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Executives like to say they are “integrating AI.” But most still treat artificial intelligence as a feature, not a foundation: they add a chatbot here, an automated report there, and call it transformation. That’s the same mistake companies made in the early days of the web: building websites as brochures instead of re-thinking their business models around digital interaction. AI is not a feature. It’s an architectural layer that will reshape every workflow, decision, and product. Those who treat it as decoration will fade, those who treat it as structure will lead. From automation to agency As product strategist Connor Davis noted, “every great company will …

Below, Nick Foster shares five key insights from his new book, Could Should Might Don’t: How We Think About the Future. Nick has spent the last 25 years working within companies at the very forefront of emerging technology, from Apple and Sony to Nokia and Dyson. Most recently, he was head of design at Google X. He has established himself as a leading figure in the field of Futures Design. In 2021, he was awarded the title Royal Designer for Industry, the highest accolade for a British designer. What’s the big idea? We need to have a conversation about the future, but not the kind you’d expect. Humans have already talked at length about what the future may or m…

Think about the last time you made a purchase using your phone. Maybe you were at a coffee shop and when your turn came, you opened your payment app, tapped your phone on the payment device, grabbed your cappuccino, and were done. Quick and easy. Maybe too quick and easy. Did the coffee shop miss a chance to engage with you? Did Mastercard miss an opportunity to show how their brand made this “priceless” moment possible? Did you miss an opportunity to teach your 8-year-old daughter a lesson on the value of money? As business leaders in an increasingly digital landscape, we’ve learned to treat “friction” as a dirty word. “Remove friction at all costs” is the ra…

Imagine this: You’re scrolling online late at night and with just a few clicks, you can order gummies that promise to boost your sex drive, a cream claiming to rebalance your hormones, or even prescription drugs from a telehealth site that spent millions on a Super Bowl ad without any disclaimers or mention of side effects. The solutions seem endless, and like most things that sound too good to be true, they often are. After 25 years in biotech and 10 years spent squarely at the nexus of science and women’s health, I’ve seen how hype can often race ahead of science. Evidence-based treatments for women remain chronically underfunded and underdeveloped. It’s no wonder t…

You may not realize you’re still clinging to the corporate world’s measures of success, but they can undermine your solo efforts. View the full article

Last week, subscribers of Microsoft’s Game Pass were in an uproar over plans to hike the price from $19.99 per month to $29.99. One of the most surprising reactions, however, came not from gamers, but from retail partner GameStop. While you’ll pay $30 per month if you sign up for Game Pass Ultimate directly with Microsoft, you’ll get the same old price — for some indefinite period — if you stick with GameStop. “Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is still $19.99 a month with us. You’re welcome,” the retailer wrote in a social media post. Gamers can subscribe to GamePass directly from their XBox, via their PC, and on the web. Those who plan to take advantage of the lower price …

A new music startup created an instrument that can turn your microwave, electric toothbrush, and baby monitor into hauntingly beautiful music. Its branding converts all of those fascinating outputs into an infinite series of Victorian-inspired patterns. Eternal Research is a brand founded by musician Alexandra Fierra, and it’s dedicated to “unlocking the existing music hidden in everyday things,” per its website. The company’s debut product is called the Demon Box. This fully analog device uses an intricate array of sensors to detect the electro-magnetic fields (EMFs) of almost any electronic device around it, and then turns those EMFs into music. The brand hit its fu…

Your pantry, your portfolio, even your flight plans all made headlines this week. The FDA turned everyone’s favorite spice into a hazard warning, while the world’s wealthiest got a new credit card that skips the whole Social Security number thing. Washington’s still stuck in neutral—though a few lucky borrowers are finally seeing their student loans disappear—and airports are feeling the fallout. Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s on a downward spiral, gold’s having a moment, and the housing market’s math still doesn’t add up no matter how many times you punch the calculator. Retailers, at least, seem to be thriving in chaos. Walmart doubled down on AI, cutting a deal with Open…

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba‘s cloud business unit has launched its second data center in Dubai, it said on Tuesday, nine years after its first, as it expands its global cloud computing services to meet growing demand. Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and artificial intelligence division, said in a statement the launch was part of the technology major’s pledge to invest 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) over three years. No financial details were disclosed in Tuesday’s statement. “The Middle East’s advantageous position in fast-tracking AI adoption and its collaborative ecosystem are crucial enablers for private and public sector companies to thrive,” said E…

