AI spreadsheets, innovative partnerships in higher ed, and a renewed focus on work life balance. Whether it be in the office or on the airplane headed to our next program, we’re always talking about the issues and trends that are shaping the way we learn as well as what interests each of us on the team. Read more below.
Does your AI speak spreadsheet?
AI: The subject of every conversation and the topic of every clickbait headline. Are our write-ups AI-generated? We’ll never tell, but trust your gut. While LLMs have also had access to spreadsheets, a new AI firm called Fundamental has created the first Large Tabular Model (LTM) designed specifically for structured business data. Unlike traditional models that treat tabular data as text, Fundamental’s understands the non-linear, multi-dimensional relationships in spreadsheets, databases, and enterprise systems. The company aims to do “for tables what ChatGPT did for text,” which feels both incredibly boring and maybe just as seismic, as structured data is the scaffolding of the global economy.
A forward looking partnership
Duke University has launched the Future Universities Alliance, a global network aimed at transforming higher education with collaboration. Through innovation sandboxes, global summits, and knowledge commons, the Alliance connects emerging universities with elite institutions, giving the former institutional credibility, and the latter access to real world innovation. As costs continue to skyrocket, technologies disrupt old techniques, and the gap between university offerings and student needs grows wider, ideas and solutions will have to become radically different and new partnerships might just be the best way to unlock them.
Not working a back to back double here
In a shift that would have kept Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie up at night, work-life balance now outranks salary as the top priority for 65% of office workers globally. Employees want control over when and how much they work rather than just remote work options. Businesses will need to look for good old-fashioned efficiencies in novel ways. But there’s an upside for the aspiring captain of industry: companies implementing time autonomy with clear expectations have seen improved cycle times, reduced rework, and increased productivity without extending working hours. Even Henry and Andrew might admire those results.
Pay no attention to all the people behind the curtain
The aptly named Moltbook made the hype machine rounds this week as the social media service for AI. Turns out it was, like most headlines about AI, just here for the clicks. While novel, the site is in fact a place where human users set up their AI agents and control them with prompts to “communicate.” As you might imagine, the whole affair is a little more revealing about the humans than the AI, which makes it a funny if not particularly incisive story about the state of the industry.