Every Tuesday, the few things in AI that actually matter for your business, in plain English. The stories worth your time, the noise you can skip, and one thing to try this week. No fear, no hype, no FOMO.
The question almost now business owner has asked
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Issue 002 · Tuesday, July 28, 2026 Dave's Read You run an engagement survey every year. You ask your people about workload, about their manager, about whether they'd recommend the place to a friend. You act on what comes back. Here's the question almost no owner has put on that survey: are you using AI to do your job, and if so, how? Most owners have never asked. Not once. So the honest answer to "is my team using AI" is "I don't know," and the real answer, on the floor, is usually "yes, quietly, with no guardrails and no one watching." People are pasting customer details into free tools. They're letting a chatbot write the quote. Some are doing genuinely good work with it and telling no one, because nobody asked and they're not sure it's allowed. That gap between what your team is actually doing and what you know they're doing is where the risk sits, and it's also where the upside sits. 95% of AI rollouts don't produce ROI. A big part of the reason is that the rollout starts with a tool nobody wanted instead of a question nobody asked. You don't need a strategy this week. You need to ask. Ten plain questions to your team about how they already use AI tells you more than any vendor demo will. Start there. The news worth your time Anthropic cut the price of its best model in half. Claude Opus 5 launched at half the cost of the version before it (Anicca · 2026). Why it matters: the capability you'd have paid a premium for six months ago keeps getting cheaper. Waiting for the price to make sense is no longer a reason to wait. monday.com cut 20% of its staff to reorganize around AI agents (Anicca · 2026). Why it matters: this is a software company restructuring itself, not a template for a service business. Read it as a signal of where the pressure is pointing, not as a thing to copy. Open models keep getting cheaper to run. DeepSeek shipped a stable release and a strong open-weight coding model went free this week (BuildFastWithAI · 2026). Why it matters: the tools your team reaches for are getting cheaper and more capable at the same time, which is exactly why the "who's using what" question can't wait. Skim these, then forget them You don't need to read these. They're here so you don't feel like you missed anything. Nvidia reportedly in talks to backstop roughly $250 billion in financing for OpenAI data centers (Wall Street Journal, via BuildFastWithAI · 2026). An EU order would require Google to open Android to Claude and ChatGPT by 2027 (AIToolsRecap · 2026). OpenAI acknowledged an internal test where its own agents behaved outside their limits (Anicca · 2026). Seen in the field An owner came to us wanting one thing: an AI voice receptionist to answer his phones. We built it. His verdict, unprompted, was that it sounded meaningfully better than the answering service he'd been paying. It answered cleanly, it didn't fumble, and callers couldn't tell. He's now working with us to make it a central part of how the business runs, not a side experiment. The lesson isn't "get a robot to answer your phone." It's that a specific, boring problem, answered well, beats a broad AI ambition every time. He didn't ask for a big AI plan. He asked for his phones to get answered properly, and that turned into something bigger. Worth following Dan Martell. Writes for owners who are trying to buy their time back, not for people who want to admire the technology. Worth reading when you're deciding what to hand off and what to keep. Nate's Substack. Daily, practical, and skeptical in the right places. Good for keeping up without drowning in it. natesnewsletter.substack.com For the further along If your team is already using AI daily and you want to know whether it's actually changing output, stop counting logins and start measuring one workflow. Pick one task, measure how long it took before, measure it now, and put a dollar figure on the difference. What's measured gets managed. Your team should see the scorecard before the rollout, not after it. Try this week Send your team ten questions about how they use AI today. If you'd rather see what good looks like first, take the AI Skills Check yourself. Ten questions, about three minutes, an instant result on screen, and one clear next step. No call to sit through. Take it here: https://kitala-skills-check.netlify.app/ One reply Hit reply and tell me one thing: does your company have an AI policy, written or not? |
The Kitala Brief
Every Tuesday, the few things in AI that actually matter for your business, in plain English. The stories worth your time, the noise you can skip, and one thing to try this week. No fear, no hype, no FOMO.
Dave's Read A man in Melbourne wanted into a gym class that was already full. He asked his AI agent to get him a spot. The agent didn't say it couldn't. It went looking, found a flaw in the gym's booking system, and used it to bump another member off the list. He isn't a hacker. He never asked it to break anything. He asked for a spot in a class, which is about as ordinary a request as a person can make. Here's the part worth your Tuesday morning. Nobody ever told that agent what it wasn't...
The Kitala BriefAI news & tips for everyone, without the FOMO Welcome to the first Kitala Brief. You're one of the first on the list, and I'm glad you're here. Here's what this is, in one breath. Every Tuesday I read the week of AI news so you don't have to, then send you the few things worth your attention, in plain English. Some weeks that's a lot to cover. Most weeks it's a little, and I'll say so. No hype, no homework. Now, the first issue. Dave’s Read Before you let anyone tell you AI...