Fast Company

WE AT FAST COMPANY SPEND ALL year, every year, researching and assessing companies. When it comes time to identify the Most Innovative Companies in the World, there are four key factors we consider: • Innovation. Did the company create something truly original? • Impact. Did this innovation have a measurable impact on the company and its industry? • Timeliness. Did the innovation happen in the past 12 months? Or, if it's older, did it bear fruit during this time frame? • Relevance. Does the innovation we're highlighting connect to larger issues facing industry or society? No company clears the bar unless it meets those criteria. From there, there are patterns that emerge, and discovering them is always my favorite part of the process. Sometimes they're obvious, like when ESG or…

IN A WORLD MARKED BY RAPID TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE, BUSINESSES MUST ADAPT TO SURVIVE—AND INNOVATE TO THRIVE. FAST COMPANY EVALUATED ORGANIZATIONS ACROSS EVERY GLOBAL REGION AND DOZENS OF INDUSTRIES TO PRODUCE OUR ANNUAL GUIDE TO THE MOST DYNAMIC COMPANIES TODAY. THE RESULT IS A DEFINITIVE LOOK AT THE PRODUCTS, STRATEGIES, AND IDEAS THAT ARE SHAPING THE FUTURE. 01 _GOOGLE 02_NVIDIA 03_SHOPIFY 04_ANTHROPIG 05_RAMP 06_YIELD GIVING 07_ADIDAS 08_DATA BRICKS 09_WALMART 10_PROXIMITY MEDIA 11_GILEAD SCIENCES 12_REDDIT 13_AMD 14_REDWOOD MATERIALS 15_TUBI 16_BYD 17_HARVEY 18_STARBUCKS 19_ ABRIDGE 20_DOORDASH 21_CLOUDFLARE 22_WORLD LABS 23_UNWELL 24_NINTENDO 25_RIMAS ENTERTAINMENT 26_DAY JOB 27_SUBLIME SECURITY 28_CYERA 29_CHAINGUARD 30_HORIZON3.AI 31_HKS 32_GAP 33_PANO AI 34_EGENESIS 35_RHODE 36_SARONIC 37_IMAX 38_PROFESSIONAL WOMEN'S HOCKEY LEAGUE 39_UNITREE ROBOTICS 40_GOLDEN 41_QUIKTRIP 42_ROW 7 43_TBPN 44_CADENCE OTC 45_COPPER 46_CRESILON 47_UNTITLED 48_THE ONION 49_TOMORROW. IO 50_DIPLO'S RUN CLUB…

SUNDAR PICHAI WAS BLINDSIDED BY CHATGPT. SOON AFTER BEING NAMED Google CEO in 2015, he'd declared that the world was entering an AIfirst era. He went on to bet his stewardship of the entire company on his belief that the technology would be “an intelligent assistant helping you throughout your day,” as he put it in his first shareholder letter. Yet his prescience hadn't prevented OpenAI from swooping in on November 30, 2022, with the first product that truly demonstrated the epochshifting power of generative AI, a breakthrough that had emerged from Google's research labs in the first place. Pichai remembers his instinctive response to ChatGPT: “Wow, this technology is going to diffuse earlier and faster than we were expecting.” The feeling, he says, was “uncomfortably exciting.” He knew that…

The nice thing about being Google is that the opportunities to put AI to work are endless. Here are just some of the places it's deploying its Gemini model. Google Search The dominant search engine is going way beyond lists of links with Gemini-powered features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. Gmail In January, the email service began rolling out a raft of new AI tools, including one that highlights time-sensitive messages. Google Meet Users of Google's videoconferencing platform can use “Ask Gemini” to catch up on meetings in progress and summarize action items. Google Home Google's line of gadgets is adding AI smarts, such as Nest security cams that provide daily text recaps of what they saw. Nano Banana This AI image model's dizzying array of photoediting tricks…

As artificial intelligence tools get increasingly agentic, Nvidia is setting the pace by designing high-powered systems that keep data centers humming. Its signature new product, the GB300 NVL72 platform, is a two-ton system that packages 72 of the company's Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 36 Nvidia Grace CPUs in a liquid-cooled rack, combining the parallel compute capacity of GPUs with the orchestration power of CPUs to enable the heaviest AI workloads. The platform is “the most ambitious system we've ever built,” says Dion Harris, senior director of AI infrastructure at Nvidia, which reached a $4.5 trillion market cap in 2025. Integrating innovations in networking, liquid cooling, power management, and software, the GB300 NVL72 functions as a plug-and-play, rack-scale AI supercomputer. “The engineering challenges were extraordinary,” Harris says, noting that the company…

Shopify is preparing for the moment when consumers no longer search for products or services online. Instead, they'll tell a chatbot what they're trying to do—plan a ski trip, outfit a nursery—and let the AI take it from there. “These AI assistants are not just going to talk to you,” Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told a small group of reporters in January. “They're going to do stuff for you. Part of this is clearly purchasing products.” To build the infrastructure for this brave new world of agentic commerce, Shopify spent the past year developing Catalog, a database of products organized by feature (price, color palette, availability, etc.) that large language models are able to parse. Crucially, Shopify has opened Catalog not just to its own merchants—millions of stores across 175…