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For all the talk of how artificial intelligence will revolutionize the way we live and work, there are few industries where generative AI has already had a profound impact. Across the education space, however, from K-12 schools to universities, AI has been widely adopted by students and teachers alike. Educators are using AI to create lesson plans and save time on administrative work and even grading. And students now regularly use AI chatbots in the classroom and for help with assignments—to varying results. The rapid clip of AI adoption has raised fraught questions about academic integrity and responsible use of the technology, among both teachers and students. But …

Capital One is buying Brex in a $5.15 billion stock-and-cash deal that underscores how traditional banks are turning to fintech startups to modernize the way businesses manage money. The acquisition, announced Thursday, would bring the San Francisco–based corporate card and expense management company into the fold of one of the largest U.S. financial institutions. The transaction is expected to close in mid-2026, pending regulatory approval and customary conditions. Brex CEO and cofounder Pedro Franceschi will continue to lead the company as part of Capital One. At first glance, the deal looks like a straightforward expansion into corporate cards. In reality, it i…

Patagonia, the outdoor apparel company, is suing Pattie Gonia, the drag queen and environmentalist, for trademark infringement—a move the company says is necessary to “protect the brand [it has] spent the last 50 years building.” In a lawsuit filed in California federal court this week, Patagonia argues that Pattie Gonia’s name, particularly when used on apparel or in support of environmental sustainability, competes “directly” with the products and advocacy work core to Patagonia. Patagonia claims in its complaint that the overlapping names have already confused customers, and that a recent move from the drag queen to sell her own branded apparel goes against a…

Everyone is talking about it in group chats, at the supermarket, and at the gas pump. No, it’s not Heated Rivalry—it is the “monster” winter storm that is set to hit the U.S. this weekend, traveling from Texas across the Southwest, into the Southeast, and finally into the Mid-Atlantic states and into New England. The storm is forecast to dump a whopping ten to 20 inches of snow, creating dangerous conditions for about half the nation, according to the Washington Post. Widespread heavy snow, sleet, damaging ice, and a potential nor’easter could affect as many as 230 million Americans from Friday, January 23 to Monday, January 26, bringing temperatures below zero, …

If you have travel plans this weekend and don’t necessarily need to travel, you may be in luck. A massive winter storm is forecasted this weekend—dubbed Winter Storm Fern by the Weather Channel—and could bring crippling ice and heavy snow to more than 30 states stretching from Arizona to Maine. With some 230 million Americans potentially affected, many airlines are preemptively warning travelers about potential weather-related disruptions and offering travel waivers in advance. The major U.S. carriers have issued alerts to travelers with flights scheduled out of airports across more than 20 states, though the terms for changing your travel plans can vary significa…

One of the giants of the gaming business has tumbled off a cliff. Ubisoft, the French game publisher best known for the Assassin’s Creed series, just announced plans to dramatically reorganize its business. In the process, the company will kill six games it had in the works, including a long-awaited Prince of Persia title that was expected this month. Ubisoft shares dropped by more than 30% following the news. The game publisher said the changes are designed to make it more agile in order to drive a “sharp rebound” for the company, which has seen its stock tank over the last five years. To chart that course, Ubisoft said it will selectively close the game studios…

With birth rates down around the world, Procter & Gamble is leaning into premium diapers to bolster sales figures. Specifically, the conglomerate is planning to sell diapers made with silk fibers in China, the company’s second-largest market, in hopes of attracting new parents. The news came out of Procter & Gamble’s earnings conference call on Thursday, during which president and CEO Shailesh Jejurikar discussed the logic behind leaning into the premium diaper category with “Pampers Prestige.” “The China team created a product,” he said, “that leveraged Chinese history with silk. The shiny, soft-yet-strong, luxurious material has been a status symbol for …

Autodesk, Inc. announced Thursday it plans to lay off about 1,000 employees, largely in sales roles. The announcement comes just a week after another tech company, Meta, announced it would eliminate up to 1,500 positions. Here’s what you need to know about the latest tech company layoffs. What’s happened? The plan will reduce the company’s workforce by approximately 7%. Autodesk indicated a significant number of the affected jobs would be in customer-facing sales roles. The plan will also reallocate resources to accelerate strategic priorities, The Wall Street Journal reported. CEO Andrew Anagnost assured employees in a letter that these layoffs were …

Valentino, who died on Monday at 93, leaves a lasting legacy full of celebrities, glamour and, in his words, knowing what women want: “to be beautiful”. The Italian fashion powerhouse has secured his dream of making a lasting impact, outliving Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. Valentino was known for his unique blend between the bold and colourful Italian fashion and the elegant French haute couture—the highest level of craftsmanship in fashion, with exceptional detail and strict professional dressmaking standards. The blending of these styles to create the signature Valentino silhouette made his style distinctive. Valentino’s style was reserved, and over…

Large language models feel intelligent because they speak fluently, confidently, and at scale. But fluency is not understanding, and confidence is not perception. To grasp the real limitation of today’s AI systems, it helps to revisit an idea that is more than two thousand years old. In The Republic, Plato describes the allegory of the cave: prisoners chained inside a cave can only see shadows projected on a wall. Having never seen the real objects casting those shadows, they mistake appearances for reality, and they are deprived from experiencing the real world. Large language models live in a very similar cave. LLMs don’t perceive the world: they read a…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company,covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. I’m dedicating this week’s newsletter to a conversation I had with the main author of Anthropic’s new and improved “constitution,” the document it uses to govern the outputs of its models and its Claude chatbot. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X @thesullivan. A necessary update Amid growin…

