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See which workplaces made this year's list.

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Employees say:&nbsp;"I sincerely love working at Vari because of the environment and the people. I really like that we are customer service oriented and focus on creating life long fans. We are nothing without our amazing customers. I enjoy my role and enjoy working with my direct leaders and team. I appreciate the opportunity to work at Vari."

Best Small and Medium Workplaces in Retail

GPTW 2023 best workplaces retail small:medium Vari_2

Employees say: 
 
"As new Vari employee, I feel like I have found a home to grow with. I love that our management team is always looking for the best way to go to market. We are comfortable with being uncomfortable, and I'm excited for the long future ahead of us!"

See which retailers made this year's list.

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Employees say: 
 
"The environment is extremely uplifting. We can express ourselves, within the realms of professionalism, using our creative energy. I'm thankful that I can be myself, without the fear of judgement because I don't have a suit on every single day."

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The technology is rarely what derails an AI initiative. The people are. Dr. Deepika Chopra explores why COOs leading large-scale AI adoption need to understand the psychology of their teams—because resilience, problem solving, and trust aren't soft skills, they're execution variables. She'll share practical frameworks for building the human culture that make transformation actually stick. 

Deepika Chopra, Author, The Power of Real Optimism

The Psychology Behind Successful AI Rollouts

Conferences

So I, I always start every talk regardless if it's at BCG or Google or Amex or at UPenn Health System or with oncology patients with one thing and I wasn't gonna do it here. I don't know why, but I decided right back there why should the people of the Fortune COO summit be denied this one simple thing and so if it's all right with you if I can ask you guys to just close your eyes. And take a collective deep breath together with me, so breathe in for 3. And then exhale for 3 counts. Something that I find interesting is that sometimes that is the only time that even myself or people will take a deep breath throughout the entire day and in the reality of it that's actually not OK you need to be deep breathing more but when I was invited to speak today I actually found myself thinking about something really interesting so we're spending this enormous amount of time talking about artificial intelligence. And not enough time talking about human beings, which we all are. Because every conversation about AI is ultimately a conversation about change, and change is primarily not a technological experience, it's a psychological one. And as a psychologist and a behavioral scientist myself, that's what really truly interests me. Not the technology itself, although it is very exciting and interesting, but what happens inside of people when the world around them changes rapidly. Because whether you're excited about AI or overwhelmed by it or skeptical of it or you are leading an organization through it, there's one thing that I think almost everyone shares right now and it's uncertainty. From a psychological perspective, uncertainty is very fascinating. So something about the brain is that human beings don't actually struggle with the hard things. We struggle with the unknown things. We can handle challenges, we can handle complexity, we can even handle adversity, and many people in this room, all of us have at some point. But what we struggle the most with is not knowing. And when uncertainty increases, the brain does something interesting, not because we are negative, but because the brain is interested in survival. And what it does is it starts to try to predict. And when it doesn't know what comes next, it starts to look for certainty, for control, for answers, and when we just can't find the answers, what the brain does is it starts to fill in the blanks. And unfortunately or fortunately it's just how the brain works, we start filling in the blanks with worst case scenario planning, and all of us have this in common again, it's not because we are negative, it's because our brain is doing what it's supposed to do, which is protect us. And it is designed for survival. Our brains are not designed for happiness or for growth, and that is something that was astounding to me when I learned it. So you can learn all the tools, you can read all the books, you can listen to all the podcasts, you can watch all the talks, but unless you feel a sense of safety, your brain will not hang on to that idea and notion of growth. And in the Power of real optimism, the book that I wrote, I wrote about how the brain is constantly actually searching for potential threats. That tendency has helped humans survive for thousands of years. But in periods like we are in now with rapid change, that sort of search can actually become a liability. So we're actually going to talk a little bit about what resistance is. So uncertainty and the idea of uncertainty activates the same systems in our brains that were designed to keep us safe. And what happens there, it activates that threat mode which is the amygdala. Our thinking narrows, our risk tolerance drops, our creativity goes down, and people become more attached to familiar ways. And what leaders often interpret in this moment as maybe resistance is something completely different sometimes. Uh, it's a very normal human response to uncertainty. It's not a capability problem, it's a psychological one. How many of you guys out there have rolled out a major change initiative in your organization and you believe that the message was crystal clear, but you're only to discover later that different teams interpreted what you had said that exact same message in completely different ways. Has that ever happened? Yeah. Well, when information is incomplete and people, they don't wanna leave blanks, our brain doesn't leave the blanks, they start filling them up like we just talked about and under uncertainty those interpretations often become more fear based, more reactive and more protective. So one of the most important leadership responsibilities during a transformation period is not managing the change. It's actually managing your team's interpretation. One of the central ideas that lies in my work on optimism is the idea that optimism is actually something that is very misunderstood. So whenever I'm speaking to a large audience of people, I always ask them what's