I keep getting the “What are the most important things I should know about AI?” question—usually when someone needs help now. 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, 29, 30 November. 3, 5, 6, 7, 12, 14, 21, 24, 25, 26

Main Idea

I keep getting the “What are the most important things I should know about AI?” question—usually when someone needs help now. If we were stuck on a long elevator ride, here’s exactly what I’d tell you. 1) Use AI as an amplifier, not a replacer. Everyone wants the robot to do their job. That’s not where we are. Think of AI as handing your smartest teammate a key to the world’s database and a whiteboard. It punches up your ideas and shines a light on blind spots you’ve stopped seeing. Efficiency is nice, but it’s a side effect. The real win is quality of thinking. Example: paste your proposal and ask, “Tighten this to 500 words, surface 5 risks I’m ignoring, and rewrite the intro for a CFO who hates fluff.” 2) Make it interview you—one question at a time. Even a “good” prompt is limited by your initial vision. Flip it. Start with: “Before you create anything, interview me one question at a time to build the perfect prompt. Stop when you have goals, audience, constraints, examples, and success criteria. Then show me the final prompt and run it.” Ten times out of ten you’ll get angles you hadn’t considered. 3) Don’t rely on long-term memory. If you think the tool will parse months of conflicting chats, you’re in trouble. Treat every session like day one. If you need persistence (brand voice, offers, ICP, compliance rules), package it into a lightweight bot you can attach every time. (Reply if you want a quick tutorial to build a bot… I’ll send a short video.) 4) Do daily reps. Like a foreign language, you won’t “learn AI” by reading about it. Use it. Expect some wins, some duds. One meaningful task per day for 30 days and you’ll feel the gears click. If in a month you’re not leaning on AI for daily work, you’re falling behind.

Here’s the play:

This week, pick one recurring deliverable (board update, client recap, forecast). Run it with AI: critique, alternatives, blind spots, then your final. Save the best prompt as a template. Start every new session with the “Interview me” script and require a final prompt you can reuse. Build a simple “memory kit” (or bot) with your evergreen context so every chat starts strong—then still treat each thread like a fresh start. PS: Keep reading for hot-takes on headlines, AI tools, and a personal story + pic

📰 AI News Worth Knowing

🧠 Will AI starve original knowledge? The WSJ warns that if everyone asks AI for answers, the sources (Stack Overflow, Wikipedia) could dry up—like living off index funds without funding discovery. Leaders: keep investing in first-party expertise and knowledge creation. Read Here ✍️ Authors vs. AI: first big checks are (almost) here. A proposed $1.5B settlement tied to ~500,000 books would pay $3,000 per book—but a federal judge just pushed for more detail before approval. Translation: content used to train models is getting priced. Expect more licensing, more audits. Read Here 🎙️ 3,000 AI podcasts… every week. A startup is flooding feeds with $1, one-hour, programmatic-ad episodes that can profit after ~20 listeners. This is content farms for audio. Moats shift to trust, brand, and human POV. Read Here 📈 “AI is a bubble” is lazy thinking. Bubbles are false beliefs that pop; AI is a durable technology wave. The real question isn’t if it lasts—it’s how fast and how deep it rewires your business. Read Here 🔍 Google’s ‘AI Mode’ could default soon. If/when conversational results become the default, expect traffic and measurement to shift—less ten blue links, more comparison/summary pages. Winners adapt content and funnels for conversations, not keywords. Read Here

🛠️ AI Tools You Need to Try

📂 Claude: Upgraded file creation & analysis. What it is: Claude can now create and edit Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and PDFs right inside Claude.ai and the desktop app. How to use it: “Turn these meeting notes + this CSV into a 6-slide Q4 forecast deck and an Excel with formulas for scenario A/B.” Sanity-check outputs, then ship. Try it 🧰 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

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From the Field: 🧗‍♂️ Telluride: 400 Feet of Exposure, Real Trust

This photo is me on the Telluride Via Ferrata with a few YPO friends—about 400 feet of sheer exposure beneath my boots. I love adrenaline activities my body and brain insist I shouldn’t do. They make me feel alive and, more importantly, remind me I can push past self-imposed limitations and come out the other side better. I’ve been in YPO for 10 years, and it’s one of the most important things I’ve ever done. Yes, it gets me on trips like this. But the real value is the people—sharp, trustworthy peers who show up in the good times and the bad with honest feedback and experience shares. That community has made me a better person and a stronger business leader. The business lesson: AI adoption can feel like cliff exposure—your instincts say “don’t.” Clip into a system (process + prompts), choose a rope team you trust, and move one secure placement at a time. Fear is loud; systems are quiet. Trust your clip, not your fear. 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