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IBL News | New York

Enterprises are rapidly transitioning from experimentation to proving measurable ROI, said a research study conducted by The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “Gen AI is becoming deeply integrated into modern work.”

The report examines how generative AI technology is being adopted in mainstream enterprises, highlighting the ROI.

The shift is moving from exploration to pilots to more disciplined, enterprise-level adoption, according to the study, which concludes that “the next phase is not about adoption; it is about advantage.”

• 82% of enterprises used Gen AI at least weekly, and 46% used it daily, with 89% agreeing that Gen AI enhances employees’ skills.

• A total of 72% of organizations formally measured the ROI of Gen AI, focusing on productivity gains and incremental profit.

• Three out of four leaders see positive returns on Gen AI investments.

The Wharton School predicted that approximately one-third of Gen AI technology budgets will be allocated to internal R&D, indicating that many enterprises are building custom capabilities for the future.

IBL News | New York 

OpenAI announced yesterday that it has 1 million business customers worldwide using ChatGPT for Work, either directly or through its developer platform.

Organizations related to areas such as financial services, healthcare, and retail are among the most active. Consumer adoption is also at high rates, with 800 million users weekly.

The San Francisco-based lab is set to generate $13 billion in revenue this year as it continues to expand sales.

To support the enterprise acceleration, OpenAI launched a new wave of tools and integrations, such as:

• Company knowledge consolidates all the context from connected apps (Slack, SharePoint, Google Drive, GitHub, Canva, Figma, Zillow, Spotify, among others) into ChatGPT.
• Codex model for code generation, refactoring, and workflow automation.
• AgentKit allows users to create and build enterprise agents.
• Multimodal models, such as the Image Generation API, Sora 2, gpt-realtime, and Realtime API to build production voice agents.
• Databricks has made OpenAI models available natively on its stack.
• The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) enables the creation of conversational commerce experiences in ChatGPT. Shopify, Etsy, Walmart, PayPal, and Salesforce are among the companies utilizing this protocol.

OpenAI quoted a recent Wharton study to highlight that 75% of enterprises report a positive ROI, and fewer than 5% report a negative return. “When AI is deployed with the right use case and infrastructure, teams see real results,” said the firm.

This week, too, OpenAI agreed to pay Amazon.com $38 billion for computing power in a multiyear deal. That marks the first partnership between the startup and the cloud company.

IBL News | Nashville, Tennessee

Educause yesterday released its Top 10 list of where higher education is headed in 2026 during the second day of its annual conference, which gathered around 7,600 educational professionals (15% over expectation) on October 28 -30 in Nashville, Tennessee.

This ranking was primarily focused on cultivating a data-centric culture and building collective will around technology initiatives.

“Tensions around free speech and ideological differences in the classroom are leaving leaders and faculty uncertain about their future in academia. And the financial stability of many institutions, and of Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) in particular, is increasingly strained by reductions in federal support,” said Educause. “We must find ways to cultivate human connection, both within ourselves and with one another.”

Traditionally, the Top 10 report, which highlights how technology leaders are thinking about and planning, serves as a guide for institutions to move forward.

This year, the Top 10 was presented by Dr. Crista Copp, Vice President of Research at Educause, and Dr. Mark McCormack, Senior Director of Analytics & Research.

• #1. Collaborative Cybersecurity: Building a cybersecurity culture of shared responsibility, end-user awareness and training, and improved access to security services and support
• #2. The Human Edge of AI: Empowering students, faculty, and staff to engage with artificial intelligence tools critically, creatively, and safely
• #3. Data Analytics for Operational and Financial Insights: Leveraging data analytics to provide insights into spending patterns, enrollment trends, and areas for cost savings and operational efficiencies
• #4. Building a Data-Centric Culture Across the Institution: Expanding and improving data access and unlocking the full potential of data as a strategic asset
• #5. Knowledge Management for Safer AI: Mitigating the risks of artificial intelligence by integrating knowledge management into data governance, privacy, and ethics programs
• #6. Measured Approaches to New Technologies: Making better technology investment decisions (or choosing not to invest) through clear cost, ROI, and legacy systems assessments
• #7. Technology Literacy for the Future Workforce: Supporting discipline-specific technology training and education to enhance student success with in-demand technology skills
• #8. From Reactive to Proactive: Using data for scenario modeling, forecasting, and prediction to strengthen institutional agility and planning
• #9. AI-Enabled Efficiencies and Growth: Using artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, and other analytics capabilities to reduce operational costs, streamline processes, and improve strategic and business decision-making
• #10. Decision-Maker Data Skills and Literacy: Enhancing the value of institutional data by training and equipping decision-makers to use and interpret it properly

• 2026 Top 10 infographic

IBL News | New York

This month, Amazon issued its new agentic platform, Quick Suite, a collection of AI tools that analyze and gather data from multiple applications, turning natural language queries into enterprise actions, processes, and workflows.

