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New ChatGPT citation data shows a small group of domains owns most visibility, while broad, cluster-based pages outperform single-intent content. The post The Science Of How AI Picks Its Sources appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Research finds that persona prompts "reliably damage" factual accuracy in certain kinds of tasks but work well in others. The post Research: “You Are An Expert” Prompts Can Damage Factual Accuracy appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Amazon’s Spring Sale officially runs from March 25 through March 31, but a few early deals are already live, and some are worth paying attention to. One of them is the Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS + Cellular, 46mm) in a Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band (M/L), now $429 (down from $529), which is its lowest price yet according to price trackers. If you prefer something dressier, the gold titanium version with a Milanese loop is also a $100 off, down to $699 from $799. Amazon is also testing one-hour and three-hour delivery in select locations, as reported by our senior tech editor Jake Peterson, so depending on where you live, you might not be waiting long once you hit buy. Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS + Cellular, 46mm) Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band (M/L) $429.00 at Amazon $529.00 Save $100.00 Get Deal Get Deal $429.00 at Amazon $529.00 Save $100.00 The Series 11 doesn’t try to overhaul what Apple already settled with the Series 10, in terms of design. Instead, this smartwatch leans into small upgrades that show up in everyday use. Battery life now reaches 24 hours, finally moving past the long-standing 18-hour ceiling, which means you can track sleep without planning your charging schedule around it. The display gets brighter too, hitting 2,000 nits, so it stays readable outdoors, and Apple’s Ion-X glass helps with visibility at off angles. It’s also tougher this time, with better scratch resistance, IP6X dust protection, and WR50 water resistance for swimming. And with the cellular version, you now get 5G connectivity, which makes leaving your phone behind more realistic for runs or quick errands. There are also software additions like background hypertension alerts and a Sleep Score, although some of those aren’t exclusive to this model. PCMag gave the Series 11 an “outstanding” rating and named it one of the best Apple Watch to buy in 2026, noting that its performance and health features remain among the best available. This is an easy upgrade if you’re coming from a Series 7 or 8, where the battery bump alone changes how you use the watch. If you’re on a Series 10, however, the case is weaker—unless you care about incremental improvements or the new cellular capabilities, especially when you consider how it compares in size and durability to Apple’s higher-end model in this breakdown of the Apple Watch Series 11 against the Ultra 3. If you do pick it up, it’s worth learning how to get more out of it with our guides and hacks for every Apple Watch user, since the hardware is only part of the experience. Our Best Editor-Vetted Amazon Big Spring Sale Deals Right Now Apple AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancelling Wireless Earbuds — $149.00 (List Price $179.00) Apple iPad 11" 128GB A16 WiFi Tablet (Blue, 2025) — $299.00 (List Price $349.00) Sony WH1000XM6- Best Wireless Noise Canceling Headphones — $398.00 (List Price $459.99) Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS, 42mm, S/M Black Sport Band) — $299.00 (List Price $399.00) Blink Video Doorbell Wireless (Newest Model) + Sync Module Core — $35.99 (List Price $69.99) Ring Indoor Cam Plus 2K Wired Security Camera (White) — $39.99 (List Price $59.99) Fire TV Stick 4K Max Streaming Player With Remote — $34.99 (List Price $59.99) Amazon Kindle Colorsoft 16GB 7" eReader (Black) — $169.99 (List Price $249.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

If you’re one of the legion of iPhone fans who can’t wait for the next major software update and all the new features it will bring, there’s some good news. Apple has revealed when you’ll be able to get a look at the iPhone’s next operating system, iOS 27—and you won’t have to wait much longer. Here’s what you need to know. Apple announces the dates for WWDC26 Apple has revealed when it will hold its next Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The conference, affectionately referred to as “dub-dub” by Apple employees, is one of Apple’s two major events throughout the year, and one of the tech industry’s most important. WWDC is an annual week-long event where Apple previews the next major versions of its operating systems to developers and the public for the first time. These are the operating systems that will ship on Apple’s new iPhones and other devices come the fall, and include iOS for the iPhone, macOS for the Mac, iPadOS for the iPad, tvOS for the Apple TV, and more. Yesterday, Apple revealed the dates for this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, dubbed WWDC26. The event will run from Monday, June 8, to Friday, June 12. But the most important date is June 8, when Apple will hold its annual software keynote. This keynote will be the first time the public will get a look at the next major versions of all of Apple’s operating systems, including the upcoming iOS 27 for iPhone. iOS 27 may be a ‘less is more’ update Usually, Apple’s major software updates are packed with new features, visual tweaks, or outright overhauls. For example, last year at WWDC25, Apple showed off iOS 26 and its Liquid Glass visual design refresh for the first time—a major shift in the way iOS looked and operated. Yet rumors suggest that this year’s iOS 27 update may be more subdued than prior years when it comes to new features. Instead, Apple is rumored to be using iOS 27 to focus on little refinements and bug fixes across the operating system. As a result, many are referring to iOS 27 as a “Snow Leopard”-like release. Snow Leopard was the product name for the 10.6 version of Mac OS X that Apple released in 2009. The release was different from prior versions of OS X because Apple chose not to introduce many new features, focusing instead on bug fixes and OS refinement. As a result, even to this day, Snow Leopard was one of the most stable and beloved operating system updates Apple ever put out. In recent years, many iPhone users have lamented that iOS has become bloated and buggy as Apple prioritized features over stability. And so the possibility of a “Snow Leopard” like iOS 27 is extremely appealing to many longtime Apple users. Of course, that’s not to say iOS 27 won’t have any new features—but they are expected to be fewer than with previous releases. Specifically, the major new feature of iOS 27 is expected to be a chatbot like Siri powered by Google’s Gemini LLM. Indeed, in its WWDC26 announcement, Apple said this year’s conference will show off “AI advancements,” likely referring to the new Siri chatbot. When can I download iOS 27? While Apple has all but explicitly confirmed it will show off iOS 27 to the public on June 8, users will have to wait a little longer to actually install the new software on their iPhones. When Apple first previews a new iOS at WWDC, it releases a beta of the new operating system to developers the same day. This means if you are a developer, you’ll be able to get your hands on iOS 27 on June 8. But if you’re a general user, you’ll need to wait longer. About a month after Apple releases the first developer beta of the new iOS, the company releases a public beta. This beta is for members of the general public who want to test the new iOS as soon as possible. However, the public iOS beta isn’t a finished product and may have incomplete features and bugs. That’s why many just prefer to wait until the final release of the new iOS. That release usually happens in the fall, shortly after Apple’s second major event of the year: its iPhone launch event. If you plan to wait until then to install iOS 27 on your iPhone, you can expect to be able to do so around the middle of September. View the full article

Redemption requests across industry surge as exodus of wealthy individuals acceleratesView the full article

Choosing the right PPC channels starts with clear goals, budget alignment, and understanding where your audience actually converts. The post How To Determine What Paid Media Channels Are Right for You appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Website migrations have a well-earned reputation for going wrong, with even well-planned migrations leading to rankings slipping, traffic dropping, or tracking breaking. But most migration problems come from small oversights rather than complex technical failures. You can reduce your risk with a staged approach. The checks you complete during staging, on launch day, and in the first few weeks after go-live often determine whether a migration stabilizes quickly or becomes a long recovery project. Before launch: Catch issues on staging Most migration problems should be found and fixed on the staging site. If issues reach the live site, recovery is slower and more uncertain. Set yourself up for success with the following tips: Keep the staging site private (even from crawlers) One common mistake is leaving the staging site publicly indexable. When Google crawls a staging environment, duplicate content can sometimes end up in search results. Rankings can fluctuate, and unfinished pages may end up indexed. Make sure you have blocked crawlers from staging site or protected it with a password so it remains invisible to search engines until the live launch. It’s not just crawlers, either. I’ve seen this happen with ecommerce sites. Customers found the staging site, tried to place orders, and the process didn’t work. This confused customer service teams, frustrated buyers, and created avoidable pressure internally. Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with Take benchmarks You want a baseline to help you identify real problems rather than reacting to normal short-term movement. Record organic sessions, rankings, top landing pages, indexed pages, conversions, and site speed before transitioning to the new site to define the “normal” you will compare the new site to. Identify priority pages Focus on pages that drive traffic, revenue, or attract links. These pages need extra care during redirect mapping, content review, and testing. Pay extra attention to internal links, redirects, and URL rules for these pages. Dig deeper: Website migrations: a plan to keep your traffic and SEO safe Review templates and content continuity Templates control titles, headings, metadata, canonical tags, structured data, copy, and media. If templates break, problems repeat across hundreds of pages. Check that: Titles and headings are present and accurate. Canonical tags use full URLs and point to live pages. Structured data has transferred correctly. Copy, images, and internal links are intact. This step protects more than rankings. It ensures the site still meets user needs and supports conversions. Make sure canonical tags use full URLs and point to live pages, as explained in Google’s guide on canonical URLs. This simple step can prevent bigger headaches later. Be intentional about URL changes Unnecessary URL changes are a common source of hidden damage. Changes made for design or CMS convenience often introduce risk without a clear benefit. Typical issues include: Adding or removing trailing slashes without a clear rule. Changing folder structures without reason. Inconsistent use of uppercase and lowercase URLs. One of the most common causes of duplicate URLs during migrations is inconsistent handling of trailing slashes. URLs with and without a trailing slash are treated as different URLs. Allowing both to resolve can create duplicate content, dilute signals, and complicate crawling. It doesn’t usually matter which version you choose, as long as the rule is consistent across the site. During a migration, avoid unintentionally switching between formats without a clear plan and proper redirects in place. The same goes for folder structures and capitalization. Don’t change what you don’t need to, and be consistent wherever possible. In one migration where we were brought in to rescue a site after go-live, every URL gained a trailing slash. Canonical tags only contained paths rather than full URLs, and internal links relied on redirects instead of pointing directly to final URLs. None of the changes were necessary, yet together they slowed crawling, caused confusion, and delayed recovery. Map redirects and compile existing ones Redirect mapping is one of the highest-risk areas of any migration. Existing redirects should be pulled from the CMS, CDN, Google Search Console, analytics platforms, and backlink tools so nothing is missed. Every legacy URL needs a clear, intentional destination. If pages are removed, redirect to the closest relevant alternative. If no equivalent exists, return a 404 or 410. Avoid sending everything to the homepage or top-level categories. Aleyda Solis’ guide to SEO for web migrations provides a strong framework for this stage. Decide what to remove and what to create Migrations are often seen as a good time to refresh all the content on a site. This can be done if all the stakeholders align, but it should be done methodically. Remove outdated content carefully. Where gaps exist in the new structure, plan new pages in advance and make sure they are ready to go live when the new site is. This planning avoids lost coverage or weak redirect decisions later. Verify Search Console access and settings Ensure the site can be verified after launch and that any international or country settings are correct. Align stakeholders early Pre-launch is also about people. Developers, designers, SEO, and analytics teams need clarity on responsibilities and deadlines. Many migration issues happen through missed handovers rather than a lack of skill. In my experience, most migration failures are preventable before launch, when fixes are safer and faster. I worked on one migration where SEO was brought after launch. The site launched with broken internal links, missing redirects for high-traffic pages, and inconsistent URL rules. Organic traffic dropped by almost 40% within two weeks, and several priority pages disappeared from search results. All of these issues were visible on the staging site but weren’t reviewed before launch. Make the case for SEO to be part of the planning process. It saves time, money, and headaches. Dig deeper: Website migration checklist: 11 steps for success Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Launch day: Verify everything works on the live site Launch day is where preparation meets reality, and all teams, including SEO, developers, designers, and analytics, see the results of their planning. What worked on staging must now work on the live site. Even small oversights can immediately affect rankings, traffic, conversions, user experience, and reporting. Calm, thorough verification ensures the migration pays off and prevents small errors from becoming lasting issues. Use this list as a starting point: Test redirects at scale Spot-checking isn’t enough. Every mapped URL should redirect once and resolve cleanly. Avoid redirect chains and loops. They slow down crawling and delay signal consolidation. In another migration we were called in to fix, only the top 50 pages had correct redirects. Thousands of other URLs redirected to the homepage. Rankings dipped, and recovery took months longer than expected. Crawl the live site Run a full crawl as soon as the site is live. Compare results with the staging crawl to identify differences. Look for: Broken links. Redirected internal links. Missing pages. Server errors. Check internal links and navigation Menus, breadcrumbs, and in-content links should point directly to live URLs. Leaving internal links to rely on redirects increases load and risk. Verify on-page SEO and content Canonicals or hreflang pointing to staging URLs are a common launch issue. Confirm titles, headings, canonical tags, hreflang, copy, and media all reference the live site. Dig deeper: How to run a successful site migration from start to finish Confirm tracking continuity GA4, paid media tags, and social pixels should already be in place before launch. This ensures tracking fires correctly, conversions are measured accurately, and historical data remains intact when the live site goes public. Remember, the staging site should be blocked from crawling or be protected behind a password to prevent test traffic from polluting reporting. In one migration, we were asked to review after launch. The domain stayed the same, but a new GA4 property was created during the redesign. Historical data remained in the original property, while new data was collected in the new one, making post-launch comparisons difficult. Keeping the same GA4 property preserves reporting continuity, supports confident decision-making, and avoids unnecessary uncertainty at a critical point in the migration. Check robots.txt and index controls Ensure pages meant to be indexed are accessible and that noindex tags are only used where intended. If you use services like Cloudflare, it’s also important to check that your robots.txt and content signals are configured correctly. For example, Cloudflare’s default setting may block AI training access while allowing search indexing. If this isn’t adjusted intentionally, AI models might pull content from third-party sources rather than your site, affecting how your brand is represented in generative AI outputs. Submit the XML sitemap Submit the live sitemap to Google Search Console to support the discovery of new URLs. Review site speed Check Core Web Vitals and page performance. A redesigned site can still load heavier assets than expected. Launch day is about verification, not assumption. After launch: Monitor and stabilize performance Even the best-planned migrations can reveal surprises once search engines and real users interact with the site. Small errors that didn’t appear on staging can impact rankings, traffic, and conversions. Calm, structured monitoring in the days and weeks after launch ensures problems are caught quickly before they affect performance or user experience. Here’s what to keep an eye on. Monitor Search Console closely: Watch for crawl errors, indexing issues, and unexpected exclusions. Patterns matter more than isolated URLs. Check indexed pages: Expect some movement, but sustained drops can point to redirect or crawl problems. Track rankings and traffic against benchmarks: Compare performance against your baseline rather than reacting to day-to-day changes. Confirm redirects still receive traffic: Old URLs can attract users and bots for months. Ensure they continue to resolve correctly. Recheck site speed under real traffic: Performance can shift once the site is under load. Audit for follow-up improvements: Once stability returns, review internal linking gaps, missing metadata, and content that did not migrate cleanly. Calm monitoring and clear data prevent small issues from becoming lasting damage. Dig deeper: Technical SEO post-migration: How to find and fix hidden errors See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with What normal recovery looks like after a migration Even well-managed migrations can see short-term movement. Rankings may fluctuate, and traffic may dip before stabilizing. If redirects are clean, content is intact, and crawl access is clear, recovery usually follows within weeks rather than months. Ongoing losses usually point to structural issues rather than algorithm changes. Knowing when to wait and when to act comes from experience. You don’t want to react too quickly or too late. Keep a careful eye on your analytics, and you’ll develop the expertise over time. Website migrations succeed when they are planned, tested, and monitored at every stage. A clear focus on pre-launch, launch day, and post-launch checks protects visibility, performance, and confidence across teams. When SEO is involved early, and checks are clearly owned, migrations stop feeling like crisis events and become managed change. View the full article

Google was asked if Personal Intelligence in AI Mode will come to paid accounts across the world (not just the US - where it has hit non-paid accounts). Google replied... (Now is the point where you click on the article...)View the full article

Google is testing changing out some of the links within AI Mode to show as overlay cards, instead of take you directly to the website it is mentioning. This obviously will result in fewer direct clicks to those websites.View the full article

Google is testing encouraging business owners to reply to reviews using AI. There is a new option in the Google Business Profile dashboard that is showing for some businesses that says "Reply to reviews with AI."View the full article

One minute he threatens death and destruction, the next he says the US and Iran are engaged in negotiationsView the full article

In February, Bing rolled out new AI Performance reports within Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing announced a new feature for this report that connects the Grounding Queries and Pages views within the AI Performance report.View the full article

Fintech, where Peter Mandelson and Harvey Schwartz were board members, is given £2mn penalty by Bank of EnglandView the full article

Apple is reportedly launching local ads within Apple Maps, as soon as this month. "Apple Inc. is preparing to introduce advertising in its Maps app, part of a broader push to generate more money from services," Bloomberg wrote.View the full article

