Interview with Jim Markus

Edited by Jenn Moon, Editor at Featured News · Nov 4, 2026

I start with the people, then pick the activity. A group of bookish introverts might prefer a script or a book for guidance. A group of improvisers may prefer a setting and permission to run wild with it. Choose for the guests you plan to invite, and everyone will have more fun.

For people who don’t usually play games, I skip anything with a rulebook. Charades works at a holiday party because everyone already knows how to play.

There's so much to be said for setting the right mood. When I run writing duels, a big part of the atmosphere comes from costuming and the way everyone is greeted at the door. When I run parlor live-action role-playing games (LARPs), I introduce the game concepts as soon as everyone arrives. It gives players an idea of what to expect, including safety mechanics, and helps them understand that they're empowered to make character decisions throughout the game.

One of the best parts of playing party games is that different people play them in different ways. A good host realizes that a quiet player can be having just as much fun as the center-of-attention player. I’ve seen this myself at parlor LARPs I’ve run recently. After the game had ended, I asked a quiet player whether they’d had fun. It turned out they had been closely following all the drama of the more outwardly expressive players. They just played a quieter game.

If someone isn’t engaging at all, that’s a different story. Some players are waiting for an invitation to participate. In those cases, you’ve got to reach out and give them time to respond.

And if players aren’t familiar with one another, I make introductions. When I’m building games, I also seed the characters with secrets that encourage players to interact with each other organically.

I'm a big fan of physical invitations. Giving players something ahead of time invites them to participate in the fiction even before the game begins. And who isn't a fan of opening a letter that isn't junk mail?

There are two things we haven’t talked about yet: attendance and wrap-ups.

In terms of game choice, it’s important to choose something that works even if one person doesn’t show up. There are several mystery dinner games that work with an exact number of people, and those aren’t the best options if you’re planning something for a group of adults. Life gets messy. People get sick. People cancel at the last minute for myriad reasons. So choose a game that gives you some flexibility there.

And finally, allow for a wrap-up. I’ve seen so many hosts plan a game and forget that people want to talk about what happened. It’s fun to get out of character and talk about the experience itself. The post-game conversation is often just as interesting for the guests as the game itself.

Jim MarkusFounder at Autumnal Games

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

By Razvan Luca

Edited by Jenn Moon, Editor at Featured News · Nov 4, 2026

On Aug. 12, 2026, Honeywell had a forward yield of 55% on my independent equity research site, Talval. The true answer was about 2%. This came from the fact that within our dividend data we had received two spin-offs as cash. Our calculations resulted in this error.

While this was an error on our part, we did not catch it as quickly as we should have. Our yield calculations come from a commercial data feed. While this is accurate the majority of the time, when there is an error it will usually be from a few predictable sources. This can cause the number to appear completely reasonable.

Since August 2026 we have looked at the dividend history of approximately 760 dividend-paying companies and cross-referenced them with their filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In all cases below, the company had provided the correct information but the error occurred between the data being provided and being displayed.

The most common source of error comes from stock splits. On May 22, 2024, Nvidia announced a 10-for-1 stock split to take place on June 7, 2024. At the same time, they increased their quarterly dividend by 150% from $0.04 to $0.10 per share. This was prior to the split and equals $0.01 per share after it.

Without adjusting the dividend history for the stock split, it would show as a reduction from $0.04 to $0.01. However, shareholders actually received an increase. In our data, Nvidia was one of 38 companies that had been marked as having reduced their dividend in the last 10 years due to not adjusting for the stock split.

This can also cause an increase in yield. Booking Holdings had a 25-for-1 stock split on April 2, 2026. Their first quarter dividend was $10.50 per share, which equates to $0.42 post-split. This causes a big increase in yield when using split-adjusted prices but non-adjusted dividends. On the same day that we had Honeywell at 55%, we had Booking at around 14%. The true yield was less than 1%.

This is a smaller error. On October 30, 2026, 448 of the 464 U.S. dividend-paying companies in the data feed we use had their dividends rounded to the nearest cent.

Most companies won’t be affected. However, those that increase their dividend by small amounts will lose their history. Realty Income is a real estate investment trust that pays monthly dividends. In their results release on November 2, 2026, they stated that they had announced their 136th dividend increase since listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994. They have increased their dividend for over 32 years in a row. However, in their 2020 annual report, they had 23 monthly payments between February 2019 and December 2020. These rose in small steps from $0.2255 to $0.234. When rounded to the nearest cent, they all become $0.23. This means eight increases are lost and the dividend appears to not have changed for two years.

Rounding can also create an apparent increase. GE HealthCare had a quarterly dividend of $0.035 per share between early 2025 and mid-2026. This was shown as $0.04 in our feed, overstating the yield by around 14%. When they did increase to $0.04 in the third quarter of 2026, their rounded history showed no increase.

When a company has a spin-off, they give shareholders stock in the spin-off business. This will have a value per share and can be recorded in data feeds as a dividend. This is not a cash payment and will not be recurring.

Flex has never paid a cash dividend on their ordinary shares. On January 2, 2024, they completed the distribution of their holding in Nextracker. Shareholders received approximately 0.17 Nextracker shares for each Flex share. This was recorded as a dividend of $6.23 in our data feed. This meant our site showed Flex with an average yield of 20% over the last five years. In our data, we found 20 payments at 19 companies had been spin-offs recorded as normal dividends.

Honeywell had a spin-off where they gave one share in Solstice Advanced Materials for every four shares in Honeywell on October 30, 2025. On June 29, 2026, they spun-off their aerospace division. They gave one share for every two shares in Honeywell. They also completed a one-for-two reverse stock split on the same day. This meant they had two dividend payments in our feed. This is why a company with a yield of around 2% appeared to have a yield of 55%.

Usually the ex-dividend date is the first day that a new buyer will not receive the upcoming payment. However, if the distribution is worth 25% or more of the value of the security, then the ex-dividend date becomes the first business day after the payment date (see Rule 11140, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority [FINRA]). That distinction is lost when everything goes into one column.

The most bizarre errors come from payments that were never paid to the common shareholders.

AT&T has a bond listed on the New York Stock Exchange alongside their common shares. This is the 5.350% Global Notes due 2066 (TBB). The notes are sold in $25 pieces and pay interest quarterly. That works out to about 33 cents per note each quarter, and that interest payment showed up in AT&T's dividend history. AT&T's common dividend is 27.75 cents a quarter, or $1.11 per year. This meant that our forward dividend was $1.73 as we were including the bond interest. This was an increase of 56%. We found 27 rows like this at 15 companies. All of these came from notes or preferred shares listed.

Some errors come from company history. Dow and DuPont used to be one company called DowDuPont. In April 2019, they split Dow. In 2026, we had two payments of $0.35 under DuPont with the dates from Dow. Dow pays $0.35 per quarter. DuPont had paid $0.20 prior to a one-for-three reverse stock split in June 2026. We caught these before they appeared on a page.

Ticker reuse can also cause errors. Fiserv has never paid a dividend on their common shares. However, in our history we had 16 dividends between 2013 and 2017. This was because Fiserv used to trade under the ticker FI, which had earlier belonged to Frank’s International, an oil services company that traded under FI until they merged with Expro in 2021. We corrected this in September 2026.

You do not need any special tools as companies provide the correct information. Under SEC Rule 10b-17, issuers generally must provide notice of a dividend to FINRA or the appropriate national securities exchange at least 10 days before the record date. This is the date that determines who will receive the dividend. The amount of the dividend is public knowledge.

Look at the latest dividend announcement or quarterly report. Multiply the normal dividend by the number of payments per year. Divide this by the current share price. If this is very different to the yield you are seeing, then trust the filing. Look at whether the company has had a stock split, reverse stock split or spin-off in the last year. If you see a dividend cut immediately after a split, be wary. If you see a much higher yield than the company’s own five-year average, double-check. If the company states that they have never paid a dividend, but there is a dividend history, then it is not theirs.

Sometimes a high yield is correct. After correcting these issues, we had nine companies with a yield of over 9% from our 642 dividend payers. Eight of these were mortgage real estate investment trusts and business development companies. These are specifically designed to pay out the majority of their income. If you see a very high yield, double-check.

The figures shown from our data came from approximately 760 dividend-paying companies out of around 1,000 U.S. and European companies. This was taken from one commercial market data feed between August and November of 2026. We looked at each suspicious payment and compared them to the company’s filings with the SEC. This includes their annual and quarterly reports, current reports (Form 8-K) and attached press releases. Forward yield is calculated by taking the last normal dividend, multiplying by the number of payments per year and dividing by the share price. This is only one data feed and mainly relates to large companies. We have not tested other providers and cannot say how often they have the same issues.

I have no positions in any of the companies mentioned. Our site uses market data from a commercial provider.

Razvan Luca

Razvan Luca is the founder of Talval Research, an independent equity research platform. Talval values around 1000 US and European companies based on their own filings. It tracks dividends, institutional holdings and insider trading. He writes about the errors within the data.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

Did you know it’s estimated that more than 145 million U.S. adults (61%) have driven while drowsy at least once, and nearly 35 million do so monthly? For many, insufficient sleep from lots of different causes can increase drowsy driving risk, so it’s crucial to prioritize sleep and recognize when you’re not at your best to drive.

A fall-asleep crash can kill you or someone else in an instant. Four in 10 adults fail to recognize the basic warning signs of drowsy driving. That translates to about 108 million people in the U.S. These findings show a critical knowledge gap and emphasize that drivers need to recognize their bodies’ warning signs before it’s too late.

The National Sleep Foundation produces Drowsy Driving Prevention Week®, an annual campaign that educates the public about the importance of sleep for safe driving and helps drivers Sleep First. Drive Alert.® Preventing drowsy driving starts with the choices we make before getting behind the wheel, like prioritizing the sleep we need. These simple habits can help you, your family, and friends recognize the risks and make safer decisions on every drive.

Can New Technology Support Sleepy Drivers?

So, are systems that support driver safety already in many cars? Yes, the automotive industry keeps moving forward with innovative driver-alertness technologies. They’re also designed to detect signs of sleepiness and fatigue, support drivers, and are intended to help prevent drowsy driving before it leads to a crash. Agreement with these safety measures is growing among everyday drivers, with an estimated 91 million U.S. adult drivers backing requirements for alertness technology in all new vehicles. A similar number of people favor including sleep and drowsy-driving education in driver licensing. 

