Hi {{first_name}}!
I’m curious… did you notice I didn’t send a newsletter last week? I’ve been testing the cadence and would love your thoughts. Do you prefer getting this every week or every other week?
Please hit “reply” and let me know what you think. I genuinely value your feedback and any ideas on how I can make this more useful for you. I write this email by hand because I love helping people understand and leverage AI and automation, and because it keeps me sharp on new tools and trends. Your input means a lot to me.
Alright, let’s get into it! This week we're covering:
New AI updates worth knowing about, including a NotebookLM upgrade that opens up completely new workflows
A practical Instagram tool that manages your DMs without sounding like a bot
Quick update on the AI training program we launched (and the question everyone keeps asking)
New and Noteworthy
OpenAI's Character Cameos for Sora: Sora’s new Character Cameo feature lets you create reusable animated avatars from pets, products, or imagined characters and use them across multiple video scenes. You can now build consistent brand mascots or product demos without starting from scratch each time. The new multi-scene capability means you’re creating full marketing content, not just isolated clips. This feature is available now with no waitlist.
Kimi K2 Thinking: A new model from Moonshot is making waves as the most autonomous "agentic" model yet. It can plan, act, verify, and refine its own work for hours without hallucinations, making hundreds of tool calls independently. It's fully open-weight and a fraction of GPT-4's cost, pointing toward a future where AI models don't just respond, they actually do work.
Perplexity's Patent Research Platform: Perplexity just launched an AI-powered patent search tool that translates complex queries into plain English. Instead of wrestling with technical databases, you can now ask questions like “show me patents for automated inventory systems” and get relevant results instantly. It’s a niche feature but a powerful one for companies doing competitive research or exploring IP landscapes before launching new products.
OpenAI Launches Aardvark: OpenAI quietly released Aardvark in private beta, a GPT-5 powered agent that autonomously hunts down security vulnerabilities in code, validates them, and suggests fixes. For businesses running custom software or web apps, this could become a valuable tool for proactive security management.
NotebookLM Gets a Major Upgrade: Google expanded NotebookLM’s capacity to one million tokens (roughly 700,000 words), massively increasing (by about 8x) how much context it can handle. The new personalized chat personas also let you set roles like “financial analyst” or “marketing strategist” so responses better fit your needs. If you’ve been using NotebookLM for research, this update makes it exponentially more powerful for analyzing large document sets or entire project libraries.
TikTok's Creator Tools: TikTok rolled out new AI tools for content planning and editing, including automated clip splitting and content calendars. They’re also testing a 90% profit share for creators in their monetization program. For businesses using TikTok as a marketing channel, these tools make professional-quality content creation faster and more profitable.
Grammarly Becomes Superhuman: After acquiring Superhuman in July, Grammarly rebranded and launched Superhuman Go, an AI assistant that connects Gmail, Jira, Google Calendar, and other business tools. It can log support tickets from emails and auto-schedule meetings based on context, marking the next evolution of email assistants that act instead of just suggest.
NotebookLM Just Got Way More Powerful
If I've featured NotebookLM before since it’s easily in my top 5 favorite AI tools, but with the recent updates it’s even more powerful. Most AI tools process information one file at a time. NotebookLM creates an entire workspace, where it can see connections across dozens of documents, videos, and web pages simultaneously. It's the difference between asking ChatGPT to summarize one PDF versus having an analyst who's read your entire company library.
Here are three features worth noting:
1. Discover Sources pulls relevant research automatically instead of manually hunting for articles. I tested it with "AI corporate training programs" and it found 20 sources in 30 seconds.
2. Interactive Audio Mode lets you interrupt those podcast-style overviews and ask questions as if you're part of the conversation. I was listening to a competitive analysis, stopped halfway through, and asked "Which report mentioned the 77% employee concern stat?" It instantly answered with the exact source.
3. Video Overviews generate actual videos with visuals, charts, and narration from your uploaded source data. Perfect for board updates, team training, or learning something new in a creative, visual way.