Over the past year, tech companies invested hundreds of billions in the new data centers needed to power rapidly increasing demand for the technology. The investment is motivated in part by confidence that major AI labs such as those at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google will continue to wring more intelligence out of their models. Indeed, fears have receded that the AI labs’ go-to strategy of supersizing models, training data, and computing power was no longer yielding large leaps in intelligence. Instead, the cadence of bigger and better models has accelerated, in part because AI coding tools are playing an increasing role in building new models. That’s certainly true at Anthropic, which says that 70% to 90% of its new code is now written by its breakthrough coding agent, Claude Code. The tool, which generates and tests software code based on natural language prompts, was originally meant for internal use by Anthropic engineers, but the company decided to release it as a real product in May 2025. In just six months, Claude Code became a moneymaker, reaching a $1 billion revenue run rate. Another reason for the acceleration in model releases was the arrival of Google at the front of the race. Its Gemini 3 family of models smoked competing LLMs on a number of industry benchmark tests, putting other AI labs on alert. The Gemini 3 models became the engine for many Google services, such as AI search and ads, and gave a boost to the company’s cloud business as well as to its Gemini chatbot. Other AI companies are specializing, honing their models for narrower use cases and skill sets. Hume AI, for example, has focused on emotional intelligence; its newest models are surprisingly good at both listening for a wide range of emotions in the human voice (say, a customer support caller), and generating voices that convey a range of emotions. World Labs, cofounded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, has focused on models that understand the world very differently than large language models. The company has launched Marble, a “world model” capable of processing physical and spatial data in order to generate realistic world simulations that can be used to train self-driving cars or guide the movements of robots. 1. Google For creating an LLM that’s suitable for powering agents With the release of its Gemini 3 family of multimodal AI models, Google cemented its position as a dominant—and still rising—force in AI. The new models, which were developed by the company’s primary AI lab, Google DeepMind, and began deployment in November 2025, were meant to unify the multimodal, reasoning, and agentic properties introduced in the Gemini 1 and 2 models. They’re among the first to be trained from the ground up to process and understand images, video, audio, and code, not just text. The Gemini 3 models also offer the reasoning, planning, and ability to use tools (such as web search) needed to power AI agents. Gemini 3 now provides the brain for a number of Google’s core consumer-facing products, including the Gemini chatbot app, which now has more than 750 million monthly active users, and the AI Overviews in Google Search, which Google says now reach more than 2 billion users monthly. On the enterprise side, usage of Gemini 3 and other Google cloud models by independent developers and companies reportedly surged in 2025. Google says that Gemini Enterprise, a platform for enterprise search, AI assistants, and agents, has grown to 8 million paid seats. With a wealth of AI talent and a plethora of training data at its disposal, such as YouTube videos, Google is likely to seriously challenge OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI for frontier model dominance well into the future. Read more about Google, No. 1 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 2. Anthropic For developing the smartest coding agent Anthropic engineers originally built its popular Claude Code tool in late 2024 to test their models’ fluency with computer code. But when they saw that the tool, which generates code based on natural language prompts, dramatically sped up software development, they began using it for their own coding work. The company also kept improving the tool, and released it as a new product. “Since it became generally available last May, it’s changed how teams build and ship software,” says Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger, “and it’s now used by companies across industries.” Customers include Netflix, Spotify, Salesforce, KPMG, and many other major names, along with thousands of startups. Claude Code improved with the November 2025 release of the Claude Opus 4.5 model, and saw an even bigger boost with Opus 4.6, announced in early February. Users say the tool is now more efficient and can handle complex coding tasks that require prior reasoning and planning. It’s now a significant revenue generator for Anthropic, which reportedly expects to become profitable in 2028. “Surpassing $1 billion in six months tells us that this isn’t about experimentation, it’s just how developers work now,” Krieger says. Read more about Anthropic, No. 4 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 3. Abridge For relieving doctors of chart-work drudgery Abridge is applying enterprise-grade AI to one of the biggest contributors to burnout of physicians and other caregivers—filling out patient charts. Caregivers can record patient visits using their phone. The Abridge platform then summarizes the information and completes the electronic patient record. Clinicians using the platform report spending 60% less time completing patient notes after hours and report an 85% increase in work satisfaction, the company says. That results in a 67% overall reduction in burnout. Abridge projects that its platform will support more than 80 million patient-clinician conversations at 250 of the largest U.S. health systems in 2026. In April 2025, the company introduced a new AI architecture, called Contextual Reasoning Engine, that uses more clinical context to turn visit data into compliant, billable notes in real time. It’s also released add-on modules that make the platform more performant in specific clinical contexts, including Abridge Inside for Emergency Medicine and Abridge Inside for Inpatient. When scrutinizing patient visit summaries, Abridge says its platform caught 97% of errors and unsupported statements, while an off-the-shelf model, OpenAI’s GPT-4o, caught just 82%. The company closed a $250 million funding round in 2025, and reached $38 million in annualized recurring revenue in Q3 2025, with a 95%+ month-over-month retention rate. Read more about Abridge, honored as No. 19 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 4. World Labs For transforming text, photos, and videos into 3D worlds Many AI practitioners believe that today’s AI models will need to grow beyond words and develop an understanding of the spatial and physical world. One of these people is Fei-Fei Li, the AI pioneer whose ImageNet training dataset laid the foundation for new computer vision systems in the early 2010s. Li started World Labs with well-known AI researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall. The startup is building a form of “world model” capable of processing sensory data and developing a physics-based understanding of the real world. It released its first world model, Marble, in 2025. It focuses on generating and maintaining highly realistic 3D environments that can be used by creatives to develop interactive games and visual effects. Ultimately, the greatest beneficiaries of World Labs’ models might be robotics companies, which currently struggle to prepare robots for real-world utility. “You need a 3D environment that is interactable, that has collisions, has physics, has dynamics to train robots, to evaluate robots,” says Li. “This is the reason spatial intelligence is important for humans and it will be important for AI. The use cases are just abundant.” Read more about World Labs, honored as No. 22 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 5. Cerebras Systems For baking big chips for big AI Cerebras is best known for making the market’s largest AI chip, meaning it occupies most of a whole silicon wafer, which is about the size of a dinner plate (other AI chips, like Nvidia’s GPUs, are baked onto much smaller pieces of the silicon wafer). The large square chip packs a lot of processing power and memory on one piece of silicon, so almost no time is wasted routing data between separate chips. That makes it highly effective at processing data from commercial AI applications that require massive throughput and very fast response times. Cerebras says its chips can process 2,500 to 3,000 tokens per second, more than 70 times faster than the best GPUs. For years, Cerebras sold its technology mainly to national labs and R&D organizations that needed supercomputing power for research. But over the past 18 months, the company has increasingly filled the growing demand for computing power for commercial AI apps such as chatbots and coding assistants. For example, OpenAI recently began using a large installation of Cerebras servers to process real-time user interactions with its Codex coding assistant. In February 2025, Cerebras said that it planned to launch six new inference data centers. At least four of them—Dallas, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, and Montreal—were online by the end of the year. Its customer list now includes IBM, Meta, Perplexity, Mayo Clinic, Notion, AbbVie, G42, Mistral, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, and AstraZeneca. In September 2025, the company raised a $1.1 billion funding round at an $8.1 billion valuation. Then in early 2026, it announced another $1 billion round at a post-money valuation of around $23 billion. 6. Alibaba Group For bringing its Qwen AI models to the cloud Qwen, from the Chinese conglomerate Alibaba Group, is a world-class family of large language models. Alibaba has developed a whole stack of infrastructure software around the models so that they can be more easily deployed within enterprises. It now open-sources Qwen, calling it the “operating system of the AI era.” As Asia-Pacific’s largest cloud provider and the world’s fourth largest, Alibaba has released more than 300 AI models spanning text, image, video, and audio generation. The company says Qwen has been downloaded more than 600 million times, and has spawned over 170,000 derivative models. More than a million developers use Model Studio, Alibaba Cloud’s platform for building and deploying AI apps using Qwen. In June 2025, Alibaba launched a strategic alliance with SAP, which now integrates Qwen into its SAP AI Core, a service layer for deploying and running AI workloads, in China and, soon, globally. A groundbreaking BMW partnership embeds Qwen into the carmaker’s 2026 Neue Klasse vehicles, the first time a global automaker has embedded an open-source LLM directly into in-car systems. Qwen is also having an impact in healthcare. The models have improved the diagnostic accuracy of PANDA cancer screening by 34.1% and reduced misdiagnoses by an acute aortic syndrome tool from 50% to 4.8%. 7. Darktrace For turning LLMs into security workers Darktrace may have been ahead of its time when it launched its Cyber AI Analyst in 2019. By 2025, the agentic security system had conducted 90 million investigations and was able to reduce them to fewer than 500,000 incidents that it deemed critical. Now Darktrace is turning its focus to security threats in the cloud, where the majority of AI models and apps are hosted. In September 2025, the company launched Forensic Acquisition & Investigation, which it says is the industry’s first fully automated forensic solution for cloud computing. The system is designed to instantly capture and preserve evidence of a security breach so that researchers can establish the root cause and timeline of a cyberattack and investigate it across different commercial clouds and on-premises computer systems. Darktrace also added a new custom large language model called DEMIST-2 that enables a deeper understanding of cybersecurity threats and orchestrates the use of agents in complex investigations. Darktrace’s security technology protects about 10,000 organizations globally from sophisticated threats to cloud, email, network, and operational technology systems. 8. Mithril For developing algorithms to keep the servers working around the clock, more efficiently One of the fundamental challenges in the AI industry is the extremely high cost of training and operating large models. Not only is there an undersupply of the silicon chips needed to do the work, but cloud providers sell access to compute power in rigid ways that can leave servers idle. Mithril’s idea is to aggregate computing power from cloud providers into a marketplace and sell it in flexible ways. For instance, if an AI lab needs cloud resources for a job that can run piecemeal, it might get a lower price than another workload that’s time-sensitive and must run uninterrupted until completion. Mithril says usage of its platform has grown by more than 550% over the past year. Its customers include well-known AI companies such as Cursor, Poolside, and Pika. It also serves a growing number of enterprises such as LG AI Research and research institutions such as Arc Institute, Stanford, and Broad Institute. Mithril, which was founded by former Google DeepMind research scientist Jared Quincy Davis, has raised $80 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Microsoft Ventures (M12), and NEA, among others. 9. Lila Sciences For integrating generative AI with lab robotics Generative AI has the potential to conceive of novel molecule combinations that form the basis for new and more effective drug therapies. But in drug discovery, the AI must extend from the digital realm to conduct physical experiments that validate the candidates. Lila Sciences describes its AI Science Factory as the first “operating system for autonomous science” capable of driving open-ended scientific exploration. Its integration of hardware and software innovation creates a closed loop where AI designs hypotheses, executes experiments, and incorporates results into new cycles of discovery. The system autonomously runs thousands of experiments simultaneously. In March 2025, Lila Sciences announced four breakthrough discoveries, all achieved through AI. They include optimal genetic medicine constructs outperforming commercial therapeutics, discovery of hundreds of novel antibodies and peptides, unique non-platinum catalysts for green hydrogen at a far lower cost, and world-class carbon capture materials. The company says it marked the first time in history that AI, not humans, was the driving force behind scientific milestones. Lila Sciences launched in March 2025 with $200 million in seed capital from General Catalyst and others, then raised another $350 million from investors such as In-Q-Tel in October. 10. FieldAI For giving robots brains for the real world Unlike other robotics companies, FieldAI isn’t trying to reverse engineer new large language models to be the brains for robots. Rather, its Field Foundation Models (FFMs) are grounded in physics. In practice this means its models make robots keenly aware of the physical risks in their environment so that they can operate safely and effectively in “dull, dirty, and dangerous (DDD) environments,” as the company puts it, without requiring GPS, maps, or constant human oversight. The FFMs can be placed in all kinds of robots including quadrupeds, humanoids, wheeled robots, and passenger-scale platforms. FieldAI CEO Ali Agha has said that his company already has more than 200 customer deployments across North America, Europe, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, including some of the largest construction firms in China and the U.S. In August 2025, FieldAI raised $405 million from top-tier investors including Bezos Expeditions, Gates Frontier, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, Nvidia, and Samsung. The company was founded in 2023 as a 30-person team with members from Google, Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla, SpaceX, Zoox, and Cruise. It’s grown to more than 100 people. 11. Runway For pushing the envelope in production-ready video generation Even as competition heats up from players like Google and OpenAI, Runway continues to set the pace for generative video. The company improved on its previous flagship models in 2025 with the release of Gen-4, which lets creators generate or edit video using text prompts and/or reference images, and then iterate and edit within a production-style workflow. The new models were designed to address a key limitation of existing models—limited ability to maintain the consistency of people, objects, and environments across multiple shots. Runway is likely the generative video company that’s most deeply entrenched in the advertising and entertainment industries, thanks to partnerships with Lionsgate, EDGLRD, Fabula, and AMC Networks. Amazon reportedly used Runway tools in the production of House of David season 2, and they were also used to create visual effects for Madonna and Beyoncé. On the enterprise side, Runway has been working with Microsoft, Ubisoft, Dolce & Gabbana, Puma, Under Armour, Valentino, and others. In April 2025, Runway raised $308 million in Series D funding at a $3.3 billion valuation, more than doubling its valuation from the previous round. And in February 2026, it raised another $315 million at a valuation of roughly $5.3 billion. 12. OpenEvidence For giving doctors an AI consultant trained in peer-reviewed studies OpenEvidence is a chatbot-style quick reference guide used by physicians and other clinicians. Caregivers can type a clinical question in natural language and get summarized answers that are grounded in peer-reviewed medical research. That’s because the information in the company’s model comes via content deals that give OpenEvidence access to the JAMA Network and The New England Journal of Medicine. In 2025, the company launched OpenEvidence DeepConsult, a deep research mode for more complex clinical questions. The tool deploys a team of specialized “PhD-level AI agents” that can search through hundreds of research reports and then stitch together a coherent, actionable answer. The company also released OpenEvidence Visits, which lets physicians easily access medical evidence and form decisions during patient exams. OpenEvidence became a part of the workflow of many doctors during 2025. The company says 40% of U.S. doctors now log in daily. That popularity didn’t go unnoticed within venture capital circles. In July 2025, the company raised $210 million at a valuation of approximately $3.5 billion. It raised another round, led by Thrive Capital and DST Global, in January 2026, which pushed its valuation up to $12 billion and brought its funding total to nearly $700 million. 13. GC AI For empowering in-house legal teams with truth-grounded AI Many of the strongest startups are started by people who had a personal need for the company’s product. That’s the case with GC AI, whose name refers to AI for general counsels, the corporate world’s top in-house lawyers. GC AI was cofounded by Cecilia Ziniti, who was general counsel in Amazon’s Alexa division, at the coding assistant company Replit, and at the autonomous driving company Cruise. GC AI’s product focuses squarely on the main responsibilities of lawyers within enterprise settings. Users can enter a chatbot-style ask-and-answer session and get answers rooted in their company’s own policies, products, and practices. The software summarizes and analyzes documents (customers report a 50% reduction in document drafting and review time), and generates first drafts of legal correspondence such as emails, clauses, and memos. Perhaps most importantly, GC AI establishes trust through a key 2025 innovation called the Exact Quote system, which ensures that every clause, citation, and contract reference comes verbatim from verified sources. More than 700 legal teams now use the platform, with notable customers including SurveyMonkey, Penguin Random House, and Vuori. GC AI raised $11.6 million in venture funding in May 2025, and another $60 million round in November, bringing its funding total to $73 million. 14. Factory For imbuing software development agents with new flexibility Factory’s AI platform is used by software developers to create and delegate tasks to teams of autonomous agents (“Droids”). The agents rely on a shared memory graph to plan, build, and ship software, and developers can use it within familiar interfaces such as the computer terminal and Slack. The platform is “model agnostic,” meaning that it can integrate major generalist models like ones from OpenAI or Anthropic, or smaller, task-focused models. The secret sauce comes from the contextual intelligence and multi-agent reasoning built into Factory’s proprietary agentic architecture. In 2025, the company notched a big performance milestone, going to No. 1 on the Terminal-Bench benchmark by outperforming major competitors in multi-agent collaboration, debugging, and infrastructure tasks. Factory is still a young company—it was founded in 2023—but it showed up just in time to play a role in the agentic phase of generative AI that followed the chatbot craze. The startup said in 2025 that it anticipated hitting a $25 million annual recurring revenue (ARR). Its customers include Bayer, EY, MongoDB, and Nvidia. It’s raised around $70 million from some pedigreed investors, including Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital, NEA, J.P. Morgan, and Nvidia, which suggests that the startup has established credibility as a platform that could help define the next era of human-AI collaboration in engineering. 15. Turing For bringing human brains to AI training Turing began life as a talent platform that matched and vetted remote software engineering talent for tech company and enterprise clients. With the AI boom that started after the launch of ChatGPT, it quickly reimagined itself as a different, but complimentary kind of platform that serves expert-driven AI training data to major AI labs such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. In 2025, the company evolved further to become an “AI research accelerator” that helps AI labs identify model weaknesses and engineer custom training data solutions. One way it does this is through “data gyms,” which are something like flight simulators for AI agents. The gym can put AI agents through numerous use case scenarios and collect feedback data on their performance, which can be used to develop clean “this worked, this didn’t” signals for training and evaluation. Turing also launched a new model fine-tuning platform called ALAN (Always Learning, Always Nimble), which it says has revolutionized the way it captures expert knowledge and transforms it into training data. The Palo Alto-based company has been growing rapidly during the past two years as the race among AI labs to reach artificial general intelligence has picked up. It’s grown to 4,000 employees, says it hit a $300 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) during 2025, and is profitable. Turing picked up another $111 million in venture capital funding in March 2025 at a $2.2 billion valuation. 16. Cohere For creating private and secure AI models for companies The Canadian AI lab Cohere was cofounded by Aidan Gomez, who was one of the Google researchers who coauthored the seminal Transformers paper that touched off the generative AI boom. Cohere’s models don’t normally show up at the top of industry benchmark tests alongside those from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, but the company has made a very smart pivot toward “sovereign AI,” in which security- and privacy-conscious companies can host their data and AI models within their own private cloud or on servers located within their security perimeter. This is especially important to enterprises in regulated industries that must meet strict security and governance standards for customer data. Cohere is also working hard to let enterprises do more with their protected data. In January 2025, it released North, an agentic AI platform that lets enterprises search company data and automate tasks using AI. North moved to general commercial availability in August, and RBC and LG are now reportedly running pilots with the platform. In August, Cohere announced a $500 million raise, followed by an additional $100 million second close in September, bringing total funding to $1.6 billion at a $7 billion valuation. 17. Snorkel AI For preparing AI models for the enterprise by harnessing specialized, research-backed datasets Expectations for applying AI models to real-world tasks in the workplace are running high in 2026, and a lot of money is riding on it. AI labs can no longer rely on increases in the amount of training data or computing power to prepare their models for critical, and diverse, real-world use cases. So they’re increasingly training models on highly specialized data developed by domain experts to continue making progress. The market research firm IDC projects that AI labs will spend $150 billion a year on such data by 2027. One of the companies addressing this market is Snorkel AI, which creates custom training datasets for many of the leading AI labs and AI app developers. The company creates its specialty domain data, which can be used to “challenge, teach, and evaluate” AI models during their training, with the help of a global network of more than 5,500 experts representing more than a thousand knowledge areas. In 2025, Snorkel released a new product called Expert Data-as-a-Service (DaaS), which quickly delivers customized datasets to match specific training needs as well as reinforcement learning environments for testing models on specific tasks and gathering feedback data. In 2025, Snorkel raised a $100 million round at a $1.3 billion valuation from firms such as Addition, Prosperity 7 Ventures, and existing investors Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. 18. Hume AI For infusing emotion and inflection into its voice model As AI matures, it’s likely that more people will begin talking to AI apps rather than typing to them. But right now, AI models in general aren’t great at detecting emotion in a human user’s voice. Nor do they nail the emotion they should synthesize into their voice during a response. That’s why Hume AI has become an important company in the industry. It saw these conditions coming. The New York-based startup has been developing models that generate emotionally correct voices and listen for emotion in human voices. In 2025, Hume released Octave 2, which, unlike traditional text-to-speech models, understands how the language in a script informs the tune, rhythm, and timbre of the voice that’s speaking it, inferring when to whisper secrets, shout triumphantly, or calmly explain a fact. Its model is trained to hear more than 200 emotions and 400 voice characteristics. The end result is that users can have a back-and-forth with an AI that sounds and feels more like a conversation with a warm-blooded human being. Hume has so far held three funding rounds with investors including Union Square Ventures, EQT Ventures, USV, Comcast Ventures, LG Technology Ventures, and others, raising nearly $80 million, according to PitchBook. But the biggest validation of Hume’s AI may be the fact that Google licensed the company’s models, and also recruited Hume CEO Alan Cowen and several other Hume researchers to work within its Google DeepMind AI group. Hume’s new CEO is Andrew Ettinger. 19. Decart For turning raw video into AI-infused video in real time Decart develops a full-stack AI video platform that can intake live video—from a Zoom call, perhaps—and affect, restyle, and regenerate it in real time. Its Mirage model might reskin the person in the frame as an animal or a cartoon character. Or Decart’s AI models might intake a webcam feed or stream and instantly change the environment into an anime or cyberpunk scene, with near-zero latency. In 2025, Decart released Mirage, which it bills as the world’s first real-time autoregressive video-to-video model. It uses generative AI to let a user enter prompts to shift the style of the video in real time, while maintaining the original video’s structure, motion, and frame rate. Decart is now working with AWS to integrate its real-time generative video and world-model technology into Amazon Bedrock, a managed service that makes various AI models available to AWS customers through an API. Decart was given early access to Amazon’s Trainium 3 chips so that its models could run well on them. The Israeli company, which was founded in 2023, says it’s already been generating “tens of millions” in annual revenue from a proprietary acceleration technology that lets customers run AI workloads faster and cheaper on GPUs. But it’s also licensing its Mirage model to gaming, real estate, and film companies to create live simulations. In July 2025, Decart raised $100 million at a valuation of $3.1 billion from investors including Sequoia Capital and Benchmark, bringing its total to $153 million. 20. Reflection AI For open-sourcing the AI frontier 2025 was the year that AI coding assistants became good enough to take a major role, alongside human engineers, in building software. However, most of these systems are built on top of closed-source, general AI models that lack transparency and can’t be modified or built upon. Reflection AI is building an open-source alternative to those models, and it’s starting with models that specialize in computer code. While popular coding models such as Claude Code and Cursor are focused on quickly generating code, Reflection’s flagship model, called Asimov, focuses on the harder problem of understanding existing enterprise codebases—often millions of lines and hundreds of interconnected systems deep. It can also read emails, Slack messages, project updates, and code documentation to develop a broader contextual understanding of how the company thinks about developing software. Some of Reflection’s team members worked on Google DeepMind’s famous AlphaGo model and helped train Google’s flagship Gemini model using reinforcement learning. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said Reflection has “one of the best teams in the world,” describing the founders—Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou—as “god tier” researchers. The company came out of stealth in March 2025 with $130 million in funding at a $555 million valuation, and six months later it raised another $2 billion from Nvidia, DST, Lightspeed, and Sequoia at an $8 billion valuation—one of the largest Series B AI funding rounds ever. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

