• Startups like Equatic and Climeworks develop ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
• Carbon removal helps businesses meet ESG goals and offset emissions through a carbon credits system.
• This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.

Out on a barge in Los Angeles, a team of engineers is hard at work tweaking the designs of a collection of machines with multiple tubes attached to tanks filled with air and different minerals.

The team works for a startup called Equatic, which uses a process called sea electrolysis to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Seawater runs through an electrolyzer, which separates the water into an acid and a base. Rock minerals neutralize the acid, and the base mixes with CO2 from the atmosphere. This results in carbonates that can safely return to the ocean.

Carbon removal technologies, like those developed by Equatic, can transform businesses by helping them reduce their legacy carbon footprint. For many companies with environmental, social, and governance goals, investing in carbon removal through the purchase of carbon credits helps them offset their emissions and get closer to their goal of being "net zero." For rapidly developing industries like artificial intelligence that massively consume energy, implementing carbon removal could help offset emissions in the long term.

The idea of Equatic emerged in the research labs at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a team led by its cofounder Gaurav Sant, a sustainability professor at the school.

Sant said that his team began thinking about how to activate and expand the capacity of oceans, which already naturally absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. Processes such as sea electrolysis have been used for decades, though scaling ocean carbon removal technology has started only in the past few years. Sant said his experience as a cement chemist helped him consider ways to reduce carbon emissions.

"There was very little attention that was being paid truthfully to reducing the carbon intensity of cement production and concrete construction," Sant said. "The journey started with low-carbon cement and low-carbon concrete, and from there, it sort of went into a bunch of other things."

For startups that want to break into the industry and market their product's integrity, they must make carbon removal measurable. At the development plant in Los Angeles, Equatic engineers measure the machinery's ability to remove carbon and produce hydrogen. They then quantify carbon removal results. They also publish their findings in peer-reviewed scientific research papers.

Equatic is developing the world's largest ocean-based carbon removal plant in Singapore, a demonstration project in partnership with the country's National Water Agency. The plan for the new plant is to remove 4,000 tons of CO2 annually and create 300 kg of carbon-negative hydrogen a day, according to its website. If these projects succeed, Equatic intends to take its idea to a commercial scale.

For Climeworks, a Zurich carbon removal startup, scaling has taken place gradually over the past fifteen years. The company uses direct air capture technology at its plants to suck CO2 out of the air and then later mineralize it into a solid rock form and store it underground.

"What carbon removal can offer to businesses is making sure that CO2 in the atmosphere, or climate in general, is not a barrier to growth," Jan Wurzbacher, the CEO of Climeworks, said.

The carbon credits market has shortcomings

While these companies plan to scale commercially, startups like Equatic sell carbon credits to businesses and individuals who want to reduce their carbon footprint. Two of Equatic's customers are Boeing and Stripe. Climeworks counts Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group, and Shopify as clients.

The carbon credits market is highly unregulated, dotted with stories of credits sold but followed by incomplete actions and scams. An investigation by The Washington Post found that some carbon credit ventures reaped profits from protected public lands in the Brazilian Amazon forests and failed to share profits with locals. Essentially, these ventures gave the impression that they would reduce emissions but used lands they had no rights to, possibly invalidating the credits they said they would offset for companies such as Netflix, Salesforce, and Boeing.

"Some 'cheaper' carbon credits that you can buy are not easily verifiable," said Indroneil Ganguly, an environmental and forests sciences professor at the University of Washington.

Critics of carbon credits argue that this system allows businesses to continue polluting. Some businesses, such as Occidental Petroleum, invest in carbon removal and use the process to extract more fossil fuels. While telling businesses to cut emissions would be ideal, Wurzbacher said that cutting them entirely or converting to more sustainable practices could be costly and not immediate.

Carbon removal can be expensive

Even at the rapid scaling rate of these carbon removal startups, their emissions removal is only a small drop in the sea. In 2022 alone, the global aviation industry emitted 800 megatons of CO2. In comparison, Climework's first commercial plant in Iceland, called Orca, can remove 4,000 tons a year, the company says. Climeworks said its larger Mammoth plant would be able to remove 36,000 tons.

The biggest hurdle for carbon removal startups like Equatic and Climeworks is cost. A plus side of Equatic's sea electrolysis process is that it creates hydrogen, which can be used as a clean energy source and lower the technology's costs.

"So you push the price down, right, and that's what stimulates the market," Edward Sanders, the CEO of Equatic, said.

What's more, carbon removal is a voluntary purchase and an elastic good, meaning that it depends on the desire of individuals or businesses to participate, and the demand can shift significantly with price.

"The way in which we are going to get the necessary volumes is going to be at a price point they can accept and still manufacture the goods they are making and clear the services they do," Sanders said.

The cost to permanently remove 1 ton of CO2 right now is between $600-$1,000. Scaling up existing technology requires more laborers and building very specific machinery, Wurzbacher said. Both Climeworks and Equatic have received grants from the US Department of Energy, including a grant for Climeworks to subsidize its expansions in Louisiana and Texas.

This year, Climeworks expanded beyond permanent carbon removal and began offering a new solutions branch of its business. If the direct air capture method is too expensive for customers, Climeworks finds a portfolio of other options they can use, such as reforestation and biomass storage.

The incoming Trump administration raises questions about the future of carbon removal and whether companies will be motivated to cut emissions. 

Both Climeworks' and Equatic's respective CEOs said that while timelines and execution could change, these solutions still had bipartisan support and political momentum. Also, carbon removal itself is inherently adaptive.

"The nice thing about direct air capture," Wurzbacher said, "is that you can basically do it anywhere in the world and have your customers at a very different place."

• AI tools can help reduce the need to attend some work meetings and boost productivity.
• These apps can summarize meetings, answer workers' questions, and train employees.
• This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.

Matt Martin knows about meetings run amok.

He's the CEO and cofounder of Clockwise, which aims to help people manage their work calendars so they have more time to get things done — and not just sit in meetings.

Earlier this year, in a bid to be more efficient, he started using an artificial-intelligence tool called Granola to help him take notes in meetings and summarize takeaways and to-dos.

The result for Martin is time saved and "actually pretty damn good notes," he told Business Insider.

Efforts to reduce the sting of meetings are perhaps as old as meetings themselves. Yet the imperative can feel more urgent thanks to our propensity, hardened during the pandemic, to wedge more gatherings into our calendars.

Now, thanks to AI, we might soon have fewer work meetings — or at least attend fewer. It's likely, according to execs leading the development of the technology, that corpulent calendars will be no match for AI-powered notetaking apps capable of being everywhere all at once.

And AI meeting bots won't serve just as digital scribes. They'll resemble all-knowing, indefatigable assistants able to take on tasks like answering questions on our behalf, interviewing job candidates, and training workers, execs told BI.

The boss' avatar

Sam Liang generally has as many as 40 meetings a week.

It's not practical for him to attend each one, so sometimes he sends an AI stand-in. This is easy enough for Liang since he's the CEO and cofounder of Otter, an app that records audio from meetings and produces a real-time transcript using AI.

Liang told BI he uses Otter to forgo some meetings. He then reads the summaries or listens to the recording. Liang expects more leaders will soon do this.

He estimated that perhaps 20% of C-level executives would use AI avatars to attend routine meetings on their behalf by the end of 2025.

In his case, Liang has an avatar that acts like a "personalized agent." Otter trained the AI using seven years' worth of Liang's meetings, along with emails and some Google docs he wrote on topics like product principles, Otter's strategies, and why the company does certain things.

