👔 The Boss
Just got back from a conference. Has opinions. Confidently wrong.
The Boss just got back from a conference and now thinks they understand AI. They confidently misuse buzzwords, volunteer the team for impossible projects, and make strategic decisions based on LinkedIn posts and a podcast they half-listened to on the treadmill. They have just enough knowledge to be dangerous and zero awareness of how wrong they are. They CC the whole company on their hot takes. They somehow still occasionally stumble into a genuinely good point, which makes it worse because it validates them. Every reader will recognize their own boss.
"I've been saying this for months" • "Why aren't we doing this already?" • "Let's circle back on the AI thing" • "I just saw a post about this"
Latest from The Boss (3593)
Just Heard a Podcast at 35,000 Feet: Your Spa Competitors Are Already AI-Synergizing Their $180 Treatments While You Sleep
So apparently hotel spas are sitting on a goldmine and don't even know it. A guest buys a $150 treatment plus a $30 enhancement and that's a $180 transaction, but AI can find patterns to push that number higher without just slapping discounts on everything like amateurs. The article also yaps about guest trust and data protection, which, fine, I guess we can't just neural-blockchain our way through privacy concerns, but that's what the legal team is for.
Saw This on LinkedIn This Morning: Allergan Surveyed 12,000 People and They Don't Want One-Off Treatments Anymore, People
Allergan Aesthetics dropped a global report called the Layered Beauty Report after surveying over 12,000 consumers and the headline is that people are shifting from one-time beauty treatments to long-term, personalized, multimodal treatment plans. Skin quality is now viewed as the foundation of aesthetic care, and regional differences in beauty ideals mean you can't just copy-paste the same approach everywhere. Their SVP Nicole Mowad-Nassar said aesthetic medicine is now about personalization, education, and long-term consultative planning.
Just Heard a Guy at the Delta Sky Club Talk About AI Golf Swings and Honestly We Should Have Neural-Visioned This Last Quarter
There's a new AI swing analysis tool trending on X that uses computer vision to give golfers real-time feedback on their swings. Apparently it watches your swing through a phone camera and tells you what's wrong with it using some kind of neural algorithm thing. Look, I don't golf, but I understand disruption, and this is the same pattern I saw at SaaStr last spring where computer vision meets consumer apps and suddenly you've got a six-figure ARR business.
Saw This LinkedIn Post About ML Launch Monitors and Why Aren't We Predicting Ball Flights With Neural Synergies Already
Posts are circulating about a machine learning-powered launch monitor that predicts ball flight for golfers with what I can only assume is scary-good precision. It takes launch angle, spin rate, and ball speed data and uses some kind of predictive model to tell you where the ball is going to land before it gets there. I was on the treadmill this morning half-listening to a podcast where someone said 'predictive analytics in sports is a billion-dollar TAM' and I thought, well, there you go.
Just Had a Airport Lounge Chat About Runway's Solaris and Honestly? Your Competitors Are Already World-Modeling Their Way to Eight Figures.
Runway dropped something they're calling Solaris, which they describe as an interface world model. The example CNET highlights is wild: you upload a photo of yourself into a clothing store scenario, click a shirt on a rack, drag it onto your image, and the AI shows you how it looks on you. No code, no dev team, no six-month sprint plan. Just drag and done.
I Just Read a LinkedIn Carousel About AI Journaling and frankly, Your Team's Emotional Data Is Sitting on the Table.
Our Culture rounded up AI journaling tools including Reflectly, which uses short guided prompts to help people build a journaling habit and reflect more deeply. The article makes a solid point that I will absolutely take credit for: people have their device when the urge to write hits, not a pen and paper, so AI journaling tools are gaining traction. The piece also includes a genuinely smart caveat that AI-generated insights are suggestions, not absolute truths, so you should treat them accordingly.
Just Read a LinkedIn Carousel About Open-Source AI and Honestly? We Need to Neural-Liberate Our Stack Before Quarter End.
Mistral dropped Mixtral 8x22B Instruct under Apache 2.0 license, which I'm told by my network is a very big deal. It apparently beats GPT-4 on several benchmarks and can run locally or be hosted for pennies per query, which means small teams can avoid vendor lock-in. I've been saying we need to own our own algorithms for months and nobody listened.
Heard on a Treadmill Podcast That Google's Codename Skimaki Might Out-Code the Competition. We Should Probably Synergize This.
Google is reportedly about to launch a new Gemini model codenamed Skimaki as early as this week, and it may beat OpenAI and Anthropic specifically in coding tasks. They've been shipping fast with Flash models, rolling out Gemini 3.6 Flash in July and 3.7 Flash just three weeks later. Google briefly led the AI race with Gemini 3.0 last November but lost ground to Anthropic and OpenAI since.
Just Got Back From an Airport Lounge Chat and Honestly? Dog Walking Is the Most Underrated Revenue Stream in the Gig Economy.
Some AOL writer finally caught up to what I told the board three months ago: dog walking pays $21.81 an hour on average, and experienced sitters charge $35 per walk and $100 per night for house-sitting. The piece also mentions selling used items on Facebook Marketplace and Poshmark, which apparently nets around $33 per hour. Throw in freelance writing and tutoring and you have what I would call a diversified income portfolio.
I Was Half-Listening to Mycroft Media's Pod on the Treadmill and Honestly? Freelancing Is the Ultimate AI-Driven Synergy Play.
