259 | “Claude Cowork” is Claude Code for All Work, Anthropic jumps to a $350 B valuation 💥 Apple swaps Siri’s brain for Gemini, hiring recession hits hard, and more AI news for the week ending on January 16, 2026

25:29In this interview, Daniela also drew a sharp distinction between what is technically possible and what is economically viable. And she stated, and I'm quoting, regardless of how good the technology is, it takes time for that to be used in a business. The real question to me is how quickly can businesses in particular leverage the technology? I mentioned that multiple times on the show and more and more in the past six months. The biggest bottleneck for achieving business growth with AI is currently not the AI models. Most of these models are better than most of the needs are. The biggest bottleneck is people and the organization and the way it is organized and the way work gets done right now.

26:12And the question is, how quickly can you train and reskill people to use the technology in an effective way? And how quickly can you reorganize your company and the structure of it and the way work gets done in order to be best positioned to gain the most out of the existing technology that we already have. Forget about what's going to get developed in the future. Daniela also said that in many aspects, AI is already possessing superhuman skills. She was kind of like laughing about the concept of AGI with the idea that it's superhuman on multiple things and completely dumb on others. But on some of these things where it's superhuman, you can already leverage that to get huge efficiencies and penetrate new markets and sell new products and services that you couldn't do previously in a profitable way.

26:57And that is a complete game changer to companies if they learn how to do that. It means as a company, you need to focus not just on the technology or maybe even less on which technology to use, but more on how to evaluate the opportunity with AI for your business, for your niche, in your sector, and maybe slightly beyond, and how to train your people and organize your company in order to capitalize on that. And I have some really exciting news related to that. Due to some personal reasons, which I'm not going to share right now, I am forced to postpone the beginning of the AI Business Transformation course that was supposed to start this Tuesday, January 20th.

27:36Now, while I'm personally sad that I cannot start the course this week, and I apologize for those of you who signed up, but don't worry, the course is starting. But for those of you who did not get the chance to sign up yet, it gives you the opportunity to still do that and join the course. The course is a complete game changer, and it has changed the trajectory of entire businesses and definitely careers of hundreds and maybe thousands of people who have taken this course in the last two and a half years. So if you want, make this your New Year's resolution to set up a solid baseline for your AI knowledge in order to drive your career.

28:12and if you're in the leadership position, your business forward based on AI in 2026. Now, a few people have approached me on LinkedIn and on other channels and asked me about the price point of$1 ,000 or$9.97 if you want to be specific. All you need to do is come and join us on the AI Friday Hangouts. It is our weekly community AI meetup that we have every single Friday. It is completely free to join and there are incredible people there. All of them have taken the course and there are people there from senior positions in large enterprises all the way to really successful solopreneurs. Many of them became solopreneurs leveraging AI following taking the course.

28:50So completely changed the trajectory of their career because of the knowledge they gained in the course and asked them if it was worth$1 ,000. So if your career and if your business is worth more than$1 ,000, do not think twice. First of all, come and join us on Friday and literally ask the people. I have no problem with you being blunt and asking people in the community what do they think, but also come and join the course. It is going to be the best investment of the year for you. And if you do this right now, you are setting yourself up for a solid start in 2026 on how to leverage AI from a practical perspective across multiple aspects of the business.

29:27And because you are listeners of this podcast, you also get$100 off. So it's only going to be less than$900. And you can do that with promo code leveraging AI 100, all uppercase, one word. Now to our next topic, which is SimilarWeb just released their January 2026 global AI tracker. Those of you who don't know SimilarWeb, they've been around for many, many years and they're tracking web traffic and they just released their AI traffic report. And you can go and check out their report. The link is in the show notes, but I'm going to share some of the key findings with you. First of all, Chachapiti's web traffic share has dropped to 64.5%, which is a relatively steep decline from the 86.7 % that it held just one year ago.

30:10Now, while they're still far ahead of number two, which is Gemini, Gemini went up from 5.7 % market share last year to 25.5%, so about 4x the scale, and they're definitely growing very, very fast. In the last 12 weeks alone, visits to Gemini has surged by 49%, whereas traffic to OpenAI's platform has declined by 22%. So the vectors right now are in definitely opposite directions where Gemini is growing and Chachapiti is shrinking. And yet Chachapiti is still pretty far ahead with roughly 3x the traffic that Gemini has right now. The other thing that Gemini is ahead is engagement with Gemini users spending about 7 minutes and 20 seconds on the platform, while Chachapiti users are only spending 6 minutes and 32 seconds on average on that platform.

