The Fast Company Innovation Festival returns to New York City this September 1518.
Hosted at Convene Brookfield Place in lower Manhattan, attendees can expect four days packed with informative panels, interactive networking sessions, engaging workshops, signature Fast Tracks that offer a behind-the-scenes look at the citys most cutting-edge companies, and intimate dinners at the city’s buzziest restaurants.
It’s a lot to take in. So we’ve compiled the top 11 reasons you should attend the 11th annual Innovation Festival.
1. Candid conversations with leaders
Headliners hitting the Innovation Festival stage this year include:
Jimmy Fallon, Executive Producer and Host, On Brand With Jimmy Fallon; Host, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
Bozoma Saint John, Chief Marketing Officer and Mentor, On Brand With Jimmy Fallon
Brené Brown, Research Professor, The University of Texas at Austin; Author, Strong Ground
Tracee Ellis Ross, Host, Solo Traveling With Tracee Ellis Ross; Founder and CEO, Pattern Beauty
Damian Kulash, Lead Singer, OK Go
Jonathan Haidt, Author, TheAnxious Generation
Norma Kamali, President and CEO, Norma Kamali
Justin McLeod, Founder and CEO, Hinge
Myechia MinterJordan, CEO, AARP
Shay Mitchell, Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Béis Travel
Brian Niccol, Chairman and CEO, Starbucks Coffee Company
Ego Nwodim, Actress, Comedian, and SNL Cast Member
Artemis Patrick, President and CEO, Sephora North America
Joy Reid, Journalist, Political Analyst, Best-selling Author
Hailee Steinfeld, Cofounder, Angel Margarita
Luis von Ahn, Cofounder and CEO, Duolingo
2. Field trips for adults
Our signature Fast Tracks offer attendees an behind-the-scenes look inside some of New York City’s most innovative companies. There are over 50 Fast Tracks this yearhere’s just a glimpse:
A brownie baking class with Tonys Chocolonely
Playing Pickleball at Life Time
An office tour and pop-a-shot tournament with TNT
An intimate gallery walkthrough highlighting Harlems economic and cultural impact on the arts at GPGallery
A look at the art of hiring and understanding when to kill a product with Ramp executives.
3. Food for thought
Taste of Innovation is a unique dining experience showcasing powerhouse chefs and restaurant executivesnot to mention some of the best food in the city. At each Taste of Innovation experience, youll dine, drink, and mingle with fellow attendees and Fast Companys editorial staff, as well as hear intimate conversations with leaders in the food space. This year’s Taste of Innovation lineup features:
Sofreh Cafe
Metropolis by Marcus Samuelsson
Manhatta
The Bazaar by José Andrés
Naks
4. Workshops to solve work’s biggest problems
Another signature of the Innovation Festival are our workshops. These are sessions that create space for a more hands-on approach to problem solving. Just some workshops this year include:
What Does Your Brand Sound Like?
The Return of Creative Craft
If Your Brand Isnt Awake, Its Dead
Unscrambling the Productivity Paradox
Humans, Machines, and the Art of Teaming
5. New experiential moments
There’ll always be a place for informative panels and one-on-one conversations at the Innovation Festival. But we’re making room for something to really engage your senses and emotions. New this year are our experiential sessions. From using sound to reset your nervous system to reconnecting with play and self-celebration through confetti, these sessions are designed to be highly interactive and deeply personal:
Why Intuition Is the Leadership Advantage AI Cant Replace
The Celebration Lab
Discover and Design Your Personal Sound Care Ritual
6. New breakout sessions
Sometimes 30 minutes isn’t long enough to dig into the topic at hand. Also new this year at the Innovation Festival are breakout sessions which are an extension of our workshops created to give attendees more access to workshop hosts and more time work through their questions and gain deeper insights:
A Deeper Dive into Bettering Your Brain
Networking That Works
Turn a Burning Question into a Bold Next Step
7. Celebrating good times
It wouldn’t be the Innovation Festival without celebratory moments! In addition to our Kickoff Party and Closing Night Party, we’re having exclusive parties for honorees on our recognition lists Innovation by Design and Best Workplaces for Innovators, as well as a dinner for our Impact Council members.
8. Activations and giveaways
Throughout the Innovation Festival Hub are activations including custom bandana embroidery from Teton Ridge and an AI-powered racing simulator powered by IBM. There are also several giveaways at different sessions. On the Innovation Festival schedule page, click the “filter by feature” option and then “giveaway” to make sure you’re in the right place at the right time!
9. Insights on today’s biggest topics
The Innovation Festival is all about exploring the driving forces of business, technology, and creativity. While there’s ample choices in programming, here are some topical sessions worth putting on your radar:
Will AGI Be a Realityand Are We Ready?
From Automation to Autonomy: Navigating the Rise of Agentic AI
On the Front Lines: Inside the ACLUs Fight for Civil Rights
Digital Defense: The Battle for an Open and Secure Internet
How Workforce Inclusion Sparks Innovation
More for Less: Maximizing Social Impact with Minimal Resources
The Changing Face of Aging
10. Networking with your fellow attendees
One of the main attractions of the Innovation Festival is how widely you can expand your network. Year after year, attendees have said this is one of their most valuable takeaways from the event. We have sessions that are specifically catered to networking. However, just hanging out and working in the Innovation Festival Hub is the perfect place to meet someone new.
11. Becoming a better you
The Innovation Festival is a place for you to learn. We pack in a lot during the event, so you can create a robust agenda that’s tailored to your interests, whether that’s in leadership, creativity, branding, technology, or beyond. We hope you take the insights and knowledge you’ll gain over the week and apply it to your work lifeor even your personal life.
Visit our event page to buy your Innovation Festival passes and to stay up-to-date on our session agenda and speaker lineup.And a special thanks to this years Innovation Festival sponsors: IBM, Lilly, NYU Langone Health, Texas A&M University, Delta, Esri, Fetch, GS1 US, Huge, Hyland, Innovate Alabama, Maven AGI, Penske, PepsiCo, Project Management Institute, SAP, Synchrony, Teton Ridge, Uber for Business, Virginia, The Weather Company, Webtoon, Wellhub, and Williams.
