Day: October 6, 2025

• Drone delivery is gaining momentum with pilot programs from Chipotle, GoTo Foods, and beyond.
• Regulatory changes, including a June executive order, have given the sector a significant boost.
• Safety, reliability, and noise concerns remain as drone delivery expands in suburban areas.

After years of stalled experiments and regulatory hurdles, drone delivery is beginning to take flight in the US.

Chipotle in August began teaming up with drone delivery and logistics provider Zipline to ensure Dallas area fans can get their burritos and bowls delivered — anytime, and almost any place. In June, GoTo Foods partnered with DoorDash and Wing to bring items from its portfolio of brands, including Auntie Anne’s and Jamba, to three Texas markets: Frisco, Fort Worth, and Plano.

The pilot programs build upon short-lived drone delivery experiments from other brands that have been rolled out and subsequently discontinued over the last decade, like the Flytrex and El Pollo Loco partnership, which briefly took to the skies in 2021.

This moment, however, seems to be different, five industry insiders told Business Insider.

“I do think it’s an inflection point for the industry,” Kent Ferguson, head of partnerships for Wing, said. “We have an improving regulatory framework to allow us to service more customers and scale much more quickly. We have the infrastructure that is flexible, cost-effective, and we have the planes on hand — thousands of planes — to service the millions of customers.”

Multiple companies, including Zipline, Wing, Flytrex, and DroneUp, are vying for commercial drone dominance with their unique designs of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, for short. Some of the aircraft resemble miniature passenger planes, while others resemble hobbyist drones, featuring four rotating propellers and an attached payload.

From an operational standpoint, the challenges of drone delivery for participating retailers are the same as those of an order being picked up by a human driver or a robot courier, GoTo Foods’ chief commercial officer, Kieran Donahue, told Business Insider.

“We still have to make sure we get the right items in the bag, that the food is prepared properly,” Donahue said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s coming from a DoorDasher in a traditional car or a drone.”

The benefits to retailers, though, are clear: faster delivery times, lower labor costs, and increased customer satisfaction — and it’s not just GoTo Foods and Chipotle that want in on the perks. Major grocery players, including Walmart and Amazon, are rolling out pilot programs at scale. Getting dinner ingredients delivered by drone may soon be as common as ordering take-out through Grubhub or Uber Eats.

A recent regulatory breakthrough

Although drone technology has become increasingly useful to the commercial sector in recent years due to technological advancements, the recent momentum isn’t thanks to better hardware alone — it’s also due to the regulatory climate.

L.R. Fox is the founder and CEO of WhiteFox Defense Technologies and vice chair of the US Chamber of Commerce Drone Committee. He told Business Insider that a June executive order signed by President Donald Trump was a catalytic moment for the industry. It signaled a path forward and broke through an otherwise complicated web of federal regulations that had prevented widespread adoption.

“The key thing that enables drone delivery is known as ‘Beyond Visual Line of Sight,'” Fox said. “Up until this point, you have companies that had literally a guy standing on a rooftop, flying the drone until he can’t see anymore, and then another guy standing on a rooftop and taking over control of the drone.”

The executive order set the stage for the Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration, which control the country’s airspace, to enable and monitor routine Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations for drones for commercial and public safety purposes.

So far, the test programs are gaining traction and shaving precious minutes off delivery times, representatives for both GoTo Foods and Chipotle told Business Insider.

“What’s unique about drone delivery is, with this particular technology, we don’t have to implement the drones at every restaurant to be able to still have full coverage of an area,” Chipotle chief technology officer Curt Garner said. “One restaurant out of five or six may be able to have the same delivery radius that we would typically experience with somebody going into a restaurant and driving a car as a courier.”

The Texas market, in particular, has been a playground for drone pilot programs, in part because of its temperate weather and the layout of its cities, Harrison Shih, head of the DoorDash Drone Program, told Business Insider.

“It’s fairly suburban, a lot of single-family homes,” Shih said. “These are the profiles that drones fly really well in, where they can lower packages.”

The DoorDash Drone Program is also operating in Charlotte, North Carolina, for similar reasons. Both sites offer the company essential testing data for scaling up in more congested neighborhoods.

“Hopefully, what we see in 2026 is that the market will open up, and more and more metropolitan areas will be able to be covered,” Shih said.

Still to tackle: No-drone zones and propeller noise

Still, as these experiments move closer to the mainstream, questions about safety and reliability persist.

