2026’s Most Innovative Companies

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AMY FARLEY: It’s easy to get lost in the weeds right now. Last year, two years ago, a few integrated a chatbot, and it was marginally useful. It was genuinely innovative, right? Within 12 months, everybody has them. So I think for us, spotting innovation has become slightly more difficult in some ways, but then every once in a while sort of step back from everything and look at the big picture, you can see which companies are actually doing something that we think is on the whole good for humanity.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Amy Farley, executive editor of Fast Company. Fast Company just released its annual list of most innovative companies, and I was so excited to sit down with Amy and parse through the lessons from Google to Anthropic to The Gap. Plus, we talk about why OpenAI got snubbed and why Elon Musk’s companies are nowhere to be found. The most innovative company’s list first started when I was editor-in-chief of Fast Company, but innovation never stands still, so let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

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I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Amy Farley, executive editor of Fast Company. Amy, great to have you on the show.

FARLEY: Thank you for having me.

SAFIAN: So this week, Fast Company released its annual list of most innovative companies. When I was at Fast Company, as you know, this was one of my favorite projects, a snapshot of change and progress and possibility within our society. This year’s project includes the big ranking of the world’s 50 most innovative companies, and then rankings in 59 industries and sectors. So it covers a total of 720 companies. That is a huge amount of work to pull all that together.

FARLEY: Bob, I mean, I feel like this is a full circle moment because you hired me at Fast Company just about 11 years ago. And one of my first projects, you tossed me in the deep end on most innovative companies. And then it was, I think, 400 and something companies. I was looking it up the other day. It’s now 720 companies. It involves more than four dozen reporters and editors. It is a months long research and reporting project, and it is an all hands project as well.

Copy LinkWhy Google won the innovation race this year

SAFIAN: Let’s start with that top 50 list, which is always a sort of fascinating portfolio. At the top is Google. So they’ve taken the upper hand in the AI race. That’s sort of what you’re saying?

FARLEY: That is what we are saying. I do want to note, and you, a former print editor, understand how difficult it is to curate a print magazine that has to go to production.

SAFIAN: Yes, weeks before. Weeks before.

FARLEY: Weeks before. And doing this in the AI era is incredibly difficult, but it was clear throughout 2025 that Google was coming back from being on the back foot after ChatGPT’s launch in 2022. Google had been investing in deep AI research, had two different AI labs. And when ChatGPT came out, everybody was surprised, how was this coming from OpenAI and how was Google sitting there on its back foot? There was even talk about whether Sundar Pichai needed to think about stepping down and handing the reins over to somebody else who would accelerate their AI work. And now here they are with Gemini powering so many different products and experiences. They’re still doing that deep research too, but they also have that Google ecosystem of products that are all sort of firing with Gemini.

So we’re recognizing it as catching up to OpenAI. I mean, OpenAI still has more users than ChatGPT, right? But catching up to OpenAI in some regards, surpassing OpenAI and others. But also just this remarkable comeback story about how Sundar Pichai was able to take this moment, this code red moment in 2022 and start moving really quickly.

Copy LinkWhy Anthropic rose as OpenAI lost momentum

SAFIAN: So just a few below Google on the list is Anthropic, which had this high profile conflict with the government. Meanwhile, you mentioned OpenAI, the largest, they don’t make the list at all. They’re not even on your top 20 list in AI. Is Anthropic’s position in spite of the government controversy because of it, or is it because everybody loves Claude Code all of a sudden?

FARLEY: This issue went to press before the conflict with the government happened. That said, I think that really solidified the position. What we were looking at was really their ability through Claude Code to lock in all of these enterprise customers, which really is you got to make money if you’re going to make LLMs. And Anthropic is making a lot of money through Claude Code in such a short time, so that’s really what we were recognizing.

Going toe to toe with the Department of Defense, I think is really interesting. A little bit of grandstanding by Anthropic to differentiate itself from its competitors. There’s also a real story about values and mission that’s driving that standoff as well.

