Worcester Business Journal

40 Worcester Business Journal | August 25, 2025 | wbjournal.com 4 0 U N D E R F O R T Y Successful businesses hire with MassAbility. Mass General Brigham MAB Community Services AccuRounds Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs Ahoi Roxbury Community College And you can be one of them. mass.gov/HireWithMassAbility How WBJ selected and wrote the 40 Under Forty, Class of 2025 is year, WBJ received 210 nominations of 108 nominees for the 40 Under Forty awards. To be eligible, a nominee has to work in Central Massachusetts, live in or near Massachusetts, and be under the age of 40 on the date of the awards ceremony, which is Sept. 17. e nominees were scored independently by three judges. WBJ then verified the eligibility of the top- scoring nominees to select the Class of 2025. is year's judges were Kola Akindele, Jennessa Burks, and Lauren Howe. Lauren Howe Lauren Howe is principal and owner of empHowered PR, a public relations consulting firm with offices in Leominster and Worcester. Among her many clients, Howe serves as public relations manager for USA Luge and is looking forward to representing the team as its press officer during the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Games. She is a member of the WBJ 40 Under Forty, Class of 2014 and was named an Ambassador of the year by the North Central Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce in 2022. Jennessa Burks Jennessa Burks is an artist, muralist, and educator who lives in West Boylston and has collaboratively painted more than 20 murals throughout Worcester. She has been commissioned to create more than 45 works of art total to be displayed across 18 states. She has been a member of Creative Hub Worcester's board and the nonprofit's lead art curator since 2020 and is Main IDEA's resident lead mural artist, working with Worcester youth to co-paint public murals. She is a member of the WBJ 40 Under Forty, Class of 2024. Kola Akindele Kola Akindele is associate vice president for external relations & partnerships at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His job is to nurture relationships with funders, whether private foun- dations, government organiza- tions, or corporate sponsors, to support research and operations, as well as to strength- en community connections. Prior to joining WPI, he held a similar position at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester and previously taught as an assistant pro- fessor in health policy at Worcester State University. He is a member of the WBJ 40 Under Forty, Class of 2016. The 40 Under Forty judges for 2025 40 Under Forty, written by AI The stories about the members of the 40 Under Forty, Class of 2025 were written by an artificial intelligence program. Similar to how 40 Under Forty profiles were written by WBJ's staff of reporters in previous years, the AI program was trained and used two pieces of information to develop the arti- cles: questionnaires submitted by the winners and their nominations. All of the AI-generated stories were then fact-checked and copyedited by a human editor. As this was the first year WBJ has used AI to write editorial copy, an additional quality check was then conducted by WBJ staff for 14 randomly selected 40 Under Forty stories, all of which found the AI program wrote the awards profiles accurately. The specific AI program used in this instance was Claude by Anthropic.

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