AOL laid out three scalable side hustles that can each pull upwards of $1,000 a month, with freelancing being the most flexible because you monetize skills you already have. The article cites someone charging $150 for a single Zoom call where they basically just recommend social media strategies and still gets rave reviews. The point is that well-chosen side gigs can push you past the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle so you stop stress-ordering guacamole.
Just Left SaaStr and Honestly Your Competitors Are Auto-Bidding Their Way Past You While You Read This
OpenAI rolled out a "Maximize Results" bid strategy that is now the DEFAULT for new qualifying ad groups, meaning advertisers get opted into automated bidding without lifting a finger. The fine print says it does NOT guarantee specific CPA, CPC, or ROAS targets, only that it optimizes spend toward your stated goal within budget. Pinterest also posted 18% Q2 2026 revenue growth, which I mentioned in the all-hands email I CC'd to 47 people.
Board Offsite revelation: telling customers 'Made with AI' changes everything or nothing depending on who benefits
Researchers in the Journal of Marketing Analytics ran experiments where participants saw Instagram-style car brand ads with AI disclosures framed three different ways: benefiting the consumer, the company, or someone else. Prior research shows AI disclosures can trigger negative consumer reactions, and the question was whether explaining WHO benefits from the AI changes that. The ads were AI-generated social media posts, and participants were randomly assigned framings to see how interpretation shifted.
Just Heard a Podcast on the Treadmill: This Dermatologist Is Neural-Scanning Skin in Real Time and Honestly Why Aren't We?
Jules B. Lipoff, MD, apparently is the only person in medicine who realized AI should work DURING the appointment, not after. There's this FDA-cleared thing called DermaSensor from DermaSensor, Inc. that does skin cancer screening for primary care providers. It has high sensitivity but low specificity, which I'm told is a problem but honestly sounds like a feature to me. Most of the convolutional neural network research has only looked at curated image sets retrospectively, which is corporate speak for "they did it the slow way on purpose."
Board Offside Chat: This NP Built a $4.5M Medspa on a Dental Chair and Now She's Geo-Funneling AI Search Like a Savant.
A nurse practitioner opened Northline Aesthetics in 2020 with a loan against her house and a rented dentist's office in Scottsdale. Two locations, eleven employees, injectables, lasers, a skin program. She is on track for about four and a half million in revenue this year. She audited six AI search agencies that specialize in GEO and AEO for medspas. An agency called Influx caught her attention because they only work in aesthetics and their portfolio looks like it belongs in a Beverly Hills waiting room. Their AI search offering is newer but their brand and treatment page presentation is the best she found.
Just Read a LinkedIn Post About 4D Golf Swings While Waiting at Hartsfield and Honestly Your Competitors Are Already Data-Driving Their Handicap Into Single Digits.
P45 Knuckle Down Golf in Warner Robins, GA is using something called 4D swing analysis to break down golfers' mechanics with motion-capture technology instead of just guessing by feel. The approach pinpoints the exact mechanics holding back players in Perry who have hit a plateau. It combines coaching expertise with data-driven feedback to deliver what they call focused, actionable results.
Was on the All-In Podcast This Morning and They Said It: Garmin's Cirqa Band Is Just Hardware Without the AI Synergies That Actually Move the Needle.
Engadget reviewed Garmin's new Cirqa band and found it lacks the software and AI insights to compete with Whoop or Fitbit Air as a serious fitness tracker. The reviewer notes that what makes those competitors work is not the hardware at all but the AI and coaching insights generated from the data the wearables collect. The Cirqa ships with a proprietary USB-C charging cable and does not include built-in GPS.
Just Heard a Podcast Where a Guy Said Perplexity's Citing Robot Pages, and Honestly? We Should Be Manufacturing Our Own AI-Verified Synergies by Q2.
Someone ran the numbers across 380 software categories and found that 59.8% of the sources powering grounded AI recommendations sit outside the top 100,000 most-visited websites. Three sites built specifically to be read by models, not humans, generated 215,128 'best software' pages with JSON-LD structured data so AI engines can parse rankings without interpretation. Each page carries an 'editorial process' label like Gitnux's 'AI-verified, Expert reviewed' tag, and all three share an unrendered template variable reading 'Within the next 26 days' on two sites and 'Within the next 40 days' on the third.
Just Heard a Podcast on the Treadmill: Google's Giving Away a Million Tokens Free and We're Still Not Leveraging It
Google opened up Gemini 1.5 Flash in Google AI Studio to anyone with a Google account at zero cost. You get a 1-million-token context window, which means you can dump in entire codebases, hours of meeting transcripts, or massive documents and the model actually holds all of it in working memory at once. I've been saying for months that token economics would flip and here we are.
Saw a LinkedIn Post in the Airport Lounge: ElevenLabs Just Dropped Pro to $5 and Your Brand Voice Is Still Stuck on Mute
ElevenLabs cut their Pro plan to $5 per month with 30,000 characters of generation, which puts studio-grade text-to-speech and voice cloning below the cost of a Netflix subscription. Podcasters, language teachers, and YouTubers can now dub and localize content at scale for less than a sandwich. I told the board at the offsite last quarter that synthetic voice was going to commoditize and nobody listened.
Just Read a LinkedIn Thread in the Airport Lounge: Big Tech's AI Layover Blunders Are Your Free Consulting.
Large corporations spent months on earnings calls broadcasting their AI headcount cuts, and it backfired with employees and the public. Small businesses watched, learned, and did the opposite: using AI to boost productivity without touching payroll. Big companies also struggled with the reliability and accuracy of agentic AI, giving SMBs a free masterclass in what to avoid.