Millions of servers run 24/7 to power the AI boom in data centers across the globe, and demand isn’t slowing down. McKinsey research shows that by 2030, data centers are projected to require $6.7 trillion in capital expenditures worldwide to keep pace. Who are the investors behind this multitrillion-dollar race to fund AI compute power? McKinsey’s Mark Patel, Pankaj Sachdeva, and coauthors share five key investor archetypes, each with unique opportunities, challenges, and potential solutions.
Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Making the Case for Technology To Drive Higher Ed Enrollment - Tony Digrazia, Ed Tech
The past nine months have only worsened the issues higher education is facing, leaving university IT teams with fewer staffers working for lower salaries amid overall tightening budgets, some of it in response to an array of new financial challenges. That’s not to mention the challenges that were ever-present in the years leading up to 2025. The enrollment cliff is here, and while overall enrollments have steadied after a yearslong decline, the full impacts of the enrollment cliff may not be felt until a couple more freshman classes are enrolled. And faith in higher education has never been lower, with a meager 35% of Americans saying college is “very important,” according to a newly released Gallup poll.
Monday, September 29, 2025
College Students’ Test Scores Soared After ChatGPT. Their Writing? Not So Much - Steve Fink, Study Finds
Exam scores jumped nearly 22 points after ChatGPT’s launch, while writing project marks dropped by about 10.
Passing students generally improved, but failing students showed mixed results—better exams but lower overall marks.
Creative research proposals showed no change, highlighting tasks where AI offers little advantage.
Universities face a dilemma: AI boosts the easiest-to-grade assessments, while deeper tasks require costly human review.
Author Talks: The key to ideation? Start with the answer, not the problem - McKinsey
What do you mean by ‘begin with the answer’? They don’t call it a “creative leap” for nothing. Nobody talks about a series of steps that lead to a creation, a genuinely creative idea. The concept of divergent thinking, or “going wide,” is key to creating truly new ideas. Most of what we typically do is convergent thinking: reducing, criticizing, judging, deciding. Once you have an answer, that’s exciting. Then you can usually work back through it to prove it should work in theory. That’s what I mean by starting with the answer. Everyone likes to think that you can start with an analysis of the data and come up with an insight. Then you can start talking about possible solutions, proceed in a linear process of steps, and arrive at a great idea. I just haven’t experienced that ideas happen in that way. Great ideas come out of generating lots of ideas, most of which will be bad, one of which—just one of which—could be brilliant.
Sunday, September 28, 2025
Detecting and reducing scheming in AI models - OpenAI
In today’s deployment settings, models have little opportunity to scheme in ways that could cause significant harm. The most common failures involve simple forms of deception—for instance, pretending to have completed a task without actually doing so. We've put significant effort into studying and mitigating deception and have made meaningful improvements in GPT‑5 compared to previous models. For example, we’ve taken steps to limit GPT‑5’s propensity to deceive, cheat, or hack problems—training it to acknowledge its limits or ask for clarification when faced with impossibly large or under-specified tasks and to be more robust to environment failures—though these mitigations are not perfect and continued research is needed.
Public views on being human in 2035 - Lee Rainy, Elon University
This July 2025 survey by the Imagining the Digital Future Center found that American adults expect the changes in many human capacities in the coming AI-influenced decade will be potent and mostly negative. Americans said the widespread adoption of AI systems will have significant impact overall on human capacities in the coming decade About half (52%) of American adults surveyed said the impact AI will have on human capacities by the year 2035 will be revolutionary or deep and meaningful; 38% said the changes will be clear and distinct; and 7% said they expect that the changes will be barely perceptible. Just 3% said the impact will be inconsequential.
Saturday, September 27, 2025
Want to future-proof your campus? Start here - Kevin Sanders, University Business
Higher education is at a crossroads. Our institutions are wrestling with enrollment cliffs, questions of relevance, technological disruption and the age-old challenge of governance. Boards debate how to remain solvent. Presidents strategize about new programs and partnerships. Provosts explore AI, online expansion or micro-credentials. Everyone is reaching for levers they hope will strengthen the institution. Yet beneath all these efforts lies a single, urgent question: How do we make our institutions stronger in a time of change? In my experience, the answer is deceptively simple: develop leaders.
https://universitybusiness.com/want-to-future-proof-your-campus-start-here/
A day in the life of a student, 2045 - John Johnston, eCampus News
It is 6:45 a.m. in the year 2045, and Maya wakes to the gentle chime of her AI-integrated learning assistant. The device, embedded into her home’s wall system, has already analyzed her biometric data, sleep cycle, and class schedule to recommend a custom morning routine. Today’s recommendation is a brief guided meditation, followed by a protein-based breakfast delivered via drone from the university’s dining cooperative. Before her feet touch the floor, her education has already begun.
