What's on Your Mind?

The way consumers search is changing faster than the industry expected. This holiday season, many shoppers are looking for gifts inside AI platforms, rather than retailer sites or traditional search. They are asking natural questions like: “Find me a cruelty-free skincare gift for sensitive skin under $100.” “What are good gift ideas for a three-year-old that are safe and durable?” “What are the safest, nontoxic treats for my Golden Retriever?” This shift is already measurable. Adobe Digital Insights reports a 4,700% year-over-year increase in retail visits driven by AI assistants between July 2024 and July 2025. At the same time, click-through rates from SEO …

European Union regulators on Friday fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X 120 million euros ($140 million) for breaches of the bloc’s digital regulations that they said could leave users exposed to scams and manipulation. The European Commission issued its decision following an investigation it opened two years ago into X under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Services Act, also known as the DSA. It’s the first time that the EU has issued a so-called non-compliance decision since rolling out the DSA. The sweeping rulebook requires platforms to take more responsibility for protecting European users and cleaning up harmful or illegal content and products on their sites, u…

FIFA has invited more teams than ever for a World Cup priced largely for fans in the 1%. The process of figuring out which teams in the expanded 48-nation field will play where begins with Friday’s draw at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Cape Verde, Curaçao, Jordan and Uzbekistan will appear in soccer’s premier event for the first time when next year’s tournament is played from June 11 to July 19 at 16 sites in the United States, Mexico and Canada. “I’m quite optimistic because to qualify you need to beat the other teams of your confederations, and that’s a sign of quality,” former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said Thursday as red carpets were installed at …

So far, Nvidia has provided the vast majority of the processors used to train and operate large AI models like the ones that underpin ChatGPT. Tech companies and AI labs don’t like to rely too much on a single chip vendor, especially as their need for computing capacity increases, so they’re looking for ways to diversify. And so players like AMD and Huawei, as well as hyperscalers like Google and Amazon AWS, which just released its latest Trainium3 chip, are hurrying to improve their own flavors of AI accelerators, the processors designed to speed up specific types of computing tasks. Could the competition eventually reduce Nvidia, AI’s dominant player, to just anot…

On November 19, Block Inc. held its first Investor Day in three years. Jack Dorsey, the company’s cofounder, chief executive, and “Block Head,” took to the stage and summarily posed what many investors and others in the industry were likely thinking. “Our business is complicated,” he said. “We want to make it much easier to understand going forward.” Dorsey—notably clean-shaven—proceeded to summarize the past few years at Block. The company is indeed much more complex now than when it was founded in 2009 as Square, named for the point-of-sale system that was the company’s first product. Four years ago, it changed its name to Block, a much more fitting monike…

Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare on Friday said it was investigating an outage that took place in the morning that brought down several global websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and others, the second such crash to affect the company in less than three weeks. Cloudflare said the issue had been resolved, and that it was was “investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs,” or application programming interface that allow software systems to communicate with each other. The company said the outage was not due to an attack. A change to how its firewall handles requests “caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning,…

Netflix has announced that it intends to buy legendary Hollywood studio Warner Bros. in a deal valued at approximately $82.7 billion. The deal, which must be approved by regulators, will further consolidate the entertainment industry and give Netflix ownership of some of the most iconic films and television franchises ever, not to mention HBO. Here’s what you need to know: What’s happened? Today, Netflix and Warner Bros announced a deal in which Netflix will purchase the legendary Hollywood studio, along with its HBO Max and HBO divisions, for a total enterprise value of approximately $82.7 billion (which Netflix says has an equity value of $72.0 billion)…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning people to stop using certain types of glucose monitor sensors after the company that makes them, Abbott Diabetes Care, said the devices were linked to seven deaths and more than 700 injuries. Certain FreeStyle Libre 3 and FreeStyle Libre 3 Plus sensors may provide incorrect low glucose readings, FDA officials said this week. Such readings over an extended period may lead people with diabetes to make bad treatment decisions, such as consuming too many carbohydrates or skipping or delaying doses of insulin. “These decisions may pose serious health risks, including potential injury or death,” the FDA said in the alert. The …

