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Lets face it: The fact that AI is amazing is no longer all that … amazing. The technology is under ever-increasing pressure to prove its real-world value for consumers, businesses, and researchers in specific contexts. These honorees in the applied AI category are proving AIs worth for fashion advice, pharmaceutical advice, coding, and much more. Alta For bringing AI to personal stylingFor people who lack style expertise or time for outfit planning, the task of choosing what to wear can be a daily frustration. Alta built a personal AI stylist app that generates outfits based on users’ actual wardrobes, lifestyle, budget, weather, and upcoming eventswhether theyre dressing for a board meeting in Switzerland or a summer wedding in Napa. Users can upload their wardrobe or let the app automatically scrape their fashion buys from receipts and photos, then receive personalized suggestions they can visualize on customized avatars. The style agent learns each user’s unique style preferences, getting smarter with use. Alta raised $11 million from top-tier investors including Menlo Ventures, secured a partnership with the Council of Fashion Designers of America that gives CFDA members access to its AI platform, and partnered with tidiness guru Marie Kondo to offer premium closet organization services. Ambience Healthcare For freeing doctors from documentation drudgeryCaregivers spend countless hours every week filling out patient chartstime that could be spent on actual patient care. Ambience Healthcare has developed an AI platform that listens in on patientphysician conversations in the exam room via a phone app and automatically generates comprehensive medical notes. The AI then creates a draft summary of the notescomplete with suggested ICD-10 and CPT codesthat the caregiver can review, edit, and sign. The system integrates with major electronic health record systems such as Epic and Oracle Cerner. Cleveland Clinic is now implementing Ambients solution after doing a comprehensive head-to-head test of AI scribe solutions for healthcare, testing five leading solutions with hundreds of clinicians and across more than 80 medical specialties over six months. Bolt For bringing vibe coding to the browserBuilding web and mobile applications traditionally requires multiple development teams, technical infrastructure, and months of coding. Among the highest-profile entrants in the new category of vibe coding tools, Bolt changes app creation by letting users describe what they want to build in natural language then instantly generating code. The platform handles front-end and back-end development logistics as well as hosting without complex setups or cloud services. After launching with a single tweet in October 2024, Bolts business grew quickly, scaling from zero to $40 million annualized recurring revenue in just four months. The company secured $83.5 million in Series B funding at a $700 million valuation. Cradle For accelerating protein engineering with AITraditional protein engineering is slow, expensive, and unpredictable, hindering progress in pharmaceuticals, materials science, and biotechnology. Cradle harnesses generative AI to accelerate protein design by creating entirely new protein sequences tailored for specific functions. This distinguishes Cradle from DeepMinds AlphaFold, which predicts the structures of proteins. The platform reduces experimental iterations, improves success rates, and uncovers novel structures that were previously out of reach for developing therapeutics, sustainable materials, and industrial enzymes. In 2025, Cradle expanded to 21 customers, including Johnson & Johnson and Novo Nordisk, demonstrating real-world validation of its technology in high-stakes drug development. GitHubFor making AI coding collaborativeIn the age of AI coding assistants, developers are under pressure to ship code faster while maintaining quality, often forcing a choice between speed and control. Since becoming the first widely used coding assistant, GitHub Copilot has evolved beyond simple code suggestions into a tool for creating entire new software features and functions. But GitHub and its parent company, Microsoft, have taken a distinct approach to developing Copilot: Rather than pursuing full automation, GitHub designed Copilot to leave the human coder firmly in control. The assistant works like a good human teammate, GitHub says, showing its work and asking for review before anything ships. GitHub says Copilot’s user base quadrupled year over year in 2025 and now includes 15 million developers and more than 77,000 organizations. Google For applying secure open models to healthcareHealthcare AI developers often struggle to build medical applications because they cant access specialized models that handle sensitive data securely. Google’s MedGemma family offers the first open multi-modal models trained specifically for medical text and image comprehension, enabling developers to keep sensitive data within private environments while adapting models for specific use cases. The models range from 4 billion to 27 billion parameters, small enough to fine-tune and serve on a single GPU, with the 27B version featuring clinical reasoning capabilities useful for patient triage and differential diagnosis. MedGemma achieved over 150,000 downloads from more than 10,000 developers in its first month, with the community creating and sharing more than 100 fine-tuned versions on Hugging Face. Hebbia For extracting insights from financial document chaosWhile making critical risk assessments and investment decisions, financial services professionals often must rely on unstructured data contained within numerous documents. Hebbia custom-built a generative AI solution for finance that lets users more quickly capture insights from millions of diverse documents located all around the organization. An investment banker might use Hebbia to generate conclusions from a call transcript, or someone in private equity could use it to identify potential risk factors before signing an investment deal. Hebbia can also summarize external documents such as market reports and credit agreements. The platform’s versatility across multiple financial tasks helped Hebbia secure a $130 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Hebbia says it now serves 30% of all U.S. asset managers and