As a unified digital workspace for day-to-day work, it connects internal documents, emails, and databases with external third-party apps, sources, and services, including Amazon S3, Snowflake, Google Drive, and Microsoft SharePoint.

It also integrates with third-party services like Salesforce for customer data, Zendesk for support tickets, and Slack for team collaboration.

These enterprise processes often require consultation with specialized teams to analyze advanced datasets,

Amazon Quick Suite includes productivity capabilities such as research, interactive visualizations (in competition with Tableau and Microsoft Power BI), and business intelligence and automation tools and agents.

Amazon made Quick Suite available in two tiers: a Professional plan starting at $20 per user per month, and an Enterprise plan at $40 per user per month with advanced features.

AWS marketing chief Julia White said to Bloomberg that existing customers of the Amazon Q Business AI software, which launched 18 months ago, will be encouraged to migrate to the new platform.

The company said Quick Suite has already been deployed to tens of thousands of Amazon employees, reporting that “the tool has reduced complex data analysis tasks from months to minutes, for example, based on internal use.”

In addition, it has rolled out the platform to hundreds of corporate beta customers, citing examples of cost savings and efficiency improvements.

However, since Amazon does not own a native productivity suite like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, it has to convince users to adopt its platform as an overlay on top of those tools.

This month, Google announced a unified Gemini Enterprise AI agent subscription, consolidating its business-focused AI tools.

IBL News | New York

OpenAI issued an app feature yesterday that includes, as initial pilots, Coursera, Canva, Figma, Expedia, Spotify, Zillow, and Booking.com, which will be integrated into ChatGPT.

Developers will be able to start building and adding apps “later this year” with an open-source Apps SDK, initially as a preview mode. This framework is built on the MCP (Model Context Protocol), an open standard that enables ChatGPT to connect to external tools and data.

Apps expected soon include Khan Academy, Instacart, OpenTable, DoorDash, Peloton, Uber, TripAdvisor, TheFork, Thumbtack, Target, and AllTrails.

In the ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, and Edu plans, the apps will also be launched “later this year,” according to the company.

These apps will be supported by a new Agentic Commerce Protocol⁠, an open standard that enables instant checkout in ChatGPT.

Yesterday, during the same Dev Day event, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced AgentKit, a toolkit for building blocks of AI agents.

AgentKit includes ChatKit, a simple embeddable chat interface for developers, along with tools to measure agents’ performance and other features.

Christina Huang, an OpenAI engineer, built an entire AI workflow and two AI agents live onstage in under eight minutes, as shown in the video below.

OpenAI announced the general availability of Codex, along with a Slack integration, an SDK, and new admin tools for monitoring and analytics dashboards.

Finally, the San Francisco-based lab introduced API updates, including GPT-5 Pro, Sora 2 in preview, and gpt-realtime-mini, a voice model that is 70% cheaper than gpt-realtime.

IBL News | New York

A new report published by MIT’s NANDA initiative, titled “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025,” reveals that 95% of initiatives trying to drive rapid revenue growth at corporations fail, delivering little to no measurable impact.

Only about 5% of AI pilot programs are achieving rapid revenue acceleration.

The research is based on 150 interviews with leaders, a survey of 350 employees, and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments.

MIT’s research points to flawed enterprise integration. Generic tools like ChatGPT excel for individuals because of their flexibility, but they stall in enterprise use since they don’t learn from or adapt to workflows.

Aditya Challapally, the lead author of the report, explained that “successful organizations pick one pain point, execute well, and partner smartly with companies who use their tools.”

More than half of generative AI budgets are devoted to sales and marketing tools, yet MIT found the biggest ROI is in back-office automation, when eliminating process outsourcing, cutting external agency costs, and streamlining operations.

Advanced organizations are already experimenting with agentic systems that can learn, remember, and act independently within set boundaries.

MIT’s report states that purchasing AI tools from specialized vendors and building partnerships succeed about 67% of the time, while internal builds succeed only one-third as often. The analysis suggests companies see far more failures when going solo.

This finding is particularly relevant in financial services and other highly regulated sectors, where many firms are building their own proprietary generative AI systems in 2025.

Other key factors for success include empowering line managers—not just central AI labs—to drive adoption, and selecting tools that can integrate deeply and adapt over time.

Workforce disruption, although no mass layoffs, is underway in customer support and administrative roles.

IBL News | New York

The AI threat has evolved into something more quotidian, similar to other social megatraumas, such as nuclear proliferation, climate change, and pandemic risk. The dystopian prediction of super intelligence takeoff, as well as human extinction and other bad outcomes, didn’t take place, according to experts consulted by The New York Times.

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, two Princeton-affiliated computer scientists, published in April “A.I. as Normal Technology.” They stated, “We should understand AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions or technical breakthroughs.”

