The next time you click “order,” your package just might make its way from the warehouse to your doorstep with the help of a driverless truck.

That’s the goal, anyway, for autonomous trucking company Gatik AI, which is focused on the “middle mile”—the routes that connect distribution centers, fulfillment centers, and retail stores. The California-based startup aims to capitalize on this lucrative slice of the market as it looks to go “freight-only” (read: no human safety operators in the cabin) and expand the number of trucks it has on the road from 65 today to roughly 300 by the end of next year.

Tech Brew recently caught up with Richard Steiner, Gatik’s VP of government relations and public affairs, to chat about the most pressing legislative and regulatory issues facing the autonomous trucking sector.

“My job is to ensure no surprises, as far as our work with the federal, state, and local authorities is concerned,” he said.

Gatik counts Walmart, Kroger, and Tyson Foods among its paying customers. Later this year, it aims to go freight-only in Texas.

But another major market—California—currently has Steiner’s attention, as a bill (AB 2286) that would essentially ban autonomous trucks is heading to the desk of Governor Gavin Newsom, who last year vetoed a similar bill.

The California Senate last month OK’d the bill that, according to Trucking Dive, would require human drivers to remain in autonomous trucks potentially through decade’s end.

“This bill would step right into the middle of an as yet unfinished regulatory rulemaking process,” Steiner told us, “which is being led by incredibly experienced regulators at the state level, which we think is entirely appropriate.”

Keep reading here.—JG

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Slack is taking a cue from BuzzFeed with a new personality quiz that aims to understand how modern office workers use AI.

In a survey of 5,000 full-time desk workers across six countries, the Salesforce-owned office chat platform sorts workers into five broad buckets depending on their usage of and sentiment toward generative AI tools in the workplace.

From “The Rebel” to “The Maximalist,” the company claims this classification system will help business leaders better organize teams to use AI effectively. (Want to see where you fall on the spectrum? Take the quiz.)

“[The personas] are a reflection of the different ways that employees are using and not using AI, as well as an understanding of the variety of emotions and experiences that people are having surrounding AI at work,” Christina Janzer, Slack’s SVP of research and analytics, said in a press briefing. “We really wanted to recognize that there is no one-size-fits all approach when it comes to your experience with AI.”

To AI or not to AI: While other surveys have clocked a groundswell of employee adoption of AI beyond the sanctioning of bosses, the research report Slack released in July found the opposite. Two-thirds of workers have yet to use AI at work, despite urgency from execs, Slack’s own survey found then.

Janzer said those results prompted Slack’s research team to try to better understand the reasons behind the disconnect.

Keep reading here.—PK

When Lauren Stevens began her reality TV career, helping Flava Flav, Bret Michaels, and eventually even Travis Kelce find “love” as a producer on some of the century’s most memorable—and often infamous—shows, she said many believed the nascent genre would simply be a fad. Now, she’s swapped reality for retail, focused on producing content for another new industry: social commerce.

In 2020, losing her excitement for the ever-changing TV industry, she co-founded Orca, a social commerce company producing shoppable livestreams, along with paid and affiliate content, with fellow producer Max Benator. Orca offers brands livestream studios and on-camera hosts and advises brands on their shoppable content, and even debuted its own livestream shopping beauty boutique, Bleu Beauty, earlier this year.

Social commerce is still in its early days, and live shopping particularly so, especially compared to China. But it’s starting to grow. TikTok, which boasts 35.8 million social buyers, has seen shopper growth rates surpassing Instagram and Facebook, per EMarketer, with overall US retail social commerce sales projected to pass $100 billion in 2025. Coresight Research estimates livestream shopping will reach 5% of total US ecommerce sales by 2026.

“A lot of people said live shopping wasn’t going to have a place here in the US, but it’s keeping us very busy,” Stevens, also Orca’s chief content officer, noted.

Keep reading on Retail Brew.—EC

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