+ THREE INSIGHTS FOR THE WEEK |
1. Digital platforms have already changed how value is created and exchanged. Their next wave — spanning physical assets, artificial intelligence, and automation — promises new efficiencies but also poses new risks.
At the 2025 MIT Platform Strategy Summit, hosted by the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, experts highlighted four emerging trends that together offer a snapshot of where platforms are heading.
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Platforms are being adapted for agentic AI. A new generation of autonomous agents can already buy, sell, and negotiate on behalf of their users — a shift that could transform how digital markets operate.
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AI is accelerating technical debt in some cases. As firms experiment with AI tools that write code, companies are discovering a hidden cost: flawed or poorly integrated code that can make systems harder to maintain and more expensive to fix.
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The “AI stack” is increasingly controlled by a handful of powerful companies. Concentration of the hardware and software used to build, train, and run AI models risks leaving most firms dependent on a few providers that would be difficult to replace.
- Platform strategies are beginning to extend into the physical world, helping companies recover, resell, and reuse hardware as part of a broader circular economy.
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2. The lifeblood of any startup is cash, but right now fewer companies are getting funded, leading entrepreneurs to explore creative alternatives and rethink what success looks like.
In a new video, entrepreneurs in residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship share strategies for navigating today’s tighter funding landscape:
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Diversify funding sources. Angel investors, family offices, corporate venture capital, revenue-based financing, and philanthropic capital are all options. “It doesn’t always have to be the traditional VC funding,” said Devon Sherman Daley.
- Build differently from day one. Ben Soltoff advised finding revenue sources earlier, even if that means targeting accessible short-term customers rather than ideal long-term ones.
- Be mindful that the conversation around what it means to be successful is changing. “Before, it was: How much money have you raised?” said Chris Moses. “Nowadays, it’s: How much revenue can you generate with how many employees?”
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3. As AI is woven into more parts of an organization’s operations, data engineers are playing a pivotal role — taking on bigger responsibilities, setting standards, choosing tools, and designing the infrastructure that keeps AI systems from falling apart.
According to a study from MIT Technology Review Insights and AI cloud platform company Snowflake, 72% of 400 senior tech leaders surveyed now consider data engineers to be critical to the success of their business. That number is even higher among the largest companies, where AI maturity is further along.
The rise in importance comes with increased pressure. More than two-thirds of leaders said that their data engineers’ workloads are getting significantly heavier. One culprit: messier data that is flowing at higher velocity and showing up in formats that older systems were never built to handle.
“Models need so much more data and in multiple formats,” MIT Sloan principal research scientist George Westerman told BigDATAwire. “Where it used to be making sense of structured data, which was relatively straightforward, now it’s ‘What do we do with all this unstructured data? How do we tag it? How do we organize it? How do we store it?’ That’s a bigger challenge.”
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For manufacturers, listening to workers pays off in productivity
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Companies that act on input from front-line employees pay their workers more and experience a productivity bump that offsets those costs.
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In the hustle and bustle of manufacturing, it’s not uncommon for managers to lose touch with front-line workers. But when companies seek out and heed input from those employees, everyone benefits: Employers see higher productivity, and employees see higher pay.
That’s the conclusion of new research from MIT Sloan professor Nathan Wilmers and Dylan Nelson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The study, based on data from a federally mandated U.S. Census Bureau survey of 30,000 U.S. manufacturing establishments, revealed that the productivity boost that manufacturers experience more than compensates for the labor costs they incur. Specifically:
| - Manufacturing companies that listen to their front-line workers pay their employees 3.6% more than those that don’t.
- Those manufacturers also see 16% higher productivity.
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Given those findings, Wilmers said, employers should consider worker voice “a real source of value” for the organization and develop a systematic approach to seeking and acting upon worker feedback.
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