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U.S. consumer prices climbed sharply again last month as the 10-week war with Iran delivered higher gasoline prices and more pain for Americans. The Labor Department’s consumer price index rose 3.8% from April 2025, the biggest jump in three years, and up from a 3.3% year-over-year gain in March. On a month-to-month basis, April prices rose 0.6% from March as gasoline prices rose 5.4%, according to the data released Tuesday. The month-over-month gain was down from a 0.9% increase in overall prices from February to March, when the initial financial shock from the war hit the U.S. economy. Labor Department figures showed that gasoline prices are up more than 28% com…

Meta founder, chairman, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that the company’s Meta Connect conference, which offers a glimpse into what the tech giant sees as the future, will take place September 23–24. The conference is typically a major event for the company. Last year, Meta used the stage to debut its AI glasses. Though little is known about what Zuckerberg plans to showcase this year, he has at least offered a preview of the conference vibes via a new Spotify playlist. Shared alongside the announcement, the “Connect 2026 Vibes” playlist consists of five extremely mainstream, EDM-adjacent pop tracks, including Jack Harlow’s new release “Say Hello” (p…

It’s time to stop calling Gen Z the youngest generation in the workforce. Gen Alpha has entered the chat. Although the oldest Gen Alphas have only just hit their teen years, they are deeply financially motivated and ready to be put to work. If you happen to be living with a Gen Alpha who seems strangely fixated on earning their own money—or who is obsessed with brands and products—you know that we’re raising a generation of hustlers (even if they’re just hustling us). But new data from public relations and marketing firm DKC is shedding even more light on the financial intrigue behind Gen Alpha. The firm surveyed 1,000 parents of 8- to 15-year-olds about their chi…

Whether it’s giving you workout plans or summarizing your sleep, AI has hit fitness apps hard. In the race to add artificial intelligence features to everything from your music playlists to your weather app, the fitness world has also become flooded with new AI-powered services promising to take your workouts to the next level. Earlier this year, Strava launched Athlete Intelligence, which uses generative AI to create summaries of users’ activities, offering neat little roundups of things like heart rate and pace during runs, bike rides, or walks. Whoop AI, powered by none other than Sam Altman’s OpenAI, leverages biometric data to offer recommendations meant to …

When Luis von Ahn, Duolingo’s CEO, sent an internal memo about AI last year, he didn’t expect it to go viral—or to ignite a firestorm about the future of work. Now he unpacks what he got right, what he got wrong, and what the backlash taught him about the real limitations of AI. It’s a candid reckoning with hype, growth, and the surprisingly complicated promise of technology in education. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company, Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time…

Anthropic has just announced Claude Design, a tool that lets teams generate and iterate visual design outputs through natural-language prompts. On the surface, it’s hard not to like the proposition: competent layout and typography on demand, fewer blank-page moments and faster shipping for everything from landing pages to pitch decks. When it comes to typography, it will make design faster, easier and cheaper. The problem is that it also makes design more likely to converge, because it defaults to what works: what’s legible, familiar and proven. In other words: safe, usable, generic. That genericness isn’t just an aesthetic issue. It reduces recognition, makes bra…

Custom AI models are not just for the AI giants anymore. Because the 37-person startup Krea is releasing its first generative AI model as the design tools startup repositions itself as a full-fledged AI research lab. The move is significant for Krea, but it also seems to tease an almost inevitable moment in the rapidly evolving AI market, where smaller players in the industry can make more disruptive bets. On one hand, Krea can hardly call itself a bootstrapped startup anymore. It’s now raised $83 million through its Series B at a $500 million valuation. On the other, it’s tiny compared to the leading frontier model companies, which constantly raise more money t…

“Who are your enemies?” I was asked this interview question throughout my entire career. And I’d always come up blank. Every time. No enemies. And when I failed to produce an impressive enemy list, the reaction was always the same: How can you claim to be competent if you haven’t made powerful enemies? I came to understand this enemy thing was rooted in the male idea of power. That men tend to see winning and power like this: For me to win, you need to lose. I came to realize that this advice to be powerful enough to have enemies was basically an invitation to turn into an aggressive bully to advance my career. But here’s the catch. I was bullied as a …

There’s an old joke among economists that goes like this: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” I didn’t say it was a funny joke. But when labor economist Robert Solow originally wrote those words in 1987, they were certainly true. Personal computers, corporate mainframes, and the first vestiges of the modern internet were all anyone could talk about. Yet productivity wasn’t budging. These whizzy technologies, in short, weren’t earning anyone any money. The phenomenon became known as Solow’s Paradox. Of course, we all know how that story ended. By the mid-1990s, productivity was on a tear, and tech was making lo…

Ian Yang saw a business opportunity sitting on the table of a restaurant. In the darkness of the room, a small portable light meant to make it easier to read a menu jumped out to him as just the kind of product his lighting company, Gantri, should be making. The challenge was that these common restaurant lights are all wireless. “They’re very dim, they’re very small, they’re not really fully fledged, like residential full-power products,” Yang says. But, he thought, they could be. That instinct led to three new wireless lighting product lines being released this week by Gantri, alongside a new digital manufacturing platform that will make it easier for other d…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. A look at the AI landscape for small businesses So much of the conversation around the great AI transformation of business has centered on enterprises, meaning companies with more than 500 employees. That makes sense: For AI and cloud companies, landing a large enterprise customer can mean securing a significant stream of recurring revenue. But if we’re really talking about AI reinventing work and making everyone more productive, small and medium-sized businesses should be a m…

