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About 15 years ago, Yuval Salant bought a laptop at a major electronics chain store. The salesperson offered him an extended warranty to cover any repairs needed after the manufacturer’s warranty expired.

Instead of simply grumbling about neighbors not maintaining their lawns properly, residents of Ypsilanti Township's West Willow neighborhood examined barriers that some homeowners face and decided to create a solution: a tool lending library.

To start with a big picture, if you look at industries like the restaurant industry, it’s huge. The statistics tell us that, at some point, half of the population of the United States has worked in a restaurant. Typically, these are part-time jobs. They don’t pay well. They don’t even pay minimum wage. The basic wage is very, very low, and you rely on tips. And restaurants, as a rule, don’t make a lot of money. We are talking about a couple of percentage points in profitability.

Chatbots can match the performance of proficient human salespeople—or outperform inexperienced ones fourfold—but only when customers are unaware they are conversing with artificial intelligence.

Could you handle scrutiny of your driving habits in return for a price break on your insurance? That’s the bargain participants in usage-based (or telematics-based) insurance programs are making. In return for driving well and logging low miles, you could save as much as 50 percent off premiums.