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Almost 10 years ago, physician and data scientist Dr. Ruben Amarasingham founded Pieces Technologies in Dallas with a clear goal: use artificial intelligence to make clinical work lighter, not heavier. At a time when much of healthcare AI focused on prediction and automation, Pieces concentrated on something harder to quantify but more consequential—how clinicians actually think, document, and make decisions inside busy hospital workflows. That focus helped Pieces gain traction with health systems looking for AI that could assist with documentation, coordination, and decision-making without disrupting care. But as hospitals began relying more heavily on AI for diagnos…

I’ve read a lot of books on building a culture at work. A lot of the advice is well intentioned but to me overly complex. A 20-step framework is a lot harder to live by than a simple operating principle. Culture is something people feel and live more than implement. Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz wrote in his book What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture, “It’s not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in company-wide meetings. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do.” For me, culture is created through actions. It’s the choices leaders make every day that shape how peop…

At a factory in Austin, a startup recently finished its first prototype: a row house it plans to replicate in cities nationwide to help with the housing shortage. Row houses—narrow, multistory homes that share walls with neighbors on each side—are ubiquitous in older neighborhoods from Brooklyn to San Francisco, but aren’t commonly built now. The American Housing Corp., wants to bring them back. “Row homes are an underbuilt category in the United States,” says Riley Meik, cofounder and CEO of the American Housing Corp. The company has developed a kit of parts that can be quickly manufactured, shipped to building sites in dense urban neighborhoods, and assembled, h…

Discounting has been part of retail’s toolkit for decades, and it can be effective, especially during high-stakes shopping seasons. But as promotions become more frequent across the industry, companies are taking a closer look at the downside: Short-term sales gains don’t always come with long-term loyalty or durable margins, and customers remember how a brand made them feel far more than what they saved at checkout. What’s often missing from the conversation is the role of experience-led value. Loyalty isn’t built through price alone—it’s built through moments that make a customer feel recognized, appreciated, and confident they made the right choice. When brands com…

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…

Shares in Palantir Technologies (Nasdaq: PLTR) are rising this morning, one day after the AI data analysis software company with significant U.S. government contracts reported better-than-expected Q4 earnings. Here’s what you need to know about Palantir’s latest results and its rising stock price. Palantir’s Q4 2025 beat Wall Street expectations Yesterday, Palantir announced its Q4 2025 earnings, and investors breathed a sigh of relief. For Palantir’s Q4, which ended on December 31, the company brought in $1.41 billion in revenue, signaling 70% year-over-year growth. The majority of that revenue comes from Palantir’s U.S. customers, which is split roughly even…

U.S. job openings fell to the lowest level in more than five years, another sign that the American labor market remains sluggish. The Labor Department reported Thursday that vacancies fell to 6.5 million in December — from 6.9 million in November and the fewest since September 2020. Layoffs rose slightly. The number of people quitting their jobs — which shows confidence in their prospects — was basically unchanged at 3.2 million. December openings came in lower than economists had forecast. The economy is in a puzzling place. Growth is strong: Gross domestic product — the nation’s output of goods and services — advanced from July through September at the faste…

For many women in the U.S. and around the world, motherhood comes with career costs. Raising children tends to lead to lower wages and fewer work hours for mothers—but not fathers—in the United States and around the world. As a sociologist, I study how family relationships can shape your economic circumstances. In the past, I’ve studied how motherhood tends to depress women’s wages, something social scientists call the “motherhood penalty.” I wondered: Can government programs that provide financial support to parents offset the motherhood penalty in earnings? A ‘motherhood penalty’ I set out with Therese Christensen, a Danish sociologist, to answer this…

Elon Musk just created the world’s most valuable private company. And he didn’t do it through rapid growth or a new product launch — at least not directly, anyway. Instead, as reported this week, Musk merged his artificial intelligence startup xAI into his wildly successful rocket company, SpaceX. Combined together, the two companies are now valued at an estimated $1.25 trillion. It’s the biggest merger in history. And because Musk controls both companies, he calls most of the shots when it comes to the deal. …

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. Anthropic uses the Super Bowl to land some zingers about the future of AI Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads are bangers. The spots, which Anthropic posted on X on Wednesday, seize on rival OpenAI’s plans to begin injecting ads into its ChatGPT chatbot for free-tier users as soon as this month. The 30-second ads dramatize what the real effects of that decision might look like for users. They never mention OpenAI or ChatGPT by name. In one ad, a human fitness instructor playing the role…

