What's on Your Mind?

Working with AI as a team isn’t about knowing the latest technology. It’s about changing your mindset to build skills AI can’t replace, focusing on outcomes, not optics, and leaving room for strategic tests. View the full article

With the help of generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude, creating content is easier and faster than ever. Here are a few quick and easy methods you can use to create content, summarize information, and even brainstorm new ideas. View the full article

AI assistants are incredibly efficient, but they can be a little predictable. Sometimes it takes an unexpected prompt to solicit a useful response. From disaster-movie logic to unusual cross-pollination, here are five techniques you can use to get better answers from your AI chatbot. View the full article

Truly unlocking the value of AI is about more than new technology; it’s about leadership. Now that artificial intelligence is giving employees back hours of time every day, organizations must help their workers reimagine their roles beyond routine output and start contributing in ways that AI can’t. View the full article

ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s value has soared to a sky-high $500 billion following a secondary sale of its shares held by current and former employees. Reuters reported Thursday that the group of employees unloaded around $6.6 billion in shares in the deal, pushing OpenAI’s valuation well north of its current valuation of $300 billion. During the secondary sale’s open window, OpenAI shareholders offloaded their stock to an investor group that included SoftBank, Thrive Capital, T. Rowe Price, Dragoneer Investment Group, and Emirati state-owned AI investment firm MGX, according to a source who described the deal’s details to Reuters. While $6.6 billion in shares cha…

Napheesa Collier is more than just a WNBA star who is critical of her league and its leadership. The Minnesota Lynx player is a vice president of the players union, which means she will be sitting across from WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert at the negotiating table ahead of an Oct. 31 deadline to reach a new collective bargaining agreement. If that doesn’t cause enough tension, Collier is also a co-founder of Unrivaled, a three-on-three women’s basketball league that plays in the winter and features WNBA stars. That could give her additional leverage to try to press the WNBA as talks unfold. Here’s a look at some of the implications of Collier’s headline-gra…

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. This week, I’m focusing on Donald The President’s recent AI-generated videos, which he (or his staff) posts on Truth Social. I also look at world models, the successor to large language models, and at OpenAI’s new Sora 2 model, which is also the anchor for a new social app. 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 fol…

Picture a data center on the edge of a desert plateau. Inside, row after row of servers glow and buzz, moving air through vast cooling towers, consuming more electricity than the surrounding towns combined. This is not science fiction. It is the reality of the vast AI compute clusters, often described as “AI supercomputers” for their sheer scale, that train today’s most advanced models. Strictly speaking, these are not supercomputers in the classical sense. Traditional supercomputers are highly specialized machines designed for scientific simulations such as climate modeling, nuclear physics, or astrophysics, tuned for parallelized code across millions of cores. What …

Pepsi has a new challenge: keeping products like Gatorade and Cheetos vivid and colorful without the artificial dyes that U.S. consumers are increasingly rejecting. PepsiCo, which also makes Doritos, Cap’n Crunch cereal, Funyuns and Mountain Dew, announced in April that it would accelerate a planned shift to using natural colors in its foods and beverages. Around 40% of its U.S. products now contain synthetic dyes, according to the company. But just as it took decades for artificial colors to seep into PepsiCo’s products, removing them is likely to be a multi-year process. The company said it’s still finding new ingredients, testing consumers’ responses and waiting for …

The federal government is expected to again accept new applications for a program that grants some people without legal immigration status the ability to live and work in the United States. Lawyers for the federal government and immigrant advocates have presented plans before a federal judge that would open the door again to accepting applications for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, otherwise known as DACA. One state — Texas, where the case is being heard — however, would be exempted from providing work permits. It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of people could be eligible to be enrolled in DACA, once a federal judge issues an order to formalize…

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have issued additional warnings related to possible Listeria contamination in pasta products. The warnings suggest that the Listeria outbreak, which has sickened at least 20 and killed four since last year, is far from over. Here’s what you need to know about the latest warnings and which foods are being recalled this time. What’s happened? On September 30, the FDA posted a new recall notice to its website, which adds 11 new items to the list of pasta products being recalled due to Listeria contamination fears. On the same day, the CDC updated its Listeri…

Despite being under a year old and having no revenue, Fermi America had a very successful initial public offering (IPO) this week. The company, which aims to provide data and power centers for artificial intelligence, saw its shares (Nasdaq: FRMI) close at $32.53 on their first day of trading Wednesday, up nearly 55% from their IPO price of $21 per share. Fermi’s stock price continued to rise through after-hours and into premarket trading on Thursday, reaching $36. It reached a high of $39 per share overnight, before dropping closer to $37 ahead of the market opening. What is Fermi? The company was cofounded by Rick Perry, former Texas governor, a GOP pr…

It’s the end of the workday. You’re ready to bounce. But you feel compelled to check in with your boss. For many workers, it feels like the appropriate thing to do. But as one viral TikTok makes clear, those norms may be changing. The skit—which has more than 20 million views—asks whether it’s okay to leave at 5: An employee walks into the boss’s office. “I’m heading out,” she informs him. “Wow—5 p.m. right on the dot. I just love your work-life balance,” he responds sarcastically. “The workday ends at 5,” she, very fairly, points out. The post then opens up the debate to the comments section: Do you leave at 5 o’clock on the dot? Do you finish up what…

Soon after Zohran Mamdani secured the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor, Amanda Litman posted a video selfie on TikTok. “The dinosaurs of the past, the boomers, the hostile managers, the assholes—they are behind us,” she preached to the camera. If viewers felt inspired to “run to take on the status quo,” they should head to her organization’s website and register. Though Mamdani is not affiliated with Litman’s eight-year-old nonprofit, Run for Something, his generational fight aligns with its purpose: to encourage young and underrepresented people to run for political office, including “hyperlocal” positions like city council and school boards. Litman …

