Amazon has spent more than two decades teaching customers that delivery should keep getting faster. What once took a week became two-day shipping, then one-day delivery, same-day delivery and, increasingly, delivery within hours. Now the company wants to eliminate even more of the wait. Amazon announced this week that it plans to expand its Prime Air drone-delivery service to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026, up dramatically from just 11 operating locations today. The company says eligible packages can arrive in as little as 30 minutes, potentially turning suburban yards and driveways into the newest part of Amazon’s enormous logistics network.

The idea is fairly simple from the customer’s perspective. Shoppers in eligible areas place an order through the same Amazon app or website they already use and select drone delivery at checkout. Amazon’s newest drones can carry many products weighing five pounds or less, including groceries, electronics, cosmetics, household products and medications. Amazon says more than 60% of its most frequently purchased items meet the size and weight requirements. When the drone reaches the customer’s chosen delivery area, it checks for people, animals, vehicles and other obstacles before hovering above the ground and releasing the package. Prime members pay $2.99 for orders under $50, while qualifying orders of $50 or more are delivered by drone for free.

For Amazon, this is the latest step in a logistics strategy built around reducing the distance between inventory and customers. The company has already created massive fulfillment centers, smaller same-day facilities and increasingly sophisticated delivery networks designed to make waiting feel unnecessary. In 2025, Amazon delivered more than 8 billion items to U.S. Prime members either the same day or the next day. Drone delivery pushes that philosophy further by removing roads, traffic lights and potentially even delivery drivers from part of the final journey. A package that might normally travel from a warehouse into a van and through neighborhood streets can instead travel almost directly through the air.

But this is also where Amazon’s pursuit of convenience begins colliding with the physical world. A website can be updated almost instantly. Expanding an aviation network into hundreds of communities is much more complicated. Amazon needs regulatory and local approvals for its drone hubs, while residents and officials have raised concerns about noise, privacy and safety. Some residents have compared the sound of drones to leaf blowers, and Amazon’s rollout has already encountered opposition in certain communities. The Federal Aviation Administration provides the broader aviation framework, but each new location still requires Amazon to deal with local conditions, airspace, neighborhoods and public acceptance.

Safety becomes particularly important when thousands of autonomous aircraft could eventually be flying above neighborhoods every day. Amazon says its drones use onboard cameras and sensors to detect obstacles and make real-time flight decisions without someone remotely steering every aircraft. The company holds FAA Part 135 certification and has developed systems designed to react to unexpected weather, aircraft and objects in their path. Amazon also says its navigation cameras process information onboard rather than providing employees with a live feed of people below. Those safeguards will become increasingly important as Prime Air moves from a relatively small experiment into something Amazon hopes tens of millions of customers will eventually use.

The bigger business question is whether customers actually need everything this quickly. Amazon has repeatedly discovered that faster delivery changes behavior. Once two-day shipping became normal, five days felt slow. Once same-day delivery became widely available, waiting until tomorrow began to feel less convenient. Drone delivery could create the same effect. A customer who realizes they can receive batteries, medicine, a phone charger or an ingredient for dinner within 30 minutes may begin using Amazon for purchases that would previously have required a trip to a local store. That makes drone delivery more than a transportation experiment. It could become another way for Amazon to compete with pharmacies, convenience stores, grocery stores and other businesses whose greatest advantage has traditionally been physical proximity to the customer.

Yet the final few miles of delivery may prove harder to automate than the thousands of miles that came before them. Warehouses can be designed around robots. Software can optimize routes. Algorithms can predict demand. Neighborhoods are different. They contain children, pets, trees, power lines, changing weather, emergency aircraft, local regulations and people who may simply dislike having drones flying overhead. Amazon’s technology may work perfectly and still face resistance because logistics eventually intersects with communities rather than spreadsheets.

That is what makes Prime Air such an interesting business experiment. Amazon is no longer simply asking whether it can move a package faster. It is asking whether customers, regulators and neighborhoods are willing to redesign a small piece of everyday life around that convenience. If the expansion succeeds, seeing a delivery drone overhead could eventually become as ordinary as seeing a delivery van parked outside. If it struggles, it may demonstrate that even the world’s most sophisticated logistics company eventually encounters a boundary technology cannot easily remove. The last mile may ultimately be the hardest mile to automate.

Marilyn Maye hardly needs another review—although I know she still enjoys reading them. Yet there she was last night, at 98, onstage at Dizzy’s Club in New York, singing, swinging, looking terrific, and thrilling an audience just as she has for generations.

