Each week we'll gather headlines and tips to keep you current with how generative AI affects PR and the world at large. If you have ideas on how to improve the newsletter, let us know!
What You Should Know
The Science of Building Skills
AI’s newest trend has reached browsers. Yesterday, Google slipped a small update into Chrome for people who use Gemini in the browser (you may not have it just yet — the rollout just started). With this update, you can save and reuse “skills,” structured sets of instructions that turn a repeatable task or process into something AI can run again quickly.
The rollout comes after Anthropic launched skills in Claude last October and OpenAI followed suit for ChatGPT two months later. While skills are helpful for directing the chatbots, they’re even more important for AI agents working on their own. According to Microsoft, 80% of Fortune 500 companies are already using agents, so you’d expect adoption to continue in the broader business world, too.
People use AI to generate outputs, but few think about the steps behind those outputs. Skills force you to slow down and spell those steps out. That is where the value is, and it can be a struggle.
It’s sort of like the once-viral “exact instruction challenge” video where a dad follows his kids’ instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The instructions say, “Take one piece of bread, spread it around with the butter knife.” So the dad uses the knife to move the slice of bread around the countertop.
“No dad,” the son says, “with the peanut butter!”
“I’m just doing what it says,” the dad replies.
That’s how AI thinks, too. Users might skip steps because they feel obvious. But AI doesn’t know what is obvious. It only knows what you tell it.
Say you want to build a skill that creates a pitch deck. You’ll need to identify what a good pitch deck looks like, define the order of the slides, give the AI your branding elements, and create documentation for how to apply those branding elements. Without one of those ingredients, it would produce a poor result every time.
Creating skills isn’t technical. You can build them in plain language and the tools will walk you through how to do it. You just need to remember to tell it to unscrew the peanut butter jar, dip the correct side of the knife in to draw out some peanut butter, then spread the knife around the bread.
As more tools adopt skills, that expectation of including the right details is only going to become more common. The people who take the time to spell things out will get more consistent results, while the rest keep wondering why there’s no peanut butter on the bread.
Elsewhere …
- AI Is Rewriting Corporate Lingo. ChatGPT Is Leaving Its Mark.
- OpenAI Opens Powerful Cyber Tools to Verified Users
- Anthropic Could Soon Release ‘Opus 4.7’ Model
- Inside the AI Index: 12 Takeaways from the 2026 Report
- Starbucks Taps ChatGPT to Match Your Mood with a Drink
Tips and Tricks
🖼️ More image options
What’s happening: It appears OpenAI has tweaked its image generator. It now produces two images and asks which you prefer. If you click on a thumbnail, it also gives you the ability to re-cut the image to a new aspect ratio.
What to do with it: These new options allow you to nail the look before you worry about the aspect ratio. You can get a 16:9 version for LinkedIn and a 9:16 for an Instagram story pretty quickly. However, the images are slightly different when you change the aspect ratio, so be aware that it won’t be exactly the same as re-cropping an image in Photoshop.
Quote of the Week
“The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service.”
— Allbirds, formerly a shoe company, in a press release about its new business venture
According to CNBC, its stock skyrocketed by 400% after the announcement
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