Month: December 2025

• Alfredo Mercedes built an AI-enabled modular recruiting platform after starting his career in defense tech.
• He runs his platform, which lives inside a VC fund, remotely from Medellín, Colombia.
• He said he’s seeing AI companies struggle with overheated compensation and employee retention.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Alfredo Mercedes, the 27-year-old founder of VU Talent Partners based in Medellín, Colombia. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m the founder of VU Talent Partners, and I recently relocated from Orlando to Medellín, Colombia.

I started my career in the Marine Corps Reserve, where I trained as an infantry mortarman. I next worked as an executive recruiter at Daversa Partners, an executive retained search firm for VC portfolio companies, where I specialized in placing executives in cybersecurity and defense technology roles.

I left Daversa in August 2024 for a six-figure role at Defense Unicorns, a Series A defense technology company that delivers AI and open-source capabilities to national security and DoD systems.

Company pivots created uncertainty around my job. I could’ve moved into a leadership role, but it wasn’t aligned with my personal vision. I wanted to build something of my own where people and venture intersect, helping innovative tech founders scale teams that advance democracy and security for real-world problems.

I took a layoff with severance in December. After leaving Defense Unicorns, I was unsure of my next move. Now I run an AI-enabled modular recruiting platform inside a global VC firm.

A VC firm recruited me for my current role

In January, I was recruited by VU Venture Partners after the GP reached out to reconnect since we had crossed paths years before to launch VU Talent Partners, where I lead today. Our goal is to eliminate the chaos of scaling by building talent infrastructure that scales with startups.

I had built a reputation in defense and frontier tech recruiting. VU Venture Partners came with a unique proposition: Instead of building another search firm, what if we built a talent platform born inside the fund, powered by the same data and signals on which startups rely?

I jumped at the opportunity

It helped that VU Venture Partners was also a perfect fit, as I was a graduate of the Venture University Accelerator, and VU Venture Partners is an early-stage global venture capital fund.

I’m the founder and CEO, which comes with a 50/50 split of ownership and profit. I run the VU Talent Partners platform on a day-to-day basis, while the VC provides capital, infrastructure, and network leverage.

3 things made me feel confident to leave a high-paying career and take this risk

First, I had a personal runway. I received rental income from my house in Orlando, which I own, and I lowered my living costs by relocating to Medellín, Colombia, and giving myself some breathing room.

Living in Medellín, Colombia, is more affordable in almost every aspect of cost of living, including rent, transportation, food, and entertainment. I live in a two-story penthouse in the main district area for $1,200 a month. Groceries delivered to my house in 30 minutes cost $40. Ubering anywhere in the city costs $10.

Second, I felt the market demand. Startups are scaling leaner, and venture firms are struggling with refreshed talent sourcing. As AI became a capacity multiplier, I felt recruiting infrastructure and speed to outcomes were missing pieces, especially.

Third, I knew I would be a unique fit. With my military experience, executive recruiting expertise, and startup operator skill set, I knew I could deliver results confidently.

From my front-row seat to the AI talent wars, these are the biggest challenges I’m seeing

• Overheated compensation: I’ve seen AI roles with total potential compensation north of $1M, squeezing startups out of the competition.
• Signal vs. noise: Thousands of people rebrand as “AI experts,” but few have shipped real systems. Filtering that talent is critical.
• Dual-use talent gap: Defense and frontier companies, in particular, need employees who can operate at the intersection of AI, government, and enterprise.
• Retention: Landing talent is one thing, but keeping them engaged when they’re constantly approached with offers is another.

My story is about building a life centered on ownership, resilience, and alignment. The Corps taught me grit. Recruiting taught me leverage. Venture taught me scale. AI is teaching me code.

At 27, I’m focused and still learning, all while creating a people-first infrastructure that outlasts me by helping teams scale talent, not overhead.

