Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

​​​​​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 …

This morning, shares of two of the largest computer memory companies that trade on U.S. markets are up yet again. The stock prices of Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) and Sandisk Corporation (Nasdaq: SNDK) rose after a Japanese memory firm issued a surprising outlook. Here’s what you need to know. Stock prices jump as demand continues Shares in several memory chip makers traded on U.S. markets are currently up in premarket trading this morning. The companies include Micron and Sandisk, as well as Western Digital Corporation (Nasdaq: WDC) and Seagate Technology Holdings (Nasdaq: STX). As of this writing, Micron shares are currently up 2.9%, Sandisk…

I saw my first holiday-themed ad on TV before Halloween. I was startled, yet not surprised. Kind of a funny feeling, really. Yes, the annual holiday shopping sprint is upon us. For years, the process has been defined by frantic comparison searches and endless product review scrolling. But this year, you can finally delegate the busywork to an army of digital assistants. AI is no longer just a party trick: it’s a legitimate, price-savvy, personal shopping engine. Want to skip the agonizing research and focus on finding that perfect gift without blowing your budget? Here are four essential AI tools you should be using right now. Gift Idea Generator You ne…

For most of modern finance, one number has quietly dictated who gets ahead and who gets left out: the credit score. It was a breakthrough when it arrived in the 1950s, becoming an elegant shortcut for a complex decision. But shortcuts age. And in a world driven by data, digital behavior, and real-time signals, the score is increasingly misaligned with how people actually live and manage money. We’re now at a turning point. A foundational system, long considered untouchable, is finally being reconstructed by using AI—specifically, advanced machine learning models built for risk prediction—to extract more intelligence from existing data. These are rigorously tested, wel…

Advertising in generative AI systems has become a fault line. Last month, OpenAI released that it would start running ads in ChatGPT. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, OpenAI’s chief financial officer defended the introduction of ads inside ChatGPT, arguing that it is a way to “democratize access to artificial intelligence,” and that this decision is aligned with its mission: “AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for the benefit of humanity who can pay.” Within days, Anthropic fired back in a Super Bowl commercial, ridiculing the idea that ads belong inside systems people trust for advice, therapy, and decision-making. In some way, this is a spat about ho…

Rare cosmic events can feel like being smiled down upon from up above. However, on the morning of April 25, an actual smiley face will appear in the sky—kind of. Venus, Saturn, and the moon will align in a pattern called a triple conjunction. Given the moon will be in its crescent form, the lineup will resemble a smiley face, but only for a short time on Friday morning. “Venus is higher above the eastern horizon with Saturn lower, and a thin, crescent moon a bit lower and a little farther north,” Brenda Culbertson, NASA solar system ambassador, told Kansas TV station KSNT. “The thin, crescent moon looks like a smile. To some people, the triangle of bright objects …

Artificial intelligence has shifted from an experiment to an expectation. Boards push CEOs about ROI. CEOs launch enterprise rollouts. Leaders invest in tools, platforms, and governance. Yet adoption still stalls. Work-arounds spread. Risk grows. Value lags. The failure rarely sits with the technology. The breakdown sits in adoption design. Many organizations treat AI as an IT rollout or a standard change initiative. Tools gain approval. Policies circulate. Training launches. What’s missing is the rigor leaders apply to external products. Employees receive tools without a clear value proposition. Managers face delivery pressure without added capacity. Governance favor…

HBO Max’s Heated Rivalry, a gay hockey romance TV series based on the Game Changers book series by Rachel Reid, is the breakout hit no one saw coming. With almost no promotion, it quickly became one of the most talked-about streaming TV shows in the U.S. after HBO Max purchased the rights from Canada’s Crave network this November, turning its two co-stars, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, into overnight celebrities. What’s unique about Heated Rivalry is just how fast its popularity has spread, and how devoted its massive fan base is. From the week it debuted, to its season finale six episodes later, its viewership grew from 30 million to 324 million streaming minut…

Judge a book by its cover, and you might think that American Canto, the memoir by Vanity Fair‘s outgoing West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi, is destined to be a classic. The memoir, which chronicles Nuzzi’s drama-filled life and career as a political reporter in the The President era, features a strikingly simple cover that serves as shorthand for the book’s ambitions. “The intent was to give the book a clean, no-frills design that felt both classic and contemporary,” says Simon & Schuster senior art director Alison Forner, who’s also designed book covers like Ezra Klein’s all-type cover Why We’re Polarized and Garrett M. Graff’s Watergate: A New History. Nuzz…

Telehealth company Hims & Hers dropped its plan to offer a knockoff version of the weight-loss pill Wegovy on Saturday — two days after it announced the new drug and one day after the Food and Drug Administration threatened to restrict access to the ingredients needed to copy popular weight-loss medications. Hims had said Thursday that it would offer a compounded version of the new Wegovy pill that drugmaker Novo Nordisk just began selling last month. Novo immediately threatened to sue Hims, and then the FDA said Friday that it plans to take decisive steps to limit access to the active ingredients in popular GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy, Ozempic and Zepbound. Hims’ own w…

AI tools are everywhere, changing the way we work, communicate, and even create. But which tools are actually useful? And how can users integrate them in a way that’s both practical and ethical? In a recent conversation for FC Live, Fast Company tech editor Max Ufberg and longtime contributor Jared Newman explored the real-world impact of today’s AI tools—how they work, what they’re good for, and where they still fall short. From writing assistants to productivity hacks, they broke down what’s worth your time—and what’s just hype. If you missed the subscriber-only event, you’re in luck. You can catch the whole conversation in the video above. View the full articl…

OpenAI is working on its own X-like social media network, the Verge reported on Tuesday, citing multiple sources familiar with the matter. The project is still in early stages and there is an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that contains a social feed, the report said. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback about the project, the Verge said, adding that it was unclear whether the company plans to release the social network as a stand-alone application or integrate it into ChatGPT. —Deborah Sophia, Reuters View the full article

There are few things everyone can rally behind as much as finding a lost dog. But what if that mission is actually a workaround for mass surveillance? That’s the question many people are asking following a Super Bowl commercial from Ring, Amazon’s doorbell camera and home security brand. The 30-second video shows a series of missing dog posters and claims that 10 million pets go missing every year. It pitches Ring’s Search Party feature as the solution. Launched in November, Search Party takes a photo of the pet and taps into Ring cameras across the area. They can then use AI to identify the missing pet and send an alert. The ad claims that at least one dog …

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Baiju Shah is constantly bridging different worlds. His formative years were shaped by observing his mother, who trained as a commercial artist, and his father, who was an engineer. As global CEO of agency AKQA, he leads an organization that deploys creativity and technology on behalf of cl…

Although the definition is a little loose, “middle age” is the name we give to the period of life before we decide someone is officially old. When someone in the United States has reached the age of 40, they can expect to live for more than 40 additional years, on average. Given this lifespan, as well as changes in beliefs about age and fitness, people don’t really start getting “old” until their mid-60s. So, middle age involves the period between 45 and 60 to 65. There are several excellent reasons to want to reconsider goals for your life somewhere in this period of life. In fact, it can be a great time to reset and think about what else you’d like to accomplish. …

Have you seen larger-than-life depictions of your friends lately? They might have been sucked into the latest social trend: creating AI-generated caricatures. The trend itself is simple. Users input a common prompt: “Create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me,” and upload a photo of themself, and, voila! ChatGPT (or any AI-image platform) spits out an over-the-top, cartoon-style image of you, your job, and anything else it’s learned about you. This ability is predicated on a robust ChatGPT (or other AI) chat history. Those who don’t have a close, personal relationship with the AI might need to give additional information to get a mo…

Daters: It might be time to spring clean your dating app profile. More than 50% of young Americans have gone on a date with someone who looked different from their profile photos, according to a new survey from dating app Hily. That’s led 54% of Gen Z and 62% of millennial daters to either end a date early or decline a second one, Hily found after surveying 3,700 dating app users earlier this month. “For a variety of reasons, quite a few people don’t regularly update their profile pics, some not even when their looks change,” the company wrote in an accompanying blog post. “Women tend to be afraid of being judged for their appearance, while men feel like the …