Unburdn AI: 🧗 No Silver Bullets. Just Reps. Most leaders still treat AI like buying Excel in 1997: cut a PO, roll it out, become “AI-enabled.” View this email in your browser

The Weekly AI Briefing

🧑‍🏫 Latest AI thoughts, tools, and news from unburdn Scheduling. Full-day sessions available: September. Sold out October. 6, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30 November. 3, 5, 6, 7, 12, 14, 21, 24, 25, 26

Main Idea

Most leaders still treat AI like buying Excel in 1997: cut a PO, roll it out, become “AI-enabled.” That’s why you’re seeing the new MIT headlines about most AI projects fizzling. It’s not that the tech can’t deliver; it’s that we keep treating transformation like a one-time software install instead of a new way of working. Think fitness, not liposuction—you don’t buy abs; you earn them with reps, coaching, and culture. My take (now backed by data): there are no silver bullets. If your team touches words, images, numbers, or sounds, you’re going to use AI—and the hard part is rewiring how you plan, collaborate, QA, and learn. Even at Unburdn, an AI training and implementation shop, we sometimes catch ourselves “doing it the old way.” We have to keep reminding the team: if we’re not amplifying with AI, we’re leaving money on the table. Even OpenAI is leaning into the human side: skills, training, and certifications—because capability beats licenses. Software doesn’t transform companies—people do.

Here’s the play:

Crawl: Baseline everyone on practical AI fluency; one shared playbook; one shared glossary. Walk: Reinforce weekly with use-case reviews, KPIs, and lightweight guardrails (prompts, checklists, red-team). Run: Pick your path—(1) build internal experts, (2) upskill a few to lead, or (3) nail proficiency then bring us in to scale. PS: Keep reading for hot-takes on headlines, AI tools, and a personal story + pic Also, a personal story about how I lost ~$4.3M

📰 AI News Worth Knowing

🤹 Adoption flips when AI feels magical. New research shows lower AI literacy often increases first-use. If you ship AI features, lead with delight and add “just-in-time” literacy where errors happen. Product, CX, and L&D can copy this sequence to boost activation without bloated onboarding. Read Here. 💘 AI as a romantic partner is no fringe thing. 16% of singles have tried it; 33% of Gen Z have; many users rate AI more supportive—and women are most likely to call AI-dating “cheating.” Culture shift ≠ hypothetical—plan for customer norms and HR policies that match reality. Read Here. 🧰 China’s “AI+” strategy: stack cheap, practical wins. While the U.S. chases AGI, China is scaling application-first plays with unit-cost discipline. For your Q4 roadmap: pick three workflows, ship narrow agents, measure cycle time + cost, then replicate. Implementation beats moonshots for the next 12–24 months. Read Here. 🧭 A sober 2027 forecast to de-hype your planning. Use this as a budget sanity check: assume slower progress, define falsifiable markers (e.g., real coding lift, autonomous agents that ship), and double down on what works today. Leaders: read before betting the farm on agents. Read Here. 📈 Traders actually lean on ChatGPT—and markets feel it. During ChatGPT outages, trading volume dropsand price impact/variance shrink, especially when fresh news hits; effects show ~30 minutes in. Treat GenAI uptime like market microstructure: route around outages or exploit the slower tape. Read Here.

🛠️ AI Tools You Need to Try

🎨 Google Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) What it is: Google’s new image-editing model for fast, high-quality edits (blend photos, swap backgrounds, keep faces consistent). How to use it: Mock campaign visuals, swap product packaging, or generate variant concepts in minutes. Ask it: “Make this shot look like a fall catalog—golden hour, knit textures, keep the model’s face consistent.” Then iterate. Try it here. 🧰 Unburdn’s Vault. A curated library of AI tools mapped to Crawl → Walk → Run stages. Great cheat‑sheet for leveling up your team’s stack. Explore Here.

📢 Take Action

You can’t outsource endurance—AI rewards the teams that keep showing up. Book us with a “Reply” or go here[Subscribe

From the Field: 🪙 A $4.3M Friction Lesson

Below is a photo my October 2013 Bitcoin ledger — ~39 BTC for $5,000. To buy them I wired money to Slovenia; the bank nearly blocked it until I gave them a fraud waiver. Then came the wallet maze: first a clunky wallet, then “somewhere safer.” When the price 10×’d I tried to cash out just a few chips: another platform, funds stuck, and 48 hours of scrambling to move everything to a brokerage and liquidate. I ended up rage-selling all of them. Walked with ~$50,000 and felt like a genius. Today, those coins would be ~$4.3M. The real cost was overreaction to friction. Why it matters for AI: Many tried AI, hit friction, and quit—that’s the $4.3M mistake. The barriers are falling fast. We’re building at Unburdn to make AI ROI nearly frictionless. Don’t tap out while others compound. Thanks for reading. 🙏 Copyright (C) 2025 AI for the Rest of Us LLC dba Unburdn. All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe