Alchemist Chicago — the deep tech accelerator partnership between the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Alchemist — today announced the startups selected for Phase 2 of its inaugural cohort.
Salesforce AI leader Manjeet Singh breaks down where enterprise AI is delivering real ROI, where it fails, and how founders can build defensible AI startups.
In this episode of the Alchemist Influencer Series, Ravi sits down with veteran technologist Marcelo Calbucci, drawing on three decades of experience at Microsoft and Amazon to cut through the AI hype.
In this episode of the Alchemist Influencer Series, Ravi sits down with Silicon Valley legend Amr Awadallah, co-founder and former CTO of Cloudera, to unpack why 95% of enterprise AI initiatives fail and what it really takes to build AI that survives beyond the demo stage.
In this episode of the Alchemist Influencer Series, Ravi sits down with Dr. Shelby Heinecke, Senior AI Researcher at Salesforce, to explore why small language models are poised to reshape the future of AI. Shelby breaks down how compact models unlock breakthroughs in privacy, speed, and on-device intelligence—often outperforming larger models on specialized enterprise tasks. She shares where the biggest opportunities lie for founders, how high-quality training data becomes a true moat, and why the next wave of AI innovation will come from systems where big and small models work together.
In this episode of the Alchemist Influencer Series, Ravi sits down with Arjun Prakash, Co-Founder and CEO of DistylAI, to break down how artificial intelligence is reshaping competition across the business landscape. Arjun explains why AI is dramatically strengthening both large enterprises and nimble startups—while leaving mid-size companies dangerously exposed. He explores how reasoning-based AI assistants will transform operations, why cost structures are collapsing across industries, and what leaders must do to stay competitive in an era where AI widens the gap between the giants and the scrappy newcomers.
In this episode of the Alchemist Influencer Series, Ravi sits down with Yohei Nakajima, General Partner at Untapped Capital and creator of BabyAGI, the first open-source autonomous agent framework. Together, they explore how hands-on experimentation and curiosity fuel innovation in AI. Yohei reflects on what he’s learned building at night and investing by day, the unexpected challenges of bringing AI agents into enterprises, and why his advice for leaders is simple: have fun, experiment, and make friends.