Beyond the not insignificant work of designing buildings, it can often seem that architects are also tasked with solving some of the biggest problems in the world. From reducing the environmental impact of buildings to increasing access to affordable spaces to fighting climate change to rebuilding what climate change has damaged, the architect’s work can verge on the infinite. For the architecture companies honored in Fast Company’s 2026 Most Innovative Companies awards, this mission creep is part of the appeal. All 10 honorees on this year’s architecture list have made societal challenges and systems-scale shortcomings into side projects of their more straightforward architectural design work. For example, the global design firm HKS earned the top spot on this year’s list partly because it did not shy away from a bold request from a client for a skyscraper design that could be both the tallest building in Salt Lake City and help reduce the city’s notoriously poor air quality. HKS came up with a unique approach to filtering the air going into the building and ventilating it back out cleaner than before. Others on the list have taken similarly expansive views of their responsibilities working in the built environment. The architecture firm NBBJ is using neuroscientific findings to inform the way it designs buildings that reduce the negative cognitive effects of high heat environments. Crest Real Estate has applied its forte in construction-permit expediting to assist in the rebuilding of fire-ravaged Los Angeles. And Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is taking an incubator approach to supporting next-generation building materials that will improve the energy performance of the buildings it designs, as well as those designed by others. The list is replete with design firms and architecture industry specialists that see the complexity of today’s big issues as a call to action, and they’re using their work as a way of getting more than a building built. Their designs and, by extension, the world will be better as a result. 1. HKS For designing a precedent-setting 41-story tower in Salt Lake City that filters air Salt Lake City’s new skyscraper is also a sky cleaner. Astra Tower, the 451-foot-tall luxury residential building that opened in 2025, was designed by HKS Architects to reckon with one of the biggest challenges facing Salt Lake City: poor air quality. Due to its geographic location in the valley of a ring of mountain ranges, Salt Lake City suffers the choking effects of what’s known as an inversion layer. Cold air forms a kind of cap at the ridge of the mountaintops, effectively trapping polluted urban air in the bowl of the city and pushing the air quality index to unhealthy levels. “You can see it. You can smell it,” says architect Emir Tursic, a partner at HKS and a Salt Lake City resident. Astra Tower’s developer called on the architects to propose a solution. The request “left us scratching our heads for a little bit,” says Tursic. “How can one building do anything about something that is of this magnitude?” Pulling on expertise from across its 29 offices, HKS took an unusual approach. Astra Tower was designed with a single entry point for its air, which is then passed through a hospital-grade filtration system before being delivered through special ducts directly to each of the building’s 372 units. When that heavily filtered air goes back out of the building, through vents or residents’ windows, it is far cleaner than when it came in. Tursic says it’s a model nearly any other building could follow. Residents can see just how good their air quality is with built-in air monitors in every unit. And the air quality education extends out to the city itself. At the top of Astra Tower, now the city’s tallest building, live data from the EPA and NOAA feed color-coded LED lighting to indicate the current air quality. One building can’t clean up an entire city’s air, but Astra Tower is certainly trying. Read more about HKS, No. 31 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 2. NBBJ For creating design interventions that lower indoor temperatures—improving worker cognition in the process Extreme heat is one of the main ways people around the world will experience climate change firsthand, but it will mean more than physical discomfort. Research shows that extreme heat can also affect a person’s mental well-being, reducing cognition, disrupting focus, and impairing emotional regulation. In workplaces, these effects can be bad for workers and bad for business. The global architecture firm NBBJ is actively designing workplace projects to reduce these negative effects. The firm has partnered with neuroscientist Dr. John Medina to reduce the impact of heat on building users, including for blue-collar workers and the most vulnerable populations. NBBJ has produced designs for projects in Seattle and Singapore that lower heat inside the buildings, creating more comfortable settings for workers in those spaces. A cross-ventilated design for Seattle’s Ferry Terminal eliminates the need for air-conditioning completely. The commercial tower Keppel South Central NBBJ designed in Singapore uses a special wall design that cuts heat by 40%. Other research is exploring the development of new sustainable materials that can greatly reduce heat gain on building exteriors. It’s climate-conscious design that puts peoples’ experience top of mind. 3. Digs For making collaboration easier for architects, builders, and clients by turning static floor plans into interactive 3D models A house’s blueprints are the raw information of the building, containing everything a designer or builder needs to know about how it’s made and how to fix it. For the end user of the building—the homeowner—this raw information can be virtually impenetrable, offering little information that a typical person would find useful or actionable. Digs, a software company focused on the architecture, engineering, and construction industries, has decoded the blueprint. Its technology makes the often 2D and static building blueprints of the past into an interactive interface and visual workspace where designers, builders, and homeowners can seamlessly collaborate on 3D versions of a project. They can work together, in an easily digestible way, to understand a building from its earliest design stages to its construction to its ongoing maintenance post-occupancy. Other tools in the company’s portfolio easily scan and process building interiors, including room measurements, building material types, and appliances and products, easing communications about a project’s design and making the operation and maintenance of a building easier to manage. By giving builders, tradespeople, and homeowners a real-time and shared visual hub, decision-making and communication are faster during the design and construction process, and maintenance during the lifespan of a building is more intuitive for the people who use it every day. 4. Gresham Smith For speeding up decision-making through AI tools that visualize projects and improve design ​​As the creative and operational benefits of artificial intelligence have rippled across the design industry, architecture firm Gresham Smith took a moment in 2025 to try to understand what impact this technology could have on the way it does business. Through a deep data analysis that looked into every part of its operation, the firm drew baselines for the way it has commonly worked. Then it saw how adding a layer of AI could improve, sometimes vastly, those outcomes. As a result, Gresham Smith developed five AI-infused platforms that reinvent how it approaches projects, clients, and the future of architecture. A portal for building information models has reduced decision-making time by 40%. An automated spatial planning tool takes early project parameters to automate general building plans, creating a viable starting place for design that reduces time by 25%. An AI assistant processes client planning meetings to create actionable design directions for designers to work toward, streamlining the process of turning client desires into buildable projects. One tool uses AI visualizations to speed up concept design, and another analyzes the emotional responses spatial designs trigger. All together, these tools bring new technologies to bear on the everyday parts of architectural design. For Gresham Smith, they are rewriting how an architecture firm works. 5. Crest Real Estate For launching a catalog of fire-resistant home designs to help Los Angeles recover from devastating wildfires As construction-permit expediters and third-generation Angelenos, brothers Steven and Jason Somers took the January 2025 wildfires that devastated the Los Angeles area personally. Through their company, Crest Real Estate, they set out to use their professional skills to help in the rebuilding process. Taking a page from the Case Study House Program that led to famous modernist home designs across Southern California, Crest created Case Study 2.0, a portfolio of model home designs that could aid the rebuilding in L.A. They brought on more than 40 local architecture firms to offer deeply discounted fire-resistant home designs that people can use to rebuild their fire-damaged homes. The designs are optimized for the average lot sizes of homes destroyed in the fire and informed by Crest’s permit-expediting experience to qualify for building permits as quickly as possible. As of early 2026, more than a dozen homeowners are currently using Case Study 2.0 designs in their rebuild projects. At least two of those are already moving into construction, and Crest expects roughly 20 other projects to be in various stages of development within the first half of 2026. As model designs intended to be replicated with few if any major changes, these projects are also speeding up the permitting process for future versions of those designs, making it more feasible for many homeowners to rebuild faster and cheaper. 6. Cove For showing that an AI-native architecture firm can improve the efficiency of designing buildings—and actually get them built Cove has gone far beyond other architecture firms in making AI the center of its design approach. Founded by two architects inspired by the idea of expanding access to good design, Cove has been early to embrace the power of AI to speed up the pace and bring down the cost of architectural design. Cove integrates AI in every stage of an architecture project, from feasibility and design through construction administration. The firm’s proprietary AI tools evaluate project designs for factors including local permit requirements, daylight access, carbon emissions, and overall cost. Other tools automate the creation of construction documents, further shortening timelines. Several of the firm’s projects have been permitted, including a 16-unit townhouse project in Atlanta that’s now under construction. Other projects in the works range widely, from housing to data centers to hospitality projects, showing the versatility of their AI-centric approach. The firm’s AI tools greatly accelerate project feasibility studies and permitting, trimming months off projects and lowering overall budgets. But the company is not just handing over the reins to AI. Automating these time-consuming and often rote processes frees up more time for human designers to refine projects, improving aesthetics while taking advantage of the time and cost savings AI makes possible. 7. Dialog For creating safer wildlife crossings over deadly highways by blending biological sciences and design Grim data informed the design of the Peter Lougheed Wildlife Overpass outside Banff, Alberta, where the migration routes of deer, elk, coyotes, and grizzly bears collide quite literally with road traffic. Vehicle-animal collisions occur an average of 69 times per year, and that’s only what gets officially reported. Dialog, an architecture and engineering firm with offices across Canada, was tasked with designing a wildlife overpass for this busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway that would help reduce some of these collisions. Wildlife overpasses are nothing new, but Dialog took a different approach with its design. By bringing wildlife biologists and ecologists into the early stages of the design process, and involving them throughout the project’s construction, the architects created a wildlife crossing with a physical form and sight lines that better accommodate the lifestyles and migration patterns of the various species known to travel this area. The project has already reduced vehicle-wildlife collisions. According to a before-and-after study, collisions are down by more than 80% since the crossing officially opened in June 2025. The science-backed design process is now being replicated on six more Dialog-designed wildlife crossings in other parts of Alberta. 8. Autodesk For creating a comprehensive digital twin to aid restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist masterpiece Fallingwater Cantilevered over the gentle waterfalls of a small stream in Southwest Pennsylvania, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is one of the most famous examples of modernist residential architecture in the United States. But, like any other 90-year-old house, the building has needed some extra help to stay in good shape. To aid in a recent historic restoration of the building, the architecture and engineering software company Autodesk developed a comprehensive digital twin of the project. This digitized approach streamlined the building’s restoration timeline, increased the historical accuracy of restoration efforts, reduced material waste, and better managed the construction sequencing, making the project faster and cheaper overall. This work builds on lessons Autodesk learned from creating and donating a similar and detailed 3D model of Notre-Dame Cathedral after its 2019 fire. That model accelerated the restoration process for Notre-Dame, enabling a highly complex and closely watched project to be completed within five years. That success and the work at Fallingwater has boosted demand for Autodesk’s digital twin technology, particularly among preservationists and others engaged in historic restoration projects. 9. CannonDesign For investing in a “smart buildings” practice The global architecture and design firm CannonDesign sees “smart design” as the future of the industry. Packed with technology and optimized to function in the most efficient and environmentally sustainable manner possible, smart buildings have gone from green niche to the architectural mainstream. As one of the larger architecture firms designing projects around the world, CannonDesign is helping make smart buildings and smart design more of the status quo. In 2025, the 19-office firm reframed its business approach to emphasize building designs and post-occupancy management strategies that rely heavily on AI and smart-building technology to improve environmental sustainability. The firm also invested millions into this effort by acquiring smart-building expert firm the Clarient Group, and an in-house innovation incubator has partnered with this new smart-buildings team to identify ideas for smart-building projects, influencing design concepts from the earliest stages. Combining the firm’s existing expertise in sustainable buildings design—CannonDesign’s portfolio includes 312 LEED-certified buildings, 14 net-zero energy projects, and five net-zero-carbon projects—it will use this smart-building focus to improve the operational efficiency and material performance of its projects. It’s not just an experiment. CannonDesign is now making the smart-buildings approach part of the way it designs all buildings going forward. 10. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill For incubating the innovation ecosystem around architecture and construction As one of the more venerable firms in American and corporate architecture, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has had a solid run of designing some of the most significant skyscrapers of the 20th and 21st centuries. From Chicago’s Willis Tower to New York’s 7 World Trade Center to Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the firm has reshaped skylines around the world. Now it’s hoping to reshape the materials those skylines are built from. In 2025, SOM launched a new approach to improving access to novel building materials and design tools through a business incubation program and a venture-like seed funding program. Using its experience and scale, the firm is trying to jump-start the businesses and suppliers that are providing the smart and sustainable building materials of the future. This is taking various forms. The firm has seed-funded a new venture that implements clean energy storage technology in skyscrapers, essentially turning towers into batteries. The firm has also formed a new partnership with an established business incubator to spur more innovation specifically directed at the fields of architecture, construction, and engineering. These investments, and others in the works, could radically redefine the buildings that make up city skylines. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

