Business

Partake Foods founder, Denise Woodard, and her daughter Vivienne at the start of the business. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Denise Woodard, founder and CEO of Partake Foods. The following has been edited for length and clarity. I spent my career in consumer packaged goods and spent significant time at The Coca-Cola Company. Then my daughter Vivienne came along. She's 11 now, but right around her first birthday, we had a couple of scary incidents that alerted us to the fact that she had multiple life-threatening food allergies. She was allergic to foods I consider to be super simple: eggs, tree nuts, bananas, and sesame. I started to realize that food allergies were going to become a big part of our everyday lives. I was really frustrated with the options from a taste and nutritional perspective. Most of all, I thought about how, emotionally, she wouldn't be able to partake in so many social events like birthday parties, playdates, and school snack time, and that she'd always feel excluded and othered. I wanted to create a solution for that.

Back through political history to the age of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have repeatedly promised the US public that tax cuts would pay for themselves, firing up economic growth and filling the government’s coffers. The promise never really panned out. From the Gipper’s day on, the Republicans’ tax cuts inevitably increased the budget deficit. Despite its failure, though, the promise is back, coated in a fine new layer of artificial intelligence pixie dust. It will fail again. The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, is relying on an AI-laced economy when he promises to deliver annual economic growth of 3% – a rate that, except for the rebound from the Covid pandemic, has been achieved only twice this century. Dreams of AI inflect Donald Trump’s fantasy that “we’re growing at a faster rate than we’ve ever grown before,” which will allow the government to “take care of the 40 trillion” in federal debt “over a period of time”. Financial markets, however, are not buying. Last week, the yield on the 10-year treasury bond surged to its highest in almost a quarter century, more than a full percentage point higher than when Trump launched his misbegotten war against Iran.

Karen Anderson moved to a small village in Northwestern France. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Karen Anderson, 57, a Californian who moved to the UK in 2011 and now lives in a small village in northwestern France. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. I was working as a 911 dispatcher for a California police department when I met my ex-husband, who is English. After dating for a year, we got married in 2011 and eventually moved to his home country, the United Kingdom. I wanted a different life and the chance to experience more of the world. For years, we split our time between the UK, where he worked, and France. And in 2016, we bought a house in France for €45,000 ($50,450), far less than anything we could have afforded in the UK. At closing, I remember being handed more than 100 pages of paperwork. We were foreigners buying a home in a language we didn't understand, so it was very scary. But our hands were held during the process. After my divorce, I decided to remain in FranceIn 2021, I returned to the US to care for my mom, who had been diagnosed with cancer.

I left my $200K Microsoft job to bet on my startup. Work became less fun, and AI made me feel ready to build it alone. Junead Khan left Microsoft in 2025 to focus on building his AI startup, Treasury, without a cofounder or venture capital funding.

British Airways is re-fitting its Airbus A380s with 106 business-class suites. Airlines love business class, and British Airways' latest updates to its Airbus A380s are proof. This week, the airline unveiled a major overhaul to the interiors of its superjumbos, including what it says is the world's largest business-class cabin, with over 100 suites spanning the double-decker jet's upper floor. "This is the largest single investment that any airline has ever made in reconfiguring an aircraft, stretching from nose to tail and touching every single aspect of the experience on board," CEO Sean Doyle said at a media event, which Business Insider attended. Over 35,000 individual parts are installed on each aircraft as part of the retrofit, which includes new galleys and staircases, British Airways said. While the A380 has fallen out of favor with many airlines since the pandemic, it still plays a key role in British Airways' fleet. The flag carrier has 12 such airplanes — the second most behind Emirates.

Personal AI agents are helping consumers claw back cash — and threatening companies that profit from consumer inertia. Personal AI agents are coming for one of companies' most profitable customer behaviors: doing nothing. As personal AI agents make their way into people's financial lives, early users are using them to lower internet bills, recover airline credits, find cheaper insurance, chase refunds, and unearth money they had forgotten was theirs. Noah Shinn, the CEO of Instinct, one such personal AI agent, touted their saving benefits on an episode of "Invest Like the Best" released last week, saying they can scan users' bank transactions, identify forgotten subscriptions, and cancel them. "It just sends back the number of what it saved you," Shinn said. Meta has marketed its new agent, Muse, in a similar way. That could come at a cost to insurers, airlines, banks, broadband providers, and subscription businesses — industries that have for decades benefited, at least in part, from consumer inertia: the millions of people who do not compare the renewal price, dispute the fee, call about the credit, or brave the cancellation maze.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Daniel Harnack, a data analytics professional. It has been edited for length and clarity. About a month ago, I was almost tricked into falling for an elaborate AI scam. A scammer stole a recruiter's LinkedIn picture, linked to her profile, and created a fake email address for her so they could send me a job listing created with the help of AI. The role was perfectly tailored to my experience, and it sounded like a dream job. Also, the pay was double the reasonable salary for that kind of role. All the person needed was my résumé to submit to the hiring manager. When, instead of taking my résumé and suggesting I apply for the role on their career site, they suggested I meet with a "career consultant" to suggest changes to my résumé, that sealed the deal in my mind that this was definitely going to be a scam where they asked for payment. This is just a reminder to everyone that AI is making these very individualized scams much easier to pull off. The usual red flags weren't thereThis was such a surprising scam because of how personalized, tailored, and realistic it was.

