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Evolution (EEVTY): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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AI has revolutionized how we access and analyze information. It spots patterns that are often invisible to the human eye, flags what we miss, and puts every competitor's hard-earned knowledge within reach. Leaders who do not use artificial intelligence are fighting with one arm tied behind their backs. But leaders who rely on AI to make key decisions risk relinquishing the one thing they are paid for: judgment. Drawing on 20 years of studying CEOs, Tim Quigley, Professor of Strategic Leadership and Governance at IMD Business School, offers a different way of thinking about the critical decisions leaders make.

Tim Quigley, Professor of Strategic Leadership and Governance, IMD 
Andrew Staples, Co-chair, Fortune Leaders Forum; Editorial Director, Asia, Fortune 

A Leader's Value in the Age of AI

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The designer behind the iPhone is getting another shot at defining how we interact with technology. Jony Ive is working with OpenAI on new AI hardware after reportedly wrestling with some of the unintended consequences of the smartphone. Fortune’s Sebastian Herrera explains why Ive’s next act could matter far beyond Apple.
Then, a huge development in skin cancer prevention has sent treatment hopes and Moderna stock through the roof. News editor Catherina Gioino has the report.
And finally, the great wealth transfer has begun. Associate editor Sydney Lake tells us why that’s causing a huge problem for some nonprofits.

Subscribe to Fortune Daily for more deep dives into the world's most powerful companies.
Additional images courtesy of Getty Images

00:00 Intro
03:37 OpenAI Hardware
11:44 Moderna Skin Cancer Treatment
15:21 The Great Wealth Transfer


Can Jony Ive Revolutionize OpenAI?

