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This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I like pushing AI to be less predictable. When AI assistants are less bland and more bold, they challenge my blind spots and nudge me to rethink. So I asked one of the boldest AI experimenters I know, Alexandra Samuel, to share unconventional tips and tactics when she visited New York recently from Vancouver. Alex, who writes about AI for The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, surprised me with the scale of her AI efforts. She described creating 200-plus automation scripts and building a personal idea database that helps with drafting pitch emails. Her quirkiest tactic? Using Suno to generate songs to explain complex concepts. Her lively new podcast, Me + Viv, explores her unusual relationship with an AI assistant she trained to serve as her coach and collaborator. She interviews AI skeptics like Oliver Burkeman and Karen Hao to challenge her own embrace of AI. The Suno songs Alex generated serve as a recurring musical thread throughout the series. In a recent episode, Im So Sycophantic, Alex confronts Vivs most irritating flaw: her pathological tendency to flatter Alex and agree with everything she says. The shows intriguing premise reminded me of another podcast I love, Evan Ratliffs Shell Game, whose second season debuted recently. Both are excellent explorations of what its like to engage deeply with AI assistants, resourceful and flawed as they are. Five tips from Alex 1. Use Suno to turn words into catch music.What Suno is: An AI music generation platform for creating custom songs Alex uses Suno extensively to create songs for her podcast about AI, treating it as a storytelling tool rather than just music creation. Im like a monkey with a slot machine. Its pretty typical for me to generate the same song 50 or 100 times, maybe even 200 times, she says. The iterative process helps her find the perfect version. She says Suno struggles with switching between male and female voices, musical styles, or languages mid-song. Alex suggests bringing your own lyrics to Suno for better results than relying on its built-in lyric generation. Heres documentation she wrote up about how she uses Suno. An alternative she recommends: Work iteratively with an AI assistant like Claude to develop lyrics that you then import into Suno. Try it for: Turning articles or announcements into short promo songs; creating engaging musical explainers; or generating a newsletter signup song Alternatives: Udio, ElevenLabs Music 2. Coda: Create your own productivity hubWhat Coda is: A software tool for creating customized documents and databases. Ive written about how underrated Coda is as an alternative to other useful tools like Notion and Airtable. Alex calls Coda an everything hub where you can build your own tools. New AI features make it easier to use and more flexible. Alex used Coda to design her own pitch machine, a sophisticated story tracking system. She has one table in the pitch machine with all of her story ideas. Another table in Coda has all the publications she writes for, with editors names and contact info. With the press of a button in Coda, she can combine multiple story pitches into a single Gmail draft while automatically updating tracking fields and follow-up dates. It took a while to set up, but now it saves her time. Who is Coda for? Alex recommends Coda for power users who like messing around with tech. She offers this test: If you use XLOOKUP in Excel, then you should use Coda. If you dont know XLOOKUP, you should use Notion. Its like a nerd-o-meter. Try it for: Project and campaign idea tracking, managing a client database, or automated email or Slack message generation Alternatives: Notion, Airtable, Google Workspace, Obsidian3. CapCut: Create social videos with AI helpWhat it is: A video editing platform with AI features Alex uses CapCut, along with custom Python scripts, to create music videos for Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. She says she has mixed feelings about CapCut because of its TikTok/ByteDance ownership, but relies on it for now. Shes been working on a system for syncing the appearance of captions on-screen to the moment when song lyrics are heard. Try it for: Creating stylish, captioned social media videos or turning podcasts into videos Alternatives: Captions, Descript, or Kapwing 4. Claude + MCP: Connect AI to your docsWhat it is: An AI assistant connected to external databases and tools via Model Context Protocol (MCP) MP servers let you connect sites and apps to AI platforms. Thats how Alex connected her Coda account to Claude. Now that theyre linked, Alex can pose casual questions to Claude, which can then look for things in her Coda docs. I can actually just have a conversation with Claude and say, Hey Claude, I just talked to an editor. Theyre looking for articles about data privacy. Can you look at my Coda doc and see what story ideas I have that might be relevant? She emphasizes security considerations: Journalists covering sensitive subjects should avoid this type of experimental workflow if theyre protecting anonymous source information. Try it for: Querying complex databases, finding relevant past work for new projects, analyzing patterns across your own documents, combining multiple data sources for insights Alternatives: The Google Drive connector in Claude or ChatGPT; or a custom setup of NotebookLM 5. Claude Code: Reduce repetitive workWhat it is: An AI-powered coding assistant that runs locally on your computer. It helps developers code faster. It also helps nonprogrammers accomplish technical tasks using natural language prompts. You can use it to organize files on your laptop, create Python scripts, or make little interactive applications or games. Despite limited formal programming training, Alex has written approximately 200 Python scripts using Claude Code. She says, Whenever you hear yourself with the deep sigh of, like, This is gonna be a drag, just go to the AI and say, Hey, heres this thing I have to do. Is there a way that could be made into a script? Alexs scripts have helped her combine PDFs and generate time-coded captions for video. She also used Claude Code to build her own Firefox extension for a financial tracking app. Try it for: Batch file processing, converting data, or whipping up browser extensions to solve specific-to-you problems Alternatives: Replit, Cursor, Claude Artifacts, Windsurf This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.