Three years (plus) after the arrival of ChatGPT, chatbots are morphing into AI agents. As generative AI models have improved and become able to reason in real time, the major AI labs, starting with Anthropic, have begun to shift their research focus from models that compose and comprehend text to ones that reason, use tools, and work autonomously. The first kind of agent that matured to the point of having real-world impact was an agent that can write, test, and document computer code. Coding agents, powered by language models, can understand plain language, which has democratized software development and made “vibe coding” possible. Products like Lovable and Bolt allow nontechnical or semi-technical product managers or marketing chiefs to quickly mock up working prototypes of apps or site features. Both products saw significant gains in both users and revenue over the past year. As did Cursor, which works alongside human software engineers in their normal user interface to build within large preexisting codebases. Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex also saw surges in usership in the last half of 2025. Customer service was another early application of AI agents, but many have been limited in their knowledge and reasoning ability, and therefore limited in scope and utility. That too is changing. Sierra, which was founded by ex-Salesforce exec (and OpenAI board member) Brett Taylor and ex-Google hardware chief Clay Bavor, is developing agents that act like all-purpose concierges or “brand representatives.” Sierra agents remember a consumer’s past interactions with the company and are versatile enough to handle a range of tasks including product returns, account updates, subscription issues, and appointment setting. Cognigy (now a part of Nice) formally launched its AI agent platform in 2025; its customer service AI agents work with human operators to plan and carry out tasks, such as handling complex transactions and coordinating across systems. ServiceNow, which provides a sort of operating system for customer support, is broadening its platform to enable the deployment and management of AI agents (both its own and those from third parties) across many departments across the enterprise including customer service, human resources, and IT. As AI agents proliferate, governance of the agents will become a big priority for enterprises. That’s why Credo AI’s Agent Registry is timely; the system gives enterprises a way to register all agents used by the company, as well as real-time oversight of the actions agents are taking, what data they’re accessing, and how they’re arriving at their decisions. In the first half of 2026, coding agents and customer service agents have already begun to reshape how organizations manage—and staff—those key business functions. By this time next year, we may look back at those applications as just the low-hanging fruit, the first of many to come. 1. Sierra For developing more thoughtful agents for business Most AI agents in customer service still behave like glorified chatbots—fast, yet they fail to retain conversational context. Sierra, which is building AI agents that function less like ticket responders and more like long-term brand representatives, is focused on a core challenge in enterprise AI: memory. The company was founded in 2023 by Bret Taylor, who currently chairs OpenAI’s board and previously co-created Google Maps before serving as CTO of Facebook and co-CEO of Salesforce, and Clay Bavor, who spent 18 years at Google leading AR and VR initiatives and overseeing product and design for Workspace apps such as Gmail and Docs. Sierra’s agents retain context across interactions, allowing them to recall previous purchases, unresolved issues, and customer preferences. The result is AI that functions less like a support chatbot and more like a persistent digital relationship layer for businesses. The approach has resonated with enterprises seeking deeper automation as Sierra reached $150 million in annual recurring revenue just eight quarters after launching in February 2024. It raised $350 million in funding in 2025 at a $10 billion valuation. In 2025, Sierra added voice capabilities to its platform, enabling customers to converse with memory-aware agents over phone calls, messaging, and web channels. 2. Cursor For putting agents where developers need them Software creation often requires engineers to toggle between writing code and managing the invisible labor around it, such as reviews, debugging, and deployment. Cursor aims to collapse the ongoing developer friction by embedding autonomous AI agents directly into coding environments. In 2025, Cursor 1.0 introduced an AI-native development environment that integrates Agent, Bugbot, and Background Agent across IDEs, the command line, Slack, Linear, and the web. The Cursor Agent can complete complex end-to-end tasks, from building features to testing and migration, while the Background Agent runs long-horizon coding tasks in the cloud, allowing developers to parallelize work without interrupting flow. Cursor’s Bugbot has reviewed more than 3 million pull requests, identifying more than 1.5 million issues with resolution rates exceeding 50%. The platform currently serves 31 million-plus users and is used by 64% of the Fortune 500, including Nvidia, Adobe, and OpenAI, generating more than 100 million lines of enterprise code daily. Cursor recently surpassed $2 billion in annualized revenue, doubling its recurring revenue in just three months. 3. Coactive For making sense of vast video libraries Video is one of the largest untapped data assets inside modern enterprises. Petabytes sit in cloud buckets and on local servers, yet almost none of it is truly searchable. At best, companies rely on manual tags and file names. Coactive turns raw visual content into structured, queryable intelligence. The platform scaled its Multimodal Application Platform (MAP), a production-ready system that analyzes images and video directly—without relying on pre-labeled metadata. MAP applies multimodal AI to detect contextual signals across billions of frames, in turn automatically generating rich metadata insights to feed moderation systems, recommendation engines, ad targeting, and other discovery workflows. Coactive’s Intelligent Sampling isolates high-value video moments in seconds, while Intelligent Search allows organizations to build custom taxonomies tailored to their domains. MAP processes billions of images and video frames, with usage growing fivefold across large-scale deployments at NBCUniversal, Thomson Reuters, and other media-heavy enterprises. At Fandom, MAP automated 88% of image labeling within weeks, cutting manual review time by 74% and reducing moderation costs by 50%. 4. Lovable For democratizing software development by making it conversational For decades, building software required fluency in programming languages and algorithmic concepts, as well as access to specialized teams for mid- to large-scale projects. Launched in late 2024, Lovable is breaking that barrier through its coding assistant platform, enabling development through natural language. The platform launched Lovable Agent, an agentic development system that turns a written idea into a deployed application. The agentic AI can autonomously manage files and coordinate front-end and backend logic and data layers. Lovable Cloud comes with a backend for authentication, storage, and secure connections, while Lovable AI allows for functionalities such as content summary, image creation, and translation based on prompts. Lovable’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) reached $200 million in November, and in December it raised a $330 million Series B at a $6.6 billion valuation. More than 35 million projects have been built on Lovable, which finished February with 500,000 paid users. Enterprise customers include Zendesk, Uber, Hubspot, Microsoft, and ElevenLabs. 5. ServiceNow For taking its generative AI agents beyond customer service to support other departments Enterprise generative AI deployments are often clustered around chatbots and customer support, leaving other departments untouched. ServiceNow is helping extend agentic automation by treating AI agents as a coordinated digital workforce spanning entire businesses. Rather than confining AI innovations to support desks, ServiceNow expanded its platform into HR, finance, IT, security, and field operation domains through its single architecture and data model to coordinate work across departments. Two breakthrough capabilities anchored the shift. AI Control Tower provides executives with a central console to monitor and govern every agent in operation, whether built by ServiceNow or third parties. Workflow Data Fabric connects live data from hundreds of enterprise systems, allowing agents to act with real-time context instead of scripted prompts. The platform’s customers, including AstraZeneca, reported saving 30,000 hours annually by automating research workflows, while the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, digitized 20 municipal processes and enhanced its citizen portal through the offerings. Likewise, Bell Canada optimized more than 2 million service jobs powered by AI-driven scheduling. Nearly 1,000 organizations have deployed agentic AI with ServiceNow, and the momentum helped drive subscription revenue to $12.88 billion in 2025, representing a 21% year-over-year growth. 6. Credo AI For helping build confidence in AI by creating trust scores for the latest models Choosing an AI model for a specific use case has started to feel like buying software without a spec sheet, and Credo AI is trying to fix that. In 2025, the company launched Model Trust Scores, a use-case-based leaderboard that evaluates 55 leading models across 95 representative use cases in 21 industries. Instead of ranking models on raw performance alone, the system measures risk, reliability, and policy alignment, which enables enterprises to weigh trade-offs before deployment. Credo also introduced an AI Agent Registry to monitor autonomous systems in real time, tracking data access, decision pathways, and policy compliance as agents act over data. The offering has resonated with customers looking for governance at scale. Meanwhile, a new integration with Microsoft Azure AI Foundry integrates governance directly into the model development process. Credo AI doubled its revenue in 2025 and grew its enterprise customer base by 150%. 7. Gong For arming sales teams with purpose-built AI agents Sales teams sit on a gold mine of customer conversation data. However, most of it is forgotten the moment the call ends. Gong is helping turn those interactions into action. The company expanded its Revenue AI platform with 18 specialized AI agents designed specifically for go-to-market teams. Instead of generic copilots, these agents can analyze unstructured data such as calls, emails, and meetings to surface deal risks, flag competitive threats, and recommend next steps. The platform’s Orchestrate product allows revenue leaders to define sales plays once and automatically guide teams through execution, measuring adherence and impact in real time. Teams using Gong’s Smart Trackers—an agent trained to detect contextual deal signals—report a win rate increase by 35%. Upwork reached 95% forecast accuracy after deploying Gong Forecast. Specifically, the Ask Anything agent, which allows reps to ask questions about their entire deal history, achieved a 26% increase in win rates. Gong surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025 and now serves more than 5,000 customers, including Google, ADP, and Uber for Business. 8. Graphite For developing agents that fix AI-generated code AI can now write code in seconds, thanks to innovations in LLMs. But reviewing the generated output still takes hours for developers. Graphite is helping enterprises automate the harder half. The company launched Diamond, an agentic code reviewer designed to analyze pull requests with the judgment of a senior engineer. Instead of flooding developers with generic comments, Diamond prioritizes real risks such as bugs, security gaps, and logic errors, then adapts to each team’s style guides and repository history. Powered by fine-tuned LLMs from Anthropic and OpenAI, the system has reportedly reviewed more than 900,000 pull requests with an over 95% positive feedback rate and a 52% comment acceptance rate, outperforming most AI reviewers and even rivaling human benchmarks. The platform also introduced Graphite Chat, a conversational layer that lets engineers query their codebase directly inside a pull request, ask for fixes, and merge changes without switching tools. The goal is to make the review process the control center of AI-era software development. Companies including Snowflake, Figma, and Notion now rely on Graphite to review code at scale. Ramp reported a cut median time between merged pull requests by 74%, while Shopify increased PRs shipped per developer by 33%. Graphite raised $52 million in Series B funding in 2025 from Accel and Anthropic’s fund. 9. Adobe For activating PDFs with AI The PDF was designed to preserve information. Today, Adobe is using it to enable conversation. The company’s Acrobat Studio blends Acrobat’s document intelligence with Adobe Express’s creative tools to turn static files into interactive workspaces. At its core are AI-powered “PDF Spaces,” where users can upload documents, assign AI assistants roles such as analyst or instructor, and query collections of files with source-linked citations. Instead of copying text into separate apps, teams can compare versions, extract insights, and instantly transform findings into additional content—all within the same environment. The shift is practical as corporate knowledge (policies, reports, agreements) often lives inside PDFs, yet remains difficult to analyze at scale. Acrobat Studio surfaces information without moving data outside secure environments and includes encryption, sandboxing, and centralized controls. The move comes as Adobe navigates regulatory scrutiny over subscription practices and AI training claims, even as its digital media revenue grew to $17.65 billion in 2025, up 11% year over year. 10. Sardine For using AI agents to stop financial crime Scammers and their malpractices have evolved to become fast, coordinated, and AI-assisted. To help fight automation with automation, Sardine launched what it calls the first agentic AI platform for overseeing financial crime management, unifying fraud prevention and anti–money laundering into a single system. Instead of simply flagging suspicious transactions, the platform’s AI agents investigate them—pulling device intelligence, behavioral biometrics, and transaction history into a real-time narrative before money moves. Its models can analyze typing cadence, hesitation patterns, and session flow to detect when a customer may be coached by a scammer during a “safe transfer.” If behavior shifts, the system can pause or trigger intervention. Beyond individual accounts, Sardine operates a consortium network spanning more than 3 billion devices, allowing institutions to share anonymized risk signals and disrupt mule networks. The platform currently supports more than 300 businesses in 70 countries. Sardine raised $70 million in Series C funding in early 2025. 11. Nice For putting AI agents to work in call centers The modern call center is no longer just rows of headsets. It’s increasingly staffed by software—and that software needs to be increasingly flexible. Last fall, AI platform giant Nice acquired AI voice agent pioneer Cognigy for $955 million. Cognigy is known for advancing agentic AI systems that don’t just answer scripted questions but can plan, execute, and resolve complex customer requests under human oversight. The platform’s AI agents can handle customer inquiries across industries, from rebooking flights during disruptions to processing financial inquiries, coordinating real-time backend orchestration. For live representatives, Cognigy’s copilot tools surface context and suggested actions mid-conversation, reducing friction without removing human judgment. Customers have seen reductions in average handling times of up to 30%, and a major airline increased the number of self-service interactions from 10,000 to 30,000 per day with the help of Cognigy’s agents. The company realized 100% year-over-year revenue growth in 2025, expanding its services into the healthcare, finance, and aviation sectors. 12. Baseten For hosting the infrastructure for AI startups Behind every fast AI answer is a slower, more complicated layer, dependent on the model’s inference capabilities, that most users never see. Baseten helps startups and enterprises scale inference—the moment when a model responds to a user query—and allows startups to deploy and scale the best open-source models without having to manage a GPU cluster. The company launched production-grade model APIs for popular models such as Qwen 3, Kimi K2, and DeepSeek R1, with a focus on low latency and enabling reliable data processing. It also introduced Baseten Training, allowing companies to pretrain and fine-tune models on the same infrastructure they use for deployment. Customers, including Abridge, Writer, and Superhuman, rely on Baseten to keep models responsive in domains such as healthcare, productivity, and enterprise applications. The company’s revenue increased more than tenfold year over year, while customer count grew 5.5x. Baseten recently raised a $300 million Series E, valuing its platform at $5 billion. 13. ConcertAI For increasing the odds of successful clinical trials Clinical trials are one of the most expensive and uncertain steps in bringing new medicines to market. Promising therapies often fail not because the science is wrong but because trials are poorly designed, recruit the wrong patients, or encounter operational hurdles. ConcertAI applies AI to large clinical and real-world healthcare datasets to help pharmaceutical companies predict trial outcomes and identify bottlenecks that might derail a study. Its Accelerated Clinical Trials (ACT) system uses AI to help researchers design protocols, select trial sites, and match patients to studies. By forecasting enrollment and outcome probabilities, the platform allows teams to test trial strategies computationally before real-world launch. In 2025, the company expanded its capabilities with the Precision Suite, a set of generative and agentic AI tools designed to help life sciences organizations analyze clinical data and accelerate drug development. Biopharma companies, including Bayer and Bristol Myers Squibb, use the technology to optimize studies. ConcertAI claims its systems can shorten clinical trial timelines by up to 10 to 20 months and reports serving 75% of the top life sciences companies. As drug development costs continue to rise, the company is positioning AI as a research layer that helps promising therapies reach patients faster. 14. Bolt.new For letting non-coders prototype apps What if building software felt more like texting than coding? Bolt.new, launched late 2024, turns a browser into a full development environment powered by StackBlitz’s WebContainers. Users only need to specify what they want to create, and the tool automatically generates, executes, and launches functional web or mobile applications without requiring any local development environment, servers, or setup. Bolt is designed for rapid development from scratch, making it ideal for product managers, designers, and entrepreneurs who want to prototype before engaging their engineering teams. In 2025, the firm grew with Bolt B2, incorporating sophisticated coding agents such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex right into its UI, along with cloud hosting and multi-agent support. It lets teams move from prototype to deployment within the browser. The company grew to $40 million in ARR in six months and has more than 8 million users. 15. Temporal For making agents more reliable AI agents are good at starting tasks, but not always good at finishing them. Temporal was built for the messy middle. By enabling AI agents to take on real operational responsibilities, the company is positioning reliability as infrastructure, rather than an afterthought. As enterprises began to move their agents from demo environments to actual workflows, errors proliferated, including APIs timing out, rate limits being reached, and long-running tasks losing state. Temporal’s platform acts as a durable execution layer, ensuring that multistep workflows pick up where they left off instead of having to start over. This attention to reliability was further emphasized with the inclusion of Temporal’s platform in OpenAI’s Agents SDK, which was already being leveraged by the AI model developer to power production systems such as ChatGPT image creation and Codex. Every step within a workflow is recorded, recoverable, and observable across clouds. Developers no longer need to write custom retry logic or rebuild brittle state machines. Temporal reported 380% year-over-year revenue growth in 2025, and raised a $300 million Series D at a $5 billion valuation in February 2026. 16. Cleo For producing an AI financial assistant with attitude Most budgeting apps quietly log your spending and send polite reminders. Cleo has opinions—and isn’t afraid to share them. Cleo has built an AI financial assistant that mixes blunt humor with behavioral science, aiming to keep users engaged long enough to change habits. Last year, the platform rolled out Debt Reset, which automatically pulls in users’ liabilities and constructs adaptive payoff strategies based on interest rates, due dates, and spending behavior. It also launched Money IQ, a gamified voice quiz that surfaces hidden subscriptions and recurring charges, turning financial blind spots into weekly prompts for action. Under the hood, Cleo’s AI processes an average of 6.4 billion transactions per day, using memory and real-time reasoning to tailor advice. The company reported $333 million in annual recurring revenue in December 2025 and more than 1.5 million monthly active users, with four consecutive years of doubling revenue and subscribers. Cleo’s real differentiator is tone as its AI layers reasoning with personality. Its much-discussed “Roast Mode,” shared more than 500,000 times and drawing 2.4 million TikTok likes, turns overspending into a blunt, sometimes biting, intervention. The joke lands—but so does the message. The company is betting that financial coaching works best when it feels personal. 17. Aurora For making autonomous trucking a reality In April 2025, autonomous trucking moved from pilot programs to paying customers. Aurora put driverless trucks on public highways hauling freight every day—with no human in the cab—marking the first sustained commercial deployment of autonomous long-haul trucking. At the core is the Aurora Driver, which pairs deep learning with a rules-based “verifiable AI” architecture built to make its decisions traceable and auditable—an answer to growing unease around opaque, black-box autonomy systems. Backed by its proprietary FirstLight lidar and millions of simulated scenarios, the system now runs routes along the Dallas–Houston corridor and has logged more than 50,000 commercial driverless miles with a perfect safety record. Last year, Aurora generated $3 million in commercial revenue, hauling freight for partners including FedEx, Werner, Schneider, Hirschbach, and Uber Freight. Moreover, the company is also working with truck manufacturers Paccar and Volvo to integrate the Aurora Driver at the factory level. The trucking sector is experiencing a chronic shortage of drivers, which continues to threaten the supply chain economy. With its solution moving autonomy onto active routes, Aurora is demonstrating that self-driving trucks aren’t a distant concept—they are operating in traffic today. 18. Mastercard For laying the pipes for agent-driven commerce AI agents are set to start shopping on our behalf—and Mastercard is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer that makes sure they can actually complete the payment. In 2025, the payments giant introduced Agent Pay, a framework that allows verified AI agents to complete transactions on a user’s behalf using tokenized credentials. Built on Mastercard’s existing tokenization network, the system issues “agentic tokens” that authenticate both the consumer and the software agent, helping distinguish legitimate AI assistants from malicious bots. Supporting tools include an Agent Toolkit, Insight Tokens, and an Agent portal—giving banks and platforms a way to embed payments directly into conversational and agent-based systems. Partners such as Microsoft, IBM, OpenAI, Braintree, and Checkout.com are integrating Mastercard’s capabilities into AI platforms, while all U.S.-issued cards will be enabled for agentic commerce, with global expansion to follow. Mastercard’s payment network handled more than 175 billion switched transactions in 2025, up from 159 billion in 2024. 19. Applied Intuition For making vehicles “intelligent companions” Instead of building its own cars, Applied Intuition builds the software brains that other manufacturers rely on. The company introduced its Self-Driving System (SDS) for Automotive, a white-box autonomy stack designed for passenger vehicles. Unlike opaque, black-box systems, SDS provides automakers with visibility into perception, planning, and control layers while remaining hardware-agnostic. The aim is to help deliver advanced driver-assistance features with higher autonomy levels, without locking OEMs into a single chip or sensor supplier. Applied Intuition also expanded into in-vehicle intelligence through a collaboration with OpenAI, which integrates LLMs into vehicles, turning dashboards into conversational interfaces that can remember preferences, assist with tasks, and connect with users’ mobile devices. The company’s domain reach currently spans automotive, trucking, mining, and defense, with partnerships including Traton Group and Komatsu. In 2025, Applied Intuition closed a $600 million Series F round at a $15 billion valuation, signaling investor confidence in its platform approach. 20. Delphi For building AI proxies for real people What if an autonomous expert built atop your skills could keep working after you log off? Delphi developed what it calls “digital minds”—interactive AI versions of real people trained on their books, podcasts, videos, and writing. Users link their content, verify their identity, and generate a conversational agent that answers questions in their voice. To maintain fidelity, the company says each digital mind includes guardrails designed to reduce hallucinations and keep responses aligned with its human source. The platform refined this concept with Interview Mode, which lets the system ask creators clarifying questions to fill knowledge gaps, and a Mind Quality Score that measures how accurately the AI reflects its human source. More than 3,000 customers, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jay Shetty, Simon Sinek, and other celebrities, are currently using the service. Delphi reported $4.8 million in ARR as of September 2025 and more than 8 million monthly interactions with digital minds. While the AI model has raised questions about identity and authenticity, Delphi claims that all accounts are verified and consent-driven. In a world where AI impersonation and synthetic content are on the rise, Delphi is vying to establish itself as an infrastructure for digital identity. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

Taking stock of the once red-hot agtech sector, analysts have called 2025 a “transition year,” a polite way of saying crop prices slid, Bayer traded near a 20-year low, John Deere reported less than half of its 2023 income, and almost two dozen startups in once-frothy areas like indoor farming, drones, and insect-based ingredients collapsed. It was enough for a managing director of ag giant Syngenta’s VC arm to jokingly “thank God” it had avoided investing in alt-protein, carbon credits, and vertical farming—though he allowed that the downturn offered “good lessons” for smart entrepreneurs eyeing “a second wave.” Fast Company’s 2026 list of the most innovative companies in agriculture attempts to identify those already riding it. Crunching two decades of data, Advancing Eco Agriculture introduced the first AI trained on regenerative farming techniques. Farmers can upload field tests or photos of diseased crops, then ask: What now? Canada-based Thunderstruck Ag achieved a breakout year for its one-of-a-kind model, bringing to market the simple solutions to industry problems that farmers have devised in their own fields or workshops. In just two years, soil-health company Holganix has clocked a tenfold increase in the use of its natural soil additive, building what may be the country’s largest regenerative agriculture program, and created a marketplace where customers’ hard-earned sustainability outcomes are sold as tradable assets. Little Leaf Farms sprouted into the U.S.’s top lettuce producer at a time when higher-funded rivals failed. Area 2 Farms, built to scale inside America’s glut of empty urban buildings, explains that previously high-flying startups withered because they eschewed time-tested growing practices in order to erect “vegetable data centers.” Speaking of centuries-old practices, the Ben Franklin-era Old Farmer’s Almanac had one of its best years ever. In other corners, established heavyweights turned familiarity on its head. Dyson debuted a line of strawberries grown how you’d expect from the vacuum brand: rotating on a futuristic Ferris wheel-like contraption that ensures even sunlight. At Bactery, a scientist invented a $30 bacteria-powered battery that’s capable of operating field-input devices for three decades. By gamifying its slaughterhouse meat-cutting process, Cargill says it has added a million pounds of food to American plates during a beef shortage. And Fed by Blue, an offshoot of the international Blue Food Coalition, used a lavishly produced TV series and celebrity-studded events to make mindfulness around sustainable seafood feel aspirational. 1. Holganix For expanding beyond its much-used soil-health test to let farmers sell their sustainability efforts as an asset One of many soil-health startups to spring up in recent years, Holganix stands out by pairing its natural soil additive (Bio 800+) with a simple digital app that plots real-time improvements in soil samples. The combination has driven a tenfold increase in use over two years. Acres treated with Holganix products grew from 300,000 in 2023 to 3 million in 2025—roughly the size of three Rhode Islands—lifting revenue from $16 million to $70 million and making it one of the fastest-growing regenerative agriculture programs in the U.S. The app may not sound particularly sophisticated in the AI era, but in some ways, that was deliberate. Studies show that the biggest barriers to adopting regenerative practices are their perceived complexity and the unclear return on investment. Holganix is trying to target both: simplicity through a streamlined app tracking system and profitability through something it calls Thrive Acres, a platform launched in 2025 enabling farmers to sell verified outcomes (fertilizer reductions, water savings, carbon sequestration) as tradable assets to corporate buyers. A portion of each sale is reinvested in the community where the asset was generated. The company has also launched an ambitious soil-mapping effort. In the past 12 months, Holganix completed about 350,000 soil-health tests, with another 850,000 planned by mid-spring 2026. Combined with satellite imagery, the data will form what Holganix says is the most detailed view yet of the soil’s “root zone,” giving farmers clearer metrics for how the land responds to regenerative practices. 2. Thunderstruck Ag For inventing an adjustable thresher that helps farmers without overcomplicating things Years ago, fueled by Fireball and Coors Light, two farmers and their uncle torched holes in a tractor wheel that kept clogging with mud, a crude fix so effective, it still gets copied today. That MacGyvered farm solution became Thunderstruck Ag’s first product—the MudSmith—and established its playbook: Partner with farmers who’ve fixed problems but need help scaling their inventions. Today, Thunderstruck—founded 13 years ago by Jeremy Matuszewski, who back then had never set foot on a farm—scours North America for farmer-inventors with simple analog innovations, helps them patent their ideas, then brings them to market. 2025 was the small company’s breakout year: Matuszewski released his own invention, the first directly from the Canada-based company, called the Razors Edge Concaves. Concaves are the curved grates on a combine that separate grain from unused plant material. Previously, farmers have had to swap these heavy plates by hand to move between crop types; the Razors Edge simply self-adjusts on the fly. Thunderstruck says that the machine increases harvest speed by 25%, while slashing fuel consumption by up to 40%. It sold a half million dollars of preorders before the first units even got built. The success accelerated Thunderstruck’s international ambitions. An unexpected trade show visit to Brazil turned into full operations there six months later, with a local team adapting the company’s unconventional sales approach. Matuszewski says that the business philosophy remains unchanged: “Growers don’t need more complexity,” just “solutions that work under pressure.” 3. Little Leaf Farms For building an indoor romaine empire In a year when high-flying vertical farming got steamrolled (SoftBank-backed Plenty declared bankruptcy, Bowery Farming ceased operations, and AeroFarms closed a key facility), Little Leaf Farms went on a tear. The company became the nation’s leading indoor leafy-greens brand, expanded to more than 8,000 stores, and built the world’s largest greenhouse for greens, a 40-acre campus in Pennsylvania. It also broke ground on a new Tennessee site that will open at 20 acres, with the potential to swell to 80. In produce sections, Little Leaf also introduced a pesticide-free, no-wash romaine that it says represents the only “teen” leaf romaine on the market—a lettuce that is neither baby romaine nor fully mature, but rather a Goldilocks variety prized for larger leaves without sacrificing crunch. Its store footprint expanded across the Ahold Delhaize empire to additional Food Lion, Stop & Shop, and Giant locations, as well as to Albertsons stores in the Midwest and South, doubling the sales growth that Little Leaf saw over the previous six months. Little Leaf now controls 54% of the indoor-lettuce market, making it the fastest-growing packaged salad brand in the U.S., even when measured against field-grown competitors. 4. Cargill For using computer vision to maximize meat yield Cargill invested in a tool that essentially gamifies frontline meat carving to squeeze more usable beef from every carcass. Using computer vision, the system tracks cuts made by Cargill’s army of slaughterhouse workers as they break animals down into rib eyes, sirloins, flank steaks, and ground beef. After each cut, workers receive an instant red, yellow, or green emoji performance grade. The world’s largest commodities trader believes that if this technology, dubbed CarVe (short for Cargill Vision Engineering), boosts red-meat yield by even 1%, it could translate into a million additional meals per year. Before CarVe, yield data at Cargill’s plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado—which slaughters 4,000 cows every 24 hours—lagged by a full day. The $90 million system is part of a broader $200 million “Operations of the Future” initiative spanning 1,000 facilities globally. This program includes other ideas applauded by the industry, such as creating natural antioxidants that can slow beef oxidation and extend freshness, alongside some unlikelier-sounding ones, like feeding surplus chocolate to livestock. At Fort Morgan, real-time AI feedback has fine-tuned the old system while improving workplace safety and, Cargill believes, motivating higher performance. 5. Dyson Farming For applying its engineering wizardry to supermarket strawberries Dyson makes peerless vacuums and unrivaled hair dryers. Fresh berries? it’s now fabricating those too. James Dyson turned his attention to farming back in the mid-2010s because he saw agriculture as an arena where sophisticated machinery ought to be improving things—and he harbored a philosophy that his native country, United Kingdom, should be capable of feeding itself. Today, Dyson Farming has channeled its namesake’s ingenuity into a vertical farm in Lincolnshire, in the British countryside. The facility’s crown jewel is a high-tech glass enclosure, just over a year and a half old, that the team now farms in. Inside, they tweak things in real time as one might expect from the company. The space houses a novel rotating growing system that spins the berry plants around a center axis like they’re riding a Ferris wheel, so they can receive equal sunlight each day. Dyson says that yields are 250% higher than those under conventional farming methods. Strawberries have been growing on-site since 2021, but thanks to recent upgrades, Dyson was able to realize James Dyson’s dream of helping feed his fellow Brits: Its first indoor-grown berries hit U.K. grocery shelves last summer. In August, the company announced it had started combining both its farming and beauty businesses through a new line of Omega haircare products that incorporate sunflower oil harvested from the Lincolnshire farm. 6. Advancing Eco Agriculture For putting regenerative-ag AI in farmers’ hands The top user of FieldLark—the first AI trained on regenerative ag, released last summer—is not its creator, Advancing Eco Agriculture CEO John Kempf. That honor goes to a farmer named Dave, who ranches 15,000 acres in Australian cattle country. Past owners of that land used conventional practices that had depleted the soil, and Dave told Advancing Eco Agriculture that, when they contacted him, he felt local agronomists’ fixes were too “cookie-cutter.” He queried ChatGPT, which spit out wrong livestock feed ratios. FieldLark, however, could manage a string of 50 questions without a problem, a discovery that later prompted Dave to joke that maybe he should get offline. AEA built FieldLark around the idea that regenerative agronomy has grown too complex. It taps into the company’s reservoir of lab tests, expert input, and 20 years of fieldwork from 10,000 farms covering 4 million acres. Farmers can ask questions ranging from the general (“How does selenium affect forage protein content?”) to the highly specific (“How do I remove rhizoctonia from my potatoes in this corner of the Great Plains?”). They can get instant analysis of field photos or plant sap tests. To limit hallucinations, FieldLark is cut off from the internet and relies solely on AEA’s curated research. Like other AIs, FieldLark has a free tier, though a paid subscription level will soon add perks such as a portal for field-specific data. Six weeks after launch, it had over 4,000 users worldwide. That base has grown by nearly 50%, with farmers submitting six figures’ worth of queries so far. One reported that the subscription paid for itself for eight years with a single week of yield improvements. 7. Fed by Blue For promoting a sea change in marine conservation via high-profile partnerships with the James Beard Foundation, Andrew Zimmern, PBS, Eric Ripert, and more In 2025, a PBS series that treated fishing supply chain innovations as stories of human ingenuity became the centerpiece of a nationwide run of live events. Guests in 47 cities ate, talked, and mingled with local chefs, fish producers, and celebrities. Seafood companies that got involved saw their own sales increase by as much as 78%, while the project earned an Emmy nomination and a James Beard Impact Award, shifting how sustainable aquaculture enters the public conversation. Hope in the Water, as the series was called, was created by a nonprofit called Fed by Blue. It is an outgrowth of the Aquatic Blue Food Coalition, a global effort spanning 40-plus governments and NGOs, that has parlayed conscientiousness around ocean-friendly seafood into something that can be cool, as opposed to rules you simply try not to violate. Fed by Blue has spent the past year introducing these same ideas to a half-million U.S. classrooms, aiming to create a generation of “blue food–literate” young people through toolkits that present seafood as not just food but the result of climate, communities, and traditions being intertwined. These notions are also finding better footing in kitchens. Last fall’s The Blue Food Cookbook, by Andrew Zimmern, was the first book by a major publisher to combine seafood recipes with a guide for how to protect the ocean and ethically consume from it. It addresses questions like “How do you shuck an oyster?” alongside more expansive ones, such as “Is industrial aquaculture sustainable?” 8. Area 2 Farms For growing fresh produce in empty urban spaces, not far from consumers Acting on the motto “Move the farm, not the food,” Area 2 Farms is working to transform America’s glut of vacant urban buildings into modular vertical farms, growing crops within a few miles of consumers. The company’s first Silo, in Fairfax, Virginia, occupies a structure that sat empty for 20 years. It offers boxes of greens, herbs, and other produce starting at $35 a week, and the grand design is to put one within 10 miles of 90% of Americans. Area 2 Farms, which will open another growing facility in Virginia soon, constructs each Silo according to local demand, adding additional locations as needed, rather than building massive centralized facilities that CEO Oren Falkowitz dismisses as “vegetable data centers.” He sees that error made by Bowery Farms, Square Roots, and others—players now facing a “brutal correction” after investing millions in up-front capital to compete in an industry with onionskin-thin margins. Area 2 Farms’ soil-dependent Silos, by contrast, can grow a far wider range of vegetables—tomatoes, potatoes, turnips, leeks, onions—at costs much closer to a local CSAs. The approach tackles inefficiencies in U.S. food distribution. Fresh produce typically travels 1,500 miles to reach consumers, losing nutritional value along the way. Area 2 Farms’ crops travel just 3.1 miles on average. The Fairfax Silo has sold 100% of its harvest for 150 straight weeks, delivering more than 20,000 harvests to date. The company recently raised $9 million to expand to 10 new farms across Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., in 2026. 9. The Old Farmer’s Almanac For offering today’s farmers what all the modern gadgetry can’t: a community, a tie to the past, and a sense of humor In December, at the age of 208, Farmers’ Almanac succumbed to the digital age. But The Old Farmer’s Almanac, founded even earlier—while George Washington was president—did not. Still wrapped in the same yellow cover and calligraphy it’s used since 1794, it actually logged one of its strongest years. Both publications survived the collapse of American agrarian life, the rise of the National Weather Service, and the invention of smartphone weather apps. But Old Farmer’s, America’s oldest continuously published periodical, has charted a novel course: helping home gardeners work in the present. In more recent years, it’s applied its “pleasant degree of humor” to food preservation, how-to guides, and gardening tools, while building a community where readers trade tips, learn canning, browse hundreds of recipes, and buy online soil-test kits, seeds, and Japanese gardening knives. At a time when media focused on modern culture—Guitar Player, Teen Vogue, Game Informer, MTV—have crashed, the idea that an almanac could be thriving feels scandalous. Yet in 2025, the print Old Farmer’s sold out, forcing a second 135,000-copy run. Its Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook hit an eighth reprint with 350,000 copies sold. The brand’s garden-planning app topped its category for North America, newsletter subscriptions grew 20% to 684,000, and it captured 95% of all “almanac” web searches. The year’s biggest challenge may have been convincing people it wasn’t going anywhere. “As sure as the Sun will rise,” editors wrote at year-end, laying out 2026’s expansion, Old Farmer’s “will be around for generations to come.” 10. Bactery For creating a soil-powered battery for precision-ag sensors Bacteries are batteries powered by bacteria. The rise of precision ag has put roughly a quarter billion sensors on farms worldwide, most of them depending on single-use batteries or complex solar setups. Bactery’s alternative—known in science as a microbial fuel cell—generates power by capturing electrons that are released when bacteria break down organic soil matter. In one year, a single Bactery produces the energy equivalent of 10 AA batteries, about twice what’s needed to power common Wi-Fi-enabled farm devices like soil moisture gauges, weather stations, and irrigation valves. The unit embeds into soil with only its cap exposed, and requires no maintenance or supporting infrastructure. It costs about $30, and the company says it’s designed to last 30 years, needs no light, works in any climate, emits zero carbon, and over its lifetime is roughly 5,000 times cheaper than solar. U.K.-based Bactery spun out of a University of Bath lab in 2019 and rebranded under its current name a year and a half ago. After testing prototypes powering water purification systems in remote Brazilian villages, the company deployed units on 50 farms across England and prepared for a commercial product launch last year. It has secured funding from SVG Ventures, the British government’s U.K. Research and Innovation, and SOSV, and is finalizing partnerships with agtech firms, energy providers, and government agencies backing soil energy as the next frontier in clean power. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