Her voice was in magnificent form, her wit as sharp as ever, and she commanded the room with the effortless authority of a true master. Watching her perform at this stage of her remarkable career was not simply a concert experience—it was a rare opportunity to witness music history in the making. Her arrangements seem to live in the very bones of her fantastic trio—Mark McLean on drums and Tom Hubbard on bass—and you will rarely hear a tighter, more intuitive display of musicianship supporting a singer. Tedd Firth, her pianist and arranger, seems to breathe the same musical air as Marilyn. He creates an ocean of sound that surrounds and enhances her, perfectly complementing her extraordinary sense of time and phrasing.

It feels as though Marilyn and Tedd continually inspire one another, each pushing the other to greater heights. The result is something truly rare—a once-in-a-lifetime musical experience. What a privilege to have been in the room for yet another unforgettable Marilyn Maye performance.

I, like most MM friends have many Marvelous Marilyn stories, but here’s one of my favorites. After a late-night performance on a cruise ship, Eda and I shared an Apple Martini with Marilyn and then escorted her back to her cabin. As the three of us linked arms and did our best to remain “steady” navigating the passageway Marilyn suddenly blurted out, “Oh, my dear, I do hope this is the ship that’s rocking!”

BTW, Marilyn told me a while ago to keep this story to myself. So, Marilyn, if you’re reading this…oops!

MARILYN MAYE

TEDD FIRTH & MARILYN MAYE

MARILYN MAYE

DIZZY’S CLUB

DIZZY’S CLUB

TEDD FIRTH, MARILYN MAYE, TOM HUBBARD

TEDD FIRTH & MARILYN MAYE

MARILYN MAYE

DIZZY’S CLUB

MARILYN MAYE

EDA SOROKOFF, MARILYN MAYE, STEPHEN SOROKOFF

MARILYN MAYE & SHANE HARTKE

EDA SOROKOFF, MARILYN MAYE, SUSIE CLAUSEN

TEDD FIRTH & MARK McLEAN

DIZZY’S CLUB

OpenAI’s decision to slow development of an upcoming AI model because of growing cybersecurity concerns is a warning that businesses deploying artificial intelligence can no longer treat security as an afterthought.

OpenAI said it is working to stay ahead of standards for monitoring, alignment and security as AI models become more capable. The move comes as businesses increasingly use AI systems for customer service, coding, research, internal operations and increasingly autonomous tasks.

For businesses, the message is bigger than OpenAI: the more authority an AI system receives, the greater the consequences when it makes a mistake or is manipulated.

An AI agent that simply drafts an email presents relatively limited risk. An agent that can access a company’s customer database, send messages, approve transactions or modify software is different. A security failure could quickly become a financial or operational problem.

That means companies investing in AI should now budget for monitoring, access controls, testing and human oversight alongside the AI software itself.

The shift could also create a new business opportunity. As AI agents become more autonomous, companies will need tools and services that continuously test what those systems are doing and prevent dangerous actions.

The lesson for businesses is straightforward: AI adoption is moving from experimentation to infrastructure, and security has to move with it. Companies that deploy AI without building safeguards around it may discover that the cost of a failure is much higher than the cost of protecting the system in the first place.

For businesses, the next competitive advantage in AI may not simply be having the smartest model. It may be knowing how to deploy that model safely.

OpenAI is slowing the pace of development of some of its most powerful AI systems, a decision that could signal a major shift in how the AI industry approaches the next stage of the technology race.

The company said Tuesday that it is temporarily slowing certain model-development efforts while it strengthens monitoring, alignment and security. The move follows growing concerns about increasingly capable AI agents and their ability to operate autonomously in ways developers did not anticipate.

For businesses, the important story is not simply that one AI company is slowing down. It is that AI safety and reliability are becoming operational business issues rather than purely technical concerns.

Companies have spent the past two years rushing to integrate AI into customer service, software development, marketing, finance and internal operations. The next phase will require businesses to ask a harder question: what happens when an AI system is capable of taking actions rather than simply generating answers?

That changes the economics of AI adoption. A business deploying an AI agent to communicate with customers, modify records, write software or make decisions cannot treat the system like ordinary software. It needs monitoring, permissions, testing, security controls and a way for humans to intervene.

OpenAI’s decision is therefore a warning for companies building their own AI automation strategies: moving fast is no longer enough. Businesses need to build systems that can be controlled when AI becomes more capable.

The companies that benefit most from the next AI wave may not be those that deploy the largest number of agents first. They may be the ones that build reliable processes around them.

For business leaders, the lesson is straightforward: AI adoption is entering a more mature phase. The question is shifting from “What can AI do?” to “What can we safely allow AI to do on our behalf?”

That distinction could define the next era of enterprise AI.

Hayden Panettiere died Sunday at 36 years old. On this coming up Friday she would have been 37. Thirty-seven.

