What's on Your Mind?

Not long ago, I was speaking at an event when a recent college graduate approached me. He’d studied neuroscience and, like a lot of STEM generalists, had set his sights on consulting—firms, like Deloitte or Accenture, that have long hired armies of junior associates for data gathering and analysis. He’d earned top grades at a great school. But all of his outreach—his informational interviews, his applications and follow-ups—had come to nothing. His story is not unusual. If entry-level consulting or finance jobs have always been difficult to land, they’re even harder to get now. This generation grew up believing that developing key skills such as coding and data analys…

GameStop Corporation has proposed to buy the online auction giant eBay Inc. for $125 per share, or a total of roughly $56 billion. “The offer represents a 46% premium to eBay’s unaffected closing price on February 4, 2026, the day GameStop started accumulating its position in eBay,” reads a press release from the video game retailer. “GameStop has built a 5% economic stake in eBay through derivatives and beneficial ownership of common stock.” Here’s what you need to know about the unusual move: What did GameStop propose? The deal, as proposed, would comprise 50% cash and 50% GameStop stock. Ryan Cohen, who took over as GameStop’s CEO in 2021, would remain …

From beyond the museum walls Monday, works of art will move and take shape as the glitterati of guests from Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman to Venus Williams will fashionably ascend the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s steps and exhibit their creative interpretations of this year’s dress code, “Fashion is art.” The question of whether fashion is art has long been topic of conversation for fashion insiders, and this first Monday in May the dress code is leaving nothing up for debate. The dress code for the starry fundraising event calls for guests to “express their relationship to fashion as an embodied art form.” Fashion has long drawn inspiration from works of art, leaving guests …

A landmark federal court decision has opened the doors to COVID-era tax refunds for millions of U.S. taxpayers. In Kwong v. United States, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims determined that the COVID-19 pandemic effectively paused federal tax deadlines from January 2020 through July 2023, giving taxpayers more time to file and pay their taxes than the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had previously recognized. The court ruled that the disaster-relief provision in Internal Revenue Code Section 7508A requires the IRS to pause all penalties and interest throughout the entire disaster period, plus an additional 60 days. That means that while the COVID-19 federal dis…

Forget AI replacing human artists—The Devil Wears Prada 2 just proved that human artists can replace AI. The new movie, a long-awaited sequel to 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, sees the return of star Meryl Streep as iconic fashion editor Miranda Priestly. It begins with Priestly in a PR crisis, sparking a slew of online hate. That includes memes like an image of Priestly dressed as a fast food worker captioned, “Would you like lies with that?” The image is only briefly on screen, and at first glance, many moviegoers assumed it was AI-generated. After all, on the internet of 2026, it most likely would be—an internet troll likely isn’t going out of their way to craft…

Google Fi has been around for north of a decade now and it still feels like the weird, smart kid in the back of the wireless-carrier room. It’s not quite a major carrier, but it’s much more than just a budget MVNO. And it’s one of the only tech services I’ve been using for years and years that hasn’t changed all that much or arbitrarily and routinely jacked up its prices. My bill has looked the same for a long, long time. So if you’re tired of the Big Three and you’re thinking about jumping ship, here’s the reality of life on Google’s network. Seamless international travel If you’ve ever landed in a foreign country only to be greeted by a $10-a-day “travel …

In April 2026, cloud-hosting platform Vercel disclosed that hackers had breached its internal systems and stolen customer data. The breach occurred because a Vercel employee had signed up for a third-party AI productivity tool using their corporate Google account and granted it full-access permissions. When that AI tool’s own systems were compromised, the attackers used the trust relationship as a bridge straight into Vercel’s internal environment. The stolen database was listed for sale on a hacker forum for $2 million. Note that the breach did not directly attack a software vulnerability. Rather, it exploited an architectural gap. The technology worked as designed, …

Artificial intelligence is helping knowledge workers do things that weren’t previously possible, according to a new report from Microsoft. In the company’s 2026 Work Trend Index report, which includes results from a survey of 20,000 knowledge workers who use AI at work, 66% of the AI users surveyed say that AI allows them to spend more time on high-value work, and 58% reveal that they’re producing work they couldn’t have produced just one year ago. That number rises to 80% among a category of AI power users Microsoft dubs “frontier professionals.” “Instead of just automating away what people used to do, and that’s an efficiency gain, what we’re seeing is much more…