Education must remain centered on curiosity, connection, and human agency
4 ways AI is empowering the next generation of great teachers
The rise of AI-native universities: OpenAI’s vision for every student
https://www.ecampusnews.com/ai-in-education/2025/09/05/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-student-2045/
Friday, September 26, 2025
Students are using AI tools instead of building foundational skills - but resistance is growing - Joe McKendrick, ZDnet
Whether you are studying information technology, teaching it, or creating the software that powers learning, it's clear that artificial intelligence is challenging and changing education. Now, questions are being asked about using AI to boost learning, an approach that has implications for long-term career skills and privacy.
There is growing concern about student dependence on AI.
Today's computer science grads might understand less about IT systems.
Some technology professors are pushing back against AI in classrooms.
Google narrows the gap with ChatGPT as millions tap Nano Banana to make hyperrealistic 3D figurines. - Robert Hart, the Verge
The surge has likely propelled Gemini to the top of various app stores around the world. At the time of writing, Gemini is the leading iPhone app on Apple’s App Stores in the US, UK, Canada, France, Australia, Germany, and Italy. In many cases, it reached the prime position by surpassing OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which now sits in second place. On September 11th, Woodward said “India has found” the image editor and later said that Google was going to have to implement “temporary limits” on usage in order to manage extreme demand. “It’s a full-on stampede to use” Gemini, he said, adding that the “team is doing heroics to keep the system up and running.” So, what’s driving the surge? While a variety of edits have been popular, the runaway hit of Nano Banana has people turning themselves — or their pets — into 3D figurines.
https://www.theverge.com/news/778106/google-gemini-nano-banana-image-editor
Thursday, September 25, 2025
How this AI chatbot helps students navigate their first semester - Alcino Donadel, University Business
Western New England University’s newest staff member is working around the clock to check in on students and instantly connect them with the campus resources they need. Luckily, no human is losing any sleep. Spirit, the university’s generative AI chatbot, is entering its second full academic year of fielding mobile text messages from students. Over the past 12 months, machine and man exchanged over 17,000 messages, with students initiating over 2,200 questions. “Sometimes it’s challenging to go find a staff member in some random building, but messaging the chatbot ensures that their voice is going to be heard,” says Jeanne Powers, executive director of the Student Hub, the university’s student support center.
Google Notebook LM’s Capabilities and Impact: Expert analysis from - Agentic Brain, AI Report
The rapid expansion of artificial-intelligence tools has produced dozens of note-taking and research assistants, but few have delivered a coherent, end-to-end learning experience. Google’s Notebook LM stands out because it blends multimodal analysis, grounded responses and interactive learning aids into a single platform. Released in 2023 and continuously updated, Notebook LM has quickly become one of the most impressive AI-enhanced research agents available today. Unlike traditional chatbots that draw on general internet knowledge, Notebook LM grounds every response in the documents you provide. Uploads can include PDFs, Google Docs, Google Slides, websites, YouTube videos, audio files or plain text. Once added, the system becomes an “instant expert” on your materials. You can converse with it in a familiar chat interface or any of the following incredibly diverse capabilities
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Here’s how to tackle this root cause for tech burnout - Alcino Donadel
Back-end operations are undergoing a period of upheaval as campus business units adopt new technology to enhance staff productivity. Uneven implementation can isolate staff and cause burnout, blunting the promise of new tools, according to an analysis of four recent reports covered by University Business. The reports examined staff sentiment and their work environments across various offices, including financial aid, cybersecurity, IT, enrollment management and teaching and learning. While the scope of each report differed, the surveys painted a picture of staff who are aware of (and often willing to adopt) new technologies, but are frequently hampered by insufficient institutional support. Among the most common staff demands was professional development in artificial intelligence.
https://universitybusiness.com/heres-how-to-tackle-this-root-cause-for-tech-burnout/
Researchers ‘polarised’ over use of AI in peer review - Tom Williams, Times Higher Ed
A poll by IOP Publishing found that there has been a big increase in the number of scholars who are positive about the potential impact of new technologies on the process, which is often criticised for being slow and overly burdensome for those involved. Z total of 41 per cent of respondents now see the benefits of AI, up from 12 per cent from a similar survey carried out last year. But this is almost equal to the proportion with negative opinions which stands at 37 per cent after a 2 per cent year-on-year increase.
Tuesday, September 23, 2025
First-of-its-kind AI tool to save 75% of academics’ time - Sara AlKuwari, University World News
Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University (HBMSU) in the United Arab Emirates has announced the launch of the region’s first AI-powered academic agent, a pioneering tool designed to save up to 75% of faculty members’ time while enhancing students’ academic achievement by 40%, marking a significant step in reshaping the future of higher education, writes Sara AlKuwari for Khaleej Times. The initiative, titled Artificial Intelligence Agent for Every Faculty, is the first of its kind in the UAE and the wider region. It integrates advanced AI capabilities into higher education in line with the UAE National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2031 and Education Strategy 2033.
