• Silvio Pfeufer uses Saltz to save time on food procurement at his Michelin-starred restaurant, Matthias.
• Saltz uses agentic AI to modernize a typically complicated process between food buyers and sellers.
• For independent eateries, the streamlined process can reduce costs and increase access to high-quality ingredients.

When Silvio Pfeufer first got into cheffing, he was surprised by the amount of administrative work involved.

"It's not only the evening, sending nice plates to guests. There's a lot of stuff to do to make that happen," Pfeufer told Business Insider. He took long phone calls from food suppliers and producers that kept him away from the kitchen.

Sourcing and buying food is a process riddled with disorganization, since farmers, wholesalers, logistics providers, and restaurants communicate in different ways — by phone, email, text message, and PDF blast — starting as early as 4 a.m. The cost and availability of products are constantly in flux, so sellers issue frequent updates: The price of wild-caught fish could change three times a day, for example.

When Pfeufer opened his own restaurant in 2024, he wanted to streamline his food procurement process. At Matthias, which pays homage to his late grandfather, Pfeufer uses an AI-assisted platform for food business owners called Saltz to speed up food procurement and reduce phone calls.

The time savings are critical, said Pfeufer, a co-owner and head chef at the Berlin-based eatery. Using AI agents, Saltz connects restaurants directly to suppliers via a marketplace that brings together disparate catalogs, transactions, and logistics so restaurants can compare and buy fresh, high-quality, and specialty products more quickly than with traditional food procurement processes.

The platform's standardized, real-time food data can be a game-changer for independently owned and operated restaurants like Pfeufer's, given their limited purchasing power. Saltz said that thousands of buyers and hundreds of suppliers use its technology, though it didn't share exact numbers. It said around 80% to 90% of its buyers are independent restaurants.

Connecting with high-quality and specialty suppliers

Pfeufer said he chose Saltz because he liked how the platform modernized old processes. In the two years he's used it, it's allowed him to discover new suppliers, order outside business hours, and gain better oversight on pricing, he said.

Founded in 2022, the startup uses AI agents to ingest PDFs, emails, and text messages that food sellers send to Saltz, standardize and enrich all the data, and consolidate it into a single platform. Its AI agents automatically update each seller's listings on the platform, eliminating the need for manual updates.

Buyers, meanwhile, see once-disparate product options, information, and up-to-date prices in one place. They can also order food at a time that's convenient for them and track their deliveries. "On a Sunday, at night, or in the morning, I can do it by myself, and don't have to have all these calls," Pfeufer said.

At Matthias, which was awarded its first Michelin star in 2025 after 10 months of service, meals must meet a high standard every day, and products have to be of the freshest quality. Pfeufer orders vegetables, milk, and other items from Saltz every week, plus fresh fish twice a week. Before using Saltz, the quality of his products wasn't necessarily worse, he said, but access to new or specialist suppliers was more limited and supply chains were longer.

"The fish is now often sourced directly from the trader or farmer, without the need for intermediate storage. This allows us to avoid additional storage times that could negatively affect freshness," Pfeufer said, adding that more oversight into the supply chain — and it being shorter — means his food is more consistently high quality.

"We've definitely been able to connect with better suppliers," he told Business Insider. The chef added that he still works directly with certain local farmers, as he is often on the hunt for rare items that aren't on the platform.

For Pfeufer, using Saltz also allows him to see more costs upfront, so he can better plan how much to charge for new dishes. "It makes all the calculations much easier, which is very important for us," he said.

Agentic AI acts as a foundational tool

Saltz was founded by brothers Andrius and Thomas Šlimas, who previously built the Shopify-acquired dropshipping platform Oberlo. After spending four years inside Shopify's supply chain machine, the brothers teamed up with industry veteran Reinis Štrodahs. Their goal: modernize the $9.8 trillion food procurement industry.

"It's impossible to make sense or structure that chaos of information which lives in different places and has no common structure," Andrius said.

The Šlimas brothers said that previous unsuccessful attempts to modernize food procurement took two approaches: either trying to force suppliers and buyers onto a single platform, which required them to change how they work, or taking on the time-consuming task of manually inputting every PDF, email, and text message.

With Saltz, AI agents upload and update product listings for sellers, so individual stakeholder workflows don't have to change. Making agentic AI foundational to the process, Tomas said, gives their platform an edge.

"That gives us a speed advantage, and in this market, speed compounds into market share."

• Donald Trump owns his own social media company.
• But Truth Social isn't where to go if you want a lot of people to see you attack Jimmy Kimmel.
• So Melania Trump made sure her demand that ABC do something about Kimmel appeared on Elon Musk's X, too.

Melania Trump says ABC should "take a stand" over Jimmy Kimmel, because she doesn't like a joke the talk show host made last week.