In some ways, the attention game for brands is only getting tougher. The increased pace of the cultural cycle and the tidal wave of slop hitting our feeds have added a layer of suspicion to any brand work. Is it real? How do you know? These are big, existential questions. This year, 20 companies, ranging from brands to agencies, are answering them from the perspective of marketers looking to build real connections with real people. The companies here are not only working to embed into and engage with culture, but they’re doing it in ways that reinforce the role of humans in that dynamic. It includes Dick’s Sporting Goods launching its own internal film studio to tell real stories of amateur athletes. It’s Heineken using its global reach to find a new successor for an Irish pub that’s been in the same family for 155 years. It’s Alto finding a way to make Expensify a secondary character in Brad Pitt’s blockbuster F1. You could argue that Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show was an ad for Levi’s (stadium) or Apple (show sponsor), but Adidas partnered with the chart-topping artist to launch his first signature shoe, which was on full display. Culture and commerce seamlessly connected to the delight of fans everywhere. The variety of brand work celebrated on this list—Nike, Billie, Cheetos, Brawny, Ikea—is a testament to the very real creative ambition behind it. 1. Adidas For taking the three stripes on tour with Oasis’s blockbuster reunion A major part of Adidas’s recovery from its Yeezy debacle has been how it’s leaned into the brand’s heritage in sneakers and sports, pairing iconic products with smart partnerships that put the brand back at the center of culture. During Oasis’s blockbuster 2025 reunion tour, the three stripes were everywhere thanks to its Original Forever collab with the band on a limited-edition line of products and even a brand ad that ran in stadiums before every concert. It also extended to the Super Bowl halftime show, thanks to its ongoing work with Bad Bunny. As part of his Puerto Rican concert residency last summer, he partnered with Adidas to produce three custom Sambas celebrating the island’s culture. Ahead of his hit Super Bowl halftime show, they launched his first original shoe, the BadBo 1.0, and the limited edition of 1,994 sneakers (a nod to the artist’s birth year) sold out in minutes. Read more about ⁠Adidas, No. 7 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 2. Unwell For elevating the Call Her Daddy ethos into a media empire—and a new brand agency As the host of Call Her Daddy, Alex Cooper has evolved from a “try-hard vlogger” into the head of a podcast network, production company, and drink brand under the umbrella of her Unwell brand. In October 2025, she continued to expand her vision with the launch of the Unwell Creative Agency, a strategic move to help brands connect with her predominantly Gen Z and millennial female fanbase. Unlike typical celebrity ventures that leverage preexisting Hollywood fame, Unwell is built on Cooper’s self-made, unfiltered persona. The agency’s debut campaign—a Google Pixel 10 ad cowritten by, directed by, and starring Cooper—put her vision at the forefront, delivering an entertaining spot that garnered more than 39 million views on TikTok. As the agency looks to add clients, Cooper is focused on maintaining the authenticity that has defined her as a trusted voice for her audience. Read more about Unwell, honored as No. 23 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 3. Wieden+Kennedy For giving the swoosh its swagger back It’s not that Nike has been resting on its laurels. But the brand hasn’t exactly been exercising the quintessential edge that made so much of its advertising iconic over the decades. That changed last year, owing largely to the work W+K has crafted across the Swoosh and Jordan Brand. The agency that coined “Just Do It” brought the swagger back with Nike’s first Super Bowl ad in 27 years putting female athletes at the center of a male-dominated moment in the most-watched ad of Super Bowl LIX. The “So Win” ad has 98 million views on Instagram alone. The agency also helped launch Nike Football’s new brand platform, “Scary Good,” in global markets leading up to the 2026 World Cup, and its “Why Do It?” campaign put Nike’s iconic tagline into the context of today’s comparison and cringe culture that so often paralyzes earnest effort. Meanwhile, for Jordan Brand, the agency made a fun alt-history called “Can’t Ban Greatness” that jokingly gives the brand a bit too much cultural credit. It got 6.34 billion total campaign impressions and 65.4 million campaign views across the brand’s social channels. 4. Publicis Groupe For pairing engaging brand work with IRL impact Two agencies under the French holding company created two of the most creative pieces of brand work in the past year. First, in March 2025, creative agencies LePub and Publicis Dublin launched a worldwide recruitment campaign for Heineken called “Pub Succession” to help independent Irish pub owner, Josie McLoughlin, find a new successor for the pub that’s been in his family for 155 years. The brewer used its global reach to have eye-catching ads in cities worldwide where large numbers of Irish people have emigrated, including New York; Boston; Sydney; Auckland, New Zealand; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Phan Thiết, Vietnam; to find the right McLoughlin. It went to 128 countries, targeting the 88 million Irish around the world. It attracted more than 2,000 applications, got more than 1.19 billion earned media impressions, and they found their successor—Alan McLoughlin from Toronto. Then, in April 2025, Publicis Conseil made a three-word adjustment to French insurance company AXA’s home insurance policy that could mean the difference between safety and harm for women all over France. The three words are “and domestic violence.” AXA had long provided quick relocation resources to its home insurance customers in the event of fires or floods, but domestic violence—reports for which doubled in France between 2016 and 2023—had not been included. With its policy update, AXA modernized its business to meet the troubling trend; the company now instantly relocates victims who report domestic violence and provides legal, financial, and psychological support. Within the first month, AXA’s new policy had already helped 121 people. 5. Dick’s Sporting Goods For investing in its own entertainment studio to win the brand game Last year, Dick’s won a Sports Emmy for a doc called The Turnaround. In August, it premiered its newest documentary, Big Dreams: Little League World Series 2024, produced in partnership with Imagine Entertainment and MLB Studios. Soon after, it officially announced an in-house studio division called Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios to formalize its commitment to entertainment as a pillar of its brand. This is innovative in itself, since most brands announce things before ever doing any of the actual work. Here Dick’s is formalizing and boosting investment in a strategy it has been building for years. Last September, chief marketing officer Emily Silver told Fast Company that the new studio division will allow the brand to take a more aggressive stance in the number of films and pieces of content it puts out. It also helps brand the studio so that Dick’s can build more of a name for itself in the [entertainment] industry and attract different writers and different projects. And it gives the brand the opportunity to put a little more structure and framework around what content it wants to produce and where it wants to lean in to help build for the long term. “It really just helps formalize the process in a way that we can be a little more choice-ful about what we want to do in the future,” said Silver. 6. Billie For changing billboards into scratch-and-sniff ads Walking the streets of New York City has always been a cornucopia for the senses. And when it comes to smell, that reputation is too often on the negative side of the nasal scale. But last year, personal care brand Billie decided to change that with an innovative approach to a decidedly old-school advertising medium. Giant billboards posted at street-level in high-traffic areas of the city had enlarged shots of armpits and invited New Yorkers to literally smell their new Coco Villa body care scent by scratch-and-sniffing the armpit billboards. More than 5 million people went for it. The ads attracted widespread media coverage from outlets like the New York Post, ABC News, and Good Morning America, and they generated more than 1.76 billion impressions. Meanwhile, Coco Villa sales were up 60% on Amazon, the week after campaign launch. 7. Goodby Silverstein & Partners For turning Cheetos hands into a creative opportunity Cheetos has its fanatical fans already, but Goodby Silverstein & Partners didn’t need Chester or get Flamin’ Hot for some of its best work this past year. The innovation here is in how the agency creatively took a universal truth about a client’s product—that people get Cheetos dust on their hands—and turned it into a tool for growth and attention. “The Other Hand” campaign tapped into the fact that most people use their dominant hand to eat Cheetos, leaving their other hand to do the other work in life. Funny ads and billboards abound, but the real standout was “The Other Hand” font, created by designers using only their “other hand.” With no paid media it generated 432 million impressions and 11,000 downloads. It also led to a partnership with Netflix and Wednesday character Thing, making its fingertips in bright-orange Cheetle dust, crowning him the “Official Thingertips of Cheetos,” and becoming the brand’s most successful entertainment tie-in. For Cheetos, the campaign overall had 1.5 billion earned impressions, an 11-point lift in social awareness, and 5 million more bags sold in a category that was otherwise declining. 8. Johannes Leonardo For putting the Weinermobile in the Indianapolis 500 Back in 1936, Oscar Mayer’s nephew Carl G. Mayer thought it would be fun to make a hot dog car as a way to promote the brand. Man, he was right. The Wienermobile has been a brand icon ever since. Johannes Leonardo was tasked with reminding people just how iconic the Wienermobile is. What makes the Wienermobile work is that it’s something you can see, even take a ride in. So the agency decided to add rocket fuel to the idea of fan participation and spectacle as advertising by bringing Wienermobiles to one of America’s most iconic car races, the Indianapolis 500. So 89 years after the first Wienermobile rolled off that Chicago factory floor, the Wienie500 took place just before the Indy 500, pitting five WeinerMobiles against each other in a race streamed live on the Fox Sports app, with the same announcers and production crew as the Indy 500. The agency named and designed uniforms for each Wienermobile, making it possible for people to support a team on DraftKings, via a free-to-play pool. The race garnered 150 million total views on Fox Sports, and rival ESPN SportsCenter declared it “the Next Great American Tradition.” There were nearly 7 billion earned impressions as people shared the spectacle. Oscar Mayer saw its biggest Memorial Day sales lift in years. 9. The Martin Agency For supercharging its brand work with AI—thoughtfully but at scale The innovation here is the Martin Agency’s ability to evolve its way of working, particularly with AI, while delivering world-class work that’s still dependent on classic creativity. The agency uses predictive intelligence to surface invisible audiences, debunk conventions, and map unseen drivers of growth, while building other tools to codify and scale distinctive brand originality and avoid AI-driven sameness. The goal is a real alternative to legacy timelines, budgets, and processes. This year, the agency launched Bud Light’s “Armchair Quarterback”, a Netflix partnership blending sports fandom with branded storytelling; partnered with Hershey on a feature film debuting this year; and it worked with Subway Takes host and creator Kareem Rahma on UPS Business Trips. The latter has topped 100 million views. The agency is doing a formidable job in balancing innovation in brand entertainment with building out and scaling a workflow that incorporates AI and trains all employees to use AI for their work while identifying opportunities to be responsible about its use, like working with SAG-AFTRA to identify responsible use of voice talent. 10. Joan Creative For hilariously reinventing the Brawny Man mascot for today’s culture It’s not every day an iconic brand mascot gets reinvented. And when it does, the potential pitfalls are massive. But when Brawny wanted to hype its three-ply paper towel on the market as the strongest, most absorbent, most durable product of any national brand, in a world where 79% of consumers were looking for a tougher towel, Joan Creative called in the Brawny Man for a makeover. Suddenly, the bearded, plaid-clad muscle man was making memes, trying internet slang, even starring in GRWM (get ready with me) videos. Gone were the cute little orange juice spills. Now he was cleaning up after ragers. The result repositioned Brawny as a significant challenger to category-leader Bounty, while building long-term brand equity for Brawny parent Georgia-Pacific. The work generated more than 1.2 billion total impressions, 23% customer growth, and a 58% boost in search traffic for the brand. Now that’s a flex. 11. FCB For funding improvements to India’s rail system by turning train tickets into a chance to win the lottery As a result of the Omnicom-IPG merger, FCB was folded into BBDO but not before creating some impressively innovative ideas over the past year. Perhaps the best and most impactful example is the agency’s “Lucky Yatra” work for Indian Railways, launched in April 2025. As one of the largest railway systems in the world, Indian Railways has more than 24 million daily passengers daily. But a massive 41% of passengers don’t pay their fares, which results in more than $820 million in annual lost revenue. So FCB created a way to incentivize paying train fare. Indians spend about $30 billion on lottery tickets every year, so FCB turned the unique number on every Indian Railways ticket into a lottery ticket, thereby giving commuters the chance to win $117 every day, and $585 every week. The campaign received more than 560 million impressions and led to a 34% increase in ticket sales at launch. Not only that, but the investment in prizes is generating a revenue of over $685 million that will be reinvested back into the system to upgrade the centuries-old infrastructure. 12. Alto For making Expensify Brad Pitt’s F1 costar When expense management software brand Expensify asked Alto to come up with an idea just as big as a Super Bowl ad, the agency didn’t go to the big game. Instead, it went to Brad Pitt’s chest. The agency managed to land the brand a leading role in the blockbuster feature film F1, as a major sponsor of Pitt’s fictional racing team. The Expensify logo was everywhere, as all logos are in Formula One: Pitt’s racing suit, in press conferences, in dialogue, on pit wall signage. It even made the movie poster. People didn’t skip the ad—they paid to watch the logo framed on the screen for 40 full minutes during the film. Including a scene in which a main character is shooting an Expensify ad. The goal was to drive a double-digit lift in brand awareness over two quarters, but the result was a 94% increase in just six months. Another big moment was at the 2025 Met Gala, when F1 costar Damson Idris arrived in a custom Tommy Hilfiger racing suit with Expensify’s logo front and center. According to Launchmetrics, the Met Gala tie-in alone generated $1.3 billion in media impact value. Touchdown. 13. State Farm For gaming its own brand IP into a successful strategy beyond Jake Most brands have to make a choice between making funny ads, investing in entertainment IP, or going deep into major sports sponsorships. State Farm utilizes all of these— and Jake of course—to firmly embed the brand in culture. The brand has built a flywheel of content across many different audiences, which has helped the company boost its net worth to $145.2 billion in 2024, up from $134.8 billion in 2023. The project pushing its brand entertainment envelope the most over the past year has been Gamerhood. Part game show, part reality series, over five weekly episodes on Twitch and YouTube ,the show pits gaming creators like Kai Cenat, Ludwig, Mark Phillips, and Berleezy against each other in a combination of gaming and IRL challenges. The third season from last summer attracted more than 23 million views. It wrapped its fourth season in August, which was expanded to Prime Video, and its episodes had more than 27 million views on YouTube and Twitch alone. 14. Mischief @ No Fixed Address For pivoting Goldfish into a snack for adults to smile about A brand stunt is at its most impactful when it is rooted in truth. Since its founding in 2020, Mischief @ No Fixed Address has made a name for itself taking brand insights to their most ridiculous—and often, engaging—outcome, and this year was no exception. If there is a theme to the agency’s hit work, it’s that sometimes a brand’s own product packaging is the best media platform for a fun idea. When Pepperidge Farms tasked the agency with changing impressions that its Goldfish cracker brand was just for kids, Mischief used a cheeky rebrand to remind adults the snacks are for them too. Enter Goldfish “Chilean Sea Bass.” The new packaging and surrounding campaign drove attention to the tune of 14.5 billion impressions, hiking sales 15%, making it the brand’s most successful PR push ever. It wasn’t just selling snacks. When E.l.f. Beauty wanted to make sure people knew its Halo Glow Liquid Filter could also be used under foundation or as a highlighter, Mischief went all in on a familiar cliché. It created a Rebecca Black-voiced pony that took offense at the brand calling the Halo Glow Liquid Filter more than a one-trick pony, insisting she was a “Multi-Talented Small-Boned Horse.” The campaign and social work spiked the product’s sales 24% and 48%, respectively, within 72 hours of the campaign’s launch. 15. Rethink For turning late-night texts into an Ikea giveaway Between legacy brands and DTC upstarts, the mattress market is anything but soft. So in February 2025, when Ikea Canada wanted to get people’s attention to promote its mattresses, Rethink decided to target a very specific audience—sleep-deprived Canadians. Between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., the brands sent social media DMs to those still scrolling with a simple “u up?” text. Those curious enough to respond were awarded a free new mattress. The cheeky DMs were accompanied by an extended ad campaign across outdoor billboards and a timed promotion offering 15% off mattresses and other sleep products. As a result, the work got 4.5 million earned impressions and drove a 36% year-over-year increase in mattress sales for the brand. 16. BBDO For using nostalgia to boost Neutrogena’s retinol sales Back on May 17, 2000, more than 14 million people tuned in for the two-hour series finale episodes of Beverly Hills 90210, in which Donna Martin and David Silver were engaged and married. In that moment of pop-cultural history is where BBDO New York saw an opportunity for skincare brand Neutrogena. The agency created a spot that features a clip of the iconic proposal scene that is then interrupted by a dermatologist reminding fans that if they remember watching this episode, they probably should be in the market for Neutrogena’s Rapid Wrinkle Repair Cream. The campaign reversed a two-year sales decline, and 62% of consumers named Neutrogena their first-choice retinol brand. 17. Code and Theory For becoming the digital reinvention expert for the world’s biggest businesses Since 2001, Code and Theory has run on a 50-50 engine: half creatives, half engineers. It’s an agency designed to build creative solutions for a wide variety of major brands, from the NFL and Stanley Black & Decker to Diageo and Amazon. The agency helped redesign Diageo’s digital hub, theBar.com, which led to a 200% boost in e-commerce year over year, a 42% increase in user engagement, and 66% in return visitors. For Stanley Black & Decker, it led a massive digital transformation, unifying more than 30 brands across more than 55 markets, which led to a 40% increase in digital revenue year over year. Its redesign of the National Football League’s app led to a 20% boost in minutes spent on average per visit, 2.3 billion minutes streamed in app, and 5 million weekly app users. A B2B campaign for Amazon Ads was built to reframe Amazon as a bridge between local businesses and ready-to-buy customers, using behavioral signals to link digital intent with real-world demand. The results for small and medium-size businesses was a 10% boost in average monthly revenue per advertiser and a 33% increase for Amazon in unaided awareness. 18. Modern Arts For creating a hit Netflix doc with WhatsApp as its star Back in May 2025, a one-hour documentary dropped on Netflix called The Seat, chronicling the Mercedes Formula One team’s journey to replace legendary driver Lewis Hamilton, who had left for rival Ferrarai. It was instantly ranked in Netflix’s Top 10 rankings across numerous markets. What many viewers didn’t know is that the film is also a WhatsApp commercial, courtesy of brand entertainment agency Modern Arts. The company has been a leader in finding ways to show a brand’s cultural impact that fits seamlessly into existing viewing habits. The insight that led to the film was that many of the discussions and debates that resulted in Mercedes choosing young Italian driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli played out over messaging app WhatsApp. Here, Modern Arts found a lane to authentically weave a brand into a compelling IRL sports drama that doesn’t expire with a campaign clock but lives on streaming platforms for the foreseeable future. 19. Superconnector Studios For reimagining product placement with Netflix and AB InBev In September, Superconnector Studios brokered an unprecedented deal between one of the world’s biggest advertisers and arguably the globe’s biggest streaming platform. AB InBev—the parent to beer brands like Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob Ultra, and Corona—signed a wide-ranging partnership deal with Netflix. This is not only getting these major beer brands front and center in Netflix’s push into live sports, but it’s also getting them early access to placement and integration into other Netflix programming like shows and movies. In just six months of the partnership, 14 titles are already in discussion or already live, including shows like Quarterback, Bridgerton, Full Swing: Ryder Cup, and Culinary Class Wars. With LVMH’s entertainment division 22 Montaigne, Superconnector is bringing a new Kenya Barris project into production this year, which wwill revolve around Hennessy’s historic Château in Cognac. 20. Tombras For helping Sweethearts win over Gen Z by ghosting Halloween The candy that usually features heartfelt messages is only big on Valentine’s Day. But last year, Tombras carved out a spot for Sweethearts during Halloween with a unique take on a scary situation. Not ghosts, but being ghosted by a date. The agency came up with the idea for limited-edition “Ghosted Sweethearts” and created a Halloween campaign that was Sweethearts’ first-ever direct-to-consumer push outside of Valentine’s Day. The boxes of candy dropped the typical messages, instead coming blank, in a box that says, “Started so sweet. Then poof! Gone.” Traffic to Sweethearts’ website surged 980% year over year (September to October), driving strong demand and e-commerce growth. The campaign generated nearly 500 million earned media impressions, valued at nearly $5 million in ad equivalency, becoming one of the most talked-about Halloween brand activations of 2025. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