White House AI Task Force Positions AI as Top Education Priority - Julia Gilban-Cohen, GovTech
When Trump administration officials met with ed-tech leaders at the White House last week to discuss the nation’s vision for artificial intelligence in American life, they repeatedly underscored one central message: Education must be at the heart of the nation’s AI strategy. Established by President Trump’s April 2025 executive order, the White House Task Force on AI Education is chaired by director of science and technology policy Michael Kratsios, and is tasked with promoting AI literacy and proficiency among America’s youth and educators, organizing a nationwide AI challenge and forging public-private partnerships to provide AI education resources to K-12 students.
Monday, September 22, 2025
How to use ChatGPT at university without cheating: ‘Now it’s more like a study partner’ - the Guardian
According to a recent report from the Higher Education Policy Institute, almost 92% of students are now using generative AI in some form, a jump from 66% the previous year. “Honestly, everyone is using it,” says Magan Chin, a master’s student in technology policy at Cambridge, who shares her favourite AI study hacks on TikTok, where tips range from chat-based study sessions to clever note-sifting prompts. “It’s evolved. At first, people saw ChatGPT as cheating and [thought] that it was damaging our critical thinking skills. But now, it’s more like a study partner and a conversational tool to help us improve.”
OpenAI's fix for hallucinations is simpler than you think - Webb Wright, ZDnet
The solution, according to OpenAI, is therefore to focus not on feeding models more accurate information, but to adjust the structure of how their performance is assessed. Since a binary system of grading a model's output as either right or wrong is supposedly fueling hallucination, the OpenAI researchers say that the AI industry must instead start rewarding models when they express uncertainty. After all, truth does not exist in black-and-white in the real world, so why should AI be trained as if it does? Running a model through millions of examples on the proper arrangement of subjects, verbs, and predicates will make them more fluent in their use of natural language, but as any living human being knows, reality is open to interpretation. In order to live functionally in the world, we routinely have to say, "I don't know."
Sunday, September 21, 2025
AI a 'Game Changer' for Assistance, Q&As in NJ Classrooms - Brianna Kudisch, GovTech
An explosion of startups and established companies are offering slick new AI products and targeted training to educators and school administrators. For instance, the nation’s second largest teachers’ union recently announced a $23 million initiative with Microsoft and OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company, to provide free access to AI and training to all American Federation of Teachers members, starting with K-12 educators.
https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-a-game-changer-for-assistance-q-as-in-nj-classrooms
Gemini for Education catching on with higher ed, Google says - Edscoop
Google announced this week that its Gemini for Education product is catching on with higher education institutions, having been adopted into “academic and administrative frameworks” by more than 1,000 colleges and universities across the United States. Gemini for Education, which the search giant claims will “transform teaching and learning” offers a generative artificial intelligence chatbot that is designed to provide assistance to students, help prepare for exams, create practice materials and design lesson plans. According to Google, the tool is now available free of charge.
Saturday, September 20, 2025
The Perceived Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Academic Learning - Mariana Dogaru, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence
The results indicate that ChatGPT helps students work faster and understand concepts better, but the difficulty in checking sources raises ethical concerns like plagiarism. By examining ChatGPT's role in STEM education, this study points out the need for AI literacy training and institutional policies to ensure responsible use. The findings offer practical insights for educators to integrate AI tools effectively, fostering critical thinking and academic integrity in technology-driven learning environments.
Got AI skills? You can earn 43% more in your next job - and not just for tech work - Webb Wright, ZDnet
Demand for AI skills is on the rise across industries. A single AI skill makes a huge difference in listed salaries. Different industries are looking for different AI skills. As businesses race to adopt AI, they're placing a higher premium on job candidates who know their way around the technology. A recent study from labor market research firm Lightcast found that jobs requiring AI-related skills offer higher annual salaries than those that don't. This is true not only in tech-heavy industries like IT and computer science but also across a range of other sectors.
