ThIs AI Punk Now? Rick Rubin Thinks So—and He Might Be Right

Friends,

Your weekly AI briefing is here to help you respond to what matters in AI. Clear signals. No chaos.

This week, three stories stood out:

🧠 Perplexity made it much easier to build agents that do real work
🎙️ Rick Rubin explained how coding is starting to feel like creativity
📈 AI is creeping closer to your workflows—and that’s a good thing

👉 If this helps you, share it with someone who’s trying to make sense of the noise.

🔥 URGENT PRIORITIES

It has been 10 weeks without any urgent priorities.

✅ No fires to put out
✅ Plenty of opportunity to assess on your timescale
✅ Your roadmap to becoming AI-First is unchanged

🎯 STRATEGIC CONSIDERATIONS

There’s no big shift this week, but here’s a question worth asking:

Hugo has developed an AI-First Readiness Maturity Model and Audit to help answer that. He’ll be running a short session to walk through the model and how it can guide your planning.

Reply to this email if you’d like to join.

And if you’re already:

✅ Training your team to use AI tools
✅ Exploring where AI fits in your business
✅ Starting to track value from AI experiments

…you’re building a real advantage.

🤓 GEEK OUT

🧪 Perplexity Labs
Perplexity just launched Labs, a new way to build custom AI agents that run automated research tasks. It’s clearly aimed at smaller businesses looking for insights from their spreadsheets, systems and data. The killer feature is ‘accuracy’ which is what they focused their search product on.

👉 Take a look at Labs

Why this matters:
It shows how quickly agent-based work is becoming accessible, cheap, and flexible. What used to require a team and a budget can now be developed in a day.

If you're already thinking about automation or preparing for an AI audit, Labs gives you a taste of what's now possible—especially for knowledge-heavy roles.

If you want to show your team the art of the possible, why not run a Hackathon?

🎙️ Rick Rubin and The Way of Code
Rubin’s latest podcast and website explore a very different take on software: one where coding starts to feel like composing music or designing clothes.

👉 Listen to the podcast
👉 Explore The Way of Code

Why this matters:
AI is making it easier to build. But what you build—and how it feels—matters even more. The work ahead is less about lines of code, and more about the imagination behind them.

If you're leading teams, designing services, or just thinking about the future of work, this is a helpful nudge to make things more human, not less.

🎨 WEEKEND PLAYGROUND

🎧 Punk Rock Software
Listen to Rick Rubin’s conversation about creative software and how coding is shifting into a more expressive medium. It’s a great weekend listen if you're burnt out on dashboards and decks.

📢 Share Your Thoughts

If What Now?! has helped you make smarter decisions, send it to someone else who’s trying to cut through the noise.

If it’s not quite hitting, tell us what’s missing. Just hit reply.

Have a good week,
Hugo & Ben