The US transportation industry has been scrambling to meet a new regulatory requirement issued at the end of June, making non-compliance with English Language Proficiency (ELP) an out-of-service violation for commercial vehicle drivers.

Tech.co’s latest survey has the data proving this impact: A spike of 10% of logistics professionals cited adapting to regulations as their top priority this quarter. That’s an increase of more than double the amount who said the same thing just one month earlier.

It makes sense that ELP regulations would be a top concern, given that they further limit the number of drivers qualified to get behind the wheel of a fleet vehicle in 2025. The industry has been seeing a shortage of drivers for years already.

Logistics Pros Prioritizing Regulatory Adoption Doubles in One Month

The new data comes from a Tech.co survey conducted on July 16th. With 10% of logistics professionals saying that they see regulatory adaptation as their biggest priority, it’s a big jump up from the 4% who said the same in June.

The new data suggests many firms are now urgently playing catch-up to ensure their drivers meet the new communication and reading standards.

Another new announcement may have added some fuel to the fire, too: On July 1st, the DOT announced an audit into state commercial driving licenses issued to non-US citizens.

1,212 Drivers Are Out-of-Service for ELP Violations Already

Fleet managers are right to be concerned.

Recently analyzed data from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has revealed the exact number of ELP-related out-of-service orders in 2025 so far: 1,212 commercial vehicle drivers have been impacted, finds CDLLife.

The specific requirements that drivers must meet? According to the law, they must “read and speak the English language sufficiently to converse with the general public, to understand highway traffic signs and signals in the English language, to respond to official inquiries, and to make entries on reports and record.”

What to Know About the New ELP Regulations

The new rule took effect on June 25. It was first announced a mere three months earlier, in April. That gave fleets a short runway to ensure that all their drivers were qualified to meet the new regulation and might explain the sudden spike.

That said, this wasn’t the first time that ELP has qualified as a reason to put commercial drivers out-of-service: The new regulation is a reinstatement.

In 2016, a FMCSA memo told law enforcement to stop placing truck drivers out-of-service for ELP violations. Now, that decision is once again being reversed by an even more nationalism-driven government administration.

Freight juggernaut UPS is shutting down facilities in three major locations in the US — as reality continues to bite for players in the logistics space.

In the last few days, the company has announced that it plans to lay off workers at distribution facilities in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Dallas, Texas, following similar moves in Pocahontas, Arkansas. The move forms part of a wider strategy to consolidate its existing presence and “reduce excess capacity,” according to Freight Waves.

The logistics sector is at an inflection point. We’ve spoken to hundreds of professionals who say they’ve been impacted by the ongoing labor shortage plaguing the industry, but other companies, like UPS, are in the process of downsizing and implementing automation to maintain productivity.

UPS Closing Three Distribution Sites

UPS plans to close three of its distribution centers as part of a program of consolidation, it has emerged. The logistics business has already shuttered one of its locations — in Pocahontas, Arkansas — and similar facilities in Dallas, Texas and Wilmington, North Carolina are set to follow.

As part of the closures, the company is also laying off dozens of staff. It recently notified the Texas Workforce Commission that it plans to release a total of 62 workers in the coming weeks, while it is unknown how many employees will be affected at either of the two other sites.

A company spokesperson, Karen Tomaszewski, told Freight Waves: “We are working to place as many employees as possible in other positions. We will work with those who may be impacted throughout the process to provide support.”

UPS Downsizing Forms Part of Wider Restructure

UPS has been quietly making layoffs and shutting facilities for a few months now. In early May, 99 workers at its Charlotte, North Carolina facility were let go, according to a notice filed with the North Carolina Department of Commerce. In July, meanwhile, it revealed it was going to imminently lay off 177 personnel and temporarily cease operations at a facility in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Announcing the news of the Dallas closure, Tomaszewski revealed that the news formed part of a wider “network reconfiguration,” which will see the elimination of 200 further sortation centers over the next five years. In place of employees, UPS will deploy automation to “improve productivity” across its networks.

UPS is also offering some of its drivers a voluntary separation package as it seeks to further curb its workforce. In April, the company signaled its intention to eliminate 20,000 front-line roles.

Industry Gearing Up For Autonomous Future?

The logistics sector is going through a tumultuous period, with big players like UPS forced to make difficult changes to their operating models, in part to accommodate advancements in areas like automation. Other firms, however, are struggling to reckon with uncertainty around tariffs and a hiring crisis.

As part of our latest report, Moving Goods With Fewer Hands, we spoke to 521 industry professionals, and 63% of them confirmed that their ability to recruit and retain drivers had either stagnated or worsened over the last year. Largely, this is due to a lack of qualified applicants, with 45% of businesses indicating that this was the biggest obstacle.

For a range of challenges related to both overstaffing and understaffing, automation has been heralded as a solution to the industry’s workplace woes. The technology certainly presents some compelling use cases, with warehouses among its biggest beneficiaries – and UPS seems to be getting ahead of the game.

Some of the most widely-used AI agents and assistants in the world, including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, and Salesforce’s Einstein, are vulnerable to being hijacked with little to no user interaction, new research from Zenity Labs claims.

Reportedly, hackers can easily gain access to and exfiltrate critical data, manipulate workflows, and even impersonate users, with relative ease. It’s understood that attackers could also gain memory persistence, which essentially grants long-term access and control to compromised data.

The findings will concern technology chiefs everywhere, who have already indicated that cybersecurity is their top concern in 2025. And with a lot of employees using AI in secret, its security gaps may be more numerous than many senior leaders think.

AI Agents “Highly Vulnerable” to Hacking, Research Shows

A new report from Zenity Labs outlines how some of the most popular AI agents on the market are vulnerable to exploitation by bad actors.

During a presentation at the Black Hat USA cybersecurity conference, researchers revealed that the platforms in question all demonstrated serious security weaknesses.

They showed that once hackers get access to these AI agents, they can exfiltrate sensitive data, manipulate workflows, and potentially even impersonate users. It is thought that they may even be able to gain memory persistence, which would give them long-term control and access.

Greg Zemlin, product marketing manager at Zenity Labs, said: “They can manipulate instructions, poison knowledge sources, and completely alter the agent’s behavior. This opens the door to sabotage, operational disruption, and long-term misinformation, especially in environments where agents are trusted to make or support critical decisions.”

Findings Shed Light on Numerous Security Loopholes

Zenity Labs set out to establish how attackers could utilize zero-click exploits to compromise leading AI agents. Among the findings, the company concluded that:

• ChatGPT can be hacked with an email-based prompt injection, giving attackers access to connected Google Drive accounts.
• Copilot leaked entire CRM databases through its customer-support agent.
• Einstein can be manipulated to reroute customer communications to different email accounts, giving attackers access to login information.
• Both Gemini and Copilot can be manipulated into targeting users with social-engineering attacks.

Upon discovering these vulnerabilities, Zenity Labs notified the companies concerned, which acted to patch the flaws and introduce long-term safeguards to ensure that the problems don’t recur. A spokesperson for Google stated: “Having a layered defense strategy against prompt injection attacks is crucial.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to deter a recent data breach through the Salesforce CRM.

