Today's episode of the Me, Myself, and AI podcast, the final one of Season 13, explores how Bank of America is preparing a massive global workforce for an AI future through upskilling and reskilling. Bernard Hampton, head of the financial institution's Academy, explains how the learning and development organization focuses on workforce agility and a building combination of technical and soft skills. Bernard Hampton leads The Academy, which is responsible for onboarding and upskilling more than 200,000 employees as Bank of America's chief people organization. The Academy, a team of more than 1,000 dedicated professionals, provides expert facilitation and coaching, compliance education, and immersive technology. Hampton joined the bank in 2004 and has served in many leadership roles, including as a consumer banking division executive. In addition to serving as the bank's executive market sponsor for the West Palm Beach market, he is an executive sponsor for multiple employee engagement groups, networks, and development programs, including the Intergenerational Employee Network....

Big fundraising deals did not take a pause for summer this week. In the U.S., the largest financings went to enterprise software company NinjaOne and blockchain technology provider Digital Asset. The largest deals of the week, however, were for European companies, with Germany's Neura Robotics pulling in $1.4 billion and Finnish space tech company Iceye landing $520 million. 1. NinjaOne, $400M, enterprise software: NinjaOne, provider of an IT operations and endpoint management platform, raised over $400 million in Series C extension funding at a $12.3 billion valuation. The Austin-based company said it grew revenue over 70% in 2025 and posted a profit in the first quarter of this year. 2. Digital Asset, $355M, blockchain technology: Digital Asset, a provider of blockchain technology geared for financial institutions, secured $355 million in a later-stage financing led by Andreessen Horowitz's crypto fund, a16z crypto. Founded in 2014, the New York-based company has raised at least $847 million in known funding to date, per Crunchbase data....

Anyone who works at Meta or knows anyone who works at Meta will tell you the same thing: It is not a happy place, particularly given the seemingly endless layoffs the company has executed over the last few years ' cuts that have only accelerated as the company funnels billions into AI. The drama kicked off when someone hijacked a livestreamed, employee-only presentation this week with an expletive-laden meltdown, demanding that attendees tell a senior Meta AI executive that he was 'a piece of sh*t.' One presenter reportedly covered their face with their hands. That outburst, Wired reports, reflects simmering rage inside the three-month-old unit of roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers who have been tasked with supporting the company's AI research ambitions. Employees describe being forced into the group with no real choice: join or quit. Many call themselves 'draftees.' Their assigned work' Generating puzzles and coding problems to train AI models. 'It's literally the gulag,' one employee told Wired. 'Most people find the work soul-crushing,' said another....

Portfolio companies that fit that thesis include LatAm neobank Nubank; fleet safety management startup Motive; WeTravel, which is a tool for travel agents; Happy Robot, which develops agents for enterprises; and coffee chain Blank Street. It is also exploring vision models and world models ' the equivalent of LLMs for visual understanding. If AI could truly understand every pixel and atom in a construction site, that will unlock robotics, Ajao said. The firm invests at seed through Series B. From the early-stage fund, Base10 plans each year to make 10 to 15 seed investments, and two to three at Series A. The Series B fund, roughly equal in size, will make three to four investments each year. 'We might ask what IT support firms look like when you have AI, or what the software stack of the modern restaurant is,' said Ajao. The firm tries to meet every company globally operating in that space. It spends roughly 50% of its time with companies that are not fundraising, with 90% of investments made due to its research....