In partnership with
Hello,
This is Simon with the latest edition of The Weekly. In these updates, I share key AI related stories from this week's news, list upcoming events, and share any longer form articles posted on the website.
Within a few months of ChatGPT entering broad public awareness, people started questioning whether it would replace their jobs. It's a question that hasn't gone away. If we look at the redundancies made by both large and small companies in recent years, AI appears to be one of the overriding factors. There are a couple of reasons why AI threatens the jobs of knowledge workers: it can produce vast quantities of work, and it does so at a fraction of the cost. Or does it?
While we might assume an AI tool can match the output of an entire team, it's also becoming increasingly expensive. If you've used a free plan on one of the main platforms — ChatGPT or Claude, for example — you'll no doubt have noticed that you don't get many tokens to play with. Choose one of the more advanced models, like Claude Opus 4, and you can burn through your allowance in a matter of minutes. There's a reason Anthropic is forecast to bring in $10.9 billion in revenue this quarter: the vast majority of customers are upgrading to paid plans to get greater usage limits.
Many companies have now settled on their chosen AI provider and are pushing everyone to use it. They want each team to find more efficient ways of working, completing tasks more quickly, and producing work they simply couldn't have done before. But the costs are skyrocketing. According to a recent report from software company CloudZero, 40% of companies are now spending more than $10 million a year on AI.
What once looked like cheap labour is now a significant operating cost, and achieving a positive return on investment is paramount. CFOs are paying close attention to the balance between AI spend and human wages.
Do you have any idea what your personal AI use costs your company? And do you think it's generating real value?
A Message From Our Sponsor
The Architecture Behind AI-Native Revenue Automation
In our new white paper, The Architecture Behind AI-Native Revenue Automation, Tabs CTO Deepak Bapat breaks down what it actually takes to apply AI to revenue workflows without breaking the books.
You’ll learn why probabilistic reasoning isn’t enough for finance, how Tabs pairs LLMs with deterministic logic, and why a unified Commercial Graph is the foundation for scalable, audit-ready automation. From contract interpretation to cash application, this paper goes deep on where AI belongs—and where it absolutely doesn’t.
If you’re evaluating AI for billing, collections, or revenue operations, this is the architecture perspective most vendors won’t show you.
Real World Use Case
Exclusive for subscribers.
In this section, I’m going to bring to you a real world example of AI use. This week, we take a look at a remote hospital in Japan.
Mitsutake Hospital in Iki City, Nagasaki Prefecture, has 88 beds, serves a remote island community, and until recently was losing money — like around 70% of hospitals in Japan. The culprit isn't mismanagement; it's complexity. Japan's medical fee system is bureaucratic enough that errors in documentation — nursing ratios, discharge records, equipment inspections — trigger government clawback repayments on fees already earned. Miss the paperwork, lose the revenue.
Fujitsu ran a three-month pilot from July to September 2025, building a platform that pulls together fragmented data from across the hospital's systems to manage facility standards, optimise bed utilisation, and streamline patient flow. The goal was simple: stop the hospital losing money through administrative errors and underused capacity.
The results: a 10% increase in projected annual revenue, and approximately 400 hours per month stripped out of administrative work. The revenue uplift doesn't come from seeing more patients — it comes from correctly claiming fees the hospital was already entitled to.
Genshukai's chairman framed the project in terms of what clinical staff should actually be doing: listening to patients, acknowledging their fears, providing a bedside manner. The AI is absorbing the paperwork that was crowding that out.
Fujitsu is expanding the platform across the wider Genshukai group. The World Economic Forum included it in its January 2026 MINDS cohort, which selects AI deployments for measurable real-world impact rather than technical novelty.
Curated News
AI agents can now use your computer at work
Certainly at my own company, agentic browsers that take over your computer have been banned. But, Microsoft's Copilot Studio computer-use agents hit general availability this month, making it the first major platform to ship the capability at production scale. In plain terms, this means you can now build an AI agent that navigates software the same way a person does — logging in, clicking through screens, filling in forms etc. Copilot Studio now logs agent sessions for audit purposes, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints can be configured for steps that require approval or fall below a confidence threshold.
Why it matters: Think about all the repetitive, screen-clicking work that happens in your business right now — vendor portals, internal systems, admin tasks nobody enjoys. This is the technology that starts to automate that. The governance guardrails Microsoft has built in — audit trails, human approval steps, security controls — are exactly what organisations need before they'd trust a machine to do it unsupervised.
Google makes a huge update to Search
At Google I/O last week, CEO Sundar Pichai described Search as now feeling "more like an ongoing conversation," with users asking longer and more complex questions. A major theme throughout the keynote was Google's effort to transform Search from a traditional search engine into a more interactive AI assistant. One of the more significant announcements for business users was the introduction of information agents — AI systems that users can set up to continuously monitor topics and return useful updates or actions in the background
Why it matters: You and your team most likely use Google Search multiple times every single day. The shift from "type keywords, get links" to "describe what you need, get an answer" changes how people research, fact-check, and gather information at work.
AI agents are coming for your legacy software
Most companies today can point to demos that impressed, pilots that worked, and tools that saved time in narrow tasks. Far fewer can say AI has changed their business across functions, processes, and teams. SAP's CEO made this point explicitly at their flagship conference this month, arguing that the structural gap isn't the AI model — it's context. While 80% accuracy may be sufficient for consumer AI, "eighty percent is just not good enough when you run the world's most business-critical businesses. They should not guess; they should deliver accurate, compliant, and secure outcomes."
Why it matters: This is a useful reality check for any business leader feeling pressure to show AI ROI. The companies seeing real returns are the ones connecting AI to their actual business systems and data — not running standalone chatbots. The question worth asking internally isn't "are we using AI?" but "is our AI connected to how we actually run?"
Upcoming AI Events
The AI Summit London
Tobacco Dock, London, June 10-11AI World Congress
Kensington Conference and Events Centre, London, June 23-24World AI Summit
Taets Art & Event Park, Amsterdam, October 07-08
Thanks for reading, and see you next Thursday.
Simon,
Was this email shared with you? If so subscribe here to get your own edition every Thursday.
Enjoying Plain AI? Share it and get a free gift!
If you find this newsletter useful, why not share it with a couple of friends or colleagues who would also benefit? As a special thank you, when two people subscribe using your unique referral link, I’ll send you my "Exclusive Guide: Supercharge Your Work with NotebookLM." It’s a practical, no-nonsense guide to help you turn information overload into your secret weapon.
You can also follow me on social media: