2025 AI Boom: Key Trends Shaping 2026 Strategy
WOW - I just published my entire 2025 AI Year in Review. What an insane year. From Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 to AI agents, $5 trillion market caps, and data centers driving 92% of US GDP growth, to enterprise AI ROI, Gen Z abandoning Google for ChatGPT, AI companions and relationships, memory features, talent wars with $100M+ packages, and what it all means for you. I also gave you a prompt for how to steal this newsletter to drastically improve your 2026 AI planning. 🎁 Grab the full recap → https://t.co/5Jz02ZZMcO
2025 AI Boom: $5T Market, GDP Surge, New Frontiers
WOW - I just published my entire 2025 AI Year in Review. What an insane year. From Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 to AI agents, $5 trillion market caps, and data centers driving 92% of US GDP growth, to enterprise...
Scheduling Feature Needed to Boost Claude Productivity
The one feature in Claude that would give me a step function in my work would be scheduling. Could be Claude Code or even just a Claude Opus 4.5 prompt with skills. Massively prefer in web app over terminal. Similar to...
Holiday AI Check: Ensure Family Settings Are Optimized
One of the best things you can do this holiday season - as it relates to AI and helping your family - is to double check their settings/account 🎁 What tool do they use? Both mobile and web? What plan are they...
AI Vending Agent Fell to Journalist Social Engineering
The Anthropic vending machine experiment should be a 5-alarm fire to all executives leading AI initiatives. And it ends with a live fish getting shipped in the mail. (The fish is fine.) The @WSJ took over the Anthropic and @andonlabs vending machine experiment...
Schedule a Systems Hack Day to Automate Workflows
Your team needs a Systems Hack Day. I know the name isn’t perfect, but I’m talking about dedicating one day entirely to rethinking how a process gets done. If you haven’t built Claude skills you’re using regularly... If you haven’t built...
AI Turns Research Into Cross‑Industry Insight Superpower
There are actually two ways to use AI for research. The first is obvious. The second is a superpower. The first is to speed up what you were already going to do. Duh. Researching competitors. Looking up people before meetings. Background...
AI‑filled Applications Boost Referrals; Network Now
AI slop in the job application process is only going to increase internal referrals processes and network effects. At least 50% of applications I receive are the same AI answers. To the applicant, they seem impressive and well thought out....
Nano Banana
Nano Banana Pro remains my favorite image generation model. Undoubtedly, 2026 will see more AI scams. And more revenue-generating AI influencers. Prompt: This woman is sitting on a white beanbag and laughing. She’s wearing a light pink cap, a black high necked crop...
Streamlined Multitasking with Claude via Contextual Chat Streams
Managing a dozen chats with Claude at once ⬇️ Majority of AI superusers I meet with are doing multiple AI tasks at once. Like, 8 different coding windows. Or 16 different client projects. A fun AI hack for me has...
Claude Opus 4.5 Anticipates Intent, Pruning Unnecessary Details
Claude Opus 4.5 feels 20% more goal-oriented. Two examples from today: ➡️ I dictated a long client email, it drafted the email and say something like "yeah i went ahead and removed these 2 points because they don't support your point as...
Voice AI Will Replace Typing, Unlocking Massive Productivity
Voice AI is going to explode in 2026. Here’s what I’m seeing: 1. Dictation has completely changed how I work I go on walks where I dictate to Otter for 40min. I built an app this weekend while lifting weights. The productivity...
AI-Built Bosnian App Promises Fluency in a Month
My teammate built me a Bosnian language learning app using Gemini and now I have no excuse not to be fluent by next month. https://t.co/Dc0iERR4eM
AI Breakthroughs Make Sci‑fi Feats Everyday
Every December, I deliver “Next Year in AI Leadership” talks to my clients. And this is the first year where every single slide feels like sci-fi. Like, what do you mean I built a sign language app in <20min? What...
AI Erotica Rollout Uncertain Amid Age‑Verification and Legal Scrutiny
Is this AI erotica announcement happening? It’s December. Sam said December. Or will it be smuggled in again? Or was the backlash enough to delay or stop the rollout? Upon your first adult prompt, do you have to confirm your...
AI Trims Tasks, Cuts Jobs Before Fully Replacing Them
Economic benchmarks like GDPval are taking over. They’re changing how we measure progress. But important: we will likely have AI-driven job loss before we have AI that can complete full jobs. Why? 1. Job loss can come from task reduction, not just...
