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I tried hummus from Costco, Wegmans, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s. I finished a container of the winning spread in a day.

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Wegmans’ hummus was a cut above the competition from the first bite. Even before I mixed in the roasted garlic and chickpea topping, this spread stood out for its moist, creamy texture and bright, citrusy tang.

With the garlic mixed in, it was undoubtedly the best hummus I’ve ever found at a supermarket — and better than plenty of dips I’ve had at restaurants. I finished the container of Wegmans’ hummus the same day I did this taste test.

My nearest Wegmans is a 40-minute bike ride away, but I’ll make that trip for this hummus again.

This story was originally published on March 6, 2024, and most recently updated on March 30, 2026.




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David Ellison has a message for Paramount staffers: tech is a key to winning

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Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison gave employees a shoutout after the media company roughly met Wall Street’s estimates in the fourth quarter.

“The progress we’ve made over the past 6+ months — from advancing our strategy to strengthening our portfolio and reorganizing our businesses to operate more efficiently and effectively — is a direct reflection of your hard work and commitment,” Ellison wrote in an email to staffers, which was viewed by Business Insider.

Ellison, who wants to turn his 114-year-old Hollywood studio into a tech-forward company, said in his memo that Paramount is focused on supercharging its tech and data capabilities.

“We recognize that in today’s highly competitive marketplace, sustainable growth depends not only on what people watch, but on the quality of the overall user experience,” Ellison wrote. “That’s why we are prioritizing investments in advanced technology and data capabilities to strengthen and differentiate our DTC offering. We are making meaningful investments across the company in innovation and technology, and we look forward to sharing more details in the coming months.”

That message comes weeks after Ellison made data a bigger part of Paramount by expanding the role of the company’s streaming data and insights team.

Paramount is planning to add short-form video to Paramount+ and is exploring ways to bring interactive features and user-generated content to its streamers, Business Insider previously reported.

In the memo, Ellison also emphasized storytelling, saying that he wants Paramount to be “the home for the industry’s leading creative talent.” While Ellison lured former Netflix original content executive Cindy Holland to run its streaming business, Paramount is losing star TV creator Taylor Sheridan to rival NBCUniversal when his contract expires.

Paramount’s biggest initiative is its quest to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which seems increasingly open to Ellison’s advances, even though it has a signed deal with Netflix.

Paramount’s results were roughly in line with analyst expectations in its latest quarter, the first full quarter since Ellison took the helm in early August. As expected, Paramount’s full-year revenue shrank for a second straight year to $28.89 billion, just under the estimate of $28.95 billion.

Paramount+ now has 78.9 million paid subscribers, up from 77.9 million last quarter and 4% higher than a year ago. Paramount’s product chief told employees that its flagship streamer added about 1 million customers on the first day it carried UFC rights in the US, Business Insider previously reported.

Read Ellison’s memo to Paramount employees here:

Team,
Today we held our 4th quarter and fiscal year-end earnings call, where we reviewed our performance and reinforced our commitment to executing against our strategy and roadmap. Anchored by our North Star priorities, we continue to drive measurable progress across all areas of the business and remain confident that we are on the right path to deliver sustained, long-term value for our shareholders.
First and foremost, I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you. The progress we’ve made over the past 6+ months — from advancing our strategy to strengthening our portfolio and reorganizing our businesses to operate more efficiently and effectively — is a direct reflection of your hard work and commitment.
This shared commitment powers our primary focus here at Paramount: delivering exceptional storytelling. We want to be the home for the industry’s leading creative talent, ensuring they have the resources, platform and reach to bring their best stories to the broadest possible audience across film, television and streaming. Every decision we make — from capital allocation to operational priorities — is in service of this objective. And our increased investment in content creation reflects this commitment, with 11 films and 11 series greenlit since August and more to come.
We recognize that in today’s highly competitive marketplace, sustainable growth depends not only on what people watch, but on the quality of the overall user experience. That’s why we are prioritizing investments in advanced technology and data capabilities to strengthen and differentiate our DTC offering. We are making meaningful investments across the company in innovation and technology, and we look forward to sharing more details in the coming months.
One of our greatest strengths as a company is our ability to mobilize the entire ecosystem behind key priorities and events through our “Paramount One” initiative. We saw this clearly demonstrated with the launch of the UFC on Paramount+ in January. Every part of the organization — from CBS Sports to Pluto, marketing to ad sales — contributed to the promotion of this landmark partnership. This all-hands on deck mentality is a true force multiplier for the Company — and I know you’ve put the same firepower behind Survivor 50, premiering tonight on CBS!
I encourage you to review our shareholder letter for more details on our quarter and full fiscal year 2025 performance. A replay of the earnings call will be available shortly on our Investor Relations site.
I couldn’t be prouder of this team. Keep up the great work.
Let’s go!
Best,
David




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Alice Tecotzky

Visa is winning the AI race in payments, but the question is whether it will pay off

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Visa is winning the AI race in the payments industry, according to a brand new ranking — but no company is revealing quite how much the technology is paying off.