"When people ask me those questions, my avatar can answer probably 90% of those," Liang said.

This knowledge can flow to new hires at Otter. Liang said his AI avatar could use what he's said and written to explain his vision for the company, its strategies, and its origin, for example.

A view of the future

The ramifications of having an ever-present AI available to document our workdays — and beyond — will be similar in scale to that of the introduction of the internet, said Terry Sejnowski, a distinguished professor at the University of California, San Diego, who's a neuroscientist and the author of the book "ChatGPT and the Future of AI."

"Nobody predicted the impact it was going to have on our lives," Sejnowski said. "Same thing here. It's going to take decades."

He said keeping track of meetings and other interactions would go well beyond capturing audio or video. Sejnowski sits on the scientific advisory committee for Softeye, a startup developing glasses intended to work with a smartphone to serve as an AI assistant. Similar attempts have been made, of course. Remember Google Glass?

Ray-Ban Meta glasses allow users to take photos and videos. In September, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said updates to the glasses aimed to let users translate certain languages, scan QR codes, and capture images of what they've seen so they can refer to them later when, for example, they need to buy something.

Softeye's plan, Sejnowski said, is to have glasses that constantly recognize objects and people around the wearer and provide related information. He said they would also take snapshots and store them, along with the time they were taken. That would make it possible, he said, to reconstruct where a user was — and rely on the AI assistant.

"You can ask it questions," Sejnowski said. "Did I promise anything to this person?"

Highlight reels of meetings

Richard White, like so many other desk workers, found himself stuck on endless Zoom calls during the pandemic.

He found it frustrating to take notes, jump to another call, and have little time to clean up his takeaways in between. Plus, White said, even good notes weren't always reliable after too long.

"Do you really remember what was important?" he said.

Four years ago, White started Fathom, a company that uses AI to capture video and generate notes from meetings.

People don't necessarily want a transcript, he said, though it's often necessary for AI to work its meeting magic — including generating notes, making to-do lists, and updating data on customer-relationship management.

White said that what most meeting-goers are after, aside from a list of action items, is a better recall of the ephemeral and unstructured information that's often delivered at these gatherings. Showing up, White said, is often the only way to access it.

He said AI notetakers would be able to produce highlight reels of key meeting moments. The goal, White said, would be to reduce "meeting inflation" by enabling fewer people to attend them while maintaining information flow.

"You'll have an AI that actually goes out and listens to every meeting in your org and comes back and tells you, 'Here's the five minutes of content you should pay attention to today,'" White said.

White said an accessible record of all but the most sensitive meetings within an organization could serve as a basis for identifying gaps in training or generating feedback. That's in part because AI can now accurately discern sentiment and tone — something that's become possible only in the past six months to a year, he said.

Beyond that, he said, AI meeting bots will be able to act on ideas. So if someone in a meeting proposes creating a document, the AI would have a draft ready soon after.

White doesn't expect we'll necessarily each have individual bots that go to meetings on our behalf. He said that would quickly result in meetings swimming with AI avatars.

The best approach, White said, would be to use a "federated" system where all the meetings are accessible. That way, anyone not in the meeting could access the content through a personal agent that lives in the cloud, he said.

White said bosses could ask AI for instances in which a meeting was positive or when participants grew frustrated. A search might take the form of, "Give me a pricing discussion that didn't go well," he said. That goes well beyond parsing a transcript for the word "price," he added.

"The tech is finally there, and it's really good," he said.

An interview with AI

AI could also help document meetings with prospective employees, said Alan Price, the global head of talent acquisition at Deel, a global human resources company that helps employers hire abroad. Price told BI that Deel had begun using AI meeting tools to reduce the time and personnel needed to hire for roles like customer service.

That's important because when Deel posts that type of job, Price said, the company might soon have some 4,000 applications. So Deel uses an AI bot to conduct an initial interview with promising candidates. Then, a recruiter can evaluate the summary of the interview and, if necessary, review the audio and video to determine whether the candidate should move on to an interview with a person.

Price said that rather than spending 30 minutes on a single interview, a recruiter could review five or six interview summaries in that same time.

That bump in efficiency has enabled a single recruiter to hire 30 to 35 candidates within about two weeks, he said.

"The recruiter makes the decision," Price said, "but it's streamlined."

• Four Seasons, Aman, and Ritz-Carlton are expanding their portfolios with private jet tours and cruises.
• The offerings are part of a strategy to keep enticing high-paying customers in 2025 and beyond.
• This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.

If you want to relax at a hotel, sip mai tais on a cruise, or see the world by private jet, you soon won't have to look further than your favorite luxury hotel brand.

Just don't refer to their vessels as "cruise ships." They'd rather you call them yachts.

Over the past few years, high-end hospitality companies such as Ritz-Carlton, Aman, and Four Seasons have expanded their portfolios to sea or air travel in a bid to keep high-paying customers within their networks.

After all, if you loved your Ritz-Carlton resort experience, wouldn't you be more inclined to try the at-sea version — even if you've never cruised before?

Four Seasons and Aman are creating an in-house vacation network

Aman and Four Seasons are in several markets — hotels, residential, retail, and travel "experiences" like private jet tours.

Alejandro Reynal, Four Seasons' president and CEO, told Business Insider that hotels and resorts accounted for about 80% of the company's revenue. Extracurriculars like its jet tours and coming ship then create a "halo effect" for the brand — an extension of its core business and another way to maintain relationships with loyal customers.

Both companies operate their multiweek group jet trips using third-party specialists. Four Seasons' launched in 2015 and uses a 48-seat Airbus A321LRneo. Aman's took flight two years prior, offering guests a sleek 19-seat loungelike aircraft (often an Airbus ACJ319).

Both include multicountry itineraries and overnight stays at their respective properties, creating a dream vacation for Four Seasons or Aman megafans.

For some travelers, these trips mark their first time staying at one of the luxe properties. But once they're in, they're hooked, Ben Trodd, Aman's COO, said.

"They will often come back and stay at our hotels and resorts individually," Trodd told BI in an email.

Four Seasons hosted eight jet trips in 2024. Almost all sold out, Reynal said, adding that the company was considering additional itineraries with varying aircraft or lengths (several of its 2025 tours already have a waitlist).

Despite their steady successes, both companies don't plan to go all in on private jets. Rather, they're turning their extra attention and resources to the friendly seas.

Ritz-Carlton is leading the hotel-to-cruise pipeline

In recent years, a flurry of hospitality companies announced their cruises — often in the form of yacht tours — in close succession: Ritz-Carlton in 2017, Aman in 2021, and Four Seasons in 2022.

It's a great time to be in the cruise business. Throughout 2024, industry giants such as Carnival and Norwegian reported record revenues and bookings.

These luxury cruises aren't anything like what you'll find on massive boats from mass-market cruise lines.

The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection's first vessel, Evrima, was a litmus test for the ultraluxury smaller-ship segment when it launched in 2022.

It was a success, with only a few availabilities during its inaugural year.

The 149-suite vessel is 623 feet long, a far cry from Royal Caribbean's almost 2,000-foot-long vessels. It also has a yachtlike feel with an almost 1-to-1 guest-to-staff ratio, attracting travelers who might not have been interested in traditional cruises.

"There's been a ton of buzz about how they knocked it out of the park," Jackie Roth, a Scott Dunn Private travel manager, told BI. Once concerned, she now believes the Yacht Collection has "elevated" Ritz-Carlton's brand, she said.