Bob Iger doesn’t understand generative AI. He thinks it is good for the quarterly bottom line. He believes a corporation can control it, and that lawyers and agreements can bind it. He is clueless. Generative AI is here to kill Hollywood—including the company he’s now leaving to Josh D’Amaro, the new heir to Disney’s throne. This became painfully clear to me during Disney’s recent first-quarter financial call. Taking a victory lap for his “modernization” efforts, he briefly laid out the roadmap for the company’s partnership with OpenAI, announced in December 2025. Under the agreement, Disney would invest $1 billion in the AI company and let it tap Disney’s IP crow…

In certain corners of corporate America, a generous parental leave policy has become a crucial tool for recruiting and retention. Many of the biggest tech employers have been leaders on this front, offering 16 to 20 weeks of leave, or even close to six months at companies like Google. But even as companies have expanded their parental leave benefits, few of them have sought to address the unique challenges many parents—and especially mothers—face when they actually return to work. A handful of companies, among them Apple and Amazon, offer a grace period that enables employees to ease back into work part-time or work flexible hours for a few weeks. Despite all th…

Novo Nordisk’s stock dove 7% on Thursday just after an announcement from a key competitor. The drop came just after telehealth company Hims & Hers announced it will offer a new version of the treatment, made from the same active ingredient, semaglutide, for a fraction of Novo Nordisk’s price. The telehealth site will offer the treatment at an introductory price of $49, the announcement said. After the introductory offer ends, patients with a 5-month subscription will pay $99 monthly for the treatment. Novo Nordisk sells the weight-loss drug for $149. Hims & Hers had already been offering the treatment in an injectable form, but the oral version is new for…

Anthropic is out with a new model called Claude Opus 4.6, an upgrade to its top-of-the-line Opus 4.5 model that launched in November. The new release could add new capabilities to Anthropic’s Claude Code coding assistant, which is facing growing competitive pressure from OpenAI’s Codex. Anthropic says Opus 4.6 improves on its predecessor’s coding skills, planning, and, perhaps most importantly, its ability to reason more clearly when handling large amounts of information. When Opus 4.6 powers Claude Code, the coding agent can comprehend larger codebases and make more thoughtful decisions about how and where to add new code, the company says. More long-term memory …

Tech workers have been worried for years now about the AI tidal wave coming for their jobs, but their bosses are starting to worry too. Stocks plunged this week as fears escalated that AI advancements will take a bite out of business for many software and services companies. The market losses are tied to updates to Anthropic’s AI-powered workplace productivity suite, Claude Cowork, which threatens to replace some software tools ubiquitous in the professional world. Companies with business in research and legal software like Thomson Reuters and LegalZoom dropped dramatically on the Anthropic news, with a wide swath of software stocks following suit. Intuit, PayPal…

Visa announced a new platform designed to stimulate small businesses through a variety of tools and network opportunities on Thursday in advance of major sporting events this year. The program, Visa & Main, identifies and is built around helping address what Visa calls the most pressing challenges that entrepreneurs face: access to capital, reaching customers, and adopting modern business tools. That starts with a $100 million partnership with small business lender Lendistry, with Visa saying it would continue to provide “additional grants and financial support programs” as part of Visa & Main. Additionally, Visa & Main connects Visa’s small …

In special education in the U.S., funding is scarce and personnel shortages are pervasive, leaving many school districts struggling to hire qualified and willing practitioners. Amid these long-standing challenges, there is rising interest in using artificial intelligence tools to help close some of the gaps that districts currently face and lower labor costs. Over 7 million children receive federally funded entitlements under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which guarantees students access to instruction tailored to their unique physical and psychological needs, as well as legal processes that allow families to negotiate support. Special education…

With community opposition growing, data center backers are going on a full-scale public relations blitz. Around Christmas in Virginia, which boasts the highest concentration of data centers in the country, one advertisement seemed to air nonstop. “Virginia’s data centers are … investing billions in clean energy,” a voiceover intoned over sweeping shots of shiny solar panels. “Creating good-paying jobs” — cue men in yellow safety vests and hard hats — “and building a better energy future.” The ad was sponsored by Virginia Connects, an industry-affiliated group that spent at least $700,000 on digital marketing in the state in fiscal year 2024. The spot emphasized that …

Rewind to 2025. The National Football League is fresh off an unbelievable, yet controversial, Super Bowl halftime performance by the superstar hip hop artist Kendrick Lamar. The country has just been introduced to a diversity-hostile administration, which has practically squashed any zeal toward diversity, equity, or inclusion that corporate America once seemingly held. As the NFL’s leadership team explores talent considerations for next year’s performance in the midst of this cultural backdrop, someone recommends Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican-born megastar whose songs are performed almost entirely in Spanish, and, surprisingly, the league acquiesces. The public blowback is…