As a particularly cold winter sputters to an end, Pennsylvanias Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps residents pay their heating bills, closed on Fridayseveral weeks earlier than expected.
Funding for LIHEAP has dried up because federal workers who administer the program were recently laid off by the Trump administration, said Elizabeth Marx, the executive director at the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project, a legal advocacy group that assists people struggling to pay their utility costs. About $19 million has yet to be sent to the state.
The state Public Utility Commission sent a letter to Congess this week about the shortfall and called the fund a lifeline for Pennsylvanias most vulnerable households.
Marx said the delay in federal funds couldnt happen at a worse time.
April is known as the start of termination season, she said, when her organization sees an uptick in the number of households whose electricity or gas is turned off. State regulations prohibit winter disconnections before April 1.
Every year we have a spike in calls to our emergency hotline because, all at the same time, people are receiving termination notices, Marx said. This is a time when the demand for LIHEAP increases dramatically.
LIHEAP is among dozens of aid programs caught short by mass firings in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Part of broad budget cuts by the Trump administration, the entire staff that allocates funds for LIHEAP was eliminated two weeks ago. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Administered largely by states, LIHEAP distributes more than $4 billion a year to 6.2 million low-income households nationwide to help with heating and cooling costs. Last year, LIHEAP provided assistance to 346,000 Pennsylvanians, including 55,000 people who were in danger of having their heating cut.
About $400 million in LIHEAP funding has yet to be sent to the states. In 2025, Pennsylvania had so far received $71 million by early April.
Marx said that no one has explained the delay. The funding hasnt yet been cut. We just havent gotten it, Marx said. We have no idea when the remaining amount of funds are going to come to Pennsylvania.
Sanya Carley, the faculty director at the University of Pennsylvanias Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, said the gutting of the staff is behind the funding interruption. With the layoffs at HHS, that means that nobody is there to allocate the remainder during the more extreme, excessive heat months, she said.
LIHEAP is one of our cornerstone social assistance programs, said Juanita Constible, a senior advocate for environmental health at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It can mean the difference between a family being able to afford to stay in their home or not, or to feed themselves or not, she said.
Even if funds were sent this week, the program wouldn’t be able to reopen immediately. You cant just turn a program like that on a dime, Marx said. The delay could also mean bad news this summer and beyond.
Without help from LIHEAP to pay debts to utility companies that accumulated over the winter, thousands of households could lose power, leaving them with limited access to electricity this summer. The pause in payments will likely drive up demand for aid in the fall, advocates said. LIHEAP also covers maintenance and repair to home furnaces.
Utility disconnections can lead to other losses for families scrambling to make ends meet. (Think of a refrigerator full of spoiled groceries.) They can spur evictions and, in some cases, cause children to be removed from homes deemed unsafe. And as Pennsylvania and the rest of the country face increasingly hot summers because of climate change, air-conditioning is no longer a convenience but a life-saving necessity. Prolonged heat exposure exacerbates chronic conditions including asthma, diabetes, and hypertension and can endanger pregnant women, children, and the elderly.
LIHEAP was among the programs seen as most critical for helping families in Philadelphia at a climate justice event hosted by Drexel University last week.
The federal government is disinvesting in data to understand health disparities, data to understand climate risk, funding for energy solutions. The LIHEAP program is now at risk, said Mathy Stanislaus, the executive director of Drexels Environmental Collaboratory.
Now more than ever, we really need to figure out how we can link up community-based leadership and priorities for state and local solutions, Stanislaus said.
The event brought together four community groups, called the Philadelphia Climate Justice Collective, to present recommendations for a just climate transition plan for the city. Finding solutions for neighborhoods with an atypically high heat index were part of the collectives report.
The governments disinvestment and dismantling casts a long shadow, Stanislaus said in an interview, referring to the fallout from federal cuts led by DOGE, Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency.
For example, the North Philadelphia-based nonprofit Esperanza lost a $500,000 grant for Hunting Park that would have covered the cost of weatherizing homes and planting trees. Hunting Park is a neighborhood where summer temperatures routinely register 10 to 15 degrees higher than wealthier and greener areas of the city.
Despite the funding cuts, the collectives leadership said they will continue working to help Philadelphias most underserved residents.
The federal government is completely erasing the history of environmental justice. The EPA administrator issued a memo two weeks ago that says were not going to consider the burdens of communities of color and low-income neighborhoods, Stanislaus said. We need to push back.
One of the participating organizations, the Overbrook Environmental Education Center, lost a promised $700,000 federal grant. Were disappointed, but were not devastated, said Jerome Shabazz, its executive director.
Are we going to rely on these folks to define for us what our dignity should look like, who we should protect and who we should love and who we should give consideration to? How are we going to have an attitude where the most vulnerable amongst us are not the people we want to serve? he asked. Thats not acceptable. If were talking about climate and environmental justice, then we must be just.
