AI Impact Awards 2025: The Changing Human Role in Science and Engineering

Newsweek

4 hours ago

Anuj Kapur, the president and CEO of software delivery company CloudBees, said artificial intelligence (AI) will help solve many of humanity's most pressing problems. But along with disruption and advancement must come responsible use and oversight.
"There's already people equating what AI has been able to do with what Oppenheimer was able to discover, and the parallels are that once you create something that's so disruptive, let's just make sure that you have the frameworks and guardrails in place to be able to actually ensure that its impact is more positive than less," he told Newsweek. "And I think similar sentiments will actually come out around AI."
AI Impact Awards: Science and Engineering
AI Impact Awards: Science and Engineering
Newsweek Illustration
CloudBees is one of the companies recognized by Newsweek's AI Impact Awards, which highlights companies across a dozen industries that are adopting AI tools to improve both internal and external operations for their business and their clients. The 38 winners were chosen by a panel of AI and subject matter experts. The awards celebrate practical uses of AI that solve real problems and have measurable impacts and outcomes.
In the category of AI Science & Engineering, the winners are using AI to boost efficiency and productivity, and to save lives around the world.
CloudBees
CloudBees is the winner of the Best Outcomes, Engineering award.
In 2024, CloudBees acquired Launchable, an AI platform for software testing and quality assurance. CloudBees Smart Tests is a production-ready solution that supports development and testing workloads. With the integration of the AI, CloubBees Smart Tests reduces cycle time, improves triage accuracy and enhances visibility into test behavior across teams, according to the company's application.
The AI has "reinforced CloudBees commitment to innovation, introducing the solution to its broad developer network—making the tool easily accessible through seamless integration into their platform."
Kapur told Newsweek that CloudBees compresses the time it takes developers to work through higher levels of automation and machine learning.
"AI is effectively the next inflection point in our journey that allows us to use best-in-class technology that has effectively been democratized over the last two and a half years and apply that under the hood to basically create the similar outcomes that we always had, but create them much more effectively, or to be able to solve new problems that are created as a result of widespread adoption of AI tooling," he said.
He said the predictive testing enabled by AI helps clients prioritize and give visibility into successes and failures. CloudBees reinforces three things: where to focus when there is a failure, how to find it fast and how to do it faster.
"Unnecessary tests and late-stage issue detection were dragging down productivity," the company's application said. "After implementing CloudBees Smart Tests, [customers] cut regression testing time by 80 percent and pre-commit testing by 66 percent—from six hours to two. The results: thousands of test hours saved annually, faster developer feedback loops, earlier code commits, and reduced cloud costs thanks to shorter test runs."
CloudBees also recently introduced its newest tool: Unify. It centralizes control across all major CI/CD tools to unify analytics, standardize governance and secure workflows without switching costs, according to the website.
"We are focused on helping our customers transform using the power of the tools and capabilities we have, regardless of where they are in their transformation journey," Kapur said. "We meet the customers where they are because the needs of a BMW are very different to the needs of Bank of America...so we want to make sure that we are open, we are flexible, and we're secure in our platform that meets the needs of our customers, calibrated to their ambitions and their capabilities."
Warp
Warp is the AI Science & Engineering winner for Best Outcomes, Computer Science for its Warp Agent Mode.
The 5-year-old software developer startup aims to empower developers to ship better software more quickly and reliably to free them time to focus on more creative and rewarding work. Warp integrates large language models (LLMs) directly into the terminal to understand commands in simpler language.
"Warp is not the only tool delivering this kind of benefit, but Warp's solution can have that kind of impact because it takes you as a developer, from a world where you are largely doing things by hand [into] a world where you're using Warp [where] you're typing instructions to an agent at the level of English, and then that agent is producing all [these] coding commands for you," founder and CEO Zach Lloyd told Newsweek in an interview.
Lloyd said that by using Warp as a developer, users can prompt it however they want—to write code, help set up new projects, debug problems in the software and production. This not only saves valuable time and resources but also democratizes access to complex systems, enabling junior developers to perform tasks without requiring senior oversight.
The results are increased productivity and time saved, allowing developers to produce more software and write more lines of code.
