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2026 will be a crucial inflection point for businesses. The data are striking—the proportion of employees using AI in their role in the U.S. doubled between 2023 and 2025. Across the Atlantic, 30% of EU workers are already using AI in their jobs. And according to Gartner, by 2026 more than 100 million workers will collaborate with “robo-colleagues.” The question for the coming year, then, is no longer whether AI will transform your organization, it’s whether your leadership team will guide that transformation thoughtfully or let it happen haphazardly, tool by tool and team by team. I have spent much of the past year working with my research team and industry partn…

How seriously are you taking your 2026 rebrand? Do you have your 365 buttons ready? If this means nothing to you, you likely spent the holiday period at the lord intended – offline. But if spending less time on your phone isn’t one of your 2026 resolutions, let me catch you up. It started with a TikTok posted in December, all about rebranding for 2026. In the comments people shared their own strategies and self-improvement tips for the upcoming year. One comment, however, stood out from the rest. “I’m getting 365 buttons, one for each day because I want to do more stuff and I’m scared of time so I want to be more conscious of it,” a user called Tamara wrote.…

I recently argued that return-to-office mandates aren’t really about productivity; they’re about control. Ironically, my article published smack-dab in the middle of a September inflection point of increasing office time requirements, a phenomenon Owl Labs dubbed “hybrid creep.” And now, perhaps shockingly, I’ve started a new job with a team that (gasp!) has an office. When I wrote my argument against RTO, I had no inkling that I would soon be back in an office (part-time) myself. I am now basically in a live experiment. So far, it’s changed how I feel about the idea of going into an office. It hasn’t changed my view on RTO. A lab for truly flexible work My ne…

Fashion collaborations are nothing new, but 2025 felt like a year particularly stuffed with branding matchups. There’s a reason why this might be happening. “Online platforms have become crowded, [there are] rapidly accelerating trend cycles, [and] it’s become more challenging than ever for brands to stand out,” Cassandra Napoli, a head culture forecaster at WGSN, says. Collaborations continue to be a unique and important tool for marketing and maintaining cultural relevance. The best lead to attention-grabbing virality, as was the case with Nike x Skims’ first drop, Sandy Liang x Gap, and Willy Chavarria x Adidas. “Collaborations have become so important because …

Everybody knows this coworker—the one who spirals about cost-cutting layoffs when snacks vanish from the break room. The one who thinks they’re getting fired because their boss hasn’t been using emojis with them lately. The one who’s the office Chicken Little: anxious, somewhat frantic, often misguided . . . and who can’t stop talking to others about whatever it is they’re anxious about. This person—and it could be you—may be justified, as it makes sense for employees to be nervous right now: layoffs are at an all-time high, and January is a common month for layoffs. But for the office Chicken Little, it’s not the dismal mass termination numbers alone that are sc…

You hear the blurps and bloops after you pass the food court in the Mall of Georgia on a fall Sunday afternoon, the unmistakable sound of points being scored and players eliminated. Then you see him: Standing in an oversize vitrine is a 6-foot-tall animatronic rodent. He’s grinning and waving, but frozen in place, preserved like a museum piece. This isn’t an outpost of Chuck E. Cheese, the 48-year-old family pizza chain with more than 460 restaurants in 45 states and another 88 abroad. It’s Chuck’s Arcade, a fledgling new enterprise launched this past summer by parent company CEC Entertainment in an effort to expand the brand’s reach to Gen Xers, nostalgic millenn…

If you had a severe case of the Sunday Scaries last weekend, you are not alone. It’s a sentiment many have been sharing online. Ready or not, with it comes an influx of unread emails, meeting invites, and responsibilities—smugly pushed to the New Year in the last weeks of December—now coming back to haunt us all. Indeed, the first Monday of the year is the Monday-est Monday of all. “Oh god,” one TikTok user posted on Monday 6th. “Everyone is circling back.” “Worst aesthetic ever: Back to work in the first week of jan,” another wrote, riffing on TikTok’s “rare aesthetic” trend. Some have used the lyrics to The Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable No…

When a gunman began firing inside an academic building on the Brown University campus, students didn’t wait for official alerts warning of trouble. They got information almost instantly, in bits and bursts — through phones vibrating in pockets, messages from strangers, rumors that felt urgent because they might keep someone alive. On Dec. 13 as the attack at the Ivy League institution played out during finals week, students took to Sidechat, an anonymous, campus-specific message board used widely at U.S. colleges, for fast-flowing information in real time. An Associated Press analysis of nearly 8,000 posts from the 36 hours after the shooting shows how social medi…