has processed over 100 million documents, or 10 times more than its nearest competitors. Jigsaw For making sense of massive public conversationsGovernments and other organizations struggle to synthesize thousands of public comments on civic issues. Traditional analysis methods can take months to deliver results, leaving feedback loops open too long for meaningful action. Jigsaw, an incubator inside Google, used Googles Gemini AI model to create a toolkit called Sensemaker. It identifies key topics and themes from large-scale online conversations, allowing users to understand thousands of perspectives within minutes while preserving discussion richness. The technology surfaces patterns, areas of agreement and disagreement, and actionable insights from data that was previously impossible to process at scale. In its pilot with Bowling Green, Kentucky’s BG2050 intiativea project addressing the expected doubling of the citys population by 2050local leaders used Sensemaker to analyze a four-week online conversation, enabling them to draw insights from community input that would have otherwise remained buried in unstructured data. Pando For taming logistics chaos Global logistics has faced relentless disruption in recent years, from the RussiaUkraine war to sourcing upheavals caused by the Trump administrations tariffs. Pando recently added an AI agent called Pi to its platform for managing complexity and risk. The agent is powered by proprietary logistics language models and can automate operations such as requesting shipment from a carrier, invoice validation, and anomaly detection. The agent recommends actions, explains its logic, and executes tasks after confirmation. Within weeks of Pis launch, a number of Fortune 50 brands, including Meta, onboarded Pando, demonstrating the platform’s ability to handle the complexities of enterprise-scale logistics. Samsung Electronics AmericaFor making AI feel natural on mobile devicesSmartphone AI features can sometimes feel gimmicky or disconnected from real-life workflows, creating barriers and distractions rather than enhancing the user experience. The features not only have to be useful but they have to show up at the right times and right places in the UX. Samsung did it right with Galaxy AI, which it integrated directly into its smartphones Android operating system to provide context-aware, personalized experiences through multimodal AI agents that can interpret text, speech, images, and videos. Users can perform multistep actions across apps, using plain language to get directions, send messages, and update calendars simultaneously. The Galaxy S25 series implementation has earned widespread praise from tech reviewersToms Guide remarked, The S25 Ultra is packed with smarter AI features I wish the iPhone 16 Pro Max had. Sonar For ensuring AI-generated code meets enterprise standardsAI coding assistants have proved that they can accelerate software development, but as the tools have evolved to touch more and more parts of an organizations code, they also can introduce hard-to-detect flaws that show up as bugs later on. Sonars platform uses AI to scan software for quality problems then fixes them. Fixes are informed by the platforms deep experienceit analyzes more than 300 billion lines of code every day, the company says. The platform’s AI Code Assurance mode provides stricter quality gates for AI-generated code, while AI CodeFix generates contextual repair suggestions based on precise analysis findings rather than generic recommendations. Sonar says that 70% of developers rate its fix quality at 4 or 5 out of 5. Typeface For generating end-to-end marketing campaignsMarketers too often must choose between AI-generated content that’s generic or that is off-brand. Typeface created the first AI marketing platform that orchestrates the entire content process from brief to finished campaign. While the Typeface integrates with more than 30 AI models, the company trains custom models that maintain brand voice, tone, and visual identity. The platform’s Brand Hub is a searchable AI content repository that enforces compliance and governance guidelines. Spaces provides a visual workspace where marketers create personalized emails, ads, web pages, and videos without becoming prompt engineers. Typeface secured major enterprise deals with Fortune 100 companies, including Asics, in 2025. VermillioFor arming creators against deepfakesVermillio makes a new kind of IP protection platform that identifies the unauthorized use of a persons likeness or voice in synthetic or AI-generated audio and video. Traditional content protection systems can fail to detect AI-generated content derived from a face or voice because theyre better at detecting exact replicas of the original content. Vermillio’s TraceID technology assigns digital signatures to every fragment of intellectual property, creating “soft bindings” through digital hashes and fingerprints that arent easily removed by generative AI models. Vermillios platform tracks IP usage across images, text, audio, and video, ensuring proper attribution and compensation while detecting harmful deepfakes. Vermillio says it had more than 130,000 pieces of unauthorized AI-generated content taken down in Q4 2024 alone. In March 2025 the company closed a $16 million Series A round led by Sony Music Entertainment and including Disney and Warner Music Group. Warp For reimagining the terminal for the AI ageDevelopers have long preferred to control their machines via a command-line terminal because its more direct and precise. Unfortunately, the terminal, which was born in the 1970s, hasnt kept up with new developments in AI-powered coding assistants and agents. So Warp built a modern, AIpowered terminal for developers called an Agentic Development Environment (ADE). The environment maintains the command line’s power while adding support for natural-language-based AI coding assistance and the ability to manage multiple AI agents. The result is a platform where AI agents have more visibility into the code base so that they can detect potential problems and offer ways of fixing them. Warp says it has seen 90% year-over-year growth in its user base, with 600,000 active developers now using the platform, including 16,000 engineering teams. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Companys Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process.
