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Most brands chasing social commerce are still solving for reach. Holly Pan stopped solving for it, and her numbers got better.

At the Social Commerce Summit, held at Sony Hall in New York, the co-founder and CEO of EllaOla joined Dr. Kellyann Petrucci and Nico Santos for a wellness panel that spent less time on channel strategy than on a harder question: what actually earns a parent's trust, and what does it cost to earn it honestly.

EllaOla exists because Pan couldn't buy what she needed. Both of her children struggled — one with eczema, both with picky eating — and the search for something clean and clinically credible turned into late nights reading labels she didn't trust.

"I spent lots of late nights doing research, reading labels, trying to figure out which supplement brand I could trust and give to my kids."

What she built instead was a formulation process with pediatricians, dietitians, and GI doctors attached to it. Ingredients that are well-studied, dosed at levels meaningful enough to matter, in the most bioavailable form the body can actually absorb. Every product carries Clean Label Project certification, which screens for more than two hundred environmental contaminants. Today EllaOla sits on shelves at Erewhon, Whole Foods, and Nordstrom.

The strategic point Pan made wasn't about the science. It was about who the science is for.

"We know parents' lives are already very busy. In order to win their trust, we want to do all the actual work — working with the experts, getting the certifications — so parents can truly trust this brand without doing all the research behind it."

That framing carried directly into her answer on creator strategy, which was the most quietly contrarian thing said on the panel. EllaOla tried the celebrity route. It didn't move.

"Rather than chase a big following, chase big celebrities — maybe the best brand ambassadors are your customers."

What worked was micro and mid-tier creators with a genuine relationship to the product, and beyond that, customer testimonials from women who had never been on camera in their lives. Pan was candid about the friction: roughly half the mothers her team asks decline outright, because they're busy. The ones who say yes produce the highest-performing content EllaOla has.

There's a lesson in that ratio for every brand in the room. The asset that converts best is the one you can't buy at scale, can't brief, and can't rush.

Looking forward, Pan named two shifts she expects to define the category. The first is a rising evidentiary bar — consumers who have moved past asking whether a product is safe and now want to know what it measurably does.

"In addition to product safety, they also care about the efficacy of the product. Basically, what does this product do to my health?"

The second is personalization, and it's where she sees AI doing real work rather than decorative work.

"Rather than a brand making a very general recommendation — one size fits all — AI can really personalize that recommendation based on a customer's age, diet, lifestyle, and nutritional needs."

Taken together, Pan's two predictions point at the same destination from opposite directions. Clinical rigor and algorithmic personalization both replace the same thing: the brand's assertion that it knows best. What's left is proof, and a customer willing to say so out loud.

The most expensive habit in retail leadership right now isn't a bad decision. It's the reflex to make one.

At CommerceNext, held at the New York Hilton Midtown, Cindy Solomon — president and CEO of the Courageous Leadership Institute — delivered a keynote that pulled courage down from the realm of boardroom heroics and put it somewhere far less comfortable: the ordinary Tuesday. Her argument was that courage isn't a moment leaders rise to. It's a practice they either build or don't, and the retail environment is currently punishing everyone who hasn't.

She opened with a question rather than a framework.

"Do we have the courage to take a pause?"

It sounds modest until you try it. Solomon's read on why it's so hard is that responsiveness has stopped being a professional virtue and started behaving like a compulsion — one with a physiological hook. She pointed the room to research indicating that going seven minutes without touching your phone triggers a release of cortisol, the body's stress hormone. The restlessness people feel trying to stay off their devices during a keynote isn't a discipline failure. It's withdrawal.

"We've become addicted to the action of responding rather than taking a breath and making a choice about whether to act or not act."

And the problem compounds with seniority, because the decisions that survive the climb are the ones nobody below could resolve.

"The higher up in the organization you go, the more difficult taking a pause gets, because what bubbles up to you are the harder and nastier and bigger decisions."