A 2024 survey by the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation found that 70% of respondents were concerned that drones would disturb their neighborhoods and may be unsafe, and 51% would oppose legislation to expand US airspace for delivery drones.

“Right now, if somebody launched a drone and had a bomb on it, there’s very little anybody can do to stop it,” Fox said. “Not from a technology standpoint, but just from a deployment and authorities standpoint — local or state law enforcement cannot do anything to stop a drone, it’s a federal crime for them to do that, which is insane.”

Federal authorities have limited authority to disable or destroy threatening drones that pose a threat to their facilities or national security. Proposed laws aim to grant state and local police more authority, but have not yet been passed.

One of the primary concerns in the industry now is that when companies fly hundreds or thousands of drones a day across various populated areas, “one of them is going to have some kind of incident,” Fox said.

“So working through how that’s resolved is definitely a factor,” he added. “Then, trying to ensure that it doesn’t cause a complete halt or pause to the industry.”

Beyond the safety concerns, other practical considerations are still being addressed, such as determining suitable delivery zones and mitigating noise from propeller blades.

“The likelihood of the drone delivery straight to your window is very far off,” Fox said. “We might not ever see in our lifetimes.”

For now, when using platforms like Wing and Zipline, customers mark their preferred delivery zone when setting up their order — generally required to be a flat surface the size of a picnic blanket with clear skies overhead.

Garner said Zipline is addressing noise concerns from both design and operational standpoints: “The drones are quite high in the air when the payload is lowered, so that buzzing noise that you would typically associate with a zone with the drone isn’t audible,” he said.

Even with hurdles ahead, the companies testing drones say the momentum is more real now than it has been before. By shaving minutes off delivery times, reducing labor costs, and opening up new occasions for off-premise dining — from soccer fields to suburban cul-de-sacs — drones are being positioned not as a gimmick but as a serious tool in the future of last-mile logistics.

If these trials succeed, the next frontier in convenience shopping might not be at your doorstep, but hovering right above it.

• The Singapore Grand Prix drew a crowd of over 300,000 to the city-state over the past weekend.
• With temperatures of more than 85 degrees, the race was declared to be F1’s first “heat hazard” race.
• Passion mixed with sweat at the race, which ended with a big win for Mercedes.

Formula 1’s Singapore Grand Prix 2025 drew more than 300,600 spectators over the past weekend, its second-biggest audience in its history.

While the crowd was diverse, every spectator had one thing in common: beads of perspiration.

Just three days before the big race, F1’s organizing body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, announced that the Singapore Grand Prix 2025 would be the first “heat hazard” race in F1 history.

Temperatures rose to 85 degrees Fahrenheit during Sunday’s race, and the track temperature was even hotter, at 91 degrees. Humidity stood at a choking 72%.

The new “heat hazard” label came with new regulations for the 20 race car drivers, such as the installation of a cooling system in the cars. Spectators battled the heat of the tropics with hand-held fans, caps, and pricey ice-cold drinks.

Here’s a look inside a weekend of crazed fan fever, mixed with sweat and Champagne.

A glittering night race made for TV

Singapore hosted the first F1 night race in 2008 and has been running the event annually since, except for two years during the pandemic.

The Singapore Grand Prix race comprises 62 laps of Marina Bay Street Circuit, a three-mile track around the city’s glittering and historic town center.

“And under the lights, the paint on the cars, it’s meant for TV,” Lung-Nien Lee, FIA’s APAC vice president of sport, told me.

Caps, umbrellas, water bottles, and hand-held electric fans kept the heat at bay for the more than 300,000 spectators who attended the race from October 2 to 5.

A new addition to the race suit: cooling vests

As part of the “heat hazard” protocol, all teams were instructed to install an 11-pound “driver cooling system” in their cars. This included a storage container of cold fluid, a plump, plumbing, and a cooling vest.

Drivers were recommended, but not required, to wear the vest — a fireproof garment with tubing installed to circulate cold fluid over their bodies during the race.

Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA’s single-seater director, told me in the F1 paddock that the sport was still fundamentally dangerous.

“The heat hazard started about two years ago when we had a race in Qatar, which was extremely hot, and there were drivers who were fainting after the race and just couldn’t get out of the cars,” Tombazis said.

He said the vests will “allow drivers to keep their cool” in a hot race.

