These projects help companies leverage AI to tackle pressing business needs

Artificial intelligence is the common theme that connects the winners in the Business Products and Services category of 2026 World Changing Ideas. AI proved its dominance in this year’s innovations for businesses, helping to accelerate critical clinical trials, fight online hackers, and even rival LLMs at their own search game. Winners Autonomous offensive cybersecurity , Xbow For all its benefits, AI is also supercharging cyberattacks, 80% of which use the technology for everything from data breaches to service outages. Xbow’s response: fight AI with AI. The cybersecurity company equips businesses with its AI-enabled cybersecurity platform, which simulates an AI hacker then identifies vulnerabilities in systems that could be ripe for real AI hacks. In 2025, it climbed up the ranks and became the number-one ethical hacker tool in the world. With this tool taking on continuous, proactive scanning, human cybersecurity professionals can spend more time on reactive defense. Xbow also sees its cybersecurity tool as democratizing access for smaller companies, startups, nonprofits, and the public sector, who have previously been priced out of top-tier security. Dewey AI Site Search , Dewey Labs As internet searches shift to tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, users are awash in information, and LLMs can easily hallucinate, confidently providing incorrect information. Many websites act as their own mini repositories of specific information, but the search function on most is lackluster. That’s where Dewey Labs’ AI site search comes in. It helps site owners lean into the expert knowledge that they have amassed, making it easier for users to find what they need. Through a pilot with ParentData and trusted economist Emily Oster, Dewey helped the sites’ users achieve a 91% success rate in finding what they wanted (compared with 28% for traditional site search). That pilot turned into a full launch in 2025 that has brought it to more sites, including Spotlight PA for election information. With 1.6 million answers provided, the company is eyeing ways to use the tool for nonprofits and public health sites. Manifold.AI platform , Manifold.AI The sluggish pace of clinical trials for drug discovery—due to legacy systems that function with Excel and manual data—can often severely delay progress. That results in the loss of valuable time for patients as well as a waste of time for researchers and an estimated $80 billion in annual inefficiency. While solutions usually address isolated points of the process, Manifold.AI is overhauling the entire system, using AI agents to orchestrate the entire clinical trial process, from trial design to execution and analysis. Last year, the tool moved from concept to product, and it has already been used by major institutions, including the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which collaborated to build a new AI life sciences research platform. Meanwhile, the American Cancer Society is using Manifest to handle one of the largest population studies of Black women in the U.S. Honorable Mentions U.S. Hub for Rare Earth Magnet Recycling , Cyclic Materials Yseop Copilot , Yseop Explore the full list of Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas , 191 projects that are making the world more accessible, equitable, and sustainable.