Volute Is Using AI to Extend Executive Education

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One bright spot in the challenged higher ed landscape is executive education. It’s built for adult learners and company leaders and often funded by employers. That makes for an attractive but intensely competitive market.

Today on the Angel Nest, we meet Volute, a company that is using AI to expand and enhance executive learning. We’ll talk to Elmer Almachar. He’s an early adopter from Northwestern University and one of Volute’s lead investors, Jean Hammond.

She’s an edtech expert who says executive education is an island of profitability. She’s betting on Volute along with founder Michael Croft, and they’re both here to tell us why. Welcome back to the Angel Nest, where real angel investors and entrepreneurs partner to build great companies.

I’m David Hemenway. I’m a five-time founder and an active angel investor, and my mission here is to tell the stories that are powering innovation. It’s a pleasure to welcome Michael Croft, the founder of Volute, and Jean Hammond, one of his lead investors.

Jean, the co-founder and general partner at LearnLaunch, a venture firm exclusively focused on edtech and the future of work. Over the past decade, she’s backed and supported dozens of companies that are working to transform how people learn from early childhood through workforce development. Jean and Michael, welcome to the Angel Nest.

Thanks for being here. Thank you. Thanks.

Michael, tell us how Volute works and how it improves and extends executive education. Yeah, we worked extensively with the business school market for many years with AI having such a rapid transformation impact on business. Business schools are finding that there’s a widening gap between what they teach the workforce and where the workforce actually are and live today.

And so we needed to find a way to bridge that gap. Specifically, how could we reimagine the way business schools deliver learning? And we found our focus in executive education. And the reason is exec ed is the most market-facing part of the institution.

It’s the closest to industry. It’s often the largest revenue driver. And the pressure of being able to deliver up-to-date information to the workforce hits them the hardest.

So the way we partner with these business schools is to attach these live communities to executive education programs. These communities are made of participants who are leaders in industry, alumni, faculty, industry experts. And Volute brings those people together in real time to solve emerging business challenges.

Jean, EdTech is known as a particularly difficult space to penetrate and sometimes a hard space for investors to finance. Yet there are huge success stories like Canvas and Blackboard and some others. You are an expert in the field and you are very enthusiastic about Volute.

Please tell us why. Yes, it is a slow-moving market in terms of the adoption rate of products into the industry. But business schools can be very fast and particularly fast followers once they see each other trying things.

I’m excited about this company because it feels like it’s hitting two things at the same time. Business is struggling to stay up-to-date with the latest news, with real research that was done on their problems and problems very much like theirs. And so a real-time interface with the business school is a great way to do that.

They’re already sending people back to the executive ed programs, but they’d love it to keep going. They don’t want it to end. And on the other hand, the universities are facing a really tough environment, lots of change and they’re not good at change.

And so the business schools being able to spot the idea that we can use AI to pull the side off of the university and open up our deep knowledge to the industry in ways that we can actually support them is really exciting. So the safety of a sort of walled garden of conversation about the real problems that includes the professors and grad students being able to see inside the problem at the same time that the business people and practitioners can actually describe, no, that’s not what I need. I need to work on this.

So that’s a really powerful combination and very much today because everybody’s looking, how can I bring AI in a way that it’s meaningful instead of that it just is one more bot doing one more bot thing. Yeah. And it strikes me that this really addresses one of the concerns about higher ed, which is that it’s not on the ground and contemporary and solving current problems.

Michael, it seems like this really gives you an opportunity to help your schools combat that. Yeah. I think especially with executive education, what’s interesting, what we learned is one of the largest value propositions is that the network itself, meeting other leaders and other organizations that are solving similar challenges to you, or they’ve already solved it and getting outside organizational perspective is invaluable.

But to your point, it stops when the program ends, where the most value from that network comes when you need it, which happens on the job when real things are happening in real time. And so for us to create this live channel between business schools and industry, where business schools become the eyes and ears of industry for the first time, getting real time insight so they can adapt. And we are now seeing an inflection point in a new generation of programs too.