• The companies making money off the AI boom aren’t the ones you might expect.
• Caterpillar, Cummins, and others have made billions of dollars selling generators to data centers.
• Some analysts have raised concerns about investors overpaying, while the companies foresee years of demand.

For the last century, Caterpillar’s calling card has been its trademark macaroni-yellow backhoes and bulldozers. Increasingly, customers are interested in something else: the generators powering the artificial intelligence boom.

At hundreds of data center construction sites across the US, Caterpillar — alongside Cummins, Generac, and Rolls-Royce — supplies dozens of these machines. With some capable of powering more than 1,000 homes, generators ensure that AI models and cloud software can run without interruption.

These hulking devices, it turns out, are cash cows. While the surge in AI demand has fueled hundreds of billions of dollars in spending, much of that hasn’t yet flowed to the usual suspects in Big Tech. Instead, it has ended up in the hands of builders, blue-collar laborers, and companies like Caterpillar and Cummins, which manufacture unsexy but crucial equipment.

Both companies have beaten the S&P 500 over the past year — and their stock prices have spiked even more than that of many major data-center customers, including Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. Like the California Gold Rush’s picks-and-shovels purveyors before them, industrial vendors are cashing in on the AI boom.

Plenty of non-tech companies have benefited from AI spending, including companies like Primoris and Dycom Industries that lay pipes and fiber that connect data centers to natural gas and the internet. Generator companies are particularly well-positioned: As hyperscalers race to build power-hungry data centers, the demand for backup and off-grid electricity has ballooned.

“Power generation is a business that has never seen this kind of scale, in any way, ever,” Tom Shepherd, a data center executive at Cummins, told Business Insider.

Data centers are a bright spot for industrial businesses

About a decade ago, Shepherd oversaw a $50 million-a-year regional power-generation business in Oklahoma that largely sold Cummins systems to customers like hospitals and wastewater plants. He recalled just one large data center in his territory, run by Google.

“There just wasn’t the scale,” he said.

Today, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has more than two dozen data centers online or in development across the US. It has revised its planned capex spending for 2025 upwards every quarter, and now estimates that it will spend at least $91 billion by the end of the year. That’s a fraction of the $7 trillion that will be spent on data centers globally by 2030, per McKinsey.

For manufacturing-oriented industrial businesses that have faced threats from tariffs, rising expenses, and persistently high interest rates, data center demand is a welcome bright spot. Business Insider previously used diesel generator air permits to estimate data center growth and found that if all permitted data centers went online, their electricity use could be as much as the entire state of Florida.

Sales of Cummins’ signature truck engines have slipped over the past year, but the company sold $2.6 billion of power-generation equipment to the data-center industry last year and expects that number to grow by 30 to 35% this year, CEO Jennifer Rumsey said on a conference call last month.

The power-generation segment of Caterpillar — often shortened to Cat — grew from 8.4% of its total sales in 2021 to more than 14% of its sales in the first nine months of this year. And Rolls-Royce’s power-systems unit reported record revenue in February, driven partly by 46% annual growth in data-center sales.

Their stock prices have also soared. Both hit all-time highs this week; Cat closed above $590 a share on Wednesday, topping the previous high set after beating earnings in October, and Cummins shares crossed $507 on Wednesday.

Analysts are generally bullish. According to information tracked by the companies, over the past year, the percentage of analysts who think investors should buy Cat’s stock has grown from 41% to 54%; for Cummins, the share has gone from one-third to half.

Some analysts have sounded alarms, but the companies aren’t worried

Some indicators suggest the market took the picks-and-shovels trade too far. In October, Morgan Stanley estimated that Cat’s power-generation arm was valued by investors at 60-to-100 times its operating income. At Nvidia, the same multiple was 25 times; at GE Verova, another electrical-equipment business, the multiple was 28 times.

Melissa Busen, who runs the electrical power division at Cat, says she’s not worried. The company’s $39.8 billion order backlog is almost triple what it was five years ago, and Busen said the largest customers are making plans for years down the road.