Friday, September 19, 2025
Did OpenAI just solve hallucinations? - Matthew Berman, YouTube
The video explains that hallucinations are ingrained in the models' construction, functioning more as features than bugs. This is compared to human behavior, where guessing on a test might be rewarded, leading models to guess rather than admit uncertainty. The core issue is the absence of a system that rewards models for expressing uncertainty or providing partially correct answers. The proposed solution involves creating models that only answer questions when they meet a certain confidence threshold and implementing a new evaluation system. This system would reward correct answers, penalize incorrect ones, and assign a neutral score for "I don't know" responses. The video concludes by suggesting that the solution lies in revising how models are evaluated and how reinforcement learning is applied. (summary provided in part by Gemini 2.5 Pro)
Sam Altman says that bots are making social media feel ‘fake’ - Julie Bort, Tech Crunch
He then live-analyzed his reasoning. “I think there are a bunch of things going on: real people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak, the Extremely Online crowd drifts together in very correlated ways, the hype cycle has a very ‘it’s so over/we’re so back’ extremism, optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement and the related way that creator monetization works, other companies have astroturfed us so i’m extra sensitive to it, and a bunch more (including probably some bots).” To decode that a little, he’s accusing humans of starting to sound like LLMs, even though LLMs — spearheaded by OpenAI — were literally invented to mimic human communication, right down to the em dash.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/08/sam-altman-says-that-bots-are-making-social-media-feel-fake/
Thursday, September 18, 2025
AI Teaching Learners Today: Pick Your Pedagogy! - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
The cost of developing, designing and teaching classes is often largely determined by the faculty and staff costs. Long-running lower-division classes at some universities may be taught by supervised teaching assistants or adjunct faculty whose salaries are lower than tenure-track faculty’s. However, we are now confronted with highly capable technologies that require little to no additional investment and can bring immediate revenue positive opportunities. Each university very soon will have to determine to what extent AI will be permitted to design and deliver classes, and under what oversight and supervision. A well-written, detailed prompt can be the equal of many of our teaching assistants, adjunct faculty and, yes, full-time faculty members who have not been deeply trained in effective pedagogy and current practice.
How should universities teach leadership now that teams include humans and autonomous AI agents? - Alex Zarifis, Times Higher Education
So, how should university teachers prepare a new generation of modern leaders to approach these mixed teams? Teaching leadership styles that are effective at motivating people is no longer enough. In addition, students must now learn how to build their team’s trust in AI, then they will need to know how to combine leadership styles in a way that gets the most out of both humans and AI.
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
Georgia Tech’s Jill Watson Outperforms ChatGPT in Real Classrooms - Georgia Institute of Technology
A new version of Georgia Tech’s virtual teaching assistant, Jill Watson, has demonstrated that artificial intelligence can significantly improve the online classroom experience. Developed by the Design Intelligence Laboratory (DILab) and the U.S. National Science Foundation AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education (AI-ALOE), the latest version of Jill Watson integrates OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is outperforming OpenAI’s own assistant in real-world educational settings. Jill Watson not only answers student questions with high accuracy. It also improves teaching presence and correlates with better academic performance. Researchers believe this is the first documented instance of a chatbot enhancing teaching presence in online learning for adult students.
OPINION: AI can be a great equalizer, but it remains out of reach for millions of Americans; we cannot let that continue - Erin Mote, Hechinger Report
This digital divide is a persistent crisis that deepens societal inequities, and we must rally around one of the most effective tools we have to combat it: the Universal Service Fund. The USF is a long-standing national commitment built on a foundation of bipartisan support and born from the principle that every American, regardless of their location or income, deserves access to communications services. Without this essential program, over 54 million students, 16,000 healthcare providers and 7.5 million high-need subscribers would lose internet service that connects classrooms, rural communities (including their hospitals) and libraries to the internet.
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
AI for Next Generation Science Education - Xiaoming Zhai, Georgia Tech
September 24, via Zoom. This talk explores the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) in advancing next generation science education, particularly through assessment and instructional support aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Xiaoming Zhai presents how AI technologies—including machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and generative AI—can enhance the assessment of complex, three-dimensional student learning outcomes such as modeling, argumentation, and scientific explanation. By leveraging tools like fine-tuned language models and computer vision networks, the talk demonstrates the potential for scalable, accurate, and equitable automatic scoring of student work, both written and drawn.
Tech leadership is business leadership - McKinsey
As the line between technology and business disappears, corporate leaders of enterprise tech, digital, and information face a new mandate: transform innovation into measurable value. The modern tech officer not only has to understand how the landscape is shifting but also must manage initiatives across a broad range of stakeholders by playing the role of either orchestrator, builder, protector, or operator. Check out this interview series hosted by Gayatri Shenai and Ann Carver, conveners of McKinsey’s Women in Tech conference, to hear from trailblazing leaders who are not only breaking barriers but also reshaping the tech landscape.
Monday, September 15, 2025
Duke University pilot project examining pros and cons of using artificial intelligence in college - AP
As part of a new pilot with OpenAI, all Duke undergraduate students, as well as staff, faculty and students across the University’s professional schools, gained free, unlimited access to ChatGPT-4o beginning June 2. The University also announced DukeGPT, a University-managed AI interface that connects users to resources for learning and research and ensures “maximum privacy and robust data protection.” Duke launched a new Provost’s Initiative to examine the opportunities and challenges AI brings to student life on May 23. The initiative will foster campus discourse on the use of AI tools and present recommendations in a report by the end of the fall 2025 semester.
Anthropic Agrees to Pay Authors at Least $1.5 Billion in AI Copyright Settlement - Kate Knibbs, Wired
Anthropic will pay at least $3,000 for each copyrighted work that it pirated. The company downloaded unauthorized copies of books in early efforts to gather training data for its AI tools. This is the first class action settlement centered on AI and copyright in the United States, and the outcome may shape how regulators and creative industries approach the legal debate over generative AI and intellectual property. According to the settlement agreement, the class action will apply to approximately 500,000 works, but that number may go up once the list of pirated materials is finalized. For every additional work, the artificial intelligence company will pay an extra $3,000. Plaintiffs plan to deliver a final list of works to the court by October.
