• Erez Druk launched Freed AI for his wife, Dr. Gabi Meckler, who spent hours writing clinical notes.
• The couple collaborates closely on Freed AI, integrating clinician feedback to refine it.
• They shared their founding story, which, they said, is a love letter to each other.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation between Erez Druk, the founder of Freed AI, an AI assistant for clinicians, and his wife, Dr. Gabi Meckler, a family physician. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Gabi Meckler

When I was in residency, I really began to feel the weight of notes.

I would stay in the hospital until midnight, writing notes. You'd come home and still have notes to do. They were constant — a fact of life. Some people suffer. Some even quit.

One day, my husband, Erez, asked me what would make my life easier. I jokingly said, "Can you just write my notes for me?"

Erez took the idea seriously. He started building something.

Erez Druk

I built a simple proof of concept using GPT, a customizable version of ChatGPT, over the course of a few hours. It was a bare bones version of Freed that allowed for patient instructions, which are what clinicians send to patients post-visit, and subjective notes, which clinicians use to document patients' experience of their condition.

I showed it to Gabi. She said "interesting," but told me it still needed a few improvements. It would break at times, it didn't know the names of several medications, and wasn't attuned to different specialities.

I knew I needed another data point beyond my wife, so I solicited the opinion of our friend, another clinician. She came over for dinner, I showed her the product, and her response was very different — one of immediate excitement. She texted the next day asking to use it.

I knew we were on to something.

We moved fast from there. It took some work to make it HIPAA compliant. I wanted to get a beta version out quickly. We got some clinicians to test it. We asked them for feedback constantly. Building Freed isn't just about vision or strategy — it's about listening to users and iterating based on what they need.

Meckler

When I started working at a clinic, after residency, I began using Freed every day. I could finally finish my notes before leaving the office. One time, I forgot to send a referral for a patient, but Freed reminded me. That moment made me realize how much Freed was helping, not just with time, but with the details that I might have missed otherwise.

Other doctors at the clinic noticed, too. They'd come to me and say, "Your husband? He saved me hours of work." That was rewarding.

One thing I love is that Erez takes my input seriously. He really understands the nuances that matter to clinicians, and the team is learning too.

Druk

Gabi holds a weekly office hour with the product managers and designers where they share their work with her. She offers her perspective on what's useful and what isn't.

It's surprising — or maybe not — that even after spending a lot of time with clinicians, there's always more to learn. We can never truly be in their shoes, there's a constant depth and nuance to uncover. That's why this setup is so valuable: It helps us get closer to understanding how they think and what's genuinely useful to them.

Meckler

Freed, as the name suggests, is all about freedom. Our goal wasn't to tell clinicians how to use their time — we simply wanted to give it back to them.

That mindset really influences our marketing. We're very intentional about not telling clinicians what they should do — they know better than anyone else. We don't tell clinicians to be heroes or push messages like maintain "eye contact" or "spend more time with patients." You probably already make enough eye contact. And if you want to Netflix and chill, great.

We're not here to tell people how to be better doctors.

Druk

Managing the relationship between husband and wife, founder and consumer, innovator and advisor — isn't always easy. It's definitely annoying sometimes to get feedback that is correct.

Meckler

I think we do it well, though, I don't know how we do it.

I try to be specific about feedback. Like, this is something you absolutely have to change before moving forward, versus this would be nice, or it's a bit iffy.

I told Erez that we needed to incorporate patient instructions. They include a summary of the visit and clear instructions based on the action plan created during the appointment. The goal is to make them easy for patients to read, understand, and follow. It's now one of the most loved features of Freed.

We're building a document analyzer now at the request of users. It will take any clinical document and give the clinician a summary. Users can also ask questions, and it will provide short responses with references from the document.

This whole time, since we launched in January 2023, Erez has been learning about medicine, and I've been learning about startups. So, I know he has to move fast. That's why I focus only on the most important things, and I push really hard when it matters.

I've loved being involved as part of our relationship.

Druk

Work is really my second obsession after Gabi — and I'm obsessed with work. So the fact that we can talk about everything, and she knows the people in the team, and what we're working on, is really fun.

We created Freed together. It's a love letter from us, our team, to all the clinicians out there.

• Trump struck some major AI tech deals on his Gulf tour this week.
• The deals have alarmed some lawmakers who worry the technology could fall into the wrong hands.
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called those critics "naive."

President Donald Trump went to the Gulf this week and struck some deals that AI companies in Silicon Valley are excited about.

Lawmakers, on the other hand, are less excited.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called those critics "naive" in an X post on Saturday.

"This was an extremely smart thing for you all to do and i'm sorry naive people are giving you grief," Altman said on X, responding to David Sacks, Trump's AI czar and a former PayPal executive.

In his own X post, Sacks said he was "genuinely perplexed" how anyone could see Trump's AI deals in the Gulf as anything but "hugely beneficial for the United States."

Among the deals announced during Trump's tour was a partnership between chipmakers Nvidia, AMD, and Humain, a new Saudi AI company launched by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to bring billions in chips and hardware to the kingdom. Amazon Web Services also announced a $5 billion plan to build an "AI Zone" in Saudi Arabia. The UAE announced a new AI campus.

OpenAI, too, is ramping up investment in the Middle East. The company this week announced plans for a new data center in the UAE. It may end up as one of the largest in the world, and is another sign that the tech industry is eyeing the region as a new AI hub.

In Washington, however, these deals have drawn critics from both sides of the aisle who worry the emerging technology could end up in the wrong hands.

During a speech on the Senate floor on Thursday, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer said the chip deal was "dangerous because we have no clarity on how the Saudis and Emiratis will prevent the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government, the Chinese manufacturing establishment, from getting their hands on these chips."

The Republican-led House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, meanwhile, said in a post on X that "Reports of new U.S. chip deals with Gulf nations — without a new chip rule in place — present a vulnerability for the CCP to exploit."

The competition between the United States and China to dominate AI technologies has ramped up in recent years. The US has tightened export controls on advanced chips and manufacturing tools to curb China's progress, while also boosting domestic production. China, meanwhile, has accelerated investment in its own AI companies and sought suppliers outside the United States.

• OpenAI has released numerous models with a confusing pattern of names over the past few years.
• It has developed both large language models like GPT-4 and GPT-4.5 and reasoning models like o1.
• Here's a guide on what they do and how to use them.

ChatGPT isn't a monolith.

Since OpenAI first released the buzzy chatbot in 2022, it has rolled out what seems like a new model every few months, using a confusing panoply of names.

A number of OpenAI competitors have popular ChatGPT alternatives, like Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. But OpenAI's models are among the most recognizable in the industry. Some are good for quantitative tasks, like coding. Others are best for brainstorming new ideas.

If you're looking for a guide on which model to use and when, you're in the right place.

GPT-4 and GPT-4o

OpenAI first released GPT-4 in 2023 as its flagship large language model. CEO Sam Altman said in an April podcast that the model took "hundreds of people, almost all of OpenAI's effort" to build.

It has since upgraded its flagship model to GPT-4o, which it first released last year. It's as intelligent as GPT-4, which is capable of acing the SAT, the GRE, and passing the bar — but is significantly faster and improves on its "capabilities across text, voice, and vision," OpenAI says. The "o" stands for omni.

4o can quickly translate speech and help with basic linear algebra, and has the most advanced visual capabilities.

Its Studio Ghibli-style images drummed up excitement online. However, it also raised copyright questions as critics argued that OpenAI is unfairly profiting off artists' content.

OpenAI says 4o "excels at everyday tasks," such as brainstorming, summarizing, writing emails, and proofreading reports.

GPT-4.5

Altman described GPT-4.5 in a post on X as "the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person."

It's the latest advancement in OpenAI's "unsupervised learning" paradigm, which focuses on scaling up models on "word knowledge, intuition, and reducing hallucinations," OpenAI technical staff member Amelia Glaese said during its unveiling in February.

So, if you're having a difficult conversation with a colleague, GPT-4.5 might help you reframe those conversations in a more professional and tactful tone.

OpenAI says GPT-4.5 is "ideal for creative tasks," like collaborative projects and brainstorming.

o1 and o1-mini

OpenAI released a mini version of o1, its reasoning model, in September last year and the full version in December.

The company's researchers said it's the first model trained to "think" before it responds and is well-suited for quantitative tasks, hence the moniker "reasoning model." That's a function of its training technique, known as chain-of-thought, which encourages models to reason through problems by breaking them down step-by-step.

In a paper published on the model's safety training, the company said that "training models to incorporate a chain of thought before answering has the potential to unlock substantial benefits, while also increasing potential risks that stem from heightened intelligence."

In a video of an internal OpenAI presentation on the best use cases for o1, Joe Casson, a solutions engineer at OpenAI, demonstrated how o1-mini might prove useful to analyze the maximum profit in a covered call, a financial trading strategy. Casson also showed how the preview version of o1 could help someone reason through how to come up with an office expansion plan.

OpenAI says o1's pro mode, a "version of o1 that uses more compute to think harder and provide even better answers to the hardest problems," is best for complex reasoning, like creating an algorithm for financial forecasting using theoretical models or generating a multi-page research summary on emerging technologies.

o3 and o3-mini

Small models have been gaining traction in the industry for a while now as a faster and more cost-efficient alternative to larger, foundation models. OpenAI released its first small model, o3 mini, in January, just weeks after Chinese startup Butterfly Effect debuted DeepSeek's R1, which shocked Silicon Valley — and the markets — with its affordable pricing.

OpenAI said 03 mini is the "most cost-efficient model" in its reasoning series. It's meant to handle complex questions, and OpenAI said it's particularly strong in science, math, and coding.

Julian Goldie, a social media influencer who focuses on SEO strategy, said in a post on Medium that o3 "shines in quick development tasks" and is ideal for basic programming tasks in HTML and CSS, simple JavaScript functions, and building quick prototypes. There's also a "mini high" version of the model that he said is better for "complex coding and logic," though it had a few control issues.

In April, OpenAI released a full version of o3, which it calls "our most powerful reasoning model that pushes the frontier across coding, math, science, visual perception, and more."

OpenAI says o3 is best used for "complex or multi-step tasks," such as strategic planning, extensive coding, and advanced math.

o4 mini

OpenAI released another smaller model, the O4 mini, in April. It said it is "optimized for fast, cost-efficient reasoning."

The company said it achieves remarkable performance for cost, especially in "math, coding, and visual tasks." It was the best-performing benchmarked model on the American Invitational Mathematics Examination in 2024 and 2025.

o4 mini, and its mini-high version, are great for fast and more straightforward reasoning. They're good at speeding up any quantitative reasoning tasks you encounter during your day. If you're looking for more in-depth work, opt for o3.

Scott Swingle, a DeepMind alum and founder of AI-powered developer tools company Abante AI, tested o4 with an Euler problem — a series of challenging computational problems released every week or so. He said in a post on X that o4 solved the problem in 2 minutes and 55 seconds, "far faster than any human solver. Only 15 people were able to solve it in under 30 minutes."

OpenAI says the O4 mini is best used for "fast technical tasks," like quick STEM-related queries. It says it's also ideal for visual reasoning, like extracting key data points from a CSV file or providing a quick summary of a scientific article.

