Henry Chandonnet

Henry Chandonnet follows how AI and tech culture are reshaping everyday life and work. He is a senior reporter on the Business News desk at Business Insider, where he covers Big Tech, AI, and the modern workplace. His recent pieces range from immersive dispatches inside experimental AI experiences to reported features on how companies, workers, and consumers adapt to new tools.

AI in everyday life and tech culture

Chandonnet’s strongest through-line is showing what AI looks like in the hands of ordinary users and inside emerging consumer experiences. He often structures stories around his own encounters with new products, such as inviting “robot trainers” wearing cameras into his apartment to clean and cook for him for free, testing both the convenience and discomfort of being part of a data-collection experiment. In another immersive piece, he visits ElevenLabs’ New York pop-up, where a robot pours him cold brew before he haggles with an AI shopkeeper, using the scene to show how generative tools are turning retail into a performance.

He examines AI agents as they collide with existing consumer services, including a story where an AI assistant handling restaurant reservations gets him banned from Resy, raising questions about accountability when software makes real-world mistakes. His coverage of an AI startup linked to a little red book that insulted baby boomers digs into how generative content and branding can create unexpected reputational crises, even when a company disputes direct responsibility for the material. He also reports on artistic projects built around AI, such as an initiative where an organizer asks people to write down their “AI secrets,” revealing how much hidden dependence and experimentation exists beneath the public narrative of tech adoption.

Alongside these culture pieces, he covers the spread of AI-enabled cheating in education, drawing on voices like a Brown University professor who frames new data on misconduct as a wake-up call for schools and students.

Chandonnet does not limit “tech culture” to AI alone; he uses profiles of consumer platforms to show how product decisions reshape intimate parts of life. His feature on Spencer Rascoff and Tinder treats the executive as “the king of love,” tracing how leadership and strategy at a dating app can redefine how people meet and form relationships.

Across these stories, the emphasis stays on lived experience and social impact rather than product specs, making his technology coverage feel grounded in everyday behavior.

Workplace, small business, and the AI economy

On the workplace beat, Chandonnet reports how AI moves from corporate rhetoric into day-to-day constraints. In a centerpiece story on “token Hunger Games,” he shows how companies that spent months pushing employees to use AI more are now introducing usage caps and budget battles, turning enthusiasm for automation into a new form of internal competition over scarce compute.

He covers the emerging market for training data as well, writing about Handshake AI’s offer to pay up to $30,000 for work documents that employees legally own and unpacking the tension between monetization, compliance, and intellectual property.

Workers at different stages of their careers appear frequently in his reporting, especially when they confront the pressure to learn new tools. An as-told-to feature with a 73-year-old who learns AI coding from her son captures the fear of “hitting enter” alongside the satisfaction of crossing a technical barrier later in life, turning an abstract reskilling narrative into a concrete personal story. Chandonnet uses similar formats for founders and small-business owners, such as a baby-products entrepreneur explaining how her company survived tariffs from China and Canada, and a founder who moved from San Francisco to Buenos Aires while building Sunflower, an AI companion for sobriety.

These pieces connect trade policy, geography, and new software models to individual financial and family decisions rather than macro forecasts.

Big Tech, trust, and AI policy

Chandonnet closely covers the reputation and responsibility of Big Tech firms as they roll out AI systems.

In his reporting on Anthropic and Meta, he describes the companies as being on the defensive and asks whether trust campaigns and messaging can repair the damage done by earlier missteps, framing AI deployment as a crisis of confidence as much as a technical challenge. He explores longstanding “AI doomer” narratives, showing that apocalyptic predictions are not new and tracing how figures connected to Anthropic and leaders like Sam Altman fit into a history of technological fear rather than an isolated moment.

His work also follows how political power and corporate power intersect around AI.

A story on Donald Trump’s high-profile AI meeting uses the seating chart - who sat next to the former president and who was missing - to map the hierarchy among executives and the signals sent to the wider industry. In coverage of episodes like Handshake AI’s document payouts or Corgi’s controversial book, he highlights how data grabs, generative content, and corporate messaging contribute to broader debates on ownership, user consent, and accountability.

Taken together, these pieces position him as a reporter who treats AI not only as a technology story but as a governance and trust story.

Formats and previous outlets

Chandonnet works across formats, including straight news, analytical features, immersive first-person reporting, and a steady stream of as-told-to essays. The as-told-to structure recurs in his work with founders, small-business owners, and nontraditional tech users, allowing them to narrate how AI, tariffs, or platform policies affect their lives in their own words while he shapes the underlying reporting framework. He pairs these narratives with scenes he reports himself, such as experimental AI pop-ups or home visits from data-collecting workers, giving his beat a consistent mix of personal testimony and observed detail.

Before his current role, Chandonnet wrote about trending tech news for Fast Company and has contributed to outlets including The Daily Beast, People Magazine, and Vulture, adding a broader entertainment and culture context to his present coverage of AI and Big Tech. That background feeds into a style that treats technology as part of a wider media and culture ecosystem, rather than a siloed business topic.