“Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need,”said the CEO of Open AI, Sam Altman, on its website.
The visionary technologist wrote a piece elaborating on upcoming scenarios in the Intelligence Age based on humanity’s discovery of the deep learning algorithm.
• “Eventually, we can each have a personal AI team full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine.”
• “AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf.”
• “We expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before.”
Higher education institutions are trying to figure out how to best integrate AI into institutional operations and strategy.
This was one of the primary outcomes of the Educause 2024 Annual Conference, which took place last week in San Antonio, Texas. The show attracted around 7,000 educators and leaders in a well-organized event. Next year, Educause’s main event will be celebrated 27-30 October in Nashville, Tennessee.
“AI is a disruptor whose impact is not yet widespread,” said John O’Brien, President and CEO at Educause to IBL News. [In the picture above].
“What AI is good for and its risks are also essential considerations,” he added.
“It will be interesting to see how AI features in future Top 10s.”
In this year’s Top 10 issues, AI was embedded in more than half of the outcomes.
On issue #1, The Data-Empowered Institution, AI can improve decision-making and analytics.
On issue #8: Putting People First, Educause highlighted the importance of figuring out the role of AI in the future of work.
On issue #10: Supportable, Sustainable, and Affordable, the key is to determine how to incorporate possible AI-infused futures into the institution’s vision and strategic planning.
In the Top 10 Survey, there were two issues specifically about AI:
The Ethics of AI: Ensuring that implementations and uses of AI are equitable and inclusive.
AI Goes to School: Tailoring AI models and tools to support student learning and advising.
Educause disclosed that another issue didn’t make the overall Top 10: Next-Gen Faculty: Helping faculty transform education, research, and scholarship in the age of AI and XR.
According to an analysis from Sequoia Capital, only a key set of scaled players and alliances with access to vast sums of capital—including Microsoft/OpenAI, AWS/Anthropic, Meta, and Google/DeepMind—remain in play in the market for Generative AI. This report follows Sequoia’s essay “Generative AI: A Creative New World.”
The most critical model update of 2024 was OpenAI’s o1, formerly known as Q* and also known as Strawberry. This is the first example of a model with true general reasoning capabilities, which needs to stop and think before giving a response the way a human would.
• The models have largely failed to make it into the application layer as breakout products, except for ChatGPT.
• In corporate IT and global systems integrators, there are opportunities in the application layer.
Today, “wrappers” are one of the only sound methods of building enduring value. What began as “wrappers” have evolved into sophisticated cognitive architectures.
They typically include multiple foundation models with some routing mechanism on top, vector and/or graph databases for RAG, guardrails to ensure compliance and application logic that mimics how a human might think about reasoning through a workflow.
GitHub Copilot is an excellent example of this.
These application layer companies are new agentic applications emerging across all knowledge economy sectors. Here are some examples.
Harvey: AI lawyer
Glean: AI work assistant
Factory: AI software engineer
Abridge: AI medical scribe
Sierra: AI customer support agent
XBOW: AI-driven penetration test simulates cyberattacks to evaluate security systems
Day.ai: AI native CRM to replace systems integrators who make billions of dollars configuring Salesforce to meet customers’ needs.
Efficient engineering is required to transform a model’s raw capabilities into a compelling, reliable, end-to-end business solution.
Microsoft announced this week new AI autonomous agents and agentic capabilities in Dynamics 365 that accelerate sales and business results, provide competitive advantage and productivity gains and savings, reduce costs and administrative work, and increase efficiency in work and revenue.
The software giant introduced ten new agents, and in November, Copilot Studio will allow users to create autonomous agents.
“Every organization will have a constellation of agents — ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous,” wrote Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer for Microsoft’s AI at Work initiatives.
These agents can build capacity for every sales, finance, or supply chain, from accelerating lead generation, processing sales orders, automating the supply chain, or client and employee onboarding.
Agents draw on the context of work data in Microsoft 365 Graph, systems of record, Dataverse and Fabric,
Microsoft mentioned McKinsey & Company, Thomson Reuters, and Clifford Chance as clients of these autonomous agents.
“New autonomous agents enable customers to move from legacy lines of business applications to AI-first business processes. AI is today’s ROI and tomorrow’s competitive edge.”
Microsoft presented three examples:
Sales Qualification Agent. This agent researches leads, helps prioritize opportunities, and guides customer outreach with personalized emails and responses.
Supplier Communications Agent: This agent tracks supplier performance, detects delays, and responds accordingly, freeing teams from consuming manual monitoring and firefighting time.
Customer Intent and Customer Knowledge ManagementAgents: These agents face high call volumes, talent shortages, and heightened customer expectations. These agents work hand in hand with a customer service representative by learning how to resolve customer issues and autonomously adding knowledge-based articles to scale best practices across the care team.
Microsoft said the agents follow core security, privacy, and responsible AI commitments, including guardrails and controls established by maker-defined instructions, knowledge, and actions.“The data sources linked to the agent adhere to stringent security measures and controls — all managed in Copilot Studio.”
The company said it uses agents for its transformation by empowering employees to scale their impact. One sales team achieved 9.4% higher revenue per seller and closed 20% more deals. Another team resolved customer cases 12% faster. The Marketing team saw a 21.5% increase in conversion rate on Azure.com with a custom agent designed to assist buyers. In human resources, its employee self-service agent helped answer questions with 42% greater accuracy.
The Educause Top 10 ranking for 2025 on higher education technology stated that rebuilding trust in institutions lies in building a competent and caring institution and leveraging the fulcrum of leadership.
