• Kristin Lewis designs products at Aura, a digital security company.
• She was surprised when her 7-year-old managed to make an unauthorized purchase.
• That led to a more open dialogue and weekly tech check-ins with her kids.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kristin Lewis, senior vice president of product at Aura, a company with a suite of products intended to help people stay safe online. It has been edited for length and clarity.

A lot of my work is about simplifying online safety, so I used to be pretty confident in my ability to keep my kids safe online. Then, my son made a purchase online that showed me keeping kids safe isn't so simple, even for an expert.

My sons are young — they're 5 and 8 now — and they don't have their own devices, only a family iPad. My husband and I download apps that we are comfortable with them using, and are often nearby when the boys are on the iPad.

I thought we were doing everything parents should. Then I learned that kids can unintentionally stumble into trouble online, even with their parents right there.

My son made an unauthorized purchase within an app

My rude awakening happened on a Saturday morning. I was doing Wordle, and my son Warner, who was then 7, was playing on the iPad. He had recently visited his 10-year-old cousin and had since been playing some parent-approved online games with him. I love that they can connect over distance like that.

Then, I received a push notification on my phone, telling me my card had been used to make a gaming transaction on the iPad. I looked at Warner and asked if he had bought something, and he replied, "Why do you ask?"

So many things were going off in my head, but I didn't want Warner to think he was in trouble. I asked him to show me the game, and he told me he was chatting with his cousin. When I looked at the screen, it was a random stranger, not his cousin's screen name. The stranger had sent him a link. Warner clicked it and made a purchase for the game.

I immediately talked with Warner and locked down messaging

The whole interaction was relatively innocuous. The stranger hadn't said anything inappropriate, and it didn't seem to be a scam. But I was struck by everything that could have happened.

I sat down with Warner and explained that he wasn't talking to his cousin. When I said that, he looked scared and asked, "Well, who is it?" I told him it could be anyone, emphasizing that while many people online are nice, others are not, so it's important to avoid talking to strangers. Then, I disabled in-app messaging, which I hadn't realized was allowed.

I'd underestimated my son's tech capabilities

That morning made me realize that I need to talk to my sons about online safety before I think they need it. Kids are naturally curious and trusting, which can be a dangerous combination online.

I hadn't considered that as Warner quickly improved his reading skills, he'd be able to explore more on the iPad. He was a lot more tech savvy than I gave him credit for.

Like most parents, I don't have the time to research every app my kids want to use. That's why the work I do at Aura is so important to me. I want to take some of the burden of safety online off parents. I would love to have more of those decisions made for me—and my team is working toward that at Aura. But for now, there's still a lot of groundwork parents need to put in.

I want to keep a positive outlook on technology with my sons

While this experience was jarring, I don't want the message to be that technology is bad. That's not the approach we use in our house. Instead, we have weekly tech check-ins where we get curious about what the kids are doing online. What games did they win, or which cousins did they catch up with? If they want a new app, we can look into it together.

Most of our family lives far away, so technology has been a great bridge to build connections. Warner's cousin always Facetimes him when he walks the dog, and the two virtually walk together. That type of interaction online is always OK. Other interactions, like gaming, are limited.

It's similar to snacking. The boys can't always have Doritos, but they can have a banana any time they like. They can't always play games, but they can answer FaceTime from family any time. I hope to empower them to make their own healthy decisions as they grow up.

• Investor Tom Liravongsa is renovating a landmarked skyscraper into an apartment building.
• The building, built in 1927, was once a major medical office and is now mostly vacant.
• Liravongsa thinks the classic craftsmanship will make it stand out from other residential buildings.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tom Liravongsa, or Tom the Skyscraper Guy, a real estate investor who purchased the majority of the Pittsfield Building, a 38-story skyscraper in Chicago that has been partially vacant for nearly a decade. Liravongsa is turning the former office building into residences. The building was built in 1927 and landmarked in 2002. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

This building has quite a history.

It's been in disarray for over a decade, and if you dive into the real history of it, it's gone through so much turmoil.

We knew that it was a Marshall Field estate building. It was built by Marshall Fields III, and prior to it becoming a disarray, I think the last lease burned in 2017. Prior to that, it was the largest medical office east of the Mississippi with 775 doctors and dentists in the building.

It's also in Jewelers Row, which is a really prominent area for selling high-end jewelry. In fact, we discovered recently that on the sixth floor, there's a store that sold pearl jewelry.