If one of them has hardships, she said, another will take its place. She noted that Cat has been supplying the data-center industry since the early 1990s and has “been able to build true partnerships” with the new crop of hyperscalers.

Cat broke ground last year on a $725 million expansion of its engine factory in Lafayette, Indiana, where it currently employs 1,900 people. The expansion will more than double the company’s output of the engines that data-center developers are demanding, and is set to come online in 2027. Expansions are also underway at Rolls-Royce plants that build data-center generator parts in South Carolina and Minnesota.

Data center construction in Asia and Europe is also a component of demand, and many generators are manufactured outside the US. Cummins said earlier this year that it planned to invest $200 million across its power-generation manufacturing sites in India, England, and the US. The company plans to double the production capacity of the giant, 95-liter engines that drive data-center generators.

The money isn’t just in backup generators that sit idle most of the time, either. In the race for power, utilities aren’t able to connect companies to the electric grid fast enough. Increasingly, Cat and Cummins have been called on by Microsoft, Amazon, hyperscalers like Coreweave, and regional players like Joule for natural gas-burning generators and turbines that can run 24/7 for months or even years.

Cat’s Busen said customers don’t just want to talk about engines and turbines — they want to talk about “a complete, integrated solution” to their electrical needs, including things like batteries, inverters, and control systems.

The biggest limiting factor for now, said Shepherd, is “the physical ability of our society to build this kind of infrastructure.”

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• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is rebranding many products under the Agentforce name.
• Benioff says customers prefer AI agent terminology over cloud, based on recent focus groups.
• Salesforce might rename the entire company Agentforce, Benioff told Business Insider this week.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is done talking about the cloud and is renaming everything after its AI software Agentforce — perhaps even the whole company.

Salesforce slapped the “Agentforce” moniker on many of its products and services recently. And when the company reported earnings this week, there were updated names for several offerings. Sales is now “Agentforce Sales.” The Service offering is “Agentforce Service,” and Platform became “Agentforce 365 Platform,” and so on.

A Salesforce employee recently told Business Insider that the company might change its official corporate name to Agentforce. This was mentioned partly in jest. However, during an interview with Benioff late on Wednesday, the CEO confirmed this is a possibility.

“It might,” Benioff he told Business Insider. “That would not shock me.”

There’s precedent for such radical moves in the industry, as companies shift focus to new technologies or strategies. Mark Zuckerberg famously changed Facebook’s name to Meta. Google’s cofounders also changed their corporate name to Alphabet. Jack Dorsey’s Square became Block.

From cloud to AI agents

Salesforce was born in the cloud, so that tech buzzword has been attached to many products over the years: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud.

Now customers don’t want to hear about the cloud anymore, Benioff said in the interview. He learned this during recent focus groups ahead of the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in October. Instead, clients want to talk about AI agents.

“I dropped the word cloud totally,” he said. “I did it at Dreamforce. Did you notice I never used it in the keynote? We learned in focus groups customers don’t talk about cloud anymore. They just want to talk about their agentic interface.”

Salesforce renamed Data Cloud, its data platform, to “Data 360” and announced the change during Dreamforce. Data 360 is central to the company’s 2026 strategic plan, which Benioff also discussed with Business Insider during the interview.

Salesforce has made a huge bet on AI agents. Some insiders have cast doubt on the initiative, but Wednesday’s earnings showed some positive signs as the company raised its revenue forecast.

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• Legal tech startup Harvey has raised $760 million this year, reaching an $8 billion valuation.
• Harvey has been widely adopted by law firms, and lawyers say it helps them deliver work faster.
• Now the startup needs to prove it can boost law firms’ profits.

Legal tech startup Harvey this year has bagged $760 million in funding and soared to a valuation of $8 billion. Now it needs to prove that it can actually boost profits for the law firms that pay for its services.

Harvey, which on Thursday announced the close of a $160 million funding round, says its products free lawyers from drudge work so they can spend more time on strategy and client counseling. But at this point, Harvey’s ROI shows up in feelings more than spreadsheets.