Although awareness of these systems isn’t low, with 58% of adults familiar with driver-alertness monitoring, only 31% have ever used the technology. That means there’s a big opportunity to increase understanding, access, and adoption. As automakers continue to develop and integrate these features that can help support drivers by detecting signs of sleepiness, it’s important to reassure consumers about any concerns, particularly since 62% of adults worry that data collected by alertness-monitoring systems could be misused. Combining advanced technology with public education and data privacy protections can continue to help build trust in technology that’s designed to keep roads safer for everyone.

Driving Towards a Safer Future

Warning signs of drowsy driving are often overlooked. If a driver doesn’t know them, they can put themselves and others on the road at risk. Basic warning signs include frequent blinking, nodding, difficulty keeping your eyes open, and drifting out of your lane. Recognizing these signals early is important because drowsiness can slow reaction times and increase the risk of a crash. If drivers notice any of these warning signs, they should pull over to a safe place and take a break before continuing their journey.

Sleep First. Drive Alert.®

Remember, the first and best step we can take to be alert behind the wheel is to get the sleep we need. When warning signs of drowsy driving or other risk factors are present, the safest decision is not to drive. That’s worth repeating: when in doubt, don’t drive. If you feel tired, struggle to keep your eyes open, or notice other signals, do not ignore them or assume you can push through them and drive alertly. Instead, it’s safer to reschedule your trip, delay your departure until you are alert, or change your driving plans to avoid putting yourself and others at risk. If you must travel, consider asking a trusted friend or family member to drive, take a taxi, or book a rideshare. 

Visit theNSF.org for more tips while you make your own plan to prevent drowsy driving, plus get NSF’s expert resources to help you be your Best Slept Self®. 

There’s only one National Sleep Foundation (NSF). NSF is an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to improving health and well-being through sleep education and advocacy. Founded in 1990, the NSF is committed to advancing excellence in sleep health theory, research and practice. For more than 35 years, NSF has promoted sleep health through expert recommendations, consensus guidelines, tech standards, and easy-to-use tips and tools to improve sleep.

Interview with Udaya Bhaskar Vemuri

Edited by Haley Spracale, Editor at Featured News · Nov 3, 2026

As an application security engineer/architect, my goal is always to build secure application designs and work toward a shift-left design model. Secure design reviews (SDR) help in designing secure architectures and identifying flaws early in the software development life cycle (SDLC) process. Designs should also be scalable to support future-oriented AI designs and other capabilities.

I started my career in security, and I came to love the work I did. Secure design reviews became especially interesting to me because they are the foundation of any application design. If an application's architecture or design is secure, the application tends to withstand attacks better than it would by relying only on front-end protections such as network firewalls and web application firewalls.

It’s been more than a year now. I was trying to solve the problem of keeping application security in step with the speed at which applications need to grow and scale their features to meet customer needs, so that security would never become a bottleneck for development teams. This is where AI-based reviews with human intervention help speed up reviews, prevent security from becoming a bottleneck, and ultimately deliver a secure application.

The AI model should have gone through its due diligence with the technology risk assessment teams and been approved by the compliance and security teams before you start sharing details with it. Nowadays, many major vendors offer on-premises options on an isolated network for your company, where they don't use your data to train the AI model. Once you have an approved AI model, you can share architecture diagrams and other details to conduct a secure design review.

So, once the application teams share the architecture diagrams, data flow diagrams, and C1, C2, and C3 diagrams, we can run them through the AI and ask it to provide evidence-based results and explain, for each vulnerability, why it considers the application vulnerable, what part of the design triggered the vulnerability, and why it assigned that severity. This way, you will get an evidence-based result from the AI, and then you can manually question each finding.

The configuration I set, or the prompt I give the AI, is to do SDR reviews using industry standards for findings and risk determination. Then, I send a list of questions to my internal app team to find out what kind of data the app handles and whether it is internally or externally facing. These are some generic questions that help the AI determine the risk. At the end of this process, there will be human validation.

I have found AI most valuable when reviewing complex designs and comparing them with previous design releases, as it can relate the overall architecture, data flow, and API or other integrations. It helps uncover issues related to authorization, authentication, integrations, and data handling if you provide the right prompt, ask the right questions, and give the AI the exact details it needs to evaluate the design.

I treat AI as a supporting tool for speeding up reviews rather than as a final decision-maker. A human always makes the final decisions. We go back and forth with questions to application teams to address assumptions AI makes when highlighting a finding. In this way, neither AI nor I make assumptions; instead, we deliver findings based on evidence. This also helps us understand the actual risk.

As I’ve said throughout., evidence-based output and human validation are the first and last guardrails I would put in place. AI might not understand the complete architecture. For example, it might flag a GDPR issue, but the compliance team may have already addressed it. Rather than sending the finding, first check with the app teams to see whether they have that data or those rules in place. This helps ensure a better secure design review using AI.

Yes, AI is developing at a fast pace, and application development is too. We can integrate with TFS or Git, read the full code, and ask the AI itself to give you the C1, C2, and C3 diagrams. Then you can send the diagrams to the app team to validate. In this way, the app team's burden is reduced, and they will be happy to collaborate. Happy exploring AI.

Udaya Bhaskar VemuriSenior Application Security Analyst

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

Edited by Adrian James, Editor at Featured News · Roundup by Featured · Nov 3, 2026

U.S. inflation heated up in September while consumer spending rose, according to MarketScreener.

Business owners and pricing leaders share the pricing adjustments they have made to protect margins without driving customers away.

Damien ZouaouiCo-Founder, Oakwell Beer Spa · Denver, CO

When supply and labor costs climbed we did not raise the prices that were listed on our website. We instead made changes to what was contained within the session (our products) by including our beer-infused cosmetics line as an added item for guests to take home after their visit. Additionally, we upgraded the robes that are provided to each guest during their stay. Lastly, we extended how long we allow guests to be checked into the facilities. So essentially guests received the same price when they booked online but now had more things available to them while they stayed.

What didn't work was testing a straight 10% lift on the booking page -- conversion softened inside a week. Bundling the value in instead of charging it at the door kept repeat bookings steady and quietly moved revenue per guest up, because retail attach climbed. The P&L reads like a price hike without the flinch.

David LoPrestiFounder & CEO, CompliCorp · Los Angeles, CA

I didn't want to just arbitrarily raise rates for clients especially when the core deliverables didn't justify it. So instead, I came up with adding a fast-tracking option. It was a much needed service for clients as they were constantly up against deadlines for submitting VPATs to Federal Agencies and Higher Ed Institutions. Procurement required our paperwork and millions were on the line.

Fast-tracking a project was clearly understood by clients as an upcharge; we had to shift around our workflow and project deadlines. And our standard timelines remained the same.

Fast-tracking protects our margins while not raising prices across the board. The choice is in the hands of our clients. That transparency was appreciated as they decide.

Natalia BassovaBusiness Owner, Resort Real Estate Inc · Breckenridge, CO

Reducing discretionary marketing costs. Whilst we increased our list of properties on the market we found that in some areas it became more difficult to pass the full cost back onto the client. We began to focus our marketing efforts by increasing the marketing on the channels that were consistently producing quality leads and removing those that weren't. This kept us profitable while at the same time keeping marketing costs down. Sellers are much more responsive to improvements in efficiency rather than extra charges.

Todd HarmonFounder, AURA Modern Home · Denver, CO

One way we protect margin is white-labeling products. Instead of selling a piece under a brand name that customers can price-compare across a dozen sites, we sell it under our own presentation, so the comparison isn't one click away.

Really savvy customers can figure out that you white-labeled something, but that's the 20%. The other 80% see what's on your website, like it, buy it, and don't want to shop around. That's especially true with higher-end customers buying higher-end, dark luxury pieces. Their time is valuable, and they're not going to spend hours hunting for a 5% or 10% discount.

So we keep our margin without racing competitors on price, and the customers we want still buy.

Carmelo ZaffaranaFounder & CEO, Lucernel LLC

With U.S. inflation rising, I did something that might sound counterintuitive: I changed my prices. Not by lowering them, but by raising them, through a series of A/B tests.

In one of my apps, I used to offer a 3-day free trial on both the monthly and the annual plan. We got lots of trials and more users, sure, but revenue didn't grow. Many people dropped off during the trial, and some even left negative reviews.

So I said: let's go weekly and annual, with a hard paywall (you have to pay to get into the app; before, it was soft because of the free trial but it's not always worth, if you want to go free / free trial, it's better if you are costs are low or you are VC-funded). I tracked the results for a week, but the first day already confirmed I'd made the right call.

Profit went up 173%. I cut out the users (and emails) who weren't really interested, and the app now reaches only highly motivated people who actually need what I offer. Me happy, customers happy.

It's not something you can always do. It depends on your product and your market. In my case, iOS in the U.S., people are far more willing to pay than in my home country, Italy, or in other European countries.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

Edited by Adrian James, Editor at Featured News · Roundup by Featured · Nov 3, 2026

AOL reported that Villa Vie Odyssey passengers were stranded in Cambodia after fuel costs disrupted the long-term cruise.

Business operators share contingency-planning practices they use to support customers when services are suddenly suspended.

Taylor HornCo-founders, Rents4Baby · Sacramento, California

At Rents4Baby, we do whatever we can to fulfill an order, starting with another rental partner or an item substitution. If neither works, we often rent through a direct competitor. We would rather get the family what they need and keep their trust, especially when it involves sleep or safety equipment like a crib or car seat.

Sometimes we send a Target gift card or order directly from a local store for same-day delivery to the family’s destination. We have built a strong network of rental partners whose values align with ours and who don’t want to leave a family stranded.

In one instance, an expensive bassinet broke 24 hours before an order, and we couldn’t get another in time from a rental partner or the manufacturer. We offered an alternative bassinet, but the customer declined.

Todd HarmonFounder, AURA Modern Home · Denver, Colorado

Our contingency practice starts before anything goes wrong: we set customer expectations up front with delivery date ranges that have a little padding built in. When things shift a few days, we've already accounted for it from day one, so we don't say anything.

When a manufacturer delays an item, we wait a few days to see if the delay changes. Once we know it's firm, we update the customer with their new tracking or shipping information. Manufacturers usually offer full refunds when something is backordered much longer than expected, but we still try to make it right for the customer.

