Dirty dog then clean dog. Magnus LOVES getting a bath.

The Top AI Capabilities Every Executive Should Be Using Right Now (But Probably Aren't) Why learning to build apps in ChatGPT, automate spreadsheets in Claude, and schedule research in Gemini matters more than understanding how LLMs work.

While you're still explaining to your team what ChatGPT is, someone in your industry is running automated competitive analysis every morning before their first coffee, building financial models through conversation, and creating presentation-ready visualizations without touching PowerPoint.

From Gemini Prompt to Google Slides in 10 Minutes. Your Team Still Needs 10 Hours. Here's Why That Matters. When competitors draft three narrative approaches in the time your team builds one slide deck, that's not a productivity gap, it's a strategic capability gap.

Some teams are still scheduling "deck week." Others type a prompt in Gemini, export to Slides, and spend that week sharpening strategy instead. The time asymmetry is creating a capability asymmetry.
www.smithstephen.com/p/from-gemin...

AI in Action: Practical Tools for Immediate Impact - Wednesday November 5, @6:30 PM, Santa Monica For alumni of The Wharton Business School in the Southern California region

www.whartonsocal.com/ai_in_action...

If you are in the LA Area on November 5, please join Lauren Eve Cantor and I for AI in Action....sign up link in the comments

Why Google’s Vertical Integration Creates a Formidable Moat in the AI Race The company that owns search, chips, models, and cloud infrastructure just posted 35% growth in enterprise AI. Every other player is missing at least two of those pieces.

Google just posted their first $100 billion quarter. But the revenue number isn't the story. It's the $155 billion in signed cloud contracts, the custom chips giving them structural cost advantages, and the fact that they're the only company that owns every layer of the AI stack simultaneously.

Everyone Has ChatGPT. Only Some Are Getting Faster. Usage is standard. ROI is measured. The constraint shifted. Leaders who build internal capability while competitors buy seats will own the next twelve months.

Everyone has access to the same AI tools now. The gap opening up is between leaders who are measuring throughput and building skills versus those still celebrating pilot launches and counting users.
www.smithstephen.com/p/everyone-h...

The $0 AI Browser Upgrade: How Chrome Is Killing Competitors Without Asking You to Switch The real competitive moat isn't AI features - it's shipping them inside infrastructure your teams already trust, with policy controls your CISO will actually approve.

Everyone's writing about AI browser features. Chrome isn't winning because it's blocking innovation - it's winning because Google's embedding AI into infrastructure that 3 billion people already trust.

Stop Waiting for IT: How to Ship Custom AI Tools in an Afternoon Why Claude Skills are spreading faster than agent frameworks: they're simple to govern, easy to standardize, and useful on day one. Copy these two builds and prove ROI this week.

The gap between 'cool AI demo' and 'tool my team actually uses' is where most adoption dies. Claude Skills closes that gap. They're small, reusable, governable, and useful on day one. I've included two complete builds with exact instructions: one for family law, one for RevOps. .

The AI Productivity Stack Just Got Practical: Four Launches Worth Your Attention Four AI launches that work where your team already works, with clear pilots you can run next week.

Stop asking your team to copy-paste into separate AI chat windows. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic just shipped tools that embed directly into browsers, spreadsheets, and screens. Here's the playbook: what each launch means, specific use cases, and how to pilot them with clear success metrics.

Stop Hiring AI Agents. Start Supervising Them. How to build retrieval systems, review gates, and economic models that turn agent hype into compounding returns.

Andrej Karpathy says this is the decade of agents, not the year. I translated his latest interview into 10 action items for leaders who need to separate production-ready AI from demo magic. The biggest shift? Stop trying to hire agents and start supervising them.

Claude Skills: Turn Your Best Process Into Repeatable AI Work Teach your AI once. Get the same quality every time. No heroic prompts required.

If you're paying $25 per user per month for AI and people are still copying prompts from Slack, you have a systems problem. Claude's just-launched Skills solves it by turning your tribal knowledge into reusable playbooks. Here's how to pilot this with your team in three days.

The Monday Morning Problem: How to Turn AI Curiosity Into Lasting Behavior Change The simple practice routine that turns impressive demos into measurable time savings and better work

Your team sat through the AI demo, nodded enthusiastically, then did nothing by Friday. That gap between curiosity and behavior change is where most AI initiatives die. Here's the field-tested framework that gets people from 'impressive' to 'I use this daily' in 30 days.

Stop Guessing When You'll Hit Your AI Limit. Google Just Put Usage Math in Plain Sight AI Studio's new usage dashboard turns 'maybe we can try this' into 'here's exactly what 10,000 requests per day will unlock for us

The number one question after any AI demo: 'How much can we actually use before we get throttled or surprised by a bill?' AI Studio now answers that up front with per-model caps visible in the dashboard. Turns out transparency accelerates adoption.
www.smithstephen.com/p/stop-guess...

How to Get Claude to Create PowerPoint Slides in Your Corporate Template (Step-by-Step) Because Your Boss Cares About Brand Consistency, and You Care About Your Sanity

I just spent hours figuring out how to get Claude Sonnet 4.5 to create PowerPoint presentations in actual corporate templates (not just generic slides that ignore your brand).

The Junior Analyst Who Never Sleeps: How Claude Sonnet 4.5 Became the Office MVP No Coffee Breaks, No Small Talk, and Somehow Still Better at Excel Than Brad from Finance

Most AI office tools feel like toys. Claude Sonnet 4.5 creates actual .xlsx files your CFO can audit, Word docs that pass legal review, and PowerPoint decks that don't embarrass you at 9 a.m. standups. Here's what I learned using it for real work, not demos.
www.smithstephen.com/p/the-junior...