Sunday, September 14, 2025
Should AI Get Legal Rights? - Kylie Robeson, Wired
In the often strange world of AI research, some people are exploring whether the machines should be able to unionize. I’m joking, sort of. In Silicon Valley, there’s a small but growing field called model welfare, which is working to figure out whether AI models are conscious and deserving of moral considerations, such as legal rights. Within the past year, two research organizations studying model welfare have popped up: Conscium and Eleos AI Research. Anthropic also hired its first AI welfare researcher last year. Earlier this month, Anthropic said it gave its Claude chatbot the ability to terminate “persistently harmful or abusive user interactions” that could be “potentially distressing.”
Responsible AI in higher education: Building skills, trust and integrity - Alexander Shevchenko, World Economic Forum
Many institutions are moving from policing AI use to partnering with students. This transition emphasizes trust, transparency and ongoing skill development, mirroring the realities of modern careers where AI is ubiquitous. It also highlights the crucial role of faculty in guiding responsible and meaningful AI use. One practical example of this approach is Grammarly for Education. Seamlessly integrating with learning management systems and writing platforms, it supports students through brainstorming, research, drafting and revision. In doing so, the conversation has matured beyond simply detecting AI use; educators and students are now exploring how AI can deepen learning, sharpen critical thinking and inspire creativity.
Saturday, September 13, 2025
Why liberal arts schools are now hopping on skills-based microcredentials - Alcino Donadel, University Business
New market demands are pushing small, four-year liberal arts colleges to offer microcredentials, indicating growing momentum across sectors of higher education to elevate workforce readiness within their academic offerings. Chief learning officers at community colleges are leading the charge in expanding non-degree offerings, reporting the highest levels of institutional investment in this area. Meanwhile, large research universities—like the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville—are catching up. However, strict faculty governance and curriculum processes and different accreditation standards have caused some liberal arts schools to lag, says Mike Simmons, an associate executive director at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
Academics must be open to changing their minds on acceptable AI use - Ava Doherty, Times Higher Education
Honest and open-ended conversations over how AI can be productively used in the learning journey are needed, not ChatGPT bans, says Ava Doherty. Students today face a striking paradox: they are among the most technologically literate generations in history, yet they are deeply anxious about their career prospects in an artificial intelligence-driven future. Since the launch of ChatGPT, the rapid advance of artificial intelligence (AI) has fundamentally reshaped the graduate job market. This shift presents unique challenges and opportunities for students, universities and the broader higher education sector.
Friday, September 12, 2025
Oxford becomes first UK university to offer ChatGPT Edu to all staff and students - University of Oxford
The University of Oxford will become the first university in the UK to provide free ChatGPT Edu access to all staff and students, starting this academic year. OpenAI’s flagship GPT-5 model will be provided across the University and Oxford Colleges through ChatGPT Edu, a version of ChatGPT built for universities that includes enterprise-level security and controls. This university-wide rollout follows a successful year-long pilot involving around 750 academics, research staff, postgraduate research students and professional services staff in a wide range of roles across the University and Colleges.
Navigating the AI Revolution in Higher Education - Alyse Jordan, Frontiers in Education
A systematic review conducted in the first nine months following ChatGPT's release provides valuable early insights into how AI has affected teaching, curriculum design, and assessment practices in higher education. The review identified both benefits and threats of AI integration, offering preliminary evidence to inform institutional policies and faculty practices (Liang et al., 2025). As the authors note, this represents "a first wave" of research, acknowledging how quickly AI systems are evolving and changing educational landscapes.Additionally, in specialized fields such as Mechanical Engineering Education (MEE), AI integration demonstrates unique applications and challenges. Research shows that AI significantly enhances learning experiences through technologies like computer-aided translation and natural language processing, making education more accessible and interactive.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2025.1682901/abstract
Research: Teachers now outpace students in K12 AI use - Matt Zalaznick, University Business
In 2025, approximately 85% of high school and college instructors, as well as students aged 14 to 22, say they’ve tested AI, a significant leap from 66% in 2024. Nearly 90% of students report relying on AI for school, up from 77% in 2024, with the top three uses being:
Summarizing or synthesizing information (56%)
Research (46%)
Generating study guides or materials (45%)
Positive attitudes toward AI’s role in education (43%) also outpaced negative attitudes (37%) in 2025, a 3% increase from 2024.