First things first: The first lady calling on a media company to do something about its employee because she doesn't like what that employee said is a bad thing. It's an attempt to use the power of the White House to silence speech that the White House doesn't like.

And it's just as worrisome as it was last September, when Brendan Carr, Trump's pick to head the Federal Communications Commission, told ABC owner Disney to "take action, frankly, on Kimmel" because Kimmel had made a joke about Trump supporters and Charlie Kirk. Disney suspended Kimmel for a few days and then reinstated him after public outcry.

There is a difference between Carr's demand and Melania Trump's demand on Monday, since Carr is a regulator with direct oversight over parts of Disney's business, and Melania Trump doesn't have any formal power over … anything. But she's still using the power of the White House to try to control speech, and that should alarm anyone with any common sense. (I've asked her office for comment.)

Let's see how new Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro responds to this one.

Much less important, but still interesting to me: The first lady's choice of platform to make her demand/threat. Melania Trump used Elon Musk's X, the site formally known as Twitter, to post her thoughts on Monday, using both her official First Lady of the United States account and her own personal account.

Trump also posted the same statement on Truth Social, the social media site owned by her husband. But that one seemed obligatory. Not in the way it's literally obligatory for Donald Trump to post at least some of his thoughts on his own social platform before he puts them anywhere else. But in the way you're supposed to tell your significant other you think they make the best pasta, when what you really crave is Olive Garden.

The numbers make it clear why Melania Trump chose to use X to make a splash: Her post on that platform has 230,000 likes, and that number is skyrocketing. Her Truth Social post has 6,500 likes and is traveling at a much more leisurely pace.

All of which is a reminder that while Truth Social is the Trump-owned Twitter alternative Donald Trump uses, it remains a minor-at-best platform. One that won't tell you how many users it has, and one that managed to lose more than $700 million on revenue of $3.7 million in 2025.

None of that is news, nor does it seem to matter to Trump, who still owns a company worth nearly $3 billion, even after a stock plunge and the departure of its CEO — perhaps because the company's current plan is to merge with a nuclear fusion company.

It also doesn't matter where Donald Trump truths or posts or spouts off — he's the president of the United States, so just about anything he says that's noteworthy gets instantly transmitted through the global media ecosystem. Like what happened on Monday afternoon, where he piggybacked on his wife's post and explicitly called on Disney and ABC to fire Kimmel.

But for the rest of us — including the first lady of the United States — where you post a message matters. Which is why she's using the one that helped her husband get into the White House in the first place.

• JPMorgan software developers say the bank is raising its expectations for AI use.
• Internal company communications reveal the bank's new AI targets.
• The updated objectives affect members of its global developer workforce.

JPMorgan Chase's message to its global armada of software developers is clear: embrace AI or risk falling behind.

Internal company documents seen by Business Insider and posted to JPMorgan's intranet for employees lay out a series of new expectations for the bank's software engineering workforce, who comprise the majority of its 65,000-person-strong Global Technology division. The newly listed objectives, published on the intranet earlier this month, say all software and security engineers are expected to "drive excellence" by adopting AI and "contributing to initiatives that improve productivity, speed, scalability, and impact."

One document authored by the bank's human resources leaders laid out two core objectives for software engineers: step up their coding game, and start harnessing AI to save time and get more done. The new language about objectives "will be added automatically and will appear by the end of March," an image of the document on the intranet showed — a reference to upcoming changes to employees' goals expected to take effect at the end of this month. The firm also instructed workers to develop clear goals with their managers that align with the bank's new objectives.

"Demonstrate measurable improvement in code quality, speed and productivity through regular use of approved AI coding assist tools, contributing to the team's overall efficiency targets," read one goal written by HR. "Engage in identifying, implementing and optimizing AI-driven automation opportunities within technology lifecycle management (TLM) processes to drive efficiency and support capacity unlock initiatives, ensuring all enhancements leverage current technology assets before considering new solutions."

A spokeswoman for JPMorgan declined to comment.

JPMorgan is among Wall Street's biggest spenders on technology and artificial intelligence, with projected tech investments reaching roughly $20 billion in 2026 — far exceeding peers like Goldman Sachs. Across corporate America, companies including Meta and Google have begun pushing employees to adopt AI tools and, in some cases, evaluating their use.

Business Insider spoke to five engineers across the bank who said the push to adopt AI has been felt far and wide — in managerial conversations, in intranet posts, and through dashboards that display who's using certain AI tools, and who's not. They added that discussions about productivity and AI adoption have become more frequent in recent weeks. It all comes as developers get ready for a pilot of Anthropic's Claude Code to be rolled out as soon as April, said a longtime IT developer in the Global Technology group. Claude Code would be made available alongside the four other large language models coders are already using: two from OpenAI's ChatGPT, and two from Anthropic's Claude.

