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AI is rapidly changing the world around us, from the way we engage online to how we work. But while the technology is able to complete an astonishing number of tasks, humans are far from obsolete. A new report from McKinsey is shining light on why humans are still essential. According to the report, roughly 57% of work hours can be automated. Meanwhile, 70% of the skills employers look for can be used for both automated work and nonautomated work. This means over the next five years, humans will have to adjust their work habits to make room for automation. McKinsey designed an index to assess how automation will impact each skill used in the workplace today. Acc…

This summer, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman became co-owners of Australia’s three-time champion SailGP team. Days earlier, Anne Hathaway joined a female-led consortium purchasing Italy’s team for around $45 million. Kylian Mbappé has bought into France’s squad, while Sebastian Vettel, Deontay Wilder, and DeAndre Hopkins have each acquired stakes in teams. So, what’s drawing A-list celebrities away from traditional sports properties and toward a sailing league that’s only been around for six years? The answer lies in how SailGP has cracked a code that eluded the sport for centuries. What Russell Coutts, the league’s CEO and cofounder, described as once being “white…

“Zootopia 2” had a roaring and record-setting opening at the box office. The animated animal city sequel from the Walt Disney Company brought in $96 million in North America over the weekend, earned $156 million over the five-day Thanksgiving frame, and scored a staggering $556 million globally since its Wednesday opening, according to studio estimates Sunday. That made it the highest international opening ever for an animated movie, the fourth highest global debut of any kind, and the top international opener of 2025. “Wicked: For Good” stayed aloft in its second weekend for Universal Pictures, earning another $62.8 million domestically over the weekend for a North Am…

The Salt Lake City Olympics planned for 2034 are now the Utah Games after organizers announced a new logo and name to reflect the multi-community work that goes into hosting the largest winter sports event on Earth. The state’s Governor, Spencer Cox, says the new logo has united people—though not in a good way. “It’s really brought people together because everyone seems to not like it,” Cox said at a recent press conference. The new logo is temporary until the final emblem of the Games is released in 2029. It spells out “Utah” in irregularly shaped characters (does that say “IJTAH?”) that are stacked on top of “2034.” Its launch color palette is just black and…

Fast Company’s Brands That Matter is designed to honor the brands that plant their flags firmly at the intersection of business and culture in unique ways. But there are also bigger companies that manage to succeed in that task with multiple brands. The five 2025 Brands That Matter family of brands honorees didn’t just excel with a single brand—they’ve created cultural moments and sales momentum for multiple brands across their businesses. While being bespoke for each brand, the efforts are nonetheless able to drive solid results on engagement and overall business performance. Coca-Cola When you make the world’s top-selling soda, it might be easy to let the ma…

As Fast Company‘s Brands That Matter marks its fifth year, the goal remains to honor globally recognized brands that inspire and resonate with audiences. This year’s honorees demonstrate the same qualities that have defined the program since its inception: a deep dedication to their core mission and meaningful connections with both their customers and the wider cultural landscape. While the recognized brands span diverse industries and achievements, they’re united by these fundamental commitments. METHODOLOGY With more than 1,200 entries, choosing Brands That Matter honorees requires months of researching and vetting applications, until finally landing on the …

Fatherhood used to be invisible in the conversation about entrepreneurship. The story was always the same: A founder celebrated for sacrifice, for grinding through the night, taming fortune one day at a time. The world championed the grind. But that archetype is now deeply outdated. The successful founder is no longer the one sleeping under their desk. That’s not simply dedication; it’s a symptom of poorly designed systems. If your company requires your constant, heroic presence, you haven’t built a business—you’ve built a cage. Today, elite performance is not measured by the hours you log, but by the resilience of the organization you leave behind. The best entre…

Age really is just a number when it comes to social media, as new research from Ampere Analysis shows that more than half of users ages 55 to 64 now watch influencer content every week. This number is up by 10 percentage points since 2020. In the U.K., the figure has also risen over the past five years, from 30% to 38%. TikTok and YouTube, in particular, are behind the growth—proof that Boomers’ social media presence is no longer limited to Facebook. “The biggest surprise in our latest data wasn’t how popular influencer videos have become, it is how rapidly this trend has extended to older audiences,” Annabel Yeomans, senior research manager at Ampere Analysi…