More than a decade ago, the real estate developer Woodbury Corporation took stock of a site in Vineyard, Utah, that had been home to a WW II-era steel mill. Surrounded by mountain views and overlooking Utah Lake, they saw possibility and a blank canvas, so they began studying growth patterns and infrastructure needs in the area. They quickly realized it would be the perfect site for a new developmentand not just a plot of houses. Woodbury bought 700 acres of land and partnered with Flagship Homes to build a city from the ground up.We had the right land in the right location at the exact moment Utah was experiencing unprecedented growth, says Nate Hutchinson, a partner on the project.[Image: courtesy Pentagram]What they didnt have was a name for the new city they were building.So they made a call to Pentagram partner DJ Stout, who was tasked with creating an identity for a city that was still just an idea.There are 23 Pentagram partners, Stout says. And in our storied history, I don’t think anybody’s actually named a U.S. city before.Cities get their names in various ways. Oftentimes, a community is named for its founder, or to highlight a local geographic feature. Modern developments tend to take a more marketing-centric approach. For every unnecessary e deployed to class up a place (think Wolfes Pointe), theres a vague gesture at historical lineage (Views at the Old Mill) or a moniker so watered down that the branding exercise becomes obsolete (Waters Edge).At the outset, Stout says the Woodbury team was clear that they didnt want their project to sound like a gated community. For one thing, the scale of Woodbury’s ambitions was much bigger. The development was conceptualized as a walkable community that could cater to Utah’s rapidly expanding population, which is slated to surge by 58% to 5.2 million by 2060. Some 30% of that is in Utah County, where the former steel mill sits. Woodbury decided its new city would feature complete neighborhoods with multiple types of housing; shopping, dining and entertainment; a range of business, civic and cultural spaces; plazas, parks; transit connectivity; and an overall focus on walkability. [Image: courtesy Pentagram]Were building an entire urban district on the front door of a transit station, along a lakefront, with healthcare, education, retail and residential all integrated from the start, Hutchinson says.The breadth of the vision gave Pentagram a lot to play with. Stout says his team started with research: Given the nearby Wasatch Mountains, which, like Utah, derive their name from the indigenous Ute people, Pentagram explored similar elements before deciding to avoid plumbing the culture for nomenclatures sake. The area also had a significant railroad history, so coupled with the transit plans for the development, Stouts team ideated some names around that; they explored names tied to Mormon settlers and the Mormon population in the area; they probed nature themes tied to Utah Lake, which is the states largest freshwater body.Stout says they wound up with more than 100 potential namesbut then he had a thought. Texas has a Texas City. Colorado has a Colorado City. Theres Kansas City. Oklahoma City. Hell, New York City. Was there really no Utah City?In Pentagrams first call with the developers, Stout says, they had mentioned that they wanted to some day be as well-known as Salt Lake City or Park Cityand, well, when it came to Utah City, I was like, I can’t believe this. I can’t believe nobody has it.[Image: courtesy Pentagram]THE OBVIOUS SOLUTIONAt the pitch meeting, Stout says his team presented around 50 names. When they got to the end of the list, he recalls saying, I think I have your name. And here it is: Its Utah City.He says he received a quizzical, unconvinced reaction from the head of Woodbury. And then I made the case that if you really want to be that well-known of a city, if that’s your ambition in the state of Utah, just like Oklahoma City or Kansas City, you should grab this name. Nobody has it.That initial reaction wasnt entirely isolated. When the name went public online, it took some hits on Reddit and elsewhereand Stout has seen it. But here he cites Pentagram legend and friend Michael Bierut.[Image: courtesy Pentagram]He’s really good at just basically looking at something and saying, This is the obvious solution. A lot of times the best solutions are right there in front of your face, and they’re obvious, Stout says. And I think sometimes creatives or designers in general wouldn’t even look at that name because it seems too obvious; there’s this thinking that we’re being paid to do a fancy logo or to come up with a fancy name. He notes Bieruts work with United Airlines. When the company was on the hunt for a new logo, Bierut suggested they hold on to the Saul Bass original. There’s this kind of lack of ego of that kind of ownership . . . and so I’m not afraid to think about things that just seem obviousbecause that’s the best solution.At the pitch presentation, the team snapped up the Utah City URLs in real time. Ultimately, says Hutchinson, Pentagram helped us distill the projects ambition into something clear.[Image: courtesy Pentagram]VISUALIZING A BRAND (OR NOT)Pentagram usually delivers a comprehensive identity system, but Stout says the Utah City team didnt want that because they still had a long runway to the project being realized. Nevertheless, Stout and his team created a logo. The team pondered the idea: If this really was a city that could end up on a U.S. map, what would stand the test of time and not look like a mere trend blip?Stout says they played with a few ideas that nodded a bit at the vernacular, but eventually seized on the ubiquitous Us found across the state, with the University of Utah being dubbed the U, the Utah Utes, and other cultural touch points. [Image: courtesy Pentagram]For the logo, Stout took a U and modified it into the shape of the state itself.Again, it’s just a simple solution, he says. If they’re going to own the Utah in their name, then they might as well own the state.Given the intended city emphasis, Stout added the typeface Gotham, owing to its roots in one of the most famous cities in the worldand the branding was complete. Until it wasnt. While the mark can still be seen on the Utah City website, a new logo has emerged on its social channelsa “C” somewhat awkwardly nestled within a “U.”[Image: courtesy Pentagram]After years of development, Utah City has just opened the projects first residential building, a 40,000-square-foot market is nearly complete, and the Huntsman Cancer Institute has broken ground on a 20-acre care and research center. According to Hutchinson, the first phase of Utah City is on track to deliver within the next couple of years, featuring additional housing, a promenade, retail village, wellness center, and miles of bike and walking trails.As the project shapes up, the team behind it says the identity will also shift. A representative for Utah City said they have been working with a local team to refine and expand the brand with a new monogram and wordmark, noting, We saw the need to evolve from an East Coast font and view of what Utah is and can be, and moved into claiming our Western roots.And, well, heycities are by nature amorphous, living things. Perhaps branding one is, too.