All of the remnants that we've just been discovering, you wouldn't have found them unless you were in the building. There are safes that were built into the wall and compressors in the basement specifically for compressed air for doctors and dentists to use.

There are grotesques on the corners of the building. I didn't even know they were there until we were literally hanging over the building.

It's really unique.

I bought 80% of the building for about $7 million

Shortly after COVID, I was looking at basically all markets that had office spaces, knowing that there would be a shift in how office space is used.

Not only is the Midwest close to home, but I'm very familiar with Chicago. I've been here long enough to know Chicago is also a developer-friendly city when you're doing the right things, which is residential.

That's what we're doing. We're changing an office building into a residential building, and there are a lot of things that come along with doing something like that.

We acquired the building in May 2023. We had actually purchased it out of a foreclosure, so that's how we were able to do that.

We paid just over $7.5 million for it.

We own 80% of the building now. When I say we, yes, it's investors, and the investors are your partners. Most people would be familiar with something like New York City, where they have vertically bifurcated buildings — that's the same situation that you have here in Chicago. So, we own everything except floors 13 to 21.

All of it was office space. I believe they started doing conversions in 2009. The building currently has 228 apartments, which are about 80% full.

Those are active market-rate apartments that are located on floors 10 to 21. We have three floors of apartments, and the floors we don't own are all apartments.

The rest is now just completely vacant. And that's what we are working through and getting turned into apartments.

It will still have some mixed-use, meaning we'll have retail-floor activation, and we'll have basement activation.

More importantly, for 100 years, people have not been able to see this building for what it is — this craftsmanship specifically. They've not been able to see things such as the copper top.

So we're offering a lot of this viewing to the public, like a museum inside the building.

I want to take advantage of the classic craftsmanship

Most developers come in and they just want to make it their own — and their own is going with what they think the market is, which is like a glass tower. We're building glass towers now, and they're nowhere near the attention and the allure that this building has.

There's been a real shift in the market to what we call themed buildings because these conversions are happening, and a themed building — like this 1920s craftsmanship building — has its own allure outside being a glass tower. Anybody can go and live in a glass tower; there's nothing exciting about that.

But to have this building with all of these features and to be able to reference them, there's something to be said about it.

To modernize different components, you'll have amenity spaces that will be a mixture of modern and also maintain a lot of the craftsmanship.

The hallways and other areas will be very much maintained, but some of the interior units might be a little more modern. But when we talk about modern, we're thinking about the basics: the way your doors and windows work.

We're talking about how HVAC and other systems are going to be modernized. Those are basic modernizations, but you can still incorporate those behind walls so you can keep the allure of these older buildings without having to change them per se.

The state of the commercial real estate market right now is that there is empty office space. We were just introduced to another WeWork-style space, completely empty — six floors of it. We were thinking, "Oh, this is such a sad thing." I remember a time when I thought, I would love to be in an office like this. Now there's no one in those offices. And so the question is, what do we do with those?

We knew that this was a maximized residential building. But more importantly, Chicago has one of the best job markets in the Midwest. It's a hub, but there are also a lot of people who live here. You don't need an office right now; we need housing.

• Cloudflare will block Big Tech AI bot crawlers by default.
• Cloudflare's Pay Per Crawl lets creators charge AI giants for content access.
• The moves address concerns about Big Tech exploiting content without consent or payment.

Cloudflare announced a major policy shift that could reshape the dynamics between content creators and AI companies.

Beginning Tuesday, the company will automatically block AI crawlers from scraping the websites it powers, unless site owners explicitly opt in. This makes Cloudflare the first major internet infrastructure provider to enforce a default permission-based model for AI content access.

The move comes amid growing concerns from content creators and publishers that AI giants are exploiting their work without consent or compensation.

Historically, search engines have indexed content in a way that drives traffic and ad revenue back to original sources. But AI bot crawlers, used for training large language models, harvest vast amounts of data and send much less traffic back to the original creators of this content. These bots are used by industry giants including Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Cloudflare, which manages and protects traffic for about 20% of the web, initially rolled out an optional one-click AI crawler blocking system in 2024. More than a million customers enabled it. Now, this becomes the default: AI companies will now be required to obtain explicit permission from websites before scraping, flipping the script on passive data harvesting.

"Original content is what makes the internet one of the greatest inventions in the last century, and we have to come together to protect it," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said.

