What's on Your Mind?

We’ve all been there: the windowless conference room, the stale coffee, the flip charts, the obligatory icebreaker, followed by hours of sticky notes and talk of disruption that feels, ironically, deeply uninspired. This is the traditional corporate offsite: a manufactured attempt at connection and creativity staged inside four beige walls. But here’s the truth that most leaders won’t say out loud: If your strategy session could’ve been an email, your offsite isn’t working. In a world demanding fresh thinking, deep alignment, and courageous reinvention, we don’t need more sticky notes; we need more perspective, pause, and place. It’s time to rethink the…

Let’s face it: The fact that AI is amazing is no longer all that … amazing. The technology is under ever-increasing pressure to prove its real-world value for consumers, businesses, and researchers in specific contexts. These honorees in the applied AI category are proving AI’s worth for fashion advice, pharmaceutical advice, coding, and much more. Alta For bringing AI to personal styling For people who lack style expertise or time for outfit planning, the task of choosing what to wear can be a daily frustration. Alta built a personal AI stylist app that generates outfits based on users’ actual wardrobes, lifestyle, budget, weather, and upcoming events—whether they’r…

Lego just announced its first book nook: Sherlock Holmes’ Baker Street. I was guessing this was coming sooner than later, with Lego’s ever-increasing focus on the adult market and the growing popularity of book nooks. The design is fantastic, full of the fine details you expect of high-quality book nooks, which are miniature dioramas that are designed to fit between books on a shelf. But, unlike those, you can actually take this off the bookshelf, unfold it into a three-building Victorian London street, and play with it. Conceived by Japanese artist Monde in 2018, book nooks often depict a street, a room, or some other structure inspired by a theme from a real boo…

Even though Tarana Burke is still correcting some past misconceptions about the #MeToo movement that went mainstream about eight years ago—it’s not dead, for example, and it wasn’t a witch hunt—she’s focused on the future. Specifically, the movement’s founder said organizing has already begun for the 2026 U.S. midterm elections. “I’m really looking forward to what we can do to build on the campaign we started in 2024,” Burke, chief vision officer of Me too. International, said Saturday during a discussion at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “I’m really excited about the idea of building a constituency; imagine us voting along the lines of our survivorship.” One go…

Amid the ongoing evolution of digital privacy laws, one California proposal is drawing heightened attention from legal scholars, technologists, and privacy advocates. Assembly Bill 1355, while narrower in scope than landmark legislation like 2018’s California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)—which established sweeping rights for consumers to know, delete, and opt out of the sale of their personal information—could become a pivotal effort to rein in the unchecked collection and use of personal geolocation data. The premise of the bill (which is currently undergoing analysis within the appropriations committee) is straightforward yet bold in the American legal landscape: Com…

Over the past decade, we’ve seen Cheetos and its Flamin’ Hot flavor brand pop up in some fun and unexpected places. There was the Spotted Cheetah pop-up NYC restaurant in 2017. The Hollywood pop-up with chef Roy Choi in 2018 called the Cheetos Flamin’ Hot Spot. A taco at Taco Bell. There was a Forever 21 apparel collection in 2019. A nail polish with Dipwell. A Dr. Squatch soap. And, of course, a pair of Crocs. Parent company Frito-Lay has sprinkled Flamin’ Hot across products like Doritos, Ruffles, Lay’s, Funyuns, Smartfood, and even in a limited edition of Mountain Dew. But Jack Black escalated things to previously unpredictable levels on Saturday Night Live this we…

The web is being swamped by AI slop—but the swamp is creeping closer to home. Your email inboxes, phone SMS apps, instant messaging, and social media services are all being overtaken by inauthentic content. From AI-generated footage of Hollywood actor Brad Pitt that conned a French woman out of $800,000, to phishing emails that direct victims to live chats with AI bots purporting to be from a legitimate business but which are actually criminals, AI scams are everywhere. Two in every three people tested by Vodafone failed to identify an AI-driven phishing attack. One of those people was George Wilson, the founder of a small business based in Marietta, Georgia. Wils…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. A year ago, our company made a bold move. We put up a million dollars in prize money for any of our team members—no matter their role—who came up with transformative ways of using AI to serve our clients. As a health marketing agency, we saw it as our version of the renowned XPRIZE, hoping that this initiative would truly spark meaningful change and inspire us to think bigger for our clients. …

