Category: Top News

IBL News | New York

OpenAI has sold over 700,000 ChatGPT licenses to about 35 public universities for use by students and faculty, according to Bloomberg.

Among those public universities, Arizona State University and the California State University system have purchased licenses to OpenAI.

Google’s Gemini AI and Microsoft Copilot are expanding their campus presence, but ChatGPT currently has the highest student adoption.

Bloomberg noted that OpenAI is offering discounted products to students to turn them into customers.

Schools willing to purchase bulk access to ChatGPT are also offered discounted pricing below the $20 per month that OpenAI typically charges for a smaller number of educational users. For corporate customers, ChatGPT can cost up to $60 each month.

According to Copyleaks’ 2025 AI in Education Trends report, ChatGPT dominates usage at 74%, followed by Google Gemini (43%), Grammarly/GrammarlyGO (38%), Microsoft Copilot (29%), Claude (25%), and Perplexity (16%).

Nearly 90% of U.S. school students report using AI for schoolwork, with 29% relying on it daily and 24% several times per week.

Usage is rising, with 73% saying they engage with AI more frequently this year than last, signaling ongoing growth rather than plateauing adoption.

IBL News | New York

Anthropic said last week that it would release its Agents Skills technology as an open standard, with a reference SDK available at agentskills.io.

To date, Microsoft has adopted Agent Skills in VS Code and GitHub and has coding initiatives such as Cursor, Goose, Amp, and OpenCode, among others.

At their core, Agent Skills are folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that tell AI systems how to perform specific tasks consistently, using reusable modules, rather than requiring elaborate prompts each time. It’s a new way to build specialized agents using files and folders.

Each skill takes only a few dozen tokens to summarize the context window, with full details loading only when the task requires them.

This architecture allows for the deployment of extensive skill libraries without overwhelming the AI’s working memory.

The coding community has received the tools very well, awarding the skills repository on GitHub with 30,000 stars.

Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence, Figma, Canva, Stripe, and Zapier are participating as partnering developers in the launch of Skills.

It’s a mutually beneficial ecosystem similar to the MCP connector partner relationship.

The Skills approach is a shift from the AI industry’s approach of building specialized agents for different use cases — a customer service agent, a coding agent, a research agent. Skills suggest a different model: one general-purpose agent equipped with a library of specialized capabilities.

This insight has significant implications for enterprise software development. Rather than building and maintaining multiple specialized AI systems, organizations can invest in creating and curating skills that encode their institutional knowledge and best practices.

To activate skills, developers need to write a SKILL.md file with custom guidance for their agent. As mentioned, a skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file that includes organized folders of instructions, scripts, and resources, giving agents additional capabilities.

Claude Code (w/ Opus 4.5) is the most powerful agent in the world.

And @AnthropicAI just released Skills.

In this video:

(1) What is a coding agent?
(2) Using Claude Code as a general agent
(3) Setting up Claude Skills in Claude Code
(4) Building a skill that can post on x… pic.twitter.com/cG7uJcXnJ6

— Riley Brown (@rileybrown) December 21, 2025

• Blog: Skills for organizations, partners, the ecosystem

IBL News | New York

Following the launch of the Gemini 3 model, Google released this month an early version of remote MCP servers that allow developers to paste a URL to a managed endpoint, rather than spending many hours setting up connectors. They are offered at no extra cost to enterprise customers who already pay for Google services.

At launch, Google is starting with MCP servers for Maps, BigQuery, Compute Engine, and Kubernetes Engine.

In practice, this setup might look like an agent querying BigQuery or interacting with infrastructure services.

“We expect to bring them to general availability very soon in the new year,” Google said.

Google plans to expand MCP support beyond the initial set of servers. In the next few months, the company says it will roll out support for services across areas like storage, databases, logging and monitoring, and security.

“We built the plumbing so that developers don’t have to.”

IBL News | New York

OpenAI announced its first certified course, titled AI Foundations, as part of its OpenAI Certifications and the OpenAI Jobs Platform initiatives – the latter in collaboration with Indeed and Upwork.

This course is designed to help users learn core, practical AI skills that apply across roles and industries. It intends to be a hands-on, real-world training experience in using today’s AI tools.

The course is available within ChatGPT, a single environment where the bot acts as a tutor, providing practice questions and a feedback loop in context.

There is also a version of this class for K-12 teachers, ChatGPT Foundations for Teachers, available on Coursera. This class is designed to help educators build AI expertise and put it to work in the classroom and administrative tasks. It will be brought directly into the ChatGPT environment in early 2026.

OpenAI stated that its goal is to certify 10 million Americans by 2030.

The company said that AI Foundations is launching through pilot programs with firms such as Walmart, John Deere, Lowe’s, Boston Consulting Group, Hearst, Russell Reynolds Associates, Upwork, Elevance Health, Accenture, and the Office of the Governor of Delaware.

“Coursera, ETS, and Credly by Pearson will help ensure our courses and certifications meet high standards for learning design, psychometric rigor, and real-world impact, allowing learners to earn high-value and portable evidence of their skill development.”

