The AI Roundup

The Matrix Edition

Dan Ilett

23 Jul 2025 — 3 min read

Good morning

I recently coached an exec team who wanted more updates on how companies are responding to AI challenges. Here's the latest:

The White House is finalising a “Winning the AI Race” plan to push US AI overseas and block federal funding in states with restrictive AI laws. It leans into open‑source AI, full‑stack exports, Pentagon use, fast‑tracking data centres, and easing chip export controls moved by the former Biden administration

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns entire roles, such as customer service, may soon vanish as AI can now do their jobs better. He issued a warning due to scammers using voice‑cloning to con people. OpenAI has also opened an office in Washington and is attempting to move closer to the White House.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said AI could wipe out 50% of entry-level office jobs.

In an open letter released , 46 leaders from Europe’s biggest companies - including Airbus, BNP, Philips and Siemens - urged Brussels to hit pause on the rollout of the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act, stating it would damage competitive edge.

Taiwan is moving the other way, announcing a $510bn set of AI megaprojects aimed at reinventing its economy and supply chain. With targets around robotics, photonics, quantum and half a million new jobs, Taiwan intends to be a hub for deep-tech R&D and AI manufacturing.

Alibaba just open-sourced Qwen3-Coder, a powerful code-generation model to rival Claude and GPT-4, giving open-source AI another gear and Western companies a productivity vs security headache.

What's really going to bake your noodle

Perplexity’s Comet is a new AI-powered browser now in beta that combines search, scheduling and task automation in one interface. It reads and drafts emails, books meetings, manages calendars and interacts with web content using live AI agents.

Comet - and other AI browsers like it - doesn’t just retrieve information, it interprets and acts on it. This is a huge shift from traditional search engines.With Comet, users ask a question and get a direct, real-time answer. That is also rewriting the rules of SEO, marketing and content strategy. To stay visible, businesses need to publish structured, high-quality answers that AI browsers can trust, cite and surface or risk internet irrelevancy.

The City CIO Club

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Take the Message Risk Test. In under three minutes, you can understand where you're carrying message risk in your company and what to do about it. Let me know what you think...

Message risk is where a company might have the best product, service, operations and employees, but the message is out of whack with the market.

This costs large companies tens if not hundreds of millions a year in wasted time and lost sales. It's simple to fix, but it gets handed off to marketing and the rest of the business ignores it until a major opportunity is lost.

Looking forward to the holidays? I am. Next week will be the last Executive Summary newsletter until we go back to school in September. If there's anything you'd like to feature or shoutout, please let me know.