It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s two planes…mimicking birds?

This is the vision that Airbus, the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer, is trying to bring to life with its airline partners as part of broader industry efforts to make commercial aviation more sustainable. Delta announced at CES 2025 that it would take part in a test run later this year of Airbus’s “fello’fly” technique, which is inspired by migrating geese, to improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions.

The solution is still years away from being used on commercial flights, but there’s optimism about the long-term potential of fello’fly to help the aviation industry achieve its decarbonization goals.

“There is no other relevant solution to decarbonize wide-body flying across the transatlantic,” Amelia DeLuca, Delta’s chief sustainability officer, told Tech Brew. “You cannot put batteries in those airplanes.”

Keep reading here.—JG

The more the merrier seems to be the case for EV charging software startup WeaveGrid, which this week announced backing from two major auto companies––sister brands Hyundai Motor and Kia––after recently unveiling an investment from Toyota.

“With Toyota, Hyundai Motor, and Kia investing in our platform, we’re seeing a clear industry convergence,” WeaveGrid CEO Apoorv Bhargava said in a statement.

“These investments validate our approach to creating a cybersecure, seamless solution that enables automakers to transform their EVs into grid-interactive vehicles,” he added. “With our solutions already deployed in dozens of the largest utilities in the country, we’re establishing the foundation for how hundreds of millions of EVs and the grid will work together.”

Grid gains: WeaveGrid provides software solutions to utility providers to help integrate electric vehicles with the power grid.

“We’re really creating this awesome software interface between the electric vehicles that are hitting the grid and the electric utilities that operate that grid,” Yakov Berenshteyn, WeaveGrid’s senior director of automotive and charging partnerships, told Tech Brew at CES 2025, “making sure that EV adoption can be scalable on the infrastructure that we have today and that we’re developing into the future in terms of charging.”

Keep reading here.—JG

It may feel like fresh new AI features are front and center in every app these days, but Americans may be unaware of how much the technology is already woven into the services they use every day.

A new Gallup survey found that nearly all Americans—99%—had used a product with AI features in the past week, but fewer than two-thirds of them (64%) reported having used products with integrated AI. Those products include navigation apps, social media feeds, and virtual assistants, and AI is defined as “computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence.”

The survey of 4,000 US adults was backed by the nonprofit Telescope Foundation, which claims to advocate for responsible tech progress.

Why the mix-up: While “generative AI” has often been used interchangeably with “AI” in the last couple years, the latter encompasses a whole range of other machine learning-based techniques, from image recognition to predictive analytics. That could lead to public misperception of the true reach of this tech as countries consider regulations and companies market it to consumers.

Keep reading here.—PK