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When the NFL Draft comes to Pittsburgh next week, civic leaders will be using the spotlight to celebrate football’s Steelers—and the city’s growing reputation as a technology and artificial intelligence hub. The events include an AI pitch competition where judges including area native Mark Cuban will award startups from a 1.75 million prize pool—with preference given to companies with a presence in Pennsylvania. There’s a growing number of startups that fit that bill. As the name suggests, VC firm Valley Capital Partners is based in Silicon Valley. But for the past few years, firm general partner Mitchell Kokko has been living across the country in Pittsburgh. …

My first job was an unusual one, but I learned so many lessons from it that I carried with me throughout my career. I was in my last year at Cambridge and was planning to leave the next year for the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard when a British publisher approached me. He had seen me at a televised Cambridge Union debate speaking on the changing role of women and he wrote to me asking me if I would write a book on the subject. I replied, “Thank you, but I can’t write.” He replied: “Can you have lunch?” So I took the train to London and ended up getting both lunch and a book contract with a modest advance. That was my first lesson: take risks. People start…

It’s April again, and that means hundreds of millions of Americans have been logging on to H&R Block or heading to their accountant to see how much they owe in taxes for 2025. For many who file, that dreaded number can feel like a nebulous sum. So how does the federal government use that hard-earned cash? There’s a website breaks it down for you, Spotify Wrapped-style. Tax Wrapped is the latest digital project from Riley Walz, the technologist responsible for viral websites including Find My Parking Cops, a tool to track San Francisco’s parking authorities; Looksmapping, a map that ranks restaurants based on the “hotness” of their patrons; and, most recently…

Editor’s note: Dr. Cree Scott spent her career solving a critical puzzle: why some leaders inspire unwavering loyalty while others struggle with constant turnover, despite similar technical skills and business acumen. As a psychologist and workplace performance expert, her expertise lay in helping leaders navigate the psychological dynamics that drive performance, organizational resilience, and sustainable growth. She was the CEO/founder of Serenity Psy Consulting and served on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council. Her book, The Missing Peace in Leadership: Reclaiming Connection and Purpose in a World of Distraction, was published on April 14, 2026. Dr. Scott …

Disengagement is expensive, and most organizations know it. A 2025 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimates that disengagement costs about $5 million a year for every 1,000 employees and that’s before accounting for what’s harder to measure. Teams deliver—narrowly avoiding burnout—but the creativity, the discretionary effort, the genuine spark of someone who truly cares? That’s becoming a rare commodity in today’s turbulent working world as AI continues its disruption. Sure, most AI is exceptional at scale, speed, and synthesis. It learns from what already exists, optimizes from the middle, and produces output that is arguably an average of every…

Today, Wednesday, April 15, 2026, is Tax Day. During trying economic times, the tax deadline can feel like a punishment. It’s difficult to watch money being taken out of hard-earned paychecks when household budgets run on thin margins. To take the sting out of Tax Day, many businesses have special deals to soften the blow. Freebies and deals for Tax Day 2026 Many restaurants are ready to make your stomach happy should you need consoling on Tax Day. If you need the food to come to you, 7-Eleven has you covered. Use the 7NOW Delivery app to get $10.40 off of orders of $25 or more. Just remember to enter the promo code WRITEOFF on April 15. Another d…

At its factory in Illinois, Rivian will soon use more than 100 retired EV batteries in an on-site power system that will help it save money on electric bills. The electric automaker is one of the first customers of Redwood Materials’s new energy storage business, which takes old or discarded EV batteries—in this case, from Rivian’s own vehicles—and deploys them in a second life on the grid. By making it possible to charge when there’s excess energy available and the cost of electricity is low, the project “can generate significant cost savings that directly contributes to a reduction in the cost of our vehicles,” says Andrew Peterman, who runs Rivian’s advanced en…

Macy’s Inc is moving forward with additional store closures in 2026. According the retailer’s website, 14 stores are closing soon nationwide, with shoppers losing their local Macy’s in 12 states. The development is hardly surprising. In February 2024, Macy’s announced it would shutter 150 “underproductive locations” by the end of 2026, although it has since extended that timeline. The company announced the closures as part of “A Bold New Chapter” that will do three things: strengthen the Macy’s name plate, accelerate luxury growth, and simplify and modernize end-to-end operations. Macy’s also owns Bloomingdale’s, a higher-end department store than its n…

Padel has taken the sports world by storm. In a smaller but growing circle, it’s also become a way to date. Much of that runs through Playtomic, a booking app for racquet sports where players join “open matches” with strangers, chat through the app, and meet people they wouldn’t otherwise encounter. For some, those connections carry off the court. “People are meeting each other on the court . . . [and then] grabbing a beer or coffee from the grounds,” says Pro Padel League CEO Michael Dorfman. That kind of interaction is exactly what the app Playtomic is designed to facilitate, and increasingly, to scale. In 2017, co-founder Pablo Carro set out to solve a …

The Walt Disney Co. on Tuesday began layoffs expected to lead to 1,000 job cuts across the company. Josh D’Amaro, who in February succeeded Bob Iger as chief executive, announced broader layoffs following a move in January to consolidate Disney’s marketing division. The cuts are expected to fall across the Burbank, California-based company’s traditional television businesses, including ESPN, as well as its movie studio. Employees in product and technology, and in certain corporate functions will also be affected. “Over the past several months, we have looked at ways in which we can streamline our operations in various parts of the company to ensure we deliver the world-…

It seems that change and volatility are the only things that are certain when it comes to the labor market. Jobs and professions that once seemed ‘stable’ are not immune to the forces of artificial intelligence and other technological advancements. At the very least, AI is changing the nature of what jobs look like and will likely continue to do so at a fast rate. All of this can make it difficult to know what to do to foolproof your career. Liz Tran is a leadership coach to CEOs and founders and the author of AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing. After two years of conversations with founders, CEOs, and leaders, Tran found that those who …

In this episode of “It’s all in the typeface,” Fast Company’s creative director Mike Schnaidt chose Kyoto for its handmade, human feel, blending Japanese calligraphy with classic Latin forms. Inspired by a process of exploration, its design reflects the human touch behind every page of this issue. View the full article

Egyptian coder Assem Sabry has long wanted an AI model that represents his culture. The problem is he hasn’t been able to find one. “The AI industry in Egypt . . . doesn’t exist,” Sabry says. So he built his own: Horus, named after the ancient Egyptian god of the sky. Sabry says the goal was to stop “relying on other models, like the American or Chinese models,” and instead ask what a more Egyptian-focused model might look like. To make Horus work, he trained it using GPUs from Google Colab and other cloud providers, alongside open-source datasets. The model, released in early April, drew more than 800 downloads in its first week on Hugging Face. Sabry is one of a…

Elon Musk wants to execute the largest initial public offering in history, chasing a staggering $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion valuation for SpaceX. To justify this unprecedented price tag, he is aggressively hyping a cosmic vision: launching 1 million artificial intelligence servers into orbit to create a 100-gigawatt space data center in the next decade. He plans to one day build a factory on the moon to catapult these servers to Earth’s orbit. If that sounds like the background plot of a boring space movie, it’s because it is science fiction. The TL;DR: here is that Musk’s blueprint is fundamentally broken, according to experts in physics, aerospace engineering…

In 2020, as people began to realize they would be spending significantly more time at home than they had planned in January, a lot of people splurged on a new TV. Approximately 315.6 million new sets found their way to households around the world that year, a 6% increase from the year before. Those sets still have some life in them. The average TV will run for 10 years or more without issue, but many homeowners are starting to feel like their sets are getting a bit long in the tooth. And over the next year or two, the industry could see a big rush in customers. Circana, which monitors consumer purchases, says the average TV is replaced every 6.6 years. That figure…

In 1988, a London pre-teen with a penchant for programming and gaming wrote a version of the classic board game Othello—also known as Reversi—for his Amiga 500 home computer. Teaching a piece of software to play the game was an ambitious coding project for someone so young. And with that, Demis Hassabis notched his first achievement in the field of artificial intelligence. The Othello-playing app “beat my kid brother, who was only five at the time,” Hassabis remembers. “It was an ‘a-ha’ moment for me, because I just thought, ‘Wow, it’s incredible that you can make a program that’s inanimate and it can go off and do something on your behalf.'” That proved to be a fatefu…

Music lovers who have complained for years about Ticketmaster fees for concert tickets are surely reveling in a jury verdict Wednesday that found its parent company Live Nation has been running a harmful monopoly over large venues across the U.S. But they will have to wait to see if the verdict leads to changes that make concerts more affordable. Here are some things to know about the verdict in the closely-watched antitrust battle: No immediate relief for concertgoers The lawsuit, initially led by the U.S. government under former President Joe Biden, accused Live Nation of smothering competition and blocking venues from using multiple ticket sellers. Days into t…

Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) could stay at 2.8% in 2027, the same as its rate for this year. That’s the latest prediction from The Senior Citizens League (TSCL) and mirrors 2026’s COLA. If enacted in October, it would increase the average benefits check from $2,024.77 to $2,081.46—a $56.69 increase. The TSCL finds the 2.8% increase concerning due to high costs of living, such as rents and mortgages. “The fact is that most senior households already get by on only about 58% as much income as their working-age counterparts, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a middle-class or working-class American who thinks the economy is doing well right…

Canva built its 265-million-person audience by being the easy-to-use, template-friendly design tool for everyone. And when generative AI arrived, it quickly integrated the technology. Now, Canva is amongst the leading spenders on compute from platforms like ChatGPT, it’s building its own models and acquiring its own AI companies, and it’s launching even more AI design features as part of its Canva AI 2.0 release that it’s announcing today. But the headline marks a deeper, philosophical shift within Canva: From being “a design platform with AI tools” to becoming an “AI platform with design tools.” Connecting with Canva’s CEO, Mel Perkins, I asked about the …

After rising by more than 580% in a single trading session yesterday, shares of Allbirds Inc. (Nasdaq: BIRD) fell this morning in premarket trading, at one point more than 30%. The steep rise and now potential fall in the stock price followed the company’s unexpected announcement that it intends to transition from a sustainable shoemaker to an AI compute infrastructure provider. But while AI-obsessed investors initially cheered the odd move, history suggests the pivot may be a challenging one to pull off in the long run. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, San Francisco-based Allbirds, whose wool footwear had been popular with Silicon …

Warren Buffett is seldom wrong, especially regarding investment and innovation. As most of us know, the Oracle of Omaha offers wisdom that goes beyond industries, generations, and cultures. And that wisdom, even if it seems obvious (ever catch yourself saying, “Wait, I could’ve said that myself!”), is usually right on the mark. Like this piercing bit of truth-telling: If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster. That’s what Buffett once shared with a group of students at Georgia Tech when they asked him about his idea of success. He explained that success isn’t just about weal…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Is the Altman firebomb just the start of extreme doomer violence? On April 10, someone threw a molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house in San Francisco. The alleged assailant, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, didn’t stop there. He then went to OpenAI’s headquarters and told the security guards there that he intended to burn down the building and everyone inside. Two days later, someone allegedly fired two shots from a car driving past Altman’s house, but OpenAI said that…

Since opening in Silicon Valley in 2019, NTT Research has operated as a long-horizon science lab, a dedicated arm of Japan’s telecommunications giant NTT Group, which invests more than $3 billion annually in global R&D. Now in its seventh year, the lab was built as a research subsidiary insulated from quarterly pressure and product roadmaps. Unlike startups or typical corporate innovation teams, NTT Research is a wholly owned entity focused on seeding advances in computing, security, and healthcare that can later fold into NTT’s global infrastructure and enterprise services. Many of these efforts take five to fifteen years to approach commercialization, a timeline…

Sixty years after it invented sports drinks, Gatorade is making a surprising pivot: It’s no longer focusing primarily on athletes. PepsiCo, Gatorade’s parent company, said Thursday that the brand wants to broaden its reach to non-athletes who are looking for ways to hydrate, whether they’re on a long flight, going for a walk or nursing a hangover. New packaging highlights the specific ways Gatorade’s various drinks and powders work and the research behind them. The change reflects U.S. consumers’ booming interest in beverages with perceived health benefits. Jack Doggett, a food and drink analyst with the consulting firm Mintel, said his research indicates 60% of consume…