Speaking at Fortune’s COO Summit in Scottsdale on Monday, Dan Helfrich, COO of the U.S. Soccer Federation, said the team’s jersey alone reflects those stakes. Designed in close collaboration with Nike, it was the result of a six-year process involving supply chains, manufacturing innovation, and, crucially, the players themselves.

“It involved putting our players at the center of it,” Helfrich said. “We actually had two years of focus groups and design sessions with Nike designers and our players—both for the aesthetic look [and] the performance feel.”

Helfrich, the former CEO of Deloitte Consulting, said all the players—which includes star forward Christian Pulisic—have described it as the best-looking and best-feeling jersey they’ve worn.

“You’re looking for an advantage,” he said. “The margins are very thin on the field… that kit holds in its performance feel, but also the energy it’s giving our players, because they like the way they look. We believe it’s a real advantage.”

Nike used obsessive procession to design jerseys for 18 soccer federations, including the U.S.

For Nike, which outfits 18 national soccer federations—including also France, Croatia, and China—the World Cup is an operational challenge measured in Olympic-scale complexity.

Venkatesh Alagirisamy, Nike’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, described the undertaking as years of preparation for a tournament that lasts only weeks.

“It takes four years of preparation to execute four weeks of World Cup games to leave a lasting impression for the next four years,” Alagirisamy said on the Fortune panel titled “Game On: The Operational Engine Behind the World Cup.”

This year, heat became a central design challenge amid concerns the 2026 tournament could become one of the hottest World Cups on record.

Nike’s solution relied on computational modeling to determine exactly where airflow vents should sit and how they should be structured to cool athletes most effectively. The jerseys are built with custom knit materials and engineered yarn designed to sit slightly off the skin, creating channels for air flow. According to Alagirisamy, the result is roughly double the ventilation of a conventional jersey.

“That’s the level of obsession that we put in place as we think about these games,” Alagirisamy said.

How U.S. soccer is using AI to find its next World Cup-ready stars

Looking beyond the tournament itself, Helfrich said a central part of his mission is ensuring the World Cup-inspired soccer obsession doesn’t become a “fleeting moment” — but instead serves as a broader jumpstart for the sport across the country.

“We feel a deep responsibility. We are a nonprofit that is charged with growing the game, making the game safe, making the game more affordable and accessible to people in every community in America,” he said.

U.S. Soccer is increasingly using AI to identify American-eligible players competing in leagues around the world—a talent pool traditional scouting methods have historically struggled to reach. On any given day, he estimated, between 50 million and 70 million boys and girls are playing soccer globally. Many may qualify to play for the U.S., but scouting them manually is nearly impossible.

“Historically, how do you get your scouts, your humans, to all of those places? You can’t,” he said. “So automatically you’re excluding 99-and-a-half percent of people.” 

As video availability expands across youth sports and AI tools improve, Helfrich said U.S. Soccer increasingly sees a future where nearly every game played by an eligible athlete can be analyzed. Models can be trained to identify positional traits and performance indicators, surfacing prospects regardless of where they play.

But he was careful not to declare the human scout obsolete. 

“There’s other stuff we care about that we can’t train AI on yet,” Helfrich said. “What’s the tone of voice of a player to a teammate when the teammate makes a mistake? What’s the body language when the team goes up or goes down? And how does it evolve?” 

The future, he said, is unambiguously a humans-and-machines model—and one he finds genuinely energizing: “In my old job I had a lot of examples that weren’t as fun. This one is a fun one to relate to.”

The World Cup opens June 12. The U.S. men’s national team will face Paraguay that same day in Inglewood, California.

But for young people in particular, the challenge is even steeper. About a fifth of Gen Zers worldwide are classified as “NEETs” and are currently locked out of the job market. Last year in the U.K. alone, more than 1.2 million applications were submitted for fewer than 17,000 graduate roles. 

Even Goldman economists have admitted Gen Z’s hiring nightmare is real—and it isn’t going away anytime soon. 

