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When people think innovation, they tend to think startup. Theres no question that the most transformative ideas in business often emerge from young ventures: new entrepreneurs building new companies powered by new ideas. At Fast Company, we peer around a lot of corners, trying to identify the most compelling stories emerging from this undiscovered terrain. But I have a little secret to share. While I love the shock of the new as much as the next business journalist, theres a subset of innovation coverage that I tend to find more surprising and inspiringgreat stories about legacy businesses that are innovating from within. This issue is full of fine examples of this, starting with our cover story on Starbucks and its CEO, Brian Niccol, by global design editor Mark Wilson. Shortly after taking the Starbucks job a year ago, Niccol launched a back-to-basics strategy. He culled the bloated menu, launched an ad campaign that refocused consumers attention on the quality of the coffee itself, jettisoned those printed drink-order stickers on cups for cute handwritten Sharpie notes, and worked to improve the physical experience of sitting in a Starbucks and enjoying your drink. All of these moves acknowledged that in its pursuit of operational efficiency (including a gold-standard app for pickup orders), the coffee giant had lost some magic. Niccol has stabilized Starbucks, but the strategy has yet to deliver the results shareholders expect and demand. He insists that its early still, and that his plan for year twoincluding a full redesign of 1,000 storeswill move the numbers in a meaningful way. Wilson explains and analyzes this plan in detail. Later in the issue, senior staff writer Elizabeth Segran talks to Latriece Watkins, the chief merchant at Walmart and a two-decade veteran of the company. Watkinss delicate task: attracting affluent shoppers to the value chain without alienating its budget-conscious consumer base. And I interviewed ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro about the sports behemoths new eponymous streaming service, which finally debuted in late August after years of planning and half-measures such as ESPN+. Among the topics we covered was gambling, an increasingly integrated feature of the ESPN experience. Is that innovative? Sure. Is it good for sports (and society)? Almost certainly not. Theres probably another reason I like to readand publishjournalism about innovation at legacy companies: Fast Company is itself a legacy brand. We turn 30 this fall. In November 1995, Bill Taylor and Alan Webber, whod formerly worked at the Harvard Business Review, launched this sui generis business magazine. It immediately spawned a flurry of imitators, such as Business 2.0, Red Herring, and The Industry Standard. Only Fast Company remains. I like to think that its because we take what we cover so seriouslyand learn from it. Happy birthday to us! And thank you, as always, for being here.
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E-Commerce
Media companies have filed so many lawsuits against AI companies over the past two years that the act has become routine. When I report on these in The Media Copilot newsletter, they’re often digest items, adding to the pile of publishers who want fair compensation for the content AI labs have ingested to create large language models (LLMs). There are so many that elaborate infographics are required to keep track of them all. Penske Media’s copyright lawsuit, however, is anything but typical, and that’s because of its choice of target. The Rolling Stone publisher is going after Google. Google is in many ways the big fish in the AI world. It’s true that more people use OpenAI’s ChatGPT than they do Google Gemini, but Google has the distinction of being both a frontier AI lab and the current owner-operator of the primary way people get information on the internet. If you count AI Overviews in search, Google is arguably bringing AI to more people than anyone on the planet, period. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} And because of that, the media is starting to feel serious pain. As more Google searches result in answers instead of 10 blue links, people aren’t clicking like they used to, and the referral traffic that publishers depend on is drying up. To add insult to injury, Google uses a single crawler to index websites for both regular search and AI, forcing publishers to allow it to harvest their content for Overviews even while search is sending them fewer and fewer referrals. The dam is bursting Still, nobody wants that referral number to go to zero, so virtually no one in the publishing world has dared poke the big G. When News Corp sued Perplexity last year, there weren’t that many AI search engines yet, but there was at least one more: Google. Everything News Corp cited in its complaintthat Perplexity ingested content, used it to build a competing product in its AI answers, and didn’t bother to pursue content licensingcould equally apply to Google, yet no second lawsuit was filed. Will that change now that Penske Media has made its move? And I don’t mean just for News Corpif the publisher of Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard has looked at the numbers and decided legal action is worth the cost and risk, how many others are coming to the same conclusion? On the other hand, this might play out more like The New York Times v. OpenAI, with other publishers mostly watching from the sidelines, reasoning they could play it safe and still benefit if