The healthcare industry faces major challenges in creating new drugs that can improve outcomes in the treatment of all kinds of diseases. New generative AI models could play a major role in breaking through existing barriers, from lab research to successful clinical trials. Eventually, even AI-powered robots could help in the cause. Nvidia VP of healthcare Kimberly Powell, one of Fast Company’s AI 20 honorees, has led the company’s health efforts for 17 years, giving her a big head start on understanding how to turn AI’s potential to improve our well-being into reality. Since it’s likely that everything from drug-discovery models to robotic healthcare aides would be …

The District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virgina (DMV) region is emerging as a national test case for the future of office space. As cities across the country grapple with persistent office vacancies, D.C. is taking a bold approach: Instead of focusing solely on residential conversions, it is pioneering a broader strategy to convert offices to…anything. While the concept of office conversions isn’t new, most efforts have been centered on residential use. D.C.’s strategy breaks that mold. In January 2025, the city launched the Central Washington Activation Projects Temporary Tax Abatement, better known as the Office to Anything program. This policy targets build…

So far, Nvidia has provided the vast majority of the processors used to train and operate large AI models like the ones that underpin ChatGPT. Tech companies and AI labs don’t like to rely too much on a single chip vendor, especially as their need for computing capacity increases, so they’re looking for ways to diversify. And so players like AMD and Huawei, as well as hyperscalers like Google and Amazon AWS, which just released its latest Trainium3 chip, are hurrying to improve their own flavors of AI accelerators, the processors designed to speed up specific types of computing tasks. Could the competition eventually reduce Nvidia, AI’s dominant player, to just anot…

Across America, a new generation of farmers is reimagining what it means to work the land. They are engineers, ecologists, and entrepreneurs—people who see farming not only as a way to grow food, but as a form of innovation. In fields across the country, these farmers are harnessing soil science, biodiversity, and technology to restore what decades of extractive agriculture have depleted. Their work represents one of the most powerful opportunities of our time: The opportunity to regenerate our planet from the ground up. Yet, the odds they face are immense. Land prices have soared, access to capital is limited, and isolation comes with choosing a career path few under…

We talk about time at work as if it’s a fixed resource: something outside of us and something we either “manage well” or “never have enough of.” People genuinely believe the clock is the problem. But the more you look at how the brain processes experience, the less true this becomes. People don’t feel pressured because they have too many tasks. They feel pressured because their brain is constructing time in a way that makes everything feel urgent or impossible to catch up with. Modern neuroscience has been pointing to this for a while. Our experience of time—what feels fast, slow, overwhelming, or “not enough”—is not a reading from an internal stopwatch. It’s a st…

Most people think of solopreneurs as a one-person machine. The solopreneur (according to social media) sends invoices, juggles client calls, manages marketing campaigns, and troubleshoots their own website—all before lunch. It’s a compelling narrative because it celebrates endless hustle and grit. But it’s also a myth. Solopreneurship simply means you make the business decisions. You don’t have to consult anyone else or wait for approval. It doesn’t mean you’re the only person doing the work. Most solopreneurs eventually bring in support (including me, in my solo business). Hiring help doesn’t mean you’re “no longer a real solopreneur.” It’s a sign that your busin…

In a Rye, Colorado, cattle pasture now subbing for the moon, an otherworldly vehicle bumps along a scrubby course of furrows and mounds, weaving around rocks and kicking up a fine dust. It’s an open-concept machine dubbed Falcon—a silver solar-powered rectangular frame on wheels, with a partial roof, windowless sides, and a spacious cockpit flanked by monitors and steering controls. An engineer sits in one of its two seats for safety as the vehicle autonomously navigates around obstacles to a location dictated by Mission Control 160 miles away. Suddenly, a wheel hits a rock, and Falcon halts, relaying real-time feedback to Mission Control. There, an operator revises a com…