Law firms want the payoff to show up on financial reports and client bills, says Zach Abramowitz, a former lawyer turned technology consultant for the legal field. Right now, he says, the payoff “inures first and foremost to the user” — the attorney who suddenly feels like they’re working with a supercharged second screen.

AI adoption has skyrocketed across the corporate world. Still, few companies are deriving measurable value from it. According to a Boston Consulting Group survey this year of more than 1,250 global firms, only 5% of companies were seeing real returns on AI.

Investors have thrown $3.2 billion at startups in the legal field this year, according to a Business Insider analysis. Harvey alone has scarfed up nearly one in four of those dollars.

Harvey builds software for analyzing and drafting documents using legally-tuned large language models.

The startup has proven that lawyers want what it’s selling. Over half of the hundred highest-grossing law firms in the United States have Harvey licenses. And the startup is quietly making inroads with some of the world’s largest enterprises, including Walmart and Comcast.

Every organization is seeking to nail down the value of artificial intelligence, said Winston Weinberg, Harvey’s cofounder and chief executive. Time savings, he said, are the “first horizon of measuring ROI.”

“The average Harvey customer is saving considerable time by using Harvey regularly,” Weinberg told Business Insider in an email. “Longer term, industry-wide, you’ll want to see metrics on transformation, profits per partner for firms, and ultimately revenue metrics for in-house teams.”

To prove it isn’t just selling workplace satisfaction, Harvey recently hired legal-intelligence shop RSGI to run a study of 40 Harvey customers, from A&O Shearman and Paul Weiss to the legal departments of AT&T and National Grid.

Most respondents said Harvey paid off in months, not years, with lawyers churning through work faster. And most said they’d be “upset or disappointed” if the tool vanished. One person joked: “Take away my coffee before my Harvey license.”

What eluded firms was a clear way to turn all that enthusiasm into hard metrics.

Only about a fifth of participants — six law firms and two in-house teams — said they had a formal way to track the return on their investment in Harvey tools. Most said they relied on adoption stats and anecdotal “power user” stories to track Harvey’s usefulness.

When asked how they measured value, 83% cited internal adoption, 75% intensity of usage, and 58% time savings. Only 18% pointed to cost savings.

One participant shrugged off the question with: “How would you measure the value of Microsoft Word?”

Harvey’s customers, at least, seem patient. A third of law firms surveyed said building a formal ROI framework was a lower priority than simply giving lawyers access to Harvey.

Harvey has clearly answered the question: “Do lawyers actually use this?” The open question is whether usage translates into higher profits or just nicer Tuesdays.

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• An analysis of large US metros showed two Florida locations had the fastest growth in independent workers.
• Other data showed Florida has been a popular destination to move to.
• Americans could be attracted to freelance or independent work in the stagnant labor market.

Florida has long been a hub for those settling into retirement, and it’s also becoming a destination for freelancers and other independent workers.

A recent report from freelance platform Fiverr and market research firm Illuminas showed which big US cities have seen the biggest estimated changes in independent professionals from 2019 to 2024 using government data. The report said since the most recent available data was for 2023, Illuminas estimated the 2024 figures “based on more recent macroeconomic data.”

Michelle Baltrusitis, head of community at Fiverr, said there’s been a “freelancing boom” in major Sun Belt cities. Orlando and Miami had the highest growth in independent professionals among 30 large US metro areas, at 32% each. Nashville followed, with a growth of 24%. The rest of the top-ten cities were all in the South or Southwest:

“The Sun Belt really represents the sweet spot between lifestyle and opportunity,” Baltrusitis, head of community at Fiverr, told Business Insider, adding it tends to offer a lower cost of living, nice weather, and booming economies.

Census Bureau data showed more people have moved into than out of Florida over the past few years, as has the South as a whole.