Recently a customer's bed was supposed to come back in stock. The manufacturer didn't get the shipment, and it was going to be two months late, so we offered the customer a refund. That's hard to do, because we pay about 3% on the credit card charge and another 3% on the refund. But it's the right thing to do. We couldn't meet the date we gave them, so that's our fault.

Mike BruceBrand Growth Architect and Consultant, Founder, Mike Bruce Design · Abuja, Nigeria

The practice I rely on is early, transparent communication, backed by compensation. When we realise a couple of days before a deadline that we can't meet it, we email the client straight away. We explain the reasons, give them the earliest new date we can commit to, and offer something free, on the house. Clients want transparency. When you aren't hiding anything, people are very understanding. That has been my experience.

I have also had to deal with a physical disruption. Our facility once lost power for two to three weeks. Our inverter system usually lasts about two days, and once that was used up, the power went out. We moved into another facility temporarily, booked for a couple of weeks, so that we could finish and submit our clients' projects.

Kiragu MainaDeveloper & Network Engineer, FyberPay · Nairobi, Kenya

Our hosting provider posted on their status page that they would reboot some or all of their servers in the coming days, but they didn't say exactly when. We couldn't plan around it, so we held on. The reboot came at a critical time, when most of our ISPs were online, and took our service down for about 20 minutes. The first sign was a call from one of our ISPs asking if everything was okay and why their customers couldn't get online. We immediately updated all our customers through our notification channels and explained it was a security reboot. With AI, flaws like these will keep turning up, so these reboots will keep happening.

So we fixed the root problem. Internet access is now a basic service, like water, and you cannot rely on one server. We now run three servers in different locations: two run the actual services and the third acts as a witness. Two people with equal rights can't settle a vote, but three can. If one fails, another picks it up.

If you provide a critical service, run more than two nodes, and have fallbacks.

Darryl StevensFounder & CEO, DIGITECH · Austin, Texas

Do not wait until after a disruption to improve your communications. Instead, test your communications plan twice yearly in tabletop exercises.

Be proactive by providing efficient rescheduling options to retain your customers and simultaneously provide your clients with a smooth experience. After all, your customers want to know someone is working on their problem. If the organization's decision maker is unavailable or incapacitated, is there clear guidance that indicates who is authorized to perform those duties, roles, and responsibilities? For complex issues that can't be resolved immediately, provide the customer with a clear action plan and a realistic timeline for the next update.

Create a status page to act as a central resource for updates. In addition, make sure that your lines of communication are well and truly open (and that your customers know that they're open). Once the systems are in place, the company should inform various stakeholders, in normal times, where to go for information during outages.

Carmelo ZaffaranaFounder & CEO, Lucernel LLC · Syracuse, Sicily

When it comes to customer support, when a service goes down, there are actually some very simple things you can do:

1. Add a status page, where it pings the service and shows the uptime. By doing this, the user can check the status themselves (Fun fact: did you know that 99.90% uptime means the service is offline for almost 9 hours a year? It seems like a little, but it's actually a lot).

2. Set up automatic routing for incoming emails: recent AI models based on the System One approach are becoming popular. They're decision-making models that don't generate any text, but calculate probabilities, yes/no decisions, scores and categories.

For an intelligent system, like I've done in my services at Lucernel, you can make it so that every email, when it arrives, passes through the System One model (Jev is the famous one at the moment), and by putting all the departments in the request, you can make it go to the most appropriate department, like Support.

Then, within Support, you integrate another request, where you analyze the type of inquiry. If, for example, it's a "the page won't load" issue, you can integrate the system that checks the status of the services and send an automatic email saying that there are service disruptions and to check the status page.

It sounds difficult, but it's actually a very easy thing to do!

3. (Not recommended anymore) Do it the old-fashioned way, where, in the automatic email, you add that there are currently service disruptions and to check the status page.

The typical automatic email: "Your request has been received and you will get a response as soon as possible", and below that, also the current status of the service.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

In the memo, “The Open Frontier: How America Wins the AI Diffusion Race,” SCSP staff explained that open models will help determine which technology ecosystem becomes the global default. Although the U.S. led the world in wireless research, Huawei won the diffusion race and connected much of the globe by out-competing on cost, financing, and speed of deployment, and China is implementing a similar strategy with AI. Its capable, low-cost, downloadable models are drawing developers: the memo notes that developer adoption has shifted measurably toward Chinese open models. The advantage, the memo says, comes not from openness itself but from the adoption it enables.

The United States needs a strategy that builds on its distinctive strengths. While there are trust and security concerns regarding Chinese open models, the American response should be to strengthen its own open model ecosystem, according to the memo. Currently, leading U.S. frontier laboratories monetize access through subscriptions, enterprise products, and managed platforms. But a strong American strategy should also support open model developers and the researchers, startups, and businesses that build on their work.

The memo outlines three lines of effort:

● Build the AI Ecosystem America Can Win. Expanding access to compute, capital, and shared infrastructure will support the development of a thriving open AI ecosystem. Researchers, startups, and governments can then inspect, adapt, and trust American models.

● Turn Leadership into Adoption. Fund tools that show a model works for its purpose, aggregate and share working deployments, and measure cost, time to complete, and mission outcomes to accelerate adoption of American AI across society.

● Govern American AI Without Making It Inaccessible. Govern risk based on what models can do, how they are used, and their impacts and outcomes, not simply whether their weights are public.

Visit scsp.ai to learn more and to read the full report.

NMSC is the most common cancer in the United States, yet the country lacks a comprehensive system for tracking its two most common forms: basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma.

For more than a decade, healthcare organizations have said that some 3.3 million Americans are diagnosed with NMSC annually, but that figure stems from research published in 2015 using data collected in 2012.

A new analysis by SkinCure Oncology suggests that approximately 4.7 million Americans are now diagnosed annually — 42 percent more than previously reported. That's nearly 13,000 individuals every day.

While highly treatable when detected early, NMSC is a serious disease that can cause significant tissue damage, disfigurement and, in some cases, life-threatening complications.

"Skin cancer deserves far more attention than it receives," said Kerwin Brandt, CEO of SkinCure Oncology. "Accurate information about the millions of Americans affected each year is essential to improving prevention, early detection, access to treatment and patient outcomes." The company is calling for the establishment of a national database to track the disease.

NMSC disproportionately affects older Americans. Since 2012, the U.S. population aged 65 and older has grown nearly 50 percent, reaching roughly 64 million in 2026. SkinCure Oncology's updated estimate takes into account this demographic shift, as well as historical growth in diagnoses, and independent federal healthcare survey data. 

As the number of Americans affected by skin cancer has grown, treatment options have also advanced. Surgery, including Mohs micrographic surgery, remains an effective and widely used treatment, but for appropriate patients, nonsurgical alternatives offer equally impressive results with no cutting, pain or need for subsequent cosmetic surgery.

One established approach, Image-Guided Superficial Radiation Therapy (IGSRT), combines low-energy X-rays with high-resolution ultrasound imaging to treat skin cancer without surgery. Published clinical studies involving thousands of early-stage lesions have reported local control rates exceeding 99 percent.

GentleCure®, offered through participating dermatology practices by SkinCure Oncology, incorporates IGSRT into a comprehensive, cancer center-level model of care delivered in the dermatologist's office.

Despite such advances, many patients still don’t learn about nonsurgical alternatives unless they ask. "Patients deserve to know all their treatment options," Brandt said. "Our goal is to ensure patients fully understand their options, and encourage them to work with their physicians to select the optimum approach."

For more information about nonsurgical skin cancer treatment options, and to find the nearest provider of the GentleCure Experience℠, visit GentleCure.com.

It’s called healthcare sharing, a nonprofit model where members pay a monthly contribution instead of a premium, and those contributions go toward covering each other’s eligible medical expenses. The concept has existed for more than 40 years, and it’s grown fast in recent years: from 160,000 participants in 2014 to an estimated 1.7 million today, largely as people search for ways to keep more of their paycheck without losing access to quality care.

Here’s how it works in practice. Members present a membership card at the doctor’s office and pay a set fee at the time of visit, similar to a copay. The healthcare sharing organization then reviews the bill and sends payment directly to the provider once the household has met a set threshold, similar to a deductible. What sets healthcare sharing apart from a premium is where the money goes: into an account used to pay other members’ medical needs, rather than into an insurance company contract.

For families comparing costs, the number that matters most isn’t the monthly amount alone. It’s the total a household might owe in a high-use year: deductibles, copays, prescriptions, and everything in between. Healthcare sharing tends to pencil out on the monthly side, with contributions typically running 30 to 60 percent below comparable traditional coverage, according to WeShare Health, a nonprofit healthcare sharing organization that has served more than 100,000 members nationwide.

“People assume affordable means settling for less,” said Christopher Jin, founder and CEO of WeShare Health, who spent over two decades in the insurance industry before starting the organization. “It doesn’t have to be that way. Lower cost and real access to quality care aren’t mutually exclusive.”

Healthcare sharing isn’t insurance and doesn’t guarantee payment of medical bills, so people weighing the option should still do their homework. Not every organization structures things the same way, and coverage details, from pre-existing conditions to prescription rules, vary by organization. It’s recommended to confirm an organization’s nonprofit status, request its guidelines in writing before enrolling, and read independent reviews rather than relying on marketing materials alone.

For individuals and households priced out of traditional coverage, it’s a reminder that the sticker price on a monthly bill isn’t the only option on the table. Sometimes the smartest way to save isn’t finding a cheaper version of the same insurance plan. It’s realizing there was a different option all along.

Learn more at wesharehealth.org.

“The Final Second” by Jim De La Vega

Executing a serial killer ought to close the case for good. But just after Eddie Ray Calhoone is put to death, Sheriff Parker Chord receives a human eye — and a message claiming the authorities executed an innocent man. Then another victim turns up bearing the Blood Smile Killer’s signature.

Parker calls his estranged sister, forensic psychologist Dr. Cassidy Chord, back to Georgia. With the killer announcing deadlines for more murders, Cassidy must reconsider the original evidence while navigating political interference and threats against those closest to the investigation. But every clue brings another question: is Cassidy closing in, or following the killer’s script?

De La Vega places twists and reversals with precision, turning apparent breakthroughs into fresh cause for alarm. A resourceful heroine, fiendishly inventive plotting and irreverent Southern humor make this second installment in the Mind Hunter series — equally welcoming to newcomers — a particularly entertaining contest of wits.

