A pre-dawn phone call from the Norwegian Nobel Institute to Venezuela on Friday morning captured a genuine moment of surprise and emotion. Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, called Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado—his hands and voice both shaking—to deliver the news.
“Oh my god,” she said repeatedly.
The Norwegian Nobel Institute released the audio recording of the call on YouTube, X, and other social media just minutes before the official announcement in Oslo. Harpviken, speaking from Oslo, told Machado: “I’m calling to inform you that in a few minutes it shall be announced here at the Nobel Institute that you will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2025.” After her repeated exclamations of shock, he quoted directly from the official announcement, explaining she was receiving the prize “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
“I have no words,” Machado said during the phone call. “I thank you so much. But I hope you understand this is a movement. This is an achievement of a whole society. I am just one person. I certainly do not deserve this.”
Machado said she felt “honored, humbled, and very grateful on behalf of the Venezuelan people,” but added, “we’re not there yet. We’re working very hard to achieve it, but I’m sure that we will prevail, and this is certainly the biggest recognition to our people that certainly deserve it.”
María Corina Machado: A Leader in hiding
A 58-year-old industrial engineer, Machado—who got the nickname of Venezuela’s “Iron Lady” due to her adoration of, and similarities to, former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher—has spent much of the past year living in hiding within Venezuela, facing death threats and an arrest warrant from President Nicolás Maduro’s government. The Norwegian Nobel Committee described her as “one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times” and praised her as a “key, unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided.”
Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, emphasized the significance of her decision to remain in Venezuela despite the personal risk.
“Despite serious threats against her life, she has remained in the country, a choice that has inspired millions,” he said during Friday’s announcement.
Machado’s recognition comes as Venezuela has undergone what the Nobel Committee called a transformation “from a relatively democratic and prosperous country to a brutal, authoritarian state that is now suffering a humanitarian and economic crisis.” Most Venezuelans now live in deep poverty despite the country’s vast oil reserves, with nearly 8 million people having fled the country.
The crisis intensified following Venezuela’s disputed July 2024 presidential election. Machado was barred from running despite winning the opposition primary, leading her to support Edmundo González Urrutia as the opposition candidate. While the government-controlled National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner with 51% of the vote, the opposition presented evidence from 80% of polling stations showing González had won decisively.
Born in Caracas on Oct. 7, 1967, Machado comes from an upper-class family and earned degrees in industrial engineering and finance before entering politics in 2002 as cofounder of Súmate, a vote-monitoring organization. She served in the National Assembly of Venezuela from 2011 to 2014, winning a record number of votes, before being expelled by the regime.
The White House criticized the Nobel Committee’s decision on Friday, with spokesman Steven Cheung posting on X: “President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives… The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace.” Trump had repeatedly claimed he deserved the award for his role in resolving conflicts, including the recent Gaza ceasefire negotiations.
“I accept this as a recognition to our people, to the millions of Venezuelans that are anonymous and are risking everything they have for freedom, justice and peace,” she said.
Whether Machado will be able to attend the December ceremony in Oslo remains uncertain due to security concerns. When asked about her chances of attending, she expressed optimism: “I trust the Venezuelan people and I trust our allies. I definitely believe we are in the final stage of a very long, painful struggle for freedom. Certainly it would be the highest honor to represent my country and meet you personally.”
The prize carries a monetary award of 11 million Swedish kronor (approximately $1.15 million). Machado becomes only the 20th woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize since its inception in 1901 and the first Venezuelan recipient. For now, she remains in hiding in Venezuela, continuing her fight for democracy in what the Nobel Committee describes as an increasingly authoritarian world.
You can watch Machado learn the news of her award in the Nobel Prize’s video below.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
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Kong Wan Sing, the founder and CEO of JustCo, one of Asia’s largest co-working space providers, doesn’t quite think of himself as leading an office company. Instead, he sees parallels with a different property business: Hotels.
“It’s a hospitality business. People come to us not just for the network, but also for the hospitality,” he told Fortune. “You need to serve them. You have to take care of their needs, like serving the customers who are coming to look for them in the office.”
Kong and JustCo are expanding their presence in Asia even as employers and employees continue to fight a battle about flexible work and returning to the office. Globally, corporate giants ranging from Amazon to JPMorgan have called workers back to the office full-time. But employees tout the benefits of working from home and hybrid work, forcing employers and office designers to get creative in how they bring people back.
The company is also expanding into new markets regionally, including Malaysia and India. In the longer run, they’re also looking to move into countries in North Asia and the Middle East.
“After entering all these markets, we will be truly covering all the key cities in Asia-Pacific,” says Kong. He’s even considering returning to mainland China, after JustCo exited the market in 2022 due to tight social distancing regulations during the COVID pandemic.
JustCo just entered the Vietnam market with a new office along Ho Chi Minh City’s waterfront. The Vietnamese city is the tenth urban market in Asia for JustCo. It’s also a return of sorts for Kong, who was first exposed to the idea of a flexi-office in Ho Chi Minh City several decades ago.
JustCo’s story
Kong Wan Sing founded JustCo in Singapore in 2011. Following a regional expansion drive in 2015, it now operates 48 offices across Asia-Pacific, including in major cities like Seoul, Bangkok, Taipei, Melbourne, and Sydney. Kong himself hails from a family of entrepreneurs; his parents operate garment factories in nearby Malaysia. “There’s genes inside me to build a business,” he says.
