Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. CEOs love to predict that all companies will eventually become AI companies. It’s doubtful any of them had “sustainable-sneaker-brand pivots to AI compute” in mind.
Allbirds, a $4B wool sneaker darling at its IPO peak, just closed a $50M financing deal to become a GPU-rental shop — sending the stock up 600%+ in a single day and taking the crown for the wildest AI pivot of the year.
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Allbirds ditches sneakers for AI compute
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Gemini lands on Mac with native desktop app
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Audit business with Notion’s built-in Claude agents
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Snap cuts 1,000 jobs on AI productivity boosts
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4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more
ALLBIRDS
Image source: Lovart / The Rundown
The Rundown: Allbirds just announced a $50M financing deal to reinvent itself as “NewBird AI”, converting the gutted footwear company into a GPU rental business and sending the stock up over 600% on the pivot.
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Allbirds initially sold its brand assets to American Exchange Group in March for $39M, a fall from the company’s $4B IPO peak in 2021.
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The AI compute move sent shares of $BIRD from $3 to over $20, lifting a market cap that closed Tuesday at just $22M.
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The company said the $50M deal will fund GPU purchases to launch a GPU-as-a-Service business, renting out AI compute under long-term contracts.
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Shareholders will also vote next month to strip Allbirds’ ‘public benefit’ status, formally ending the company’s sustainable-footwear mission.
Why it matters: Many CEOs love to say every company will eventually be an AI company, but gutting a business for parts and retooling it as a GPU rental probably isn’t what they had in mind. Allbirds is running the same move that blockchain rebrands used to revive dying tickers, this time with a compute crunch giving the pitch cover.
TOGETHER WITH UNWRAP
The Rundown: Unwrap’s customer intelligence platform pulls all your feedback (surveys, reviews, support tickets, social comments, etc.) into one view, and then uses AI and NLP to surface actionable insights and deliver them straight to your inbox.
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All customer feedback automatically categorized
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Query feedback using Unwrap Assistant, or in your favorite tools via MCP
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Real-time alerts from feedback as they arise, and a clear view of customer sentiment
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A platform trusted and tested at scale by DoorDash, Stripe, Clay, lululemon, WHOOP, and more
The Rundown: Google just rolled out a new Mac app for its Gemini assistant, giving the AI a native desktop chatbot experience, coming a year after rivals like ChatGPT and Claude made their moves.
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The app launches via Option+Space and offers screen-sharing, Drive and Photos file access, and Nano Banana image and Veo video generation.
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The Gemini app trails in agentic abilities, remaining a chat-first assistant, while Claude and ChatGPT can directly execute tasks on users’ machines.
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Google calls this release “just the beginning” of its desktop assistant push, with more features teased for the coming months.
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The company also rolled out a Windows app that bundles Gemini and Google Lens into a search bar, but shipped English-only versus the Mac’s global rollout.
Why it matters: The desktop is becoming a fight for muscle memory, with native apps unlocking stickiness as a user’s daily driver. Gemini is showing up a year late, which follows a trend of losing to Claude / ChatGPT on accessibility and ease of use, even more than performance — but Google’s distribution can make up for things in no time.
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Notion’s prebuilt Claude-powered AI agents and use them to audit your workspace for efficiency. We found the audits to be thorough and well-formatted, like a report you’d get from a real consultant.
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Give the agent access to relevant pages and workspaces, and hit the save button. Then, open it and @ mention the pages/databases you want reviewed
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Just say: “Audit this page,” and it will work, running its preconfigured audit and creating an issue report with severity and a recommended fix for each item
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If you give the agent edit permissions on the page/database it audited, you can tell it to make the recommended fixes itself, as well
Pro tip: This flow works for other templates, too. Try Business Process Audit to map and diagnose a workflow, or Task Triager to route a brain-dump to your Tasks database.
PRESENTED BY POSTMAN
The Rundown: Postman’s cost savings analysis evaluates six engineering workflows to prove how AI-native development delivers measurable ROI by eliminating manual API tasks and external tool friction.
In this report, you’ll explore:
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Measurable ROI of actual time and money saved per team
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Why natively integrated, built-in AI outperforms external tools
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Before-and-after benchmarks engineering leads can use to measure impact
SNAP
The Rundown: Snap just announced layoffs of 1,000 employees representing 16% of its workforce, with CEO Evan Spiegel attributing the reduction to AI efficiency rather than shareholder pressure.
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Snap is swapping traditional teams for small AI-augmented pods, with the tech writing 65% of new code and fielding 1M+ monthly queries at the company.
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Spiegel said AI’s advances “enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, & advertisers.”
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The social media giant’s stock rose 7-9% on the news but remains down 30% YTD, with the plan targeting $500M in annual cost savings by the end of 2026.
Why it matters: Wall Street is rewarding two AI moves above all else right now: wholesale pivots (Allbirds) and AI-driven layoffs. With the tech sector’s sentiment at an all-time low and anxiety over job loss rising, the disconnect between what markets cheer and what workers fear is only widening.
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🌎 Lyra 2.0 – NVIDIA’s AI to turn text, camera paths into explorable 3D scenes
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🎆 Ernie Image – Baidu’s powerful new open-weight text-to-image model
ASAPP’s Nirmal Mukhi and special guest Kate Leggett analyze recent Forrester research on planning, staffing, and operationalizing the new roles AI agents bring to the customer service workforce.*
Adobe debuted Firefly AI Assistant, its push into “agentic creativity”, with a chat that runs multi-app creative workflows across Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom, and Firefly.
Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash text-to-speech, a new model with audio tags that can steer tone, pace, and accent, currently #2 on Artificial Analysis’s TTS leaderboard.
GPT-5.4 Pro produced a proof for a 60-year-old math problem, with mathematician Jared Lichtman saying it found a path humans overlooked for nearly a century.
Anthropic is switching Claude Enterprise pricing to charge businesses based on token consumption, a shift that could significantly raise bills for power users.
Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.
Today’s workflow comes from reader Kerstin R. in London, UK:
“I have a lot of clothes I no longer need. And while I’ve donated some, there are some higher ticket items in there I’ve been looking to sell. But getting all of the items listed on a secondhand sales platform seemed very time-consuming and daunting.
So I’ve built my own system, where all I need to do is take some photos of each item, add some keywords, brand, size, and price, submit it via an Airtable form directly from my phone, and Claude creates all the copy for each text field I need from headline to description to make it a super compelling and optimised listing.
Claude also helps me gauge pricing based on existing listings on the platform. Huge time saver and I can finally get some money back from things I no longer need.”
How do you use AI? Tell us here.
That’s it for today!
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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown
