The Right Tools for the Job

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're slowly going through the process at work to sign off on Claude AI as an acceptable tool for day-to-day use. As a company that uses Google Workspace, we had previously enabled Google Gemini as our official platform. I imagine we're not alone in this; many companies are probably making similar decisions right now.

What's been interesting, however, is the reaction from the colleague who sits next to me. He'd been using Google Gemini as his preferred AI tool even before joining the company, is pretty deep in the Google ecosystem, and had been advocating for it as a great solution to others in the business. But since getting access to Claude, he's entirely switched that opinion. He's in a technical role, so he's been using Claude's Code tool and has quickly realised how much better suited it is to some of his tasks. Each day, I now hear him make some comment about how great it is ,and how he's planning to pay for a personal Claude account to use outside of work too.

We've known for a while that certain AI tools, and their underlying Large Language Models (LLMs), can be better suited to some tasks than others. But how often do we actually test that? How often do we stop and think, "I have this task, so I'll use X platform rather than Y"? To add another layer to this, different models from the same provider can also vary in cost. Sticking with Claude as an example, their Haiku model is well suited to quick, straightforward tasks, while Opus is designed to think more deeply about complex problems and deliver more considered answers. That extra capability comes at a price. So again, how many people really think about that, and switch between models depending on the task at hand?

My guess is that most people pick a provider and a model, and then do everything with it. It becomes a habit. You get used to the kinds of answers it gives, and perhaps how best to phrase your prompts. But it's also a limiting habit. Taking a moment to consider which tool you're using for which task could make a real difference to the quality of your output.

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No real world AI Use Case in this edition. Back to normal next week.

The European Central Bank’s chief economist said AI could add more than 4 percentage points to euro area productivity growth over the next decade if adoption remains strong, though high energy costs could slow progress. He also warned that Europe is starting from behind, with a smaller share of AI-related patents than the US.

Why it matters: This is a useful reminder that the AI story is not only about chatbots. Policymakers increasingly see it as an economy-wide productivity tool, which means pressure will keep building on firms to find practical use cases.

EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera met or planned meetings this week with the leaders of Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Amazon as Brussels examines whether dominant tech companies could extend their power into AI through control of platforms, training data, and cloud infrastructure.

Why it matters: This is the kind of story you should watch because AI competition may increasingly be shaped by regulators, not just product launches. Vendor choice, market access, and platform dependency could all become bigger strategic issues.

Reuters reported that OpenAI is offering private-equity firms attractive economics, including a guaranteed minimum return on preferred equity, as it competes with Anthropic to form joint ventures that could speed AI rollout across large portfolios of established companies. The structure is designed to help absorb the high upfront cost of custom deployments and lock in enterprise customers more quickly.

Why it matters: This is a sign that the next phase of AI is not just about better models. It is also about finding new commercial structures that make large-scale adoption easier for traditional businesses.

Thanks for reading, and see you next Thursday.

Simon,

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