The company expects to sail its third ship in 2025.

By then, Four Seasons will still be a year from its vessel's planned launch.

Four Seasons' and Aman's 'floating resorts'

In 2026, Four Seasons plans to expand its "experienced-based business" beyond private jets with a 95-suite ship.

Reynal said bookings were already "very successful," with about two-thirds coming from the company's repeat customers.

"How do we create this luxury ecosystem around the brand, and which businesses do we need or don't need to be in?" the Four Seasons CEO said. "People were very favorable for us to pursue a Four Seasons experience at sea, and it has proven right."

Aman offers at-sea vacations with Amandira, a traditional five-cabin luxury yacht.

Its next vessel, set to launch in 2027, is planned to be more like a 600-foot-long cruise ship, flexing 10 times as many cabins.

Loyalty to the brand — not cruises — is key for these projects.

"People will follow Four Seasons wherever they go and whenever they launch a new experience," Roth said.

Other travel agents said they'd already received requests for the coming floating resort.

"We are led by the demand of our guests, who often call for us to expand into certain categories," Trodd, Aman's COO, said. "Our customers will travel because it's Aman first and the destination as a second consideration."

Potential road (or sea) blocks

"The luxury cruise market is niche but very competitive," Patrick Scholes, a lodging and leisure research analyst at Truist Securities, told BI. "Operationally, it's not easy. The risk and complexities are far greater than a land-based hotel."

Plus, not every wealthy traveler loves cruises, especially if their only experience is with the stereotypical attraction-filled, crowded megaships.

To overcome this, Four Seasons and Aman could simply continue doing what they do best — creating an ultraluxury experience.

"Customers are going to expect six-star service, and you better get it right," Scholes said.

Four Seasons' ship will be no Carnival cruise. According to its CEO, it won't even resemble some of the traditional industry's smaller luxury ships.

Renderings promise a sleek and luxurious vessel. On board, guests are planned to have 11 upcharged restaurants, a marina that opens onto the water, and cabins up to almost 10,000 square feet, some with au pairs and security personnel.

Aman, for its part, has remained mum about details. Its renderings also flex a yachtlike look. And as with its on-land properties, Trodd said the vessel would provide privacy, space, and a "restorative" experience.

When Four Seasons' and Aman's ships join Ritz-Carlton's, there will be no need to go to airlines for flights or cruise lines for cruises.

Just stay loyal to your favorite hospitality company, as they would want.

• Investment tactics often require big buy-ins and high fees.
• New tech is lowering the price of entry in fields like direct indexing and private markets.
• This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.

Investing like a billionaire comes with a high price tag. But thanks to technology, the barriers to these elite opportunities are starting to crumble.

Consider direct indexing, a strategy favored by the rich to lower taxes by selling underperforming stocks and using the losses to offset other gains. These personalized portfolios used to be out of reach of the merely affluent, requiring steep account minimums. Over the past five years, direct indexing has exploded as technological advancements have made it worthwhile for wealth managers to offer the services to Main Street customers. The account minimum for Fidelity's FidFolios, for example, is only $5,000.

"Direct indexing has become accessible at a different level of wealth than it has been in the past," said Ranjit Kapila, the copresident and chief operating officer of Parametric. "That wouldn't have been available or possible without the technology trends we've had to be able to do this level of computation at scale in a cost-efficient manner."

Parametric, the pioneer of direct indexing, is also moving downstream. By adopting fractional-share investing, Parametric lowered the minimum for its core product to $100,000 from $250,000. The firm plans to offer a direct-indexing product with fewer customization features for $25,000 in 2025.

Private markets face steeper hurdles. This opaque field was traditionally reserved for deep-pocketed investors like pension funds and ultrarich individuals. But now investors have more access to financial results for funds and privately held companies as data providers race to meet their needs. Machine learning and AI have made it easier for these firms to extract and analyze data.

BlackRock views this data as the great equalizer and has grand ambitions of indexing these opaque private markets. The asset-management giant agreed this summer to acquire the data powerhouse Preqin for $3.2 billion.

"We anticipate indexes and data will be important to future drivers of the democratization of all alternatives," BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said on a conference call. "And this acquisition is the unlock."

Leon Sinclair, Preqin's executive vice president, argued that with the number of public companies dwindling, it's imperative for mass-affluent investors to get better access to private markets.

"Clearly there's more, deeper, better sources of funding for private companies that could stay private for longer," Sinclair said. "I think it's fair that the mass affluent can — in the right way — be brought along on that journey to get exposure to that part of the mosaic earlier."

Investing in automation for a competitive edge

Kapila described these technological developments as part of a trend in wealth management to capture customers before they make it big.

"There's a desire by financial advisors to try and engage investors earlier in their wealth-accumulation cycle," Kapila said.

Parametric, acquired by Morgan Stanley in 2021, operates in a competitive arena. Thanks to a wave of similar acquisitions, Parametric faces well-capitalized rivals such as BlackRock's Aperio and Franklin Templeton's Canvas. Industry stalwarts like Fidelity and upstarts like Envestnet also want a piece of the action.

Kapila said the need to compete on scale and fees required Parametric's technology to be as efficient as possible.

"It'll be harder," he said. "We have to do many, many more accounts to really drive growth in assets, etc. But those challenges are exciting to me as a technologist."

To meet that need, Kapila is pushing Parametric to develop more automated products, such as Radius, which launched this year. Radius constructs equity and fixed-income portfolios and runs simulations to identify the best selections for portfolio managers. He plans to launch more cloud-native tools, which are easier to scale and manage, for other asset classes in 2025 and 2026. Parametric is also piloting generative-AI tools to onboard accounts more efficiently.

Clients' expectations are also rising. There's demand for Parametric's tax benefits but with actively managed strategies rather than indexes, he said, spurring partnerships with asset managers.

Parametric recently launched an offering that allows customers to pick equities off strategies from the financial-advisory and asset-management firm Lazard.

To stay ahead of the curve, Preqin is developing more sophisticated products. Last year, the UK firm launched an Actionability Signal that uses machine learning to identify private companies likely to be open for investment.

"The sole focus on public information for certain tasks around valuation and risk management are not really going to be the way that people do this," Sinclair said. "We're moving much more to a world where real proprietary private information at the asset level, which is transactionally oriented, is available to people."

In June, his division launched a data tool that analyzes $4.8 trillion worth of deals across 6,500 funds. This database can be used in a slew of ways, from backing up valuations in negotiations to identifying which financial factors, such as revenue growth or debt paydown, contributed the most value to a successful deal.

With the rise of generative AI, Sinclair expects that users will be able to interpret data with more ease using natural language commands.

"I think you'll see that be more prominent across the industry where people expect to interact with large data sets in really natural common ways," he said. "We think all that will probably start to be visible over the coming years."

Tech is the first step to narrowing education gaps

On average, retail investors allocate just 5% of their portfolios to alternative investments. If BlackRock successfully indexes private markets, it could go a long way toward boosting that percentage.

However, Sinclair said more work is required to help mass affluent investors feel comfortable investing in private markets. As someone who grew up working class and was only introduced to finance in college, he knows there is an education gap to overcome.

"To get Joe Bloggs very excited and comfortable with committing capital, they need to be able to understand what the different basis of those returns are," Sinclair said.

