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- What happens to your business when your AI fails? + An early Christmas Present
What happens to your business when your AI fails? + An early Christmas Present
This week brought a reminder that the more we rely on technology the more we need to consider the business continuity when things go wrong.
Hugo Pickford-Wardle
October 24, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
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.
🌟 Your invitation to join AI Night School as my guest
Next week we start the new course at AI Night School where you learn to prompt from 1st Principles.
If you've ever wondered how AI might help you unlock actual value in your business, this one is for you.
In response to so many of you wanting to learn the fundamental skills to start unlocking true value from AI I have designed this course to take you into 2026 as AI literate, skilled prompters.
Think of this as an early Christmas present for being an early AI Optimist subscriber and advocate. And please, if you think someone you know may find this valuable we’re building this community through word of mouth and referrals, so please pass on the good vibes.
📰 This was the week that was...
This week gave us a useful reminder: as we rely more on AI, robustness matters more.
AWS suffered a major outage that rippled across services and businesses. It wasn't an AI story - but it matters to anyone building on cloud infrastructure. Because the more dependent we become on technology, the more critical resilience becomes.
Meanwhile, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, signalling its ambition to become the next social media, search, and consumer gateway to the digital world. Which raises an interesting question: why are so many businesses fixated on ChatGPT when Claude is more aligned to unlocking value for businesses?
I've spent this week testing Claude Code and Obsidian as the foundation for a robust, maintainable personal AI tech stack. The results? Powerful and a little overwhelming. It feels like there's space between ChatGPT's consumer appeal and Claude's technical depth for something new to emerge.
The signal beneath the noise? We're past the "does AI work?" phase. Now the questions are: how reliable is it? How much control do we have? And what happens when it breaks?
Let's get into it.
🔥 Urgent Priorities
✅ No fires to fight
✅ But infrastructure fragility is showing
✅ Time to stress-test your dependencies
This week doesn't demand immediate action - but it does demand honest questions about what happens when the systems you rely on go down.
🎯 Strategic Insight
This is not a week about capability - it's a week about continuity.
Tension: We're building faster than we're building resilience. Every new AI capability adds another dependency. And dependencies become vulnerabilities when infrastructure fails.
Optimistic insight: This is solvable. Business continuity planning isn't new - we just need to apply it to AI adoption with the same rigour we apply to everything else mission-critical.
What's really shifting:
AI strategy now requires business continuity planning. What's your fallback if your primary AI provider goes down? Do you have redundancy? Can you switch models or platforms quickly?
Personal tech stacks are becoming viable alternatives. Tools like Claude Code and Obsidian let you build systems you control - not rent from the major AI providers. The trade-off? More complexity, more maintenance, but more resilience.
And everyone building on third-party platforms needs to ask: how much do we trust this vendor? How aligned are our interests? What's our exit plan?
Why this matters now: The next competitive advantage won't just come from adopting AI faster - it will come from adopting it more robustly.
👉 Takeaway: Map your AI dependencies. Identify single points of failure. Build redundancy into your most critical workflows. Treat AI infrastructure like you'd treat any other mission-critical system.
🤓 Geek-Out Stories
1️⃣ Ray Dalio built an AI clone of himself The legendary investor and author has created an AI version of himself - and his reflections on what AI clones can (and should) do are genuinely thought-provoking.
Why it matters: Dalio's writing on economic cycles and the rise and fall of empires underpins much of my optimistic view on AI. His take on AI clones extends that thinking: these aren't replacements for humans, they're tools for scaling wisdom and preserving insight.
2️⃣ AI that creates communities Neya is a new platform using AI to help people build and sustain communities around shared interests and causes.
Why it matters: AI for impact often comes from grassroots activities, startups, and communities themselves. Ensuring everyone is empowered (and skilled) to take advantage of AI is crucial for building the future we all want to live in.
3️⃣ India bets on frugal AI While the major AI companies - OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft - chase ever-larger, more expensive models, India is pioneering a different path: frugal AI that's cheaper, more efficient, and more accessible.
And what if the big AI providers are wrong? Newsweek explores the possibility that the "bigger is better" hypothesis driving the major AI labs might be fundamentally flawed.
Why it matters: This challenges the entire premise of the current AI race. If frugal AI can deliver comparable value at a fraction of the cost, it redistributes power away from the biggest providers and toward smaller players, developing nations, and businesses that can't afford billion-pound infrastructure investments.
🎨 Weekend Playground Plan your Christmas travels with Manus AI
Manus AI just launched version 1.5, and their trip planner is an excellent way to see what modern AI assistants can do.
Your mission this weekend: plan your Christmas travel. Let Manus handle the logistics, the options, the trade-offs. See how it feels to delegate complex planning to AI.
Why this matters: This is what AI-assisted planning looks like when it works. Pay attention to where it delights you and where it frustrates you - that's the gap between current capability and real utility.
If The AI Optimist helps you think more clearly, forward it to someone else navigating the shift. If it's not quite landing, hit reply and let me know - I read every message.
Stay strategic, stay generous.
Hugo & Ben
