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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…

The European Union’s law enforcement agency cautioned Tuesday that artificial intelligence is turbocharging organized crime that is eroding the foundations of societies across the 27-nation bloc as it becomes intertwined with state-sponsored destabilization campaigns. The grim warning came at the launch of the latest edition of a report on organized crime published every four years by Europol that is compiled using data from police across the EU and will help shape law enforcement policy in the bloc in coming years. “Cybercrime is evolving into a digital arms race targeting governments, businesses and individuals. AI-driven attacks are becoming more precise and de…

Like many people, I use AI for quick, practical tasks. But two recent interactions made me pay closer attention to how easily these systems slip into emotional validation. In both cases, the model praised, affirmed, and echoed back feelings that weren’t actually there. I uploaded photos of my living room for holiday decorating tips, including a close-up of the ceramic stockings my late mother hand painted. The model praised the stockings and thanked me for sharing something “so meaningful,” as if it understood the weight of them. A few days later, something similar happened at work. I finished a long run, came home with an idea, and dropped it into ChatGPT to pres…

As AI takes on a greater role in our media ecosystem, many journalists look at it like a farmer sees an invasive species: as a force that threatens to slowly choke, kill, and replace their work, potentially threatening their livelihood. There’s good reason for this: For reporters and editors, AI represents an assault on multiple fronts. Not only can large language models (LLMs) take over many tasks within journalistic work—research, writing, editing—AI systems also threaten to substitute media publications entirely. The more readers get their information from AI, the less reason they have to engage with publishers or journalists directly. Ask a journalist how it…

SpaceX owns 98% of global rocket launches, a monopoly with virtually no competition. Only China is competing with Elon Musk at this point in number of launches and, while the country is getting closer to mass-producing reusable rockets, it appears far from making that happen. The world needs to scramble. We can’t let a single company dominate the future of humanity—and much less one that is owned by Musk. “If you copy SpaceX, it’ll take you 10 years to get where they are today,” Lin Kayser, cofounder of Dubai-based engineering AI firm Leap 71, tells me in a video interview. “But in 10 years, SpaceX won’t be where they are today. The game will be over.” Startups and na…

Over the past year, a quiet shift has been unfolding across the internet. A growing wave of AI-generated news and content sites has flooded search results. Many of them are technically accurate, cleanly written, and structurally sound, yet they feel strangely interchangeable. A recent analysis by NewsGuard identified more than 1,000 AI-driven content farms producing articles at scale, often without original reporting, perspective, or voice. The information is there. But something essential is missing. It is not accuracy or clarity; it is a point of view. That absence points to a deeper question: If everyone is using the same models, trained on the same data, to generate i…

For a while now, we’ve been hearing warnings about AI eliminating jobs. First, it was only at the fringes. But now it’s starting to bite into roles once thought untouchable. It isn’t just administrative work, copywriting, or design anymore; even advisory roles, data analytics, and coding are being reshaped by automation. But history teaches us that technological disruption doesn’t eliminate work, it reshapes it. The industrial revolution, for example, didn’t end human contribution, it simply redefined the places where humans bring the most value. AI is doing the same thing today. While it does, in fact, take (or reduce the need for) some jobs, it can, and will, p…

With AI capabilities doubling in a matter of months, agility is no longer a competitive advantage for business leaders—it’s now become a survival skill. “The entire order of companies and the way in which they deliver value and the entire business models that they have been built on for the last few decades or longer are being rewritten in front of us,” Peter Smart, chief experience officer and managing partner of product design firm Fantasy, said during a discussion at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “The new agility is coherence: Can you create the conditions by which it’s very clear what we do, what the value is that we produce, and how we’re going to get there?” …

The CEO job description has remained remarkably stable for decades—but the times they are a’changin’. That stability persisted through wave after wave of technological change. The internet, mobile, cloud computing—each transformed business operations, but none fundamentally altered the CEO’s core responsibilities. Strategy, culture, resource allocation, organizational design—the essential functions remained constant even as the tools improved. AI is different. It isn’t just a tool that executes; it is also a system that makes choices. It makes judgments about customers, employees, and strategy. And this means that when you deploy AI, you’re not just installing sof…