As millions of Gen Zers face unemployment and entry-level office roles becoming scarcer, hiring managers are being forced to get creative to find the very best candidates. So Fortune has rounded up the curveball make-or-break interview questions now shaping hiring decisions.

Do you think we are in an AI bubble?

Do you think we’re in an AI bubble? Even the experts who’ve predicted past crashes can’t seem to agree. But if you’re looking for a job right now, your opinion on all this could decide whether you get the job. Dave McCann, IBM’s managing partner for EMEA, says he now throws the curveball question in interviews as a make-or-break test.

There’s no right or wrong answer, but actually knowing where you stand could give you an edge and pique the exec’s interest. McCann doesn’t care which side you pick—he cares whether you’ve thought it through.

Can you design a car for a deaf person?

Lyft CEO David Risher likes to ask candidates: “Design a car for a deaf person.” The curveball question may sound unusual, but for Risher, it’s a quick way to “suss out” whether a candidate can put themselves in the shoes of a customer—and he got the idea from his time working with Jeff Bezos. 

“I want to see the candidate close their eyes and ears and imagine what that feels like, then be able to describe the experience to me in detail, including what someone in that position might need,” Risher said. “That’s how I know I’ve got someone who can build great customer-obsessed experiences.”

Do you have any questions for me?

The question that turns its head on the interviewee and enables them to put the hiring manager in the hot seat isn’t an unusual one. But for Twilio’s CEO Khozema Shipchandler, it’s what comes next that matters most. 

If your answer is a blank stare or “Nope, I’m fine,” consider yourself on thin ice. 

“The number one red flag for me is when someone doesn’t ask questions towards the end of an interview,” Shipchandler exclusively told Fortune. “That’s a pretty significant mark against them being curious about what they’re interviewing, the company, the way we might work together, chemistry, culture, all of those things.”

And Denny’s CEO Kelli Valade echoed that it doesn’t really matter what you ask employers at the end of the interview—the fact that you do ask something shows you did your homework, are seriously interested and is a big green flag.

Can you start right away?

Picture this: You’ve spent hours applying for the dream job and sitting through multiple interviews. Finally, you think you’ve won over the hiring manager when they ask, “when can you start?” 

You’d be forgiven for thinking the right answer, is “straight away.” After all, you want to seem eager. But Gary Shapiro, the chief executive of U.S. trade association Consumer Technology Association, revealed that he turns candidates down who say they’re available within two weeks. “They don’t get the job, because they’ll treat us the way they treat that former employer.”

Other things to look out for: Coffee cup tests, pricey menu items and wait staff

It’s not just what you say in the interview that could cost you the job. Hiring managers are also watching what you do—as early as when you walk through the revolving doors and great reception. They’re looking at how you treat staff before and after your interview, as well as, what you do with the coffee (or tea) cup you were drinking from. Hint: offering to clean it up will go down will.

Other hiring managers take their prospective new hires out for a lunch interview and watch for whether they season their food before taking a bite. Why? Because putting salt (or anything) on your food before tasting it is the equivalent of judging a book by its cover and apparently, highlights a lack of patience.

That’s not all. They’re also testing you for how quickly you order, whether you wait for others to sit before sitting down to eat, the price of the items you order, and how you treat wait staff.

One consultant even revealed on X that he knows a CEO who goes as far as taking candidates for breakfast and secretly asking the servers to mess up their order “to see how they’d react.”

But in reality, firms want to build more with less—and even though visions are created by designers, they don’t always get to see them to fruition. Instead, intermediaries may be placed in charge of procurements and overseeing the financial costs of executing designs.

“The process is not often as linear as we [designers] would like it to be, and at times we even get slightly cut out, and something comes out on the other side that wasn’t really what we were expecting,” said Tina Norden, a partner and principal at design firm Conran and Partners, at the Fortune Brainstorm Design forum in Macau on Dec. 2.

“To have a better quality product, communication is very much needed,” added Daisuke Hironaka, the CEO of Stellar Works, a furniture company based in Shanghai. 

Yet those tasked with procurement are often “money people” who may not value good design—instead forsaking it to cut costs. More education on the business value of quality design is needed, Norden argued.

