Richard

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is back at Amazon after a two-year break, now leading the tech giant’s home security camera division as a VP. The division is called RBKS for its entities: Ring, Blink, Key (in-home delivery service), and Sidewalk (wireless network).

And according to an email viewed by Business Insider, if employees at RBKS want a promotion, their applications will now have to describe how they use AI at work. This is meant to reward “innovative thinking” and promote speed and efficiency, Siminoff wrote.

Related: ‘No Longer Optional’: Microsoft Staff Mandated to Use AI at Work

“When we combine innovative technology with our missions, we create something truly special,” Siminoff wrote in the email viewed by Business Insider.

Siminoff famously pitched his video doorbell company, then called “Doormat,” on “Shark Tank” in 2013 and left without a deal. Then, after the company was acquired in 2018 for a reported $1 billion by Amazon, he went back on the show, this time as a Shark investor, sitting alongside Kevin O’Leary and Mark Cuban, the same people who rejected him years prior.

Amazon isn’t the only tech giant that’s requiring the use of AI for promotions and performance reviews.

In June, Microsoft also began considering formal metrics for evaluating how much employees use AI during the workday.

Julia Liuson, president of the developer division at Microsoft, reportedly sent an email to managers that said “using AI is no longer optional,” and the time spent using internal AI tools, both in-house and from the competition, should be measured in employee performance reviews.

Related: Duolingo’s CEO Clarifies AI Stance After Backlash — Read the Memo

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What would Jensen Huang study if he were 20 years old again?

Nvidia’s 61-year-old CEO answered this question during a trip to Beijing on Wednesday, as reported by CNBC. Huang, who graduated from college two years early at the age of 20 and is now the CEO of the most valuable company in the world, said that the “20-year-old Jensen” would have “probably chosen more of the physical sciences” over “the software sciences.”

The physical sciences include disciplines that study non-living systems, such as physics, earth science, and chemistry. Software sciences, on the other hand, include fields like computer science and AI engineering.

Huang didn’t major in either of those areas. His LinkedIn profile shows that he graduated from Oregon State University in 1984 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. He received a Master’s in the same field from Stanford University in 1992. Electrical engineers make the physical computer hardware used by software engineers and developers.

Related: Nvidia CEO Says ‘100% of Everybody’s Jobs Will Be Changed’ Due to AI

Huang did not elaborate on why he would have picked the physical sciences over software engineering, but he has stated in the past that AI equalizes software development, allowing even non-programmers to generate code. At London Tech Week last month, Huang said that everyone can write code simply by prompting AI using natural language.

“There’s a new programming language,” Huang said at the event. “This programming language is called ‘human.'”

Huang has repeated the same message before. Last year, he said that AI would take over coding, making learning programming languages optional.

^{Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang arrives for a press conference in Beijing earlier this week. Photo by ADEK BERRY/AFP via Getty Images}

Huang previously said that if he were in school today, the first thing he would do is “learn AI.” In a January interview on the podcast “Huge Conversations,” Huang said that students should be asking the question, “How can I use AI to do my job better?”

“Learning how to interact with AI is not unlike being someone who is really good at asking questions,” Huang said on the podcast.

He also said in the interview that he uses AI as a personal tutor to learn new things, program, write, and analyze concepts. Huang uses the $20 a month version of ChatGPT as a tutor and Perplexity’s AI search engine to learn more about subjects like biology.

Related: Nvidia’s CEO Says It No Longer Matters If You Never Learned to Code: ‘There’s a New Programming Language’

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was also asked what students should study. In an interview last year with Bloomberg, Zuckerberg said that the most important skill young people should embrace is thinking “critically” and “learning values.”

Zuckerberg said in the interview that he hires new people based on their demonstrated ability to dive deep into a field and master it. Zuckerberg has been on a hiring spree lately, poaching AI experts from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to build a new AI team.

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has served as its CEO ever since. Nvidia is the biggest company in the world, with a market capitalization of $4.21 trillion at the time of writing.

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Last week, I had to dig deep into a new client’s background — fast. They were in the middle of a substantial PR crisis, and time was not on our side.

In the past, I would’ve turned to Google and manually sifted through page after page of results. I’d look at their website, news mentions, social media activity, reviews and even obscure forum posts. The goal was always the same: get a full picture of who they are, how they operate and what’s already public that could help — or hurt — their reputation.

Doing that kind of research the old way can take hours.

Now, it’s far more efficient thanks to AI. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Grok can quickly summarize public information, giving me a snapshot in seconds instead of hours. But this shortcut comes with a big caveat: we also have to consider what these systems are saying about people and companies, and how they’ve come to those conclusions.

Large language models (LLMs), the tech powering these AI tools, are trained on massive datasets pulled from across the open web. That means your brand’s online presence isn’t just being seen by people anymore — it’s being interpreted and summarized by machines, too.

This changes the game for public relations.

Because while LLMs can be incredibly powerful, they’re still prone to hallucinations — a polite term for making things up. And if you’ve spent even five minutes with Google’s new AI Overviews (AIOs), you’ve seen it firsthand.

Some examples I’ve personally encountered in AIOs:

• That Gouda is the best-selling cheese in the U.S.
• That you should add non-toxic glue to pizza to keep cheese from sliding off
• That drinking urine is an effective treatment for kidney stones

Related: Why AI-Forward Communication is the Future of Public Relations

Ridiculous? Absolutely. But it underscores a bigger issue: these systems can spread false or misleading information quickly and at scale.

Even with less extreme topics, hallucinations happen. I once asked Grok to summarize my background. It confidently told me I’d served in the Army Airborne. In reality? I was a Marine.

As more people rely on AI to answer questions they once typed into search engines, the accuracy and relevance of your brand’s presence in these models is becoming critical. Not only do you want to make sure the information is correct, but you also want your brand to show up at all. Ideally, you want to appear in answers about your industry, not just yourself.

So, how do you influence what these systems say? Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as feeding them your preferred narrative. If it were, AI tools would already be flooded by spam from low-quality marketers.

Instead, LLMs prioritize information from trusted sources across the web, and not all sources are weighted equally. Your company’s official website helps, but third-party credibility matters far more.

That’s why editorial media coverage remains the most powerful tool in modern PR — and it matters now more than ever. There are two core elements here: high-quality editorial features and press releases.

Editorial features — stories published by reputable media outlets that quote you or spotlight your work — carry the most weight. Why? Because they’re difficult to manipulate. Getting published requires a compelling topic, a unique perspective and often, relationships with journalists. You have to earn it. That’s exactly why LLMs treat this kind of coverage as a strong trust signal.

The more insight you share in those features, the better. If you’re quoted briefly, it suggests your voice is just one of many. But if your expertise shapes the bulk of the story, that sends a much stronger signal — both to readers and to the algorithms parsing it.

That’s also why it’s smart to pursue interviews and contributor content in addition to being quoted. These allow you to go deeper, share your thinking more fully and increase the likelihood that your perspective makes it into an AI summary.

Press releases still matter, too — but in a more limited way. They’re a paid channel, so anyone can publish them, but there’s still some editorial oversight. Editors at distribution services do basic fact-checking and screen for hyperbole before syndicating them to media outlets. The key is to make sure your press release is actually newsworthy. A strong release can also prompt journalists to cover your story further.

While LLMs pull data from various formats — text, audio, video — text-based articles still produce the fastest and most reliable impact when it comes to influencing AI responses.

Related: Yes, AI Might Take Your PR Job. Here’s What You Can Do About It.

In many ways, AI has transformed PR. But the fundamentals haven’t changed. You still need to earn high-quality media coverage. The difference is that now, those features are no longer just about reaching human audiences — they’re about training the machines that shape perception at scale.

The companies and individuals who recognize this shift and act on it now will gain a long-term advantage. Those who don’t? They’ll get left out of the conversation — by people and by AI alike.

Businesses that use mobile push notifications see up to an 88% boost in app engagement, while 65% of users come back within 30 days when push is enabled, according to data from conversion rate optimization firm Invesp. That kind of retention is every entrepreneur’s dream—and Feedify makes it easy to tap into.

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It was the Coldplay kiss cam moment that caused cringes around the world.

The CEO of a unicorn tech company and his head of human resources were caught on camera in a not-so-work-appropriate moment that has since gone viral. Now the two executives, Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and Chief People Officer Kristin Cabot, are facing public (and workplace) backlash.

What happened at the Coldplay concert?

On Wednesday evening at Gillette Stadium near Boston, a popular segment of Coldplay’s show took an unexpected turn. The band’s camera crew singles out people in the crowd and puts them up on the jumbotron, and lead singer Chris Martin improvises a song. This time around, the camera landed on a snuggling couple who quickly tried to hide their faces. Martin quipped, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”

A video of the moment quickly went viral, and as the video spread, it revealed that Martin might have been on to something. The man in the video was Byron, and the woman was the company’s human resources chief, Cabot. The problem? Byron is married to someone else.

What is Astronomer?

Astronomer is a private data infrastructure startup that reached “unicorn” status in 2022 with a $1 billion or more evaluation.

According to the company’s LinkedIn page, “Astronomer empowers data teams to bring mission-critical analytics, AI, and software to life.”

Has Astronomer responded?

On Friday evening, Astronomer posted on X that Byron has been placed on leave.

Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Pete DeJoy is currently serving as interim CEO given Andy Byron has been placed on leave.

We will share more details as appropriate in the coming days. pic.twitter.com/VfgWPnfycl

— Astronomer (@astronomerio) July 19, 2025

Axios reports that Cabot was also placed on leave while the company investigates the matter.

Previously, an Astronomer spokesperson told Newsweek and the New York Post that a supposed apology from Byron, which had been circulating online, was fake.

The fake apology from Byron was posted on X, with the imposter writing that they wanted to apologize to his wife, family, and colleagues, and noted, “I am a Coldplay fan. And not just of the first two albums. I also like the recent stuff.”

Another fake post, attributed to Coldplay, read: “Starting with our next show, we’re introducing camera-free audience sections for people and their sidepieces.”

Related: IBM Replaced Hundreds of HR Workers With AI, According to Its CEO

How does a CEO scandal like this affect the workplace?

The incident creates potential legal troubles and a crisis of leadership for the company, David Rice, HR expert at People Managing People, told Entrepreneur via email.

“The big issue is the example that it sets. Obviously, a CEO should know better. But the fact that it’s with the chief people officer is even worse,” Rice wrote. “She should definitely know better, and that is going to lead to a complete mistrust in HR, no matter what happens next.”

“Both are on the hook here, and no online apology is going to make this go away,” says Rice, pointing out why companies need to have very clear HR policies about inter-office relationships and the consequences of not adhering to them.

President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act) into law on Friday in a live ceremony. The legislation sets regulations for stablecoins and was passed in a bipartisan vote of 308 to 122.

At the signing ceremony, Trump said he wants to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the world.” White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks said the law helps pave the way for American dominance in the crypto industry by “creating clear rules of the road” and updating “archaic” payment systems.

A stablecoin’s value is pegged to a fiat currency, in this case, the U.S. dollar. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are not. The GENIUS Act makes it law that “permitted payment stablecoin issuers” must hold reserves for every dollar of stablecoins offered. A reserve can be “any government-issued asset approved by regulators,” such as bank deposits and short-term treasury bills.

“Congratulations to our GREAT REPUBLICANS for being able to accomplish so much, a record, in so short a period of time,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday.

Watch the ceremony, here:

Related: From Tom Brady to Kevin O’Leary – See Who Lost Big in the Wake of the FTX Crypto Collapse

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Most solo entrepreneurs are stuck doing everything themselves — chasing leads, managing content and drowning in admin. But the ones scaling to six and seven figures? They’re using AI to build a business that works without them.

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