This week I’m writing from Manchester, where I’ve been attending a conference on aging. Wednesday was full of talks and presentations by scientists who are trying to understand the nitty-gritty of aging—all the way down to the molecular level. Once we can understand the complex biology of aging, we should be able to slow or prevent the onset of age-related diseases, they hope.
Then my editor forwarded me a video of the leaders of Russia and China talking about immortality. “These days at 70 years old you are still a child,” China’s Xi Jinping, 72, was translated as saying, according to footage livestreamed by CCTV to multiplemedia outlets.
“With the developments of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality,” Russia’s Vladimir Putin, also 72, is reported to have replied.
SERGEI BOBYLEV, SPUTNIK, KREMLIN POOL PHOTO VIA AP
There’s a striking contrast between that radical vision and the incremental longevity science presented at the meeting. Repeated rounds of organ transplantation surgery aren’t likely to help anyone radically extend their lifespan anytime soon.
First, back to Putin’s proposal: the idea of continually replacing aged organs to stay young. It’s a simplistic way to think about aging. After all, aging is so complicated that researchers can’t agree on what causes it, why it occurs, or even how to define it, let alone “treat” it.
Having said that, there may be some merit to the idea of repairing worn-out body parts with biological or synthetic replacements. Replacement therapies—including bioengineered organs—are being developed by multiple research teams. Some have already been tested in people. This week, let’s take a look at the idea of replacement therapies.
No one fully understands why our organs start to fail with age. On the face of it, replacing them seems like a good idea. After all, we already know how to do organ transplants. They’ve been a part of medicine since the 1950s and have been used to save hundreds of thousands of lives in the US alone.
And replacing old organs with young ones might have more broadly beneficial effects. When a young mouse is stitched to an old one, the older mouse benefits from the arrangement, and its health seems to improve.
The problem is that we don’t really know why. We don’t know what it is about young body tissues that makes them health-promoting. We don’t know how long these effects might last in a person. We don’t know how different organ transplants will compare, either. Might a young heart be more beneficial than a young liver? No one knows.
And that’s before you consider the practicalities of organ transplantation. There is already a shortage of donor organs—thousands of people die on waiting lists. Transplantation requires major surgery and, typically, a lifetime of prescription drugs that damp down the immune system, leaving a person more susceptible to certain infections and diseases.
So the idea of repeated organ transplantations shouldn’t really be a particularly appealing one. “I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon,” says Jesse Poganik, who studies aging at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and is also in Manchester for the meeting.
Poganik has been collaborating with transplant surgeons in his own research. “The surgeries are good, but they’re not simple,” he tells me. And they come with real risks. His own 24-year-old cousin developed a form of cancer after a liver and heart transplant. She died a few weeks ago, he says.
So when it comes to replacing worn-out organs, scientists are looking for both biological and synthetic alternatives.
We’ve been replacing body parts for centuries. Wooden toes were used as far back as the 15th century. Joint replacements have been around for more than a hundred years. And major innovations over the last 70 years have given us devices like pacemakers, hearing aids, brain implants, and artificial hearts.
Scientists are exploring other ways to make tissues and organs, too. There are different approaches here, but they include everything from injecting stem cells to seeding “scaffolds” with cells in a lab.
In 1999, researchers used volunteers’ own cells to seed bladder-shaped collagen scaffolds. The resulting bioengineered bladders went on to be transplanted into seven people in an initial trial.
Now scientists are working on more complicated organs. Jean Hébert, a program manager at the US government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, has been exploring ways to gradually replace the cells in a person’s brain. The idea is that, eventually, the recipient will end up with a young brain.
Hébert showed my colleague Antonio Regalado how, in his early experiments, he removed parts of mice’s brains and replaced them with embryonic stem cells. That work seems a world away from the biochemical studies being presented at the British Society for Research on Ageing annual meeting in Manchester, where I am now.
On Wednesday, one scientist described how he’d been testing potential longevity drugs on the tiny nematode worm C. elegans. These worms live for only about 15 to 40 days, and his team can perform tens of thousands of experiments with them. About 40% of the drugs that extend lifespan in C. elegans also help mice live longer, he told us.
To me, that’s not an amazing hit rate. And we don’t know how many of those drugs will work in people. Probably less than 40% of that 40%.
Other scientists presented work on chemical reactions happening at the cellular level. It was deep, basic science, and my takeaway was that there’s a lot aging researchers still don’t fully understand.
It will take years—if not decades—to get the full picture of aging at the molecular level. And if we rely on a series of experiments in worms, and then mice, and then humans, we’re unlikely to make progress for a really long time. In that context, the idea of replacement therapy feels like a shortcut.
“Replacement is a really exciting avenue because you don’t have to understand the biology of aging as much,” says Sierra Lore, who studies aging at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California.
Lore says she started her research career studying aging at the molecular level, but she soon changed course. She now plans to focus her attention on replacement therapies. “I very quickly realized we’re decades away [from understanding the molecular processes that underlie aging],” she says. “Why don’t we just take what we already know—replacement—and try to understand and apply it better?”
So perhaps Putin’s straightforward approach to delaying aging holds some merit. Whether it will grant him immortality is another matter.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Putin says organ transplants could grant immortality. Not quite.
—Jessica Hamzelou
Earlier this week, my editor forwarded me a video of the leaders of Russia and China talking about immortality. “These days at 70 years old you are still a child,” China’s Xi Jinping, 72, was translated as saying.
“With the developments of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality,” Russia’s Vladimir Putin, also 72, is reported to have replied.
In reality, rounds of organ transplantation surgery aren’t likely to help anyone radically extend their lifespan anytime soon. And it’s a simplistic way to think about aging—a process so complicated that researchers can’t agree on what causes it, why it occurs, or even how to define it, let alone “treat” it. Read the full story.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
India is using robots to clean sewer pipes so humans no longer have to
When Jitender was a child in New Delhi, both his parents worked as manual scavengers—a job that involved clearing the city’s sewers by hand. Now, he is among almost 200 contractors involved in the Delhi government’s effort to shift from this manual process to safer mechanical methods.
Although it has been outlawed since 1993, manual scavenging—the practice of extracting human excreta from toilets, sewers, or septic tanks—is still practiced widely in India. And not only is the job undignified, but it can be extremely dangerous.