More than 70% of LIHEAP recipients come from households with at least one senior citizen, person with disabilities, or child under the age of 6.
Constible, of the NRDC, said if LIHEAP disappeared there would be a lot more evictions.
Wed see a lot more potential deaths or serious physical harm. I think ed see a lot more families trying to make a decision between heating and eating, or stalling medical care that they need, she said.
Marx said the disruption to LIHEAP funding is occurring as more people are losing access to consistent electricity, water, and gas service. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, last year one in four Pennsylvania households said they had trouble paying their energy bills. Even before this winter, LIHEAP funding had fallen since the 2021-2022 fiscal year, when Pennsylvania received more than $480 million. This year, the state was allocated around $200 million.
Now, experts say the situation is dire. People will die, Carley said. People will die this summer if they cannot cool their homes and they cannot pay their bills.
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
The steeple of Boston’s Old North Church has a historic claim to fame. In 1775, Paul Revere arranged for lanterns to be displayed as a signal to colonists that communicated British troop movements, and the route of an impending invasion: one lantern if by land, two if by sea. Now, 250 years later, the church is once again a messenger for a dire moment in American history.
April 18 marked 250 years since Revere’s ride the night before the Battles of Lexington and Concord outside Boston that set off the Revolutionary War. To mark the occasion, a Boston art collective called Silence Dogood (its name a tip of the hat to one of Benjamin Franklins pseudonyms) used the occasion to project far less veiled messages in vintage-style typefaces onto the Old North Churchs steeple.
[Photo: Aram Boghosian/courtesy Silence Dogood]
The Revolution Started Here and It Never Left, Let the Warning Ride Forth Once More: Tyranny Is at Our Door, and One if by Land, Two if by D.C. were digs at President Donald Trump and statements of identity about Boston as the birthplace of the American Revolution.
[Photo: Mike Ritter/courtesy Silence Dogood]
Two-hundred fifty years later, tyranny has returned, the group said in a statement. Let Boston once more be the beacon in the country’s hour of darkness and relight the rallying signal to protect our liberty.
Silence Dogood started last month with a projection at the Old State House responding to border czar Tom Homan’s comments about bringing hell to the city. The visual protests have grown in a very organic way since, an organizer tells Fast Company. The group is finding ways to both react to events as they unfold in real time and mark the anniversary of the Revolutionary War with messages about the Trump administration’s abuses of power.
Projections were a staple of protest against Trump in his first term; activists and artists projected critical messages onto Trump’s hotels in cities like Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Silence Dogood has taken that concept and adopted it for Boston, and for the nation’s semiquincentennial, with thoughtful font and location choices. That the White House touted Trump a king only bolsters the group’s message.
[Photo: Aram Boghosian/courtesy Silence Dogood]
The projections were written in a handful of fonts, including some the group has customized. One was chosen as an homage to colonial-era pamphlets like Thomas Paine’s 1776 Common Sense, which gives their projections a sense of historic context, paired with a more blocky font used in all-caps.
As a medium, projection allows the collective to make large statements directly on the places where history happened, and messages can be quickly designed and executed. Since launching, they’ve projected onto the facades of other historic buildings, including Faneuil Hall and Old South Meeting House. The group uses a Reon solar-powered mobile electric generator, 1,600-lumen Epson projectors, and a computer using the projection mapping software MadMapper.
By bringing their projections to historic sites and using fonts and anniversaries to tie history to the modern day, Silence Dogood has tapped into a potent medium that brings timely messages to timeless locations with only the power of type and light.
Popular language learning app Duolingo is giving its bite-size lesson treatment to one of the oldest games in the world: chess.Duolingos chess course will take users, who can range from complete novices to those with a solid understanding of how to play, through its gamified exercises to become better game players. The focus is mostly on attracting new players, including those who have felt chess is too difficult to learn or otherwise inaccessible.For the most part, a lot of chess products out there are usually built by an advanced user for more advanced-use casessomeone who already is familiar with chess and is kind of trying to elevate their abilities even further, Edwin Bodge, Duolingo senior product manager, tells Fast Company. So we are more targeting beginners and think that were addressing a part of the market that hasnt previously been addressed.[Animation: Duolingo]Users can learn how each piece moves, spot tactical patterns, and build a strategy. They can then apply those lessons in mini matches, which are just a few minutes long, to full games against its character Oscar. The bot will track how many matches the user has won and lost and can scale up or down the difficulty based on past performance.This is a game thats been played for so long, and essentially Duolingo is now carrying the torch of [getting] more people interested in this game that has been around for so long and put our unique spin on it, Bodge said.[Image: Duolingo]Chess is the companys first new subject since it branched beyond languages and introduced math and music classes in 2022 and 2023, respectively. The company launched in 2012 and has amassed more than 37 million daily active users as it brought language learning to the iPhone age and leaned heavily into attracting a young user base.The company said that chess is the fastest course its developed to date thanks to advancements in AI. The product team pitched CEO Luis von Ahn on the course in late August and its first engineer started on the job in November.Duolingo is testing chess with a limited number of learners starting Tuesday. Itll roll out to all learners on iOS in English in the coming weeks, it said, with plans to eventually extend to additional operating systems and other languages in the coming months.
