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IBL News | Orlando, Florida

Socrait, a voice-enabled AI tool that listens to classes and logs useful points for teachers, was named the winner of FETC’s Pitchfest 2.0, the gamified startup competition for K-12 educators and IT leaders who attended the Future of Education Technology Conference this week in Orlando, Florida.

Flawlessly executed, the FETC 2026 conference brought together thousands of K-12 attendees to explore the future of technology in education. In addition to keynotes, sessions, and hands-on workshops, the Orange County Convention Center’s expansive exhibit hall featured over 450 leading solution providers.

Discussions covered a range of topics, including the potential impact of agentic AI on university operations and educational practices. The integration of AI was a major focus. Educators and administrators were provided with insights and strategies for leveraging AI technology to enhance learning outcomes and prepare students for the future.

“Socrait was built by a teacher, for teachers, to reduce the cognitive and administrative burnout of tracking, documenting, and following up on everything that happens in class each day,” said Jim Clor, Co-Founder and Senior Vice President at Socrait.

“When companies listen and iterate with schools, we all benefit from better, more effective products that truly serve students,” explained Jennifer Womble, FETC Conference Chair.

[Jim Clor and Jennifer Womble, in the picture on the right]

The competition featured audience voting through the FETC app based on pitch videos, along with six school and district leader judges.

Yourway Learning finished in second place, followed by QuestionWell AI, Savannah Math Labs, and ReframeXR.

Don’t be sad because it’s over…smile because it’s happening again next year! ❤️🎉

Another successful @fetc #FETC is in the books! Thank y’all again for an AMAZING conference!

We will see you next year back here in the great city of Orlando from 1/26-1/29! pic.twitter.com/5PkstUK12R

— Victoria Thompson, M.S. is at FETC! (@VictoriaTheTech) January 14, 2026

Feeling incredibly grateful to be back at #FETC this year! Excited to share the magic of Augmented Reality and the power of Google NotebookLM with educators who inspire every day. Grateful for this community and the chance to keep learning together. pic.twitter.com/6c7IYt6Kd5

— Zeny Ulloa, Ed. S. 🙏🌴💻 (@zeny_ulloa) January 12, 2026

Fantastic week as always at the #FETC26 conference, it was a great honor to be a featured speaker for the classroom leaders track and terrific sharing sessions with teachers from around the world on creative uses of educational technology! #FETC never disappoints!! pic.twitter.com/z2GERRtLSP

— Tim Needles (@timneedles) January 14, 2026

Final countdown to @fetc with 1 day to go! Registration is in the west concourse of the @orangecountyconventioncenter🧡 it will open Sunday January 11 at 7:00 AM! We are glad you are here #gamechangers! Remember, it happens in the hallways! Come join us at the #FETC #edtech… pic.twitter.com/tvzg467xEz

— Jennifer Womble →#FETC Jan. 11-14, 2026 (@JenWomble) January 11, 2026

IBL News | New York

As the pace of change itself has accelerated, organizations are moving from endless pilots to impact with real business value—and a sense of urgency behind it. And successful businesses are moving from “What can we do?” to “What should we do?”, prioritizing velocity over perfection.

The telephone took 50 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took seven years. Mobile reshaped consumer behavior. Cloud computing was transformative. A leading generative AI tool, ChatGPT, reached about twice that many in two months. Three years later, ChatGPT has over 800 million weekly users, roughly 10% of the planet’s population.

Each improvement simultaneously accelerates all the others: Better technology enables more applications. More applications generate more data. More data attracts more investment. More investment builds better infrastructure. Better infrastructure reduces costs. Lower costs allow more experimentation.

Deloitte subject-matter experts and external technology leaders stated in a report released this December that the data reveals several trends and interconnected forces:

• AI is going physical, converging with robotics.

• Organizations are automating broken processes, solving single points of pain, instead of redesigning operations. Gartner predicts that 40% of agentic projects will fail by 2027.

• Organizations are discovering their existing infrastructure strategies aren’t designed to scale AI to production-scale deployment.

• Token costs have dropped 280-fold in two years; yet some enterprises are seeing monthly bills in the tens of millions. Usage exploded faster than costs declined.

• Leaders are shifting from incremental IT management to orchestrating human-agent teams, with CIOs becoming AI evangelists. “Success requires modular architectures, embedded governance, and perpetual evolution as core capabilities,” said Deloitte. 