Now, several companies have emerged to offer alternatives at a wide range of technical complexity. Read the full story.
—Hamaad Habibullah
This story is from our new print edition, which is all about the future of security. Subscribe here to catch future copies when they land.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 RFK Jr buried a major study linking alcohol and cancer Clearly, the alcohol industry’s intense lobbying of the Trump administration is working. (Vox) + RFK Jr repeated health untruths during a marathon Senate hearing yesterday. (Mother Jones) + His anti-vaccine stance alarmed Democrats and Republicans alike. (The Atlantic $)
2 US tech giants want to embed AI in education They’re backing a vaguely worded initiative to that effect launched by Melania Trump. (Rolling Stone $) + Tech leaders took it in turns to praise Trump during dinner. (WSJ $) + Elon Musk was nowhere to be seen. (The Guardian) + AI’s giants want to take over the classroom. (MIT Technology Review)
3 The FTC will probe AI companies over their impact on children In a bid to evaluate whether chatbots are harming their mental health. (WSJ $) + An AI companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Podcasting giant Joe Rogan has been spreading climate misinformation He’s grossly misinterpreted scientists’ research—and they’re exasperated. (The Guardian) + Rogan claims the Earth’s temperature is plummeting. It isn’t. (Forbes) + Why climate researchers are taking the temperature of mountain snow. (MIT Technology Review)
5 DeepSeek is working on its own advanced AI agent Watch out, OpenAI. (Bloomberg $)
6 OpenAI will start making its own AI chips next year In a bid to lessen its reliance on Nvidia. (FT $)
7 Warner Bros is suing Midjourney The AI startup used the likenesses of characters including Superman without permission, it alleges. (Bloomberg $) + What comes next for AI copyright lawsuits? (MIT Technology Review)
8 Rivers and lakes are being used to cool down buildings But networks in Paris, Toronto, the US are facing a looming problem. (Wired $) + The future of urban housing is energy-efficient refrigerators. (MIT Technology Review)
9 How high school reunions survive in the age of social media Curiosity is a powerful driving force, it seems. (The Atlantic $)
10 Facebook’s poke feature is back If I still used Facebook, I’d be thrilled. (TechCrunch)
Quote of the day
“Even if it doesn’t turn you into the alien if you eat this stuff, I guarantee you’ll grow an extra ear.”
—Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, warns of dire consequences if Americans eat shrimp from countries other than the US, Gizmodo reports.
One more thing
Why one developer won’t quit fighting to connect the US’s grids
Michael Skelly hasn’t learned to take no for an answer. For much of the last 15 years, the energy entrepreneur has worked to develop long-haul transmission lines to carry wind power across the Great Plains, Midwest, and Southwest. But so far, he has little to show for the effort.
Skelly has long argued that building such lines and linking together the nation’s grids would accelerate the shift from coal- and natural-gas-fueled power plants to the renewables needed to cut the pollution driving climate change. But his previous business shut down in 2019, after halting two of its projects and selling off interests in three more.
Skelly contends he was early, not wrong. And he has a point: market and policymakers are increasingly coming around to his perspective. Read the full story.
—James Temple
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ The Paper, the new mockumentary from the makers of the American Office, looks interesting. + Giorgio Armani was a true maestro of menswear. + The phases of the moon are pretty fascinating + The Damien Hirst-directed video for Blur’s classic Country House has been given a 4K makeover.
October 2025 presents content marketers with a rich mix of content themes and topics. Halloween headlines the month, but there are also inspirational cultural observances, industry celebrations, and seasonal transitions.
Content marketing is the process of creating, publishing, and promoting content such as articles, videos, or podcasts to attract, engage, and retain customers.
Content marketing is closely associated with search engine optimization, generative engine optimization, and social media marketing. While so-called evergreen content has its place, in 2025 search engines, large language models, and shoppers often seek fresh stories and angles.
What follows are five content marketing ideas your business can try in October 2025.
AI-Generated Halloween Fun
Marketers can feature AI tools prominently for Halloween 2025. This image is AI-generated.
Halloween is a key retail sales event. In 2024, for example, U.S. shoppers spent nearly $12 billion on costumes, candy, and decorations.
For content marketing, Halloween shopping guides and party suggestions are staples. So add artificial intelligence to freshen things up and expedite the process!
Merchants can employ AI for Halloween content in at least three ways:
Interactive AI-powered tools. Imagine an online party supply shop that “vibe codes” an AI-powered Halloween party planning tool. The tool asks shoppers questions, and based on the answers, it delivers a full party plan, complete with games and a shopping list.
Entertaining articles. Just about any merchant can publish articles with themes of “We Asked AI for the Most Outrageous…” or “We Asked AI to Design the Spookiest Costumes of 2025.”
Offer AI prompts. The same party supply shop could publish a list of the 10 best Halloween party planning prompts, such as “10 ChatGPT Prompts for the Perfect Halloween Party.”
National Manufacturing Day
Origin, a direct-to-consumer apparel brand, appeals to shoppers seeking U.S.-made products.
National Manufacturing Day, observed on the first Friday in October, began in 2012 to showcase modern manufacturing and inspire skilled workers.
In 2025, the occasion falls on October 3 and is part of a broader Manufacturing Month coordinated by the National Association of Manufacturers.
For ecommerce businesses, Manufacturing Day is an opportunity to showcase suppliers and how they make products. Shoppers like this sort of supply chain transparency. For example, Origin is a direct-to-consumer apparel brand with an engaging manufacturing story. How and where it produces products is a vital part of the brand’s appeal to shoppers seeking U.S.-made products.
National Manufacturing Day is beneficial for seemingly all direct-to-consumer brands and an opportunity to share a founding story.
Italian-American Heritage Month
Mr Porter is a leading example of retail content marketing. The site’s articles align with engaging topics and popular products.
Every October since 1989, the United States has observed Italian-American Heritage Month, acknowledging the profound impact of Italian immigrants and their descendants on American culture.
From cuisine and fashion to construction and music, Italian-American contributions weave into the fabric of daily life.
For ecommerce businesses, the observance inspires content that connects products to heritage and the Italian-American experience.