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E-Commerce
We live in a culture that glorifies leadership. Titles like manager, director, or CEO are treated not just as jobs, but as glamorous career destinations (even when the actual job is anything but). In the corporate world, ambition and talent are often defined by how many people report to you, and the ladder of success is measured by headcount under your name. You can be the most talented coder, designer, analyst, or scientist, but sooner or later the corporate current will push you toward leading others. It is the professional equivalent of a rite of passage: You can only go so far unless you manage people. This obsession with leadership explains why nearly everyone wants to be one, and why admitting that you dont may get interviewers and recruiters to label you as unambitious.” The fact of the matter is, that the number of people aspiring to lead far exceeds the number of people who can actually lead, especially if we measure leadership talent not by the ability to get the job but actually having a positive impact on your team and organization after you do (yes, this applies to politics, too). Data from organizational psychology is sobering: Most people are not competent leaders. Studies suggest that 50% to 60% of leaders are seen as ineffective by their employees, and engagement surveys regularly show that my manager is the single biggest factor driving dissatisfaction at work. In other words, the demand for leadership positions is far greater than the supply of leadership competence. The real problem is not the enthusiasm for leadership, but that people are bad at evaluating their own leadership potential. Many confuse ambition with aptitude, confidence with competence, or popularity with effectiveness. Fortunately, science has given us some reliable markers. Leadership is not mystical. It can be assessed. And while there is no perfect recipe, there are 10 questions you should ask yourself if you are considering the move from individual contributor to leader of others. Think of this as a checklist, not a guarantee of success, but a necessary starting point. Do you have technical expertise? In the past, leaders were legitimized because they knew more than the people they supervised. The master craftsman became the workshop head. The top surgeon ran the department. The best soldier led the unit. Today, AI and automation are eroding the value of expertise. A machine can often answer factual questions faster and better than your boss. Still, expertise matters, not just what you know but whether others see you as credible. A leader without expertise is like a captain who cannot sail: The crew will not follow. The key is not to be the smartest in the room, but to have demonstrated competence in a domain that earns you the respect of those you lead. This legitimacy is essential. Without it, your authority will be questioned at every turn. Are you a fast learner? Intelligence is often misunderstood. It is not about trivia knowledge or SAT scores. It is about the ability to learn new things quickly. In leadership, this matters enormously. Every new project, crisis, or strategy requires you to absorb information, process it, and adapt. Smarter leaders are more likely to solve complex problems, avoid repeating mistakes, and keep pace with change. The real measure is not raw IQ but whether you can demonstrate learning agility. The best leaders are not those who never make mistakes, but those who rarely make the same mistake twice. Are you curious? If IQ is the ability to learn, curiosity is the willingness to do so. It fuels exploration, questions, and the humility to say I dont know. Curiosity also enhances intelligence because it pushes you to acquire knowledge you did not have. Meta-analytic studies show that trait curiosity predicts leadership effectiveness. The paradox is that curiosity tends to decline with age and expertise. The more senior we become, the more tempted we are to rely on what we know instead of questioning it. The best leaders resist this temptation. They continue to ask questions even when they already have answers. Do you have integrity? This should go without saying, but it rarely does. Leadership without integrity is not just ineffective, it is dangerous. Integrity is not about never making mistakes, but about having a moral compass. It requires altruistic values and, critically, self-control: the ability to resist temptations, avoid abusing power, and make decisions that benefit the group rather than the individual. History is full of leaders who failed on this count, from corporate scandals like Enron to political leaders who enriched themselves while destroying their nations. A lack of integrity may not always prevent people from climbing to the top, but it always determines how they are remembered. Do you have humility? Humility is the underrated secret of leadership. It means knowing what you do not know, being self-critical, and acknowledging when proven wrong. It also means being able to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you in certain areas and not feeling threatened by it. We crave humility