As Meta has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into outpacing its competition in the AI arms race, employees have been forced to get on board with its big bet. Meta employees have been asked to enthusiastically adopt AI and are now evaluated on their AI use in performance reviews. Recurring layoffs have reportedly stoked discontent: According to a recent New York Times report, employees have built websites to count down to another round of rumored job cuts next week. Now the company is also using mouse-tracking software to collect employee data that will help train Meta’s AI models—and employees are not having it. A Reuters report today revealed that an onli…

Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old mayor of New York City, who campaigned on making the city more affordable, is facing one of the hardest tests of leadership: delivering on ambitious promises despite facing a challenging landscape. After inheriting a $12 billion gap in the budget—the largest since the Great Recession—Mamdani just released his $124.7 billion budget proposal for the 2027 fiscal year. It includes important measures like funding for childcare, worker protections, and greater access to mental health care. It also includes some entirely new investments that focus on creating more affordable housing opportunities for low-income New Yorkers. In a video post…

Leadership is no longer linear. Among the founders I meet, there’s a clear shift: Younger entrepreneurs are starting earlier, building faster, and often working across multiple ventures at once. More than half of Gen Z has a side hustle. Entrepreneurship is beginning to look less like a single trajectory and more like a portfolio. But this generation isn’t just building businesses. They’re building dynamic careers with intent. There is a growing expectation that entrepreneurs integrate social and environmental impact into core business decisions. Nearly a third of Gen Z is interested in serving on nonprofit boards or advisory groups. The line between building a …

Martha Stewart just launched a new startup called Hint—an “always-on, AI-native home management platform” set to launch this summer. The venture was born out of a conversation Stewart had with Kyle Rush, her neighbor and an AI engineer. The two wanted to create software that can help identify and solve pesky home repairs, as well as reduce expenses. After Stewart partnered with Rush and home-services executive Yih-Han Ma, Hint was born. “The first thing you do is give us your address,” Ma explained to Fortune. Then, Hint pulls publicly available data on the property. Users can upload further information, like inspection reports and insurance policies, to give Hint…

You don’t have to be the loudest person in the room to command it, but these three habits might be quietly costing you credibility without you even realizing it. From the words you choose to how you walk through the door, here’s what to change so your ideas actually land. View the full article

A few weeks ago, I was reconnecting with a former colleague from my higher education days, and we started talking about our current work. At one point, she paused and said, “I love the path you’ve taken, but if you’d asked me 10 years ago, I would have said you’d definitely end up a dean somewhere.” Honestly, there was a time I thought so, too. For years, that path felt not only plausible, but likely. I loved universities: the intellectual intensity, the sense of mission, the complicated human systems. I was drawn to institutional leadership and to the challenge of helping organizations navigate moments of conflict, ambiguity, and change. I understood academia int…

If you’ve been in the corporate world long enough, you might have seen technical specialists hit a career ceiling. They’re brilliant at what they do, but they can struggle to advance to leadership positions. That’s because management requires a different type of thinking: less task-oriented, more focused on the big picture. This is a mindset that’s common in successful company founders, who employ knowledge, experience, and intuition to maximize value creation within the given context. And it’s a mindset that’s increasingly relevant today. For instance, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs survey from 2025 names analytical thinking as the top core skill emplo…

You are on a street. You see stone buildings, gas lamps, some men in long coats. Is this somewhere in Europe? Probably. But, when? That is the question that WenWare adds to the formula of GeoGuessr, a popular game that shows Google Maps locations all over the Earth and asks players to guess where it is. The free browser-based WenWare drops you inside an AI-generated historical panorama, completely navigable in virtual reality, and gives you 60 seconds to do two things: pinpoint the location on a world map and adjust a timeline slider to the correct year. The person behind the project goes by @underpaid_mom on X. With no real name, no company, the game was created…

Many local government leaders across the country know the types of street designs that reduce the number of severe crashes, but they keep delaying the changes because they’re waiting for money. Waiting for a big federal grant. Waiting for a full reconstruction project. Waiting for the perfect, permanent solution. But while Americans wait, people keep getting hurt. There’s a better way, and it doesn’t require tearing up a single road. Road diets repurpose space that already exists. By narrowing or reducing car lanes on overly wide streets, cities can carve out protected bike lanes, pedestrian refuges, and calmer traffic conditions—without major reconstruction. But…

Airports around the world tend to fall somewhere between the beautifully designed and artfully efficient (think Changi, in Singapore) and the messy and chaotic (sorry, Newark Liberty). But a newly redesigned airport in Noto, Japan, a seaside town 300 miles northwest of Tokyo, offers another option with its whimsically themed Pokémon attraction. From July 7 of this year through September 2029, the hub will be known as the “Noto Satoyama Pokémon With You Airport.” The interiors will be adorned with murals, illustrations, and sculptural installations of the media franchise’s adorable and beloved characters. The hope is that the playful redesign will boost tourism to the …

In this era of AI-powered rapid change, what defines innovation at the world’s most cutting-edge companies? Fast Company’s executive editor, Amy Farley, and editorial director, Jill Bernstein, two architects of the annual Most Innovative Companies list, take you inside the ideas and approaches that earned MIC recognition for 2026. In this interactive session, they break down the trends behind this year’s most forward-thinking organizations and share practical strategies that leaders at all levels can apply right now. Whether you’re refining your roadmap or scanning the horizon for what’s next, you’ll gain actionable insights and valuable new perspectives. View the full …

Most teams respond to communication problems by adding more meetings. Another weekly check-in to keep everyone aligned. Another “quick sync” because the email thread got messy. Another call because half the team left the last one with different interpretations of what had just been decided. The meeting load grows. The communication problem stays. That is because what looks like a communication problem is usually something deeper. It shows up as surprises that should not have been surprises. As decisions relitigated by people who were never comfortable with the outcome. As confusion about who owns what. As uncertainty that everyone feels and nobody names. In ot…