Gemini crossed a billion users, most of them just talking to it. Eight Pulitzer winners admitted to using AI. Adobe moved its whole suite inside ChatGPT, which I think is the correct move: the stuff you can reach through an agent is the stuff you keep paying for. Also: agent skills escaping the laptop, DOGE’s receipts meeting the GAO, and vertical drinking.
The Tanzu UX and design team has been using AI in their work for awhile now. Here’s my interview with them to find out how it’s been going:
It’s full of their real work experiences and tips. As you’ll remember, dear readers, I did a similar interview about Tanzu product management.
ICYMI
Original content published since last time.
- Locking down platforms for AI – what default secure takes away on purpose – Tanzu Catsup
- The CISO’s ham sandwich recipe
Wiring AI Into What You Already Have
- Introducing Adobe for ChatGPT: Create, edit and get work done – all in ChatGPT – Adobe hasn’t done well in the “AI era.” Perhaps the answer is this: people are happy to use Adobe, and if let them use it through AI too, they’ll keep using AI. In my experience, once you integrate with AI tools (through skills, MCP servers, or just having an API that agents can use), those services are more sticky and valuable. For example, I would be very excited if my bank had that kind of integration, just for reading the ledger.
- AI skills start on laptops. Enterprises inherit the mess. – Now my mistake, now my problem.
- IBM and Red Hat Expand Lightwell to Strengthen Trust and Governance for AI-Era Open Source – ”Lightwell”
Who’s Actually Using It
- Google’s Gemini AI app passes 1 billion monthly active users – “Alphabet Inc. put the app at 650 million monthly users last October and 750 million by February. Pichai cited 900 million on stage at Google I/O in June, and the July quarterly report had it above 950 million.” // Google paired the announcement with usage data rather than revenue figures. The company said 63% of Gemini users interact by voice, with a growing group using voice alone, and that parents are 43% more likely to use voice for everyday tasks. One in five interactions with Gemini Live involves a live camera feed or screen sharing, and 38% of school-related requests include an attachment. // Gemini generates more than 150 million images a day, according to Google. The app has more than 100 million active users on iOS, and Google said power users on macOS prompt about twice as often as users on other surfaces. Gemini can also trigger actions across more than 40 apps.”
- A record-breaking eight Pulitzer awardees disclosed AI use this year – Once you realize AI is a great tool, you have a new great tool to use to get your work done better: “The industry [used to be] far more apprehensive about AI tools than it is today, with a clearer understanding now of what uses might be appropriate – data collection and analysis, for example – and when it might not, such as in writing and editing stories in any format that might be considered for a Pulitzer Prize.”
- Free AI Humanizer – Remove AI writing.
More
- You Don’t Miss Myspace – You Just Miss 2005 – “Not seeing content from real people is a frequent complaint about social media platforms, and many of Forrester’s poll respondents repeated that trope, though the generation gap was wide.” // And yet, they seem to still be sticky eyeballs…
- DOGE’s wild, unverifiable savings claims discredited in US government report – Who could have predicting that from a team with someone named “Big Balls”?
- The first notch is magical – Lovely pictures of knobs and dials.
- Floor796 – Great internet art.
Wastebook
- ”Vertical drinking.” Here
AI Summaries
I wanted to read these, but I didn’t make the time, so I asked the robot to summarize them.
- 🤖 InfoQ 2026 Culture Panel: Code Is Cheap, Teams Shrink to One, and Engineers Become Custodians of Agent Output
- 🤖 Adobe Puts 70+ Creative Suite Tools Inside ChatGPT, Betting Distribution Beats Product
- 🤖 Americans Now Read 12.6 Books a Year, Down From 18.5: The Case That Ideological Capture, Not TikTok, Emptied the Literary Audience
- 🤖 Nobody Has 20 Years of AI Transformation Experience, So SIs Should Simulate Judgment Instead of Waiting For It
- 🤖 1Password’s Off-by-1 Labs Runs 6,080 AI Patch Attempts at Six Fresh CVEs: Only 26% Come Back Clean
- 🤖 “She Hears Voices at the Wrong Time” – How You Diagnose a Disease Defined as Thinking Differently
- 🤖 AI Workloads Are the Same Platform Problems Wearing New Project Names
Upcoming Talks
- AI Connect Riga 2026 – Riga, Latvia, 22 August. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”
- Cloud Foundry Summit 2026 – Heidelberg, Germany, 21 September. “Making and Maintaining the Case to Stay on Cloud Foundry”
- DevOpsDays Istanbul 2026 – Istanbul, Turkey, 24 October. Keynote, title to come.
- Cloud Native Denmark 2026 – Copenhagen, Denmark, 19 November. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”
Logoff
I’ve changed how I do AI summary posting, a little. The blog is at IncomphrensibleMeadia.com. I had to move it from micro.blog to WordPress because some of the posts were too long, like this one.
The deal with that blog is that I summarize, I guess, a lot of things. The text summaries are easy enough. I also summarize videos and podcasts. With those, I set it up so that there are summaries at the top and then cleaned up transcripts at the bottom. This is the first video I did this with, and it is amazing for me: it’s exactly the stuff I want to extract from a video.
Anyhow. So, that’s what the “AI Summaries” section ahead is listing. I’m also going to start putting my daily briefing in there to see what that’s like. That one looks at all my RSS subscriptions and social media feeds, clusters, and picks out things I’d be interested in from there.
I’m a little apprehensive about this because the agent could auto publish stuff I don’t want published or that bad-mouths things and people I don’t want bad mouthed. I’ve been doing this since November of 2025, though, and spent a lot of time tuning it, so it seems fine.
I also have 5 to 6 minute podcast summaries done in my AI-trained voice that I’ll get around to putting up. Probably.
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