I Was Gone. AI Wasn't. Here's What You Missed.
A week of AI news, the stuff that actually matters to your business, in one issue.
I owe you an explanation.
Last week I was in Orlando speaking at the Niche Media Conference, presenting to a room full of publishing executives about where AI can be applied in their industry. Great event. Genuinely good conversations. A lot of people who are curious and few who are scared. Everyone is trying to figure out what to do with AI before it’s too late.
But here’s the thing. While I was quiet, AI absolutely was not.
I’ve been watching my inbox pile up with news, and I want to do something different today. Instead of trying to catch you up on everything, I’m going to tell you the four things that actually matter for your business right now, as of this morning.
Word of the Day: Agentic AI
Agentic AI is an AI that can take actions on your behalf, not just answer questions.
Think of the difference between a GPS that tells you where to turn, and a self-driving car that just takes you there. That’s the difference between a regular AI and an agentic one. One answers. The other acts.
This matters to your business because almost every major AI announcement in the past 30 days has been about agents. The war isn’t about who has the smartest chatbot anymore. It’s about who has the most capable AI that can actually do things without you babysitting it every step of the way.
Story 1: Your Browser Is About to Get a Brain
Google just added something called Skills to Chrome. Here’s the simplest way I can explain it.
You know how you type the same kinds of requests into AI over and over? “Summarize this page.” “Find me competitors for this product.” “Pull the key numbers from this article.” Right now, every one of those starts from scratch.
Skills lets you save those prompts as one-click buttons inside Chrome. You set it up once, and from then on it’s a tap. They’re also building a library of pre-made Skills for the most common tasks so you don’t even have to write the prompts yourself.
This is free to any Chrome user with Gemini enabled. You don’t need a paid plan to try it.
How to try it:
Open Chrome on your desktop (Mac, Windows, or ChromeOS) and make sure your browser language is set to English (US)
Sign into your Google account in Chrome
Open the Gemini sidebar by clicking the Gemini button in the upper-right corner of Chrome (if you don’t see it, go to chrome://settings and look for “Gemini in Chrome” under AI)
Type any prompt you’d want to reuse, like “summarize this page” or “compare products across my open tabs”
After Gemini responds, look for the option to Save as Skill directly in the chat history
Next time, just type / in the Gemini sidebar to pull up your saved Skills, or click the + button
Google states it may take a few days to reach all eligible devices (gHacks Tech News), so if you don’t see it yet, check back in a day or two.
The bigger picture here: prompts are turning into saved software. What used to be something you typed is becoming something you click. That’s a real shift in how AI gets used day to day.
Story 2: Claude Has a New Trick (And It’s Watching While You Sleep)
I want to tell you something that happened on a podcast, and then I want to tell you why it should stop you cold.
A guest on the Latent Space Podcast described a friend who had given an AI agent real access to his life. Bank account. Inbox. And a webcam in his bedroom that the agent watched while he slept, so if something went wrong, the agent would call 911.
Now. That’s a hobbyist. That’s not normal. I’m not suggesting you do that.
But here’s what I am telling you: the direction AI is moving is toward persistent, always-on agents that act on your behalf without you needing to ask. Anthropic just launched something called Routines inside Claude Code, which lets AI run tasks on a schedule or in response to specific triggers, like when a GitHub event fires or a deadline hits. No human needs to be in the loop. The AI just runs.
They also redesigned the entire Claude Code desktop app to manage multiple AI agents working in parallel. It looks less like a chat window now and more like mission control.
You don’t need to use Claude Code today. But you do need to understand what this means for your business: the AI tools you use are about to get dramatically better at running tasks in the background while you focus elsewhere.
The honest part: Some users are reporting that Claude has felt less sharp recently. There’s real evidence Anthropic has been rationing computing power due to GPU shortages, and it’s affecting response quality. So yes, the features are growing. The performance sometimes wobbles. That’s the reality right now, and I’d rather tell you that than pretend everything is perfect.
Story 3: The Number That Should Change How You Think About AI Investment
Stanford just released its annual AI Index Report for 2026, and one stat hit me harder than anything else.
GenAI reached 53% of the population in just three years.
For context: the internet took about seven years to hit that level of adoption. Personal computers took over a decade. AI did it in three.
Global corporate AI investment hit $581.7 billion in 2025. That’s up 130% from the year before.
Here’s what that means for you: your customers are using AI to make buying decisions. They’re asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity who to hire, what to buy, and which businesses to trust. If your company isn’t showing up in those AI answers, you’re invisible to a growing chunk of your market.
This is what I call GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. It’s the new version of SEO, but instead of trying to rank on Google, you’re trying to get cited by AI. Right now, most business owners have never even thought about it.
That’s a deeper topic for a future issue. But start thinking about it today. Open ChatGPT right now and search for your type of business in your city. See who it names. If it’s not you, that’s your homework.
Story 4: The Job Market News That’s Hard to Ignore
I’m going to be direct with you here because sugarcoating this doesn’t help anyone.
That same Stanford report found that employment among software developers aged 22 to 25 has dropped nearly 20% since 2024. Entry-level workers in law, finance, and marketing are seeing the same pressure. The jobs that used to be the on-ramp to a career, the research, the summarizing, the first-draft writing, AI is doing that work now.
One of the Anthropic co-founders said publicly that in the AI era, knowing how to ask better questions matters more than knowing how to write code.
Here’s what it means for you as a business owner: if you’re hiring, the smart play right now is to hire people who are already curious about AI and learning it on their own, not people who are waiting to be trained. The gap between those two types of employees is going to widen fast.
If you are that employee reading this, you already have a head start. Keep going.
What I Saw at the Niche Media Conference
I gave a talk last week to publishers. Magazine people. Newsletter people. Event people. Folks who have built audiences over decades and are now watching AI threaten to upend everything they know about content.
Here’s what I told them, and I’ll tell you the same thing.
AI is not your competition. AI is your operations department. The publishers who are going to win aren’t the ones who figure out how to block AI. They’re the ones who figure out how to put AI to work faster than anyone else, while keeping the human voice, the human relationships, and the human judgment that their audiences actually care about.
Nobody subscribes to a newsletter because they want perfect grammar. They subscribe because they trust the person writing it.
That’s not going away. Build on it.
And if you want me to come say that to your company or your conference, just reply to this email.
The Bottom Line
I haven’t written in a while. I’m not going to pretend I caught you up on everything. I didn’t.
But here’s what I know is true right now. AI is moving from “answer my question” to “go do the thing.” Agents are running tasks, Chrome is saving your prompts, and the companies that don’t start thinking about how AI fits into their workflows are going to feel it in 12 to 18 months.
You don’t have to boil the ocean. Pick one thing from this issue and do something with it. Turn on Gemini in Chrome. Ask your team who’s already experimenting with AI. Search your company name in ChatGPT and see what it says about you.
Start somewhere. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
I’ll be back tomorrow.
Scott
SmartOwner is published (almost) daily by the team at DigitalTreehouse. Want AI consulting or automations for your business? Reply to this email. Interested in having Scott speak at your company or event? Reply to this email.
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