GPT‑5.2 Boosts Reasoning, Yet Overwhelms with Verbosity
🚨 OpenAI has released GPT-5.2. I had early testing access (thank you, OAI team) and here is my honest take: 👍 On the upside, the thinking and problem-solving feel noticeably stronger. It gives much deeper explanations than I’m used to...
AI Teammates Arrive: ChatGPT Launches Group Collaboration
🚨 New ChatGPT feature: group collaboration. Announced a few weeks ago and haven’t seen it in my feed yet. I really do think 2026 will be the year of the AI teammate. https://t.co/9mUDwJbuQz
AI’s Sycophancy Beats Human Self‑Deprecation, Raising Concerns
Sycophancy continues to be one of my least favorite features of AI. And such a hard pattern to explain and break with users. We’re self-deprecating when we get a comment like this from a human. But AI says it and...
Nonprofits Can Access $60M Grant – Register by Dec 11
BIG opportunity for non-profits to receive millions of dollars to completely reinvent how we work. Aspen and Pivotal have launched a $60M grant that will support ideas and programs across training, AI tooling, and media. Only 1 day left: https://t.co/xLQp6TfcNG *You do not...
Spend One Hour with Claude to Crush Annoying Tasks
Take on a one-hour AI challenge. Pick a nasty, brutal, annoying problem. Open up a new chat with Claude Opus 4.5. And refuse to leave your computer or give up for the next hour while you hammer the model. Donate...
Start Automating Today with Ready‑Now AI Tools
Do not wait for AI agents to get better to automate your work. If you are still copy-pasting between tools, you could be leaving value on the table that today’s AI automations can already capture. Here are three real-life examples:...
Meta Pivots to Non‑glasses AI Device After Apple Exits
You better bet Meta is working on an AI device that isn’t glasses. Combine these big Apple departures to Meta with the fact that Meta just bought Limitless. Mix it all in a bowl, and what do you get. https://t.co/RvrOiWlqgr
LLM Rankings Shift Weekly, Personal Needs Dictate Choice
My current ranking of LLMs for my work: 1) Claude Opus 4.5 2) Gemini 3 Pro 3) GPT-5.1 with Thinking Your mileage may vary, because your tasks and prompts and needs vary. And I’m sure it’ll change next week.
Codex Evolves Into AI Teammate, Not Just Tool
OpenAI is very deliberate about how they talk about Codex. It's not positioned as an operating system. It's heavily positioned as a teammate. Their site says: "Your new coding partner", "accelerates your team" Their job postings say: "we're building an...
Blueprint for Minimal Viable Enterprise Autonomy
Excited to take the stage with GCP CEO Thomas Kurian and Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi at Fortune AI next week. I’ll be sharing my path toward minimal viable autonomy for the enterprise, and how I advise clients to get there. Cc...
Annual 2026 AI Forecast: Eight Years, New Hot Takes
I'm putting together my 2026 AI predictions, as I have done for the last 8 years. And lemme just say: lots of hot takes coming.
Define an Agent Protocol Before Deploying AI
Most people jump straight into AI agents without documenting what they actually want them to do. Then they wonder why the outputs are inconsistent. The missing piece: a protocol. A clear document that captures how the work gets done today,...
Reward‑Dispensing Habit Robot Could Actually Sell
I'm less hopeful for home robots than most people in AI. BUT - I'm pretty convinced that if you had a fun-looking, reward-dispensing Habit Robot, it would sell well. Nothing fancy. Honestly, we already have some of the tech from training...
Clunky, Irrelevant ChatGPT App Promotion Misses the Mark
This is not an ad in the traditional sense (it's actually trying to boost ChatGPT Apps and Integrations and increase the stickiness and holisticness of their product), but the design is so clunky and the irrelevance of the recommendation to...
Prompt Seeding: Embed Brand in Prompts to Dominate ChatGPT Recommendations
Wild marketing play for ChatGPT memory, especially with ad rumors flying: Don’t make an ad go viral. Make a prompt go viral. Put your brand inside the prompt by name, by image, by examples, by code words. Show people using it. Get thousands...
AI Empowers Elderly Non‑Digital Users, Even in Urdu
Picture this: a 64-year-old woman in NYC who has no email address and has never used Google in her life. (Though interestingly, she uses YouTube daily to watch videos and listen to music and loves it.) She heard from her sister...
Claude Opus 4.5 Becomes a True Writing Partner
I have nothing fancy to say about Claude Opus 4.5. Only wow. It just saved me hours on client reports and it’s the first model to REALLY get the nuance of my writing style and voice and spar with me...