30:57Maybe the most disappointing number there, not for me, but for Microsoft, is that Copilot only accounts for 1.1 % of web traffic on the open market, falling behind much smaller competitors and declining from 1.5 % last year. Now, while the pack has one clear leader and a very clear number two, the rest of the companies are pretty tied together with DeepSeaCut number 3 with 3.7%, followed by Grok, Perplexity, and then Claude, all with relatively small single digits percentage of the web traffic. Another not too surprising dynamics is that specialized AI writing platforms, which were a huge success in 2024, took a big hit in 2025.

31:40So tools like Jasper fell by 16%, Ritesonic dropped by 17 % just in the last 12 weeks. And with some smaller writing tools have dropped more or less to zero over the past year. Why is that? Because the non-specialized tools became very, very common, that they were not very common in 23 and 24, and they are now providing as good as a value, especially when you have connectors into your environment and you can train the model to work the way you want it to work, and you can create projects and custom GPTs and scales and so on. It takes away a lot of the benefits and the value that these specialized AI writing tools had before, and now they don't have any additional edge while they definitely don't have the marketing and the brand awareness that the large models do.

32:23Now, while this is all interesting statistics, we need to remember that this is the open web traffic and it ignores enterprise adoption that drives most of the revenue for these companies. But what it is clearly telling us is that there's still one dominant player, a clear number two, and then a bunch of companies that are significantly smaller despite the amount of news we are hearing about them, from a scale perspective, they're not even in the same ballpark as Gemini, definitely not ChatGPT. The next big topic before we switch into rapid fire items is about AI in healthcare and specifically the involvement of the big labs in AI in healthcare.

33:03So OpenAI has shared that close to 200 million users globally ask ChatGPT health-related questions every single week, which makes it very, very clear that people have such a need and they most likely want to know more about their health based on actual data versus random general generic data of the internet, which drove OpenAI to acquire healthcare records startup Torch, which allows ChatGPT to now connect to multiple data sources, including potential patient data, but also different wearable devices data, including Apple Health and similar solutions. Anthropic quickly launched Cloud for Healthcare just a few days after OpenAI HITPT Health was revealed, offering tools for providers, payers, patients, and including data things from wearable without using any of that data for training.

33:53Another OpenAI-related company, Merge Labs, which is a company that is competing with Neuralink by developing a brain interface for computers, just raised$250 million seed round at an$850 million valuation raised from Sam Altman with some money from OpenAI itself as one of the investors. Now let's analyze a little bit what's going on here. First of all, healthcare is a space that is in a very bad shape in the US, and it literally just calls and begging to be disrupted with some new technology that will make it significantly more efficient than it is right now. And AI is a prime contender to solve at least some of the problems in the current healthcare space.

34:34The second reason is that there is a huge amount of money in healthcare. So being able to solve some of these problems, don't just solve problem, but actually could come with a very significant financial reward. The third is really the need. Because people have lack of healthcare in the US, they're looking for alternative solutions. These AI models in which you can go in and for free, ask questions about health and get reasonable information is a easy path for people to take in order to ask about their health, consult about the results that they got, and so on. And so being able to make that more accurate by connecting it to actual data sources is very attractive for these AI companies.

35:16And the last component ties back to what I said several times, even on this particular episode, is tooling is becoming more important than the model itself. So if you can build healthcare-related tools, connectors, and so on in order to make the investigation of your personal health more effective and easy and trusted and secure way for people to do, more people are going to use it. You might be able to charge more money for it one way or another. So monetize it either through healthcare providers or drug companies, et cetera, et cetera, or even just by the users themselves willing to pay to get specific healthcare information.

35:48So the bottom line, this makes perfect sense. And that's why we're going to see more and more of that in 2026. And now two rapid fire items. We're going to start with the impact of AI on healthcare. And the first topic comes from a report about the US labor market that is saying that we're entering into what they're calling a hiring recession. Based on the report quoted by CNBC, 2025 marked the weakest year for job creation outside outside of the actual recession since 2003. Employers were adding only 584 ,000 jobs, and most of it is in a single industry. So 69 % of all jobs created in 2025 were in healthcare.