In fact, here’s a fun example of a presentation I created for a group of wellness professionals at a mastermind I spoke to last week: A presentation on Red Light Therapy (created with NotebookLM with a simple prompt)
Another NotebookLM workflow example: I drop 5-10 YouTube videos, podcasts and articles covering new AI tools and news into a notebook. Then I ask it to identify the best tools and information worth covering in the newsletter based on my audience, and I ask it to pull out specific use cases and cite specific information. It generates an audio overview I can listen to while driving, and I come back later to pull exact quotes and examples when I'm writing. Cuts my research time from 3-4 hours down to about an hour.
Real business applications:
For service businesses preparing proposals, upload past successful projects, client testimonials, and competitive research. Ask NotebookLM to identify your strongest differentiators and generate flashcards your sales team can use for training.
For operations teams, drop in your SOPs, training materials, and process documentation. Convert them into audio overviews your team can listen to during onboarding instead of reading 50-page manuals.
For quarterly planning, upload your numbers, team feedback, and market research. Generate a video overview for your board meeting, and a study guide for your management team.
ChatGPT and Claude are great for individual tasks. NotebookLM excels when you need to work with large amounts of interconnected information. It maintains context across multiple documents and shows you exactly which source it's pulling from. This matters when you're building proposals or making strategic decisions based on research.
The free version gives you 50 sources, at 500,000 words each. The paid version (comes with Google Workspace premium) bumps that to 300 sources. Most businesses will find the free tier handles everything they need.
Tool Spotlight: JotForm's Instagram Agent
JotForm's new Instagram Agent is here, and it's one of the most practical AI tools I've seen for handling social media without losing your sanity.
It automatically replies to your Instagram DMs, comments, and story mentions and actually sounds like you. Not a generic bot. You.
How it works: It trains itself by reading your Instagram bio, your posts, and past DMs. Picks up your tone, phrasing, and personality. Then handles all your Instagram interactions automatically so you can get back to focusing on higher value work.
Real use cases:
Consultants and coaches: Answer discovery call requests and share booking links without interrupting deep work
Professional services: Handle "What are your rates?" and "Do you work with [industry]?" questions that come in outside of regular working hours.
B2B service providers: Share case studies, pricing guides, and resources automatically when prospects send inquiries.
The setup takes five minutes. The free plan covers 100 conversations per month - plenty for testing. You can customize everything: set active hours, create keyword triggers (like "newsletter" automatically sending your signup link), and review conversations to improve its responses.
This won't replace genuine human connection. But it handles the repetitive stuff: FAQs, resource sharing, appointment booking, so you can focus on conversations that need your personal attention.
Worth trying if you're getting 20+ DMs per week with mostly repetitive questions. If you sign up please let me know how you like it!
A Follow-Up From Last Week Regarding AI Team Training
Last week I mentioned that all the major AI models are getting huge upgrades before year-end, and that the smart move is figuring out where AI almost works for you today so you're ready when those updates drop.
A couple people followed up last week, and asked “how do I actually get my team ready for this?"
Great Question.
I’ve been noticing that most business owners I talk to already get that AI matters. The gap isn't understanding why AI matters. It’s getting your team comfortable enough with the basics so when ChatGPT 6 or Gemini 3 come out, it feels like a natural upgrade instead of starting from zero.
Over the past few months, I've been running deep dive training sessions with a few companies. We start with a 90-minute foundational session to get everyone on the same page and expose the team to what’s possible. We follow that with two deep dive sessions focused on the tools that resonated most with the team.
For example, if your team is already using Google Workspace, we might spend those follow-up sessions on Gemini: showing you how it integrates directly into Gmail for drafting emails, connects to Google Calendar for scheduling, pulls from your Drive for document work, and basically lives where you're already working. No switching between apps or copying and pasting. Just AI that fits into your existing flow.
Or maybe your team needs help understanding how to set up custom Claude projects or build custom ChatGPT’s for recurring tasks like proposal generation or data analysis. We figure out what actually moves the needle for your business and then spend the time making sure everyone knows how to use it in a hands-on “done with you” fashion.
If you're curious how this might fit your organization, simply hit reply and we can start a conversation on how I might be able to help.
That's it for this week! I'm curious which of these resonates most with you. The NotebookLM workflows? The Instagram automation? Or the strategic thinking approach with ChatGPT?
Just hit reply and let me know.
See you again next week,
Julien
PS: If someone on your team is struggling with where to start with AI and wants to start small, feel free to forward this to them. They can subscribe at www.ampra.ai/join-our-newsletter.