Fast Company

There’s no easy way to say this! But after nearly 15 years, I’m leaving Fast Company I landed at what was then called Co Design after crashing a startup and wondering what I’d do with my life next. Then in the blink of an eye, a decade and a half went by. Along the way, I penned thousands of articles, traveled the world, toured secret labs, reported print features, shot fun videos, started a popular podcast, met and profiled so many people I admired, and received the world’s greatest education on design—thanks largely to the patience of so many of you. The only thing that could pull me away from the best job in journalism was an evolution of practice. I’ve written more than 14,000 stories at this point in my career. I've had the itch for a while. Rather than writing about design, I wanted to be designing. So I’ll be joining the design team at Hark as Lead Writer at the company, where I’ll help build the product and brand. No, you probably haven’t heard of Hark. It’s a stealthy AI lab that’s recruited talent from Apple and elsewhere, with the intention of going all-out to build high craft AI hardware and software systems of tomorrow. I’m hesitant to speak for others about an expansive job that I haven’t even started yet, but I think it’s safe to say: We have a rare, generational opportunity to reimagine the computer of tomorrow, and rethink everything around what’s become (an admittedly exploitative and toxic) digitally-anchored world. We need hyper talented, hyper caring people working on this challenge, and I met quite a few of them when visiting for the position. I’ll be relocating to the Bay Area (say hi!) and speaking publicly less, while admiring what my friends at Fast Company are doing from afar. I owe the deepest of debts to my closest collaborators— Liz Stinson , Cliff Kuang , Amy Farley , David Lidsky , Jill Bernstein , Brendan Vaughan , Stephanie Mehta , Morgan Clendaniel , Maia McCann , Daniel Salo , Vanessa S. , Cody Nelson , Joshua Christensen , and Heather Keets Wright —along with my team of fellow design writers/editors, the astounding Elizabeth Segran, Ph.D. , Nate Berg , Jeff Beer , Grace Snelling , Jesus Diaz , Hunter Schwarz , Lilly Smith , Diana Budds , and María José Gutiérrez Chávez . FC Design has a bright future in their hands, and I know it will continue to thrive as the world’s most interesting and relevant discussion tracking where design, culture, and business meet. This won’t be the last time you hear from me! I have a couple lingering stories in the hopper running through the end of the year, and I’m hoping to make a semi-regular cameo on By Design. But thanks for reading this and any of my work for the last 15 years at FC, or even those who know me back from Gizmodo and Kotaku. And look, if you hold some grudge for something I said over that time, maybe I was wrong that day. (But…also…maybe I wasn’t?) I’m sad to leave, but I cannot cannot wait to build something new

Shameless plug alert! I’m here to proudly shill for the Fast Company Innovation Festival, our biggest event of the year, on September 14-17 in NYC. I’m not just trying to sell tickets. I’m also taking requests. What topics should we cover? What companies do you want to hear from? Which executives, founders, thinkers, and entertainers would you like to see on stage alongside announced speakers ranging from ESPN chairman James Pitaro to Netflix film chief Dan Lin to CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator ? We're deep into the planning but there's plenty of time to act on your suggestions. So put your ideas in the comments, where you'll also find a link to register. 🙏

A few weeks ago, I decided to build the productivity app of my dreams: a voice-activated tool that captures my thoughts on long runs and turns them into meeting agendas. No opening my phone mid-stride, just talk, and let the tech handle the rest. It wasn't exactly plug-and-play. It took me roughly six hours to work with Claude to connect Siri to Notion Notes and make it work. But I had a secret weapon the whole time: I was messaging with Fast Company's global tech editor Harry McCracken . Not everyone has that luxury. Now you do. On Thursday, April 23 at 1 PM ET, Harry and contributor Jared Newman are hosting a live virtual session: The AI Productivity Playbook: A Practical Guide to Working Smarter. They'll share the tools and workflows they're actually using, and answer the questions you submit at registration. Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/etZ2eeHm

🚨Exclusive: Anthropic Says Claude Is Evolving into an "Internal OS"🚨 We’ve spent decades organizing work around tools—dashboards, CRMs, ticketing systems, workflows. But inside Anthropic , that structure is starting to dissolve. Work isn’t being routed through systems anymore. It’s being initiated through a prompt. 🧠 Anthropic says employees now rely on Claude, its flagship AI model, along with its products Code and Cowork, for most of their day-to-day work. Even the company’s legal team is now building its own tools, a domain where you least expect AI to be involved. ⚠️ Employees now use the AI model for ~60% of their work, with ~50% self-reported productivity gains—and about 27% of that work wouldn’t have existed without AI. But the tradeoff is emerging: more output, more surface area to verify. 🎙️ I spoke with Mike Krieger (co-lead of Labs), Cat de Jong (Head of Applied AI) and legal leaders at Anthropic about why Claude is starting to function less like a tool—and more like an internal operating layer. 💬 “The operating system framing is the right instinct,” Krieger told me. “We’re focused on making people materially better at the work they already do—and capable of things they couldn’t reliably do before.” 💡 To prevent chaos, the company has introduced “Skills”—version-controlled, reusable workflows that encode how work should be done. A finance workflow, a legal review process, a product analysis—once defined, they become standardized, auditable, and instantly reusable across the company. 📊 Boris Cherny , head of Claude Code at Anthropic, recently claimed on a podcast that since introducing the tool, engineering productivity has increased by 200%, measured by pull requests per engineer. 💬 “The more people use it, the more comfortable they get with what it can actually do, and the more they push on what to hand off next,” de Jong, told me. 📌 Experts warn of a deeper risk: compressing the learning curve so aggressively that workers supervise systems they don’t fully understand. 👉 Read my full analysis on Fast Company : https://lnkd.in/dndBpFug #EnterpriseAI #AgenticAI #FutureOfWork #AIInfrastructure #Claude #Anthropic #AIAdoption #DigitalWorkflows #AITrust #Productivity #AI #Mythos #GenAI #ClaudeCode Senthil Muthiah McKinsey & Company Jeffrey Chivers Syllo Satyen Sangani Alation Nick Durkin Harness