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What if the road could charge your EV?
January 15, 2024

Tech Brew

Splunk

It’s Monday. One of the things that makes people wary about abandoning internal combustion engine vehicles is that, at the moment, it’s just not as easy to charge an EV as it is to swing by a gas station, particularly on road trips. But what if your car charged as you drove? Tech Brew’s Jordyn Grzelewski details a startup looking to do just that in Detroit.

In today’s edition:

Jordyn Grzelewski, Patrick Kulp, Annie Saunders

FUTURE OF TRAVEL

Paving the way

An electric cargo van is pictured on a stretch of roadway equipped for wireless charging. Stephen McGee

The future of EV charging may make you forget about charging altogether.

That’s if efforts to introduce wireless EV charging technology, like what Israeli startup Electreon is now testing on a quarter-mile stretch of road in Detroit, are successful.

“What we’re trying to accomplish is showing that this is a feasible option for multiple use cases,” Stefan Tongur, Electreon’s vice president of business development for the US, told Tech Brew.

The project in Detroit, unveiled late last year, represents what has been described as the first public wireless charging roadway in the US. It’s happening in Michigan Central, a tech and mobility hub Ford is building in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood.

Wireless charging is emerging as a technology of interest for the auto industry, with advocates pointing to potential benefits like a more seamless charging experience and possible reductions in battery size because drivers won’t need as much range.

Keep reading here.—JG

     

PRESENTED BY SPLUNK

Face your new cybersecurity frenemy

Splunk

Wondering if generative AI will be your cybersecurity ally—or enemy? Surprise, surprise: IT security leaders think the answer is…both.

Splunk breaks down the deets in their new article, How CISOs are (and aren’t) using generative AI. Their article lays out tons of practical advice and actionable insights about the intersection of AI and security, such as:

  • advice and opinions on industry trends and best practices
  • leadership guidance from fellow leaders
  • digestible research curated specifically for the C-suite

Read the whole article to see how your new frenemy, generative AI, can help you manage the more mundane (while still important) parts of cybersecurity—and how to prepare for potential attacks that come with using AI.

Learn from the leaders.

AI

Executive attention

People at the 2024 CES event in Las Vegas. Anadolu/Getty Images

Between ChatGPT-integrated cars and at-home health tests, CES tends to have something for everyone.

While AI dominated this year’s iteration of the tech industry’s biggest showcase, there were also plenty of announcements around car tech, extended reality (XR), and all manner of other gadgets. To help take a sampling of everything there was to see, we asked a slew of tech execs what they saw or were looking to see at CES 2024.

Fresh off a panel on AI and jobs with acting Labor Secretary Julie Su and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, Kathy Baxter, principal architect of responsible AI at Salesforce, told Tech Brew she is always looking to learn about how companies are handling responsible AI.

“We hear over and over again how important it is for the public to trust AI. And so what are companies doing as a result of that?” Baxter said. “So I’m always looking for that tangible kind of example that companies are showing.”

The strong presence of public-sector officials like Su at CES speaks to how policymakers are increasingly looking to better understand AI, she said. “We’re really seeing an explosion of interest among governments,” Baxter said.

Keep reading here.—PK

     

READER SPOTLIGHT

Coworking with Yoav Amiel

Graphic featuring a headshot of RXO CIO Yoav Amiel Yoav Amiel

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

As chief information officer at RXO, I oversee the technology enablement for the organization. My role is to set the strategy and direct the many information technology initiatives, as well as the computer systems required to support our different lines of business. We focus on transportation solutions, and we have built a proprietary technology platform to help connect shippers and carriers and move freight more efficiently.

My daily focus is building products that enable business growth through innovation, along with running, maintaining, and protecting the systems for the organization that ensure every employee can do their job with proper and functioning technology. This includes product capabilities, servers, software, infrastructure, information security, enterprise applications, engineering, data science, and more. In other words, if it runs on electricity, there is a good chance it is part of my responsibility.

What’s the most compelling tech project you’ve worked on, and why?

The most compelling project I have been part of is building our proprietary transportation platform, RXO Connect. The transportation industry is still very inefficient and fragmented, and RXO Connect optimizes the interactions for both shippers and carriers. From a technology perspective, it includes many innovative components and “fun” key ingredients, including building scalable systems from the ground up, developing proprietary machine learning and AI engines that leverage huge data sets, and driving adoption via closed feedback loops. It is exciting to be in a position of delivering capacities that have direct and immediate impact on user adoption, productivity, and business results.

Keep reading here.

     

TOGETHER WITH ELASTIC

Elastic

Behind the scenes of search tech. Uncover innovations shaping search at Elastic’s 2024 tech trends webinar on Jan. 31. See how the newest innovations, tools, and methodologies are changing the entire landscape of search technology + understand real-world concerns surrounding data safety and user privacy. Register today.

BITS AND BYTES

Stat: Nearly 23 million. That’s the number of American households that have enrolled in the Affordable Connectivity Program since late 2021, Tech Brew’s Kelcee Griffis reported. Congressional leaders last week introduced a bipartisan bill to extend the program.

Quote: “Waymo was the original leader in this area and they continue to make incremental progress, and even while being leaders, they’ve always been very careful with their expansion. What Waymo is doing is methodically knocking down the barriers to AV introduction.”—Mike Ramsey, an auto analyst at Gartner, to Tech Brew’s Jordyn Grzelewski regarding the robotaxi company’s expansion onto Phoenix freeways

Read: Huawei ends US lobbying operations after years of fighting ban (Bloomberg)

Friend or foe: It can be hard to know how generative AI and security systems fit together. Hear what CISOs think about embracing AI (and what to be careful of) in Splunk’s latest article.*

*A message from our sponsor.

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