From killbots to cuddly little guys: Why tech companies suddenly have cute mascots for their AI Jolly wants to help make your life easier — and be cute while doing it. The mascot for Meta's Muse AI is a slightly rotund, plush creature with rosy cheeks, big eyes, and a toothless grin. It can wear clothes or little headphones when he's "working" on tasks for you. As someone who once went through some (embarrassingly) elaborate hoops to acquire a Labubu, I must admit that I was immediately enamored by the creature's debut. I'm not alone — much ink has been spilled on how cute the little avatar is. Jon Stewart even devoted a whole segment to debating the cuddly guy's true intentions. Jolly joins a growing group of creatures vying for the hearts and minds of potential AI users. There are the round, mouthless dots of OpenAI, the fluffy Genspark lobster, and Grok users have adopted a little teal alien named "Groklet. " All adorable, all plushy, and all debuting as the general populace was starting to worry that AI would maybe kill us all. The idea behind Jolly and the rest of the mascots is simple: make us forget about all that AI doom-and-gloom and learn to love it.

Mercedes Formula 1 boss Toto Wolff has revealed one of the key lessons he learned from the way he handled Mercedes’ slump in fortunes after its dominant run of consecutive world championships. From 2014-2021 Mercedes won eight consecutive constructors’ championships and seven drivers’ titles during an unprecedented period of F1 dominance. But during the ground effect rules era from 2022-2025 it struggled to regularly compete for victories, and Wolff has admitted that adapting to a spell where Mercedes wasn’t as competitive taught him valuable lessons about how to manage the team - particularly when one of its key players tried to quit in late 2023. Wolff recalled the story in great detail when speaking at the Milken Institute Asia Summit 2026 in Singapore ahead of this weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix, explaining how his actions in front of the media had driven Mercedes’ technical director James Allison to want to leave the team. “A few years ago we won eight constructor championships in a row and suddenly the regs changed and we really crashed down,” Wolff told moderator Ray Dalio on stage at the event.

Creators of an AI-generated sci-fi series said it took $38,000 in AI credits and 8 to 10 generations per shot "The Arc," a 5-episode sci-fi series with a runtime of about 83 minutes, was made with AI-generated video.

October 11, 2026Our Legacy’s first China store, located in Shanghai’s Former French Concession, is its largest retail space to date and marks a new chapter in the Swedish brand’s global expansion. Photo: Courtesy of Our Legacy“It’s really the next level for us,” Richardos Klarén, Our Legacy’s CEO, says from his office in Stockholm. The stylish Swedish label, which was founded by Jokum Hallin and Cristopher Nying in 2005 (Klarén joined a couple of years later), is embarking on a new phase of expansion. This month, it will open its biggest store yet in Shanghai, China. But they’re not going in alone. Dongliang, the pioneering multi-brand concept store, will act as Our Legacy’s operational partner in the country. Founded in 2009, the retailer’s business comprises 15 stores across China, as well as lifestyle concepts including a restaurant, a tea house, and a flower shop. Our Legacy already partnered with the retailer as one of its stockists in China, and has a permanent space in its Maison Dongliang location.

The tree is up, the wreath is hanging on the front door and you’ve just opened your advent calendar. All told, it’s beginning to feel a lot like … Halloween. If it sounds like the stuff of nightmares then that’s the point: Britons are increasingly decorating their homes with ghoulish versions of Christmas traditions. Think of it as Halloweenmas. “What was traditionally a single-night celebration has turned into a month-long event mirroring many of Christmas’s traditions, but without the same level of expectation,” said Charlotte Broadbent, the UK general manager for the online wholesale platform Faire. Analysis of thousands of sales transactions on the platform revealed a huge rise in the number of Halloweenmas products available – up more than 500% in the past four years, from 425 in 2021 to 2,632 in 2025. The biggest areas of growth are trees, wreaths and ornaments. According to the budget retailer Wilko, Halloween trees are one of the biggest decorating trends of 2026. It said sales of artificial trees were 200% higher in September than a year ago. “There really aren’t any rules with a Halloween tree,” says Wilko.

Liberty Mutual’s Amy Gross discusses how AI, data analytics, drones, and connected technologies are helping construction firms identify risks earlier, improve safety and claims outcomes, and make better-informed decisions — while creating new demands around cybersecurity, privacy and human oversight. In August 2026, Risk & Insurance caught up with Amy Gross, General Manager, North America Construction, Global Risk Solutions, Liberty Mutual. What follows is a transcript of that discussion, edited for length and clarity.

DALLAS, Oct. 11, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- For years, the cybersecurity industry has described its hiring problem in the same terms: too many open roles, too few qualified people. The pipeline conversation has typically assumed one kind of candidate - a computer science graduate who codes. ExcelMindCyber, the Chicago-based accelerated cybersecurity training organization led by Chief Visionary Officer Tolulope Michael, is building its business on a different premise: that a large share of unfilled cybersecurity work does not require an engineering background at all. "Cybersecurity isn't just for techies - it's for problem solvers,strategists, and GRC professionals. " - TOLULOPE MICHAEL, CVO AT THELIX HOLDINGS A Pipeline Built for One Kind of Candidate Michael's programs focus on Governance, Risk, and Compliance - GRC - the discipline concerned with security policy, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance rather than penetration testing or code.