04/08/2026
Did a session at the FCA AI workshop on building your own AI brain.
15 minutes. No live demo, because I never trust venue wifi.
The title was Stop Starting From Zero, and that is the whole problem in one line. Most people open a fresh chat every single time and re-explain their business from scratch. Every day. Forever.
The fix is boring. Markdown files. A folder structure. Write down the things about your business you keep having to repeat, and stop repeating them.
But the thing that stuck with me was what came up when we talked about tools.
Almost everyone in the room is using ChatGPT or Claude.
Barely anyone is using Copilot.
Which is strange when you think about it.
Copilot is already sitting inside Word, Outlook, Teams and Excel. It is the one AI tool most of these businesses are already paying for.
It came with the licence.
And the numbers back up the room.
Microsoft has around 20 million paid Copilot seats against more than 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 users.
Of the seats that are paid for, industry estimates put weekly usage at 20 to 30 percent.
So most of it sits there unopened.
Meanwhile, people are paying separately, out of their own pocket half the time, for a tool that lives in a browser tab.
I do not think that is a Microsoft problem. I think it is a habit problem.
People do not adopt the tool that is closest.
They adopt the tool they had a good first experience with.
That is it. That is the whole mechanism.
Same reason the AI brain works. It is not the smartest system.
It is the one that means you never have to explain yourself twice.