Susan Grajek, Vice President of Partnerships, Communities, and Research at Educause, stated during her keynote presentation at the nonprofit organization’s annual event in San Antonio, Texas, “We need to lean into uncertainty.” She added: “Choosing hope will increase trust.”
#1. The Data-Empowered Institution: Using data, analytics, and AI to increase student success, win the enrollment race, increase research funding, and reduce inefficiencies
#4. A Matter of Trust: Advancing institutional strategies to safeguard privacy and secure institutional data
#5. The CIO Challenge: Leading digital strategy and operations in an era of frequent leadership transitions, resource limitations, societal unrest, and rapid technology advancements
#6. Institutional Resilience: Contributing to institutional efforts to prepare for and address a growing number and range of risks
The Educause Nonprofit Association presented its Top 10 trends for 2025 on higher education technology, highlighting the need to solve the industry’s trust problem. A majority of Americans (57%) distrust postsecondary institutions, and 68% think they’re moving in the wrong direction.
According to a June 2024 Gallup poll, the share of Americans who are confident in higher education has dropped by 21 percentage points in the past ten years.
“The three biggest reasons survey respondents gave for their lack of confidence in higher education are poor quality or irrelevant educational content (46%), politicized agendas (41%), and cost (28%),” Susan Grajek, Vice President, Partnerships, Communities, and Research, for Educause explained during keynote presentation in San Antonio, Texas, during the annual event of the association.
This trust problem is also reflected in how institutions use data and technology. AI is not contributing to increasing confidence. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer found that trust in AI companies has declined by fifteen percentage points in the last five years (from 50% to 35%) and by eight percentage points (from 61% to 53%).
“The higher education industry needs to develop a strategy and approach to AI,” explained Susan Grajek.
“Trust has an emotional component and a behavioral component. We trust people and organizations we believe are authentic and caring. But that’s not enough. We must also know that people, organizations, and things function well. Colleges and universities need to show that they understand and care about students, faculty, staff, and community members, and they need to work efficiently and effectively,” she added.
OpenAI announced the launch of its Academy, an initiative for developers and organizations in low—and middle-income countries.
OpenAI plans to provide them with AI technology, API credits, and guidance to help “drive collective innovation.”
The company said, “Investing in the development of local AI talent can fuel economic growth and innovation across sectors like healthcare, agriculture, education, and finance.“
The OpenAI Academy will distribute an initial $1 million in API credits to expand access to OpenAI models, enabling participants to build and deploy innovative applications.
It will partner with philanthropists “to invest in organizations solving challenges at the front lines of their communities.”
“Over the past year, we’ve seen first-hand that investing in AI education, resources, and community-building can have an outsized impact. For example, KOBI, the winner of the OpenAI prize at The Tools Competition, uses AI to help students with dyslexia learn to read. I-Stem, one of the turn.io Chat for Impact contest winners, uses AI to enhance access to inaccessible content designed to help blind and low-vision communities in India find meaningful employment.”
“To further support developers around the world, OpenAI also funded and published a professional translation of the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark, a measure of general AI intelligence, into 14 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, and Yoruba.”
Zoom will allow users to create a digital clone of themselves to chat asynchronously with colleagues. After recording themselves, users can type a script of what they want the digital double to say.
It will be an AI-animated and photorealistic avatar with synced lip movements and upper arms and shoulders.
Zoom announced this month during its last annual conference that this feature will be launched in 2025.
Zoom’s CEO, Eric Yuan, envisions enabling users to create digital twins who can attend meetings, answer emails, and take phone calls.
Several companies are developing AI tech to clone a person’s face and voice digitally. One example is Tavus, which helps brands create virtual personas for personalized video ads. Another is a Microsoft’s service that generates convincing digital stand-ins for a person.
Glean, an AI platform specialized in retrieving data from most used SaaS apps to automate workflows, raised over $260 million in new funding, valued at $4.6 billion. Altimeter and DST Global co-led the round.
The start-up is introducing advanced prompting capabilities to automate complex, multi-step workflows in its model-agnostic platform. It includes a prompt library.
Its prompt builder allows users to create, edit, test, and save prompts easily.
Arvind Jain, CEO at Glean, said, “Every employee, in every role and every company, can leverage AI daily to increase their impact exponentially.”
• “To make AI work at work, it needs to connect and deeply understand all the data, people, processes, and context-specific to your work. It also needs to be intuitive enough for everyone to use, yet powerful enough to do real work.”
• “The AI transformation we’re in the midst of today promises to be as big or bigger than the internet, mobile, and cloud transformations we’ve seen over the last century.”
Black Forest Labs, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed German startup behind the image generation model Flux 1, announced, in a blog post, an API in beta.
Developers can choose which Flux model to build into their app or service, including content moderation layer and constraints on image resolution.
The company also unveiled its latest image generation model, Flux1.1 Pro, which it claims provides six times faster generation than its predecessor.
The model can scale up to 2k (2048 × 1080) images, a feature soon available in the API.
In addition to Black Forest Labs’ platform, Flux1.1 Pro is available through the startup’s partners, including Together AI, Replicate, Fal.AI, and Freepik.
Prices start at 2.5 credits per image; 100 credits cost $1. Flux1.1 Pro costs four credits per image.
Black Forest Labs was co-founded by the engineers who built the tech behind Stability AI, including Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser, Dominik Lorenz, and CEO Robin Rombach. It raised $31 million in funding and is now said to be raising $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.
The start-up’s current backers include Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan and former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe. It is developing video-generating models.
Competitors include Ideogram, Pika, Luma, Runway, Stability, Midjourney, and incumbents like OpenAI and Google.
The startup became controversial after its deal with xAI to build Flux into xAI’s Grok without safety guardrails, resulting in a torrent of outrageous images.
