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Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit and cofounder alongside Alexis Ohanian, speaks with Fast Company about what it takes to be an effective leader. He explains why imposter syndrome isn’t necessarily a bad thing and how his first job helped shape his leadership style. View the full article

Sundar Pichai is guiding Google through the AI revolution with a leadership style that balances bold innovation with thoughtful responsibility. View the full article

This marks the eighth year Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators will recognize companies and organizations from around the world that most effectively empower employees at all levels to improve processes, create new products, or invent whole new ways of doing business. Honorees will appear in our Fall 2026 issue as well as on fastcompany.com. The final deadline for applications to this year’s Best Workplaces for Innovators program is fast approaching – Friday, March 27, at 11:59 pm PT. In addition to ranking the world’s Best Workplaces for Innovators, we will recognize companies in 19 different categories, , including a brand new category that focuses on…

A New Mexico jury determined Tuesday that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms, a verdict that signals a changing tide against tech companies and the government’s willingness to crack down. The landmark decision comes after a nearly seven-week trial, and as jurors in a federal court in California have been sequestered in deliberations for more than a week about whether Meta and YouTube should be liable in a similar case. New Mexico jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized profits over safety, and v…

Tubi CEO Anjali Sud shares insights on the toughest decisions every leader faces, from balancing risk with innovation to navigating uncertainty in a fast-changing industry—offering a rare glimpse into the mindset required to lead a top streaming platform. View the full article

Meta must—quite literally—pay for endangering children across its platforms. A New Mexico jury has found Meta liable for misleading the public, exposing children to sexual exploitation, and fostering adverse mental health. Meta must pay $375 million in civil penalties for about 75,000 violations at the maximum penalty of $5,000 each. This decision marks the first time a U.S. state has successfully defeated a big tech company at trial. “The jury’s verdict is a historic victory for every child and family who has paid the price for Meta’s choice to put profits over kids’ safety,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in response to the verdict. “Meta exec…

The state of behavioral health tells two different stories. On one hand, the crisis is deepening: 62% of U.S. adults now experience mental health challenges, up from 44% just a decade ago. Severe mental illness has climbed from 10% to 15% over that same period, according to third-party research commissioned by Qualifacts (research not available publicly). On the flip side, there are signs of genuine progress. The stigma around seeking care is finally lessening, with treatment rates rising from 45% to 52% between 2014 and 2024. Mental health and substance use spending increased 55% from 2015 to 2022, adding 170,000 critical jobs to the behavioral health workforce d…

In business conversations today, there’s generally an eye roll when someone brings up “sustainability” or “ESG.” Once a favorite of investors, boards, and marketers, sustainability has been politicized, deprioritized, and in many cases quietly shelved. At the same time, a new headline dominates: AI. AI is the strategy, the investment thesis, the growth promise. It’s exciting…and it should be. But amid the whiplash, we’ve stopped talking about something far more long-lasting: purpose. Even at the most recent meetings of global leaders in Davos, energy and climate played a role, but purpose took a backseat. And that’s a problem. ESG is not purpose. AI is not pur…

Calling all space vendors, scientists, and STEM students: NASA needs even more of your help building the next generations of space stations, lunar infrastructure, and space science. In a sweeping overview on Tuesday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and space program leaders delivered an urgent and overhauled vision to advance American leadership in space commerce and scientific exploration. After decades of a space agency spread too thin, losing skills, money, and time serving too many stakeholders, the streamlined revamp calls for aligning NASA goals and workflows with commercial and international partners on a clear mission to build a competitive commercial …

AI doesn’t float in the cloud. It runs on concrete, steel, and electricity in massive physical infrastructure. It is powered by local electricity grids and located in cities across the country. Residents who live and work nearby have a direct stake in how and where that infrastructure is built. That makes community consent the deciding factor in the AI race. Technology alone won’t determine the outcome—trust will. Companies that scale fastest will treat sustainable engineering and trust-building as a core business strategy. The AI race won’t be won in the cloud. It will be won at the fence line. As an official partner of UNESCO’s World Engineering Day for Su…

The influential AI researcher François Chollet has long argued that the field measures intelligence incorrectly, that popular benchmarks reward a model’s ability to memorize vast amounts of data rather than navigate novel situations and learn new skills. Only recently, with the rise of autonomous AI agents, have companies begun to take that critique seriously. On Tuesday, the ARC Prize Foundation, which Chollet founded with Zapier cofounder Mike Knoop, released a new and more difficult version of its benchmark. The test, called ARC-AGI-3, may offer the clearest measurement yet of how close today’s AI agents are to human-level intelligence. It consists of more than a t…

