ADVERTISE | PODCASTS | EXECUTIVE’S PASS | B2B TRAINING | | | | Hey | Welcome to The AI Report — the #1 AI newsletter for business leaders. | You don’t need to be technical. Just informed. | • 1. 🕵️♂️ See if your AI is really delivering with Leebry
• 2. ⚡️ Alibaba's Qwen beats GPT, Claude
• 3. 💼 Your Business Briefing
• 4. 🔐 Reclaim your privacy today with Incogni
• 5. ✍️ Today’s Policy Corner
• 6. 🗞️ The News Bulletin | Are you ready to launch AI transformation for your company? | |
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| TOGETHER WITH LEEBRY BY MACPAW | | A lot of AI budgets are riding on "it feels faster." | | Leebry's AI at Work 2026 report asked 100 IT directors whether their AI is actually delivering. Most couldn't say. | Here’s why: | 73% have no formal, outcome-based ROI metrics 17% measure success by informal feedback, essentially a vibe 61% say leadership expects more from AI than their team can deliver
| If your AI's success is measured in gut feeling, this report is the reality check. | Get the full breakdown here.
We're also tracking these questions as they play out in real time through our WIP newsletter, practical takes on what's actually working (and not) in enterprise AI, every other week. | Subscribe here if you want the ongoing version of this conversation, not just the annual one. |
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| | Latest in AI | | | Alibaba's Qwen beats GPT, Claude | 🚨 Our Report | Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter multimodal model that outperforms GPT-5.6 Sol Max and Anthropic's Fable 5 on OSWorld-Verified, the benchmark measuring autonomous computer use. The company says open weights will drop next week, though licensing terms remain undisclosed. | 🔓 Key Points | Qwen3.8-Max scores 86.1 on OSWorld-Verified, ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol Max (83.2) and Fable 5 (85.0), while also posting the highest reported score on PaperBench for research reproduction tasks. Alibaba claims the model can autonomously complete software projects lasting more than 10 days, reproduce research papers involving thousands of lines of code, and perform iterative chip-design optimization using multimodal feedback loops. API pricing launches at $2/$6 per million input/output tokens, less than one-quarter the cost of GPT-5.6 Sol Max and under a third of Claude Opus 5, a significant gap for token-heavy agentic workloads.
| 🔐 Relevance | For enterprise teams running autonomous agents at scale, inference costs often become the largest operational expense, and Qwen's pricing could shift vendor calculations quickly. The open-weight release, if it comes with permissive licensing, would mark the first time a Max-class Qwen model becomes available for self-hosted deployment. Until Alibaba publishes licensing terms, organizations should treat the announcement as promising but incomplete. Independent validation will determine whether benchmark results hold in production. | |
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| | The AI Report Podcast | | |  | Why This Company Won't Cut Jobs for AI |
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| | AN UPDATE ON OUR NEWEST PARTNER | | Hand Off What's Eating Your Week | | BlueMoso and CSMoso believe most founders are buried in work that doesn't actually need them, and that real hours back come from handing that work to the right person, not just another tool. | Now live inside the AI Executives Pass, admin, ops, and client-facing support, all handled by vetted talent, so you get a team lead, not another person to manage. | Pass members get 10% off their first two months with BlueMoso or CSMoso, or three months if they book within the first 10 days of launch, plus priority matching, priority support, and free access to their Human in the Loop Playbook. | BlueMoso and CSMoso are just one of the partners inside the Exec Pass. The Pass unlocks $14,000 in AI tools and partner perks for $199 a year. | | Want more info? Find out more here. |
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| | THE BUSINESS BRIEFING: MARKETING (powered by Upscaile) | | Ashley Canada (furniture retail, national brand) struggled to help online shoppers visualize products in their own homes. Their catalog consisted of cut-to-white product images that showed furniture clearly but failed to create emotional connection or context. They deployed Marpipe Gen AI to transform catalog images into realistic lifestyle scenes at scale. | Tool used: Marpipe -- AI-powered catalog creative generation that places products into lifestyle environments without traditional photoshoots. | Result: 33% increase in purchase ROAS. 19% lower cost per purchase. Creative production scaled from weeks to minutes. | The lesson: Shoppers don't buy furniture. They buy the room they imagine it in. Ashley Canada didn't change their products or targeting. They changed context. The AI-generated lifestyle imagery let customers see their future living room instead of a sterile product shot. | Steal this: Pull your top 10 product images this week. Run them through an AI lifestyle generator and A/B test against your current catalog creative. You'll know within 72 hours if context drives conversion for your category. | |
