5 Tools That Take the Busywork Out of Your Week

💼 In Today’s 5-min AI Brief

• Your Everyday AI Toolkit: AI shortcuts every small team should try

• Prompt of the Week: Keep your AI images true to your style with one simple prompt

• AI News You Can Use: Big shifts driving AI’s next era

• What I’m Learning: Google’s free AI coding agent Gemini CLI and ASI Arch

🛠️ Your Everyday AI Toolkit

Small Business Starter Pack: 5 Tools to Automate Core Tasks

Small businesses drive nearly half of global GDP, yet most haven’t adopted AI. Even simple AI solutions can unlock big wins and give small teams their time back.

Here are five high-leverage workflows every small team should consider:

• Meeting Notes – Fireflies.ai records meetings, transcribes calls, and flags follow‑ups so nothing gets missed.

• Internal Docs and Emails – Microsoft 365 Copilot helps draft, summarize, and format content across Word, Excel, and Outlook.

• Customer Support – Freshdesk Freddy handles common tickets, drafts replies, and flags what needs human review.

• Marketing Content – Canva Magic Studio generates on-brand visuals and videos in minutes, no design skills needed.

• Bookkeeping Tasks – Sage and Xero automate invoices, track cash flow, and answer finance questions in plain language. 

These tools can act like junior teammates that handle the repeatable work so employees can focus on the work where they’re able to add the most value - a huge asset for small businesses.

💭 Prompt of the Week

If you’re using an AI image generator and have an inspiration image, try this prompt to preserve its style and fine details:

This is a simple way to get AI to match the style and keep the quality of a reference image, whether it’s your brand’s look or a favorite visual theme, without having to re-describe it every time.

💡 AI News You Can Use

Big Shifts Driving AI’s Next Era

Mary Meeker - well-known for spotting big tech changes - just shared her newest Trends: Artificial Intelligence report, calling AI one of the most game-changing shifts yet. Here are some standout trends from her 340 page report:

• Record growth – AI hit 50% adoption in just three years. ChatGPT has 800M active users, 20M paying subscribers, and is growing 5.5x faster than Google’s early days.

• Global from day one – Most ChatGPT users are outside North America. India leads usage, followed by Indonesia and Brazil, while China races ahead in robotics and open-source AI.

• Impact everywhere – From science to autonomous taxis, AI is reshaping nearly every sector. By 2035, it’s predicted to handle complex, multi-step tasks across all industries.

While AI’s potential is huge, the biggest wins right now come from focused, workflow‑specific uses - especially in business‑to‑business (B2B) settings, where companies sell products or services to other companies. In these cases, success is easier to measure, and human oversight keeps risks in check.

Last Week in AI

• Google brings Deep Think to Gemini – Over the weekend, Google rolled out a new variant of its Deep Think model in the Gemini app. It’s based on the same AI that recently won gold at this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad (the high school “Olympics of math”). While the full version can spend hours reasoning through complex problems, the consumer version is tuned for speed, still performing at a solid bronze-medal standard.

📖 What I’m Learning

If you’re interested in what I’ve been digging into… check out:

1. ASI ARCH Research: AI can now conduct independent scientific research and experiments that beat those created by humans. Wild. ASI-ARCH is an autonomous, self-directed AI system that discovers, designs, and tests entirely new AI models, with no humans in the loop. This has the potential to speed up scientific progress faster than anything we’ve seen before.

2. Gemini CLI: The Free AI Coding Agent: Google just dropped Gemini CLI, a free tool for building and experimenting with code. You get 1,000 free requests a day, a huge workspace for bigger projects, and it even rivals some $500/month coding assistants. It’s got search built in, plus the ability to generate images and videos, making it impressively versatile. 

Final Thoughts

I hope you picked up something useful this week. Drop me a note and share how you’re using AI in your work.

Thaddeus