Window into the Future

While all that was unfolding, Claude landed inside Microsoft 365 (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook) with one conversation carrying context across all four. ChatGPT landed inside Sheets and Excel. And GPT-Realtime-2, a voice model with GPT-5-level reasoning baked in, is openly aimed at the call centre.

Nothing to install. It's just there.

AI used to be a separate tab. You'd open Claude, paste your context, ask the question, copy the answer back. There was always a moment of switching that filtered out the casual stuff. If it wasn't worth opening another tab, you didn't bother. That filter is now gone.

So if you're wondering how to read all that, here are three habits I keep coming back to that are not new but very useful:

1. Think before you prompt.

Old advice but there's a recent study Think First, ChatGPT Later that puts numbers on it. The think-first group retained more, made better decisions on follow-up tasks. The AI-first group was faster on the original task and worse on everything after. We've covered the difference between using AI and getting better at it before. The research is finally catching up. (Vlad at Lucanet put it well after he finished our 15 Days of AI for teams this week and posted that what stuck for him were the frameworks, not the tools, which tracks.

2. Make it show its working. 

Whatever AI gives you, ask it to walk you through how. What it assumed, what it ruled out, what trade-offs it made. Not for the model. For you. Microsoft's Work Trend Index this year calls this human agency, which is on the nose but accurate. (We did a whole issue on the same idea applied to Skills.)

Painfully accurate. Which brings me to the third one.

3. Decide what shouldn't exist. 

Philippa Hardman wrote this week that when anyone can build a course in an afternoon, the real job becomes deciding which ones shouldn't. Same logic for almost anything you ship now. AI will produce a hundred decent versions of anything in the time it takes to drink coffee so the bottleneck moves to the front of the process. What to make at all, for whom, why this and not the other ninety-nine. An earlier issue made the same point: the teams getting traction aren't the ones using AI most but the ones still asking what's worth doing.

(Speaking of which, we just kicked off a partnership with Ocado Retail to roll 15 Days of AI into their UK team. It’s our flagship enterprise product. If you want it for your team, reply and let's talk.)

That's the texture of the week. Signals in every direction. Pick whichever habit looks doable and try it.

How to AI 🤖 

Every week, this section is your shortcut. Here are a couple of ways you could try AI this week that are worth your time:

• How to research 1, 10, or 100 companies using Claude Code.

• How to vibe code and build your own ideas.

• How to build real products by yourself (no coding skills needed).

• How to use Claude Design for real product design workflows.

• How to design your brand in one weekend.

Before you go ✌️

Now that AI's inside Excel, Word, Sheets, and your inbox, what's the part of your job you'd rather keep doing yourself? Hit reply, I read every one.

See you next Sunday!