“We are also piloting certifications with Arizona State University and the California State University system staff, faculty, and students to create pathways for students to hone their AI skills and showcase them to employers as they enter the job market.”

IBL News | New York

Google incorporated its latest model, Gemini 3, into Stitch, its experimental AI-powered design tool.

This implementation leads to higher-quality UI generation.

Additionally, Google introduced another experimental feature called “Prototypes,” which allows users to stitch together different screens on their canvas to create a working prototype.

Along with Stitch, many users are using another free Google AI tool to design professional-level app UI. They take those designs into Google AI Studio to turn them into fully functional apps, as shown in the video below.

IBL News | New York

Online education platform Coursera said on Wednesday it will buy rival Udemy in an all-stock deal, valuing the combined merged company at $2.5 billion.

Coursera shareholders will own 59%, and Udemy shareholders will own 41% of the company.

Udemy shareholders would receive 0.8 shares of Coursera for each held, valuing the company at about $930 million. Coursera shares were up about 8%, while Udemy jumped nearly 28%.

According to Morgan Stanley, which acted as Exclusive Financial Advisor to Udemy, the company will generate annual run-rate cost synergies of $115MM within 24 months of closing and will have $1.2Bn in cash.

The deal unites two of the largest U.S.-based online learning platforms at a time when course enrollment growth has cooled, prompting companies to seek scale and pursue enterprise clients and more predictable subscription revenue.

Coursera and Udemy bet that a combined platform will be better positioned to capture corporate demand for workforce training, particularly in artificial intelligence, data science, and software development, as employers invest in reskilling workers amid rapid advances in generative AI.

Coursera, which partners with universities and institutions to offer degree programs and professional certificates, has increasingly focused on enterprise customers. At the same time, Udemy operates a marketplace of independent instructors selling individual courses and subscriptions to businesses.

Shares of online education companies have lagged the broader market amid concerns about competition, pricing pressure, and AI’s impact.

Udemy shares have fallen about 35% so far this year, while Coursera is down roughly 7% over the same period, leaving both companies trading well below their post-IPO highs.

Morgan Stanley led the IPOs of Coursera, Udemy, Instructure, Docebo, Phoenix Education Partners, and Kinder Care. It was the exclusive financial advisor to Udacity on its sale to Accenture and to Kahoot! – $1.7Bn Public Takeover Led by GSPE companies trading well below their post-IPO highs.

IBL News | New York

Google said that, in 2025, over 1,000 U.S. higher education institutions, reaching 10 million students, were using Gemini for Education and NotebookLM.

With over 150 features related to teaching and learning, Google disclosed the main uses as follows:

• Building a deep understanding with Guided Learning.
• Prepping for exams with personalized practice quizzes and study guides in Gemini Canvas and flashcards in NotebookLM.
• Preparing for interviews, receiving resume feedback, and creating professional headshots with Nano Banana..
• Drawing connections between materials with interactive visual Mind Maps in NotebookLM makes research and synthesis easier.
• Creating visual explainers for presentations and group projects using Video Overviews and transforming written content into Audio Overviews for on-the-go learning.
• Adding fresh ideas, relevant resources, and differentiated activities to lessons with Gemini in Classroom, available for Google Workspace for Education.
• Sharing interactive AI learning experiences for students using NotebookLM and Gems from their learning management. system, through integrations with Google Classroom, Canvas by Instructure, and PowerSchool Schoology Learning.
• Producing polished, collaborative video content with Google Vids, using AI features like sample scripts and voiceovers.
• Creating engaging lessons and flexible teaching with Chromebook and Chromebook Plus devices.

In 2025, in terms of AI literacy, over 1 million educators and students received Google for Education training, with over 100,000 earning Gemini Certifications.

Educators got hands-on with ready-to-use AI prompts for teachers and 100+ ways to use Geminii in education.

• 150 Google for Education announcements in the 2025 Year in Review guide.

IBL News | New York

OpenAI, whose ChatGPT now serves 800 million users per week, shared the State of the Enterprise AI Report, which draws on a survey of 9,000 workers across 100 enterprises adopting AI.

The primary outcome is that enterprise AI adoption is accelerating, reshaping how people work, teams collaborate, and organizations build and deliver products.

In addition, AI is not just helping people do the same work faster—it is enabling people to do new kinds of work.

AI is gaining traction across every sector, with technology, healthcare, manufacturing, professional services, and finance seeing a momentum.

Globally, the fastest‑growing business customer bases include Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, and France, each exceeding 140% year‑over‑year growth.

International API customer growth has exceeded 70% over the last six months, with Japan having the most significant number of corporate API customers outside the U.S.

Across surveyed enterprises, 75% of workers report that using AI at work has improved either the speed or quality of their output. Workers report saving 40-60 minutes per day, with heavy users reporting more than 10 hours per week.

Across departments:

• 87% of IT workers report faster IT issue resolution.
• 85% of marketing and product users report faster campaign execution.
• 75% of HR professionals report improved employee engagement.
• 73% of engineers report faster code delivery.