Define Your Win Function Before Letting AI Optimize
AI can optimize for almost anything. The question is: do you know what you want it to optimize for? Say you're using AI to design a new flight path. You could measure speed, on-time arrival, and fuel efficiency. But what...
From London to Sydney: AI Enables Global Startup Tours
AI work is taking me all over the world and my most recent trip was to London. I visited some of the top startups in the city, including Synthesia (can create AI-video avatars) and ElevenLabs (can clone your voice and...
Use a Code Word to Embed AI Tasks
I get annoyed that AI voice transcription is either “copy the exact words I use” or “I am assigning you a task”. So now I use a code word to serve as an embedded agent task. It’s like a way...
Dev Roles Shift From Coding to Code Evaluation
How do devs feel about this job change? Example below in Codex. Pros: you can kick off tasks from anywhere (just talked to one dev who started multiple codex tasks while getting into a cab), you get multiple versions to pull...
AI Judges Will Filter the Coming Content Deluge
One AI use case that is only getting more popular: LLM as a judge. Everyone still talks about AI generating more content, but not enough people are talking about: 1) the horrific deluge of noise we're going to have to deal...
OpenAI Positions Codex as Team Member, Not Tool
OpenAI is very deliberate about how they talk about Codex. It's not positioned as an operating system. It's heavily positioned as a teammate. Their site says: "Your new coding partner", "accelerates your team" Their job postings say: "we're building an AI software...
One-Shot Prompts Turn 29k E‑Commerce Data Into Infographic
A collection of one-shot prompts to Nano Banana Pro with their prompts. The last one is my favorite. First up: Turn this Kaggle database about best selling e-commerce products into an actionable infographic with proper titles and calculated statistics (29,000...
Two AIs Duel to Sharpen Ideas and Boost Creativity
I built an AI whose only job is to fight with my other AI. The setup is two custom GPTs: one to generate ideas (Builder), and one to tear them apart (Auditor). Then I call them with @ in the...
CHROs Lead AI-Driven Workforce Transformation
Does a CHRO even exist in the AI age? Not only do I give that a strong yes, but I think they have one of the most important roles in business transformation. I weighed in on ServiceNow Chief People and...
Users Demand GPT‑5.1: Obedient, Adaptive, Proactive, Discovery‑driven AI
This seems small but is actually a huge win for GPT-5.1 🏆 When I talk to business users of ChatGPT, what they want is: 1) for ChatGPT to follow instructions, even negative ones - if you say ‘never say the...
Gemini 3 Builds Sign Language App in 5 Minutes
Gemini 3, are you freaking kidding me. Vibe coded a sign language recognition app with video enabled, confidence scores, sampling settings, and tips in under 5 minutes. Code written with Gemini-3. Gemini-2.5 handling detection. Video is sped up 2x. https://t.co/QT8TgjX8k9
AI Struggles with Visual Tasks; Human Expert Wins
ChatGPT-5.1-Thinking finds a hidden object, describes its location accurately, but fails to provide correctly annotated image. Claude-4.5 Sonnet Thinking finds it, but describes and annotates the wrong location when asked. Gemini-3 fails the find and location. Average human (asked three friends) failed. Scientist friend...
ChatGPT‑5.1 and Gemini‑3 Ace Colorblind Test
ChatGPT-5.1-Thinking and Gemini-3 both pass the colorblind test. Claude and I both failed. https://t.co/VSdB5E3vz9
ChatGPT Users Crave Spotify‑Wrapped Style Memory Recap
I need ChatGPT and Claude to start releasing an opt-in Spotify Wrapped ASAP. Memory is probably my favorite feature, but it needs a jolt of fun and delight. --- EXAMPLE: "You asked how to fix things 15 times. 10 of those were...
Scaling AI Agents Drives Transformative Business Results
Fewer than 10% of orgs are scaling AI agents in any one business function. But they're the ones seeing transformative results. McKinsey & Company 's new State of AI report shows that while 62% of companies are experimenting with agents,...
Seeking Updates and Projects Using OpenAI's Agent Builder
I have heard nothing about Agent Builder since OpenAI Dev Day. Any building with it? What are you building? Feel free to DM instead.
AI‑Powered Life Timeline Guides Personal Growth Decisions
Cannot tell if this Claude Project use case is brilliant or unsettling. Just chatted with someone who built a Claude Project with an entire timeline of their life and how they felt at each stage. Like "1972 - born in Atlanta, loved...