the first word that comes to mind when you think of optimism? And oftentimes I, I'll just have people shout it out, and most of the time without surprise it's this resounding like positivity being positive. And you know I think that it's, it's alarming sometimes for people that I, I'm someone that this is what I study. I'm known as the optimism doctor, which by the way I am not the most optimistic person, um, but that's for another, another day, another story. The good thing is that what I teach is that optimism is actually something that's learned it's a psychological skill, it's not a personality trait, so that's good news for me. Um, but I think what people oftentimes are looking for and they believe what optimism is, is this idea of certainty that everything, knowing that everything's gonna work out, but that's not optimism, that's certainty, and certainty is a luxury that I think very few leaders have right now or honestly very few humans have right now. Real optimism is actually something a bit different. Real optimism is the belief that even when things don't work out or we don't know exactly how they will work out or what comes next. We have the capacity to respond. To adapt, to learn, to shift, to figure it out. And that distinction really matters because adaptability is what we're talking about and adaptability is becoming, I believe, one of the most valuable skills of our time. Not just individually but for organizations, so I thought I would leave you guys with 3 practical ideas that you can take back to your teams. The first one is create clarity wherever you can. The brain handles difficult better than it handles ambiguity. So when people don't understand what's going on and something is unclear, they start to create stories and I know we all have done this in our own lives personally, but guess what, it shows up in an organization as well because we are human. And a lot of times the stories that we start creating to fill in those blanks are often worse than the reality. In periods of uncertainty, clarity becomes a form of leadership, not because you have all the answers, but because you're willing to communicate what you do know and what you don't know. And what matters most right now. People can tolerate uncertainty. We can learn that, but what we struggle oftentimes with is confusion and so clarity really matters. The second one is building adaptability again, not certainty. So I think one of the big mistakes I see when I'm working in the trenches with organizations is that. People I think leaders try to try their hardest to eliminate uncertainty altogether but really honestly we can't do that. So instead of asking how do we make people feel certain, I think a better question is how can we help people feel capable. Capable of learning, capable of adjusting, capable of pivoting, capable of responding because confidence doesn't really just come from certainty, it comes from the evidence that we have successfully adapted before and so optimism is so much more about resiliency we have all already every single person in this room has. Already persevered through your hardest days and your organization has persevered through their hardest days and so one of the things we know from a science based perspective is reminding ourselves of what we have persevered through and also historically what people have persevered through, especially in leadership in change in large technology shifts is very important. Adaptability starts with this idea that that we call cognitive flexibility, and that is the ability to generate more than one possible outcome, more than one possible solution, and there's an exercise that is my favorite exercise that I love to lead teams through, and I call it the three futures exercise. And so what it is is it's taking a current challenge that your team is facing and then asking everybody to write down three possible futures. The worst case scenario, which you will note, some people are really good at coming up with those first, and by the way, I'm one of those. And again I wouldn't try to squash the worst case scenario because oftentimes that that might be something we have to prepare for, but the key here is to not just stop there. Also to imagine and start to talk about what's the most likely scenario. So this is looking at the reality of the situation, and sometimes those two things can be the same. And then the third one, the best possible outcome. And so the key really here is, is to ask with all of those scenarios what would we do in each of the cases. And the goal really isn't the best prediction. The goal is the flexibility. And so even if someone believes or your team believes that the worst case scenario is actually the most likely outcome, that's not the point. The point is to try and have cognitive flexibility and come up with 3 different possibilities and hopefully more. And the third thing is not and we talked, I heard, um, one of the speakers a couple sessions ago talk about this too, but the third one is don't underestimate the role of meaning. One thing we often miss in sort of this conversation about AI is that people are sort of not just asking how will this change my work. When I go into teams and I'm I'm talking about this, a lot of times what I'm hearing is people are asking, will I still matter? Will my contribution matter? Where do I create value? And those are not technological questions as you'll see those are deeply human ones, because regardless of how much technology changes, people still want purpose, they still want meaning, they wanna know that their work still matters and that they have value. Those needs don't disappear. If anything, I think they're starting to become more important during this period of change. And maybe that's why I feel actually quite optimistic is not because the uncertainty is going away, it's not, and not because the change is starting to slow down, it's certainly not. I'm optimistic because I've spent my career studying humans and human beings are remarkably good at being adaptable. We learn, we evolve, we recover. We develop skills that we never imagined we'd need and we find meaning in new circumstances and we do it over and over again and so the organizations that thrive the most won't necessarily be the ones that have the most certainty or that are the most fast. They're gonna be the ones that remain curious, flexible, resilient, connected and engaged while things continue to evolve because ultimately this moment is not just testing our technology, it's actually testing our adaptability and adaptability begins with the belief that we can meet what's next we've done it before and that belief is what I call real optimism. Thank you.

