What's on Your Mind?

After-hours meetings have gone from rare to regular occurrences, and while some are hoping AI can help reverse the trend, experts warn breaking the habit will take more than tech. In a recent survey conducted by AI-powered workspace provider Miro, 33% of US-based knowledge workers said they frequently attended after-hours meetings in 2025, up from 23% in 2024. “Six in 10 people attend meetings after hours at least once a month, and that has all kinds of negative downstream effects,” says Dom Katz, Miro’s ways of working lead. “The data suggests more and more people consistently have meetings after their usual workday ends, and it’s getting worse; not just in the U…

At the Exceptional Women Alliance, we enable high-level women to mentor each other to enable personal and professional happiness through sisterhood. As the nonprofit organization’s founder, chair, and CEO, I am honored to interview and share insights from some of the thought leaders who are part of our peer-to-peer mentoring. This month I introduce to youKarlyn Mattson, an award-winning retail C-suite executive and founder of The Leadership Advisors.She has decades of experience delivering profitable growth, transformative consumer and product experiences, omni-channel and digital transformation, and consumer centric value creation for brands such as Macy’s, Target, a…

Twenty-four-hour customer support with zero hold time, infinite personalization, customized care, and behavior-based response are all aspects of the customer experience that will be expected sooner rather than later from every one of your customers. All of this is becoming reality, thanks to agentic artificial intelligence. Agentic AI is the most advanced form of artificial intelligence to date. It works autonomously, can understand natural language, sets goals and plans workflows, and makes decisions in real time based on the data it collects and examines. It learns from results and then teaches itself a new way to satisfy the needs of those that interact with it, i…

Sales has historically been a true proving ground for new technological breakthroughs. CRM systems, predictive analytics, tools that promise better targeting, faster follow-up, and higher close rates have to be proven, or shown to be false in the realm of sales. The next technology to be proven is agentic AI. Agentic AI will create the most profound transformation sales will undergo in this century. Agentic AI systems can act independently, pursue goals, adapt to context, and collaborate with humans through the duration of a sales cycle, no matter how short or elongated. AI alone already saves sales team members over two hours a day in admin tasks, and agentics will …

When it comes to agentic artificial intelligence, the fear of missing out factor is clear. Organizations are plopping down agents, in part, because that’s what everyone else seems to be doing. But FOMO is not a business strategy. To make agentic AI work, business leaders need to ignore the hype and concentrate on establishing exactly what agents can do for them, how, and at what cost. Our own work has proved that AI agents, which independently plan and execute complex multistep tasks, can deliver substantial value by accelerating timelines and reducing costs. And that is just the start. The ever-improving ability of AI agents to work with people to plan, communicate, …

As of yesterday, March 12, hundreds of thousands of innovators, disruptors, and leaders began descending on Austin for SXSW. If you search “Tech and AI” in this year’s schedule, you’ll find 185 results. That’s more than double the 80 AI sessions in 2024, the same year I wrote a Fast Company op-ed about how women have spent decades building the intellectual foundation of AI while receiving almost none of the credit. It was also the year that companies with at least one female founder raised $38.8 billion in venture capital funding which is a 27 percent increase from the year prior, but still not close to the high point in 2021 with a raise of $62.5 billion. Two years …

Things are moving quickly in the Middle East following the February 28 attack by Israel and the United States on Iran. Repeated waves of US-Israeli strikes have hit military and government sites across Iran, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and prompting a temporary leadership council to take charge in Tehran. Iran has responded with threats to close the Strait of Hormuz and launched retaliatory attacks around the Gulf, raising fears that the conflict could spill over into a broader regional war and disrupt global energy supplies. One way the average Joe is trying to keep track is by “monitoring the situation” using dashboards—many of which, their creators admit, were spun …

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. It’s been five years since the intense early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first round of lockdowns that mandated work-from-home for companies around the world. Among the debate at the time: concerns about how younger workers and new recruits would cope without access to experienced colleagues and mentors. Doomed to impersonal video conferencing in converted bedrooms, these youngst…

As AI oozes into daily life, some people are building walls to keep it out for a host of compelling reasons. There’s the anxiety about a technology that requires an immense amount of energy to train and contributes to runaway carbon emissions. There are the myriad privacy concerns: At one point, some ChatGPT conversations were openly available on Google, and for months OpenAI was obligated to retain user chat history amid a lawsuit with The New York Times. There’s the latent ickiness of its manufacturing process, given that the task of sorting and labeling this data has been outsourced and underappreciated. Lest we forget, there’s also the risk of an AI oopsie, including …

We’re still in the earliest days of artificial intelligence. It was just November 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT, and the world changed. However, enough time has passed for us to have a sufficient perspective to categorize AI and autonomous agents into three distinct eras. Introduction—2024: In the initial shockwave, there was more novelty and hype than practicality around the possibilities of AI. Businesses and leaders understandably struggled to understand what was barreling toward them. Evaluation—2025: There was a reality check for organizations as they began testing, experimenting with, and piloting AI projects in their search for use cases that created va…

Women may be at a heightened risk for being edged out of their job (or having their duties change) due to AI. According to a new study, jobs disproportionately done by women, especially in higher income countries, are more steadily becoming automated. The joint study, which comes from the United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO) and Poland’s National Research Institute (NASK), was released today. It assessed the ways in which generative AI is reshaping the world, as well as how it changes the role of human beings. “We went beyond theory to build a tool grounded in real-world jobs. By combining human insight, expert review, and generative AI models,…

AI is an extraordinary tool that amplifies our cognitive capacity. It can analyze, summarize, and generate content faster than any human. However, AI is only ever as good as the questions we ask it. It will never replace our capacity for thinking, and can, in fact, reinforce bias because it is learning what we teach it. For this reason, the top skills of the future include thinking skills. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report, employers anticipate that beyond technical literacy, the most in-demand capabilities will be creative thinking, critical thinking, resilience, and the capacity for learning. Thinking is a premium, and yet it is al…

