Robots to the Rescue
The OECD just released a statement that should make every AI skeptic pause: artificial intelligence investment accounted for nearly 90% of US economic growth in the first half of 2025. “The robots have come to the rescue,” one economist put it. While critics debate whether the AI boom is overhyped, the numbers say something else entirely.
📰 The Rundown
🌍 OECD: AI Investment Is Holding the Global Economy Together
➡️ The move: In a Bloomberg Television interview, OECD Secretary General Mathias Cormann declared that AI investment will continue rising and deliver “significant beneficial impact” on productivity growth. The Paris-based organization raised its US growth forecast to 2% for 2025, crediting tech spending for cushioning the blow from tariffs. Fitch’s chief economist was more blunt: “The AI revolution has prompted additional private sector spending on a scale that is heavily cushioning the adverse impact of tariff hikes. The robots have come to the rescue.”
⚡ Why it matters: Information technology capital expenditure accounted for nearly 90% of US economic growth in the first half of 2025. That’s not a typo. While pundits debate whether AI is overhyped, corporations are voting with their checkbooks. Global growth is projected to slow from 3.2% this year to 2.9% in 2026, but without AI investment, those numbers would look far worse.
🎯 Your takeaway: The economic case for AI adoption just got a lot harder to ignore. Companies investing in AI infrastructure are not just chasing trends. They are building the foundation for the next growth cycle.
🎬 Adobe Firefly Adds “Prompt to Edit” for AI Video
➡️ The move: Adobe launched major updates to its Firefly video tools today, including a feature called “Prompt to Edit” that lets creators make precise changes to AI generated clips without regenerating from scratch. Tell it to “remove that person in the background” or “zoom in slightly on the main subject” and Firefly applies the edit directly. The company also released its Firefly video editor in public beta, a browser based timeline tool that combines AI generated content with traditional footage.
⚡ Why it matters: Until now, most AI video generators forced you to roll the dice again if anything was off. One wrong element meant starting over. Adobe’s new approach treats AI video more like traditional editing: refine what you have instead of hoping for perfection on the first try. New third party models include Black Forest Labs’ FLUX.2 and Topaz Astra for 4K upscaling.
🎯 Your takeaway: If you’ve been frustrated by the lack of control in AI video tools, Adobe just answered. Pro and Premium subscribers get unlimited generations through January 15.
🇨🇳 Chinese AI Chip Startup Prepares $300 Million IPO Despite US Blacklist
➡️ The move: Biren Technology is preparing to launch a Hong Kong IPO in the coming weeks, aiming to raise approximately $300 million. The Chinese AI chip startup is on the US Entity List, which severely limits its access to advanced manufacturing and supply chain partners. Despite these restrictions, Biren has continued attracting capital and government support, with an early 2025 funding round valuing it around $2 billion.
⚡ Why it matters: Export controls were supposed to slow China’s AI chip development. They have not stopped it. Biren’s BR100 chip was positioned as competitive with Nvidia’s top tier data center accelerators before the company was blacklisted. This IPO signals that capital markets, at least in Asia, are betting China will find workarounds. The global AI chip race is becoming a two track system with different rules for each side.
🎯 Your takeaway: The AI supply chain is fragmenting along geopolitical lines. Companies building AI strategies need to consider which hardware ecosystem they are tying themselves to.
🔧 Tool Spotlight: Read AI
Read AI turns your meetings into actionable intelligence. Beyond basic transcription, it analyzes sentiment, tracks topics over time, and provides personalized coaching to help you communicate better.
What makes it different: Read AI does not just tell you what was said. It tells you how it landed. The platform highlights emotional tone shifts in your meetings, helping you gauge whether a client was engaged or skeptical. A “Speaker Coach” feature identifies patterns across all your meetings, flagging habits like speaking too fast or using filler words.
Best for: Sales teams analyzing customer conversations, managers tracking team dynamics, anyone who wants feedback on their communication style without hiring a coach.
Pricing: Free plan includes basic reporting and five meeting reports per month. Pro plans start at $19.75/month with unlimited reports and advanced analytics.
👉 Try it: read.ai
✨ Try This Today: The Simplify Sprint
Most business communication is too long. Memos that should be one page stretch to three. Emails that need two sentences balloon to seven. AI can fix this in seconds.
The technique: Take any document you are about to send and ask AI to cut it by 50% while preserving the key points.
How to use it:
1. Paste your draft into ChatGPT, Claude, or your preferred AI tool
2. Prompt: “Cut this in half while keeping all essential information. Remove fluff, redundancy, and anything that does not directly serve the main point.”
3. Review the output and notice what was removed
4. Ask yourself: did I actually need those parts?
Why it works: When AI removes half your words and the message still makes sense, that is feedback. You learn what was filler and what was substance. Over time, you start writing tighter first drafts.
Time required: 2 minutes per document. Try it on your next email before hitting send.
✨ The Wire
🔗 Adobe is offering unlimited Firefly image and video generations through January 15 for Pro and Premium subscribers. Adobe Blog
🔗 Nvidia acquired SchedMD, the company behind Slurm workload management software, signaling that control in AI infrastructure is shifting from raw silicon to the software layers that orchestrate compute. TechStartups
🔗 AMD announced a partnership with HPE for its Helios rack scale AI architecture, offering 2.9 AI exaflops FP4 performance in a single turnkey rack for trillion parameter training. ts2.tech
Neural Notes — AI that amplifies your value, not replaces it.
