Ah, the sweet sound of cha-ching. In the old days, it came from the cash register, but today’s point-of-sale systems are much more complex (and often expensive), so you need to make sure that you choose the right option:

• Many POS systems geared toward restaurants increasingly automate tasks like inventory management, customer orders and reservations.
• More retail-focused POS software contains tools for managing discounts and loyalty programs.
• Data-minded business owners might also appreciate that other POS systems specialize in generating insights using sales trends and customer purchase history.

Consider where you’re generating the most sales. Is it online or in-person? Do you really need that full-fledged register with all of the bells and whistles?

Click to learn more about the best POS systems for small businesses.

Chat GRE: How to learn AI without a tech degree

Glossier: New biography traces “girlboss” CEO’s rise and fall

The molar the merrier: Startup wants to regrow lost teeth

(Source: Shutterstock)

It’s been almost a year since OpenAI released an early demo of ChatGPT, setting the internet ablaze. Five days later ChatGPT had a million users asking for everything from sales text to poetry, novels, and translations. 

Hate it, love it, fear it … however you feel, business leaders today must respond to AI’s great evolution. Even as big companies loosen college degree requirements, they’re increasingly requiring employees at all levels to understand generative tech and use these tools in their day-to-day duties.

According to a survey of 1,000 business leaders in the U.S. and U.K., the most desirable skill for future employees is knowledge of AI. However, LinkedIn found that almost half of workers think they should know more about AI than they do.

So, how can employees upskill without going back to college for an expensive STEM degree?

Fortunately, more than 70% of business leaders say their company will invest in an AI skills program. “Keeping pace with AI adoption will require employees to upskill and reskill continually — and HR will enable much of this learning,” workplace expert Dr. Terri Horton told LinkedIn. 

How this looks in practice will depend on where the worker sits. Customer service can use AI to answer queries, while marketing employees can use AI for keyword analysis or to generate content. It will be specific to each job or function. Some workers will only need a basic walk-through of how to enter generative prompts; others may need more advanced, technical online courses in machine learning or Python.

Even without employer assistance, there are plenty of free or affordable AI training resources. These include courses from Udemy, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, LinkedIn Learning, and even Harvard University, which cover algorithms, game-playing engines, handwriting recognition, and machine translation. Certification often requires an extra fee; Harvard’s certificate is $219.

Still, that’s a bargain compared to a new Master’s program in AI launched by the University of Texas at Austin. The price tag? Close to $10,000. Maybe someone ought to just program an AI to teach this stuff.

🤿 DIVE DEEPER

• With Little Employer Oversight, ChatGPT Usage Rates Rise Among American Workers

• How to Build an Online Business, According to ChatGPT

(Source: Simon & Schuster)

In Glossy, journalist and author Marisa Meltzer goes behind the scenes at Glossier, one of the most influential startup cosmetics brands of the 2010s and a standard bearer of “no-makeup makeup.” The book traces Glossier’s meteoric rise to a $1.2 billion valuation and unravels what happened to make founder Emily Weiss step down as CEO in 2022.

Weiss first entered the zeitgeist as a Teen Vogue “super intern” on MTV’s The Hills. She launched her blog Into The Gloss, secured venture capital, and utilized social media to create the Glossier aesthetic, bolstered by millennial-pink packaging and the refreshing mantra “skin first, makeup second.” She was on the front lines of last decade’s “girlboss” movement.

But Meltzer takes a closer look at Glossier’s corporate culture, which received allegations of insensitive treatment of workers (particularly people of color at its retail locations). Glossy paints a balanced portrait of Weiss’s impressive tech-mogul ambition, and questions how superficially inclusive marketing might cover up bad behavior like an embarrassing blemish.

(Source: Shutterstock)

Next year, Kyoto University’s startup venture Toregem Biopharma will begin clinical trials for a drug to inhibit proteins that suppress tooth growth. If successful, it will initially help babies affected by anodontia (who are born missing some or all of their permanent teeth).

But the researchers have a secondary goal: to regrow lost adult teeth from itty-bitty “tooth buds” that remain, essentially disrupting Big Denture. The as-yet-unnamed drug has been successful in animal trials, and Toregem is hoping to have it on the market for humans by 2030.

(So, you’ll need to buy plastic vampire fangs for this Halloween, but a decade from now, your Dracula costume will be a lot more convincing.)

(Source: LinkedIn)

Written by Elizabeth Barton, Rachel Brodsky, and Dan Ketchum.