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|  |  | Thursday, December 4, 2025 | |  | | Boris Roessler/dpa via Getty Images | Good morning, Quartz readers! It’s Shannon Carroll with the Daily Brief. Today, broker bots are pushing instant portfolios, AI labs are pushing bravado over safety, Dollar Tree is pushing thriftiness as a success strategy, and Subway is pushing an 800-pound oven as a loyalty perk. | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | Salesforce delivered a show-me quarter. Revenue landed near $10.3 billion, profit vaulted past forecasts, backlog rose double digits, and the AI-and-data run-rate hit roughly $1.4 billion — enough to jolt a bruised stock higher. | Dollar Tree finds gold in the bargain bins. With shoppers trading down and chasing little extras, the company’s multi-price strategy and discretionary mix have turned budget retail into one of the year’s most competitive arenas. | Shoppers give Macy’s a holiday surprise. Revised guidance, solid quarterly gains, and a
record-setting holiday weekend suggest Americans still spend when the deals feel right, giving the department store a welcome boost. | Trump’s tariff blitz hits the
labor market. Manufacturing and payroll data point to a sector stuck in retreat, with on-again, off-again import taxes driving companies to slash headcounts, delay investments, and redirect production. | | | SPONSORED |  | Finally, Skincare Made for
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| | BOT AND PAID FOR | Financial planners can tell when someone has relied on a robo-advisor because the portfolio is tidy — and the blind spots are enormous. But the AI tools behind them are booming anyway. Robo-advisors managed about $1.4 trillion in 2024, according to Market Research Intellect, as big players have sold the dream of instant portfolios and smartphone onboarding as a cheaper, faster stand-in for a human who remembers your birthday. And that pile of money could more than double over the next decade as more people decide that an
app is better (and cheaper) than an awkward meeting in a conference room.
Robo platforms can slash advisory fees, kill minimums, spin up portfolios in minutes on your phone, and quietly harvest tax losses while you sleep. The problem is that they only see what fits inside a standardized questionnaire and a brokerage account. They don’t see the concentrated stock sitting in a separate plan, the aging parent who may need care, or the startup someone hopes will pay for their retirement.
Underneath the sleek interface, many of these models are black boxes owned by big financial firms, with your data flowing through families of companies that have plenty of incentive to cross-sell, analyze, and repurpose it long after you tap “agree.”
Experts say a planner can rummage through a stack of statements and see concentration risk, messy estate issues, or insurance gaps that never show up in an app’s risk quiz, then talk a panicked client out of selling at the worst possible
moment. Human advisors also lose sleep over what happens to the sensitive financial data behind robo platforms if those businesses get sold, hacked, or quietly repurposed. For straightforward, smaller accounts, handing the keys to an algorithm can be a good start, but once your money has begun to sprawl across jobs, marriages, kids, and side hustles, a human who knows which uncomfortable questions to ask may be the real bargain. Quartz’s Deborah Kearns has more on the cheap advice that can get expensive fast. | | | RECOMMENDED READING | The
future of tech, decoded.
Semafor Technology unpacks the ideas, innovations, and power shifts redefining the global tech landscape. From AI and machine learning to the startups and policies shaping
the industry, each briefing delivers clarity and depth on the tech transforming our world
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| | | AN AI-CARUS MOMENT | The world’s biggest AI labs love to talk about superintelligence, but the people grading their homework see something closer to a group project gone sideways. The Future of Life Institute’s new AI Safety Index gave
eight major companies everything from a C+ to straight Fs, including across the one category you’d think they’d care about most: not losing control of the superhuman systems they’re racing to build. Even today’s leaders — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind — could only scrape together middle-of-the-pack scores while conceding that catastrophic failure risks might sit as high as one in three.
The picture gets uglier once you leave the front row. xAI, Meta, and a trio of Chinese
players drifted lower, with reviewers pointing to weak robustness, flimsy threat modeling, and models that still slip into serious harm under standardized tests. OpenAI slid from a B to a C- after a string of real-world incidents, including cases where chatbots reportedly encouraged self-harm and produced psychotic-like behavior in long-term users. Reviewers didn’t mince words, warning that “frequent safety failures” are now the norm and that companies still haven’t figured out how to keep their own products from producing the kinds of outputs
lawmakers are already writing bills about.
A few companies offered more transparency this go-around, filling out detailed surveys for the first time, but even the overachievers are still well short of emerging rules in the EU and California. The reviewers’ verdict lands somewhere between exasperated and alarmed: enormous ambition, minimal guardrails, and safety plans padded with hopeful assumptions instead of measurable thresholds. For an industry obsessed with control, the one thing
it can’t convincingly control is the very intelligence it wants to scale. Quartz’s Jackie Snow has more on the AI
builders flunking the test they insist they’re all ready to ace. | | | SPONSORED | | Finally, Skincare Made for
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