As social media users continue to spend more time in their direct messages than posting to the main feed, companies are beefing up their features for private chats.
TikTok recently said it will soon offer users the ability to send pictures and voice notes up to a minute long in its direct messages (DMs) and group chats, while Meta announced filters to sort Instagram DMs by categories like “Story replies,” “Unanswered,” “Followers,” and “Verified Users” for professional and personal accounts with more than 100,000 followers.
[Image: Meta]
The intent is to make the DMs more engaging. TikTok’s DMs will soon be more media rich, while Instagram’s could see more engagement from bigger accounts that would otherwise drown in new message notifications. Both updates are part of wider push to reengineer social media apps for the way people use them now, which is more private and less posting.
A 2023 Morning Consult poll found 61% of adults with a social media accounts were more selective about what they posted online, and 28% said they posted less on their preferred platform than the year before. It’s a change Instagram head Adam Mosseri called “a paradigm shift,” in May, and the implication for social media app design is a greater emphasis on improved messaging.
Meta’s X-clone Threads, which launched without DMs in 2023, finally added them in July. Meanwhile, Instagram has made a flurry of improvements to its DMs since 2024, including editing messages, pinned chats, longer voice messages, location sharing, and scheduled messages. Spotify has added DMs, too, just in case you wanted to use yet another closed platform to connect with someone.
Social media might feel far less social than it once did, but it seems a lot of the conversation is simply going on away from public view. As people spend more time chatting one-on-one than posting publicly, social media apps are becoming a lot more like messaging apps, too.
Blank Street started in 2020 as a coffee shop operated out of a single cart in Williamsburg. Just five years later, its a chain with more than 90 global locations thats become almost more well-known for its over-the-top matcha drinks than its actual coffee. Now, its getting a subtle rebrand that makes the whole identity look like an ice-cold glass of green tea latte.
The new branding, crafted by the agency Wolff Olins, includes a new logo symbol inspired by that original coffee cart, new custom fonts, and a greater focus on green. It stays true to the brands quintessential neutral aesthetic while adding a few original touches to be just a bit more distinctive. George Lavender, creative director at Wolff Olins, says that, given the brands massive growth, Blank Street was due for a visual touch-up.
[Image: courtesy Wolff Olins]
The company currently operates locations in New York, Boston, D.C., London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, and is gearing up to expand into L.A. soon. According to a June profile in the The Wall Street Journal, Blank Streets current valuation is around $500 million, and it earns an estimated annual revenue of $149 million.
A large chunk of that income is thanks to the monumental popularity of Blank Streets matcha creations, which includes flavors like its best-selling strawberry shortcake matcha, blueberry matcha, and cookies-and-cream matcha. Matcha’s popularity has exploded in the U.S. in recent years, with some reports estimating that the beverage’s sales have reached beyond $10 billion over the past 25 years.
[Image: courtesy Wolff Olins]
Mohammad Rabaa, Blank Streets global creative director, says that matcha now accounts for more than 50% of the business.
It started as a coffee cart in Williamsburg and snowballed, becoming this thing that was much bigger than they ever thought it might become, Lavender says. I think it was a good moment for them to stop, reflect, and try to reestablish who they are.
[Image: courtesy Wolff Olins]
Refining a brand designed to be neutral
Blank Streets former branding centered around the idea of its identity being almost an empty vessel, Lavender saysa metaphorical blank space that customers could fill with whatever drink they like best. To that end, their logo was an ultrasimple sans-serif wordmark, complimented by a palette of black, white, and fern green.
With Blank Street, you have a company that’s highly creative and expressive in their creations, Lavender says. In order to have a sense of balance to that, their own identity needs to be so neutral, because every seasonal campaign is so wildly different.
[Image: courtesy Wolff Olins]
He adds that the existing identity was clearly working, but it was veering into a territory that was almost too neutral. That’s why, through this process, we really wanted to make the evergreen Blank Street brand just a little bit more special.
Lavenders team started by adding a literal blank space as an added symbol in the logo. It’s a plain rectangular box thats designed after the dimensions of the window on Blank Streets original coffee cart, and it will start to appear on the brands cups, signage, packaging, and socials this fall.
[Image: courtesy Wolff Olins]
Alongside the box motif, Wolff Olins also swapped out Blank Streets former public domain fonts for two custom sans serifs, developed in partnership with the type foundry Due Studio. The refresh also includes a warmed-up version of Blank Streets signature green hue, paired with a palette of various other greens that the brand can use in secondary applications. The goal is to eventually phase out any former black and white branding (which still remains on the outside of some small format stores) in favor of the new green and cream logo.
[Image: courtesy Wolff Olins]
A more matcha-forward brand
Blank Street, which used to be called Blank Street Coffee, is also in the process of dropping the coffee from its name, including by moving the word to a secondary position on signage. The branding changes, alongside the name edit, seem to point to the idea that Blank Street is embracing a new identityperhaps one that emphasizes its fan-favorite matcha over its coffee beverages.
They are shifting away from Blank Street Coffee to Blank Street, and I’m sure that’s a very conscious move based on the strawberry shortcake matcha being their most popular seller ever, Lavender says.
[Image: courtesy Wolff Olins]
Lavender adds that the companys creative direction was never to explicitly mimic matcha, but the drinks growing popularity was more of an unspoken thing throughout the process. According to Rabaa, green was the company’s core color even before introducing matcha, and any similarities between the new branding and the green tea drink itself are not a nod, but more like a happy coincidence.
Either way, Blank Street’s sales numbers show that matcha is definitively its stand-out productand now, it has an identity that looks the part.
For most of his career, Mike Kelland worked on software. But after selling his last startup in 2016, he decided to focus on climate change instead.
