| THE PROMPT |
ISSUE #002
APR 14, 2026
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// YOUR WEEKLY AI EDGE
FAKE INFLUENCERS ARE GETTING REAL BRAND DEALS
Plus: OpenAI goes shopping, Zuck clones himself, Microsoft builds bots that never clock out, and Stanford confirms nobody agrees on anything.
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Good morning. Monday inbox carnage is already underway. Let's make this the one worth opening.
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// TODAY'S SIGNAL
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, REAL PAYCHECKS
AI-generated influencers had a better Coachella than you did. They were everywhere this weekend. Posing with celebrities. Racking up followers. Landing brand deals. Zero sunburns. Zero drama. Zero pulse.Brands are paying them because the ROI math is embarrassingly simple: no flights, no hotel rooms, no "sorry I'm not feeling the vibe today." They're polished, consistent, and cheaper than any human creator with comparable reach. The influencer economy just got its first workforce that doesn't eat, sleep, or renegotiate contracts.
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// THE REAL STORY
The competition for brand deals is no longer human-vs-human. If you work in content, social, or marketing, learn exactly how these AI personas are being priced and deployed. Your clients will ask about them this quarter.
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// SHORTCUT
Copy, paste, go
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"I just heard about [AI tool or trend from this week's news]. Explain it to me like I'm a [your role] at a [company type] who has 5 minutes before a meeting where this will come up. What do I need to know, what should I absolutely not say, and what's one question I can ask that makes me sound like I've been paying attention?"
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OPENAI WANTS TO MANAGE YOUR MONEY NOW
OpenAI bought Hiro, a personal finance AI startup. Budget tracking, investment advice, and retirement planning — all headed straight into ChatGPT. The app 200 million people use to draft emails and argue about whether a hot dog is a sandwich could soon tell them where to put their 401(k). OpenAI is building the everything app, and your wallet is the latest room they've walked into. Their CRO also dropped an internal memo this week about building a "moat" around their products. Corporate-speak translation: make ChatGPT so embedded in your daily decisions that leaving feels like switching banks. Buying Hiro is that strategy applied to your finances.
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// TRANSLATION
"Moat" means lock-in. OpenAI wants ChatGPT handling your work, your money, and eventually your schedule. Each new feature makes it harder to leave. That's the product strategy.
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ZUCK IS CLONING HIMSELF FOR MEETINGS
Meta is training an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg — his voice, his mannerisms, his communication style — to interact with employees and lead meetings. A CEO's biggest constraint is time. Clone the decision-maker and you scale leadership the same way you scale servers. AI Zuck could deliver feedback, answer strategic questions, and maintain presence across 70,000 employees without the real one in the room. Every Fortune 500 CEO is watching Meta try this. The org chart — where access to leadership is gated by calendar availability and layers of middle management — starts to collapse when the boss can be in every room at once.
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// STEP BACK
"Face time with leadership" has always been a scarce resource. AI clones make it abundant. Middle managers lose one of their core functions: being the relay between the top and the bottom. That reshapes how entire companies are structured.
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🔴🟡🟢 RED LIGHT / GREEN LIGHT
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🔴 // RED LIGHT
ANNOUNCING YOUR COMPANY'S "AI STRATEGY" ON LINKEDIN
Unless you're the CEO, broadcasting your org's internal AI plans signals you care more about looking innovative than being it. Keep the strategy internal. Post the results.
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🟢 // GREEN LIGHT
KEEPING A PERSONAL PROMPT LIBRARY
A running doc of prompts that worked for your specific workflows is a compounding advantage. Most people start from scratch every session. That's like deleting your contacts every time you close your phone.
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🔴 // RED LIGHT
TRUSTING AI WITH FINAL NUMBERS IN A CLIENT REPORT
AI is confident and wrong often enough that any number in a deliverable needs a human check. One hallucinated stat in a board deck and your credibility is done. Verify everything with a dollar sign or a percentage.
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🟢 // GREEN LIGHT
USING AI TO PREP FOR SALARY CONVERSATIONS
Feeding your role, market data, and company context into AI to generate counter-arguments and salary benchmarks is one of the highest-ROI prompts you'll ever write. Do this before your next review.
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MICROSOFT'S COPILOT IS GETTING A NIGHT SHIFT
Microsoft is testing AI agents for Copilot that run autonomously inside Microsoft 365. These aren't the "help me rewrite this email" tools. They follow up on tasks, manage workflows, and run 24/7 like a Roomba for your to-do list.If your company uses Microsoft 365 — statistically, your company — the amount of output one person can generate is about to spike. That changes headcount math, promotion criteria, and what "high performer" means when everyone has a bot handling their admin work.
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// CAREER MATH
The people who learn to manage these agents early will look like they have a secret team. The people who ignore them will wonder why their peers got twice as productive overnight. Get access to Copilot now, even if your company hasn't rolled it out formally.
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STANFORD SAYS THE AI TRUST GAP IS GETTING WORSE
Stanford dropped its 2026 AI Index. The headline: the people building AI and the people living with it are further apart than ever. Builders are optimistic. The public is anxious. Job displacement fears are climbing. Trust is dropping. Neither side thinks the other one gets it. The tools keep getting more capable while the average person's understanding stays frozen at "I tried ChatGPT once and it made stuff up." That gap is where misinformation, bad policy, and career paralysis all live.
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// THE MOVE
Read the executive summary of Stanford's 2026 AI Index (free, 15 minutes). Pull one stat and drop it in your next team meeting. Talking about AI with data instead of vibes is a positioning play that costs you nothing.
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// TOOLBOX
PERPLEXITY
Google search if Google answered your question instead of showing you 47 ads and a Reddit thread from 2019. Ask anything, get a sourced answer with citations. Free tier is generous. One caveat: it sometimes cites AI-generated content as a source, which is the ouroboros of misinformation. Verify anything that matters.
→ perplexity.ai (free)
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// WAIT... DOES THIS ACTUALLY WORK?
THE OBSCURE PROMPT OF THE DAY
prompts nobody asked for. results nobody expected. try it anyway.
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"You are a career counselor from the year 1926. I'm going to describe my current job to you. Based on what you know about the economy in 1926, tell me what my closest equivalent role would have been, what I'd be paid, and whether you'd advise me to keep at it or pivot to something more promising."
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// OUR VERDICT
We told it we write a newsletter about AI. It said we'd be a telegraph news summarizer making $35 a week and strongly suggested we pivot to radio advertising. Somehow the advice still applies.
SURPRISINGLY PRACTICAL: ★★★★★
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// YOUR EDGE
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01
Learn this: AI literacy for non-technical roles. Knowing what these tools can and can't do, and how to talk about them without sounding like a press release. Stanford's report makes the stakes clear: that knowledge gap is becoming a professional liability.
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02
Watch this: Hiro (now inside OpenAI). Fintech and AI are colliding, and the companies at that intersection need people who understand money, not just models.
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03
Say this: "Microsoft is testing AI agents that work autonomously inside 365. If that hits our stack, our workflows look completely different by Q4. Do we have a plan?"
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// GOT THIS FROM A FRIEND?
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