While Zoom is unquestionably the biggest name in videoconferencing, its free tier has some limitationsparticularly the 40-minute time cap on group meetings. The good news is that several excellent platforms offer generous free plans capable of handling everything from brief check-ins to extended sessions.
Ready to explore other options? Check out these free Zoom alternatives.
Google Meet
If youre already embedded in the Google ecosystem, Google Meet is about as convenient as it gets.
Joining meetings is straightforward, accessible via a web browser without needing software downloads, or through dedicated mobile apps.
Its free tier supports up to 100 participants in a meeting and group sessions up to an hour in length.
For one-on-one meetings, the time limit is 24 hoursthough, if youre holding 24-hour meetings . . . seek help.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is more than just a meeting tool, and while its full suite of features might seem overwhelming if you only require video calls, the free tier offers a nice set of meeting capabilities.
Access is provided through web, desktop, and mobile applications, and you can host meetings with up to 100 participants for an hour.
Beyond meetings, the free plan includes unlimited chat and file sharing integrated within the Teams environment, making it a good option for groups looking for a legit collaborative platform. Features like screen sharing, customizable backgrounds, and the unique Together Mode, which places participants in a shared virtual setting, are available.
And for some reason, Teams lets you hold 30-hour one-on-one meetingsoutdoing Google by an extra six hours. Again: Dont be crazy.
Jitsi Meet
As a truly free option, Jitsi Meet is a compelling alternative to providers with both free and paid tiers.
This platform offers encrypted communication and notably does not require user accounts for hosting or joining meetings.
While theres no set user limit, Jitsi matches the 100 participants that the other freebies offer. There are no arbitrary time limits on meeting duration.
Standard features like screen sharing, chat, virtual backgrounds, and polling are included, while an option for end-to-end encryption adds another layer of security. And if youre looking for even more control, Jitsi Meet can also be self-hosted.
Zoho Meeting
Finally, consider Zoho Meeting, which allows meetings with up to 100 participants for up to an hour, putting it on par with Google Meet and Microsoft Teams in terms of basic capacity.
The service includes essential meeting features like screen sharing, chat functionalities, virtual backgrounds, and whiteboarding.
While Zoho Meeting is particularly attractive if youre already using other Zoho products, it also stands alone as a capable option for anyone seeking a reliable free meeting platform outside of the Google or Microsoft spheres.
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more.
How do big companies evolve? How do they learn to do something new? These are questions that have taken up untold pages of books, magazines, and journal articles. As a venture capitalist (VC) in water, Ive seen firsthand that most large companies in the sector struggle to effectively engage with external innovation, particularly with entrepreneurs developing technologies that could enhance their value propositions or product suites. Yet, both sides stand to gain: Large companies expand their product suites without having to build from scratch, and startups gain access to something invaluable: distribution at scale.
Thats what makes Xylems success with Xylem Innovation Labs such an impressive case study. Formed in 2021, the program was a deliberate effort to bridge this gap, engaging with the growing ecosystem of water entrepreneurs and investing in the best talent developing industry solutions. If you think entrepreneurship is hard, try corporate innovation.
A model that works
Building a new function within a company requires navigating the constraints of an existing organizational structure. Simply tacking on a skunkworks team with a Gone in 60 Seconds-type team of innovators often leads to fragmentation, internal resistance, and ultimately, failure. Xylem Innovation Labs avoided these pitfalls by structuring its program with precision and purpose, making it a model for systematic change.
At its core is the Partnerships Accelerator, designed to fast-track the introduction of breakthrough technologies that address critical challenges for water utilities, industrial water users, and communities worldwide. Each year, the team surveys the entire company to identify strategic gaps that technology could help fill in. They then scour the global startup landscapeworking with partners like us at Burnt Island Ventures (BIV) and Imagine H2Oto find companies with the right solutions. Applications are then reviewed across Xylems business units, and a committee that includes members of the companys C-suite (this is a $8.6 billion revenue company, after all) makes the final selections.
Once a startup is selected, it gains direct access to Xylems leadership and expertise, with a dedicated team member acting as a guide through the corporate landscape. They then embark on a year-long Partnership Accelerator program that not only develops their partnership with the company but a path to the broader market. The program is defined by its speed and transparencywe all know that startups dont have the luxury of waiting years for a decision. When a no comes fast, its never a “no forever”its about timing, potential, and mutual fit. This founder-friendly approach makes it one of the most effective corporate innovation models Ive seen.
