Last year, potato farmer Josh Qualey experienced a potato beetle infestation bad enough that he felt the pesticides he’d been using on his crops just weren’t cutting it. Qualey oversees 550 acres of potatoes and rotating grain crops on his farm in Sherman, Maine. After a meeting with GreenLight Biosciences, a biotech company that makes novel crop protection products with ribonucleic acid, Qualey decided to give its insecticide targeting the Colorado potato beetle a shot.

“It costs so much money to grow an acre of potatoes nowadays that you need to secure your investment,” Qualey told Tech Brew. “I just decided, ‘Hey, we’ll try it. Other than a little money, we have nothing to lose.’”

And the insecticide, which GreenLight dubbed Calantha, “worked great,” he said. After spraying it on his entire yield and waiting a few days, the beetles were annihilated.

Keep reading here.—TC

All eyes in the autonomous vehicle sector were on Austin in June, as Tesla launched its long-awaited robotaxi service on a limited basis.

Meanwhile, its top competitor in the space, Alphabet-owned Waymo, announced several moves demonstrating its continued scaling of a business that now has commercial operations in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta—with Washington, DC, and Miami coming soon.

Hard launch: Waymo and Uber launched a robotaxi service in Atlanta on June 24. The move is part of a partnership between the ride-sharing giant and the robotaxi startup as they both aim to scale up driverless rides. Uber manages the fleet, while Waymo handles the vehicle testing and operations.

Waymo rides are available on Uber’s network across 65 square miles of the Atlanta area, from downtown to Buckhead to Capitol View, with plans to expand in the future. Users can opt into autonomous rides in the “ride preferences” section of the Uber app to increase their chances of hailing a Waymo vehicle.

Keep reading here.—JG

It’s always been prudent for finance and IT to work together. But now that AI and especially generative AI are here, the two functions are becoming intertwined like never before.

Some CFOs still would prefer to stay in their silos, Russ Blattner, co-founder and CEO of AI governance platform Superwise, told CFO Brew, and only deal with the budget aspects of technology. That’s a mistake, he believes.

In the AI era, “the CFO is going to have to become more of a pitcher than a catcher,” he said. They’ll need to actively work with CIOs rather than “just sitting back and receiving proposals for spends that include AI.”

With ubiquitous AI comes ubiquitous risks: That’s because AI is (1) everywhere, and (2) really, really risky. It’s becoming “integrated into everything,” Blattner pointed out. An enterprise organization can use “up to a thousand” different types of software, he said. If only half of those add AI, that’s still 500 types of AI the company will need to contend with.

Keep reading here.—CV