SwissCognitive Guest Blogger: Zachary Amos – “Leveraging AI to Predict and Reduce College Dropout Rates”

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already impacting education in many ways. Some schools are embracing it to serve students better, and many learners use it to help them with research and assignments. One of its more promising uses in this field, though, is reducing dropout rates.

Dropping out of college before finishing a degree may limit students’ opportunities in the future, but it can also be difficult for schools to predict. AI can help all parties involved through several means.

Identifying At-Risk Students

Preventing dropouts starts with recognizing which people are at risk of quitting prematurely. Machine learning is an optimal solution here because it excels at identifying patterns in vast amounts of data. Many factors can lead to dropping out, and each can be difficult to see, but AI can spot these developments before it’s too late.

Studies show early interventions based on warning signs can significantly reduce dropout rates, and AI enables such action. Educators can only intervene when they know it’s necessary to do so, and that level of insight is precisely what AI can provide.

Early examples of this technology have already achieved 96% accuracy in predicting students at risk of dropping out. Combining such predictions with a formal intervention plan could let higher ed facilities ensure more students finish their degrees.

Uncovering Non-Academic Risk Factors

In addition to recognizing known predictors of dropout risks, AI can uncover subtler, non-academic indicators. The causes of dropping out are not always easy to see in classroom performance. For example, over 60% of college students experience at least one mental health issue, which can threaten their education. AI can reveal these relationships.

Over time, AI will be able to highlight which non-tracked factors tend to appear in students with a high risk of dropping out. Once schools understand these non-academic warning signs, they can craft policies and initiatives to address them.
Enabling Personalized Education
AI is also a useful tool for minimizing the risks that lead to quitting school before someone even showcases them. Personalizing educational resources is one of the strongest ways it can do so.

The AI Research Center at Woxsen University in India successfully used chatbots to tailor lessons to individual students. Students utilizing the bot — which offered personalized reminders about classwork — were more likely to receive a B grade or higher. People attending Georgia State University showed similar results when using a chatbot to drive engagement.

Personalized education is effective because people have varying learning styles. AI provides the scale and insight necessary to recognize these differences and adapt resources accordingly, which would be impractical with manual alternatives.

Improving Accessibility

Similarly, AI can drive pupil engagement and prevent stress-related dropout factors by making education more accessible. Many classroom resources and university buildings were not designed with accessibility for all needs in mind. Consequently, they may hinder some students’ success, but AI can address these concerns.

Some AI apps can scan physical texts into digital notes to streamline note-taking for those with impairments limiting their ability to use pens or keyboards. Natural language processing can lead to better text-to-speech algorithms for users with vision impairments. On a larger scale, AI could analyze a campus to highlight areas where some buildings or walkways may need wheelchair ramps or other accessibility improvements.

Responsible AI Usage Can Minimize Dropout Rates

Some applications of AI in education — largely dealing with students’ usage of the technology — have raised concerns. The technology does pose some privacy risks and other ethical considerations, but as these use cases show, its potential for good is also too vast to ignore.

Responsible AI development and use can help universities ensure every student gets the help they need. As a result, dropout rates will fall. Schools will benefit from the higher student success rate, and the student body will benefit by achieving goals that will help them in their future careers.

About the Author:

Zachary Amos is the Features Editor at ReHack, where he writes about artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and other technology-related topics.

Der Beitrag Leveraging AI to Predict and Reduce College Dropout Rates erschien zuerst auf SwissCognitive | AI Ventures, Advisory & Research.

Here are the latest AI developments to keep an eye on:

Nvidia pledges $500B to build U.S. AI supercomputers
Meta to train AI on public Facebook & Instagram data
New AI model reveals misfolded proteins in Alzheimer’s
MIT trains LLMs to reduce toxic language
Leaders assess AI risk with business impact framework
…and more!

That’s a wrap for this week – more AI stories coming soon!

Wishing you a peaceful and joyful spring season.

Warm regards,

The Team of SwissCognitive

Der Beitrag Who’s Betting, Where, and Why in AI erschien zuerst auf SwissCognitive | AI Ventures, Advisory & Research.

Who’s Betting, Where, and Why in AI – SwissCognitive AI Investment Radar

As global AI funding levels remain elevated, this week’s investment activity reveals a tightening pattern: fewer hubs, bigger bets, and sharper focus. Silicon Valley, Beijing, and Paris now account for 80% of global AI funding, while other regions navigate capital scarcity and look for niche leverage. Meanwhile, Amazon’s CEO used his annual letter to justify billions already spent, calling AI investments a necessity for long-term competitiveness.

