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Cracking the AI Productivity Paradox: Insights for Business Leaders
OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation, Google launches Deep Think for Ultra subscribers, Apple looks to step up AI investments and more!
Everyday AI
August 01, 2025
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Today in Everyday AI
7 minute read
🎙 Daily Podcast Episode: Why isn't generative AI boosting productivity as expected? We explore the challenges, solutions, and the future of AI in the workplace. Give it a listen.
🕵️‍♂️ Fresh Finds: Anthropic unveils new research on AI systems, big tech breaking the bank for AI and Bing’s AI steals search traffic from Google. Read on for Fresh Finds.
đź—ž Byte Sized Daily AI News: OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation, Google launches Deep Think for Ultra subscribers and Apple looking to step up AI investments. For that and more, read on for Byte Sized News.
🧠Learn & Leveraging AI: How can we escape the AI paradox? We break down how you can boost your productivity with proper AI implementation. Keep reading for that!
↩️ Don’t miss out: Did you miss our last newsletter? We talked about Microsoft’s AI cloud services boosting revenue growth, China probing NVIDIA over AI chip concerns, Microsoft Copilot testing GPT-5 Smart Mode and more. Check it here!
Cracking the AI Productivity Paradox: Insights for Business Leaders đź’ˇ
AI makes us all more productive.... so why isn't revenue soaring?
That's the AI Productivity Paradox.
↳ Does that mean GenAI doesn't work?
↳ Or do we all collectively stink at measuring GenAI ROI?
↳ Or are employees just pocketing that time savings?
Faisal Masud is a tech veteran with answers. He's the President of HP Digital Services, and he's going to help us solve the AI Productivity Paradox.
Also on the pod today:
• Hybrid Work's AI Integration Challenges 🧑‍💻
• Generative AI Impact on Large Enterprises 🏢
• AI Tools vs. Traditional Employment Roles 🤔️
It’ll be worth your 30 minutes:
Listen on our site:
Click to listen
Subscribe and listen on your favorite podcast platform
Listen on:
Here’s our favorite AI finds from across the web:
New AI Tool Spotlight – TipTap brings AI to any editor, Solver is AI-powered, self-driving software, Effie is an AI writing productivity tool
Anthropic – Anthropic has unveiled research explaining what gives an AI system its personality and what makes it “evil.”
Big Tech – Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta are sharply increasing their capital expenditures driven by strong AI demand.
Business of AI – More details have emerged on how Windsurf’s VCs and founders got paid from the Google deal.
AI Search – Ever since Bing added AI, it’s been stealing more search traffic from Google.
Future of Work – AI researchers are negotiating up to $250M pay packages.
Read This - Experts are predicting AI will lead to the extinction of humanity.
1. OpenAI Raises $8.3B at $300B Valuation 🤑
OpenAI has accelerated its fundraising, securing $8.3 billion ahead of schedule as part of a larger $40 billion target for 2025, according to The New York Times. This surge comes amid soaring usage, with ChatGPT boasting over 700 million weekly active users and revenue estimates hitting up to $13 billion annually.
Heavyweights like Dragoneer, Blackstone, and T. Rowe Price led the round, signaling strong investor confidence in AI’s commercial potential.
2. Google Launches Deep Think for AI Ultra Subscribers 🧠️
Google has just rolled out its advanced problem-solving AI, Deep Think, to subscribers of its $250-per-month AI Ultra plan. This model, a faster variant of the one that recently won Gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad, now powers the Gemini app with quicker—but slightly less perfect—solutions.
While the original version took hours tackling complex math, this wider release aims for speed, estimated to perform at a Bronze level.
Shoot me your requests..... I got some time later today. 👇
— Jordan Talks Everyday AI (@EverydayAI_)
1:28 PM • Aug 1, 2025
3. Apple Steps Up Its AI Investments Amid Industry Pressure 🍎
Apple is making a serious push into AI, with CEO Tim Cook confirming increased investments, team reallocations, and steady acquisitions to catch up in the fast-moving AI landscape, according to a recent earnings call and CNBC interview.
Despite past criticism for delays in shipping AI features like Siri improvements, Apple insists on quality over speed, planning launches like live translation and AI workout buddies later this year, with more personalized Siri updates expected in 2026. Cook dismissed the idea that new AI devices, such as glasses, will replace the iPhone, suggesting instead these will complement existing hardware.