In the early 2000s, Kong was an employee of Singaporean real estate investment company Mapletree, working out of a flexi-office in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City. (A flexi-office is a modern workspace where employees don’t have assigned desks, but instead choose from various work zones including hot desks, quiet pods, and collaborative areas.)
The experience opened his eyes to the value of flexible workspaces, and he saw a business opportunity in Asia, where such spaces were still few and far between.
Kong notes that, just three years ago, just under 4% of all offices in Asia-Pacific were flexi-offices. It’s since risen to over 5%, but that’s still half the level seen in more developed markets in Europe and the U.S. Yet JustCo’s CEO says he’s seeing a “surge” in Asia: “The growth is definitely much faster than European or American countries.”
JustCo also leases small offices for businesses to rent. Sixty percent of JustCo’s clients are multinational corporations looking for space for a regional office, Kong said. Companies like Chinese tech giant Tencent and U.S. vaccine maker Moderna use JustCo for their local offices.
New brands
JustCo has since broadened its offerings to potential renters, launching two new brands: “THE COLLECTIVE” and “the boring office.”
The former is a luxury co-working space, equipped with premium white-glove services like daily breakfasts and aperitif hours, and twice-a-day office cleaning. The first such space was launched in Tokyo in March.
“Japan is a very mature market, and people in Japan—they appreciate luxury stuff,” said Kong, when asked why the country was chosen to debut its premium brand. Kong and his team has since launched THE COLLECTIVE in Bangkok and Taipei; the company will bring the concept to Singapore and India in 2026.
“The boring office” sits on the other end of the spectrum, catering to firms that want a stripped-down solution. “When you go to the boring office, there’s no cleaning [of rooms] every day, only once a week,” Kong says. “And the pantry is a very basic pantry that provides only water—there’s no coffee, nothing.” The first space under that brand was launched in Singapore in July.
These three brands cater to companies’ differing needs, and are priced along a sliding scale.
The firm’s luxury offices are 20 to 30% more costly than the classic JustCo workspace, while the boring office’s spaces are cheaper by roughly the same amount, Kong explains.
AI won’t automate creative jobs—but the way workers do them is about to change fundamentally. That’s according to executives from some of the world’s largest enterprise companies who spoke at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco earlier this week.
“Most of us are producers today,” Nancy Xu, vice president of AI and Agentforce at Salesforce, told the audience. “Most of what we do is we take some objective and we say, ‘Okay, my goal is now to spend the next eight hours today to figure out how to chase after this customer, or increase my CSAT score, or to close this amount of revenue.”
With AI agents handling more tasks, Xu said that workers will shift “from producers to more directors.” Instead of asking, “How do I accomplish the goal?” they’ll instead focus on, “What are the goals that I want to accomplish, and then how do I delegate those goals to AI?” she said.
Creative and sales professionals are increasingly anxious about AI automation as tools like chatbots and AI image generators have proved to be good at doing many creative tasks in sectors like marketing, customer service, and graphic design. Companies are already deploying AI agents to take on tasks like handling customer questions, generating marketing content, and assisting with sales outreach.
Pointing to a recent project with electric-vehicle maker Rivian, Elisabeth Zornes, chief customer officer at Autodesk, said that the company’s AI-powered tools enabled Rivian to test designs through digital wind tunnels rather than clay models. “It shaved off about two years of their development cycle,” Zornes said.
As AI takes on some of these lower-level tasks, Zornes said, workers can focus on more creative projects.
“With AI, the floor has been raised, but so has the ceiling,” she added. “We have an opportunity to create more, to be more imaginative.”
The uneven impact of AI
The shift to AI-augmented work may not benefit all workers equally, however.
Salesforce’s Xu said AI’s impact won’t be evenly distributed between high and low performers. “The near-term impact of AI will largely be that we’re going to take the bottom 50 percentile performers inside a role and bring them into the top 50 percentile,” she said. “If you’re in the top 10 percentile, the superstar salespeople, creatives, the impact of AI is actually much less.”
While leaders were keen to emphasize that AI will augment, rather than replace, creative workers, the shift could reshape some traditional career ladders and impact workforce development. If AI agents handle entry-level execution work, companies may need to hire fewer people, and some learning opportunities may disappear for younger workers.
Ami Palan, senior managing director at Accenture Song, said that to successfully implement AI agents, companies may need to change the way they think about their corporate structure and workforce.
“We can build the most robust technology solution and consider it the Ferrari,” she said. “But if the culture and the organization of people are not enabled in terms of how to use that, that Ferrari is essentially stuck in traffic.”
President Donald Trump said the US would be “starting” land strikes on drug operations in Latin America, though again declined to provide details on when and where the escalation of his military campaign would actually begin, or if countries could still do anything to avert the threatened action.
“We knocked out 96% of the drugs coming in by water, and now we’re starting by land, and by land is a lot easier, and that’s going to start happening,” Trump told reporters Friday in the Oval Office.
The US president for days has been pledging to broaden the effort, which comes after the Pentagon has launched a series of attacks on what it has called drug-smuggling boats in international waters off the coast of South America.
While Trump’s posturing has largely been seen as a pressure campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, he on Friday insisted the land targeting may not only impact Venezuela.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be in Venezuela,” he said, adding that “people that are bringing in drugs to our country are targets.”
Trump has justified the actions in part by framing the fight against drug smuggling as akin to combat operations. He told reporters that if overdose deaths were counted like combat deaths, it would be “like a war that would be unparalleled.”
Striking targets on land would represent a major escalation, and Maduro earlier this week said that if his nation came under foreign attack, the working class should mount a “general insurrectionary strike” and push for “an even more radical revolution.”
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