AI Prescriptions, Robo Bosses, and Ads Inside ChatGPT
Hi Friend,
In our AI Smart Lab session last week, I brought up something I’ve heard from a dozen founders in the last month. They bought the tools, told the team to go do the vendor’s free training, and then wondered why nothing changed.
So we went and looked at that training. Anthropic’s is excellent if you write code. For the person in accounts payable, it’s close to useless. That’s the gap managers and leaders MUST understand.
We run our own sessions live every week, and the completion rate isn’t in the same universe as self-serve. Completion in the live zooms is 95% on average and the self-serve completion rate is near 0. People start the training and almost never complete it all when it’s self-serve, unless somebody is doing it for a certification that they care about. In the live training and Labs one person shows a small win, and three others go try it that afternoon. The group sharing is critical to a team’s success in deep AI adoption and implementation.
When to Pivot, Pause, or Double Down on Your AI Investment
If you are halfway through an AI project and quietly wondering whether it was a mistake, this one is for you. Andrea built a mid-project decision framework that scores three things honestly: whether the tool actually works in your environment, whether it is moving the business, and whether your team can use and sustain it.
Score each one green, yellow, or red. Mostly green means keep going. Mostly yellow usually means the opportunity is real but the current path is wrong. A red means it is time to pause or stop, and stopping is not the same as failing.
The part worth sitting with is the sunk cost question. If you had not started this project yet, would you approve it today based on what you now know?
Our Most Requested Service: AI Strategy and Consulting
The question clients bring us right now is almost always the same. They know AI can help. They do not know which tools to trust, how to protect their data, or how to get the team to actually use all of it.
We start with your workflows, not with software. We map where the time is spent, then build a phased roadmap with secure tools and clear owners, and we train your team to run it after we leave.
One client, a medical training company, worried the whole way through that AI meant cuts. Nobody was laid off. Every person was upskilled and moved into higher-leverage work, and the hands-on training led to automating 99% of their customer service operations, worth $177,000 in combined savings and repurposed labor. We have trained more than 20,217 professionals this way.
This week’s stories
Utah Lets an AI Write a First Prescription
Utah’s Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy cleared Nolla Health to let AI issue a first prescription for acne, not just a refill. Adults in Utah can sign up through the Nolla Derm app for $4.99 a month. For the first 100 patients, two doctors approve every prescription, then review drops to weekly, then to at least 10% of prescriptions each month. Utah’s average wait for a dermatologist is 61 days, and 11 counties have none at all.
My Take: A US state wrote a staged approval ladder with numbers attached, 95% agreement with doctors, zero serious adverse events, and written state sign-off before the AI gets more room. That is a regulator publishing a QA process, and it is the first one any service business can be measured against. I expect this to get copied into insurance, lending, and legal work long before the medicine debate is settled.
Source: Nolla Health
MIT Built a Tool That Repairs Broken AI 3D Designs
MIT CSAIL, working with Google and Northeastern University, built InstructMesh. It pairs a 3D generator with a language model so you can highlight the bad part of an AI-made design and fix it in plain words before printing. When the generator recreated popular 3D models, nearly 80% came out structurally flawed. People with no 3D modeling experience caught and fixed those flaws about 90% of the time.
My Take: Everybody is going to quote the 90%. The number to pay attention to is the 80%, because it measures something the AI industry keeps declining to measure: the gap between output that looks right and output that works. . We see the same split in client work, where the AI draft is needs workand the checking step is vital..
Source: arXiv
California Says a Human Must Sign Off Before AI Ends a Job
Governor Newsom signed SB 947, the No Robo Bosses Act, on September 30. In California, an employer can no longer rely only on an automated system to dismiss or discipline a worker. A person has to review and verify the decision, and the worker has to be told an automated system was used. The state Labor Commissioner, the Attorney General, or local prosecutors can enforce it. The bill’s author counts more than 550 “bossware” products on the market.
In plain terms, if an AI tool scores, ranks, or flags your employees in the US state of California, a person now has to check that output and you have to tell the worker it was used.
My Take: This law is cheaper to comply with than almost anything else on the books, and most companies will still get caught out by it, because the requirement is not a human, it is proof of a human. Ask most teams today to produce evidence that a person reviewed an AI-generated performance flag last March and you get a shrug. You need to keeprecord now, with a date, a name, and what the person changed. The first enforcement cases in California will turn on missing documentation
Source: Office of Senator Jerry McNerney
A Judge Threw Out Two Lawsuits Over Google’s AI Answers
Judge Amit Mehta dismissed antitrust suits brought by Penske Media, owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, and by Chegg against Google. Both argued Google used its search power to take their content for AI Overviews without paying, and that their traffic fell as a result. The court found that expecting traffic in return for publishing content for free is not the same as an agreement.
My Take: Publishers just learned that 20 years of search traffic was a habit, not a contract. The whole SEO industry was built on a counterparty that never signed anything and was free to stop at any time, and a court has now said so plainly. Look at the timing against the OpenAI story below: in the same week a judge closed the legal route to recovering traffic lost to AI answers, OpenAI started selling placement inside AI answers. That is what we are looking at forthe next decade, and the fight moves from antitrust to licensing deals and paid placement. If you need help with AI SEO and getting your brand to show up inside AI answers, email us at [email protected].
Source: U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia
OpenAI Is Putting Ads Next to the Images ChatGPT Makes
OpenAI is testing a visual ad format in ChatGPT, labeled and kept separate from the image you asked for, in October in the US with a first group of advertisers. OpenAI says ChatGPT reaches 1.2 billion people a week. Launch partners report early numbers: WeightWatchers saw a cost per acquisition 15.3% lower than its blended paid search benchmark, and Portland Leather says 93% of its visitors from ChatGPT ads were new.
My Take: OpenAI shipped the ability to measurealongside the ad unit, with attribution through AppsFlyer, Triple Whale, and Northbeam, and that matters more than the format itself. Attribution is what turns a test into a line in next year’s budget. Treat the launch numbers as what they are, which is a self-selected set of partners on a launch day, so trust AND verify.
Source: OpenAI
Tool picks of the week
- Voice Instructions Creator: Reads your writing to find your tone and style, then builds voice instructions you can hand to any AI tool.
- Open Forge AI: An AI search platform that shows you how your brand shows up in AI answers and where competitors are beating you.
- Leonardo.AI: A free AI image and video generator.
Got a burning question, a fresh take, or just want to share your latest AI wins? Hit us up at [email protected]. Your insights keep this community growing and thriving!
Have a great day!
-Nicole A. Donnelly
Founder, AI Smart Ventures
AI Strategy – AI Training – AI Consulting – AI Implementation