Ole Scheeren believes great architecture is built upon stories—not just the ones we climb but the ones we tell ourselves about our futures. The job of the architect isn’t simply to design physical structures. It’s to imagine worlds, to give people the freedom to go about their lives in a meaningful way. Architects don’t just draw structures; they shape how people move, how they meet, how they see the city and themselves. In this conversation, we'll explore Scheeren's variation on Louis Sullivan's oft-cited maxim: "form follows function.” 

Form / Fiction × Flux

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the business landscape, and Fortune 500 CEOs are taking notice. At Fortune Global Forum, industry leaders shared their insights on how AI is already transforming the workforce and various sectors. From hiring to health care, this rapidly evolving tech is sparking both excitement and concern among executives.

CEOs on How AI Is Already Changing Everything

Tech

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the business landscape, and Fortune 500 CEOs are taking notice. At Fortune Global Forum, industry leaders shared their insights on how AI is already transforming the workforce and various sectors.

At Fortune Global Forum, industry leaders shared their insights on how AI is already transforming the workforce and various sectors.

Right now, it's hard for a doctor to use generative A I as part of their diagnosing because they're not allowed to in most places in two years, we believe it'll be malpractice not to use generative A I. That's a massive shift. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the business landscape and Fortune 500 ceos are taking notice A I is sort of like at least 80% likely to be beneficial from health care to job searching A I is revolutionizing industries and sparking both excitement and fear. It's even being used to help write this video intro, but fear not. There is a real human speaking and crafting this story for you at least for now. So how will A I truly impact the workforce? Will it lead to significant job losses or open the door to unprecedented innovation? CEO S woke up 18 months ago that this is real. They woke up to 18 months ago. This is real. At the same time, I think they're extraordinarily frustrated by the lack of return on investment they've gotten so far. But I think they're starting to see these autonomous agents as a mechanism to begin to rewire and rethink and reimagine their business. At this year's Fortune Global Forum, we asked executives to weigh in on a I's transformative power and share their visions for a future where humans and machines work side by side. So you don't expect to see significant job losses as a result of A I. No, not significantly. I actually think what will happen is people will rise to the opportunity, they'll spend their time more productively and there will be many, many, many more opportunities for how people can contribute to society as a whole. One of the biggest forces that is impacting the world of work is going to be A I. And I think that I don't need to actually give any advice to Gen Z that they should be thinking about this and on the forefront of it, they will naturally be the ones who are embracing it because they're the ones who have been, especially the ones just entering the workforce right now. They've been using it in school, they were using it to apply to jobs. They're going to be extraordinarily comfortable when someone asked them to use it at work. So I think actually I would want to give advice maybe to Gen Xers like myself or beyond to be open to the fact that the world of work is going to change pretty radically and being open to and actually embracing A I as opposed to being afraid of it is going to be incredibly important for the decade to come as artificial intelligence emerges at the forefront of corporate strategy, companies are racing to harness its potential to gain a competitive edge in their respective industries. Hiring talent with an A I focus has become a bigger goal and challenge while she companies battle it out to secure talent. How will A I change the landscape of hiring? When um I talked to a lot of executives on what the recruiting experience is like for them when they'd make career transitions. And they talk about this very white love surface of having uh a great connection with the recruiter and having a person who's kind of really out there to look after them during their career transition. And then you talk to people who are beginning their career and it's a very different experience where they talk about the job seeker black hole where they apply to companies and they don't know what's going on and they don't know why their applications aren't getting through. Every single worker in the world shall have their own personal talent agent. If you think about how a talent agent works for uh athletes and for, for musicians, that is someone who understands everything about you about the market and who works tirelessly on your behalf. This is one of the things that generative A I can actually bring salesforce reports that one in five workers are quote unquote underground A I users who keep their A I secret from co workers to gain a competitive advantage. Meanwhile, others say A I tools have slowed down their productivity in the workplace and in the future, you'll find that employees will be in a position where they can be much more in charge of the ideas. Be a part of the creativity that takes place, no matter what role they have, you can be in a production line. If the production line becomes more automated, there'd be an opportunity for that employee to be in a position of all of the automation right now. What we are doing uh is still use a combination of human people and generate A I. Um And we call our generate A I CO ploting because we still do not let A I make decisions. I think A I can, can help our staff with the, with the job, but the decision itself has to be with someone because it's very difficult to manage a company at this point. If something goes wrong, we cannot find out who should take the responsibility. Is a, we are not there yet beyond the white-collar workforce A I is also disrupting more human industries like healthcare. The Association of American Medical Colleges projects, a shortage of up to 86,000 doctors in the US by 2036 exacerbating the country's already poor health care rankings globally. Two health care leaders break down how A I can help fill this gap. I had an opportunity recently to watch as we were watching a generative A I application take a Jama case. So a very complex medical case, it diagnosed that case in seconds. It was unbelievable. It really showed the capability that will be there. If you think about the undersupply of physicians that everyone's been worried about. I think we can take that issue away. I think if you think about rural America and rural communities across the globe, they've been dramatically underserved. But with an A I application, you can start to bring technologies to places that have been underserved and actually create a much better or equitable environment in those places. So I understand people's fear every new technology generates fear, but we will have to together learn and advance this technology using the right regulation to make sure we do this appropriately. Putting all of the information we have at the fingertips of every clinician is a net positive for the world and something we have to figure out how to do in the most safe and productive way. I want to have A I for clinical. That is what we're all about. And so I'll give you an example. You go get a lab value. Usually you have to wait for your lab values, your physician has to see it and then you might get an interaction well with our patients with A I. And when the interaction we have with all of their treatments, we can do an algorithm that actually adjusts and customizes because your reaction to a medication might be slightly different than mine, the medicine might react more so you can have a lower dosage. I might need a higher dosage as an example. While A I is already revolutionized in the workplace, the leaders we talked to were clear that there's still a need for human oversight and decision making. They also said that they can see A I as a tool that can help workers rather than replace them. Our advice to people is to welcome the opportunity to embrace how A I might help them in their jobs. As we've been saying for some time now A I is not going to take your job, but someone who uses A I will.