Features

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So with OpenAI this is a sort of second chance for him to reimagine what the future of devices look like, what the future of hardware looks like, and, and maybe there's a way to benefit society. Hello from New York. I'm Ellie Austin and you're watching Fortune daily. So if you've been on social media at all recently, you've no doubt seen coverage of the Lindsay Clancy trial. Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse from Massachusetts, is on trial for the death of her three young children, Cora, Dawson, and Callum, who died in 2023. Clancy has pleaded not guilty to 3 1st degree murder charges. So the central legal question at the heart of this trial is whether postpartum psychosis made her not criminally responsible for the deaths. I'm not going to speculate about the outcome of the trial, which is due to move to closing arguments imminently. But instead, I've been thinking about what the huge reaction to this case has taught us. Well, hundreds of supporters, primarily women, have gathered outside the court in recent days, all dressed in pink in solidarity with Lindsay. When interviewed on TV, these supporters emphasize that they are not there to minimize the horrific deaths of the Clancy children in any way. Instead, They want to draw attention to what they see as critical flaws in women's mental healthcare, particularly during that vulnerable postpartum period. Indeed, on the stand, Clancy's former mother-in-law testified that Lindsay was quote begging for help before her children's deaths. Whatever its outcome, the trial paints a picture of fractured systems of brief provider visits and of a lack of specialized training, leaving vulnerable new mothers without proper help. It's a complete and utter tragedy that it took the deaths of 3 children for this issue to hit the national consciousness. But hopefully, the legacy of this trial will be that maternal mental health is finally seen as core healthcare and an area in urgent need of research and resources, rather than a niche issue cloaked in shame. Next on Fortune Daily, OpenAI enters the hardware market and possibly the courthouse in the process. Fortune tech correspondent Sebastian Herrera joins me to share the latest on Apple's trade secret theft lawsuit against the AI company. Also, a huge development in skin cancer prevention has sent treatment hopes and Moderna stock through the roof. News editor Katerina Giorno has the report. And finally, the great wealth transfer has officially begun, and associate editor Sydney Lake tells us why that's causing a huge problem for some nonprofits. More Fortune daily ahead. Sebastian, hello, and thank you for joining us from San Francisco. It's so great to see you. So I want to talk about a piece of your reporting about how Jony Ive, uh, arguably one of Apple's two most famous figures ever alongside Steve Jobs, is now working with OpenAI, one of Apple's biggest competitors. So give us a bit of context to start. Who is Jony Ive and why does this matter? Yeah, besides Steve Jobs, Johnny Ive is probably the most famous Apple employee ever. He was, he worked side by side with Steve Jobs for years, and together they designed some of the most iconic Apple products that we know. That includes their first computers, that includes, of course, the first iPhone, uh, that includes the Apple Watch, and so Johnny Ive is known to bring the design field that we know for our Apple products to us, to the consumers. He's responsible for the, the curvature, the, the clean lines of, of the iPhone, the, the way that they look and feel. Uh, and so, you know, he's a very famous person from Apple, uh, and he, he left the company, uh, in 2019. Uh, at the time that he left, you know, he had really been more and more disengaged with the company ever since Steve Jobs died in 2011. That was really his running mate, and after he passed away, uh, Johnny Ive slowly kind of sort of began less and less to be involved with Apple, and so in 2019 he left to form his own design firm which is called Love Firm, and then, you know, soon after that he partnered with OpenAI and now together with OpenAI they're building hardware products for this AI era that we're in. Tell us a bit more about the products they're building, and then I want to get into the reaction to this story. Yeah, definitely. I mean, we're all waiting to see what OpenAI and Johnny Ive have cooking up. Uh, a lot of people still believe in the tech industry that you, you can't just have an AI product talking to us, you still have to tether it to a phone. The belief is that a phone could still be part of what, uh, Johnny Ive is still working on this time. With OpenAI instead of Apple. Uh, and, but what we're expecting is a family of products from OpenAI and Johnny Ive, uh, and that's supposed to come out beginning next year, 2027. The reason why it's such a big deal is because, uh, here you have Apple's famed designer now working with the rival OpenAI but still working on Products that, you know, could be revolutionary for all we know. I can't imagine that Apple would be too thrilled if it was a phone, given their iconic status of the smartphone. Tell us a bit about how Apple has has responded more broadly to this relationship between Jony Ive and Sam Altman. Apple takes its devices and its uh proprietary hardware really seriously. They're known to sue people, uh, and companies that they feel is in any way copying them or trying to go after them, and that's