Purchase at https://tinyurl.com/the-final-second. 

“A Personal Mistake” by Larry Shields

Jeremy Walker has come a long way from a childhood marked by bullying, loss and a close friendship with Robin Simon. Now running a growing AI consulting firm, he faces a question success can’t answer: If machines learn from humanity’s prejudices, violence and competitive instincts, can we teach them to do better?

His search reconnects him with Robin, now an MIT sociology professor — and the woman he once brushed aside. As old feelings resurface and pressures on his marriage, family and business mount, one mistake threatens the life Jeremy has worked so hard to build.

Shields explores ambition, grief and love without judging his characters’ morally complicated choices. Their personal struggles unfold as a technological future emerges, promising vast wealth for some while threatening the livelihoods of others.

“A fraught lifelong friendship between a man and a woman anchors this ambitious novel of ideas,” writes Kirkus Reviews, adding, “Shields’ depiction of AI’s effects is wonderfully cleareyed.”

Purchase at https://tinyurl.com/a-personal-mistake.

“Sugar Sand Land” by Patricia Leavy

Emerson Blue makes a fortune being watched. Renn Walker has spent years trying to disappear.

At 28, the reality-star-turned-influencer is the second most-followed celebrity on social media. Forty-eight-year-old Renn is a Grammy-winning country singer whose career collapsed following allegations of sexual misconduct. When they meet, their attraction is immediate. So is the public’s interest.

As their unlikely romance develops, Emerson and Renn discover how much their carefully managed images conceal. She helps him find his way back to his art; he offers her a chance to step away from the performance. But finding privacy — and trusting someone with what they’ve kept hidden — comes with complications.

Patricia Leavy’s “Sugar Sand Land” pairs a steamy celebrity romance with questions about reputation, loss and second chances. Beneath the glamour is a timely question: How much can we really know about people whose lives we follow on a screen?

Purchase at https://tinyurl.com/sugar-sand-land-patricia-leavy.

“Scenes of Visionary Enchantment: The Geology of the Lewis and Clark Expedition” by John W. Jengo

Lewis and Clark charted rivers and crossed mountains, but how well did they understand the ground beneath their feet? Better than some scholars have suggested, geologist John W. Jengo argues in this exploration of the expedition’s overlooked scientific work.

Traveling by canoe, kayak, bike and on foot, Jengo followed portions of the explorers’ route across the continent to compare their journal entries with the landscapes they described. His research reveals the accuracy and detail of their geological observations, viewed through the scientific knowledge available in the early 1800s.

Along the way, readers discover the forces and catastrophic events that shaped the terrain, encounter Native American pictographs and oral histories, and meet pioneering geologists whose contributions have largely been forgotten. Jengo even tracks the expedition’s scattered rock, mineral and fossil specimens to Philadelphia and Paris. The result invites history buffs, rockhounds and curious travelers to see a familiar American journey through the geology along its path.

Purchase at https://tinyurl.com/visionary-enchantment. 

Edited by Jenn Moon, Editor at Featured News · Oct 30, 2026

You hear leaders say it constantly: As you move up, you have to become more strategic and less tactical. I see the point, but at face value it’s misleading in a way that causes real problems. Yes, you have to become more strategic. That’s a given. But you absolutely do not have to become less tactical. I’d argue you should be getting more technical as your career advances.

It’s an easy trap to fall for. As you progress in your career, you find yourself in more meetings, making bigger decisions, with little to no expectation of being on the floor more than a few minutes a day. And when you’re in the trap, you will still be slammed with work, thus making you feel productive.

I fell into this trap as a senior operations manager running outbound for a 1.3-million-square-foot warehouse. I took the advice. More planning, less floor time. And then a tactical problem arrived: The move to one-day shipping dramatically changed how the ship docks had to operate, and nobody had a game plan. I had very technical area managers (AMs) and operations managers (OMs), but this was a new problem, and they weren’t cracking it.

The ship dock issues were impacting every other department, including my inbound counterparts. The team was looking for answers and getting frustrated by a feeling that their hard work was not leading to results.

Meanwhile I was nearly oblivious, buried in admin work, trying to be more “strategic.” What I actually had to do was sit on the ship dock for a month and learn the process intimately. How the hostlers operated the yard; how the sorter read the hundreds of scan locations; what time of day each specific zip code volume started to hit. Once I understood it, I could build the game plan.

It worked so well I was asked to spread it across the network, which led to promotions and a significant increase in authority.

I carried that for the rest of my career. No matter my position, I knew the floor work as well as or better than the hourly associates performing it. It was transformative. Yes, it was extra work. But I knew what my team was going through. I solved problems they couldn’t, or hadn’t thought of. And I knew when someone was pulling the wool over my eyes, which is a hidden but very important part of this.

So how do you balance the two? How do you stay tactical without micromanaging your team? The answer is to simply be knowledgeable. Understand how every system works. Be able to perform the full role of every position on the floor. Know what the data is telling you. When you have the knowledge of how things work, you know if your team is performing the job correctly or not. If they are, it’s easy to give them space. If they aren’t, it’s an easy conversation and doesn’t feel like micromanaging.

The take: When you’re a strategic leader facing a tactical problem — congratulations, you’re a tactical leader again. You do not get less tactical as you get more strategic. You do both.

Ben Williams

Ben Williams is the CEO & Principal Consultant at OpsStack Solutions, which helps small and midsize warehouse, fulfillment, and distribution operations find the constraints draining their margin. A Marine Corps veteran, he spent roughly 15 years leading large-scale operations, including teams of 800+ associates and initiatives spanning 80+ facilities.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

Interview with Dr. Igor Ivitskiy PhD

Edited by Haley Spracale, Editor at Featured News · Oct 30, 2026

I face this all the time in audits. This is one of the main reasons clients come to me for audits. They come with roughly the following request: “Everything is perfect. My agency, my contractor, and my advertising department send perfect reports. Everything is just unbelievably great, but the money isn’t increasing and the business isn’t growing. Find the reason.”

In all these accounts, when you clean them up, the results take off. And the owner is in shock because they spend exactly the same amount on marketing and advertising but get more results.

I had a small online store. Then I opened Google Ads. Of course, I chose general keywords like “microwave,” “electric kettle,” and “hair dryer.” I don’t think I even wrote any ads. I copied them from the catalog pages of my online store. Do you know what my first ads looked like? The headline was something like “All microwaves,” and the ad text said, “A microwave is a device designed for heating food.” They were terrible ads. Of course, I wasted money. I got a lot of clicks, but I didn’t know that you need to look at search queries and that relevance matters. I looked at the keyword “microwave”: a lot of money wasted, a lot of clicks, and not one sale. I decided that Google Ads didn’t work.

Previously, I worked in pure mathematical modeling. Thousands of scientists work in this field all over the planet. There, my approach wasn’t unique; I was one of thousands. Then I moved into marketing. I didn’t betray science; I changed laboratories. I do the same science in the laboratory of business, money, and advertising. I work a lot with small and medium-sized businesses.

At one conference, a guy was giving a talk, and he said, “Our ROAS, the return on the money put into advertising, was 19,000%.”

Honestly, I was shocked. I didn’t know what you would need to sell to achieve a 19,000% ROAS. I thought, “Maybe this is a sweet spot. Maybe I need to go into this field.”

Then he said roughly the following: “We set up advertising for a client, and someone whose click we paid $1 for bought goods. This means we were able to give the client a ROAS of 19,000%.”

The hall just exploded with applause, and after the conference, everyone came up to this guy and asked for his contact information and how to work with him.

I was laughing because how can you attribute a sale to one click? I’m sure that the ad campaign had not just one click, but thousands of clicks, maybe tens of thousands. Most likely, there were 2,000 clicks at $1 each, and you need to compare the profit not to $1, but to the $2,000 spent on the whole campaign. But nobody mentions this.

One of my businesses is an online school. People register for a webinar, and after the webinar, they buy the course. I knew that 40% of registrants attended the webinar and that 6% of attendees bought the course.

Then I started testing additional advertising channels. I launched the updated Google inventory. I think Performance Max had just appeared; this was four or five years ago. It gave me conversions at eight times less than the usual cost, and I felt like I had hit the jackpot. Although I’m a mathematician, I have a major personal flaw: I like to count money I haven’t earned yet. In my mind, I was already buying myself a new car. Later, it turned out that the numbers were misleading.

I should have at least checked attendance. Fewer than 1% of these leads attended the webinar, compared with the usual 40%. I moved the entire budget there. It was only when my profit fell dramatically a month later that I realized something was wrong. I started looking at attendance by channel and saw that these were just dead leads. Then I started counting not just webinar registrations as conversions, but also webinar attendance, email confirmation, or a visit to Telegram or ManyChat after registration. And this worked well.

The company had advertising budgets of $5–6 million a month and was optimizing for conversions. On paper, everything looked good—too good. They had a separate person on staff whose job was to set up and track conversions. The absurd thing was that I went in and looked at his purchase conversions. There were roughly hundreds of thousands.

Then I overheard the owner say, “Tens of thousands of purchases a month.” I said, “Wait, hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands?” The owner said, “If we had hundreds of thousands, I would be the richest man on the planet.” He wasn’t looking at the absolute number of conversions; he mostly looked at relative numbers: the conversion rate and the cost per conversion. He liked everything.

It turned out that this person had set the conversion action to trigger not when a payment was made, but when someone clicked the payment button. There is a saying that there is nothing in the world more permanent than the temporary. He set it up temporarily, forgot about it, and everything kept running for months. When there is a chain of dependencies, someone waits for an answer from someone else and decides to do something temporarily while waiting. Then the answer doesn’t come, or it comes but goes unnoticed. And what was temporary becomes permanent. This is a common problem.

I had a client. I looked at the account, and he said, "Our margin is colossal. We pay $20 for a client in Google and get $1,000 of profit from a client." I said, "Why don't you increase your cost per conversion fivefold—your target cost per acquisition (Target CPA)? Right now, your Target CPA is $20, but you can afford $100." He said, "I can." I said, "What stops you from paying $100 for one lead instead of $20?" He said, "It is expensive." I said, "Expensive for whom? You have $980 of net profit. If you pay $100 to earn the same $1,000, your profit will fall from $980 to $900, so net profit falls by about 8%. And the number of clients will not be 100 but 1,000. Net profit will grow almost tenfold."