He zeroed in on one key part of the problem: Cutting emissions is no longer enough to address climate change on its own. He’d read an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that explained that well also need to remove hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. We’re 30 years beyond the point where decarbonization alone was enough, Kelland says.
He spent nearly a year meeting with scientists to learn about potential new carbon removal technology, and eventually met a researcher working on ocean alkalinity enhancementthe process of adding alkaline minerals to the ocean to help it store more CO2. The method can also help reduce ocean acidification. But the tech was stuck in the lab.
I said, this is the moment to take this and turn it into something, Kelland says. In 2019, he cofounded Planetary, a startup focused on commercializing the idea. Now, at a site in Nova Scotia, the company is actively adding its antacid to the ocean.
Earlier this year, it sold independently verified carbon credits to British Airways, Stripe, and Shopify for CO2 that it had already removed. And in a recent deal, Frontiera coalition of tech companies and others that are trying to help the nascent carbon removal industry grow committed $31 million to buy more than 100,000 tons of carbon removal from the startup over the next four years. It hasnt yet been tested at a large scale. But the goal is to scale up to remove gigatons of CO2and do that at a very low cost.
How Planetarys ocean antacid works
The method works by adding small amounts of minerals like lime (calcium oxide) or magnesium oxide into the ocean near the coast. Making the water more alkaline accelerates a natural process so the ocean can absorb more CO2 from the air. The CO2 reacts with the minerals to form bicarbonates that are dissolved in the water and can lock up carbon for thousands of years.
The company works with power plants and other industrial facilities that already discharge water into the ocean, and then adds its minerals via those existing pipes. “Our philosophy is really the more that we can reuse existing infrastructure, the cheaper and more scalable this is going to be,” says Kelland.
[Photo: Planetary]
In Nova Scotia, the startup works with a power plant that circulates ocean water through its systems for cooling. On a tiny corner of the power plant’s property, the startup produces the minerals for the process, and then adds them to the power plant’s pipes before the water goes back in the ocean. The size of its operation is roughly 8% of a direct air capture plant, but can capture more carbon, Kelland says.
The minerals aren’t unique. “This is literally Tums,” Kelland says. But because the standard way to make the product has a relatively large carbon footprint, the company couldn’t buy it off the shelf. Instead, the company uses alkaline byproducts of existing industrial production and mining that would otherwise end up in landfills. Then it purifies them so no harmful heavy metals or other pollutants are added to the ocean.
[Photo: Planetary]
The impact on marine life
One benefit for marine life is clear: Locally, in the parts of the ocean where the minerals are added, the process can help reduce acidification. Extra CO2 in the ocean creates acid that makes it hard for species like oysters to form shells. (The bicarbonate formed by Planetary’s process, by contrast, helps form shells and coral.) Since the industrial revolution, the ocean has become around 30% more acidic.
“That has really nasty effects on ecosystems, from the base of the food webthe tiny little plankton that form shellsall the way up to shellfish that we eat,” says Kelland. Fisheries are already being impacted by ocean acidification. Because of the ocean’s enormous scale, Planetary’s process can’t bring its pH back to pre-industrial levels. But if it’s done at scale in coastal zones, it can help counterbalance the pressure from human emissions.
Like any form of geoengineering, this type of work also has risks. “Unintended consequences from ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) are still an active area of research, and the risks depend largely on the mineral used and how much alkalinity is added,” says Melissa Meléndez, an oceanographic researcher at the University of Hawaii at Mnoa. “Some minerals could introduce trace metals that might be harmful to marine ecosystems, and certain organisms are more sensitive to abrupt chemical changes than others.” Because there’s still uncertainty, she says, field testing and monitoring are critical.
Kelland argues that the risks can be controlled. There’s a risk to marine life if the water becomes too alkaline, but that’s already been well studied for the billions of tons of water that industry discharges into the ocean each day, which has to meet certain pH requirements. The levels can be monitored, and the system can stop immediately if needed. It’s also possible to carefully measure the amount of undissolved particles that go into the water and control that. The company can meet existing regulatory limits.
Since Planetary is doing something new, though, it’s also continuing to work with scientists to do in-depth research on potential impacts. One large ecotoxicology study, for example, looked at the potential impact of the antacid on lobster larvae, and found no effect.
Kelland argues that the science is already well enough understood for the copany to scale up to larger projects, though more research will be needed before the gigaton-scale would be possible.
Even if there’s some environmental risk, the risk to marine life from climate change and ocean acidification is larger. With ocean acidification, for example, “we know that it poses very significant risks to any creatures that form shells in the ocean, which are a substantial portion of the food base,” says Brad Ack, CEO of Ocean Visions, a conservation organization that works on climate challenges to the ocean and studies approaches like ocean alkalinity enhancement. “So we’re already running a very signifiant risk just by letting this happen. You have to weigh the risk of doing things against the risk of not doing things.” (Ocean Visions has no relationship with Planetary or financial interest.)
[Photo: Planetary]
Scaling up
Ocean alkanity enhancement has the potential to scale quickly, says Hannah Bebbington, head of deployment at Frontier. “We think you can get to gigatons of scale,” she says. “It has a minimal physical footprint. It requires very little energy and it piggybacks on some existing coastal infrastructure. So from a pathway perspective, we are really excited about this category.”
In the carbon removal industry, companies are aiming for a cost of $100 or less per ton of captured CO2. But Planetary has calculated that it could get as low as $17 per ton. The low cost depends on sourcing its byproduct very close to its coastal operations. (In a pilot that it had planned earlier in the U.K., the startup ended up canceling the project because the cost of delivering materials was too high; now, material supply is one of its key criteria.) In an analysis of locations where it could access the right supply chains, it calculated that it could eventually scale up to around 2.9 billion tons of CO2 removal per year. Right now, society’s total global emissions are around 40 billion tons a year.