Breakthrough partnerships and lessons learned
Since its 2022 launch, the Partnerships Accelerator has engaged over 45 companies from 14 countriescontributing to real progress across the water innovation ecosystem by accelerating solutions, relationships, and learning. Nearly a quarter of these startups have formalized partnership agreements with Xylem, while a new cohort are just beginning their journey. This isnt just about numbers; its about tangible progress in tackling some of the most pressing water and public health challenges of our time.
The potential for transformation is significant, and initiatives like this are setting a new standard for how large companies can engage with startups to deliver meaningful change. Take Aclarity, a BIV portfolio company that developed an electrochemical oxidation process to destroy forever chemicals (PFAS). After participating in the 2022 Xylem Partnerships Accelerator, Aclarity continues to collaborate with Xylem to bring its technology to market. Other partnerships have already led to new product launches, such as eoapp Aqua, a satellite-based water quality monitoring tool that debuted in the U.S. in 2024 as a collaboration between Xylem’s YSI brand and EOMAP, a German remote sensing company.
For BIV, partnering with Xylem isnt just strategicit has reshaped how we approach venture investing in water. Xylem collaborates with a global network of more than 40 open innovation partners, including universities, research institutes, accelerators, VCs, and end users. This extensive reach gives us an edge in sourcing high-potential startups, but this isnt a one-way street. We share promising startups with Xylem, and nearly half of our portfolio companies have engaged with Xylem in some capacity. The result? A stronger ecosystem where startups have a direct path to commercialization.
The buck doesnt stop here
Xylem Innovation Labs isnt just coasting on its early successes. In 2024, Xylem expanded its corporate venture investing plans to support emerging companies and water services providers, complementing its existing investments in BIV and Westly Group. More importantly, its now deploying capital into high-impact, frontier markets through its work with WaterEquity. This holistic approachcombining partnerships, investments, and strategic innovationis creating a powerful engine for scaling water technology solutions at an unprecedented pace.
And the impact is growing. A self-reinforcing funding and innovation flywheel is now in motion for early-stage water companies. Four companies from BIVs Fund I have already advanced to Series B funding, and weve since launched Fund II and Opportunity Fund I, both anchored by Xylem, to further support high-growth water startups. The timing couldnt be better. Both VC and entrepreneurial attention are shifting toward climate adaptation and resilience, and water is at the center of that transformation.
Institutional agility is possible
Ive seen too many large companies fail at innovation simply because they lack the structure and discipline to integrate external ideas. But Xylem Innovation Labs is proof that it doesnt have to be this way. I believe that when a corporation commits to engaging with startups strategicallyrather than treating innovation as a PR stuntit can create an engine for sustained competitive advantage. Xylem has done this by taking external innovation seriously, embedding it into its core strategy, and executing it with speed and transparency. In todays world, where water challenges are intensifying, integrating emerging technologies isnt optional, its a necessity for survival and long-term growth.
Tom Ferguson is founder and managing partner of Burnt Island Ventures.
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more.
In most companies, generative AI is full of contradictions.
On one hand, 67% of business leaders predict that GenAI will transform their organization in 2025, according to a KPMG survey. On the other, just 36% of executives say their company has a well-defined vision for AI.
The core issue: Nearly 2.5 years after ChatGPTs introduction, most companies are still stuck in what I call prototype purgatory. Theyve bought and attempted to adopt off-the-shelf GenAI tools and developed pet project prototypes. But despite big promises from vendors or demos, theyve generated little more than incremental valuefar from the AI revolution that was promised.
I see this constantly when talking to enterprise execs. Theyre frustrated. And the data bears this out, too. Recently at A.Team, we surveyed 250 senior tech leaders responsible for AI initiatives at their companies and found that only 36% of organizations have successfully deployed AI to production. (The majority of respondents came from enterprise companies.) The rest remain caught in an endless cycle of proof of concept projects and pilotsor havent gotten started at all.
Its not hard to see why this is happening. The space is moving at whiplash speed, disrupting itself weekly. Its impossible to upskill your full-time employees on all things AI, which makes it difficult to make crucial technical decisions. At this stage of the game, locking into one platform is highly premature.
But amidst these struggles, some companies are breaking through. The most fascinating part of our research was what AI leaders do differently than AI laggardsand it’s not what you might expect.
The talent equation: Blended teams win
The most striking finding from our research was that organizations that use blended teamsa model that integrates specialized freelance talent with full-time employeesare twice as likely to reach advanced stages of AI innovation.