SAFIAN: OpenAI was at the top of the most innovative list in 2023, near the top in ’24. But now the second year in a row that you’ve, I don’t want to say this, but kind of snubbed them, right?

FARLEY: Yeah.

SAFIAN: Are you not believers in what OpenAI and Sam Altman are doing?

FARLEY: We had a lot of debates about putting OpenAI on here for Sora alone. There really was a great discussion. When we’re making our list, we want to see business success, but we also want to see a company that is, if not helping humanity, at least not actively working against the best interests of humanity. And I’ll be honest, that was part of our calculus with OpenAI this year. I’m not saying they’re working against the best interests of humanity, but there’s certainly a question mark around the company and that gave us pause enough to not put it in the top 50.

SAFIAN: And I guess it’s a good thing you didn’t put Sora on there because now they’re pulling that, right? I mean, they have more users, but they’re trying to get further into the business market and that means adjusting their priorities. And maybe we’ll see if they get that momentum back again, right?

FARLEY: Yet another validation of our choice of Anthropic over OpenAI here.

Copy LinkHow NVIDIA and Shopify are shaping the next AI economy

SAFIAN: So number two on this year’s list is NVIDIA, also number two last year. So unlike with OpenAI, the gap between them and other competitors, other chip makers, it’s not narrowing. They’re still driving the train.

FARLEY: Let me draw your attention a little further down the list to number 13, which is AMD. They’re definitely working on creating a chip infrastructure that could, again, if not rival NVIDIA, then certainly offer an alternative for some customers. The competitive moat around NVIDIA is enormous, but there’s some things to keep an eye on.

SAFIAN: The first non-AI company on the list at number three, Shopify, but it’s because of their AI efforts. You’re shaking your head. They are an AI company, right?

FARLEY: Yeah, they are. Shopify is interesting. This was a little bit of an early bet on our part, and I think it’s an early bet on Shopify’s part. They’re laying the plumbing for the agentic commerce era. And we’ve seen some hiccups in their partnership with OpenAI. But Shopify has been doing a lot behind the scenes to create sort of a checkout protocol that allows retailers and brands to offer their own checkout experience to customers, even if they’re checking out via a chatbot or in the future, some sort of agentic spot.

They also, and I think this is really interesting, they are working for all of their customers and anybody else who wants to, helping to make all of their product catalogs readable by LLMs so that they can return results. If you ask for a gray sneaker and a company describes their sneaker as midnight in Canada, the chatbot will know that’s actually a gray sneaker. It’s a long process. It’s a big investment into agentic commerce. We haven’t seen agentic commerce take off yet, but if it does, it will be in large part because of the work of Shopify.

Copy LinkWhy Reddit and Tubi became breakout media innovators

SAFIAN: The print version of Fast Company, this issue has four different covers. Sundar Pichai for Google, Ryan Coogler for his business Proximity Media, big Oscar showing with Sinners. I want to ask you about the two others. First, Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman. So Reddit’s become this go to source for data among AI models. I saw that it’s a source in 11% of all AI searches, more than Wikipedia. Is that the reason?

FARLEY: That is a big part of it. The reason Reddit is so valuable to these LLMs is because it is this source of real human conversation, human opinions about everything, from your AI boyfriend to which contractor you should use to put solar panels on your roof. And I think it’s really fascinating to watch how Steve Huffman is. He’s both offering LLMs access to these conversations. He is trying to keep chatbots out of Reddit so that they don’t engineer conversations. And he’s trying to also make Reddit more accessible to maybe people who haven’t naturally sort of joined up by using chatbot features within Reddit to help direct you to forums and conversations. All the while though, he has to preserve this essential humanness of Reddit. Otherwise, the whole thing falls apart, right?

Steve Huffman was on the TBPN podcast last week, and he mentioned that he may have to introduce facial identification to ensure that Reddit users are human. And people on Reddit were up in arms about this corporate overlord coming in with biometric identification, but it may have to happen that way in order to keep the bots off of this very human site.

SAFIAN: So the fourth cover is Anjali Sud of Tubi, another media company. Now, there we go. There’s the other cover. Now, Tubi might be unexpected for folks who are focused on Netflix or Paramount Plus and so on. What’s the story at Tubi? Why Tubi now?

FARLEY: Tubi used to be kind of a joke. If somebody said they were watching stuff on Tubi, it was sort of like you were watching some really B-list television. The thing is that Tubi has this enormous catalog, quality stuff like Criterion Collection level stuff. And also it has its movie from 2024 called The QB and Me, and it’s like a YA romance. It has everything and it’s free. Tubi really started taking off two years ago when all the other streaming services started raising prices and younger people were like, “I’m not going to keep paying more for all of these different services.” And Tubi has almost everything and it’s free, ad supported, obviously.

So Tubi has really emerged as this player making streaming free and as seamless as possible. Anjali has experimented with different ways of getting people to engage with Tubi content, because it’s such a vast library that you could just sort of get lost. So now there’s sort of like a TikTok-like scroll on the mobile experience of Tubi, so you can just sort of flick through, save stuff that you might want to watch, plays little short videos to kind of act as teasers. Netflix introduced a similar UX last year, literally drawn from Tubi. So that shows you that Tubi is definitely onto something there.

And now Tubi is starting to work with creators as well and get a budget that YouTube couldn’t necessarily offer more creative freedom than they would have if they went to a studio. Tubi will just sort of hand them cash. So Tubi’s now kind of hitting all the notes, right? The Criterion Collection, the YA stuff, the fan fiction stuff, and now the creator ecosystem. So it’s soon going to have absolutely everything.

SAFIAN: So I got to start scrolling through my Tubi. Yeah.

FARLEY: Watch The QB and Me. I think it might speak to you.

SAFIAN: I always love all the new things I learn with each most innovative company’s list and which of the trends I’m watching are confirmed and which might be ebbing. So why aren’t any of Elon Musk’s companies on the list, but we tailor The Gap is? We’ll talk about that more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, fast companies, Amy Farley took us through the top ranked players on this year’s most innovative companies list. Now we dig into overall lessons across the thousands of companies examined, plus why Elon Musk’s companies were left off, how The Gap unexpectedly found its way on, and surprises from the defense sector to Bad Bunny’s Remus Entertainment. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkWhy Elon Musk was left off and BYD moved ahead

Right below Tubi on the list is BYD, the Chinese automaker, growing electric vehicle juggernaut, but no Tesla and no SpaceX. Did you guys talk about the pros and cons of having Elon Musk on the list?

FARLEY: We certainly did. And we did last year. I mean, this year was actually much easier to not see Elon Musk on the list. BYD has surpassed Tesla as the largest EV manufacturer. We actually recognized it for its design prowess, creating EVs to fit local markets. And that’s been important for its expansion around the globe. Tesla wasn’t going to make it on MIC by any metric this year.

SpaceX is an interesting question. Last year, we put Rocket Lab on the top 50 and not SpaceX. And that was the year that SpaceX did that like chopsticks catch of its heavy lift rocket, right? And that was an extraordinary moment. But we did actually deliberately counterprogram against SpaceX there, because we think it is very important for access to space to be competitive, to not be limited to one company and one megalomaniacal billionaire at that.

So Rocket Lab is a real challenger in that space. Not quite yet. They’re still doing sort of light lift rockets, but we wanted to recognize the companies that were working to expand access to space rather than control it.

SAFIAN: With BYD, I’m curious what kind of discussions you had about how to represent and cover Chinese industry overall. I mean, there’s a lot of uneasiness about competition between the U.S. and China, not just in the autos, but broadly.