Companies Must Act Now to Avert Catastrophe

The findings from Zenity Labs will certainly ruffle some feathers in the AI world. Increasingly, AI agents are becoming a staple of the modern workplace, with companies investing heavily in their strategies and employees right across the business leveraging the latest tools to streamline their operations.

In our report, The Impact of Technology on the Workplace, we spoke to professionals across the business sector to get a better idea of how technology was shaping their working habits. Among our findings, we learned that just 27% of businesses had implemented policies to strictly limit the kind of data that can be shared with AI models.

It’s a worrying combination: not only are companies failing to introduce appropriate safeguards, but the AI tools themselves have obvious security vulnerabilities. With adoption continuing apace, businesses everywhere face a race against time to bed in strict governance policies — or they risk ending up as another data breach statistic.

The Google-Salesforce data breach just keeps getting worse, with the tech giant confirming that the exposed information included some from Google Ads customers.

Data breaches are, simply put, the worst. They cost businesses a lot of money and they make the online world just a little less secure for everyday people.

This Google breach is a doozy too, with a lot of data being stolen through the Salesforce CRM that could have a far-reaching impact on the company and its customers.

Google Ads Customer Data Confirmed Exposed

According to the company, a security breached suffered by Google has exposed data of Google Ads customers.

“We’re writing to let you know about an event that affected a limited set of data in one of Google’s corporate Salesforce instances used to communicate with prospective Ads customers.” – Google breach notification, from BleepingComputer

At the beginning of August, Google disclosed that it was one of the many companies that were targeted through the Salesforce CRM for data breaches. The full scope of the breach, which hit companies like Adidas, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Chanel, Tiffany & Co., and Qantas Airways, among others, remains to be seen.

What Google Ads Customer Data Was Exposed?

The question on everyone’s mind when data breaches occur is what kind of data was actually exposed. When it comes to platforms like Google Ads, there is a lot of valuable information being passed around between the company and its customers.

“Our records indicate basic business contact information and related notes were impacted by this event.” – Google spokesperson

Fortunately, the company notes that no payment information was exposed, and that all data within the Google Ads Account, Google Analytics, Merchant Center, and any other Ads platforms were still secure.

How to Protect Your Business From Breaches

When these kind of breaches happen, it’s easy to feel helpless. After all, if a massive corporation like Google can get hacked, what could you possibly do to prevent your business from falling victim?

The reality is that there is a lot you can do to keep your business from being hacked. While technology is constantly improving, many of these attacks use social engineering and human error to gain access to systems.

That means that, if you can train your staff to notice the telltale signs of cybersecurity threats, you’ll be able to stave off security breaches more effectively than even Google.

Check out our in-depth cybersecurity guide to learn more

OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman are profusely apologizing after its launch of GPT-5 featured some egregiously misleading charts that made the model seem better than it was.

AI errors are the reality for the technology in modern times. From deleting databases to pretending to be human, AI models are prone to making mistakes, both inane and quite serious.

Well, it appears AI companies are just as prone to mistakes as their models, with OpenAI committing “unintentional chart crime” on arguably the best stage you can imagine for the technology.

OpenAI Apologizes for ‘Unintentional Chart Crime’

During its livestream announcing the launch of its latest AI model, GPT-5, OpenAI showed some extremely misleading graphs that had incorrectly labeled bar graphs, showing the AI model was better at avoiding deceptions than it was.

In a post on X, CEO Sam Altman describes it as a “mega chart screwup” and the person that runs the company’s official account tweeted that it apologizes for the “unintentional chart crime” committed during the livestream.

“The numbers here were accurate but we screwed up the bar charts in the livestream overnight; on another slide we screwed up numbers.” – Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, on Reddit

In addition to the apology, OpenAI has edited and fixed the blog post announcing GPT-5, featuring the correct bar graphs and numbers from the data.

OpenAI has since fixed the incorrect charts on the blog post announcing GPT-5. Source: OpenAI

Was the Error Due to AI?

Given the fact that an AI company made the error, it’s completely reasonable to ask whether or not this error was, in fact, due to AI. Well, according to CEO Sam Altman, the mistake was the result of human error, rather than an AI hallucination.

“People were working late and were very tired, and human error got in the way. A lot comes together for a livestream in the last hours.” – Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

Now, would an AI company be even remotely inclined to admit that GPT-5 made an egregious mistake while trying to announce its improvements to the world? Probably not, but for now, we’ll have to take Altman’s word.

When Will AI Errors Be Behind Us?

While the error from OpenAI may not have been because of AI, there are still too many instances of the technology going rogue for everyday users to be thoroughly convinced.

Recently, a company that was using an AI model had its entire database deleted, with even the model admitting that “This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I destroyed months of work in seconds.”

In another instance, the AI from Anthropic pretended it was human during an experiment in which it was tasked with running a company.

Suffice to say, the errors keep stacking up, and if Sam Altman and OpenAI want people to trust the tech, they’re going to have to start making an effort to limit these mistakes, especially during the livestreams that announce it.

Drivers clearly want to stay at UPS: The parcel delivery company is extending its voluntary layoff program by a few weeks because so few individuals are taking them up on it.

While the trucker shortage is impacting logistics businesses around the world, some larger companies are still trying to trim their workforce to be a bit more lean. UPS is among them, with a big push to reduce overhead amid a strategy shift.

It’s not going well, though, with its buyout offer being largely rejected by UPS drivers, thanks to a number of notable factors.

UPS Extends Voluntary Layoff Program

UPS has quietly extended its buyout offer to employees, allowing a bit more time for drivers to get on board with the program.

While UPS hasn’t confirmed the lack of interest, the deadline extension is a pretty good indicator that there haven’t been enough employees taking them up on it. However, in the company’s earnings call on July 29th, CEO Carol Tomé said there was “a lot of interest,” so it’s hard to say exactly what’s going on.

The buyout program is fairly generous, as far as buyouts go. The company is offering $1,800 per year of service, with a minimum amount of $10,000 per employee. So, an employee that worked at UPS for 30 years, for example, would be entitled to $54,000.

The original deadline was July 31st, but some reports point to it being pushed all the way to August 14th.

Why Aren’t UPS Employees Taking the Buyout?

While the lack of interest isn’t entirely confirmed, there are a few notable reasons why UPS employees would be wary of taking the buyout offer.

For one, the Teamster union is staunchly opposed to it, saying that the “devious driver voluntary severance plan” isn’t generous enough given what they are asking.

“The Teamsters are prepared to fight UPS on every front with every available resource to shut down this illegal buyout program.” – Sean O’Brien, Teamsters General President

On top of that, the job market is a bit shaky given the Trump tariffs and the advancements in AI, which means that gainful employment is notably harder to come by in 2025.

UPS Offering Buyouts During a Trucker Shortage

UPS is offering buyouts to its drivers in an effort to reduce its workforce. However, there is a persistent trucker shortage that is threatening the stability of the logistics industry as a whole. So, which is it? Are more drivers needed or is UPS overstaffed?

The reality of the trucker shortage is hardly debatable. Our annual logistics report from Tech.co found that 69% of businesses say that driver shortages have had an impact on their ability to meet freight demand.

Still, while that is true, UPS is also in the midst of a strategy shift, planning to reduce its deliveries of Amazon products due to poor margins. It’s also just generally trying to reduce costs, including the closing of 200 domestic package sorting centers.

