BriefingUpdated 3 weeks ago
You don’t need to be a tech expert to lead in the age of AI.
Choose your department. You’ll find real examples from teams already using AI, along with the questions I’d ask before signing a contract. Need help with your own life or small business? Meet the agents.
Pick your department
Eight departments- FinanceReconciliation, fraud detection, forecastingClose the books faster and catch invoice errors before payment.Explore Finance AI tools
- HRHiring, employee support, onboardingScreen candidates faster and answer routine HR questions automatically.Explore HR AI tools
- LegalContract review, redlines, regulationFaster first-pass contract review, with risky terms flagged.Explore Legal AI tools
- MarketingAudience insight, content, brand safetyGet from brief to launch faster, on brand.Explore Marketing AI tools
- ProductFeedback synthesis, specs, rapid testingTurn customer feedback into roadmap priorities.Explore Product AI tools
- Customer SupportTicket resolution, live rep assistanceAnswer repeat questions automatically and cut resolution times.Explore Customer Support AI tools
- SalesPipeline intelligence, meeting summariesProspect research and post-call admin, done for you.Explore Sales AI tools
- Operations & Supply ChainWarehouse counts, fleet upkeep, freight trackingCount stock in minutes and see where every shipment is.Explore Operations & Supply Chain AI tools
For you, or a small business
What can an AI agent do for you?
A chat tool answers a question. An agent does a job: it can take one bounded task, work across the tools you already use, and bring the result back for your yes. This guide says what an agent is in plain words, which one fits your week, and what to keep under your own approval.
- Find your first job
Start with a task you repeat every week and that has a clear finish line.
- Meet the right kind of agent
From inbox and marketing help to research, operations and customer calls.
- Use it with confidence
Keep meaningful approvals with a person while the agent earns trust.
One useful job. Clear boundaries. A human at the important decisions.
Who has done it, and what happened
Four companies, four outcomes, each with its source.HR · Asymbl
Polly now answers the routine benefits and time-off questions that used to land on a person, which freed up about 10 hours of HR work a week.
The takeaway The AI here is deliberately narrow: a Slack chatbot that only answers what it's been explicitly trained on, and hands off anything requiring judgment to a human instead of guessing. That limit is what made it safe to let employees talk to it directly — nobody gets a wrong benefits answer with no person accountable for it. If your HR team's time is going to answering the same handful of policy questions over and over, that's the specific, boring problem this kind of tool solves. The harder judgment calls stay with people.
HR Brew · Jul 2026Product · Algolia
The new pricing page variant beat the old one by 15% on its target metric, an estimated six-figure effect on sales pipeline.
The takeaway The AI didn't just suggest a better pricing page — it wrote and built the working test variants itself, on-brand, with no developer involved. If your team's test ideas die in an engineering queue rather than a lack of ideas, this is what removing that specific bottleneck looks like: hours instead of a multi-week wait for a developer to become free. (One caveat: Amplitude's own writeup never names which metric moved 15%.)
Amplitude blog · Jun 2026Sales · monday.com
Amanda, an AI voice agent that qualifies every inbound lead by phone, cut demo-request response time from 24 hours to under two minutes.
The takeaway Speed to lead is where this paid off fastest and most measurably — the 24-hours-to-2-minutes number is the kind of gain that shows up in pipeline within a quarter, before you'd see anything from the harder, judgment-heavy parts of the funnel.
Growth Unhinged, Kyle Poyar · Jun 2026Customer Support · KlarnaLearn from this
AI handled two-thirds of chats at its peak — work Klarna said was equal to 853 employees — but support costs still rose to $50M in Q3 2025 from $42M the year before, after Klarna reversed course and rehired.
The lesson The AI wasn't wrong to exist, it was deployed past its competence: genuinely excellent at the repetitive two-thirds, genuinely bad at the rest, and Klarna cut headcount before drawing that line.
CX Dive · Nov 2025
Free AI courses
Updated Sep 2026Everyone from OpenAI to the University of Helsinki now gives away an AI course, far more than anyone has time to sort through. We collected the ones worth taking and grouped them by how you learn: the basics, courses where you build something, courses about AI agents, and courses for your own department. Each card says who it suits, how long it takes, and exactly where money shows up, if it does.
- FreeBeginner
Elements of AI
University of Helsinki and MinnaLearn
Interactive quizzes and logic problems — no maths, no code, no videos. Helsinki's own count: two million students. It predates chatbots, so it teaches the foundations rather than ChatGPT.
What you build
- What the technology is actually doingHow a prediction gets made, and where machine learning differs from ordinary software that follows rules.
- Judgement about its limitsBias in training data, and the failures that are built into the method rather than fixable by a better vendor.
“Conceptually rigorous without being technical” Hashmeta review · May 2026
- FreeBeginner to intermediate
AI Summer Adventure
Nufar Gaspar, with The AI Daily Brief and Superintelligent
Twenty-three hands-on stations in three tiers, at your own pace — from the tools you already own to workflows that run on their own. Free with an account.
What you build
- Everyday productivity assistantsTier one works on the daily grind — turning messy notes and transcripts into something you would actually send.
- Custom knowledge assistantsTier two builds assistants that answer from documents you supply, rather than from whatever the model happens to know.
- Autonomous agents and multi-tool workflowsTier three chains steps together so a task runs without you sitting over it.
- FreeBeginner to intermediateAbout 90 minutes
Agents and Workflows
OpenAI
Self-paced, about 90 minutes, video and short exercises inside ChatGPT, with progress saved so you can stop and return. Needs a free ChatGPT login and gives a completion certificate. The third of OpenAI Academy’s three courses; start here if you already use ChatGPT every day.
What you build
- A brief an agent can act onGiving the context, the output you want and the boundaries before the agent starts, so the result needs one review rather than five.
- A review step you keepWhere a person must still look, which the course treats as part of the workflow rather than an afterthought.
- A workflow you run againTurning the one task that worked into a pattern you can reuse and hand to a colleague.
“useful because it connects AI literacy to repeatable work and human oversight” Curtis Pyke, Kingy AI · Jun 2026
Looking for something specific?
Try plain-English questions like “how are HR teams using AI for onboarding?” or “best AI tools for contract redlining”.
The essays
Liat's Insights
Essays at the intersection of AI, strategy, and leadership. Read them on the blog, or get each new one by email.
For your team
Want this for your leadership team?
That is exactly the work I do with companies.
