Fast Company March/April 2023

This was my first year overseeing the Most Innovative Companies issue as editor of Fast Company—and what a strange and thrilling time to be going through this process. For years, MIC has been led by deputy editor David Lidsky and senior editor Amy Farley. With tremendous rigor, Lidsky and Farley work with nearly every other member of our editorial staff (plus a dedicated crew of contributors) to ensure that we are definitively and defensibly identifying the most deserving companies. This year's endeavor had begun well before I arrived last summer, informed by Fast Company's daily reporting on business innovation. Then, over the past several months, our editorial team vetted thousands of applications, which included significant additional reporting. The project concluded with the selection of the year's 50 Most Innovative Companies in…

A woman in leggings and Ugg boots poses for a selfie. A blond millennial strides along a porch in a leopard-print blouse. A leather recliner stretches across a snug living room. The images scroll by under one's thumb, a blur of shoppable scenes. I'm getting an early look at the new Inspire section on Amazon's smartphone app. Set to launch this year, it's the company's response to TikTok: a personalized, machine-curated feed of user videos, all with “buy” links. Despite having little interest in the actual products on each page, I find myself lured in. “It's one of those things,” confesses the Amazon spokesperson who arranged the demo, “that can [take you] down a happy rabbit hole.” These days, everyone's rabbit hole is a little different. Whereas in the earliest years of…

ON A BRIGHT MONDAY MORNING AT THE END OF JANUARY, THE SIX-PERSON LEADERSHIP TEAM BEHIND CHATGPT—THE MOST ADVANCED AI CHATBOT EVER TO BE DEPLOYED TO AMASS AUDIENCE—GATHERS FOR ITS WEEKLY MEETING. IT'S TAKING PLACE IN OPENAI'S San Francisco headquarters, a former factory that's now home to 375 researchers, engineers, and policy specialists—the people responsible for creating the breakthrough technology. Past the building's imposing gate, through a courtyard edged by palm trees, and down the hall from a pebble fountain that emits a spalike burble, the team members arrive at a snug conference room, laptops in hand. OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati takes a seat at the center of the table. Winter sunshine filters through a row of casement windows and a cluster of hanging plants. Murati, her hair drawn up into…

WHEN TARIQ HASSAN, U.S. chief marketing officer at McDonald's, joined the Golden Arches in 2021, the company was trying to figure out how to expand on the cultural cachet it gained from its “Famous Orders” campaign, which asked stars such as Travis Scott, BTS, and Saweetie to share their go-to orders. In considering how to bolster the brand's relevance, Hassan says, “The biggest unlock we had was moving from talking brand to fan to truly talking fan to fan.” Fan to fan meant tapping into a preexisting TikTok trend of menu hacks, empowering customers to make new food creations, such as the Hash Brown McMuffin. McDonald's also launched a menu hacks campaign that encourages more people to get creative. In addition, the company lured people to its app with unique…

SPRING 2020 FELT LIKE A “NEARdeath business experience,” says Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky, as bookings dropped 80% within a few weeks. It was also an opportunity to trim back the company's distracting side projects—tours, hotels, even an airline—and, he says, “focus on the core”: its home-rentals platform. Last spring, that work led to the biggest change to Airbnb in a decade: a redesign that lets people search accommodation by category, rather than just destination, which has the benefit of introducing travelers to places and properties they might have overlooked. The company then turned its attention to how it orients new hosts. To ease prospective ones onto the platform, Airbnb created its version of a Genius Bar last fall, allowing people to contact specialized support or match up with…

PATAGONIA'S CIRCLE OF INFLUENCE If its role as a trendsetter in corporate sustainability and purpose holds, Patagonia's plan to use the nonprofit Holdfast Collective to dispense its annual profits for environmental causes is likely to inspire other companies to follow suit. IN SEPTEMBER 2022, PATAGONIA, renowned for being at the forefront of environmental advocacy, sustainable production, and progressive business practices, had a new declaration: Earth would be its only shareholder. What that actually meant was that founder Yvon Chouinard and his family had given up ownership, transferring the company's voting stock to the Patagonia Purpose Trust and the other 98% of its ownership to the Holdfast Collective, a new 501(c)(4) organization. Holdfast's mission is to preserve wild lands and pursue other nature-based climate solutions, fund grassroots environmental organizations, and support politicians working…