"AI crawlers have been scraping content without limits," he added. "Our goal is to put the power back in the hands of creators, while still helping AI companies innovate. This is about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant internet with a new model that works for everyone."

Pay Per Crawl

As part of its broader push toward a permission-based internet, Cloudflare also rolled out Pay Per Crawl on Tuesday. This new feature lets select publishers and creators charge AI companies for accessing their content. Participants can set pricing for individual crawlers, granting full control over how and whether their work is used in AI model training.

Cloudflare hopes to create a transparent, consent-driven marketplace that helps creators decide whether to allow all AI crawlers, permit specific ones, or set their own access fees, turning previously unmonetized content usage into new revenue streams.

For AI companies, Pay Per Crawl offers a streamlined interface to browse access terms, view pricing, and choose whether to pay or walk away without the data.

Pay Per Crawl is currently available to a select group of partners, with broader access available through this sign-up page.

Major publishers have signed on or expressed support for Cloudflare's latest move to block AI bot crawlers by default, including Gannett, Time, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, and the Associated Press. Other companies, such as Stack Overflow, have endorsed the initiative.

At its core, Cloudflare's moves are an attempt to reset the internet's economic model for the new age of generative AI. This initiative doesn't halt AI innovation, but encourages it to grow responsibly by paying for intellectual property and rewarding the creators behind the data.

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at [email protected].

• Big Tech wins legal battles, allowing AI to use copyrighted content for free.
• Judges rule that AI training with copyrighted material is fair use.
• Here's what this could mean for the future of the internet.

Big Tech notched major victories recently in the debate over copyright and artificial intelligence.

It's getting closer to the point where anything published online is fair game to be scraped, copied, and funneled into AI models and chatbots that ultimately compete against the creators of the original material.

This is the moment Google, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and other giants of the generative AI era have been waiting and hoping for. They are getting much closer to having legal certainty that they will never have to pay for the data that's essential for their blockbuster AI products.

What does this mean for the future of the web and the business of content creation? Read on (or just wait an hour or so for an AI summary from your favorite chatbot).

Here's the big news: A judge recently ruled that Anthropic's use of millions of books to train its AI models qualifies as fair use, a legal doctrine that permits the use of copyrighted content for free without the owner's permission in certain circumstances. Meta also won a similar big legal case.

"Good news for all gen AI developers," wrote Adam Eisgrau, a senior director at the Chamber of Progress, a lobbying group funded by tech giants including Google, Amazon, Apple, and Nvidia. The Anthropic decision will be "likely applicable in many cases," he added.

The plunging value of the written word

A investment banker I spoke to recently summed up the impact of fair use in the age of generative AI: People will pay very little for the written word these days.

He's right. When copyrighted content can be scooped up for free and regurgitated in a slightly different form in milliseconds, the value of text online — even exclusive "frontier content" — plunges.

The US Copyright Office is a lone voice on the other side of this discussion right now. It concluded recently that using copyrighted content for AI violates fair use because generative AI is flooding the web with mountains of additional words, images, and videos. That extra supply undermines the market for the original content. Judges seem to be ignoring this so far.

One of my former editors used to give me this advice when I wanted to write about issues like this: No one cares that much about the media. Some might say they do at dinner parties, but they really don't. These days, this industry is minuscule compared to the rest of the economy. Go write about bigger things, this editor would say.

One example: Meta holds about $80 billion in cash and marketable securities. That's almost 10 times the total value of the New York Times. Meta will spend as much as $72 billion in capex this year, mostly for AI data center infrastructure. Mark Zuckerberg is also offering $100 million compensation packages to try to hire single AI experts.

And yet, Meta won't pay a dime for content for AI model training and won't pay when it uses this copyrighted content in generative AI outputs. Same for Google and most other AI giants.

Why can't machines do the same?

Right after ChatGPT came out in 2022, and I first realized that AI models were trained on mountains of copyrighted material without payment or permission, I happened to be visiting an old friend at a Big Tech company. I brought the issue up, and this person replied with this argument: Humans learn by consuming copyrighted content on the web, in books, and from other sources. They internalize this information, process it, and often produce new ideas and content that is based on the original stuff they've read in the past. Why can't machines do the same?

This was delivered with such speed and calmness. There was no pause to reflect or think. It was as if this Big Tech company had been preparing for this moment for years — the moment when everyone realizes their work is being used for AI models and chatbots that ultimately compete against them.