36:32Now, in addition, most of this growth happened in the first half of the year. So even in healthcare, the growth has been significantly slower in the second half of the year, which made the second half of the year basically flat. Based on this report, the hiring recession will likely continue into the first half of 2026, but they're anticipating maybe a potential improvement for job seekers in the second half of 2026 due to tax cuts, lower interest rates, and clearer tariffs picture. I'm not sure that's the case because I think by then we'll see more and more advanced agentic and AI capabilities in general, which may make the additional hiring redundant or at least not as attractive as it would have been otherwise, just based on improved market terms.

37:15Another report on a similar topic came from Goldman Sachs Research, who warns that AI is now poised to automate tasks accounting for 25 % of all work hours in the US. They're stating that this could lead to a job apocalypse that results in, and I'm quoting, humans going the way of horses. Another report quoted on the register came from First Forrester that predicts that AI could eliminate 10.4 million jobs by the end of the decade, which is 6.1 % of all jobs in the US. Now, to put things in perspective, Forrester, VP of Principal Analyst, JP Gounder, notes, I'm quoting, to give you a sense of magnitude, the US lost 8.7 million jobs during the Great Recession.

38:01The numbers aren't directly comparable since the job loss to AI are structural and permanent, while those lost during a recession are cyclical and microeconomic. What he's basically saying is that in the recession, these jobs came back. And with the AI, they're not going to come back. The other thing that I will add, and I said that previously, is that in many cases, the kind of jobs that are going to get lost are white collar, high paying jobs that have an even bigger impact on the economy. The other thing that this research finds is that agentic AI is actually accelerating the process and making the prediction even gloomer, gounder revealed that, and I'm quoting again, where our earlier forecast saw just 29 % of US jobs lost to automation coming from Gen AI.

38:49That number is now 50%, which accounts for agentic AI solutions that leverage Gen AI as well. Now, the other aspect of this talks about the jobs that are not going to get lost, and they're saying that more or less every job that doesn't get lost will change dramatically. So they're saying for every job lost, roughly three jobs will be completely transformed and strongly influenced or augmented by AI, nearly a fourfold increase from the previous forecasts that they have released. Now, despite the disturbing numbers, Gounder insists that the future remains largely human for the next five years. And he's arguing that, and I'm quoting, labor productivity would need to accelerate significantly for AI to going back to the beginning of the sentence.

39:32Now, despite these really negative numbers, Gounder insists that the future remains, and I'm quoting, largely human, at least for the next five years. And the problem that I see with that is that five years are literally around the corner for society to figure out how to deal with such significant unemployment and restructuring and reskilling at a very large scale. It's just not something we know how to do. And society just moves a lot slower than that. And so there's a very serious sense of urgency in all the numbers from all these different surveys that I just shared with you. And I have zero doubt that this will become a big deal in the mid elections right now, and it will become a much bigger item in the presidential elections of 2028.

40:13Now, speaking of job losses and making it a little more specific, Meta is downsizing its Realty Lab by a thousand positions. This is the part of the company that has been focusing on the Metaverse, which is the reason why Meta changed their name from Facebook to Meta. And now they're cutting a thousand jobs in that particular department, saying that they're going to be focusing the savings into developing wearable technologies and focusing more on the glasses and the partnerships and the success that they have seen over there. To put things in perspective, they have accumulated more than$70 billion in losses since establishing that department in 2021.

40:50Switching to our next topic, Apple has finally finalized the agreement that was rumored for a very long time to have Gemini power Siri. Apple would pay about$1 billion annually for Google for the AI tech to power Siri. This is obviously a massive benefit for Google and the success of its AI models. According to people with knowledge about the information, the Gemini-powered Siri will have the ability to answer factual questions, tell stories, provide emotional support, and help people accomplish tasks such as booking travel. To align with Apple's strict privacy standards, Gemini-based AI will run directly on Apple's devices without going to the cloud at all.

41:31This shows you how advanced Google is right now in minimizing the requirements of the hardware to be able to run these models on. And that's obviously a huge win for Google, both from a technological perspective, as well as from a financial perspective and from a perception perspective, especially after the initial relationship of Siri was with OpenAI. And I assume they assumed that Siri will use their models and not anybody else's. Now, is that the end of the Siri AI saga? I'm not exactly sure. It's been happening for a while, but at least in the short term, this is the direction that Apple is going with.