• Companies are turning to consulting firms for help navigating Trump's tariffs.
• Firms are advising them to audit contracts, adjust pricing, and manage costs proactively.
• "Companies have more control than they realize," Shannon Copeland, CEO of SIB consulting, told BI.

If you are confused by what President Donald Trump's tariffs mean for you, you are not alone.

As businesses confront a new era of American protectionism, many are turning to consulting firms for strategies to adapt to the rapidly changing regulatory landscape.

Business Insider spoke to the leaders of some of the world's top consulting firms to find out what advice they give their clients.

Some businesses' first instinct is to pass the cost of tariffs onto the consumer. In March, the Association for Supply Chain Management surveyed 400 supply chain professionals and found that 65% of companies intended to do just that.

Several consultants told BI, however, that blanket price increases aren't always the best move.

Consumers are facing higher prices across the board, so unless the product is a basic necessity, trying to shift the cost will generally result in reduced demand, KPMG's national operations lead, Paul Hencoski, told BI. Ultimately, a business would be forced to cut prices to move stock, he said.

"Companies have more control than they realize," Shannon Copeland, CEO of SIB consulting told BI. As a cost-cutting specialist, SIB aims to help clients avoid overpaying in the areas they can control, so that when prices rise, they're not starting from a place of inefficiency, Copeland said.

"The businesses that fare best are the ones that don't leave their spend on autopilot," he said. "Get proactive and treat tariff exposure like any other enterprise risk."

He advised companies to audit vendor contracts, analyze rate structures, and assess recurring spend for hidden vulnerabilities.

With tariffs restricting supply chain maneuverability, the rapidly emerging topic companies need to be thinking about is "go to market," Boston Consulting Group Global Chairman Rich Lesser told BI.

He said they should be asking questions like: How do you understand your economics versus your competitors? How do you monitor what's happening in real time on a store shelf or in an industrial supply chain? How do you think about pricing for your business?

McKinsey Senior Partner Cindy Levy said some companies may benefit from revisiting prices more often. "Instead of once a year, they may adjust every few months. It's really about managing costs across the value chain, especially when raising prices isn't an option."

Other ways to cut costs include "changing packaging or ingredients, adjusting promotion strategies, or focusing on products that are under less cost pressure," she added.

Kristin Bohl, a PwC partner focused on customs and international trade, offered three broad tips: Create agile strategies, bring the right people together, and model out your impact.

"You cannot make informed decisions about your strategic response to the tariffs unless you know the financial impact of those tariffs on your business," she said. Options for businesses who wanted to avoid raising prices include delaying tariff payments or even getting a refund, she said.

In the short run, "consumers and businesses are likely to share the burden, with more of it falling on consumers over time," researchers at the University of Pennsylvania wrote in a brief on the economic impact of Trump's tariffs.

In early April, Trump announced a 90-day pause on his "reciprocal tariffs," which initially targeted about 185 countries. Since then, the administration has been negotiating with various trading partners, including Canada, Mexico, Japan, and China.

Trump announced an agreement with the UK this month, which includes "billions of dollars of increased market access for American exports," specifically agricultural products, Trump said.

The US and China, meanwhile, also reached an agreement. Both countries agreed to lower tariffs by 115% while retaining an additional 10% tariff, according to a statement by the White House.

That means the United States will remove the additional tariffs it imposed on China on April 8 and April 9, but keep duties levied on China prior to April 2. China, meanwhile, will remove the retaliatory tariffs it announced since April 4 and suspend or remove the non-tariff countermeasures taken against the United States since April 2.

When it comes to preparing for the long term, KPMG's Hencoski said companies need to construct a response team of people from across their organization that can digest all the impacts and develop a plan of action.

Companies are also "using this moment to revisit longer-term decisions around their footprint, suppliers, and even where to invest," Levy said. The smartest among them "aren't just reacting — they're preparing for a future where disruptions are the norm."

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• Consulting firms have seen increased demand since President Donald Trump began levying tariffs.
• Leaders from McKinsey, BCG, PwC, KPMG, and SIB told BI old and new clients alike are reaching out.
• "We're seeing double-digit growth in our revenue and bookings in several sectors," KPMG said.

President Donald Trump's tariffs have shaken financial markets, spurred consumer stockpiling, and forced businesses to brace for hits to their bottom lines.

While another of Trump's efforts, DOGE, has hurt the consulting industry, the tariffs, aimed at narrowing the $1.2 trillion trade deficit in goods the US imported in 2024, have so far spared the services sector, leaving consultancies largely untouched.

That puts them in a unique position to help companies trying to navigate shifting trade dynamics and rising costs. Leaders from McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, PwC, SIB consulting, and KPMG told Business Insider they're being tapped more often by both existing and new clients seeking guidance.

Kristin Bohl, a PwC partner for customs and international trade who is leading the Big Four firm's tariff advisory work, told BI that since Trump's announcement on April 2, PwC is "definitely seeing an uptick in demand."

She said tariffs are a multi-dimensional problem, so multiple lines of PwC's business, including finance, tax, logistics, and tech, are in demand, resulting in a "doubling down or tripling down" in interest from clients.

McKinsey & Company launched a "Geopolitics" practice more than a year ago, Cindy Levy, a senior partner at the firm, told BI. "Since then, we've seen interest from both long-standing and new clients — especially around scenario planning, cross-functional response, and navigating an increasingly uncertain global environment," she said.

McKinsey is hearing from companies in several sectors, but most notably from those "highly exposed to trade shifts," including semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, automotive, and electronics. The firm is also seeing "growing interest" from consumer sectors, which are especially sensitive to pricing and sourcing, Levy said.

Rich Lesser, BCG's global chair, told BI that the firm has had several "new conversations" with existing clients. "Trade and tariffs were not a hot topic a year ago," he said.

It's good timing, in a way. As part of the Elon Musk-led effort at the White House DOGE Office to cut costs, federal agencies have been asked to review and justify their spending on consultants.

Several consulting firms earlier told BI that government contracts make up a significant portion of their income, threatening their bottom line. So, increased demand from current corporate clients — and new interest from new ones — for advice on navigating Trump's trade war has been a needed win for consulting firms.

Lesser said clients are largely seeking "insight on how we see this playing out." However, the tariff discussions have also brought "renewed energy" to longer-standing questions about driving productivity and adopting AI, he added.

SIB, a consultancy that specializes in cost-reduction, told BI that it had seen "a noticeable uptick in inbound inquiries since April 2," building on the 43% jump it saw after Trump took office.

"This latest wave of interest is clearly tied to tariff-related cost concerns, as business leaders brace for pricing volatility and its ripple effects across their supply chains and vendor contracts," SIB CEO Shannon Copeland told BI.

At KPMG, the firm's national operations lead, Paul Hencoski, told BI that it's normal to see an uptick in demand when there's a change of government, but that the rise had been "particularly acute" over the last six months. "We're seeing double-digit growth in our revenue and bookings in several sectors, and our pipeline is up year over year," Hencoski said.

Hencoski said he's seen strong demand for the lines of business that are most relevant to tariffs: KPMG's tax and trade practice, supply chain services, and risk and regulatory compliance. "Certainly, any type of economic downturn could affect us, but at the present time, we've seen no material impact," he said.

Businesses want to act now

Clients are largely turning to consulting firms for guidance on how to navigate the uncertainty expected in the near term.

BCG's clients want to "land the 2025 plane in a reasonable way," Lesser said. However, they're also mindful that this is just "one leg of a long-term journey."

While companies are focused on managing immediate disruptions — from supply chain shocks to shifts in the competitive landscape — many are also reassessing their longer-term strategies, including investment in capital and talent.

"Everybody's feeling like this is not a time to be making big investments when you don't know the environment you're operating within," Lesser said. "This starts with capital allocation but even extends to how much hiring to do in an uncertain landscape."

McKinsey's Levy said clients' big concern is staying competitive. "We're seeing companies focus not just on managing disruption, but also on where they can play offense — whether that's diversifying supply chains, moving faster than competitors, or spotting openings in a changing landscape."

PwC's tariff lead said there is demand from existing clients who already have sophisticated custom strategies, but need to work out how to adjust them for the shifting landscape.

Larger companies are concerned about their investment strategies, whether they can hire new people, their manufacturing footprint, and how they can expand operations.

PwC is also hearing from new businesses who weren't previously impacted by tariffs and lack "the muscle memory around how to be strategic in this space," she said.

Bohl said the impact of tariffs could be enough to wipe out smaller companies' ability to keep operating. She said they want to understand the impacts and work out potential strategies.

KPMG's Hencoski said his clients are "looking for calm in the storm."

The strongest demand is coming from the industrial manufacturing sector, where businesses need to find alternative sources for components and materials, and from the consumer retail sector, where it's all about the product supply chain, he said.

There is "absolutely a desire to take action now," Hencoski added.

"Their C-suite, their boards, their shareholders are demanding that they have a plan, and so they're actively digesting the information as it changes every single day and developing a plan of action at the same time," he said.

SIB's CEO also told BI that there is a sense of urgency from clients.

"We're seeing a definite shift toward immediate action. Most leaders recognize that waiting could leave them exposed — especially if vendors are already embedding tariff-related increases into contracts or invoices," Copeland said.

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• Aleem Hossain used AI to create a sci-fi film for under $300.
• The film explores themes of identity and cultural heritage through a South Asian lens.
• Hossain said he feels a sense of authorship, but still isn't sure if he should profit from it.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Aleem Hossain, an associate professor of Media Arts & Culture at Occidental College. He's also a filmmaker who recently created the short film, "Do Bangladroids Dream Of Electric Tagore?" This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I was a filmmaker before I became a professor.

I started making films in high school because I was deeply interested in telling stories that just weren't being told. I gravitate toward the stories of underrepresented folks. My films are personal — and a bit vulnerable — so it's not always easy to find funding.

Many of them are science fiction. There's a long tradition of independent sci-fi, but it doesn't get talked about much. It's nowhere near as common as an independent comedy or realist drama. That's because, quite literally, sci-fi is usually imagining the world differently from how it exists today, and it takes money and resources to do that.

I've made one feature-length film, and I'm working on a second right now. I've also made about 15 short films.

I've found ways to fund my creative pursuits, investing personal money, running Kickstarters, and convincing stakeholders to contribute. My first feature film cost about $30,000. I've made many of my short films for far less. "Do Bangladroids Dream of Electric Tagore" is my most recent short film, and it cost me just about $300.

A big reason for the low cost is because I used AI. I spent a bit on subscriptions to Midjourney, an AI image generator. I used a free version of a generative AI voice tool, ElevenLabs. I also hired a voice actor. That was pretty much it.

The film takes place 50 or so years in the future, somewhere in New Jersey. There are no humans. There's been a failed robot uprising, and the robots that survive reflect on their memories of home by reciting the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali writer.

The title is a direct reference to Philip K. Dick's novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," which was also the inspiration for the movie "Blade Runner." Both of those pieces ask several interesting questions about our responsibilities to the robots we create.

They're great, but those stories are largely told through a white male lens. I wanted to expand that.

I'm half South Asian, so I told a story set in that context. My dad is a Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh, and my mom is a white woman born and raised in Connecticut. I grew up watching Steven Spielberg and Bollywood, and I wanted to convey that experience through my film.

It's a parallel to how we live our lives these days.