[Photo: Planetary]
Community opposition could be a challenge. In the U.K. pilot that the company scrapped for supply chain reasons, protestors fought the project, saying that they were concerned about marine life. Right now, the company operates under existing regulations for discharge from industrial plants, but it’s possible to imagine that some communities might pass new legislation banning the new practice.
Still, the company managed to get widespread support for the project in Nova Scotia, including from indigenous communities like the Mikmaq. In some cases, Bebbington says, communities may actively want the company to set up operations. “We’ve actually seen that a lot of fisheries have been interested and engaged in this sort of ocean alkalinity enhancement,” she says. The technique can help support populations of oysters and other important food species.
Business support is necessary to help the work grow, since carbon removal companies need to sell that service. While environmentalists often argue that supporting carbon removal is a distraction from the work of cutting emissions, Bebbington says that both are necessary.
Frontier is working with Stripe, Google, Shopify, McKinsey Sustainability, Autodesk, H&M Group, and Workday to purchase carbon removal from the startup. (Other companies, from Canva to Zendesk, are participating through a partnership that Watershed, a corporate decarbonization program, has with Frontier.)
“We make these commitments to proactively ensure that there will be carbon dioxide removal solutions in place to meet our net-zero target at the end of the next decade,” says a spokesperson from H&M. “As the first fashion retailer joining Frontier as a member, we want to inspire others in our industry to follow our example and become early buyers of carbon removal.”
“When you look at what the IPCC report says, in order to limit global warming to either 1.5 or two degrees, we are going to need to both radically reduce the emissions we emitthat’s sort of 80% of the challenge ahead of usand then also proactively remove carbon dioxide permanently,” Bebbington says.
Scientists estimate that we’ll need to remove between 5 billion tons and 10 billion tons of CO2 a year by 2050 (and even more if we miss targets for cutting emissions.) So far, we’ve only removed a paltry 100,000 tons.
Getting to the goal “requires deploying technology, refining technology, scaling technology, bringing technology down the cost curve, which takes time, takes capital, takes talent,” says Bebbington. “The mandate today that we encourage corporates and countries alike to adopt is a dual mandate: You both need to radically reduce your emissions and starting today, work on proactively scaling carbon removal. Because if we wait until 2050, you can’t just flip a light switch and expect that we’ll have gigaton scale carbon removal that is safe, responsible, cheap, effective. That market, that technology, takes time to develop.”
Predicting the future can be fun, but you get the sense Judge Amit Mehta wasn’t having much of it in his ruling that declared the long-awaited remedies in the Google antitrust case. Although the case centered around how Google achieved its dominance in search over the past 20 years, Mehta also considered what’s to come, specifically the emergence of AI chatbots like Gemini as go-to information portals for large numbers of people.
That’s important, especially to people in the media, many of whom were disappointed that the remedies weren’t harsher. While Mehta discarded industry-altering solutions like forcing Google to sell Chrome or Android, the ruling does recognize AI assistants as core distribution infrastructure in the media ecosystem. They may be a different animal from search engines, but Mehta writes that there’s enough overlap that the courts should regard them similarly: “…the use cases for GSEs [General Search Engines] and GenAI chatbots ‘are not identical but they do overlap in a number of places’ like ‘a Venn diagram’.”
That recognition is a significant step toward building a future AI ecosystem that works for everyone. There are of course myriad lawsuits and licensing deals between media companies and AI companies, and the ruling is a signal that the courts will treat AI assistants as critical distribution channels on par with browsers and search defaults.
{"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
Exactly what form that takes is far from clear, but something else is: publishers need to build for that future now. AI isn’t an add-on or a feature. Flawed as they may still be, AI portals are the new battleground for where the best information providers will duke it out, just like SEO used to be. There are different rules for AI answer engines (governed by GEO, or generative engine optimization), but the fundamental gamebeing the source that gets citedis the same.
The shift from clicks to citations
As AI engines grow in popularity, there’s been a parallel trend of declining search traffic. This was entirely expected, but reports from both Pew Research and Similarweb have put numbers on that uncomfortable and rapidly accelerating reality. In addition, TollBit’s most recent State of the Bots report showed the meteoric rise in AI scraping as well as the abysmal click-through rates from AI summaries.
All of this has sent the media world in a panic since a great deal of the industry’s business model depends on that click-through traffic on search engines to fuel ad impressions. The understandable focus on revenue, however, overlooks the less tangible benefits of ranking in search: brand visibility and authority benefit from prominent placement in search resultsboth for publications and individuals.
That same logic carries over into AI answers. Although click-through is borderline negligible, users do often see the source that’s being cited, even if it’s just a publication name in a footnote. It’s like being quoted on the evening newseven if you weren’t able to directly monetize the mention, it reinforces your credibility. In other words, the impression (meant both literally and figuratively) still matters.
If your publication is cited in AI answers repeatedly, that can drive demand indirectly. Seeing the same name repeatedly in authoritative answers can influence whether that user decides to subscribe, recommend a source, or follow a journalist or outlet. Its a softer conversion path than direct clicks but not meaninglessakin to share-of-voice in traditional media measurement.
The hidden value of AI summaries
This isn’t to say such intangibles make up for lost revenue from referral traffic. But they do help publishers answer the question, “Why would you want to?” when considering whether they should compete for placement in AI summaries. And it’s not like monetization is out of the question: larger publications continue to sign licensing deals with AI companies, Perplexity is architecting a revenue-sharing system, and pay-per-crawl programs from the likes of Cloudflare continue to grow.
In fact, seeking placement in AI answers and measuring success will be key data for any publication when the time comes to negotiate with AI companies on licensing. And there’s every chance that court rulings could force the issue in the future, especially now that Judge Mehta has established the importance of AI information portals.
And let’s be real: If you choose to opt out or ignore AI summaries, someone else is going to be cited. As users often don’t just read answers, but copy them and even use them in their own documents and web pages (Perplexity even provides a button for this), that could have a compounding effect as at least some of that material ends up in data for AI training and web crawling. Since AI answers rely on citations more than links, it could be difficult to unseat a competitor once they secure a popular summary.
