New year-round initiative unites a dedicated news desk, a flagship conference, original research, and an advisory board, grounded in the engineering community’s most trusted editorial brands

CLEVELAND, Sept. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Arrowfly, an award-winning B2B media and marketing company, today announced the launch of AI for Engineers, a year-round resource for engineers and technical leaders applying artificial intelligence in their work. Anchored by Arrowfly’s network of 20+ flagship engineering brands, collectively reaching 2.1 million verified industry readers, 29 million website visitors, 1.6 million email subscribers, and generating 202 million monthly impressions, AI for Engineers brings together four interconnected pillars: a dedicated News Desk, a flagship annual conference, and an Advisory Board. Together, they form a year-round platform equipping engineers with practical knowledge, peer connections, and professional guidance as AI reshapes the engineering profession.

The demand is already there. More than 30,000 engineering and technical professionals have engaged with AI topics across Arrowfly’s engineering portfolio through webinars, newsletters, and editorial content. Engineering organizations are now investing in AI across every core function, from design and R&D to automation, manufacturing operations, cybersecurity, and workforce development. As AI adoption accelerates, the need for practical, hands-on knowledge is becoming increasingly important. AI for Engineers was built to meet that demand: a year-round destination combining rigorous editorial coverage, peer-driven applied learning, and an advisory structure accountable to practitioners.

“AI is no longer a future-state consideration for engineers. It is a present-tense operational reality across product design, manufacturing, robotics, medtech, and energy,” said Amanda Buehner, Senior Vice President, Sales & Strategy, Engineering, Arrowfly. “What we’re hearing from engineering leaders is that the challenge isn’t whether to adopt AI. It’s how to move from experimentation to practical, repeatable applications that deliver results. AI for Engineers is built around that need, bringing the industry together around trusted information, real-world implementation, and direct exchange between practitioners.”

Four Pillars, One Mission

News Desk: The AI for Engineers News Desk puts specialized editors inside each engineering discipline to report on how AI is changing the work: the tools practitioners are adopting, the workflows being rebuilt, and the decisions engineers are navigating right now. Backed by more than 20 engineering brands and 2.1 million verified readers, it is the only editorial resource built from the ground up for engineers who are already building with AI.

Live Event: AI for Engineers takes place September 20–22, 2027, at M Resort Spa Casino in Henderson, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas. The three-day conference brings together an expected 700 engineers and technical leaders to learn how AI is being designed, built, and deployed across the product and plant lifecycle. Engineers attending arrive with a shared pressure: leadership has committed to AI, budgets are moving, and the question is how to build something that works. The program spans five discipline-specific content tracks covering Engineering Design and Automation, Medical Devices and Medtech, Robotics, Energy and Electronics, and Industrial Operations and Smart Manufacturing, drawing mechanical engineers, design engineers, CAD/CAE specialists, product development managers, R&D directors, medical device engineers, regulatory affairs professionals, clinical engineers, biomedical researchers, robotics engineers, automation engineers, warehouse operations managers, systems integrators, manufacturing executives, and electrical engineers. The format combines daily keynotes, editorial sessions, pre-scheduled 1:1 meetings, and speaking slots, with Day 3 closing in peer-to-peer guided conversations structured around specific AI topics. A welcome reception on Day 1 and an offsite dinner on Day 2 round out the program. Attendees leave with practical, vendor-tested AI workflows they can apply immediately.

Registration for AI for Engineers 2027 is open now. Engineers and technical leaders can register at aiforengineers.arrowfly.com/event.

Original Research: The AI for Engineers research program launches the 2027 Outlook of AI, an original peer-to-peer study spanning five engineering disciplines: AI in Engineering Design and Simulation, AI in Medical Devices and Medtech, AI in Robotics and Automation, AI in Energy and Electronics, and AI in Industrial Operations and Smart Manufacturing. The study captures how engineering organizations are adopting AI by function, what is working, where the barriers remain, and what leaders expect by 2030. Results are compiled into a gated report published in Q4 2026 and distributed across Arrowfly’s engineering portfolio and beyond. Engineers who complete the survey and qualify receive a complimentary pass to AI for Engineers 2027.