AI is becoming a big part of online commerce. Referral traffic to retailers on Black Friday from AI chatbots and search engines jumped 800% over the same period last year, according to Adobe, meaning a lot more people are now using AI to help them with buying decisions. But where does that leave review sites who, in years past, would have been the guide for many of those purchases? If there’s a category of media that’s most spooked by AI, it’s publishers who specialize in product recommendations, which have traditionally been reliant on search traffic. The nature of the content means it’s often purely informational, with most articles being designed to answer a questi…

A quiet shift is reshaping the trajectory of wealth in America, but it isn’t happening in the boardrooms of Wall Street or the halls of Silicon Valley. It’s unfolding in neighborhoods, driveways, and home offices across the country, powered by teachers, software engineers, nurses, military families, and small-business owners who never expected to become real estate investors at all. As the cofounder and CEO of a rental technology company that supports independent property owners (and as an investor myself), I see this transformation every day. What starts as an unexpected ownership moment often turns into a thoughtful plan for long-term financial stability. Many i…

Early in my career, I learned a valuable lesson that has stayed front and center. I was working for a company struggling to meet its marks. We were doing fine, but not knocking it out of the park. I walked into a quarterly business review, confident in our marketing metrics. We were hitting or surpassing every KPI, and I presented our achievements with pride. My CEO made a statement that stopped me in my tracks: “Marketing success means nothing unless the company as a whole is winning.” That moment was a turning point. In our focus on metrics, it’s easy to overlook what really matters. It’s a lesson I was grateful to learn early and one I believe every leader should e…

Hello again, and thank you for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In. Last October, I visited the Silicon Valley headquarters of 1X Technologies—the startup behind a humanoid home robot called Neo—and spoke with its VP of product and design, Dar Sleeper. Among the points he made was that long-standing public expectations have set a high bar for household robots. Naturally, he name-checked the world’s most iconic one. “The ultimate, North Star, in a lot of people’s minds, is Rosie the Robot,” he told me. “A Jetsons world where you ask and receive, and it makes your life better, you spend more time with your family, you’re more present.” Sleeper’s referen…

Nobody wants to swipe anymore. Dating apps like Bumble and Tinder are scrambling to keep younger users engaged, and dealing with problems like bots on their platforms. But one brand is breaking the pattern and winning. Hinge’s “designed to be deleted” tagline signals its strategy: focus on meaningful connection, not endless swiping. The app can feel slower and even harder to use, leading to fewer matches but ultimately more dates. Now, the big question is whether Bumble and Tinder can pull off a similar shift toward quality over quantity. View the full article

Ford Motor Co. has stepped up technology in its popular F-150 pickup to combat the ever-evolving techniques car thieves have at their disposal. It is the latest cat-and-mouse move that the automaker hopes will help customers avoid the costly and frustrating process that occurs when vehicles are swiped and includes a feature that won’t allow an engine to start even if a key fob is in the pickup. Motor vehicle thefts recently have been on the decline in the U.S. after several years of increases. Still, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that more than 850,000 vehicles were stolen in the U.S. in 2024, pegging losses at $8 billion. But thefts dropped 2…

Time magazine has named the “Architects of AI” as its 2025 Person of the Year, a decision that has sparked significant backlash from gamblers who lost out on semantics. The companies behind AI tools and infrastructure aren’t “AI” in the literal sense, so prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket ruled that anyone betting on “AI” doesn’t win. As author Parker Molloy pointed out on Bluesky, gamblers on the site are not pleased. “Someone please explain to me how this is not a trick?” one user complained after betting on billionaire Elon Musk on Kalshi. “Person of the year is a singular title…” “ThE aRcHiTeCtS oF AI,” another user wrote. “Fuck you pay me.” Oth…

Some studies show that the interview process can take up to six weeks. But there are ways that might help speed up the process and get those final hiring managers to land on you as the one they offer the job to. View the full article

The conversation about AI in the workplace has been dominated by the simplistic narrative that machines will inevitably replace humans. But the organizations achieving real results with AI have moved past this framing entirely. They understand that the most valuable AI implementations are not about replacement but collaboration. The relationship between workers and AI systems is evolving through distinct stages, each with its own characteristics, opportunities, and risks. Understanding where your organization sits on this spectrum—and where it’s headed—is essential for capturing AI’s potential while avoiding its pitfalls. Stage 1: Tools and Automation This is w…