Kitchen supply stores could particularly benefit. Italian cuisine has a broad appeal worldwide. Imagine showcasing how to make a ragu or pizza while promoting cookware, utensils, or specialty ingredients.
There are certainly other ways to connect products sold to Italian culture. Menswear retailer and marketplace Mr Porter has a history of producing content related to Italy. Here are some examples.
In each article, Mr Porter promotes between 12 and 20 products.
World Space Week
World Space Week is a chance to engage with tech-savvy shoppers and space enthusiasts.
The United Nations established World Space Week in 1999. More than 90 countries now recognize it.
World Space Week takes place from October 4 to 10 each year, commemorating the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the signing of the Outer Space Treaty in 1967.
Educational retailers could publish activity guides that highlight space-themed toys, puzzles, and kits. A home decor shop might curate collections of space-themed bedding, wall art, or lighting. Hobby stores and craft shops could capitalize, too.
Winterization Listicles
October is a time to get ready for the cold season.
October is the heart of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. Temperatures creep downward, and the trees blaze with fall colors. It is time to prepare for winter.
That preparation presents an opportunity to publish helpful winterization listicles. These lists should offer practical, scannable guides that help consumers prepare for the cold.
Here are a few example headlines.
A home improvement retailer could publish “10 Steps to Winterize Your Home.”
An auto parts store could create the list “15 Essentials to Prepare Your Car for Winter.”
An online outfitter might write “12 Gear Must-Haves for Cold-Weather Adventures.”
Checklists and practical advice position merchants as problem solvers. It also nudges shoppers toward timely seasonal purchases they may not have planned, potentially increasing basket size and driving early Q4 revenue.
There’s a lot that goes into SEO. And, now, more broadly into being found online and online visibility overall, whether we’re talking about an organic result in a search engine, an AI Overview, or through a large language model (LLM).
With SEO being a discipline that often takes a long time (compared to ads and some other channels and platforms), with a large amount of complexity, technical aspects, contradictions of how it works, and even disagreements, it has to be organized in a way that can be implemented.
Over the years and decades, this has resulted in the acceptance of specific “best practices,” along with the fact that it is a longer-term commitment. That, ultimately, has led to the use of checklists and specific cadences to accomplish what is typically seen as an “ongoing” and never-ending discipline.
In full disclosure, you’ll find articles written by me that talk about checklists and ways to structure the work that is important to be visible and found online. I’m not saying we have to throw them out, but we can’t simply do the list or activities.
“Always-on SEO” sounds great in theory: ongoing optimization, constant monitoring, and steady progress. But in reality, it often becomes a nebulous set of tasks without priority, strategy, or momentum.
This article challenges the default mindset of treating SEO as a perpetual checklist and proposes a sprint-based approach, where work is grouped into focused time blocks with measurable goals.
By approaching SEO in strategic sprints, teams can prioritize, measure, adapt, and improve – all while staying aligned with larger business goals.
The Problem With Perpetual SEO Checklists
What I often see with SEO checklists is a lack of prioritization. Everything becomes a task, but nothing is deemed critical.
The checklist might have “right” and “good” things in it, but it isn’t weighted or prioritized based on any level of strategic approach or potential level of impact.
And, when there’s a lack of direction, we often can end up with a set of actions, activities, or tactics that have no clear end or evaluation defined. This ends up getting us into a place of just “doing SEO” without being able to objectively say what the result was or how things were improved.
Like any digital marketing channel, activity without the right anchor or foundation, in SEO, can result in wasted effort.
Technical fixes and content updates may not support meaningful business goals and can be a huge investment of time and money that ultimately don’t impact the business. And, activity without results or clear direction can drive SEO teams and professionals to boredom or burnout.
I’ve taken over a number of situations where a business thought SEO didn’t work for them or that the team was not competent enough due to stakeholder confusion.
When activity doesn’t generate results and you find it out a year into an investment, it is hard to recover, especially when no one really knows what “done” or what success looks like in the effort.
I say all of this not to bring up pain, say that checklists aren’t good, or even that the ongoing tactics aren’t right. I’m simply saying we have to have a deeper understanding and meaning behind what we’re doing in SEO.
What Sprint-Based SEO Looks Like
SEO sprints are focused and time-bound (e.g., four weeks) efforts with specific goals tied to strategy. Rather than working on everything at once, you work on the highest-impact priorities in chunks.
You can also combine types into a custom sprint. Regardless of whether you stay in a category or make one that contains blended themes or tactics, it needs to be anchored to an initial strategy, plan, or audit for your first one.
Each sprint ends with measurable outputs, documented outcomes, and clear learnings. The first one might be rooted in an initial plan, but each subsequent sprint will include a retrospective review from the previous one to help fuel continuous learning, efficiencies, improvements, and ultimate impact.
Benefits Of SEO Sprints
A quick win benefit is gaining focus. Pivoting away from a generic checklist to sprint structure results in solving a defined problem, not tackling a vague backlog.
As noted earlier, sprints are time-based as well. By having the right length (not too short or small of a sample size, yet too long and repeating tactics that aren’t effective), you gain the benefits of agility and an adaptable longer-term approach overall.
Agility in sprints allows you to adjust based on performance and new insights. Checklists are not only generic or often disconnected from strategy, but are getting out of date constantly with shifts in online visibility optimization sources and methods.
Accountability and team clarity come more naturally as well. It’s easier to report on and justify value with clear before/after comparisons and to keep people engaged and in the know on what’s happening now and what’s next.
Sprints can be tied directly to goals (revenue, lead generation, funnel support) and not just rankings or other KPIs that are upstream and further removed from business outcomes, and shorter-term expectations can take pressure off of long-term waiting for something to happen.
How To Implement Sprint-Based SEO
Start with strategy. Identify what matters to the business and where SEO fits. Define sprint themes and objectives, and make them specific enough to be meaningful and measurable.
Example: “Improve organic conversions for top 5 services pages” vs. “Improve rankings.”
Build a backlog or tactics plan, but don’t treat it like a checklist. Use it to feed sprint plans, but not overwhelm day-to-day work.
In short:
Plan your first sprint: Choose one clear objective, timeline, and outcome.
Track and review: Report on progress, document what was done, and define what’s next.
Iterate: Use learnings from each sprint to improve the next.