From there Solomon turned to the retention question every retail executive in the room has been asked to solve, and reframed it as a chemistry problem. The conversation about keeping younger employees, she suggested, usually gets stuck on perks when the actual gap is neurological.

"They were raised on dopamine, raised on a steady diet of it. And when they go to work and they don't get any of it, that's how you lose them."

She was quick to draw a line around what she was and wasn't proposing.

"I'm not talking about cheerleading. I'm talking about using the wins as something to learn from."

The mechanic she described is specific: name the win, then dissect it with the same rigor most organizations reserve for the post-mortem. You did a fantastic job on that presentation — here are the four things you crushed. Delivered privately, it develops one person. Delivered in the room, it develops everyone listening. Solomon cited research attaching real numbers to the effect — sharply higher productivity, a markedly greater appetite for hard problems, and a meaningful lift in close rates among salespeople operating in that state.

Her point wasn't that praise is nice. It was that most companies run a thorough autopsy on every failure and almost never run one on a success, which means the behaviors that produced the win never get documented, taught, or repeated.

"We want to make sure we're dissecting the wins as much as we are the failures."

The keynote's sharpest line came when she got to transformation — the word every retail organization currently has in a deck somewhere.

"Change management — that's a myth. Nobody's managing change. You either lead through change or you let change happen to you."

What separates the two, in her framing, is whether leadership does the unglamorous work of explaining itself. When a team is reacting and frantic and certain it has to do something immediately, the rationale is the first thing to get cut. It is also the only thing that converts compliance into participation.

"If you want your team to actively engage with you to make the change — to make it easier, to make it faster, to make it work — you've got to start with that why in order to enlist people."

Read together, Solomon's three prescriptions have an awkward quality in common. Pausing before you respond, stopping to dissect a win, explaining the reasoning before you issue the directive — every one of them looks, in the moment, like a delay. That is exactly why they get skipped, and exactly why the leaders who protect them are the ones whose organizations move faster afterward.

The conversation around stablecoins has shifted. It's no longer a question of whether institutions will adopt them — it's a question of how fast.

At ETH NYC, held at the Javits Center in New York, Rain CEO Farooq Malik sat down with Yueqi Yang, Crypto Reporter at The Information, for a conversation that cut through the speculation and landed squarely in the present tense. What Malik described wasn't a future state. It was already happening.

"This has probably been the most surprising thing to see over the last year or so. Even before some of the regulatory clarity started coming into the United States with the passing of GENIUS, we were starting to field inbound from some of the largest companies in the world that were already thinking about stablecoins as a way to improve their capital efficiency."

Rain, which powers stablecoin card programs across more than 100 markets globally, has watched enterprise demand evolve in real time. The inbound, Malik noted, isn't coming from crypto-native startups. It's coming from public trading companies, banks, remittance platforms, and global marketplaces — organizations that see stablecoins not as a speculative asset but as operational infrastructure.

The business case, as Malik framed it, is straightforward: reduce the cost of servicing clients while expanding the universe of clients you can actually reach.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive data point Malik shared was about geography. Conventional wisdom holds that stablecoin adoption is primarily an emerging markets story. The reality Rain is seeing is more nuanced.

"While many people think that stablecoins are primarily being adopted outside the United States, the largest destination of all consumer transactions and B2B transactions that we are seeing in the market are all ending up in the US — US merchants, US customers, US bank accounts, US economic participants — which is in many ways flying in the face of what a lot of people expect."

The implication is significant. Stablecoin adoption in the US isn't presenting itself as a crypto product. It's presenting as embedded financial services — faster to launch, more modular, and more cost-effective than legacy alternatives. With GENIUS passed and institutional demand accelerating, the question Malik's session raised wasn't whether stablecoins would go mainstream. It was whether the infrastructure could scale fast enough to meet the moment.

Every proposed fix for AI-generated likeness assumes the same thing: that this is a content problem. Phillip Shoemaker came to VidCon to argue that the assumption is the reason nothing is working.

His session at the Anaheim Convention Center — titled, plainly, Who Owns Your Face in the Age of AI? — opened with a number designed to break the room's sense of scale.