An increasing number of businesses operating in the transport and shipping sector are being forced to spend more each month on fuel, data obtained by Tech.co in July 2025 reveals.

The news comes after a sharp increase in crude oil prices in June, and signals that US businesses are really starting to feel the pinch.

To make matters worse, being forced to manage these immediate financial pressures means logistics businesses now have less time and resources to address deeper issues impacting their industry, such as driver shortages.

Rising Fuel Costs: A Creeping Concern

In July, we asked 264 logistics professionals working in the US shipping and transportation sector about the issues affecting their businesses the most.

20% of our survey’s respondents reported that rising fuel costs were hitting their businesses harder than any other issue at present.

Concerningly, this is the highest this figure has been in since April. It’s a 4% rise on the number of businesses that said the same about diesel prices in June, and a 7% rise on May’s figure, which sat at just 13%.

Businesses aren’t suddenly using more fuel; as we’ve mentioned, there has been a sharp uptick in the price of crude oil. Spurred on by escalating tensions in the Middle East over the past few weeks, prices rose by 11.3% in June, and we’re now seeing it start to eat into operating budgets across the US transport and shipping sector.

The percentage of logistics professionals stating that their business is being hit the hardest by rising diesel prices has hit a three-month peak. Image: Tech.co Research

Diesel Prices Are Squeezing Budgets

Over half (52%) of the logistics professionals we surveyed said that their companies were now spending more than one-fifth of their monthly operating budget on fuel alone.

Fuel is, of course, a core operating expense — and when these sorts of outgoings start to rise, other things have to give. Recent weather volatility means that preparing for unforeseen circumstances is also becoming a non-negotiable for an increasing number of businesses, so there’s even less spare cash to play with.

This means that, after accounting for these critical priorities, firms often can’t fund the strategies needed to deal with the more persistent challenges impacting the US transport sector.

Month-to-Month Pressures Take Priority

Indeed, in our July survey, we found more evidence that immediate pressures like rising fuel prices have turned many eyes to the here and now, and away from investing in solutions to challenges like driver shortages, which inhibit growth and expansion.

For instance, only 14% of logistics companies are prioritising recruitment and retention, even though 24% listed workplace shortages as their biggest concern. A larger proportion of companies reported that they were prioritizing “vehicle upkeep” (20%) and “managing financial pressures” (17%) instead.

If fuel prices continue to rise, it may make it more difficult for some logistics companies to address long-standing challenges — and justify splashing out on solutions.

A slightly smaller percentage (16%) of businesses reported that they were prioritizing adopting new technology, but this number could quickly shrink if budgets continue to be directed towards core operational demands. And, with the tariff uncertainties still looming overhead, there’s every chance they will be.

Truck drivers are one of the professions least impacted by AI, according to a new, wide-ranging study from Microsoft.

Although many in the logistics industry are embracing advancements in artificial intelligence and anticipating the rollout of autonomous trucks over the next decade or two, “Industrial Truck and Tractor Operators” aren’t turning to AI to help them complete their jobs in anything like the numbers other professions are.

The logistics industry is at a critical inflection point, with an ongoing labor shortage causing problems for global supply chains. According to our Moving Goods With Fewer Hands report, one of the biggest barriers to hiring is a dearth of skilled applicants. But unlike other industries, companies won’t be able to turn to AI to pick up the slack just yet.

Truck Drivers Among Jobs Least Impacted by AI, Says Report

Setting out to establish which jobs are most and least likely to be replaced by AI, Microsoft researchers analyzed 200,000 anonymized conversations with Bing Copilot users in 2024.

The study, titled Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI, also drew on the federal government’s job classification system to devise an “AI applicability score” for each user’s occupation.

Industrial truck and track operators ranked among the workers least likely to seek help on-hand from AGI, along with tire builders, Surgical assistants, massage therapists, and concrete finishers.

The researchers noted, however, that their data doesn’t show actual job displacement. Rather, it shows how “AI capabilities overlap with work activities”. Of course, job specifications could change in light of what AI can and can’t do, meaning some jobs slated to be heavily impacted may not ultimately be affected.

However, it does give a good indication of the sorts of employees seeking assistance from artificial intelligence today, and those that aren’t. And naturally, truck drivers aren’t going to be asking AI to take the wheel – at least for the time being.

Knowledge, Communication Roles Most at Risk; Physical Work Safe

The 25 jobs considered most likely to be replaced by AI include interpreters, historians, passenger attendants, sales reps, and more.

Many of these roles are unlikely to surprise onlookers, with several companies replacing their workers with AI in the last couple of years. Google, for instance, has reportedly laid off workers in its ad division while heavily deploying AI across customer care and sales processes.

Knowledge work and roles that revolve around communication dominate the list of “at-risk” professions. On the other side of the coin, jobs built around manual labor, physical presence, or machine operation, rank the lowest.

Will Trucking Jobs Ever be Replaced by AI?

According to Microsoft’s study, at present, there don’t seem like too many jobs that AI tools can actually help truckers with.

Of course, AI is built into the technology used in the industry every day to help with things like minimizing fuel consumption and optimizing routes, but it’s some way off from replacing actual workers, even during a labor shortage.

Big AI advancements like autonomous trucks are yet to make their mark on the logistics industry, largely as a result of legal complications. Self-driving trucks have their share of opponents within the industry, with detractors citing safety concerns, as well as the threat to the existing workforce.

But if the current pace of AI development is anything to go by, seismic change could be much, much closer than we think right now.

OpenAI has moved to quell rising fears over privacy by removing a feature from ChatGPT, it has emerged.

The feature in question allowed users to make their conversations with the chatbot discoverable in search engines. To do so, they would select a check box that gave the platform permission to “make this chat discoverable.”

The news was first broken by Fast Company, which revealed that nearly 4,500 conversations had been indexed by Google and showed up as results. It’s thought that in many of these instances, the user involved mistakenly opted to share their private conversations, as the above disclaimer appears in small text.

With concerns over the use of AI at work growing, business leaders will be delighted by this news. A recent report from Gusto shed light on employees’ AI habits, revealing that 45% of staff have used AI tools without first consulting their boss. The OpenAI announcement ensures that sensitive company information won’t be appearing in search results anytime soon.

OpenAI Removes Feature to Make Conversations Discoverable in Search

OpenAI has officially removed a feature from ChatGPT that made it possible for users to share their conversations with others — and be discovered in web searches.

Users had the opportunity to select a check box to “make this chat discoverable,” followed by a disclaimer, in smaller text, that read “allows it to be shown in web searches.”

An investigation by Fast Company revealed that nearly 4,500 ChatGPT conversations had surfaced in Google search results. It’s thought that, in many of these cases, users were actually unaware of what they were enabling, as the disclaimer is written in small font.

Writing on X, an OpenAI representative explained: “This was a short-lived experiment to help people discover useful conversations… Ultimately, we think this feature introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t want to, so we’re removing the options.”

Personal Information Unwittingly Shared with AI Chatbot

The Fast Company report refers to a publicly viewable user chat that “described in detail their sex life and unhappiness living in a foreign country, claiming they were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and seeking support.” Reportedly, the chat also includes details of family history, friends, and relationships.