Some of the drivers were not too keen on the new addition to their garb. Max Verstappen, the Dutch-Belgian driver of Red Bull Racing, said before the race that he did not like the tubes and did not intend to use the vest.

But George Russell of Mercedes said he had worn the vest before, and backed the system, per a report by the BBC.

Cameron Kelleher, F1’s director of communications, told me that the vests were heavier than necessary and were still a work in progress.

Handheld fans brought welcome relief to some fans in the sweltering heat.

Lina Cucinotta, a Ferrari fan who had made the trip up to Singapore from Australia, was fanning herself with a large black hand-held fan when I approached her near one of the stands.

Coming from Melbourne, which is experiencing a pleasant spring with temperatures of 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, she said her family came to Singapore seeking the weather.

“But my fan is ready to die,” Cucinotta, an administrative professional, said with a laugh.

Cucinotta attended the Singapore Grand Prix in 2023, and she said it was hotter that year.

Beer and coconut water to cool down

The only food and drinks available in the F1 grandstands were small carts selling game-day food like hot dogs, nachos, and fried chicken.

A Heineken beer cost 17 Singapore dollars, or about $13. Other offerings included SG$18 frozen margaritas and SG$5 bottles of soft drinks.

But the weather drove me to make an impulsive purchase, and an overpriced Sprite had never tasted better.

A stall staff member told me that the beers and margaritas were flying off the shelves in the heat.

Taking a quick race break at Alan Walker’s concert

To take a breather from the stands, I made my way to the concert venue, which was located near the middle of the track.

I was just in time for Alan Walker’s set. Dancing along to his 2015 hit “Faded,” I couldn’t help but wonder how the Norwegian DJ was wearing his signature mask and hoodie in the heat.

A star-studded event

The Grand Prix was star-studded from start to finish. Other popular artists in the weekend’s line-up included Elton John, Lewis Capaldi, K-pop artists G-Dragon and CL, and rock band Foo Fighters.

K-pop band Seventeen’s members, Dino and Vernon, were also spotted touring the Red Bull garage on Sunday and enjoying some time in the pit lane.

The FIA safety car driver was experienced with keeping the heat at bay

Bernd Mayländer, the FIA’s safety car driver, has had the gig for about 25 years and said he has nailed down how to deal with heat in countries like Qatar and Singapore.

Mayländer, who has to wear a full race suit like the drivers, said he keeps a bottle of water with him in his safety car to stay hydrated and makes sure to keep sipping.

“But I can’t drink too much either, as I’ll have to make some unnecessary pit stops,” he told me less than an hour before the start of the race. The veteran had beads of perspiration on his face even before he donned his race suit.

A short burst of rain cooled down the tracks

Right before the race started, a short burst of rain cooled down the tracks and had fans running for shelter.

But some car fanatics stayed put with umbrellas and raincoats to watch the tests of the legendary F1 pit stops. They watched as the crews removed old tires and fit new ones in under 2.5 seconds.

The clouds dried up in minutes, leaving the surroundings just as hot, and admittedly more humid than before.

Charles Leclerc enjoyed a cool breeze during the drivers’ parade

The drivers got one last chance to cool down before the race, during the drivers’ parade at sunset. I joined hundreds of others on the pit lane, straining against a rope barricade to snap pictures.

Under the darkening sky and a light drizzle, the 20 drivers took a lap around the race track, seated in convertible cars and waving to fans in the stands.

They would soon be donning their full-body race suits, balaclavas, boots, gloves, and helmets for the race.

According to the F1 website, the face apparel is designed to protect drivers from fire and heat, an essential for drivers who endure temperatures of more than 140 degrees Fahrenheit in the cars’ cockpits.

F1 says the drivers lose up to 5% of their body weight during races.

McLaren’s crew hugged and cheered after winning the Constructors’ Championship

The race ended with Russell from Mercedes in the first spot, followed by Verstappen from Red Bull Racing in second and Lando Norris from McLaren in third.

McLaren won the Constructors’ Championship, a title awarded to the team with the most championship points at the end of a season.

Crew members of the British automaker hugged and high-fived as Norris’ car dashed past the finish line.

Sweat mixed with Champagne

Norris, the 25-year-old Briton who clinched the third spot, emerged from the podium drenched in sweat and Champagne.

Big bottles of bubbly were popped during the price presentation ceremony — it helped that luxury giant LVMH was a race sponsor — and sprayed all over the winners and their crew.

