🧭 THIS WEEK AT AI SECOND ACT
Howdy, Thanksgiving week here in the US, and a bunch is happening in AI land -
Huge new AI releases linked below.
My coding/development site had a rename - link below, it’s now ‘Vibe Build Lab’. Yay.
Summary of last 6 months of AI Second Act - guess I missed the 6-month anniversary :(. But, in fact, it has been 6 months! We’re growing (cough ‘quite’) slowly but growing… <hint, hint, pls share this newsletter!>
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My goal is to make this as valuable and practical as possible as we navigate the new AI era. 🚀
🧰 AI NEWS + LEARNING
Here are a few things I found recently:
US Genesis Mission - AI research accelerator. Not sure about these, really. Seemed to work back in the day, ie Manhattan Project and getting to the moon. I think Biden announced a project to cure cancer from memory, but I haven’t heard much about that since. AI could definitely revolutionize research, so let’s see.
Google released their new image generation - Banana Pro, and it’s incredible! Google blog. Examples here. Incredible space images from papers here.
Google released Gemini 3, benchmarks here, which put it clearly at the top. [not sure if these companies can manipulate benchmarks - will have to check usage in some months’ time]
btw, if you missed it, OpenAI just released ChatGPT v5.1 also!
Anthropic launched Opus 4.5, putting it clearly at the top of AI coding. Detailed blog post here.
Ever wanted to make music? - Try Suno. They just raised $250m, and apparently, there is some crazy stat of how much music people are making on it - exceeding Spotify's complete library every few weeks!
Anthropic video on AI lying, cheating, and generally being bad! Definitely a lot of work still to do to get AI to be and stay safe!
Lastly, for my vibe coding [AI-assisted coding] site, I had to change the name and URL due to a name clash with existing businesses/sites.
Vibe Build Lab!! See the projects here, and actually, I need to add to this as I have way more projects on the go!
🗺️ FEATURED INSIGHT
6 Months of AI Second Act: The Posts That Matter Most
This week marks about six months since I started writing AI Second Act in earnest.
Rather than pile on another how-to, I'm hitting pause to look back at what we've covered.
If you're new here, this is your cheat sheet. If you've been around a while, it's a refresher. Either way, bookmark what's useful.
🏁 Where to Start
These three give you the foundation without the fluff:
AI 101 — What Mid-Career Professionals Need to Know in 2025 — Core terms, career implications, and how to set up a smarter chatbot in 2 minutes.
Start Here: What to Do First with AI at Work — The 5-step starter plan for quick wins without big projects.
The 6 Highest-Value Things AI Gives Mid-Career Professionals — Where AI actually gives you leverage today, with copy-paste prompts.
💬 Get Better at Prompting
How to Get 80% More from AI with Better Prompts — The 80/20 of prompting, with real examples.
Beyond the Basics: Build Prompt Systems That Work — 20 smarter prompts and 3 strategies to level up.
From Chaos to Clarity: Problem Solving with AI — Structure any messy problem in under 5 minutes.
⚡ Practical Tools & Time-Savers
These are the posts people actually use:
Email + AI = 3 Hours Back in Your Week — Manual tricks + AI tools for your inbox.
Meeting Co-Pilot Kit — Complete kit to prep, capture, and summarize meetings.
NotebookLM 80/20 Mastery: 10x Learning — Free tool to 10x how you learn from documents.
Turn Your Project Files Into an AI Knowledge Base — Your messy folders = AI goldmine.
👥 Leading Teams Through AI
For when you need to bring others along:
How to Talk to Leadership About AI — 6 specific capabilities that matter to VPs. Skip the philosophy.
The 3 AI Fears Every Team Has — and How to Calm Them — Replacement fear, looking stupid, wasting time. The playbook to turn resistance into curiosity.
How New Team Members Get Up to Speed in Days, Not Months — Real experiments in AI-accelerated onboarding.
Why Internal AI Projects Fail — Before you launch that pilot, read this.
🔒 Don't Skip This One
Lock it Down — Privacy with AI Tools — How to keep your information private. Non-negotiable stuff.
What's Next
We're heading into 2026 with a sharper focus: less AI news, more practical application. Frameworks you can use on Monday morning. Prompts you can copy-paste. Real experiments from inside a corporate role, not from the consulting sidelines.
If there's a topic you want me to dig into, reply to this email. I read everything.
Thanks for being here.
Weekly AI strategies for operating executives
— Brett
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Picture by Natalie Kinnear on Unsplash.