These companies find that this model helps alleviate the AI talent crisis that most companies are experiencing. Ninety-four percent of the tech leaders we surveyed said talent constraints are their primary barrier to innovation, with 85% having delayed critical AI initiatives due to talent shortages.
[Graphic: A.Team 2025 State of AI Innovation Report]
Theyre finding that traditional hiring can’t solve this problem89% said the traditional recruitment model is broken. Two-thirds of respondents said it takes at least 4 months to hire top engineering talent. These protracted hiring cycles are particularly problematic in AI development, where technology evolves at a breakneck pacerendering traditional workforce planning obsolete as new possibilities emerge and roadmaps change. In 2025, its hard to know the exact skills you will need in six months.
Successful organizations that have escaped prototype purgatory have found a different approach with blended teams, and they report stunning improvements from incorporating freelance or fractional talent into their teams:
99% enhanced innovation capability
98% improved project success rates
96% accelerated speed of delivery
[Graphic: A.Team 2025 State of AI Innovation Report]
Build versus buy: A third way may be the answer
For the past 2.5 years, Ive watched build vs. buy become one of the dominant discussions in executive boardrooms. While off-the-shelf AI tools like ChatGPT Enterprise and GitHub Copilot deliver obvious value, it now looks like the build approach is winning. Among companies that have successfully deployed AI to production, 93% say building custom solutions delivers more value than off-the-shelf tools. But that might not be the whole story.
The most successful organizations aren’t building everything from scratch, however. They’re taking an “assemble” approachleveraging the explosion of open-source building blocks (we’ve seen a 60% boom in open-source GenAI contributions on GitHub in the past year alone) while customizing solutions for their specific needs.
The assemble model is built for speed; integrated components can be easily updated or swapped out, which is crucial when the shelf life for state of the art AI is shorter than a jar of organic marinara sauce. It allows you to keep the most crucial part in place: developing these GenAI components into existing workflows that empower your employees and customers, giving you a true data moat.
When you look at where the senior tech leaders in our study are making their investments, it reflects this kind of foundational approach:
50% are increasing spending on AI safety and monitoring tools
49% are prioritizing AI development platforms
41% are investing in data infrastructure
[Graphic: A.Team 2025 State of AI Innovation Report]
Theyre not investing in the models themselves but in everything needed to turn them into production-grade systems: data pipelines, testing frameworks, monitoring tools, and integration capabilities.
Want ROI? Start with AI-powered automation
One of the biggest questions about generative AI is: Are companies seeing ROI? And if so, where?
We got the answer by asking AI leaders their expected ROI timeline across four key areas of focus:
Custom AI product development
AI-powered automation
Customer-facing AI features
Internal AI tools
[Graphic: A.Team 2025 State of AI Innovation Report]
Not surprisingly, AI-powered automation had the highest ROI rate already achieved, at 14%. Surprisingly, customer AI product development came in second, at 12%. Perhaps most surprisingly, most leaders expect to see ROI across every use case this year.
[Graphic: A.Team 2025 State of AI Innovation Report]
Our research suggests that a significant portion of that investment will go into custom AI product development and customer-facing AI features. While the dominant AI discussion has focused on cost cutting, more respondents said they were focusing on generating ROI through revenue generation (46%) over cost cutting (30%).
[Graphic: A.Team 2025 State of AI Innovation Report]
Its been said a million times, but it bears repeating: This will be a critical year for AI development inside most companies, with many Fortune 500 players at risk of falling behind. And while there have been whispers of a trough of disillusionment, tech leaders remain bullish: 96% plan to increase AI investments in 2025, with over half planning increases of 51% or more.
The challenge isn’t a lack of ambitionit’s execution. Most AI initiatives fail at the last milenot because the technology isn’t viable but because organizations underestimate the complexity of productizing AI and dont have the right talent with the right mindset inside their organization.
Companies that embrace these challenges and think differently will escape prototype purgatory. The rest may find themselves in limbo for years to come.
Raphael Ouzan is cofounder and CEO of A.Team.
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more.
AI is no longer a side project. It now sits at the heart of how companies grow, compete, and make decisions. Yet many leaders still struggle to separate hype from value and wonder how to invest wisely without wasting time or resources.
A key challenge lies at the top: a lack of AI literacy among executive teams. Research covering nearly 7,000 executives across 645 firms shows a clear pattern: Companies led by AI-literate teams are more likely to identify where AI can create value and act on it.
Rethink responsibility
Many executive teams still treat AI as a tech issuesomething for IT or data teams to figure out. But AI is a leadership issue. It belongs on the agenda of every CMO, CFO, CHRO, and CEO.
More importantly, its not about a single role. Its about the collective literacy of the top team. Research rooted in upper echelons theory confirms this: AI-literate leadership teams are more likely to build strategic visions that integrate AI and translate that vision into tangible action, from capability building to execution.
