, older consumers that don’t necessarily need a three-row SUV, for example.”

    The Illinois plant delivered just over 50,000 R1 units last year. With R2, the capacity of the plant can go up to 215,000 units annually. And Rivian plans to break ground on a new plant in Georgia next year to support production of the R2 and the future R3.

    “You’ll see additional savings as we reduce and spread our overhead and cost across a much larger volume of products,” McDonough said.

    As for Rivian’s path to profitability, McDonough noted cost savings derived from the launch of the second-generation R1 last year, and said the company will achieve further reductions with the R2.

    Rivian employees were able to cut the material costs in half compared to R1, and to reduce manufacturing costs via scale and design efficiencies. McDonough also pointed to opportunities to raise awareness of the brand with the introduction of R2, for a company that she acknowledged is “not yet a household name.”

    Execs also see opportunities to advance the company’s autonomous features with the R2, which will feature in-house-designed cameras.

    “That allows us to have a closed, end-to-end data loop, and being vertically integrated across our software stack, across the hardware design of the product, and then the buildout of our large driving model as well, which is an in-house neural net that’s capturing data from our customer fleet over time,” McDonough said. “R2 is also really important for Rivian as we think about the continued progress of our autonomous growth, given the proliferation of our car park with a product like R2.”

    This report was originally published by Tech Brew.

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    Jordyn Grzelewski, Tech Brew

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  • Life hack: Buying a private jet, yacht, or expensive car can help you save money through Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ | Fortune

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    Don’t cry because you’re not going to Aspen this year, smile because a ski family might avoid paying some taxes by flying there privately. Bloomberg reported yesterday that ultra-wealthy Americans are taking full advantage of a new rule in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that allows them to completely write off certain high-value assets.

    ICYMI: President Trump’s landmark legislation expanded a tax break known as bonus depreciation, which now lets business owners deduct 100% of certain purchases from their taxable income. Eligible splurges include yachts, cars, racehorses, and private jets—as long as they’re used for business more than half of the time. Demand is climbing:

    • Sales of private jets are up by 11% from this time last year, according to data from the jet broker Global Charter.
    • Horse sales at the world’s largest thoroughbred auction in Kentucky grew by 24% last month compared to 2024.

    Gas stations and car washes also qualify. Sales of these establishments spiked after Trump temporarily expanded bonus depreciation in 2017. One entrepreneur told Bloomberg that he avoided millions of dollars in taxes by buying several car washes, which offset income from the sale of his family business.

    Looking ahead…this rule will cost the IRS $363 billion in lost revenue over the next decade, according to estimates by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation.—ML

    This report was originally published by Morning Brew.

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    Molly Liebergall, Morning Brew

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  • A whopping 72% of S&P 500 companies disclosed AI as a ‘material risk’ on their 10-Ks this year | Fortune

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    AI is everywhere these days—and that means so is AI risk.

    Among S&P 500 companies, 72% mentioned AI as a material risk on their Form 10-Ks this year, the Conference Board found, up from 58% last year and 12% in 2023. The shift is reflective of how AI use within business has matured from the experimental to the widespread, the organization wrote in a report. (The Conference Board’s report defines “AI” broadly, including not only LLMs but also robotics, automation, machine learning, and other types of AI.)

    The companies most likely to disclose AI risk were those in “frontline adopter” industries, such as the finance, healthcare, industrial, IT, and consumer discretionary sectors.

    S&P companies were most concerned about the reputational risks of AI, the Conference Board reported; 38% of them disclosed potential reputational threats from AI on their 10-Ks. Forty-five companies mentioned “implementation and adoption” risks, such as overpromising on AI projects or AI not meeting expectations, while 42 stated that consumer-facing AI was a risk. Other reputational risks companies mentioned included privacy and data risks, hallucinations, competitive threats, and issues with bias and fairness.

    One in five S&P companies mentioned AI-related threats to cybersecurity as a risk on annual filings. While 40 companies simply stated that cybersecurity in general was a risk, 18 called out third party or vendor risks, and 17 said data breaches were a risk.