The robotics pioneer who helped unleash the Roomba vacuum is now betting that you might one day replace your beloved dog or cat with a plush robot that follows you around your home and adapts to your daily habits. Colin Angle unveiled a four-legged prototype of that artificial pet, called the Familiar, on Monday. Imagine a creature the size of a bulldog with doe-like eyes and bear cub ears and paws, extending itself into a greeting stretch that invites you to pat its touch-sensitive fake fur. “We chose a form factor that’s not a human, not a dog, not a cat, because we wanted to steer away from all of those preconceptions,” said Angle, who leads the startup Familiar Mach…

Whataburger is rethinking the fast-food kids meal. The Texas-based burger chain just relaunched its Kids Whatameal with a new focus on an engaging packaging experience over a singular plastic toy. In a sense, the packaging is now the toy: The meals come in a bright, white-and-orange box with a handle on top, an interactive maze printed on the side, and one of five collectible sticker packs inside. “We wanted to build something that was a bit more intentional and experience-led,” Scott Hudler, Whataburger’s chief marketing officer, tells Fast Company. But the experiential strategy is first visible in the food options themselves—essentially by providing kids wit…

Have you ever watched a physician try to maintain eye contact while also tracking the clock, the screen, and an overflowing inbox? That tension has become a defining feature of modern healthcare. The exam room—once a place for focused conversation—is now one of the most attention-fractured professional environments. At the same time, we’re living through an unprecedented surge of excitement about artificial intelligence in healthcare. New capabilities arrive almost weekly, promising speed and scale. But amid the hype, we are still tackling the wrong problem. Healthcare’s central challenge is not a lack of AI capabilities. It is a lack of attention. When I spend ti…

As a CEO operating within the global supply chain—where every purchase is tied to efforts to end forced and child labor—I think often about what work is for: not just making it faster, but making it matter. That’s what makes the latest Gallup findings on AI so striking. The headline insight isn’t productivity. It’s something more revealing: We’re becoming more efficient, but not more engaged. Employees say AI is making them more productive, yet global employee engagement has declined for two consecutive years, now sitting at just 20%. We’re optimizing how work gets done, but for many people, we’re eroding the experience of doing it. That gap is a failure of intent…

Weight loss culture in America is nothing new: Our collective obsession with being thin is more than a societal ideal—it’s practically a religion. But in a country where self-improvement through hard work is lauded, the quick-fix GLP-1 weight loss revolution—without the “no-pain, no-gain” labor—might just rub people the wrong way. That’s the suggestion of a new Rice University study published last month in the International Journal of Obesity. According to the study, despite the popularity of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound and their impressive effectiveness, and despite that many people praise the dramatic results, your friends and neighbors may still …

One of the most daunting tasks when you start a new job is developing trust with your new colleagues. Whether you’re new to the world of work or an experienced hand, you are still starting at ground-zero with your new colleagues when you walk in the door. While you’re likely to get the benefit of the doubt, you still need to develop a rapport quickly and help people to see that you can be relied on. Here are four suggestions to get you started. 1. Find a couple of quick wins You want your new colleagues to see that you can be successful at your work. Unfortunately, many projects can take a while to complete and determining whether those projects are successful …

Judgment is scarce in the age of agentic AI. Access is not scarce, and nearly every enterprise can now reach the same frontier models. Yes, automation is the starting line, but reimagining end-to-end processes and having context–rich process intelligence are how you get ROI from artificial intelligence. And that is incredibly hard to build overnight. That is where competitive advantage now lives, in the ability to apply AI with discipline, context, and consequence, with accountability for outcomes. Agentic AI is redrawing the competitive landscape quickly. The winners will go deep instead of wide, deliberately owning the last stretch of the process where context, …

Every day, I see another LinkedIn post celebrating a company that’s AI-powered. Meaning, they have added AI systems to their workflow, built co-work agents, and are using the technology to assist their team. And every day, I find myself thinking that they’ve missed the point entirely. The problem isn’t that these companies are using AI. It’s that they’re applying 2026 innovation to a 2016 mindset. They’re slapping a Band-Aid on an old wound instead of asking where the wound came from and if it will happen again (or worse). THE AI ASSIST Consider social media management. The traditional AI-powered approach gives teams an AI assistant to help write posts fas…