In San Francisco, startup Virtue AI secured $30 million to tackle deployment risk, a concern that’s becoming more pronounced as adoption scales. UK-based Synthesia reported $100 million in revenue and welcomed Adobe Ventures as a new backer, underscoring the value of enterprise AI tools that are already delivering results. And in China, a newly launched $8 billion AI fund backed by government and finance ministries will channel early-stage investments into foundational research and startup formation.

CEE continues to gain investor attention as a cost-efficient and increasingly capable AI development region, while Korea saw a domestic political pledge of $70 billion toward AI initiatives. On the infrastructure front, Nvidia’s $500 billion long-term strategy—including chips and supercomputing partnerships—continues to drive share price gains, while nEye Systems closed a $58 million round to push optical chip development further into the AI stack.

Big tech players aren’t staying out of the startup scene either. Alphabet and Nvidia reportedly invested in SSI, the new venture by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s startup is reportedly eyeing a massive $2 billion seed round. CMA CGM’s €100 million partnership with Mistral AI brings logistics into the funding spotlight, and the trend toward agentic AI for financial research continues to spread across fintech.

Previous SwissCognitive AI Radar: AI Funding Highlights.

Our article does not offer financial advice and should not be considered a recommendation to engage in any securities or products. Investments carry the risk of decreasing in value, and investors may potentially lose a portion or all of their investment. Past performance should not be relied upon as an indicator of future results.

Der Beitrag Who’s Betting, Where, and Why in AI – SwissCognitive AI Investment Radar erschien zuerst auf SwissCognitive | AI Ventures, Advisory & Research.

Here’s a fresh batch of stories shaping the AI conversation:

Europe plans €20B AI gigafactories to boost innovation
US tariffs risk weakening AI alliances, say experts
Alzheimer’s research taps into AI through new training program
4,000 researchers share optimism on AI’s benefits
AI analysts emerge as key to enterprise transformation
…and more!

Let’s keep tracking how AI continues to unfold!

Kind regards,

The Team of SwissCognitive

Der Beitrag AI Alliences at Risk erschien zuerst auf SwissCognitive | AI Ventures, Advisory & Research.

AI Funding Highlights – SwissCognitive AI Investment Radar

This week’s AI investment landscape has been defined by diverging strategies, capital flows, and a widening discussion around equity, access, and economic consequence. On one side, the U.S. and EU are outlining ambitious visions for leadership. While the Stargate initiative pushes scale and speed, the EU’s dual strategy of financial commitment and regulatory positioning is placing ethical trust at the heart of its long game.

At the institutional level, signals of maturity are surfacing. Stanford’s AI Index highlighted pressure points shaping enterprise tech strategy, while BCG’s IT Spending Pulse underlined a shift: budgets are recalibrating as generative AI moves from novelty to core capability. Large investors are responding in kind—Bay Area-based SignalFire closed a $1 billion fund focused solely on applied AI companies, and Microsoft’s AI alliance with MSCI emphasizes the financial sector’s shift to AI-informed strategies.

From a regional angle, the Gates Foundation is betting $7.5 million on Rwanda as a launch point for AI scaling hubs in health, agriculture, and education. Canada attracted a CAD$150 million investment from Siemens for a global AI R&D center focused on battery production, while Italy’s Axyon AI secured €4.3 million for financial forecasting, and Ukraine’s QurieGen raised €2.2 million for AI-driven cancer drug R&D.

Meanwhile, a different class of firms is recalibrating customer interaction models. Arta Finance unveiled a suite of AI agents for portfolio insight, and startups skipping traditional funding stages—especially in Europe—signal a shift toward faster, more efficient capital strategies. But UNCTAD’s report reminds us that AI’s projected $4.8 trillion global impact comes with significant risks: unless addressed, the gap between early adopters and the rest could deepen.

This week’s updates confirm that the race is no longer about who adopts AI—it’s about how, and at what cost.

Previous SwissCognitive AI Radar: From Mega Rounds to Market Ripples .

Our article does not offer financial advice and should not be considered a recommendation to engage in any securities or products. Investments carry the risk of decreasing in value, and investors may potentially lose a portion or all of their investment. Past performance should not be relied upon as an indicator of future results.