exactly what they're doing in this case as well. They recently sued OpenAI and they, they've, they're claiming that OpenAI uh stole trade secrets through Johnny Ives, uh, hardware firm called IO. Products. Now, I is not named in the lawsuit itself, but they are suing OpenAI and former Apple employees for trade theft. And so they're alleging that uh these employees took secrets on how to build Apple products to OpenAI. They, you know, infamously in the, in the lawsuits say that they were showing Apple devices in interviews with OpenAI, uh, and, and, you know, taking information from. Apple computers, Apple is essentially trying to slow down what OpenAI is working on with Ive, and maybe they'll be successful with that. Um, you know, at the moment, uh, you have these two tech giants going at it for the future of hardware, uh, and it's been a very sort of intriguing story in Silicon Valley. What does your reporting say about why Apple decided not to name Ive in the lawsuit? Is there a degree of strategy around that? And they probably are doing that to sort of protect his legacy in some way at Apple, uh, but it's, it's a, it's definitely a very awkward thing for all parties involved, and I think Ive notably hasn't, you know, made a public comment. There was a really interesting line in your piece where you suggested that Jony Ive. Might feel a degree of guilt for their societal ills, some of them that have come from the development of the iPhone, which is actually a subject we talked about yesterday on this show. Tell me a bit about that and how teaming up with OpenAI to produce this hardware might assuage some of that guilt. Some of our reporting that we did with my colleague Emily, is that I feel a sense of guilt on what the iPhone has become, and what that means is that, you know, uh, we've all seen the reports of, uh, uh, the addiction to our phones that, that we, we have as a society and to, you know, to social media. And so I, who's known as a, as a person who's, you know, deeply cares about the things that he builds, um, you know, he reportedly, uh, just doesn't feel great about all the Consequences for society that the iPhone has brought upon us. And so with OpenAI this is a sort of second chance for him to reimagine what the future of devices look like, what the future of hardware looks like, and, and maybe there's a way to benefit society through what he's building, whether that's AI that can help us out in our homes, whether it's, you know, with people that are blind or, or, um, have some sort of, um, uh, you know, handy. Cap, it's a huge opportunity, but it comes with a lot of responsibility just like the iPhone did, and I think when, when I and Jobs were building the iPhone, I, I don't think they could imagine the impact that it's had on all of our lives and how it has become really the main thing that connects all of us around the world to each other, um, and, you know, some of that has been positive, some of that has been negative. What does this mean for other AI companies, Sebastian, and how they think about entering the hardware space? Yeah, you know, Every company that matters in Silicon Valley is trying to figure out the next form factor for AI, and what that means is that, you know, these different tech companies, they wanna be the ones who deliver us our AI in, in whatever way is best, and I think a lot of companies like OpenAI or like Meta, for example, they don't wanna have to rely on Apple to deliver their AI to consumers. If they can create. Glasses or wear, you know, other sort of wearables where their AI can live on and that can be the next hot product. They would love to have that reality. And so, for example, Meta is a really great example of that. They have their Meta Ray-Ban, uh, glasses, their smart glasses that have cameras on them, and you can talk to the AI. You can listen to music, uh, and they've really figured out a way to have a, a product that's been pretty popular, uh, among consumers and it has been a way to introduce. Consumers to their AI, you know, it's, it's an arms race to who can figure out how AI is best delivered to the consumer, whether it's meta, whether it's OpenAI. There's Chinese companies working on this as well. Everyone's trying to figure it out, and there's, you know, there's millions, there's billions at stake here. Sebastian, thank you so much. We'll be watching this space to see how this develops and come back and tell us more about this lawsuit if and as it evolves. Where can people find more of your reporting? Yeah, they can check out more of my articles on Fortune.com and thanks so much for having me. Thank you, Sebastian. Speak soon. Next up, Anatomy of a Deal with my colleague Kat Giorno. Kat, I wanna talk to you about this big announcement um that's recently come out from Moderna that it is developing a cancer vaccine that could drastically improve treatment rates for skin cancer. Specifically, I have to say skin cancer runs in my family, so I'm very invested in this. Tell us how this vaccine works. It's in partnership with Merck, so they took a case, a study of around 1100 people who happen to have. Melanoma and they took out their tumors. So these are all people who have been treated already. They've surgically removed their tumors, and they've caused the vaccine to be grown basically and treatable per person. So it's personalized. They take the cells from the tumor and they make each vaccine per person, and they've found a reduction in about any kind of recurrence, any kind