A few months later, we had a call with the client, and he said, "The best decision in my business was to just increase the budget and the cost per lead." He had some kind of mental ceiling, a mental wall, that made him think more than $20 was expensive. I just explained to him that if there is room, why not? He said, "We grew so much that now we are the biggest in the market."

Nobody segments by conversion. They look at the number and believe that number, but when you segment, right away there are a lot of questions.

I say, “Look, you have 20. 20 what? Conversions. Which ones?” It is the same as asking, “What is 5 pineapples?” How much is 5 pineapples plus 5 watermelons, plus 5 oranges, plus 5 apples? The person says, “It will be 20.” I say, “20 what?” He says, “Fruits.” I say, “OK. How much is 5 chairs plus 5 shirts, plus 5 cats, plus 5 kilograms of flour?” He says, “It will be 20.” I say, “20 what?” “Kilograms of animals.”

Dr. Igor Ivitskiy PhDFounder at Doctor Ads

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

Employers need graduates who can solve complex problems, lead teams and make sound decisions under pressure. Yet a college degree alone doesn't guarantee those abilities—or the moral judgment to use them responsibly.

Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is challenging the direction of higher education. Recently featured in national media for its visionary approach, the Christ-first university is restoring what families and employers should expect from a college education: morally grounded, market-ready graduates and a radically affordable path to a degree. 

Preparing Graduates to Innovate and Lead

At Cornerstone, students explore life's biggest questions while preparing to serve their professions and communities.

Introduced in fall 2026, The Cornerstone Core™ equips every undergraduate with three foundations:

● Christian worldview and moral judgment. Applying Biblical truth to real-world decisions.

● Wisdom of the American Experience. Understanding America's founding principles and economic freedom.

● Marketplace intelligence and innovation. Developing analytical reasoning and AI literacy to judge what should be done, not simply what can be done.

Every traditional undergraduate completes an internship or practicum, while CU LEAD develops leadership through experience.

The results: 96% of business graduates and 97% of health, science and technology graduates enter employment or graduate school within six months.

Higher Education Should Be Radically More Affordable

Cornerstone is also challenging the cost of college. The university reduced on-campus tuition by 22% annually, freezing that rate through 2027–28, making its private college experience often just as affordable as public universities. Importantly, 100% of traditional undergraduates receive aid.

For students seeking greater flexibility, Cornerstone offers online degrees and innovative SOAR™ smartphone-delivered business programs, with tuition 50% lower than traditional on-campus programs. Students can advance their careers and a Christ-centered education.

Preparing Students to Engage the World

Cornerstone prepares students to confront the issues shaping America—from artificial intelligence and economic freedom to family stability and cultural division—applying a Christian worldview of hope and Christ-centered purpose.

As part of this distinctive curriculum, students examine competing ideas and deeply consider the most challenging issues they will face in the real world through Wisdom Conversations, Christ & Culture Week and the Wisdom & Influence podcast, each bringing national leaders into respectfully engaging discussions.

The promise of a Cornerstone education is graduates who not only excel in their professions but also have the wisdom and courage to lead, serve others and strengthen the communities that depend on them. 

Explore The Cornerstone Core™, The Cornerstone Advantage® and degree programs.

By Toni Kiss

Edited by Jenn Moon, Editor at Featured News · Oct 29, 2026

The first example that comes to my mind is a community website for architects and interior designers. It's a platform similar to Pinterest, with interior design projects. Another team had already optimized it: They installed a cache and made a dozen changes, in order to make it quicker. Still, when we started to work on it in September 2026, the page with the projects took 6.1 seconds to answer from the server. The reason: The projects were shown in a new random order for every visitor, so the page was excluded from the cache and built from scratch on every visit.

We changed the order so it rotates once a day, not on every visit. Every project still gets its turn at the top, but now the page can be cached. We measured the same metric twice on Sept. 23, 2026: the server response time, meaning the time until the first byte of the page reaches the browser. Before the change, uncached: 6.1 seconds. After the change, served from the cache: 0.06 seconds. The cache did the speed-up; the change in the order is what let the page into the cache.

They had optimized it, but they hadn't looked at the real usage—the daily usage on phones, not only the lab test. What we did wasn't only optimizing, it was a change of perspective. No score tells you that a random order keeps your page out of the cache.

On our own website, when we made our audit on Aug. 1, 2026, we had a really low mobile score of 67 in Google Lighthouse and a Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), the time until the main content shows up, of eight seconds, the average of four tests. Our results varied between 3.3 and 9.3 seconds. With the advertising pixels blocked, we had a score of 81 and an LCP of 3.7 seconds. The pixels weighed around 427 kilobytes.

In the lab, the scores were showing bad results, but in real daily usage the site was okay. In our experience, there is often a difference between the lab score and the real field, because Lighthouse simulates a phone on a slow connection, and many visitors have a faster one.

We ran more tests, and we found that the cookie plugin was active but wasn't blocking the pixels. Once we discovered that, we made the change, and after the fix the pixels waited for consent in 10 out of 10 test runs.

In the speed audits we run for our clients, we felt there was a big difference between the lab score and the real-life experience. That's why we ran our own research, The Website Gap, published by Clan of Creators in October 2026, to confirm our hunch, or to learn from it.

We tested 100 business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service (SaaS) websites, 50 in the U.S. and 50 in the U.K. We took companies with roughly 50 to 1,000 employees from public growth lists, like the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and the Sunday Times Tech Track, wrote our criteria before we started, and picked at random among the companies that met them. None of them are our clients. We collected all the data on Oct. 10 and 11, 2026: the homepage tests, the network checks and the questions to the artificial intelligence (AI) assistants. We tested each homepage once in Lighthouse, on a simulated phone, and took the real-user data from Google's Chrome User Experience Report, which covers the 28 days before collection. The full method is in the report.

One thing to know before the numbers: the lab test measures only the homepage, while the Chrome data from real users covers the whole domain, all the pages together. So the two are not directly comparable. They are two different views of the same website.

In our research, the median homepage took 12.2 seconds to show its main content in the lab. For real Chrome users on phones, the median was 2.2 seconds across the whole domain. In the lab, 88 of 99 homepages had a "poor" Largest Contentful Paint result, over four seconds. In the real-user data, 63 of 97 websites had a "good" Largest Contentful Paint result, under 2.5 seconds for three out of four visits. That is Google's rating for this one metric, not a verdict on the websites overall.

So for many of these websites, the lab score makes them look slower than they feel to real visitors. Loading time is only one part of the experience, though. A fast page can still confuse a visitor or lose them somewhere else.

At the end of the day, we need to find the balance between the lab score, which scans the scripts, the pictures and everything, and the real usage: how the website works for a normal user, not only in the lab.

In our research, 39 of 100 homepages sent data to LinkedIn or Meta before anyone touched the cookie banner, and 31 of them had a consent platform installed.

We saw the same problem closer to home. On our own website, the banner was there, but the pixels didn't wait for it. On the community website above, there was no banner at all. On 31 of the 39 SaaS websites, the banner was there, but the pixel didn't wait for any approval or refusal. The pixel started right after you landed on the website.

The two-minute test: Open a private window, like an incognito window. Open the inspect tool in Chrome and go to the network tab. Don't touch the banner, and you can easily see what data is leaving the website you want to test.

We report what the browser sent, not whether it is lawful.

In our research, only 33 of 98 homepage headlines (the H1, the main heading of the page) name the product type, like "contract management software." The other 65 don't. The page title, the one in the browser tab, names the product type on 68 of 98 websites. The information exists, but it's missing from the H1. And 55 of 98 say in the first lines who the product is for.

In my experience, teams often choose a slogan for the headline to sound premium, instead of being practical and straight to the point. But we are living in a world where being practical and straight to the point saves time. We need a mind shift to understand that being practical is not bad. It can be good, because you are saving time for your users.

In our research, when we asked AI assistants about each company's exact niche, at least one of them recommended 93 of the 100 companies. When we asked about the broad category, only 31. On the niche questions, ChatGPT mentioned 83 companies, Gemini 84 and Perplexity 63.

This covers our questions and these 100 companies, not every product or every way of asking. But the pattern was clear: The assistants found most of these companies when the question was specific, and missed most of them when it was broad. Companies need to think about their target, the people they want to reach, and the words those people use when they search.

Asked the same question twice, ChatGPT changed its answer for 30 of 100 companies. So is ChatGPT recommending you? One check is a sample, not a measurement. Ask twice before you draw a conclusion.

Coming back to the community website: On Sept. 23, 2026, before we started, its homepage had a Lighthouse mobile score of 69, and the main content showed up after 13.6 seconds on a simulated phone. After our changes, measured the same way on the same day, the score went up to 98 and the main content showed up after 2.2 seconds.

But there is a catch. There is a part the tools don't really catch, or that is hard to find. In the season when they opened registrations for their yearly projects contest, a new version of PHP, the programming language the site runs on, broke the forms: contest registrations, project uploads and login returned errors. The audit tool didn't catch it. The audit tool isn't looking at the big picture. It only looks at the lab test and at what files are sent or loaded. It's not looking at the entire server.

That's why it's great to use Lighthouse to find the heavy scripts and so on, but these tools measure what's easy to measure. A person sees the real cost, how each thing is used, how to fix it and what needs to be fixed first, because it's also a perception thing.

If you have one hour this month, check these by hand on your own website:

• Test your lead forms once a month. Sometimes a version changes, a plugin comes in, an update, and so on.

• Open your website in incognito mode, open the inspect tool, go to the network tab and see what your site is really sending, and where.

• Check the speed in Search Console before the Lighthouse score (review the Core Web Vitals report).

• Read your H1 without context. Would a stranger know what you are selling, based only on the H1?

• Search for your niche with the words your buyers use to find software or tools like yours, and try it twice to see how the assistants really react.

• Look at the review websites in your category. In our research, 74% of Perplexity's recommendation answers linked to review and comparison websites like G2 and Capterra. That was an early, exploratory read, and it doesn't prove that a profile there gets you recommended. It only shows where the assistants were looking when they answered.

Check not only with tools: Check the real experience, the human experience on the website. It's not all about tools. It's also about how it feels and how it lands on the end user's screen.

