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Fast Company’s global tech editor Harry McCracken and tech writer Jared Newman cut through the AI hype to walk you through the tools and techniques that are making a difference in the way they work. In this conversation, they break down the trends behind 2026’s most forward-thinking organizations and share the practical, steal‑worthy strategies that leaders at all levels can apply right now. Whether you’re refining your road map or scanning the horizon for what’s next, their overview will provide you with actionable insights and valuable new perspectives. View the full article

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…

When University of Pennsylvania student Crystal Yang was in high school, she and her friends were avid players of the trendy online game Wordle. One of Yang’s friends, however, is blind and was unable to join in. That inspired Yang, while still a high school student, to work with researchers at Texas A&M University looking at conversational audio interface possibilities for the game. Soon, she founded a nonprofit called Audemy that has developed more than 50 audio-powered games accessible to blind and visually impaired players. The organization is now also at work on an accessible gaming console that will incorporate audio and tactile features and can function wi…

In our 2026 Performance Marketing survey with Harris Poll, we asked more than 300 marketing decision-makers about the trends and investments they predicted for 2026. The biggest takeaway—75% report increased expectations for accountability. And nearly two-thirds say leaders now evaluate them based on pipeline contribution rather than traditional top-of-funnel metrics like lead volume. For years, marketers have argued for a more meaningful seat at the revenue table, one that is measured on business outcomes instead of activity. That shift is happening. Leaders are asking marketing teams to deliver revenue outcomes without giving them the visibility to understand, p…

After a rough start to the year, America’s four major publicly traded quantum computing companies are surging once again. The latest rally kicked off about a month ago, right around World Quantum Day, and since then, all four quantum computing companies—D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS), IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ), Quantum Computing Inc. (Nasdaq: QUBT), and Rigetti Computing, Inc. (Nasdaq: RGTI)—have recovered much of their 2026 losses. And today, their stocks are up even more. Here’s why. Quantum stocks are finally reversing their bad start to 2026 America’s so-called Quantum Four publicly traded companies saw an incredible year of stock gains in 2025. But in…

Back in March, Amazon announced new 1-hour and 3-hour delivery options for tens of thousands of items in over 2,000 cities across America. But now the e-commerce juggernaut is making those short wait times look relatively long. Starting today, the company is launching a 30-minute delivery service, dubbed Amazon Now, in several cities across the U.S. Here’s what you need to know. What is Amazon Now? Amazon Now will make thousands of Amazon’s products available for delivery within 30 minutes or less. It joins Amazon’s other existing fast delivery options in the United States. These include under 60-minute delivery with the company’s Prime Air drone service in eig…

Bill Gross has a long history of betting on technological shifts and watching those bets pay off. But the latest proposition from one of Silicon Valley’s most storied founders and investors depends on forces far beyond the Bay Area. With ProRata, Gross is betting he can build a market in which publishers and creators can see how their work informs AI-generated outputs and get paid accordingly. He doesn’t expect AI companies to participate out of goodwill. In fact, Gross has already launched a spinoff, Gist, which allows ProRata partners to generate additional revenue from ProRata’s indexing of their work. Instead, he believes outside pressures will eventually leav…

There’s a quiet trade-off happening inside high-growth companies right now. We’re moving faster than ever, and teams are more efficient. AI is handling work that used to take hours, and asynchronous communication means decisions don’t have to wait for meetings. On paper, it’s all an upside. But underneath the speed, something else is happening. Leaders are moving further away from their teams. Not intentionally and not dramatically—just gradually enough that you don’t notice it until alignment shifts: decisions that need to be revisited, priorities that aren’t as clear as you thought, or challenges surfacing later than they used to. The assumption that new…

One of the best days of Gabriella’s career was also one of her hardest days as a parent. Gabriella, who asked for a pseudonym to protect her children’s privacy, had just filmed the launch video for her new company. On the train ride back home, she got a call from her daughter’s school. The new nanny she’d hired, who had been thoroughly vetted, had left her two-year-old son locked in the car in the school’s parking lot and disappeared for half an hour before teachers heard the crying and rushed to help. “I remember feeling so guilty and crushed, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I don’t feel like I can leave my children because I don’t know how to find childcare that I can trust,’…