    Companies also foresaw potential compliance risks from AI. Forty-one listed “evolving regulation and uncertainty” as a risk area, and some specifically referred to the EU AI Act, which has steep penalties for noncompliance.

    This report was originally published by CFO Brew.

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    Courtney Vien, CFO Brew

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  • Recruiters caution against using AI to write job postings because it’s been trained on ‘crappy’ descriptions | Fortune

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    Thinking of using AI to write a job description for your company? Experts and recruiters are cautioning against it.

    What’s wrong with automating this part of the often long, difficult hiring process, especially for highly specialized IT roles? While using AI might be a time-saver, according to many in the recruiting world, it also robs the company of the ability to think deeply about what a job requires, as well as an opportunity to connect in a more human way with candidates.

    Paul DeBettignies, the founder of Launch Hiring as well as founder and strategist of Minnesota Headhunter LLC, said that he doesn’t have a lot of faith in the use of AI for crafting job descriptions.

    “If we’re going to automate everything, then hiring, finding a job, and recruiting is going to become even more transactional than it’s already been,” DeBettignies said. “We all already say we don’t like it, so we’re just going to do more of it?”

    DeBettignies added that recruiting has always relied heavily on tech tools. Many years ago, a time-strapped recruiter might have used cut-and-paste to slap together a job description from other job descriptions found online, such as Craigslist. AI might only make this trend worse.

    “For years, job descriptions have always sucked, and now that we’re using AI, AI has been training on crappy job descriptions,” DeBettignies said.

    Failure to launch. Creating a good job description relies on insightful questioning. Managers must articulate who they might need to hire and why. According to recruiting author, facilitator, and speaker Katrina Collier, “most of them get it wrong.”

    Fortune reported last year that 66% of managers are “accidental”; Collier said accidental managers haven’t been trained in managing a team, let alone in replacing someone’s role within it.

    “Unfortunately, the managers just want recruitment to go away, it’s their least favorite task,” Collier said. “When you’ve got the likes of any of the large language models, OpenAI, whatever it is, they can just type in…whatever, and up comes a job description and they go roll with that.”

    Collier said the description generated by AI often isn’t specific to a company and team. Instead, she encourages recruiters to have an internal conversation to work it out.

    If a company chooses to lean into the AI description, DeBettignies can ask the model why someone might not want to apply for the role. He often gets the same three answers: There are too many bullet points, there isn’t information on why someone would want to work at a company, or there isn’t enough information on salary or benefits.

    “My advice is to not fully automate this,” DeBettignies said. “I do appreciate speed and I appreciate efficiency. Hopefully it does get us to…where we are now able to do the human things more and better and deeper than we’ve been able to do.”

    AI as a spackle of sorts. To some, like Steve Visconti, the CEO of cybersecurity company Xiid, AI is a tool that could be used to help fill gaps in job descriptions.

    Visconti said he believes AI is a good tool for help with job postings, “because you don’t want to overlook something that should have been obvious.”

    “I would write the job description—which I do, by the way, I do this—and then I generate an AI version,” Visconti said. “Then I try and merge the two and see how I can make it better. So, in a sense, AI didn’t save me a lot of time, it just made it better in that specific case. I think it’s a great tool, very valuable.”

    Visconti pointed out how AI could help fill in required skills for a vital IT position, including cloud native, Kubernetes, OpenShift, and so on.

    Collier agreed that the tool could be helpful if “you really know who you need to hire” and AI is used to help flesh out a description.

    “It can be amazing if you’ve done all the research, but often it’s just a case of, I need a quick win,” Collier said. “They just go and ask, and then [AI is] pulling in all the badly-written job descriptions that exist in the world and going, ‘Yeah, here’s a great one.’”

    This report was originally published by IT Brew.

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    Caroline Nihill, IT Brew

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  • Wayfair CFO says sellers on the company’s $12 billion marketplace are trying to ‘insulate’ customers from tariffs

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    The home goods category has seen its share of twists and turns over the past five years: a pandemic-era boom and then a slump when consumers pivoted toward travel and experiences rather than physical items. Now, it’s facing headwinds in the form of tariffs and an uncertain economy, and generative AI could be changing how people shop.

    Kate Gulliver, CFO and chief administrative officer at Wayfair, spoke with CFO Brew about her career, and about her company’s plan to roll with the punches.

    From startup to category leader: In some ways, Gulliver has grown along with Wayfair. After working in private equity, she joined the company as head of investor relations in 2014, and helped to run its IPO. At that time, it had about $1 billion in sales and 2,000 employees, Gulliver said. She describes it as “a super high-growth but relatively immature company from a systems and process perspective.” Today, Wayfair employs around 12,000 people and brought in $12 billion in revenue from June 2024 through June 2025.

    From investor relations, Gulliver became global head of talent, and was named CFO and CAO in 2022. Her career at Wayfair has evolved in an organic fashion.

    “I largely let my career be guided by the opportunity most immediately in front of me,” she said. “I’ve never tried to guide toward ‘10 years from now, here’s where that role is getting me.’ It’s been more ‘Is this the next right move?’”

    As a combined CFO and chief administrative officer, Gulliver has plenty on her plate: HR, finance, real estate, legal and compliance, corporate affairs, and communications all report to her. She enjoys the breadth of the dual role, which she says gives her insight into the “backbone” of the company. “Intellectually,” the many departments she oversees “can feel quite different day to day, which is fun,” she said.

    A turbulent five years for retail: As a seller of discretionary goods, Wayfair has been on a rocky ride over the past five years. It was able to capitalize on the home goods boom of the pandemic, when shoppers stuck in lockdown were buying items for their spaces. But as restrictions lifted and consumers pivoted toward spending on experiences, it saw net losses for three consecutive years. Wayfair had to restructure and underwent several rounds of layoffs, cutting around 13% of its workforce, or 1,650 jobs, in 2024.

    Now, though, the category is “starting to stabilize,” Gulliver said. Wayfair had a bumper second quarter this year, with revenues rising 5% year over year.

    “We’re feeling good about the momentum currently,” she said.

    Wayfair isn’t seeing consumer softness yet due to tariffs and economic uncertainty, Gulliver said, though it’s seeing more strength in its high-end lines, such as Perigold, AllModern, and Joss & Main, than in its “core mass” lines. (“There’s no question the higher-end market is stronger than mass,” CEO Niraj Shah said during a recent earnings call.) The company is keeping its eye on the macroeconomic picture, though. It’s doing a lot of forecasting, incorporating both its internal data and third-party inputs such as credit card data and housing market trends, Gulliver said.

    So far tariffs haven’t had that much of an impact, Gulliver said. That’s partly because Wayfair is a marketplace. Sellers post many unbranded items that look similar to one another, so they’re largely competing on price, she said. Lower prices also allow for better placement on Wayfair’s search results, boosting sales. Sellers, Gulliver said, are finding ways to absorb or offset tariffs at different points along the supply chain, which is “helping to insulate consumers” from higher prices. “Consumers are still seeing like-for-like pricing,” she said.

    AI, how about midcentury modern? Wayfair is also anticipating changes generative AI might make to shopping habits. It’s partnering with some major AI providers on developing agentic shopping tools, Gulliver said. And it’s added GenAI features to its website and app that show customers how furniture might look in different spaces within a home, alongside recommendations for similar Wayfair products. “It’s a fun way to capitalize on how consumers might be changing how they shop,” Gulliver said.

    At the same time, the retailer’s made a surprisingly analog move: opening brick-and-mortar stores. Its Chicago store has resulted in a “halo” effect, boosting sales and brand recognition in the Chicago area, Shah said on an earnings call. Three more physical stores are planned in the coming years.

    As a Wayfair shopper and home design fan herself (“That is the thing I read about in my spare time”), Gulliver understands what consumers are looking for. But even her broad remit, she acknowledges, only goes so far. “I’m always going to the brand team or the merchant team” and asking, ‘Have we thought about getting this product?’,” she said. “And they’re like, ‘Kate, stay in your lane.’”

    This report was originally published by CFO Brew.

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    Courtney Vien, CFO Brew

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