The Google research paper that launched the generative AI boom has overtones of this, too. Attention Is All You Need introduced the "Transformer" to the world. This is a special type of AI model that ingests mountains of content and data to train powerful generative models.

Why did the Googlers who wrote this paper come up with the name "Transformer"? I don't know, but the word tackles the fair use question head-on. One of the tests for whether you are violating copyright law is whether you "transformed" the original work enough to avoid infringing. Google came up with this Transformer name in 2017, a full five years before ChatGPT brought this new technology — and this copyright question — to the world.

Tech blogger Ben Thompson has a cool-headed and well-informed view of all this. He strongly supports the decision of the judge in the Anthropic case, agreeing that training AI with books for free qualifies as fair use, calling it "critically important." AI learning, like human learning, is transformative and does not infringe on copyright when outputs don't replicate the original material. With copyright law, there's always a trade-off meant to incentivize creation without stifling innovation, he explained, and fair use exists to balance those interests.

A warning from the grave

So, what will flow from the fact that basically any copyrighted content online is now fair game for AI companies to use for free?

Here's one prediction. This comes from the grave, but also from deep within OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

Suchir Balaji was part of an OpenAI team that collected data from the internet for AI model training. He joined the startup with high hopes for how AI could help society, but became disillusioned. In November, Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment. The city's chief medical examiner determined the death to be suicide.

Before he died, Balaji wrote an essay on his personal website criticizing AI companies for using public data without compensation and questioned their claims of "fair use." He argued that this trend threatens the sustainability of the internet by draining value from original content sources.

Balaji cited a study that found traffic to coding Q&A site Stack Overflow traffic dropped by about 12% after ChatGPT's release. Developers who once visited the site to ask or answer questions are now turning to AI, reducing new sign-ups and community engagement.

This is undermining the web's "Grand Bargain." Google and other tech giants used to crawl websites and collect the data without paying. But in return, they sent traffic and visitors to the creators of these sites so that they could make money via advertising, subscriptions, product sales, and other methods. Nowadays, Big Tech's AI bots crawl for free and send much less traffic to the creators of the original copyrighted content.

Cloudflare, which runs one of the biggest networks on the web, rolled out a potential solution on Tuesday. The company launched a "pay per crawl" service that helps content creators require payment from AI companies for accessing and using their content.

Cloudflare will block AI crawlers by default for new customers, making content access opt-in rather than opt-out. Major publishers, including Ziff Davis, The Atlantic, and Time, have signed on. The hope is that this will force big tech companies to pay to scrape new digital content for AI development. A startup called Tollbit is trying a similar thing.

I don't know if these efforts will succeed. The core point is that humans should be allowed to learn from copyrighted information for free, and machines probably should too. Reversing this might create even more problems. As a journalist, would I be able to read a Ben Thompson newsletter and incorporate one of his ideas into a future article? Maybe not. Would Thompson be banned from reading scoops by Business Insider and analyzing that new information for one of his amazing newsletters? Is that a good idea? Probably not.

Some predictions

One result of all this could be that, in the future, truly valuable information may no longer be put on the web. Here are three examples that suggest this might already be happening:

• Ben Thompson distributes his content via paid newsletters, rather than relying on free web distribution.

• Bloomberg runs probably the Western world's largest newsroom. Why? One reason is that its news arm is buried inside a massively profitable financial data business. Another is that Bloomberg's most valuable news content is published on the Terminal, a trading tool used by wealthy investors. This system has its own network — it doesn't rely much on the web. Bloomberg only publishes its best news content on the web after a long delay — and a lot of its content just stays on the Terminal and never goes on the web at all. Surprise: It has a well-financed newsroom.

• Finally, valuable content may be shared in the future only via personal meetings and relationships, or even through paper publications again. Anything where the data is out of the immediate reach of Big Tech AI crawling bots.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft started a new publication called Signal that explores the future of AI, society, and business.

It's published on paper only.

• The newly patented DevGen.AI tool was developed in-house and released in January.
• The bank says it's saved almost 300,000 hours this year alone, but won't replace developers' jobs.
• DevGen.AI solves a long-standing headache for coders within and beyond Morgan Stanley.

During a Morgan Stanley hackathon at the end of 2023, two teams were trying to solve a problem that has plagued developers for years: how to rewrite legacy code into modern programming languages.