Other drivers were sombre as they left the pit

Drenched in sweat and dehydrated, the drivers who did not clinch the top spots left the F1 pit without much fanfare.

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari’s 40-year-old British driver, did not take his iconic gold helmet off as he walked out.

George Russell relaxed in the press conference

Russell ended the duties of the day with a press conference in the paddock after the race, flopping down onto the white sofa with the confidence of a winner.

The 27-year-old Briton maintained his lead throughout the 62 laps, cruising to the top spot.

Ending the day drenched in sweat but fulfilled

I called it a day and lugged my camera and laptop back to the train station, enjoying the fireworks celebrating the end of the race, lighting up the skyline.

The weekend was hot, sweaty, and tiring, but certainly one to remember.

Olwyn Patterson was scrolling LinkedIn when she spotted the profile of someone she thought would be the perfect person to help promote an upcoming event put on by her company, a platform that connects startups with VCs.

She typed up a quick introduction in her usual efficient staccato.

“I run a biannual demo day that reaches 4,000 startups a year, one of which I noticed is also in your program. We also have a 15k-plus founder, VC, and angel investor newsletter. There seems to be a natural crossover between our communities. It’d be great to share opportunities with each other.”

Moments later, her inbox pinged with a reply: “Very impressive AI-driven outreach.”

Patterson was taken aback. She prided herself on her clear, professional writing, even if it could come off as stilted.

Flummoxed and more than a little offended, she turned to her LinkedIn community of tech-industry peers to make sense of the interaction. “To anyone who thought I was a bot, I (humanly) apologise,” she wrote in a post. “I’m just a confused human trying to write some emails.”

Together, they pondered the question that’s haunting much of the professional community right now: what, exactly, does it mean to write like a human? “I used to suck at grammar and really worked on it as I became a writer,” one of her contacts, a tech founder, wrote. “Now I’m nervous that I come off as a bot.”

ChatGPT writing is flooding LinkedIn. The platform estimates that more than half of the long-form posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated.

“It’s like microplastics,” says Annette Vee, an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies the intersection of writing and technology. “Whether you realize it or not, and whether you’re using it or not, it’s already in the bloodstream.”

But with no consensus over how ChatGPT, Claude, and other large language models should be used — and whether their use should be flagged — armies of users have taken on the role as the platform’s self-appointed AI police.

People who don’t know will just assume, ‘Yeah, this person is using AI.’ Meanwhile, you’ve been writing this way for 25 years.

It’s made the basic act of writing incredibly fraught. “AI is now a specter hanging over everything we write,” says Vee.

The fear of being accused of not being the author of our own words — let’s call it imbotster syndrome — is reshaping how people write. And LinkedIn, once a place for hustle brags and TED-talk-flavored self-improvement stories, has become a staging ground for a subtler kind of performance: proving you’re human.

Imbotster syndrome is usually stirred up by matters of style, rather than substance.

Across comment sections on LinkedIn and threads on Reddit, users swap lists of suspect words and patterns, debate punctuation habits, and joke about the em dash as if it were ChatGPT’s unofficial watermark.

Cliché phrases like “in today’s fast-paced world” or the neat cadence of a three-part list are enough to set people off. A line that aims for impact will get flagged as an “AI tell.”

The stress that this has unleashed is something Cheril Clarke, a ghostwriter for finance and healthcare executives, knows well.

Clarke has built a career helping powerful people sound like the best versions of themselves. But in the era of ChatGPT, that task is more daunting: ensuring her clients don’t get confused for robots.

“There are certain patterns that are completely natural for most of us when we’re talking. And the frequency with which AI uses these is really killing them,” says Clarke. “People who don’t know will just assume, ‘Yeah, this person is using AI.’ Meanwhile, you’ve been writing this way for 25 years.”

Clarke freely admits that ChatGPT is built into her process. She uses it to map out her ideas and generate outlines and rough drafts. She then rewrites the speech, op-ed, or LinkedIn post in her own words and style.

But as people became attuned to the telltale rhythms of AI-generated text, Clarke has added a final step to her process: stripping out any words or rhetorical flourishes that might add flair and persuasive force to her writing, but are now overly associated with AI.

This means she pulls apart phrasing that used to flow smoothly and avoids the breathless pacing that makes AI-generated content feel overstuffed with pauses and oddly emphatic.