The other shift the ruling underscores is that, in an AI-mediated world, discovery isn’t a single-platform game. The decision requires Google to share data with its rivals. And with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot all pushing aggressively into AI answers, publishers will need to think beyond optimizing for Google. That means monitoring how content surfaces across various AI gateways, each with different rules for visibility. Just as SEO once became a core newsroom discipline, the coming challenge will be multi-engine optimizationtreating AI portals as the front doors for audiences they are rather than optional experiments.
The AI-first discovery era begins
Many were hoping the Google ruling would rebalance the power between Google and publishes. While that mostly didn’t happen, it did create a clear signal that AI engines will be the next frontier where content will compete for attention. The rewards for publishers are less tangible, at least for the time being, but there are rewards. And they beat the penalty: disappearing from discovery altogether.
{"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
Some people are simply better at transforming casual human connections into social capital. Their network is their influence. My first career break was a simple introduction to a social entrepreneur. It led to who I am today. Networking isnt just social leverage. Its the art of making people remember you when they shouldnt have to. Its creating pull so strong, opportunities orbit you, not the other way around. You make yourself impossible to ignore. Turning networking into career gold is about playing the long game: human connection, done with intent.
Start with a constellation
Think of every person you meet not as a contact, but as a star. A single star is just a point of light. But connect a few and have a constellation. Connect enough, and you have a galaxy that can change your life. Your career is not a ladder; its a night sky. Your job is to populate it with bright, interesting stars. That means talk to everyone. The person next to you on the plane. You might as well make the most of it if you are going to spend hours with them. Introduce yourself to the quiet ones in the corner. Youre not pitching. Youre connecting. Youre finding out what makes them light up. Thats how you connect the dots. You never know who will say, Hey, I know a guy . . . Thats the constellation at work. Serendipity is just what happens when your network is wide enough for luck to find you.
Give. Then give again. Expect nothing
The fastest way to kill the magic is to keep score. How can I help you? is my mantra. If you find a book that reminds you of someone who might find it useful? Send it to them. Hear about a project that aligns with a contacts skills? Connect them. Your value isnt what you can get; its what you can give. It builds a currency of trust. People remember generosity. They are hardwired to reciprocate. But you cant do it by waiting for the return favor. You have to give like its your job. But dont expect them to return the favor. The ROI is trust. And trust is the only currency that never inflates.
Be a person, not a profile
Nobody connects with a LinkedIn headline. They connect with a human. Talk about your failed startup. Your weird hobby. The time you made a mistake. And of course, how you bounced back. Vulnerability is a superpower. Its the secret that bypasses the professional face and goes straight to the person on the inside. Your specific, unapologetic self is your greatest asset. Authenticity is magnetic. It draws the right people and repels the wrong ones. Its a filter. Use it.
Get the follow-up right
You met someone great. What now? If you send a generic LinkedIn request, youve already lost. The gold is in the specificity. Your follow-up should reference something unique to the conversation. Great talking about the future of work yesterday. Heres that book or post I mentioned. No need to reply. Just thought youd enjoy it. That simple follow-up makes you a person. A thoughtful one. Not just a networker. Youve added value immediately with zero ask. Youve deposited into the trust bank. Now youre not a forgettable face.
The goal is to be a connector
You gain more social capital by connecting other people than by connecting people to yourself. If you see a developer who needs a designer. Connect them. You hear a problem and know the right person who can solve it. You make the intro. You become a value creator. Youre the person everyone wants to know because knowing you means access to a whole world of other interesting, capable people.
Thats when youve truly made it.
Dont just be interesting, be interested. Be a giver, not a taker. Be a person, not a profile. Build your circle of influence, one genuine connection at a time. The gold was never the asset you acquire or invest in. It was in the people you meet along the way.
Most of us will work for a really bad boss at some point in our lives, perhaps more than one. Research by the Harris Poll bears this out, showing that more than 70 percent of workers have had at least one such noxious manager in their career. These difficult managers can range from inexperienced and incompetent bosses to truly mean-spirited individuals who have little regard for human suffering. Researchers have found that when we experience incivility in the workplace, about half of people intentionally decreased their work effort, more than three-quarters said it decreased their commitment to the organization involved, and more than one in ten said they had left a job because of poor treatment/behavior.
Whats interesting is that many people think Its all their [the bosses] fault when, in fact, we often play a role in the difficult relationship. When we have a less-than-ideal boss, its also helpful to look in the mirror, for there may be some things we are doing that contribute to the situation. In addition, its easy to mistake incompetence for ill intent toward us. Keeping this in mind may give us a bit more empathy for a previous bad boss because we learn our own leadership skills by leading others, just as that previous bad boss had to learn to lead by leading us.
Really bad bosses can be soul-crushing and draining to work with. It helps us realize that when a boss, or any other person, treats us badly, their behavior may have very little to do with us and more to do with what is going on in their own world. But although we cannot control how others think or behave, we do have control over ourselves and our behavior.
When you have an insecure boss, there are some things you can do to make the situation more palatable. First, let them know, and feel, that they are in charge. Dont challenge them, particularly in front of others. Keep track of your own contributions and successes so they will be top of mind when they tell you that you have not made any contributions. And learn as much as you can from them while youre there and network widely to expand your learning, contacts, and opportunities. Sometimes the biggest learning from these situations is that you never want to make anyone feel the way this boss makes you feel. Thats still a valuable lesson.
If you work with a difficult person, keep in mind that you cannot change them and their behaviors. Only they can make these changes. Their own self-understanding and ability to self-manage is not up to you or even about you, but it can have a strong impact on you. When you have a really horrible, no-good boss, one that is demeaning or abusive, it may be helpful to remember that their behavior says more about them than it does about you. Although its never pleasant to have an abusive manager, remembering this may help you to not take their behavior personally. It doesnt excuse their behavior, but it may help you put it in perspective. You own your behavior; they own theirs.