Thursday, September 11, 2025
Insights on today’s labor market: Uncertainty, agentic AI, and more - McKinsey
It’s Labor Day in North America, a day to recognize and celebrate the contributions of workers across the continent—and also reflect on the continued uncertainty and rapid change in today’s labor market. In a recent episode of McKinsey Talks Talent, Indeed’s chief economist Svenja Gudell joined McKinsey’s Brooke Weddle, Bryan Hancock, and Lucia Rahilly to help business leaders make sense of the current collision of labor market trends: gen AI, agentic AI, an aging workforce, shifting priorities, and more. Tune in to the episode, then explore more of our insights on how to navigate the new world of work.
Getting Ahead of EU AI Literacy Requirements – How Businesses Can Stay Compliant and Competitive - Jonathan Armstrong, European Business Review
In most companies, AI is being used in business functions from HR and marketing to customer service. Figures reveal 78% of global companies use AI, with 71% deploying GenAI in at least one function[i]. However, often employees don’t fully understand how these tools work, and this gap can no longer be ignored.The EU AI Act, particularly Article 4, addresses this by making AI literacy a legal requirement. Since February 2025, any organisation operating in the EU, or offering AI-enabled services to EU markets, must ensure their employees, contractors, and suppliers have a sufficient understanding of the AI tools they use. It is not enough to deploy technology responsibly; organisations must demonstrate that their workforce knows what they are doing.
Wednesday, September 10, 2025
The future of work is agentic - McKinsey
Think about your org chart. Now imagine it features both your current colleagues—humans, if you’re like most of us—and AI agents. That’s not science fiction; it’s happening—and it’s happening relatively quickly, according to McKinsey Senior Partner Jorge Amar. In this episode of McKinsey Talks Talent, Jorge joins McKinsey talent leaders Brooke Weddle and Bryan Hancock and Global Editorial Director Lucia Rahilly to talk about what these AI agents are, how they’re being used, and how leaders can prepare now for the workforce of the not-too-distant future.
Seizing the agentic AI advantage - McKinsey
Nearly eight in ten companies report using gen AI—yet just as many report no significant bottom-line impact.1 Think of it as the “gen AI paradox.” At the heart of this paradox is an imbalance between “horizontal” (enterprise-wide) copilots and chatbots—which have scaled quickly but deliver diffuse, hard-to-measure gains—and more transformative “vertical” (function-specific) use cases—about 90 percent of which remain stuck in pilot mode. AI agents offer a way to break out of the gen AI paradox. That’s because agents have the potential to automate complex business processes—combining autonomy, planning, memory, and integration—to shift gen AI from a reactive tool to a proactive, goal-driven virtual collaborator. This shift enables far more than efficiency. Agents supercharge operational agility and create new revenue opportunities.
Tuesday, September 09, 2025
Ep. 11 AGI and the Future of Higher Ed: Talking with Ray Schroeder - Unfixed: How AI is Reshaping Higher Education with Nick Janos and Zach Justus, Podcast
In this episode of Unfixed, we talk with Ray Schroeder—Senior Fellow at UPCEA and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois Springfield—about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and what it means for the future of higher education. While most of academia is still grappling with ChatGPT and basic AI tools, Schroeder is thinking ahead to AI agents, human displacement, and AGI’s existential implications for teaching, learning, and the university itself. We explore why AGI is so controversial, what institutions should be doing now to prepare, and how we can respond responsibly—even while we’re already overwhelmed.
Artificial Intelligence: Three top experts share advice on how to implement AI tools into your business today — Executive Insights, Louisville Business First
Certainly, AI can be used across the board and in all those functional areas within a company. A real-world example is a company that is a customer of ours literally spent 40 hours a month in each of its regions compiling data and providing some analysis of that data back up to the executive team. It was a very manual process and quite frankly, a pain point for each of the leaders that ran the regions across the country. They were able to install an AI project that allowed for the aggregation of data across all the offices within the region automatically and gain intelligence off of those operational metrics. It cut that time for report creation from 40 hours down to under an hour. So, operationally they saved themselves a week of someone’s time every month.
Monday, September 08, 2025
San José Completes First City-Led AI Startup Grants - Scarlett Evans, AI Business
The city of San José California has announced the winners of its inaugural AI Incentive Program, the first city-run grant program of its kind in the U.S. Under the initiative, early-stage startups using AI to tackle everything from maternal health to food waste competed for public funding and professional services. From a pool of 170 competitors, three won a $50,000 grant, while one received $25,000 in funding. The winners were maternal health company Elythea, which uses AI voice agents to connect with at-risk patients, smart kitchen platform Metafoodx that uses embodied AI to cut waste and optimize operations at restaurants and hardware optimization company Clika, which simplifies AI models into low-power formats to improve accessibility and efficiency across edge devices.