He added: "I think it's in the industry's interest to enable those new sources of capital, to bridge the gap in understanding, to bridge the gap in analytics, to bridge the gap in frequency of reporting, to make that an easier journey for people to go on."

• Advertising took over the streaming-TV experience this year, and it'll only get bigger next year.
• Interactive ads that try to get viewers to shop or take other actions are gaining traction.
• This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.

It's back to the future in Hollywood.

Streaming is starting to look like the TV days of old. Entertainment for the masses is back. Bundles are making it easier to consolidate subscriptions.

And ads seem to be everywhere.

Netflix, Disney+, and Max — which all started ad-free — now have cheaper ad-supported tiers. Amazon turned on ads in Prime Video this year, making advertising de facto for more than 100 million viewers in the US in one fell swoop.

EMARKETER expects streaming advertising to reach half of linear-TV advertising's size in 2024 and approach parity with it in 2027.

According to the analytics firm Antenna, these cheaper versions are gaining traction with viewers, too. In May, most new paying subscribers to five major streamers were choosing ad-supported tiers — a year earlier, this was true for only two streamers.

On Disney's latest earnings call, execs said that about 60% of new subscribers in the US were opting for its ad-supported tier, which accounted for 37% of its total US subscribers.

Ad-supported TV viewing also is on the rise through free services like Fox's Tubi, Paramount's Pluto TV, and The Roku Channel. According to Nielsen, those services plus YouTube made up 14.8% of viewing in July, up from 12.5% a year earlier.

"What's old is new again," said Jonathan Miller, a veteran media executive and chief executive of Integrated Media Co., which invests in digital media.

Miller sees ad tiers as a validation of the dual revenue streams that long supported cable. "Advertising and subscriptions have always been a successful model," he said.

Streaming ads are here to stay because — along with bundling, cheaper programming, and password-sharing crackdowns — they're one of the ways streamers can help make themselves sustainable.

Ads have also begun to directly shape the content streamers offer. Streamers are showing more sports and other live programming because of the big audiences and advertisers they attract.

For example, Netflix's highly anticipated Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight on November 15 was a win for the streamer despite some tech glitches. Why? Because it showed Netflix's ability to draw huge audiences at once; it said that as many as 60 million households tuned in. That large audience bodes well for Netflix's NFL games on Christmas and its live WWE programming set to debut in January.

Viewers' tolerance for ads will be increasingly tested

Streamers that dipped a toe in the ad space are looking to wade in.

The ad load — or ad volume per hour of entertainment — has crept up over the past year, according to the measurement firm MediaRadar. There was an average of six minutes of ads per hour in September across eight leading ad-supported streamers, up by 9% from January 2023, when Netflix and Disney had just entered the ad-supported game. That's still far lower than cable, where ad loads can push an eye-watering 15 minutes or more an hour. Viewers are also more likely to tolerate ads in live sports because people are used to them being part of that content.

Amazon and Warner Bros. Discovery recently said they'd start showing more ads to their streaming viewers in 2025, while emphasizing that their ad loads were lower than their competitors.

"On the ad-load side, we are light," WBD's streaming chief, JB Perrette, said of the streamer Max during the company's third-quarter earnings call. "We have a very light ad load compared to everyone else in the market, so there's room to grow on the capacity side."

The industry consensus is that streaming ad loads won't become a throwback to cable, though — at least not anytime soon.

For one thing, it's a buyer's market. Amazon flooded the market with ad inventory, which depressed ad prices for everyone. Streamers aren't incentivized to add too much more ad inventory because it'll just drive the price down more. Some advertisers are also wary of annoying viewers who are still getting used to seeing ads in streaming.

"The supply has grown significantly over the last few years," said Maureen Bosetti, the chief investment officer for Mediabrands. "It's created a marketplace for marketers."

Makers of streaming video ads are also becoming more ambitious. It's not enough for an ad to be seen — they'll try to get viewers to take action, whether by clicking a QR code or dropping a featured product in their shopping cart. These interactive ads could get higher price tags at a time when streaming ad prices have come down.

"As a consumer, I'm seeing more of them," Jessica Brown, a managing director of digital investment at GroupM, said of interactive streaming ads. "We're getting more pitches from the streaming partners. You can measure success in a different way."

Warner Bros. Discovery recently rolled out two such formats. "Shop with Max" identifies items in TV shows and films and matches them with relevant advertiser products that viewers can shop while they watch. "Moments" uses AI to figure out themes, sentiments, and on-screen elements that line up tonally with the advertiser's message.

Fubo recently announced four ad formats, including ones that show trivia questions or polls and product carousels. Fubo said such ads made people 47% more likely to purchase something compared with standard video ads.

"A big objective we have is to make a majority of ads have some form of interactive or engaging feature," Krishan Bhatia, an NBCUniversal exec who was hired by Amazon to lead its Prime Video ads push, said at a recent event. "What brands love about it is not just the fact that you generate a potential purchase off it but people are spending more time with your brands."

Innovation and business go hand in hand — and that's constantly on enterprise leaders' minds, regardless of their industry.

Executives must understand how technological advancements, systemic barriers, and generational shifts are affecting their growth, then strategize accordingly.

Business Insider's annual list of people transforming business highlights these leaders who work in media, finance, technology, transportation, and labor.

The WNBA's first female commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, is spearheading a transformation in the sports sector with her focus on fan engagement and equity among players. In finance, Leon Sinclair is leveraging data and analytics to reshape the world of alternative investments at Preqin, where he's an executive vice president. Mike Hopkins, the head of Amazon's Prime Video and MGM Studios, is forging an ad-focused entertainment-business strategy that could redefine how content is made and consumed in the digital age.

Below, in alphabetical order by first name, are the 10 business leaders our reporters and editors credit with shaking up and remolding their industries.

Anna-Lisa Miller, executive director of the KKR-cofounded nonprofit Ownership Works

Employers often say they prefer to hire employees who act like owners. As the executive director of the nonprofit Ownership Works, Miller aims to get employers to act on that ethos.

"It's not credible to ask employees to feel, think, and act like owners if you don't give them a financial ownership stake," Miller said.

Since its founding in 2021, Ownership Works and its corporate partners have shared $570 million in wealth across six companies and worked with more than 160,000 workers at 113 companies.

One way Miller seeks to convince business owners of the merits of employee shareholding is by showing them how it can improve the bottom line. She pointed to a time an employee in an Ownership Works company helped their employer save money by replacing a component costing $100 with a 3D printed part that cost just a few dollars.

"They often know where the company is losing money or making a mistake or where things could be better," Miller said. "And they often have ideas for how to fix the problem. It's just nobody ever asked them to."

Miller's career in employee ownership grew out of an interest in community development. Early in her career she helped a nonprofit in Hawaii create farming cooperatives, and she worked with another nonprofit to convert small businesses into worker cooperatives.

Miller said she wanted to find scale, so she approached Pete Stavros, KKR's cohead of private equity. Stavros first experimented with employee ownership at a garage-door manufacturer in 2015, leading to some of KKR's best results. He was looking to spread that model further.

After announcing the creation of Ownership Works with a $10 million donation, Stavros hired Miller as his first employee. Now it's her job to help the company's 25 private-equity partners, including KKR and Apollo, institute plans in their portfolios.

She does this in part by partnering with accountants, lawyers, and professional-services firms to make it easier to create these plans, acting as an employee-ownership consultancy. The organization also collects and shares metrics of success, such as hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to employees and decreasing turnover and higher profits at companies with employee ownership.

