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For the past two years, companies have been asking the wrong question: how do we use AI in our processes? That question made sense at the beginning. When large language models first appeared, the instinct was natural: take what already exists, from workflows to functions, decision chains, etc., and try to accelerate them. Add copilots. Add assistants. Add automation layers. Improve productivity. But as we’ve seen, that approach doesn’t scale. As I’ve argued in previous pieces, enterprise AI hasn’t failed because the technology doesn’t work. It has failed because we tried to place it in the wrong layer. Large language models were never designed to run a company, …

Over the past two years, AI has been framed as a productivity engine, a cost-cutting lever, an infrastructure race, and, on more dramatic days, as a civilizational rupture. Boards demand AI road maps. CEOs announce “AI-first” agendas. Entire divisions are reorganized around tools whose capabilities shift every quarter. But beneath the noise lies a quieter and far more consequential reality: AI does not create strategic clarity. It reveals whether you had any to begin with. I’ve argued previously that the next layer of advantage in corporate AI will not come from owning infrastructure, but from building better internal models of how your business world actually wo…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Imagine a world where marketing managers oversee AI copywriters, sales leaders direct AI-powered CRM systems, and engineers supervise code-generating agents. This is already starting to happen. By 2030, AI is projected to displace 92 million jobs while creating 170 million new ones, according to the World Economic Forum. Rather than replacing humans, AI is redefining their roles. In the near…

“Sean,” the CEO of a health technology startup, invited Garry to join what he called a strategy offsite. By mid-morning, it had become something else. Six people, a whiteboard, a Series A closing in ninety days. The question on the table: where do we invest next? More engineers? A bigger sales team? Another content hire? Garry set down his coffee and asked a different question. “What if we stopped asking what we can afford to build, and started asking what we can now imagine building—that we genuinely couldn’t have a year ago?” The room shifted. So did the conversation. And that reframe—from resource allocation to possibility expansion—is the strategic inflection …

If you work in an office, your next coworker might not be human at all. Workers are already well-acquainted with artificial intelligence in the office, using AI tools to take notes, automate tasks, and assist with workflow. Now, Microsoft is working on a new kind of AI agent that doesn’t just assist, but acts as an employee. These “Agentic Users” will soon have their own email, Teams account, and company ID, just like a regular coworker. “Each embodied agent has its own identity, dedicated access to organizational systems and applications, and the ability to collaborate with humans and other agents,” states a Microsoft product roadmap document. “These agents ca…

Will artificial intelligence enable an even higher level of creativity, or turn us into cognitively deflated Sims spitting out chatbot responses? This question has polarized much of the internet. On one hand, you have the ardent defenders who believe that AI writing speeds up their process, allowing them to quickly transform bullets of information into elegant and typo-free copy. On the other hand, there are the critics who contend that AI writing seems to violate something sacred, and that by using a large language model (LLM) to write, you’re not only degrading the craft, but also yourself. AI, in its ideal form, is a technology that allows us to off-load or complet…

When AI systems started spitting out working code, many teams welcomed them as productivity boosters. Developers turned to AI to speed up routine tasks. Leaders celebrated productivity gains. But weeks later, companies faced security breaches traced back to that code. The question is: Who should be held responsible? This isn’t hypothetical. In a survey of 450 security leaders, engineers, and developers across the U.S. and Europe, 1 in 5 organizations said they had already suffered a serious cybersecurity incident tied to AI-generated code, and more than two-thirds (69%) had uncovered flaws created by AI. Mistakes made by a machine, rather than by a human, are directly l…

As a kid of the 1970s, I was fascinated by a short-lived art movement known as photorealism. The painters who practiced it created works that weren’t merely realistic. They were borderline indistinguishable from photographs—an extraordinary feat to pull off with oil on canvas. If the genre hadn’t involved so much painstaking effort, it might have gained more momentum. Thanks to generative AI tools such as DALL-E and Midjourney, which can turn a written prompt into a photo-like image in seconds, we now live in an era of point-and-click photorealism. The results often don’t amount to anything more than internet chum. I certainly didn’t consider any of it to be art—until la…

