AI is Becoming "Absolutely Unreal"

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If you read the note I sent a couple of weeks ago, you’ll know we are entering a new era of AI. 

It’s only been about six weeks, and tools with these new capabilities are being released rapidly.

And I want to go deeper into an example I shared to illustrate the new capabilities that have been unlocked for business leaders. 

Because it is mind blowing. Game changing. Or as our team member recently put it, “absolutely unreal.”

A few weeks ago I set a seven-sentence prompt at 9:30 at night and put Perplexity Computer on it.

I woke up to a lead list of 5,128 fishing vessel owners, ranked from highest to lowest by number of boats per owner.

Exactly the way you'd triage a list if you were doing it by hand. Except nobody did it by hand. It ran overnight.

That used to be weeks of work. Hundreds of hours. Researchers. Databases. Manual sorting. Thousands of dollars in time.

Now it's a side job. A prompt before bed.

Think about what that does to your customer acquisition cost. 

If you're running any kind of outbound sales and marketing, the math on what it costs to build a qualified list just changed. It is dropping, and fast.

This is what the new era of AI looks like. 

It takes a goal, breaks it into tasks, runs them in the background, and comes back with something you can use. You don't stay in the conversation. You describe where you want to end up and it works through the steps to get you there.

There are a few tools in this category available right now. Here is a breakdown of the main ones:

1. Perplexity Computer —

You describe an outcome. It breaks the work into tasks, assigns each one to the best AI model for that job, and runs them in parallel. It can search the web, generate documents, process data, and connect to over 400 apps. The lead list above was built with this. 

Available to Perplexity Max subscribers at around $200USD/month.

2. Claude Cowork —

Lives inside the Claude desktop app on your computer. You give it access to a folder of your files, describe what you need done, and it handles it. Reorganize files, pull data from a pile of PDFs, draft a report from your notes, build a spreadsheet from screenshots. No technical setup required. 

Available on Claude Pro at $20 USD/month.

3. ChatGPT Agent Mode — 

Available inside ChatGPT. Runs multi-step tasks and can work across tools like web search, code execution, and file handling. A reasonable starting point if your team is already using ChatGPT day to day.

Available on ChatGPT Plus at $20 USD/month.

Most people are still using AI as a back-and-forth. Ask a question, get an answer, move on. 

The harness is a different category entirely. And it has only been available to most small business owners for the last couple of months.

We hosted a quick 37-minute webinar on this for our past AI day attendees and now we’re opening the replay up ungated to our newsletter list. 

The webinar replay goes deeper on the harness, including what it looks like in practice and what business leaders need to know moving forward.