Every single Monday is "AI Monday"

👋 Good morning/evening (wherever you are). It’s Monday.

In early 2023, IgniteTech CEO Eric Vaughan told his staff that Mondays were for one thing only: AI.

Customer calls were paused, budgets set aside, and the entire focus shifted to building AI projects.

He saw generative AI as an existential shift. His staff did not.

Resistance came hardest from the technical teams. Training was ignored, deadlines were missed, and projects stalled.

According to Fortune, Vaughan poured 20% of payroll into AI education, but the pushback only grew.

Within a year, nearly 80% of the company had been replaced.

The results were hard to argue with.

IgniteTech launched two patent-pending AI solutions, kept profit margins near 75 percent, and completed a major acquisition.

Two years later, Vaughan calls it the hardest decision of his career, yet one he would not hesitate to repeat.

OK let’s keep going ↓

🔥 Creative pulse

It’s no secret I love AI sci-fi videos.

Here’s an older one from VOIDLINK that deserves more views. And by “old”…I mean a couple months.

He’s one of the most underrated creators on YouTube, with only three videos so far.

(And he always composes the music too.)

Anyways, this isn’t your typical alien video. It’s thoughtful, poetic, and surprisingly relaxing.

Watch the video. Posted on LinkedIn.

PS: If you’re passionate (and obsessed) about AI creative…guess what?! I just launched an AI creative club. It’s only $5/month. Skip the Big Mac and use it for this instead. I’m serious, you’ll thank me later. Click here to join.

💡 Here’s what you should know

• Claude Opus 4 can end harmful chats

  Anthropic added a safeguard letting Claude close rare abusive interactions as part of its AI welfare and alignment research.

• Grammarly launches AI agents and new writing surface

  The company debuts an AI-native editor with eight specialized agents that deliver research, feedback, and audience insights directly in the writing process.

• Arm hires Amazon AI chip exec for in-house push

  Arm brought on Rami Sinno, a leader behind Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips, as it invests in building its own processors and components beyond core designs.

• Foxconn’s Apple era wanes as AI servers take lead

  Revenue from AI servers and cloud products, including work for Nvidia, has overtaken iPhones for the first time, signaling Taiwan’s tech shift from consumer electronics to AI infrastructure.

• DoorDash scales AI to boost employee learning and productivity

  Chief People Officer Mariana Garavaglia says the company is integrating AI literacy, personalized development, and workflow automation across teams, reframing HR as a product-driven function.

• Google highlights 14 ways employees use AI at work

  From coding and sales to marketing and recruiting, Googlers are using Gemini, Imagen, and other AI tools to boost efficiency, spark creativity, and focus on higher-impact work.

• Nearly 90% of videogame developers now use AI agents

  A Google Cloud survey found 87% of game developers rely on AI to cut costs and automate repetitive tasks, freeing teams to focus on creativity amid rising budgets and industry layoffs.

Also, Flow has an X account:

💰 The numbers

• Intel got a $2B lifeline from SoftBank to stabilize its AI chip business, giving it breathing room in the fight with NVIDIA and AMD

• EdgeCortix secured $100M Series B to scale its energy-efficient AI edge processors, backing next-gen SAKURA chips for robotics, defense, and generative AI workloads

• IVIX raised $60M Series B to expand its AI financial crime detection platform, used by governments to track offshore assets

• Medallion raised $43M to build its AI-powered credentialing platform for healthcare, shaving onboarding delays and compliance workloads

🧠 Thought starters

Here’s 8 takeaways from MIT’s new GenAI Divide report that will flip how you think about AI in business:

• Only 5% of AI pilots deliver rapid revenue growth. 95% stall.

• Startups run by 19- and 20-year-olds are hitting $20M revenue in a year with focused AI products.

• Companies spend half their GenAI budgets on sales/marketing, but the biggest ROI is in back-office automation.

• Build vs buy: vendor tools succeed 67% of the time, internal builds succeed ~33%.

• Resistance is strongest inside technical teams, not just frontline staff.

• Enterprises are quietly cutting costs by not backfilling support/admin roles rather than layoffs.

• Shadow AI (unsanctioned ChatGPT use) is everywhere, creating compliance and security risks.

• Early adopters are already testing agentic AI that can learn, remember, and act inside workflows.

Here’s a link to MIT’s report (GitHub).

Learn more about MIT NANDA (Networked Agents and Decentralized AI) here.

😂 Meme of the day

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

Join the AI Creative Club (you’ll find me there). It’s not only for artists and filmmakers…it’s for anyone who recognizes this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn as much as you can about AI to multiply your impact...to become superhuman. Remember, creativity is just intelligence having fun. This club is for ultra curious people, and if you’ve made it this far…you’re pretty damn curious and probably the smartest one in your circle of friends. It would be my honor to have you in there.

Are we friends on LinkedIn and X? Let’s connect. DM me or hit the follow button.

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