This advice may be helpful in not exacerbating an already difficult problem or avoiding having your behavior become what gets singled out for punishment. But if you continue to work with an abusive manager who diminishes you, it can negatively affect your motivation, confidence, mental health, and career. In these situations, you may want to take the learning and move on.
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
The answer to this question is, like so many others, It depends. It depends on what your goals are for your career, for learning, for experience; your appetite for comfort versus adventure; how you think about remuneration and learning; and how uncomfortable your current situation is. There is no promise that the situation you are in will get better, and theres no guarantee that a new job will have a better manager. Many of us have stayed with bad or even very bad bosses longer than we should have, and we have left other difficult managers whom we might have stayed with longer and learned from.
Just as our boss can fire us, we can fire our boss by leaving them or the organization. Some helpful should I stay or should I go questions to help you assess whether its time to begin looking for another position and manager include these:
What have I learned from this person, and in this position, so far?
Is there still an opportunity for me to continue to learn and grow in this position, working for this manager? If so, what is it that I want to learn, and how might I go about obtaining this knowledge and growth?
To what extent are the skills Ill continue to learn be transferrable to other jobs or careers I may want in the future?
Do my reasons for considering leaving this man- ager have to do with ethical lapses in the manager or organization?
Is working for this person negatively affecting my mental health?
Are there people higher up in the organization whom I admire or aspire to be like?
Even when your answers to the above questions point to I should go, there may be times when leaving a bad boss may not be a viable short-term solution. In these situations, it can be helpful to focus on what you can learn while you remain there, which may include taking on new projects or challenges, networking widely within the company, or practicing dealing with a difficult, demanding person. However, working with a bad boss comes with an emotional and sometimes physical toll, and the longer you continue to work with them, the larger the overall toll it will take.
When leaving a bad boss or situation, as hard as it may be, plan to make a graceful exit. Rage quitting, including creating an ugly scene on your way out or leaving a mess for your manager, others on the team, and the person who comes in behind you, may feel satisfying in the moment or even justified based on the way youve been treated, but its rarely a good option for your long-term reputation. Making a graceful exit means making a transition plan to help the person who comes in behind you understand the relevant processes and know where to find key information, thanking your manager for what youve learned from them, tying up as many loose ends as possible, being constructive in explaining why youre leaving, and offering to answer some questions in the weeks following your departure.
Excerpted from Manage Yourself to Lead Others: Why Great Leadership Begins with Self-Understanding. Copyright 2025 by Margaret C. Andrews. Available from Basic Venture, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Technologies from AI to advanced robotics have been celebrated for their ability to lighten peoples workload. But despite their promises, these technologies arent being used to improve workers lives or keep them safe. In 2023, 385 workers died every day due to hazardous working conditions, with over 3 million more work-related injuries and illnesses reported that year in the United States.
Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet spent a collective $155 billion on AI development in the first six months of 2025close to what the entire U.S. government has spent on education, training, employment, and social services since the start of its fiscal year nine months ago. Yet, very little of this investment has gone to make workers lives safer. What does this say about us as a society?
In health care, a common cause of workplace injury is strain from lifting and physically assisting patients. Assistive technology could go a long way to preventing these common injuriestechnologies like robotic exoskeletons, which can be applied in healthcare settings for this purpose, already exist. But we do not see companies racing to build the best robotic assists for care workers. Instead, thousands of companies are creating chatbots that replace their customer support staff or automate away entry-level roles.
In fact, robots actually seem to be making warehouse workers jobs worse. Speeding up processes with robotics requires workers to speed up as wellleading to increased injuries. Several investigations have found increased rates of injury in warehouses that use robotics; between 2016 and 2019, Amazon warehouses with robots had a 50% higher injury rate than those without. And even in 2020, when Amazon temporarily relaxed many of its requirements to work at a certain pace, warehouses with robotics had a 14% higher injury rate than those without.
While warehouse robots now come with more safety protections, updating older equipment with new safety features does not seem to be a priority. In fact, safety doesn’t seem to be a priority.
During a visit to a large warehouse facility a few years ago, I watched workers packing boxes at lightning speed, surrounded by screens and robots. I also saw aggressive signage throughout the facility, warning workers that heavy machines could begin moving at any moment. The message was clear: If you were injured it was your fault for not being careful enough.
Neglect of worker safety is not newthroughout U.S. history, production speed and profits have outweighed the value of human lives. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows a pretty consistent year-over-year drop in overall workplace injuries and fatalities, the change is minuscule: Injuries have dropped from 2.8 per 100 workers in 2019, to 2.4 in 2023. Meanwhile, death rates are increasing for workers of color: In 2023 Black workers faced their highest fatality rates in 20 years, and Latino worker deaths have risen steadily since 2020.
Powerful health and safety technologies exist but are vastly underutilized. A new sensor could help farm workers, one of our most poorly paid but important workforces, prevent dangerous heat-related illness. Wearable smart devices can monitor air pollution and alert workersfrom miners to cleanersof dangerous air quality. Other smart tech can help correct bad posture that could lead to injury or ensure machinery shuts down automatically if a worker gets too close. These technologies could prevent harm for many workers but we need to invest in them andcruciallygive workers input and decision-making power to ensure the technologies we invest in will effectively address their needs.
There are companies leading the way on consulting workers when implementing new technologies, like Microsoft, which is working in partnership with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) to get worker input on AI development. However, many lower-wage professions are unlikely to get the investment needed to implement advanced worker safety tech. Updated workplace safety regulations, which account for the possibilities unlocked by new technologies, are needed to ensure workers are getting access to lifesaving equipment.
When I envision an economy employing advanced technologies, I do not think of one where workers get their limbs amputated in factories, suffer lung damage from cleaning chemicals, or get stress injuries from being asked to work faster and faster for meager pay.
We need bold actionregulations that require the use of safety tech, incentives for companies that invest in it, and worker voices at the table. Policy makers and business leaders can help us course correct; we need worker protections for a new age of technology and investment in tech that centers the needsand safetyof workers.