The way we consume culture has fractured into millions of pieces and the far corners of the internet. But media companies are finding creative ways to keep capturing market share. For publishing imprint Bloom Books, that means capitalizing on TikTok’s rise by turning #BookTok’s viral hits into paperback bestsellers. For Webtoon, it’s doubling down on a dynamic fast-metabolism format with five-minute-long “episodes” that bring comic books to life. The satiric newspaper The Onion is channeling its best quality—humor—into a new revenue stream by opening its own ad agency, while the New York Times is cranking out vertical video reels meant to be viewed on smartphones. Live sports continue to command audiences, with Beyond Sports offering a unique twist by rendering players as animated cartoon characters in action, in real time. Former YouTube channel turned entertainment company Dude Perfect is chasing the “live” element with a stadium tour, which attempts to land the trick shots and other antics that made it famous. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s buzziest new podcast, TBPN, brings SportsCenter energy to business and technology news. And AI continues to be a driving force. Some companies are focused on charting a responsible path forward, like cybersecurity giant Cloudflare, whose recent moves block LLMs from stealing journalists’ work. Others explore AI’s potential, like Moments Lab, which is training a filmmaking chatbot. Still others are using AI for the public good, like the Council on Foreign Relations, which is collaborating with Anthropic to rapidly translate thousands of Chinese Communist Party “dark matter” texts never before seen by American policymakers, into English. 1. Cloudflare For safeguarding the Internet from AI crawlers Founded in 2009 and now one of the world’s biggest cybersecurity companies, Cloudflare is both buttress and bulwark for much of the internet’s architecture. It speeds up websites by routing data through edge networks—serving 80% of the top generative AIs—and protects 20% of all existing websites from malicious attacks. That means it’s also equipped to block bots employed by AI companies—trawlers that scrape any written word found online for chatbot training. Some magazines and newspapers have drafted deals to license content to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. But bots from Perplexity, for example, have been caught stealing data without permission, tanking financial incentives for content creators to keep putting out new stuff. In September 2024, Cloudflare launched AI Audit, which lets websites block AI crawlers with a single click—a service since used by 1 million customers. And in July 2025, it took the trailblazing step of blocking crawlers by default—websites can choose to allow them, with AI companies identifying their mission as training, inference, or search—and it’s now developing a “Pay Per Crawl” feature. The moves have been cheered by more than 40 companies including Conde Nast, Time, Pinterest, Reddit, and Quora, but for Cloudflare, it’s not just about digital altruism— it’s good business. As CEO Matthew Prince puts it: “Nobody wants to see the world consolidated into 5 AI companies. There would be very few businesses left to serve.” Cloudflare undergirds trillions of web traffic connections each day, with $2.2 billion in revenue (up 30% year-over-year) from 332,000 customers in 2025. Read more about Cloudflare, honored as No. 21 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 2. TBPN For becoming Silicon Valley’s go-to tech ‘news’ network You can’t throw a stone in Silicon Valley without hitting a tech-bro-turned-pundit starting a podcast. But few have enjoyed as meteoric a rise as 29-year-old Jordi Hays and 36-year-old John Coogan, whose TBPN (“Technology Business Programming Network”) launched just 16 months ago and has since skyrocketed to tech-world fame. Their angle? The pair tackle business news like sports commentators. Each 3-hour episode is energetic and rambling, hyping startup culture, gossiping about the AI talent wars as if they were tracking sports teams trading all-star players, and following buyout deals as if they were heavyweight-fight victories. It’s not hard-hitting journalism, but they seem to have struck gold with a simple idea: Like sports fanatics, the tech world loves drama. Many observers have drawn comparisons to ESPN’s SportsCenter—and part of the appeal is that TBPN’s hosts, as former entrepreneurs themselves, know the inside baseball (Hays founded crowdfunding VC Party Round, and Coogan cofounded meal replacement Soylent). TBPN has earned clout both within tech’s elite circles and more fringe crowds on X, with guests ranging from Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen to pseudonymous social media celebrities like @carriednointerest. In December, TBPN inked a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange to broadcast from its trading floor, and in January, both hosts were picked up by blue-chip talent agency CAA. TBPN relies on no outside investors and says it is profitable, bringing in $5 million in ad revenue in 2025. In September, the company hired a former Postmates and HQ Trivia executive as its first president and charged him with tripling revenue in 2026. According to the company, it already sold almost all its 2026 ad inventory by December. Read more about TBPN, No. 43 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 3. The Onion For proving print isn’t dead—especially if it’s funny With newspapers across the country disappearing, The Onion looked very much like yet another casualty. Founded in 1988, the legacy satire brand shuttered its print business in 2013 and was all but left for dead until 2024, when its website was taken over by a new coalition of owners led by Twilio’s billionaire CEO and a former NBC News reporter. Within months, the new ownership group breathed fresh life into the brand. First, it grabbed headlines with a publicity stunt: buying Alex Jones’ conspiracy-fueled right-wing outlet, InfoWars, out of bankruptcy. The Onion then bucked a long-running industry trend by resurrecting its print publication, which has hit the ground running. In September 2025, a year after it was reintroduced, it ranked as the 13th largest print newspaper in the United States by subscribers, slotting in between the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune, with almost 54,000 paying subscribers in over 50 countries. Since then, The Onion has only gained steam. In September, it revealed its next act: launching its own (funny) copywriting agency called America’s Finest, creating a new revenue stream. The agency has already netted gigs with Paramount (for its R-rated comedy The Naked Gun); the investing group Subversive ETFs (which targets publicly traded companies that sitting U.S. Congress members have invested in); and Frank McCourt’s nonprofit Project Liberty. The Onion’s total revenue tripled in 2025, up to roughly $6 million from under $2 million the previous year. Read more about The Onion, No. 48 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 4. Webtoon Entertainment For turning web comics into Hollywood IP—and vice versa The comic book universe exploded in the 2020s, and so did Webtoon. The South Korean web comics platform is the go-to place for big brands like Marvel and Star Wars to launch web comics around their intellectual property, already housing franchises like Stranger Things, Godzilla, and the legendary manga series Fullmetal Alchemist. In 2025, Disney took a 2% equity stake in the company and commissioned a standalone app for 35,000 comics from Disney’s iconic catalog. And it’s not the only media giant swinging big with Webtoon. In November, Warner Bros Animation announced a deal for 10 titles, and Webtoon is juggling 20 anime projects with Oscar-nominated studios DandeLion, Aniplex, and Crunchyroll. Webtoon’s ambition has grown alongside its Hollywood footprint. Beloved by Gen Z for its scrollable format, it branched into short-form video in 2025, releasing 5-minute episodes that infuse 14 Webtoon comics with motion, sound, music, and voice acting. Webtoon is also taking cues from not only TikTok, but also Netflix — last year it revamped its home page with algorithms based on reading history, and it threw open the doors to an online fan merch shop and a 2026 Los Angeles creator residency. Perhaps Webtoon’s most impressive achievement is the content pipeline it has built: 900 of the platform’s titles have been adapted into over 11 million books, games, toys, TV shows, and films — including by Webtoon’s own studio, whose 2025 productions smashed records in the U.S. and Canada on Tubi. Owned by parent company and internet giant Naver, Webtoon has a sibling, fan fiction platform called Wattpad; both are part of an ecosystem that feeds the other with ever more content for cultivation. Webtoon boasts 155 million monthly active users, 24 million creators, and [TK 2025 REVENUE FROM MARCH 3, 2026 EARNINGS] 5. Bloom Books For flipping the script on the book publishing industry When publishing houses bet on authors, they typically do it in advance, signing a check after the pitch is made but before the novel is written. But Bloom Books, a 5-year-old imprint of Sourcebooks, is rewriting that business model — choosing instead to buy up the back catalogs of already self-published authors. It’s still a gamble, but with the odds stacked more in Bloom’s favor. The rise of TikTok’s “#BookTok” made it possible for any story posted online to go viral, amassing millions of fans and a cult following — and those are the stories Bloom targets. The company has honed a lucrative strategy that turns internet blockbusters into paperback best-sellers. The imprint’s focus on romance overlaps nicely with BookTok’s most burgeoning genres — think romantasy and fan fiction. Bloom’s first author was 50 Shades of Grey’s E.L. James, who left a prestige publisher to help launch the fledgling imprint in 2020. Bloom’s 52 authors released 99 books in 2025 — 32 of which became New York Times best-sellers, an impressive hit-rate of almost one-third. The imprint’s small roster punches above its weight, accounting for nearly a quarter of the U.S. romance fiction market. It’s the reason Sourcebook cracked the top 5 publishers by print sales in 2025, according to Circana Bookscan — bumping much-larger rival Macmillan out of the trade’s longtime “Big Five.” Bloom’s success even inspired its own case study at Harvard Business School. 6. Beyond Sports For sprinkling a little Disney magic onto the sports field The live-sports industry is booming, and so is the market for alt-casts (alternate telecasts), which augment the game-watching experience with everything from the Manning brothers commenting on the action to Sheriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story re-enacting a hockey skirmish or football pile-up. The latter comes courtesy of Beyond Sports, a Netherlands tech company acquired by Sony in 2022 (for estimates of up to $70 million). Beyond uses AI to transform live gameplay into real-time animations, featuring beloved TV and movie characters. The aim is to bring more kids and non-sports-fans into the fold. The company’s tech wizardry powers ESPN’s wildly popular NFL “Funday Football” series. 2023’s inaugural Toy Story-themed broadcast became the most-viewed live event on ESPN+ and Disney+ at the time, and a December 2025 Monsters Inc.-themed broadcast—with more than half a million viewers—was praised by sports trade groups as an “unmistakable leap in the art form,” with Beyond producing smooth, natural body movements from a complex tangle of optical trackers and RFID data. (Pixar even had the movie’s star voice actors record 30 minutes of game-time commentary.) Since 2021, Beyond has won three Emmy Awards, and its audience is growing, with broadcasts moving from streaming-only to primetime cable in 2025. In October, ESPN renewed a deal for more Disney-themed NFL, NHL, NBA, and WNBA games. On December 1, the company revealed it’s absorbing fellow Sony division Pulselive, which builds digital ecosystems for rights holders like the Premier League and World Rugby. The move signals that Beyond might aspire to expand beyond telecasts, to become a hub for everything from fantasy sports to prediction markets. 7. The New York Times Company For reinventing itself again and again in the digital age In the cratering news-media landscape, the New York Times stands out for actually making money—$700 million in revenue last quarter, up 10% year over year, netting out to a 28% bump in investor earnings per share. What’s it doing right? It’s a master of adapting to changing times. Take its successful expansion into audio/visual content. Its wildly popular The Daily podcast turned the newspaper’s star columnists into prominent talking heads. More evidence of digital savvy: In October, the Times debuted a TikTok-like “Watch” app with short-form vertical videos from eye candy-laden sections such as NYT cooking, The Athletic, and Wirecutter. The self-described bid to lure in a younger audience appears to be working. In Morning Consult’s 2025 ranking of fastest-growing brands, the New York Times was No. 2 among Gen Z. The effort represents a deft pivot from longer-form TV (see: its early-2020s FX/Hulu docuseries) to content geared for mobile, with the company’s video consumption across platforms more than doubling in 2025. Last quarter, the Times added 460,000 digital-only subscribers, its biggest three-month jump in years, bringing the total number to 12.33 million. The company also credits its success to its strategy of bundling subscriptions, with more than half of subscribers now paying for multiple products. The latest challenge the 174-year-old paper has had to adapt to is the rise of AI, and in 2025, the Times continued to blaze a trail on copyright lawsuits to protect journalists, suing Perplexity for using its content without compensation (following a 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for similar allegations). It’s also making a statement on free speech in the The President era, suing the Defense Department and Secretary Pete Hegseth in December over the Pentagon’s restrictions on press access, which the Times called a violation of First Amendment rights. 8. Moments Lab For creating an AI librarian for video archives Paris-based Moments Lab (formerly called Newsbridge) is one of many companies training AI models—but it’s found a niche targeting the news industry and Hollywood. Its AI platform, trained on 1.5 billion assets, can “understand every moment in a video and make it searchable.” And its Discovery Agent, launched in September, can field conversational prompts to create whole new videos from raw footage, cutting a filmmaker’s journey from idea to execution down to a brisk three minutes. According to the company’s CEO, it’s just months away from being able to produce a full-length documentary of America’s history from a decades-spanning library of news reels. There seems to be plenty of opportunity for Moments in this space. Speed is king in news, and journalists are increasingly expected to deliver reports in near-real-time. Meanwhile, there’s mounting pressure in Hollywood to crank out more entertainment, faster and cheaper than before, a la Netflix. Moments doesn’t hide the fact that it might accomplish this by replacing human workers with tech: Its CEO told Business Insider last year that a US financial media client already admitted it would need fewer editors. Founded in 2016, Moments works with giants including Warner Bros. Discovery, Thomson Reuters, Sinclair, and LVMH. Banijay Entertainment, the production company behind reality TV hits Survivor, Big Brother, and MasterChef, also signed a deal in September to organize its vast video archives, and Hearst is among the clients testing the new agentic AI. In 2025, the company doubled its revenue, tripled its number of users, raised $24 million in funding, and won “Best of Show” awards from the National Association of Broadcasters and International Broadcasting Convention. 9. Dude Perfect For nailing the trick shots on a stadium tour Dude Perfect began as a YouTube channel in 2009, with five college guys attempting crazy feats like bucketing a basketball thrown from the nosebleed seats of a full-size stadium. Now 17 years later, the group is running a media juggernaut focused on what they call “sports comedy.” Its diverse business pursuits include filming a Nickelodeon TV show, designing a toy for Walmart, endorsing drive-thru coffee chain 7 Brew, and claiming 19 quirky world records (like longest barefoot Lego walk). In 2024, the company netted $100 million from venture capital firms and hired a former NBA executive as its first CEO. In 2025, it spent that much of that cash, revealing a sprawling theme park-esque headquarters in Texas and hosting a summer “Hero Tour,” in which performers attempt mind-boggling trick shots live at arenas in 21 cities across the country. Although the Hero Tour’s follow-up theatrical release in Regal Cinemas flopped (not everyone can pull off a Taylor Swift-style hat trick), the tour itself was a hit, with 15 sold-out shows and over 200,000 spectators. The group, which has publicly leaned into its founders’ Christian backgrounds, snagged the nation’s largest promoter for faith-based events for the tour. it also forged partnerships with Samsung Galaxy and Google Gemini, headlined Arthur Ashe Kids Day at the U.S. Open, and is releasing trick shot games on Nex Playground’s motion-powered gaming system this summer. Dude Perfect has been profiled in Forbes, The Associated Press, The Ankler, and on the Texas A&M blog (the guys’ alma mater). And its YouTube channel, where pro athletes like Serena Williams, Steph Curry, and Luka Doncic have joined the antics, has more than 60 million subscribers. 10. Council on Foreign Relations For enlisting AI to bring previously unreachable Chinese texts to scholars around the world Amid China’s ascent on the global stage, the Council on Foreign Relations—the 105-year-old think tank and publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine—turned its eye eastward. In 2024, it launched the China Strategy Initiative, aimed at navigating the fraught geopolitics between China and America. Enter China Open Source Observatory, the initiative’s new project, which seeks to shed light on the so-called “dark matter” of China policy—hard copy material from the Chinese Communist Party that is greatly influential but isn’t online, and thus isn’t “seen” by Americans. The observatory is employing AI to scan and translate a cache of 10,000 Chinese government texts that have never before been digitized. The U.S. government did similar translation work from 1941 to 2013, but with new AI tech, the observatory saw a chance to fill the void—opening a window into Beijing even as it closes its doors to U.S. officials. The observatory collaborated with Google and Anthropic engineers to supercharge the effort, pushing LLMs to achieve what it calls “near-perfect” Chinese language translation accuracy, even on specialized subjects like military affairs and diplomacy. The texts will be freely available and AI-crawlable—meaning the fruit of the project’s labor will become public knowledge via AIs like ChatGPT (sans some sensitive material only available to researchers). The first 1,000 volumes will be released this spring. Project leads Rush Doshi and Tanner Greer say the council’s work has already been used by scholars, policymakers, and journalists for papers, board meetings, and exposes. In the past year, the China Strategy Initiative’s analysis has shown up everywhere from Congressional testimony on Taiwan to a column in the New York Times. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