Elon Musk recently declared that for most people, the best use for his LLM Grok was to turn old photos into microvideos.

However, the hype cycle dominates the economy:

• Around 60 percent of stock-market growth in recent years has been attributed to AI-associated companies.

• Researchers are negotiating pay packages in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

• Overall, AI capital expenditures show that there is more money being poured into construction related to chip production than into offices. The economist Alex Tabarrok said, “We’re building houses for AI faster than we’re building houses for humans or places for humans to work.”

Self-driving cars, like Waymo cabs, and Ukrainian autonomous drones will be followed by drug development, materials discovery, and other innovations, and the economy will be transformed. Like electricity, the Industrial Revolution, or the internet, AI will utterly change, but not terminate, the world.

IBL News | New York

AI-driven private schools, run by for-profit companies, are expanding their footprint in the U.S. while public schools struggle to attract and retain students, and others accelerate their investments in AI.

These schools teach core subjects for two hours a day and devote the afternoon to developing practical skills, such as financial literacy, public speaking, and entrepreneurship.

Alpha Schools was founded in 2014 as a pricey private school in Austin. Today, with an annual tuition of $45,000, it is leading the parental school choice movement while embracing AI technology that generates personalized learning plans for students.

This fall, Alpha Schools will launch in Santa Barbara, California; New York City; Chantilly, Virginia; and Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina, before expanding to Houston, Tampa, and Puerto Rico.

Existing locations are in Scottsdale, San Francisco, Miami, and Palm Beach. There are also five in Texas, including Brownsville, home of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Instead of teachers, these schools employ professional guides and coaches who
come from a range of backgrounds, from tech to law. Their mission is to motivate students. They make over $100,000 a year.

Students learn on third-party apps, such as Synthesis Tutor and Math Academy, as well as Alpha Schools’ own programs. Each subject is taught in 25-minute sessions, with short breaks in between.

Skeptics have questioned the effectiveness of replacing teachers with AI-assisted learning and restricting learning to 25 minutes per subject.

Alpha School is gaining more national attention, boosted by the support of billionaire Bill Ackman, an outspoken critic of DEI.

• The New York Times: AI-Driven Education: Founded in Texas and Coming to a School Near You

IBL News | New York

Through a splashy event yesterday, Apple introduced its newest iPhones: the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and a sleek, lightweight, and slimmer version, the iPhone Air, [in the picture above], 5.6 mm with a 6.5-inch display device.

The Air’s price point of $999 is 22% more expensive than the 17 base model, which starts at $799. The iPhone 17 Pro starts at $1,099.

At Apple’s event, the audience witnessed that the company continues to market itself as a best-in-class hardware maker first, not an AI device maker.

The most compelling use of AI was the Live Translation feature coming to AirPods 3. Priced at $249, AirPods 3 feature live translation technology, powered by Apple Intelligence, to help users translate foreign languages in real time.

Beyond the AirPods, AI technology has received only minor upgrades, mostly to its front camera. There was no mention of Siri.

To date, Apple has only released a baseline of AI features, such as AI writing tools, summarization, generative AI images, live translation, visual search, and Genmoji.

Sources said that Apple is still looking to outsource some technology to Google Gemini to catch up in the AI race.

Meanwhile, Google last month rolled out its latest release of an AI-powered Android phone with its Pixel 10.

TechCrunch wrote that “today’s iPhone owners often swap out Apple’s technology for Google’s by opting for Gmail, Google Drive and Docs, Google Maps, and Chrome over Apple’s own apps like Mail, its iWork suite, Apple Maps, and Safari, for example. When people search the web, they turn to Google’s Search app, not Apple’s built-in Spotlight search, despite its many integrations over the years to offer basic facts and answers, leveraging sources like Wikipedia.”

The company conveyed that the look and feel of updated iPhones, along with their hardware advancements, will continue to drive sales, enabling Apple to incorporate quality, camera improvements, privacy-preserving technology, intentional software design changes like Liquid Retina, and now, super-thin phones.

first new iphone upgrade i have really wanted in awhile! looks very cool.

— Sam Altman (@sama) September 9, 2025

IBL News | New York

Meta rolled out this month an AI feature that allows users on Instagram and Facebook to translate voice content with their sound, tone, and lip-sync from English to Spanish.

With more languages to be added over time, these AI translations are available to Facebook creators with 1,000 or more followers and all public Instagram accounts globally.

Creators can view translations and lip syncs before they’re posted publicly. Viewers watching the translated reel will see a notice at the bottom that indicates it was translated with Meta AI.

Creators are also gaining access to a new metric in their Insights panel, where they can see their views by language.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri explained in a post on Instagram, “If we can help you reach those audiences who speak other languages, reach across cultural and linguistic barriers, we can help you grow your following and get more value out of Instagram and the platform.”

 

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