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Weekly Update

This Week in AI

5 things that happened in AI this week explained for business owners in plain English.

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AI Tools

The AI company you use is now worth almost $1 trillion

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, filed to go public at a value of $965 billion after raising $65 billion from investors. That makes it one of the most valuable companies on earth.

This means Claude is not going anywhere. In fact, the more investment these AI companies receive, the better, cheaper, and faster the tools you use every day will get. For your business, this is a signal that AI tools are becoming long-term infrastructure, not a trend. Build your workflows around them now, not later.

Pick one task you do manually every week and spend 20 minutes today building it into a Claude or ChatGPT workflow. The tools are here to stay. Your habit of using them is what matters now.

Automation

Amazon's AI can now buy things for you mid-conversation

Amazon launched a new ad format through Alexa where a customer can say they want something, the AI handles the entire order, and the purchase is complete without any clicking, browsing, or checkout pages.

AI is moving from answering questions to completing actions. This is called agentic AI, and it is arriving in the tools your customers already use. If you sell products online, the next big shift is not better product pages. It is making sure your products show up when an AI assistant goes shopping on someone's behalf.

Review your product titles and descriptions today. Ask ChatGPT: "Would an AI assistant be able to find and describe my product clearly based on this listing?" Then improve it based on the answer.

AI Tools

Big tech companies are funding AI retraining for workers

Anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon and others joined together to fund a nonprofit focused on retraining workers for an AI-driven economy. They have already raised over $500 million toward a $1 billion goal, running pilot programs in four US states.

Even the companies building AI are publicly saying workers need to be retrained. This is not a small signal. If you have a team, now is the time to start building their AI skills before it becomes urgent. The businesses that invest in this now will have a serious advantage over those that scramble later.

Ask each person on your team to name one task they repeat every week. Then together, test whether ChatGPT or Claude can help with that task. One hour of this is worth more than months of waiting to "figure out AI properly."

Claude

Netflix shared exactly how it gives Claude its work instructions

Netflix accidentally made public the exact instructions it uses to tell Claude how to behave when working on their code. It is a simple text file with clear rules: here is what we are building, here are the commands, and do not ship anything with errors. That is it.

This is a lesson for every business owner using AI. The difference between AI giving you generic outputs and AI that actually works for your business is a clear set of instructions. Netflix does not just open Claude and start typing. They tell it who they are, what they are doing, and what standard is expected. You can do the same thing for your business.

Open a new Claude or ChatGPT conversation and start with: "You are my assistant for [your business name]. We sell [what you sell] to [your customers]. Our tone is [warm/professional/casual]. Always [your key rule]. Now help me with..." Notice how much better the output gets immediately.

AI Tools

Stacking cheaper AI tools together is beating the expensive ones

Researchers found that combining several smaller, cheaper AI models in a layered setup actually outperformed a single expensive frontier model on real tests. The combined score was 65% versus the big model's 57%.

You do not need the most expensive AI subscription to get the best results. For your business, this means using the right tool for each task, rather than paying premium for one tool to do everything. It is like hiring a team of specialists instead of one very expensive generalist. The outcome is often better and the cost is lower.

List the AI tools you currently use and what you use each one for. If you are using only one tool for everything, try splitting tasks: use Claude for writing and strategy, ChatGPT for brainstorming, and Canva AI for visuals. Compare your results this week against last week.

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