Welcome, humans.
Thanks to everyone who came to the livestream with Speak co-founder and CTO Andrew Hsu today! Andrew answered every question, showed us all of Speak’s new features, and taught us a lot about their tool and the current limitations with today’s voice AI, which was our favorite part of the convo.
Also, Speak for ASL launching in 2026?! One of our viewers suggested it, and Andrew seemed intrigued by the idea… we’ll see what happens!
Here’s what happened in AI today:
- Microsoft analyzed 37M+ Copilot conversations… we share what they found.
- Adobe embedded Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat into ChatGPT.
- Shopify shipped 150+ AI updates including Agentic Storefronts.
- ChatGPT became Apple's most-downloaded free iPhone app in 2025.
NEXT UP… THURSDAY (Tomorrow!): We’re doing an AI Marketing Tools Showcase livestream @ 11:00am PST | 1:00pm CST | 2:00pm EST
Marketing in 2025 looks nothing like it did two years ago. AI isn't just for helping you write better copy… it's fundamentally changing how campaigns get built, optimized, and even who (or what) you're marketing to.
In this livestream, we're bringing in four founders to show you what's actually possible right now.
Click the link above to see who the guests are. Then on YouTube, select “Notify Me” to get a notification when we go live.
These are teams backed by Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, and other top-tier investors who've already built platforms used by Reddit, DoorDash, and leading consumer brands. If you work in marketing, you won’t wanna miss this one. Want to know who they are? Click the link for the reveal.
Microsoft Studied 37.M+ AI Conversations. Its Findings Might Explain Why Shopify and Adobe Just Went All-In on AI.
Microsoft just analyzed 37M+ Copilot conversations, and surprisingly, the answer to “what do people actually use AI for?” isn't what you'd expect.
For starters: Health questions topped every category. Every device, every hour, every day of the week. People reached for AI more for wellness tracking than coding (which actually makes since most folks use other AI like Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT-Codex for coding).
Interestingly, the time of day you ask a question matters too: At 2 a.m., people asked about philosophy. During work hours, they planned travel (lol). Weekdays meant programming, and weekends meant gaming.
Here’s Microsoft's other key findings:
- Top 5 uses of Copilot: searching, advice, creating, learning ,& technical support.
- Desktop users explored 20 different topic combinations; mobile users stuck to 11.
- January conversations focused on programming; by September, they'd shifted to more about society and culture.
Oh, and if you’re worried about the privacy of your copilot chats, read this: the study only extracted summaries, never actual conversations. Privacy secured!
Read the full report here.
In the world of AI for commerce, there was also major news today: Shopify shipped 150+ updates showing businesses embedding AI into commerce operations rather than treating it as a bolt-on feature.
What Shopify launched:
- Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant, now generates custom apps, builds automations, edits themes from plain English.
- Catalog API gives developers access to millions of products with one integration (live now for developers who want to add commerce infrastructure).
- SimGym uses AI shoppers trained on real sessions to test changes before launch (this one’s wild).
- Agentic Storefronts syndicate products across all major AI platforms automatically.
The Sidekick shift is interesting. It basically evolved from reactive helper to strategic advisor. Here’s how it works:
- Type a request, get a custom admin app.
- Describe a workflow, Sidekick builds the automation.
- Need theme changes? Just tell it what you want.
The bigger unlock though: Agentic Storefronts. Shopify merchants now set up once and their products appear in ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity conversations. One integration puts them everywhere AI shopping happens.
Why this matters: AI has stopped being a category of apps and is starting to become infrastructure for daily life. Microsoft's data proves people already treat it as ambient support for health, creativity, and personal decisions. Shopify proves businesses are building it into fundamental operations: commerce, customer service, product discovery.
And Adobe proved this today, too. As promised at MAX, the company literally embedded Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat directly into ChatGPT. Users can now tell the chatbot to edit images, remove backgrounds, merge PDFs, or animate designs without leaving the conversation.
Major platforms like ChatGPT and Copilot are becoming places where shopping happens. Businesses that treat AI as optional bolt-on features will watch competitors embed it into every operation, from inventory to checkout.
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Prompt Tip of the Day
Stop carrying baggage between prompts. Engineer BOOTOSHI says most of us are killing our coding agent efficiency by continuing conversations—and the fix is simple: reset completely between features.
His workflow: plan → build → test → document → reset context from scratch. No continuing threads, no accumulated fluff.
Why it works: Each new feature gets fresh context instead of dragging along irrelevant details from previous builds. Think of it like opening a new Google Doc instead of scrolling to page 47 of your messy running notes
Geoffrey Huntley (an Opus user) echoes this: when AI gets it wrong, it's usually because we under-specified in a cluttered context. His fix? git reset --hard or just start a completely new prompt.