Advisory Board: Completing the initiative is the AI for Engineers Advisory Board, a council of engineering and technical leaders shaping the standards, ethics, and best practices of AI in engineering. The Advisory Board holds the entire program accountable to the engineering professionals it serves, ensuring that editorial coverage, conference programming, and research priorities reflect real practitioner priorities, not vendor agendas.

Solution providers and technology companies can reach AI for Engineers’ audience of 2.1 million verified engineering professionals, spanning every discipline from mechanical and design to robotics, Medtech, energy, and industrial operations, at organizations including Amazon, NVIDIA, Boeing, Siemens, Medtronic, and Tesla. To learn about sponsorship and partnership opportunities, contact Arrowfly’s Engineering team.

About Arrowfly

Arrowfly is a live and digital B2B destination serving professionals across the engineering, healthcare, food, retail, and hospitality sectors. Across 40+ brands, the company delivers trusted journalism, original content, live and digital events, video, and demand generation programs to the decision-makers shaping their industries. Powered by Clara, Arrowfly’s proprietary performance platform, partners get real-time visibility into audience engagement, lead quality, and campaign ROI. The company is backed by an established reputation for editorial independence and credibility across the markets it serves. For more information, visit arrowfly.com.

Media Contact:

Annie Wissner

VP of Marketing

awissner@arrowfly.com

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/arrowfly-launches-ai-for-engineers-the-definitive-news-desk-conference-research-and-advisory-board-for-engineers-navigating-ai-302893752.html

SOURCE Arrowfly

The smart co-pilot for gig drivers opens its full app to every U.S. rideshare and delivery driver through the end of 2026, as new gig driver unions press for first contract with Uber and Lyft

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — GigU, the smart co-pilot that gives gig drivers the tools and knowledge to decide which trips are worth accepting in seconds, has made its full app free to every rideshare and delivery driver in the United States through the end of 2026, and launched on iPhone for the first time, broadening access to more transparency for nearly eight million workers.

The app is now available on both iOS and Android at no cost, removing the subscription that’s stood between U.S. drivers and GigU’s Cherry Picker and NetProfit tools that score every incoming trip offer against a driver’s real operating costs and show, before the driver taps accept, whether the trip is worth it.

U.S. drivers who were paying GigU app subscribers before September 1 will receive one additional year of free access for being loyal customers.

“You Don’t Have to Accept What You’re Handed”

GigU built its business on a single idea: a driver who can see what a trip actually pays makes different decisions than a driver who cannot. The company is now betting that removing the subscription price for this set of tools is the fastest way to change how American gig workers earn a living for the better.

“This is a culture shift in how drivers work with these platforms in terms of GigU providing them with transparency. Until now the platforms had all the power, controlling all aspects of a gig worker’s profits. As if they were on the battlefield with tanks, and drivers are out there with sticks and stones,” said Luiz Neves, GigU CEO and co-founder. “Everything changes once a driver learns to work with strategy and real numbers instead of accepting every offer that comes in. We are making the technology free for the rest of 2026 because we do not want cost to be the reason a driver never finds that out.”

Drivers who use GigU report earnings improvements of up to 30 percent after they begin screening offers (“cherry picking”) against their own costs, according to feedback the company collects directly from its users. GigU serves more than 185,000 subscribers globally today.

Why Now

Labor Day 2026 arrived at a turning point for American gig drivers as California became home to the world’s largest union of gig workers, thanks to historic legislation. Championed by Governor Gavin Newsom and the state’s legislature last year, it provided a pathway to unionization for roughly 800,000 rideshare workers.

However, the negotiations over California drivers’ pay and benefits will take time. GigU is a tech antidote that is available to drivers now, giving them the information to screen incoming offers against their real operating costs — a practice its users report improves their profits significantly.

