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Motorola Solutions is a Chicago-based provider of technology and communications solutions focused on public safety and enterprise security. It has about 21,000 employees worldwide.
The National Emergency Number Association estimates that 240 million 911 calls are made in the US each year. But fragmented emergency-response systems across various agencies and organizations can lead to dangerous delays.
"You hope to never call 911, but when you do, it needs to work," Jehan Wickramasuriya, the corporate vice president of AI and platforms at Motorola Solutions, told Business Insider.
He added that call takers' jobs can be demanding and unpredictable, and they're often under intense pressure. "There can be a high level of stress if there's an active shooter or domestic disturbance," he said. "They're trying to keep a caller calm and simultaneously find out if they need medical help." Meanwhile, he said, callers may be "speaking so fast that it's difficult to understand and retain everything they say."
Motorola Solutions
Pinpointing a caller's location adds a layer of complexity. Mobile 911 calls are typically routed based on cell-tower locations rather than the caller's actual position. This requires calls to be redirected, adding several seconds to response times.
"At the end of the day it's a data problem," Wickramasuriya said, "because a lot of information needs to get transmitted in each call."
Motorola Solutions is using AI to consolidate this data in a single platform.
The company structures its AI research team around specialized AI domains, such as computer vision and speech and audio processing, rather than individual product lines.
Wickramasuriya said the core AI team consisted of about 50 scientists, developers, and engineers who collaborate closely with hundreds of product managers, designers, and user-experience specialists.
Motorola Solutions also works with various cloud and technology vendors on its AI-enabled products and services.
In June, Motorola Solutions launched Vesta NXT, software designed to help 911 call handlers manage emergency calls. It brings data from various public-safety systems onto one platform, helping the handlers gather and summarize information.
The tool uses AI to surface details including the caller's location and, for callers who have opted to share their medical profile from their phone, any underlying health conditions. It can also suggest the best entrance to a building. "That's important information for first responders," Wickramasuriya said.
The software has translation and transcription capabilities, helping English speakers and non-English speakers communicate. AI also helps call handlers manage nonemergency calls β by streamlining the reporting of issues like abandoned cars or stolen property, call handlers can focus more on critical emergencies.
Most important, AI can improve the human element of emergency response. "AI is working in the background to help the call taker attend to the person on the other end of the line," Wickramasuriya said.
Motorola Solutions says roughly 60% of 911 call centers in the US use its call-handling software. It's transitioning existing Vesta 911 users to its new system with the AI features.
The company says these AI tools are already translating millions of minutes of audio each month and have helped lighten emergency-call handlers' workloads partly by resolving nonemergency calls and connecting callers to other resources.
Lee County is the first Public Safety Answering Point, which is a call center that handles emergency calls and coordinates responses, to use the VESTA NXT. Motorola Solutions said administrators there found the AI-generated searchable text transcripts and real-time summaries of 911 calls that call handlers can share with dispatchers and first responders helped save time and alleviate stress for call handlers.
Wickramasuriya said the company was focused on improving Vesta NXT.
He said the goal was to "expand the usefulness" of the software by integrating it more deeply into existing workflows, including by developing features that connect first responders directly with dispatchers and call takers.
Another aim, he said, is to help understaffed 911 call centers "understand their staffing needs and identify which call takers are handling high-stress situations and address stress and fatigue among call handlers."
The U.K. government is consulting on an opt-out copyright regime for AI training that would require rights holders to take active steps if they donβt want their intellectual property to become free AI training fodder. The rise of generative AI models that are trained on vast quantities of data has brought intellectual property concerns to [β¦]
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Databricks, the data analytics platform, has raised $10 billion in a funding round that values the company at $62 billion (up from $43 billion). Backers include Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, GIC, and Iconiq Growth. The round is one of the largest venture rounds in history, and will drive future mergers and acquisitions, stock [β¦]
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CEOs of American startups are seeing their salaries drop as the venture capital industry's cash crunch lingers.
Kruze Consulting, which provides accounting services to early-stage, VC-backed companies, released a study showing that the average seed-stage founder who is also a startup CEO makes $132,000 a year. This is down from $142,000 in Kruze's 2023 study.
The consultancy recently analyzed 450 of its seed-stage startup clients' payroll records to determine the average base salary for different jobs at early-stage companies. Kruze's study says that employee compensation accounts for around 75% of the total operating costs for its startup clients.
In addition to the base salaries analyzed by Kruze, equity is an important part of a startup employee's total compensation that can mean a financial windfall if a company is successful. The salaries in Kruze's study do not include equity-based compensation.
Kruze identified three buckets where seed-stage startups were likely to spend more money on talent: founders, early employees, and consultants. The study provided more detailed information on founder and early employee pay while noting that the average early-stage startup in its review spends 12.5% of its operating costs on consultancies.
Kruze also analyzed the one-time costs associated with hiring, such as equipment and training.
The average seed-stage founder is likely to be making less than what other people on the leadership team are making. A technical co-founder acting as the startup's chief technology officer earns, on average, a slightly higher salary, at $134,000.
The chief operating officer and chief product officer make $135,000 and $149,000 per year, respectively.
The salary difference accounts for the greater technical expertise the CTO, COO, and CPO are likely bringing to the table, the Kruze study found.
Founder salary increases to an average of $183,000 when a startup closes its Series A funding round and bumps up to an average of $218,000 when a startup hits its Series B, according to Kruze's data.
Kruze's data showed that after getting funding, most many-stage startups begin by hiring more engineers, followed by designers, product managers, salespeople, and marketers.
Engineering compensation can vary greatly, depending on a person's technical expertise and experience with AI and machine learning and where in the country they're based. According to Kruze's analysis of its early-stage startup payrolls, engineers can make anywhere between $65,000 and $235,000 annually.
| San Francisco Market | Other Major Tech Hubs (e.g., Austin) | |
| Entry Level | $75,000 - $105,000 | $65,000 - $95,000 |
| Mid-level | $100,000 - $145,000 | $90,000 - $130,000 |
| Senior | $140,000 - $185,000 | $125,000 - $162,000 |
| Very senior | $180,000 - $235,000 | $160,000 - $210,000 |
Startups usually start hiring sales teams after they achieve early product-market fit, the Kruze study found. Their total compensation typically includes a base salary plus commission, the latter of which could double base salary β which, depending on seniority and location, could be anywhere from $45,000 to $150,000.
| San Francisco Market | Other Major Tech Hubs (e.g., Austin) | |
| Entry Level | $50,000 - $80,000 | $45,000 - $72,000 |
| Mid-level | $80,000 - $110,000 | $70,000 - $100,000 |
| Senior | $110,000 - $135,000 | $95,000 - $120,000 |
| Very senior | $120,000 - $150,000 | $110,000 - $135,000 |
Product and design teams can include a wide range of employees, some of whom are skilled engineers with experience working in Big Tech. Depending on seniority, job function, and location, Kruze's data showed that product team members could make anywhere from $70,000 to $185,000.
| San Francisco Market | Other Major Tech Hubs (e.g., Austin) | |
| Product | $130,000 - $185,000 | $110,000 - $175,000 |
| Junior Designer | $80,000 - $150,000 | $70,000 - $130,000 |
| Senior Designer | $100,000 - $172,000 | $99,000 - $155,000 |
Startups take varying approaches to building out their marketing and operations teams, with some hiring talent early on and others waiting until later in the company life cycle to bring people on. The Kruze study found that this contributed to a wide salary band for this group of employees β from $39,000 annually for a junior employee to as much as $325,000 for the top role.
| San Francisco Market | Other Major Tech Hubs (e.g., Austin) | |
| Head of Marketing | $200,000 - $325,000 | $150,000 - $270,000 |
| Mid Level Marketing | $100,000 - $175,000 | $80,000 - $145,000 |
| Customer Support | $65,000 - $100,000 | $60,000 - $94,000 |
| Assistant | $50,000 - $150,000 | $39,000 - $75,000 |
While payroll is a huge part of a startup's operating expense, salary isn't the only line item associated with hiring and retaining talent. The Kruze study found that early-stage startups spent an additional 10% of base compensation per employee on payroll taxes and required benefits, including unemployment, workers' compensation, and federal, state, and local payroll taxes.