Scented candle lovers, the day you have waited for all year is finally here. Today marks the kick-off of the annual Candle Day sales event from Bath & Body Works, during which the retailer’s pricey scented wax pillars will go for just a third of their regular cost. Here’s what you need to know about Candle Day 2025. What is Candle Day 2025? Candle Day is Bath & Body Works’ annual candle sale bonanza. Throughout the year, many of the company’s three-wick candles go for $29.95 each, but during Candle Day, many of those candles can be had for prices as low as $9.95. Due to the massive savings, Candle Day is a sales event that candle lovers across…

The District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virgina (DMV) region is emerging as a national test case for the future of office space. As cities across the country grapple with persistent office vacancies, D.C. is taking a bold approach: Instead of focusing solely on residential conversions, it is pioneering a broader strategy to convert offices to…anything. While the concept of office conversions isn’t new, most efforts have been centered on residential use. D.C.’s strategy breaks that mold. In January 2025, the city launched the Central Washington Activation Projects Temporary Tax Abatement, better known as the Office to Anything program. This policy targets build…

Greetings, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Even by tech-industry standards, the air of serene confidence OpenAI CEO Sam Altman projects in public appearances is overwhelming. Still, that doesn’t mean he never sweats behind the scenes. Indeed, we learned this week that Altman is downright concerned about the future of his company’s flagship product, ChatGPT. On December 1, The Information’s Stephanie Palazzolo and Erin Woo reported that Altman had initiated a “code red” effort within OpenAI to make its chatbot more personalized and customizable. The move involves diverting resources from other efforts, such as developing AI agents and monetizing the …

Columbia Sportswear just lauched its Endor collection, and I want it all. Inspired by the clothes worn by the rebel squad that took on the Death Star’s shield generator in Return of the Jedi, it’s the latest and largest Star Wars drop from Portland, Oregon-based company. It’s also the best fit for the brand since its Empire Strikes Back‘s Echo Base Han Solo parkas, which I missed back in 2017, and I will forever feel like a dumb Tauntaun for not grabbing one (they run for almost $1,000 each now). The highlight of the collection is General Han Solo’s Trench, a $600 jacket that mimics the camouflage duster that Harrison Ford wore while leading the strike team on the…

While the iPhone 17 is expected to be one of the hottest gifts this holiday season, some of the early adopters of Apple’s latest phone may be moving on to something different already. New data from B-Stock, a B2B marketplace for wholesale liquidation of returned and overstock inventory, finds that large cellular carriers are already moving “bulk quantities” of iPhone 17s through the resale channels for B2B customers. One sale on the site currently offers 111 iPhone 17 Pro Max units (with bidding for the lot standing at $80,200 as of Wednesday afternoon). All totaled, there were more than 300 iPhone 17 devices up for resale on the site as of Wednesday. The sale…

The data center boom is fully underway, and the numbers are staggering: billions of dollars in costs, millions of square feet worth of buildings, gigawatts of energy, and millions of gallons of water used per day. But before these AI-fueling behemoths can get up and running, there’s an extensive amount of prep work needed to build the infrastructure those data centers rely upon, with a whole other set of staggering costs, material flows, and resource requirements. The infrastructure behind (and below) the data center boom is in the midst of its own massive scale building boom, with no end in sight. That’s created a thriving business for the companies that provide the …

The Phoenix Mercury rebranded for the first time in team history, and the new look is part of a wider trend across the WNBA as teams modernize their logos for a growing league. The new Mercury logo shows an “M” that’s a simplified version of the letter taken from the team’s old script wordmark. The bottom of the “M” is angled up at 19.97 degrees as a nod to the team’s 1997 founding as one of the league’s eight original franchises, and it’s set on a circle with a crescent shadow that represents the planet Mercury. The modernized logo was designed in-house. The rebrand comes at an inflection point for the team, which lost star player Diana Taurasi to retirement in F…

Authenticity is currency. You can spend it recklessly and go broke, or invest it strategically and build wealth. Most leaders are choosing bankruptcy without even realizing it. Right now, workplaces are debating authenticity. Some call “bring your whole self to work” a dangerous myth that punishes marginalized employees. Others claim it’s the secret to engagement and retention. Both are right—and both are missing something. Unfiltered authenticity without skill can be destructive. And yes, marginalized employees pay a higher price when they try to be authentic in systems that weren’t built for them. But your team already knows when you’re faking it. Th…