It’s also likely that the true number of ChatGPT conversations visible in search is much higher, as Google may not index all conversations.

This will be a cause for concern among the growing number of people using ChatGPT for emotional support. According to a recent study, three-quarters of respondents have tapped the chatbot to help with anxiety.

As we’ve covered in this guide, that practice brings with it significant privacy concerns.

Safety Boon for Workplace Bosses

With AI usage in the workplace growing, senior leaders will be pleased that OpenAI has removed a feature that could have spelled disaster for their business’s privacy.

As mentioned in the above guide, a growing demographic of workers is using tools, such as ChatGPT, without first seeking the permission of their boss. This means that it’s impossible to regulate their usage — as well as what they might be sharing.

In order to ensure that this doesn’t become a problem further down the line, companies need to educate their staff on how to use AI safely. With cybersecurity one of the biggest issues facing the business world today, practicing good data hygiene is absolutely essential to deterring cyberattacks.

As this piece demonstrates, the consequences are often severe.

The overwhelming majority of organizations has been targeted by a ransomware attack in the last 12 months, according to a new study from Active Directory security firm Semperis. 78% of the IT professionals they surveyed for their 2025 Ransomware Risk Report revealed that they had been hit with an attempt in the last year, with 69% of the attempts resulting in a ransom payment being paid.

The hardest hit industry globally was manufacturing, with 81% of IT professionals surveyed admitting their company had fallen victim to a ransomware attack. The same proportion of IT and Telecoms companies were on the receiving end of an attack, while 79% of finance companies were also targeted successfully by cybercriminals using ransomware, the report says.

Cybersecurity is among the biggest concerns for businesses in 2025. Our own research indicates that many businesses are woefully underprepared for the threat landscape, with 98% of senior leaders unable to correctly identify all the signs of a phishing attack. So, while these figures are certainly concerning, they’re far from susprising.

78% of Organizations Hit With Ransomware Attacks

For their 2025 Ransomware Risk Report, Semperis spoke to 1,500 IT and security professionals across multiple industries in the US, UK, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. They were trying to shine a light on the nature of ransomware attacks in 2025.

78% of surveyed businesses were subject to an attempted ransomware attack in the last 12 months. Shockingly, 69% of successful attempts resulted in the company acquiescing to the attackers’ demands.

As discussed in the introduction, manufacturing and telecoms were the hardest hit industries (81%), followed by financial institutions (79%). Interestingly, however, attacker success rates were higher in the finance world (64%) than anywhere else. For comparison, while 67% of government organisations experienced at least one ransomware attack in the last 12 months, only 33% were successful.

In the energy (77%) and transportation sector (71%), the vast majority of companies were also reporting that they had had to deal with a ransomware attack in the last twelve months, reflecting that no stage of the supply chain – from manufacturing to last-mile delivery – is safe from cyberattacks.

Manufacturing Industry Hit the Hardest

The study reveals that the joint-most targeted sector is manufacturing, with a staggering 81% of firms hit with ransomware attempts in the last 12 months. 50% of these attacks were successful, with 63% of breached companies meeting the attackers’ demands. In 61% of cases, companies paid out between $500,000 and $1 million. Coming at second place is the healthcare industry, which continues to be plagued by data leaks and breaches as we move into the tail end of 2025.

Concerningly, 83% of breached manufacturing firms confirm that their identity infrastructure was compromised, while 39% were hit on more than one occasion. This indicates that paying a ransom won’t necessarily ward off further attacks.

The business disruption such attacks can cause is significant. It took between one day and one week for most afflicted manufacturing firms (63%) to resume normal operations, with a further 16% experiencing downtime for between one week and one month. They’re financially costly too, of course, with 61% of manufacturing organisations hit with a ransomware attack paying between $500,000 and $1,000,000 to the perpetrators.

With the vast majority of logistics firms (85%) currently operating at near-full capacity according to our latest industry report, these setbacks could have devastating effects on global supply chains.

Semperis Report Lays Bare Extent of Problem

Cybersecurity is one of the most pressing issues facing the business sector today, with Semperis’s report illustrating that this problem is felt across all industries. Recently, 1.4 million people were hit in a massive data breach at Allianz Life, the latest in a long line of data breaches that have plagued the business world for decades now.

Companies everywhere are still ill-prepared for the scale of the problem, which is only going to get worse with the emergence of highly accessible, incredibly powerful AI tools.

The business world needs to do more. It’s not just a question of increasing cybersecurity budgets — although this is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. More action needs to be taken to procure talent, upskill existing employees, and ultimately introduce a culture of collective responsibility where deterring threats is concerned. Without it, this problem will only get worse.

We live in the time of AI, and its power seems inescapable.

Just to list a few recent headlines about the impacts of AI on the business world: Lawyers are using the tech to (reportedly) boost productivity by 34% to 240% across six legal workflows, a huge 84% of software developers say they use or plan to use AI tools in their workflow (despite listing some trust issues), and AI investments are surging even while VC funds overall drop.

In other words, we can’t overthrow our robot rulers just yet. In the meantime, it might help to understand them a little better.

White collar workers everywhere have had a few years to pick up some AI skills, but if you’re a holdout, the good news is that you won’t have to invest very much energy into learning the basics.

Here, we’ve rounded up a wide range of online training courses. Some are just a few hours long, while others will take several months to complete. The only thing linking them all is that you can complete them in your own time, from anywhere with an internet connection, and all without paying a cent.

IBM: AI for Everyone – Master the Basics

⏰Length: 4-8 hours

It’s right there in the title: This one’s a great starter course for AI newbies who just need to understand the basics in order to upskill and keep their career on track.

IBM’s long history in computing makes them a natural fit for designing and running this course, which walks its students through AI applications, use cases, and the definitions of AI concepts such as machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks.

It also discusses the ethics concerns behind AI bias and how the technology impacts broader society.

The four modules will only take a few days to work through, with no technical background required. It’s popular, too, with over a quarter of a million people enrolled at one point or another.

Head over to the edX platform to try out this free course today.

Codeacademy: Accessing OpenAI APIs from Python

⏰Length: 2 hours

Plenty of workers already have an understanding of how to communicate with a generative AI chatbot. If that’s you, perhaps you’re hoping to gain more of an edge in the competitive “knowing how to use AI” corner of the business world. This more specific course can do the trick.

Over the course of just a couple hours, Codeacademy will teach users how to navigate the OpenAI API — the building blocks that any developer can use to create a new AI-powered app.

This particular course shows users how to use the Python coding language to discover API key authentication, gain access to API endpoints, and model configurations, among other tasks.

If you have a little bit of coding knowledge (and plenty of other free online courses can help with that), this course will help you craft a custom AI app for your company or your entrepreneurial pursuits. If you already have a vision for an app, you might be able to have a working beta turned out by the weekend.

Check out the course and get started over on Codeacademy here.

Davidson & Galileo: Intro to AI for Digital Marketing

⏰Length: 9-15 hours

Marketing and AI have an up-and-down relationship: On the one hand, 77% of Chief Marketing Officers have already adopted genAI for at least some creative development tasks, according to one study. However, another 27% of CMOs are limiting or completely avoiding the use of generative AI on their teams.