There’s a statistic that’s been making the rounds for the better part of a decade that says the average person is exposed to about 10,000 ads every day. This has always sounded a tad suspect, as it amounts to an ad every six seconds of our waking day (it has since been debunked). But maybe the reason it’s persisted this long is because it really feels true. Our feeds are saturated with ads. The airwaves, TV broadcasts, sports sidelines, team jerseys, and our streamers are full of them. Now artificial intelligence is threatening to make that 10,000 ads a day statistic a reality. Agency Genre.ai has made AI-generated ads for IM8, Popeye’s, and Qatar Airlines, …

In artificial intelligence, 2025 marked a decisive shift. Systems once confined to research labs and prototypes began to appear as everyday tools. At the center of this transition was the rise of AI agents – AI systems that can use other software tools and act on their own. While researchers have studied AI for more than 60 years, and the term “agent” has long been part of the field’s vocabulary, 2025 was the year the concept became concrete for developers and consumers alike. AI agents moved from theory to infrastructure, reshaping how people interact with large language models, the systems that power chatbots like ChatGPT. In 2025, the definition of AI agent…

Agentic AI is coming, whether you’re ready for it or not—a PwC survey published earlier this year found that 88% of U.S. companies are beefing up their agentic AI budgets, and a broad majority have adopted AI agents in some capacity. When it comes to using AI agents for shopping or in the commerce space, more than half of consumers are or will be doing so by the end of the year. But many people still aren’t quite sure how or when to use AI agents. They may not know where to find them, how to prompt them, and in some cases, if the agent they are interacting with is legit or potentially a disguised bad actor. Fetch, an AI firm founded in 2017 in the U.K., is trying to…

Imagine living in a house with the latest smart home system: lights dim on voice command, your thermostat learns your schedule, your refrigerator orders milk before the carton runs out. It’s practical yet delightful. It improves your daily life. Now imagine that same house built on shaky foundations: the electric wiring is aging, and the plumbing is rotting. No matter how advanced your devices are the structure won’t support them reliably. That’s the difference between AI and blockchain. AI is the smart tech; blockchain is the well-designed infrastructure that ensures everything works reliably, predictably, and with integrity. Similar to how a home needs both …

Stories about AI-generated fabrications in the professional world have become part of the background hum of life since generative AI hit the mainstream three years ago. Invented quotes, fake figures, and citations that lead to non-existent research have shown up in academic publications, legal briefs, government reports, and media articles. We can often understand these events as technical failures: the AI hallucinated, someone forgot to fact-check, and an embarrassing but honest mistake became a national news story. But in some cases, they represent the tip of a much bigger iceberg—the visible portion of a much more insidious phenomenon that predates AI but that will be …

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. Is the Altman firebomb just the start of extreme doomer violence? On April 10, someone threw a molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house in San Francisco. The alleged assailant, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, didn’t stop there. He then went to OpenAI’s headquarters and told the security guards there that he intended to burn down the building and everyone inside. Two days later, someone allegedly fired two shots from a car driving past Altman’s house, but OpenAI said that…

Illinois lawyer Mathew Kerbis markets himself as the Subscription Attorney, charging businesses and individual clients a monthly rate for legal advice and offering additional services like contract review and legal document drafting for a flat fee. Kerbis is a fairly tech-savvy lawyer—he’s a regular at the American Bar Association’s ABA Techshow conference, he hosts a podcast about subscription-based billing and other industry innovations, and he uses a Stripe-integrated web portal to streamline client payments. So it’s not surprising that he’s spent time experimenting with AI tools to help him do legal research, draft documents, and otherwise assist clients more effi…

When Christopher Pelkey was killed in a road rage incident in Arizona, his family was left not only to grieve but also to navigate how to represent him in court. As they prepared to confront his killer, Gabriel Horcasitas, during sentencing, they made an unusual and deeply controversial choice: to have Pelkey appear to speak from beyond the grave. To do so, they turned to technology: An AI-generated video featuring a re-created voice and likeness of Pelkey was presented as a victim impact statement ahead of sentencing. The video showed a digitally resurrected Pelkey appearing to speak directly to the judge. Of course, the statement wasn’t truly Pelkey’s. He couldn…

For those of us who earn a living publishing content on the open internet, Amazon’s lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity can seem darkly amusing. Perplexity is among the many AI companies that has spent years extracting value from the internet in exchange for little. Its crawlers have synthesized endless amounts of content from publishers, even working around publishers’ attempts to block this behavior, all so Perplexity can summarize content without having to send traffic to the websites themselves. Now Perplexity and its rivals are going a step further, with a new wave of AI browsers that can navigate pages automatically. Perplexity has Comet, OpenAI has ChatGP…

A momentous week in the technology sector made it clear there is no sign the boom in building artificial intelligence infrastructure is slowing — despite the bubble talk. Nvidia, whose processors are the AI revolution’s backbone, became the first company to surpass $5 trillion in market value. Microsoft and OpenAI inked a deal enhancing the ChatGPT maker’s fundraising ability and OpenAI promptly started laying groundwork for an initial public offering that could value the company at $1 trillion. Amazon said it would cut 14,000 corporate jobs, just days before its cloud unit posted its strongest growth in nearly three years. These developments, along with numer…

Below, coauthors Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein share five key insights from their new book, Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work. Melissa is an associate professor of management science at Stanford University, where she codirects the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization. Michael is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, where he is a Bass University Fellow. Both have had their work featured in major publications, including The New York Times and Wired. What’s the big idea? Have you ever wished that you could assemble your version of the Avengers at work? That’s basically what it means to build a Flas…