In this crazy, modern world, our ancestors can come from one part of the world, but we live in another. That's also true of the items we buy, and the clothes we wear, which, oftentimes, and to the surprise of many Americans, are made in Bangladesh.

What if the equivalent were true, but for robots? This is a film that envisions a future in which our country is populated by robots from another country, brought here to serve — and what memories they carry of home.

It asks people to reflect on how they treat others. How we worry about being oppressed, but in fact, there are ways in which we might be the oppressor.

I took an AI filmmaking course from Curious Refuge, which helped me better prompt these tools. What's interesting about prompting is that it's just sort of churning. You're pulling a slot machine over and over again. I generated thousands of robots to get the ones in the movie.

You have to experiment. Ask for a "robot-horse" in the style of Guillermo del Toro, then try Spielberg, and see which one you like better.

I used a mix of technical terms and descriptive verses in prompting. For example, I like the depth of field and spatial distortion of a 28-millimeter lens, so I often include "28-millimeter" in my prompts.

I think it's a mistake for the critics of AI to say that one of the downsides of AI is that it can't be used to make great art. I think this film is pretty good. I feel a deep sense of having authored it. I came up with the story and every frame.

Still, I don't feel like I have the right to profit off of it.

This technology is clearly violating intellectual property. It poses a real danger of displacing and putting people out of work. It's also exacerbating climate damage because of how energy-intensive it is.

I'm deeply conflicted about it.

See Hossain's full movie below.

• Warren Buffett said on Saturday he will step down as the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway by year's end.
• The board has voted to make Greg Abel, now a vice chair at the company, its CEO and president.
• Abel is expected to maintain Buffett's existing investment approach.

Hours after Warren Buffett stunned the crowd at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting by announcing that he'd step down at the end of the year, its board voted unanimously for Greg Abel to replace him.

Buffett — who is 94 and has been the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway for 55 years — will remain as chairman of the board of directors, according to a press release. Greg Abel will become the new CEO and president as of January 1, 2026.

"I think the time has arrived where Greg should become the chief executive of the company at year end," Buffett told the audience on Saturday, referring to Abel, one of his top hands.

Abel, 62, has been Berkshire Hathaway's vice chair of non-insurance operations since 2018. He's also chair of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, which Buffett hailed as one of the conglomerate's four "jewels" in his annual shareholder letter in 2021, the same year Buffett first tapped Abel as his successor.

While Buffett's approval was a major plus, the company's board of directors was tasked with confirming his successor, and did so on Sunday.

Investors and shareholders expect that Abel will maintain Berkshire Hathaway's investment philosophy. He told shareholders at this weekend's meeting that he would start by maintaining the company's "fortress of a balance sheet," which allows it to make large investments without relying on banks, Barron's reported.

Abel is known, however, for having a more hands-on management style than Buffett.

He was estimated by Forbes to be worth $484 million in 2021. In 2022, he sold his 1% stake in the company's Berkshire Hathaway Energy unit for $870 million.

Abel has risen through the ranks with a persistent focus on energy.

The Canadian native played hockey in his early years and attended the University of Alberta. He graduated in 1984 with a degree in commerce.

He joined PwC after graduation and quickly moved on to a small company called CalEnergy. In 1999, CalEnergy acquired MidAmerican Energy and adopted its name. That same year, Berkshire Hathaway bought a controlling interest in MidAmerican Energy. Abel took over the reins of MidAmerican in 2008 — renamed Berkshire Hathaway Energy in 2014 — and helmed it until 2018.

He's also served on the board of several major companies, including Kraft Heinz, and has been affiliated with organizations and institutions like the Mid-Iowa Council Boy Scouts of America, Drake University, American Football Coaches Foundation, and the Horatio Alger Association.

He lives in Des Moines, Iowa. Those who've spotted him at a hockey rink in town, watching his son practice, say he comes across as a "regular guy," the Des Moines Register reported.

Buffett also has a reputation as a folksy and down-to-earth person, living in Omaha, Nebraska.

At Berkshire Hathaway, succession doesn't seem to be just about handing over a job. With the title, Buffett said he's passing down traditions — like writing letters — and a mindset, too.

In Berkshire Hathaway's 2024 annual report, Buffett wrote, "At 94, it won't be long before Greg Abel replaces me as CEO and will be writing the annual letters. Greg shares the Berkshire creed that a 'report' is what a Berkshire CEO annually owes to owners.

"And he also understands that if you start fooling your shareholders, you will soon believe your own baloney and be fooling yourself as well."

• Tech giants didn't have much to say about Trump during earnings calls this week.
• The president's tariffs, however, came up a lot.
• Amazon and Apple discussed tariffs the most, mentioning them 42 times collectively.

Big Tech had little to say about President Donald Trump during their earnings calls this week.

Neither Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, nor Snap mentioned the president at all, according to a review of transcripts from Q2 earnings calls by AlphaSense, a market intelligence company. Meta mentioned "Trump" just once in a press release from April 11.

Big Tech executives have aligned themselves closer to Trump since he won the election. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago after the election, and Google donated $1 million to the inauguration fund. Apple CEO Tim Cook did the same.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also donated to the fund. On a podcast this week, Zuckerberg said, "Our default as an American company should be to try to have a productive relationship with whoever is running the government."

The absence of direct mentions of Trump is perhaps surprising given the disruption the president's trade policy has caused American businesses.

Trump has said his goal in enacting broad tariffs is to rectify an "imbalance" that has "fueled a large and persistent trade deficit in both industrial and agricultural goods," according to the White House.

The tariffs have forced companies, especially ones that sell consumer goods, to rethink their strategies. During the ongoing 90-day pause on the "reciprocal" tariffs that Trump issued in April, some companies have begun diverting inventory closer to their US markets and looking for alternatives to manufacturing in China, which has taken the brunt of the tariffs.

While Big Tech avoided talking about Trump, they did have plenty to say about tariffs this quarter. Last quarter, tariffs only came up a handful of times.

Amazon and Apple, the two biggest sellers of consumer goods, made up the bulk of Big Tech's tariff talk during the recent earnings calls. Amazon mentioned tariffs 16 times in its earnings call on Thursday. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that "Amazon is not uniquely susceptible to tariffs" and expressed some optimism that the company could still keep prices low.

Apple, meanwhile, mentioned tariffs 26 times on its earnings call. Cook said the company "had a limited impact from tariffs" and was able to "optimize our supply chain and inventory" for the past quarter. He said he expects tariffs to add about $900 million to its costs this quarter — provided that the administration makes no further changes.

Apple is also diverting iPhone production from China to India to mitigate the impact of tariffs. Cook said the company expects "the majority of iPhones sold in the US will have India as their country of origin" in the June quarter.

Microsoft CFO Amy Hood mentioned tariffs once on the company's earnings call on Wednesday. Discussing Microsoft's personal computing revenue, which came in at $13.4 billion, she said, "Windows OEM and Devices revenue increased 3% year-over-year, ahead of expectations as tariffs uncertainty through the quarter resulted in inventory levels that remained elevated."

Times have changed since this time last year, when Trump and his economic policies were out of sight and out of mind.

• CEOs face pressure from investors to enhance their AI strategies.
• Investor demand for AI adoption surged from 68% to 90% from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, according to KPMG.
• One investor told BI there's no board of a VC-backed startup that isn't discussing AI.

Executives, investors, and boards are united on one thing: AI.

Last month, enterprise AI company Dataiku published a survey that showed that CEOs are putting pressure on themselves, and each other, to ramp up their AI strategy.

But a new report from KPMG shows that some of the heat is coming from investors. Investor pressure to adopt AI has jumped from 68% to 90% from the last quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2025, according to the firm's survey of 130 executives from a mix of public and private companies with over $1 billion in revenue.

KPMG's head of ecosystems Todd Lohr said he expects investors to double down more, potentially driving a rise in activism.

"There's a signal of 'change is going to continue to come,' especially if you're not moving fast enough," he told Business Insider. "There's going to be others that are going to move your hand for you."

Lohr said board members, too, are becoming more attuned to AI.

"I do a lot of speeches for boards and board members, and they're getting pretty deep on the technology because they want to make sure they're asking the right questions for how it's going to disrupt their businesses," he said.

Several venture capitalists told BI that they are actively driving their portfolio companies to deploy AI.

"We've been working with our portfolio companies to incorporate GenAI features into their product portfolios," Jai Das, president and partner at enterprise technology firm Sapphire Ventures, told BI. "AI is a generational shift, and companies that don't embrace it in a big way will be history footnotes versus becoming companies of consequence."

Maria Palma, general partner at Freestyle Capital, said the firm has been having discussions with all its portfolio companies on how they are integrating AI. It's also hosting a series of "optional sessions on AI's potential to improve workflows across various departments, like engineering or marketing," she wrote to BI by email.

In the age of AI, Palma's thesis is that companies should have "strong peripheral vision" so they can keep an eye on the tools competitors are deploying. "Adopting AI in your company won't guarantee its survival. But the lack of it? That will guarantee to put your company at a huge disadvantage, and ultimately place it on a path toward extinction," she wrote.

In some cases, though, companies are scrambling to save face. They're applying AI features as a quick fix rather than analyzing where they can achieve real gains, founders of companies developing those AI features told BI.

This results in an "AI arms race that creates real risks," Florian Douetteau, Dataiku's CEO, told BI.

"Without a unified strategy across the business, organizations expose themselves to chaos: siloed experimentation of point solutions, unmonitored AI application usage, data leakage, cost overruns, and more," Douetteau said. "AI is raw power, and it can only work to drive measurable business results if it is controlled."

Darren Louie, a vice president at Proof — a platform for digital identity and verifications — echoed the idea.

"Investor expectations are understandably rising, so businesses are under growing pressure to demonstrate ROI on their AI initiatives, but many of these companies have serious and valid concerns about compliance and security," Louie said.

Across the board, spending on software has accelerated among Global 2000 enterprises in the last two quarters, said FirstMark Capital's Matt Turck. Within that, there's been a "meaningful increase" in spend on AI tooling and applications as companies move from consulting projects and proof of concepts to deploying AI, Turck told BI via text.

That means discussions about AI are happening constantly, he said.

"As an investor, I don't think there's any board of VC-backed startups where there isn't a current conversation on using AI throughout the company to increase efficiency across functions like development, sales, marketing, etc," he said.

The big question, though, is whether the Trump Administration's sweeping new tariffs will change things, he said.

The "tariff nonsense is particularly painful because it may (or may not) have stopped that trend — we'll see what the Q2 numbers look like," Turck said.

• Donald Trump celebrated his first 100 days in office with a rally in Michigan.
• Immigration was a primary concern among attendees.
• I went to the rally and spoke with people about their impressions.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump marked his first 100 days in office — for the second time.

I attended the rally, which took place in Macomb County, Michigan, just north of Detroit. I arrived at about 4 p.m. ET, shortly before the doors of the venue, an expo center for trade shows, closed. Trump was scheduled to speak at 6 p.m.

When I arrived, the venue was about three-quarters full, which felt surprisingly sparse for a milestone like Trump's first 100 days.

Protesters lined up outside. By 5 p.m., it looked like thousands of people were carrying signs, megaphones, pride flags, and dozens of inverted American flags — a signal of distress.

There were also several vendors outside selling hats, shirts, and other MAGA merch.

"We did good," one vendor told me when I asked him how he thought Trump fared in his first 100 days.