A brand-new index from Evident, a company that tracks AI in finance, lists Visa as no. 1 among 12 global payments companies. Mastercard and PayPal follow in second and third place. Fintech giants like Stripe and Block rank fifth and sixth on the index, demonstrating how quickly newer players have built serious AI firepower.

“With relatively nascent industry players like Stripe and Block performing well — and showing their AI potential reflected in their valuations — the Index leaders cannot afford to drop off the pace,” Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-founder and co-CEO, said in a press release.

Payment companies — which move money around between banks, businesses, and consumers — run on technology. Evident’s new industry ranking, released Wednesday exclusively to Business Insider, reveals how the companies we interact with every day are using AI, from deciding whether a transaction goes through to detecting fraud.

Whether ranked No. 1 or dead last, all of the companies have at least one thing in common: none have published their achieved or projected ROI across all their AI efforts. By comparison, 10 of the 50 banks that Evident tracks already share those figures.

“The absence of ROI disclosure — or any group targets for AI ROI — is increasingly conspicuous,” Annabel Ayles, co-founder and co-CEO of Evident, said. To justify their expenses, the market will “sooner or later demand clearer evidence of value.”

Together, the dozen companies documented almost 100 AI use cases over the past two years, but the top three punch above their weight — they were responsible for more than half of the use cases recorded in the index. Visa and Mastercard are particularly advanced in using AI for fraud detection and cybersecurity.

Visa, in its 2025 annual report, acknowledged AI competition, noting that some competitors will beef up their products and others will offer employees AI tools.

“If we do not continue to invest in developing and supporting our AI-based initiatives, we may fall behind technological developments,” the report said.

Visa has invested more than $3.5 billion in AI and data over the past decade and employs more than 2,500 technologists working on innovations, including over 300 AI models in production, chief data officer Andres Vives told Business Insider in a statement.

Top firms staffing up aggressively

The index doesn’t focus on specific use cases; instead, it evaluates companies on four criteria: talent, innovation, leadership, and transparency.

Talent has the biggest impact on each company’s ranking, and the report found that the payments industry overall is investing heavily in AI and data hiring. Compared to other financial institutions, the index found that they have 30% more AI-focused workers, even though they generally have smaller workforces. Among the 12 ranked companies and their more than 335,000 employees, an average 6.5% are focused on AI, Mousavizadeh told Business Insider. That 6.5% figure, she added, is the highest concentration of AI talent Evident has found across the sectors it tracks.

PayPal alone accounts for 18% of the AI talent among the indexed companies and employs more than 4,000 AI workers. Stripe and Block also stand out for their density of AI employees, who make up more than 10% of their total workforce.

Payments companies aren’t alone, of course, in focusing on AI talent — technologists specializing in AI are among the most in-demand jobs in the broader financial sector.

The gap in ROI transparency

Leaders at bulge-bracket banks are already facing questions about when they will see AI investments pay off—analysts, for example, pressed JPMorgan leaders on the merits of the bank’s massive technology spending during a recent earnings call. Jamie Dimon, the bank’s CEO, acknowledged tech competition from fintechs on that call, and again from payments companies during the investor conference in February, name-dropping Stripe and PayPal.

For now, AI’s benefits at payments companies are often baked into existing performance measures, such as lower transaction costs, according to the index.

But there are still demands to stay competitive. Evident found that agentic capabilities will likely play a bigger role as companies move from using AI for “defensive necessity to strategic advantage.” (Both PayPal and Mastercard teased AI agents in recent earnings calls, and Visa mentioned the potential of agentic commerce during its fourth-quarter earnings call.)

Overall, Evident found that the payments companies that moved fastest on AI are furthest along in their journeys, and the next competitive milestone may be in financial transparency: the first one to publish comprehensive ROI measures will become another type of “first-mover.”

Here’s the full ranking:




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