Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More. As we step fully into the era of autonomous transformation, AI agents are transforming how businesses operate and create value. But with hundreds of vendors claiming to offer “AI agents,” how do we cut through the hype and understand what these systems can truly accomplish and, more importantly, how we should use them?The answer is more complicated than creating a list of tasks that could be automated and testing whether an AI agent can achieve those tasks against benchmarks. A jet can move faster than a car, but it’s the wrong choice for a trip to the grocery store.Why we shouldn’t be trying to replace our work with AI agentsEvery organization creates a certain amount of value for their customers, partners and employees.This amount is a fraction of the total addressable value creation (that is, the total amount of value the organization is capable of creating that would be welcomed by its customers, partners and employees).If every employee leaves the workday with a long list of to-dos for the next day and another list of to-dos to deprioritize altogether — items that would have created value if they could have been prioritized — there is an imbalance of value, time and effort, leaving value on the table.The easiest place to start with AI agents is looking at the work already being done and the value being created. This makes the initial mental math easy, as you can map the value that already exists and analyze opportunities to create the same value faster or more reliably.There’s nothing wrong with this exercise as a phase in a transformation process, but where most organizations and AI initiatives fail is in only considering how AI can apply to value already being created

Despite the boom of education technology investment and innovation over the past few years, founder Julia Stiglitz, who broke into the edtech world as an early Coursera employee, thinks there’s a lot of room to grow. Her new startup, CoRise, sells expert-led programming to people who want to up-skill their careers. It’s a fresh play in a crowded sector, with heavyweights including Udemy, Udacity, Guild Education and, well, her her former employer. “We haven’t solved the problems yet, and in fact, they’re growing,” Stiglitz said in an interview with TechCrunch. The edtech veteran is right: the next-generation of edtech is still looking for ways to balance motivation and behavior change, offered at an accessible price point in a scalable format. There’s an inherent tradeoff between engagement and scale – an elephant that even the unicorns have not entirely been able to avoid

Maven, co-founded by Udemy’s Gagan Biyani and AltMBA’s Wes Kao, began in 2020 with a startup idea that perfectly combined two booming sectors: the creator economy and edtech. The startup sold cohort-based classes, led by creators and influencers, to students. The small-group classes were created by instructors and powered by classmates, a bet on the idea that anyone with expertise could be a teacher. Now, two years after launching, and with $25 million in known funding from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Naval Ravikant, Sahil Lavingia, Li Jin, Arlan Hamilton and more, Maven is pivoting its offering away from that original pitch