When teachers rely on commonly used artificial intelligence chatbots to devise lesson plans, it does not result in more engaging, immersive, or effective learning experiences compared with existing techniques, we found in our recent study. The AI-generated civics lesson plans we analyzed also left out opportunities for students to explore the stories and experiences of traditionally marginalized people. The allure of generative AI as a teaching aid has caught the attention of educators. A Gallup survey from September 2025 found that 60% of K-12 teachers are already using AI in their work, with the most common reported use being teaching preparation and lesson planning. …

Health tech gadgets displayed at the annual CES trade show make a lot of promises. A smart scale promoted a healthier lifestyle by scanning your feet to track your heart health, and an egg-shaped hormone tracker uses AI to help you figure out the best time to conceive. Tech and health experts, however, question the accuracy of products like these and warn of data privacy issues — especially as the federal government eases up on regulation. The Food and Drug Administration announced during the show in Las Vegas that it will relax regulations on “low-risk” general wellness products such as heart monitors and wheelchairs. It’s the latest step President Donald The President…

​​​​​The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. More people will require surgery this year than ever before. ​​​​And next year, that number will rise again. By 2030, more than 313 million surgical procedures will done annually. This is a demand the current healthcare system can’t keep up with. The result will be longer wait times, more complications, and a system stretched far beyond its limits. For decades, surgical innovation has …

In 2025, employers cited artificial intelligence as the rationale for nearly 55,000 layoffs at companies like Amazon and Microsoft. And with the new year barely underway, we’re already seeing a new crop of AI-related job cuts. Citigroup is cutting over a thousand jobs, according to Bloomberg, and in a memo this week, CEO Jane Fraser warned of more layoffs later this year. “Over time, we can expect automation, AI and further process simplification to reshape how work gets done,” she added. Meanwhile, Meta is conducting more layoffs in its virtual reality division, cutting about 1,500 jobs as part of a broader strategic shift to invest further in AI. Given these r…

Is it just me or is every app update lately promising to “reimagine my workflow” with a new generative assistant? My toaster probably has a chatbot now. We’ve reached a point where software is trying so hard to think for us that it’s actually making it harder to just do the work. In other words, when everything is “smart,” everything is noisy. If you’re feeling the same AI fatigue while trying to manage a career, a household, and a few side projects, here are three pure-utility apps that are actually free and refreshingly, wonderfully dumb. Joplin If you’ve been in the tech world for a while, you remember when Evernote was the king of the mountain, before i…

In theory, AI should have transformed manufacturing by now. From predictive maintenance and fatigue detection to real-time quality control, the promise has always been smarter, faster, and safer operations. But in practice, the factory floor is still a place where AI ambitions often run into real-world limitations. That’s a huge problem, especially because the size and weight of this industry are hard to ignore. U.S. manufacturing alone contributes $2.9 trillion to the economy, accounting for over 10% of total output and supporting nearly 13 million workers, according to the National Association of Manufacturers. Globally, manufacturing represents 16% of world GDP and a …

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. The AI ‘arms race’ may be more of an ‘arm-twist’ The big AI companies tell us that AI will soon remake every aspect of business in every industry. Many of us are left wondering when that will actually happen in the real world, when the so-called “AI takeoff” will arrive. But because there are so many variables, so many different kinds of organizations, jobs, and workers, there’s no satisfying answer. In the absence of hard evidence, we rely on anecdotes: success stories from founde…

The flap of a butterfly’s wings in South America can famously lead to a tornado in the Caribbean. The so-called butterfly effect—or “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” as it is more technically known—is of profound relevance for organizations seeking to deploy AI solutions. As systems become more and more interconnected by AI capabilities that sit across and reach into an increasing number of critical functions, the risk of cascade failures—localized glitches that ripple outward into organization-wide disruptions—grows substantially. It is natural to focus AI risk management efforts on individual systems where distinct risks are easy to identify. A senior execu…