All programs now are dealing with AI. Imagine we’re in a world where leaders have to think, how do I manage a team of humans and AI bots? And so the way in which we have to change people’s mindsets has to happen in real time, and it has to have a closer relationship between academia and industry. Jean, I’m also betting that business schools are going to love anything that connects them to their successful alums.

Yes, absolutely. People who are using, who’ve been to school, see the value in it and understand that and then want to keep being engaged is a really powerful driver. And businesses are doing things like going back to spend time on a campus with some of the major business schools, but that’s so expensive.

It’s not in the purpose of today’s work. It’s more sitting back, sage on the stage from the old days. And that’s not what people need.

People need the answers that they’re working on. How can I find the person with the most expertise in this area? How can I start a dialogue that involves both the academic insights as well as the real time worldview? It feels like real time use cases. And Michael, you have some real traction.

Tell us about that. We’re leading with five top tier universities. We’re launching this fall.

You’ll be meeting one of them soon. One of our champions and advocates for this. They really are pioneers in the industry.

They’re part of very large school networks. So everyone’s watching and waiting and seeing what is going to happen here, but they’re very excited about it. I also think too that our ability to work with the schools and understand how their participants are wanting to learn today because they’re getting demands that they can’t fulfill too as an institution.

And remember, executive education, these are leaders in industry. And these business schools function by having those relationships, both from becoming employers of their alumni, corporate partnerships, custom programs. It’s a huge business model for business schools.

And we help create a new model, which is this idea of an evergreen ongoing community, which means an evergreen ongoing revenue stream through subscriptions. Just to jump in, the cost of doing a custom program is very expensive because all of the machinery inside of a university is creaky and made for a century ago. And so the idea that they want the kind of individual service that you could get with a custom program, but maybe they want it in a custom environment from Volute that allows them to have the privacy, the feedback space, and the real-time almost slack for business and business schools kind of performance in getting to a conversation.

Gene, is this a turning point for higher ed? Were you surprised when you heard the number of universities, and I know Michael’s got some prestigious ones on his list, that were willing to make such a radical turn and try something different like this? It’s taken him a while to get them really interested, but now that there’s a real movement, people are very excited. You know, the demo of the product really tells people this is something that we need now. And, you know, if you look at the university with research being cut and other things, the business school is kind of a cash cow and executive ed is a cash cow amongst in that mix.

And so it’s a powerful way to really take the best of what is working and make it work even better. So Gene, is most ed tech investment now going to be centered around AI? Well, it’s certainly going to play a major role. It may not be every single thing, because we do need the human in the loop.

We need the human working with the kids, but particularly in the adult learner space, everything’s going to be having an AI component. And so I think that’s important. And, you know, this is what business is about, using AI.

So having the business school be AI enabled with a really sophisticated offering is a pretty powerful story, and Volute’s doing that. And making the universities incredibly contemporary, which is a great thing. Michael, how does Volute actually work? So our secret sauce is really in the way our AI learns the network.

So where most AI products are content-based, we are community-based. And AI learns the characteristics of people and the interactions in the network and helps rally the best people to your cause, to your challenge. Beyond that, once the working group is formed, then we have an AI agent that joins your group.

And that AI agent actually has access to the private, engaged business school’s institutional knowledge, that it can surface in a contextual way, making it relevant to your specific need. And these are things that are not available to public AI. Great.

Jean Hammond, EdTech investor and expert on the future of learning, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. We’re delighted to be able to talk about this topic with a true expert in the field and an early adopter of Volute.

Elmer Almachar is the Managing Director of the Kellogg Global Network and Executive MBA program at Northwestern University. Elmer, it’s a pleasure to welcome you to the Angel Nest. Thank you for joining us.

Tell us how Volute will add value to executive education. Yes, and David, thank you for having me on. Really, there are three areas or three ways about how Volute or how we think that Volute will add value.

And let me start, though, by the challenge. And the challenge is this. As we all know, the age of AI has increased the necessity for learning cycles, not just within business, but certainly within higher education.

And one of the things that we wanted to do, and we knew we had to do at Kellogg, was to figure out how to incorporate AI, certainly, to think about AI as a business challenge. But really, how will AI be a driver for good business decision making? And what our goal always is, is to make good business leaders. For me, and from our perspective, what the true attraction, initial attraction to Volute was, threefold.

