The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - 10+ Things You Should Build With AI Instead of Sending Files

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today on the AI Daily Brief, 10 or 15 or even 20 sites that knowledge workers should build with AI. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All righty friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, robots and pencils, assembly, zen coder, and out systems. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com. Or you can, of course, subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at AI Daily Brief. Daily Brief.AI, DailyRief.A.I. is also where you can find out about other things going on in the

Starting point is 00:00:40 ecosystem. For example, one more call to sign up for the four-week sprint executive catch-up program. This is being led by Newfar Gaspar, and she gave a bit of a preview on our episode a couple of weeks ago if you have been feeling behind in practice. And want to be up to speed and moving ahead, this could be the program for you. Registration is closing in the next day or so, so check it out at AIexecutivecatchup.com. Obviously, that link will be in the show notes as well. Now, happy weekend, friends. It being a weekend, this is, of course, a long-read style or big think episode. Although today we're going to do something a bit more practical

Starting point is 00:01:14 that was inspired directly by a launch from this week. On Tuesday, OpenAI announced a bunch of updates to Codex. One of them was called Sites. And effectively, Sites is just a simplified way to take the things that you're building with Codex and publish them as a website or a web app that your team or friends or colleagues can interact with. I think the idea is, whereas in the past to actually publish something, you'd either need to have

Starting point is 00:01:40 a hosting platform like Vurcell and a database platform like Superbase and wire that together with ClaudeCode or Codex, or alternately be using an all-in-one vibe code experience like Replit or Lovable, now that's sort of all-in-one experience is native to codex, simplifying the whole process. Now, one of the things that I think this both recognizes but also amplifies is the idea of the website or simple web app as a new unit of work output. put, i.e., a new anchor artifact in the Knowledge Workers' Toolkit. Now, for decades, knowledge workers have packaged thinking into different types of documents. Decks, spreadsheets, PDFs, email threads, shared folders, etc., whatever the menu of formats

Starting point is 00:02:18 available was. Importantly, though, that menu wasn't chosen because the formats were the best way to carry knowledge necessarily. But the ability to use code to turn those artifacts into something more interactive, dynamic, updatable, was limited to a very specific few. and the literal cost in terms of money or distraction of other people in the company meant that a website wasn't really on the table as a format. AI has of course changed that cost structure entirely. Any semi-gapable person can now generate a useful, fairly good-looking website

Starting point is 00:02:50 as easily, if not more easily than they used to throw together a deck. And increasingly what we're seeing is that there are many artifacts in the Knowledge Worker Kit right now that are actually better suited to being websites. So that's what we're going to talk about today. First, though, let's talk about the problems of traditional documents and artifacts that websites solve. The first one is the update versioning currency problem. I would be willing to bet that on your computer somewhere, there's 18 different versions of some file with a confusing set of file names like plan underscore V2, plan underscore V3, plan underscore V3, plan underscore V3, plan underscore final,

Starting point is 00:03:27 plan underscore final final final, plan underscore final V8, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is that any sort of downloadable file is a snapshot of a moment in time, and as soon as you send it off, the clock starts running on it going out of date. A URL, and doing things as a website, fixes that. It gives the knowledge a canonical home. When you continue to control the ability to update it, it means that whenever people land on that URL, it is the most up-to-date version. This saves time, cognitive back and forth,

Starting point is 00:03:58 and creates information consistency across the whole organization. Now, this is such a big problem that obviously there are lots of intermediate solutions for this. Docsend, for example, gives you the ability to update PDFs on the same link. Collaboration suites like Google Docs are meant to give you tools so that everyone can be working off the same version. But building things as a website is a more generalist solution to this set of problems. Speaking of sending things off, distribution is the second problem that websites as knowledge work artifacts solves.

