Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Anthropic on Wednesday launched Claude for Small Business, a new package of agentic workflows, skills, and connectors designed to automate business tasks common to smaller companies. Claude for Small Business includes workflows for payroll planning, month-end close, business performance monitoring, and marketing campaign management. It also includes skills, or reusable capability packages for AI agents, focused on cash-flow forecasting, invoice chasing, contract review, lead triage, content strategy, and more, Anthropic says. Users get connectors, or integrations, to commonly used platforms including QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, …

Yeti’s logo is simple: just its name written in an all-caps sans-serif font, placed within a rounded rectangle. But to speak to new consumers, they’re getting rid of the one element that gives it brand recognition. In a new campaign created in collaboration with Wieden+Kennedy Portland, Yeti deleted the “Yeti” in its logo to make room for other four-letter words, like “Hike,” “Surf,” Golf,” “Fish,” “Hunt,” and “Snow.” They’re all written in the Yeti brand font, which closely resembles the bold grotesque sans serif Archivo Black. For the company, which was founded in 2006 and marks its 20th anniversary this year, it’s about broadening its reach. The word variat…

All writing is autobiographical. Even if you’re not explicitly writing about your own experience, it shows up in the topics you choose, the details you focus on, even the things you leave out. Key example from my trove of nearly 3,000 articles here on Inc. over the years: a study I latched onto a decade ago about the single thing wealthy families do to give their kids a leg up on the world. The answer, drawn from University of Southern California research, was straightforward: They buy the neighborhood. The insight wasn’t so much about money as it was about what money makes possible. Stable schools, stable peer groups, and stable environments. The specific …

Below, Dan Pontefract shares five key insights from his new book, The Future of Work Is Grey: The Untapped Value of Age in the Workforce. Pontefract is a six-time award-winning author and a leadership and corporate culture strategist. He has spent more than 20 years in senior leadership roles at TELUS, SAP, and BCIT, serving as a chief learning officer and chief envisioner. In 2018, he founded his own firm, the Pontefract Group, to help leaders and organizations improve leadership and corporate culture. What’s the big idea? Organizations are overlooking a major, unavoidable shift—the aging workforce—and those that learn to value and integrate people of all ages…

Custom AI models are not just for the AI giants anymore. Because the 37-person startup Krea is releasing its first generative AI model as the design tools startup repositions itself as a full-fledged AI research lab. The move is significant for Krea, but it also seems to tease an almost inevitable moment in the rapidly evolving AI market, where smaller players in the industry can make more disruptive bets. On one hand, Krea can hardly call itself a bootstrapped startup anymore. It’s now raised $83 million through its Series B at a $500 million valuation. On the other, it’s tiny compared to the leading frontier model companies, which constantly raise more money t…

Michaels is expanding its party supply and celebration offerings. In September 2025, the arts and crafts retailer introduced The Party Shop at Michaels, an in-store shopping experience that brought party supplies, balloons, and other celebration essentials to its shelves. This year, its product selection will grow even further. In a May 13 press release, Michaels announced it is expanding its in-store party supply assortment and introducing new in-store experiences, with plans to add nearly 600 new products to its shelves throughout 2026. Michaels isn’t the only unexpected retailer with a party supply aisle. Last month, Staples announced it was getting …

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. A look at the AI landscape for small businesses So much of the conversation around the great AI transformation of business has centered on enterprises, meaning companies with more than 500 employees. That makes sense: For AI and cloud companies, landing a large enterprise customer can mean securing a significant stream of recurring revenue. But if we’re really talking about AI reinventing work and making everyone more productive, small and medium-sized businesses should be a m…

Martha Stewart just launched a new startup called Hint—an “always-on, AI-native home management platform” set to launch this summer. The venture was born out of a conversation Stewart had with Kyle Rush, her neighbor and an AI engineer. The two wanted to create software that can help identify and solve pesky home repairs, as well as reduce expenses. After Stewart partnered with Rush and home-services executive Yih-Han Ma, Hint was born. “The first thing you do is give us your address,” Ma explained to Fortune. Then, Hint pulls publicly available data on the property. Users can upload further information, like inspection reports and insurance policies, to give Hint…