Traditional economic development tends to focus on investments made and jobs created. For this year’s group of Most Innovative Companies—or in many cases, foundations or governments, in this case—the key performance indicator isn’t dollars spent, but connections made. Growth comes not from directing resources, but finding a better way to nurture what you already have. Governments found creative ways to unleash the potential of their residents, workers, and civil servants. The state of New Mexico, for example, made a first-in-the-nation move to subsidize childcare for all, giving working parents and families a leg up. In Illinois, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act offered a pathway for low-income residents to electrify homes and cut their bills, while the San Diego Unified School District used one of their underutilized assets—land—to help launch an effort to build thousands of units of housing for their staff. And in St. Louis, the Arts Place Initiative eases the path towards owning a place to live for local artists, giving creativity a new home. Other organizations took a different approach to preserving local economics. Surfing nonprofit Save the Waves started the study of “surfonomics” and launched an insurance product to protect local economies built around key breaks. The Next California, an effort by the World Wildlife Foundation, seeded an agricultural shift in the Mississippi Delta, offering farmers a new opportunity amid a changing climate. And Brazil’s re.green tapped AI and high tech to restore Amazon rainforests, in part by bringing back sustainable, profitable hardwood harvests. Sometimes, the best impact comes from simply bridging a gap. Ox Delivers, which makes electric trucks for shipping goods in rural Africa, gives small businesses a better route to market (and money). Nevada’s Lithium Loop initiative seeks to build a full-circle mining, processing and development pipeline to make batteries in the U.S. And the new Greater Futures Scholarship Fund from the Greater Hartford Gives Foundation offers a more comprehensive model of college scholarships hoping to give students a real leg up on getting into, and graduating from, college. 1. State of New Mexico For making one of the most stubborn and trying costs for working parents disappear From San Francisco to New York City, municipal support for subsidized childcare have become a buzzed-about big city policy. In New Mexico, the goal of universal childcare has already been achieved, addressing a key pillar of the affordability problem plaguing families and helping working parents get some breathing room. In the words of a state official, it’s “putting families at the center of your policymaking.” Starting last November, every New Mexican family qualified for free, subsidized childcare, funded by an Early Childhood Trust Fund, currently paid for by oil and gas revenue. That’s a huge deal: it’s estimated that families in New Mexico spend $12,000 on average every year for childcare, and families nationwide can spend up to 16% of their income on childcare for a single child, according to the department of labor. In New Mexico, everyone qualifies, and the state helps support the increased demand by subsidizing higher wages for childcare workers. New Mexico also plans to invest in more than 1,000 child care sites to build out the infrastructure to support the program. Early results look promising. In the first month, about 7,000 children from 6,000 families enrolled in the program, 63% of whom were eligible but wouldn’t have qualified before, and more than 1,300 childcare providers received subsidies. 2. The Next California/WWF For supporting food safety and food systems while supercharging the Mississippi delta agricultural economy The long-term toll of climate change is expected to hit farms hard, as flooding, drought, and extreme heat and weather collude to challenge any notion of agricultural certainty. To get ahead of that disruption to the food system, the World Wildlife Foundation decided to not just look at what is being lost, but what can be created. The Next California Initiative, a years-long vision to transform the mid-Mississippi Delta and bring new commodity crops to the region, hopes to literally and figuratively seed a new era of agriculture. By 2034, backers hope, 3% of the region’s crop will be more high value fruits, nuts, and specialty grains. In partnership with local agriculture organizations, the WWF has spent years developing plans for spreading new crops across the region and laying the roadmap for new markets and logistics networks for growers. So far, a handful of pilots have been launched as part of the final phase of the project; for instance, switching to more profitable, specialty rices. In the years to come, the initiative hopes to set a template for climate resiliency and economic vibrancy. Three percent may seem small, but research shows that change could bring $3.2 billion more revenue to area farmers. 3. San Diego Unified School District For shoring up public education by making housing more affordable for teachers For teachers trying to work in downtown districts while paying increasingly high rents, the math often doesn’t add up. In California, ground zero for the nation’s affordability crisis, at least a third of educators are rent-burdened and struggle to pay for housing. Late in 2025, San Diego’s school district decided if the city’s costly housing market wasn’t making room for teachers and other district employees, they would. School leadership announced they would be utilizing the district’s own unused properties to create 1,500 units of affordable housing. The plan calls for building housing on land that will stay in San Diego Unified School District hands, and offering more options for educators to cut the cost of living. Some of the proposed projects will include childcare centers, a further boost for working parents. “Building affordable housing, and the district retaining ownership of the land to collect annual lease revenue, strengthens our schools and the surrounding San Diego neighborhoods,” said Superintendent Fabi Bagula. The school district has committed to building long term and based on the proposals in the works, would receive $504 million in revenue over the 99-year lease terms of these developments. 4. Greater Hartford Gives Foundation For creating a scholarship program that addresses higher education’s increasingly high cost Investing in education, long seen as the pathway to brighter futures and better outcomes, feels more like an investment than ever these days, considering the rising costs of college and for most, student loan debt. The average tuition has doubled in the last 30 years, and that’s not counting the rising cost of student housing. Roughly a third of college students in the past year have considered dropping out due to financial burdens. The Greater Hartford Gives Foundation decided it was time that the concept of a scholarship evolved. The Connecticut nonprofit’s new Greater Futures Scholarship Program, in partnership with Hartford Promise, aims to be a more realistic, and holistic, means of supporting higher education. Students at Greater Hartford public schools will receive generous financial support—up to $100,000 over the course of four years—as well as up to a decade of additional support services including career coaching and training, mental health support, and financial assistance for books, laptops and emergency needs. While the scholarship doesn’t require students to study in state, it is expected to dramatically boost the fortunes of the region’s graduates, a significant portion of whom will stay. The payoff? A study by the Parker Strategy Group found that over the course of a decade, with 100 students supported in each graduating class, the Greater Futures program would create 760 college graduates (50 with master’s degrees), $151 million contributed in additional local and state taxes, and entrepreneurial and investment success that would support and sustain 9,110 more jobs. 5. Lithium Loop For funding the creation of a fully domestic lithium mining economy to supercharge EV and battery production in the U.S. As the growth of renewable energy and EVs continues to gain momentum globally, the United States finds itself playing catch-up, especially to China, when it comes to mining and manufacturing the raw materials and finished goods behind this monumental shift. In Nevada, advocates for what’s called the Lithium Loop hope to start closing that gap. The plan, an effort supported by the governor’s office, state and local officials, and university partners, and backed by federal funding for the Nevada Tech Hub at University of Nevada-Reno, is to create and expand a closed circle for lithium-ion battery manufacturing, from digging up the materials to assembling and even recycling spent batteries, that becomes a “cradle to cradle” hub for the nation’s electrification and energy storage needs. Millions of dollars in funding for job training is flowing, and the Bureau of Land Management has approved two future lithium mines, Thacker Pass and Rhyolite Ridge. The state has already become a hotbed for the domestic battery industry, with firms like Tesla and Redwood Materials. But now the potential of the Lithium Loop to help bolster production, and fill in increasing demand for utilities and AI data centers, promises to grow the industry, incubate startups, and create up to 50,000 new jobs by 2029. 6. Save the Waves Coalition For insuring surf breaks—and the communities that rely on them—in the event of natural disasters It’s not possible to get a doctorate in surfonomics. But according to work done by surfing nonprofit Save the Waves, studying the local economic benefit of popping up and dropping in can be a boon to protecting surf spots around the globe. Last September, Save the Waves released a study of the surf economy for Santa Cruz, California, breaking down the environmental risks, investment strategies, and benefits of the region’s $194 million annual surf economy. It’s work like this that has fueled the organization’s more ambitious economic effort around the $9.5 billion global surf economy, creating an insurance policy for surf breaks. The idea is to measure the impact of surfing on a local economy, create a local trust that would benefit the relevant stakeholders, then enact an insurance policy that would pay out everyone in the event of a storm or disaster. Save the Waves has already set up such a system in El Salvador, enlisting global insurer Willis Towers Watson as a partner. Starting in 2026, the model will be up and running. It’s an idea the nonprofit hopes to expand across the oceans as a model for protecting local surf economics from the ravages of climate change. 7. OX Delivers For a cheap electric truck that aids mobility in Rwanda, while making small businesses more profitable A U.K. company that designed a bare-bones, easy-to-ship electric truck, OX Delivers seeks to solve a key conundrum for African farmers and entrepreneurs: with unstable, unaffordable, and uncertain transportation options, how can small businesses get goods to market? It’s an important question. Globally, the Food and Agricultural Organization estimates this problem leads to $400 billion worth of food spoiling before ever reaching a buyer. The OX, an electric truck with a 90-mile range that can be outfitted with cold storage, offers a cheaper, more reliable way to move goods. In Rwanda, where OX Delivers has created a service allowing farmers and merchants to rent space on these vehicles, it’s made formerly long, arduous journeys, sometimes on bicycle, far more efficient. So far, the company has signed up 5,000 customers since launching in 2021. The company has faced challenging economics, despite signing a $163 million contract in December 2024 to add service in nearly a half-dozen new countries. But the firm’s acquisition in late February by Berekley Coachworks, which brings commitment to the mission, passion for the technology, and fresh resources, gives it a new runway for growth and expansion. 8. St. Louis Art Place Initiative For finding a way to support a more thriving arts economy in a shrinking Midwestern metro The challenge of an affordable lifestyle and the tenuous nature of federal funding has been a tough one-two punch to art and culture in our cities. In St. Louis, a new initiative seeks to transform what some many see as blight into home and creative spaces for aspiring creatives. The Arts Place Initiative plans to turn vacant lots into affordable housing and creative space for artists. By cobbling together different grants, such as funding from the Community Development Administration, the initiative seeks to help pay a portion of the downpayment, with artists responsible for the mortgage, taxes, and insurance. In the Gravois Park neighborhood, for example, a three-story home is being converted into residential units for low-to-moderate income artists, with a backyard accessory dwelling unit being turned into an artist-in-residence program space. In all, the Arts Place Initiative plans to build 20 homes for artists, co-designing the properties and seeking to prevent displacement and build wealth through homeownership. The push for new artists housing is part of a larger network of programs focused on investment in the arts. Additional efforts include diverting a portion of tourism tax to the Regional Arts Commission and creating a maker district on Delmar Boulevard. 9. State of Illinois Climate and Equitable Jobs Act For typing utility improvements to bottom-line investments helping the budgets and health of low-income residents In a clever spin on the phrase “power to the people,” Illinois lawmakers have figured out a novel and successful formula that not only pushed utilities to be better public servants and cut their emissions, but also uses this cudgel to directly improve the lives of low-income utility clients. The Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, passed in 2021, mandates that utilities in the state cut electricity consumption; paying for home electrification, including electric stoves and heat pumps, counts for that reduction. That’s why the law has become a prime engine for low-income electrification across the state; residents can get more efficient heaters, new cooling systems, and electric ranges that reduce indoor air pollution. More than 700 homes have benefitted from whole-house electrification in just the past three years, with zero costs upfront. As the program drives down electricity use and cuts pollution, it also helps state residents lock-in cheaper electricity bills, at a time when rising energy costs have become a key political issue. Pairing the effort with solar and battery storage can save even more. With cuts and cancellations to federal programs for energy efficiency and green retrofits, these kinds of state-level solutions become even more important. 10. Re.green For using AI and an economic development model to help restore the Amazonian rainforest Considering the importance of the Amazon rainforest to our global climate, it’s clear not all forests are created equal. As Brazilian firm re.green sees it, not all forest restorations projects are created equal, either. Utilizing a unique technology and analytics model, fusing AI, satellite imagery, and seed-planting drones to figure out the most cost-effective, sustainable spots for forest restoration, re.green believes it can be much more effective at replanting and managing carbon credits. By planting in degraded farmland that used to be rainforests, re.green seeks to reverse the great decline of this crucial biome. And with its commitment to native hardwood species–it works with nearly two dozen partner nurseries–it creates sustainable, harvestable wood that can bolster business and jobs for local communities. To date, Re.green has restored nearly 100,000 acres, planted more than 6 million seedlings, and created hundreds of local jobs. In 2025, the company not only won the prestigious Earthshot Prize for its sustainability efforts, but also landed a massive deal with Microsoft to restore 82,000 acres of forest and signed a $15 million deal with the Brazilian development bank. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