When Allison Whalen returned from parental leave years ago, she found her corner of the business in shambles. Her direct reports were frustrated, her projects had stalled, and she felt the weight of disruption on both sides. Curious whether her experience was unique, she asked around. The response was striking: The number-one reason employees left their companies after parental leave wasn’t lack of policy—it was career derailment caused by how leave was managed. That “aha” moment led her to found Parentaly, a company that helps thousands of employees and managers navigate parental leave through pre-leave planning, return-to-work support, and manager training. With cli…

Figma burst into the public eye in 2022 after Adobe was blocked from buying the design startup for $20 billion. This chapter set the stage for an even bigger milestone at Figma: a splashy IPO this summer at nearly double that valuation. Cofounder and CEO Dylan Field shares what distinguishes Figma from competitors, and why design is increasingly at the center of every industry in today’s software-driven economy. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business lead…

Mita Mallick shares five key insights from her new book, The Devil Emails at Midnight: What Good Leaders Can Learn From Bad Bosses. Mallick is a corporate changemaker who, with an extensive career as a marketing and human resources executive, has advised Fortune 500 companies and startups alike. She is a LinkedIn Top Voice and was named to the 2025 Thinkers50 Radar list. She is a contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Adweek, and Entrepreneur. What’s the big idea? The silver lining that comes from working for several bad bosses? You can learn what not to do as a leader. From every bad boss comes a valuable lesson about how to manage teams and con…

It looks like it could be sitting on the campus of any number of major universities across the country, but this sleek, glass-lined educational building is far from the conventional teaching space: It’s a new training facility for the Ironworkers Local 63 union in Chicago. The training facility is being used to give young ironworkers hands-on experience welding, climbing, and installing the essential elements that underlie buildings around the world. As anxiety snowballs over just which professions will survive the emergence of artificial intelligence, physical trades like ironwork are seeming more and more AI proof—the building itself a counterargument to the percept…

David Droga was the face of Accenture Song even before it was called Accenture Song. The ad legend sold his agency Droga5 to Accenture’s creative advertising and marketing division then-called Accenture Interactive in 2019. He became CEO of that division in 2021, and rebranded Interactive as Accenture Song in 2022. So when he stepped down in May, the $20 billion company was not only losing its CEO, it was also losing the voice of the agency. Named to lead the new era was Ndidi Oteh, who comes from leading Song’s operations in the Americas, and has been at Accenture for about 14 years, where in her previous role she was the global account lead for Nike, and retail in…

The White House website has been updated to blame the government shutdown that began Wednesday on Democrats. The official White House homepage was topped on Wednesday by a red, scrolling banner with the all-caps message “DEMOCRAT SHUTDOWN: DEMOCRATS’ [sic] IN THEIR OWN WORDS” along a countdown showing how long the shutdown has been going on. Users who clicked through were taken to a landing page with a livestreamed video of clips of Democratic lawmakers criticizing past shutdowns, integrating partisan messaging into its design. With a news ticker, countdown clock, and clips of politicians speaking on Capitol Hill, this is web design inspired by one of Presiden…

The government shutdown that began Wednesday will deprive policymakers and investors of economic data vital to their decision-making at a time of unusual uncertainty about the direction of the U.S. economy. The absence will be felt almost immediately, as the government’s monthly jobs report scheduled for release Friday will likely be delayed. A weekly report on the number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits — a proxy for layoffs that is typically published on Thursdays — will also be postponed. If the shutdown is short-lived, it won’t be very disruptive. But if the release of economic data is delayed for several weeks or longer, it could pose challenges, particul…

It’s not just Hollywood that’s been grappling with how to deal with AI-generated characters. Wikipedia editors are figuring all this out as they go along, too. Following reports this week that an AI “actress” named Tilly Norwood is attracting interest from talent agents and rattling real-life performers who make their living in movies and on TV, Wikipedia editors moved quickly to create a page for the character—and almost immediately began arguing over how to describe it. Is it a synthetic actress? Is it even a she? Can Tilly Norwood, despite having 45,000 followers on Instagram, be accurately described as doing anything? These are the types of questions tha…

It’s the dream: You finish a huge project that wins widespread acclaim—from your boss, your peers, your clients, your friends and family. You’re flying high. The world should be your oyster. And yet? You can’t find the inspiration to follow up. Your productivity dries up. You’re afraid lightning won’t strike twice. You fear being a one-hit wonder. Maybe not in the obsolete pop star sense—but in the professional, creative, successful sense. It’s a horrible, limiting feeling that kills your productivity, not to mention confidence. But according to research from the Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, there’s a cause for the feelings of inadequac…

It’s a familiar frustration: You miss your connection because of a delayed flight. The line at the customer assistance desk is 30 people deep. The airline app offers little help, and the call center puts you on hold for half an hour. Will you ever escape Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR)? Enter Hopper Technology Solutions (HTS) Assist, a new generative AI travel agent that helps customers with post-booking travel questions, changes, and disruptions. HTS assist was built by Hopper, the mobile-only travel-booking platform that’s known for its intuitive, user-friendly interface and for predicting flight prices with near-flawless accuracy and pinging users when i…

Think about the last piece of health advice you actually followed. Chances are, it wasn’t from a medical journal or even a doctor’s office. Most likely it was from a colleague, a neighbor, or a trusted friend—the kind of advice that feels personal and authentic. As humans, we’re wired to trust people we know or feel like we know. That’s why two-thirds of Americans now seek health information on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and other social platforms, where it’s easy to connect with others who have relatable voices or similar stories. The default ways we explored our symptoms in the past, i.e., by seeing a doctor or referencing a handful of known credible sour…