Artificial intelligence is rapidly learning to autonomously design and run biological experiments, but the systems intended to govern those capabilities are struggling to keep pace. AI company OpenAI and biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks announced in February 2026 that OpenAI’s flagship model GPT-5 had autonomously designed and run 36,000 biological experiments. It did this through a robotic cloud laboratory, a facility where automated equipment controlled remotely by computers carries out experiments. The AI model proposed study designs, and robots carried them out and fed the data back to the model for the next round. Humans set the goal, and the machines did much of …

As autonomous AI agents increasingly browse, compare prices, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers, one challenge is becoming unavoidable for merchants: trust. On Wednesday, Akamai Technologies announced a strategic collaboration with Visa aimed at addressing that problem. The partnership integrates Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai’s behavioral intelligence, allowing merchants to authenticate AI agents, link them to real consumers, and block malicious bot traffic before it ever reaches sensitive systems. The move comes as agent-driven traffic floods the internet. According to Akamai’s 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report, AI-powered bot traffic sur…

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. A February 9 blog post about AI, titled “Something Big Is Happening,” rocketed around the web this week in a way that reminded me of the golden age of the blogosphere. Everyone seemed to be talking about it—though as was often true back in the day, its virality was fueled by a powerful cocktail of adoration and scorn. Reactions ranged from “Send this to everyone you care about” to “I don’t buy this at all.” The author, Matt Shumer (who shared his post on X the following day), is the CEO of a startup called OthersideAI. He explained he was addressing it to “my family, my friends, the people I care about wh…

Immediately, after a keynote speaker I was coaching for a large conference finished her rehearsal I pulled her aside. “How much of your script was written by AI?” I asked. She looked up at me out of the corner of her eye and hesitantly said, “Most of it.” I delicately shared with her that I could hear it. She started several sentences with phrases like: “Here’s the thing,” “The truth is,” and the word “Unlock!” She sounded like a bot and not like a human, and, if I could hear it, I was certain the audience would too. Around the same time, a speechwriter I work with told me her client kept barking orders at her as if she was speaking to her AI assistant. “Delete that.…

As companies ramp up pressure on their workers to embrace AI, a new source of workplace conflict has emerged. A report released this week by background check company Checkr suggests that managers and employees are increasingly at odds over AI use in the workplace. Most employees seem to view AI with skepticism, adopting it largely in response to directives from managers and leadership. For many leaders, however, it has become a business imperative as they scramble to keep up with competitors and assuage shareholder concerns—and managers seem to be absorbing that message. The Checkr report, which surveyed 3,000 workers (half of whom were managers and half of whom were …

Every year, companies and space agencies launch hundreds of rockets into space—and that number is set to grow dramatically with ambitious missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But these dreams hinge on one critical challenge: propulsion—the methods used to push rockets and spacecraft forward. To make interplanetary travel faster, safer, and more efficient, scientists need breakthroughs in propulsion technology. Artificial intelligence is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs. We’re a team of engineers and graduate students who are studying how AI in general, and a subset of AI called machine learning in particular…

There’s an idea in AI called “liquid content.” It typically refers to the idea of morphing the facts, ideas, and expressions from one medium to another. The most well-known example is a feature within Google’s NotebookLM: Once you’ve filled a folder with various kinds of data, it can whip up a podcast about that data, enlisting a couple of cheery AI-generated voices to give you an overview, analysis, or debate. Taken to its logical extreme, liquid content suggests a future for media companies where what you create is repurposed across any and all formats. Making a podcast? With the right tools and prompting, in mere minutes, it can be reimagined as a series of clips, …

Artificial intelligence is radically changing how healthcare providers tackle vision loss, with tools that can be used from diagnosis to treatment and even follow-up care. One such example is Visilan, which uses smartphone imaging, telemedicine, and AI to screen, diagnose, and monitor patients for vision care. And with this technology, more of the 1 billion-plus patients who live with vision loss can be treated, Jordan Shuff, executive director and founder of Visilan, said at last month’s World Changing Ideas Summit, cohosted by Fast Company and Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. But in this race to expand care, it’s also important to have guardrail…

