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Universal Pictures’ two-part Wicked gamble continues to defy gravity at the box office. Just a year after part one brought droves of audiences to movie theaters around the country, even more people bought opening weekend tickets to see the epic conclusion, Wicked: For Good. According to studio estimates on Sunday, Wicked: For Good earned $150 million from North American theaters in its first days in theaters and $226 million globally. Not only is it the biggest opening ever for a Broadway musical adaptation, unseating the record set by the first film’s $112 million launch, it’s also the second biggest debut of the year behind A Minecraft Movie’s $162 million. “The…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, I’m focusing on gathering some informed opinions from people trying out Google’s new Gemini 3 Pro AI model. I also look at another “circular” AI investment agreement. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan. What smart people are saying about Google’s Gem…

For the 150th episode of my award-winning podcast series, FUTURE OF XYZ, I sat down with Nick Foster, former head of design at Google X and leading futures designer. We quickly found common ground in our strong belief that society doesn’t think about the future in the right way. ​​Too often, the future is reduced to flashy visions, both in media headlines and through messages from leading corporations. The future feels like a sci-fi movie that still seems far away. Nick and I both believe the future isn’t some distant fantasy, but rather a tomorrow already unfolding before us. To prepare, we must pay closer attention to what we know now and how people are acting today. Wh…

You wouldn’t pay a surgeon to file your tax return, and you wouldn’t ask your accountant to perform your appendectomy. The same is true for AI: Organizations should start realizing that different AI providers excel at different needs, from coding to specialized research or creative design. Over the coming year, enterprises will absorb a variety of these AI providers’ technologies in earnest and at scale—department by department, role by role. Legal teams will standardize on tools like Harvey. Customer service teams will rely on Glean or purpose-built agents. Development teams may choose resources from Anthropic. Marketing, engineering, finance, and HR will similarly g…

Love it or hate it, iOS 26 brought the most radical software redesign to the iPhone in over a decade. The company’s new design language, Liquid Glass, mimics how light in the real world warps and transforms when passing through physical glass. Many iPhone users find Liquid Glass refreshing, fun, and technically impressive. Detractors of the new design say Liquid Glass’s myriad transparent toolbars and other UI elements, which let the content behind them bleed through, make iOS 26 harder to navigate than its predecessors. Regardless of where you stand, Liquid Glass isn’t going away. Yet, if you fall into the latter camp and find the new design element distracting, …

The Bezos vs. Musk battle for satellite internet service is heating up In what’s rapidly becoming the new space race: Amazon will start testing its high-speed internet service that it’s building out to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink service. With a broader rollout planned for next year, Amazon announced on Monday some updates to its Leo network—including a new program that will see select businesses taking part in an “enterprise preview” of the forthcoming service. In turn, Amazon can collect feedback to tailor services for specific industries. “Amazon Leo represents a massive opportunity for businesses operating in challenging environments,” Chris Weber, vic…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Just 10 days ago, on February 10, Japan-based Sumitomo Forestry announced that it had agreed to acquire Tri Pointe Homes—a large U.S. homebuilder ranked No. 715 on the Fortune 1000—for $4.5 billion, signaling that Japanese builders were further accelerating their buying spree of U.S. homebuilders. Fast-forward to today, and Stanley Martin Homes—which has been owned by Japan-based Daiwa House since 2017—announced that it has agreed to buy United Homes Group, which has a strong presence in the Carolinas, for $221 million—further accelerating Japanese b…

For years, the customer experience playbook has been treated like a technology problem. Add another tool. Deploy another bot. Automate another workflow. And yet here we are, heading into 2026 with customer satisfaction in freefall. Forrester’s 2025 CX Index shows scores hitting a new low for the fourth consecutive year. This isn’t a failure of ambition or innovation. It’s a failure of how we define success. Leaders have been optimizing for activity instead of outcomes. In the rush to scale digital engagement, many organizations fell into a bit of a containment trap, measuring success by how many customer interactions never reach a human. On paper, it looks efficie…

Sports are entering a new era and it could be powered by artificial intelligence. Jeremy Bloom, CEO of the X Games, is placing a bold bet on AI to revolutionize how competitions are judged and scored. From reducing human error to enhancing fairness and accuracy, AI judges could redefine the future of professional sports. But can machines truly replace human judgment on the world’s biggest stages? View the full article