So appointing a chief AI officer (CAIO) without a broader shift in understanding wont be enough if the rest of the executive team cant grasp the art of the possible and actively shape the direction AI takes in the business. As one leader put it, Hiring a CAIO is like hiring a pilot for a crew that doesnt believe in flying.
The cost of poor AI literacy
As MIT Sloan Management Review points out, The overall low literacy rate is a problem for todays executives, who will face more and more processes or products that claim to be powered by AI. Making informed decisions about these AI tools requires leaders to understand how they align with strategy and operationsand to know which questions matter.
Without a clear understanding of what AI can door where it breaks downexecutive teams fall into familiar traps:
Buying into hype they cant evaluate
Investing in tools without understanding their fit
Setting expectations AI (or teams) cant meet
Focusing on flashy pilots instead of long-term capability building
The result is often pilot purgatory, or initiatives that stall. Missed opportunities. And in some cases, the slow decline of companies that once dismissed digital as a passing trend.
From confusion to competence: The AI literacy ladder
To help executive teams assess where they stand and what to do next, we use a five-step model: the AI literacy ladder. Think of it as a five-step staircase representing the typical journey executive teams take as they build fluency in AI, moving from scattered perspectives to a shared understanding and strategic alignment:
Confusion: AI feels like a buzzword. Theres no shared understanding or agreement on relevance.
Curiosity: Interest is rising, but views are fragmented. Theres little clarity on where to begin.
Comprehension: The team develops a common language around AIs potential and risks.
Confidence: Teams ask sharper questions and align on use cases that matter.
Competence: AI becomes part of strategic planning and decision making.
[Graphic: Philippe De Ridder, CEO at BOI]
Why AI-literate teams outperform
When executive teams build AI fluency together, they unlock a dynamic we call the AI fluency flywheel: Teams that move beyond confusion and start learning together gain momentum. They stop treating AI as an isolated initiative and start treating it as a core strategic capability. Over time, this fluency allows them not just to respond, but to lead.
[Graphic: Philippe De Ridder, CEO at BOI]
So where do executive teams learn AI?
Despite the flood of AI training programs, few are built for leadership teams. Most are either too technical, too long, or designed for individuals. Whats missing is a shared learning experience. One that helps leadership teams:
Understand whats possible and whats not
Cut through noise and inflated promises
Align on use cases worth pursuing
Build a common language across roles
Closing the gap starts at the top
As AI reshapes how organizations operate and compete, executive teams cant afford to stay on the sidelines. The journey toward AI maturity isnt about becoming technical experts. Its about building shared fluency across the leaership team. It starts with honest reflection: Where are we on the AI literacy ladder? What will it take to move forward, together?
The first step is simple but powerful: Make space for the conversation. Invite different perspectives. Commit to learning together. Teams that do this wont just keep up. Theyll help shape whats next.
Philippe De Ridder is founder and CEO of BOI (Board of Innovation) and AUTONOMOUS. Laura Stevens, PhD is managing director, Data & AI at BOI.
The Lyrid meteor shower is one of the most well-known stellar displays, occurring once a year in April. It’s also one of the oldest meteor showers that we know of, with records dating back to 687 BCE from Chinese astronomers.
Unlike many meteor showers, the Lyrids are relatively short: In 2025, the event runs a little more than a week, from April 17 to April 26. It will peak in the nighttime hours of April 21 to 22.
Typically, you can expect to see 10 to 20 meteors per hour at the peak, though the Lyrids have been known to outperform and deliver up to 100 meteors per hour.
If you’d like to catch the show this year, here’s what to know about the 2025 Lyrids meteor shower peak.
What’s the best time to see the Lyrid meteor shower peak?
The Lyrids will be most visible after midnight and before the dawn hours. That’s as the moon will be relatively dim in its waning crescent phase and wont rise until the early morning hours, around 3 a.m. local time. It’s best to target this window of time between midnight and 3 a.m.
Where should I look to see the Lyrids?
The Lyrids are viewable from the Northern Hemisphere. To see them, find the bright star Vega, which is a bluish white star that will rise in the northeast in the evening hours. Its one of the brightest stars in the night sky and is easily visible, even from light polluted areas (aka, excessive artificial lighting).
Vega is located in the constellation Lyra. Lyra is the radiant of the meteor shower, which means that the meteors will appear to originate from this constellation (hence the name, the Lyrids).
To get the best view of the meteor shower, try to avoid areas with lots of light pollution.
What causes the meteor shower?
The Lyrid meteor shower may look to us like it originates from the constellation Lyra, but it’s actually the product of Earth passing through the trail of the comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher, which takes 415 years to orbit the sun.
As the comet proceeds through the solar system, it leaves dust and debris in its wake. When Earth intersects this trail, thats what produces the meteor shower.
