What's on Your Mind?

If you’re self-employed and spend any time on social media, you’ve seen the debate. One person swears you need a professional website from day one. Another says a logo is the first thing to invest in. Someone else is selling a $500 course that promises to “elevate your brand’s presence.” Everyone has an opinion about where your money should go first (and they’re usually selling whatever they’re recommending). I’ve been running my own business for three years. I’ve run the branding gamut from DIY templates in Canva to hiring a professional brand designer. Here’s what I’ve learned: the right branding investment depends entirely on where your business is toda…

A recent Washington Post investigation described something called “degree hacking” — students racing through accredited online bachelor’s and master’s programs in weeks rather than years. One woman earned both degrees in 2024 for a combined cost of just over $4,000. Another completed 16 college courses in 22 days. A cottage industry of YouTube coaches and $1,500 consulting packages has sprung up to help people game the system. Academic officials are alarmed. Accreditors are saying they may investigate. Reddit moderators at one university forum have had to create a separate subforum to contain the conflict between regular students and speed-runners. I am not alarme…

Electric bills are rising in Ann Arbor, Michigan, just like in other cities. But a new city program is starting to install city-owned solar panels and batteries at homes, a move that could save some residents hundreds a year. The first projects are underway now. For residents, it’s a way to get the benefits of solar without the upfront investment. “Any other way, I couldn’t afford to do it,” says Bruce Schauer, age 80, who saw the advantages of adding solar panels and a battery, but wouldn’t have gotten a system otherwise. After his system is installed in the next couple of weeks and starts sending power to his home, he expects to save around $400 a year on his electr…

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. Are the biggest AI labs betting on the wrong horse? Big AI companies are betting nearly all of their R&D and capital expenditure on the idea that pre-trained transformer models can deliver AI with human-level general intelligence. This approach relies heavily on backpropagation, the standard algorithm used to train deep neural networks. Ben Goertzel, who coined the term “AGI” with his 2005 book Artificial General Intelligence (co-written with DeepMind founder Shane Legg), i…

AI experiments are usually simple to launch and often produce promising results in controlled settings. But translating those successes into scaled, enterprise-wide impact can be much harder. As Chair and CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLP, I have counseled many senior leaders on AI implementation, and this has become a recurring theme in my conversations with clients. Many of them turn to us to help them move beyond what I’d call “pilot fatigue.” Our latest State of AI in the Enterprise research points to the same trend: companies are launching numerous pilots but are scaling fewer than 30% of them. The pace of AI innovation is extraordinary. New models, tools, and…

“When are you looking to retire?” It may seem like a harmless question for a boss to pose to an employee, but for older workers, it can come with a coded message—it’s time for you to end your career. “There could be insinuations, like, ‘What are you looking to do after this?’ Or, ‘how long do you anticipate being here?’” says New York-based employment lawyer Mahir Nasir, who’s had multiple older clients come to him with scenarios of getting nudged towards retirement. He’s seen this play out in various ways. For instance, say an employee’s been working at a bank for 20 years, during which they’ve established strong relationships in the specific territory they…

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, …

It’s understandable that following the announcement that John Ternus will succeed Tim Cook as Apple CEO, people will pore over his résumé for signs of how the company might change. Cook was famously an operations and logistics wizard, handpicked by Steve Jobs to manage Apple with his trademark efficiency. But his successor is more of a mystery. Ternus has been a senior vice president of hardware engineering at Apple for five years, and a VP since 2013, but beyond that he hasn’t been credited with steering the company in a particular direction. All anyone can really say for now is that Apple will be led by someone who is strongly experienced in hardware, which sounds …

A few times every month, I push and force my brain to come up with new ideas. The process is counterintuitive. I become bored on purpose. I believe an idle mind connects better dots. I feel guilty every time. But I push through it. I’m supposed to be working. I have a to-do list and emails to respond to. And I deliberately allow my mind to do nothing. This idea is a hard sell right now. People swear by all sorts of productivity frameworks. We’ve built entire work cultures around the idea that idle time is wasted time. So we fill every moment with work or content. With something. Anything to avoid the discomfort of just being. History’s great minds understood the …

Alison Rand is a strategist, author, and design leader working at the intersection of design strategy, organizational structure, and operations. A former developer who helped build early UX practices at agencies like Huge and Hot Studio, she now consults with organizations to untangle complexity—how people work, how decisions travel, and how culture is shaped through structure. She is pursuing a master’s degree in Strategic Foresight at the University of Houston, co-founded Forty Fifty, a social health platform for women navigating midlife, and is the author of Sentido with MIT Press. In her interview with Doreen Lorenzo, Alison explores what it means to lead creative…

For years, it was common for even the biggest tech companies to have annual capital expenditures, or capex, in the single- to low-double-digit-billion range. You might have heard a tech company say it planned to spend $9 billion, $15 billion, or even $25 billion on research, development, and other costs in the upcoming fiscal year. But lately, capital expenditures at the largest tech companies have been off the charts, with some companies now regularly forecasting single-year capex in the hundreds of billions. The driving factor for this is, of course, artificial intelligence (AI). Some of the biggest names in tech are throwing previously unthinkable sums b…

The new orthopedic wing at Sanford Health’s hospital campus in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has a unique patient-centric amenity that few other hospitals can offer. On the top two floors of the facility, which conducts surgeries and emergency services and connects to a nearby delivery ward, there is now a hotel. In largely rural South Dakota, where a trip to the hospital often means a drive halfway across the state, hospital patients now have the option to stay overnight ahead of a big procedure under the same roof as the hospital. “It’s much more convenient for patients to go down an elevator ride for eight floors and check in for surgery than commuting across town or …

