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Welcome to The AI Report — the #1 AI newsletter for business leaders.
We believe you don’t need to be technical. Just informed.
Inside: real-world use cases and Partner Perspectives you won’t find anywhere else:
• 1. 📲 Save up to $1,100 on iPhone 17 Pro with T-Mobile
• 2. 💥 Stripe wants to turn your AI costs into a profit center
• 3. 💼 Your Business Briefing
• 4. 🦈 Say goodbye to annoying ads with Surfshark
• 5. ✍️ Today’s Policy Corner
• 6. 🗞️ The News Bulletin
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TOGETHER WITH T-MOBILE
Save up to $1,100 on iPhone 17 Pro with T-Mobile
Save up to $1,100 on iPhone 17 Pro with T-Mobile
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*With 24 monthly bill credits when you add a line and trade-in an eligible device on SuperMobile. For well-qualified customers; plus tax & $35 device connection charge.
Latest in AI
Stripe wants to turn your AI costs into a profit center
🚨 Our Report
Stripe has released a preview of a new billing feature that lets companies selling AI-powered products pass through the underlying costs of model usage to their customers, while automatically adding profit margins on top.
🔓 Key Points
The feature lets companies charge a markup percentage on token usage automatically, so a business could set a consistent 30% margin over raw LLM token costs across providers without manual tracking.
It works by tracking API prices from chosen AI models, recording customer token usage, and applying the profit-margin markup in real time, which solves a growing pain point for companies running agentic AI workloads.
Stripe has also introduced its own AI gateway for access to multiple models, and the billing tool integrates with popular third-party gateways like Vercel and OpenRouter.
🔐 Relevance
For enterprise teams embedding AI into products or internal tools, managing token costs is becoming a margin problem. As agentic workloads scale, usage-based costs can grow unpredictably. Stripe's feature signals a shift toward AI-specific billing infrastructure, which could reshape how vendors price AI-embedded services. The feature is currently in preview.
THE BUSINESS BRIEFING: OPERATIONS
Edel Optics (mid-market e-commerce, 1.5M+ orders shipped across 53 countries) was burning 150 hours monthly on repetitive support tickets while their team struggled to keep up with volume across a 250,000-item catalog. They deployed My AskAI integrated with Zendesk to handle first-line responses, trained it on their help docs and historical tickets, then refined it over three months by blocking faulty-item tags (which need humans) and enabling auto-handover when the AI couldn't answer.
Tool used: My AskAI — AI customer service agent that integrates with helpdesks to auto-resolve tickets.
Result: 79% AI resolution rate across 4,000 monthly tickets. 150 hours saved per month. 92% CSAT score on AI-handled conversations.
The lesson: Resolution rate jumped from 25% to 79% once they stopped trying to automate everything. They blocked ticket types requiring judgment (faulty goods, complaints) and let AI handle only what it could confidently resolve, such as order status, returns, and product lookup.
Steal this: Audit your last 100 support tickets this week. Tag them as "AI-ready" (factual, repeatable answers) or "human-only" (judgment, escalation, nuance). Route only the AI-ready categories to automation.
TOGETHER WITH SURFSHARK
Say Goodbye to Annoying Ads with CleanWeb from Surfshark
Ever tried following a quick dinner recipe online, only to be ambushed by endless ads, autoplay videos, and suspicious pop-ups? It’s not just annoying—it’s often tracking your every move without your consent.
That’s where CleanWeb by Surfshark comes in. CleanWeb blocks ads, trackers, and malware before they even load, giving you a faster, safer, and frustration-free browsing experience. Imagine surfing the web without constant interruptions or creepy targeted ads following you around.
Installation is simple, and with Black Friday plans starting at just $1.99/month (plus 3 free months), it's a no-brainer. Enjoy a cleaner, faster internet today with Surfshark CleanWeb.
THE POLICY CORNER
President Trump's December executive order directed the Justice Department to sue states with "burdensome" AI laws and tasked officials with drafting a uniform federal AI framework for Congress. The proposal will recommend preempting certain state regulations while preserving state authority over child safety, data centers, and government AI procurement. California's transparency requirements for AI developers and New York's RAISE Act incident reporting rules are among the state laws likely targeted.
Deadline: Draft framework expected by early April 2026 (90 days from executive order).
Your move: Inventory which state AI laws currently apply to your operations (California SB 53, New York RAISE Act, NYC Local Law 144). Don't pause compliance, federal preemption isn't active until Congress passes legislation and courts resolve challenges.
AI News
Amazon launches Canvas AI tool for sellers: Real-time dashboard visualizes inventory, ad performance, and suggests pricing adjustments—predictive business intelligence without the data science team. FULL STORY
Google, Meta tie AI use to performance reviews: Tech giants now track AI adoption in employee evaluations, with Google scoring software engineers on AI-assisted code production for first time in 2026. FULL STORY
Meta creates applied AI engineering org: New team under CTO Andrew Bosworth targets ultra-flat structure of 50 employees per manager to accelerate superintelligence work in Reality Labs division. FULL STORY
OpenAI renegotiates Pentagon deal after backlash: Altman admits "opportunistic and sloppy" rollout, adds explicit bans on domestic surveillance and restricts Defense Intelligence Components from using ChatGPT without contract modification. FULL STORY
Trending AI Tools (sponsored by our tools database)
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Plixu is a free AI-powered SEO audit tool to identify website issues and enhance search visibility
The Money: AI hardware shifts from chips to connectivity
As AI clusters hit data-movement limits, investors are pouring capital into optical interconnects and infrastructure enablers. Two major rounds this week targeted companies solving bandwidth bottlenecks, not building better processors.
Deals to know:
Ayar Labs (Series E, $500M) -- Co-packaged optics replacing copper links in AI data centers. Delivers 4-20x throughput per watt. Investors: Neuberger Berman, MediaTek, Qatar Investment Authority, Alchip Technologies, ARK Invest, Insight Partners, Sequoia Capital, 1789 Capital
Encord (Series C, $60M) -- Data infrastructure platform for physical AI and robotics training. Enables multimodal data labeling at scale.
Signal: Money's flowing to whoever solves chip-to-chip communication. Compute density means nothing if data can't move fast enough between processors.
Refer a Friend
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Until next time, Martin, Arturo, and Liam.
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