The microbiome is a crucial component of our health, linking the gut with various bodily functions. Olipop CEO Ben Goodwin explains.

Olipop CEO: What to know about the microbiome and gut health

Health

Olipop CEO: What to know about the 'microbiome' and gut health

The microbiome is a crucial component of our health, linking the gut with various bodily functions.

So the microbiome is very, very powerful. It's kind of this master system that sits underneath many of the other different components of our body. As I got older and I learned about the microbiome and I learned about the brain gut axis. The light bulb kind of went off for me that we need fiber, we need prebiotics and we need nutritional diversity and every human being alive needs those things. In the research. There's really strong ties between microbiome, health and digestion, microbiome, health and immune function, microbiome, health and neurotransmitter health or or mood stability. There's also a strong correlation between fiber and optimal blood sugar response. Historically, hunter gatherer tribes and indigenous communities, they would actually get somewhere between 100 and 200 g of fiber a day. Unfortunately, the average industrialized consumer and the average American maybe gets 10 to 15 g of fiber a day and gets up to 80 g of sugar a day. There's all sorts of barriers for folks around making conversions over to healthier choices. One of the biggest barriers being that all of the food and drinks that they grew up with. So they have like an E an emotional relationship with and that are really addicting and cheap are very, very present and easy to consume. And I think that we see the impacts of junk food on our country's health, right? According to the CDC, 40% of Americans have type two diabetes or prediabetes. 70% of Americans have chronic digestive distress. They're projected to be over a billion people with type two diabetes by 2050. That's not a great trajectory. And what we eat and drink can have a really substantial impact on our health. Lollipop is designed to actually meet that consumer need for something that tastes great and tastes like something that matches their expectations from a soda. Uh but also has empirically backed ingredient, nutritional strategies so that you can essentially have your soda and drink it to. There's a $300 billion health and wellness category and the vast majority of those brands don't do any independent research to figure out if their product is actually conferring benefit to their consumers. And while I'm sure there are are products that are still better than a traditional uh Coke or Pepsi, we have a real opportunity right now to, to not just be a little bit better but to actually be health contributing. And honestly, the health and wellness and consumer package goods sector in my view needs to migrate in that direction for the health and wellness of the American population.

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