🧭 Missed the Internet Boom? Don’t Miss This One

🧭 THIS WEEK AT AI SECOND ACT

Howdy — and welcome to all our new subscribers! I’m glad you’re here. AI Second Act is your weekly guide to building, leading, and growing with AI.

This is the first edition of the newsletter — and I’d love your help shaping it. You’ll find a quick feedback poll at the end, and I always welcome direct replies.

👉 Just hit "Reply" and let me know what you want more (or less) of 💬. My goal is to make this as valuable and practical as possible for professionals like you navigating the new AI era. 🚀

This week, we’re stepping back for a quick reset to highlight just how monumental this AI wave really is — and why it demands your attention:

• 🌊 The magnitude of the technology shift is unlike anything we’ve seen since the internet.

• ⚡ The speed of adoption is unprecedented — and it’s accelerating.

• 🎯 That makes it critical to learn how to apply AI not just in your work, but in your life.

We’ll break down what’s happening, why it matters, and how to begin riding the wave — even if you’re just starting.

[Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash]

🧰 AI NEWS + LEARNING

Here’s a few things I found recently:

• Open AI released o3 and o4-mini - major updates to their foundation models offering faster, more efficient capabilities.

• Sider.ai launched a Chrome extension - offering fast, sidebar-style access to a range of AI tools across the web.

• Open AI released a prompt cookbook - a detailed and long-form guide on designing better prompts, recently published for public use.

• Canva adds an AI Assistant - the popular design platform now includes an integrated AI assistant to help with layouts, visuals, and copy.

• Interesting article, explaining the State of AI in 2025 - charts showing the huge costs of AI, carbon footprint [which we must fix!], applications and investments among others.

(Use these to explore, test, and think about where you might apply one or two in your week ahead.)

🗺️ FEATURED INSIGHT

Let’s get into making sure we understand how big a deal AI is with a couple of quotes and some forecasts.

Quotes:

Forecasts:

• $1.8 trillion — Projected size of the AI market by 2030, growing over 37% annually. (Statista)

• $4.4 trillion — Annual economic impact of generative AI across industries. (McKinsey & Company)

• 7% global GDP boost — Projected economic growth from AI in the next decade. (Goldman Sachs)

• 40% of jobs affected — Proportion of roles impacted by AI in the coming years. (World Economic Forum)

AI Growth:

🚀 ChatGPT — OpenAI’s popular chatbot — reached 100 million users in just 2 months, the fastest growth rate of any consumer app in history! For comparison, it took Facebook nearly 4.5 years to reach the same milestone.

📈 The number of AI startups has increased more than 4x since 2020, with billions in funding flowing into tools, copilots, and automation platforms. The boom is real — and accelerating.

Start Learning Now:

Were you working in tech in the early 2000s — but somehow the internet boom passed you by while you were buried in 'other stuff'? At most, you sent a few emails ☕📧. Or maybe you’ve always been into computers… but ‘somehow’ forgot to mine Bitcoin back in 2011? 😬💸

Don’t let history repeat itself with AI 🎯. This wave is just as big — if not bigger, so it’s critical you learn and integrate AI into what you do. (And yes… that might have been me missing a couple of huge topics. Cough. Sputter. Moan. 🤦‍♂️).

💡 Add AI to What You Do:

If you're very new to AI, start with ChatGPT, and simply pick a basic task to give it a try — like asking it to rewrite a short email for clarity or drafting a headline for your LinkedIn post. We'll go deeper on ChatGPT prompts and workflows in a future edition.

Here are 6 simple, beginner-friendly ways to get started with AI this week — no tech skills required.

1. Ask ChatGPT for help writing or rewording something — Stuck on an email or LinkedIn post? Ask ChatGPT to improve your writing or generate a first draft.

2. Summarise a long article instantly — Use Sider.ai or Perplexity.ai to drop in a URL or PDF and get a summary in seconds.

3. Try Canva's AI Assistant — In Canva, use the AI tools to generate copy, design suggestions, or even full images.

4. Use ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas — Need ideas for a project, title, or outline? Ask ChatGPT for 10 options and see what sticks.

5. Start a conversation with Claude — Try Claude.ai for a slightly more conversational and nuanced experience, especially good for writing or analysis tasks.

6. Do fast research with Perplexity — Use Perplexity.ai as a smarter alternative to Google when you want fast, trusted summaries or citations.

Start small — the goal is to make AI a natural extension of what you already do, not add more work.

🗣️ What About You?

Have you already tried using AI to reinvent part of your work or life? What happened?