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are famously close, with a friendship that spans five decades. The actors were first seen together in The Godfather Part II, but their friendship has propelled them to do several other films together, including Heat and The Irishman. Today, they appear in a different creative project: a campaign for the luxury outerwear label Moncler. The campaign is premised on expanding the definition of warmth. Moncler, which is known for creating warm jackets, also wants to be known for the warmth of feeling between friends and loved ones. In the imagery for the campaign, De Niro and Pacino are captured in black-and-white by Platon, the renowne…

If talent is the oxygen of a company, succession planning is the life-support system. Yet too many organizations treat it like an org chart exercise, waiting until someone resigns or retires before scrambling to find a replacement. When a leader walks out, the ripple effects are immediate: strategy stalls, teams lose momentum, and culture wobbles overnight. The bigger problem? Most companies aren’t ready when it happens. According to DDI’s 2025 HR Insights Report, only 20% of CHROs say they have leaders prepared to step into critical roles, and just 49% of those roles could be filled internally today. That means most organizations are closer to a leadership cr…

If you’ve ever been hit with a sketchy text warning you of an overdue toll road payment or mysterious U.S. Postal Service fees, you’ve likely been targeted by one of the largest cyber scams sweeping the globe. Now, Google is suing an international cybercrime group it believes is responsible for the ubiquitous text-based phishing scheme, which may have raked in as much as $1 billion over the last three years. In the lawsuit filed Wednesday, Google alleges that 25 people are part of a sprawling scam operation that is known as “Lighthouse” and was designed to swipe the logins and passwords of victims caught in its web. The Lighthouse scam hinges on tricking people w…

Six years ago, I wrote (with colleague Jennifer Riel) a Harvard Business Review article on functional strategy. But the questions about functional strategy keep coming unabated. It is a vexatious issue for CEOs, functional leaders, and boards of directors. So, I thought it would make sense to dedicate a Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) to Functional Strategy: The Three Key Functional Leader Tasks. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here. How Did We Get Here? In the business world today, there are great differences of opinion as to what functional strategy is or even whether functions should have strategies. A prevalent view holds that …

The difference between OpenAI and Anthropic has never been clearer. OpenAI is constantly in the news with a new consumer app or feature, and is being billed as the next great consumer tech platform. Most recently it made news by offering a social network around its Sora image generator, and even says it plans to allow NSFW content on ChatGPT. Anthropic, meanwhile, has chosen a different path. The company stresses that because it gets most of its revenues from businesses and developers, it’s not trying to capture the mass market, and it’s not terribly concerned about how long users spend on its platform every day. “We are interested in our consumer users to the degree…

Aaliyah Arnold, the 21-year-old founder of BossUp Cosmetics, goes live on TikTok a few times a week. Each livestream will last anywhere from 4 to 12 hours. Thousands tune in to watch her pack mystery boxes for customers, give away products, and teach makeup tutorials. “I mix in music, jokes, giveaways, and real product demos so people feel like they’re hanging out with me while shopping,” Arnold tells Fast Company. Livestreaming now makes up 60% of her company’s total sales. Her biggest livestream to date hit $170,000 in sales, with more than 1 million viewers tuning in. Arnold is one of many solopreneurs on platforms like TikTok leaning into “live selling” to ge…

You may have seen warnings that Google is telling all of its users to change their Gmail passwords due to a breach. That’s only partly true. Google is telling users to change their passwords, but not because of a breach that exposed them. In fact, Google’s real advice is to stop using your password altogether. Here’s what I mean. The breach traces back to Salesforce, whose systems were compromised by the hacker group known as ShinyHunters (also tracked as UNC6040). Attackers obtained business-related Gmail data, including contact lists, company associations, and email metadata. No actual Gmail account credentials were stolen, but the nature of the stolen data makes ph…

Porte Neue is the typeface of effortless sophistication, and that’s why the ‘Fast Company’ design team chose it for the latest issue View the full article