When one builds something, she said, there are both capital investment and a lifecycle cost. “If you’re spending a bit more money on good quality furniture, flooring, whatever it might be, arguably, it should last a lot longer, and so it’s much better value.”

Investing in well-designed products is also better for the environment, Norden added, as they don’t have to be replaced as quickly.

Attempts to cut costs may also backfire in the long run, said Hironaka, as business owners may have to foot higher maintenance bills if products are of poor design and make.

AI in interior and furniture design

Though designers have largely been slow adopters of AI, some luminaries like Daisuke are attempting to integrate it into their team’s workflow.

AI can help accelerate the process of designing bespoke furniture, Daisuke explained, especially for large-scale projects like hotels. 

A team may take a month to 45 days to create drawings for 200 pieces of custom-made furniture, the designer said, but AI can speed up this process. “We designed a lot in the past, and if AI can use these archives, study [them] and help to do the engineering, that makes it more helpful for designers.” 

Yet designers can rest easy as AI won’t ever be able to replace the human touch they bring, Norden said. 

“There is something about the human touch, and about understanding how we like to use our spaces, how we enjoy space, how we perceive spaces, that will always be there—but AI should be something that can assist us [in] getting to that point quicker.”

She added that creatives can instead view AI as a tool for tasks that are time-consuming but “don’t need ultimate creativity,” like researching and three-dimensionalizing designs.

“As designers, we like to procrastinate and think about things for a very long time to get them just right, [but] we can get some help in doing things faster.”

Bastion is a white label issuer of stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to underlying assets like the U.S. dollar. Rather than hire lawyers to secure regulatory licenses and software developers to write code, companies hire Bastion to more easily spin up their own branded stablecoins.

Other participants in the startup’s fundraise included the venture arm of the Japanese tech giant Sony, the venture arm of the South Korean phone maker Samsung, the crypto arm of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and the crypto VC Hashed.

Nassim Eddequiouaq, cofounder and CEO of Bastion, declined to specify at what valuation his startup raised the new capital. He and his team raised $25 million in a 2023 seed round. Eddequiouaq and his cofounder Riyaz Faizullabhoy, who has since left the company, were previously executives at Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, and, before that, the pair worked at Meta on the tech giant’s now-scuttled stablecoin project Libra.

“Almost every week, there are some announcements of whatever company launching its branded stablecoin,” Ludovic Copéré, senior investment director at Sony’s venture fund, told Fortune. “We think Bastion is very well positioned to be this kind of glue and enabler for many corporates, many entities to launch, manage, [and] operate their stablecoins.”

Stablecoin mania

Bastion’s fundraise comes as seemingly every crypto and fintech investor throws money at one of the buzziest sectors in Silicon Valley. 

Stablecoins, which are designed to stay stable in price, have long been popular among crypto traders, who park their winnings in the tokens after trading more volatile cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. But, over the past year, stablecoins have broken out into the mainstream, as proponents say they are cheaper and faster alternatives to legacy payments infrastructure.

In February, fintech giant Stripe closed its $1.1 billion acquisition of the stablecoin startup Bridge. In June, the stablecoin issuer Circle went public in a gangbuster IPO. And, in July, President Donald Trump signed into law new legislation that regulates the burgeoning stablecoin industry.

Amid the drumbeat of enthusiasm, a rush of startups have raised new tranches of funds. It’s an increasingly competitive industry, but Eddequiouaq, Bastion’s CEO, isn’t worried. “We are already competing really well today on the marketplace,” he said.

A differentiator between Bastion and its competitors, which include established companies like Paxos and newcomers like Agora, are its suite of stablecoin services, said Eddequiouaq. These include crypto wallets to let customers hold the tokens as well as pathways to convert stablecoins into cash in 70 countries, including the U.S. “We are building the tools that we wish we had when we built the Libra project,” he said, claiming that Bastion’s tool suite outpaces rivals.

While Bastion and its team of 27 employees haven’t been public with what corporations are using its technology to launch stablecoins, Eddequiouaq said he’s “quite excited about the next, let’s say, eight to nine months of the company.”