42:07And hopefully we'll start seeing Siri work in a way that is somewhat aligned with what we're used to with models like Gemini, ChatGPT, and so on. The other interesting aspect of this is that the new Siri will have the context of a lot of information from the Apple device itself, meaning you will know the history of chats and images and locations and so on, and we'll be able to provide a lot more personalized information and have a lot more context about who you are, what you've done, who you've communicated with, and so on, which will make it very productive, effective, and personal. Speaking of personal intelligence, Google just officially launched Personal Intelligence, which is a big beta release that allows Gemini AI to securely access and reason across your data from Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube, and Search, basically connecting a lot of the stuff that Google knows about you without training the model, but allowing the model to conclude what you want, what you need, again, based on additional context that it can get from that information.

43:08The new personal intelligence feature is first of all, rolling out to Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the US. And then like everything else, it's going to roll out to other users, free users and other countries around the world. According to Josh Woodward, the VP of Google Labs, the system is designed with, and I'm quoting, two core strengths, reasoning across complex sources and retrieving specific details. Basically, in the bottom line, it is allowing you to solve problems and give you information that just the chatbot itself cannot do because it doesn't have the level of context that the personalized information will have.

43:41Google also said from a privacy concern perspective that connecting your apps is going to be set to off by default, and you can choose to do that or not. So what's the bottom line of these two pieces of news from Apple and from Gemini? That the future of AI is a lot more personalized than it is right now. We heard Sam Altman talk about this many times, Dario Amadei talk about this many times. And just like with many other use cases, Google has a serious edge going in that direction because they have access to so much information about us. And that's even before tapping into Android devices, Android apps, Android usage, location based and so on.

44:20And I'm sure that's coming next. Why is that important? Because AI thrives on context. The more context it has, the better the answers it can give, the better the solutions it can find, the better it can reason. And context can be given to it by you writing better prompts and giving it context, or it's finding the context in different ways. The very first glimpse to that we saw with memory, right? So these tools start to have memory and remembering things about previous chats, but if you can tap to memories from other sources, you will have significantly more context and will be able to provide us even better information.

44:52While we have seen stuff like this on the business side, so connectors to your email and your data sets and so on, this is now slowly moving, or maybe not so slowly, moving into the personal space as well, whether from Google's universe or from Apple's universe. We're going to see more and more of that. While in the beginning, we will see more and more people blocking it and not interested in it over time as you will see others getting immense value from that you will just stop caring and give google and or apple access to that information just like if i would have told you 20 years ago google will know every email that you're receiving everything you have in your calendar where you are at every second of the day which applications you use what you're buying and so on you would have thought i am crazy and yet right now you're doing it without even thinking about it i'm pretty sure the same exact thing is going to happen with the AI aspect of the same kind of tools.

45:45Staying on Google, Google just announced the new version of shopping on Gemini, and they're taking a different approach than ChatGPT. So ChatGPT's approach is to take a percentage, basically a commission from every checkout that happens on ChatGPT for any purchase. Google is going to take the path that they know very, very well and basically take a cost per click. So if somebody clicks and goes and purchase something that was generated from Gemini, you're going to pay for that click. They are experts in that. They have a gazillion of data points in their history to know how to do that effectively, and that's the path they are going to take.

46:17In addition, Gemini has data sets for over 50 billion products with AB, including complete descriptions, sizing, availability, where to purchase them, price comparison, and that is a huge advantage over what OpenAI has that has to start developing and categorizing and cataloging all of that information, which will take them a while. Some major players have already committed to using the Google checkout in Gemini. That includes Walmart and Shopify, which by itself is going to give it access to millions and millions and millions of SKUs and products across multiple vendors. And at the same exact week, Microsoft announced the same thing, that they're launching Copilot checkout, which is a new feature that allows you to check out inside of Copilot.

47:01Now, according to early data from Microsoft, consumers journey that include Copilot are 194 % more likely to purchase than people who just go and shop regularly without using AI. I think that makes a lot of sense. If you're already doing the research, it means you have serious intent. If the AI recommends something, it means you have clear path to what you want to purchase, which will dramatically increase the chances of purchase. I don't think that's specific to Microsoft Copilot. I think that is true for any AI-assisted shopping journey. And in general, I think this is just a very first step into a very different online shopping journey than we know today.