there’s a decision favorable to the media. We’ll know the answer to that soon enough, and yes, technically Penske Media isn’t the first content provider to sue Google over AI Overviews; Chegg, an online educator, filed suit against the $3 trillion tech giant back in February. But Penske’s lawsuit does something else: It exposes Google’s claim that AI Overviews send “higher quality” traffic to publishers as a meaningless consolation prize. Last fall, when the effects of Overviews were just beginning, Google said that people who click on links in the summaries were more intentional users, and thus more likely to engage and even transact with the sites they click on. And that may be true, but it’s telling that Google still hasn’t provided concrete data to back up that claimspecifically how much Overviews reduce click-through rates overall. And that’s OK, because now we have third-party data on the click-through rates of AI answer engines, and they’re dismal. Pew Research, Similarweb, and TollBit have compared the crawl-to-referral ratios for AI engines to search engines, looking at how many users they actually send versus how often they scrape content (which usually is indicative of a search), and they don’t look good. Click-through from AI search is 90% lower than regular search, per TollBit. In other words, the drop-off in referrals from AI summaries is so massive that, in almost all cases, the “higher-quality” visitors couldn’t possibly make up for the loss in business from the lost search referral traffic. And remember: Google doesn’t separate its search and AI botsyou either let both crawl your site, or you get nothing. Google Nero? Google is rumored to have begun talks with publishers to license content for its AI, which would be a massive shift, and possibly quell the impulse for other publishers to join Penske in the legal arena. However, that would turn Google AI search results into another OpenAI: summaries that included content from publishers big enough to have leverage, leaving smaller players with little recourse but to continue to provide their content to Google for free. If the two Google crawlers were separate, things would be different. Publishers of any size could opt-out of AI Overviews while maintaining their position in regular search. The fact that Google is considering paying publishers for AI is evidence that the two technologies are governed by different business models. Forcing a site to give up content for both is like a gas station that forces you to get a car wash before it’ll fill up your tank. Over the past decade, the publishing world has woken up to the predations of Big Tech. The search/social era didn’t turn out well for the industry, and now it wants to choose a different path with AI. Except now tech companies like Google have so much leverage over distriution, the choice has been taken away. Can a lawsuit get it back? Maybe, maybe not. But at least it shows the media is no longer afraid to try. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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E-Commerce
A number of people online are declaring that some of the best bosses in the workforce are middle-aged dads who have daughters. The reason? Male bosses with daughters are more likely to see the world through their daughters eyes, sympathize with womens struggles, and go to bat for them when it comes to promotions and pay raises. Theres research that backs up some of these ideas, and its something more people have noticed anecdotally and started discussing online, Fortune recently reported. As one TikTok user describes the appeal: Hes no longer the main character in his own life, adding that a girl-dad boss has more awareness around issues like sexism, confidence gaps, unfair expectations. . . . He listens more, hes less reactive, hes got perspective. That self-awareness arc makes for a better leader. Another proud TikTok user gushed, looking pleased as punch: When your Gen X girl dad mentor at work tells you hes proud of you. POV: corporate girlies when they find a male manager thats a girl dad, wrote another. In the clip she is celebrating and dancing around the room. Many in the comments agreed with her sentiment. When they have daughters it changes the game, one person commented. Someone needs to do a case study on why they are the best managers, another suggested. Its not just hearsaydata has long backed this up. Having a daughter can also push male CEOs toward greater support for women in the workplace as they become more attuned to the struggles they face, research from the Stockholm School of Economics, Erasmus University, and Jönköping University confirmed. A male CEO having a daughter, rather than a son, correlates with a 4% increase in female directors and an 11% increase in female employees, the research found. Further research discovered firms at which senior partners had more daughters than sons hired more women partners. They also performed better than their competitors. At firms where senior partners had more daughters, the female hiring rate was 11.87%but at firms where the partners had equal numbers of daughters and sons, it dropped to 9.78%. It dropped even further for those who had more sons than daughters. Its not only in business that girl dads are making the world a better place. U.S. congressmen with daughters are also found to vote more liberally on womens issues, especially on reproductive rights, as do U.S. federal judges.
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E-Commerce
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