The atmosphere inside was celebratory.

In many ways, the crowd was rallying around the downsizing of the federal government. But the White House DOGE office was far from the top issue among the 15 attendees I spoke with. Immigration stood out as the primary concern in more than half of my interviews.

A brick-patterned suit and Americana on full display

Blake Marnell, a 60-year-old from San Diego, was garnering attention from the press for his bright orange brick-patterned suit when I approached him.

"This is my suit to support the border wall," Marnell said. "It's always been one of his policies that I support the most."

He told me he was wearing a costume suit he bought "off the rack" in England and has been sporting it at political events since 2019. An online search shows that his suit has made him so recognizable that he's often referred to as "Brick Suit."

Marnell noted that US Customs and Border Protection said illegal border crossings were down 95%. The agency said it apprehended 7,181 immigrants crossing the southwest border between ports of entry in March, a 95% decrease from March 2024.

This was my first time attending any sort of Trump programming, but it was clear there was a loose dress code. MAGA hats were a must. Many people wore red. There was a full display of Americana — flag-patterned dresses, camo, denim bedazzled with rhinestones.

A 60-year-old woman who asked not to be named told me she thought Trump had "done very well first 100 days, especially when it comes to the border," she said.

"My parents came in the right way," she said, adding that they emigrated from the Netherlands to Rochester, New York. "They were actually sponsored by a family member," she said.

Some people appeared to have been at the rally simply for the spectacle of it all. Nina, a 26-year-old from Montenegro, told me she was visiting Michigan for her friend's wedding this weekend. Among the activities they had planned, including going to a concert, Nina said she thought it would be a "fun experience" to see the American president.

Trump arrives onstage

About 30 minutes before Trump was scheduled to speak, the event organizers asked for volunteers to move to a set of bleachers close to the stage. That way, when Trump arrived, he'd see a full arena, the organizers said.

As the crowd waited for Trump, I chatted with a 31-year-old. He told me that his parents came to the US from Iraq and that he was originally a Democrat. Trump's "marketing skills" won him over, he said.

By the time Trump arrived, a bit after 6 p.m., the venue was filled with thousands of people.

"This is the best, they say, 100-day start of any president in history," Trump said after he took the stage. "We've just gotten started."

He listed his achievements since he assumed office for the second time. Week after week, he said, the administration has been ending illegal immigration, taking back jobs, protecting the country's workers, restoring rule of law, ending the "inflation nightmare," eliminating "woke lunacy," stopping the "indoctrination" of children, and slashing billions in waste, fraud, and abuse.

Trump has signed a record 142 executive orders since he started his second term. They relate to issues such as immigration sanctions and contracts with top law firms.

The past 14 weeks have been a "revolution of common sense," he said.

Here's a quick rundown.

DOGE has pushed almost a quarter million federal workers out of their jobs, Politico said. And more cuts are yet to come, whether or not Elon Musk, Trump's advisor and DOGE champion, hangs around. The office claims on its website to have saved $160 billion, or close to $994 per taxpayer. But Musk said in a Cabinet meeting earlier this month that he expected the group would save just $150 billion by 2026.

Unemployment has risen slightly from 4% to 4.2% since Trump took office. The US added 228,000 jobs in March, exceeding the average monthly gain of 158,000 over the prior 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The consumer price index unexpectedly fell about 0.1% in March, according to the BLS. This marks its first drop since 2020. But supply chain experts and logistics researchers told Business Insider that Americans should expect significant disruptions in both the availability and the prices of products in the coming weeks in light of Trump's tariffs.

Tariffs have also roiled the stock market. The S&P 500 is down 10% from its February record highs. Economists are increasingly saying a recession is likely.

The tariffs are also forcing companies big and small to rethink their plans. Small-business owners told BI that tariffs were cutting into profit margins and forcing them to raise prices. Corporations have paused imports, sales, and the production of goods in facilities outside the US. Companies are laying off workers.

The full effects of the tariffs remain unclear as Trump negotiates with countries during a 90-day pause.

Trump has also dismantled federal diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and told government agencies to "take strong action to end private sector DEI discrimination." He's ordered federal funding for the "promotion of gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology" to be cut from K-12 schools in the name of ending "radical indoctrination."

A focus on border security and immigration

In his speech, Trump commended his administration, saying it had curtailed migration at the southern border, alongside drug cartels and gangs.

"We've achieved the most secure border in American history," he said.

He later shouted out Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — photographed last month wearing a Rolex at a maximum-security prison holding Venezuelan migrants who the Trump administration says were involved with the Tren de Aragua gang — saying she was doing great work.

Despite attendees' focus on immigration, two people told me they were surprised — and a little disturbed — by the high-drama video of migrants being arrested and imprisoned that was played about 25 minutes into Trump's speech.

In total, Trump spent about an hour and a half onstage.

He resurfaced his usual schtick. Trump repeatedly took aim at the media. He asked the crowd whether Biden should be called "sleepy" or "crooked."

He also praised Musk, DOGE, and what he said was the firing of "unnecessary deep-state bureaucrats."

And for all the commotion around Trump's tariffs, four people I spoke with appeared relatively staid on the matter. Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday that pared down some auto tariffs, though the 25% levy on imported cars is set to remain. Those tariffs are the most likely to affect Michigan voters.

One attendee, who said he was under 30 and declined to share his name, told me that the tariffs were just "a sign he's arrived." The 60-year-old woman who said her parents came from the Netherlands said Trump may need to better weigh which items need to be under tariffs.

For some of Trump's loyal supporters, if they had any complaints, it seemed to be about the miscommunication they said surrounded some of his policies.

"I'm still a supporter, but I'm a little disappointed in the way he's handled the communication that's going out to the American people around his policies," one 30-year-old told me. "Time will tell, as they say."

• Smaller, boutique consulting firms are leveraging AI to compete with established players.
• Many of these firms have a narrow focus, like helping clients with pricing or cost-cutting.
• Their methods aim to make consulting accessible to a broader range of clients.

Two sets of players have long ruled the consulting world.

There is MBB, which is McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, and Boston Consulting Group. And then there is the Big Four: PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and Ernst & Young.

But now, a new wave of upstarts fueled by AI is attempting to chip away at that dominance.

Many of the founders of these new firms come from the traditional consulting realm. They told Business Insider their experiences not only give them marketable skills but have also helped them identify new opportunities in the industry.

They are boutique firms. They are much smaller than the established ones, often run by teams ranging from just a few people to a few hundred. They're also more specialized, focusing on areas like pricing strategy, cost reduction, or refining slide decks.

And, importantly, they are all in on AI.

Many of them said their methods have helped them reduce old-school bureaucracy, offer more competitive rates, and make the human side of consulting work easier.

Here are eight boutique firms that are, to varying degrees, challenging the classic consulting model.

Xavier AI

Xavier AI describes itself as the world's first AI strategy consultant.

According to Joao Filipe, cofounder of Xavier and a former McKinsey consultant, the Xavier AI chatbot can provide clear, actionable business knowledge and deliverables, like a 60-page business plan, a sales presentation, or a detailed marketing strategy.

Filipe said Xavier AI has its own proprietary reasoning engine that is tailor-made for business use cases and can provide detailed sources without the hallucination you might find with other chatbots. He said Xavier can provide both strategy recommendations and actionable plans for implementation.

"99.9% of businesses could really never afford McKinsey or any of the MBBs," Filipe told BI. "We created Xavier AI so that anyone could have the power of a consulting firm at their hands when they need it."

Xavier AI just launched, but Filipe said he's been piloting it with different clients, including an international bank using it to research potential clients and better understand their needs.

Perceptis

Alibek Dostiyarov, a former McKinsey consultant, and Yersultan Sapar, a former engineer at Apple, cofounded Perceptis.

The company aims to help smaller and midsize firms compete with bigger industry players by using AI to streamline some of the more tedious processes in consulting, like proposal writing.

Perceptis is now focused on the business development side of consulting. Its AI-powered operating system can do industry research, identify opportunities that align with their client's skillset and background, and create detailed, custom proposals that the client can use to win a job.

Dostiyarov told BI earlier this year that a lot of the internal processes completed at consulting firms are heavy with manual labor and "lend themselves almost perfectly to what GenAI is capable of doing."

He also said Perceptis could make smaller firms, which don't typically have internal AI tools, more competitive in the market.

The company told BI this week that while initially serving boutique management consultancies, it's now quickly expanding to serve IT services, system integrators, software developers, financial services, design firms, and real estate agencies.

Perceptis had raised $3.6 million in funding as of January.

SIB

SIB specializes in helping clients like restaurant groups, hospitals, universities, and government agencies find savings in fixed costs — expenses that remain static regardless of how much a company produces.

SIB CEO Shannon Copeland told BI that these are often found in areas that "escape scrutiny," like fees for telecommunications, utilities, waste removal, shipping, and software licenses. According to his LinkedIn profile, Copeland is an alum of Accenture and Deloitte.

SIB has grown since its 2008 launch in Charleston, South Carolina. It's now a national firm serving hundreds of clients, ranging from Kroger and Marriott to governments like San Diego County. It recently added over a dozen Fortune 500 companies and private equity firms. Since its launch, SIB says it has identified more than $8 billion in cost savings.

Copeland said that, unlike traditional consulting firms, SIB operates under a contingency model. "If we don't find savings, we don't get paid," he said, adding that the firm doesn't charge fees upfront.

SIB uses AI agents to monitor invoices, vendor contracts, and billing patterns. The firm's consultants use the resulting insights to negotiate better contract terms or restructure their vendor relationships.

"You could think of us as part AI, part old-school operator," Copeland said.

In addition to cost-cutting, the firm also focuses on strengthening relationships, a cornerstone of traditional consulting.

"We actually encourage vendors and clients to return to high-trust, high-accountability partnerships by using data as the starting point for better collaboration," Copeland said. "Working with robots actually makes humans listen to each other more. It's ironic, but it works."

Monevate

Monevate's motto is simple — focus on one thing and do it well.

The firm focuses on pricing strategy for software-as-a-service and high-growth tech companies. It also works with private equity firms to assess the commercial viability of potential investments.

According to his LinkedIn profile, James Wilton, an alum of McKinsey, Kearney, and ZS Associates, founded Monevate in 2021. Wilton now serves as the Firm's managing partner. The firm has 16 full-time consultants and has helped over 50 SaaS, tech, and AI companies in the past three years.

"Most of our clients are backed by venture capital or private equity, and increasingly, we're working with teams building AI products and features," Wilton told BI by email.

Wilton said clients usually turn to Monevate when they've hit a wall with their current strategy because their product has changed or the market has evolved. "We design and implement fully-baked pricing strategies, including packaging, price architecture, and price levels," he said.

Wilton said the impetus to launch the firm came from the gaps he saw in traditional consulting. "Clients often complained about recommendations that never went anywhere, high fees that only the largest companies could afford, no skin in the game, inflexible delivery models, and highly variable service quality depending on the team," he said.

Monevate keeps its focus narrow, but that's allowed even its most junior consultants to become "deep pricing experts," Wilton said.

He added that the firm's work is "narrow by consulting standards, and it means walking away from other kinds of work, but it allows us to be truly great at what we do."

Keystone

Keystone is a strategy consulting firm that advises technology companies, life science companies, governments, and law firms. Its clients include major corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Intel, Novartis, and Pfizer.