"In a given week last year, in a single week, seven hundred million images were created — fake content generated by one AI tool in seven days."

Shoemaker asked the audience to sit with it, because the figure resists comprehension. Seven hundred million images is more than most people will see in an entire lifetime, produced inside a week, by one tool among many.

He was careful not to overstate what those images are. The overwhelming majority were harmless — logos, birthday cards, the ordinary output of a creative utility. But a substantial number were faces. Real ones.

"And guess what? Nobody was asked for permission."

What followed was the most useful part of the session: a systematic rejection of every frame the industry currently uses. Shoemaker walked through the vocabulary people reach for — that this is a deepfake problem, a content moderation problem, a misinformation problem — and the remedies each one implies. Government intervention. Faster takedowns. Pressure on AI companies to stop generating real faces at all.

He thinks all of it misses.

"It's not a content problem, it's a property rights problem. This is property."

The distinction changes what a solution even looks like. A content problem gets solved by removal, which is inherently reactive and always arrives after distribution. A property problem gets solved by ownership — which implies permission, licensing, and the ability to be compensated rather than merely to complain. As Shoemaker put it, the reason the current system fails is structural: right now, people can't really own their face.

To show how little protection status actually buys, he offered two examples without naming either subject.

The first was one of the largest audiences on the internet — a creator with the money, the recognition, and the legal representation to respond to almost anything. Confronted with what AI could do with his likeness, his reaction wasn't a legal strategy. It was disbelief.

"Look, are the platforms even ready for this? Is anybody ready for this?"

The second was a globally recognized actress who discovered an AI version of herself already built and distributed without her involvement. Her response to the press was the line Shoemaker said he hasn't been able to shake.

"If it can happen to me with everything I have, what chance do the rest of us have?"

For a room full of creators, that question landed as arithmetic rather than sympathy. If the ceiling of fame, wealth, and legal firepower isn't enough to secure control over your own face, then no amount of individual leverage solves this. What's missing isn't effort. It's a property right that doesn't yet exist — and the practical infrastructure to enforce it once it does.

Scary Moon shipped without a story. Its players wrote one anyway, and the studio is now animating it.

At VidCon, on a panel at the Anaheim Convention Center alongside Spencer Cook and Chris Pruett, Kyle Joyce described a development loop that inverts the usual order of operations. The session had gathered developers behind some of Meta Quest's most active social titles to talk about how player communities shape games in real time. Joyce's contribution was the clearest illustration of what that actually means when you let it run.

The premise is that Scary Moon is a sandbox horror game, which is to say it has monsters but no narrative scaffolding — no campaign, no canon, nothing telling players where any of it came from.

"Lore's been a big one for us, because the community created the backstory."

Players took the monsters and invented origins for them, unprompted. Joyce's read on why is refreshingly unsentimental: that's simply what kids do with characters they care about. The studio's decision was not to correct it or to ignore it, but to formalize it. The team refines the community's material into something coherent, feeds it back through Discord, and lets the next round build on it — at which point, as Joyce described it, the thing starts generating on its own.

The output is no longer confined to the game. Enver is releasing an animated series later this year, opening with a pilot, built directly from lore its players wrote.

"The shorts are basically based on the community-driven lore. They're saying, 'Hey, this is the origin story of the monster.' So we go in and create it and visualize it."

Those videos pull millions of views — which is where the strategy stops being a community-engagement story and starts being a distribution one. Joyce was explicit that the real question underneath all of it is how a VR title reaches people who don't own the hardware.

"How can Scary Moon live outside of just a VR game? How can it be more of a universal effect?"

The funnel he described runs backward from how most studios think about marketing. Someone finds an animated short, gets attached to a monster, wants to know where it lives — and buys a headset to get there. Discovery happens on a platform the game isn't even on.

"I think that's going to be a big thing for almost any game in VR: you have to be able to expand out and be a universe."