Those nuggets of an idea turned into DevGen.AI, a tool the bank unveiled in January that has so far saved developers more than 280,000 hours as of June, or 11,666 days they would have previously dedicated to deciphering outdated code, according to Trevor Brosnan, the bank's global head of technology strategy, architecture, and modernization. Brosnan led the effort to build the tool, which turns code from old languages into plain-English specs that can then be rewritten.

Legacy code refers to outdated, older software code — think of languages like Cobol, which was developed in 1959 — that can raise security risks and slow down how quickly companies can take advantage of new technology, The Wall Street Journal reported. Banks and financial institutions are especially dependent on older programming languages, per the Journal.

"In early 2024, I pulled some of our top distinguished engineers at the firm out of their line of business teams and into a new applied AI team, because my instincts told me that there was some great opportunity here," Brosnan told BI.

His instincts were right — the tool has exceeded even his high expectations. It was granted a patent in early June with assistance from the bank's Patent Accelerator Program, which Megan Brewer, the head of firmwide market innovation and labs, helped start.

Cutting out 'onerous' work, not jobs

Brewer and Brosnan said that DevGen.AI won't take software engineering or other jobs with the time it saves. The technology, Brewer said, replaces "onerous" rote work.

"That means those people can actually go work on what we need to be working on, which is the future," she said. Brewer said AI presents opportunities throughout the firm, and that Morgan Stanley is currently looking into how it can use agentic AI across teams.

"The reality is we have so much modernization work to do, and we have ongoing demand from all of our businesses to deliver more functionality, more capability for our clients," Brosnan told BI.

Young people are struggling to land quality positions in the tech sector, in particular, and AI is already starting to gobble up jobs across industries. White-collar job postings nationwide are shrinking faster than blue-collar listings, including for software developers.

Still, Brewer and Brosnan were adamant that DevGen.AI won't render developers obsolete. Morgan Stanley had 233 technology jobs in the Americas posted on its website at the time of writing, including dozens of openings for software engineers.

The initial team for DevGen.AI was tiny

Not many of the technologists at the bank worked on DevGen.AI — Brosnan said the initial team was fewer than five people "who are passionate about this." Eventually, the core group expanded to around 20 engineers. Throughout the process, they consulted with subject matter experts across the firm to figure out different use cases for the tool, Brosnan said.

Morgan Stanley could have outsourced the development of the tool, but Brosnan said they decided to develop it internally in part to "implement all the kinds of security controls." Now, he said, employees across divisions, from its institutional to wealth management businesses, are using the tool.

"Even within the world of generative AI, this was a very, very, very clever use of it, but it also was extremely impactful," said Larry Bromberg, the global head of intellectual property legal, who co-leads the Patent Acceleration Program.

Pleased as he is with the result, Brosnan said his team very briefly celebrated their successes.

"Frankly, they are still very focused on their day job. Our mission is to accelerate modernization at Morgan Stanley, and we've still got lots of work to do," he told BI.

The technology will stay internal for now

One cause for celebration was receiving a patent, which Morgan Stanley employees are encouraged to do through the Patent Accelerator Program. Brewer said the program provides support throughout the invention and legal process.

Patent-holders span the firm — there are around 500 across 14 different divisions, Brewer said. From 2023-2024, the Patent Accelerator Program increased final submissions to patent offices by 53%, and Brewer said that they'll "definitely" surpass that this year. Brewer said that 20% of patent holders are junior staff, and 10% are distinguished engineers.

One of the lead engineers on the DevGen.AI team is something of a serial patent recipient, or a "serial offender" as Brewer put it, with 13 patents to date.

Brosnan said the team doesn't have immediate plans to license the newly patented tool externally; it would likely be in high demand given how many financial and Big Tech companies have to deal with outdated coding languages.

"Right now, our plan is to leverage this definitely for all of our modernization demands internally. We haven't decided anything different from that," he said, adding that Morgan Stanley has shared technology with peers in the past.

In the meantime, the question of how to use AI and modernize the bank isn't going anywhere. As Brosnan put it, his technologists are back to "hands-on keyboards" after every win.

• My husband and I had always planned on having kids in our late 20s or early 30s.
• Then, two years ago, he was in a traffic collision and became paraplegic.
• Though we will face additional challenges as parents, it's not stopping us from having a family.

Two years ago, my husband, Daniel, was in a life-altering traffic collision that severed his spinal cord at his lower back.

