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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.…

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…

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…

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 …

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…

Hello again, and thank you, as always, for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In. In a remarkably influential 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen declared that software was “eating the world.” From entertainment to commerce to transportation, he argued, startups that were about code at their core were disrupting many of the world’s most deeply entrenched businesses. That was just the beginning, he warned: “Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming.“ Fifteen years later, we know that some of the disruptors Andreessen cited—such as Zynga, Groupon, and Skype (RIP)—did …

The other night, I heard cabinets opening in the kitchen and the shuffling of bags and containers. My husband was looking for snacks with our 9-year-old. After, he got him ready for bed, read him a book, and ordered us dinner. Then he sat down at his laptop and worked until 9 p.m. As I unloaded the dishwasher, I realized two things. First: My husband was killing it. Second: The second shift isn’t women’s work anymore. It’s everyone’s burnout. The second shift, rewritten In 1989, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild introduced “the second shift” to describe what happened when women got home from their paid job to an unpaid one: making dinner, folding laundry, shuttl…

Productivity, and alleged lost productivity, has driven most of the conversation around traffic congestion and sprawl in the United States. While “time is money” is true in some contexts, it’s a terrible starting point for planning transportation systems. Traffic congestion is a pervasive issue, whether it’s the destination (a downtown, a stadium, a new development) or the streets connecting to the destinations. In economic terms, congestion occurs when demand exceeds supply: not enough lanes for everyone trying to get somewhere at once. Your time is valuable and there are sometimes real consequences you experience when roads are clogged with cars. But it’s a serious …

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…

Small-business owners are up against a lot. It can be difficult to come up with the funding required to take an idea and turn it into something profitable, especially in an economy that can often feel less stable than many of us might prefer. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad idea to start your own small business. In fact, the opposite is often true. If you have an idea and a plan you believe in, the future of your small business can be wide open. Of course, there are a few considerations to keep in mind along the way, Chedva Ludmir tells Fast Company. Ludmir, who founded the consulting and coaching firm Consider Labs, regularly works with entrepreneurs…

Below, Joe Tidy shares five key insights from his new book, Ctrl + Alt + Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet. Tidy is the BBC’s first cyber correspondent and a leading voice on cybercrime. He has covered major global cyberattacks and produced widely viewed international documentaries, including a high-profile investigation into Russia’s most wanted cybercriminal. What’s the big idea? Teenage hackers are quietly reshaping cybercrime. They’re not movie-style geniuses, but persistent, socially connected, and often addicted—causing real harm through data breaches and feeding a cycle that leads to ever more serious attacks. Listen to the audio version…

Below, Daniel Coyle shares five key insights from his new book, Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment. Coyle is the New York Times bestselling author of The Culture Code. He has served as an adviser to high-performing organizations, including the Navy SEALs, Microsoft, Google, and the Cleveland Guardians. What’s the big idea? Everybody wants to flourish—to experience joyful, meaningful, shared growth. The problem is, we’ve been trained to approach the most important parts of our lives as if they are games to win, when they’re more like gardens to be grown. Flourishing isn’t about being smarter—it’s about taking simple actions that foster t…

Alysa Liu, who quit skating at 16, didn’t ‘need’ a gold medal, she told reporters in Milan—she had already found joy. The 20-year-old from California, who won the first individual Olympic gold in women’s figure skating for the U.S. after 24 years, didn’t need to be champion. She says she was just thrilled to perform. “I don’t need this [medal],” Liu said right after winning, full of joy, while cheering on her competitors. “But what I needed was the stage and I got that, so I was all good. No matter what happened.” Liu isn’t feigning enthusiasm for the cameras. You can feel it radiating from her body when watching her skate—which she did, flawlessly, when perfo…