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
Bland AI outputs grow stale quickly. Instead of just speeding up routine tasks, what if we used AI to slow down, challenge our thinking, and build new tools, dashboards, and experiments? Read on for creative approaches that are changing how I think about AI.
1. Create your own devil’s advocate assistant
Get thoughtful pushback on decisions. Challenge ideas.
The tactic: Use AI as an intellectual sparring partner to stress-test your thinking, explore alternative perspectives, and identify potential blind spots before making important decisions.
Try this: Present a plan, idea, or decision to an AI assistant with instructions to challenge your thinking constructively. Identify risks you haven’t considered, consider secondary impacts, and add nuance to your analysis.
Get your AI assistant to stop kissing up to you and start challenging your ideas. [Generated Photo: Jeremy Caplan/Ideogram]
Prompt template
“I’m planning to [decision/plan] because [reasoning] and with a goal of [objective]. Play devil’s advocate, give me multiple perspectives on this, be bold, surprising, creative, and thoughtful in your reply, and address these questions:
What are the strongest arguments against this approach?
What alternatives should I consider?
What risks might I be overlooking?
What questions should I be asking myself?
What challenges should I expect to face?
What could I do to gain more insight?
What could I do to increase the chances of success?
Pro tip: Try asking your AI assistant to role-play. It can respond as a financial advisor, family member, or competitor, for varied viewpoints. Or ask it to act like a person you admire, living or dead, real or fictional.
Limitation: Your AI devils assistant will be generic if you dont provide detailed context. And you may get a predictable response if you dont instruct it to be bold.
Suggested model: I have found ChatGPT 5 to be excellent for this. Gemini and Claude also work well. If youre considering anything sensitive, you may want to use a free offline private AI tool like AnythingLLM or Jan. Ill write more soon about private AI tools like these. If you have input on those, add a comment below.
Example: I described a new planned morning schedule to GPT 5. The subsequent exchange got me thinking about several new issues.
The conversation helped me clarify my own thinking. It pushed me to organize and deepen my own analysis. As a bonus, GPT 5 produced a tangible artifact for mea PDF with tables.
2. Learn something new
Map out a personalized curriculum.
[Generated Photo: Jeremy Caplan]
AI tools let me try out skills I thought I was too late to develop, like coding simple applications, designing graphics, analyzing large data sets, and exploring complex docs in other languages.
You can also lean on AI assistants to help you develop offline skills, like learning about photography, improving your Greek, understanding crypto, sharpening project management skills, making bread by hand, or prepping for any new coverage area for a project or team. AI assistants excel at creating structured learning and practice plans tailored to your schedule, style, and goals.
Try this: Give an AI assistant context about what you want to learn, why, and how.
Detail your rationale and motivation, which may impact your approach.
Note your current knowledge or skill level, ideally with examples.
Summarize your learning preferences
Note whether you prefer to read, listen to, or watch learning materials.
Mention if you like quizzes, drills, or exercises you can do while commuting or during a break at work.
If you appreciate learning games, task your AI assistant with generating one for you, using its coding capabilities detailed below.
Ask for specific book, textbook, article, or learning path recommendations using the Web search or Deep Research capabilities of Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. They can also summarize research literature about effective learning tactics.
If you need a human learning partner, ask for guidance on finding one or language you can use in reaching out.
Add specificity
Mention any relevant deadlines. Note budget, time, or other constraints.
Share info about your existing schedule so the assistant can help map out optimal learning time slots. Making the plan concrete increases the likelihood youll follow through. ChatGPT recently generated a calendar file with a list of appointments I could easily import into my Google calendar.
Pro Tip: Ask for help setting up a schedule, setting learning targets, measuring progress, choosing resources, motivating yourself, and implementing backup plans when you fall off track. Ask for a learning plan you can print out, charts you can fill in, interactive apps to track progress, resource lists you can look up, experts you can follow, and strategies for avoiding common pitfalls.
3. Stretch your creative design muscles
Try this: Use AI image generation tools to experiment with visual ideas. Start with simple concepts and iterate to add nuance or complexity. Practice describing visual concepts in text, then see them realized instantly and iterate on your prompts.
Try MyLens or Napkin for creating mind maps, flow charts, timelines or various other infographics out of detailed prompts or source docs.
Use Ideogramdetailed in this postor ChatGPTs new image generatordetailed in this postto describe any style of illustration, infographic or other visual.
For creative video generation, try Hypernatural, which lets you turn text into moving images.
Use this to: Add creative images to presentations, experiment with social media graphics, or generate infographics for teaching, publishing, or project work.
Limitation: AI image generators are improving rapidly but still struggle with precise text placement, detailed charts, and maintaining brand consistency across multiple images. Most dont let you select specific image dimensions, though Ideogram does.
Examples: I generated the images in this post with ChatGPT and Ideogram, and Ive used Hypernatural to make video versions of past posts, like this 2-min video about Raindrop, which I wrote about last week.
4. Create a personalized dashboard
Build custom tracking tools and mini-applications
Without knowing anything about code, you can generate simple web applications for tracking anything important to you. Prompt your AI assistant to help you keep tabs on reading or eating goals, fitness metrics, project progress at school or work, or stats for Wordle or your game of choice.
Try this: Ask AI to create a dashboard or tracking tool tailored to your specific needs. Experiment with Claude 4 Artifacts, Gemini’s code canvas. Also try vibe coding tools like Lovable or Bolt that specialize in creating apps and sites based on prompts. For advanced projects, consider Windsurf Cascade.
Pro tip: Plan to iterate. It almost always takes multiple attempts to get something workable, because you realize your needs when you see the first prototype. Start with simple tracking before requesting complex features. Ask for additional functionality with follow-up prompts. Herea a Prompt Example.
Limitation: The simplest versions of these mini applications work in your browser only. To use an application on multiple devices, youll need to save the code and host it with a service that allows you to create a database. For that, try Lovable, Bolt, or Windsurf.
Example: Im working on a content planning and workflow app to organize and track my newsletter work.
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