It starts with Jason Sudeikis in the make-up trailer for what must be the latest season of Ted Lasso, where he’s asked if he’s heading back stateside for the World Cup. He says no, then for some weird reason, taps his script with his Visa card. Poof! The script is now a World Cup match ticket. Thus begins Sudeikis’ surreal trip home, as dramatized in Visa’s new World Cup commercial “Tap in.” The campaign uses a simple play on words—in football, a tap-in goal is the easiest there is—to illustrate the ease with which fans can use Visa in and around the 2026 World Cup. Along the way in the campaign we see football stars Lamine Yamal, Erling Haaland, Jorge Campos, and le…

The day John Lennon was shot, on Dec. 8, 1980, he and Yoko Ono gave an interview to a San Francisco radio crew from their home in New York’s Dakota Apartments. They were promoting their new album “Double Fantasy,” but the two-hour conversation was wide ranging. Though the interviewers had been warned “no Beatles questions,” Lennon and Ono were thrillingly open. That day, Annie Leibovitz also shot the famous portrait of a clothes-less Lennon wrapped around Ono. The interview is similarly naked. The two, particularly Lennon, riff on love, their relationship, creativity, life after the Beatles, raising their toddler son, writing songs in bed and much more. At the age of 40…

They’re calling it “discomorphism.” To mark its 20th birthday, Spotify introduced a revamped logo that bedazzled its green, circular mark into a shimmering dark green disco ball. Following backlash online, Spotify assured its users that the old logo is coming back soon. “Alright, we know glitter is not for everyone,” the music streaming service said on social media. “Our temp glow up ends soon. Your regularly scheduled Spotify icon returns next week.” Alright, we know glitter is not for everyone. Our temp glow up ends soon. Your regularly scheduled Spotify icon returns next week. — Spotify (@Spotify) May 17, 2026 Spotify tells Fast Company the disco bal…

Trains are set to resume rolling on the Long Island Rail Road on Tuesday after a deal was reached to end a strike that had shut down the busiest commuter rail system in the country. But commuters in the eastern suburbs of New York City still had to muddle through another tough morning rush hour, as trains weren’t set to be running in time for the commute into work after the agreement was reached late Monday. Limited train service was set to resume around noon, with full service expected to be back in time for the evening rush. The LIRR still urged riders to work from home again Tuesday if possible. Shuttle buses were being offered from a handful of locations on Long Is…

In February, April Watson hit her head while stowing products at an Amazon warehouse outside of Atlanta, Georgia. The injury gave her a concussion, and she was told by a neurologist that she would have to go on restricted duty and work at a slower pace than was typically expected of her. Despite having paperwork from the doctor that clearly stated that she had to work more slowly, however, it took Watson over a month to get the necessary accommodations on the job—all because she couldn’t get the correct medical form from Amazon’s internal AI assistant or easily connect with an HR employee. In the meantime, Watson was flagged for making errors on the job, and had…

A tough economy, rising grocery bills, high gas prices, credit card bills, fears of layoffs: A 2025 survey of 2,000 adults from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine revealed that 78% of adults lose sleep to financial stress. That double whammy of financial stress and bad sleep can lead to a slew of health problems—as well as declining performance at work, which in turn could lead to actual (or even worse) money problems. Insufficient or disrupted sleep affects every major physiological system, not just daytime energy levels, says Jennifer L. Martin, professor at Florida International University in Miami who specializes in sleep science. “Individuals facing money…

Work is the closest thing most adults have to a full-time identity. Strip away sleep, and roughly half of our waking lives are spent working. If you take a conservative estimate—40 to 50 hours a week, across four to five decades—you end up with well over 80,000 hours on the job. And yet, the most salient feature of work is not how many hours we devote to it, but rather how we experience it, which varies wildly. For some, it resembles what the sociologist Max Weber once described as a “calling,” a source of meaning and even a kind of secular transcendence. For others, it’s closer to what Karl Marx labeled alienation: a draining, joyless routine that disconnects effort …