of metasization of this cancer from happening again. Wow. And this is mRNA technology which came into the public lexicon, as we will all remember during the COVID pandemic. During COVID, yeah, and again with Moderna, no less. So now Moderna and Merck are making this this cancer vaccine that could potentially really save people's lives. Moderna's stock rose very sharply in response to this news last week. Tell us a bit about the machinations of why that is. It's actually insane. It went up 100%. So from a $25 billion market cap to $50 billion almost within like three hours of the entire news dropping. MERC's also rose, and as a result of just the entire idea of. Seems now curing cancer. Everything across the board has also risen. So Eli Lilly and all these other firms have also been rising in terms of stocks. So Merck and Moderna did a sort of joint venture on this vaccine. Absolutely. So Merck has their own entire vaccine. It's called Keytruda. This is actually part in place with the Moderna MERC vaccine, which is called an antiogen antigen. OK, quite a mouthful, quite a mouthful, a mouth I mispronounced it, but the two of them together, they treated about half the control group. With both of these vaccines together, and they treated the other half with just the Keytruda, which is which is MERC's own vaccine, and they found a reduction in terms of any kind of recurrence or any kind of metastasization. I think the stats were 49% reduction in recurrence and a 56% reduction in metastasization of these cancer cells with the joint vaccine, the joint with the joint vaccine. So what assumptions are investors now making about Cancer vaccines in the future of cancer treatment. I mean, melanoma is a high risk. It's the deadliest form of skin cancer you can have out there. And the fact that we've, they've found a way to really cure it and really, well, let's say like found a way to reduce the recurrence and also any kind of ill effects that happens with this cancer, insane. And as a result of that, investors are now doubling down on this, and you're seeing this across the entire health industry, you're seeing this across the whole entire longevity space. People are thinking mRNA has like such an amazing potential. Possibility and this is the first time that we've ever seen something that's personalized, really like drive through it. What should we look out for in the coming years when it comes to the evolution of cancer treatment because it's been this, this unattainable goal for such a long time, the prevention, the curing of cancer, it feels like it could be in touching distance. Is that true? Potential. I mean like think about it this way, most cancer treatments like chemotherapy, radiology, all this is indiscriminate, it affects your whole entire body, yes, it affects those cancers. causing cells, but this is personalized, so the, the actual like added benefit of this is that you are not getting those ill effects of let's say throwing up or like hair loss that comes with chemotherapy or other kinds of cancer treatment because it's only affecting those personal cells that are causing cancer. Kat, this is so interesting, we will watch very intently to see how this story develops. Remind people where they can find more of your reporting. Yeah, go onfortune.com. Next up, the business of luxury with Sydney Lake. The great wealth transfer, it's something that people have been anticipating for years, decades really. It is the 124 trillion great wealth transfer is fully underway, but nonprofits are paralyzed by how to chase millennials' newfound wealth, and it's essentially as The baby boomer generation starts to age out and phase out, the younger generations, particularly millennials, um, and some of Gen Z, will inherit all of that baby boomer wealth. So, kind of the trend behind this is the idea of For decades, baby boomers have really been the primary philanthropists in society. They're the ones who hold the most wealth, they have the most disposable income, but as this great wealth transfer starts to really move and transpire, and a lot of money is changing hands. The idea is philanthropy as we know it is fundamentally going to change, but what's actually interesting from the data is. At this point, millennials are actually the most active generation in terms of philanthropy and volunteerism, being involved with with nonprofits, but still, baby boomers are the ones who quite literally have the most bang for their buck. So, nonprofit organizations are really having to rethink. Hey, how are we going to attract a brand new generation of people who we really haven't been chasing for, for a long time because for decades, baby boomers have largely been, you know, making connections to certain causes, certain organizations, but millennials haven't had the disposable income really to Donate to kind of their nonprofits and philanthropies of choice at least at the same scale, you know, these are like mega gifts like hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars. Millennials, as we all know, we're all kind of struggling out here. Economy's tough, not as much disposable income. So it'll be interesting to see the wealth quite literally move, you know, it could be across the country, it could be from city to city, organization to organization, kind of once the, the money itself changes hands. That's it for Fortune daily. I'm Ellie Austin. Please remember to like, subscribe and let us know what you thought of today's episode. I'll see you in the comments.

