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Nearly 30 million Americans annually are impacted by water scarcity and don’t have reliable access to clean water. The water crisis stems from a wide range of issues, ranging from extreme weather events like hurricanes and flooding to depleted aquifers and overuse of wells. Our aging water infrastructure alone leaks 6 billion gallons per day, while pipe failures lead to nearly 10,000 “boil water” notices every year. Water is an essential and increasingly limited resource. It shapes where we live (or don’t). Vast lands across America remain undeveloped due to a lack of natural water resources, exacerbating the housing crisis. Water increasingly restrains and defines h…

For two decades, Wayfair has thrived by offering customers an abundance of trendy, inexpensive furniture—around 30 million options, specifically. But as an e-commerce company, Wayfair’s employees didn’t actually touch or feel any of the pieces on the site. “Our goal was to find suppliers of furniture and make them easily available online to our customers,” Michael McCorry, director of curation strategy and operations, tells me. “We only learned about the products later, through customer reviews and feedback. If a product got bad reviews, it would sink lower in the rankings.” For the customer, shopping at Wayfair presented something of a risk. With such an enormous…

Waymo and Waze are teaming up to prevent people from driving into potholes. On Thursday, the companies announced a joint pilot program that will take pothole data collected by Waymo’s robotaxis and display it on Waze for Cities. The robotaxis already have cameras, radar, and other sensors that can be used, among other things, to note potholes. Waze and Waymo are both owned by Google parent Alphabet. The tool is an additional means of spotting potholes on Waze. Users have long been able to report any potholes they see through the Waze app. “This pilot program with Waymo adds another source of data to that effort, giving cities a clearer picture of road co…

Before Waymo was Waymo, it was Google’s self-driving car project. Starting in 2009, the effort spent many years in test mode—with humans in the driver’s seats ready to take over, just in case—that its vision of vehicular autonomy often felt far from practical reality. Since last year, however, Alphabet’s robotaxi service has begun to scale up quickly. It’s now fully open to the public in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area. And today the company is announcing that it’s testing fully autonomous trips, sans human driver, in Miami, and plans to do so in Orlando, Florida; Dallas; Houston; and San Antonio in the coming weeks. For now, …

Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle company, plans to expand its ride-hailing service, Waymo One, to Washington, D.C. in 2026, the company announced Tuesday. While the nation’s capital currently prohibits fully autonomous operations, a Waymo spokesperson said the company will work closely with local policymakers over the coming year to help formalize necessary regulations. This marks the first time Waymo is bringing its commercial ride-hailing service to a city that experiences regular snowfall. Waymo vehicles don’t yet operate in winter weather, though the company has conducted cold-weather testing in upstate New York, Michigan, and parts of California. As a res…

From AI tools to self-driving cars, new technologies regularly tout themselves as being autonomous. Yet, their companies often have to recruit us humans for help in unexpected ways. The most recent example comes courtesy of Waymo’s self-driving cars. The Alphabet-owned company has been hiring DoorDash drivers to close vehicle doors after a passenger leaves them open, CNBC reports. Yes, Waymo’s whole thing is driverless cars, but it needs another type of driver to show up and fix the simplest things. The arguably embarrassing predicament came to light when an Atlanta-based DoorDash driver shared Waymo’s request on Reddit. It reportedly offered the gig worker $…

Robotaxi pioneer Waymo plans to expand to London next year, marking the company’s latest step in rolling out its driverless ride service internationally. Waymo said Wednesday that it will start testing its self-driving cars on London streets in the coming weeks—with a human “safety driver” behind the wheel—as it seeks to win government approval for its services. In a blog post, Waymo said it will “lay the groundwork” for its London service in the coming months. The company said it will “continue to engage with local and national leaders to secure the necessary permissions for our commercial ride-hailing service.” Waymo’s self-driving taxis have been operating …

Every organization that produced an Epstein-related villain once called him a leader. Peter Attia. Larry Summers. The head of the World Economic Forum. HR statements issued. Leadership transitions announced. The story told as if it’s over. It isn’t. Not for the women inside those organizations, who are right now having a single quiet thought: Ah. That explains everything I’ve experienced. The subtle dismissals. The closed doors. The invitations that never came. The jokes that weren’t funny but nobody challenged them. The way one man’s voice filled the room and everyone else just . . . made room. And not for the rest of us—because the real scandal isn’t…

How are the world’s most creative people using AI to drive their work forward? This was the question at the heart of an in-depth survey Fast Company recently conducted in partnership with Whalar, a leading social agency focused on content creators. We found that, for most, AI has become a routine part of the creative process—and a return to an AI-free working life has become almost unfathomable. Yet the survey also found the world’s creative elite are grappling with a technology that gets more powerful and useful every day but remains unwieldy, error-prone, and not entirely trustworthy. “I want people to understand how well it can augment and enhance the thinking…

There we were: two experienced professionals, each standing on the iconic red dot of our own TEDx stages, ready to deliver what we hoped would be the most impactful talks of our careers. For Jamie, her meticulously rehearsed opening line—the one she practiced 327 times in the shower, in the mirror, and in front of a very patient partner—evaporated the moment the spotlight hit. Hundreds of expectant eyes waited as the silence stretched . . . and stretched. “Oh @*#%,” she whispered—into the mic. What was meant to be a private moment of panic turned into a public announcement. But instead of recoiling, the audience leaned in. Scott was one minute and fifty secon…