“AI writes like it’s running a marathon at the same pace the whole time,” she explains. “That’s not how you run. You slow down, speed up, breathe. The machine doesn’t.”

The em-dash, which lets a thought pivot without a hard stop; the triplet list cadence, a satisfying three-part rhythm that makes ideas memorable; and the classic “not X but Y” structure, which writers and speakers often deploy to add a note of surprise and contrast, have all been dropped from her repertoire.

In this new economy of style, polish has become a liability, and the typo has turned into a kind of authenticity badge.

That loss of the last one — as in, This isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about trust — is especially galling to Clarke. The sharp rhetorical flip builds tension by pointing the reader one way before pivoting to the payoff, the point where you really want to land. But AI has run it into the ground. Once a clever flourish, the move now reads like a template stamped out by a bot.

“I’ve been using these things for 20 years, and they used to be second nature,” Clarke told me. “Now I have to stop and think about it. Of all the things that are going to have to evolve because of AI, that one probably hurts the most. They’re a powerful device but AI ruined it.”

The belief that a reader can reliably spot AI-generated writing is often wishful thinking.

Vee warns that the earliest and most obvious giveaways — stiff, robotic sentences or bizarre hallucinations — are already fading, and detection technology has not kept up with how quickly language models are learning how to mimic human style.

“There’s a general assumption that you can tell whether something is written by AI. I think that’s not right,” she says.

But the thing about imbotster syndrome is that it triggers second-guessing.

Some professionals say they deliberately degrade their own writing to sound less professional and prove they’re human. They skip commas, lean on casual slang, or even insert mistakes. In this new economy of style, polish has become a liability, and the typo has turned into a kind of authenticity badge.

“I can’t tell you how many social media posts I’ve seen from people who seem to think that because you use formal punctuation or formal language, that means you’re a bot,” says Casey Fiesler, an associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder. “People start rewriting themselves in this panic, trying to avoid anything that might look ‘too perfect.'”

After her LinkedIn DM was flagged, Patterson’s company experimented with ways of attaching more obvious human fingerprints to their cold outreach.

One colleague, she says, even suggested opening a message with “Hope all good.” But the idea was ultimately nixed,

“I don’t think if I got a message that said ‘Hope all good’ I’d go, yep, definitely human,” Patterson says.

It’s like the more careful you are, the more suspicious you look.

The thing is, there is no getting — or writing — around AI anymore. It’s here, and it’s everywhere. The anxiety over being mistaken for a bot is baked into our writing habits now, whether we use the tools or not.

“You can’t make any writerly decision without taking into account AI at this point,” says Vee. “So, you’re either like, ‘I’m going to lean into it’ or ‘I’m going to avoid it.'”

People are calibrating their style with AI in mind, second-guessing familiar words and punctuation, and even reshaping their reading expectations around the possibility that a piece of text might be synthetic.

AI has blurred the line so thoroughly that any piece of writing is judged in its shadow.

But there is real human DNA in every “AI tell.” A lot of writing that’s flagged as AI writing is merely the language of corporate America that’s been refined over millions of PowerPoint presentations, press releases, and speeches — and then absorbed and spat back not just by ChatGPT and other AI models, but by all of us real-life communicators.

LinkedIn posts didn’t suddenly start sounding like inspirational keynotes the moment ChatGPT showed up. The language — earnest, self-important, carefully optimized for impact and, yes, spliced with em-dashes — was already there. It had been honed over years of blog posts, marketing copy, company manifestos, and social media updates. If the outputs feel familiar, it’s because they are. The patterns people now flag as synthetic were, until recently, just standard professional voice.

That’s what makes the shift so disorienting. The suspicion crept in slowly, and now it’s everywhere. People aren’t avoiding a specific tone because they’ve decided it’s not working for them anymore. They’re trying to stay ahead of whatever might get flagged next.

“Just the other day I saw someone say in a comment, ‘I can’t believe you used AI to write this,'” says Fiesler. “And I was like, why? Because the language was a little formal? But that was enough for them to assume it came from a bot.

“It’s like the more careful you are, the more suspicious you look,” she says. “And for some reason, everyone’s paying attention and looking for it.”

Or, as ChatGPT suggested I put it:

“The more flawless your style, the more suspicious it looks. And in the end, not clarity but credibility is the ultimate goal.”

Jack Buehrer is a freelance journalist based in Ohio.