As knowledge workers including software engineers shifted to remote work during the pandemic, executives expressed a concern that productivity would suffer as a result. The evidence is mixed on this, but in the software industry particularly, remote work exacerbated many of the challenges that employees already faced. According to a 2021 Garden survey, the majority of developers found slow feedback loops during the software development process to be a source of frustration, second only to difficult communication between teams and functional groups. Seventy-five percent said the time they spend on specific tasks is time wasted, suggesting it could be put to more strategic use. In search of a solution to bolster developer productivity, three former Atlassian employees -- Dylan Etkin, Michael Knighten and Don Brown -- cofounded Sleuth, a tool that integrates with existing software development toolchains to provide insights to measure efficiency.

David Kline is a journalist, author and intellectual property strategist. With every new trend comes a counter-trend. And so despite the current excitement over the wonders of artificial intelligence, one company is betting that human intelligence can still deliver solutions for businesses that AI cannot hope to match. Article One Partners (AOP) is a crowdsourced network of over 42,000 researchers in 170 countries -- 42% of whom have graduate degrees in a variety of science, technology, and engineering specialties. The firm got its start uncovering patent-busting prior art for defendants in high-stakes patent infringement suits, where it quickly earned a reputation for finding invalidating prior art in hidden corners of the globe that Google search could never reach -- an unpublished Korean-language PhD dissertation, a rural Norwegian library, even in a New York City pawn shop.