We need to have a blunt conversation about the word empowerment. In the majority of companies, the lie behind the word “empowerment” becomes apparent in familiar ways: job descriptions that promise autonomy, leaders who proudly talk about their empowered teams, and meetings that end with “you’ve got this.” Reality though strips away the veneer of this lie: that same work still runs through a gauntlet of approvals, sign-offs, and second-guessing. The language suggests freedom. The system reinforces control. The result is not empowerment. It is dependence with better branding. In our work at Amazon helping Fortune 500 leaders understand how to dismantle their r…

Across job listing sites over the past few months, you might have noticed something curious. Alongside traditional titles like “designer,” “engineer,” and “product manager,” a new crop of roles is appearing. They have names like “designer engineer,” “builder,” or “design crafter,” and they represent a tipping point in the design industry that’s just beginning to play out. That tipping point is captured in the second annual AI in Design report, published by the investor firm Designer Fund and the venture capital firm Foundation Capital. This year’s report draws on a survey of over 900 designers across 60+ countries, including partners like Stripe, Framer, Linear, Noti…

U.S. markets are poised to open with gains on Wednesday as bond yields slipped and oil prices fell. Futures for the S&P 500 rose 0.4% while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average edged 0.2% higher and Nasdaq futures jumped 0.7%. The yield on the 10-year Treasury eased overnight to 4.64% from 4.66% late Tuesday, but are up from less than 4% before the war with Iran began. That’s a notable increase and part of the reason that stock prices look even more expensive while threatening to slow the economy. Higher yields can drive up rates for mortgages and loans going to companies to build AI data centers, which has been a big source of growth for the economy. Ther…

Management and union leaders at Samsung Electronics failed to reach a last-minute deal over wages Wednesday, raising prospects for a strike at the South Korean electronics giant that could rattle global semiconductor supplies and the country’s trade-dependent economy. Government officials have threatened to invoke rarely used emergency powers to force a settlement at Samsung, where the union, which represents more than 70,000 workers, says the company has failed to offer adequate compensation despite its soaring profits fueled by the global boom in artificial intelligence. After the latest round of talks ended without a breakthrough on Wednesday, union leader Choi Seung…

Today, Figma announced an AI agent built natively inside its collaborative environment. Forget the disconnected, floating prompt boxes we’ve grown so tired of; this system gives you multiple digital assistants right on your digital drafting board in Figma Design. According to the company, it is capable of churning out interface elements and banishing the mindless drudgery of pixel-pushing, while keeping creators locked in their creative zone. With the update, Figma is fundamentally reengineering the digital drafting board into an autonomous engine. By throwing the gates wide open—inviting the marketing department, code-wranglers, and project supervisors to play …

The Target boycott is ongoing but it might be having less of an impact. On Wednesday, the company reported first-quarter earnings that included successes like a 6.7% increase in net sales year-over-year (YOY). The $25.4 billion in net sales included a 24.5% jump in non-merchandise sales, like Target Circle 360 membership revenues and the Target+ marketplace. In that vein, Target saw its digital comparable sales rise by 8.9% thanks to a 27% jump in same-day delivery with Target Circle 360. The retailer also reported earnings per share of $1.71, surpassing Wall Street’s predicted EPS of $1.46, according to consensus estimates cited by CNBC. “There is mu…

The release of Google’s latest AI models this week at Google I/O was yet another example of the direction of travel for the generative AI revolution. Facing a user base that is increasingly burning more tokens under basic subscriptions or API access, AI companies are starting to hike prices and throttle usage. In response to those cost pressures, consumers are beginning to cut their cloth accordingly. And while frontier AI providers are releasing ever more powerful models into the world, smaller companies are advancing, too. Often based in China, these are frequently accused of copying the innovations of U.S. models through techniques like distillation, or reverse eng…