In May, the App Drivers Union was certified by the Massachusetts Department of Labor Relations as the exclusive bargaining representative for roughly 70,000 rideshare drivers, the first union of its kind in the country. Under the state law that created it, if the union and the platforms have not reached agreement within 180 days of certification, either side may request a mediator. That clock runs out in November.

Nationwide, gig drivers have found their earnings and take rates have declined over the past four years since Uber switched to opaque pricing algorithms on both sides of its marketplace, per Columbia Business School.

Research published in June 2026 by Len Sherman, Executive in Residence and Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School, examined the distribution of hundreds of thousands of Uber trip offers across seventeen U.S. cities using anonymized ride-offer data from GigU users. In Dallas and Tampa, for example, where no minimum pay standards apply, half of all trip offers paid below 90 cents per mile. In Boston, where a 2024 settlement with the Massachusetts Attorney General set an hourly pay floor, ride offers averaged more than 2.5 times higher, with very few trips falling below the median rates seen in the unregulated cities.

“Left to its own devices, Uber has been able to exploit an asymmetric information advantage over drivers in a race to the bottom in pay rates,” said Sherman. “Uber initially recruited millions of drivers on a public promise that they would keep 80% of every fare. A decade and billions of trips later, in city after city, drivers are keeping less than half. No other major marketplace platform comes close to that spread.”

The same Columbia research tracked the trip histories of three veteran Uber drivers across a decade in Texas and Florida, roughly 50,000 rides in total. Uber’s share of the fare rose from 15% to 20% in the platform’s early years to more than 50% today.

The full report is available here, and GigU’s summary of the findings for drivers is available here.

What Comes Next for Drivers

GigU is building a loyalty program that connects drivers to services they use every day, including fuel, car washes and vehicle maintenance. The company is developing new tools that will let drivers compare their own results against what other drivers are earning in the same city, at the same hours, in the same conditions, closing an information gap that has favored the platforms since the rideshare industry began.

With these new features, drivers will be more connected to each other and be able to access and share valuable information to operate even better and boost their profits.

“I’ve always considered myself a fast runner, but I can only see how fast I really am if I can see how fast other people are,” said Thiago Vieira, Head of Global Expansion, GigU. “One of the biggest problems in the gig economy is that you have no feedback on how well you are performing. That is the gap we are closing for gig drivers — to give them better information to make more informed business decisions.”

Availability:

GigU is available now on the App Store and Google Play. The app is free for U.S. gig drivers through December 31, 2026. The new iOS app works with iPhones that are running iOS 17 or higher.

About GigU:

GigU gives gig-workers the tools, community and knowledge to take control of their earnings and their safety. Built from face-to-face work with drivers in Brazil, Europe and in the United States, GigU is a smart co-pilot that shows rideshare and delivery workers what a trip actually pays after their real costs, so they can choose the work worth taking. The company serves more than 185,000 subscribers across Brazil, Portugal and the United States and has raised nearly four million dollars in seed funding.

For more information, visit https://gigu.app/us and the GigU Blog: https://gigu.app/us/blog.

U.S. Media Contact:

Chris Knight

U.S. Communications & Editorial Director for GigU

@ Divino Group / MOUSA.I., on behalf of GigU

(415) 786-9226 m (on WhatsApp)

chris@divinogroup.net

U.S. Company Contact:

Thiago Vieira

Head of Global Expansion for GigU

+55 21 99664-4020 (on WhatsApp)

thiago.vieira@gigu.app

Editorial Notes & Resources:

GigU digital press kit: https://app.air.inc/a/b98V56oYR

Columbia Business School research, June 10, 2026: Uber’s Long and Winding Road to 50% Take Rates, by Len Sherman — len-sherman.medium.com

GigU Blog: The Number You Always Felt, Now on the Record – June 9, 2026

GigU Blog: California’s Uber and Lyft Drivers Just Won a Union. The Hard Part Starts Now. – August 12, 2026

GigU Blog: California certified a gig driver union. Uber already got paid. – August 25, 2026

GigU Blog: Enshittification has a name now. Drivers have lived it for years. – September 4, 2026.