Chances are, you’re working hard, hustling along, and doing your best to stay ahead of things. But when you strive for success, you can risk burnout by concentrating on a limited definition of success. It’s possible, however, to reduce the likelihood you’ll burn out and ensure you stay energized by redefining what you’re trying to accomplish and how you’re making the effort. Burnout is especially prevalent. According to Gallup, three out of four employees experience burnout. If you experience it, you’re likely to have more sick days, feel less confident, and be looking for another job. In addition, if you’re feeling burned out, you may also experience exhaustion or de…

If you’ve been in the corporate world long enough, you might have seen technical specialists hit a career ceiling. They’re brilliant at what they do, but they can struggle to advance to leadership positions. That’s because management requires a different type of thinking: less task-oriented, more focused on the big picture. This is a mindset that’s common in successful company founders, who employ knowledge, experience, and intuition to maximize value creation within the given context. And it’s a mindset that’s increasingly relevant today. For instance, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs survey from 2025 names analytical thinking as the top core skill emplo…

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. When the software engineer and entrepreneur Deon Nicholas was CEO of Forethought, a customer service automation platform, he had an executive assistant to manage the minutiae of his workday. Not surprisingly, he appreciated the help. “That was something that I found was critical, something that actually helped me as a leader,” he explains. Few of us who aren’t in the executive suite have the luxury of calling on another person to wrangle our schedule, triage email, and otherwise keep the chaos of our professional and personal lives under control. As Nicholas contemplated the frenzy of excitement over AI agents…

Airports around the world tend to fall somewhere between the beautifully designed and artfully efficient (think Changi, in Singapore) and the messy and chaotic (sorry, Newark Liberty). But a newly redesigned airport in Noto, Japan, a seaside town 300 miles northwest of Tokyo, offers another option with its whimsically themed Pokémon attraction. From July 7 of this year through September 2029, the hub will be known as the “Noto Satoyama Pokémon With You Airport.” The interiors will be adorned with murals, illustrations, and sculptural installations of the media franchise’s adorable and beloved characters. The hope is that the playful redesign will boost tourism to the …

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…

Starbucks Corporation has announced that it will lay off 300 corporate employees in the United States. The layoffs represent the third round of job cuts that the coffee chain has initiated in the last 15 months. They come as the company is in the midst of efficiency and cost-cutting measures under the leadership of CEO Brian Niccol, who assumed the role in 2024. Here’s what you need to know about the latest Starbucks layoffs. Starbucks to cut 300 corporate jobs in the U.S. On Friday, Starbucks confirmed that it was cutting 300 corporate jobs in the United States. The news was first reported by CNBC. The job cuts will not impact the majority of the comp…

As the preeminent internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia is known for having articles on every topic under the sun. From the commonplace to the esoteric, if it’s at all noteworthy in the grand scheme of the universe, it’ll have its own Wikipedia entry. But what about everything that never happened? Meet Halupedia, a new online encyclopedia dedicated to “topics that have received insufficient attention in mainstream reference works,” as the site’s homepage reads. In other words, every entry on Halupedia is entirely invented—or rather, hallucinated—by AI. No matter what you’re looking for on Halupedia, there will be an entry for it. Visitors to the site can press the “Stu…

With its AI credit limits officially up and running, design software maker Figma has just notched another successful quarter under its belt. The company reported $333.4 million in revenue for quarter one—a 46% increase year-over-year (YOY). The boost follows 40% and 38% revenue growth YOY during the two previous quarters. Figma attributes its improving performance, in large part, to its AI-powered tools. “Our outperformance in quarter one was fueled by stronger than expected seat expansion across entire organizations, driven by design’s growing importance and adoption of our AI products including Figma Make, MCP, and Figma Weave,” Figma CFO Praveer Melwani sa…

Using your email address as your username has become the standard. In many cases, you simply enter your email address and choose a password. Some services remove the need for a password altogether, allowing you to register using just your email address and a onetime code sent to it. Others offer the option to connect your account directly to your Google or Apple identity. As we scroll, shop, apply, and register across services, our email address quietly becomes our identity everywhere, from shopping platforms to banking to travel. Over time, more and more of our activity starts pointing back to a single account. While it all feels convenient, there is an issue we …