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What happens when the lights go out? For most of us, it’s just an inconvenience. But for millions of households and small businesses, outages mean life-saving medicine spoils, work grinds to a halt, and daily life becomes uncertain.

This week on Things Have Changed, we’re joined by Cole Ashman, founder of Pila Energy, who is on a mission to make backup power accessible to everyone.

From growing up in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina to working on cutting-edge energy products, Cole has seen firsthand how fragile the grid can be — and how urgently we need solutions that work for all people, not just homeowners with deep pockets.

With Pila, Cole and his team are building portable, modular, and intelligent batteries that can protect what matters most — whether that’s a fridge, a CPAP machine, or your home office.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why today’s grid challenges (aging infrastructure, AI-driven demand, climate disasters) make resilience more urgent than ever
• The problem with traditional backup power and who gets left behind
• How distributed, plug-and-play batteries can scale faster than big infrastructure projects
• Why resilience should be a right, not a privilege

🎧 If you care about technology, climate, or the future of energy, this conversation will change the way you think about power — and what it means to stay resilient.

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When Fatigue Becomes Fatal: Voice AI and the Future of Worker Safety

Fatigue isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a $400 billion problem. In this episode of Things Have Changed, we sit down with Yujie Wang, founder of Vocadian, to talk about a silent workplace epidemic that affects doctors, truckers, miners, and factory workers alike: occupational fatigue.

Yujie draws from his time at MIT and Harvard to share how cutting-edge voice-AI and circadian science can detect fatigue before disaster strikes. After a near-eyeball-loss accident involving a fatigued driver, Yujie dove into research, developing a non-intrusive, voice-based biometric that can flag impairment in just 30 seconds—no wearables needed.

We explore:

• How shifting sleep-wake cycles and cognitive weariness impact high-risk professions.
• The creative ways Vocadian integrates voice screening into pre-shift checklists, sometimes alongside mining booths or safety training modules.
• Why multimodal data—including environmental factors and scheduling—is critical for accurate insights.
• The ecosystem around worker safety: companies, insurers, unions, and regulators all play a part in making this tech useful and accepted.

From the rumble of highways to the flattened hospital corridors, you’ll hear stories of close calls—and how voice might just be the early warning we desperately need.

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Today, more than ever, industries are turning to tech to address inefficiencies that plague day-to-day operations. The legal industry, often viewed as one of the most traditional and slow-moving professions, is undergoing a silent revolution. Lawyers, known for their meticulous review processes and reliance on institutional knowledge, are increasingly overburdened by repetitive tasks like document review and answering the same questions multiple times.

Ruli AI, co-founded by Bryan Lee, is at the forefront of this shift, leveraging artificial intelligence to redefine how lawyers work. On Things Have Changed, we recently hosted Bryan Lee, co-founder and CEO of Ruli AI, to discuss how AI could tremendously boost efficiencies within the legal space while giving lawyers the tools they need to focus on strategic, high-value work.

Ruli AI: The AI Partner for Lawyers

Bryan’s career journey is far from the typical one - going from big law to launching an AI startup. After spending years juggling the demands of capital markets law, in-house legal counsel, and AI development at Google and Meta, Bryan observed a universal pain point: lawyers spending countless hours on tasks that could be automated.

“Imagine if lawyers had an AI partner that could handle repetitive tasks, like summarizing contracts, reviewing for inconsistencies, or even answering basic questions,” Bryan explained. “That’s where Ruli AI steps in.”

Ruli AI offers a legal platform with two primary components:

1. Legal Hub: Automates intake processes, answers FAQs, and centralizes organizational knowledge for seamless collaboration.
2. Copilot: A personal assistant for lawyers, capable of summarizing documents, conducting research, and providing clear, actionable insights.

This dual approach makes Ruli AI a trusted partner that helps lawyers focus on what they do best: solving complex legal challenges.

The Legal Profession’s Efficiency Problem

At the heart of Ruli AI’s mission is the drive to solve a problem that plagues the entire legal industry: inefficiency! The numbers are staggering. In a typical in-house legal team, a single lawyer might support 100 or more employees, resulting in a backlog of unanswered questions, delayed document reviews, and unproductive hours spent on repetitive tasks.

Lawyers and AI are an Ideal Fit

Ruli AI shows that AI & Law is a perfect fit. There is growing consensus that at least in the Legal field, AI is being viewed more as an Aid, and not a Replacement. By automating routine tasks, AI can empower lawyers to spend more time on complex cases, strategic thinking, and client relations. This technological shift allows legal teams to work more efficiently and cost-effectively while maintaining high-quality services.

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