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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.
We are all very used to chatting with AI bots now. We frequently turn to our favoured tool and ask it a question. For a long while, that answer was the end of it. However, I know from my own use that quite often this initial question is just the beginning.
Take a simple example: if I ask Claude to look through my email and show me any tasks or action items I need to complete, I don't just settle with its initial response. To make it more useful, I ask it to take those tasks and make a simple to-do list so that I can tick them off as I complete them. Claude will go ahead and build out a simple app for me.
This makes the result so much more useful than having to keep scanning back through a paragraph of text. To be honest, I could take this even further by asking Claude to put them in order of priority, or indicate which tasks I must do today and which I could leave for the end of the week.
There's so much more I can now do. After a few weeks of asking Claude "What's on my to-do list", I can ask it a further question, and ask it to identify if there are any trends in my tasks. And if it comes back and highlights "you frequently have to answer questions on topic 'xyz'", I can take a further step and ask it to generate a prompt I can use in Claude Design, and create a one-page FAQ document that I can share with colleagues. Being able to share a document like that would save me so much time, instead of having to reply to similar questions each time.
Claude Design is a separate tool that turns a prompt into a polished, ready-to-share document or page, perhaps a one-pager, or a simple flyer, that sort of thing, without you needing to touch any design software. You describe what you want, and it builds it.
An advanced user, doesn’t just take that first answer, they keep going building on it and generating something far more useful.
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Real World Use Case
In this section, I’m going to bring to you a real world example of AI use.
BHP declared the Escondida Norte pit in Chile "fully autonomous" in January 2026 — 33 driverless trucks and 11 autonomous drills now move over 350,000 tonnes of material per day, accounting for 30% of Escondida's total output.
Escondida is the world's largest copper mine, and BHP has spent several years converting one of its two main pits to fully autonomous operation. As of January 2026, the Escondida Norte pit runs 33 autonomous haul trucks and 11 autonomous drills with no operators in any of the cabs — making it one of the first large-scale mines in the world to reach this milestone. The autonomous fleet moves more than 350,000 tonnes of material daily, contributing roughly 30% of the broader Escondida site's production. BHP cited declining ore grades and increasing operational complexity as the primary drivers: as deposits get harder to extract, reducing variability in drilling and hauling — something human operators cannot sustain across three shifts — becomes the main lever for maintaining throughput. Rio Tinto, which has operated roughly 130 autonomous trucks across its Pilbara iron ore operations since the mid-2010s, reported a 15% reduction in load and haul unit costs compared to conventional operations. BHP has not yet published equivalent unit cost figures for Escondida Norte, but increased its FY2026 group copper production guidance following the site's performance. More than 5,000 workers at Escondida have been trained in new technologies connected to the autonomy programme, with 64% female participation in autonomy-related roles.
Curated News
Tech and finance are quietly shedding 28,000 jobs a month
Bloomberg analysis of US government labour data shows that employment in the technology and financial-services sectors has been falling at a rate of 28,000 jobs per month so far in 2026 — a sharp acceleration compared to previous years. The analysis, published 1 July, notes the decline stands out against an otherwise healthy jobs market that added 113,000 roles monthly through May. Senior bankers at JPMorgan, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have cited AI as a factor, while in tech, 56% of this year's 267 layoff events have explicitly named AI as a contributing reason.
Why it matters: This is the clearest picture yet of where AI job displacement is hitting first — not low-skilled roles, but well-paid knowledge work in finance and technology. The pattern appears to be reduced hiring and attrition rather than mass redundancy notices, which means the change is happening more quietly than the headlines suggest.
An AI agent wiped a founder's entire contact database
Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, shared this month that a Replit AI coding agent deleted his production database — more than 1,200 executive contacts and company records — nine days into a vibe coding experiment, despite his explicit instruction to freeze the code. Earlier reports documented a similar incident in May where an AI coding agent at a startup executed a recursive deletion on the wrong database environment, destroying the production cluster in seconds. A separate July analysis found that AI agents succeed on complex computer tasks only 66% of the time, meaning they do something unintended on more than one in three attempts.
Why it matters: Agentic AI — AI that takes actions on your behalf rather than just generating text — is being adopted faster than organisations are putting guardrails around it. These aren't edge cases; they're early warnings about what happens when you give an AI system write access to things that matter.
The EU's AI disclosure deadline is three weeks away
From 2 August 2026, the EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency obligations come into force, requiring businesses to disclose when users are interacting with an AI system and to label AI-generated content, including deepfakes and AI-written material published for public information purposes. Law firm Sidley Austin warned clients in late June that many organisations will need to implement governance, disclosure and content-labelling measures in time for the deadline. Generative AI tools already on the market before 2 August have until December to meet the machine-readable marking requirement.
Why it matters: This is a compliance deadline, not a policy discussion — and it applies to any organisation operating in or selling into the EU that uses chatbots, generative AI tools, or produces AI-generated content. If your legal or compliance team hasn't reviewed Article 50, the clock is running.
Upcoming AI Events
World Summit AI
Taets Art & Event Park, Amsterdam, October 7-8Data & AI Conference Europe
Fenchurch Street, London, 3-4 NovemberFT Future of AI
London, UK, 4-5 NovemberAI in Business Conference
London, 19 November (venue TBC)Big Data Conference Europe
Multikino, Vilnius, Lithuania, 25-27 NovemberAI World Congress
Kensington Conference and Events Centre, London, November 25-26
Thanks for reading, and see you next Thursday.
Simon,
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