FARLEY: We did talk about it, not in a sort of national security way. I mean, that’s sort of an undercurrent there. But when we see these moments of Chinese companies both changing the game in China but also sort of moving the goalposts for companies outside of China, then we feel like it’s important to recognize them. So BYD fits that.

We also have Unitree, which is the humanoid robotics company that’s based in China that’s on the top 50 list. Again, back to Elon Musk, he’s betting the farm on his optimist robots, but we have yet to see them really do anything meaningful and they cost a ton. And then you have Unitree, which has a robot on the market for something like $4,000, $4,900. I mean, it’s basically the price of a high-end refrigerator. And you can buy that robot. Bob, I saw that robot walking around Austin last week at South by Southwest. It flipped me off. So yeah, listen, what’s more innovative than that?

SAFIAN: If you’re going to spend your $4,000, you might as well be able to give somebody a hard time about it.

FARLEY: Exactly.

SAFIAN: Yeah, that’s right.

FARLEY: But this idea of humanoid robots sort of being something way off in the sci-fi future, and here this company is making this robot and handing it to people for not that much. I mean, we’ve seen a lot of things on social media of these bots kind of going haywire. I saw something of a restaurant the other day where it was like dancing for customers, but then got a little excited and started flipping plates and three staffers had to come wrestle it away. So yeah, they’re not perfect, but they’re here. They’re becoming mainstream. And that has, as I said, reset the goalpost or lit a fire under U.S. humanoid robot makers.

Copy LinkThe unexpected companies redefining culture and defense

SAFIAN: There are always some surprises on the list, some unexpected appearances. Are there entities that kind of jumped out to you as you were working on this like, wow, we have to highlight this one?

FARLEY: We have a shirtless photo of Diplo, the DJ as our number 50. I don’t know how familiar you are with Diplo’s Run Club, but it’s actually fascinating. Diplo a couple of years ago did a 5K in Miami and afterwards wandered into one of Miami’s legendary nightclubs and saw a lot of his fellow runners at this nightclub, which was still going off from the night before. But these people were kind of in there with their runners high, having a great time, and he put two and two together and said, “Why don’t I make this happen?” So now he has this company that has 5K races across the U.S. and people run the 5K and then Diplo DJs a set. He sells in sponsors, he sells tickets to the race and the party. It’s a brilliant little business model.

But also I think it really speaks to another undercurrent that’s on this top 50 list, which is that even in this age of AI and on the cusp of agentic AI, human creativity is really important and people are kind of craving it all the more right now. And we see a bunch of companies, you could put Ryan Coogler’s Proximity on there that do a lot to elevate human creativity, find new ways to express it. That is definitely a real theme of the list this year.

SAFIAN: Were there any businesses that you saw proposed by someone and you were just like, “Ugh, no way,” and then you dug into it more and you were like, “Oh yeah, I guess I should?”

FARLEY: There was a little bit of like, should we put Gap on the list this year? There was sort of a moment this summer when Gap released this very cool ad campaign with this girl group dancing to “My Milkshakes.” This thing took off on social media, and it was a real moment. Was that enough for Gap to be on the top 50? Not in and of itself, but slowly we sort of see the evidence that Gap is the one bright spot for its parent company, Gap Inc. right now. They do seem to have put themselves back in the cultural center. So that was one that was sort of maybe like a sleeper.

The company that actually took a while to get on to the top 50 list, it’s a defense tech company called Saronic, which makes drone boats for warfare. They make both the software and the boats themselves to deliver autonomously payloads in the ocean, resupply naval ships, whatever. We’ve heard a lot about drone warfare coming out of Ukraine and now obviously Iran’s drones are a big part of what’s happening right now. But I think it’s very interesting to understand that the future of war will be autonomous on air and on sea.