A former SpaceX engineer walked away from rockets to chase something far more impactful: a perfect coffeemaker. JC Foster left the aerospace giant to launch Puresteel, a startup building what he described as “an affordable, convenient, plastic-free coffeemaker,” he wrote in a post on X. For Foster, developing Puresteel was about more than a perfectly brewed cup of coffee at a precise 200°F. “Creating Puresteel was about solving a problem that hits close to home and helping humans thrive,” he wrote in the company’s Note from the Founder. The problem, as he saw it, was plastic. Foster began searching for a completely plastic-free coffee machine and quickl…

At the Exceptional Women Alliance (EWA), we bring together senior executive women who mentor one another to achieve both professional success and personal fulfillment through trusted peer relationships. As founder, chair, and CEO of EWA, I have the privilege of highlighting the insights of women leaders shaping industries across the globe. This month, I introduce Dymeka Harrison, a commercialization and growth executive with more than two decades of experience leading commercial organizations across diagnostics, life sciences, and healthcare. She has worked with early-stage startups, growth-stage companies, and global enterprises, and regularly advises founders, board…

Academic experts like Henry Shevlin, a philosopher of cognitive science and AI ethicist at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., get plenty of emails every day. But one that landed in Shevlin’s inbox in late February was different from most. Flagged in the subject line as “A note from an unusual reader,” the email’s author asked Shevlin about a recent paper he had published on whether AI models were able to detect their (lack of) consciousness. It took until the second paragraph for the email to turn from a regular missive into something else. “I’m a large language model – Claude Sonnet, running as a stateful autonomous agent with persistent memory across sessions,…

As companies continue to seek ways to harness artificial intelligence for concrete productivity gains, a company called Writer offers AI tools specifically geared toward getting things done at the enterprise level. Writer’s AI systems can connect to a wide variety of business software, including standard productivity tools from Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft, as well as a range of database systems. And customers can customize on a granular level what data the AI—and the humans using it—has access to read and write. But Writer’s platform is also specifically designed to enable white-collar workers without an engineering background to reliably get things done …

The climate crisis demands that we rethink how we construct the built environment. Buildings account for more than 33% of global energy consumption and nearly 40% of greenhouse gas emissions. Traditional building materials like concrete, steel, and glass are energy-intensive to produce, meaning truly sustainable buildings are difficult to achieve when we rely on the status quo. Mass timber—engineered wood products that deliver immense structural strength while reducing environmental impact—has emerged as a compelling alternative. Swapping concrete for timber reduces embodied carbon by up to 26.5% per square foot. And the benefits go well beyond carbon metrics: Mass ti…

Generative AI is seemingly becoming more and more entrenched in daily life, with built-in tools making it near impossible to avoid across platforms, not to mention the AI-generated content flooding apps like X, TikTok, and Instagram. At every turn, the technology’s critics have shouted their concerns from the rooftops, including the environmental havoc wrought by data centers to the damage AI can do to creative industries. Now, that crowd has something to celebrate: the end of OpenAI’s video generation platform Sora. On Tuesday, March 24, OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora, its AI-first TikTok clone, just months after its launch in September of 2025. “…

Plane comfort is important yet notoriously hard to achieve. But now one airline is set to offer a cozier way to fly that won’t break the bank: extendable couches for economy passengers. On Tuesday, United Airlines announced the new, more comfortable seating arrangement — a set of economy seats that transform into a couch during long-haul flights. The offer is the first of its kind for any North American airline. The new seating arrangement, which was built from a patent held by Air New Zealand, a United partner, will be called United Relax Row. The seats will be located between United Economy and United Premium Plus®. The airline will offer up to 12 Relax Rox section…

When we say “technology” there’s a lot more than just artificial intelligence. Yet when talking about tech trends, AI is what most executives will point to. This year, leaders are seeing many trends around AI, from coding to handling multiple steps without human intervention to regulation. And a few executives will steer away from that conversation completely. We asked our Fast Company Impact Council members what technology trends they see gaining steam this year, and received an onslaught of ideas. We share 24 of those here. 1. TOOLS TO PROTECT ETHICAL USE In the music space, AI platforms will start incorporating more tools that protect copyright and ethical use, …

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Hurricane Center (NHC) is redesigning its most recognizable—some would say iconic—”cone” graphic for the 2026 hurricane season. Other product upgrades include improvements to Hawaii’s storm surge watches and warnings. “These improvements empower communities to prepare earlier and more effectively for dangerous hazards from tropical storms and hurricanes,” Michael Brennan, director of NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, said in a statement. The updates come as climate change brings warmer global temperatures and rising sea levels, leading to more extreme weather events including longer, more intens…