At the Exceptional Women Alliance, we help senior women leaders mentor one another through shared insight. As founder, chair, and CEO, I speak with executives shaping how organizations evolve and perform. This month, I spoke with Jennifer Renaud, CEO of Kradle LLC and a board director with more than 30 years experience in digital innovation, commercial strategy, and customer-centered growth. She has guided companies through operating model transformation and post-integration growth. As artificial intelligence becomes embedded across organizations, Renaud believes companies must rethink how decisions are made. Traditional hierarchies, designed for stability and con…

Artificial intelligence is constantly in the news, and it’s one of the most talked about topics among our Fast Company Impact Council members. Its use and acceptance levels are changing daily, with company direction on how to approach it changing alongside that. Boards, leadership, teams, and customers are also reassessing AI usage in the workplace and in the work product. We asked our Impact Council members what kinds of attitude changes toward AI they are seeing in their ecosystem. This question drew an onslaught of replies—clearly a topic everyone has thoughts about. We are sharing 26 of their responses, ranging from the theoretical to unusual use cases. 1. MOVE AW…

As concerns mount over artificial intelligence and its rapid integration into society, tech companies are increasingly turning to faith leaders for guidance on how to shape the technology — a surprising about-face on Silicon Valley’s longstanding skepticism of organized religion. Leaders from various religious groups met last week with representatives from companies including Anthropic and OpenAI for the inaugural “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable in New York to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into the fast-developing technology. It was organized by the Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities, which seeks to take on issues such as extremism, ra…

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is just one month away. That event will see Apple launch the next iterations of the software that powers its various devices, including iOS 27 for the iPhone. But Apple will also be rolling out a new version of iOS before then, and it will feature an enhancement that will benefit Android users as much as Apple’s own. Here’s what you need to know. iOS 26.5 brings encrypted RCS messaging to iPhone Apple’s iMessage protocol has long had end-to-end encryption for texts sent between Apple devices. But for texts sent between Android phones and iPhones, encryption has always been absent. And that wasn’t the fault of …

If you find yourself having to fly the allegedly friendly skies anytime soon, my goodness—good luck. Even in the best of times, heading to an airport can be an unpredictable headache. Now, in the midst of our current U.S. TSA meltdown, security wait times are climbing to crazy new highs. And the effects of that can often ripple far, even if you’re lucky enough to begin your journey in an airport (within the U.S. or without) that’s reasonably all right. Today, for an especially timely Cool Tools suggestion, I want to share a trio of resources with you that’ll help you see exactly what to expect before you head to the airport—and thus be able to plan and be prepared…

Below, Alex Mayyasi shares five key insights from his new book, Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life. Mayyasi is a journalist who writes about business, economics, and food. He hosts the new podcast Gastronomics and is a longtime contributor to NPR’s Planet Money. A former editor of Priceonomics, he launched Gastro Obscura, which won two James Beard Awards, and published the New York Times best-selling book Gastro Obscura. What’s the big idea? The economy isn’t static or centrally controlled. It’s an evolving system where information, technology, and human behavior interact to continuously reorganize opportunity. Listen to the a…

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: A big-budget blockbuster World Cup ad from a footwear giant features a laundry list of star players, celebrities, and a storyline that revolves around a big game in an unexpected place or with unexpected characters. This could describe Nike’s classic 2002 “Cage” ad, Adidas’s 2006 “José” ad, Nike’s 2014 “Winner Stays” spot . . . You get the idea. But it’s also a broad summary of Adidas’s newest World Cup commercial, “Backyard Legends,” which launched on May 7 via star Timothée Chalamet’s Instagram. The five-minute advertising epic opens with Oscar-nominated actor Chalamet trying to put together the greatest street socc…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Zillow economists use an economic model known as the Zillow Market Heat Index to gauge the competitiveness of housing markets across the country. This model looks at key indicators—including home price changes, inventory levels, and days on the market—to generate a score showing whether a market favors sellers or buyers. Higher scores point to hotter, seller-friendly metro housing markets. Lower scores signal cooler markets where buyers hold more negotiating power. According to Zillow: Score of 70 or higher = strong seller’s market …

Judging by a slew of recent corporate announcements, your next “co-worker” might be an artificial intelligence agent—doing the work of an assistant, job scheduler, morning debriefer, learning coach and more. JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank, describes a clear vision for a new world of omnipresent AI agents: “Every employee will have their own personalized AI assistant; every process is powered by AI agents, and every client experience has an AI concierge.” In brick-and-mortar retail, Walmart is already implementing its vision around agents, which involves support of customers, in-store employees and other business areas, with supervisor agents assigning tasks…