in leaders precisely because it is so rare. Politicians who admit mistakes are refreshing because they are exceptions. CEOs who credit their teams rather than themselves stand out because they are uncommon. Humility is not a weakness, but an understated strength. Without it, leaders become delusional. With it, they inspire trust. Are you ambitious? Ambition has a bad reputation, but it is essential. Leaders need drive, energy, and persistence. The crucial distinction is motivation: Why do you want to lead? If your ambition is fueled by power hunger, vanity, or narcissism, you will likely harm others in the process. The right kind of ambition is prosocial. It is about wanting to make others better, to create impact beyond yourself, and to leave a legacy that matters. Do you have people skills? Leadership is the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team. That requires emotional intelligence: empathy, listening, influence, and conflict resolution. It will be very hard for you to lead if you cannot manage yourself, or manage others. You can be brilliant, curious, and ambitious, but if you cannot connect with people, you will never sustain their trust or loyalty. Think of great coaches in sports. Their tactical knowledge is important, but their ability to motivate, read the mood of a locker room, and manage egos is what separates the great from the mediocre. Leaders in business face the same test. Your success is measured not by your individual performance, but by the collective performance of the group you lead. Can you tame your dark side? Everyone has one. For some, it is arrogance. For others, impulsivity, paranoia, or aggression. These dark side traits are not inherently bad, since they often fuel ambition and resilience, but when unchecked they derail careers. The difference between great and terrible leaders is not the presence of flaws, but the ability to control them. Good leaders know how to edit themselves, even when nobody forces them to. They resist the temptation to just be themselves when their unfiltered selves would damage relationships. As I illustrate in my latest book, Dont Be Yourself: Why Authenticity is Overrated and What to Do Instead, some of the best leaders succeed not by being authentic, but by being disciplined versions of themselves. Can you inspire others? Charisma is a multiplier. When you are competent and ethical, charisma amplifies your impact. Leaders who can communicate a vision with confidence, passion, and clarity are far more effective at rallying teams. But charisma without substance is dangerous. It can make bad leaders even more destructive by persuading people to follow them off a cliff. Think of Martin Luther King Jr., his charisma mattered because it was grounded in integrity, purpose, and competence. Compare that with countless populist leaders whose charisma fuels division and chaos, not to mention charismatic leaders who were utterly destructive (most populist brutal dictators or colorful tyrants fit the bill). If you are ethical and competent, be as magnetic as possible. If you are not, please be boring. Are you coachable? Leadership is never a finished product. Even if you check every box above, the world will keep changing, and your skills will eventually become outdated. The only way to stay relevant is to be coachable: to seek feedback, listen, and adapt. Some of the most successful leaders in history were relentless learners. Leaders who stop learning become rigid, outdated, and irrelevant. Being coachable is not about deference. It is about evolution. So, should you be a leader? If you can answer yes to most of these questions, you are better prepared than the majority of people who aspire to lead. If not, it is worth reconsidering. There is no shame in remaining an expert, an individual contributor, or a collaborator without a managerial title. In fact, organizations increasingly recognize the value of technical specialists who do not want to, or should not, manage people. Of course, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the elephant in the boardroom: Plenty of people ascend to leadership not because they are especially talented, but because they lucked into the right family, the right network, or the right school tie. Nepotism, privilege, and elite membership still grease the wheels of many leadership careers. Ive left these off the checklist for the simple reason that not everything that is should be. Just because these forces still work doesnt mean we should celebrate them, let alone confuse them with actual leadership potential. Leadership is not for everyone, nor should it be. But when done well, it can transform teams, organizations, and societies. When done badly, it can destroy them. The checklist above is not just about career advancement, it is about protecting others from the wrong kind of leadership. If you do not have the integrity, humility, or people skills to lead, the most responsible thing you can do is abstain. In the end, leadership is not about you. It is about what you do for others. And that is the question worth asking before you chase the title: Do you want to lead for their sake, or yours?