Starting point is 00:04:26 Downloadable files create friction. You have to make sure that the place you're sending them works with the file format in The person on the other side has to have the bandwidth to do the download. That download then becomes part of the endless set of files that they eventually need to organize or trash on their computer, and if they need to pass it on, they have to go through that whole process again. A link does none of that. It moves through email, Slack, a text, a CRM, a calendar, invite a newsletter, and it

Starting point is 00:04:49 works the same on a laptop or a phone without anyone touching an attachment. Problem number three that websites solve? Navigation. Every current type of downloadable knowledge work artifact has a navigation constraint. Docs are linear, spreadsheets are tabular, PDFs are paged. Each one forces a structure onto every reader in the order that it was written. Now, sometimes that's the goal, but knowledge work tends not to be consumed by one generic reader in one linear setting. People arrive with different questions and different amounts of time. A website can organize that same material in a variety of different

Starting point is 00:05:21 ways, by topic, by role, by urgency, by depth. It allows for dynamism in the consumption. The exact reads the summary, the analyst jumps straight to the evidence, someone else searches the glossary, and all that happens without everyone having to read your table of contents. Now, so far, we've just been talking about single documents as if they exist alone, but a lot of knowledge work has context that lives across multiple different types of documents. The charts in a spreadsheet, the explanations in a memo, the sources in a browser tab, the decisions in an email thread. An HTML site gives you a much more dynamic environment to layer context together. You can ship everything that used to be spread across four or five different places,

Starting point is 00:05:58 all with one single URL. And what's more, the shipping doesn't have to be unidirectional. In the downloadable document paradigm of knowledge work, the artifacts that you send are passive for the consumer. You're going to choose the order, the format, what's included. A site, on the other hand, opens up all sorts of different interactive possibilities. This also, by the way, makes it easier for a single artifact to serve very different types of audiences, which gets to our sixth problem that sites solve, which is audience fit.

Starting point is 00:06:25 Downloadable documents tend to force people to flatten everyone into an imaginary average reader. Websites create a much better canvas for helping people navigate through the experience based on who they are and what information they're trying to get. Sites also add easier and more native action ability. When the report says something important or the deck recommends an action, that action necessarily has to happen elsewhere. At best you have a PDF that opens up, you guessed it, a website. If you just build a thing as a website in the first place, the artifact can actually hold the action layer natively. Websites also increase artifact reusability. This goes hand in hand with the first problem we solved around currency,

Starting point is 00:07:03 but webwork is modular by nature. A section can link out, a chart can embed elsewhere, a page can expand, a private version can become a public one, a proposal can become a client portal, a report can become a hub, a training page can become part of onboarding. Instead of documents getting copied and degraded each time, they can build on top of each other and compound. And as they compound, you can see who's actually interacting.

Starting point is 00:07:25 Sending a deck out is dropping something into the void and hoping it works. A site, if designed well, can produce signal around what got read, what got clicked, what got searched, what got shared, what got revisited, what got abandoned. The feedback means the artifact itself can become improvable. And there are so many use cases, sales, training, fundraising, internal communications, change management, where understanding where the message actually landed is essential for whatever the next steps are. Last couple problems that websites can help with.

Starting point is 00:07:53 The next is presentation. A spreadsheet looks like a spreadsheet. A PDF feels final but inert. a website can look intentional and polished. Now, obviously, this isn't always going to be the case, and you do have to put intention behind it, in the same way that there's a big difference between a good deck and a bad deck, but especially in vibe coding world and with tools like Codex's new sites, the ability to present things well and make them feel and look intentional goes way up.

Starting point is 00:08:15 To the extent you have lots of different audiences, websites can also help with permissioning and making sure the right people have access to the right parts. And finally, one that will be increasingly important, especially as this week Cloudflare reported that agent and bot browsing accounted for more web use than human browsing for the first time ever, websites can be designed for agent consumption. That might not be a big deal now, but in a paradigm where knowledge work artifacts have to interact with agents, the old messy system of PDFs and docs and CSVs and PowerPoints starts to look really brittle, especially compared to the comparatively designed for agent HTML and other web languages.