If you’re working under one of those 77% that are into the concept however, you might want this intro to digital marketing with AI. The course will take you through real-life applications and the key factors for successfully integrating AI with marketing strategies, along with a discussion of the risks and challenges that have led some CMOs to turn away from the idea.

Once you’re through with the course, you’ll even emerge with “advanced prompt engineering techniques for optimizing AI-generated content for specific marketing objectives.”

Offered through an international collaboration between Guatemala City’s Galileo University and North Carolina’s Davidson College, this course is available to all. It’s a great fit for a busy worker, too, since it should take you about 3 weeks to complete, with about 3-5 hours per week.

Check out the course on edX over here.

Stanford: Machine Learning Specialization

⏰Length: 80 hours

At a whopping 80 hours of commitment required, this is our longest course recommendation in this guide. In fact, it’s technically a three course series: The modules include “Supervised Machine Learning: Regression and Classification,” “Advanced Learning Algorithms,” and “Unsupervised Learning, Recommenders, Reinforcement Learning.”

Not only will you learn how machine learning works, but you’ll gain the “techniques to build real-world AI applications,” thanks to this collaboration between DeepLearning.AI and Stanford Online.

Best of all, your instructor is Andrew Ng, a top AI guru who cofounded and ran Google Brain, among many other AI-related accolades.

Be warned: The course is listed as “Beginner level,” but that means you’ll be expected to have a little coding knowledge before you start. If it’s for you, head over to Coursera and get started today.

UMD: Digital Marketing Analytics – Tools and Techniques

⏰Length: 12-20 hours

This course isn’t solely dedicated to AI. Instead, you’ll superpower your digital marketing abilities with a whole host of tools for data analysis within the field. AI and big data applications can be included with and bundled into SEO and paid search strategies, web analytics, and online testing.

It’s another reminder that AI tools aren’t great by themselves. Only when used intelligently and combined with tried-and-true strategies can you actually glean a little extra productivity from them. Here’s how the course intro explains it:

“Businesses today have access to an increasingly large amount of detailed customer data, and this influx of “big data” is only going to continue. […] Using real-world applications from various industries, this course will help you understand the tools and strategies used to make data-driven decisions that you can put to use in your own company or business.”

Available as part of Maryland Smith’s Digital Marketing Professional Certificate, this course can be audited online here, and will just take four weeks to complete with just three to five hours per week.

Keeping Up With AI Advancement

Perhaps you’re a worker just hoping to retain your job as the US economy drifts closer towards a recession. If so, hopefully the selection of online courses above can do the trick.

If you own or manage your own company, however, and want to make sure you’re not missing out on AI-powered growth or cost-cutting, than maybe you’d prefer taking a look at our guide (and free template) for creating your own AI business policy.

Other guides worth checking out include our walkthrough on how to best spot AI cyber attacks, or how to stop ChatGPT from training on your data.

We’ve also rounded up other free AI training courses in the past, so check our archives for even more suggestions.

Global cloud platform company Cloudflare has accused Perplexity AI of using “stealth, undeclared crawlers” to intentionally ignore websites’ no-crawl directives.

In other words, Perplexity is getting around regulations aimed at stopping its AI web crawlers from receiving access to certain websites, according to this new report.

For AI critics, this news might serve as another indicator that AI tools are built off the backs of unauthorized data. It’s a claim that, oddly enough, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself has aligned with, in a 2024 legal filing that claimed AI requires copyrighted material in order to train itself.

What’s Perplexity AI Up To?

According to the Cloudflare report, Perplexity is responding to websites’ network blocks by, apparently, “obscur[ing] their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences.”

The AI company is reportedly modifying their user agent, changing their source ASNs, and even ignoring or not fetching “robots.txt” files, all in an attempt to disguise unauthorized activity. 

Cloudflare is having none of it. According to its report, the company has de-listed Perplexity as a verified bot and has added heuristics to their managed rules to block even stealth crawling.

How Cloudflare Ran Tests

The issue was first brought to Cloudflare’s attention by its own customers, who issued multiple complaints about unauthorized Perplexity crawling, according to the report.

“We received complaints from customers who had both disallowed Perplexity crawling activity in their robots.txt files and also created WAF rules to specifically block both of Perplexity’s declared crawlers: PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User. These customers told us that Perplexity was still able to access their content even when they saw its bots successfully blocked. We confirmed that Perplexity’s crawlers were in fact being blocked on the specific pages in question, and then performed several targeted tests to confirm what exact behavior we could observe.” -Cloudflare

That purported behavior? A new user agent that claimed it was “Google Chrome on macOS” — and not PerplexityBot or Perplexity-User, the only crawlers that Perplexity should be using.

For its part, Perplexity appears to disagree with Cloudflare’s findings. In a statement to The Verge, a Perplexity spokesperson called the report a “publicity stunt,” and said that “there are a lot of misunderstandings in the blog post.”

Perplexity’s Partnerships and Deals

Perplexity has been having a busy few months, even prior to weathering these new accusations of unscrupulous web crawling activity.

First, in early June Bloomberg reported a potential deal between Samsung and the AI startup that would see the tech giant invest in Perplexity while integrating its product into future Samsung devices.

Then, later that month, reports surfaced of a potential acquisition: Tech heavyweight Apple was internally discussing the benefits of buying Perplexity outright.

Perplexity’s AI tools are used by 15 million people and the company reached a $1 billion valuation last year. Now, it appears to be working towards closing lucrative deals with deep-pocketed companies like Apple and Samsung. Let’s hope it isn’t willing to break website regulations to come out ahead.

84% of software developers report using or planing to use AI tools in their workflow, according to a big new Stack Overflow survey. That’s an increase from the 76% who said the same thing one year ago.

However, just one in three (33%) developers say that they trust the accuracy of AI tools — which is down from 43% in 2024.

In other words, AI has never been more widely used, yet an increasing number of developers are finding that they trust it less as their experience with it grows.

Fewer Developers Have Trust in AI

Stack Overflow’s 2025 developer survey compiled responses from a massive pool of over 49,000 developers in 177 countries. It’s one of the biggest annual surveys in the sector, making it a great yardstick for general AI acceptance.

Not only did the new survey find that developers’ trust in AI has dropped, but it also charted a decline in AI “favorability,” which now stands at 60%, down from 72% in 2024 and 77% in 2023.

The results are surprising, given how well generative artificial intelligence has saturated the business world by mid-2025.

“One of the most surprising findings was a significant shift in developer preferences for AI compared to previous years, while most developers use AI, they like it less and trust it less this year. This response is surprising because with all of the investment in and focus on AI in tech news, I would expect that the trust would grow as the technology gets better.” -Erin Yepis, Senior Analyst for Market Research and Insights at Stack Overflow, to VentureBeat

Has the Tide Turned Against AI?

Granted, the trust levels in 2024 were only 43% (barely up from the 42% that AI rated in 2023), so there was never a particularly high trust in AI from the start.

Still, a drop to 33% indicates that developer trust in AI is headed the wrong direction for the many big-tech players that have placed huge bets on the still-nascent technology in recent years.

Anecdotally, I can confirm that one editor I know has told me that they don’t think AI tools can accurately replicate a good writer’s output, but that they think AI could be useful for writing code.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen coders complaining about the ways in which AI inserts time-consuming bugs in the code it writes — even if they trust it to write the written word. In both cases, those with experience in their field say that AI can’t quite cut it.