The secondhand clothing market is booming worldwide. Yet it took over a decade for The RealReal to reach profitability, and ThredUp is still chasing that goal, due in part to the hugely complex intake process that goes into receiving, authenticating, pricing, listing and delivering millions of unique items.

Today, AI is revolutionizing that process. Fortune senior writer Phil Wahba goes behind the scenes at The RealReal’s authentication center in New Jersey to see how the new AI-powered intake tools are transforming the secondhand clothing industry.

Inside The RealReal’s AI-Powered Authentication Center

Tech

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In the US alone, there's $200 billion trapped in people's closets of luxury goods, and then every year $80 billion gets added. Resale is booming, but just a few years ago, used apparel resellers like the Real Reel and Thread Up were hanged by a thread. Despite the US secondhand clothing market reaching $43 billion in 2023, shares in both companies plunged towards record lows. Single skew items, 50 million items sold, 200 attributes per item. When you get in there and you really start to understand the business, you realize it's much more complex than you think it is. That same year, ultra fast fashion giant Sheehan. Expanded its third party marketplace to the US, further threatening resale on speed, price, and variety. So how did digital secondhand sellers survive? Enter AI. Really what we're doing here is capturing more and more data. The decisions are happening at the speed of machines as opposed to humans. Can AI help resellers compete against the world's biggest, fastest retailers? This facility is about 500,000 square feet network wide across the east and west coast. We have about 1.3 million square feet of warehousing space. The real real is one of the largest luxury goods resellers on the planet. Yet the company operated at a loss for more than a decade, and the complexity and costs of processing secondhand goods remained a major challenge. If you think about real real, you're not sourcing from like other brands, right? You're sourcing from individuals. All of these items will be very, very unique. You could have a particular color or a particular style or a fabric. You have a significant supply side uncertainty, which makes this whole problem much, much more challenging. Unlike broader resale sites like eBay, the Real Real and ThreadUp are responsible for intaking, authenticating, pricing, and shipping millions of items flowing through their inventory. This puts them at a major disadvantage against other online retailers, including ultra fast fashion giants like Xi'an which can drop up to 10,000 new designs daily and ship products within weeks at deep discounts. Today, The Real Real believes AI can change that. So this is our receiving department and we have one of our merchandise operations specialists and he is taking some scanned images of tags, the designer tag, the fabric tag, and this is the start of feeding data into Athena, and that is our AI powered intake platform that helps us to automate the authentication and lifting process of these items. And it's essentially going to assign it a counterfeiting score, and that's going to help route it to the next phase in the warehouse. The Real Real has been incorporating AI tools across its operations since 2018, significantly cutting processing time through AI enhanced intake, authentication, and pricing. The strategy is starting to pay off. In 2025, for the first time, the real real logged four consecutive quarters with positive adjusted EBITDA. GMV rose 22% in the second quarter of 2026, and operating expense leverage improved by roughly 4.7% points. We really focused how we think about AI on our value props and our moat. Authentication is a big one for us. It's our pricing algorithms. We let the market set the price. We don't set the price, so it's all of that data, but it's also taking dollars out of the unit economics that it would take to process the item so we can take that money and invest it in. or invested in other parts of our business. Authentication has long been a challenge for the Real Reel. In 2018, Chanel sued the company for selling counterfeit Chanel products, and a few years later, the Real Reel settled a class action lawsuit accusing the company of using undertrained staff to help meet high authentication quotas. Today, the Real Real's AI powered intake system, Athena helps workers price and authenticate SKUs in seconds. The company plans for Athena to process half of all new items by the end of 2026, up from about 20% a year earlier. On the supply side, the decisions are happening at the speed of machines as opposed to humans. So typically if you think of like a supply chain, right, it has many, many subsystems, so AI can form that layer or a decision support system which can integrate all of this together and actually do scenario analysis of the speed of machines. So now you can have fewer experts or they can be used in a better way. And secondly, your kind of speed of decision making has significantly improved. We've actually built proprietary. for our gemologists, our watchmakers, our handbag experts to count the melee on every stone, the weight of our diamonds. It utilizes a highly magnified camera to help us take a high resolution picture, and it's able to come up with the carat weight in a moment, just 1 or 2 seconds. And so now actually our humans don't need to so much look at that. They're going to be focusing more on grading the actual diamond, which is where their expertise lies. Does this speed up the process? Does it make it more accurate, or both? It's both. It adds consistency, of course, and speeds up the process where we can process items much faster for the consigner so it gets on the site faster, but also the technology behind the scenes, making sure that each individual item is authentic. But also that the consigner is valid too. The global resale market is still booming. It's expected to reach $393 billion by 2030. And now secondhand resellers are integrating AI across buying and selling, ranging from one tap pricing to personalized agentic shopping experiences. Yet as supply, demand, and AI integration increases, critics still point to lasting industry issues around authentication, shipment delays, and low payouts. What are some of the pitfalls of AI where maybe companies lay too much on the back of AI? One of the big challenges that everybody is facing with AI right now is that fundamentally these are nondeterministic systems, what is known as the verification problem. They do tend to hallucinate. It's important for decision makers to understand, especially in the supply chain side. This is sort of mission critical. Decisions that you're making and if you make a wrong decision, it can potentially result in millions of dollars of losses. So when you integrate these things, it's super critical to figure out who is doing the verification, where is the human sitting in the loop. Somebody needs to be accountable for all of these decisions. We've invested millions of dollars over the years and continue to do so as fakes have gotten better. Over the years as things have changed, it requires us to continuously learn, continuously evolve our technology, but it is the art and science. Like at the end of the day you do need that gemologist to come in and look at the item or you need that watchmaker to come in and open the watch to make sure there's no aftermarket parts, and that's where the art and science is really important, but also makes. Us defensible to AI. Why does Gen Z like resale so much? You know, I think it's a few things. I think it's authenticity that's number one, you're right? Like in a world where everything's starting to look the same and it's algorithms after algorithm, it's the anti-fast fashion at the end of the day, but you know you're going to go somewhere and you're going to look authentic to who you are and you're going to look unique, be your own stylists, right?

The traditional talent agency model is dead. The modern talent agency is no longer just a toll booth trying to broker a quick deal. It's moving into the center of culture and operating as a full-service, data-driven agency. United Talent Agency’s Darnell Strom and digital content creator Gstaad Guy explore what happens when agents work directly with creators to turn an online following into a full-stack commercial ecosystem. 

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