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Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Upon hearing of a celebrity’s death, have you ever been startled to realize that they hadn’t left us long ago? That happened to me last weekend. Except the dearly departed in question wasn’t a person, but a company: Ask.com, the web property forever better known by its original brand, Ask Jeeves. For years, I wrote about Ask quite regularly. But when its owner, media conglomerate IAC (which is in the process of changing its own name to People Inc.), announced it had shut down the site as of May 1, it was its first time in the news in more than 15 years. The last time before that was in November 2010, when IAC g…

Artificial intelligence is constantly in the news, and it’s one of the most talked about topics among our Fast Company Impact Council members. Its use and acceptance levels are changing daily, with company direction on how to approach it changing alongside that. Boards, leadership, teams, and customers are also reassessing AI usage in the workplace and in the work product. We asked our Impact Council members what kinds of attitude changes toward AI they are seeing in their ecosystem. This question drew an onslaught of replies—clearly a topic everyone has thoughts about. We are sharing 26 of their responses, ranging from the theoretical to unusual use cases. 1. MOVE AWAY…

As artificial intelligence use skyrockets, tech companies are racing to build data centers, the infrastructure needed to run and teach their models. There are roughly 4,000 data centers around the U.S., with reports suggesting 3,000 more are coming online soon. Just one problem: No one seems to want a data center in their backyard. Communities oppose them because they consume massive amounts of energy and water and pollute the environment. Another concern? Data centers are major eyesores. These complexes can span hundreds of acres and usually feature uninspiring, windowless concrete facades. Built quickly, efficiently, and as inexpensively as possible, their desig…

We live in an age of entertainment abundance, yet for some, screens can be a source of friction. According to a recent study by Nielsen, the average viewer spends 12 minutes searching before deciding on content each time they turn on their TV. That’s just the visible symptom. As entertainment fragments across dozens of apps, devices, and profiles, the living room itself has become a place of negotiation and missed connection. Discovery becomes exhausting, and shared moments are rare. When you think about it, the TV remains one of the last shared screens in our lives. And so, its role as one of the most important interfaces for AI in the home is growing exponential…

Many people finish the workday not just tired but wired. Their mind keeps racing, their body feels tense, and even in moments that should be restful they feel a lingering sense of urgency. Conversations replay in their mind, unfinished tasks resurface, and their nervous system seems unwilling to power down. You may recognize this experience. It has become so common that it is often accepted as the norm in modern professional life. Yet this persistent state of activation carries consequences for physical health, especially for people prone to headaches. As a board-certified neurologist who specializes in headache medicine, I see a lot of patients whose pain increas…

April was not a good month for the tech industry in terms of job losses. Last month, major firms—including Microsoft, Meta Platforms, and Snap—all announced significant workforce reductions. But now, May is not shaping up to be any better. This week alone, news emerged that several major tech companies, including Cloudflare, PayPal, and Coinbase, are set to cut thousands of positions. And yes, you can blame AI for the job cuts—or at least the bosses are. Cloudflare cuts more than 1,100 jobs Yesterday, Cloudflare announced that it was laying off more than 1,100 workers across the globe. That equates to roughly about 20% of the company’s workforce. …

The once-empty space over 14 lanes of interstate highway traffic coursing through the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas is now an exceptional new development open to the public: Halperin Park. The $300 million freeway capping project includes a playground, splash pad, band shell, large lawn, and linear walkway that resurrects an erased section of a historic street. Joining the widely celebrated freeway-capping Klyde Warren Park, which opened its first phase over a stretch of a recessed downtown freeway in 2012, Halperin Park is a community-centric model for addressing the divisions wrought by highway building. Reconnecting a neighborhood Designed by architec…

It made sense 50 years ago to market to entire generations as if they were one persona. It was a way for companies to understand consumers when there was little else to go on. But does this approach still work today? In the 1960s, marketers needed to reach the large cohort of post-war consumers entering adulthood (and peak spending years). Et voilà, the idea of the Baby Boomer generation was born. The conventional wisdom was that the entire cohort had lived through similar experiences that shaped their values and spending patterns similarly. It was largely true at the time, but a lot has changed since then. Technological progress was impressive, but it didn’t …

If you’ve been debating whether or not to pick up a Nintendo Switch 2 then you’ll want to act soon. Nintendo says it is raising the Switch 2’s price from $450 to $500 in the U.S. due to “changes in market conditions,” most notably the global shortage of random access memory (RAM). The change is set to go into effect on September 1. Similar price increases will simultaneously occur in Canada ($630 CAD to $680 CAD) and Europe (€470 to €500). In Japan, the system’s MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price) will rise a bit earlier, going from ¥49,980 to ¥59,980 on May 25. Nintendo blames the widespread change on the fact that market condition changes are lik…

The literature world is up in arms after a prominent author, who also serves as the national ambassador for young people’s literature, denigrated the quality of the majority of children’s literature. Mac Barnett recently published an essay collection for adults, titled Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children. In his book, he wrote, “So I now offer Barnett’s Addendum to Sturgeon’s Law: Maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids’ books are crud.” The sentence references science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon’s famous 1957 defense of the science fiction genre. Sturgeon wrote that “ninety percent of everything is crud,” and investigated why science fiction among al…

As concerns mount over artificial intelligence and its rapid integration into society, tech companies are increasingly turning to faith leaders for guidance on how to shape the technology — a surprising about-face on Silicon Valley’s longstanding skepticism of organized religion. Leaders from various religious groups met last week with representatives from companies including Anthropic and OpenAI for the inaugural “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable in New York to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into the fast-developing technology. It was organized by the Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities, which seeks to take on issues such as extremism, ra…

While many AI companies are betting their products can be useful to a broad segment of businesses, a startup called Emanate is taking the opposite approach, building highly targeted tools designed for complex sales transactions in the industrial materials sector. Founder and CEO Kiara Nirghin says the somewhat esoteric market, which includes manufacturers, distributors, and service providers working with materials from steel building materials to metal piping, has intricate sales processes involving generating quotes for bespoke orders, connecting existing customers with goods they may need, and proactively finding new customers. The industrial materials sector,…

If you’ve taken the New York City subway lately, you might’ve seen an ad that’s driving social media wild. The ad shows messages from two employees: Steve, who says he’s “not coming in today sry,” and an AI sales agent named Ava, who says she booked 12 meetings and researched 1,269 prospects. The ad’s header reads, “Fire Steve. Hire Ava.” In other words, fire humans and replace them with AI. goddamn this sucks pic.twitter.com/InMUGd0y1A — F♯A♯∞, fka ☕️ (@coopercooperco) May 7, 2026 The ad comes from AI company Artisan, which offers an AI agent to replace low-level sales representatives. The company is known for its controversial anti-human advertising—and the…

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is just one month away. That event will see Apple launch the next iterations of the software that powers its various devices, including iOS 27 for the iPhone. But Apple will also be rolling out a new version of iOS before then, and it will feature an enhancement that will benefit Android users as much as Apple’s own. Here’s what you need to know. iOS 26.5 brings encrypted RCS messaging to iPhone Apple’s iMessage protocol has long had end-to-end encryption for texts sent between Apple devices. But for texts sent between Android phones and iPhones, encryption has always been absent. And that wasn’t the fault of …

AI is transforming the world of work—and many people are unhappy about that fact. KPMG’s 2025 American Worker Survey found that 52% of workers worry that AI will take their jobs, with that figure rising to 60% for Gen Z. A recent report by the AI firm Writer found that almost a third of employees report sabotaging their company’s efforts towards AI transformation. There are few, if any, parallels for this level of resistance to the adoption of a technology in the modern workplace. Yet most businesses that fail to adapt to the emergence of AI will soon find themselves out of business altogether. In early 2023, Eric Vaughan, CEO of the enterprise software company IgniteT…

It was the shock that the design world didn’t see coming, but should have. In mid-April, Anthropic, the maker of Claude, launched a stand-alone design tool called Claude Design. No matter that Google had already tried the same thing with its platform Stitch, and there were also plenty of perfectly good vibe coding tools on the market. The possibility that Anthropic—the same AI company known for upending product development by rapidly commoditizing code—was coming for design next introduced a sudden urgency into the conversation around design tools and automation. Friends suddenly looked a lot more like competitors. Designer-influencers reacted in hyperbolic doomerism. I…

Rumination is one of the most overlooked risks to effective leadership. It’s also one of the most common and most contagious. When leaders engage in rumination, it quietly erodes their well-being, judgment, and the psychological climate of their teams. In psychology, rumination refers to repetitive, unwanted, past-centered, and intrusive negative thinking. Unlike self-reflection, which is purposeful and forward-looking, rumination can become a vicious cycle that loops leaders into “What if?” or “Why did I…?” with very little learning in return. I’ve noticed an increasing number of leaders who are particularly prone to rumination. This might come down to the fact that th…

The top note in a new perfume called Miami Split comes from an unexpected place: a banana processing plant in Ecuador. The fragrance is extracted from banana-scented water, a byproduct of washing fruit, that was previously thrown away. It’s one of the unusual ingredients sourced by Abel Fragrance, a company that avoids using any fossil fuels in its products. Instead, it is looking to biotech to make natural fragrances. Right now, petrochemicals are the status quo in the industry. “Almost all fragrance molecules are synthesized from fossil fuels,” says Frances Shoemack, the brand’s founder. A typical fragrance is made from between a dozen and a few hundred fragrance molecu…

In an article a couple of weeks ago, I argued that the failure of enterprise AI was not really about enthusiasm, adoption, or even model capability. It was architectural: large language models were never built to run a company. Companies run on memory, context, feedback, and constraints, while LLMs remain, at their core, systems for predicting text. In a second one, I argued that the answer was not “better prompts,” but a deeper shift: from tools to systems, from answers to outcomes, from copilots to systems of action, and from prompts to constraints. Enterprise AI cannot be session-based. It has to remember. That argument now needs a third step, because something imp…

A few weeks ago, I stood on a stage at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB), looking out at the Class of 2026. The air was thick with a very modern kind of tension. While previous generations might have experienced the standard “graduation jitters,” what I saw was something far more intense: a profound sense of confusion and chaos. I was there to help them decode it. For the past four years, these students have been caught in a crossfire of conflicting narratives. On one side is the traditional establishment promising that a degree is a golden ticket to a linear, predictable path. On the other is a loud, disruptive chorus telling them that in the age of Ar…

For years, leaders advanced by outperforming others, knowing more, producing more, delivering more. Performance earned authority. That equation has changed. Artificial intelligence now generates ideas, analyses, and strategies in seconds. What once set strong performers apart, speed, output, and insight, is no longer a differentiator. As AI expands what leaders can produce, something else is becoming clear. The leaders who stand out are not the ones with the most information. They are the ones who project confidence, clarity, and credibility when it matters most. Leaders are no longer evaluated primarily on what they know. They are evaluated on how they lead w…

You’re at the playground, making small talk with another mom while your kids dig in the sandbox. The conversation follows a predictable script: sleep schedules, daycare waitlists, whether your toddler will eat anything green. It’s pleasant enough, but you’ll forget about it by the time you pile your kids into the car for nap time. But what you really wanted to ask is: What’s something about birth and postpartum that surprised you? What do you wish your partner understood? How did becoming a mother change your marriage? Those are the conversations that actually matter, because they deepen relationships and allow mothers to pass their wisdom to one another. But they…