She's helping the nonprofit expand beyond private equity. Ownership Works recently worked with the cold-storage company Lineage to give $100 million in IPO proceeds to its employees and create a stock-ownership plan.

Miller believes that expanding employee ownership could significantly narrow the wealth gap and reduce financial insecurity.

Arthur Sadoun, CEO of Publicis Groupe

Sadoun said he mostly received pushback when, in 2017, he told creative agencies that the future of creativity was commerce and AI.

"It's funny when you look at what happened now," Sadoun, the chief executive of the French advertising giant Publicis Groupe, told BI.

Back then, Sadoun faced a daunting task. He had just taken over as the third-ever leader of the 91-year-old company, home to the storied agencies Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Publicis Conseil, which had created iconic advertising like the Marlboro Man, Tony the Tiger, and "Labour Isn't Working."

But Publicis was languishing behind its competitors having lost key clients like McDonald's. Financial growth was anemic.

Sadoun embarked on a plan to turn Publicis from a communications partner to a company that could help clients transform their businesses. He sought to break down silos between Publicis' various agencies and help them retool around a bet on "personalization at scale," advanced by the biggest acquisition in its history: the 2019 purchase of the data marketing firm Epsilon for $4.4 billion.

"The financial market did not like that," Sadoun said.

Neither did many of Publicis' own employees, particularly the Don Draper-esque creatives who were maddened that an outsize focus on data and programmatic ads meant the Parisian company would lose its je ne sais quoi. Competitors mocked Publicis' multimillion-dollar investment in creating an AI platform.

Sadoun and Publicis are having the last laugh.

At about $27 billion, Publicis' market capitalization is the largest of any individual advertising-agency holding company. It's forecast to end the year with the largest annual revenue, too, with the combination of its data and media offerings representing about half of its sales. While 2024 was a cause for celebration, it faces challenges ahead: This month, its rival Omnicom announced a deal to acquire Interpublic Group that would create the largest ad-agency network.

Sadoun described Publicis' award-winning campaign for the French telco Orange as a good outward representation of its modernized offering to marketers. The commercial begins with stars from the French men's national football team flaunting their skills. The reveal — using VFX and deepfake technology — is that the stars of the ad were in fact from Les Bleues, the women's national team.

Sadoun credits his leadership team and employees for Publicis' turnaround. He has a more personal hope for his own legacy.

In 2022, Sadoun had an operation to remove a tumor in his neck that turned out to be cancerous. Unusually for the CEO of a public company, he disclosed his diagnosis before he underwent treatment: grueling rounds of chemo and radiotherapy that would affect the jet-setting executive's ability to travel. He was flooded with messages revealing that many people were hiding their chronic illnesses from their employers and colleagues.

The following year, Sadoun helped launch the Working with Cancer Pledge, which encourages companies to commit to offering more recovery-focused working environments. More than 600 companies have signed up, and the initiative was promoted with a splashy Super Bowl ad bought and created by Publicis last year.

"My one mission in life now, apart from my family, is to erase the stigma of cancer in the workplace," Sadoun said.

Cathy Engelbert, commissioner of the WNBA

2024 was a transformative year for the WNBA. It said that attendance increased by nearly 50% year over year and that ratings on ESPN were up by 170% from last season, fueled in part by its rookie stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Sponsorship deals have boomed, bringing in advertisers newer to the sports world like Bumble and Skims.

Presiding over its astronomical growth is Engelbert, a former Deloitte CEO who became the league's commissioner in 2019.

The league has been planting the seeds of its growth for a while. It gained attention by playing during the pandemic in a bubble. It raised $75 million from investors, allowing it to invest in marketing and fan engagement. And it landed sponsorships on its own, separate from the NBA. External factors like the rise of "name, image, and likeness" deals and social media also helped draw attention to the sport.

"The thing that was overlooked is that Rome wasn't built in a day," Engelbert told BI. "We didn't do this overnight." One emphasis was on improving the fan experience by meeting spectators where they were, such as updating the app to look more like TikTok, Engelbert said.

The WBNA is a big brand now, and with its growth has come scrutiny. Engelbert took heat when she didn't directly condemn threatening comments on social media toward players but likened the situation to a rivalry between male players in the 1970s. She later apologized, promising to do better.

"We've been debriefing around a lot of things that happened this year," Engelbert told BI, adding that the league was looking at beefing up security and mental-health resources. "The vitriol our players, me, we all get, we're going to try to tackle that multidimensionally."

Engelbert also wants to talk about the flip side.

"There's a huge negative to all the vitriol, but there's also people caring about the league like they haven't before," she said. "Apathy's the death of a brand, and there's no more apathy."

The WNBA, which is majority-owned by the NBA, remains unprofitable; several outlets described sources as saying it was on track to lose $40 million or more this season. The WNBA declined to comment.

Increased sponsorship and media rights will be crucial to keeping up the W's momentum and getting in the black. In a big start, the women's league recently struck an 11-year, $200 million media-rights deal, up from its current deal of $60 million a year. Engelbert also has her sights set on global expansion, starting with the WNBA getting its first Canadian franchise next year. Corporate sponsorships are catching up to the rise of women's sports. Engelbert is ready to capitalize, with stats to appeal to the bottom line.

"There's a little scratching and clawing to make sure the old view of the WNBA is not the current view," she said. "Our fans are actually likely to buy from you. So we say this is a good business decision for you."

Fei-Fei Li, cofounder and CEO of World Labs

Almost 20 years ago, while she taught at Princeton, Li, known as the "godmother of AI," tested the hypothesis that everything humans could see could be categorized and labeled.

This idea built off her graduate research focused on object recognition. Li harnessed the power of crowdsourcing to pioneer ImageNet, a database of 15 million images that became the foundation of computer-vision and deep-learning research.

Li has continued advancing this research. This year, she and the leading AI researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall launched World Labs, a startup that aims to take AI beyond large language models. It's valued at $1 billion.

With $230 million in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, AMD Ventures, and Nvidia's NVentures, World Labs is seeking to explore AI applications in the two-dimensional plane of pixels and in 3D worlds with spatial intelligence. In December, World Labs dropped its first AI project: a tool designed to turn any image into a 3D model.

Since her initial research breakthroughs, Li has testified before Congress about applying responsible ethics to AI and has advocated the inclusion of more women and people of color in the field.

"Language is important but, as humans, much of our ability to understand and interact with the world is based on what we see," Li wrote in an op-ed article in The Economist in November.

She believes spatial intelligence — which can help with developing robots that look after older adults, or extra hands for a surgeon — is what truly human-centered AI will look like.

She's now a codirector of Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI and serves as the Sequoia Capital professor of computer science at Stanford. Li has also worked as a vice president and chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia

Huang is becoming the stuff of legend.

He has a reputation as a genius, a visionary, and a workaholic. Bosses everywhere want to know his every theory of management to replicate even a fraction of his success. That's because Nvidia has gone from a niche tech firm to one of the most valuable companies in the world in a little more than two years.

After decades of toiling out of the limelight, providing the video-gaming industry with graphics chips to render complex, ever-changing imagery but not gaining much name recognition beyond it, Nvidia burst into broader consciousness in 2022, after ChatGPT came to the market. Word quickly spread that the company had for years been buying thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units — it turned out that the kind of computing they're best at is similar to the demands of artificial intelligence.

Huang actually donated OpenAI's first eight GPUs, delivering them himself. But Huang anticipated the connection between his chips and AI long before then — he just didn't know how it would materialize.