Google's New Universal Translator AI is FREE & More AI Use Cases - The AI Advantage, YouTube
In the first part of this podcast, the host discusses Google's new universal voice translator, a significant improvement in translation technology. This new feature, available as a free update to the Google Translate app, allows for real-time conversations between two people speaking different languages through a "conversation" feature. The translator is noted for its impressive speed and low latency, which makes for a much smoother user experience. The app also includes a mode that can be used on a table between two people, with each person seeing the translated text facing them. Users can tap a microphone button to speak, and their words are instantly translated and displayed on the other side of the screen. The host expresses excitement about this development, highlighting its potential to create more meaningful connections between people from different linguistic backgrounds.
Sunday, September 07, 2025
How AI Is Changing—Not ‘Killing’—College - Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed
Key findings from Inside Higher Ed’s student survey on generative AI show that using the evolving technology hasn’t diminished the value of college in their view, but it could affect their critical thinking skills. Some of the results are perhaps surprising: Relatively few students say that generative AI has diminished the value of college, in their view, and nearly all of them want their institutions to address academic integrity concerns—albeit via a proactive approach rather than a punitive one. Another standout: Half of students who use AI for coursework say it’s having mixed effects on their critical thinking abilities, while a quarter report it’s helping them learn better.
New AI-powered live translation and language learning tools in Google Translate - Matt Sheets, Google Keyword
Building on our existing live conversation experience, our advanced AI models are now making it even easier to have a live conversation in more than 70 languages — including Arabic, French, Hindi, Korean, Spanish, and Tamil. Whether you’re an early learner looking to begin practicing conversation or an advanced speaker looking to brush up on vocabulary for an upcoming trip, Translate can now create tailored listening and speaking practice sessions just for you. These interactive practices are generated on-the-fly and intelligently adapt to your skill level.
Saturday, September 06, 2025
Mass Intelligence: From GPT-5 to nano banana: everyone is getting access to powerful AI - Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing
There have been two barriers to accessing powerful AI for most users. The first was confusion. Few people knew to select an AI model. Even fewer knew that picking o3 from a menu in ChatGPT would get them access to an excellent Reasoner AI model, while picking 4o (which seems like a higher number) would give them something far less capable. According to OpenAI, less than 7% of paying customers selected o3 on a regular basis, meaning even power users were missing out on what Reasoners could do. Another factor was cost. Because the best models are expensive, free users were often not given access to them, or else given very limited access. Google led the way in giving some free access to its best models, but OpenAI stated that almost none of its free customers had regular access to reasoning models prior to the launch of GPT-5.
Why did the CSU spend millions on ChatGPT amid a budget crisis? We asked school leaders - Julia Barajas, LAist
CSU CIO Ed Clark explained. We were [also] seeing that some universities in our own system were starting to negotiate deals with these vendors, but then others couldn't afford to do that. So, we're thinking: “We're not going to create a digital divide within our own system. We're going to make sure that everybody has access to these tools.” And we buttress that with: We believe that these tools are going to become fundamental, just like the internet is today — every industry, every academic field, every discipline is going to be using these tools. So, we need our students, our community members, to engage with them now. We're not going to wait until we're far behind everybody else ... to give this access. And on the workforce side, in terms of student preparation, we already know that employers are expecting students to graduate with [AI] skills. ... We want our students to be prepared for the workforce or graduate school or whatever they're going to do when they leave the CSU.
Friday, September 05, 2025
China Is Building a Brain-Computer Interface Industry - Emily Mullen, Wired
In a policy document released this month, China has signaled its ambition to become a world leader in brain-computer interfaces, the same technology that Elon Musk’s Neuralink and other US startups are developing. Brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, read and decode neural activity to translate it into commands. Because they provide a direct link between the brain and an external device, such as a computer or robotic arm, BCIs have tremendous potential as assistive devices for people with severe physical disabilities.
Preparing students for a world shaped by artificial intelligence - the Guardian
Prof Leo McCann and Prof Simon Sweeney are right to warn that uncritical reliance on artificial intelligence risks bypassing deep learning (Letters, 16 September). But that does not mean large language models have no place in higher education. Used thoughtfully, they can enhance teaching and learning. Graduates will enter a workforce where AI is ubiquitous. To exclude it from education is to send students out unprepared. The task is not to ignore AI, but to teach students how to use it critically.
Here are 4 pain points amid the new normal of online learning - Alcino Donadel, University Business
The rapid pace of AI development is transforming the online experience. More students will access AI tutoring and adaptive learning that create personalized programs. At the same time, respondents predicted declining prominence in full-time faculty and lecture-based instruction as central components to online learners’ experiences, as students rely instead on a mix of adjunct faculty and technology-mediated experiences. “Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed a profound shift: what began as an exception has become a baseline expectation,” Bethany Simunich, vice president for innovation and research at Quality Matters, an education quality assurance agency. “Today’s students—across every age and background—expect learning to be flexible and accessible.”
Thursday, September 04, 2025
Teaching Online Podcast - Tom Cavanagh and Kelvin Thompson, University of Central Florida
Episode 193. Guests Ray Schroeder and Dr. Melissa Vito unpack decades of practical wisdom on leadership vision in conversation with hosts Tom and Kelvin. This episode is the first in a mini-series of “pillar panels” offering distilled insights from esteemed community members on key, “structural support” topics essential in the future of strategic online/digital education. This episode includes links and reflections synthesizing the advent and growth of online learning.