There will be tributes. There will be photographs of the beautiful little girl who grew up before America’s eyes, clips from Heroes and Nashville, recollections from co-stars, and inevitable examinations of the final days of her life. The more uncomfortable question isn’t how Hayden Panettiere died. It is how she lived—and what the rest of us accepted as normal while watching it happen.

Panettiere was found unresponsive Sunday in Greenville, South Carolina, and pronounced dead despite attempts to save her. Authorities have said there were no signs of foul play. Her death remains under investigation, and no official cause has been announced. Reports that emergency dispatchers referenced a possible overdose should remain exactly that—reports—until medical authorities determine what happened.

Her father, Skip Panettiere, called his daughter an “incredible light” and a “force of nature.”

She was also a woman who had spent years publicly telling us that something had gone terribly wrong.

Panettiere began working before she could possibly understand what work was. Her career started in infancy.

By childhood she was appearing on soap operas. At 17, she became internationally famous as Claire Bennet, the indestructible cheerleader on Heroes. Then came Nashville, Golden Globe nominations, films, magazine covers and the peculiar machinery through which Hollywood transforms a human being into something everyone believes they know.

But Hayden Panettiere was not indestructible. She told us that herself. Only months before her death, she published This Is Me: A Reckoning, a memoir in which she wrote candidly about addiction, depression, abusive relationships, motherhood, fame and the enormous cost of growing up within an industry that had been employing her since she was a baby.

This isn’t the moment to turn her struggles into another cautionary celebrity tale. It is time to ask what we could have done differently. What does it do to a child to learn that being charming, beautiful, precocious and professionally useful earns applause before she has had the opportunity simply to discover who she is? Hollywood has been asking that question for decades without apparently becoming sufficiently interested in the answer.

We have watched child stars struggle again and again. Some survive it beautifully. Others spend adulthood trying to understand where the person ends and the product begins. Every time something terrible happens, we discuss the pressures of childhood fame as though we have discovered them for the first time.

We haven’t. We knew. Panettiere also spoke openly about postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter Kaya in 2014 and about her struggles with alcohol and prescription medication. She sought treatment. She spoke publicly. She attempted to rebuild. She returned to acting. She wrote the book.

She also endured another devastating loss when her younger brother, Jansen Panettiere, died suddenly in 2023 at only 28 from complications related to an enlarged heart. How much can one human being carry before we stop praising her resilience and ask why she has been required to be so resilient in the first place?

We use that word constantly…..strong. She was so strong. She was a fighter. She was brave. She kept going, until she couldn’t

There is a danger in continually celebrating someone’s ability to survive. Eventually we can become spectators to the survival rather than participants in making the life more survivable. Being a celebrity makes that easier. We consume people’s breakdowns as content. Their weight changes become photographs. Their relationships become headlines. Their relapses become exclusives. Their pain becomes engagement.

Then, when somebody dies, the machinery abruptly changes tone. Suddenly everyone becomes tender. Tenderness arriving after death is simply too late.

That doesn’t mean the public could have “saved” Hayden Panettiere. We should resist that comforting arrogance as well. Addiction is complicated. Depression is complicated. Human beings are complicated. Love cannot guarantee another person’s survival, and neither fame nor money insulates anyone from suffering.

At this moment, we don’t even know what caused her death. We do know enough about her life to ask better questions about our culture. What protections do we owe children who work in entertainment? What happens when a child’s identity becomes inseparable from her ability to perform? Why do we reward people for revealing their deepest wounds publicly and then continue consuming those wounds as entertainment? Why do we confuse access to someone’s story with actual knowledge of the person? And most importantly: Why are we so much better at memorializing people than noticing them while they’re still here?

Panettiere’s death feels especially cruel because she appeared to be attempting another beginning. Her memoir was released in May and became a New York Times bestseller. She had returned to work and recently starred in the 2026 psychological thriller Sleepwalker. Three weeks before her death, she posted a photograph with a friend captioned simply, “Good times and good friends.”

None of that tells us what was happening privately. That’s precisely the point. We never know entirely what another person is carrying. Fame doesn’t change that. Beauty doesn’t change it. Success certainly doesn’t change it. Maybe what the world could have done better for Hayden Panettiere is what we could do better for one another.

Stop assuming the person who looks fine is fine. Stop turning suffering into spectacle. Stop demanding that people transform their wounds into inspirational stories before we consider those wounds worthy of compassion. Stop applauding resilience so loudly that we fail to notice exhaustion. Stop waiting until somebody dies to tell the world how extraordinary they were.

Hayden Panettiere was 36. She was a daughter. She was a sister who lost her brother far too young. She was a mother. She was an actress who had been performing almost from the beginning of her life. She was a human being who repeatedly told the world that being successful and being okay were not remotely the same thing.

We heard her. The harder question is whether we really listened.