The world of public relations has always been about making a splash. And in an age of more and more media clutter, breakthrough ideas have never been more important. To create that can’t-miss-it buzz, this year’s most innovative PR firms paired an A-list Hollywood actor with an A-list Hollywood director, staged a surprise pop-event in a major urban transportation hub, enlisted some of the biggest stars from the booming world of women’s sports, and employed some creative grammar to stir up social media chatter. Giant Spoon created a campaign for the emerging electric vehicle brand Lucid that was essentially a short action film, directed by James Mangold (Ford v Ferrari, A Complete Unknown) and starring Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet. Jellyfish staged a surprise mini takeover of Grand Central Station to promote Apple TV+’s hit sci-fi series Severance. The Brand Agency not only created a memorable campaign for one of Disney’s most popular animated TV shows that had been on hiatus for nearly a decade, but it also enlisted Bradley Cooper to help the venerable BOSS fragrance line reach a younger audience with its newest scent launch. In the sports arena, Day One Agency leaned into the growing women’s sports wave by leveraging partnerships with female athletes and leagues for a popular beauty brand and teamed up with legendary tennis star Billie Jean King to promote a ride share service. For Super Bowl LIX, Colle McVoy deployed Paris Hilton to give traditional hot sauce brand Frank’s RedHot a dash of hip, and Alison Brod Marketing + Communications used an intentional typo to help get social media users talking about Coors Light. Black Arts PR helped Britpop mega-band Oasis make its much anticipated reunion tour a hit in its home country. Moonrock helped brands like Walmart and Ally Bank crack the wildly popular gaming space code. SolComms helped boost sales of contraception and cervical cancer prevention products, all with a greater social purpose in mind. And Weber Shandwick deployed AI bots to help navigate a real-time PR crisis for a major multinational food and beverage brand. 1. Giant Spoon For turning an ad for an emerging EV brand into a short action film (directed by James Mangold and starring Timothée Chalamet) If you were in New York City in the summer of 2024, you might remember the giant, inflatable dragon wrapped around the Empire State Building promoting HBO’s House of the Dragon. Giant Spoon was behind that. In 2025, the agency pulled off another big stunt: it got Timothée Chalamet, arguably Hollywood’s hottest young star, to be the face of its client Lucid Motors’ marketing campaign. For Lucid’s “Driven” campaign, the electric car brand partnered with Chalamet and director James Mangold (Ford v Ferrari, A Complete Unknown) on a high-octane short film that positioned Lucid’s Gravity model as the symbol of a reimagined automotive future. In the spot, Chalamet’s motorcycle breaks down, leading him and model Larsen Thompson to steal a Gravity SUV to escape. One social media user referred to it as “cinema gold” — and according to Giant Spoon, the campaign resulted in more than a 10% increase in likelihood of buying a Lucid for shoppers getting a car in the next 6 months. Ahead of the premiere of A24’s Marty Supreme, starring Chalamet, Giant Spoon worked with Lucid again on a content series where the three-time Oscar nominee drove one of the cars while being interviewed by New York Knicks stars Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart about what “greatness” means to him. In its first week, the series drew 2.87 million impressions on social media and secured press in publications like Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and more. According to Giant Spoon, the series set a new benchmark for Lucid, surpassing its highest social engagement ever within the first hour of launch. Overall, Giant Spoon says it grew new business by 13% year-over-year in 2025. 2. Weber Shandwick For using generative AI to help brands navigate crises in real-time In the Internet and Social Media Age, a PR crisis can go viral in an instant. To help companies respond as quickly and effectively as possible, Weber Shandwick developed an AI tool that can work just as fast. Weber I/O, an agentic crisis communications platform, navigates teams through unfolding scenarios in real time—drawing on an organization’s own plans and past responses, along with intelligence from similar crises, to forecast likely escalation and engagement scenarios and draft responses in the organization’s tone. For instance, the platform was essential during an ESG crisis faced by a Fortune 500 food and beverage client. In that case, Weber used its AI tools to track audience sentiment and media coverage in real-time and to detect crises and deploy AI agents to craft and send messages to appropriate outlets in the client’s voice. Those efforts streamlined the tasks crisis management hd to do so they could focus on more high-level work. For the same client, Weber Shandwick developed a campaign highlighting the company’s mission and commitment to creating and sustaining U.S. manufacturing jobs, and used AI to test a complex message for the marketplace across key audiences. The campaign generated significant social-media mentions and coverage in top-tier media outlets. According to Weber Shandwick, its North American business saw double-digit year-over-year growth in multiple sectors. 3. Jellyfish For engineering a viral popup event at Grand Central Station to promote Season 2 of Severance If you happened to pass through New York’s Grand Central Terminal on January 15, 2025, you might’ve stumbled across the mysterious glass office cubicle occupied by Severance cast members Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Patricia Arquette, Zach Cherry, all in character, that appeared in the middle of the station. It turns out it was a viral marketing stunt orchestrated by Jellyfish as part of a campaign promoting the second season of the Emmy-winning Apple TV hit. The immersive, live-action event featured the actors portraying their “”innie characters”” performing everyday office tasks, like staring at computer screens with green numbers flashing on them, just as they do on the show. According to Jellyfish, the stunt helped the Severance Season Two campaign earn 1 billion impressions, 3.5 million engagements, and over 77,000 organic social mentions. The campaign also earned the agency the Silver Lion award at the 2025 Cannes Lion festival. Severance, meanwhile, has become Apple TV’s most-watched series. 4. Colle McVoy For creating hip campaigns for formerly sleepy brands For many, the words “cool” and “hip” might not be the first terms that come to mind when they think of La-Z Boy recliners or Frank’s RedHot hot sauce. But last year, the Minneapolis-based full-service creative agency Colle McVoy helped reposition the brands as just that, winning them a new generation of fans. For La-Z-Boy, the agency did a brand refresh targeted to Gen Z, positioning the product as more than just your grandpa’s old-school couch. The effort included a new logo, a softer visual identity, and a confident, inviting tone that positioned the product as more than a chair or sofa, but rather a sanctuary. The agency also led a #BanReclining campaign, in which people signed a pledge to keep their seats upright when they’re on an airplane. That effort resulted in more than 470,000 pledges, while the campaign drew some 2.9 billion impressions overall, plus coverage in major media outlets including CNBC. In its most recent earnings report, La-Z-Boy reported an increase in sales to $522 million, up 4 percent from the previous period. For Frank’s RedHot, meanwhile, Colle McVoy tapped Paris Hilton as the face of the brand for a winky Super Bowl LIX campaign that played on Hilton’s kitschy internet fame and her iconic catchphrase “That’s hot.” Instead of releasing a traditional in-game spot, the brand focused on the week leading up to the game, when fans are filling their shopping carts for their game-day parties. During that period, Hilton unveiled her own bedazzled Frank’s bottle and shared her “hottest” recipes for Buffalo chicken wings and dip with fans. Within 24 hours, more than 20,000 fans also submitted their own recipes in response to a Frank’s request. In all, the campaign resulted in 7.1 billion earned impressions and drove pre-game sales to a record $7.1M, a 178% year-over-year increase. 5. The Brand Agency For creating fun, experimental activations for “forgotten” brands and media The all-female team behind creative communications firm The Brand Agency delivered a one-two punch for brands that hadn’t been top of mind for some time. Disney’s animated series Phineas and Ferb, for example, was off the air on a 10-year hiatus, before returning for a fifth season. The Brand Agency helped promote the show’s comeback marketing campaign, which took place over the summer (the titular characters’ favorite season, since school is out). Their efforts included a stop at the Vans Warped tour (which itself was returning from a multi-year hiatus), activations including a secret spy lair disguised as an ordinary portable bathroom, and a Los Angeles premiere party that featured cast members like Ashley Tisdale and Vincent Martella, who performed popular songs from the show. According to the agency, the campaign received 3.1 billion earned media impressions, $79.6 million in estimated media value, and 11.5 million organic social media impressions. The 100-year-old fashion brand BOSS, meanwhile, which has been releasing its own signature scents for nearly 40 years, has spent the past few years attempting to refresh its image for younger generations. To aid that effort, The Brand Agency supported the campaign for the launch of the new BOSS Bottled Beyond fragrance, which featured actor Bradley Cooper and Colombian singer Maluma as brand ambassadors. For the launch party, held at the Manhattan’s immersive tech museum Mercer Labs, the agency invited influencers and celebrities like TikToker Noah Beck and Abbott Elementary star Tyler James Williams. Activations included scent samplings and photo opportunities. Cooper and Maluma were at the party and prior to the event, the agency hosted a separate performance with Maluma at the top of the Empire State Building. According to the agency, the event generated 7.7 billion earned media impressions, $192.7 million in total estimated media value, and 88.2 million in organic social media impressions. Overall, The Brand Agency says it grew by 32% in gross billings between January and September 2025, marking its third consecutive year of double-digit growth. 6. Black Arts PR For bringing Oasis into the social media age “I said maybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves me.” It seems that Black Arts PR, the firm that represents Oasis, took those lyrics to heart when handling public relations in the UK ahead of the wildly popular Britpop band’s much anticipated 2025 tour—its first in 16 years. When the group announced it was going on the road after the lengthy hiatus, fans were shocked. Had band members and brothers Noah and Liam Gallagher squashed their long-running public beef? Either way, the global reunion tour, which took place during the fall and summer last year and spanned the U.K., Europe, North America, and South America, ended up making more than $380 million in ticket sales, merchandise, and sponsorships — and is likely to reach more than $1 billion for its entire global run. Leading up to and during the tour, Black Arts PR handled the UK regional press for the band, with a campaign focused on reminding fans of the pride, nostalgia, and impact its music carries back at home. For instance, the firm touted the 30th anniversary of “Wonderwall” — the band’s most popular album, with 22 million copies sold globally — by heavily pushing limited-edition releases of “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory” box sets that featured four remastered 7” vinyl discs with B-sides in a “cigarette-style” box, including various colorways. The Sunday Times went on to call the Oasis comeback tour the “biggest rock comeback in history.” 7. SolComms For helping companies find new prescriptions for improving women’s health After the re-election of Donald The President in November 2024, the telehealth company Wisp saw sales of its reproductive health products, such as its Plan B morning after pill, spike as women began to stockpile emergency contraception for fear that they might lose access to it. SolComms worked with Wisp to gather data demonstrating the phenomenon, then publicize it. That effort led to over 700 media placements, including segments on CNN and stories in The Hill and The Associated Press, that resulted in more than 9 billion impressions. The campaign didn’t just help Wisp boost its business (according to SolComms, the company saw an immediate 2,000% surge in emergency contraception sales); it also helped the company fulfill its goal of raising awareness of women’s health issues. The fact that 10% of Wisp’s patients live in reproductive care deserts made the effort even more meaningful. Also in 2025, SolComms worked with Teal Health, a virtual women’s health company that focuses on eliminating cervical cancer by offering at home screening kits for the disease. The agency helped position the FDA’s approval of the kits as a milestone for women’s health, driving over 1,700 media stories and 13.9 billion impressions. All told, the campaign spiked consumer sign-ups by 250%. 8. Moonrock For helping brands like Walmart find a cheat code for video-game marketing Little-known fact: With some 3.5 billion players worldwide, gaming is a more popular entertainment option than movies and music combined. Moonrock is at the forefront of tapping that popularity for marketers, through both digital and real-world efforts. In 2025, for instance, the agency produced Walmart Skyward, a custom activation built in Minecraft that also extended into Discord. Through Skyward, players could go in and explore a branded world while engaging in Walmart’s Discord Video Quest program. That program allowed users to join Walmart Skyward’s server (a digital public space where users can chat and interact) to watch a trailer to unlock rewards like Discord avatars and other in-game items. According to Moonrock, Walmart Skyward drove “”millions”” of community interactions in Minecraft and Discord, with influencers engaging organically, fans creating content, and the campaign running well beyond its launch window. Discord also reported that the program resulted in over 513,000 completed views and 178 days of total watch time, surpassing established benchmarks and driving strong engagement. In another effort for Wamart, Moonrock launched an in-store gaming tour that spanned 75 locations across the United States, bringing hands-on gameplay and brand experiences to Walmart parking lots. For Ally Bank, meanwhile, the agency created Tee Time Speed Run a custom, immersive golf experience on Fortnite where players can “”be the ball,”” and participate in different obstacle courses and challenges. That initiative won a Digiday Award for Best Esports/Gaming Campaign. 9. Alison Brod Marketing + Communications For spinning a “mistake” into marketing gold No, your eyes weren’t deceiving you. In conjunction with Super Bowl LIX last year, Coors Light launched a series of ads that read “Mountain Cold Refershment” in which “refreshment” was deliberately misspelled. The spots appeared as print ads in the New York Times and on large digital billboards in high-profile locations like Times Square. Social media users quickly noticed the mistake, with many wondering whether it was a genuine proofreading error. In a public statement, Coors Light blamed it on a “case of the Mondays.” The company also released limited-edition “Mondays Light” 12-packs as well as sloth-themed ads and merch, like a “chill face roller,” to promote relaxation on everyone’s least favorite day of the week, especially the one after the Big Game. Alison Brod Marketing + Communications helped capitalize on the misspelling to make sure it went viral on social media and was covered in top media outlets. For the “Case of the Mondays” brand for the 12-packs and merchandise, the agency helped develop and push the “chill” narrative and helped position the beer brand as the solution to cure the post-Super Bowl Monday blues. Those efforts helped drive 12.6 billion earned impressions. All told, the brand sold some 1.8 billion of the limited-edition beer packs. 10. Day One Agency For tapping into the women’s sports boom to reach new audiences Michael Jordan may have ushered in the Golden Age of athlete as pitchman. Now, with women’s sports booming, Caitlin Clark, Coco Gauff, and others are taking up the mantle. This past year, New York-based Day One Agency helped bring e.l.f Beauty and Lyft Silver into the sports marketing arena. For Gen Z beauty favorite e.l.f, the agency secured a partnership with Katherine Legge—the only woman racing in the NASCAR CupXfinity Series and Indy 500—sponsoring her during races in which she drove an e.l.f.-branded car. D1A got e.l.f into the ring with female wrestlers, becoming the first-ever beauty sponsor for the Wonder Women of Wrestling (WWW) Varsity Tournament, the largest high school girls’ wrestling event in the United States. And the agency brokered a sponsorship deal between e.l.f and the Professional Women’s Hockey League, tapping Minnesota Frost star Kendall Coyne Schofield as a brand ambassador. All told, according to D1A, e.l.f supported more than 500 athletes and drew more than 12 billion impressions from activations in 26 cities worldwide. For Lyft Silver, D1A paired the newly launched service, which aims to help the millions of older adults in the United States who lack adequate transportation, with tennis legend Billie Jean King—demonstrating an ability to reach diverse demographic groups. To that same end, D1A also helped forge a collaboration between Lyft Silver and the New York Liberty’s Timeless Torches dance troupe. The results? Lyft reported that Lyft Silver got off to a strong start. Rides have doubled since last May, with an 80% user retention rate, and nearly 20% of Silver users are new to the platform. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

The most innovative retailers in 2025 used technology not to chase trends, but to solve real problems. As tariffs squeezed margins and labor costs climbed, companies scrambled to adapt. Shopify opened its platform to agentic AI shoppers, letting customers purchase directly within ChatGPT. Amazon launched Lens Live to turn smartphones into instant product scanners. Rebel scaled its re-commerce platform into new categories, processing over 70,000 returned products weekly and keeping 25 million pounds of goods out of landfills. Others doubled down on heritage and experience. J.Crew proved nostalgia sells when paired with a carefully curated archive. Printemps brought its European department store model to Manhattan, where food and beverage now accounts for 35% of sales. Fanatics launched Fanatics Studios to produce sports content, creating new touchpoints to keep fans inside its ecosystem. On the operational side, Walmart insulated shoppers from trade wars by keeping grocery prices low while building higher-margin revenue streams. Its marketplace and advertising businesses grew 37% and 28% respectively, helping the company achieve e-commerce profitability for the first time. 1. Shopify For opening its doors to agentic AI shoppers As chatbots begin to reshape online shopping, Shopify is racing to ensure the five million merchants using its platform aren’t left behind. In fall 2025, Shopify introduced a partnership with ChatGPT that lets merchants sell directly within the chatbot, so customers can discover and buy products without ever leaving the platform. The company also launched a universal cart option that allows shoppers to add items from multiple retailers through a conversational interface whereby a bot can fill your cart rather than forcing you to hop between different websites. Behind the scenes, Shopify is also deploying AI to lighten the load for merchants. It built an AI-powered store builder that lets retailers build a functioning storefront by simply describing what they want. The company also upgraded Sidekick, its AI assistant, with voice chat capabilities in more than 20 languages, visual asset generation, and analytics support. The bet appears to be paying off: Shopify reported 9% year-over-year revenue growth in Q3, reaching $1.67 billion. Read more about ⁠Shopify, No. 3 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 2. Walmart For insulating shoppers from the trade wars In 2025, Walmart got better at being Walmart: keeping prices down, moving inventory faster, and leveraging its scale to weather storms. While tariffs squeezed competitors, the megachain kept grocery prices low to pull shoppers in, then built higher-margin businesses around them. Its marketplace and fulfillment services for third-party sellers grew 37%, while its advertising business—which leverages data from serving 90% of U.S. households—jumped 28%. The strategy worked: Walmart achieved e-commerce profitability for the first time and grew overall sales more than 5%. The company also leaned into AI where it actually matters. Sparky, an AI shopping assistant in the Walmart app, helps customers find products. Wally, an internal AI tool, helps merchants troubleshoot inventory issues in real time. And Walmart used its massive infrastructure to push delivery speeds faster—three-hour deliveries grew 91% year-over-year, with plans to reach 95% of the U.S. population by the end of fiscal 2026. Read more about ⁠Walmart, No. 9 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 3. Fanatics For parlaying its sports merch and collectibles into live events and film and television Most sports retailers stop at the jersey, but Fanatics is building an entertainment empire. In 2025, the sports merchandising giant’s annual fan festival, Fanatics Fest, nearly doubled attendance from 70,000 to over 125,000, signaling strong demand for live experiences beyond traditional retail. Now Fanatics has launched Fanatics Studios, a joint venture with OBB Media, with a mission to create, finance, produce, and distribute content at the intersection of sports and culture. Fanatics Studios, which projects over nine figures in revenue in its first year, arrived with deals already in place: co-producing the 2026 ESPY Awards with ESPN, creating original content for WWE’s digital platforms, and partnering with Major League Baseball on a 2026 World Baseball Classic docuseries. Looking ahead, Fanatics Studios will produce the official film for the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic games, and is developing documentaries, live event specials, and digital series—proof that content isn’t a side project but a way to keep fans inside the Fanatics ecosystem while selling more merch in the process. 4. Square For updating its signature point-of-sale system to meet the needs of today’s retailers For most retailers, a point-of-sale system is just the thing that processes payments. Square wants to change that. After six years without launching a new point-of-sale device, the company unveiled Square Handheld—a pocket-sized business command center that weighs just 11 ounces. The device lets sellers manage everything from payments to inventory and back-of-house operations on the go, giving teams the speed and flexibility they need in fast-paced retail environments. The hardware is just the entry point. Square is building an entire ecosystem around modern retail needs, from accepting Bitcoin payments to launching AI-powered analytics that predict future sales and automate marketing campaigns. The company also rolled out subscription billing tools, recognizing that more businesses want to offer monthly boxes or memberships without juggling multiple platforms. That shift toward recurring revenue models is especially relevant for Square’s fastest-growing user base: content creators and small media businesses. The company now offers subscription management for premium content and exclusive newsletters, plus integrated social media tools that let creators share products and monetized content directly to Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. The numbers tell the story: In Q2 2025, Square sellers processed more than $64 billion in gross payment volume, pushing the company’s gross profit up 11% year-over-year to $1.03 billion. 5. J.Crew For using its heritage and legacy to sell customers updates to its classic styles Since J.Crew relaunched an iconic catalog in September 2024—with Demi Moore on the cover wearing one of her personal vintage J.Crew sweaters from the ’90s—the brand has been mining its own archive and doubled down on its heritage. The strategy came to life during New York Fashion Week 2025, when J.Crew transformed a landmark building in Lower Manhattan into a museum of its 40-year history. Visitors entered through a lobby lined with archival photography and vintage catalog pages before discovering the centerpiece: the Rollneck Generation campaign. The initiative celebrated the relaunch of J.Crew’s ’80s classic sweater with a roster of rising stars including Taylour Paige, Dominic Sessa, and Benito Skinner. Beyond the splashy activations, J.Crew launched the “J.Crew Archive” capsule—a collection that reissues beloved pieces like limited-edition denim jackets, flannel shirts, and striped tees. The brand also leaned into nostalgia on social media with #JCrewHeritage, encouraging customers to share their vintage finds and well-worn favorites. The Rollneck sweater alone generated 42,000 keyword searches during launch week, with Google searches spiking 900%. Overall, the heritage focus helped J.Crew drive a 20% increase in returning customers and 4-5% sales growth compared to the same quarter in 2024. 6. Printemps For reimagining the department store In March 2025, the French retailer opened its first U.S. location in Manhattan’s financial district, importing a European model that treats shopping as an experience rather than a transaction. The store is less than half the size of a typical American department store, with far less space devoted to clothing racks and cosmetics counters. The product selection is tightly curated—a quarter of its brands are either exclusive or new to the U.S.—and customers are encouraged to wander through a space designed to evoke a luxurious Parisian residence. What really sets Printemps apart, however, is the food. The Manhattan store houses five dining venues, including a Champagne bar, café, raw bar, and fine dining restaurant. And it’s not just window dressing: Food and beverage accounts for roughly 35% of overall sales at the New York location, proving that people will linger (and spend) when you give them a reason to stay. The approach has worked even in a tough market: Printemps told the Wall Street Journal that the first two months delivered sales “above our expectations.” 7. Rebel For diverting returns from landfills and putting them back on the market American retailers return about 17% of their inventory, or about 8.4 billion pounds of products annually, and most of it ends up in landfills, regardless of condition. Rebel is trying to change that math. The recommerce platform—which started as a baby gear business and expanded to home goods, travel products, and outdoor gear in 2025—processes more than 70,000 unique products weekly at its 300,000-square-foot warehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. There, it turns returned and overstock goods into deals for budget-conscious shoppers. The volume is so substantial that Rebel’s website adds new deals every 15 minutes. To handle that scale, Rebel built an AI-powered system that detects, logs, and tags the condition of each return, then determines the most efficient path from retailer to consumer. The company’s smart-pricing algorithm auto-adjusts item prices based on demand, condition, and inventory more than 10 times daily, allowing Rebel to offer shoppers savings of up to 70% off retail prices. The growth has been steep: Rebel’s revenue increased 1,806% in just three years, and by August 2025, the company had already surpassed its entire 2024 revenue. 8. Amazon For using AI and personalization to help customers navigate the ‘everything store’ Navigating Amazon’s “everything store” has always meant wading through endless options. In 2025, Amazon used AI to flip that experience and let technology do the heavy lifting while shoppers sit back. In September, the retail giant launched Lens Live, which turns smartphones into real-time product scanners by letting you point your camera at any item and suggesting matching products directly in the camera view. The company’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, also got a major upgrade with Shopping Memory, which recalls past purchases, browsing history, abandoned carts, and even how much time shoppers spent looking at different items. Rufus can now ask clarifying questions, compare products across categories, and surface relevant deals based on individual shopping patterns. The assistant expanded to cover $700 billion worth of products and rolled out to 13 additional international marketplaces. Though it is a free service, Rufus has generated $700 million in operating profit in 2025. 9. Field.iO For creating easily deployed immersive retail experiences Creating an immersive retail experience used to cost $5 million and take two years to build. Field.io has collapsed that timeline to four months and $150,000. The London-based studio spent 15 years building custom digital environments for clients like Nike and Chanel. In 2025, it packaged that expertise into Lucient OS—a platform that transforms physical stores into intelligent, responsive spaces. The system uses anonymous sensors to track movement and behavior, then adjusts lighting, sound, projections, and even scent in real time. Since the AI processing happens on-site rather than in the cloud, customer data never leaves the building. For Nike, Field.iO built a centralized digital hub that manages immersive visuals across 94+ flagship stores globally. The platform can adapt to any screen size or architecture, which means new stores can deploy experiences quickly. Content shifts based on hyperlocal context while staying responsive to broader campaigns and product launches. The results: 40% operational efficiency gains and 47% conversion rate improvement. By reducing deployment time by 82% and costs by 97%, Field.iO is making these responsive retail experiences accessible to thousands of retailers who couldn’t previously afford them. 10. VenHub For creating the fully automated convenience store of the future VenHub is betting that the future of convenience stores doesn’t include humans—just robotic arms and algorithms. In 2025, the Las Vegas-based company opened five fully automated locations in Los Angeles, including Hollywood, Glendale, North Hollywood, the LAX/Metro Transit Center, and Union Station. The stores operate 24/7 without staff, and unlike traditional convenience stores, where products sit on open shelves vulnerable to theft, VenHub keeps everything behind bulletproof glass. Customers order through a touchscreen app, and robotic arms retrieve chips, soft drinks, basic medicines, or small electronics and hand them over within seconds. The unmanned model is resonating far beyond urban transit hubs dealing with labor costs and shoplifting. VenHub has racked up more than $400 million in pre-orders for its smart-store kiosks, with interest coming from unexpected places: a 200-person community in East Texas that doesn’t want to drive miles for sundries, and a gated Connecticut neighborhood where parents want a safe, walkable option for their kids to grab snacks. Since the stores require no employees and can be installed in just seven days, they’re ideal for locations that can’t support traditional staffing. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

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