He couldn't feel his legs at the scene and was taken away to the ER, where they assessed his condition and immediately sent him to the local hospital for a spinal fusion surgery.

This event almost perfectly coincided with our discussions around family planning and how we finally felt ready to try. We had dated for six years before getting married early in the pandemic and felt we had weathered some of life's hardest challenges together; by this point, we felt as though we were ready for the next step of parenthood.

When Daniel became paraplegic, the kinds of concerns we had radically shifted.

We have added things to consider

Most new parents-to-be worry about things like the ups and downs of pregnancy or how to maintain the division of labor between working parents. Instead, we face a whole different slew of challenges.

Because of his paraplegia, we can't get pregnant the old-fashioned way and will require medical assistance. There are several methods for sperm retrieval that have escalating costs and medical involvement, with only limited insurance coverage leading to additional out-of-pocket expenses.

His doctor has been excellent in walking us through what these steps will look like and how we can ensure that we can still have children. As might be expected, these physical changes have been hard on Daniel and his understanding of his own sexuality, but haven't dulled his desire to have children. However, this isn't even the primary concern for me.

It's not getting pregnant and giving birth that I'm worried about (although there are plenty of medical uncertainties during any pregnancy), but what life will look like once we do bring an infant home.

Daniel already struggles with sleep most nights due to his chronic nerve pain. How will we manage night shifts with a newborn? Will he be doubly sleep-deprived by nerve pain and midnight feedings, or will the constant lack of sleep worsen his symptoms?

And if Daniel is on nighttime baby duty, what kind of crib do we need to ensure that he can actually reach and pick up our child, and rock them back to sleep without a rocking chair?

I've already begun researching wheelchair-accessible strollers and changing tables to understand what kind of specialized equipment we'll need to purchase, and while there are options available, this limits us from receiving gently used gear from family and friends.

We had been hoping to save money by having Daniel take on the majority of childcare while I returned to work, because he is self-employed as the founder of a worker-owned rum distillery and we need my job's provided health insurance. However, with his limited mobility and irregularly scheduled physical therapy sessions, we are reconsidering day care despite its cost, adding to the already-stacking medical bills.

It won't be easy, but we have so much love and support

Though I've not met a single parent who said parenting is easy, our situation provides additional challenges. We're just beginning our parenthood journey and already see the added hurdles we'll have to face. However, we're choosing to have children because it's an important goal in our lives and shows that we have faith in a future together.

Daniel and I have seen children in our future plans. We agreed that our late 20s or early 30s would be the time to start trying; we just didn't expect doing so to require medical intervention or custom childcare equipment to handle the added challenges of disability.

In a twist of fate, we discovered exactly how much incredible support we already have in our community in the aftermath of his injury. Neighbors who would watch our dog while we had long medical appointments, and friends who brought home-cooked meals once a week, while Daniel was inpatient during his recovery.

Even with both our families living out of state, we felt secure having a strong network of local friends who shepherded us through the first year of his recovery, and have already had a few conversations about whether they would be willing to come to our aid once again when we have children.

Our local friends, most of whom are not parents themselves, readily agreed that we can rely on their help. Knowing that we'll have backup in the form of nearby friends makes a difficult situation feel less distressing.

We know having children won't be easy, but we also know that we won't be tackling it alone. We've overcome so many challenges already, and fundamentally, having children is a statement of hope for the future — even if that means needing more complicated baby strollers than most parents have to use.

• As July kicks off, 2025 still lacks a defining summer anthem.
• Alex Warren and Sabrina Carpenter have charting hits, but they lack creativity and staying power.
• Last year's musical highs, combined with this year's political chaos, have produced a pop hangover.

It's official: Pop fans are suffering through a dry spell.

By this time last year, we had already been treated to a veritable feast of summertime smashes and breakout stars.

Remember Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)," which eventually tied the all-time record for most weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso," followed closely by her chart-topping "Please Please Please," and Chappell Roan's "Good Luck, Babe!" — not to mention the entirety of Charli XCX's "Brat," a zeitgiesty album if one ever existed, to the point where brands, politicians, and even world-renowned art centers were trying to capitalize on the fervor?

Even though we're halfway through the year, most of the hits at the very top of the Hot 100 were produced last year. Brand new music is struggling to gain relevance, let alone hold onto it.

Alex Warren's grandiose power ballad, "Ordinary," is apparently the biggest song in the US right now. But much as its title suggests, "Ordinary" lacks friction, creativity, or any hint of a cool factor — crucial ingredients in the special sauce that propels a warm-weather bop to "song of the summer" status.