Bringing home the Baconator is not as easy as it used to be, and it’s about to get even harder in cities around the country. Fast food giant Wendy’s is continuing its push to close hundreds of locations as it seeks to stabilize profits and shed underperforming restaurants. Nearly six months after the burger chain first announced the plan on an investor call, its U.S. footprint is decidedly smaller, with multiple states seeing net store declines in the double digits, according to a review of Wendy’s store locator tool. As of Friday, the tool showed 5,675 locations in the United States. That’s roughly 200 fewer locations than what it showed at the end of Sep…

Elon Musk on Thursday sparred with an attorney for OpenAI during his third day of testimony in the contentious trial over the company’s pivot from nonprofit status to a for-profit venture valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. The trial centers on the 2015 birth of the ChatGPT maker as a nonprofit startup primarily funded by Musk. It pits the world’s richest person against Sam Altman, a fellow OpenAI co-founder he accuses of betraying promises to keep the company as a nonprofit dedicated to humanity’s benefit. Tempers have flared on both sides of the high-stakes trial, as the morning began with an existential discussion about the future of humanity — complete with r…

Change, whether personal or professional, can be challenging. But it can also create opportunities to make a meaningful impact. But navigating the uncertainty is tricky. Art Markman, a leading cognitive scientist and Fast Company contributor, joined Fast Company executive digital director Maia McCann in a recent conversation to share strategies on how to stay grounded, optimistic, and purposeful during times of change. Drawing on his expertise in well-being, Art offers tools to help you influence outcomes you care about and show up with clarity and confidence, no matter what the year brings. View the full article

With gas prices, energy bills, and grocery costs all rising, the affordability crisis is top of mind for most workers. But you can’t talk about that crisis without also talking about extreme wealth inequality, says Patricia Stottlemyer, policy lead for labor rights at Oxfam America. And just as affordability has worsened recently, so has the gap between regular workers and the rich, including company CEOs. In 2025, for example, the top 1,500 CEOs of the world’s largest corporations saw an 11% real-terms pay raise. The average global worker, on the other hand, saw their real wages increase by only 0.5%. That means those CEOs saw their pay increase 20 time…

AI is changing how directors and cinematographers work—but not the way you might think When people think of artificial intelligence in Hollywood, they might picture deepfakes, synthetic actors, or AI-generated scripts and video. Google’s Veo3, along with other tools like Pika Labs and Kling AI, made headlines for their photorealistic AI generated video clips (as did OpenAI’s Sora 2 before the company in March announced plans to shutter it). But for freelance filmmakers, the real shift is happening behind the scenes. For years, cinematographers and directors have had to wear many hats: artist, technician, project manager, negotiator. Now, AI is quietly taking over…

Apple posted strong results for its quarterly earnings on Thursday, but investors’ attention is also focused on the upcoming CEO change and the tech firm’s artificial intelligence strategy. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced earlier this month he will be stepping down from the role, with Apple’s head of hardware engineering, John Ternus, assuming the role later this year. The January-March results announced Thursday reflect the continued momentum of iPhone sales. Cook said in a statement that it was the company’s best March quarter ever, with “double-digit growth across every geographic segment.” The company earned $29.58 billion, or $2.01 per share, in the January-March per…

Raising Cane’s, the Louisiana-based chicken finger chain known for its tangy sauce, crinkle fries, and thick Texas toast, is continuing to expand. This May, Cane’s will open locations in seven states, including its first in one. The company recently told USA Today that the new openings will kick off on May 12 and continue through May 27 with new restaurants coming to California, New York, North Carolina, Maryland, Florida, and Ohio. Additionally, Arkansas will get its first-ever Raising Cane’s in the Jonesboro area. Two other locations — Oklahoma City and Lexington, Kentucky — will reopen, on May 4 and May 18, respectively, after being revamped. “We’re staying co…

AI is being touted as the future of weather forecasting—faster and more precise. But new research shows a major blind spot: it often fails at predicting extreme weather. Traditional physics-based models still do better. “They do perform well on a lot of tasks, but for very extreme events—that are the most important for society—they still struggle,” says Sebastian Engelke, a statistics professor at the University of Geneva and one of the authors of a new study in Science that pitted some of the leading AI weather models, including GraphCast and Pangu-Weather, against a database of recent extreme events. For record-breaking heat, like a heat wave in Siberia in early…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported a Salmonella outbreak in more than a dozen states. Worse, the outbreak appears to be linked to a strain of the bacterium that may be resistant to antibiotics. Here’s what you need to know about the source of the outbreak, where its occuring, and what you can do about it. What’s happened? On April 23, the CDC posted an update regarding its ongoing investigation into a multistate outbreak of Salmonella infections. The outbreak is believed to be linked to backyard poultry, such as ducks and chickens. The first reported infection linked to the outbreak is believed to have occurred on February 2…

It’s official: the robots are taking over. Taking over the internet, that is. Conspiracy theorists have long discussed the “dead internet” theory, which reasons that online spaces, once entirely populated and filled with content created by humans, have slowly become dominated by bots posing as people. The more extreme conspiracists allege that this transformation is deliberate, with governments and corporations using the bots to manipulate public perception. With the rise of AI since ChatGPT’s debut in 2022, the dead internet theory—or at least some version of it—has sounded more and more plausible. Now, according to a recent study, it’s closer to coming true. …

At one point or another, most of us have stared at our computer screen and wondered: Is this it? For some, it’s a passing feeling. Yet, for others, that boredom turns into lingering dissatisfaction, leading to quiet quitting, or even walking away from a job entirely, which rarely solves the deeper problem. New data from Gallup shows that while only 30% of workers think it’s a good time to find a new job, more than half are actively looking anyway. In a decade and a half of working as a therapist, I’ve met a lot of smart, creative people who feel capable of more, if only they could figure out where to direct their energy. These restless souls (and I count myself among…