First you choose a partner, then you choose a genome? For this episode of FC Explains, Fast Company Senior Writer Ainsley Harris digs into the rapidly growing world of embryo genetic screening, including IVF startups like Orchid and Nucleus that offer parents the ability to select embryos based on genome sequencing. Proponents say this kind of genetic testing helps optimize health outcomes and prevent hereditary disease. Parents say it’s giving their kids the best shot at life. On this episode of FC Explains we dig into why some scientists have called polygenic embryo screening “modern snake oil,” and why others are calling for an urgent, society-wide conversation abo…

One cold Friday night a few years ago, I collapsed to the ground in the arrivals hall of a small French airport. I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. It took physical collapse for me to acknowledge that I was burned out and that my work life was unsustainable. In the time since my own burnout, the term has become ubiquitous. And given the abundance of research on the topic, I’m not going to deny its dangers. Burnout is real, serious, and measurable. However, I don’t believe that we’re living in a burnout epidemic. What we are living through is an epidemic of the use of the term burnout. And that overuse is blunting the urgency of a massive global issue. What burno…

Every four years, the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) provides a snapshot of how students across the country are performing in math and English. It doesn’t tell us about individual students; instead, it gives us information about how well our public schools are preparing students. The 2024 results showed that 28% of 8th graders were proficient in mathematics (on grade level), and 30% were proficient in reading. In both, the average scores and proficiency rates are still below 2019 rates. One explanation for this dismal reality? Public schools simply aren’t capable of delivering results for students. But look closely at historical trends in NAEP R…

The American economy runs on what are known as heuristics, a diverse array of mental short-cuts that help consumers make a dizzying number of choices to navigate the wild complexity of everyday life. These shortcuts help us select the restaurants we may choose to patronize, the cars we drive, the food we purchase, and the schools we attend and to which we send our children. We rely on scoring systems, certifications, and ranking methodologies to consider what movies to see, what music to listen to, and whether to purchase fair-trade products. These shortcuts come in many forms, from the complex (like the tools used to rate bonds and other financial products) to the straig…

The American economy runs on what are known as heuristics, a diverse array of mental short-cuts that help consumers make a dizzying number of choices to navigate the wild complexity of everyday life. These shortcuts help us select the restaurants we may choose to patronize, the cars we drive, the food we purchase, and the schools we attend and to which we send our children. We rely on scoring systems, certifications, and ranking methodologies to consider what movies to see, what music to listen to, and whether to purchase fair-trade products. These shortcuts come in many forms, from the complex (like the tools used to rate bonds and other financial products) to the straig…

In September 2023, we thought we had done something revolutionary. Helios AI became the first company in our industry to launch a generative AI agent. We called her Cersi. She was designed to help food companies understand the climate risks threatening their agricultural supply chains. She was powerful, intuitive, years ahead of the curve—and almost completely ignored. At the time, ChatGPT had just exploded onto the scene, and the hype around AI was deafening. Headlines promised that AI would transform every corner of business. Venture capital poured into the sector. But hype doesn’t always translate into real-world use—especially in industries that aren’t built to ad…

On average, 11 car crashes occur every minute in the U.S. By the time you finish reading this sentence, several vehicle collisions will have happened across the country, some of which were likely fatal. In the world of aviation, the number of crashes involving a U.S. civilian aircraft is about 1,200 per year, and very few of those result in fatalities. Despite the 5,500 American planes that are in the air at any given moment during peak times, collisions are rare, because airspace is designed for safety. Planes are required to communicate with one another and with ground control. No one gets to “opt out.” Our roads are another story. More than 280 million reg…

“We are cooked.” That’s the sentence I see with every AI-generated Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube short made with Seedance 2.0. And yes, we are. The walls of reality have finally vanished, sucked in by a black hole of Nvidia chips. So I’m going to Nancy Reagan the hell out of everyone and demand a global public service announcement like that old “Just Say No” to drugs campaign, which was everywhere when I was growing up. We need Mr. T back to make young and old fools listen up, because the companies printing money with their generative video tech are doing zilch to fix the planetary problem they have created. The message? Everyone should stop believing everyt…

The conversation is changing. For the first time ever, the person or thing on the other side of an interaction isn’t always human. Every time I talk with other executives, the “agentic future” comes up. It’s a compelling idea: agents replacing old systems to actually solve problems for us without oversight. With more than a billion AI agents poised to handle everything from customer complaints to complex trades by 2029, the hurdle isn’t the tech itself. It’s whether we can actually trust it. The reality is that most businesses are stuck in the pilot stage. Not for failure of imagination, but because we don’t have the right tools to move from a cool demo to a smart sys…

Public trust in the media and in data has been undercut by information overload, relentless social media cycles, and targeted influence campaigns. Whether driven by politics, social movements, or commercial interests, the credibility of what we see and hear is under threat. By thinking through the ways that we’ve lost our trust, we might find more ways to reverse the trend and bring people back together. Last month, Gallup released the latest results of a survey on trust in the media that began in 1972. It showed that current confidence in the mass media is at a new historic low. A majority trusting public in 1972 has now flipped to being a majority distrustful public…

As a physician at Duke, I often saw how women, especially those juggling chronic illness, caregiving, and limited healthcare access, faced delays in getting the right care. What stood out wasn’t just the complexity of their conditions, but how predictable the barriers were. Women face unique challenges in getting timely access to the care they need. Many care options are simply inconvenient and often do not meet patients where they are. For example, forcing a busy working mom to take the day off work, driving 30 minutes for a routine screening can be a challenge if having to juggle a 9-5 and childcare too. Many women are caregivers for aging parents or children, compo…