AI Workslop isn’t an AI problem. It’s a management problem. Your team's polished PowerPoints are actually expensive paperweights, and ChatGPT isn't the one to blame

4 in 10 workers are drowning in "AI workslop”: polished decks that look finished but leave receivers doing all the thinking. Cost to a 10K-person company? Millions. The fix isn't another AI tool; it's management 101: clear standards, better editing, measuring value, not volume.

Fork Your AI Conversations: Why Power Users Branch Their Chats Finally, a Way to Have Your Cake and Edit It Too

Ever spent 20 minutes rewriting a prompt because you wanted to try a different approach but didn't want to lose what you already had? Turns out there's a better way. All three major AI platforms now have branching built in. Here's how to use it:

Most Americans Have Heard of AI. Few Actually Use It. Here's What That Gap Means for Leaders Fresh Gallup data reveals why your AI rollout might be stalling and five practical fixes that actually work

Turns out your Gen Z employees aren't your biggest AI believers, and your team cares more about security than ROI. Fresh survey data from 3,000+ Americans just flipped several boardroom assumptions on their head. Turns out that your training budget matters more than your tech stack.

We were talking a few days ago about how Claude can now edit Office documents (Word, Powerpoint, Excel, PDF). They dropped a new feature today - they can edit word documents and use track changes. I tried it this morning and it was amazing. Wow! Well done, Anthropic! 😉

The Great AI Split: Humans Want Advice at 10 PM, Systems Want Automation at Scale Fresh data from OpenAI and Anthropic reveals writing beats code, context beats price, and your best ROI might be helping people edit emails faster

New data from OpenAI and Anthropic just dropped: 75% of AI conversations happen after work hours, and people use it more for rewriting emails than writing code. Turns out the AI revolution is happening at 10 PM in home offices, not in your innovation lab. Here's what that means for your Q1 strategy

From ChatGPT to Court Sanctions: Why Public AI Tools Are Professional Malpractice Waiting to Happen Your Client, Your Signature, Your Problem: A Guide to the Legal AI Minefield

The legal profession has survived fax machines, email, and track changes. They'll survive AI too, but only if firms stop treating it like a first-year associate who doesn't need supervision. New article on why your firm needs an AI policy that's more sophisticated than 'don't get caught.'

When The Curves Cross: AI, Robots, and the Next Ten Years We Can’t Ignore The real divide isn’t industries; it’s adopters vs. non-adopters on the same team - so re-skill and redesign now.

AI-augmented workers are creating a diamond-shaped workforce where one person equals yesterday's entire team. If you can't name three AI experiments running in your organization today, you're not behind - you're competing in a different century.
www.smithstephen.com/p/when-the-c...

Claude just started handing you finished files, not advice Finally, an AI that ships excel and powerpoint slides, not just vibes.

I asked for a model, a memo, and three slides. Claude replied with attachments, not adjectives. If your week runs on decks and spreadsheets, this will save you real hours.
www.smithstephen.com/p/claude-jus...

The $1.5 Billion Question: What Anthropic's Copyright Settlement Really Means for Creative Work At $3,000 per book, Anthropic just proved that training AI on human creativity costs less than a month's cloud computing bill

Anthropic just paid $1.5B to settle with authors, proving that disrupting an industry is expensive - but not THAT expensive. Breaking down what the largest copyright settlement in history really costs (spoiler: it's less than their weekly AI training budget).
www.smithstephen.com/p/the-15-bil...

Context is Capacity: How to Stop Paying for an AI That Can't Remember Forget the marketing hype. We break down the one number that actually determines an AI’s power for real work - context window size - and why the gap between tiers is wider than you think.

That feeling when a colleague asks a question you've already answered? That's your AI hitting its context limit. This piece explains how choosing the right AI tier is one of the most important productivity decisions you'll make this year.
www.smithstephen.com/p/context-is...

It’s Google’s World, We’re All Just Living In It Default is destiny - Gemini now lives in your inbox, your pocket, and (Siri-ously) maybe your iPhone.

Everyone argues about the smartest AI model. Meanwhile, Google shows up where you work, Search, Gmail, Sheets, and your phone. The court didn’t break them up. Siri may soon phone a friend; the compounding gets real.  
www.smithstephen.com/p/its-google...

Claude flips the privacy default, opt out before September 28 Treat this like the “do not swim with the hair dryer” label for your data, funny until it isn’t

Claude just flipped the privacy default for consumer accounts. I explain what changed, why it matters if you discuss client or company work in AI tools, and the exact steps to turn training off. Read it, switch the setting, and share with your team before Sep 28.
www.smithstephen.com/p/claude-fli...

Summer 2025 in AI: what changed, what matters, and what’s next From GPT-5 and Claude 4.1 to Grok 4 and Pixel 10, here’s what changed and why it matters

Summer AI moved from demos to deliverables: GPT-5, Claude 4.1, Grok 4, Pixel 10, and yes, Nano Banana topping the charts. I pulled the whole season into a plain-English brief for busy leaders.
www.smithstephen.com/p/summer-202...

If Apple Lets Google Fix Siri, That's Not Surrender. It's Strategy. Perfection is pretty, shipping is profitable

Apple loves certainty, AI deals in probabilities. That friction explains the stall and the rumor mill. I lay out what a Google tie-up would require, where it could bite, and why it might be the fastest path to a smarter Siri.
www.smithstephen.com/p/if-apple-l...