Your Unique Lens.

AI can copy almost anything now, except you.

Every codified skill is going cheap, all at once. Writing, coding, design, research, analysis. If a job can be written down as a process, it is becoming a tool anyone can run. Scary.

The one thing that does not commoditize is your lens. The specific stack of what you have lived and mastered, who you are, your values, your goals. Mine is two decades of production, a head start on AI, and a handful of things I care about a lot. The more layers of me I stack into my projects, the emptier the competitive landscape gets.

So don't try to out-tool everyone. You can't, and you don't need to. Take the one thing nobody else has, your lens, and put a force multiplier behind it. AI is that multiplier. Everything in this issue is a version of that bet.

A pricing engine for a moving company.

A friend of mine has run a commercial moving company for twenty years. Office relocations. Pricing commercial moves is his expertise.

It is harder than it looks. The inventory in every room, the truckloads, the crew, the access at both ends, the overtime, the fuel, the materials. A hundred numbers, and they all pull on each other. For twenty years, landing the quote has been his business, keeping all these numbers in his head and on clipboards and spreadsheets.

So I built him a tool with CGA OS, the system I run my studio on. He does not fill out a clean form. He feeds it the job the way it actually shows up: messy emails, handwritten notes, a voice memo from the walkthrough, photos of the rooms. The tool reads all of it and hands back the full quote and the client proposal, in the exact format he has used for twenty years. Because that is how I trained it. His way, not a generic one. Building a tool like that used to be its own team's job, engineers, months, a decent budget. Now it collapses into one operator with a system.

The thing only he could do, anyone on his team can do now.

Here is the part I keep thinking about. I did not just build a pricing tool. I captured the workflow. And a captured workflow travels, to the next moving company, to any business whose work has the same shape.

The tool is just this week.

The workflow compounds for years.

What's baking?

A couple of newsletters ago the Data Bakery was a toy for joining public data. Two sources nobody thought to combine, and out comes something neither one showed alone. That join is the whole engine, and it is a working node in my system now.

The move from here is to widen what it joins. Not just static datasets, but the things exploding right now, a fresh capability from the week's news, a new way machines can sense the world, a domain that capability has never touched. Run the same join on those and the output stops being a neat insight and becomes a revelation, something you can suddenly see or do that you could not before.

Here is the kind I am after. There is a real technique out of MIT where a silent video secretly carries the sound that was in the room, because every object in the frame trembles a little when someone speaks. Join that to the silent home movies in everyone's attic, the old reels with no audio, and you could pull a voice back out. Nobody ever recorded your grandmother speaking on that film. It turns out it was there the whole time. We just never knew how to listen.

We are not all the way there yet. The Bakery is the working node; the revelation engine is what I am building on top of it. But the joins start here, and you can already make new discoveries with it.

Find your one-of-one lane.

Use YOU to your advantage.

Scaling Creativity is a module in the AI Literacy, Ethics & Productivity program.

I teach a session called Scaling Creativity in the AI Literacy, Ethics & Productivity program, and the whole class turns on one idea: in the age of AI, creativity is not a nice-to-have, it is a survival skill, because your lens is the one part of you that cannot be automated.

Here is an exercise I run the room through. You can do it right now.

Think of a time your expertise let you see something other people missed. A pattern, an opening, a problem you could solve because of what you specifically know. You acted on it, and it worked. Hold that moment.

Now ask the question almost nobody asks. If you had AI then, how would you have scaled it? Not done it faster, scaled it, turned that one-time insight into a system that runs again and again. The gap between the win you had and the engine you could have built around it is the whole opportunity in front of us right now.

Our America 250, at GBH.

This week I also spent a day at GBH, part of Our America 250. Massachusetts spent its first 250 years inventing the country, and a lot of what it runs on: public education, the telephone, the polio vaccine, the first American node of the web. The question of the day was, what will the state invent in the next 250? The mood was equal parts long-term optimism and short-term concern, which is honestly where most thoughtful people sit right now.

The talk that stuck with me was Joseph Aoun, who runs Northeastern. His point was that education does not end anymore. A degree used to be a finish line. Now it is closer to a subscription you never cancel, because the field keeps resetting faster than any diploma can keep up. Nobody graduates out of this one.

That is the other half of the lens. Your lens is yours for life, but the world it works in changes every week, so keeping it sharp is a job that never finishes. This is where AI earns its keep for me. It is the fastest way I have ever had to keep learning and stay current in my own lane. Your lens, plus learning that never stops, multiplied by AI. That is the whole formula.

What actually mattered in AI this week.

I read more AI newsletters than is healthy so you do not have to. Here is the 5% worth your time, with what I think it means.

The most capable model got a government leash. GPT-5.6, the new frontier model, just got reined in by the government. The headline is not which model. It is that raw capability is starting to be rationed, gated by who you are and where you sit. The edge stops being "do you have the best model" and becomes "what can you build with the one you can get." That has always been the CGA bet, and it just got more true.

Claude moved into Slack as a coworker. The agents are leaving the chat window and showing up where the work actually happens. For operators this is the quiet shift: AI stops being a place you go and becomes a teammate in your workspace. The companies that win will not be the ones with the best chatbot. They will be the ones who learned to delegate.

Agents started getting credit cards. New tooling lets an AI agent spend money on its own, safely. Thinking was step one. Doing is step two. An agent that can research, decide, and then actually transact is a different animal, and it is arriving faster than most people expect.

Pass it on

That is the week. A pricing engine for a moving company, and two events full of people trying to work out what AI means for them.

If you run a business with a problem worth solving, or you know someone who does, I would love an introduction. Finding the pain and building the tool that takes it away is the whole job, and it is how I keep flying. And if you are putting AI in front of a team or a stage, that is work I love and I am available for it.

If you know one person who would like this, send it their way. A share is the best fuel you can give me. And if you are reading this on LinkedIn, the full thing lands in your inbox first. The email list is the one place I actually own.