As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, an auction in New York will feature rare items that trace the nation’s history. The event Friday at Christie’s, dubbed “We the People: America at 250,” will bring together foundational political texts, iconic American art and rare historical artifacts. Among the highlights is a rare 1776 broadside printing of the Declaration of Independence produced in New Hampshire by printer Robert Luist Fowle, estimated at $3 million to $5 million. “It’s historically significant because you get to see what people at the time actually saw,” said Peter Klarnet, senior specialist for books, manuscripts and Americana at Chri…

AI is no longer just a cascade of algorithms trained on massive amounts of data. It has become a physical and infrastructural phenomenon, one whose future will be determined not by breakthroughs in benchmarks, but by the hard realities of power, geography, regulation, and the very nature of intelligence. Businesses that fail to see this will be blindsided. Data centers were once the sterile backrooms of the internet: important, but invisible. Today, they are the beating heart of generative AI, the physical engines that make large language models (LLMs) possible. But what if these engines, and the models they power, are hitting limitations that can’t be solved with mo…

What shape could buildings take in 2026? Fast Company asked architects from some of the top firms working around the world what they thought about the look of architecture in 2026. Of course, a building designed in 2026 almost certainly will not be completed in 2026, and construction timelines are notoriously fluid. But according to experts, there are some overarching trends in architectural design that could put a clear 2026 stamp on buildings designed this year, whenever they officially open. Here’s the question we put to a panel of designers and leaders in architecture: When they finally get built, what will buildings designed in 2026 look like, and what w…

Foldable phones have spent years trying to justify themselves. Some were too fragile, others too bulky, and most felt like solutions in search of a problem. The Galaxy Z TriFold is Samsung’s clearest attempt yet to answer a more reasonable question: Can one device replace the phone-tablet combo without becoming a chore to carry? Coming to the United States later this month, the TriFold folds twice, opens into a 10-inch screen, and closes back into a pocketable form. It’s an assertive design, but not a novelty play. Samsung seems very aware that this kind of device only makes sense for a specific kind of user. The double fold is the trick, but the software does…

Last year, various surveys, including reliable indicators, have highlighted a significant decline in reading habits over the past decades. The most striking evidence is not simply that people read less, but that their capacity for deep reading is weakening. According to OECD data, the proportion of 15-year-olds who fail to reach minimum reading proficiency has now risen to nearly one in four across advanced economies, with sharp declines in tasks requiring inference, evaluation, and integration of information across texts. In the United States, NAEP scores show that average reading performance among 13-year-olds has fallen to its lowest level in decades, reversing…

When I was a product marketing leader for a corporate regional bank, I found myself getting annoyed during an all-day strategy meeting. My frustration came from hearing the same voices, sharing the same old ideas. I wondered why other people, especially the women in the room, weren’t speaking up. I remember thinking, “Well, you could be the one to speak up.” I felt nerves jump in my throat and doubt sink heavily in my stomach. Who was I to speak up? I thought that others in the room were smarter than me since they had higher titles and more experience. Looking back now, I realize that I had a big problem, a Pedestal Problem. I silenced my ideas because I was intimida…

In the world of social impact and sustainability, 2025’s word of the year could have been “headwinds.” It became a euphemism for everything from political pressure and regulatory changes to economic uncertainty, AI disruption, and social upheaval. But in many ways, “headwinds” is an understatement for what impact and sustainability leaders across the corporate and nonprofit sectors navigated in a year of budget cuts and evolving risk factors. For much of the past year, leaders across the corporate and nonprofit sectors have been recalibrating approaches to advancing their missions against these trends. In 2026, we’ll start to see those new approaches in action. …

While traveling to Riyadh for the Fortune Global Forum, FII9, and the Global Health Exhibition, I witnessed something that should be a wake-up call for health systems everywhere. Saudi Arabia is already operating the kind of connected, AI-enabled healthcare infrastructure many countries are still debating how to build. At FII9, the conversation was unmistakable. Global innovation momentum is shifting toward the Middle East, and nowhere more than Saudi Arabia, where national digital platforms like Sehhaty already give millions of residents unified access to their health data. At the Global Health Exhibition, I saw population-level analytics, AI-powered diagnostics, multiom…

Severance is the hit sci-fi show about office workers who “sever” their consciousness—slipping into another mode the moment they arrive at the office, then forgetting everything about their 9-to-5 as soon as they leave. The concept was inspired by the creator’s own monotonous desk job before he found success in television. Part of the show’s appeal lies in how familiar the premise feels: a dull, repetitive workday that people can’t wait to escape. In the real world, employees don’t have a mental switch to flip, but they’ve found subtler, and potentially more insidious, ways to disengage. The latest trend, dubbed “task-masking,” has taken over Instagram and TikTok. It’…

Nearly 500 buildings designed by Wright were built during his lifetime, but almost 15% of those have been demolished or lost through neglect, according to the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, an organization that works to preserve the famed architect’s work Now, a new logo for the organization serves as a reminder of how important it is to protect architectural history. Designed by the studio Order, the Conservancy’s new logo features a missing square that’s meant to represent the void when one of Wright’s buildings is lost or neglected. The Conservancy’s previous logo was a representation of the Lark Administration Building in Buffalo, New York, which…

Should I take this project? Say yes to the new job offer? Stick with this plan or walk away? Every choice we make can feel huge. And every path has its own set of risks and rewards. There are always more questions for every life-changing decision. Sometimes the pros-and-cons lists feel more like busywork than progress. You check off the boxes, stare at the lists, and still end up confused, stuck in the same mental loop. That’s why I rely on the rule of 3 framework to make tough decisions. I hope it helps you clarify your life-changing choices. How it works Whenever you’re stuck, force yourself to create three paths: B, C, and D. Why not A? A is usually the defa…