The rise of artificial intelligence is transforming every industry, but it also creates enormous demand for digital infrastructure and natural resources. Data centers, the engines of this transformation, consume vast amounts of water and energy. A single hyperscale data center consumes up to 5 million gallons of potable water every day. In Phoenix, 58 centers together demand more than 170 million gallons daily, enough to ​​serve up to several hundred thousand households. This is the internet’s hidden water footprint, amplified by AI, cloud computing, and data-heavy services. Training a single large AI model in a Microsoft data center can require about 185,000 ga…

Artificial intelligence—surely the most hyped technological development to seize the spotlight in a generation—does not appear to be very popular with the American public. A clear majority recognize AI is a big deal, but recent Pew Research Center polling found more concern than excitement, particularly in its impact on creativity and relationships. Quinnipiac surveys find opinions souring even as usage rises. It’s associated with job losses, cheating, dubious advice, excessive energy consumption, and a variety of doomsday scenarios up to and including the eradication of humanity. In March, 57% of respondents to an NBC poll said the risks associated with the technolo…

If you’re in charge of an editorial team, you’re used to objections from the rank and file about using AI. “It gets things wrong.” “I don’t know what it’s doing with my data.” “Chatbots only say what you want to hear.” Those are all valid concerns, and I bring them up often in my introduction to AI classes. Each one opens a discussion about what you can do about them, and it turns out to be quite a bit. AI hallucinations require careful thought about where to apply fact-checking and “human in the loop.” Enterprise tools, APIs, and privacy settings can go a long way to protecting your data. And you can prompt the default sycophancy out of AI by telling it to give you c…

In 2026 (and beyond) the best benchmark for large language models won’t be MMLU or AgentBench or GAIA. It will be trust—something AI will have to rebuild before it can be broadly useful and valuable to both consumers and businesses. Researchers identify several different kinds of AI trust. In people who use chatbots as companions or confidants, they measure a feeling that the AI is benevolent or has integrity. In people who use AI for productivity or business, they measure something called “competence trust,” or the belief that the AI is accurate and doesn’t hallucinate facts. I’ll focus on that second kind. Competence trust can grow or shrink. An AI tool user, quite ra…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Have you ever wanted to break up with your doctor—not because of the practitioner, but because of the difficulty in engaging with their practice? You’re not alone. I’ve left doctors for that reason and McKinsey has found that nearly 25% of consumers have delayed care because they hate everything about the process. System complexity is not doctors’ fault, but making the care experience easier for pati…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. AI won’t replace doctors anytime soon. Despite the clickbait headlines and the reports of chatbots outperforming doctors on this-or-that clinical task, medicine will always depend—literally and figuratively—on human touch. What’s interesting, though, is how AI seems to be improving that human touch. Thanks to notetaking apps, doctors can stop typing and be more present in the precious minutes they…

A year before Elon Musk helped start OpenAI in San Francisco, philanthropist and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen already had established his own nonprofit artificial intelligence research laboratory in Seattle. Their mission was to advance AI for humanity’s benefit. More than a decade later, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or Ai2, isn’t nearly as well-known as the ChatGPT maker but is still pursuing the “high-impact” AI sought by Allen, who died in 2018. One of its latest AI models, Tulu 3 405B, rivals OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek on several benchmarks. But unlike OpenAI, it says it’s developing AI systems that are “truly open” for others to build upon. …

Air France on Tuesday unveiled a new first-class suite as it expands efforts to lure wealthy travelers from business jets and lend a ‘French touch’ to the tussle for premium revenue. The CEO of parent Air France-KLM, Ben Smith, told Reuters the unspecified investment aimed to place Air France at the top of the European league in airline luxury, signalling a battle with British Airways and Lufthansa. “A large percentage of the customers are flying for business reasons … Many of them have the choice of a private jet or flying in first class,” Smith said in an interview. “What is new for us over the last few years is a marked increase in the number of luxury cust…