It's a genuinely unusual position for a studio to be in. The narrative asset now driving acquisition wasn't in the design document, wasn't scoped, and wasn't written by anyone on payroll. It was produced by players who cared enough to invent it, and the studio's actual skill was recognizing what it had and building the pipeline to carry it outward.

Gabrielle Judge didn't coin "lazy girl job" because she wanted to work less. She coined it because she wanted to build something more.

At the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit, the founder of Miss Anti-Work — the media company that has generated tens of thousands of worldwide media mentions — sat down to unpack one of the most misunderstood phrases to come out of the Great Resignation era.

"I'm a huge high achiever. I'm a huge workaholic. I have been since before I had a job. And so what was really hard for me was to get a quote-unquote lazy girl job — which was still a really good job."

At the time, Judge was an account manager at Wix. The role was a lateral move, not a step up. But it gave her something more valuable than a title: time. She was completing her responsibilities in two to four hours a day — and building Miss Anti-Work with everything left over.

The term, she explained, means something different to everyone who uses it. Some people take lateral roles because they aren't careerists and simply want balance. Others, like Judge, take them as low-risk launchpads for something bigger.

"Those three keywords together are quite controversial. I knew that going into it. I thought it was fun. That's like Gen Z humor."

The result was a viral moment that became a media company, a brand, and a genuine cultural conversation about what ambition is actually supposed to look like. For the founders and executives in the room at the Fortune summit, the subtext was hard to miss: the most entrepreneurial move Judge made wasn't quitting her job. It was keeping it — just long enough to build something that didn't need it anymore.

The fear that artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs has dominated the public conversation around the technology for years. Darian Nwanko, who has worked directly with organizations building AI systems, has a different framework entirely.

"You shouldn't think about this as AI replacing you. I think about this as AI recruiting you."

The distinction isn't semantic. It's structural. Nwanko walked through the mechanics of how large language models are trained — specifically, the process of reinforcement learning from human feedback. "They literally gather thousands of experts in each of these respective domains," he explained, "and create curated datasets to teach these models how to perform each one of your respective roles particularly well."

In other words, the expertise already in the room isn't being made obsolete by AI. It's being absorbed by it. The models are built on human knowledge, refined by human judgment, and most effective when used by people who bring domain expertise to the interaction.

Nwanko offered a personal example: as a self-employed person navigating tax season, he used an AI tool to work through IRS documentation before meeting with his accountant. "My accountant thought I was particularly smart, but I'm like, 'I'm not that smart. I actually just interacted with an AI tool to expedite my learning.'"

"The rate at which you learn increases. It just depends on how you use it."

For the founders, operators, and executives at AI Next, the message was a reframe with real stakes. The question isn't whether to engage with AI — it's whether you're using it to grow faster than the people who aren't.

POSSIBLE Miami brought together some of the sharpest minds in marketing, technology, and brand strategy for a conference that didn't shy away from the hard questions. A Founders Corner was on the ground for the sessions that mattered most.

James Merrill, Opolis Optics & Stoked Plastics

"The sustainability claims are everywhere and the proof point is nowhere."

Merrill has spent four years building a solution to a problem the industry largely created for itself. When his team began developing their recycled materials formula, they found brands claiming to be "100% sustainable" were incorporating just three to five percent recycled content. Gen Z consumers were already catching on. Opolis Optics is the proof of concept — every pair of sunglasses pulls four water bottles from the ocean. Every pair of ski goggles pulls ten. The era of the green campaign is over. What's replacing it is data, trackability, and proof that holds up.

Jo Shoesmith, Amazon

Amazon's Chief Creative Officer came to POSSIBLE with a thesis: the most powerful brand stories aren't built on products — they're built on human truths so universal they need no translation. Her examples: a holiday spot about three women recreating a sledding tradition that ran for two consecutive years, and a COVID-era film about a canceled ballet recital that resonated globally because it captured the specific grief of a moment stolen.

"That's that very big human truth that we can tap into and have a piece of work travel."