When (And Where) “Always-On” SEO Still Applies
Certain things do need continuous attention. I’m not saying that it is right for 100% of your sprints to be 100% custom.
There are recurring things that could, or likely should, go into sprints or be monitored and maintained by regular or routine audits or checklists, e.g., crawl errors, broken links, technical issues, etc.
But, this maintenance work shouldn’t be the SEO strategy. It should support it. Use “always-on” as infrastructure or basics, not direction, and remember that the checklist isn’t the strategy, and if you have one, it is a planning tool, not necessarily your tactical plan and roadmap to ultimate SEO ROI.
Why It’s Time To Rethink “Always-On” SEO
I’ve hit on it enough, but I will wrap up by reminding you that endless to-do lists don’t move the needle.
Checklists can be good things and full of the “right” tactics. However, they often lack strategy and don’t serve shorter attention spans or allow for enough agility.
Sprint-based SEO helps teams be more strategic, productive, and aligned with the business overall, with room to implement prioritized tactics, tied to overall goals, and adjust to market and business needs and conditions.
Shifting your team from “always-on” to “intentionally paced” is a move to start seeing results and not just activity.
On a spring day in 1954, Bell Labs researchers showed off the first practical solar panels at a press conference in Murray Hill, New Jersey, using sunlight to spin a toy Ferris wheel before a stunned crowd.
The solar future looked bright. But in the race to commercialize the technology it invented, the US would lose resoundingly. Last year, China exported $40 billion worth of solar panels and modules, while America shipped just $69 million, according to the New York Times. It was a stunning forfeit of a huge technological lead.
And now the US seems determined to repeat the mistake. In its quest to prop up aging fossil-fuel industries, the Trump administration has slashed federal support for the emerging cleantech sector, handing his nation’s chief economic rival the most generous of gifts: an unobstructed path to locking in its control of emerging energy technologies, and a leg up in inventing the industries of the future.
China’s dominance of solar was no accident. In the late 2000s, the government simply determined that the sector was a national priority. Then it leveraged deep subsidies, targeted policies, and price wars to scale up production, drive product improvements, and slash costs. It’s made similar moves in batteries, electric vehicles, and wind turbines.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has set to work unraveling hard-won clean-energy achievements in the US, snuffing out the gathering momentum to rebuild the nation’s energy sector in cleaner, more sustainable ways.
The tax and spending bill that Trump signed into law in early July wound down the subsidies for solar and wind power contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The legislation also cut off federal support for cleantech projects that rely too heavily on Chinese materials—a hamfisted bid to punish Chinese industries that will instead make many US projects financially unworkable.
Meanwhile, the administration has slashed federal funding for science and attacked the financial foundations of premier research universities, pulling up the roots of future energy innovations and industries.
A driving motivation for many of these policies is the quest to protect the legacy energy industry based on coal, oil, and natural gas, all of which the US is geologically blessed with. But this strategy amounts to the innovator’s dilemma playing out at a national scale—a country clinging to its declining industries rather than investing in the ones that will define the future.
It does not particularly matter whether Trump believes in or cares about climate change. The economic and international security imperatives to invest in modern, sustainable industries are every bit as indisputable as the chemistry of greenhouse gases.
Without sustained industrial policies that reward innovation, American entrepreneurs and investors won’t risk money and time creating new businesses, developing new products, or building first-of-a-kind projects here. Indeed, venture capitalists have told me that numerous US climate-tech companies are already looking overseas, seeking markets where they can count on government support. Some fear that many other companies will fail in the coming months as subsidies disappear, developments stall, and funding flags.
All of which will help China extend an already massive lead.
The nation has installed nearly three times as many wind turbines as the US, and it generates more than twice as much solar power. It boasts five of the 10 largest EV companies in the world, and the three largest wind turbine manufacturers. China absolutely dominates the battery market, producing the vast majority of the anodes, cathodes, and battery cells that increasingly power the world’s vehicles, grids, and gadgets.
China harnessed the clean-energy transition to clean up its skies, upgrade its domestic industries, create jobs for its citizens, strengthen trade ties, and build new markets in emerging economies. In turn, it’s using those business links to accrue soft power and extend its influence—all while the US turns it back on global institutions.
These widening relationships increasingly insulate China from external pressures, including those threatened by Trump’s go-to tactic: igniting or inflaming trade wars.
But stiff tariffs and tough talk aren’t what built the world’s largest economy and established the US as the global force in technology for more than a century. What did was deep, sustained federal investment into education, science, and research and development—the very budget items that Trump and his party have been so eager to eliminate.
Another thing
Earlier this summer, the EPA announced plans to revoke the Obama-era “endangerment finding,” the legal foundation for regulating the nation’s greenhouse-gas pollution.
Over the weekend, more than 85 scientists sent a point-by-point, 459-page rebuttal to the federal government, highlighting myriad ways in which the report “is biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policy making,” as Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers, put it on Bluesky.
“The authors reached these flawed conclusions through selective filtering of evidence (‘cherry picking’), overemphasis of uncertainties, misquoting peer-reviewed research, and a general dismissal of the vast majority of decades of peer-reviewed research,” the dozens of reviewers found.
The Trump administration handpicked researchers who would write the report it wanted to support its quarrel with thermometers and justify its preordained decision to rescind the endangerment finding. But it’s legally bound to hear from others as well, notes Karen McKinnon, a climate researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“Luckily, there is time to take action,” McKinnon said in a statement. “Comment on the report, and contact your representatives to let them know we need to take action to bring back the tolerable summers of years past.”
You can read the full report here, or NPR’s take here. And be sure to read Casey Crownhart’s earlier piece in The Spark on the endangerment finding.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
Earlier this summer, I walked through the glassy lobby of a fancy office in London, into an elevator, and then along a corridor into a clean, carpeted room. Natural light flooded in through its windows, and a large pair of umbrella-like lighting rigs made the room even brighter. I tried not to squint as I took my place in front of a tripod equipped with a large camera and a laptop displaying an autocue. I took a deep breath and started to read out the script.
I’m not a newsreader or an actor auditioning for a movie—I was visiting the AI company Synthesia to give it what it needed to create a hyperrealistic AI-generated avatar of me. The company’s avatars are a decent barometer of just how dizzying progress has been in AI over the past few years, so I was curious just how accurately its latest AI model, introduced last month, could replicate me.