Seeing peers lose their jobs has a way of making people weird. It’s not much different from grief. When someone loses a loved one, you can almost feel the tension: people fumbling for the right words, hoping not to say something insensitive, then saying something insensitive anyway. “Everything happens for a reason.” “They’re in a better place.” That is, assuming any condolences are shared at all. Many of us have been there. You don’t want to overstep. Don’t want to make the person feel worse. I get it: Showing sympathy can feel like a minefield. The same thing happens when companies downsize their staff, only the loss isn’t life. It’s employment. When someone get…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk just admitted what we have been saying since he first made his grand promises about the company’s Cybercab robotaxi and Optimus humanoid robot: His target to mass-produce these products was unrealistic, and now they’re crumbling faster than a Cybertruck’s accelerator pedal. On January 20, Musk said on X that early production of both products will be “agonizingly slow”—a remarkable admission for a man who has spent the past year telling investors these moonshot projects would save his flailing car company. “For Cybercab and Optimus, almost everything is new, so the early production rate will be agonizingly slow, but eventually end up being insanely…

Leaving your corporate job for a solopreneur path is a bold move—and it can feel terrifying. But as long as you’re prepared, it can be a smart move, especially in the current rocky job market. I worked at one corporate job for 15 years. Then I pivoted to a new career in marketing. Eighteen months later, I was working for myself as a full-time freelance writer. Within two months of going solo, I had replaced my salary at a marketing agency, but I’d also taken a lot of baby steps in advance of making the switch. You can make the transition to solopreneurship easier if you build a safety net before you walk out the corporate door. Here’s how. Calculate how much…

U.K. banks and government tech systems going down. University students in Australia struggling to complete their coursework. Homes across Europe losing access to their Ring doorbells. While you were sleeping, large parts of the Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based internet went offline around the world. According to the AWS outage monitor, the problem stemmed from a misconfiguration of Domain Name System (DNS) resolution within the company’s cloud infrastructure. The problem was remedied within three hours of being encountered—by people unable to log onto Roblox or search the web with Perplexity. But the outage highlights just how much the web’s day-to-day function…

Take a moment to think about what the world must have looked like to J.P. Morgan a century ago, before his death in 1913. A shrewd investor in emerging technologies like railroads, automobiles, and electricity, he was also an early adopter, installing one of the first electric generators in his house. Today, we might call him a Techno-Optimist. He could scarcely imagine the dark days ahead: two world wars, the Great Depression, genocides, the rise of fascism and communism, and a decades-long Cold War. Had he lived to see it, he might have asked how, despite so many scientific and technological breakthroughs, things went so wrong. Today, we are at a similar junctur…

OpenAI has announced that starting in December, ChatGPT will allow the generation of erotic content for verified adult users. At the same time, Elon Musk’s xAI has launched Grok Imagine, an image-generation system that already includes an NSFW mode for producing explicit imagery. None of this should surprise anyone. Desire, fantasy, and pornography have always been powerful engines of technological adoption. Photography, video, the internet, and even online payments all grew, in part, because of it. The interesting question is not about sex: it’s about what these decisions reveal about the kind of humanity Big Tech companies are shaping. Desire as a managed serv…

Electric bills are climbing almost everywhere—and in some states, the increases have been staggering. If you live in the Bay Area, your average utility bill from PG&E went up nearly 70% over the last five years. Between 2024 and 2025, alone, bills grew by double digits everywhere from Utah to Massachusetts to Tennessee. The surge in AI data centers often gets the headlines as the main cause of the increase, but they’re just one of many factors. Here’s what’s driving soaring utility bills, and what could help fix it. It’s not necessarily data centers—yet In a Berkeley National Lab report published last year that looked at trends in electric rates from 2019 t…

Alaska Airlines said its operations have resumed Friday after it had to ground its planes for hours because of an information technology outage. The airline said in a statement that 229 flights were canceled because of the outage and that more flight disruptions were expected as it worked to “reposition aircraft and crews.” Alaska Airlines said it is working on getting travelers affected by the disruption to their destinations. It asked that passengers check their flight status before heading to the airport. The grounding Thursday affected Alaska Air and Horizon Air flights. Hawaiian Airlines, which was bought by Alaska Air Group last year, said its fl…

Apple said on Monday it is cutting jobs across its sales teams to strengthen its customer engagement efforts, noting that only a small number of roles will be impacted by the layoffs. An Apple spokesperson told Reuters that the company is continuing to hire and the affected employees can apply for new roles. The impacted employees include account managers serving major businesses, schools and government agencies, according to Bloomberg News, which had reported the news earlier in the day. Staff who operate Apple’s briefing centers for institutional meetings and product demonstrations for prospective customers were also affected, Bloomberg said. One of the …