Toni Kiss

Toni Kiss is the co-founder and creative director of Clan of Creators, an independent creative agency that works on brand, web, video and campaigns for companies in Europe and the US. Toni leads the agency's creative direction and design work. Clan of Creators also publishes The Website Gap, a research series on how business websites perform for real visitors.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

By Dr. Igor Ivitskiy PhD

Edited by Jenn Moon, Editor at Featured News · Oct 29, 2026

Why did I start to study sales myself? I have worked on the profitability of Google advertising since 2006. But every time I worked with large clients, I saw a repeating pattern: The advertising looked well set up, exact keywords, all the settings, careful targeting, target leads come at a good price, everything is great. And then the client says that everything is great, but they will cut the budget. I ask why. Because the profit stays in the same place.

Leads come, but the cash does not grow. And what usually comes to people's heads? This is really my experience, what came to me first. If sales are bad, then the managers are bad, and we need to replace the managers. We fire some, new ones come, and they repeat the same mistakes. Then comes the thought that the price is probably too high, so let's lower the price. As a result, the margin falls, the problem stays, and the profit is even smaller. Then, again my experience: A few years ago someone told me that my sales scripts were bad. We hired a sales script expert and paid a five-figure sum in dollars.

The first thing that always came to my head as a business owner: I will go and listen to the calls. I turned on the phone system and started to listen. I listen, and anger, of course, comes over me right away. I start to look into the customer relationship management (CRM) system. Anger again. This one did not fill in the card. This one forgot to move the deal to the next stage. This one put a plus sign in the CRM instead of a comment about the call.

To find where exactly the clients and the money are lost, you need to step outside a little, break the whole client path into atoms, count the conversion at each stage and compare what the managers tell you with what really happens. So in my online school, we started to count.

We record our sales calls. From March 11 to July 25, 2026, our phone system logged 11,781 calls of 45 seconds or longer. Of them, 8,674 had a recording, and we transcribed 8,518, or 98% of the recorded calls. The other 3,107 calls had no recording file. They came from every manager and every month, and we found no single cause. The 906 people who had only such calls bought less often: 1.4%, against 3.1% for people with a recorded call. Because of this difference, our transcript results may not represent all callers. Our first count began with every call followed by a payment within 14 days, so it had too many buyers. This count uses every transcribed call.

We matched each call to purchases in our CRM by client. The calls covered 4,921 people, and 154 of them paid within 14 days after a call. That is 3.1%, our base rate. Every "times the base rate" below uses it. Each person counts once, even after several calls. For a buyer, we only count what was said before the payment.

We found phrases with keyword rules in Ukrainian and Russian. "I'll think about it" is our label for a group of similar remarks, not a quote. For it, two artificial intelligence (AI) models reread all 363 matches, and a third settled the 41 cases where they disagreed. A check of 50 random remarks found 48 labeled right. The rules for price and for split payments were right in 27 and 29 of 30 random checks.

These are links between words and sales, not proof that the words caused the sales.

I have taken several sales courses and several trainings, and there, work with objections is always like the cornerstone. But in my experience, people rarely state their real objections directly. They say something like: "No, it's expensive, it's complicated, I'll think about it." I can't count how many times I, as a client, said the first time that I would think about it, that it was not interesting. And then, if an experienced manager started to talk with me, we found that I was not interested because I did not trust them. Then they gave me more information, and often I agreed.

Our calls pointed the same way. From March to July 2026, 208 people put off the decision with "I'll think about it" or similar words. Of them, 29 later bought, or 13.9%. Most did not, but that is about four and a half times the base rate. The gap held in calls of two minutes and longer and for each of the five managers with enough people to compare (at least 20 with the phrase and 50 without).

But look at how some managers work. He sits at the phone, the CRM is in front of his eyes, and the person says that he will think about it. And he, click, puts the status "refusal" in the CRM. That's it, goodbye. But it's not necessarily a refusal; it may be worth one more contact. Maybe in a week this person is ready to buy, but you will not call, and a competitor may.

Once I, personally, as a client, left a company because a manager simply started to push me. The price was 5,500 euros. I was ready to buy 100%. I told the manager: "Yes, yes, I'll take it. I will pay on Monday." And he started to tell me that on Monday I would lose a 500-euro discount that worked only until that day. I said: "OK, I will pay 500 euros more." We hung up, and he started to bomb me with private messages. Why did this happen? Because he did not understand why I would pay later. The reason was my payment schedule.

In the same calls, a concrete price came up with 1,040 people, about one in five. Of them, 98 bought, or 9.4%, about three times the base rate. When the longest call lasted two to five minutes, 7.9% of people who heard a price bought, against 1.0% of those who did not. When the manager named the price first, 43 of 344 people bought, or 12.5%. When the client asked first, 35 of 499 bought, or 7.0%. For the other 197 people, the client named a sum without asking, or we could not tell who spoke; 20 of them bought. Maybe calls that reach the price are simply warmer. The data can't rule that out.

Look what managers often do instead. Many start to argue. Or they tell the client that if it's expensive, then this is not for him. This also humiliates the client. Or some give a discount right away, 20% off. And you think: How much did they inflate the price if they give me 20% at once? In fact, first you need to understand what stands behind the objection.

The client says it's expensive, and the manager starts to add value. But sometimes, in my experience, the client believes in the value and just has no budget at that time. And here you needed not to add value, but to offer a contract with payment in 60 days, or monthly payments for half a year, to split the price. In our calls, managers offered to split the payment to only 258 people, about one in 20. Of them, 42 bought, or 16.3%, about five times the base rate. The gap held in calls of two minutes and longer. Maybe managers offered it only in warm calls.

In my projects, I paid many specialists who built sales scripts for me. I know how a script should not look. I remember very well the first sales script I bought; I paid a lot of money. They gave me a special program: The manager sits in headphones, talks with the client and must go along a tree in this program. Ask the client this question. The client answered yes or no. The manager presses, for example, "yes," and the next question opens. I was delighted when I saw it, but in my experience, the program slowed managers down because they were focused on which button to press. A normal sales script is a frame, a few key points.

Many business owners have this inner wish to describe the ideal sales process. The client leaves a request, the manager picks up the phone right away and calls him. The client answers and says that you have a great business and asks for a proposal. And in five minutes the accountant already pays you this million. But in reality, it is a bit different. In reality, some requests are processed after two or three days: They left it on Friday, and the manager called on Monday.

Our CRM data for July 2023 to July 2026 shows how call speed lines up with payments. In all, 1,014 people left a product request on our website. We left out 85 who paid before any call, 139 who never got a call attempt and 150 we could not match to orders with confidence. Of the other 640, 84 got a first call attempt within 15 minutes, and 23 of them, or 27.4%, paid within 30 days of the request. Of the 556 who received a later call attempt, 79, or 14.2%, paid. The fast group paid almost twice as often. This is a link too, not proof that a fast call caused the payment. Only about one person in eight got a call that fast. We measured the time from the request in our CRM to the first call attempt, answered or not, and counted a purchase as a paid order.

I will never forget one night when I had a toothache, a terrible one. At night, at 4 or 5 a.m., I sat down to search for a 24-hour dentist, and ads popped up. I click, I call, nobody picks up. I click, I call, nobody picks up. So I understand that their ads run around the clock, but they are either not open 24 hours or do not pick up the phone.

Ask yourself how your sales process works. Then ask: What if the person did not pick up the first time? What if the person picked up and told you to go away? What if he asked you to write to his email? What if you wrote, and he did not answer for 3 days? What if there is a mistake in one digit of the number, but the person is real? And to get angry, try to ask these "what ifs" to your current managers. Very often the results are sad.

I always recommend finishing any ad setup with a test call to the manager, to hear how he will handle this request. In my view, half of success in business is great advertising. The other half is sales.

Dr. Igor Ivitskiy PhD

Igor Ivitskiy is a PhD in mathematical modeling and the founder of Doctor Ads. He has worked on the profitability of paid advertising since 2006 and runs an online school of Google advertising. He was ranked #6 in The PPC Survey's Top 50 Most Influential PPC Experts of 2026.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

For many drivers, the difference between what their insurance policy covers and what an accident actually costs could leave them facing thousands of dollars in unexpected expenses.

In Texas, drivers are required to carry liability insurance, but the state's minimum coverage requirements haven't increased since 2011, even as medical expenses and other accident-related costs continue to rise.

The $30,000 Coverage Gap

Under Texas law, drivers must carry minimum liability coverage of $30,000 for injuries to one person, $60,000 for injuries per accident and $25,000 for property damage. Known as 30/60/25 coverage, these amounts represent the legal minimum, not necessarily the protection needed after a serious crash.

According to a 2023 report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the estimated average lifetime medical cost of a serious crash injury was $69,345, while the total economic cost reached $280,726, based on 2019-dollar estimates.

That total economic cost is more than nine times Texas's $30,000 minimum bodily injury liability limit.

The problem? Once the at-fault driver's liability insurance reaches its policy limit, that coverage generally won't pay additional expenses, even when medical bills, lost income and rehabilitation costs continue to grow.

When the Other Driver Doesn't Have Enough Insurance

The financial risk becomes even greater when the driver responsible for an accident has little or no insurance.According to research cited by the Insurance Research Council, approximately one-third of U.S. drivers were uninsured or underinsured in 2023.That means even when another driver is responsible for a collision, their insurance coverage may not be sufficient to compensate everyone injured.

Ryan L. Thompson, founder and managing partner of Thompson Law, also known as 1-800-LION-LAW, understands these challenges from both sides of the legal process. Before representing injured individuals, Thompson spent years defending major corporations, gaining firsthand experience with how insurance claims are evaluated and resolved.

The Coverage Many Drivers Overlook

One important protection is uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, commonly known as UM/UIM.

This coverage can help eligible policyholders recover certain expenses when an at-fault driver has no insurance or insufficient liability coverage.

Texas law generally requires insurers to include UM/UIM coverage in auto policies unless the policyholder rejects it in writing.

However, drivers may decline this protection to reduce their premiums without fully considering the potential financial consequences.

Understanding the difference between liability coverage and UM/UIM protection is an important step toward avoiding costly surprises.

Check Your Policy Before an Accident Happens

Thompson Law encourages drivers to review their insurance declarations page, which summarizes their coverage types, limits and deductibles.

Drivers should check whether their liability limits are adequate, whether they carry UM/UIM coverage and whether additional protection makes sense for their circumstances.