When Synthesia launched in 2017, its primary purpose was to match AI versions of real human faces—for example, the former footballer David Beckham—with dubbed voices speaking in different languages. A few years later, in 2020, it started giving the companies that signed up for its services the opportunity to make professional-level presentation videos starring either AI versions of staff members or consenting actors. But the technology wasn’t perfect. The avatars’ body movements could be jerky and unnatural, their accents sometimes slipped, and the emotions indicated by their voices didn’t always match their facial expressions.
Now Synthesia’s avatars have been updated with more natural mannerisms and movements, as well as expressive voices that better preserve the speaker’s accent—making them appear more humanlike than ever before. For Synthesia’s corporate clients, these avatars will make for slicker presenters of financial results, internal communications, or staff training videos.
I found the video demonstrating my avatar as unnerving as it is technically impressive. It’s slick enough to pass as a high-definition recording of a chirpy corporate speech, and if you didn’t know me, you’d probably think that’s exactly what it was. This demonstration shows how much harder it’s becoming to distinguish the artificial from the real. And before long, these avatars will even be able to talk back to us. But how much better can they get? And what might interacting with AI clones do to us?
The creation process
When my former colleague Melissa visited Synthesia’s London studio to create an avatar of herself last year, she had to go through a long process of calibrating the system, reading out a script in different emotional states, and mouthing the sounds needed to help her avatar form vowels and consonants. As I stand in the brightly lit room 15 months later, I’m relieved to hear that the creation process has been significantly streamlined. Josh Baker-Mendoza, Synthesia’s technical supervisor, encourages me to gesture and move my hands as I would during natural conversation, while simultaneously warning me not to move too much. I duly repeat an overly glowing script that’s designed to encourage me to speak emotively and enthusiastically. The result is a bit as if if Steve Jobs had been resurrected as a blond British woman with a low, monotonous voice.
It also has the unfortunate effect of making me sound like an employee of Synthesia.“I am so thrilled to be with you today to show off what we’ve been working on. We are on the edge of innovation, and the possibilities are endless,” I parrot eagerly, trying to sound lively rather than manic. “So get ready to be part of something that will make you go, ‘Wow!’ This opportunity isn’t just big—it’s monumental.”
Just an hour later, the team has all the footage it needs. A couple of weeks later I receive two avatars of myself: one powered by the previous Express-1 model and the other made with the latest Express-2 technology. The latter, Synthesia claims, makes its synthetic humans more lifelike and true to the people they’re modeled on, complete with more expressive hand gestures, facial movements, and speech. You can see the results for yourself below.
COURTESY SYNTHESIA
Last year, Melissa found that her Express-1-powered avatar failed to match her transatlantic accent. Its range of emotions was also limited—when she asked her avatar to read a script angrily, it sounded more whiny than furious. In the months since, Synthesia has improved Express-1, but the version of my avatar made with the same technology blinks furiously and still struggles to synchronize body movements with speech.
By way of contrast, I’m struck by just how much my new Express-2 avatar looks like me: Its facial features mirror my own perfectly. Its voice is spookily accurate too, and although it gesticulates more than I do, its hand movements generally marry up with what I’m saying.
But the tiny telltale signs of AI generation are still there if you know where to look. The palms of my hands are bright pink and as smooth as putty. Strands of hair hang stiffly around my shoulders instead of moving with me. Its eyes stare glassily ahead, rarely blinking. And although the voice is unmistakably mine, there’s something slightly off about my digital clone’s intonations and speech patterns. “This is great!” my avatar randomly declares, before slipping back into a saner register.
Anna Eiserbeck, a postdoctoral psychology researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin who has studied how humans react to perceived deepfake faces, says she isn’t sure she’d have been able to identify my avatar as a deepfake at first glance.
But she would eventually have noticed something amiss. It’s not just the small details that give it away—my oddly static earring, the way my body sometimes moves in small, abrupt jerks. It’s something that runs much deeper, she explains.
“Something seemed a bit empty. I know there’s no actual emotion behind it— it’s not a conscious being. It does not feel anything,” she says. Watching the video gave her “this kind of uncanny feeling.”
My digital clone, and Eiserbeck’s reaction to it, make me wonder how realistic these avatars really need to be.
I realize that part of the reason I feel disconcerted by my avatar is that it behaves in a way I rarely have to. Its oddly upbeat register is completely at odds with how I normally speak; I’m a die-hard cynical Brit who finds it difficult to inject enthusiasm into my voice even when I’m genuinely thrilled or excited. It’s just the way I am. Plus, watching the videos on a loop makes me question if I really do wave my hands about that way, or move my mouth in such a weird manner. If you thought being confronted with your own face on a Zoom call was humbling, wait until you’re staring at a whole avatar of yourself.
When Facebook was first taking off in the UK almost 20 years ago, my friends and I thought illicitly logging into each other’s accounts and posting the most outrageous or rage-inducing status updates imaginable was the height of comedy. I wonder if the equivalent will soon be getting someone else’s avatar to say something truly embarrassing: expressing support for a disgraced politician or (in my case) admitting to liking Ed Sheeran’s music.
Express-2 remodels every person it’s presented with into a polished professional speaker with the body language of a hyperactive hype man. And while this makes perfect sense for a company focused on making glossy business videos, watching my avatar doesn’t feel like watching me at all. It feels like something else entirely.
How it works
The real technical challenge these days has less to do with creating avatars that match our appearance than with getting them to replicate our behavior, says Björn Schuller, a professor of artificial intelligence at Imperial College London. “There’s a lot to consider to get right; you have to have the right micro gesture, the right intonation, the sound of voice and the right word,” he says. “I don’t want an AI [avatar] to frown at the wrong moment—that could send an entirely different message.”
To achieve an improved level of realism, Synthesia developed a number of new audio and video AI models. The team created a voice cloning model to preserve the human speaker’s accent, intonation, and expressiveness—unlike other voice models, which can flatten speakers’ distinctive accents into generically American-sounding voices.
When a user uploads a script to Express-1, its system analyzes the words to infer the correct tone to use. That information is then fed into a diffusion model, which renders the avatar’s facial expressions and movements to match the speech.