Huang, 61, was born in southwestern Taiwan. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Oregon and Stanford. He had a few jobs in the semiconductor industry, including at Nvidia's major competitor AMD, until he founded Nvidia at 30 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.

Despite the recent spotlight on him now, Huang has staying power. He's one the longest-serving tech CEOs, with more than 30 years at the helm. In a recently published memoir, Morris Chang, the founder of Nvidia's most important supplier, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, described offering Huang the CEO job at TSMC.

Even now that Nvidia has a market capitalization of more than $3 trillion, Huang sees his work as far from finished.

"I watched Jensen make these kinds of bets that are far-reaching, where there's a lot of ambiguity as to when it's going to happen or not," Rev Lebaredian, a vice president of omniverse and simulation technology at Nvidia, told Business Insider this year. Huang is usually right. The journey to enter 2025 with hundreds of foundation models chasing ChatGPT started for Nvidia in about 2006.

The next big journey may be self-driving cars and robots, or something else entirely.

Some investors still worry that when it comes to Nvidia, what goes up must come down. But investors also believe that if anyone can see or make the future, it's Huang.

Leon Sinclair, executive vice president of Preqin

Sinclair, who grew up in the market town of Rugby in the middle of England, didn't picture a career in finance.

"We never really spoke about money around the dinner table or anything like that because there was never any of it," the 42-year-old told Business Insider in an interview.

Now Sinclair is helping demystify private markets and powering its growth through data.

With civil service in mind, he studied political science at Loughborough University and joined England's Department of Health shortly after graduating in 2004. But Sinclair, a competitive basketball and track athlete, quickly tired of the bureaucracy and craved a faster-paced work culture.

After six months, he left for a research-analyst position at Intercontinental Exchange, the operator of major stock exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange and clearinghouses. The finance novice was eager to catch up and learn as much as he could about debt products and subprime markets. He left in 2010 for the data provider Markit, well before the firm merged with IHS and was acquired by S&P Global.

Throughout his two-decade career he has maintained a sense of intellectual curiosity, describing himself as one of the most avid readers of industry news among his peers. Drawn to the complexity of private markets, he pivoted away from credit to build IHS Markit's private-equity and debt division. In 2023, he joined the private-markets-data powerhouse Preqin.

"You see some of the most innovative companies in the world, and you work with some of the most innovative funds in the world who are deploying capital into just really interesting spaces," he said.

Sinclair oversees how Preqin addresses the needs of fund managers, investment banks, and placement agents, representing some 3,000 front-office teams, trying to navigate the opaque industry of private markets. Preqin says the asset class has more than doubled to $16.8 trillion in assets under management over the past five years. Preqin's data can be used, for instance, to target limited partners for fundraising or create customized benchmarks to better convey performance to investors.

Private markets are becoming more transparent as providers like Preqin find ways to combine publicly available and proprietary data, Sinclair said. In June, his division launched a data tool to analyze deals across 6,500 funds. This aggregated data can be used to back up valuations in negotiations or identify which financial factors, such as revenue growth or debt pay-down, contributed the most value to a successful deal. The firm's insights are set to become more widely available, as BlackRock is set to acquire Preqin for $3.2 billion.

Sinclair said it's easier for individual investors to participate in private markets than ever before, pointing to the growth of data products and favorable regulatory developments. But he added that having options isn't the same as understanding them.

"There's a massive amount of education to do. Alternatives have a totally different vocabulary, a different way of thinking about performance, a different way of thinking about risks to the types of products," he said.

"I think there's also an obligation of the industry to build the right analytical tools, the right educational tools, datasets to bring the mass affluent along on that journey."

Marin Gjaja, CEO of Ford Model e

The electric-vehicle market has experienced tremendous upheaval in the past year, and car companies are scrambling to understand today's EV buyers.

At Ford, Gjaja, the chief operating officer of the Model e electric division, is tasked with navigating the money-losing division through huge changes in demand and customer profiles.

After years of growth in the EV segment driven by wealthy early adopters, car companies face the challenge of selling these expensive and complex vehicles to more-regular customers.

Ford split its gas and electric divisions in 2022 in a bid to speed up EV development. The company's EV strategy has changed a few times since then, but Ford still breaks out its financial performance: So far in 2024, the Model e division has lost $3.6 billion.

In his operations role, Gjaja is trying to reverse those losses by working with Ford's dealers to improve customer experiences and perceptions. Before joining Ford in 2022, Gjaja was a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with clients in retail, technology, and automotive, among other industries.

He's putting those years of consulting experience to work as Ford tries to bridge the gap between the wealthy early adopters behind the initial success of vehicles like the Mustang Mach-E and the F-150 Lighting and the more-practical customers who more often leave the lot with a hybrid.

While higher prices have turned off some of these new EV shoppers, Gjaja said at an automotive conference in September that this cohort was considering a lot more than sticker price — including their distance from the nearest charger, the cost of charging, battery life, and resale values.

Gjaja argued that simply discounting electric cars wouldn't be enough to convince shoppers and certainly wouldn't solve Ford's profitability problem in its Model e division.

Instead of focusing on "functional economics," Gjaja said, he examines the "behavioral economics" of EV adoption. He said the journey from what he called an EV denier to a long-term convert could take up to three years.

"My job is to figure out how to sell and market a vehicle that people don't appreciate its value until they own it for three years," Gjaja said.

Mike Hopkins, head of Amazon's Prime Video and MGM Studios

Amazon is a retail and cloud powerhouse, and thanks to Hopkins, it's become a media powerhouse, too.

Under Hopkins, Amazon now offers not just a wide variety of TV and films but some of the biggest sports franchises like the NFL and the NBA, and even news. Amazon spent $18.9 billion on video and music in 2023, up by 14% from 2022. According to the data firm Ampere Analysis, sports is a growing part of Amazon's entertainment outlay, accounting for 14.3% in 2024, up from virtually nothing five years ago.

Amazon's entertainment offerings help keep people subscribing to Prime, the free-delivery service that includes Prime Video and other benefits. But it's also becoming a moneymaker in its own right.

In January, Amazon shook up the streaming-ads market when it turned on ads in Prime Video, driving down ad prices for competitors like Netflix while giving Amazon a big shot at the $28.8 billion pie that EMARKETER has forecast will be spent on streaming-TV ads this year.

Morgan Stanley has estimated the move could bring in $3.3 billion in revenue this year, on top of Amazon's existing ad business, worth $47 billion in 2023. And with NFL and other streaming rights, Amazon is muscling in on traditional TV networks' turf and training viewers that it's the place to go for live sports. It's even dipped a toe in news, the last stronghold of traditional TV, with a Brian Williams-hosted election-night special.

Hopkins' hire in 2020, along with the NBC entertainment vet Jennifer Salke's two years earlier, was a big signal that Amazon was serious about establishing itself as a key player in entertainment.

Hopkins is a product of legacy and digital entertainment, having been the chairman of Sony Pictures Television and the CEO of Hulu. At Amazon, he oversaw the $8.5 billion acquisition of the film studio MGM and pushed the company's entertainment studio to expand into broader fare. Prime Video also makes money by fulfilling its promise of being a one-stop shop for viewers by selling subscriptions to other companies' apps like Max, Starz, and, in its most recent flex, Apple TV+.

"What we're trying to build is a next-generation entertainment service," Hopkins recently told Bloomberg.