In 1983, Howard Schultz was an employee of Starbucks, a small chain of coffee stores that mainly sold beans (and no drinks), when he was sent to Milan for a trade show. As Schultz observed Italians visiting their local cafés, he loved what he saw, describing it as a “sense of community, a real sense of connection between the barista and the customer.” A few years later, after Schultz convinced Starbucks’s owners to sell him the company, the new owner attempted to build that same type of connection here in the U.S. To do so, Schultz knew he had to take care of his people. He called them “partners,” not employees, a symbol of a more collaborative working relationshi…

As Sir Isaac Newton discovered, the core scientific law of gravity is that what goes up must come down. The principle applies in many areas, which is why markets are jittery about the near-unchecked, three-year growth of stock prices fueled by the strength of the generative-AI revolution. The market is on a tear, with a large gap growing even wider between public market valuations and the significantly higher private-market valuations of AI-exposed companies. The top five tech companies in the U.S. are, collectively, valued at more than the combined size of the Euro Stoxx 50, the U.K., India, Japan, and Canada—and account for around 16% of the entire global public equ…

When I was cycling across the country on my bike, I spent anywhere from six to nine hours a day in the saddle—for almost three solid months. It made a lot of people wonder: What did you listen to all day long? “Was it mostly music, or more like audiobooks, podcasts?” asked a friend of mine when we went for a drink at a bar after I got back home. “What was on your playlist?” “Nothing,” I said. She frowned slightly, as if she’d misheard me. “What do you mean, ‘nothing?’” “I mean, nothing. I don’t listen to anything when I ride,” I replied. “I don’t even wear earbuds.” You could see the wheels of her mind grind to a standstill. “What the hell. You…

Before becoming a coach for neurodiverse individuals with ADHD, Justine Capelle Collis had a successful advertising career. She worked in Australia and the UK, and also across the US and Canadian markets. Her clients have included Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. And she achieved all this without realizing that she has ADHD. That realization came when she became a mother. Both of her sons were diagnosed with ADHD, and she started asking questions. “How do I advocate” and get “the system to bend” for them, rather than having them “fit into the system and then break?” she asked. She then went on a personal journey to retrain. Collis enrolled in po…

It’s the end of the year and the pressure is on, demands are high, and you’re probably close to the end of your rope as you try to wrap up your remaining projects before the holidays start. If that’s you, you’re not alone. Holiday stress is very common: In a survey by LifeStance Health, 57% of respondents said they experience stress over the season. But it’s possible to maintain your energy and momentum and not only get things done but stay engaged and finish strong. Fortunately, there are a few pragmatic strategies to maintain your energy and momentum through the end of the year. 1. Maintain control You’re likely to start feeling out of control. This is becaus…

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…

When Jon LaMantia, a Long Island-based business reporter, was in journalism school, his professor drilled one rule into his students: you get two exclamation points a year and no more. “So if you use them in January,” LaMantia recalls being told, “you better hope there’s nothing to exclaim for the rest of the year.” The rule stuck. LaMantia still thinks about that rigid quota today. “I use exclamation points all the time in texts and emails. If you don’t, the message sounds more stern,” he says. “But I can’t remember the last time I used one in a business article.” Strong feelings about the exclamation point aren’t uncommon. People tend to either love it or l…

It’s been a tumultuous year for the legacy retailer, shaped by new tariffs, shifting consumer habits, and the constant flip between “wartime” and “peacetime” leadership. Tony Spring, Macy’s Inc. chairman and CEO, shares why his team is now on “version 27 of the plan,” and what it really means to court the next generation of shoppers. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you ge…

Twenty years ago, not too long after Youtube itself launched, Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla started uploading videos to the platform. What started as two teenagers trying to make each other laugh turned into the biggest channel on YouTube. It was the first ever to reach 10 million subscribers. Eventually Smosh was acquired by a company called Defy Media. The company would expand rapidly–more videos, more cast members, even a movie–but then came turmoil and uncertainty for Smosh. Padilla left the company in 2017, largely due to creative differences with Smosh’s parent company. He returned to the business in 2023, when he and Hecox purchased Smosh from YouTuber-led med…