Not long ago, I was speaking at an event when a recent college graduate approached me. He’d studied neuroscience and, like a lot of STEM generalists, had set his sights on consulting—firms, like Deloitte or Accenture, that have long hired armies of junior associates for data gathering and analysis. He’d earned top grades at a great school. But all of his outreach—his informational interviews, his applications and follow-ups—had come to nothing. His story is not unusual. If entry-level consulting or finance jobs have always been difficult to land, they’re even harder to get now. This generation grew up believing that developing key skills such as coding and data analys…

Egyptian coder Assem Sabry has long wanted an AI model that represents his culture. The problem is he hasn’t been able to find one. “The AI industry in Egypt . . . doesn’t exist,” Sabry says. So he built his own: Horus, named after the ancient Egyptian god of the sky. Sabry says the goal was to stop “relying on other models, like the American or Chinese models,” and instead ask what a more Egyptian-focused model might look like. To make Horus work, he trained it using GPUs from Google Colab and other cloud providers, alongside open-source datasets. The model, released in early April, drew more than 800 downloads in its first week on Hugging Face. Sabry is one of a…

Debate about whether artificial intelligence can replicate the intellectual labor of doctors, lawyers, or PhDs forgoes a deeper concern that’s looming: Entire companies—not just individual jobs—may be rendered obsolete by the accelerating pace of AI adoption. Reports suggesting OpenAI will charge $20,000 per month for agents trained at a PhD level spun up the ongoing debate about whose job is safe from AI and whose job is not. “I’ve not seen it be that impressive yet, but it’s likely not far off,” James Villarrubia, head of digital innovation and AI at NASA CAS, told me. Sean McGregor, the founder of Responsible AI Collaborative who earned a PhD in computer sc…

An increasing number of companies are finding the much-promised financial gains of implementing artificial intelligence in the workplace have been slow to materialize. But that isn’t stopping many CEOs from spending even more on AI in the coming year. A new study from advisory firm Teneo finds that 68% of CEOs will increase their AI spending next year. A growing number, however, are aware that they need to start showing returns on that investment—and an important part of their job is convincing shareholders to remain patient. “As efforts shift from hype to execution, businesses are under pressure to show ROI from rising AI spend,” the company wrote. “Large-cap CEO…

As I said in previous articles, executives like to say they’re “integrating AI.” But most still treat artificial intelligence as a feature, not a foundation. They bolt it onto existing systems without realizing that each automation hides a layer of invisible human work, and a growing set of unseen risks. AI may be transforming productivity, but it’s also changing the very nature of labor, accountability, and even trust inside organizations. The future of work won’t just be about humans and machines collaborating: It will be about managing the invisible partnerships that emerge when machines start working alongside us . . . and sometimes, behind our backs. The ill…

Nearly every company I work with is focused on using AI to drive productivity and efficiency. They are starting to see real gains, and that’s leading to excitement about AI’s future potential. However, AI used to drive efficiency is only the starting line, and there’s real risk if we stop there. In my work with Fortune 500 leaders across the C-suite, from chief HR officers (CHROs) to CTOs and CMOs, I’ve seen that the very best organizations recognize a bigger opportunity: using AI to help managers build connection and trust with their teams. The companies that are able to leverage AI both to drive efficiency gains and to build highly motivated teams will be the ones that …

For nearly four years now, the conversation about generative AI has revolved almost exclusively around productivity, threatened jobs, automatable tasks, efficiency, and competitiveness. But there is a largely underestimated dimension to this revolution: its cultural effects. AI is not just transforming how we work; it is transforming how we are together, how we trust each other, how we communicate, and how we organize ourselves. To measure this, it helps to borrow a framework from Erin Meyer, a professor at INSEAD whose book The Culture Map identifies eight dimensions along which the cultures of the world differ. Applied to artificial intelligence, Meyer’s eight dimen…

AI isn’t eliminating human work. It’s redistributing human judgment, away from routine tasks and into the narrow zones where ambiguity is high, mistakes are costly, and trust actually matters. This shift helps explain a growing disconnect in the AI conversation. On one hand, models are improving at breathtaking speed. On the other, many ambitious AI deployments stall, scale more slowly than expected, or quietly revert to hybrid workflows. The issue isn’t capability. It’s trust. The trust gap most AI strategies overlook AI adoption doesn’t hinge on whether a system can do a task. It hinges on whether humans are willing to rely on its output without checking …