The headquarters of Alphabet's X labs in Mountain View, California, is easy to miss. A simple yellow "X" marks the visitors' entrance to the sprawling building that was once a large indoor shopping mall. But on a weekday in late May, the parking lot is bustling, filled with employees and visitors, as X's pod-like driverless cars buzz about. Inside, various teams of mostly young people--the company won't say just how many people are employed at the facility--work on "moon shots," which Alphabet defines as transformative technologies that could have a huge impact on the world. Besides the driverless cars, publicly identified projects at X include Loon, an effort to use high-altitude balloons to deliver the Internet to remote regions of the world; Wing, which is building self-navigating drones for delivering stuff; and Makani, which is developing odd flying wind turbines tethered to a ground station.

Companies taking advantage of amazing new digital technologies dominate our list of 50 Smartest Companies. But despite impressive advances in artificial intelligence and automation, the economy remains in a troubling slowdown.