The Dallas-based personal injury firm, founded by Thompson, reports recovering more than $2.1 billion for injured people and families nationwide as of August 2026.

The message for drivers is simple: Meeting the state's minimum insurance requirements doesn't necessarily mean you're fully protected.

Taking a few minutes to understand your policy today could make a significant financial difference tomorrow.

For more information, visit 1-800-LION-LAW.com.

By Dr. Janice Perkins

Edited by Jenn Moon, Editor at Featured News · Oct 26, 2026

Consider a common corporate challenge: An executive team needs its organization to carry out a major restructuring. Leaders spend weeks building their case to get everyone “aligned” before the initiative launches. The effort is exhausting, and people still aren’t on board. The alignment they were chasing never fully arrives, and the launch is shaky at best. Senior leaders end up frustrated with middle managers for not complying and getting on board.

I see versions of this scenario in my clients’ organizations regularly. It reflects a common assumption: that alignment must come before action, and that leaders can create it by “giving” people the direction and the reasons until they’re convinced.

My doctoral research on executive coaching relationships, combined with my experience coaching executive teams, has led me to question that sequence. In the coaching pairs I studied, chemistry often developed before explicit agreement and helped people move forward together. That doesn’t eliminate the need for alignment, but it has changed how I think about its role. In my view, chemistry may be a more important precondition for forward movement than securing buy-in up front.

Buy-in is an appealing corporate phrase because it gives change a tidy sequence: Leaders create an idea, convince others, and the idea moves through the organization. As a result, leaders often oversell initiatives and push uncomfortably hard to persuade everyone to get on board. The approach is logical, but it doesn’t account for the emotional acceptance, trust and psychological safety people need before they shift.

Dictionary.com defines persuade as “to prevail on (a person) to do something.” But people generally resist feeling pressured, which is one reason they push back against change or increased speed. No one likes to be prevailed upon. In my experience, that is the resistance leaders feel from other levels of the organization when change is initiated. It often isn’t resistance to the idea or the change itself, but to the way it is introduced and carried out across the organization.

People recognize the difference between being persuaded to follow and genuinely wanting to move together. Buy-in is an outcome; the more important question is whether you’ve created conditions that encourage participation. Take a step back and ask what companies really want from buy-in: people moving in the chosen direction. Traditionally, leaders tell employees what they expect. Some also explain why and invite questions to gain support.

As a former athletic coach and now an executive coach, I wanted to know whether the chemistry we rely on in athletic and executive coaching could be understood well enough to teach leaders how to build stronger teams and cultures.

For my 2026 doctoral dissertation at Kansas State University, Impacts of chemistry in executive coaching, I conducted a hermeneutic phenomenological study of six executive coach-client pairs in the fall of 2025. I analyzed recorded coaching sessions, session transcripts and video elicitation interviews, in which participants reviewed recordings of their sessions and reflected on key moments. I examined when chemistry emerged and intensified, instances of perceived alignment or shared orientation, and references to implicit and explicit values. I studied what happens when people move beyond simply communicating and begin thinking, responding and creating together.

My findings challenge a common assumption: Chemistry is not simply luck, charisma or personality fit, nor something that appears only after people have known and trusted one another for years. In the pairs I studied, chemistry offered a faster pathway to connection and trust, and it emerged through identifiable relational conditions that I believe can be replicated and strengthened.

Within those coaching relationships, chemistry was associated with increased agency and ownership, reduced relational friction, a stronger sense of identity and greater confidence. Based on those findings and my work with executive teams, I believe strong team chemistry can significantly reduce the need to persuade people to move in a particular direction, and that buy-in can become a natural result of chemistry rather than a separate campaign.

One concept from my study helps explain how interactions became productive without requiring prior agreement.

Mutual orientation is the shared direction of attention and engagement within an interaction. It is not the same as a shared goal. In coaching, the coach’s goal is to help the client succeed. The client has specific goals for their professional development. The organization paying for the coaching has goals for the client’s career growth. Those three goals are different, but they point in the same direction. That is mutual orientation. It’s not agreement about outcomes; it’s alignment in the moment about what matters for improvement and growth. And it helps reveal what buy-in gets wrong.

Here’s a metaphor I often use with executives who are trying to implement change and are frustrated by a lack of buy-in despite all their effort communicating. Picture a couple of young adults being pulled on an inner tube behind a speedboat on a busy holiday lake. The riders are safe inside the boat’s wake. The riders and the driver haven’t explicitly discussed any of this; they’re simply facing the same direction while participating in the movement in very different ways.

Buy-in assumes sameness. But the two riders could be having completely different experiences. One is thrilled, and the other is nervous. Their experiences aren’t symmetrical, and they don’t need to be. They share orientation, not identical understanding. They’re facing forward, moving together in the same direction.

Buy-in also assumes commitment comes before movement. The riders haven’t committed to a particular kind of ride, but they committed to the ride itself when they got on the tube and into the water. The driver committed the minute they got behind the wheel. The moment the boat accelerates, the riders are already moving. In the coaching pairs I studied, change regularly came before conscious agreement. The only conscious agreement was showing up and being willing to be moved. Participants shifted, opened up and changed before they had explicitly committed to doing so. You don’t persuade someone through a relational gate; you create the conditions for them to walk through it on their own.

What throws people off the inner tube is the boat cutting hard left or right without warning or explanation. The shared orientation breaks down not because anyone stopped caring, but because the direction changed without enough time to adjust together. In my work with clients, the most common causes are decisions made at the top without considering all stakeholders, without connecting the change to the “why” or without acknowledging the loss people need to process. People don’t mind going fast if they are safely in the wake. They mind being thrown off or put in danger.

Buy-in treats persuasion as the fuel for changing direction. But you can’t talk people back into the safety of the wake. What brings them back is the steering: holding the orientation or slowing the turn. Sometimes changes have to be made suddenly, and the driver can signal the riders. Otherwise, it’s the driver’s actions, not words, that communicate with the riders. People won’t mind the speed if they can adjust to the turn in time, so ask them what they need to prepare for it. That question is often overlooked, and skipping it dumps people either into the lake or outside the wake. Time and again with clients, I’ve seen those as the two places where resistance shows up.

In practice, mutual orientation means communicating with stakeholders (anyone behind the boat) and, instead of only telling them where the boat is headed, asking what they need to keep holding on and prepare for a turn. Leaders need to make sure both the direction and the speed of the turn are mutual. The goal isn’t to slow down. It’s to steer the turns in a way that doesn’t toss people off or into unsafe places. Not because everyone has agreed, but because they’re all still in the water, facing forward, held by the same momentum.

My research found that a relational container, in which both parties feel safe to contribute to the shared orientation, was paramount. Within the safety of that container, interpersonal chemistry emerged and powered mutual orientation. I identified six conditions that enabled chemistry to emerge and thrive, which I call the Six Gates of Chemistry: Legitimacy, Dignity, Containment, Agency, Attunement and Orientation.

Alignment emerged without being engineered. In session after session, participants found mutual orientation without explicitly discussing goals or values. The goals were understood simply by showing up to the sessions. Mutual orientation appeared as coordinated conversational rhythm, shared attention, and a distinct quality of conversation and inquiry.

Alignment amplified chemistry rather than initiating it. Chemistry often emerged before any explicit alignment took place. Attunement, dignity, legitimacy, agency and rhythm also affected how strong the chemistry became. Once established, chemistry was “sticky” enough to remain a positive force for forward momentum. Tension and challenge, consistency and humor also accelerated it.

My study examined one-on-one coaching relationships, not organizations or restructurings, so it doesn’t establish that corporate change succeeds without buy-in. But seeing these gates in the research made me look back at the successful and unsuccessful leadership I’ve observed over decades in corporate leadership, athletic coaching and executive coaching. I’ve come to believe the same conditions apply to leaders and their teams. The recommendations below are my interpretation of the findings, grounded in that experience.

Start with the relational container. Can employees ask questions, give feedback and take the time they need to adjust to the loss that comes with each change? Are they allowed to be human beings who need to adjust emotionally, or are they expected to simply execute instructions? Do leaders know what each level of the organization is experiencing “behind the boat”?

Stop waiting for full alignment before acting. Don’t hold people hostage until they see what you see or believe what you believe. In my study, movement often preceded agreement, and I’ve seen the same with teams. That doesn’t give you permission to leave people behind; make sure they’re still “behind the boat” and feel safe enough to keep holding on. Leaders who wait for full consensus may be delaying unnecessarily. In my experience, creating the conditions for shared direction often matters more than securing explicit buy-in up front.

Listen for unspoken values and direction. In conversations with direct reports, peers and stakeholders, people signal what matters to them, and what concerns them, before they say it out loud. Leaders who develop sensitivity to those signals can respond to what’s actually motivating people, not just what’s being said. Resistance is often the first sign that people feel outside the wake. Listen to it, pause and reset mutual orientation.

Treat alignment as an ongoing practice, not a box to check before change begins. The pairs I studied didn’t achieve alignment once, like flipping a light switch. They moved in and out of it, and the coach maintained the relational container through dignity, legitimacy and attunement. In my experience, effective leaders do the same, just as a good boat driver does for the riders.

Use shared values as anchors during change and as a way to understand stakeholders’ experience. Values that are genuinely shared can hold teams together during change, but only when they are real, recognized, discussed and respected. They don’t anchor anything when they’re written on a wall or website but not lived out in everyday work.

The conventional model of change leadership treats buy-in as a box to check. Based on my research and my work with leaders, I see buy-in as an ongoing relational practice that tends to how stakeholders, and the employees carrying out the change, actually feel. That practice focuses on building the chemistry that strengthens mutual orientation and helps change take hold.

Change begins in the quality of attunement, a willingness to inquire and the openness created when people sense they share something that matters. Once chemistry emerges, and the conditions that support it remain, change can accelerate.

For leaders exhausted from trying to secure buy-in and create engagement, my message is simple:

Stop asking, “How do I get them on board?”

Start asking, “How can I get my team to click?”

This article draws on my doctoral dissertation, Impacts of chemistry in executive coaching (Kansas State University, 2026), a hermeneutic phenomenological study of six executive coaching dyads. Data sources included recorded coaching sessions, transcripts and video elicitation interviews. The full dissertation is available through K-State Research Exchange and ProQuest.