Der Beitrag AI Funding Highlights – SwissCognitive AI Investment Radar erschien zuerst auf SwissCognitive | AI Ventures, Advisory & Research.

Copyright: intelligencebriefing.substack.com – “How AI Is Accelerating Industry Disruption And Leadership”

If you follow the tech news, there’s no way around the claims of disruption: industries, jobs, tasks—everything is going to change massively. But most likely, it’s not the case in your own area of influence. Change seems to happen at a much slower pace than management consultants make it appear. But does it?

At the end of last year, I shared my experience creating the AI-narrated version of my book, AI Leadership Handbook. I had previously recorded about 45 minutes of myself reading blog posts to create a voice clone using an AI tool called ElevenLabs. My family and friends couldn’t tell the difference between my voice clone and my own voice. Yes, that’s how good the technology is. Since then, things have moved incredibly quickly in this space.

When Industry Heavyweights Move Quickly

The industry is moving incredibly fast and evolving from a human-only to an AI-embraced approach to narration. Just because progress seemed slow doesn’t mean that the pace can’t change in a short period of time and in your industry, too:

• December 2024: Rakuten Kobo was the only distributor to accept AI-narrated audiobooks created using AI tools outside the distributor’s platform, such as the author’s voice clone. Findaway Voices by Spotify allowed AI-generated narration using stock voices, and Amazon/ Audible had a close beta program using AI voices provided via their platform.
• January 2025: Audiobooks.com was the second platform to accept AI-narrated audiobooks using outside technology.
• February 2025: Findaway Voices by Spotify announced a partnership with ElevenLabs as part of which authors can create the audiobook using their own voice clone and distribute the AI-narrated audiobook via Spotify. The distribution includes additional platforms, including Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and audiobooks.com.
• March 2025: Amazon/ Audible expands its Virtual Voices beta program. Authors can now narrate their Kindle-based ebook using stock voices.

With every new platform opening up to AI-narrated books, I have added the AI Leadership Handbook for distribution there. As of the publication of this article, the audiobook is available on the following platforms (from least to most realistic narration):

• Amazon/ Audible — Stock voice
• Spotify/ Barnes & Noble — Andreas’s voice clone
• Audiobooks.com/ Kobo — Andreas’s voice clone + Matt’s voice clone for the forward

So, why care about Amazon’s approach? More on that in the next section(…)

Read more: www.intelligencebriefing.substack.com

Der Beitrag How AI Is Accelerating Industry Disruption And Leadership erschien zuerst auf SwissCognitive | AI Ventures, Advisory & Research.

Get up to speed on the AI stories making an impact right now:

Mega-rounds shift toward infrastructure and applied AI
Brain implant,  using AI enables speech from thought
AI beat the Turing Test by being a better human
AI predicts virus outbreak hotspots using host traits
Brain-inspired AI cuts power and boosts efficiency
…and more!

The AI conversation never stops – and neither do we! Don’t miss what’s next!

Warm regards,

The Team of SwissCognitive

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From Mega Rounds to Market Ripples – SwissCognitive AI Investment Radar

The AI Investment Radar is back with another Thursday-to-Thursday round-up of the most significant developments in global AI funding and strategic investment. This week, headline attention was dominated by Anthropic’s $3.5 billion round—March’s largest raise—marking a continued race among frontier model developers. Yet beyond that, capital movements spanned from public sector commitments to corporate scaling strategies.

EY-Parthenon announced a $250 million allocation toward AI-powered edge platforms, while Deloitte reaffirmed its $3 billion commitment by expanding its Global Simulation Center of Excellence. OpenAI’s plans for a $40 billion round, led by SoftBank, underscored how large-scale compute and model development remain critical funding priorities.

At a government level, the EU pledged €1.3 billion to develop AI and digital skills under its Digital Europe Programme. On a global scale, IDC projects that AI investments will add $22.3 trillion in economic value by 2030, equating to nearly $5 for every dollar spent. Meanwhile, philanthropic and regional efforts—from Google’s $10 million AI grant to nonprofits, to Mastercard’s investment in Singapore-based AIDA—highlight the growing importance of distributed innovation.