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E-Commerce
Tis the season for carved pumpkins, god-awful candy corn, and an inevitable workplace costume that lands someone a well-earned talking-to from HR. Halloween is near, which means its the perfect time to reflect on a tale from the cubicle thats even spookier than Tales From the Crypt. It starts with three words that would strike fear in the heart of anyone who’s ever worked in corporate America. Performance. Improvement. Plan. Taken at face value, the phrase sounds gentle, maybe even helpful, like the start of a company-sponsored self-care journey. In reality, a PIP is usually the workplace equivalent of a death sentence, a corporate guillotine that gives being on the clock a whole new meaning. At least thats how it felt early in my career when it happened to me. The news hit like a cold email from HR with no greeting. I remember sitting across from my manager (lets call her Lisa) at a long-ass boardroom table, fluorescent lights humming, my coffee going cold as she explained the expectations moving forward. She had that tone people use when theyre rehearsing empathy. And while I tried to keep my composure, all I could hear as Lisa spoke was, Your days here are numbered. I was working at a startupone of those scrappy, ever-changing companies where job descriptions are more like suggestions. Every few months, my priorities shifted, as did my boss, team, and sometimes the department I worked in. Still, I kept my head down, remained adaptable, and did solid work. But at some point after my third job title change, I started to lose steam. Projects dragged. Deadlines slipped. Some of it was on meconstant change can burn out even the most proactive employee. But a lot of it came down to the chaos: unclear direction, competing priorities, constant pivots. Id go from one urgent request to another, without anyone assessing my workload or considering whether I was merely spinning my wheels. So it was a wake-up call when Lisa summoned me into that 1:1 meeting and told me I was being put on a PIP (no Gladys Knight). I didnt just need to tighten up; I needed to learn how to move in a room full of vultures. Theres something humbling about having your performance questioned in black and white. I felt embarrassed, frustrated, and, honestly, a little angry. Id been juggling a revolving door of responsibilities while management kept changing the rules mid-game. But once the sting wore off, I realized this was a turning point. I could either take it as a big L like the late Harlem rapper or treat it as feedback. I decided to lock in. The thing is, I had a publicity problem. So many of my contributions were going unseen, unrecognized, or worse, attributed to someone else. I set out to change that. Asana became my amigo. Weekly emailed status updates to Lisa became the norm. Long division had nothing on the way I was showing my work. I also stopped waiting for clarity. If directions were vague, I asked all of the questions until I got specifics. If priorities clashed, I pushed for alignment. It wasnt easy; when youre a young professional, advocating for yourself can feel like being confrontational. But I also understood how silence had been making me complicit in my own confusion. Believe it or not, things improved. My work got sharper. My time management leveled up. Even Lisa softened a bit, noticing that I was handling the pressure with a new kind of steadiness. I started to believe I might survive the PIP and come out on the other side even strongernot unlike how 50 Cent emerged from the gunsmoke of nine bullet wounds before becoming a household name. Then the layoffs hit. Lisa sat there silent while her boss broke the news: My role was being eliminated as part of a restructuring. I raised an eyebrow when she assured me it had nothing to do with the PIP. It didnt really matter, though. All that growth, all that effortand I was still out of a job. But I didnt walk out defeated. I knew Id done my best work during that PIP. I learned the annoying art of workplace communication and receipt-taking. I stood up for myself. And I left that job with more confidence than I had going in. That was the real win. (Not to mention the years-later apology from Lisa, who admitted that she undervalued me. Better late than never, I guess.) My Scottie PIPpen days taught me a difficult but necessary truth: Sometimes you can do everything right and still get caught in the wrong storm. But if you use that pressure to sharpen your processes, youll come out stronger, no matter how it ends. So if you ever find yourself cast as the main character in your own workplace horror story, dont panic. Get organized. Get visible. Get curious. (And get your résumé updated, just in case.) Because its not about proving anyone else wrong. Its about proving to yourself that even when things get scary, youre built to survive. The Only Black Guy in the Office is copublished with LEVELman.com.
Category:
E-Commerce
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