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. For years, banks have known their customer experience needs to catch up to the digital expectations set by tech and retail giants. Now, with AI dominating the boardroom agenda, the temptation is to bolt on yet another tool and call it transformation. But real progress doesn’t come from piling on more tools—it comes from using AI to intelligently orchestrate smarter, more connected customer journ…

Ideo—the global design firm famous for putting Design Thinking into the lexicon of corporate America—has vastly reduced its staff as appetite for its services have waned. But two years following the culling, the company has hired a new CEO. Michael Peng will take the role in June. Peng is a former Ideo partner who has spent the last five years leading the venture studio Moon Creative Lab, which was founded by the Japanese investment firm Mitsui & Co. “His leadership will bring a unique blend of human-centered creativity, multicultural fluency, thoughtful collaboration, and strong business acumen,” the company announced in a press release. Meanwhile, Derek Robs…

Andrew Hoffman is a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. He has been writing and teaching about business and environmental issues for almost 30 years, having published 18 books and over 100 articles. His work has been covered by the New York Times, Scientific American, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and NPR. What’s the big idea? We need to rethink business education. If we keep producing business graduates who care only about making their wallets fatter and exploiting a broken system, then we’re doomed. It’s urgent that we reshape how we teach business in higher education so that we create a different kind of business lea…

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…

“The apocalypse will start having vermouths and tapas,” a friend told me yesterday. Just a day before, the electricity shut down for all of Spain and Portugal, trapping thousands in subways, trains, and elevators for hours, forcing people to walk miles back to their homes, putting hospitals on backup power, and turning off traffic lights, phones, and credit card readers. It shut down everything. Officials are still calculating the economic costs, but it will be in the billions. As this was happening, I still saw the people drinking in bar terraces too, as I was walking up the street to pick up my son early from school. They were joking and making fun. Others were…

Apple just announced new accessibility features coming to its operating systems. There’s a redesigned braille input experience, and a new reader that allows you to customize your text so it’s more legible. But there’s one that will be great for anyone attending any lecture or presentation: Magnifier for Mac. The iPhone and iPad got their Magnifier apps back in 2016. It worked pretty much like the iOS camera: You point your device anywhere you want and zoom in to the desired level. It also allows you to apply real-time filters to enhance readability depending on your vision’s condition, like turning a book’s black text over white page into white text over blue, as well as …

Cisco is the latest company to announce a quantum breakthrough. On Tuesday, the company said it has developed a prototype entanglement source chip that has the potential to cut the timeline for practical quantum computing by as much as a decade. The chip was developed in partnership with UC Santa Barbara and is novel in that it generates up to one million entangled photon pairs per second, and does so at room temperature, saving considerable resources. Additionally, Cisco is also announcing the opening of Cisco Quantum Labs, which will be the company’s dedicated quantum research hub in Santa Monica, California. The chip itself was developed at Cisco’s “Outshift” i…

The streaming service Max is officially reverting to its previous name, HBO Max, which is great news for people who never stopped calling it HBO Max in the first place. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) announced today that the streaming platform would be again called HBO Max this summer as part of a shift in strategy to focus on HBO programming and other premium content that distinguishes the streamer from its competitors. WBD first removed the name HBO Max in favor of the simplified Max in 2023, when it merged with Discovery+. After two years of testing it out, it seems viewers really just want more of the shows they like, not more of absolutely anything possible. S…

Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Company’s workplace advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer your biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: What should I do if I think my coworkers are gossiping about me? A: In past columns I’ve said that much of office life can feel like high school, and this is the ultimate example. This is a situation that feels awful but that you have little control over. So while you can’t control other people, you can control your own actions and reactions. Here are a few things you can do: Don’t engage in negative gossip yourself “Gossip is an important pa…