“How did you get to where you are in your career?” My interest in this question dates back 45 years to when I was an MBA student at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Whenever corporate executives were guest speakers at our classes, I would listen intently as they described what contributed to their career advancement. In the same vein, as I speak with leaders today, I always make a point of asking them what they consider to be the main drivers of their success. Over more than four decades, the two most common responses are: (1) “I worked hard” and (2) “I have several unique skill sets.” As I look back on my corporate career, including as chai…

E-commerce continues to eat up ever-increasing share of the U.S. retail market: Americans bought more than $3.3 billion of items online every day in the second quarter of last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Online retail’s share of spending is increasing with every year that passes. Traditionally, that’s meant typing a term or phrase into a search bar and clicking through to a shopping basket. But the AI revolution is poised to swamp online retail, too, with agentic AI set to shop on behalf of customers. The e-commerce sector is rapidly preparing for what’s about to come—an influx of non-human customers acting on behalf of humans. “We avoid hype aroun…

One of Paramount’s most powerful creative minds has left the production company: Taylor Sheridan, whose major hits like Yellowstone, Landman, and Lioness made him one of Paramount’s most powerful writers and producers, has ditched the media house. The move comes shortly after a new Chief Executive, David Ellison, came on board in August and a merger between the company and Skydance was approved. Sheridan will remain involved with his Paramount projects until his current deal ends in January. But while Sheridan helped prime Paramount for success, starting early next year, he will be making programs for NBCU’s streaming service, Peacock — a direct competitor. S…

Nick Foster is not a fan of how Silicon Valley imagines the future. As a designer and writer who has spent his career at places like Google, Nokia, and Sony, he’s had a front-row seat to the tech world’s relentless obsession with turning science fiction into science fact. The problem, he argues, is that the source material was never meant to be a manual for reality. “The primary function of science fiction is to explore ideas and to entertain. It shouldn’t be considered a brief,” Foster tells me. He worries when he hears people in meetings say, “We should make the thing from Minority Report.” To him, it’s a lazy shortcut—an idea taken from a cinematic universe built f…

If you have ever welcomed a new baby into the world, you know the mix of hope and uncertainty that comes with those first days. For decades, newborn screening has been a quiet triumph of public health, catching rare but serious conditions before symptoms appear and giving families a head start on care. Now, genomic newborn screening, which includes whole genome sequencing, is poised to take this life-saving work further by screening for hundreds of genetic conditions at birth and changing the standard of care. FROM RESEARCH TO REAL-WORLD IMPACT The GUARDIAN study is pioneering genomic newborn screening in New York City. As the largest genomic newborn screening prog…

There’s a line I heard recently from Mel Robbins that’s been echoing in my head ever since: “People do well if they can.” It’s deceptively simple. The kind of phrase you nod at, maybe even repost. But when you sit with it, really sit with it, it starts to challenge a lot of the assumptions made every day. Especially when it comes to financial health and literacy. NOT LAZY, JUST LIMITED OPTIONS Let’s be honest: It’s easy to judge what we don’t understand. It’s easy to look at people struggling with money and tell ourselves stories. They’re reckless. They don’t care. They should know better. But here’s the thing: Most people actually do care. They want to pay off…

Bill Gates has invested billions over the last two decades to help fight climate change. But in a new blog post, he argues that world is too focused on cutting short-term emissions. “The doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals,” he writes, calling for a “strategic pivot” to focus on “improving lives” by focusing development dollars more on agriculture and disease and poverty eradication. The logic is flawed, and built on a series of false trade-offs that ignore how interconnected climate and development goals are. Gates criticizes the “doomsday” view that climate change will “decimate civilization” i…

With birth rates down around the world, Procter & Gamble is leaning into premium diapers to bolster sales figures. Specifically, the conglomerate is planning to sell diapers made with silk fibers in China, the company’s second-largest market, in hopes of attracting new parents. The news came out of Procter & Gamble’s earnings conference call on Thursday, during which president and CEO Shailesh Jejurikar discussed the logic behind leaning into the premium diaper category with “Pampers Prestige.” “The China team created a product,” he said, “that leveraged Chinese history with silk. The shiny, soft-yet-strong, luxurious material has been a status symbol for …