The firm was founded in 2003 by Greg Richards, a mechanical engineer by training and an alum of Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, who now serves as an advisor to Harvard Business School, and Marco Iansiti, a physicist and professor at Harvard Business School.

Iansiti told BI that Keystone tends to be more "geeky and nerdy" than traditional consulting firms. "We love to kind of get deep on the tech side of things," he said. The team includes data scientists, AI experts, and academics.

While many consulting firms are embracing generative AI, which is often used to automate day-to-day work like writing emails or reviewing documents and contracts, Iansiti said Keystone is focusing more on operational AI.

Operational AI is used to transform core business functions like managing supply chains, inventory, pricing, and forecasting. In 2023, the firm launched "CoreAI," a team dedicated to using AI to automate and improve these areas.

"We get excited about the term deep enterprise on this," Iansiti said. "Deep enterprise is really the idea of using deep learning models that are embedded around crucial operating processes in the enterprise."

The firm's "value add," he said, lies in building this kind of "pretty unique operational AI" for its clients.

Fusion Collective

Fusion Collective is an IT consulting firm that offers a range of consulting services to clients, including strategy and management advice, cloud transformation, and AI alignment.

The firm was founded by Blake Crawford, who worked on enterprise architecture at MTV Networks and Viacom, and Yvette Schmitter, an alum of Deloitte, PwC, and Amazon Web Services, where she led three cloud migrations, including the largest in the company's history.

Schmitter said that in her experience, clients are seeking AI advice from consulting firms before they're ready.

"We have organizations who are running at 99 miles an hour, hiring these firms to build these AI strategy documents, 165 pages of beautiful PowerPoints, right?" she said. But these companies still can't "operationalize" AI, she said. "Why? Because the basic infrastructure isn't there. Any type of vulnerability that they have in security, their cloud infrastructure, is just exacerbated by AI."

In the end, clients chose consultants based on trust, their networks, and existing business relationships, she said.

"I really believe that a true partner is one who's going to tell you the truth. Tell it like it is even if it hurts right?" Schmitter said. To that end, she said she asks clients who come to her about AI strategy to have a solid grasp of their infrastructure footprint, data governance policies, and security before they accelerate adoption.

The bottom line is that Fusion Collective likes to keep its advice real. "If companies have not mastered the fundamentals, you're not ready for AI, and you're not ready for an army of consultants to come in to do stuff," Schmitter said.

Slideworks

Slideworks isn't necessarily going after consulting firms' business, though it focuses on something many of the big guys are known for: making powerful slides.

Slideworks offers what it calls "high-end" PowerPoint templates and "toolkits" created by former consultants for Bain, BCG, and McKinsey.

When you work as a consultant at a top-tier firm, "you are schooled every day in best practice presentations and slide design," the company says on its website. The idea is to offer access to a library of slides and spreadsheets for areas including strategy, supply chain management, and "digital transformation."

In a February blog post, Alexandra Hazard Kampmann, a Slideworks partner, wrote that "management consultants are often made fun of as 'slide monkeys.'" Yet, she added, the slide is a "crucial reason" why McKinsey and BCG consultants have so many Fortune 500 companies as clients.

Slideworks offers a "consulting toolkit," which contains 205 slides and costs $129. It also offers a "consulting proposal," which has 242 slides plus an Excel model and costs $149.

There are also operations, mergers and acquisitions, business strategy, and product strategy templates.

Slideworks says it has more than 4,500 customers globally, including Coca-Cola, Pfizer, and the professional-services firms Deloitte and EY.

Unity Advisory

Some top UK executives from Ernst & Young and PwC are joining forces to launch a new firm called Unity Advisory in June, the Financial Times reported. The firm will be chaired by Steve Varley, who spent nearly 19 years at EY, and led by CEO Marissa Thomas, who worked at PwC for over 30 years, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

It is backed by up to $300 million from Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm, and will focus on tax and accounting services, technology consulting, and mergers and acquisitions.

"CFOs are open to a new proposition," Varley told the FT. "The Big Four are a classy bunch of service providers, but people are looking for a proposition that is super client-centric, has really low administrative cost, is AI-led rather than based on legacy infrastructure and, crucially, has no conflicts."

• Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, pushed back against "scaling laws."
• These laws say that the bigger AI models are, the more high-performing and smarter they will be.
• "It's not just about scaling anymore," he said at a talk in Singapore.

For years the AI industry has abided by a set of principles known as "scaling laws." OpenAI researchers outlined them in the seminal 2020 paper, "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models."

"Model performance depends most strongly on scale, which consists of three factors: the number of model parameters N (excluding embeddings), the size of the dataset D, and the amount of compute C used for training," the authors wrote.

In essence, more is more when it comes to building highly intelligent AI. This idea has fueled huge investments in data centers that allow AI models to process and learn from huge amounts of existing information.

But recently, AI experts across Silicon Valley have started to challenge that doctrine.

"Most interesting problems scale extremely badly," Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, said at the National University of Singapore on Sunday. "You cannot just assume that more data and more compute means smarter AI."

LeCun's point hinges on the idea that training AI on vast amounts of basic subject matter, like internet data, won't lead to some sort of superintelligence. Smart AI is a different breed.

"The mistake is that very simple systems, when they work for simple problems, people extrapolate them to think that they'll work for complex problems," he said. "They do some amazing things, but that creates a religion of scaling that you just need to scale systems more and they're going to naturally become more intelligent."

Right now, the impact of scaling is magnified because many of the latest breakthroughs in AI are actually "really easy," LeCun said. The biggest large language models today are trained on roughly the amount of information in the visual cortex of a four-year-old, he said.

"When you deal with real-world problems with ambiguity and uncertainty, it's not just about scaling anymore," he added.

AI advancements have been slowing lately. This is due, in part, to a dwindling corpus of usable public data.

LeCun is not the only prominent researcher to question the power of scaling. Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang said scaling is "the biggest question in the industry" at the Cerebral Valley conference last year. Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez called it the "dumbest" way to improve AI models.

LeCun advocates for a more world-based training approach.

"We need AI systems that can learn new tasks really quickly. They need to understand the physical world — not just text and language but the real world — have some level of common sense, and abilities to reason and plan, have persistent memory — all the stuff that we expect from intelligent entities," he said during his talk Sunday.

Last year, on an episode of Lex Fridman's podcast, LeCun said that in contrast to large language models, which can only predict their next steps based on patterns, world models have a higher level of cognition. "The extra component of a world model is something that can predict how the world is going to evolve as a consequence of an action you might take."

• Consulting firms are rapidly adopting AI tools to enhance efficiency and innovation.
• Firms say that workers were ambivalent about AI at first.
• Now, they say AI has helped workers save time, which they reinvest in more advanced work.

It wasn't long ago that consultants at McKinsey & Company would pore over reports to ensure they aligned with the firm's writing style.

Now, an AI agent called "Tone of Voice" does that.

At Boston Consulting Group, consultants now use a tool called Deckster to reduce the time they spend polishing PowerPoint slides. At Ernst & Young, instead of contacting payroll, consultants can ask a chatbot to explain their pay slips.

Consulting firms are among the early leaders of the generative AI craze. They're helping other companies train employees, develop new tools, and regulate the technology.

They are also testing generative AI internally, and in just the past two years, they've unveiled a new suite of chatbots, agents, and applications that have quickly and quietly changed how consultants do their work.

McKinsey has embraced GenAI's conversational approach

At McKinsey, consultants are using an in-house generative AI chatbot called Lilli. It synthesizes the firm's entire body of intellectual property, which spans 100 years and over 100,000 documents and interviews, the firm told BI.

Users enter their requests into Lilli, which aggregates the key points, identifies five to seven relevant internal content pieces, and points users to appropriate experts within the firm. Users can opt to have queries answered by the firm's internal knowledge repository or external sources.

Lilli's usage at the firm has exploded since it was first rolled out in 2023. Over 70% of the firm's 45,000 employees now use the tool. Those who use it turn to it about 17 times a week, McKinsey senior partner Delphine Zurkiya told BI.

When McKinsey first launched Lilli, employees experienced what the firm calls "prompt anxiety," or uncertainty over what to ask the bot. But it found that just one hour of training improved employee engagement. Zurkiya said the tool has also evolved since its launch. It wasn't initially designed to parse PowerPoints, where most of the firm's knowledge exists.

Now, McKinsey consultants told BI they use it for research, summarizing documents, analyzing data, and brainstorming. In a case study published on its website, the firm reported that workers saved 30% of their time using Lilli.

Zurkiya, who describes herself as "one of the heavy users of Lilli," said she often uses it with teams to identify the right approach to solving client problems. "We almost have AI in the room with us because we are often saying, oh, what does Lilli think," she said.

Partners at McKinsey told BI that the firm has been developing AI products for years. In 2015, it acquired a data analytics and design company, QuantumBlack, which now serves as McKinsey's AI consulting arm. It employs 7,000 tech experts across 50 countries.

"About 40% of the work we do is analytics-related, AI-related, and a lot of it is moving to Gen AI," senior partner Ben Ellencweig told BI last year. McKinsey builds generative AI solutions for clients through an "ecosystem" of alliances with 19 AI companies, including Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and Nvidia, and has completed over 400 genAI projects for clients.

But the popularity of ChatGPT crystallized the value of a conversational tool, Zurkiya said. "There wasn't a major shift in our strategy in the sense that we had already been developing a lot of tools internally. It's just these tools now have become, we'll say faster, in delivering value thanks to that natural user interface," she said.

McKinsey consultants do not have access to ChatGPT.

Lilli is just one of several AI tools changing work within the firm. Zurkiya said that AI technology is being deployed at three levels. On an individual level, a platform lets consultants build their own AI agents — technology that, among other things, can solve problems and execute tasks autonomously. Then, there are more domain-specific tools. Agents in the Life Sciences practice, where Zurkiya works, can help consultants get up to speed on specific companies in the sector. There are also firm-wide tools, like new ones for booking meetings and travel.

The firm also applies the lessons from building Lilli to new client projects, developing similar tools that fit their needs.

Despite the hype around genAI tools, consultants don't seem worried that their jobs could be threatened as a result. Commentators on the anonymous professional networking app Fishbowl who work at McKinsey described its tools as "functional enough" and best for "very low stakes issues."

BCG wants AI to 'increase the joy' in work

Over the last two years, BCG has pushed to train its employees in AI.

In 2023, the firm unveiled ChatGPT Enterprise to all its employees under the stipulation that all data would remain under its control. Since then, the firm's 33,000 employees have built over 18,000 custom GPTs — tailored versions of ChatGPT — for internal uses from summarizing documents to generating automatic email responses to answering HR-specific questions.

BCG has also developed eight or nine internal generative AI tools, Scott Wilder, partner and managing director, told BI.

One tool it has heavily invested in is Deckster, a slideshow editor, Wilder said. It's trained on 800 to 900 slide templates and helps consultants quickly create presentations. Wilder said one of Deckster's most popular features is a "review this" button, which helps junior consultants by grading slides based on best practices used by midlevel managers and leaders. About 40% of associates use Deckster weekly, Wilder said.

The tool has become so popular that some of its consultants are fretting about job security. "BCG folks who've tried Deckster: how worried should we be about our jobs? Is it already creating groundbreaking productivity that more junior folks won't be needed as much?" one consultant wrote on Fishbowl last year.