CoreWeave’s downscaled IPO, along with continued investor concerns about AI implementation gaps, also offer a more tempered look at the market’s momentum. Yet from drug discovery at Isomorphic Labs to AI-enabled supply chain optimization, the range and depth of AI deployments continue to grow.

Tune in next week for more updates of the world of AI investments.

Previous SwissCognitive AI Radar: Global AI Capital Moves at Full Speed.

Our article does not offer financial advice and should not be considered a recommendation to engage in any securities or products. Investments carry the risk of decreasing in value, and investors may potentially lose a portion or all of their investment. Past performance should not be relied upon as an indicator of future results.

Der Beitrag From Mega Rounds to Market Ripples – SwissCognitive AI Investment Radar erschien zuerst auf SwissCognitive | AI Ventures, Advisory & Research.

SwissCognitive Guest Blogger: Eleanor Wright, COO at TelWAI – “Fortifying the Future: Ensuring Secure and Reliable AI”

As AI becomes further integrated into various domains, from infrastructure to defence, ensuring its robustness will become a matter of national security. An AI system managing power grids, security apparatus, or financial networks could present a single point of failure if compromised or manipulated. Historical incidents, such as the Stuxnet cyberweapon, illustrate the physical and cyber damage that can be inflicted. When considering AI’s complexity, the potential for a cascade of both physical and digital harm increases dramatically.

As such, we should ask: How do we fortify AI?

AI systems must be designed to withstand attacks. From decentralisation to layering, these systems should be constructed so that control points can seamlessly enter and exit the loop without disabling the broader system. Thus, building redundancy and backup at various control points within the AI systems. For example, suppose a sensor or a group of sensors is deemed to have failed or been corrupted. In that case, the broader system must be capable of automatically readjusting to stop utilising data and intelligence gathered from said sensors.

Another strategy for strengthening AI systems involves simulating data poisoning attacks and training AI systems to detect such threats. By teaching the systems to recognise and respond to attacks or failures, they can automatically reconfigure without the need for human intervention. If an AI can learn to identify tainted data, such as statistical anomalies or inconsistent patterns, it could flag or quarantine suspect inputs. This approach leans heavily on machine learning’s strengths: pattern recognition and adaptability. However, it’s not a failsafe; adversaries could evolve their attacks to more closely mimic legitimate data, so the training would need to be dynamic, constantly updating to match new threat profiles.

Maintaining a human in the loop to enable oversight and override is considered one of the most crucial elements in the rollout of AI in various industries. Allowing humans to oversee AI decision-making and restricting autonomy can prevent potentially harmful actions taken by these systems. Whilst critical in the early stages of AI deployment as capabilities scale and evolve, there may come a point where human oversight inhibits these systems and, in itself, causes more harm than good.

Finally, AI sovereignty may prove to be the most critical element in ensuring companies and governments fully control essential algorithms and hardware powering their operations. Without this control, these systems could be vulnerable to foreign interference, including cyberattacks, espionage, or sabotage. As the use of AI increases, the sovereignty of AI systems and their components will become increasingly important. At its core, AI sovereignty is about control, whether exercised by governments, corporations, or individuals. Through the control of data, infrastructure, and decision-making power, those who build and deploy AI systems and sensors gain control of AI.

Fortification will involve integrating resilience, adaptability, and sovereignty into AI’s DNA, ensuring it is not only intelligent but also resilient and unbreakable. It can provide technological advantages, but it may also expose systems to disruption and vulnerability exploitation. As organisations race to harness AI’s potential, the question looms: Will AI enable organisations to gain a strategic advantage, or will it undermine the very systems it was designed to strengthen?

About the Author:

Holding a BA in Marketing and an MSc in Business Management, Eleanor Wright has over eleven years of experience working in the surveillance sector across multiple business roles.

Der Beitrag Fortifying the Future: Ensuring Secure and Reliable AI erschien zuerst auf SwissCognitive | AI Ventures, Advisory & Research.

From brainwaves to the edge of space, AI is powering bold new directions.

Man with ALS fed his dog with only his thoughts
EU commits $1.4B to boost AI and cybersecurity
AI unlocks new paths toward curing disease
AI and data power next-gen space exploration
…and more!

See you next Sunday with fresh insights from the world of AI!

Sunny regards,

The Team of SwissCognitive

Der Beitrag Man Feeds Dog with Thoughts Thanks to AI erschien zuerst auf SwissCognitive | AI Ventures, Advisory & Research.