Restaurant delivery in New York is not like restaurant delivery in any other part of the country. The city has a long history with food delivery thanks to its dense population and copious restaurants (roughly 25,000 at last count). It even had its own delivery brand, Seamless, launched over a quarter-century ago as SeamlessWeb in the city. Now, after a brief fall from public view, Seamless is back in New York.
Seamless has operated under the thumb of a much larger brand for years. It merged with Grubhub in 2013, but retained its own branding in the biggest and arguably most important delivery market in the country. But when Grubhub got a new, foreign owner in 2020Amsterdam-based Just Eat Takeaway (JET)its new leaders moved to more or less erase Seamlesss branding. Grubhub would benefit from optimized marketing and streamline network effects, JETs CEO said.
Just as pandemic shutdowns boosted the delivery business, Grubhub effectively ditched a brand that appealed to its largest market, opening the door to eager competition from national brands like Uber Eats and DoorDash.
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In hindsight, this was a mistake, one that Grubhubs new, New York City-based owners want to correct. Wonder, the so-called mealtime superapp led by serial entrepreneur Marc Lore, bought Grubhub for $650 million in January. Lore hasnt offered many details about Grubhubs future, but it clearly sees value in the New York market.
Its interesting to think that there would be nostalgia around one of these digital-first delivery brands, says Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. I think people might be happy to hear that this brand is back and look at it as bringing backand reconnecting withan old friend.
If that friend were a person, theyre old enough to order a cocktail. Seamless debuted in New York in 1999, well over a decade before upstart competitors would challenge its dominance. (At the time, two of DoorDashs three founders were under age 10.) Back then, orders placed online often arrived at restaurants by fax, an almost quaint precursor to the high-tech networks that route these orders today.
Now, the stakes are even higher. Grubhubs share of the restaurant delivery market has fallen to a distant third behind DoorDash and Uber Eats. Per recent reporting in Bloomberg, Grubhub controls just 5% of the delivery market nationwide, according to data from Bloomberg Second Measure. In New York, Bloomberg reports, numbers from YipitData suggest that Grubhub controls about a fifth of the delivery market. In an interview, Grubhub CEO Howard Migdal disputed this, saying Grubhubs data shows it controls a significantly higher portion.
Even with a slight tailwind, reviving the legacy brand will take work. The most important thing for Grubhub to do, Calkins says, is to highlight what makes Seamless different.
There is something about being a local brand, a New York brand, that could be a differentiator, he says.
That seems to be Grubhubs plan. In a statement, the company praised Seamless for consistently speaking to and delivering on the nuances of living in the city that only New Yorkers could appreciatea.k.a. the type of if-you-know-you-know nod that plays well in local ads plastered on bus shelters and inside subway cars.
Of course, getting New Yorkers attention is just part of the contest. The challenge then, Calkins says, is you have to get people to care.
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Hackers linked to Russia’s government launched a cyberattack last spring against municipal water plants in rural Texas. At one plant in Muleshoe, population 5,000, water began to overflow. Officials had to unplug the system and run the plant manually.
The hackers weren’t trying to taint the water supply. They didn’t ask for a ransom. Authorities determined the intrusion was designed to test the vulnerabilities of America’s public infrastructure. It was also a warning: In the 21st century, it takes more than oceans and an army to keep the United States safe.
A year later, countries around the world are preparing for greater digital conflict as increasing global tensions and a looming trade war have raised the stakes and the chances that a cyberattack could cause significant economic damage, disrupt vital public systems, reveal sensitive business or government secrets, or even escalate into military confrontation.
The confluence of events has national security and cyber experts warning of heightened cyberthreats and a growing digital arms race as countries look to defend themselves.
At the same time, President Donald Trump has upended Americas digital defenses by firing the four-star general who led the National Security Agency, shrinking cybersecurity agencies and slashing election cybersecurity initiatives.
Businesses now are increasingly concerned about cyberattacks, and governments have moved to a war footing, according to a report this month by NCC Group, a British cybersecurity firm.
The geopolitical dust is still settling, said Verona Johnstone-Hulse, a London-based expert on government cybersecurity polices and the report’s co-author. What the new normal looks like is still not yet set.
Many in the U.S. are already calling for a more muscular approach to protecting the digital frontier.
Hybrid war is here to stay, said Tom Kellermann, senior vice president of cyberstrategy at Contrast Security. We need to stop playing defense its time to make them play defense.
Digital life means more targets for hackers
Vulnerabilities have grown as people and businesses use connected devices to count steps, manage finances and operate facilities such as water plants and ports. Each network and connection is a potential target for foreign governments or the hacking groups that sometimes do their bidding.