"Ordinary" has failed to capture the zeitgeist in any meaningful way; rather, it belongs to the same derivative, gospel-adjacent subgenre of pop that has also spawned hits like Benson Boone's "Beautiful Things" and Teddy Swims' "Lose Control." This is the kind of music you hear a lot in the grocery store and the dentist's office.

If "Ordinary" were being challenged by a massive hit, radio play probably wouldn't be enough to sustain its No. 1 reign. So, yes, blame Warren's dearth of competition — but there's also something more eerie at work here.

Music executive Kayode Badmus-Wellington, who has over a decade of experience in A&R, calls it the "hangover effect."

This year's biggest hits sound stale

Newer songs in the Hot 100's current top 10 include three tracks from Morgan Wallen's latest album, "I'm the Problem," and Carpenter's June single, "Manchild." You might assume these would be leading "song of the summer" contenders, but even market-tested hitmakers Wallen and Carpenter have yet to recreate their dominance from recent years. Wallen's "What I Want," featuring Tate McRae, debuted atop the chart but immediately fell from the summit in its second week. "Manchild" met the same fate.

A one-week reign at No. 1 usually signals that a song that can spark curiosity — of course, when it comes to A-listers, tons of people will listen to their new releases no matter what — but may not have the power to hold their attention. The issue is that neither "What I Want" nor "Manchild" offers anything fresh or particularly stimulating. Both songs rehash sounds and themes that Wallen and Carpenter have repeatedly explored.

(Carpenter said "Manchild" was actually written around the same time as her last album, 2024's "Short n' Sweet," which explains why it sounds like a B-side. It doesn't have the juice that "Espresso" did to become a lasting hit, or, perhaps more accurately, the caffeine boost.)

Badmus-Wellington described 2024 as "such a high" for pop music, spurred by blockbuster releases like Taylor Swift's "The Tortured Poets Department" and Beyoncé's "Cowboy Carter," as well as fresh faces like Shaboozey and Roan. Fans were getting spoiled from all sides, so this year's shortfall feels even starker by contrast.

"The big pop names have mostly fired their shots. The new wave hasn't really announced itself with the same confidence or clarity this year," he told Business Insider. "There are fewer group anthems. A lot of the current songs, they're not necessarily made for the room. Last year's hits felt very communal."

Political chaos created an overstimulated audience

Pop music has always been cyclical; one could argue that 2025 is simply the ebb to 2024's flow. However, the dramatic political vibe shift has also played a role.

Last summer, Charli XCX declared that "Kamala IS Brat," a lesbian pop star enjoyed historic concert crowds, and Swift's Eras Tour continued to gush with feminine joy and friendship bracelets. In January, President Donald Trump's inauguration hastened the arrival of an era that looks and feels very different. The cultural consciousness is now dominated by mass deportation and multiple wars across the world.

"Regardless of people's preferences in terms of politics, 2024 just felt so much more optimistic. That's why you saw 'Brat' and the Kamala effect, and it all created an atmosphere that invited feel-good, confident music, and people just wanted relief and celebration," Badmus-Wellington said. "Now, it's just so distracting, because you have people's rights being violated and threatened, and people are just so anxious in many ways. That's leading back into the overstimulation of constant political noise."

Overstimulation, paired with last year's musical overindulgence, has led to a stupendous comedown. Not only are fewer superstars releasing albums, but audience attention is fractured. Badmus-Wellington said he's noticed people retreating back into known comforts and nostalgia, listening to songs they already know and love, rather than exploring new releases or discovering new artists.

"Song of the summer" is a famously subjective term, but the warmest season is inextricably linked to group outings, from parties and beach days to road trips and picnics. As a result, songs that fit the bill are usually sing-along friendly, anthemic; like a rallying cry. This summer, it looks like fans haven't found anything to rally behind — at least, not yet.

• Investment processes that once took months are gaining speed thanks to AI.
• This is transforming an in-depth investment approach known as fundamental investing.
• Executives from Alliance Bernstein to JPMorgan take us inside the fundamental investing revolution.

It took an AllianceBernstein healthcare analyst just one afternoon to analyze what would have once taken her months: the potential impact of President Donald Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" on specific drugs and insurance plans across state lines.

