AI-powered startups like Phia, co-founded by Stanford graduates including Bill Gates’s daughter, raised $8 million to revolutionize online shopping with AI price comparison and styling. Concurrently, Ohio State University launched an AI fluency initiative requiring students to gain AI competency across majors. In higher education operations, Microsoft’s Copilot+ AI-enabled PCs are improving research productivity by enabling faster, local AI processing. Additionally, industry experts underscore data quality and prompt engineering as critical skills for successfully leveraging AI in education and finance. These advancements reveal transformative shifts in pedagogy and campus technology adoption.