GigU Blog: A seat at the table in California and a GigU celebratory table at El Cholo. – September 23, 2026

Massachusetts App Drivers Union certification: MA Department of Labor Relations, May 22, 2026 — mass.gov

Media Contact

Chris Knight, Divino Group, 1 4157869226, chris@divinogroup.net, https://gigu.app/us

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prweb.com/releases/gigu-makes-its-driver-profit-tools-free-across-the-us-and-launches-on-iphone-for-the-first-time-302891180.html

SOURCE GigU

HFS replaces its flagship Horizons assessments with Services-as-Software™ Star Ratings built on more than 400 enterprise client verdicts, zero vendor influence and no analyst scoring, ending a decades-old industry model in which provider rankings were shaped by briefing decks and vendor relationships rather than delivery reality

BOSTON, Sept. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — HFS Research today launched HFS Services-as-Software™ (SaS) Stars Ratings and retired HFS Horizons, its flagship analyst-scored provider assessment. SaS Star evaluations rate providers purely on how enterprise clients experience their capabilities in live delivery and whether they help those enterprises achieve real business outcomes. Every rating comes from enterprise clients running live engagements; providers submit no scoring inputs and cannot influence the ratings in any way, and HFS analysts do not score providers.

The move is a deliberate break from the analyst industry’s long-standing provider rating model, in which rankings are assembled from vendor briefings, RFI responses, and vendor-selected references, then scored by analysts whose judgments are inevitably shaped by their relationships with the providers they evaluate. That model has served providers well and enterprises poorly, rewarding briefing power and marketing scale over what actually happens once the work is live. The SaS Stars methodology replaces pitch with proof, giving enterprises a current view of where providers create value, where friction persists, and includes a customizable dashboard that shows how the field changes when enterprises apply their own priorities.

From this point forward, HFS provider ratings will be driven by enterprise client experience rather than any subjective scoring. HFS will continue to design the methodology, test the evidence, provide market context, and explain what the findings mean, but providers do not determine the inputs and analysts do not determine the scores.

“The analyst industry has spent two decades ranking providers on briefing decks, RFI responses, and analyst opinion, and everyone in the market knows how much those rankings are shaped by vendor relationships. Horizons was part of that model, and we are retiring it because enterprises deserve better,” said Phil Fersht, Founder, CEO, and Chief Analyst, HFS Research. “SaS Stars removes the analyst and the vendor from the scoring entirely. The only people who rate a provider are the enterprise clients living with the work, and we believe that is the only credible basis for provider evaluation from here on.”

A provider rating built from lived enterprise client experience
SaS Stars Ratings are built around five dimensions that distinguish Services-as-Software delivery from legacy services: AI-first delivery, proprietary IP and codified expertise, investment velocity, outcome-aligned commercials, and production scalability. Only current enterprise clients rate a provider. Participants must own or govern the engagement, have at least 12 months of experience with it, and be independent of the provider being rated. Ratings are weighted by engagement scope, tenure, and deal size and confidence-adjusted to reduce the impact of thin or divided samples. Providers cannot buy inclusion, influence their scores, select the client references, or submit scoring inputs.

What changes with SaS Stars

100% enterprise client-sourced ratings, zero vendor influence: Scores come from enterprise clients running live engagements, not vendor briefings, RFIs, or vendor-selected references.An enterprise decision tool, not a static scoreboard: Enterprises can re-weight the criteria to their own priorities and re-rank the provider field to build a more relevant shortlist for their own context.A broader field of view: The model gives specialists and challengers a fairer chance to be seen alongside established firms, based on who enterprises use and how those clients experience delivery – not provider market presence or briefing power.Current evidence at market speed: The model is built in weeks rather than the roughly six-month cycle common to traditional provider studies.Context without analyst scoring: HFS analysts design the methodology, interpret the market evidence, and identify implications, but do not determine provider scores.