Harry Kargman, Kargo

Kargo's founder described a shift in real-time creative that AI has now made possible: imagine a water brand serving a hydration message to a live sports audience at the exact moment a player fumbles the ball. Not planned. Not pre-produced. The right creative, in the right moment, triggered by what's actually happening on the field.

"That opportunity didn't exist until, I would say, this year where AI enables that to happen."

Charlamagne Tha God

Charlamagne has watched every platform emerge and every prediction about what would kill radio prove wrong. His message at POSSIBLE was hard-earned and simple: the content is never the variable. The distribution always is.

"You have to meet people where they are. Back in the day, they said 'if you build it, they will come.' That used to be true maybe 20 years ago. But now you have to build everywhere."

The creator economy has always moved faster than the brands trying to work within it. At the ANA Creator Marketing Conference in Las Vegas, Lyle Stevens — co-founder of Later and now its Chief Innovation Officer — laid out a vision for where the industry is heading that was equal parts practical roadmap and provocation.

Stevens opened with a framework that reframed how brands should think about creator content entirely. The social feed, he argued, is no longer the destination. It's the starting point. Brands that are still measuring creator success by likes and reach are measuring the wrong things.

"Creating that content, giving them their authentic voice, weaving in the story, then deploying it across multiple places — trying to deploy it after the fact is like pushing a rope. It's really hard to do."

In conversation with Grace Niu, Influencer and Brand Marketing Manager at Quest Nutrition, Stevens unpacked what effective creator briefs actually look like in practice. The answer isn't product-first content or authenticity-first content — it's both, woven together and deployed across multiple channels simultaneously rather than as an afterthought.

His sharpest observation came when he turned to AI. Every time the barrier to creative expression drops, the creator economy expands. AI is simply the latest barrier to fall. And contrary to conventional wisdom, Stevens predicted that job disruption from AI won't shrink the creator economy — it will grow it, just as COVID did.

"I actually think we're going to see a lot of job disruption actually result in many more creators, just like we did during COVID."

His final point shifted the room. Stevens described a near-future — potentially as close as the upcoming holiday season — where the traditional draft-and-approve cycle between brands and creators gets inverted. Instead of a creator submitting a draft for brand feedback, brands will use AI to generate a draft asset using a creator's licensed name, image, and likeness, then send it back to the creator for approval.

"It's going to flip the entire process on its head, and that's going to be a very interesting moment for the creator economy."

For the marketers in the room, the message was clear: the question is no longer whether AI changes the creator relationship. It's whether you're building for the model that's coming or defending the one that's already leaving.

There are conversations that happen at Essence Festival that don't happen anywhere else. Bea Dixon, co-founder and CEO of The Honey Pot Company, sat down with journalist Delina Medhin for a conversation about what it actually means to take investment, build wealth, and exit a business you love.

The exchange started with a question that cuts straight to the tension many Black founders carry: when is the right time to take an investor, and how do you know? Dixon's answer reframed the entire premise.

"Once you start to take money, the idea eventually is to sell. How does an investor make their money back? They don't make their money back by just investing and leaving it in your business."

It's a truth that gets obscured in the culture around Black entrepreneurship, where investment is often celebrated as validation without a full reckoning with what it commits you to. Dixon was clear-eyed about what comes next — and about the stigma that can follow a Black founder who sells.

"When you do sell, it can be looked at as a sellout, which is absurd — because this is just how business works. That's how you obtain your wealth."

Medhin pushed further: what's the point of it all? The planes, the sacrifice, the grind, the gut-level intuition that has to hold up under pressure year after year? Dixon stripped out the inspirational packaging.

"You're living under a level of stress that is not normal or natural. You're stretching yourself in your mind in ways you didn't even know were possible. That's the point, right? It should make you wealthy."

For the founders in the audience at Essence — many of them early-stage, navigating the same questions about whether to bootstrap or raise, whether to hold or sell — the conversation offered something rarer than a blueprint. It offered permission. Permission to think about the exit from the beginning. Permission to define wealth on your own terms. Permission to build something extraordinary and then, when the time is right, get paid for it.