In the stagnant job market, where hiring opportunities are often harder to come by, building a business, freelancing, or independent contract work could be an attractive option.

Baltrusitis thinks the rise of independent professionals will continue in the Sun Belt and nationwide because people want more work flexibility, multiple income streams, and control over their careers.

Other data suggested a rise in working for yourself. ADP Research found the number of independent contractors rose by 50% between 2019 and 2024, adding growth has been steady since 2021, when the labor force was recovering from pandemic-induced job losses. Ege Aksu, an economist at Revelio Labs, found that the share of job switchers transitioning into entrepreneurship has surged over the past few years while hiring has slowed.

“It’s maybe speaking to work culture and autonomy, flexibility that are more talked about in today’s job market,” Aksu said, who also thinks it could be due to necessity due to the fewer job prospects.

Baltrusitis said people looking to freelance should consider what skills they could monetize and be willing to go through trials and errors. She also suggested that people research how others advertise their skills on freelance platforms.

• Geoffrey Hinton said he was surprised it took Google this long to catch up in the AI race.
• Google received significant praise for its release of Gemini 3 and Nano Banana Pro models.
• Hinton, an AI pioneer who previously worked at Google Brain, said the tech giant is now likely to surpass OpenAI.

The “Godfather of AI” thinks it’s about time that Google caught up in the AI race.

“I think it’s actually more surprising than it’s taken this long for Google to overtake OpenAI,” Geoffrey Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto who previously worked at Google Brain, told Business Insider in a Tuesday interview.

Google is coming off the heels of its widely praised launch of Gemini 3, an update that some in tech said elevated the giant beyond OpenAI’s GPT-5. Google’s Nano Banana Pro AI image model has also proven to be a hit.

Three years after Google reportedly declared a “code red” after the release of ChatGPT, recent reports indicate it’s now OpenAI that is sounding the alarm.

“I think that right now they’re beginning to overtake it,” Hinton said of Google’s position relative to OpenAI.

On top of the successful launch of its latest AI model, shares of Google rose on reports that it might broker a billion-dollar deal to supply Meta with its own AI chips.

Making its own chips is a “big advantage” to Google, Hinton said.

“Google has a lot of very good researchers and obviously a lot of data and a lot of data centers,” he said. “My guess is Google will win.”

Hinton, who helped pioneer AI research during his time at Google Brain, said that the search giant was once at the forefront of AI but held back.

“Google was in the lead for a long time, right?” he said. “Google invented transformers. Google had big chatbots before other people.”

Google was cautious, Hinton said, in the wake of Microsoft’s disastrous 2016 launch of its short-lived “Tay” AI chatbot, which it took offline after it posted incredibly racist tweets.

“Google, obviously, had a very good reputation and was worried about damaging it like that,” he said.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has previously said that the company held back on releasing its chatbot.

“We hadn’t quite gotten it to a level where you could put it out and people would’ve been okay with Google putting out that product,” Pichai said earlier this year. “It still had a lot of issues at that time.”

In the past, the company has had some shaky rollouts. Just last year, Google had to pause its AI image generator after some users complained that results showing historically inaccurate images of people of color were too “woke.” Its initial AI search overviews generated nonsensical advice, such as putting glue on pizza to prevent cheese from falling off.

Google just made a big university donation in Hinton’s honor

Hinton spoke to Business Insider ahead of the announcement that Google was donating $10 million CAD to help establish the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Toronto. The university, where Hinton split his time while at Google, said it would match Google’s gift.

Hinton left Google in 2023, citing concerns about AI’s development. Since then, he has repeatedly spoken out about the risks that AI poses to society, ranging from the potential to outsmart humans to displacing jobs. In 2024, Hinton was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics.

“Geoff’s work on neural networks — spanning his time in academia and his decade here at Google — laid the foundation for modern AI,” Google said in a statement. “This chair honors his legacy and will help the university recruit visionary scholars dedicated to the same kind of curiosity-driven, fundamental research that Geoff championed.”