OpenAI shipped ChatGPT Images 2.5, cutting generation time by up to 50% and improving how well it holds a subject across reference photos and repeated edits. The new Sketch feature (type "@Sketch") lets you draw directly in the chat as a reference, and the templates gallery now includes presets labelled Poster and Merch. It's rolling out to every ChatGPT tier, and OpenAI says more than 3 billion images a week are already being created across ChatGPT and the API. Between this and Gemini, the quick concept mockup has moved from the designer's desk to the sales rep's!
Meta launched Muse on September 8, a personal agent that runs on its own cloud computer with its own browser, so it keeps going after you close the app. Give it a goal and it books the table, buys the tickets, builds the playlist and remembers your friends' allergies before it sends the invites. It connects to Spotify, Ticketmaster, OpenTable, Gmail and Shopify out of the box and drives anything else through the browser. This is the first agent built for everyone, not for developers. Our advice? Go connect it to your spotify and tell it to build a playlist, it's an easy (and fun) on-ramp to learning how to use agents!
Michelle Bu (at Stripe) gave seven AI coding agents three tries each at a brief every distributor will recognize: build and launch a working t-shirt store with original designs, take payment, and ship only after the money clears. Seven of 21 runs produced a working shop. Three of the runs that passed testing carried silent defects, including a Stripe version mismatch that sent shipments to the wrong addresses and print-on-demand error responses that the agents read as successes. Every model picked Stripe unprompted and coded against framework versions a year old. It's an interesting (and early) exercise on full store build out through to checkout. And yes, we've got skubot building shops on our roadmap!
ElevenLabs launched Reception, a packaged voice agent for small businesses that answers every inbound call, books the job and texts a confirmation. Setup is a website URL, from which it reads your services, hours and intake process, and it handles more than 70 languages with encryption. If you've ever lost a rush order because the call came in at 5:45 on a Friday, you already understand the need. It's aimed at small local businesses today, and a distributor's front desk works the same way: someone has to catch the inquiry and hand a warm lead to a rep. In merch sales, often the fastest reply still wins the day!
Ask skucast is live: ask it anything about running a promo business and it answers from 350+ episodes, citing the episodes it pulled from. In episode 372, Bobby sits down with Ritz, who built it, to talk about how. Not a tutorial, more a look under the hood: what you feed it, what breaks (transcripts, dates, guest names), and why the first version was too slow to ship. If you've got years of webinars, call recordings or training decks sitting in a drive, this is what turning them into something your team can question looks like. Listen now →
Two CEOs gave advice this week that sounded opposite but turned out to be similar. Every's Dan Shipper burns more than three times the tokens of anyone else at his company and treats low AI spend as a smoke signal; Every runs no usage cap, keeps a $500 auto refill that pings Slack on every top up, and asks what each run cost, bought and taught. Shopify's Tobi Lütke, a year into making AI-use a baseline expectation, warned about "slop grenades", unreviewed AI output tossed at coworkers. Gartner put a number on the damage: 40% of workers have hit AI slop, and each incident costs about two hours to sort out. So spend more on AI, and read everything before it leaves your desk.
Three signals in one week: Microsoft added Grok to the model picker in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, so Copilot users now choose between Grok, OpenAI's GPT and Anthropic's Claude inside the same document. Google opened Claude Opus 5 to every one of its engineers through its internal development platform, after years of steering staff toward Gemini alone. And Apple shipped iOS 27 with the rebuilt Siri, stating plainly that the underlying models were "custom-built in collaboration with Google and its Gemini models." When the three biggest software vendors on earth decide no single model is good enough for everything, the reliance on ChatGPT looks less like a habit and more like a liability.
🏭 Kevin Walsh (Showdown Displays) argues in PPAI Media that AI widens the gap between well run merch shops and everyone else.
📝 Superhuman bought Fathom, the meeting notetaker, and will fold live summaries and CRM bound meeting notes into its email and calendar apps.
🏢 Vertical AI had a week: OpenAI shipped ChatGPT for Financial Services and Astra for Law, Anthropic shipped Claude for Financial Advisors with eleven connectors.
📅 Gemini now works across Workspace from whichever app you're in: drafts Docs and Sheets in the background, fixes calendar clashes, and asks before any email goes out.
🌐 People built more than 5 million ChatGPT Sites in three months. Teams can now co-edit, share privately with named people and attach a custom domain.
🤖 One reviewer gave Grok Bot a real job and it built about 1,000 CRM records backward from ten years of calendar entries and negotiated a $10,000 sponsorship in four hours.
💸 Consumer AI spending hit roughly $40 billion this year, triple last year, while the number of users barely moved. Same people, bigger bills.
🎙️ Got a pile of recordings? We turned ours into Ask skucast. Episode 372 walks through how we did it!