What's on Your Mind?

Grating coworkers, tone-deaf bosses, a ninth ask for revisions on a PowerPoint deck—as the workday annoyances pile up, it’s only a matter of time before every worker hits a boiling point. And when they do, they often hit up a trusted colleague to vent to in a direct message on a platform like Slack or Teams. “So often you’re sitting in a meeting, you’re hearing something, and you’re like, ‘Am I crazy, or are they contradicting themselves? Did they change the strategy again? Can you believe they just said this thing?’” says one former employee at a consulting firm, who agreed to speak to Fast Company anonymously. Sounding off to coworkers in DMs feels like both an out…

From changing the daily workflow to the way we order food at a kiosk, AI is showing up in just about everything we do. But according to a new report, the way people use AI differs based on generation. And some of those ways are downright weird. The new insights come from a survey by AI-powered study aid Edubrain of 3,000 Americans ages 18 to 60. (Boomers weren’t included in the survey, but according to other recent research, they’re the least likely to use AI). It found that when it comes to who is using AI the most regularly, it’s not the youngest tech-savvy group. It’s actually millennials: 37% of the group uses it daily, while only 25% of Gen Zers, and 19% of …

In the latest chapter of the pizza wars, Papa Johns announced it is closing hundreds of North America locations during a fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday. It will also cut about 7% of its workforce. In that call, Papa Johns’ chief financial officer and president of North America Ravi Thanawal said the company plans to shutter a total of 300 underperforming restaurants in North America “that are not meeting brand expectations or lack a clear path to sustainable financial improvement, as well as locations where we can effectively transfer sales to a nearby restaurant.” The closures will happen by the end of 2027, with the first two-thirds closed by year end.…

Some consider self-employment a soul-crushing grind—a pit of despair one falls into after being laid off, or after graduating into a job market where entry-level jobs have evaporated. Chasing clients, following up on payment requests, and working into the night, all for little pay . . . it’s a stopgap until you find a full-time job. Who on earth would choose it? But freelancing doesn’t have to feel like gig work. And in fact, plenty of people, especially Gen Zers, do deliberately choose it. If you’re skeptical about freelancing or struggling to earn enough to pay your bills, it might be time for a mindset audit: Instead of thinking like a paycheck-chasing hustler, thi…

According to the World Economic Forum, 40% of employers expect to reduce their workforce where AI can automate tasks by 2030. Thanks to artificial intelligence, leaders are under pressure to raise the bar on what they will deliver to their stakeholders—with the expectation that thanks to AI, companies can (and must) achieve more. That matters for job hunters, who need to get clear on the value they can provide to organizations if they want to get hired. And while we can be reactive—relying on the AI screeners, which many recruiters use, to select us out of the pile of submitted résumés—we should get proactive, smartly deploying our networks to get our feet in the door…

Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he started Facebook. Bill Gates was 21 when he started Microsoft; co-founder Paul Allen was 23. Steve Jobs was 21 when he co-founded Apple; co-founder Steve Wozniak was 26. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang were 30. Yet they’re the exceptions, not the rule. A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found the average age of entrepreneurs who start a company and go on to hire at least one employee is 42. A study conducted by the Census Bureau and two MIT professors found the most successful entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged, even in the technology sector. After compiling a list of 2.7 million company founde…

We’ve been sold a lie. Somewhere between “go to school” and “get a job,” work became the central node of our lives—the very thing that defines us. We measure our worth by our output, our identity by our title, and our health by how much we can endure. The hours. The travel. The back-to-back meetings. The busyness. That’s not the picture we painted for ourselves when we chose our major in college and envisioned what we thought would be a fulfilling career; that’s conditioning. The result of which has shaped our meaning of work and how we see ourselves in it. But meaning isn’t found in the busyness of the grind—rather, it’s found in alignment. And when our work has gre…

I have what I consider a healthy skepticism toward authority. I’ve always considered leaders—despite what titles they hold—as fallible people who don’t necessarily deserve blind adulation or deference. That skepticism has made it hard for me to adopt the “company man persona,” which might explain how little of the proverbial corporate ladder I’ve climbed. And rather than take responsibility for that, I’m going to “blame” my dad: The instinct to question rather than comply, to think critically instead of playing yes-man, came from him. We never had a formal conversation about it. I just watched how he moved through the world—confident, grounded, with little to prove—a…