You’ve put in the hours, delivered results, and earned the respect of your peers. But when it comes to moving up, the biggest obstacle isn’t performance or policy—it’s your boss. Managers often hold disproportionate power over career mobility. Research shows they can become the gatekeepers who decide who advances and who stalls. Gallup finds managers account for up to 70% of the variance in engagement, and half of employees say they left a job to escape their manager. Add to that the fact that companies fail to pick the right person for the job 82% of the time, and it’s clear why bad bosses cost organizations billions in lost productivity, stalled growth, and attritio…

Yes, there are the New Year’s traditions of setting ambitious goals and ditching bad habits, but one evergreen resolution that ought to top lists is to banish bad design. Why endure something that simply doesn’t work (or is an affront to aesthetics) any longer than we have to? In the spirit of fresh starts, we polled experts in architecture, tech, industrial design, and urbanism on the everyday annoyances and the big-picture issues that they think are in desperate need of a refresh in 2026. (Top on my personal list? Eye-searing headlights.) Design is inherently an optimistic act, and by fixing these issues, we’re a step closer to a more beautiful and better world…

When my mom was dying, hospice came daily and stayed for about ninety minutes. They answered questions, checked what needed to be checked, and did what good professionals do: They made a brutal situation feel slightly less impossible. And then they left. Ninety minutes go fast when you are watching your mother decline. The rest of the day stretches out in a way that does not feel like time so much as exposure. Every sound becomes a data point. Every small change feels like a decision you did not train for. Her breathing sounds strange. What do we do? How often should we turn her to avoid bedsores? What is the diaper situation, exactly? That was the gap, the lo…

At first glance, the most striking part of the SunRise, a recently redeveloped residential tower in Edmonton, Alberta, is the boldly colored facade, with strips of primary color and a lively mural. Called The Land We Share, the vibrant landscape sketch has sparkled on the skyline since its unveiling this past summer. But the mural is far more than a pretty picture. Covered on all sides in a kind of colored solar panel called BIPV made by Canadian firm Mitrex, the mural and the rest of the structure generate roughly 267 kilowatt hours, enough to cut the building’s carbon emissions in half. Typically, high-rises generate solar power primarily via their rooftops. Bu…

By now, the headlines almost write themselves: humanoid robots everywhere, AI in everything. Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026 didn’t disrupt that narrative—it confirmed it. What changed was the subtext. This was the year AI stopped feeling experimental and started feeling infrastructural. Intelligence has shifted from novelty to baseline, forcing harder questions about consequence, control, and agency—not just what technology can do, but how it reshapes systems once opting out is no longer realistic. For years, progress at CES has been measured in speed, scale, and spectacle. In 2026, a different metric quietly surfaced: judgment. The most advanced products we…

Back in November, Fast Company and Johns Hopkins partnered for the first-ever World Changing Ideas Summit in Washington, DC, an event that convened leaders across business and academia to engage with the ideas and innovations reshaping the future. Knowing we were heading into a new year that undoubtedly is bringing new challenges to every industry, we asked some of our speakers working in space, healthcare, AI, and the intersections therein, what would be top of mind for them in 2026: “We’re in a race against resistance.” Akhila Kosaraju, founder and CEO of Pharebio, is using predictive and generative AI to power drug discovery. The startup plans to develop 15…

A few weeks ago, my iPhone woke me up at 3:30am. In a way, it was my fault. I’d technically set the alarm “for three thirty.” In another way, it was Siri’s fault. Apple’s AI assistant never thought to question if I was asking for AM or PM. And it simply assumed the most painful option for me. It’s just one of countless tiny examples of how Siri, 16 years since Apple acquired the technology, has been a disappointing product. Siri was already looking dusty before modern LLMs, and with the launch of ChatGPT, it has been completely left behind. Which is why in June 2024, with fans and investors growing impatient, Apple promised a new era of AI—”Apple Intelligence.” …

Amanda Lee McCarty, sustainability consultant and host of the Clotheshorse podcast, remembers fixing a tear on her Forever 21 shirt with a stapler—just long enough to get through the workday before tossing it out. In the early 2000s, when fast-fashion brands began flooding the market, clothing became so cheap that shoppers could endlessly refresh their wardrobes. The garments were poorly made and tore easily, but it hardly mattered. They were designed to be disposable, encouraging repeat purchases. “It didn’t seem worth the time and effort to repair the top,” she recalls. “And besides, I didn’t have any mending skills at the time.” McCarty isn’t alone. Sta…

