This year turned out to be a mixed bag for the EV transition.

On one hand, sales grew and even set new records. On the other, many automakers walked back electrification plans amid slower-than-expected demand, fiercer competition, challenges making EVs profitable, and difficulties convincing the next wave of prospective EV buyers to go electric.

Now, with EVs comprising about 9% of the new-vehicle market, the sector is entering an uncertain period amid a presidential transition that promises to yield major policy changes. Some experts say that the next Trump administration’s plans to roll back many of the Biden administration’s clean-energy policies could slow EV adoption in the near term.

To get a feel for what might be in store for the EV sector in 2025, Tech Brew caught up with some business leaders.

Go local: With the federal government likely to deprioritize electrification for the next four years, some executives told us they’ll be shifting their focus to municipalities and states that are still committed to the clean-energy transition.

“It’s now going to be cities and states that lead, and they’re not backing down,” Tiya Gordon, co-founder of curbside EV charging company Itselectric, said. “The investments have been made…And so it’s going to be far more of a federalist approach to charging than the national, unified approach that we had been able to build out through the current climate-forward administration.”

Keep reading here.—JG

As natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and wildfires worsen and increase in frequency, it’s become clear that the climate crisis is a business risk. Therefore, some companies are now engaging with predictive data and analytics to figure out how to best protect their physical assets—and where to build new ones.

John Mennel, a managing director at Deloitte and its purpose strategy leader, helps companies access that sort of data and advises them on how to interpret it. Tech Brew talked with Mennel about that process and the other analytical tools Deloitte uses to guide companies in becoming more sustainable.

Tell me about you and the work that you do at Deloitte.

The work I do is with large corporations and some public sector organizations, helping them both figure out their decarbonization strategy and figure out the economics around it and then implementing it—whether that’s putting in the technology, managing the data, doing renewable energy, improving manufacturing processes…all the things you can imagine that are part of decarbonizing.

Then I also do a lot of work on just the economics around that. One of the great things about sustainability now is the economics are quite good. Renewables are the cheapest source of energy, and so companies generally save or make money when they’re more sustainable. A lot of what I do is helping clients figure out the economics and the financing. We have an integrated sustainability practice that cuts across everything we do: That’s our consulting business, our technology business, our transaction business, our audit and accounting business, and our tax business. I’m on the leadership team for that global practice, and I look after all of our digital assets and data, like the software products and models that we build.

More broadly, our sustainability practice focuses on a couple of different things with clients.

Keep reading here.—TC

If anyone knows what’s keeping ad-tech folks up at night, it’s Shiv Gupta.

As the founder of the ad-tech education company U of Digital, Gupta’s job is to help make sense of some of the industry’s weediest topics, like identity resolution or what the heck a clean room does. Ahead of the New Year, Marketing Brew spoke to Gupta about what his clients are asking about and what he’ll be keeping his eye on in 2025.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

In 2024, what did your clients ask about the most?

I’d say the topics that are in the most in demand are still all things CTV-related. It’s a new frontier. It’s changing really fast. People want to learn about all things CTV. No. 2 is new. It’s AI. That’s an entirely new frontier, and it’s moving really fast. Commerce media is another big one. That’s newer, too…[Topics like] clean rooms, identity, privacy, it’s kind of quieted down significantly on that front, which I find to be fascinating.

AI can mean a thousand different things. What specific pieces of AI are advertisers asking about?

A lot of people don’t feel comfortable with the basics of AI right now. [They’re asking], help me understand large language models versus generative AI, help me understand the basic nuts and bolts first…help me understand how AI is revolutionizing planning. How is it revolutionizing activation and buying? How is it revolutionizing measurement and analytics? What are the tools people are using from an AI perspective to change how they do work in those areas?

Keep reading here.—RB