Additionally, early-stage startups add another 15-25% of base compensation per employee on optional benefits, namely health insurance, in addition to 401K contributions, paid time off, and life insurance.
Equipment such as laptops and work stations cost startups between $2,500 and $3,000 per employee, Kruze's data found. Startups are also paying for software licenses, onboarding and training. Based on its analysis, Kruze recommends that startups looking to hire should budget between 25-35% higher than the base salary to account for additional costs, noting that certain cities and states might be more expensive than others.
Photobucket was sued Wednesday after a recent privacy policy update revealed plans to sell users' photosβincluding biometric identifiers like face and iris scansβto companies training generative AI models.
The proposed class action seeks to stop Photobucket from selling users' data without first obtaining written consent, alleging that Photobucket either intentionally or negligently failed to comply with strict privacy laws in states like Illinois, New York, and California by claiming it can't reliably determine users' geolocation.
Two separate classes could be protected by the litigation. The first includes anyone who ever uploaded a photo between 2003βwhen Photobucket was foundedβand May 1, 2024. Another potentially even larger class includes any non-users depicted in photographs uploaded to Photobucket, whose biometric data has also allegedly been sold without consent.
Β© PM Images | Stone
With AI gaining mainstream adoption, most companies are exploring generative AI applications powered by operational data, but delivering reliable and accurate results presents significant challenges. Todayβs databases are often not optimized for AI, leading to issues like hallucinations, low accuracy, [β¦]
The post Cloud database startup SkySQL raises $6.6M in funding to bring conversational AI to databases first appeared on Tech Startups.
A location-tracking company that sells its services to police departments is apparently using addresses and coordinates of doctors' and lawyers' offices and other types of locations to help cops compile lists of places visited by suspects, according to a 404 Media report published today.
Fog Data Science, which says it "harness[es] the power of data to safeguard national security and provide law enforcement with actionable intelligence," has a "Project Intake Form" that asks police for locations where potential suspects and their mobile devices might be found. The form, obtained by 404 Media, instructs police officers to list locations of friends' and families' houses, associates' homes and offices, and the offices of a person's doctor or lawyer.
Fog Data has a trove of location data derived from smartphones' geolocation signals, which would already include doctors' offices and many other types of locations even before police ask for information on a specific person. Details provided by police on the intake form seem likely to help Fog Data conduct more effective searches of its database to find out when suspects visited particular places. The form also asks police to identify the person of interest's name and/or known aliases and their "link to criminal activity."
Β© Getty Images | Vadym Ivanchenko
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At a Business Insider roundtable in November, Neeraj Verma, the head of applied AI at Nice, argued that generative AI "makes a good developer better and a worse developer worse."
He added that some companies expect employees to be able to use AI to create a webpage or HTML file and simply copy and paste solutions into their code. "Right now," he said, "they're expecting that everybody's a developer."
During the virtual event, software developers from companies such as Meta, Slack, Amazon, Slalom, and more discussed how AI influenced their roles and career paths.
They said that while AI could help with tasks like writing routine code and translating ideas between programming languages, foundational coding skills are necessary to use the AI tools effectively. Communicating these realities to nontech stakeholders is a primary challenge for many software developers.
Coding is just one part of a developer's job. As AI adoption surges, testing and quality assurance may become more important for verifying the accuracy of AI-generated work. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the number of software developers, quality-assurance analysts, and testers will grow by 17% in the next decade.