Espionage is one motive, demonstrated in a recent incursion linked to hackers in China. The campaign known as Salt Typhoon sought to crack the phones of officials, including Trump, before the 2024 election.
These operations seek entry to sensitive corporate or government systems to steal secrets or monitor personal communications. Such information can be hugely valuable by providing advantages in trade negotiations or military planning. These hackers try to remain hidden for as long as possible.
More obvious intrusions can serve as a warning or deterrent, such as the cyberattacks targeting the Texas water plants. Iran also has shown a willingness to use cyberattacks to make political points.
The cyberattacks that frighten experts the most burrow deeply into telephone or computer networks, inserting backdoors or malware for later use.
National security experts say this was the motivation behind a recent attack from China called Volt Typhoon that compromised telephone networks in the U.S. in an effort to gain access to an unknown number of critical systems.
China could potentially use these connections to disable key infrastructure power plants, communication networks, pipelines, hospitals, financial systems as part of a larger conflict or before an invasion of Taiwan, national security experts said.
They can position their implants to be activated at a date and time in the future, said Sonu Shankar, a former researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory who is now chief strategy officer at Phosphorus Cybersecurity.
National security officials will not discuss details, but experts interviewed by The Associated Press said the U.S. no doubt has developed similar offensive capabilities.
China has rejected U.S. allegations of hacking, accusing America of trying to smear Beijing while conducting its own cyberattacks.
Global tensions tick up
Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Trade disputes. Shifting alliances. The risk of cyberattacks goes up in times of global tension, and experts say that risk is now at a high.
U.S. adversaries China, Russia, Iran and North Korea also have shown signs of cybercooperation as they forge tighter economic, military and political relationships.
Speaking to Congress, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard noted that Iran has supplied drones in exchange for Russian intelligence and cybercapabilities.
Russia has been the catalyst for much of this expanded cooperation, driven heavily by the support it has needed for its war effort against Ukraine, Gabbard told lawmakers.
Amid global fears of a trade war after the tariffs that Trump has imposed, supply chains could be targeted in retaliation. While larger companies may have a robust cyberteam, small suppliers that lack those resources can give intruders easy access.
And any tit-for-tat cycles of cyberconflict, in which one country hacks into a sensitive system as retaliation for an earlier attack, come with great risk for all involved, Shankar said. It would put them on the path to military conflict.”
The Trump effect
At a time when national security and cybersecurity experts say the U.S. should be bolstering its defenses, Trump has called for reductions in staffing and other changes to the agencies that protect American interests in cyberspace.
For example, Trump recently fired Gen. Timothy Haugh, who oversaw the NSA and the Pentagons Cyber Command.
The U.S. faces unprecedented cyber threats, said Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He has asked the White House to explain Haughs departure. How does firing him make Americans any safer?” Warner said.
Also under Trump, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency placed on leave staffers who worked on election security and cut millions of dollars in funding for cybersecurity programs for local and state elections. His administration eliminated the State Departments Global Engagement Center, which tracked and exposed foreign disinformation online.
The CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies also have seen reductions in staffing.
The administration faced more questions over how seriously it takes cybersecurity after senior officials used the popular messaging app Signal to discuss sensitive information about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. Gabbard later called the episode a mistake.
The officials in charge of America’s cybersecurity insist Trump’s changes will make the U.S. safer, while getting rid of wasteful spending and confusing regulations.
The Pentagon, for instance, has invested in efforts to harness artificial intelligence to improve cyberdefenses, according to a report provided to Congress by Lt. Gen. William J. Hartman, acting commander of the NSA and Cyber Command.
The changes at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency come as its leaders consider how best to execute their mission in alignment with the administration’s priorities, a CISA statement said.
As Americas Cyber Defense Agency, we remain steadfast in our mission to safeguard the nations critical infrastructure against all cyber and physical threats, the statement read. “We will continue to collaborate with our partners across government, industry, and with international allies to strengthen global cybersecurity efforts and protect the American people from foreign adversaries, cybercriminals, and other emerging threats.
Representatives for Gabbard’s office and the NSA didn’t respond to questions about how Trump’s changes will affect cybersecurity.
Signs of progress?
Despite shifting alliances, a growing consensus about cyberthreats could prompt greater global cooperation.
More than 20 nations recently signed on to an international framework on the use of commercial spyware. The U.S. has signaled it will join the nonbinding agreement.
There’s also broad bipartisan agreement in the U.S. about the need to help private industry bolster defenses.
Federal estimates say the cybersecurity industry needs to hire an additional 500,000 professionals to meet the challenge, said Dean Gefen, former chief of cybertraining for Israel’s Defense Intelligence Technological Unit. He’s now the CEO of NukuDo, a cybersecurity training company.
Companies need effective guidance from the government a playbook,” Gefen said. What to do, what not to do.
David Klepper, Associated Press