Opinion: Cutting Through the Hype for GenAI in Higher Educationv - Stephan Geering, GovTech
Amid so much promotion, news coverage and forecasting about artificial intelligence, the university CIO must distinguish between practical, impactful applications and those driven by hype or outweighed by risk. For chief information officers, the priority is clear: distinguish between practical, impactful applications and those driven by hype. The goal is to adopt AI that enhances teaching, learning and operational efficiency without compromising academic standards. Before assessing what's practical versus aspirational, CIOs must first ground their strategy in a clear understanding of responsible AI frameworks such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology AI Risk Management Framework and with an eye on upcoming federal and state regulation such as the Colorado AI Act.
Wednesday, September 03, 2025
AI Companies Roll Out Educational Tools - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
Fall semesters are just beginning, and the companies offering three leading AI models—Gemini by Google, Claude by Anthropic and ChatGPT by OpenAI—have rolled out tools to facilitate AI-enhanced learning. Here’s a comparison and how to get them. Each of the three leading AI providers has taken a somewhat different approach to providing an array of educational tools and support for students, faculty and administrators. We can expect these tools to improve, proliferate and become a competitive battleground among the three. At stake is, at least in part, the future marketplace for their products.
AI Is Eliminating Jobs for Younger Workers - Will Knight, Wired
Economists at Stanford University have found the strongest evidence yet that artificial intelligence is starting to eliminate certain jobs. But the story isn’t that simple: While younger workers are being replaced by AI in some industries, more experienced workers are seeing new opportunities emerge. Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at Stanford University, Ruyu Chen, a research scientist, and Bharat Chandar, a postgraduate student, examined data from ADP, the largest payroll provider in the US, from late 2022, when ChatGPT debuted, to mid-2025. The researchers discovered several strong signals in the data—most notably that the adoption of generative AI coincided with a decrease in job opportunities for younger workers in sectors previously identified as particularly vulnerable to AI-powered automation (think customer service and software development). In these industries, they found a 16 percent decline in employment for workers aged 22 to 25.
Tuesday, September 02, 2025
Taking AI Welfare Seriously - Robert Long, et al; arXiv
In this report, we argue that there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future. That means that the prospect of AI welfare and moral patienthood, i.e. of AI systems with their own interests and moral significance, is no longer an issue only for sci-fi or the distant future. It is an issue for the near future, and AI companies and other actors have a responsibility to start taking it seriously. We also recommend three early steps that AI companies and other actors can take: They can (1) acknowledge that AI welfare is an important and difficult issue (and ensure that language model outputs do the same), (2) start assessing AI systems for evidence of consciousness and robust agency, and (3) prepare policies and procedures for treating AI systems with an appropriate level of moral concern. To be clear, our argument in this report is not that AI systems definitely are, or will be, conscious, robustly agentic, or otherwise morally significant.
Microsoft AI CEO Warns "Seemingly Conscious AI is Coming" - Wes Roth, YouTube
Get ready for this discussion about AI to start popping up a lot more and that discussion will be is AI conscious? Now you might have an immediate response to that like of course it's not or maybe it is there's some people who are convinced that it is. My take for the record has always been that while maybe not the current chatbots that we have right now. We might stumble upon something as we scale up and improve it, add more systems. But as you'll see, the issue isn't whether it is or not, but more that we have no idea. Not knowing will cause problems. Now, here you're going to see me talking to Nick Bostonramm. I was absolutely blown away by the fact that he took some time to talk to us.
Monday, September 01, 2025
ChatGPT-5 Gets Warmer, Friendlier Update - Scarlett Evans, AI Business
OpenAI has announced an update to its latest ChatGPT model to make it “warmer and friendlier” in response to user complaints. The announcement follows OpenAI’s launch of its latest GPT model earlier this month, which has been met with user complaints and calls for a return to the GPT-4o model. The update is hoped to alleviate some of these concerns, with a push for a more approachable chatbot that doesn’t increase in sycophancy (another recent complaint around the program.) “Changes are subtle, but ChatGPT should feel more approachable now,” the company wrote on X.
How to remain resilient, focused, and effective in uncertain times - McKinsey
Disruption isn’t an occasional hurdle; it’s the new normal. According to McKinsey research, 84 percent of leaders report feeling underprepared for future disruptions, with geopolitical tensions topping the list of concerns. Leaders today are called to steer through shifting trade policies, international conflict, and internal organizational pressures—all while keeping their people engaged and their strategies on track. McKinsey’s Ida Kristensen and coauthors outline four dimensions of resilience that can help organizations stay grounded and agile when the path ahead is unclear:
Financial
Operational
Organizational
External
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