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The next five years will transform communications more dramatically than the previous five decades. Here are 5X: five seismic shifts that are reshaping the future of our profession. The Attention Economy: Earned renewal. The strategy: Companies can’t buy attention the way they used to — they must earn it by creating ideas that move through culture, not just media. The impact: Winning ideas spread because they let people express their identity and values. Breakthrough concepts don’t just reach communities — they form them. The Creator Economy: Influence redefined: The new reality: Brands must co-create with those who shape culture, measuring actual influence over vanity metrics. Why it’s important: Creators increasingly drive earned strategies, capturing attention that attracts traditional media coverage and fuels broader cultural conversation. The Stakeholder Economy: Business meets culture. The Experience Economy: Digital, integrated: What this means: Audiences, who increasingly live their waking hours connected, expect personalized, participatory experiences across physical and digital touchpoints. Moments must be felt, not just seen. The breakdown: The companies that succeed in this AI generation will look nothing like those that succeeded in the last one. If you haven’t changed your playbook, you’re already behind.

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The idea of four-day work week is gaining traction among proponents of the four-day work week, and at least one software startup CEO has moved his company to a 32-hour week — with no change in pay — because of AI. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is a four-day work week booster, having introduced a 32-hour workweek bill last year, though such a proposal is unlikely to get far in Congress. Instead of firing people, proponents argue that firms share the gains of improved technology by giving workers some of their time back. Instead of fearing AI will replace them, workers welcome its advancements and figure out creative ways to leverage the tech. Economist Juliet Schor, lead researcher for 4DWG, a global nonprofit that’s piloted shorter work weeks with 245 organizations in the U.S., U.K. and elsewhere says “The ability of large language models like ChatGPT to wipe out millions of good-paying positions means we need to be intentional about how we adjust to that technology. Reducing hours per job is a powerful way to keep more people employed.” Smaller firms can more easily implement a big change like a four-day week — larger companies are likely to have a harder time making it happen, experts say. But reducing work hours to make sure a lot of people don’t lose their jobs when technology advances isn’t a new idea. Shortening work hours as a way to reduce unemployment was one of the arguments wielded by advocates for five-day work weeks back in the early 20th century. (That used to be a wild idea, too.)  Roger Kirkness, the CEO of a small software startup called Convictional moved the company to a four-day workweek — without reducing anyone’s pay. Kirkness tells that using AI accelerates writing code but it doesn’t speed up everything — teams still need to be able to think creatively to solve problems and get real work done. The four-day work week is meant to keep everyone fresh, with enough time to recharge so they can do deep-thinking.

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Generative AI has entered the mainstream faster than any previous new technology. But the tech industry hasn’t yet figured out the best ways to build AI products — and fierce competition, along with rapid advances, means nobody stays at the top of the heap for long. Those are some of the top-line findings of a new report on the state of AI foundation models from Innovation Endeavors, the venture capital firm co-founded in 2010 by former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt. The report says that 1 in 8 workers globally now uses AI on a monthly basis. 90% of that growth took place in the last six months. New models regularly topple technical benchmarks, but the cost of training them is also ballooning. “The average duration of human task a model can reliably do is doubling every seven months,” per the report. New models typically spend three weeks at the top of the usage charts and then drop off as newcomers emerge and open-source rivals absorb and commoditize their advances. Frontier models “depreciate on a 6–12 month timescale,” the report says. AI is “fundamentally disrupting” software development and collapsing the distinctions between programming, product management and design, the report also finds. Therapy, life organization and learning” lead the list of general-interest AI use cases.

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New global campaign by Havas, Beyond the Brief, launched live at the 2025 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, was designed not to spotlight neurodivergent talent as a token effort, but to reposition it as essential to the future of the creative industry.  Helmed by Donna Murphy, Global CEO of Havas Creative and Health Networks, the campaign builds on the foundation of Neuroverse: Powered by Havas, aiming to shift how the industry identifies and cultivates creative potential radically. The campaign’s anchor panel was named “Neurodivergent Minds: They Don’t Need Advertising. Advertising Needs Them.” Days before the launch, unbranded digital teaser displays appeared along the Croisette, posing provocative questions like, ‘What if the future of creativity doesn’t look like the past, and never did?’ Each display featured a QR code that led to a dedicated microsite with a full agenda of neurodiversity-focused programming, including featured panels, downloadable insights, and events hosted beyond Havas. The campaign also highlighted that neurodivergent people are more than just creative contributors; they’re also a critical consumer demographic. A session at the Havas Café titled “The New Creative Alchemy: Neurodivergent Minds & AI as Industry Catalysts” offered a roadmap for how brands and agencies can better support neurodivergent talent and create products and campaigns that resonate with their experiences. “With Beyond the Brief, we’re looking to amplify these voices and challenge the industry to rethink the systems in place,” Murphy emphasized. By debuting the initiative at the largest creative festival in the world, she made it clear that this wasn’t about corporate social responsibility; it was about redesigning the very ecosystem of creativity. Too often, neurodivergent candidates are excluded not because they lack.

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 Embedded Finance 2.0 is where the “Pay” button graduates into a full on-platform treasury desk and the question morphs from Can we process a payment? to Should we hold your cash? First, the deep-pocketed few will likely chase full-fat charters. Intuit already controls an OCC-granted industrial loan company, and rumor has it Shopify is exploring a Canadian Schedule I license so it can plug directly into FedNow and CAD settlement rails. Owning the license erases sponsor fees, provides direct central-bank access and turns Fed holidays into just another dashboard metric. It also drags CEOs into capital-ratio land, where quarterly stress tests replace flashy conference-stage keynotes. Second, mid-tier platforms are furiously diversifying sponsors. Stripe quietly maintains half a dozen partner banks across continents; Adyen splits deposits between its European and U.S. charters so funds never cross jurisdictions. A multi-tenant model may mollify supervisors who now demand credible “if-this-bank-fails” exit plans. It also means engineering teams must reconcile half a dozen core-banking APIs before morning coffee—a non-trivial tax on velocity. Third, a new generation of BaaS providers such as Unit, Treasury Prime, and Griffin, is selling compliance as the actual product: automated KYC, ledger-level reporting, FDIC-ready dashboards baked right into the API call. The value prop is clear—“Let us worry about Section 314(b) so you can focus on restaurant software”—but only holds if the RegTechs stay ahead of evolving rules. If they lag, their SaaS clients inherit the audit headache anyway. If Embedded Finance 1.0 merely added a Pay button, 2.0 aims to become the balance sheet. The platforms that survive will treat compliance as a feature, not a cost center. That means real-time ledgers auditors can query in a single GET request, FedNow and SEPA Instant wired in at the kernel, and credit models transparent enough that supervisors nod before shareholders cheer. SaaS founders used to brag about daily active users; tomorrow they might brag about their Liquidity Coverage Ratio. The irony would be delicious if it weren’t so expensive. Once embedded finance volumes crest half-a-trillion dollars, systemic stability demands oversight inside the platforms where money truly lives. The badge on your business debit card might one day read Shopify, Toast or Xero—but the compliance brain under the hood will need to think, grizzled and cautious, like JPMorgan.

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