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AI won't fix a broken workflow. It'll just run it faster.

The teams getting ROI from AI didn't start with the model. Brian Kohlmann, who leads AI and emerging tech at Bader Rutter, shares a practitioner's framework for evaluating AI in operational work, plus the four questions to answer before you adopt anything.

Everyone can demo AI. Very few can tell you whether it holds up in your actual workflow. We'll give you a practical way to evaluate AI: what's worth adopting, what to skip, and what has to be true about your data and process first.

Learn 95% of Codex in 30 minutes

What happens when you throw out the GTM playbook

That investor was wrong. Gamma is now worth $2B, with 50M users and more than half their growth driven by word of mouth.

They're one of 6 AI-native startups in HubSpot for Startups' free Bold Bets Playbook. Replit grew revenue 50x after half the team pushed back on the strategy. Ramp generated 100M+ views from a single stunt. Clay's co-founder wouldn't hang up a sales call until the prospect DMed him in Slack.

Each one took a GTM risk most founders would never greenlight. Each one paid off.

Get the free Bold Bets playbook

What’s Happening AI today

1. SpaceX begins trading today — and its reception just set the floor for Anthropic and OpenAI's IPOs: SPCX opens on Nasdaq this morning after pricing last night. The institutional reception is the first real data point the market has on appetite for large, loss-making technology companies in the AI era. Both Anthropic — filing at $965 billion for an October listing — and OpenAI at $852 billion will be watching the day-one performance closely. If SPCX holds above its IPO price through the close, investment banks will use today's multiple as the anchor for every AI company IPO conversation through the rest of 2026. If it drops, every S-1 risk factor about market conditions becomes immediately more live.

2. Claude Fable 5 just shipped — 95% on SWE-bench Verified, $10/$50 per million tokens: Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 today — its first Mythos-class model available for general access. It scores 95% on SWE-bench Verified and 80% on SWE-bench Pro, substantially ahead of Claude Opus 4.8's 88.6%. Pricing comes in at $10 input / $50 output per million tokens — double the Opus 4.8 rate. Early testing shows Fable 5 leads on raw capability across most tasks but falls back to Opus 4.8 in guarded domains where safety constraints are applied. For teams running autonomous coding agents on hard engineering problems, this is worth evaluating immediately. For teams running regulated workloads, Opus 4.8 may still be the safer default.

3. DeepSeek just cut prices by 75% permanently — and it is aimed directly at the mid-market: DeepSeek V4 Pro dropped its pricing by 75% this week in what is being called a structural move rather than a promotional one. The new pricing sits below every Western frontier model and is specifically targeting the startups, agencies, and independent developers who have been price-sensitive since GitHub Copilot's billing change. The pressure is not on Anthropic's enterprise contracts — those still go to Claude and GPT-5 based on capability and compliance. The pressure is on the mid-market tier that every Western lab has been counting on for volume revenue. DeepSeek is winning that segment aggressively, and the June 2026 price war just became structural.

AI news highlights

• SpaceX prices at $135/share — $1.77 trillion valuation, largest IPO in history — SPCX begins trading today on Nasdaq, setting the institutional benchmark for Anthropic and OpenAI
• OpenAI finalising Oracle Cloud deal — puts GPT models inside Oracle's infrastructure, expanding multi-cloud access post-Microsoft restructure
• Microsoft ships MAI-Thinking-1 — plus a wider family of in-house models, reducing strategic dependency on OpenAI
• SK Hynix hits $1 trillion market cap — AI memory demand reshapes the chip industry, joining Samsung and Micron
• OpenAI expands Codex into business work — Sites, Annotations, and enterprise plugins move it beyond coding
• New York passes 7 AI bills this session — kids chatbot safety, AI training data transparency, FAIR News Act, data center moratorium, surveillance pricing ban
• Rhode Island bans therapy chatbots — Colorado vetoes algorithmic pricing bill; California's 30 AI bills now in second-chamber review
• OpenAI launches Rosalind Biodefense — GPT-Rosalind now available to vetted developers and public health partners for pandemic preparedness

Trending AI tools

• Elentaria — GTM from diagnosis to execution — multichannel planning and outreach in one
• Octolane — Self-driving AI CRM you can talk to for pipeline hygiene and follow-ups
• Sherloq — Shows which LinkedIn prospect is warm — right now, based on intent signals
• Cartesia Sonic — Fastest human-like voice API for real-time phone and agent deployments
• Relay.app — Build and extend AI agents with custom skills and integrations
• Magic Patterns — Design system-aware product prototyping with AI
• Happycapy — Build and launch AI agents on cloud data with built-in DB and analytics
• Databox MCP — Plugs your business data directly into Claude via Model Context

That’s a Wrap

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