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Source NM. The first thing Andy Barrientes noticed when he showed up for his shift at RMS Foods on Valentine’s Day in 2005 was the cloud of black smoke emanating from the building. A fire had started in the factory around 4:20 p.m., not long before Barrientes was scheduled to clock in as maintenance manager at the food manufacturing plant in southeastern New Mexico. The blaze had caught his coworkers coming off the day shift by surprise; they reported smelling the smoke before seeing the flames. When Barrientes arrived, he saw the staff huddled together at the park across the street. “Everyone was holding han…

Early in my career, a colleague and I made a shared commitment one summer to eat healthier. Salads. Smoothies. The full routine. Like many well-intentioned plans, our discipline began to fade after a few weeks. Eventually, we introduced what we jokingly called Grease Wednesdays, a weekly cheat day as a reward for all our good behavior. Every Wednesday, one of us would head out to grab fast food, and we’d hide away in a small boardroom to indulge in our shared lack of nutritional discipline. At first, it was just the two of us, chatting with laptops closed and fries on the table. And then coworkers began peeking into whatever boardroom we were in, curious about the…

Being a middle manager often feels like living in two worlds at once. On one side, executives cascade big goals and sweeping strategies. On the other, teams look to you for clarity, advocacy, and daily guidance. You’re constantly reconciling top-down demands with bottom-up realities, often with too little time and too few resources to satisfy either side. The paradox of the role is stark: Middle managers carry enormous responsibility for execution but don’t always have the authority to make critical decisions. You’re expected to deliver results on budgets you don’t control, within structures you didn’t design, and through policies you didn’t write. This tension is one…

At hundreds of Burger King restaurants across the U.S., there’s a new invisible worker who’s tracking which ingredients are in stock, analyzing daily sales data, and checking in on whether employees are saying “Thank you” and “You’re welcome.” It’s an AI assistant named Patty. According to Thibault Roux, Burger King’s chief digital officer, the voice-activated chatbot is designed to help employees and managers handle tasks that might usually require pulling out a computer or consulting with an instruction guide. Patty began showing up at select locations about a year ago, and is now in a pilot phase at approximately 500 Burger Kings. It’s expected to roll out to the …

Recently, Grok AI faced criticism after users found it was creating explicit images of real people, including women and children. Although xAI has now implemented some restrictions, this incident revealed a serious weakness. Without safeguards and diverse perspectives, girls and women are put at greater risk. The dangers artificial intelligence poses to women and girls are real and happening now, affecting their mental health, safety, healthcare, and economic opportunities. Last fall, a mother discovered why her teenage daughter’s mental health had been deteriorating: It was a result of conversations with a Character.AI chatbot. She’s not alone. Aura’s State of Youth …

What began as a race to build better AI models has escalated into a competition for compute, talent, and control. Foundation models—large-scale systems trained on vast datasets to generate text, images, code, and decisions—now underpin everything from enterprise software and cloud infrastructure to national digital strategies. The industry’s language around AI has grown more ambitious—and more elastic. Agentic AI has leapt from research papers to Davos billboards, while artificial general intelligence, or AGI, now appears routinely in investor decks and earnings calls. Definitions have begun to blur. Some companies quietly lower the bar for what qualifies as general, …

It’s sometime in the future, and Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman have joined forces on a new venture called Energym. The global chain of gyms is designed to harness the energy of the unemployed as they exercise on machines. The generated electricity feeds the AI servers that put them out of a job. Think Planet Fitness meets the Matrix, but without living in a simulation. Energym’s mission is to feed the AI machines with human sweat, and it’s a great business model. By 2030, almost 80% of people have lost their jobs. If you have no money and no purpose, you may as well use all your free time to work out and feed AI server fans with some kilowatts. “It solves our …

As a young child, interior designer Jeremiah Brent and his mother visited open houses and model homes in his hometown of Modesto, California, as a form of daydreaming. Brent walked through the houses, imagining the people who might live there, building a fantasy around what these homes could be. Since then, Brent has turned his childhood design obsession into a sprawling career: He runs a 50-person design firm, moonlights on Queer Eye, and recently brokered his first bedding deal with Target. Having come up in the industry through a series of audacious bets on himself, Brent has developed a sense of humor and pragmatism around his relationship with creativity and his…

If you don’t want to be left behind by the AI revolution, you really need to start paying for it. At least that’s become the common refrain among some AI enthusiasts, who seem intent on instilling FOMO in less technical users. The free versions of ChatGPT and Claude, they say, are woefully inadequate if you want to understand where things are headed—so stop being a cheapskate and hand over your $20 (or $200) a month like the rest of us. “Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone,” HyperWrite CEO Matt Shumer recently wrote in a widely shared essay on AI’s impact. “The people paying for the best tools, an…

It’s the last week of Black History Month (BHM) and it’s clear Americans are over performative values. Trite BHM-inspired merchandise sits on retailer shelves untouched while media is abuzz covering the artistry, activism, and symbolism of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. The signal is clear: consumers are looking to brands for real solutions to real problems, not products that commodify culture. Most companies build everything from advertising to AI for the “average user,” but in doing so, they react to rather than lead markets. Strategic leaders look to growth audiences—underserved groups who are the fastest-growing demographics—as lead users. They are the “can…

OpenAI’s Codex AI coding assistant is having a growth spurt. OpenAI tells Fast Company that its weekly active users have tripled since the start of the year, while overall usage (measured in tokens) has increased fivefold. The surge is likely driven by the release of new models—GPT-5.2 last December and GPT-5.3-Codex in early February—as well as the launch of Codex’s app version a few weeks ago. OpenAI says the app has been downloaded more than a million times. Across all access points—including the cloud, app, and command line—more than a million developers and other users now rely on Codex at least once a week, according to the company. Generating computer code has …

QR codes have become a convenience of modern life. Just scan the black and white mosaic with your phone’s camera and you can do everything from connect to your hotel room Wi-Fi to pay for that public parking space to pull up a restaurant menu. But QR codes can also leave you vulnerable. That’s because scammers, organized criminal gangs, and shady nation-states are using the unassuming tech to get you to hand over your data unwittingly. Here’s how they’re doing it, and how you can protect yourself. People love the convenience of QR codes—but so do scammers It’s hard to believe that something nefarious can lie within a QR code, but it can. In order to understand…

It’s no secret that Flavor Flav loves the Olympics. The rapper and Public Enemy member has become one of the loudest supporters of women’s sports in the past few Olympic cycles. He is the official hype man and a sponsor for USA Water Polo. In October 2025, he announced he was bringing the hype to the Winter Olympics as a sponsor for USA Bobsled and Skeleton. Now, after the USA women’s hockey team declined a perfunctory invitation to the State of the Union address after President Donald The President shared a chummy locker room phone call with the men’s team—in which they laugh at the prospect of the women’s gold medalists attending—Flav is once again stepping up.…

Stablecoins that offer interest-bearing rewards may increasingly resemble bank deposits. But unlike traditional deposits, they lack the regulatory safeguards that undergird the banking system. That gap, according to JPMorgan CFO Jeremy Barnum, risks creating what he calls a “parallel banking system.” The issue is already on lawmakers’ agenda. During JPMorgan’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call, Evercore analyst Glenn Schorr noted that Congress is preparing to debate stablecoin policy, referencing a letter from the American Bankers Association that underscores the urgency of addressing a loophole around interest on stablecoins. Schorr added that Treasury estimated “$6.…

The public outcry over artificial intelligence has largely focused on what it could mean for the average worker. Entry-level jobs in sectors like tech and finance have already been impacted by the rise of AI. And while economists have said the claims of workforce disruption are overblown at the moment, some companies are, in fact, making major cuts to their workforces in the name of AI. Just this week, Block CEO Jack Dorsey cut 40% of head count at the fintech company, citing efficiency gains from its adoption of AI tools. But it’s not just rank-and-file workers whose jobs may be on the line. As CEOs tout the vast potential of AI—and make cuts to their workforces acc…