AI you can trust, and the keys to prove it

What we're tracking

• •The risk of building on a single model When a business wires a process around one proprietary AI model, it is making a quiet bet that the model, its price, and its terms will stay roughly where they are. That bet is cheap to place and expensive to unwind. The more of your workflow that assumes a particular model's behaviour — its tone, its speed, the shape of its output — the harder it becomes to move when the terms change underneath you.
• •Grounding an assistant in what your company actually knows A general-purpose AI model knows a great deal about the world and nothing about your business. It has never seen your contracts, your onboarding notes, or the reason a particular customer churned in March. That gap is why so much AI output reads as fluent and generic at the same time. The fix has a name — grounding — and it means pointing the model at your own material so its answers are anchored in your reality rather than the average of the internet.
• •A second factor you can hold in your hand Security announcements rarely make headlines, but this one matters for any business that runs Windows machines. Google's Credential Provider for Windows now supports FIDO2-compliant physical security keys as a second factor at sign-in [3]. In plain terms, that means a member of staff can be asked to tap a small hardware key — something they physically possess — before their machine will let them in.
• •Point automation where your people cannot reach There is a natural instinct to aim your newest, cleverest tool at your best opportunities. SaaStr made the opposite argument today, and it is the more interesting one: put AI on the leads your representatives will never get to, not the hot ones they are already working [4]. The reasoning is a matter of where the marginal value sits. A human is already calling the hot lead, and calling it well. The cold lead, the one that went quiet six months ago, the one nobody has the hours to chase — that is work not being done at all, which means automation there adds something rather than duplicating it.
• •What software still cannot do for you Amid a day of AI announcements, one of the sharpest pieces was about turning up in person. SaaStr recounted losing a Fortune 50 customer at renewal despite a flawless implementation and users who liked the product [5]. The satisfaction scores were high. The renewal was lost anyway, and the lesson drawn was that showing up in person would have changed the outcome.