Fixing AI Mistakes Takes Up Time

There’s no denying that AI tools can do simple tasks. But the complexities of software development might just be beyond the current technology, if this new survey is any indication.

Take the most common problem reported in the survey, for example. 66% of developers said they were dealing with “AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite.” The second place concern was raised by the 45% who said debugging AI code took more time than they wanted.

The exact question was “When using AI tools, which of the following problems or frustrations have you encountered?” and the third-most common response is an interesting one. 23.5% of respondents simply said: “I don’t use AI tools regularly.”

In the future, perhaps opting out of AI tools entirely will be the new hyped-up trend.

President Trump is ending the de minimis extemption, a 1938-era rule designed to encourage the sale of small packages to the US.

The change does into effect on August 29, roughly a month after the announcement.

The rule had previously been ended for imports from China earlier in the year, but this new change will end it for imports to the US from any country.

What’s Changing and Why?

The de minimis threshold was $800 (per item, per day) prior to the removal of the exemption, and allowed small companies to avoid duties and complex paperwork on small-scale imports.

Why the new change? According to a statement from Trump covered by the New York Times, the rule was used to “evade tariffs and funnel deadly synthetic opioids as well as other unsafe or below-market products that harm American workers and businesses into the United States.”

A US Customs and Border Protection report found that more than 60% of 2021 de minimis shipments originated in China and Hong Kong.

Who Loses Without De Minimis?

The ecommerce industry will likely be disrupted by this news. Many smaller operations or dropshippers have already adjusted to the China-only removal of de minimis by shifting to new sources for imports, and will now be forced to re-examine their supply chains once again.

Consumers will likely also lose out. Prices will rise across the board in many categories, with hobbiests and tech-lovers among the hardest hit.

Not only is the de minimis exemption ending, but new, higher tariffs mean that the duties paid on low-valued products are, in many cases, higher than ever.

Who Wins Without De Minimis?

It may be relatively good news for large US retailers like Walmart, since they’ll have the size needed to withstand these headwinds and can benefit from the reduction in competition.

After all, fast-fashion online retailers like Temu and Shein may see valuations drop, since their cost structure depended on the de minimis exemption. Low-value China and Hong Kong exports reached $66 billion in 2023, a number that’s now not likely to be repeated any time soon.

It’s also good news for many US-based companies, which may be able to produce domestic versions of now-costly products, although constaints including raw materials and climates will still impact them.

US-produced goods may eventually fill the gap in the market for lower-priced products, though these companies may lack the competition that could in theory push them to create higher quality goods.

Anthropic has announced a new rate limit for users on its chatbot, Claude, specifically targeting users that are exploiting use of its coding tool, Claude Code, by running it for a long time throughout the day.

This comes after reports of technical issues at Anthropic in the past month, which could be because of the way some subscribers are excessively using the chatbot.

As AI chatbots continue to develop and become more popular, stricter usage limits could potentially be put in place, in order to ensure AI companies can keep up with the demand.

Anthropic Announces New Rate Limit for Claude Users

AI startup Anthropic will be introducing weekly rate limits on its chatbot, Claude, mainly to control usage among users who are running its AI coding tool, Claude Code, “continuously in the background, 24/7.” Likewise, the limits aim to tackle users violating Claude’s usage policy by sharing accounts and reselling access to the coding tool.

The new rates will go into effect August 28 for subscribers on the $20/month Pro plan, and for those on the $100-$200/month Max plans. Anthropic’s existing usage limit resets every five hours, and the company has confirmed this will remain in place.

Additionally, there will be new rate limits that reset every week: an overall usage limit, and one specific to Claude Opus 4. Max subscribers can buy additional usage should they need what the rate limit provides.

Anthropic’s New User Limits Come Amid Tech Issues

A few weeks ago, Anthropic users started to report that they had been hit with restrictive usage limits. Turns out, Anthropic had introduced these limits without reporting them to subscribers, causing many to express their annoyance.

The reasons for wave of new limits could be tied to the fact that Claude has experienced a partial or major outage at least seven times in the last month.

If, like Anthropic has stated, users are running Claude Code as excessively as they are, then it would be understandable if the startup is dealing with high user demand.

Could More AI Companies Limit Use for Subscribers?

One user on Anthropic’s $200/month Max plan has reported to TechCrunch that they have been using the service to make over $1,000 (measured on API pricing) worth of calls in a single day.

On top of this, since 2019, chatbots have experienced a 92% increase in usage, and this number will no doubt increase as the technology develops.

As businesses and consumers continue to implement the technology, AI companies may struggle to keep up from a technical perspective. Anthropic has suggested in the past that it is constrained when it comes to computational resources, and increased usage could be unsustainable in the long run.

Investments and collaborations – Perplexity and Samsung seem to be considering one – could play a major role here. If the technology continues to move as fast as it is, and more and more people begin to use it regularly, user limits could become more strict.

Robotaxi company Waymo has announced it will be launching its services in Dallas, Texas, next year. This is through a partnership with rental car company Avis Budget Group.

The company, owned by Alphabet, has positioned itself strongly in the robotaxi industry, although it continues to face competition from the likes of Tesla and Amazon’s Zoox.

Nevertheless, Waymo appear to be leading the charge, and the technology continues to develop at a rapid pace.

Alphabet’s Waymo To Bring Robotaxi Service to Dallas Next Year

Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous ride-hailing service, is gearing up to launch its robotaxis in Dallas, Texas, next year. To do so, it has partnered with rental car company Avis Budget Group, which will manage the company’s fleet in the area.

Passengers will be able to call a driverless ride through the Waymo app once the service launches in the area. Waymo also makes its services available in some cities through Uber.

Dallas will add to an expanding list of cities where Waymo currently operates, which includes: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

Waymo Outpaces Tesla, Zoox, and Others

Compared to competitors, Waymo appears to be making the biggest strides as autonomous transportation becomes a commercial prospect.

“The Waymo Driver has now autonomously driven over 100 million miles on public roads, and the team is testing across more than 10 cities this year, including New York and Philadelphia.” -Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai

Tesla robotaxis launched in Dallas last month, conducting rides with a technician in the front passenger seat. There have been reports of incidents including a vehicle failing to stop at a train crossing on its own as a train approached.

Competitor Zoox, owned by Amazon, remains in the picture, but the service isn’t set to launch until the end of this year.

Upward Trajectory for Waymo Continues

Currently, Waymo looks like the service to beat. And it doesn’t plan on stopping once it gets to Dallas, either. The company has reported that it is testing electric robotaxis in Houston, San Antonio, Miami, San Diego, Nashville, Washington, Boston, and Tokyo.

It is currently providing over 250,000 rides per week, in the five cities where the service is available. According to Obi, an real-time ride-hail price aggregator, this could be worth at least $5.1 million a week.

Alongside driverless trucks, the autonomous vehicle industry is continuing to expand. And with the technology developing at a rapid pace, it could soon become a known reality for many.

Every business owner knows that marketing is important, but not everyone knows how to do it. Reaching new customers is vital to the success of any company, but with hundreds of strategies and dozens of platforms to choose from, the decision can be quite daunting, especially for small businesses that don’t know where to start.

