I have seen the future of social networking, and it’s way better without Elon Musk at the controls. Hi there, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

The world’s greatest business expertise still resides in the brains of individual humans. This feature is about making it easier to find them. Last June, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky took on a second job. Microsoft, the social network for business professionals’ owner since 2016, expanded his responsibilities to include Microsoft 365—the suite still better known by its former name, Microsoft Office—and its Copilot AI assistant. The role charges him with making AI useful in a productivity context, a goal that’s still very much a work in progress. But Roslansky also remains in charge of LinkedIn, a place whose entire reason for being springs from the network effect of its billion-plus members. Their unique connections, learnings, and willingness to help other people can’t be fed into an LLM and reprocessed into the kind of generic advice a chatbot can spout. In a world of increasingly commodified information, Roslansky argues that LinkedIn’s essential humanity is more essential than ever.

By investing in cool tech companies, the 102-year-old media giant wants to foster relationships that matter for everyone involved. Hello again, and thank you for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In.

I’ve kept so many terrible images that it’s hard to find the wonderful ones. An app, and a few new habits, are helping. Greetings and thank you once again for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In—and a happy Halloween to you.

Figma CEO Dylan Field on why the design platform bought an Israeli startup’s tool for making AI images a starting point, not the destination. Recently, Figma CEO Dylan Field assembled employees from throughout the company for a demo of a new-ish tool for generating, refining, and editing synthetic images and videos. Rather than being built around one-off prompts, it allowed users to create visual workflows for comparing and manipulating options created by different AI models. It also facilitated putting imagery through multiple rounds of polishing and remixing, adding a large dose of human taste and quality control to the process.

‘The mouse built this house,’ says CEO Hanneke Faber. But to extend Logitech’s reach, she’s focused on upping its software game and thinking bigger than ever. There are bigger, better-known tech brands than Logitech, but few have ever rivaled its quiet but pervasive impact on how people engage with the digital world. Headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, but with equally deep roots in Silicon Valley, the 44-year-old company helped to popularize once-unfamiliar devices such as computer mice and webcams. Those are still two of its marquee product lines.

1X Technologies is taking orders for a robotic household helper it thinks could change the world. Neo’s first chore? Learning how to do its job. With one sweeping gesture, Dar Sleeper hoists the humanoid robot off the ground. Bracing its back with one arm and its legs with the other, he gently carries it across the room and lowers it onto a sofa, where it lies in repose as if catching a quick nap.

Apple’s latest laptop packs the new M5 chip—but it’s still defined by its quiet focus on everyday benefits. Hello again, and thank you, as always, for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In.

Nigel Ng has a very precise vision for the animated series based on his YouTube comedy bit. AI is helping him achieve it. “The gyoza needs to look a little whiter. It’s too pink.”

OpenAI’s social network allows users to make videos depicting deceased celebrities. They can be disturbingly crass, boring—or hilarious. Hello again from Fast Company and thanks for reading Plugged In. Before I go any further, a bit of quick self-serving promotion: This week, we published our fifth annual Next Big Things in Tech list. Featuring 137 projects and people in 31 categories, it’s our guide to technologies that are already reshaping business and life in general, with plenty of headroom to go further in the years to come. None of them are the usual suspects—and many have largely flown under the radar. Take a look, and you’ll come away with some discoveries.

Executives with a combined 130+ years of tenure on the company’s decades of work to get people to talk to their PCs—and why the time might finally be right. People remember many things about Windows 95, which turned 30 a couple of months ago. There were its signature new features, such as the Start Button, taskbar, and long file names. The launch event—hosted by Jay Leno—at Microsoft’s campus. The TV commercials with the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.” The crowds of PC users so eager to get their hands on the upgrade that they descended on computer stores at midnight.

AI goes to the edge, AR displays get better, quantum computing becomes real, and other breakthroughs. The companies that create the foundational technologies that enable other companies’ progress are embracing AI, of course. But that’s only part of the story. These honorees made big progress in 2025 on quantum computing, battery science, and other fronts.

Here’s how Fast Company’s small army of editorial staffers judge our annual Next Big Things in Tech awards. For the past five years, Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards have celebrated technological breakthroughs that are changing the way we work and live. This year’s awards include 137 honors for innovations impacting everything from applied AI to telecommunications to agriculture.