One of the more experimental tools BCG has unveiled is GENE, a conversational chatbot. The bot is built on top of GPT-4o by ElevenLabs and sports an intentionally robotic voice.

"It's a deliberate choice, a subtle reminder that I'm an AI, not a human. Keeps expectations in check," GENE said about its voice during a BCG podcast in December 2023. "Plus it adds a bit of retro charm, doesn't it?"

GENE also explained that its knowledge base is "built from an extensive collection of BCG's best thinking on genAI, shaped by conversations with industry experts, articles, and research studies."

The bot is designed to be a "conversation partner," the firm said. Consultants have employed it for brainstorming, hosting podcasts, live demonstrations, and are even considering using it to interview partners to create content for the firm. Teams can change the bot's "temperature" to control the tone of its responses.

BCG also has an internal platform for building AI agents in beta testing.

Amid gloomy narratives of layoffs and robots coming for jobs, Wilder said the firm's thesis on AI is optimistic. "We will say our goal is to take out the toil and increase the joy," he said. The firm estimates that employees reinvest about 70% of the time they save into "higher value activities," he added.

But those time savings also mean the expectations on consultants are in flux. BCG hasn't changed how it evaluates performance now that it relies so much on genAI tools. However, a spokesperson for the firm told BI it is "thoughtfully considering the role they play as these technologies become more central to how we work."

Deloitte, KPMG, and PwC see promise in AI agents

At Deloitte, generative AI appears to be more tightly regulated. For one, ChatGPT is blocked from the firm's internal system, three consultants told BI.

"I think probably what they really are trying to avoid here is analysts or just forgetful people putting something like client data into a generative AI tool," Andrew Sutton, a senior advisory consultant at the firm, told BI. Sutton, who builds internal AI tools for other consultants at the firm, said they're required to develop them in secure environments to prevent data leaks.

"If we are using a tool that comes from something like OpenAI, we have special communications and contracts with them," he said. "The amount of bureaucracy, all that stuff, that we have to go through is insane."

The firm has its own ChatGPT alternative called Sidekick, which comes with a disclaimer that employees are only allowed to use it for non-client work. Deloitte consultants told BI they use it for summarizing documents, brainstorming, editing emails, and coding.

Deloitte has invested billions into artificial intelligence, however. In March, it unveiled Zora AI, a new fleet of AI agents. The firm says they're trained in specific subjects — like finance or marketing — and designed to think like humans. Last year, it expanded its digital delivery platform, Ascend, with generative AI capabilities.

Publicly, the firm's leadership has also rallied around the technology. At Nvidia's GTC Conference in March, Deloitte principal Jillian Wanner, who leads AI staff development at the firm, acknowledged that the consulting industry is being "disrupted" amid AI transformations. Jim Rowan, head of AI at Deloitte, previously told BI that senior managers should use AI to demonstrate its effectiveness and give employees time to explore the technology.

In a recent statement to BI, Rowan said, "We believe AI is transforming all industries, including our own, ushering in new business models and ways of working, and helping to uncover new sources of business growth and innovation."

KPMG is taking two-pronged approach to AI adoption, according to its head of ecosystems, Todd Lohr. "I'm a big fan of top down and bottoms up," Lohr told BI. "It's really hard to know what hundreds of thousands of people in an organization are doing day to day. But by giving them the technology and letting them use it, they're coming up with even better and more creative ways than any top down methodology."

He said people were a bit confused about how to use genAI when the firm started rolling out the technology two years ago.

"I call it swivel chair processing. It's really hard for people who have been doing tasks for — in some cases — decades to stop what they're doing," Lohr said. Since then, the firm has harvested data on how employees are prompting AI. It's used that information to build new tools, for itself and clients, through retrieval augmented generation — a technique to enhance the specificity and accuracy of large language models — and open data sources, Lohr said.

As consulting firms develop more sophisticating tooling, like platforms for agents, they've realized they need hubs to centralize them. KPMG signed an agreement with Google Cloud this month to purchase licenses for Agentspace — a new platform that integrates AI agents with a company's data — for its US workforce.

Deloitte recently unveiled Agent2Agent, a new platform to improve interoperability between agents. It's the firm's largest collaboration with Google Cloud and ServiceNow.

PwC unveiled a similar platform, called agent OS, last month. It helps centralize clients' agents, and the more than 250 internal ones it has built in the past 18 months. The idea is to convert isolated agents from "ships passing in the night" to "an armada that's working together," Matt Wood, PwC's global and US commercial technology and innovation officer, told BI.

After a post-pandemic dry spell in which many consulting firms struggled with layoffs, lost contracts, and cost-cutting initiatives, generative AI is something of a light at the end of the tunnel — even with the latest scrutiny from Washington.

"My bet is that as more agents become available, organizations will see not just efficiency, but growth," Wood said. "And that growth will allow them to double down on what is working and will result in larger organizations, not smaller organizations."

• Tech giants are known for their challenging interviews.
• Google, Meta, and Nvidia top the list of rigorous interviews with multiple rounds and assessments.
• But tough questions show up across industries, according to employee reports on Glassdoor.

It's tough to break into high-paying companies.

Google is notorious for having a demanding interview process. Aside from putting job candidates through assessments, preliminary phone calls, and asking them to complete projects, the company also screens candidates through multiple rounds of interviews.

Typical interview questions range from open-ended behavioral ones like "tell me about a time that you went against the status quo" or "what does being 'Googley' mean to you?" to more technical ones.

At Nvidia, the chipmaking darling of the AI boom, candidates must also pass through rigorous rounds of assessments and interviews. "How would you describe __ technology to a non-technical person?" was a question a candidate interviewing for a job as a senior solutions architect shared on the career site Glassdoor last month. The candidate noted that they didn't receive an offer.

Tech giants top Glassdoor's list of the hardest companies to interview with. But tough questions show up across industries — from luxury carmakers like Rolls-Royce, where a candidate said they were asked to define "a single crystal," to Bacardi, where a market manager who cited a difficult interview, and no offer, recalled being asked, "If you were a cocktail what would you be and why?"

The digital PR agency Reboot Online analyzed Glassdoor data to determine which companies have the most challenging job interviews. They focused on "reputable companies" listed in the top 100 of Forbes' World's Best Employers list and examined 313,000 employee reviews on Glassdoor. For each company, they looked at the average interview difficulty rating as reported on Glassdoor.

Here's a list of the top 90 companies that put candidates through the ringer for a job, according to self-reported reviews on Glassdoor.

• Stord, a commerce enablement platform, is now valued at $1.3 billion.
• Founder Sean Henry said his entrepreneurial journey began at age 7, selling electronics online.
• Stord operates a fulfillment network, shipping nearly 50 million packages annually.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sean Henry, the founder of the commerce enablement platform, Stord. It's been edited for length and clarity.

When I look back on my life now, at 28, I can easily see that I was always an entrepreneur.

The dots usually connect in hindsight. But in the moment, being an entrepreneur often feels a bit like you're in a perpetual existential crisis. You're always wondering what you're supposed to do next.

I grew up on a farm in Woodstock, Georgia. My dad grew up in a trailer park in Columbia, South Carolina. He was a field engineer at BellSouth, a telecommunications company, and stayed there for almost 40 years.

You might think someone like that would be pretty risk-averse. But the best thing both my parents gave me is the belief that I can do anything. You can see it in my siblings, too — there's an actress, a nurse, a lawyer, and a high school English teacher among us.

My founder story began back in elementary school. When I was 7, I was selling items on eBay and Craigslist. I'd post signs around local neighborhoods that said things like, "We'll buy junk electronics" or "I can fix phones and computers." I bought everything from broken phones and computers to used-but-working devices, then cleaned them up, repaired them, or broke them down for parts — batteries, chargers, chips — and resold them.

By middle school, I started selling phone cases, too. By high school, I had entered into automotive parts, in part, because I could afford my own car by then. I remember my teachers being mad at me because I was always on my phone in class responding to emails and customer service messages.

I tried re-investing the $30,000 in savings I had racked up into other endeavors. I attempted to build an app that lets spectators in sports arenas message people in sections from the opposing team. That didn't really take off. I was trading stocks with my dad on the side. At one point, I even tried my hand at being a YouTuber by making videos about e-commerce.

How I ended up in logistics

Somehow, I kept coming back to the customer shipping experience.

The summer before I entered college at Georgia Tech in 2015, I interned at HUEHOCO, the German metal processing giant. I worked at several of their factories over time, five of which were abroad in Germany, Mexico, and Canada.

I noticed that this massive global company with 14 factories worldwide was overspending on every shipment.

I launched Stord the year I started college to improve the shipping experience for brands and consumers. I wanted to level the e-commerce playing field so that it wasn't only controlled by Amazon, Walmart, and Target.

You, as a consumer, probably see Stord more than you realize. When you see that delivery promise, the shipping insurance offering, or when you get that post-purchase landing page — that's all Stord.

We have an orchestration layer of software that helps manage, route, and execute the network. Then we run a physical fulfillment network with 10 of our own fulfillment centers and also partner with over 50 fulfillment centers.

There's one question I always ask myself

I went all in on building Stord while I was at Tech. I hired new employees, we raised a $2.5 million seed round — on top of checks from accelerators and angel investors. I dropped out before my fourth semester. Six months later, I won the Thiel Fellowship. It's a two-year deal that requires you to drop out of college.

There's a lot of talk about the value of college these days, especially for young entrepreneurs. I'm a dropout, and I gave my family an analogy to explain my case. Entrepreneurship is like professional sports. If you had an offer from the NBA, I don't think you should go to college, and delay the NBA just because you want the degree first.

Stord is now valued at $1.3 billion. Last year, we delivered 30-35 million packages to 11.5% of unique US households. This year, we expect to ship almost 50 million packages to nearly 20% of US households.

We exist in markets in the EU, UK, and Canada and plan to launch a few more. In light of the tariffs, we've seen an influx of interest in e-commerce brands looking to move inventory to our US and Canada locations. Over the past few months, we've helped brands divert millions of units. In the short term, I suspect we'll see a lot of brands holding more inventory closer to their primary markets.

There's a simple question I ask myself that brought me to where I am today: Why not you? Once you realize that everything in life was made up by someone no smarter than you, everything changes. You think, "If I give this all my energy, why couldn't I transform this industry?"

• President Donald Trump's tariff strategy is already causing price hikes and supply chain snarls.
• Logistics experts and shipping industry insiders told BI the effects are only going to intensify.
• Consumers can expect inflation, stock shortages, and higher unemployment, the experts said.

President Donald Trump's tariffs are already wreaking havoc on the supply chain, and several experts believe it could get worse.

Business Insider spoke with nine supply chain researchers, shipping industry insiders, and logistics specialists about the timeline for when consumers might expect to see the most significant effects of Trump's aggressive trade policy, should he maintain his current strategy.

They agreed that, in the coming weeks, Americans can expect major disruptions to the prices and availability of goods — store shelves may be emptier, prices will rise, and some products will run out sooner than others.

And if things continue on the current trajectory, four of them said, by the end of the year, those effects could be compounded, leading to higher domestic unemployment rates, global market instability, and increased geopolitical tensions.

Shipping rates are already down

Bookings of ocean freight shipments have been down significantly in the weeks since Trump's sweeping tariffs took effect. Though on April 9, the president paused his higher tariffs on goods from many countries for 90 days, his 10% baseline tariff on all countries remains in effect, as does his 145% tariff on imported Chinese goods.

During the first week of April, following Trump's initial April 2 tariff announcement, ocean freight container bookings saw a sharp global decline of nearly 50%, according to data from the digital logistics company, Vizion. Specifically, imports into the US fell 64% compared to the previous week, including imports from China to the US, which dropped 36%. Exports out of the US also dropped 30%, according to Vizion data.

In the following weeks, that nosedive continued in what Vizion has called a "tariff shockwave." For the week of April 14, ocean freight container bookings showed that overall US imports declined 12% week over week, and imports to the US from China declined 22% week over week, Vizion data shows.

"This is a big deal," Bob Ferrari, a supply chain executive and managing director of the Ferrari Consulting and Research Group, told Business Insider of the changes in shipping volume. "It has a lot of ramifications because it's something that the system is not equipped to deal with, and businesses are not equipped to deal with. It has a lot of far-reaching implications."

Front-loaded inventory is running low

Before Trump took office, let alone announced or implemented his tariffs plan, many major companies brought in extra inventory of products to the US in an attempt to mitigate the impact of potential tariffs, multiple supply chain experts told Business Insider. Trump implemented tariffs on countries including Mexico, Canada, and China during his first term and made tariffs a central part of his reelection campaign.

"I would say between one and three months of inventory, they tried to bring in early," Lisa Anderson, a supply chain expert and president of LMA Consulting, said.

But that buffer will run out — and soon.

With the tariffs against China currently at 145%, many companies have been forced to cancel their shipments of new stock and are in a holding pattern trying to wait out Trump's 90-day tariff pause to see what changes come next before placing big orders, Chris Tang, a University of California, Los Angeles professor who's an expert in global supply chain management and the impact of regulatory policies, told Business Insider.

"Right now, they're canceling orders, so the inventory will be running low, " Tang said of businesses. "And once they sell off this inventory, then it's either higher prices or no products."

According to data from supply chain research and analysis firm Sea Intelligence, canceled bookings of container shipments from Asia to both coasts of the US over the next few weeks are increasing drastically, in what the company calls a "quite extreme" scenario.

Multiple supply chain analysts told Business Insider that, in a normal business cycle, June through August is when end-of-year imports, like back-to-school supplies, fall products, and holiday merchandise, arrive in US ports. But the decreased volume of shipments and increased cancellations of shipment bookings that the industry is already seeing indicate that the normal cycle could be significantly disrupted, they said.

"There may be short-term stockouts, particularly in retail," Sean Henry, founder and CEO of the logistics startup Stord, told Business Insider. "And with brands streamlining their product lines, there will be a tighter selection of products in certain categories."

Ryan Petersen, the founder and CEO of Flexport, told Business Insider that if Trump makes a deal to lower the tariffs in time to bring back shipping bookings before inventory completely runs out, there will be minimal impact on consumers.

"But if there's no deal, then yes, there will be big shortages," Petersen said. "Probably worse than anything we've seen in our lifetimes."

Trump told Time on April 22 that he believes seeing tariffs as high as 50% in the next year would be a "total victory."

The 'bullwhip effect'

If the shortages start, further price hikes would be close behind, Ferrari said. Low-margin products that companies don't make a lot of money from — like toys, apparel, holiday items, and home goods — could see shortages and price hikes sooner than others, Ferrari said.

The exact date when Americans could start seeing the effects of those product shortages depends on how much pre-inventory companies have loaded up, Ferrari said, but added that consumers could see some price hikes as early as May or June.

"But once that occurs, then it'll be cascading," he added. Appliances and electronics could see the next round of price hikes and possible shortages starting in July or August, Ferrari said. And despite Trump's exemption of some electronic devices from tariffs, not every component of every device is included in that exemption, so Ferrari expects those to be affected as well.

Higher prices could then decrease consumer buying habits through major spending seasons, exacerbating the negative effects on the economy, Nick Vyas, the founding director of USC Marshall's Randall R. Kendrick Global Supply Chain Institute, told Business Insider.

"Imagine a mom, if her budget for back to school is exposed to 50%, 60% even 70% inflation, they will not be able to expand their budget to absorb that," Vyas said. "She will just say, 'Hey, if I was going to buy 10 things, now I'm only going to buy five things.' So that actually creates less demand, which creates consumer spending degradation. And all of a sudden, you start to see economic activity slow down, and this creates what we call in supply chain the bullwhip effect."

If consumers choose not to go out and spend money due to increased prices, demand decreases, Vyas said. Then, when all the backlogged supply that had been deferred and delayed in hopes that the trade environment would stabilize hits the market, there'll be no one interested in buying it.

"All of a sudden, now you have an imbalance between supply and demand," Vyas said. "And this becomes really the sort of crisis that we dealt with initially in COVID times, which was not pretty, where we had nothing, then too much of something, then nothing, then too much. When you go back and forth like that, the bullwhip is really bad for the market. It's bad for the industry. It's bad for retailers — for everybody."

The potential impacts in the long run

The longer it takes to work out a trade deal with China that lowers tariffs, the worse things could get for everyday Americans four supply chain analysts told Business Insider.

Margaret Kidd, an instructional associate professor of supply chain and logistics technology at the University of Houston, told Business Insider that the volatility of Trump's tariff policy is being compounded by numerous trade negotiations, the ongoing trade war with China, and potential new tariffs on pharmaceuticals, truck imports, and even Chinese ships.

"In the end, American consumers bear the brunt and become the downside partners of President Trump's tariff policies," Kidd said. "His approach could soon earn him the title of 'The President Who Canceled Christmas.'"

A continued trade war also has the potential to hurt US businesses.

Petersen told Business Insider the impact of decreased freight bookings "is already being felt."

"American companies are importing these goods, and if they have to cancel their bookings, their business is really suffering," Petersen said.

That means small and medium-sized businesses could close up shop for good, and hundreds of thousands of jobs could be lost across the retail, shipping, and logistics industries.

The Budget Lab at Yale on April 15 estimated that, if Trump's tariff strategy continues without deals, the US unemployment rate could increase by 0.6 percentage points by the end of 2025, and there could be 770,000 fewer people on payrolls.

And the international repercussions could be even more significant, Vyas and Tang said.

"If not managed properly, this could create a huge risk and drag the global economy into a tailspin," Vyas said. "And it would be a very difficult shock for us to absorb as a society, because the recovery process and the global trade world order could really go into disarray, which is actually contrary to what he's trying to accomplish."

In just a short period of time, Tang said Trump's current trade strategy could erode decades of relationship-building with our existing trade partners like Canada and Mexico. Vyas said that tension could drive our allies to create their own trade routes with China — the exact opposite effect of Trump's goals.

But Vyas said his biggest concern is the potential geopolitical conflict that could arise out of the trade war.

Still, he said he's optimistic that Trump will use the 90-day pause to strike a deal with many countries, including China, to lower their tariff rate and avoid the worst of the possible outcomes.

"Because what is alternative? If we ratchet up the continued pressure on China, we create the huge destruction of the global economy, to the point that it's as bad as the Great Depression of 1928 or something even bigger than that," Vyas said. "So then, when you think from that standpoint, I would say, why not be optimistic, because the alternatives are not that pretty."

• CEOs mentioned Donald Trump in 88 earnings calls in the past 30 days, up from 5 in the same period last year.
• Trump's tariffs on imports have driven increased CEO discussions in earnings calls.
• CEOs frequently mention tariffs, with 569 instances in 30 days, up from 58 last year.

One quarter into Donald Trump's second term and executives just can't stop saying his name.

The number of earnings calls in which CEOs said "Donald Trump" or "Trump" over the past 30 days has spiked since the same period last year, according to Business Insider's review of earnings call transcripts collected by AlphaSense.

Trump's name was said by CEOs in 88 earnings calls over the past 30 days compared to only 5 times in the same period last year.

The CEO of home goods store Restoration Hardware, Gary Friedman, mentioned Trump's name four times in the company's earnings call on April 2.

The conversation around Trump has largely been propelled by the tariffs he's levied on goods imported into the country. For home goods companies like RH, these tariffs have sent stock prices downhill. "Oh sh—t," Friedman said on the call right after he heard that the company's stock had plunged 26% in light of Trump's sweeping "Liberation Day" tariffs which imposed duties on 180 countries.

Instances where CEOs have singled out the word tariffs have exploded since last year. CEOs called out tariffs in 569 earnings calls over the past 30 days compared to just 58 instances last year.

On Thursday's earnings calls for the first quarter of the year, Whirlpool CEO Marc Bitzer mentioned "tariffs" 50 times. Bitzer presented them as positive news for the company.

"The tariffs will finally help create a level playing field for Whirlpool," he said in the call.

Several other companies repeated the word tariffs like a mantra during calls this week. The game and toy company Hasbro referenced tariffs 35 times during its call on Thursday. Consumer goods company Procter & Gamble mentioned them 26 times.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon mentioned tariffs five times on the firm's earnings call on April 11. Dimon, who told people fretting about tariffs to "get over it" in January, swung to the other side in his latest letter to shareholders this month, noting that tariffs will "slow down growth."

During the company's earnings call he walked his January comments back further. "I wish I hadn't said it. I was specifically referring tariffs relating to protecting national security," he said. Then, he conceded that "you may need tariffs to help fix some of the problems related to national security."

EV maker Tesla called out tariffs 25 times. Tesla CEO Elon Musk — who is one of Trump's advisors — deflected responsibility.

"I just want to emphasize that the tariff decision is entirely up to the President of the United States," Musk said in the company's earnings call on Tuesday. "I will weigh in with my advice with the President, which if he will listen to my advice but then it's up to him, of course, to make his decision."

Other popular words that have surfaced lately are "mitigate." It was said by CEOs on 209 occasions in the last 30 days compared to 131 times last year.

The word "uncertainty" has also been popular. CEOs used it in 486 instances compared to 284 last year.

• Kira Learning, chaired by Andrew Ng, launches AI agents to assist teachers in the classroom.
• The platform aims to transform learning by making it easier to customize for students.
• "AI is helping redefine what it means to be a great teacher," Ng told BI.

The classroom is getting a tech upgrade with AI-powered teaching assistants.

Kira Learning, an edtech startup chaired by Google Brain founder, Stanford professor, and AI researcher Andrew Ng has unveiled a new platform that brings AI agents to the classroom.

Kira's AI agents will carry out the repetitive tasks that often consume hours of teachers' time. They can help with grading, lesson planning, and analyzing classroom discussions to provide insights on which students are succeeding and which students are struggling. The platform also offers one-on-one tutoring for students.

The company says its goal is to free teachers up to focus on shaping the learning process — as opposed to just conveying information.

As AI becomes more integrated into classrooms, Ng sees this as part of broader transformation of teachers' roles.

"AI is helping redefine what it means to be a great teacher," he told Business Insider by email. "Traditionally, we've expected teachers to be subject matter experts. But with the workforce changing so rapidly and schools introducing new subjects to prepare students for a rapidly evolving world, what happens when a teacher is asked to teach something entirely new, say, computer science, without years of experience in that field?"

Kira has done this dance before. It launched in 2021 with the aim of helping teachers without a background in computer science teach the subject effectively. At the time, several states were ramping up legislation around making computer science a requirement to graduate from high school.

"Computer science started being introduced into high schools in a way that existed at parity with subjects like English and biology and history," Andrea Pasinetti, cofounder and CEO of Kira told BI. "Between legislation being passed and it becoming a requirement for students, there was often a window of one, at most two years, and that required training."

To help teachers quickly get up to speed, Kira developed AI tutors to help teachers master the subjects. It also developed AI teaching assistants to help them in the classroom. In 2023, it partnered with the state of Tennessee — an early adopter of this legislation — to roll out the platform to all public middle schools and high schools in the state. Its since been adopted in hundreds of school districts in states across the country.

Now, the company is expanding its platform to include all subjects. Its new suite of AI agents will help fulfill the company's ultimate goal of personalizing the learning process — one that Pasinetti said is "almost impossible" today, given how understaffed schools are.

Subverting AI to make learning better

Ng has been at the forefront of AI and education. He's launched ed-tech companies like Coursera, and DeepLearning.AI — where his latest course "Vibe Coding 101" is available. In an interview with Forbes in 2014, he said that AI has the "potential to free up humanity from a lot of the mental drudgery."

More than a decade later that notion has taken hold of the corporate world where workers are using AI to eliminate rote tasks like writing emails, analyzing data, and synthesizing research. However, what constitutes "mental drudgery" in the realm of education is less clear, especially as educators — and students — worry that the technology will make skills stagnate.

Kira, in some sense, is subverting the building blocks of generative AI to cut out the busywork and enhance the learning process.

The technology underlying AI is a "fundamentally discursive technology," Pasinetti said. While the methodical nature can help students work through material through the Socratic method — enabling a back-and-forth dialogue — the issue is that it's also designed to deliver answers as quickly as possible, Pasinetti said. Several of the most popular generative AI chatbots are also in a race against Google to become the world's default search engine.

Kira's aim is to introduce "friction" into students' conversations with AI at the right stages so that they actually have a productive struggle and learn through the experience, Pasinetti explained.

In practice, that means Kira's platform can incrementally guide a student through a tough problem by calibrating itself to students' understanding of the subject.

Kira's agents use these insights to inform teachers about student capabilities by building knowledge maps to determine what students know and don't know across a subject.

Schools are getting tech-savvy

Kira's business model banks on classrooms' growing embrace of not only AI and data, but tech-enabled learning.

In recent years, schools have begun implementing "adaptive learning technology" which can collect and leverage data on students' performance, progress, and learning style to tailor the learning experience. This technology aims to increase equity across the classroom and help teachers and students use time more effectively.

That coincides with the widespread adoption of learning management systems during the pandemic. These are software programs that help educators design and manage online learning like Blackboard, Moodle, or TalentLMS. They surged in popularity in 2020 and 2021, according to EducationWeek.

According to EdWeek's survey of 1,000 school district leaders, principals, and teachers conducted in 2022, only 6% of educators said their school district didn't use an LMS. Schools can either integrate Kira into their existing LMS or use the platform as a standalone LMS.

Pasinetti said that by adopting Kira, schools can cut down on at least four to five pieces of software — often the most expensive ones.

Kira's leaders see AI overhauling relationship between students, teachers, and technology — which could lead to more meaningful changes down the road.

"This is a big shift that's happening, and especially if you don't have a subject matter expertise, you're kind of learning alongside your student," said Jagriti Agrawal, Kira's cofounder and vice president of artificial intelligence. "I think that that mindset could be a helpful one."

• AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a still-theoretical AI that can reason like humans.
• Top researchers agree the leap to AGI is close but differ on just how close.
• Some say we'll see AGI in as little as two years. Others say we're still decades away.

One of the oft-stated goals of the current AI arms race is to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

AGI is a still-hypothetical form of machine intelligence that can solve human tasks through methods that aren't constrained to its training.

The question of when we'll reach it is debated among many of the top names in the field. Here's a closer look at how far we are from AGI, according to the people closest to it.

Demis Hassabis

AGI will arrive "in the next five to ten years," Demis Hassabis — the CEO of Google DeepMind and a recently minted Nobel laureate — said on the April 20 episode of 60 Minutes. By 2030, "we'll have a system that really understands everything around you in very nuanced and deep ways and kind of embedded in your everyday life," he added.

The show's host, Scott Pelley, then posed the question: Has an AI engine ever asked a question that was unanticipated? To which Hassabis responded, "Not so far that I've experienced. I think that's getting at the idea of what's still missing from these systems. They still can't really yet go beyond asking a new, novel question. Or a new, novel conjecture. Or coming up with a new hypothesis that has not been thought of before."

AI systems don't yet have curiosity, and they are lacking in imagination and intuition, he said: "In the next maybe five to ten years, I think we'll have systems that are capable of not only solving a important problem or conjecture in science, but coming up with it in the first place."

Sam Altman

The CEO of OpenAI believes that we're already making major progress toward AGI. On the Y Combinator podcast, he said one of the things he's most excited about in 2025 is the arrival of AGI.

Miles Brundage

OpenAI's former head of AGI readiness believes we'll see some form of AGI manifest in the next few years. Brundage, who left OpenAI in August, said that in the next few years, the AI industry will develop "systems that can basically do anything a person can do remotely on a computer." That includes operating the mouse and keyboard or even looking like a "human in a video chat."

Dario Amodei

Dario Amodei, CEO of OpenAI's competitor Anthropic, believes we will see some form of AGI by 2026. In an essay he posted to the company's website in October, he described AGI, which he prefers to call "powerful AI," as smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across many fields, multimodal, independent, fast, replicable, cooperative, and free of a physical embodiment. In short, he believes it'll be akin to "a country of geniuses in a data center."

Geoffrey Hinton

AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton believes that we might see AI that's smarter than humans in as little as five years.

In a post on X last year, he wrote, "I now predict 5 to 20 years but without much confidence. We live in very uncertain times."

Andrew Ng

Leading AI researcher Andrew Ng is a little more conservative in his estimates about AGI. He's described it as a form of intelligence that can do "any intellectual tasks that a human can," whether that's driving a car, flying a plane, or writing a Ph.D. thesis.

And he's not convinced we'll get there soon. "I hope we get there in our lifetime, but I'm not sure," he said, adding that people should be skeptical of companies that claim AGI is imminent.

Richard Socher

Richard Socher, a former Salesforce executive who is now the CEO of AI-powered search engine You.com, says there are two ways to define AGI. "There's a simple economic one, which is 80% of the jobs will be automated with AI, and then we can call it AGI," he previously told Business Insider. He predicted we'll get there in three to five years.

When you expand the definition of AGI to a form of intelligence that can "learn like humans" and "visually have the same motor intelligence, and visual intelligence, language intelligence, and logical intelligence as some of the most logical people," then the timeline could range from as little as 10 years to as much as 200 years, he said.

Yann LeCun

Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, doesn't believe we'll see AGI anytime soon.

At the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos in January, LeCun said AGI "is not around the corner" and it "will take years, if not decades" before it comes to fruition.

And LeCun says we shouldn't expect it to arrive as a single event.

On an episode of Lex Fridman's podcast in March, he said, "The idea somehow which, you know, is popularized by science fiction and Hollywood that, you know, somehow somebody is going to discover the secret, the secret to AGI, or human-level AI, or AMI, whatever you want to call it. And then, you know, turn on a machine, and then we have AGI. That's just not going to happen. It's not going to be an event. It's going to be gradual progress."

• SplxAI raised $7 million to enhance AI security, offering tools like Agentic Radar for protection.
• The company tests for security vulnerabilities and edits system prompts to be safer.
• Its CEO believes GenAI gives cyber attackers an edge, and companies must vet technology earlier.

Companies are racing to adopt AI in pursuit of productivity and profits, but the last thing anyone wants is a chatbot going off the rails.

AI systems are vulnerable to all kinds of new threats, from data poisoning to adversarial attacks. In a World Economic Forum survey of over 200 business leaders in 2023, more than half said generative AI would give cyber attackers an overall advantage in the coming two years, while just under 9% said that advantage would go to the defenders.

It's now two years later, and it seems the majority of those business leaders were right: AI has given cyber attackers the upper hand. In a recent Accenture survey of 600 bank cybersecurity executives, four in five said generative AI is helping hackers faster than banks can keep up.

As more companies worldwide adopt AI, Croatian security startup SplxAI wants to redefine how they test AI systems for vulnerabilities by preemptively targeting threats. The company recently raised $7 million in a seed round led by Launchhub Ventures, with participation from venture firms Rain Capital, Runtime Ventures, Inovo, DNV Ventures, and South Central Ventures.

One way companies do this now is through red-teaming, which involves simulating adversarial attacks on an AI system. But red-teaming can often take a few weeks or even months, and companies are racing to vet tools before they deploy them, SplxAI's CEO Kristian Kamber told BI. The company takes an offensive approach by adjusting system prompts — guidelines that shape how an AI model responds to user queries — reducing the need for additional defensive guardrails later.

Before clients connect to SplxAI's platform, the company sends them a questionnaire to understand what risk means to them. They ask questions like, "Are there any questions your chatbot should not answer?" or "Which parts of the system prompt are confidential?"

Elin.AI, for example, a chatbot geared toward Gen Z, said it "needs to do swearing because it needs to speak the language of the kids," Kamber said.

Once SplxAI customizes its approach, it runs a series of attacks. It can run over 2,000 attacks and 17 scans in less than an hour. These include prompt injection attacks, in which AI systems are fed malicious prompts to check for profanity, misinformation, or data poisoning. It runs tests to check for bias, harmful content, or intentional misuse.

Kamber said the tests have revealed a wealth of bias, misinformation, and vulnerabilities in the technology companies use.

SplxAI ran tests on a popular workplace productivity tool that revealed it could let data leak between colleagues. Its tests on a healthcare company that operates chatbots at pharmacies revealed that the bots hallucinated when giving medical instructions. They told patients to take pills at the wrong times or offered incorrect instructions on how to use injection needles. It uncovered gender bias in a chatbot that provided career advice to students. The bot told young women to pursue careers as secretaries and young men to pursue careers as business managers.

Based on its tests, SplxAI generates a report that lists the vulnerabilities of a system and its suggestions for fixing them. But the company goes a step further by changing system prompts. Kamber calls it "hardening" and said it's the biggest driver of the company's business. "We're doing a huge piece of remediation because otherwise no one will buy the platform if it's just testing and offensive security suggestions," Kamber said.

An Arabic chatbot popular in the Middle East and Africa approached SplxAI with a request to ensure the chatbot didn't speak negatively about Abu Dhabi's royal family and other sensitive topics in the region. "We hardened the system prompt that much that you cannot even ask suggestive questions," Kamber said.

Companies are these days preoccupied with shoring up not just one, but multiple agents, chatbots, or applications, as they automate complex tasks. After being approached by several Fortune 100 CEOs about red-teaming this type of work, SplxAI unveiled Agentic Radar — an open-source tool for mapping vulnerabilities in operations with multiple agents.

Kamber said he's shocked by how quickly the world has woken up to the dangers of agentic AI. "Last year, no one was really understanding why AI red-teaming was needed. Now everyone is running to our door."

Take a look at their 12-slide pitch deck.