• “The organizations that succeed will probably not be those with the most sophisticated technology. They’ll be those with the courage to redesign rather than automate, and the velocity to execute before the window closes.”

• “The gap between laggards and leaders grows exponentially.”

IBL News | New York

The George Washington University launched its GW Engineering AI Academy in November to equip faculty to lead change through AI fluency and an entrepreneurial mindset.

This strategic initiative aims to position the GW’s School of Engineering and Applied Science as an AI-forward institution, taking a leadership position.

“We’re building AI literacy across our school, moving from uncertainty to confidence, from tools to workflows, and from passive adoption to intentional innovation,” said Professor Lorena Barba, GW Engineering AI Academy Director.

“The entrepreneurial mindset aids in challenging the status quo, recognizing opportunities at the intersection of disparate concepts, and solving complex problems to drive meaningful societal impact and human flourishing. Our vision is: AI Literacy as the Foundation for Transformation.”

The integration of AI literacy with the Entrepreneurial Mindset is a framework championed by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), of which GW is a partner. This framework follows “a set of attitudes, habits, and behaviors conducive to problem-solving, innovation, and value creation, especially in engineering contexts.”

“The result of this initiative is engineering education that prepares students not just to use AI, but to shape how AI serves humanity,” explained Lorena Barba.

For the inaugural session with the first faculty cohort, the GW Engineering AI Academy focused on AI Workflows, exploring how to move from being an AI “operator” to an AI “manager, orchestrating a team of digital specialists.

The second session focused on context management by curating and maintaining an optimal information bank available in everyone’s AI assistant.

IBL News | New York

The Trump Administration is dismissing the risks of AI — from mass job losses to a potential financial bubble — as it is chasing faster growth and cheers soaring stock prices.

Asked whether he harbors any fears about an emerging bubble that can damage the economy, President Trump recently said, “No. I love AI.”

In an elaborated report, The New York Times concludes that the president and his top aides have fully embraced AI and showered its leading corporate backers with money and regulatory support.

That optimism was on display on Tuesday, after the federal government reported that the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of more than 4 percent last quarter.

Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, said the new data indicated the president’s broader agenda was working, as he touted signs of a “boom” in AI.

However, many economists and even some technologists in Silicon Valley say that AI might cause significant job losses and pose a risk of financial havoc.

President Trump, who has long viewed the stock market as a barometer of his economic success, has celebrated the soaring stock prices of major technology companies like Nvidia.

Through a series of executive orders, signed over the last 11 months, Mr. Trump has moved to eliminate regulatory guardrails and make it easier for tech companies to build data centers, power their operations, sell computer chips, and source critical materials.

He has done so under the advisement of David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor now serving at the White House, who has publicly likened AI skeptics to a “doomer cult.”

For now, economic data show no mass firings due to AI. But it also proves how it is reshaping the labor force, particularly for younger Americans, including recent college graduates.

A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that companies embracing AI in the region mainly opted to retrain their workers, rather than let people go. More striking, however, was the slow rate at which these companies were hiring new workers, especially for college-educated positions.

The New York Fed’s report also found that adoption disproportionately reduced employment for workers ages 22 to 25 in industries set to be highly affected by the technology.

This month, President Trump signed a directive that restricted states from imposing their own regulations on the technology.

IBL News | New York

Universities and public colleges are in a hurry to make their webpages, online course content, and mobile apps accessible to people with disabilities by April 2026 to meet compliance guidelines and requirements.

The Department of Justice gave institutions two years to comply with its regulations under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), effective April 2024.

Experts in Higher Ed said that this Act will require serious time and financial investment, making it prohibitive for many institutions.

Compliance requires publicly funded entities to ensure that all web and media content — thousands of webpages — adheres to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

It means every PDF file must be accessible, captions and audio descriptions must accompany every video, and every sound clip must be paired with a transcript.

Faculty have to make course materials accessible, and any third-party tech platform from vendors must also be compliant.

The consequences of not responding are severe, as the DOJ has taken a larger role in enforcing civil rights laws in higher ed under the second Trump administration. Also, legal and activist groups can sue noncompliant institutions.

Some experts have pointed out that the White House can use the new rules in its negotiations with higher ed institutions, given the widespread lack of preparation.

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.