Number one, the platform was, and even in its infancy, mature enough for us to be able to see how we could apply it and incorporate it into the learning journey of our students. Now, our students, so I work with executive MBA students, as well as executive education students. They are a little bit older.

They are much more senior than the full-time students. And what we wanted to do was have a platform where we could integrate it into their learning journey, but also into their professional life, just in time, real time. And Volute offered that.

That’s number one. Number two, it also offered a, call it a sandbox for us to be able to develop. That was a large part of the partnership value proposition between Volute and Kellogg.

We wanted to partner with a company that would allow us to explore and would explore with us as we took this agentic AI journey together. And then the third thing was, we needed a platform that was robust enough potentially to then expand beyond the student base into perhaps the alumni base and even around the globe. We have, yes, domestic programs in the United States, but we have partners around the world.

And we wanted a platform that would be robust enough to be expanded globally. So those are the three reasons why we were attracted to Volute. It seems like a natural, something that combines learning in the classroom and case studies taught academically with real world experience and real on the ground situations in day-to-day business.

That sounds like what’s happening here. Absolutely. And let me extend that even more.

We know a large part of the learning takes place in the classroom. That’s obvious. The other large place that it takes is outside the classroom.

So all of our students, it is an in-person program. And that means that they come here over the weekend or sometimes during a week, take classes, and it’s outside the classroom where they talk to each other during that class weekend session that they deepen their learning and really create the practical application knowledge of the things that they learned in the lecture. But here’s the gap that needed to be bridged.

What do you do if you’re not in your cohort weekend experience? What do you do if you’re actually in the real world, in your professional life, being a business leader, having to make rapid decisions in a world where AI has created that need for more rapid learning cycle? That is where Volute, I saw Volute and Kellogg had seen Volute come in. Because you could always, for instance, call a friend. I guess that’s a very old-fashioned way to do it.

But real time, just in time. What if your friend has not had that same experience that you need to learn from? And one of the things that we wanted to do was extend the learning beyond the class weekend and week session. And Volute is a platform that allows for that to happen.

So we call that the community of learning. We wanted to empower the community of learning outside, yes, of the class, but also outside of the in-person class weekend. And that is hugely valuable for any of our students.

Yeah. And it feels like the networking that’s going to happen here is also going to be important as well among the students, and it also gives the university an opportunity to stay in better touch and involve their alumni. Yes.

And Michael Croft and I talked about this, and this is part of our emergent journey together. One of the things that was very important for students and possibly for alums, you know who you know, but you don’t know who you should know. If you have a particular kind of problem and everyone, it’s natural as human, you have a base, a network that you go to, but you’re leaving, as it were, value on the table because there is another potential, not just person, but network out there, especially if you’re facing a problem that no one in your immediate community, no one in your friend group, no one in your immediate network has actually had to face.

How to apply AI, agentic AI, for instance, in healthcare. That probably will not be part of a certain set of your friend’s experience. How do we get that person facing that problem connected with somebody who they don’t know, who has already faced that problem? Well, it turns out a platform driven, like the loot driven by AI, can make that connection.

It can tell you not just who you know, but who you should know. And let’s face it, Omer, we all need more friends. That’s right.

That’s exactly right. I want to bring in Michael Croft, who is, of course, the founder of the loot, and just say congratulations on getting a partner like Northwestern involved so early. That’s just tremendous.

Yeah, Omer’s been fantastic. All of his colleagues, too, at Northwestern University have been pioneers really from early on. Our conversation started with a few other people before I met Omer, and so there’s been a lot of forward thinking at this school, and it was, for me, kind of a breath of fresh air to hear people from the academic side really start to embrace what’s happening out in the real world, what’s happening in business.

And Omer’s been a fantastic partner, and we’ve only just begun. Omer Amachar, Managing Director of the Kellogg Global Network, an executive MBA program at Northwestern University, and an early adopter of Volute. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you, David. Thank you, Omer. David Hemingway.

Thanks for tuning in, and so long until next time.