'Anxiety' among developers

The developers Business Insider spoke to said they've been encouraged to use AI tools for a wide range of tasks, from writing code to preparing presentations. One dashboard that tracked adoption and usage of the bank's GitHub Copilot appeared to show details as granular as which employees had installed it and identified individuals as "light," "heavy," or "non" users.

For some, the message has added pressure inside a firm that has drawn scrutiny in recent years for its use of internal monitoring tools and performance tracking. Business Insider published a series of reports on the firm's Workforce Activity Data Utility in 2022, a program that collected data points about how employees were spending their day — from the length of video calls to how long they spent drafting emails to where they were sitting in the office.

"There's a lot of anxiety in the environment right now," the longtime IT developer said. Those who don't use AI risk being seen as underperforming, the developer said. Another developer said their manager said in a recent meeting that availability of the new AI tools comes with an "expectation" that velocity and output should show "a noticeable increase" quarter over quarter.

Three of the five developers Business Insider spoke to said the tools are helpful, despite discomfort over the tracking.

New performance dimensions

The updated guidance on AI use comes as the bank implements other adjustments to how it ranks workers' success on the job. Going forward, the bank said on the intranet portal, it's streamlining some of the primary "dimensions" it uses to grade employees, pivoting to using two categories: "what you achieve" — business outcomes — and "how you achieve it," including adherence to the firm's behavioral principles.

According to screenshots from the bank's intranet, JPMorgan will segment workers into three buckets: "stand out" for those who exceed job standards, "achiever" for the majority of employees, and "needs improvement" for those who require "additional support" and have struggled to perform consistently.

Another page Business Insider reviewed listed skills non-managers working in software engineering were expected to display across "all performance dimensions." One is "Data Fluency," noting that the skill is applied by those who develop and drive "adoption of new tools or methodologies to leverage data in the flow of work." "Rate of adoption" is cited as one measurement of the employee's impact toward exhibiting the skill in practice.

The documents from the JPMorgan intranet echo the firm's long-standing culture of internal monitoring and data collection, making clear that continuous performance tracking is vital for keeping workers on target throughout the year.

"You and your manager will use your objectives to track your progress during the year, recognize impact, and streamline your annual review," the firm wrote on an internal page tied to goals.

Have a tip? Contact these reporters via email at ralexander@businessinsider.com or SMS/Signal at 561-247-5758 or atecotzky@insider.com or Signal at alicetecotzky.05. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• A large division within Meta Reality Labs is undergoing an overhaul to become fully "AI-native."
• The unit is now organized into "pods" made up of "AI builders" and "AI pod leads."
• This new push and the latest layoffs at Reality Labs are unrelated, Meta said.

Meta is rebranding some employees as "AI builders" and organizing them into AI-native "pods," according to a leaked memo obtained by Business Insider.

The memo described an overhaul of roles, titles, and team structures across a 1,000-employee team within Meta's Reality Labs. It's part of a broader, aggressive push by Meta to adopt small teams and use AI.

The pilot program was announced last month within the Reality Labs team that builds developer tools. Everyone in the division will now have one of three titles: AI Builder, AI Pod Lead, or AI Org Lead. That's to encourage a shift toward a flatter organization, a structure that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has advocated.

"Our ultimate goal is to drive a step change in engineering productivity and product quality," the memo reads. "To achieve this, we're fundamentally rewiring how we operate, how we are structured, and how we support each other."

When asked for comment, Meta referred Business Insider to comments earlier this year from Zuckerberg that 2026 is the year AI will begin to "dramatically change the way we work," with projects that once required large teams potentially handled by one, "very talented" person.

According to the memo, each pod consists of a small group of AI builders focused on specific outcomes, often working across disciplines. For example, engineers could take on design work, depending on the task. Some Meta employees have already begun referring to themselves as AI builders on LinkedIn, Business Insider previously reported.

These pods are led by Pod Leads, who oversee day-to-day operations. They are, in turn, overseen by Org Leads, who also manage performance reviews and oversee promotions — processes that will be supported by unspecified "AI systems."

The memo said that the overall team size will remain the same under the new structure.

Meta laid off hundreds of staff on Wednesday, and this cut affected staff in Reality Labs, among other teams. A Meta spokesperson said the reorganization is not related to the cuts.

Have a tip? Contact Charles Rollet via email at crollet@businessinsider.com or on Signal and WhatsApp at 628-282-2811. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Many tech leaders say they're ditching screen time limits, though some still use them.
• Instead, they're focused on how their kids are interacting with technology, prioritizing creativity.
• Short-form video and social media remain major concerns for many parents.