47:39I think the next steps are going to be a lot more agentic where we're not going to even engage with the products. We will have an agent shopping for us, potentially consulting with us, but in many cases, knowing exactly what we need and want, and we'll just complete the processes for us without us even being involved or with us being involved a lot less than we are right now. And this is just a step that is taking what we know today and making it easier for us to get used to. But I definitely do not think this is how it's going to end up. Switching to a few interesting releases from OpenAI. OpenAI just released quietly the ChatGPT Translate tool.

48:11It is basically similar to Google Translate. And you can get to it through going to chatgpt.com forward slash translate. And you will see that it is very similar to Google Translate. It can translate between 50 different languages and it has the ability to write the output in specific context, which is really cool and is a benefit beyond Google Translate. So you can make it more formal, more childish towards university and so on, because it understands, again, context and it understands the target audience and what they might expect to see. There have been some new rumors about the new device that OpenAI is developing together with Johnny Ives' team.

48:46Apparently, the product has a code name SweetP. it's potentially going to be up to five different devices that's based on instructions delivered to Foxconn which might be one of the hardware developers and the five devices might be ready for launch by Q4 of 2028 which is the lineup which is a timeline that is beyond what was initially released one of the products at least again based on this rumor or leaked information looks like a tiny little pill that is going to go behind the person's ear so a completely different form factor than anything we know. There are also rumors about a home-based device, such like a Amazon or a Apple Home.

49:25And there's also rumors about a pen. So I guess we'll just have to wait and see. But the little pill behind the ear looks very interesting. And if that's the direction it's going to go, it will be something you can probably wear the entire day without even remembering it's there while enjoying the benefit of it. So if this information is actually accurate, this is a new and exciting kind of hardware that we've never seen before. Another interesting release from this week is Slack released a new overhaul of Slackbot. The new Slackbot is again, a context beast that can connect through everything inside of Slack and understand the entire context of a specific person and be able to provide them information related to that context.

50:02And more importantly, it can only provide information context on information that it is actually allowed to see. From a security perspective, the Slackbot will only show individuals information that they would have access to through the relevant channels, meaning people will not have access to information from channels they do not have access to as humans. So it's supposed to cover both sides of the story, give you very quick efficiency of learning things you want to learn on what's happening across multiple channels while preventing you from seeing information that you're not supposed to see.

50:32Another interesting announcement from this week comes from Replit. Replit is a vibe coding tool that I use regularly and I really like. And they just came out with mobile apps on Replit, which allows you to go from an idea to a mobile app actually deployed on the App Store in just a few minutes. So this is just an expansion of everything they've done so far. Now they're also delivering it into the mobile app universe. Another interesting development this week comes from Cursor. Cursor released an interesting research about how to scale autonomous coding agents, revealing a new way to orchestrate them that will allow them to work with a lot more agents on a lot smaller staff on much smaller tasks while coordinating between workers and managers to complete all these tasks together.

51:15And using this, they were able to use these agents to develop a brand new web browser completely autonomously, writing one million lines of code, consuming trillions of tokens as a single project without any human intervention. Now, the tool was running independently for over three weeks to do this project. Again, just to give you an idea of how rapidly this technology is moving forward. We were talking about minutes and then hours and then days. And now we're talking about weeks. And yes, is it fully baked? No. Is it a research project? Yes. But the fact that there's a research project out there that was able to create a reasonably working web browser on its own, writing over a million lines of code and making hundreds of thousands of edits just shows you how quickly this technology is evolving.

52:10That's it for this week. you can find a lot more important news in our newsletter that we just can't get to, including some senior people from Thinking Machines that are going back to OpenAI, including the fact that Elon Musk lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft is going to a jury trial in April and including many other crazy valuation raises that are happened this week. So go and check up our newsletter. You can sign up from the link in our show notes. If you're there, go and check out the link to the course. I promise you it will change your knowledge on AI and can completely change the trajectory of your personal career and potentially your business.

52:43And you just got a small extension. So take an advantage of it right now and take an advantage of the$100 off with the Leveraging AI 100 promo code. We'll be back on Tuesday with another how-to episode. And we are going back to our live Thursday interviews. So every Thursday at noon Eastern, we're going to go live on Zoom and on LinkedIn Live for you to come and join us with our special guests and ask questions and participate in the conversation. So check out the schedule for that in the link in the show notes as well. And again, if you are already on our newsletter, there are links on how to join on the newsletter as well.

53:19That's it. Have a great rest of your weekend and I will see you back on Tuesday.