Expectations for productivity can overshadow concerns about AI ethics and security.
"Interacting with ChatGPT or Cloud AI is so easy and natural that it can be surprising how hard it is to control AI behavior," Igor Ostrovsky, a cofounder of Augment, said during the roundtable. "It is actually very difficult to, and there's a lot of risk in, trying to get AI to behave in a way that consistently gives you a delightful user experience that people expect."
Companies have faced some of these issues in recent AI launches. Microsoft's Copilot was found to have problems with oversharing and data security, though the company created internal programs to address the risk. Tech giants are investing billions of dollars in AI technology β Microsoft alone plans to spend over $100 billion on graphics processing units and data centers to power AI by 2027 β but not as much in AI governance, ethics, and risk analysis.
For many developers, managing stakeholders' expectations β communicating the limits, risks, and overlooked aspects of the technology β is a challenging yet crucial part of the job.
Kesha Williams, the head of enterprise architecture and engineering at Slalom, said in the roundtable that one way to bridge this conversation with stakeholders is to outline specific use cases for AI. Focusing on the technology's applications could highlight potential pitfalls while keeping an eye on the big picture.
"Good developers understand how to write good code and how good code integrates into projects," Verma said. "ChatGPT is just another tool to help write some of the code that fits into the project."
Ostrovsky predicted that the ways employees engage with AI would change over the years. In the age of rapidly evolving technology, he said, developers will need to have a "desire to adapt and learn and have the ability to solve hard problems."
Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/BI
Spotify Wrapped arrived on Wednesday, packaged in its usual neon, Instagram-ready glory.
The annual release dominates social-media posts for a day, but beneath the colorful cards (designed to be bespoke but distributed en masse), it's Spotify's brag about the amount of data the company has collected on you, mirrored back in a way that's meant to make surveillance sexy, silly, and shareable.
In recent Decembers, the wrap-ification of our data has spread beyond Spotify. Apple Music, Spotify's main competitor, now has a similar feature called Replay, unveiling this year's version on Tuesday. Starbucks has sent out emails telling people about their favorite beverages and number of store visits, shocking some with exactly how many dozens of Frappuccinos they bought. Duolingo kicked off the Wrapped season earlier this week, showing people how many mistakes they made while trying to learn a new language. The British supermarket chain Tesco has sent Clubcard members a review of what they bought in recent years, called Unpacked. And on Tuesday, Tinder hosted a Year in Swipe party, where it revealed the top trends in online dating the app gleaned from its broad swath of 50 million monthly users, which included people getting specific about what kind of person they're looking for or putting a hand emoji in their bios to indicate they're searching for real connections.
All this is getting weird. The type of lattes we drink and the music we listen to are things we fundamentally know about ourselves. The most common names of men and women on Tinder (Alexes and Daniels dominated among men, Marias and Lauras women) tell us nothing about how to find love. But these year-in-review trends still catch avid attention and, in turn, provide free advertising for companies when they're reshared. About an hour after Spotify unveiled this year's Wrapped, its market cap reached $100 billion for the first time. Spotify did not respond to requests for comment.
"People are so excited about seeing data collected from them and then being shown back to them in a way that feels meaningful and relatable," Taylor Annabell, a researcher with Utrecht University who has studied the Wrapped phenomenon, said. "Wrapped taps into this belief we have that data is meaningful and that we want to see it because it helps us understand ourselves."
Wrapped 2024 included the usual unveiling of top songs and artists, but Spotify has added a "Wrapped AI podcast," which features two voicebot hosts chatting through your listening habits without really saying much about the songs, in particular. There was also a section picking apart how listening styles changed over different months of the year. For me, that meant going from "van life folkie indie" to "mallgoth permanent wave punk," mildly embarrassing phrases that might describe my musical tastes from a distance but tell me little new about myself.
