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The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Most ordinary people know little about the calculus, statistics, linear algebra, logic, and programming languages required to design projects and products to leverage artificial intelligence. However, we are not exempt from using products and services that rely on AI. If we do not learn how to maximize these tools, our organizations—businesses, schools, and governments—will …

In news outlets, business publications, and scholarly journals, there is a crescendo of commentary about the combined power of human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Without question, that convergence is already yielding exciting discoveries in many fields. Yet a third, equally crucial, kind of intelligence is being left out of the discussion: nature’s intelligence. The idea that nature itself displays the hallmarks of what we understand as intelligence—the ability to learn, to encode those learnings in new, more effective models, and to continually adapt—is not altogether new. Leonardo da Vinci understood this well. Nature was his teacher and his inspira…

Public servants manage a geographically distributed group of people across dozens of public and private organizations daily. Cybersecurity officials work with state and federal counterparts, and homelessness coordinators work with public health departments and nonprofits. State veterans affairs departments sit at the intersection of educational and health benefits along with housing and job assistance. From my conversations with public servants across the country, it’s clear that most critical government functions cannot happen without collaboration. This makes it paramount to have a deep understanding of who does what across dozens of organizations for government…

In a world where trust in institutions is at an all-time low and the pace of change is relentless, the most effective leaders are not those who hide behind polished press releases or corporate jargon. They are the ones who step forward with authentic stories—stories that reveal not just their vision, but their humility, values, and the messy realities of leading in uncertain times. Welcome to the era of the storytelling CEO, where transparency isn’t just a buzzword, it’s the new leadership currency. Why Stories Matter More Than Ever For millennia, stories have been the glue that binds communities, shapes cultures, and helps us make sense of the world. Today, as org…

In September, the U.S. Labor Department reported that weekly applications for unemployment aid jumped by 27,000 to 263,000, the highest in four years and a warning sign for the future of low-income populations. And at a time when government policy couldn’t be less interested in addressing systemic economic disparities, solving these issues will depend on the ability of business leaders to listen, learn, and come together to tackle the socioeconomic issues impacting a majority of Americans every day. I’ve seen these challenges up close for years in my New York Capital Region home—and the challenges are just as present in cities around the U.S. So on a national level, …

The early darkness in most of the U.S. means that fall has set in. That also means it’s officially holiday shopping season. With the economic impact of President The President’s ever-fluctuating tariffs an open question, there’s an opportunity for shoppers to make their spending meaningful, which opens up a lane for companies that are offering something other than the e-commerce onslaught of nearly identical products that populate sites like Amazon and Walmart. What the Amazons and even Etsys of the world are currently missing is the sense of curation that defines Uncommon Goods, an online shop stocked with exclusive, offbeat items sourced from independent artisans. …

The airline industry is notoriously hard to decarbonize: large jets traveling long distances can’t feasibly use batteries, and sustainable aviation fuel is still only produced in tiny volumes. As airlines explore a range of options, United Airlines Ventures’ Sustainable Flight Fund just invested in one possible solution—a system that uses crushed rocks to capture CO2 for use in fuel or to store underground. The fund announced today that it invested an unspecified amount in Heirloom, a company that uses a powder made from limestone to pull CO2 from the air, relying on the material’s natural ability to absorb the greenhouse gas. At a facility in California’s Central…

My family had Slide Show Night when I was growing up. Not every Saturday, but a whole bunch of Saturdays. Either my sister or I would be in charge of setting up the projector, the screen, and loading the carousel. During the show, there’d be a few landscapes or skylines taken during vacations, but almost all the shots were up close. Like most dads, mine wasn’t a professional photographer, but he did a good job of capturing memory triggers: faces, gestures, and decorations. Before we were driving age, my sister and I were given our own cameras as Christmas gifts. We’d spend our own money buying and developing film. We basically documented our Gen X life: playing in th…

It’s 4:59 PM on a Friday. You’re the Head of Design at a mid-sized biotech firm—mid-sprint, mid-thought—building out a set of specialized design roles that will define how your team delivers value for the next three years. Then the email arrives. Your recruiting partners have sent a pre-written job description, authored by a product manager, with a mandate to use it as-is. The title: UX/UI Designer. You pause. Not because the gesture wasn’t well-intentioned—it was. But because you recognize exactly what this moment represents: a quiet, recurring erosion of role clarity that has followed the design profession for over a decade. One ambiguous title, multiplied a…

People are often under the false impression that making their language complex or using jargon enhances their credibility. That might be true in certain circumstances. If you’re an academic talking to other academics or a software engineer talking to other software engineers, using jargon makes sense. However, if you‘re talking to people outside of your field of expertise, it can alienate them. And when you alienate someone, it can cause them to switch off. It also reduces the likelihood that they take away anything useful or do what you’d like them to do. That’s probably the last thing you want to happen when communicating with someone. So if you’re prone to …

Biometric authentication—the ability to unlock your devices by using just your face or fingerprint—is one of the few smartphone features that, even today, leave me feeling like we’re living in the future. When I was a kid, technology like facial recognition was limited to science fiction. But as cool and useful as biometric authentication is, the technology can also leave us vulnerable. Here’s why—and how to protect yourself. It’s not just journalists and activists who can have their biometrics used against them Last month, journalists got a stark reminder that their biometrics might not keep the data they have on their devices safe from law enforcement searches. W…

My brother’s text messages can read like fragments of an ancient code: “hru,” “wyd,” “plz”—truncated, cryptic, and never quite satisfying to receive. I’ll often find myself second-guessing whether “gr8” means actual excitement or whether it’s a perfunctory nod. This oddity has nagged at me for years, so I eventually embarked upon a series of studies with fellow researchers Sam Maglio and Yiran Zhang. I wanted to know whether these clipped missives might undermine genuine dialogue, exploring the unspoken signals behind digital shorthand. As we gathered data, surveyed people and set up experiments, it became clear that those tiny shortcuts—sometimes hailed as a hall…

I have a confession to make. I keep a secret document in my Google Drive titled “Fund Theses That Piss Me Off.” And every time I read about a venture capital fund with a generic, meaningless, or buzzwordy thesis that manages to raise a bunch of money regardless, I copy and paste it into my burn pile. This is how I started to notice a couple of years back how sometimes VCs will make dramatic changes to their thesis and investing focus. And it happens not just at a fund level, but across whole chunks of the industry, too. Take, for instance, climate VC. This was a white-hot category not too long ago. Today, all of a sudden, all the climate funds are gone, or they’v…

Spend a few minutes on developer Twitter and you’ll run into it: “vibe coding.” With a name like that, it might sound like a passing internet trend, but it’s become a real, visible part of software culture. It’s shorthand for letting AI generate code from simple language prompts instead of writing it manually. In many ways, it’s great. AI has lowered the barrier to entry for coding, and that’s pulled in a wave of hobbyists, designers, and side-project tinkerers who might never have touched a codebase before. Tools like Warp, Cursor, and Claude Code uplevel even professional developers, making it possible to ship something working in hours instead of weeks. But her…

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…