Alongside the voice model, Express-2 uses three other models to create and animate the avatars. The first generates an avatar’s gestures to accompany the speech fed into it by the Express-Voice model. A second evaluates how closely the input audio aligns with the multiple versions of the corresponding generated motion before selecting the best one. Then a final model renders the avatar with that chosen motion.
This third rendering model is significantly more powerful than its Express-1 predecessor. Whereas the previous model had a few hundred million parameters, Express-2’s rendering model’s parameters number in the billions. This means it takes less time to create the avatar, says Youssef Alami Mejjati, Synthesia’s head of research and development:
“With Express-1, it needed to first see someone expressing emotions to be able to render them. Now, because we’ve trained it on much more diverse data and much larger data sets, with much more compute, it just learns these associations automatically without needing to see them.”
Narrowing the uncanny valley
Although humanlike AI-generated avatars have been around for years, the recent boom in generative AI is making it increasingly easier and more affordable to create lifelike synthetic humans—and they’re already being put to work. Synthesia isn’t alone: AI avatar companies like Yuzu Labs, Creatify, Arcdads, and Vidyard give businesses the tools to quickly generate and edit videos starring either AI actors or artificial versions of members of staff, promising cost-effective ways to make compelling ads that audiences connect with. Similarly, AI-generated clones of livestreamers have exploded in popularity across China in recent years, partly because they can sell products 24/7 without getting tired or needing to be paid.
For now at least, Synthesia is “laser focused” on the corporate sphere. But it’s not ruling out expanding into new sectors such as entertainment or education, says Peter Hill, the company’s chief technical officer. In an apparent step toward this, Synthesia recently partnered with Google to integrate Google’s powerful new generative video model Veo 3 into its platform, allowing users to directly generate and embed clips into Synthesia’s videos. It suggests that in the future, these hyperrealistic artificial humans could take up starring roles in detailed universes with ever-changeable backdrops.
At present this could, for example, involve using Veo 3 to generate a video of meat-processing machinery, with a Synthesia avatar next to the machines talking about how to use them safely. But future versions of Synthesia’s technology could result in educational videos customizable to an individual’s level of knowledge, says Alex Voica, head of corporate affairs and policy at Synthesia. For example, a video about the evolution of life on Earth could be tweaked for someone with a biology degree or someone with high-school-level knowledge. “It’s going to be such a much more engaging and personalized way of delivering content that I’m really excited about,” he says.
The next frontier, according to Synthesia, will be avatars that can talk back, “understanding” conversations with users and responding in real time Think ChatGPT, but with a lifelike digital human attached.
Synthesia has already added an interactive element by letting users click through on-screen questions during quizzes presented by its avatars. But it’s also exploring making them truly interactive: Future users could ask their avatar to pause and expand on a point, or ask it a question. “We really want to make the best learning experience, and that means through video that’s entertaining but also personalized and interactive,” says Alami Mejjati. “This, for me, is the missing part in online learning experiences today. And I know we’re very close to solving that.”
We already know that humans can—and do—form deep emotional bonds with AI systems, even with basic text-based chatbots. Combining agentic technology—which is already capable of navigating the web, coding, and playing video games unsupervised—with a realistic human face could usher in a whole new kind of AI addiction, says Pat Pataranutaporn, an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab.
“If you make the system too realistic, people might start forming certain kinds of relationships with these characters,” he says. “We’ve seen many cases where AI companions have influenced dangerous behavior even when they are basically texting. If an avatar had a talking head, it would be even more addictive.”
Schuller agrees that avatars in the near future will be perfectly optimized to adjust their projected levels of emotion and charisma so that their human audiences will stay engaged for as long as possible. “It will be very hard [for humans] to compete with charismatic AI of the future; it’s always present, always has an ear for you, and is always understanding,” he says. “Al will change that human-to-human connection.”
As I pause and replay my Express-2 avatar, I imagine holding conversations with it—this uncanny, permanently upbeat, perpetually available product of pixels and algorithms that looks like me and sounds like me, but fundamentally isn’t me. Virtual Rhiannon has never laughed until she’s cried, or fallen in love, or run a marathon, or watched the sun set in another country.
But, I concede, she could deliver a damned good presentation about why Ed Sheeran is the greatest musician ever to come out of the UK. And only my closest friends and family would know that it’s not the real me.
During Black Friday in 2024, Stripe processed more than $31 billion in transactions, with processing rates peaking at 137,000 transactions per minute, the highest in the company’s history. The financial-services firm had to analyze every transaction in real timeto prevent nearly 21 million fraud attempts that could have siphoned more than $910 million from its merchant customers.
Yet, fraud protection is only one reason that Stripe embraced real-time data analytics. Evaluating trends in massive data flows is essential for the company’s services, such as allowing businesses to bill based on usage and monitor orders and inventory. In fact, many of Stripe’s services would not be possible without real-time analytics, says Avinash Bhat, head of data infrastructure at Stripe. “We have certain products that require real-time analytics, like usage-based billing and fraud detection,” he says. “Without our real-time analytics, we would not have a few of our products and that’s why it’s super important.”
Stripe is not alone. In today’s digital world, data analysis is increasingly delivered directly to business customers and individual users, allowing real-time, continuous insights to shape user experiences. Ride-hailing apps calculate prices and estimate times of arrival (ETAs) in near-real time. Financial platforms deliver real-time cash-flow analysis. Customers expect and reward data-driven services that reflect what is happening now.
In fact, having the capability to collect and analyze data in real time correlates with companies’ ability to grow. Business leaders that scored company in the top quartile for real-time operations saw 50% higher revenue growth and net margins, compared to companies placed in the bottom quartile, according to a surveyconducted by the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) and Insight Partners. The top companies focused on automated processes and fast decision-making at all levels, relying on easily accessible data services updated in real time.
Companies that wait on data are putting themselves in a bind, says Kishore Gopalakrishna, co-founder and CEO of StarTree, a real-time data-analytics technology provider. “The basis of real-time analytics is—when the value of the data is very high—we want to capitalize on it instead of waiting and doing batch analytics,” he says. “Getting access to the data a day, or even hours, later is sometimes actually too late.”
