Bringing home the Baconator is not as easy as it used to be, and it’s about to get even harder in cities around the country.  

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

In a general sense, workplace leaders are trained to focus on what can be seen and measured. They’re taught to pay close attention to employee performance, productivity, and efficiency—often without realizing that some of the most important aspects of work will never appear in any of these metrics.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers didn’t mince words in court this week while adjudicating the ongoing trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI in Oakland, California. Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, needed to stop being messy bitches.

When Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe crossed the finish line at the London Marathon on April 26, an Adidas attendant was waiting on the sidelines to collect his shoes. The attendant wrote Sawe’s record-breaking time, 1:59.30, on the side of the shoes, waited for him to take some photos with them, and then whisked them off to Adidas’s archives in Herzogenaurach, Germany.

50% of the global population is ageist against older people, according to the World Health Organization. As the Managing Director of a recruitment company, I know this is true. Spend enough time listening in on hiring conversations, and a curious pattern emerges.  When companies talk of innovation, adaptability, and fresh thinking, they often imagine a young, agile, fast-moving team with the latest technologies at their fingertips.

Alison Rand is a strategist, author, and design leader working at the intersection of design strategy, organizational structure, and operations. A former developer who helped build early UX practices at agencies like Huge and Hot Studio, she now consults with organizations to untangle complexity—how people work, how decisions travel, and how culture is shaped through structure. She is pursuing a master’s degree in Strategic Foresight at the University of Houston, co-founded Forty Fifty, a social health platform for women navigating midlife, and is the author of Sentido with MIT Press.

Given the rhetoric coming from today’s military leaders, you’d be right to think climate change and sustainability has been tossed aside. The nation’s 2025 National Security Strategy labeled climate change a “disastrous” ideology. “The Defense Department is not in the business of climate change, solving the global thermostat. We’re in the business of deterring and winning wars,” said Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. 

There’s an idea in AI called “liquid content.” It typically refers to the idea of morphing the facts, ideas, and expressions from one medium to another. The most well-known example is a feature within Google’s NotebookLM: Once you’ve filled a folder with various kinds of data, it can whip up a podcast about that data, enlisting a couple of cheery AI-generated voices to give you an overview, analysis, or debate.

The company that pulled onto the road nearly 16 years ago as UberCab increasingly seems less interested in driving than in what users do before and after summoning a ride through its app.

It’s understandable that following the announcement that John Ternus will succeed Tim Cook as Apple CEO, people will pore over his résumé for signs of how the company might change. Cook was famously an operations and logistics wizard, handpicked by Steve Jobs to manage Apple with his trademark efficiency. But his successor is more of a mystery. 

A few times every month, I push and force my brain to come up with new ideas. The process is counterintuitive. I become bored on purpose. I believe an idle mind connects better dots. I feel guilty every time. But I push through it. I’m supposed to be working. I have a to-do list and emails to respond to. And I deliberately allow my mind to do nothing.

“When are you looking to retire?” 

AI experiments are usually simple to launch and often produce promising results in controlled settings. But translating those successes into scaled, enterprise-wide impact can be much harder. 

Chipotle Mexican Grill needed to do something. In February, the fast-casual restaurant brand reported that traffic to its restaurants fell for the fourth straight quarter to end 2025, and it was projecting flat same-store sales growth for 2026. At that point, the company’s stock had dipped by about 33% over the last year. 

Emma Grede is the powerhouse entrepreneur behind size-inclusive fashion brand Good American and shapewear line Skims—some of the Kardashian family’s most successful business ventures. (Grede co-founded the brands with Khloé and Kim, respectively.) In a recent Bloomberg podcast, Grede shared her staunch take on the pitfalls of remote work.

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence has penetrated every aspect of the hiring process—even the elements that should necessitate a human touch, like conducting job interviews. The vast majority of companies already rely on AI to sift through applications and résumés, but many of them are now also using it for screening calls and initial interviews. 

An opportunity for more Americans to save for their retirement may be on the way. 

Chipotle has been tweaking its recipe to lure diners back, and in the first quarter of the year, it appears to be working.

When browsing social media, it’s sometimes hard to discern reality from AI. Is a video of bunnies jumping on a trampoline at night real life? Probably not. But while some of us are stuck trying to figure out the authenticity of visual content, Spotify is jumping ahead to help users know if who they are listening to is actually human.