4. Amazon Eyes Ads in Alexa+ Conversations 📢
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed during the company’s Q2 2025 earnings call that Alexa+—Amazon’s advanced AI assistant—is poised to become a new platform for dynamic, conversational advertising aimed at enhancing product discovery. While Alexa+ is free for Prime users and offers a $20 subscription tier, Jassy hinted at potential future plans for ad-free subscriptions, signaling a shift toward monetizing multi-turn AI chats.
This move comes as Amazon ramps up AI investments with a massive $31.4 billion capital expenditure spree and aims to compete with Google and OpenAI, who are also exploring AI-driven ads.
5. OpenAI Axes Searchable ChatGPT Logs Amid Privacy Alarm 🪓
OpenAI has swiftly pulled the plug on a ChatGPT feature that let anyone scour public logs for sensitive user conversations, including crime confessions and trade secrets, according to CISO Dane Stuckey’s recent announcement.
The decision comes just as the feature went viral online, exposing potential privacy risks for users unaware their chats were publicly searchable.
🦾How You Can Leverage:
Reddit is full of stories about people juggling seven gigs simultaneously.
All excelling.
All getting "exceeds expectations" on their reviews.
And their secret weapon? AI that's automating 70% of their workload while bosses measure productivity using decade-old metrics.
Faisal Masud joined Everyday AI today to get us the ACTUAL tea on this paradox. As in, if AI is making us all more proactive, why aren’t revenues soaring?
Faisal is the President of HP Digital Services and he just revealed why your company isn't printing money despite having access to AI that can compress 60-second tasks into 2-second wins.
It's everything else you're doing wrong.
1 – Your Performance Metrics are Measuring The Wrong Century 📊
Customer service used to take 60 seconds per ticket. Now AI handles it in 2 seconds.
But you're still celebrating teams that hit the old 60-second benchmark.
Faisal watched this exact scenario play out across multiple enterprise companies. While startups are seeing 40% productivity gains, massive corporations are barely moving the needle. Why? They're measuring industrial-age outputs in an AI-powered world.
The goalposts moved. You didn't notice.
When Amazon started with 7-8 day shipping, that was revolutionary. Now it's next-day everything. The bar keeps rising, but most companies are still using last decade's standards to evaluate this decade's AI-enhanced work.
Try this:
Open your team's current KPIs spreadsheet right now. Find any metric based on time-to-completion for tasks your team uses AI for. Replace those time-based measurements with quality and outcome metrics instead. If your customer service team resolves tickets faster with AI, measure customer satisfaction scores and first-contact resolution rates rather than response time.
2 – The Great AI Policy Illusion 🪄
Trillion-dollar companies building AI technology don't have proper AI policies.
Let that sink in.
Faisal worked at these places. He saw the chaos firsthand. Companies scrambling to control what employees use while those same employees have ChatGPT bookmarked on their personal laptops at home.
You can't police remote workers using external AI tools.
You shouldn't want to.
The smarter play? Make your internal AI offerings so incredible that employees stop looking elsewhere. Most companies do the opposite. They provide mediocre internal tools then wonder why their team goes rogue with external platforms.
Faisal's insight cuts deep. Employees will use whatever works best for them. Your job isn't to restrict their toolkit. It's to compete with the external options by offering something better internally.
Try this:
Send an anonymous survey to your team asking what AI tools they're actually using for work tasks. Not what they're supposed to use. What they really use. Then audit your internal AI capabilities against their preferred external tools. Either upgrade your internal offerings to match or officially adopt the tools they're already finding valuable.
3 – The Death of Traditional Job Descriptions 💼
Stop hiring humans for human roles.
Start hiring humans for AI-augmented roles.
Faisal shared something wild from his Staples days. Back in 2016, his team launched an AI-powered easy button handling a thousand different customer commands. It was powered by IBM Watson and ahead of its time. Today, that level of automation is table stakes.
Yet most job descriptions read like they were written in 2014.
When someone leaves your team, you can't just copy-paste their old responsibilities. The role fundamentally changed the moment AI entered the picture. Companies like Shopify are evaluating every potential hire against one question: could AI do this instead?
The future belongs to smaller teams with AI superpowers. Not larger teams doing industrial-age work.
Faisal's experience running teams at Amazon and Alphabet taught him that hiring more people usually creates more problems. More handshakes. More bureaucracy. More complexity. The magic happens when you enable small teams with incredible tools.
Try this:
Before posting your next job opening, spend 20 minutes listing every task the previous person did. Mark each task as either "uniquely human" or "AI-augmentable." Rewrite the job description focusing entirely on the uniquely human responsibilities. Add "AI proficiency" as a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have. Include specific examples of how they'll work alongside AI tools to amplify their impact.
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