Andrew Chin, the firm's chief artificial intelligence officer, said the analyst used one of the $790 billion asset manager's in-house tools to quickly interpret the legislation and identify which companies would be affected, allowing her to make a fast, confident investment call.

"Because she was able to do that, she was able to make money for our client portfolios a lot faster," said Chin, adding that the analyst "locked in some of the alpha" in a way that was not previously possible.

Fundamental investors take a slow and methodical approach to their investment decisions. Whether reviewing financial statements or talking to vendors and company executives, it can take months for a fundamental investor to reach a conclusion about what to invest in and at what price.

Not anymore. Artificial intelligence is changing the slow investing game popularized by investors like Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway and Peter Lynch of Fidelity.

While asset managers have long used machine learning to crunch spreadsheets and detect trading signals—especially in quant and systematic strategies— these tools can also quickly digest and analyze vast reams of unstructured information, like earnings call transcripts, regulatory filings, and even emails. It's allowing large asset managers to make fundamental investing decisions faster than ever before.

Here are three firms that are using AI to transform their investment processes:

JPMorgan Asset Management

Two and a half years ago, JPMorgan Asset Management AI strategist Dillon Edwards sat down with upward of 50 portfolio managers to understand what they needed. He asked them about the screens they use, the questions they ask themselves throughout the day, and the common thread was, "Just get our attention to the right data, at the right time, in the right place."

That request led to the creation of Smart Monitor, which Edwards described as "Spotify for the investor." It scans mountains of data to surface timely, relevant insights for the firm's portfolio managers and analysts.

Smart Monitor is part of JPMorgan's broader AI build-out for its $3.7 trillion asset management arm, which is hosted on a platform called Spectrum. Another tool within this platform is Moneyball, which helps portfolio managers identify and correct potential biases in their investment decisions by analyzing historical data and market behaviors.

Rather than building something new for investors to learn, Edwards and his team focused on AI directly into the process that investors have spent years perfecting.

The bottom-up approach has helped to minimize AI skeptics: A handful of "champion" PMs worked closely with engineers during development and became in-house unofficial salespeople who market it to their own teams.

"No one wants another tool, another thing to do, something that the AI team somehow thinks is going to be helpful for an investor without empathizing with what they're doing today," he said.

Kristian West, JPMorgan Asset Management's head of investment platform, said the firm is also developing similar tools with the goal of seeing if they can continue to scale the quantitative process, or data-driven systematic investing.

"That's an area where we think it is just pretty obvious, whereas technology and data capabilities improve, those two worlds collide a lot more," he said.

Alliance Bernstein

For fundamental investors—portfolio managers and analysts who base long-term decisions on a deep understanding of individual companies—this marks a turning point: a chance to move faster and dig deeper, but also a moment to rethink how they work.

Chin calls this evolution the rise of the "iron person": a human investor enhanced by AI armor. Not a replacement, but an upgrade.

AB has developed an internal chatbot called AB AI, along with several tools to help pull from internal data, prep for company meetings, or conduct research tailored to the manager's investment philosophy.

Chin said that many AB analysts often develop their own AI agents using ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot with specific prompts to, for example, run an analysis on the companies in their sector after an earnings call.

"They're able to then analyze companies the way they want to, so they get a more tailored or customized version of what the tool can provide them," he said.

Chin said about 75% of the firm's over 500 investment professionals are using their tools.

People sharing stories like "it takes me a day rather than a month to do something, or I was able to get this insight that I did not get before," have driven others to try it, said Chin.

For the remaining 25% who haven't picked up AI, he believes they "will just naturally come when they see the performance of their counterparts has gotten better."

BlackRock

A big reveal from BlackRock's investor day last month shows just how fast the field is moving. The $11 trillion investing behemoth has launched Asimov, an agentic AI platform for its fundamental equity business. Agentic AI doesn't just answer questions following prompts — it can take action on its own.

"While everyone else is sleeping at night, we have these virtual AI agents, they're scanning research notes, company filings, emails to generate portfolio insights," the firm's chief operating officer, Robert Goldstein, said.

He hopes Asimov will be deployed across the firm by the next investor day, offering investors at the world's biggest asset manager a powerful teammate.

Raffaele Savi, its global head of systemic investing, underscored how significantly AI is affecting the investing world.

The speed and power of having "real-time, millions of stimulations a day happening in the background, developing situational awareness" that helps ensure the portfolio reflects the manager's intentions are "profound."

"The world has changed tremendously," he said.