This Week’s Playbook: 3 Things You Can Do Right Now
Back after a two-week break (I was traveling — thanks for your patience). Here’s your action list. Pick one and knock it out today.
Make your AI stop writing like a robot. The #1 complaint about ChatGPT and Claude is that the writing sounds like AI. There’s a two-line fix. Go into your AI’s settings (the “custom instructions” box) and paste: “Always write in Simplified Technical English” and “Talk to me like I have ADHD — short, skimmable, bullets over paragraphs.”
Try this: add both lines, then ask it to explain something you’d normally struggle to read. Night and day.Write your business a one-paragraph “who we are” file. Every time you open a fresh AI chat, it knows nothing about you — so you re-explain your business for the hundredth time. Fix it once: write a short paragraph (what you sell, who you serve, your tone) and paste it into your AI’s custom instructions. Now every answer starts smart.
Try this: ask Claude to interview you with 5 questions, then have it write the paragraph for you.Give one team member an AI they can just text. Your non-techy staff will never “learn a tool” — but they’ll message a coworker. Lindy Teammate lets anyone text an AI helper straight from Slack, like pinging a colleague.
Try this: drop it in one channel and let your team ask it the repetitive “what’s our policy on X / where’s that file” questions all day. Reply and I’ll tell you how we set these up for clients.
The Big Story: Everyone’s Getting a “Personal AI Agent” — And It’s Simpler Than the Hype Suggests
The buzzword of the month is the personal AI agent — an AI that doesn’t just answer questions but has its own memory, its own job, and can actually do things for you. xAI launched “Grok Bot” this week, following OpenClaw and Hermes before it, and Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,000-word manifesto arguing everyone will soon have a personal AI that knows them and their goals. IDK why Mark hasn’t built this already in WhatsApp, though… a little more action, please, Mark?
Here’s the part nobody’s saying plainly: there’s no magic. A “personal agent” is three boring things — a set of instructions (”you’re my money manager”), a few connected tools (Gmail, calendar, Slack), and a text file where it writes down what it learns. That’s it. You can build a “Jarvis” for your business today without waiting for a $200/month product.
Why you should care: The winners of this shift won’t be the people who read about personal agents. They’ll be the ones who gave one a real job - “draft my follow-ups,” “pull my weekly numbers,” “answer new leads at 2am” - and let it run.
What this means for you: Don’t overthink it. Pick one recurring job you’d hand a new assistant, write down the instructions like you’re training a person, and point an AI at it. That’s exactly the “AI employee” we build at LOW/CODE - the difference is just how carefully the instructions and guardrails are written.
The News That Actually Matters
He Asked His AI to Book a Gym Class. It Committed a Cyberattack Instead.
This one’s worth reading twice. An Australian man asked his personal AI assistant (running on the open-source OpenClaw framework) to get him into a full gym class - he was 4th on the waitlist. Instead of giving up, the AI found a hole in the gym’s booking system and cancelled a stranger’s reservation to bump him up. Then it cheerfully confessed what it had done.
Funny story, serious lesson. As these agents get the power to act - click buttons, send messages, spend money - a vague instruction can turn into a real problem. Gartner now expects 40% of business apps to include AI agents by year’s end, up from under 5% in January.
Why it matters for you: The value of AI is that it does things. The risk is the same sentence. Before you let an AI act on your behalf, give it a lane — what it’s allowed to touch, what needs your sign-off. Be super clear, be verbose: remember, you’re training the most enthusiastic 18 year old inexperienced but knowledgable genius.
Your AI Work Isn’t Locked In Anymore
Quieter but genuinely useful: ChatGPT now lets you import and sync your projects, saved instructions, and history from other AI tools like Claude. For two years, the fear with picking an AI was “what if I bet on the wrong one and lose all my setup?” This is important because the pendulum is going back from Claude to OpenAI. Better models, cheaper (or at least more tokens for your subscription) and follows instructions better.
Why it matters for you: That fear is easing. You can try Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok for a month and move your work if a better/cheaper one shows up - and this week Grok 4.6 launched near the top of the pack for a fraction of the price, so the “cheaper option caught up” story keeps repeating.
What to do: don’t marry one AI. Run the same real task through two of them this month and keep whichever nails your work.
The AI Office — Tools You Can Use This Week
This is the heart of the newsletter. Two worth a look:
Natter — Type with your voice, anywhere on your computer, with live transcription as you talk. If you think faster than you type (most of us do), you’ll draft emails, notes, and replies in a third of the time. (Mac only for now.)
Grok Imagine 2.0 — A new image tool that just hit #2 for editing on the public leaderboards. Describe a promo graphic or drop in a photo and ask it to fix the background, swap colors, or add text - no designer needed. Pair it with Canva for the finishing touches.
The “So What” for Business Owners
The move isn’t “get yourself an AI.” It’s “give your team one.”
Look at the pattern this week: personal agents everywhere, Zuckerberg promising everyone their own AI, tools you text like a coworker. Most owners are still thinking about AI as their personal productivity hack. The leverage is one level up: give every person on your team an AI teammate for the boring parts of their job.
The math is simple. One owner using AI saves a few hours a week. A ten-person team each handing their most repetitive task to an AI is a different company.
What to do: This week, ask each person on your team one question - “What do you do every week that a smart assistant could do for you?” Those answers are your AI roadmap. If you’d rather have someone build and wire up those AI teammates properly - with the guardrails so you don’t get the gym-class treatment - that’s exactly what we do at PHOS AI LABS. We also run hands-on AI training for teams that want to learn it themselves. Reply and we’ll scope one with you.
Quick Hits
Meta is open-sourcing its AI again. Its new free “Muse Glimmer” model is built for exactly this agent stuff. Great for developers, changes nothing about your Monday - filed here so you can safely ignore it.
Anthropic will start watermarking all text written by Claude. Worth knowing if you auto-write customer emails or content - “invisibly tagged as AI” is becoming standard, and “made by a real human” is quietly turning into a selling point. Check the explanation here:
Scott Williams@swill1amshttps://t.co/HR4wnn5JbF12:30 PM · Aug 13, 2026 · 21.6K Views4 Replies · 6 Reposts · 34 LikesOpenAI’s mystery gadget leaked — reportedly a screen-less smart speaker, ~$300, coming in 2027. Fun to watch, nothing to buy. Pure noise for now.
That’s your week in AI. Forward this to someone who keeps asking “should I be using AI?” — the answer is yes, and this newsletter is their starting point.