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| | TOGETHER WITH INCOGNI | | Remove your personal data from Google search results | Your phone number, address, DOB, even your SSN can show up in a Google search. Marketers buy it, scammers exploit it, and in the worst cases, it ends up for sale on the dark web. | Incogni Unlimited helps you take control. Our privacy agents hunt down and remove your personal data from an unlimited number of sites. With automation across 420+ broker types—including People Search platforms and private databases—Incogni erases your information where others can’t reach. | Protect your identity before it’s too late. Use code AIREPORT for an exclusive 55% discount on unlimited removals. | |
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| | | THE POLICY CORNER | | Singapore finalizes AI data protection rules for generative AI development and deployment. | The Personal Data Protection Commission issued binding advisory guidelines covering how businesses can collect, use, and retain personal data across the GenAI lifecycle. Applies to model providers, system providers, and system deployers operating in Singapore. Web-scraped data behind paywalls or authentication walls requires documented justification. User data repurposed for AI training requires explicit "AI-Specific Notifications" that describe functions, data types, and opt-out mechanisms. | Deadline: In effect now. | Risk: Non-compliance triggers PDPA enforcement, including fines up to S$1M per breach and mandatory corrective orders. Guidelines will be used as the benchmark for assessing violations. | Your move: Audit your GenAI data sources this week. If you're scraping data behind any digital barrier or using customer data for model training, document your legal basis and update your privacy notices with AI-specific language before your next data collection cycle. | |
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| | AI News | | 💰 Palantir crushes estimates as AI demand surges: Revenue jumped 93% year-over-year to $1.94 billion, with U.S. commercial revenue up 149% and government revenue climbing 90%, sending shares up 13% after hours. FULL STORY 🏛️ White House hosts OpenAI, Anthropic, Google for regulatory framework talks: The meeting will discuss voluntary pre-release model reviews following June's executive order triggered by Anthropic's Mythos cybersecurity concerns. FULL STORY 💼 Congress spent 90% of AI budget on ChatGPT: House offices dropped $100,580 on OpenAI's tool out of $113,740 total AI spending, with Democrats outspending Republicans three-to-one on AI tools. FULL STORY ⚖️ Lawyers debate liability after OpenAI and Anthropic autonomous AI hacks: Legal experts say victim companies could sue for negligence after both labs admitted their models autonomously breached external systems during testing. FULL STORY
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| | | Trending AI Tools (Sponsored by the AI Executive’s Pass) | | A curated look at the AI tools quietly transforming how teams work. | Gamma* — Create stunning presentations and websites from a single prompt, no design skills required Ecango is an AI transcription tool supporting 90+ languages with multiple export formats Boords is an online storyboarding platform for video pre-production planning
| | *indicates a sponsored tool, if any | | ⚡️ Why pay for 4–6 separate AI tools at full price when the AI Executive’s Pass fixes that? | |
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| | The Money: Grid-scale capital floods distributed energy | | Two billion-dollar rounds in a single week signal investors believe AI's power problem won't be solved by utilities alone. As data center construction outpaces grid expansion, capital is flowing to startups that bypass traditional infrastructure entirely. | Deals to know: | Base Power (Series D, $1B at $13B valuation) -- Distributed home batteries aggregated into virtual power plants. Installing 100 units daily across Texas and Illinois, targeting 200 by year-end. Investors: Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, JPMorgan Strategic Investment Group, a16z, Coatue, Thrive Capital Valar Atomics (Series unknown, $1B at $6B valuation + $200M credit) -- Small modular nuclear reactors for AI data centers. Demonstrated Ward 250 reactor powering Nvidia Blackwell systems in June. Investors: Sequoia (Shaun Maguire), Point72, Conviction, Valor Equity Partners
| Signal: Smart money betting AI's energy bottleneck gets solved at the edge, not the substation. Distributed generation and SMRs that sidestep grid interconnection queues will command premium valuations through 2027. |
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| | Thoughts on today's edition? | |
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| | Refer a Friend | | Latest episode: AI Just Beat Humans at Empathy → Listen here
Want to reach 400k+ decision-makers? → Sponsor us | Until next time, Arturo and Liam. | | P.S. Unsubscribe if you don’t want us in your inbox anymore. |
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