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.It was researched, designed, and written entirely by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Synthesia’s AI clones are more expressive than ever. Soon they’ll be able to talk back.
—Rhiannon Williams
Earlier this summer, I visited the AI company Synthesia to give it what it needed to create a hyperrealistic AI-generated avatar of me. The company’s avatars are a decent barometer of just how dizzying progress has been in AI over the past few years, so I was curious just how accurately its latest AI model, introduced last month, could replicate me.
I found my avatar as unnerving as it is technically impressive. It’s slick enough to pass as a high-definition recording of a chirpy corporate speech, and if you didn’t know me, you’d probably think that’s exactly what it was.
My avatar shows how it’s becoming ever-harder to distinguish the artificial from the real. And before long, these avatars will even be able to talk back to us. But how much better can they get? And what might interacting with AI clones do to us? Read the full story.
How Trump is helping China extend its massive lead in clean energy
On a spring day in 1954, Bell Labs researchers showed off the first practical solar panels at a press conference in New Jersey, using sunlight to spin a toy Ferris wheel before a stunned crowd.
The solar future looked bright. But in the race to commercialize the technology it invented, the US would lose resoundingly. Last year, China exported $40 billion worth of solar panels and modules, while America shipped just $69 million, according to the New York Times. It was a stunning forfeit of a huge technological lead.
Now, thanks to its policies propping up aging fossil-fuel industries, the US seems determined to repeat the mistake. Read the full story.
—James Temple
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter all about the latest in climate and energy tech. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 AI chatbots of celebrities sent risqué messages to teenagers Virtual versions of Timothée Chalamet and Chappell Roan discussed sex and drugs. (WP $) + An AI companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Trump can’t make up his mind about US tech giants While defending them against EU regulation, he’s also pushing to break them up. (FT $) + He’s hosting tech leaders at the White House later today. (Reuters) + Elon Musk doesn’t appear to have made the guest list. (CNBC)
3 Trump’s cuts have led to babies born with HIV Clinics in East Africa are closing, and people are being forced to skip vital drug doses. (The Guardian) + Artificial blood could save many lives. Why aren’t we using it? (Slate)
4Germany has already met its 2028 goal for reducing coal-fired power For the second year running, it won’t have to shut any more plants as a result. (Bloomberg $) + The UK is done with coal. How’s the rest of the world doing? (MIT Technology Review)
5 The risk of all-out nuclear war is growing But we’ve normalized nuclear competition so much, the risks aren’t always clear. (New Yorker $) + Maybe it’s time to start burying nuclear reactors’ cores. (Economist $)
6 xAI is hemorrhaging executives The CFO has left just months after joining. (WSJ $)
7 India’s chip industry is gaining momentum Years of investment are starting to pay off. But can it strike deals with overseas chip giants too? (Bloomberg $) + Meanwhile, Taiwan’s chip hub is home to a baby boom. (Rest of World) + Inside India’s scramble for AI independence. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot only needs one AI model to work It’s all it requires to master humanlike movements successfully. (Wired $) + How ‘robot ballet’ could shake up factory production lines. (FT $) + Humanoid robots still aren’t living up to their lofty promises. (IEEE Spectrum) + Will we ever trust robots? (MIT Technology Review)
9 How studying astronauts could improve health on Earth There’s still a huge amount we don’t know about space’s effects on humans. (Vox) + Space travel is dangerous. Could genetic testing and gene editing make it safer? (MIT Technology Review)
10 The Caribbean island of Anguilla has hit upon an AI cash cow By selling its .ai domain. (Semafor) + How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrime. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“If you are not being scammed yet, it’s because you haven’t encountered a scam designed just for you and only for you.”
—Jeff Kuo, chief executive of Taiwanese fraud prevention company Gogolook, warns the Financial Times about the endless possibilities generative AI presents to scammers.
One more thing
China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused.
Last year, China’s boom in data center construction was at its height, fueled by both government and private investors. Renting out GPUs to companies that need them for training AI models was seen as a sure bet.
But with the rise of DeepSeek and a sudden change in the economics around AI, the industry is faltering. Prices for GPUs are falling and many newly built facilities are now sitting empty. Read the full story to find out why.
—Caiwei Chen
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ The trailer for the forthcoming Wuthering Heights film is here and it looks…interesting. + This fall’s crop of video games is outstanding. + Textured walls are a surefire way to make your home look dated. Here’s some other faux pas to avoid. +The dogs of this year’s US Open are too cute ($)
Agentic AI is coming of age. And with it comes new opportunities in the financial services sector. Banks are increasingly employing agentic AI to optimize processes, navigate complex systems, and sift through vast quantities of unstructured data to make decisions and take actions—with or without human involvement. “With the maturing of agentic AI, it is becoming a lot more technologically possible for large-scale process automation that was not possible with rules-based approaches like robotic process automation before,” says Sameer Gupta, Americas financial services AI leader at EY. “That moves the needle in terms of cost, efficiency, and customer experience impact.”
From responding to customer services requests, to automating loan approvals, adjusting bill payments to align with regular paychecks, or extracting key terms and conditions from financial agreements, agentic AI has the potential to transform the customer experience—and how financial institutions operate too.
Adapting to new and emerging technologies like agentic AI is essential for an organization’s survival, says Murli Buluswar, head of US personal banking analytics at Citi. “A company’s ability to adopt new technical capabilities and rearchitect how their firm operates is going to make the difference between the firms that succeed and those that get left behind,” says Buluswar. “Your people and your firm must recognize that how they go about their work is going to be meaningfully different.”
The emerging landscape
Agentic AI is already being rapidly adopted in the banking sector. A 2025 survey of 250 banking executives by MIT Technology Review Insights found that 70% of leaders say their firm uses agentic AI to some degree, either through existing deployments (16%) or pilot projects (52%). And it is already proving effective in a range of different functions. More than half of executives say agentic AI systems are highly capable of improving fraud detection (56%) and security (51%). Other strong use cases include reducing cost and increasing efficiency (41%) and improving the customer experience (41%).
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written entirely by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
Every week we publish a handpicked list of new products and services from vendors of ecommerce merchants. This installment includes updates on email marketing, marketplace automation, AI agents, multi-site commerce, D2C subscriptions, interactive messaging, and website builders.