If you are Verizon customer, like me, you’ve probably been scrambling to make phone calls, send texts, and get online since Wednesday, due to a massive, nationwide service outage. (I am writing this from my local food co-op outside Boston, where I am using the internet in their cafe.) The mobile giant says the issue has now been resolved, however, some customers are saying they’re still without service. Some 1.5 million users reported the prolonged outage on Downdetector, which still had some 893 reports (as of around 2:30 p.m. ET). That’s over 24 hours after customers first started losing service around noon ET on Wednesday, with iPhone users reporting an “SOS” icon,…

As we head into the new year, I am facing a daunting prospect. After over 34 years in higher education as a professor and administrator, I’m moving to the private sector to support more effective teaching practices. I would classify this change as a significant career pivot. I am changing market sectors (public sector to private) and shifting from serving a single institution to a global base of clients. Decisions like this are not to be made lightly. It is important to ensure that you are making this move to run toward something attractive and not just away from something that frustrates you. Here are three important considerations if you think a significant career m…

r/Bald is a popular subreddit where those who are losing their hair or have recently taken the plunge and shaved their heads can find support, encouragement, and a general ego-boost from the community’s 1.4 million weekly visitors. Created in 2011, the subreddit has 23,000 weekly contributions. Often, they follow the format of men uploading photos of their receding hairlines. “Is it time?” reads one recent post. The answer, in almost every instance, is yes. The before-and-after transformations are overwhelmingly met with enthusiasm and welcoming responses. “Might as well go all the way” one recent post read. “10 years younger my dude!” replied one Redditor. Anot…

Put down Wordle. New brain-exercise-for-the-day just dropped. “Can you read 900 words per minute?” a viral post that has been doing the rounds on X, challenges. “Try it.” If you made it to 600 words per minute, that’s more than twice the speed of the average reader. If you made it to 900, congratulations—according to some back-of-the-napkin math, that makes you 278% faster than the national average (which is 238 words per minute). By that same logic, it could take you around 40 seconds to read this 600ish word article. But should it? As one X user pointed out, “this is like brainrot for reading.” Or as Jane Ollis, medical biochemist and founder at AI-pow…

Most organizations still hire for culture fit—even those that loudly champion diversity and inclusion. The phrase sounds benign, even wise: who wouldn’t want colleagues who “fit in”? But behind this feel-good notion lies one of the biggest obstacles to innovation and progress in modern workplaces. Culture fit has become a euphemism for cultural cloning: selecting people who already look, think, and behave like the incumbents. It’s a polite way of saying, we want people like us, because there’s nothing more comforting than working—and hanging out—with people who are just like you! The irony, of course, is that such homogeneity kills the very things organizations claim …

As we move into 2026, it’s time to examine the subtle behaviors that undermine our professional impact. As someone who works with mid- to senior-level leaders, I see and hear the ways in which communication behaviors and patterns get in their way. Small changes can create influential outcomes! Here are three critical habits to eliminate if you want to project true confidence and gravitas. Breaking these three habits isn’t about becoming someone you’re not—it’s about removing the barriers between your capabilities and how others perceive them. True executive presence combines confident delivery with substantive content, and that starts with eliminating the small be…

Right now, too many physicians and patients are trapped in a fragmented system. Information exists—but rarely in a form that’s usable or easily actionable. Too often, lab results arrive as scanned images. Medication histories show up late or unreadable. Critical details hide in pages no one has time to sift through. What clinicians feel in those moments is not just inconvenience—it’s strain. They’re carrying the weight of navigating a complexity that shouldn’t sit on their shoulders in the first place. Many expect artificial intelligence (AI) to solve the problem but while it can be an important part of the solution, AI is only as smart as the data it feeds on and onl…

If you’re in an unfulfilling job or are dissatisfied with your work, it’s possible to get a fresh start no matter what the season. In fact, there are a few strategies that can help you find meaning and enhance your experience even as you slog forward. A lack of fulfillment in your job can have intense effects. It can derail your motivation, your energy, and even your performance. And these, in turn, get in the way of your happiness at work and can impact your overall happiness outside of work too. For many people, it’s hard to find meaning at work. In fact, half of workers in the U.S. reported that they lacked satisfaction in their work, and 38% said their job was…

People know when a brand genuinely cares about well-being—for employees, customers, and humanity at large. In many cases, it’s an intangible truth they can simply feel—in how they’re treated, how decisions get made, and whether a company’s stated values actually show up in practice. Plenty of brands talk about purpose and people. Fewer live it. And the difference is increasingly obvious. That gap is why “brand well-being” is emerging as a meaningful framework for companies that want to build durable growth—not just short-term performance. At its core, brand well-being recognizes that a brand isn’t a logo or a campaign. It’s a living ecosystem made up of people, cultur…