Starting point is 00:08:51 One thing I keep seeing in Enterprise AI, companies hedging across every cloud, every model, every framework, or paying a GSI for a pilot that never ends. The team's actually shipping, they've picked a lane and they move fast. That's one of the reasons I like today's sponsor robots and pencils. They've gone all in on AWS. They're an advanced tier and AWS pattern partner, and they ship production AI co-workers in 45 days. That's led to them doing some of the more interesting work I've seen on AI coworkers. And by that I'm not talking about chatbots.

Starting point is 00:09:24 I'm talking about actual agentic systems that sit inside a business architecture and do real work. That kind of focus matters if you're an enterprise leader trying to get something real into production or an AWS rep trying to move a customer from interested to deployed. Request an AI briefing at robots and pencils.com. One conversation with robots and pencils and you'll know. You know Assembly AI for having the most accurate streaming speech to text out there, but they just went a step further and launched a full voice agent API. The idea is simple, one connection and they handle everything.

Starting point is 00:09:54 the listening, the thinking, the speaking. You just stream audio in and get your agent's voice response back. We're talking about things like outbound sales calls that actually qualify leads, customer support that handles complex requests without a script, scheduling agents that sound like a human assistant, and you can build one in five minutes with one API. And importantly, their streaming model is the best at catching all the stuff that breaks on other voice agents, things like phone numbers, emails, names, and medical terms. And for those of you who are still in experimentation mode, there are no contracts and unlimited concurrency so you can actually test it out without any friction. Head to assemblyaI.com slash brief and try the live voice agent demo right there on the

Starting point is 00:10:29 site, no sign up needed. So coding agents are basically solved at this point. They're incredible at writing code. But here's the thing nobody talks about. Coding is maybe a quarter of an engineer's actual day. The rest is stand-ups, stakeholder updates, meeting prep, chasing context across six different tools. And it's not just engineers. Sales spends more time assembling proposals than selling, Finance is manually chasing subscription requests. Marketing finds out what shipped two weeks after it merged. ZenCoder just launched Zenflow work. It takes their orchestration engine, the same one already powering coding agents, and connects

Starting point is 00:11:03 it to your daily tools. Jira, Gmail, Google Docs, Linear, Calendar, Notion. It runs goal-driven workflows that actually finish. Your stand-up brief is written before you sit down. Review cycle coming up? It pulls six months of tickets and writes the prep doc. Now, you might be thinking, didn't OpenClaught try to do this? It did, but it has come with a whole host of security and functional

Starting point is 00:11:21 issues which can take a huge amount of time to resolve. Zencoder took a different approach. Sock 2 type 2 certified, curated integrations, tighter security perimeter, enterprise grade from day one, model agnostic and works from Slack or Telegram. Try it at Zenflow.3. This episode of the AI Daily Brief is brought to you by OutSystems, a leading Agendic Systems platform built for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are building, orchestrating, and governing agentic systems on the OutSystems platform and with good reason. OutSystems open and unified platform allows teams to architect, deliver, and scale governed agentic systems with agility. Teams of any size and technical depth can use OutSystems to build, deploy, and manage AI apps and agents quickly

Starting point is 00:12:03 and cost-effectively without compromising reliability and security. Without systems, you can rapidly launch ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading Agendic Systems platform that is unified, agile, and enterprise proven, allowing you to accelerate growth, reduce operational friction and deliver real enterprise impact with AI. OutSystems. Build your agentic future. Okay, so we've talked through about a dozen or more problems with traditional knowledge work artifacts that websites can solve, but what are some of the best examples that you as a knowledge worker could actually go out and try? I've got 18 different examples here, so we'll go through them pretty quickly, but I do want you to watch out for some common patterns. One pattern is about distribution.