Got an ecommerce product release? Email releases@practicalecommerce.com.
New Tools for Merchants
Getsitecontrol launches email deliverability tools.Getsitecontrol, an email marketing platform for ecommerce brands, has released features to help businesses monitor, understand, and improve email performance. Getsitecontrol provides live analytics for each campaign type. Users can now send email campaigns from their own domain instead of a shared one. Smart Sending mode uses AI to analyze each recipient’s behavior and deliver emails at the optimal time. Also, Getsitecontrol forms now support Google reCAPTCHA to verify subscribers.
Getsitecontrol
Amazon introduces Lens Live, an AI-powered visual search feature.Amazon Lens, a visual search tool in the company’s Shopping app, is adding Lens Live. When shoppers with Lens Live open Lens, the camera instantly scans products and displays matching items in a swipeable carousel. Shoppers can tap an item in the camera view to focus on a specific product, add items directly to their cart, and save to their wish lists. Lens Live also integrates with Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant.
Fortis expands embedded payments capabilities with Adobe Commerce extension.Fortis, a provider of embedded payments and commerce technology, has launched its FortisPay extension for Adobe Commerce, accepting e-checks, ACH, credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more. Users of the Fortis extension can (i) securely store payment information and monitor for expired cards, (ii) get real-time order status updates embedded directly in the ecommerce platform, (iii) access Level 2 and Level 3 processing for B2B optimization, and (iv) embed workflows with NetSuite, Microsoft, Sage, Acumatica, and other leading systems.
eBay releases regulatory resource for sellers.eBay has launched a guide on the laws and regulations that may apply to sellers on the platform. The guide provides a central location for key regulatory information, a discovery tool to help identify relevant laws and regulations, and direct links to guidance on how to comply. Enter your location and shipping destination, and the discovery tool will highlight potential applicable laws and provide info on how to stay compliant.
ChannelEngine and Salsify partner on marketplace expansion.ChannelEngine, a marketplace integration and automation platform, has partnered with Salsify, a platform for product experience management and content syndication, to enable brands to expand reach, optimize performance, and scale across retail channels. Users can (i) enrich and localize product content through Salsify’s PXM platform, (ii) activate listings across 950 global marketplaces via ChannelEngine’s direct integrations, (iii) automate operations such as inventory syncing, pricing, order flows, and returns, and (iv) track performance and optimize growth with built-in reporting and insights.
Salsify
Alibaba launches AI agents to boost efficiency for global merchants.Alibaba International has launched Marco, an AI tool to enhance global ecommerce operations. Marco assists ecommerce merchants across Alibaba’s ecosystem, handling over 60 tasks across marketing, marketplace compliance, and customer service. The company has also introduced three specialized AI agents for complex cross-border ecommerce tasks: Intelligent Refund Agent, HS Code Agent to automate customs classifications, and Merchant Recruitment Agent to identify and pre-qualify potential sellers.
Run Payments launches Merchant for payments, reporting, dispute management.Run Payments, a payments orchestration platform, has launched Run Merchant, an application to orchestrate credit card and ACH payment data across multiple gateways and processors. Merchants can (i) manage all transactions in real-time across every location, sales channel, and processor, (ii) accept payments via virtual terminal, hosted payment pages, or API, (iii) track, respond, and resolve disputes without leaving the portal, and (iv) stay compliant with B2B transactions by accommodating Level 2 and Level 3 interchange optimization under Visa’s evolving Commercial Enhanced Data Program framework.
RunDTC unveils Unify Accelerator to power multi-site commerce on Shopify.RunDTC, a digital commerce agency, has launched Unify Accelerator, a quick-launch platform for enterprise retailers, developed with Contentstack, an adaptive digital experience platform. Designed for large-scale commerce organizations, Unify provides an interface powered by Contentstack’s DXP, enabling marketers and merchandisers to manage content across Shopify efficiently and at scale. From a single interface, merchants can access scheduling, preview and staging functionality, and control who can create, approve, and publish content.
Cleeng unveils free D2C subscription platform.Cleeng, a developer of subscriber retention management solutions, has unveiled Pro, a direct-to-consumer subscription management platform that can be launched quickly. Free for up to 10,000 subscribers, Cleeng Pro offers subscription management, identity and entitlement control, advanced analytics, support, and optional Merchant of Record and payment orchestration services. Cleeng Pro features no-code onboarding, best practice guides, and a partner network that includes JWPlayer, Applicaster, Videodock, Urban Zoo, Alpha Networks, and Sportradar.
Cleeng
Genstore launches AI-native store builder with a conversational interface.Genstore, an AI-native store builder, has launched its platform, which enables small and micro businesses to start, run, and scale a store, combining a simple conversational interface, instant AI store setup, autonomous growth tools, and multichannel integration. Genstore lets users upload a product image in the chat and instantly generates a product page with descriptions, templates, and visuals. Sellers can create a site, list products, answer questions, and run campaigns — all by chatting.
WEX partners with Trulioo for digital onboarding and fraud prevention.Trulioo, an identity platform for personal and business verification, has partnered with WEX, a payment processing and fleet management company. WEX provides processing for customers in the areas of corporate payments, employee benefits, and fleet services. Trulioo Document Verification combines advanced biometrics and machine learning to detect forgeries, deep fakes, and injection attacks.
Twilio introduces Rich Communication Services for branded interactive messaging.Twilio, a customer engagement platform for real-time, personalized experiences, has announced the global availability of Rich Communication Services messaging. Twilio’s RCS enables companies to send branded, verified messages with rich interactive features. RCS is available to all active customer accounts through Twilio’s Programmable Messaging and Verify APIs. Existing customers can upgrade, and new customers can implement both SMS and RCS through a single integration via the Twilio platform.
Miva launches Vexture, AI-powered search for ecommerce discovery. Ecommerce platform Miva has launched Vexture, a product discovery tool to help merchants deliver faster, more relevant search results based on real customer intent. Vexture combines local private AI embeddings from the merchant’s product catalog and other data, enabling it to interpret shopper language naturally and dynamically. Vexture leverages AI-driven natural language processing and store data to go beyond traditional keyword matching and understand what shoppers mean, not just what they type.
