Fast Company Next Big Things in Tech: general excellence winners

Among the 130-plus honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech for 2024, four organizations stood out for the ingenuity and potential impact of their innovations. They’re making warehouses safer, creating open-source technology for farming in the age of global warming, improving the capabilities of our phones and laptops, and deploying wireless connectivity in areas that have long been underserved.

ArcBest For helping robots and humans safely work side by side Forklifts are essential for moving materials in modern warehouses, but they’re also a too-frequent source of employee injuries. ArcBest’s Vaux Smart Autonomy is designed to build robot forklifts and reach trucks that can safely operate in a variety of environments, going beyond the minimum required by OSHA standards to sense potential collision hazards in 3D. The company is working with AI leader Nvidia to build deeper understanding into its robots, letting them recognize whether obstacles in a workspace are humans or objects and move accordingly.

PepsiCo For helping farmers adapt to climate change To help tackle the threat that climate change poses to agriculture, PepsiCo developed a new open-source tool for farmers that maps out how extreme heat, flooding, drought, and other weather patterns affect key crops. The tool suggests strategies to help farmers make their crops more resilient and boost productivity. After launching on farms in Thailand and Vietnam, the tool is now rolling out globally.

Qualcomm For processor progress—from phones to laptops If your new Android flagship phone packs some cool AI-powered features, there’s a pretty good chance it’s based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. Designed with generative AI in mind, the processor can handle AI models with up to 10 billion parameters without ever hitting the cloud. Qualcomm also made news in 2024 with its Snapdragon X Elite chip—the first processor based on Arm architecture that offers the blazing performance, battery stamina, and software compatibility necessary to give Intel and AMD stiff competition in the Windows laptop market.

Taara For speeding data on a beam of light Using wireless optical communication technology, Taara—a “moonshot” project from Google parent company Alphabet—can move data at up to 20 gigabits per second over a distance of more than 12 miles. That allows deployment of high-speed internet in areas poorly suited to 5G, from densely packed cities to rural areas. Working with Liquid Intelligent Technologies, the company brought connectivity to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo by hopping over the Congo River—a body of water whose location has made transmitting internet over a fiber connection particularly expensive.

The companies behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2024. See a full list of all the winners across all categories and read more about the methodology behind the selection process.