Prime Video captured just 3.7% of TV viewing in November, well behind Netflix (7.7%) and YouTube (10.8%), per Nielsen. Despite some wins, like the popular show "The Boys" and the buzzy film "Saltburn," it has a way to go in becoming a consistent hit factory. Still, since most people don't pay for Prime Video as a stand-alone service, it doesn't have the churn problem that dogs other streamers.

As part of Amazon, Prime Video is also insulated from some of the financial pressures affecting other entertainment companies. Hopkins is still bringing financial discipline to bear, however.

Amazon cut hundreds of jobs across Prime Video and MGM Studios teams early in 2024. Hopkins recently told Bloomberg that the advertising ramp-up was a factor in pursuing NBA rights and that he expected Prime Video to be profitable "very soon."

Prathibha Varkey, president of Mayo Clinic Health System

Since 2021, Varkey has been the president of the Mayo Clinic Health System, a network of 16 community hospitals and 45 multispecialty clinics across more than three dozen communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The facilities serve rural areas where care can otherwise be difficult to access.

Varkey, who comes from a family of physicians, said her work focused on reaching patients without ready access to the sprawling Mayo Clinic campus in Rochester, Minnesota, and its world-renowned medical expertise.

Varkey told Business Insider that part of her focus was finding new ways to incorporate technology so that more people can obtain care and administrative burdens can be reduced. That includes using artificial intelligence to help with diagnosing conditions and using technology so that clinicians can manage complex chronic conditions virtually.

The efforts also include introducing a mobile clinic that can go where routine and preventive care is needed and even provide wireless internet access so patients can confer with specialists. The clinic, which travels across southern Minnesota, offers virtual or in-person appointments. It has two exam rooms and a laboratory.

"So now you have preventive exams, specialist visits that are occurring in very remote areas," she said.

Varkey said Mayo Clinic Health System was also trying to bring medical expertise to rural residents through programs that connect small local clinics with specialists from hub sites or from Mayo's Rochester campus. Small clinics, she said, might have only a single nurse practitioner — nothing like the variety of disciplines a larger facility would have.

"It's been very exciting to watch, and patients have really appreciated it as well," Varkey said.

Another effort to meet patients where they are is the organization's hospital-at-home program. Varkey said remote monitoring technology helped these patients remain with family and be more comfortable than they'd be in a medical facility.

"You get the same Mayo care," she said, adding that the approach had been popular with patients.

Varkey, who also holds an MBA from the University of Minnesota, returned to Mayo in 2021 after serving as the president and CEO of Yale New Haven Health Northeast Medical Group.

From 2001 to 2013, Varkey held leadership positions at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, including associate chair of the Department of Medicine, medical director of Ask Mayo Clinic, and program director of the Preventive Medicine Fellowship.

Varkey said the expanding capabilities of AI and discoveries in genomics and molecular medicine were "taking healthcare to the next level — and very fast."

While those developments are exciting, Varkey said, they shouldn't distract from the primary goal of patient-centered care.

Ranjit Kapila, chief operating officer and copresident of Parametric

Kapila likes to stay ahead of the game.

During the first 10 years of his career, the computer-science graduate completed four certifications each year while working as a tech consultant for firms like Nasdaq and Sallie Mae. While working at the hedge fund Citadel in the mid-2000s, he took MBA classes at night at Northwestern University.

"Everything in this field changes so quickly," he said. "Things change in finance and things change in tech at an ever increasing pace."

Now Kapila is a copresident and chief operating officer of Parametric, a pioneer of direct indexing with $570 billion in assets under management. He joined Parametric in 2019 after rising up the ranks at BlackRock, overseeing portfolio construction management for its widely used Aladdin platform. Kapila moved to a much smaller firm to have a bigger impact.

"It was an opportunity to kind of look at what Parametric has done well, think about how to build on the success, but then also take advantage of what's happening in the technology space and rethink how Parametric could operate, let's say, five years from that point," he said.

His move was well timed. There has been a boom in direct indexing, a tax-savvy investing strategy of buying individual securities modeled off an index like the S&P 500. Two years after Kapila joined Parametric, Morgan Stanley acquired Parametric's parent company, Eaton Vance. Thanks to a wave of similar acquisitions, Parametric faces well-capitalized competitors such as BlackRock's Aperio and Franklin Templeton's Canvas. Industry stalwarts like Fidelity and upstarts like Envestnet also want a piece of the action.

Kapila said Parametric, founded in 1987, has experience and scale on its side.

"I will say that given the technology trends, sometimes it's easy to come in and have a solution. It's much, much harder to have a scalable solution that will serve clients when the demand spikes," he said. "We're managing over 200,000 accounts for our clients. The level of scale, I think, often is a breaking point for some of the newer entrants."

To stay ahead of the competition, Kapila is pushing Parametric to develop more automated products, such as Radius, which launched this year. Radius constructs fixed-income and equity portfolios and runs simulations to identify the best selections for portfolio managers. Kapila described it as a "turning point" for Parametric.

"This is the first time we've had a product that's really end-to-end running in that automated platform manner with a person reviewing and approving and intervening as necessary," he said.

He plans to launch more cloud-native tools, which are easier to scale and manage, for other asset classes in 2025 and 2026.

Parametric is also bringing its tax-savvy strategies to active management, launching Custom Active this summer. Rather than modeling portfolios off indexes, clients can pick equities off strategies from its asset-management partner Lazard or sports-league sponsors.

"Those are examples where we can provide a tax overlay and help people get the advantages of direct indexing while managing to an active model," Kapila said.

"There's a demand for that, and it's early days," he added, "but I think that's really what's playing out."

• Coming EV models include small hatchbacks, pickups, sports cars, and minivans.
• They come from brands like Audi, Cadillac, Lucid, Mercedes-Benz, Rivian, Tesla, and Volkswagen.
• This article is part of "Getting Ready for Electric," a series of guides and practical advice for buying your next EV.

A large number of exciting EVs are headed to market soon.

Several automakers have modified their electrification strategies in recent months, replacing some of their prior electric-vehicle concepts with a focus on internal-combustion-engine and hybrid models.

Even with this strategic change, you can expect to see a lot of EV options in the coming years.

Here's a collection of cool EVs — including small hatchbacks, pickups, sports cars, and minivans — that we can't wait to drive.

Audi Q6 e-tron

The Audi Q6 e-tron is the 11th battery electric model to join the brand's lineup and marks the debut of Audi's all-new EV platform.

With a 100-kWh battery pack, the Q6 e-tron is rated by the Environmental Protection Agency for 321 miles of range. The Q6 e-tron with Quattro all-wheel drive has 456 horsepower and can do 0 to 60 mph in just 4.9 seconds. There's also a higher-performance SQ6 e-tron.

The Q6 e-tron starts at $63,800.

Cadillac Vistiq

The Cadillac Vistiq, starting at $77,400, is a three-row midsize luxury electric SUV positioned between the smaller Lyriq and the flagship Escalade IQ.

Cadillac says the Vistiq will have a range of about 300 miles with a 102-kWh lithium-ion battery pack. With dual electric motors generating 615 horsepower, it can go from 0 to 60 mph in just 3.7 seconds.

Production at GM's Spring Hill, Tennessee, plant is expected to start in early 2025.

Canoo pickup truck

The Texas-based startup EV maker Canoo unveiled its electric pickup in 2021, but there hasn't been much news about the innovative cab-forward truck since. So it's unclear when it will go into production. What we do know is intriguing, including 600 horsepower, 200-plus miles of range, and an ultraconfigurable truck bed.