Dr. Janice Perkins

Dr. Janice Perkins is an executive coach and leadership researcher who helps teams build chemistry that drives change. A member of 100 Coaches with Master-level status from the Association of Corporate Executive Coaches, she trains coaches through Coach Training EDU, competed on the inaugural season of Top Coach and contributed to the 2024 book The Intersection of Leadership and Coaching.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

By Aleks Sztemberg

Edited by Jenn Moon, Editor at Featured News · Oct 26, 2026

As a co-founder of an analytics platform for e-commerce, I have noticed something interesting. When we speak to product teams, all they focus on are sales numbers. Improving the shopping experience, making sure the user finalizes the purchase.

But as I am writing this, somewhere around me, a good pair of jeans is heading back to the warehouse.

Don't get me wrong. Returns are hardly a new problem. Alongside shopping cart abandonment, they're one of the biggest headaches in e-commerce. At the NXT Commerce conference I attended last year, several major brands were talking about exactly this challenge.

And the numbers confirm this.

According to the National Retail Federation's 2025 Retail Returns Landscape report, U.S. retailers projected that customers would return approximately $849.9 billion worth of merchandise in 2025. The research included a survey of 358 e-commerce professionals at large U.S. retailers.

Of course, $849.9 billion in returned merchandise doesn't mean $849.9 billion in losses. Many products are resold. But add to this the costs of shipping, handling, inspection, repackaging, customer service and discounts on products that can no longer be sold at full price, and you start to wonder how much profit disappears along the way.

And more importantly, how much of this could be prevented without worsening the shopping experience or affecting sales numbers?

Teams we speak to spend most of their time and budgets on understanding what makes people buy.

It's already difficult, sure. But what really impacts revenue is knowing where they come from, which products they view, how long they spend comparing options and what finally convinces them to click that "BUY" button.

But what happens after that?

In many businesses, a return is treated as a separate transaction. Someone in logistics handles it, customer service processes the refund, and the product hopefully makes it back into inventory...or not.

Now, what's really interesting for me is what happened before the return.

Take fashion, for example. According to the European Environment Agency's 2024 report, around 20% of clothing and 30% of footwear purchased online in Europe get returned.

Perhaps shoppers regularly order three sizes, try them at home, and send two back, or maybe they added an extra item by accident. Or the photo is different online and in reality.

These are very different problems, and they require very different solutions.

Yet if all you're looking at is total sales and total returns, you'll probably never know the difference.

Here's a statistic I found particularly interesting.

In DHL's 2025 e-commerce shopper research, based on 24,000 online shoppers across 24 countries, 54% cited the wrong size as a reason for returning an item. And 55% cited poor quality or faulty products.

Meanwhile, in DHL's 2025 business survey, which surveyed 4,050 businesses across 19 countries, only 24% selected incorrect sizing among the main reasons for returns, and 26% selected poor quality or faulty products.

Sure, different groups are answering different questions, so these figures don't prove that retailers don't understand why customers return. But they suggest there may be a gap worth investigating.

We also need to remember that customers may give answers just to process the form, sometimes picking an option because it is the easiest. So to truly understand the reason why, we need to dig deeper into behaviors, segments and patterns.

What I also think is interesting is how we talk about the customers who return products as if they belong to one and the same group.

Imagine two customers.

One orders 20 products over six months and returns three, the other one orders four products and returns three.

Both have generated three returns. Are their cases really the same?

The first might be a loyal, profitable customer. The second may be considerably more expensive to serve.

Even knowing this, we'd need to look at the value of their purchases, margins and reasons for returning before drawing conclusions.

The NRF's 2025 consumer survey, which included 2,006 consumers who had returned at least one online purchase in the previous 12 months, found that 82% consider free returns important when shopping online, and 71% say they're less likely to purchase from a retailer again after a poor return experience.

And I can relate. I don't like to pay for delivery, even if I know that the cost might be hidden in the price. I want to feel that it was free, and returns as well. No questions asked. Otherwise, I won't buy.

That's quite a dilemma. Brands need to reduce the cost of returns, but customers increasingly expect returns to be easy and free in order to buy at all.

Let's imagine a hypothetical large retailer who generates €10 million in annual online sales, with a 20% return rate by sales value.

Those are pretty realistic numbers, by the way.

That's €2 million worth of merchandise coming back in our hypothetical example.

Let's say that company could reduce the return rate from 20% to 18% without any impact on sales or customer experience.

Maybe two percentage points don't sound like a lot, but that's €200,000 worth of additional merchandise retained, assuming sales remain unchanged.

Sure, it is not €200,000 in additional profit, but it's potentially meaningful savings in processing, shipping and other return-related costs. Better than firing people, for example, as an optimization strategy.

But where to look?

How I would do it is quite simple, actually.

Identify the products with the highest return rates, compare them with similar products, and examine whether particular customer groups, campaigns or purchasing behaviors stand out.

Then you can compare purchases after they've had enough time to be returned. A product sold yesterday hasn't had the same opportunity to come back as one sold three weeks ago.

Lastly, test one improvement at a time and measure what happens, not only to returns but also to conversion and customer satisfaction.

After all, reducing returns by discouraging people from buying is hardly a success.

And here's food for thought: What if the return is just another way of receiving customer feedback?

There's an environmental side to this conversation too.

The European Environment Agency estimated in its 2024 report that between 22% and 43% of returned clothing purchased online in Europe ends up being destroyed. Its definition includes recycling and other forms of disposal, not just incineration.

I'd like to clarify that we should make a distinction between the returns that would happen anyway, and those that can be prevented by changes in the interface, better user experience, improving the customer journey or better customer service.

But what I keep thinking about is that e-commerce has become incredibly sophisticated at understanding how to get customers to buy. We can measure practically every interaction leading up to checkout.

Yet we are sweeping under the carpet the fact that we often pay far less attention to understanding why some of those purchases don't work out.

Maybe it's time we started treating a return not just as a refund, but as valuable feedback about the shopping experience.

Because a successful sale isn't necessarily the one that happens at checkout.

It's the one the customer decides to keep.

Aleks Sztemberg

Aleks Sztemberg is the Co-Founder at Stormly. an AI-powered analytics platform for e-commerce businesses. She works with retailers and product teams to better understand customer behaviour, uncover opportunities to improve shopping experiences, and turn complex data into actionable insights, from improving conversions to reducing preventable returns.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

Artificial intelligence gives consumers another way to explore those questions. Instead of reviewing individual search results, they can ask an AI assistant to explain their options and suggest what to consider.

For businesses, that creates a reason to look beyond whether their website appears in a search. They also need to consider whether useful information about their expertise is available when someone begins researching a decision.

Start With the Questions Customers Already Ask

Businesses often have valuable educational material hiding in everyday conversations.

A home-services company may regularly explain how to recognize maintenance problems. A technology provider may help customers understand which features they need. A financial professional may answer questions about preparing for retirement.

Those conversations can become the foundation for informative articles that help people understand a subject before choosing a provider.

The starting point is simple: Identify a common customer question and answer it clearly. Explain unfamiliar terms, offer practical examples and support factual claims with reliable sources.

An article that helps readers make sense of a problem gives them a concrete reason to recognize a company’s expertise.

Make Expertise Available Beyond Your Website

A company website remains an important source of information about its services and people. Publishing useful material elsewhere can extend that information to audiences who have never visited the site.

“Companies have traditionally concentrated on what Google sees when someone searches for them,” said Rick Smith, founder of NewsUSA. “Now they also have to think about what AI systems find when someone asks about their company, their competitors or their entire industry.”

Founded in 1987, NewsUSA distributes educational feature stories through newspaper and digital news partners, helping businesses communicate their knowledge to broader audiences.

For readers, the value comes from the information itself: Does the story answer the question? Is the explanation understandable? Does it help them decide what to do next?

Find Out How AI Describes Your Company

Businesses can also examine how their existing online presence appears in AI responses.

NewsUSA’s AI Authority Audit evaluates how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok describe a brand, examining cited sources and gaps compared with competitors.

That review can provide a starting point for understanding the information people may encounter while researching a company or its market.

Publishing an article does not guarantee an AI citation or recommendation. Responses can change, and visibility depends on multiple factors.

Still, businesses can take a practical step today: Make their knowledge easier to find and understand.

The questions customers ask are already there. Clear, useful answers give a business something meaningful to contribute.

Learn more at NewsUSA.ai.

An older interview, a news feature or a description on another website may tell part of the company’s story. Taken together, those materials form a public record that extends beyond the messages a business publishes itself.

As consumers use artificial intelligence to research companies and compare options, that wider record deserves attention.

The question is no longer simply whether information about a business exists online. It is whether that information accurately explains what the business does and the expertise it offers.

Look at Your Business From the Outside

A useful starting point is to consider what a prospective customer would want to know.

What services does the company provide? Who does it serve? What experience do its professionals bring? Is there useful information explaining how they approach common customer problems?

A polished website can answer some of those questions. Articles, interviews and other publicly available materials can add context.

Business owners can review those sources for outdated details, unclear descriptions and missing information. They can also examine whether the topics associated with their company reflect the work they do today.

Local Stories Can Show Practical Expertise

Local and regional news outlets offer a setting for information that connects business knowledge with everyday concerns.

A seasonal home-maintenance article can explain problems residents may encounter. A technology feature can help small-business owners understand a changing industry. An educational story can introduce readers to professionals whose experience is relevant to their needs.

The strongest contribution is specific and useful. Rather than relying on broad claims about being a leader, a company can demonstrate its knowledge by explaining a topic well.

NewsUSA has worked with newspaper and digital news partners since 1987 to distribute consumer-oriented feature stories. Its services give organizations a way to share educational content beyond their own websites.

Check the Picture AI Presents

An AI response offers another view of how a company is represented online.

Does the response describe the business accurately? Which competitors appear? What sources, if any, does the platform cite?

NewsUSA’s AI Authority Audit examines brand descriptions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok, with citation evidence and competitor comparisons. Businesses can learn more or request an audit at NewsUSA.ai.

The findings should be treated as a snapshot. AI responses can vary, and an article’s publication does not ensure that a platform will reference it or recommend the company.

For businesses, the lasting priority is an accurate, useful public presence. That means keeping company information current and contributing explanations that help people understand the problems the business solves.

A reputation develops wherever people encounter a company’s name. Giving them clear information helps make those encounters more meaningful.