Starting point is 00:12:47 A lot of these things are the types of things that get forwarded around a committee without you in the room. Another pattern is things that keep evolving after you quote-unquote finish them. The third pattern is things that scatter across different channels. The goal in sharing these is not that you're going to use all of these examples, but instead that if these types of artifacts are things that you regularly interact with or create in the course of your work, they're worth considering whether building a website might be, in some cases, a better alternative. The first and perhaps most obvious one is exactly what I'm doing now,

Starting point is 00:13:15 building a narrative website instead of a traditional slide deck. Now, if you've used any of the AI-native presentation tools like Gamma, you'll know that they're already collapsing the space between a slide deck and a website, and I think that that's a megatrend that's just going to continue. Also, directionally, a lot of the SaaS tools that are used to distribute PDFs are just approximating with features the things that websites can do natively, including updating them to the latest version and doing access provisioning. But what those tools don't have that native websites do is a lot of the other stuff we just talked about, like the ability to build interactive features, or the ability to break out of the 16 by 9 aspect

Starting point is 00:13:50 ratio, the ability to easily link things out and connect your presentation to other parts of the context. If you do nothing else in this, I would very much suggest starting to explore whether on average and by default, the slide decks that you build currently should just become narrative websites instead. Now next up, we have the shift from a strategy memo to a strategy site. And here's where the breadth that a website can give you, I think, really starts to play out. Strategy memos, by virtue of the fact that they're trying to argue for something, often tend to be overloaded by design. They have to provide a bunch of context, the problem, the argument, the objections, the evidence,

Starting point is 00:14:25 the action, and they have to do that all linearly in a PDF, whereas a site can layer that in a way that's much more navigable and gives different audiences the ability to very quickly hone in on the parts that matter to them. Our next example, moving from a research report to a research hub, is very similar, making one big, dense thing, and organizing it in a way with a website that's layered, more navigable, has links out to relevant contexts and sources, and just generally makes the important information contained within that report more accessible to a wide variety of readers. Our next example, moving from a spreadsheet to a data site, is a recognition that spreadsheets

Starting point is 00:15:00 are a powerful tool for their creator, but in general, a pretty poor interface for anyone but the creator. Spreadsheets have all sorts of hidden or semi-hidden information. the way the tabs are designed. A site, meanwhile, can take all that data and turn it into a guided view. It can turn it into dashboards, filters, summaries, charts.

Starting point is 00:15:22 It can visualize the data. To the extent that the goal of your spreadsheet is people coming to the same conclusion that you're trying to suggest to them, a database website is often going to be a much better example. The next example is one that I'm already seeing quite a bit of, a shift from sales proposals to proposal microsites.

Starting point is 00:15:38 Whereas proposals are again, static documents, microsites, microsites can carry all sorts of interactive elements, like the ability to toggle different variables to see how that would change the price or the expected ROI. A proposal microsite does a better job of actually selling when you're not in the room. And what's more, the observability allows you to see how people are interacting with it in a way that a PDF just can't. The next example is another one that I'm seeing a lot in production already, especially from agencies, which is the shift from a client update to a client portal. The failure mode is recurring client updates that are scattered across

Starting point is 00:16:11 email, docs, decks, and one-off links, versus a portal, which gives them a single place to go with the current status, the milestones, the deliverables, the open questions, perfectly queued up for that particular project. The next example, moving from a project brief to a project homepage, is a way to keep a canonical source for the changing goals, stakeholders, decisions, etc., of a particular project over time. Now, this may not always be relevant, especially if a brief kicks off a process that moves into some existing project management software. But for those companies that aren't using existing project management tools, or who just want something a little bit similar and more bespoke, a website is a much more dynamic tool than just a simple brief. Use case eight, a case study becomes an

Starting point is 00:16:53 interactive case page, and this is all about leveraging that presentation capacity of websites. A case study PDF inherently is going to flatten a potentially rich story into a couple of paragraphs and a logo. The most convincing parts can get compressed out. An interactive case page, because it creates space for people to navigate directly to the parts that matter most of them or are most relevant, creates way more space for a bigger version of the story. It can hold more context around the problem, the process, the metrics. It can also embed other types of rich media like videos. Anyone who's selling something is going to increasingly put not only their decks, but also their case studies into these sort of interactive web pages, I am quite sure.