And Saronic is also very interesting because they’ve invested in buying a shipyard in Louisiana to build these enormous 150 foot drone boats. So they really think that American manufacturing is going to be a big part of the future of the American defense story. It’s also part of this sort of Silicon Valley backed startup wave that are all trying to disrupt the big defense contractors with their sort of more nimble models, obviously Anduril being sort of foremost among them. This was the first year that we produced a list of the best companies in defense tech, and that was interesting.

Copy LinkWhat the list reveals about agentic AI and super fans

SAFIAN: So across all these 50 companies and the 720 across all the lists and the many thousands more that were vetted by your team to make these selections, are there lessons that pop up to you about what you take away from all of this work?

FARLEY: The one big trend, and we’ve alluded to this here, is the arrival of agentic AI or the emergence of it, the expected arrival. I mean, there’s a number of companies that, as I said, are laying the groundwork for that. We see these companies like Harvey, which is a legal AI company. Abridge makes a tool for doctors that automatically transcribes clinician visits. These companies that are really working hand in hand with specific industries to create tools for people on the front lines of those industries to co-create products.

At the same time, as I said, the importance of human creativity. Because in addition to Diplo, we had The Onion in there. Reddit is another story about human creativity, Bad Bunny and his Rimas Entertainment. I mean, they brought more than $700 million in direct revenue to the island of Puerto Rico with his 31 concert residency last summer.

One thing, my colleague, Jill Bernstein, who helps on this issue, she and I were discussing the other day, is this idea of finding and speaking to super fans, those really, your core audience that is going to spend a lot of money on you. And I think the ultimate example of that is Hybe, which is the Korean music label, which produces BTS, which just came back from their military stints and released their reunion album. Hybe has been so good about activating super fans who spend so much money on this band that they are obsessed with that I think that’s like a template for a lot of companies.

The perfect example of this is Adidas, the band Oasis, the Gallagher Brothers, used to always wear Adidas gear when Oasis reunited and went on tour. Adidas made a collection with Oasis and then set up pop-up shops all over those Oasis concert venues and sold a ton of merch, right? So that’s like knowing your super fans and then going and finding them, I think is sort of the new wrinkle.

Cadence OTC, which makes a morning after pill for women that they sell over the counter. But instead of selling them in sort of the usual drugstores, Cadence worked really hard to make sure that it was carried in convenience stores like 7-Elevens and gas stations and places where people in sort of healthcare and even pharma deserts. And it seems so obvious, but nobody else has done that, right?

Copy LinkWhy spotting true innovation is getting harder

SAFIAN: I mean, you and I worked on earlier versions of most innovative companies together when I was at Fast Company. Has it gotten harder to identify innovation?

FARLEY: It’s easy to get lost in the weeds right now. Everybody is innovative here, because you’re able to catch up, I think, in some regards quickly. Last year, two years ago, if you integrated a chatbot and it was marginally useful in your company website, it was genuinely innovative, right? Within 12 months, everybody has them.

So I think for us, spotting innovation has become slightly more difficult in some ways. But then every once in a while, if we just step back from everything and look at the big picture, it’s relatively easy to spot, because then you can see which companies are actually doing something that we think is on the whole good for humanity.

SAFIAN: Well, Amy, this has been so much fun. Please congratulate all of your colleagues, the many who worked on this as providing such a rich source of information and inspiration. And thanks for coming on Rapid Response to chat about it. Always great to see you.

FARLEY: Thank you for having me.

SAFIAN: When I first suggested that Fast Company do a list of most innovative companies, there wasn’t a fanfare of support. But over the years, it’s been an amazing source of insight, from early days highlighting AirBnb and Hulu, chronicling the rise of Facebook and Google, spotlighting leaders like Jack Dorsey and Canva’s Melanie Perkins. Innovation sometimes means different things to different people, but to me, it’s about inspiration and vision. It’s a glimpse of the world to come, the world we want to see.

So yes, we need to keep our eye on all things AI and try to guide its development in positive directions, because it is moving so fast. At the same time, we can’t forget to prioritize human connection because that’s what differentiates brands and what makes life meaningful. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.