Wrapped content has proven so effective on social media that people are making up new categories themselves, packaging parts of their private lives not captured by apps.
Of course, Spotify can't capture everything about your tastes β maybe you played a vinyl record on repeat or shared a streaming account with someone in your family. ("It's not me who can't stop listening to Chumbawamba. It's my cousin, I swear!") Maybe you opted for a mysterious approach and kept your Tinder bio short and sweet.
But where data is lacking, some have set out to create it themselves. Wrapped content has proved so effective and viral on social media that people have taken to making up new categories, packaged parts of their lives not captured by apps, and turned it over to their followers. Here, at least, these people get to curate their experiences and post them as they wish. Last December and already this week, some people took to TikTok to talk through how many first dates they went on during the course of a year, using cute and colorful slideshows to walk their users through their year of bad dates, situationships, and ghosting. A third-party project called Vantezzen takes TikTok data and generates a Wrapped-like analysis for those who want to know how many minutes they spent doom scrolling.
All this comes as people have largely thrown up their hands and given in to sharing their data with their apps. Companies have "gotten us to move past just accepting that they are spying on us to celebrating it," said Evan Greer, the director of the digital-rights advocacy group Fight for the Future and a vocal opponent of Spotify who released an album called "Spotify Is Surveillance" in 2021. "That's the shift we're seeing with this explosion of these types of year-end Wrapped viral gimmicks," Greer added. "They're actually about hypernormalizing the fact that the online services that we use know so very much about us."
Tinder's year in review looked at data from profiles in the US and globally and its own survey results, determining the most popular love languages and zodiac signs, the fastest-growing words mentioned in bios (freak, pickleball, and finance all soared this year), and how people like to communicate (ironically, "better in person" won out over the messaging app). It also created an interactive vision-board feature for people to set intentions for their 2025 dating plans. The company's in-person Year in Swipe party was held in a moody Manhattan bar, where attendees could make charm bracelets or have a tarot-card reading, and each sported a button designed to correspond with their dating vibe, like a black cat or delusional. Tinder did not respond to a request for comment about whether people could opt out of being used in the aggregate data.
But Spotify, in particular, wants to tell its users more about themselves throughout the year. In September 2023, the company began making "daylists," or curated playlists released multiple times throughout the day. While they don't come with the sharable, flashy cards to post on Instagram, they're given catchy names that hint at something about you, changing several times a day. Just this week, Spotify has dubbed me a "Laurel Canyon hippie" and crafted a vibe for a "yearning poetry Tuesday afternoon."
The daylists feel like Spotify's attempt to take the Wrapped success "to the next level," said Nina Vindum Rasmussen, a fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science who worked on the Spotify research with Annabell. It's "data fiction that accompanies people throughout the day," she said, adding: "What does it mean for them to have this mirror constantly shoved in their face?"
Most of us have gotten comfortable with β or at least resigned to β the fact that Big Tech is watching our every move. Wrapped season is a shiny reminder of all we've done, seemingly in private, on our phones. But don't count on your friends to stop sharing their elite spot as a 0.05% top listener of Taylor Swift anytime soon.
Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
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Federal subsidies meant to make health insurance more affordable for low- and middle-income Americans could be on the chopping block when Donald Trump returns to the White House.
President Joe Biden's enhanced version of the Affordable Care Act subsidies β which provide lower premiums and reduced out-of-pocket costs for lower-earning Americans who don't get health insurance subsidized by their employer or a government program like Medicaid β are set to expire at the end of 2025. At some point next year, Trump and a Republican-led Congress will decide whether to renew or end the subsidies.
Ending the subsidies would save the government money but restrict healthcare options for the people and families who rely on them. If the subsidies are allowed to expire, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that nearly 4 million people would drop coverage in 2026.Β
The president-elect has been inconsistent with his support for the Affordable Care Act and has previously proposed cuts to healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid. The Trump transition team did not respond to BI's inquiry about ACA subsidies but previously shared a statement that Trump would "protect Medicare" as president.