“Every number in SaS Stars comes from enterprise clients running these providers in live environments. That changes the starting point completely,” said Saurabh Gupta, President, HFS Research. “We are not building another 2X2 matrix for providers to optimize against. We are giving enterprises a decision tool grounded in the experience of their peers, one they can tailor to what matters to them. It also means specialists and challengers can earn visibility through delivery performance, not marketing scale.”

Inaugural Agentic AMS ratings expose the gap between AI ambition and production reality
The first SaS Star Ratings study focuses on Agentic Application Management Services (AMS), drawing on more than 400 enterprise client evaluations across 34 providers. The research finds strong enterprise demand but a significant gap between the agentic AMS narrative and what is operating at scale: approximately 54% of enterprise clients expect to increase AMS spending over the next 12 months, yet only around 14% of engagements combine autonomous resolution, AIOps, and live-volume scale. Just 12% use outcome-based, gain-share, or risk-share pricing.

Every SaS Star rating combines two enterprise client verdicts. The star rating reflects how clients score a provider’s capabilities as they experience them in delivery across five Services-as-Software towers. It is confidence-adjusted based on how consistently clients agree, and that determines the tier: Leader, Challenger, or Aspirant. Client advocacy—the share who would actively recommend the provider—then positions providers within each tier. Accenture, TCS, Infosys, Capgemini, Publicis Sapient, Cognizant, HCLTech, IBM, and Wipro make up the Leaders tier. No provider earned five stars, which clearly highlights that SaS Stars is not designed to manufacture winners. The data also surfaces strength beyond the largest firms: Challengers Hexaware and Genpact receive the highest scores for Outcome-Aligned Commercials, the lowest-rated tower across every Leader.

The findings suggest the constraint is increasingly commercial and operational rather than purely technical. Enterprise clients report that AI is lowering run costs and improving resolution speed, but fixed-price, capacity-based, and time-and-materials commercial models still dominate.

“Enterprises are automating the work while still paying for effort, and that leaves enterprise clients carrying most of the automation risk. It is the single most important finding in this first study, and it explains why clients rate commercials and delivery consistency as bigger watch-outs than the technology itself,” Fersht added.

The research also surfaces a gap between provider marketing and day-to-day client experience. Enterprise clients identified delivery consistency, commercials and pricing, continuity, and scale as more prominent watch-outs than technology capability itself.

The SaS Star ratings include an interactive dashboard built for subscribed enterprise clients making real decisions. The published leaderboard uses the aggregate weighting selected by participating enterprise clients as the study default. Users can adjust any of the five tower sliders to reflect their own priorities and instantly re-rank all 34 providers. An enterprise that puts outcome-aligned commercials first, for example, will see a different shortlist from one that prioritizes AI-first delivery.

The inaugural Agentic AMS edition of HFS SaS Star Ratings is available free to all at https://www.hfsresearch.com/sas-stars/. Future SaS Star Ratings will be available exclusively to HFS premium clients.

About HFS SaS Star Ratings
HFS Services-as-Software (SaS) Star Ratings are provider ratings built entirely from enterprise client evaluations of live provider engagements. HFS designs the methodology and provides research context, but providers have no influence over their scores or ratings: they do not submit scoring inputs, cannot pay to be included or rated, and analysts do not score providers. The ratings help enterprise decision makers compare the providers their peers actually use, understand strengths and watch-outs, adjust criteria to their own priorities, and build evidence-backed shortlists.

About HFS Research
HFS Research is a global research and advisory firm focused on helping enterprise leaders make critical technology and services decisions. HFS combines independent research, enterprise data, and direct engagement with enterprise clients and market leaders to examine how AI, technology, and new operating models are reshaping business outcomes.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hfs-research-reinvents-the-provider-evaluation-with-sas-starsthe-first-ratings-scored-entirely-by-enterprise-clients-302893815.html

SOURCE HFS Research