Who does AI actually reach?

Friends,

your weekly AI briefing is here - designed to help you respond to AI, not react to the noise. No curveballs. No chaos. Just clarity.

A quick note from Hugo:

If your team is feeling the pace of AI and wondering where to start, I run workshops that don't focus on AI at all. We use the "superpower" framing - telepathy, teleportation, time travel - to unlock what problem is actually worth solving, then pair it with AI. Teams leave with momentum and a plan.

If you'd like your team to think bigger, get in touch.

Shoutout to my friend John Mulholland for the superpower framing.

📰 This was the week that was...

You could feel the pace of change accelerating this week. Three major launches landed on the same day, and each one tells you something different about where business is heading.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7, a step-change in long-running agentic work - the kind of model that quietly does hours of senior engineering without supervision. Canva unveiled Canva AI 2.0, reimagining itself as a conversational, agentic system at the centre of how work gets done, with Slack, Gmail, Calendar and more baked in. And OpenAI gave Codex control of your desktop, so its coding agent can now open and operate apps on your Mac while you get on with something else.

What's in it for a UK business leader? The tools your teams used yesterday are measurably more capable today. The ones that were "nice to have" a quarter ago are becoming the place where work actually happens. And the gap between "what's possible" and "what we're doing" is widening faster than most plans assume.

Let's get into it.

🔥 Urgent Priorities

✅ No fires to fight this week ✅ Capability is accelerating - plan for the tools your team has in 90 days, not today ✅ Time to budget for ambition, not just adoption

This isn't a week for panic. It's a week for sitting with a bigger question: who are we becoming?

🎯 Strategic Insight

Tension: The pace of capability is accelerating, and yet the people who most need to believe AI is for them increasingly don't. New exclusive data from Startup Sherpas (shared below) shows girls in the UK's most deprived schools approaching "strongly disagree" that AI will create more opportunities than it takes away. At the same time, Canva's AI 2.0 launch makes a point worth pausing on: even as their platform becomes fully agentic, they insist humans remain at the heart of design for most organisations.

Optimistic insight: The acceleration is real, and so is the choice about what to do with it. The cost of doing is collapsing to near zero. As execution becomes abundant, it becomes commoditised. What rises sharply in value is why you exist, who you serve, and what you stand for. Natural intelligence, supported by silicon intelligence, is the competitive lens - not silicon on its own. The leaders who'll compound advantage from here are the ones who use the speed to create more room for judgement, creativity and connection, not less.

What's shifting: The smart question is no longer "which tool should we buy?" but "who on our team - and in the communities we serve - needs to believe this is for them?" AI is becoming the substrate, not the stand-alone product. That makes belief, confidence and access the new bottleneck.

Why this matters now: We've been writing about the three jobs for a while - create headspace, make room in the P&L, and reinvent the business. This week is squarely a Job 3 week. If you only plan for Job 2 (tool adoption, cost take-out), you'll likely discover the pipeline of AI-ready talent is narrower than you thought, and the people you most want to develop feel least included. If you plan for inclusion alongside reinvention, you get three things: a deeper talent pool, a team that raises rather than lowers its ambition, and a brand that stands for something.

👉 Takeaway: Between now and summer, pick three practical moves:

• Invite one underrepresented group inside the business to co-design an AI workflow that matters to them

• Pair every AI tool rollout with a clear "what's in it for you" story for the people using it

• Set an explicit ambition target for AI usage, not just a cost target

If that sparks a question you're sitting with, reply and tell me - I'll come back to you personally.

🤓 Geek-Out Stories

1️⃣ Canva AI 2.0: the agentic platform that still puts humans at the heart

Canva has announced its biggest evolution since launching in 2013. Canva AI 2.0 brings conversational design, agentic orchestration, living memory across your projects, and connectors into Slack, Gmail, Zoom, Notion, Google Drive and Calendar - plus a deepened partnership with Anthropic that lets you move Claude artifacts straight into Canva to edit and publish. It now serves more than a quarter of a billion people every month, and their in-house models run up to 7x faster and 30x cheaper than comparable frontier alternatives.