Trump has not publicly said whether he plans to let the enhanced ACA subsidies expire, but he has made cost-cutting a cornerstone of his second-term promises.
The Affordable Care Act β also known as Obamacare β was passed in 2010. The law introduced the ACA marketplaces, which were meant to make health insurance more affordable for lower-earning people whose incomes would be too high to qualify for Medicare and Medicaid. It also requires insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions, like diabetes and heart disease.
Biden's expansion increased the financial assistance for people already on ACA plans and lifted the income eligibility cap for those benefits. Some middle-class families had previously been priced out of health insurance.
Since 2020 β the year before the subsidies went into effect β the number of people with ACA marketplace coverage has grown by 88%, to 21.4 million people from 11.4 million, per KFF.
Gary Young, the director of Northeastern University's Center for Health Policy and Healthcare Research, told Business Insider that the ACA subsidy debate underlines a growing problem: America's healthcare costs are ballooning, and it's taking a toll on people's finances and federal budgets.
"We are having this debate at the same time that we are beginning to see healthcare costs ramp up," Young said.
Ending subsidies would be cheaper for the government and taxpayers. Some Republicans like Vice President-elect JD Vance have said they want to inject needed competition into the health insurance marketplace. Young said a more robust marketplace could lead to more diverse insurance plans being available, allowing people to choose coverage that best fits their needs without the government footing the bill.
"There's concerns about whether the subsidies maybe went too far," Young said. "They're providing people with financial resources to purchase more extensive insurance than they otherwise would purchase, and it's not necessarily an efficient way of using federal resources."
Still, Young said letting the ACA subsidies expire would probably make healthcare more expensive for millions of people. Nearly all Americans on ACA plans would pay higher premiums, he said. KFF reported that low-income people would see the steepest increase in healthcare costs relative to their income.
Any move by Trump to change ACA policies would need congressional approval. Because insurers have to submit their plan proposals next summer for the 2026 enrollment period, Trump will probably need to decide early in his term whether to extend the enhanced ACA subsidy.
The US government spent $6.75 trillion total in fiscal year 2024, which resulted in a national deficit. At $912 billion, the Department of Treasury reported that healthcare β programs like Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more β is a top government expenditure behind Social Security. Medicare costs add another $874 billion. If the enhanced ACA subsidies were to become permanent, the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation estimate that it would cost $335 billion over the next 10 years.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy were tapped by Trump to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency. The pair plans to propose cuts for the government's most costly programs, but it's not yet clear if that will include healthcare programs.
Trump's nominees for the top healthcare positions are Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading the Department of Health and Human Services and Dr. Mehmet Oz leading the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Neither Kennedy nor Oz has outlined a specific plan for affordable healthcare in 2025, and neither responded to a request for comment.
In an opinion piece published in 2020 on Forbes, Oz said he supports a universal healthcare plan, but the stance is likely to be at odds with the Trump administration's cost-cutting agenda.
Are you doing anything to prepare your finances or healthcare plan for Trump's second term? If so, please reach out to this reporter at [email protected].
Correction: December 2, 2024 β An earlier version of this story misstated who is eligible for the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies. The subsidies apply mostly to people who purchase health insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. Some Medicare recipients are also eligible, but not Medicaid recipients.
Anthropic is proposing a new standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data resides. Called the Model Context Protocol, or MCP for short, Anthropic says the standard, which it open sourced today, could help AI models produce better, more relevant responses to queries. MCP lets models β any models, not just Anthropicβs β [β¦]
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Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to acquire Datavolo, a data pipeline management company, for an undisclosed sum. Snowflake unveiled the deal at the close of the market bell on Wednesday, when it also announced its Q3 2025 earnings. The purchase hasnβt yet closed, and itβs subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted in a release. [β¦]
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