Don’t worry non-engineers, this applies to you: Got a new task? Start a new chat.
A clean slate with clear specs outperforms a 50-message thread every time.
Want more tips like this? Check out our Prompt Tip of the Day Digest: December.
Treats to Try
*Asterisk = from our partners (only the first one!). Advertise to 600K readers here!
- *Cloud GPU costs add up fast. The Dell Pro Max with GB10 lets you run 70B models (big ones) locally for a one-time cost instead of burning $1.50/hour forever. With 128GB of unified memory, you can fine-tune your own models on proprietary data, and prototype AI products—all on your desk. Check it out.
- Incredible lets you spin up “Deep Work” AI agents powered by its Agent MAX engine that run multi-step workflows end-to-end—like research plus outreach, CRM cleanup, or month-end reporting—with an execution layer tuned to avoid loops and hallucinated tool calls.
- InspectMind reviews full construction drawing sets and specs in minutes, cross-checking hundreds or thousands of PDF sheets for clashes and code issues so you can fix problems before rework gets expensive (read more).
- SpaceControl lets you control 3D object generation using simple shapes or detailed meshes (geometric guides) instead of text prompts—sketch a basic form and it generates a detailed 3D asset matching that exact geometry (paper).
- SciSpace launched its BioMed Agent as a domain-native “AI co-scientist” that connects to 150+ tools and 100+ biomedical databases to help researchers analyze datasets, interpret variants, design lab workflows, and accelerate drug and genomics work from a single interface.
- Internet Backyard automates your data center's billing from quoting to payment, replacing spreadsheets and cutting payment delays from 45-120 days (raised $4.5M).
- SnakeBench benchmarks AI models by having them compete in Snake games, ranking which ones are best at strategic thinking and path-finding (375+ models across 2,263+ matches)—you can watch the top match LIVE here.
Around the Horn
Why yes, this is a robot kicking the bolts out of its creator. And yes, I have seen Terminator, thanks for asking!
- ChatGPT was Apple’s most-downloaded free iPhone app in the U.S. in 2025, beating Threads, Google, TikTok, and WhatsApp and underscoring how often people now open a chatbot before a browser.
- Figma rolled out AI-powered object removal, isolation, and outpainting tools plus a revamped image toolbar, so designers can erase or move objects and expand images for new formats without bouncing out to Photoshop or Canva.
- Spotify will test “Prompted Playlists,” an upgraded AI playlist feature that lets Premium users in New Zealand write detailed prompts—like “top artists from the last 5 years, deep cuts only”—and get mixes that lean on their entire listening history.
- Instagram rolled out a “Your Algorithm” tab that shows your top Reels interests and lets you dial topics up or down, giving users rare direct control over what the recommendation system surfaces.
- Tavus says its upgraded AI Santa, built on the company’s real-time PAL agent platform, now sees some users talking to a video-call Santa for hours per day.
- Amazon pledged more than $3B in India through 2030, targeting cloud and AI infrastructure in a move it says could support 1 million jobs, quadruple exports to $80 billion, and bring AI tools to 15 million small businesses.
- Google launched a new AI Plus subscription in India priced at ₹199 (about $2.21) per month for the first six months and ₹399 (about $4.44) after, directly targeting OpenAI’s ChatGPT Go with a sub-$5 Gemini plan in a price-sensitive market.
- DeepSeek is reportedly using Nvidia’s export-controlled Blackwell GPUs smuggled into China through overseas data centers to train its next model, according to a Bloomberg-summarized report that Nvidia says it has seen “no substantiation” for.
- SpaceX and Blue Origin are reportedly racing to build AI-ready data centers in orbit, with Musk planning upgraded Starlink satellites and Bezos backing BlueRing as regulators start sketching rules for space-based compute.
- Microsoft and Providence built an AI system that can analyze 16 million pathology slides to find patterns in how tumors respond to treatment, aiming to turn pathology data into more personalized cancer care.
- Google launched fully managed MCP servers for Maps, BigQuery, Compute Engine, and Kubernetes Engine so AI agents can plug into its APIs via a standard Model Context Protocol endpoint instead of custom connectors.
- RSL 1.0, a new “Really Simple Licensing” web standard, has officially launched to let publishers tell AI crawlers what they can use and how much they should pay, including the ability to block AI training and AI answers while staying in normal search.
- Google piloted AI-generated article overviews on select publishers’ Google News pages, paying outlets like Der Spiegel, El País, and The Washington Post to experiment with summaries that may reduce clicks but promise more engaged readers.
- Here’s a fun fact: There is an AI 2027 tracker (referring to this report) and ~91% their predictions have come true so far. Also, apparently this report is so famous it’s now a Jeopardy question.
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P.S: One more thing…
Ya gotta click to watch this one. It’s video meme perfection.
A Cat’s Commentary
