Written for the leaders, owners and professionals of the 11 million businesses with between $50,000 and $50 million in revenue.

We all let our Outlook or Gmail inboxes stack up from time to time, but Gen Z is the most likely to suffer from unanswered correspondence overload. A new survey of U.S. workers from Babbel, the language learning platform, found that those under 25 are twice as likely — 18% vs. 36% — to have over 1,000 unread emails.

“Gen Z’s communication preferences are heavily influenced by the prevalence of instant messaging platforms and social media,” a Babbel culture expert told CNBC while “the structured and formal nature of email communication may feel unfamiliar and more complicated to many.”

To combat this, the expert recommends managers encourage auto-sorting filters and dedicated email-answering timeblocks. Also, a messaging platform like Slack might feel more natural to younger workers. Or maybe some of them could answer those 1,000 emails with whatever AI program wrote their college essays?

Co-Intelligence: Wharton prof says AI fears are overblown

Jumbo: How Dutch grocery chain builds community

Flappie: Smart cat door keeps dead mice outside

(Source: Penguin Random House)

Emotions over AI gravitate toward extremes: while many CEOs dream of boosting productivity by orders of magnitude, many workers are terrified their livelihoods will vanish.

Ethan Mollick, an associate professor of management at the Wharton School — whose new book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI is a No. 1 Amazon Charts bestseller — wants us to be realistic yet optimistic. He spoke with b. about reasons for excitement and experimentation as the world transforms around us.

b.: What was the lightbulb moment that led you to embrace AI rather than fear it?

Mollick: Once you kind of get through this sort of existential crisis — why does this thing appear to think, what’s this mean for jobs and work? — you can start to use it for very productive and positive things. … I think using [AI] both makes it feel scarier for a little while but also you start to understand its limitations and abilities.

b.: What moral and ethical responsibilities should business leaders have as they use AI?

Mollick: There’s a lot of ethical concerns associated with AI — how they’re trained, who controls them, what biases they have, whether people are passing off work as their own … 

The advice I give … is bring AI to everything you do — ethically, legally — and see what works or what doesn’t work. That’s the only way to [learn] what it’s good or bad at. … You need to get a sense of, where is it useful and where is it not for your products or services. And then you want to think about what use case it has …

I wouldn’t use [the free version of ChatGPT] for idea generation. [The paid version is] a much more powerful system, maybe 10 times as powerful. … And there are three “frontier” models right now: Claude 3, GPT-4, and Gemini Advanced. I think people need to use one of those.

b.: How should a company protect its proprietary information while using AI?

Mollick: There’s lots of privacy solutions out there. If you pay for the premium GPT-4, there’s a switch you could throw so it doesn’t train your data. … It’s a software process, not an entity.

b.: At this point, if you’re in the business world, is it a losing battle to be a contrarian who refuses to use AI?

Mollick: There are some parts of regulated industries where you can’t use AI right now. … When we rely on [AI] as a crutch, that could lower our ability to do things or understand things.

But I think using AI as a co-intelligence offers a huge amount of opportunities for the future. … The results are likely to be complicated with lots of positives and negatives, but just talking abstractly [about it] doesn’t help as much as actually getting your hands dirty.

This interview has been edited for length. Read the full Q&A at business.com.

Co-Intelligence is available now. 

Today’s podcast conversation is with EducationSuperHighway VP of Government Affairs and Policy Adeyinka Ogunlegan and Sr. Program Director Sean Gerner. They discuss the digital divide, broadband nutrition labels, and the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program.

Watch the episode on YouTube or search for Builders from business.com on your favorite audio platform.

Your team is only as effective as the support you give them. After all, a happy and engaged team is a productive one. 

To make your team the most effective it can be, Paycor is the platform you need. From talent acquisition and onboarding to managing payroll and benefits, Paycor gives employers one place to support their employees and ensure they’re satisfied and engaged. It can also help you keep your records in order and ensure you’re in compliance with important regulations. 

For a complete human resources tool that makes building and managing your team a cinch, Paycor has all the tools you need. See for yourself how Paycor can help you grow your team in a no obligation guided tour by clicking the link below.

(Source: Shutterstock)

If you’ve used an error-prone self-checkout kiosk at the grocery store, you know it’s not conducive to mental health.

That’s why Dutch supermarket chain Jumbo is reimagining the checkout experience. About 200 Jumbo locations feature “Kletskassa,” which roughly translates to “chat checkout.”

It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like: cashiers aren’t derided for leisurely chatting up shoppers; they’re downright supposed to. Kletskassa lanes even have nooks — staffed by volunteers — that serve coffee and welcome community members to settle in and say hi to each other. Slow checkout especially caters to elderly shoppers. The initiative is part of the Dutch government’s One Against Loneliness campaign, instituted to combat the loneliness epidemic faced by a third of the country’s seniors.

As an example of a business recognizing its place as a community pillar, Jumbo’s Kletskassa goes down like a warm cup of coffee on a wintry Holland day.

(Source: Flappie)

Your precious innocent kitty wants some fresh air, but it’s also a relentless killing machine that loves to bring eviscerated treasures home — and you’re tired of steam-cleaning the carpets.

Enter Flappie, an AI-powered cat door that debuted at the CES tech convention back in January. This Swiss-made device has an outside-facing, night-vision camera, which uses a “unique and proprietary” dataset to identify when your little hunter has a dead mouse (or similar prey) in their maws. If kitty comes bearing gifts, Flappie locks ‘em out with a 90% success rate.

“What we’re doing here is solving the biggest problem of cat owners,” says a Flappie rep in a promotional video.

But, where’s AI to clean up hair balls from our bathroom floor at 3 a.m.?

(Instagram)

Written by Tina Nazerian and Dan Ketchum.