These days, parenting means navigating a seemingly endless parade of decisions about technology. Can your toddler watch "Sesame Street" on an iPad? Does FaceTiming the grandparents count toward screen time? Should your teen have access to social media just because "everyone else" seems to?

Parents are more cognizant than ever about the pitfalls — and potential — of technology, so it's natural to wonder how the people leading tech companies handle this with their own kids. Paypal cofounder Peter Thiel and Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel have both said they limit their young children (all 8 or under) to an hour and a half of screen time per week. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said that he wants his kids to use screens for communication, not passive consumption.

It turns out, tech leaders, for the most part, are like the rest of us: trying to balance screen-free time and critical thinking skills, while also giving their kids access to the world that technology can unlock.

Here's how seven tech leaders are handling technology decisions for their families.

Finding the middle

Kate Doerksen is the co-founder and CEO of Sage Haven, an app that helps parents monitor their kids' messaging. Her kids, who are 7 and 9, get an hour per day on their iPads or Nintendo Switch, plus additional time if the family is playing a video game together. She plans to delay smartphones and social media, but her daughter has an Apple Watch with messenger (which Doerksen monitors).

"Like most things in life, the right answer feels like it lies somewhere in the middle," Doerksen says. "It's not tech abstinence, and it's not unlimited, unfettered usage. It's moderate usage on non-addictive apps and games with boundaries."

Learning and creating

As the chief learning officer at the online education company Stride, Niyoka McCoy, sees tech as a normal part of life, but she's still intentional about how her children — who are 14 and 2 — use it.

"We believe technology should be a tool for learning and creativity first, and entertainment second," she says. Her kids don't have hard-and-fast screen time limits, but McCoy aims to avoid them passively consuming content.

"When kids spend too much time scrolling or watching instead of creating, learning, or building something meaningful," she says, "that is when technology stops being beneficial."

Focusing on well-being, not screen time

Three years ago, Hari Ravichandran's daughter, who was then 13, went through a tough time — one that he believes her access to a smartphone contributed to. He had given her a phone at 13, but now believes that was too young, so he decided to take the phone away and delay access until 15 or 16 for her as well as his three younger children.

"I knew we couldn't just send her back into the same digital environment that had amplified those issues," said Ravichandran, the founder and CEO of online security company Aura.

At the same time, "What I think is overblown is the idea that technology itself is the enemy," Ravichandran says. "Cutting it out completely doesn't solve the root problem and can actually limit kids' independence and digital literacy."

Today, he focuses on how technology impacts his children's mood, sleep, self-esteem, and overall well-being.

"For us, it's less about strict bans and more about awareness, accountability, and open dialogue," he says.

Making sure values align

Tim Sheehan, co-founder and CEO Greenlight — which provides debit cards for children and teens — gave his four kids access to smartphones at 12, and social media at 15. His kids now range in age from 17 to 26. When they were younger, he watched their tech consumption closely, knowing how impressionable they were.

"My goal is to make sure the outside influences in their lives support the values we're trying to instill," he says.

Limiting short-term video

Justice Eroline, chief technology officer at the software development firm BairesDev, has a blanket rule of 1 hour of screen time for his kids, who are 8, 10, and 12. Even within that, he pays close attention to the type of content they're watching.

"I don't allow short-form content for the kids as it affects their attention span," he says.

Ahu Chhapgar, chief technology officer at fintech company Paysafe and dad of two (ages 10 and 13), says short-form video worries him more than anything else.

"When kids get access to it, they almost enter a trance," he says. "That level of stimulus is not how the brain evolved to process information, and I do worry about long-term effects on attention and impulse control."

Allowing AI, and gaming

Unlike some parents, Eroline is much less concerned about gaming.

"Video games can teach kids a lot of different things: teamwork, reaction time, problem solving, grit, dealing with defeat," Eroline says. "The content of the video game might be questionable, but there are plenty that can work for different age ranges."

Chhapgar won't let his kids have access to smartphones until they're 14, and social media until they're 16, but he does encourage them to use ChatGPT for 20 minutes each day.

"No one has all the answers about AI yet," he says. "So I'd rather they explore, build, and experiment responsibly instead of just passively consuming technology."

Controlling the interaction

Nik Kale, principal engineer with Cisco Systems, makes sure that his 3-year-old isn't given a screen when she's upset.

"I don't want her building a dependency where the first response to discomfort is a device," he explains.

He also ensures that he or his wife — not an algorithm — are choosing what their daughter sees.

"I don't let automated systems make unsupervised decisions in my production environments at work," he says. "I'm not going to let one make unsupervised decisions about what my three-year-old's brain consumes either."

That, to him, is much more important than seemingly arbitrary screen time limits.

"Parents are adding up minutes like it's a toxicity dosage," he says, "when the real variable is whether a human or an algorithm is driving the experience."