Agent Mode processes nearly 400,000 daily requests, growing at 25 percent weekly, according to Warp. This saves developers about 187,000 engineering hours monthly. The AI generates six million lines of code monthly and powers 2.3 million weekly Agent Mode requests. As a result, Warp is achieving 70 percent monthly revenue growth, the company said.
This doesn't mean the AI agent will do all the work for you—it still requires the user to input the right commands and context.
"We're not at a place in the technology where a product manager, designer, business person, is going to be nearly as effective using these as someone who is an experienced developer and pointed in the right direction," he said. "You're letting them use this technology to amplify the impact of them having that knowledge."
Lloyd adds that he is optimistic that there will always be a human element to software development and that AI is something that "gets rid of a lot of the drudgery of work and lets people focus on more interesting stuff."
"The problem-solving skills that make a great software developer have always been somewhat divorced from what language you write code in," he said. "It's kind of like you learn how to do arithmetic because it's important you do arithmetic. But at the end of the day, you're gonna use a spreadsheet or a calculator, and you as a thinking person [are] going to be able to focus on the harder, more interesting parts of the job."
With the "infinite demand for software in the world right now," Lloyd said AI can increase the capacity and speed of software production by overcoming some limitations.
"What I imagine happening is that the amount of software that is produced in the world goes up dramatically, and you'll probably have around the same number of software engineers, but each engineer being able to produce vastly more than they do today," he said. "And I also think the role of what an engineer does is going to change very much – from manual work to one where you're much more like an orchestrator of AI."
Every Cure
Every Cure is the overall winner of Newsweek's AI Impact Awards and it's using AI to advance drug engineering to treat some of the world's rarest and most aggressive diseases.
After surviving Castleman disease while in medical school by repurposing existing drugs to find a new treatment, David Fajgenbaum and his co-founder, Grant Mitchell, started Every Cure to help save other people's lives.
Every Cure is on a mission to "systematically identify, validate and deliver repurposed treatment to patients suffering from rare and undertreated diseases" using AI, according to the company's application.
Mitchell told Newsweek that the approximately 4,000 FDA-approved drugs are "available to use and they're just like sitting on the one yard line waiting to be unlocked for further uses."
The AI they use helps make predictions about which existing drugs can potentially treat which diseases. The AI engine, known as MATRIX (Therapeutic Repurposing in eXtended uses), is trained to analyze massive biomedical data sets to evaluate the viability of every possible drug and disease combination.
Every Cure collaborates with tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, academics, researchers, patient advocacy groups and physicians. They also have a Scientific Advisory Board and a Technical Advisory Board to provide guidance.
The company defines success by three main outcomes: accuracy and utility of the AI platform, advancement of promising treatments and building an ecosystem for broader repurposing.
So far, 87 percent of the top 100 predictions from the MATRIX platform have aligned with known effective treatments, and more than eight promising repurposing projects have been identified. Additionally, partnerships with seven major organizations have been established.
Every Cure also received new funding, including a $48.3 million contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and $60 million in philanthropic funding through The Audacious Project.
In 2025, Mitchell said the company is moving from a research phase into actual patient impact projects.
One of the latest areas of success has been research into treatment for autism. The company was able to identify a precision therapy for verbal impairment by administering folinic acid, also known as leucovorin, to individuals with autism. This treatment helps bypass the blocked folate receptor, helping patients regain their ability to speak.
"So if little Every Cure can be launching five or more projects a year [for] diseases of real unmet need, that's an amazing amount of impact for the size of our organization," Mitchell said. "I really think that drug repurposing is the highest ROI for dollars in lives saved."
He adds that their model for AI drug discovery goes directly to patients, leading to an immediate feedback loop.
"Not only are we helping patients in the fastest and most efficient way possible, we're advancing the field of computational biology by building models and improving on them at a faster rate than you could otherwise," he said.
Many of the AI Impact Award winners will be present at Newsweek's AI Impact Summit later this month. The three-day event sponsored by will take place from June 23 to 25 in Sonoma, California, and will bring together diverse leaders across industries and expertise to share insights on how organizations can most effectively implement AI to achieve their goals.
To see the full list of AI Impact winners, visit the official page for Newsweek's AI Impact Awards.
Newsweek will continue the conversation on meaningful AI innovations at our AI Impact Summit from June 23 to 25 in Sonoma, California. Click here to follow along on the live blog.