👉 Read the announcement

Why it matters: For any SME that runs on decks, social, sheets and internal comms, Canva is about to stop being "a design tool" and start being "the place work happens". The signal underneath the feature list: Canva explicitly positions humans as still at the heart of design. That's a permission slip for your teams to lean in confidently without worrying they're losing the craft.

👉 Action: Nominate one team - marketing, HR, sales ops - to pilot Canva AI 2.0 for 30 days. Ask them to log three things weekly: hours saved, quality gained, and where a human had to step in. That last column is where your real competitive advantage lives.

2️⃣ Exclusive: Startup Sherpas data shows who AI is - and isn't - reaching

Startup Sherpas surveyed 70 young people at the start of their AI programmes. Students at independent schools hold a net-positive view of AI at +0.51 on a 5-point scale. Students at the most disadvantaged school in the study - Walkers Riverside Academy in Newcastle - scored -1.61. Girls in disadvantaged state schools scored -1.41 net, the lowest in the dataset. When asked whether "AI will create more interesting opportunities than it takes away", WRA students averaged 1.50 out of 5 - approaching "strongly disagree" as a group.

👉 Contact Startup Sherpas for the full report

Why it matters: This is the pipeline of AI-confident young people you'll be hiring from over the next decade, and it's narrower than it looks. It skews male. It skews affluent. If your talent, product or customer strategy assumes broad AI enthusiasm among the next generation, the data says you'll miss the majority. The good news: this is a fixable perception gap.

👉 Action: If you run a schools partnership, apprenticeship scheme or early-careers programme, ask one question this quarter: "what are we doing specifically to make girls from disadvantaged backgrounds feel AI is for them?" If the answer is "nothing targeted", that's your next investment.

3️⃣ AI optimism travels further than you think: Nepal and Sri Lanka

A reporter's notebook from Computerworld cuts against the Western AI conversation in a way worth reading. In Kathmandu and Colombo, the chatter isn't hallucinations, rogue agents or data leaks - it's empowerment, upward mobility and women-led entrepreneurship. Local founders, without the burden of legacy systems or bloated IT budgets, are building AI-native from day one. Free-tier tools and open-source small language models mean, in the words of Momo VC's Preeti Adhikary, "AI is truly democratised now."

👉 Read the notebook

Why it matters: Two stories run alongside each other at the moment. One says AI concentrates power in a handful of US hyperscalers. The other says AI lowers the bar for anyone, anywhere, to build something. Both are true, and the second is the one most underweighted in UK boardrooms. Your competition is no longer just the incumbent down the road - it's the AI-native founder in Colombo with no technical debt and nothing to unlearn.

👉 Action: Ask one thing in your next strategy meeting: "if we were starting our business today, in a market with no legacy, what would we build?" Then listen for which of your current constraints are actually habits.

🎨 Weekend Playground

🧪 Take Opus 4.7 on your "I'll get to it" pile

Claude Opus 4.7 landed today with a meaningful step up in long-running agentic work. Early testers report it handles the kind of tasks that previously needed close supervision - and its vision has more than tripled in resolution.

Pick the one thing that's been sitting on your "I'll get to it" pile for months. The messy spreadsheet. The half-written strategy. The policy doc that needs a refresh. The diagram you keep meaning to decode. Hand it to Opus 4.7 on Saturday morning with a cup of coffee, and see how far it gets before you finish it.

Why this matters: The best way to recalibrate your sense of what AI can do is to give it the task you assumed it couldn't. This isn't a productivity hack. It's a calibration ritual.

👉 Mission:

• Pick the one task you've been avoiding because it's "too fiddly"

• Paste it into Opus 4.7 with the context you'd give a new hire

• Ask it to tell you what's unclear before it starts

• Review the output the way you'd review a junior colleague's - give feedback, not rewrites

• Notice what surprised you. That's where your 2026 leverage lives.

📢 Share the Optimism

If The AI Optimist helps you think more clearly, forward it to someone else navigating the shift.

And here's the question I'm genuinely curious about this week: what AI question are you holding right now? The one you haven't quite asked anyone, or the one you've asked and not had a good answer to. Reply and tell me - I read every message and I'll come back to you personally.

Stay strategic, stay generous.

Hugo & Ben