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E-Commerce
My working days often unfold in either Zoom minimalist workplaces or glass-walled conference rooms with sleek windows, filled with entrepreneurs pitching ideas. As a marketing executive and startup mentor, I lead strategies for companies of various sizes, guide founders at startup accelerators TechStars and Founder Institute, and serve as an awards jury member. My calendar overflows with executive consultations, brand campaign planning, and deadline sprints. But between Christmas and New Year’s, I trade those sterile spaces for museum halls alive with color and history. It wasnt easy getting out the door the first time I did this in 2021. I was filled with fears. What if a startup stalled? What if a client bailed? Eventually, though, I did it. I carved out full days for museums. No notifications mid-visit, no news feeds. Just artand a notebook. This wasn’t a lazy holiday stroll. I didn’t set out to make this a blueprint. I just craved difference. What I didn’t expect was how profoundly it refueled me. I feared it would derail momentum; instead, it unlocked clarity. If you’re a leader convinced you can’t afford the pause, that’s precisely why you must. Here’s how to begin. What the museum ritual looked like I timed it consciously: Christmas week plus New Year’s Eve, overlapping holidays when clients slow down anyway, so I missed zero critical days. While I was out, my colleagues handled brand campaigns; an assistant triaged the rest. If a force majeure broke out, they’d route it. Christmas Eve morning last year, I headed out. Here’s a day in the ritual: Slow walk to an art gallery, followed by unhurried coffee, sketching initial impressions. Then, hours absorbing art. No music in headphones, no quick email scans. Full presence. Leaving the gallery, I wandered to the local Christmas market near the town hall. I savored warm coffee and bagels, relishing the heat of the cup in my hands. By the end of the day, the inspiration hit. I filled my notebooknot pitches, but reflections: yearly goals reframed, market blind spots, forgotten creative hunches, leadership values dusty from neglect. Insights flowed because I carved the space. They stuck. Three insights that reshaped me Here are three insights I stumbled upon while I took a moment for a pause: 1. Different lenses multiply breakthroughs. A single perspective limits you. As I moved from the Cubism hall to the Impressionism hall in one museum, I recalled a direct-to-consumer brand struggling in Asia. They were obsessed with premium customers but missing the mass market. My walking and thinking led to a simple pivot: Tailor messaging to local culture. Sales took off. Now my mornings begin with one question: “What lens am I using today?” Calm. Global. Daring. I lead from vision now, not reaction. The world meets me there. 2. Stillness trumps speed. Startups move fast. Metrics can triple in a month. But speed under pressure clouds your judgment. In one case, a data management company struggled with positioning. Their new product features were failing despite endless debates. After the Christmas pause, fresh ideas clicked. We repositioned the product and landed a major client in days. Now I always ask myself: “Is this vision or just velocity?” The pause comes first. 3. Dare to break the rules. Art thrives by breaking conventions. Picasso’s Cubism shattered traditional views, just like the best startups do. During one gallery visit in December, I thought about a tech team stuck in safe, predictable marketing. We shifted to bold, unexpected ideas, like blending AI visuals with Renaissance art vibes in January. It felt risky, but the client loved it. Sales jumped. Now I ask every team: “What’s the rule we can break?” Daring moves win in tech. Why more leaders should try a museum ritual Your mind craves depth, not distraction. We grant muscles recovery; why starve our creativity? Step into galleries, and ideas resurfacevision sharpens, you reconnect to the leader unswayed by noise. Perhaps museums arent your catalyst: Lakeside solitude, hiking trails, or a quiet café moment might move you more. The central pointthat leaders need deliberate downtime to recharge and generate catalytic ideasremains. Taking a break didn’t slow me down; it realigned me to essentials. We mistake time off for indulgence. Wrong. It’s leadership disciplineslowing down to think about what’s vital.
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E-Commerce
In 2025, AI became officially unavoidable: It had been lurking in the background before, as early adapters experimented with it. But this year, companies invested more than $202 billion in AI, a 75% increase from $114 billion invested in 2024. Major tech companies fought bitterly over AI talent, offering astronomical pay packages. There was a groundswell of demand for talent, and unsurprisingly this spread to the demand for AI, data science, and engineering jobs, which increased 28% compared to 2024, according to data provided to Fast Company by IT staffing company Mondo. The firm also provided data on the top five jobs that took off in 2025, which weve listed by volume of demand. Some of the jobs are new to Mondos dataset. Others saw explosive growth in demand compared to 2024. But theyre all related to AI. Theres a spike in certain jobs growth every year, but as we wrap up 2025, its clear: This was the year of artificial intelligence. And the technology isnt going anywhere. Neither are these jobs: 1. Data Engineer (18% growth) An AI is only as strong as the data thats powering it. Accurate and reliable data is a must, and as the demand for AI increases, so does the demand for data engineers who can ensure models are fed the highest-quality data. 2. Analytics Engineer (25% growth) Analytics engineers ensure that companies can make sense of the data they have and use it to provide actionable insights. They organize data so its easier to analyze, apply software engineering best practices to analytics code, and design and maintain data models. They also collaborate with other teams inside the organization to help turn these insights into better decisions. 3. AI Full-Stack Engineer (new) AI full-stack engineers can create complete AI applications: They can build the front-end user experience, the back-end infrastructure that powers the application, and embed AI as needed. In a world where everyone wants to be on the AI bandwagon, AI full-stack engineers are the next generation of full- stack engineers. 4. AI Solutions Consultant (new) One of the largest challenges companies deploying AI are facing is understanding where the tech can make a difference. AI solutions consultants serve as a bridge between business leaders and technical teams. They identify use cases for AI, evaluate which tools to employ, and weigh in on how AI should be implemented. 5. AI Business Insights Analyst: (new) An AI business insights analyst pairs data analysis and insights from AI with the surrounding business context to help leaders understand how to shape their strategy in an ever-changing world. The fastest-growing roles sit at the intersection of AI, data infrastructure, and business translation, reflecting employer demand for talent that can deploy, govern, and operationalize AI at scale, Mondo Stephanie Wernick Barker wrote in an email. Compared to 2024, employers are hiring fewer generalists and more hybrid specialists who combine technical depth with measurable business impact.
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E-Commerce
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