I keep getting the âWhat are the most important things I should know about AI?â questionâusually when someone needs help now.
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The Weekly AI Briefing
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Main Idea
I keep getting the â
What are the most important things I should know about AI?â questionâusually when someone needs help
now. If we were stuck on a long elevator ride, hereâs exactly what Iâd tell you.
1) Use AI as an amplifier, not a replacer.
Everyone wants the robot to do their job. Thatâs not where we are. Think of AI as handing your smartest teammate a key to the
worldâs database and a whiteboard. It punches up your ideas and shines a light on blind spots youâve stopped seeing. Efficiency is nice, but itâs a side effect. The real win is
quality of thinking. Example: paste your proposal and ask, â
Tighten this to 500 words, surface 5 risks Iâm ignoring, and rewrite the intro for a CFO who hates fluff.â
2) Make it interview youâone question at a time.
Even a âgoodâ prompt is limited by your initial vision. Flip it. Start with:
âBefore 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.â Ten times out of ten youâll get angles you hadnât considered.
3) Donât rely on long-term memory.
If you think the tool will parse months of conflicting chats, youâre 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⌠Iâll send a short video.)
4) Do daily reps.
Like a foreign language, you wonât âlearn AIâ by reading about it. Use it. Expect some wins, some duds. One meaningful task per day for 30 days and youâll feel the gears click. If in a month youâre not leaning on AI for daily work, youâre falling behind.
Hereâs 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 âInterview meâ script and require a final prompt you can reuse.
Build a simple âmemory kitâ (or bot) with your evergreen context so every chat starts strongâthen still treat each thread like a fresh start.
PS: Keep reading for hot-takes on headlines, AI tools, and a personal story + pic
đ° AI News Worth Knowing
đ§
Will AI starve original knowledge? The WSJ warns that if everyone asks AI for answers, the sources (Stack Overflow, Wikipedia) could dry upâlike living off index funds without funding discovery. Leaders: keep investing in
first-party expertise and knowledge creation.
Read Here
âď¸
Authors vs. AI: first big checks are (almost) here. A proposed
$1.5B settlement tied to ~
500,000 books would pay
$3,000 per bookâbut 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
đď¸
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
đ
âAI is a bubbleâ is lazy thinking. Bubbles are false beliefs that pop; AI is a durable technology wave. The real question isnât
if it lastsâitâs
how fast and how deep it rewires your business.
Read Here
đ
Googleâs âAI Modeâ could default soon. If/when conversational results become the default, expect traffic and measurement to shiftâless ten blue links, more comparison/summary pages. Winners adapt content and funnels for conversations, not keywords.
Read Here
đ ď¸ AI Tools You Need to Try
đ
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: âTurn these meeting notes + this CSV into a 6-slide Q4 forecast deck and an Excel with formulas for scenario A/B.â Sanity-check outputs, then ship.
Try it
đ§°
Unburdnâs Vault. A curated library of AI tools mapped to Crawl â Walk â Run stages. Great cheatâsheet for leveling up your teamâs stack.
Explore Here.
đ˘ Take Action
If you want AI to change your results, make it change your
habits first.
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From the Field: đ§ââď¸ Telluride: 400 Feet of Exposure, Real Trust
This photo is me on the Telluride Via Ferrata with a few YPO friendsâabout
400 feet of sheer exposure beneath my boots. I love adrenaline activities my body and brain insist I shouldnât 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.
Iâve been in YPO for
10 years, and itâs one of the most important things Iâve ever done. Yes, it gets me on trips like this. But the real value is the peopleâ
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 exposureâyour instincts say âdonât.â
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. đ
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