That’s where platforms like VistaPrint can make a big difference. Between the array of valuable tools for creating custom marketing materials to the advice from experts on how to use them, this service has proven to offer small businesses a chance to supercharge their marketing efforts in a meaningful way.

So, how can businesses actually elevate their brands marketing strategy with VistaPrint? Below, we’ll outline some of the functionality you can expect from the platform and highlight some key features that will make marketing your business that much easier in 2025.

Choose the Right Materials

Depending on how big your company is, what kind of industry you’re in, and where you’re located, you could have very distinct marketing material needs.

Fortunately, VistaPrint knows that businesses want to market in a lot of different ways, which is why the platform provides such a vast selection of materials to choose from. Here are some of the marketing materials you can choose from with VistaPrint:

• Postcards
• Flyers
• Brochures
• Rack cards
• Booklets
• Folders & holders
• Magnets
• Tickets & vouchers
• Tabletop
• Door hangers
• Menus
• Napkins

If you’re a take-out restaurant that wants to get some door-to-door attention, door hangers and menus can attract the right clientele. If you’re an event planner that wants to look professional for your attendees, brochures and pamphlets will do the trick.

All that to say, your marketing strategy needs to be catered to your particular needs as a business, and with all the materials provided by VistaPrint, you should be able to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Make a Good First Impression

Marketing is all about cutting through the noise and getting customers to actually notice you, and the only way to do that is by making a good, lasting first impression. After all, there are thousands of companies vying for the attention of an audience, and many customers will simply move on if their first experience with a business isn’t favorable. That’s why VistaPrint has a wide range of tools designed to make your business appealing at first glance.

For one, VistaPrint provides plenty of support when it comes to your company logo. If you already have one established, you can easily upload it to the platform, allowing you to add it to all the marketing materials we listed above.

However, if you don’t have a logo yet, VistaPrint can help with that too. The platform offers a free Logomaker that can generate dozens of options for your business. On top of that, you’ll be able to customize the logo once VistaPrint has created it, so you can make sure the icons, colors, and wording is just right for your business.

Below, we’ve provided a few screenshots of what that process looks like. We created a fake business, called the Fake Store, that sells fake products and the tag line was “the fakest products around.” We had some fun with it and achieved our images below in minutes. Imagine what you could do! Here are the results:

Be Consistent

In 2025, people are used to high quality marketing throughout their customer experience. All that materials they see on a regular basis — whether it be from big corporations and small startups — are consistent across the board to create a recognizable brand identity, no matter where you see it.

In fact, consistency is so important that could be impacting your bottom line, with one study finding that companies with consistent branding, on average, earned 10-20% more revenue than those that don’t prioritize it at all.

VistaPrint is designed for exactly that, providing a full-on marketing suite for businesses of all sizes. You’ll be able to upload your brand assets once, and then use them for a variety of materials, so you can be sure that your logo, your color scheme, and your entire marketing identity is consistent throughout.

Tesla has announced a $16.5 billion deal with South Korean technology company Samsung, over the manufacturing of its next-generation AI6 chip.

The deal will provide a leg-up for Samsung, who has struggled to get previous chip-making projects started after failing to strike deals with major clients.

Samsung will now look to bolster its chip-making presence in the industry, and Tesla will see the continuation of its AI chips as contributing to its ambitions to become known as an AI and robotics company.

Tesla Strikes Partnership With Samsung for AI Chips

Automotive company Tesla has signed a deal worth $16.5 billion with Samsung, that will now produce its next generation AI6 chips. “The strategic importance of this is hard to overstate”, Elon Musk wrote, when announcing the deal via X.

Tesla’s AI6 chip, or Hardware 6, is the company’s “all-in-one” chip design, which is capable of many functions across the company’s operations. This includes powering its driver assistance system and high-performance AI training in data centers.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is already working with TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) to make its AI5 chips, which are primarily built for Tesla’s Full-Self Driving technology. According to Musk, Samsung already makes Tesla’s AI4 chip.

Tesla Deal Offers Samsung AI Boost

While Samsung are already working with Tesla on its AI4 chip, this new deal represents a major boost for a company that has lagged behind in the race for AI chip-making.

Last October, it was reported that Samsung had postponed taking deliveries of chipmaking equipment to its Texas factory, because it had failed to win any major customers for the project. Samsung has delayed the plant’s operational start until 2026.

However, the deal with Tesla adds a very lucrative customer into its ranks. Musk even posted via X that he thought the deal could be worth more than the initial $16.5 billion, “Actual output is likely to be several times higher,” he wrote. The deal between the two companies is set to run until the end of 2033.

Samsung and Tesla Supercharge AI Ambitions With Deal

Both companies have strong AI ambitions. Samsung, on the one hand, will be competing with companies such as TSMC. The Taiwanese company already boasts clientele that includes Nvidia, Apple, and Qualcomm. With a client like Tesla, however, Samsung could hope to catch up.

“This is a critical point, as I will walk the line personally to accelerate the pace of progress.” Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla.

Tesla too has its own AI ambitions, as it drives to make the change from an automaker to an AI and robotics company. There is yet to be a timeline for when the new AI6 chips will begin production, but as the AI5 chips will be produced at the end of 2026, we can assume the AI6 will follow.

PayPal will soon roll out functionality to allow businesses to accept over one hundred cryptocurrencies, the company has revealed. Reportedly, merchants will soon be able to accept Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, USDC, and many more, with the option set to go live in the coming weeks.

In terms of how it will work, when a consumer opts to pay for goods or services using cryptocurrency, the funds will automatically be converted into either fiat currency or PayPal’s own PYUSD stablecoin, before being deposited in the merchant’s account. Supposedly, transactions will settle immediately.

With job losses spiraling in the retail sector, this news will be warmly greeted by the small business community. By opening up a growing and potentially lucrative new customer base, it hands merchants a vital lifeline. At the same time, crypto advocates will be pleased by the backing of a major payments provider after a mixed year in fortunes.

PayPal to Allow Businesses to Accept Crypto, Company Reveals

PayPal is on the verge of letting customers accept crypto as a form of payment, the company has confirmed. In the coming weeks, merchants will have the option to accept over one hundred different cryptocurrencies at the checkout, including the likes of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and more.

It’s estimated that there are 650 million cryptocurrency users around the world, with a global market size that is projected to reach $11.71 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research.

Frank Keller, general manager of large enterprise and merchant platform at PayPal, said in a statement: “We wanted to give small businesses access to this customer base that is growing. It’s still nascent but it’s surprising how quickly it’s picking up. When PayPal turns it on, it creates trust.”

PayPal Lays Groundwork for Crypto Future

When consumers select cryptocurrency as their preferred payment method at the checkout, their funds will automatically be converted into the relevant fiat currency, or PayPal’s stablecoin, which is known as PYUSD. Essentially, stablecoins refer to crypto tokens that are designed to maintain a stable value. From there, the funds are deposited in the merchant’s account.

Reportedly, crypto transactions will incur a 0.99% transaction fee, and will be settled instantly. For businesses that want to accept international payments, the fees could exceed 10%. Businesses can opt to convert their funds to PYUSD will earn about 4% on those balances.

The announcement forms part of a wider PayPal strategy to embed crypto assets into its offering. Said Keller: “We want to show that we’re invested in the crypto space. We want to play a bigger role, and for that to be successful we need to really scale it to the next level.”

News Offers Glimmers of Hope in Testing Climate

For small businesses, it’s great news: PayPal’s announcement will potentially unlock a lucrative new market segment. And with the sector experiencing a downturn in 2025, it’s not a moment too soon.

According to a study conducted by the National Small Business Association, nearly two-thirds of small businesses picked “economic insecurity” as their top challenge for 2025. A further 40% of respondents claimed that they’d been unable to secure the financing they need to stay afloat in a trying market.

While the economic outlook is pretty bleak, PayPal’s Pay with Crypto scheme could be a cause of optimism for small business owners. It will also be celebrated by crypto enthusiasts. The digital asset community was an early winner of Trump’s second term, but fortunes have been mixed recently. The backing of PayPal represents a big step towards a mainstream future.

Steves & Sons, a Texas-based doormaker, has become the first partner of autonomous trucking startup, Bot Auto, the companies have revealed. The doormaker has been piloting Bot Auto’s Freightliner tractors since June, and has now agreed to partner with the tech startup.

Steves & Sons is a 159-year-old company based in Houston. It has worked alongside its managed logistics provider, J.B. Hunt, since 2019. Reportedly, the first routes that Bot Auto will run for the company will be to and from San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston. The pilot will focus on streamlining transfers between plant and customer, and improving planning and execution.

Self-driving trucks have long been heralded as the future of the logistics industry, touted as a solution to the ongoing hiring crisis. At this point in time, however, that promise has yet to be realized, with a lack of federal guidance on the issue stymieing progress. This has created an inconsistent regulatory landscape, with different states passing different mandates.

Texan Business Partners With Autonomous Truck Startup

A small Texan doormaker business, Steves & Sons, has officially partnered with autonomous truck startup, Bot Auto. The companies revealed the news in a joint statement with J.B. Hunt, a managed logistics provider that is also partnered with Steves & Sons.

The announcement follows a successful pilot program that started in June 2025. During this time, the doormaker tested retrofitted Freightliner tractors on routes between Houston and San Antonio.

According to Scott Lovett, chief operating officer at Steves & Sons:

“We’re proud to be working with J.B. Hunt and Bot Auto to drive innovation and stay at the forefront of technology. This collaboration is about more than just improving logistics — it’s about reimagining how our industry operates to meet the evolving needs of our customers and communities.”

Paving the Way for an Autonomous Future

Headquartered in San Antonio, Steves & Sons has been making doors for 159 years. In 2019, the company struck a deal with J.B. Hunt, one of the largest for-hire carriers in the country, to take care of its deliveries and transportation. It has since begun to test Bot Auto self-driving trucks on its routes.

Unlike many of its contemporaries, which tend to partner with specific truck manufacturers, Bot Auto operates a Technology-as-a-Service business model. It offers Level 4 autonomous vehicles, which do not require human interaction in most instance, but can be manually overridden by a driver when required.

As per the new partnership, the involved parties plan to pilot Freightliner trucks, which have been retrofitted with Bot Auto autonomous technology, on roads between San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston. It is hoped that the program will allow the companies to streamline transfers, and improve logistical planning and execution.

Debate Over Self-Driving Technology Continues

For all its undoubted promise, autonomous trucking technology continues to divide opinion. Its advocates point to the benefits that it can bring to logistics businesses, including solving the hiring crisis, saving money, and boosting efficiency. On the other side, its detractors cite safety concerns, liability issues, and fears that it will make human operators redundant.

As part of our Moving Goods With Fewer Hands report, we surveyed 521 industry insiders to get their views on autonomous trucking, amongst other things. We found that most respondents (42%) concurred that we can expect “widespread” use of this technology on public roads in the next 15 years. Just 14% believed that that it won’t happen until after 2050.

Whatever the case may be, there’s no disputing that technology poses a genuinely compelling answer to some of the problems that the logistics industry is currently facing. In fact, 73% of survey participants confirmed that technology has already helped them to address workforce challenges this year.

Allianz Life has confirmed that personal information belonging to 1.4 million customers was compromised in a data breach. The company detected the attack on July 16, 2025, notifying the Maine Attorney General the next day. In its statement, the insurance provider claimed that the “majority” of its customers are at risk.

Reportedly, the perpetrators employed sophisticated social engineering techniques to target Allianz employees, rather than seeking to exploit technical vulnerabilities in the company’s security infrastructure. It is thought to be the work of Scattered Spider, a hacking collective which recently brought the UK-based retailer, Marks & Spencer, to a standstill with a vicious cyberattack.

The latest high-profile data breach of this year spotlights the critical importance of investing in your infrastructure. With cyberattacks often sometimes proving terminal for businesses, it’s essential to procure the best talent, leverage the possibilities of AI, and upskill your existing employees on how to spot the warning signs.

“Majority” of Allianz Customers Affected by Data Breach

Allianz Life Insurance Company, a Minnesota-based subsidiary of Allianz SE, has suffered a massive data breach, the company confirmed on Saturday. According to a statement, the “majority” of its approximately 1.4 million customers were affected.

After discovering the breach on July 17, 2025, the company filed a disclosure with the Maine Attorney General. Reportedly, the attack targeted a third-party CRM platform used by the provider. An internal investigation found “no evidence” that any other systems were affected, said the company.

The parent company, Allianz SE, revealed that the hackers were “able to contain personally identifiable data related to the majority of Allianz Life’s customers, financial professionals, and select Allianz Lie employees, using a social engineering technique.”

Hackers Use Humans as Attack Vector, Not Tech

Social engineering refers to exploiting human psychology, rather than technical vulnerabilities within an organization’s infrastructure. An example might include impersonating a colleague to try and gain access to someone’s details. The group responsible, thought to be Scattered Spider, typically contact company help desks, impersonate existing employees, and attempt to get passwords reset.

Scattered Spider recently made headlines with a wide-ranging cyberattack on UK-based retailer, Marks & Spencer. The impacts lasted for months and incurred more than $400 million in financial losses. Previously, the group has taken aim at MGM Resorts and Caesar’s Palace.

The Allianz hack is the latest in a growing list of attacks on insurance vendors. In June, Aflac was breached by bad actors, with an investigation ongoing. Erie Insurance and Philadelphia Insurance have also been hit with similar attacks in recent months.

Businesses Deserting Basic Cybersecurity Duties

According to a recent report from Experis, cybersecurity is the chief concern of businesses across the tech sector in 2025. And it’s not hard to see why. Here at Tech.co, we maintain a running list of major data breaches, and we’re always shocked by the sheer frequency with which they occur.

Clearly, businesses are not doing enough to safeguard themselves against potential threats. More than just a question of investment, cybersecurity depends upon collective responsibility. In other words, it’s vitally important that your business is hiring the best talent and upskilling its existing employees with best practices.

And this is a requirement right across the business — according to our own research, a shocking 98% of senior leaders are unable to identify all the signs of a phishing scam. If we don’t act now to turn the tide on threat actors, this problem will continue to spiral out of control — and the consequences will be severe.