Skip to content

Notes from New York: Fast Company Innovation Festival 2026

Fast Company's Innovation Festival in New York was all about AI. The lessons I took home, however, were something else. The more AI can produce, the more human judgement matters: which problem is worth solving, and whether you have the nerve to aim higher than good enough.

Notes from New York: Fast Company Innovation Festival 2026
Notes from New York: Fast Company Innovation Festival 2026
1:47

You're designing the system, not the output

Despite all the hustle around AI, good design still remains the same. As Spotify's Design Lead Emily Galloway put it, ease of use, creating value, and delighting people still matter the most.

When AI makes output nearly free, the scarce thing is no longer production. It is taste: the judgement to know what is worth making. Faster is not always better, and more is definitely not better in most businesses.

Good design hasn't changed

The work itself is shifting. Speaker after speaker described the same change: you are no longer designing a single output, but the system that produces it. Designers are doing engineering, engineers are doing design. As Nvidia's Adel El Hallak put it, writing code is now just one task among many.

The tidy handoffs from strategy to design to build are dissolving. The teams and org charts built around them will have to follow.

Events LinkedIn Post 1200x628 (14)

Customers want outcomes, not AI

The most useful insight had nothing to do with technology. From Walmart to J.Crew to L'Oréal, companies kept arriving at the same uncomfortable truth: nobody wants to use AI. Consumers want the outcome: the gift bought, the trip planned, the problem solved.

Unless you own one of the major AI models, people are not going to spend time in your chatbot. They are already inside someone else's. So the question stops being "what is our AI strategy" and becomes "how is our customer's behaviour changing, and how do we meet them there".

Stop asking people to come to you; create value where they already are.

Author: 

Salla Erkkilä, is an award-winning business strategist and digital transformation expert with over 15 years of experience in business development, digital transformation, marketing, and communications.