Hyundai Ioniq 9

The 2026 Hyundai Ioniq 9 is an all-electric midsize three-row family SUV set to go on sale in the first half of 2025. Built on the Electric Global Modular Platform platform, which also underpins the Kia EV9, the Ioniq 9 features a 110.3-kWh battery pack and an estimated range of 385 miles.

Kia EV4

The Kia EV4 is a concept for a stylish compact EV sedan that debuted at the 2023 Los Angeles Auto Show. Kia has not confirmed that the EV4 will enter production. But Car and Driver believes it could arrive as early as 2026 with up to 300 miles of range and a starting price of about $39,000.

Lotus Emeya

The Lotus Emeya is a high-performance four-door GT with as much as 905 horsepower. According to Lotus, the Chinese-built EV can do 0 to 62 mph in 2.78 seconds and has a top speed of 159 mph.

Lucid Gravity

The Gravity is the second model to emerge from the American EV startup Lucid. It's a three-row luxury SUV with up to 828 horsepower and an estimated 440 miles of range. The Gravity Grand Touring is on sale now, starting at $94,900.

Mercedes-Benz G 580 with EQ Technology

The iconic Mercedes-Benz Geländewagen can finally be had as an EV. Offered alongside its internal-combustion siblings, the 2025 Mercedes-Benz G 580 with EQ Technology comes with a 122-kWh battery pack, 239 miles of range, 579 horsepower, and a starting price of $161,500.

Polestar 5

The Polestar 5 is a luxury high-performance EV sedan that is scheduled to launch in 2025. The Polestar 5, set to compete against the likes of the Porsche Panamera and Mercedes-Benz EQS, will be built on the brand's first dedicated EV platform, featuring an 800-volt battery and electric motors that can produce up to 884 horsepower. While developed by Polestar's research-and-development teams in the UK and Sweden, the 5 will be built in the brand's new factory in Chongqing, China, alongside the coming Polestar 6 EV sports car.

Ram 1500 REV

The Ram 1500 REV is Stellantis' answer to the Ford F150 Lightning and Chevrolet Silverado EV. Its 168-kWh battery pack helps it reach an estimated 350 miles of driving range. According to Ram, the 654-horsepower pickup can do 0 to 60 mph in just 4.4 seconds and tow up to 14,000 pounds.

Rivian R3X

The R3X is the high-performance variant of the Rivian's coming R3 midsize electric SUV and has distinct hatchback styling. According to Rivian, the R3X should be able to achieve over 300 miles of range and do 0 to 60 mph in less than 3 seconds. The R3 and R3X are expected to arrive after Rivian commences customer deliveries of the R2 in the first half of 2026.

Scout Terra and Traveler

Volkswagen Group's Scout Motors recently unveiled its Scout Terra pickup and Scout Traveler SUV. The body-on-frame off-roaders, with a starting price between $50,000 and $60,000, are inspired by the International Scout utility vehicles of the 1960s and '70s. The Terra and Traveler are set to enter production in 2027 in South Carolina.

Tesla Roadster

The long-awaited second-generation Tesla Roadster was announced in 2017 and remains in development purgatory. The Roadster was supposed to go on sale in 2020 but has been continuously delayed. When it does arrive, Tesla says it should go from 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, reach 250 mph, and have a range of 620 miles.

Volkswagen ID Buzz

The VW bus is back. Volkswagen relaunched its counterculture-era icon as the all-electric 2025 ID Buzz. The new bus, which starts at $60,000, comes with a 91-kWh lithium-ion battery pack and is available in all-wheel drive. The ID Buzz has an estimated 234 miles of range.

• EV customer bases are changing, so auto executives are investing in more hybrid-focused models.
• Hybrid EVs can be more practical and affordable than charge-only EVs.
• This article is part of "Getting Ready for Electric," a series of guides and practical advice for buying your next EV.

Though the electric-vehicle market is having its toughest year yet, battery-powered cars are here to stay.

As EV sales slowed this year, major automakers had to reconsider their lofty goals and adjust to shifting customer bases.

Automotive executives moved forward with several EV launches this year, with some companies adding more hybrid models — cars that industry experts say could become a bridge for future EV owners.

Companies are turning to hybrid models to appeal to a more practical and frugal shopper, as wealthy early EV adopters who fueled years of growth have recently fled the market.

It's clear that the expansion the EV segment enjoyed over the past few years is no longer a guarantee of future growth. But executives insist they're committed to an all-electric future, even at a slower clip and with an updated strategy.

In the coming years, you can expect a greater menu of green vehicles on dealer lots — at various price points and with more seamless charging options.

Why more consumers are considering hybrid EVs

Hybrids — once thought to be a relic of the pre-Tesla EV market — are quickly gaining in popularity as EV demand slows.

Green-car shoppers are increasingly drawn to hybrid cars, which come in plug-in and non-plug-in varieties. These cars offer a stepping stone to full EV adoption, with the safety net of a gas-powered engine to ease range anxiety.

While these vehicles solve a pervasive concern among new EV shoppers, a lack of supply has also driven up the price of these cars, creating an affordability barrier for some shoppers.

Still, companies that stayed in the hybrid market over the past several years are now reaping the benefits of a renewed interest in these cars.

Toyota, which was once criticized for its slow adoption of EV technology, is now enjoying big increases in hybrid sales. That's elevating the brand's cache among green-car shoppers in general, with Toyota often at the top of brand considerations for EV shoppers now.

Ford is also taking this approach. The company has said that Ford's hybrid cars are converting more car buyers than any other segment. More than half of all Ford Maverick pickup truck hybrid buyers are new to the brand.

A strategic shift after EV growing pains

The nascent EV market experienced a demand shift this year: The new generation of shoppers are more frugal and practical than their early-adopter counterparts.

But the market is still growing. J.D. Power said that battery-powered cars accounted for 10.2% of retail sales in the US in September, up by 0.8 percentage points from the same month a year ago.

This growth rate is much slower than the rates of the past four years. EV market share soared from about 2% of retail sales in the 2010s to nearly 8% by the end of 2023, Kelley Blue Book said.

The important distinction here is that demand hasn't dried up — it's just changing.

Companies are scrambling to adjust, pulling back production on big, expensive EVs and prioritizing more affordable models. Ford, for example, recently said it would pause production of its F-150 Lightning pickup truck for the rest of the year.

Ford also announced plans in August to replace two electric three-row SUVs with hybrid models. GM promised this year to bring hybrids to the North American market, reversing its full-EV strategy in the region, though the company provided few details about its Stateside hybrid plan.

As companies shuffle the deck, EV launches are expected to slow. S&P Global Mobility expects that about half of the 143 EV launches it's tracking between 2024 and 2026 could be delayed or canceled.

This upheaval is likely to continue after President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. Trump has been tough on EVs, promising to gut Biden-era legislation designed to support the EV transition.

But it's unclear how much a new administration could undo the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes electric-vehicle tax credits, without Congress's help.

These EV tax credits, which can effectively lower the purchase price of a new car by up to $7,500, have been a specific target of Trump's. As affordability becomes a top barrier to EV adoption, the dissolution of these incentives could lower demand even further.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become a close ally of Trump's, which initially gave industry executives and experts hope that the president-elect could soften his EV approach.

However, Musk's stances have largely aligned with Trump's so far, including opposing government subsidies for electric vehicles.