Financial Mindset

When the U.S. last hosted the World Cup in 1994, the event drew unexpectedly large crowds . At that time, soccer wasn’t as popular among Americans as it is now, so expectations for attendance had been fairly low. So as the U.S. prepared to host the World Cup again in 2026, expectations for tourism were high. But in the run-up to this year’s World Cup, the ongoing war in Iran has resulted in soaring inflation and high fuel prices , neither of which bodes well for tourism or event attendance. Recent tourism reports indicate there will be fewer hotel reservations than anticipated due to reduced international travel confidence and a growing uncertainty related to U.S. immigration policies, geopolitical instability, tariffs and inflation. We are a professor of hospitality and tourism management and a professor in international sports management . We believe there is good reason for concern in the 11 World Cup host cities in the U.S. An additional five cities in Mexico and...

Airbnb Inc. Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky is starting a new artificial intelligence lab, according to several people familiar with the matter, marking his first foray into the global AI race. Chesky plans to create an AI venture to develop artificial intelligence models and is considering a focus on user interaction and design, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the information is not public. He is in the early stages of funding the lab, one person said, and the details could change.  Chesky will remain CEO of Airbnb, several people said. He will not serve as chief executive of the new lab, one person said.  Chesky co-founded Airbnb nearly 20 years ago after studying design in college. In recent years, he has often said AI applications for travel and e-commerce require a rich user interface, rather than the kind of text-based chatbots popularized by OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. Unlike online travel rivals Expedia Group Inc. and Booking H...

Nvidia has acquired Kumo AI, a small, four-year-old startup that develops foundation models designed to make accurate business predictions, according to two sources familiar with the deal. Kumo’s three co-founders, Vanja Josifovski, Hema Raghavan, and Jure Leskovec, transitioned to Nvidia last month, the sources said. While the founders’ LinkedIn profiles have been updated, and now describe them as Nvidia employees, the Kumo website makes no mention of the change. The financial terms of the deal could not be learned. Nvidia, which has acquired numerous AI startups in recent years, declined to comment. The Mountain View, Calif-based startup had received $37 million in venture capital funding in two 2022 rounds from investors including Sequoia Capital. Its models have been used so far by companies including food delivery app DoorDash , Reddit, and U.K. grocery chain Sainsbury’s. As Fortune ‘s Jeremy Kahn reported last year, Kumo’s RFM model could do f...

A senior vice president at Okta approved a gratuity that was $18 over the company’s threshold on a $2,000 dinner. The auditing system flagged it, a person wrote it up, an email was sent, his assistant processed it. It landed on the COO’s desk — routed there from the board. “I’m paying somebody to audit that expense report,” Okta President and COO Eric Kelleher said at a BCG-hosted breakfast roundtable at the Fortune COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona. “I’m paying somebody to flag that, and I’m paying somebody to write up an email and send to me, and I’m paying my assistant to receive the email and process it.” He let that hang in the air. “That’s waste.” Of course, we all know exactly why that process exists: someone built it and kept it that way. That person is almost certainly still in the building, certain it’s the right way to do things, defending the inefficient structure that everyon...

Geoffrey Hinton almost didn’t believe he’d won the Nobel Prize. When the committee called in 2024, the 77-year-old computer scientist ran a quick calculation in his head. What are the odds, he asked himself, that a theoretical psychologist hiding in computer science gets the Nobel Prize in physics? “Well, maybe one in two million,” he told the crowd at the Sana AI Summit in New York last week. Then again: what are the odds you dream about winning it? “Maybe one in two million … So that means it’s a million times more likely it’s a dream than reality.” The audience laughed. Hinton wasn’t done. For several days after the announcement, he said, he half-expected to wake up. The one thing that consoled him: “If it was a dream, I would wake up, and that nightmare about Trump being president wouldn’t be true.” A beat. The audience laughed as Hinton added, “I’d give it up for that.” ...

Eric Kelleher has a problem that no amount of AI can solve for him. The President and COO of Okta has agents on his team. He’s named them—Leo, Sloan, Hank, Walker—and they show up in business reviews alongside his human staff. He’s personally booked a flight to Bangalore and spent the entire trip standing up an open-source agent on a separate machine, a deliberate act of immersion he then assigned to every member of his leadership team. “That flight to me was transformative in how I recognized what the capabilities of this technology are,” he told a roomful of top operations executives at the COO Summit this week. And yet, he added, the hardest part isn’t the technology. It’s the managers. “We have trained every manager in the world to think about one thing and that is: what’s their headcount,” Kelleher said. “Our managers have spent decades learning how to think about headcounts and payroll.” The shift he...

China has quietly emerged as the global oil market’s stealthy swing consumer, potentially holding off doomsday a while longer. For months, investors wondered why crude oil prices failed to reach worst-case scenarios, even as a fifth of the world’s supply remained bottled up in Persian Gulf. To be sure, Saudi Arabia diverted exports to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, economies in Asia imposed rationing, and the world’s biggest oil-consuming countries coordinated releases from strategic reserves. But the efforts haven’t fully offset the missing Mideast oil, with the shortfall estimated at more than 10 million barrels a day. At the same time, the U.S. naval blockade on Iran removed took more barrels off the market. As a result, the ongoing stalemate between the U.S. and Iran on reaching a lasting ceasefire deal that reopens the strait has stoked increasing panic from a growing chorus of voices. “We’re approaching unheard of inventory levels,” Exxo...