Why Abel Avellan, Ahmad Ghahreman, and Amy Gilliland are Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech visionaries of the year. Our honorees in the new tech visionaries category are executives who applied new thinking to pressing problems. One is working to take cellular broadband places it’s never gone before. Another aims to make the tech industry less dependent on the risky business of mining rare earth materials. And the third is applying AI to the thorny challenge of defending against ever-smarter missiles and drones.

Realistic, real-time voice generation for conversational AI, a plug-and-play AI infrastructure stack, video with consistent characters across multiple clips, and more. Now that we’ve all grown used to the fact that computers can pull off once-astounding feats such as speaking in a convincing human voice and generating photorealistic video, the unglamorous work of integrating AI into real-world business is more crucial than ever. These honorees for foundational AI are solving basic issues such as preventing image generation from becoming a copyright nightmare, ensuring the world doesn’t run out of truly high-quality training data, and beyond.

A better antenna for satellite broadband, a tool for automating data use governance, and hearing aids that do more than aid hearing, Not every breakthrough comes from a tiny startup or one of a handful of familiar tech giants. The honorees in the enterprise-size category are large enough to marshal serious resources but small enough to pivot quickly. That balance allows them to pursue ambitious projects without losing focus.

These innovations put data to work in sales, marketing, music, and beyond. If there’s one thing businesses have in abundance, it’s data—in some cases, far more of it than they know what to do with. AI can turn daunting mountains of information into knowledge that’s accessible to staffers across the organization, regardless of their technical chops. These honorees are helping their customers unlock better understanding of data to do everything from supercharging sales teams to choosing the right music to license.

My rides in Elon Musk’s supposedly autonomous ride-hailing cars still involved a human overseer in the driver’s seat—among other notable rough edges. Greetings, salutations, and my thanks—as always—for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan and creators Casey Neistat, Cleo Abram, and Michelle Khare, among others, discuss how the video site took over the living room and whether AI will help or hurt its future. The final installment of our five-part series. In this final chapter of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, the platform migrates from computers and phones to the biggest screen in the house: the living-room TV. It also takes on TikTok with brief videos called Shorts and becomes a major destination for podcasts. And it begins to tackle one of its greatest opportunities—albeit a fraught one—by incorporating AI into the creation process. To succeed, it will have to do this without losing the human element that made YouTube a phenomenon in the first place.

While Meta’s Vibes offers a sea of AI-generated sameness, OpenAI has imbued its similar app with a spark of life. It’s tons of fun, for now. Hello there, and welcome once again to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

In part four of our five-part series, Rebecca Black, iJustine, Felicia Day, Casey Neistat, Sal Khan, and other early YouTube creators reveal what it was like to break through—before the slop came. In part four of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, insiders describe how the company’s Partner Program began sharing ad revenue with creators, kicking off the age of the professional YouTuber. As monetization transformed the platform, creators faced the newfangled challenges of managing fame in the viral video age. YouTube, meanwhile, wrestled with hate speech and other unsavory content.

YouTube could’ve been Google’s first flop. Robert Kyncl, Lyor Cohen, and key engineers from YouTube and Google reveal new details on how they innovated their way to success. Part three of a five-part series. In part three of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, new parent Google confronts the messy issues standing in the way of the video streamer’s long-term viability. As Viacom sues over YouTube users’ unauthorized uploading of intellectual property, Google and YouTube engineers simultaneously build technology that will save the business. Called ContentID, it lets copyright holders remove their work—or, better yet, leave it up and benefit from its monetization.

How a humble browser plug-in put video at the heart of the web—and eventually lost its way. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

In part two of a special five-part oral history, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, Sequoia investor Roelof Botha, and others share how the video site’s success and struggles led to its historic $1.65 billion acquisition. In part two of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, we look at how the company’s rapid ascent after its 2005 founding led to multiple challenges, from bandwidth costs to unhappy copyright holders. This prompted the startup to consider selling itself, and on October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would be buying it, for $1.65 billion. That deal came with the promise that the web giant would help YouTube scale up even further without micromanaging it. Eventually, the balance they struck between integration and independence paid off. But when YouTube was still a tiny, plucky startup, nobody was looking that far ahead.

In part one of a special five-part oral history, YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, music executive Lyor Cohen, investor Roelof Botha, iJustine, Felicia Day, and others revisit how a Flash-enabled video site became the cultural force of today. In YouTube’s early days, the odds seemed good that the platform would be destroyed—not by a competitor, but by its own popularity.