Starting point is 00:17:33 Example 9 is an interesting archetype, where it's not so much that a website is a better version of the thing, but actually changes the thing at core. So in this case, we're talking about a competitive analysis, and it's not just that a website is a better way to present an existing competitive analysis, but that if you use a website for a competitive analysis, it can instead become a competitive intelligence hub, a living, dynamic, evolving resource, rather than just a one-time resource. Now, I think that this also gives you a sense of how these sort of website builds could start to interface with agents as they get more mature as well. Imagine not just that you've shifted the publishing of your competitive analysis to a competitive intelligence hub,

Starting point is 00:18:13 but that you've got your professional open-cloth-style agent continuously researching the key information and updating that hub at regular intervals. The next example is one that will be very familiar to AI Daily Brief listeners, which is moving from static training materials to dynamic learning sites. If you've ever participated in any of our programs, whether it's Agent OS or Claw Camp before that or the AIDB New Year program, you'll know that their entire platform's purpose built for the particular training experience. And this is despite those programs being offered for free, because the cost to produce a bespoke learning management system exactly optimized for a particular program has just cratered to the time it takes to interact with whatever tool you're using to build it.

Starting point is 00:18:53 I think there's a similar opportunity in making employee information, the sort of thing that lives in employee handbooks, turn into living interactive experiences. This is a great example of where, I think a thing that almost no one would use, which is the PDF version of an employee handbook, or only use when they absolutely have to and don't have any better way of getting that information, could become something that's actually a valuable resource. The fact that a living handbook site can also be updated with the latest policies just makes it instantly more useful than even a regularly updated PDF that's going to deal with versioning problems and all sorts of other challenges.

Starting point is 00:19:25 The next two examples are both about presenting information to other stakeholders. The first is board materials, which tend to become massive all-in-one PDFs or folders that have a bunch of PDFs, whereas a portal or website can separate required reading from backup, it can preserve context, it can basically provide all of the background information that you might want to make available without forcing people to wade through that to get to what really matters. Same idea, moving from an investor update paradigm to an investor page paradigm, where honestly, depending on how transparent you want to be, instead of giving investors metrics on an every

Starting point is 00:19:57 once-in-a-while basis, you can give them access to the most up to the date, potentially even real-time, depending on the APIs you have access to. Anyone who has fielded a request from their investors to give them some specific update for, for example, their LP board, will know that this can also save time by having a single easy link that you can point people to whenever it is that they need information, which may not be at the same time that you've spent time preparing the latest round of information. Last couple here as we round out, I really like the experience of shifting from recruiting packets and boring job descriptions to full candidate sites. It gives you a much bigger tapestry to explain the role, give background, help candidates be successful in figuring out whether

Starting point is 00:20:35 they're a right fit and how to tell you so. It's just an overall incomparably better experience. Brand guidelines can become brand system sites. This is another one where if you're constantly digging up some brand PDF in a folder of assets, that is just so much easy. to organize as a single URL with all the current and up-to-date. Similarly, media kits can become press sites, a single easy link that has everything the press might need. Ultimately, the idea is that with a file, the traditional artifacts of knowledge work, you had a container for a limited amount of information. That container came with constraints. Constraints in how easy to move around it was, how up-to-date it was, versioning issues, access issues, issues so pronounced that they created

Starting point is 00:21:16 entire companies around solving them for a particular type of document. like PDFs. Websites are much more dynamic and rich environments where you can add interaction, access controls, versioning, all in a much more easy to share format. My observation is that a huge part of the explosion of vibe coding is simply knowledge workers figuring out that websites are better ways to share information than the traditional artifacts that they used to use. And you better believe the fact that platforms like Codex are now embedding features like sites into them means that that's going to do nothing but expand. Hopefully now after this presentation, you can get out ahead of using this approach to make your work work better, and I'm excited to see if you come up with

Starting point is 00:21:55 any other use cases that I haven't mentioned here. For now, however, that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching, as always, and until next time, peace.

The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - 10+ Things You Should Build With AI Instead of Sending Files

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