Apologies for the XOXO sabbatical. I’ve been deep in build mode with Bloomsuite and moving house at the same time… because apparently, I like my life layered.

Its exciting times. Building Bloomsuite has meant watching the exact thing I’ve seen clients, colleagues and friends struggle with for years slowly come to life as a product.

As a trained film maker, teaching to content create is rewarding but the same barriers arise down the line. "Where do i find that tool again? ... Whats the best way to structure this? ... Ugh i'm so busy what do I make next".

It's hard enough for them to run their business day to day. So when it comes to the content hamster wheel, this kind of friction chips away at consistency. I’m now watching that v friction get mapped, structured, systemised which is slightly surreal because when you’ve lived inside a problem for long enough and see it translate into a solution it feels… magical.

At a recent ElevenLabs London conference, VC veteran Douglas Leone said that said he’s tired of startups born around boardroom tables. The best ones, he drilled home, come from lived pain. You can research a market. You can analyse behaviour. But you can’t manufacture decades of experience feeling the same frustrations.

Justine Moore at a16z speedrun double whammy validated my journey in "Its Time to Build"....

With the POC 80% complete and a handful of VCs and angels waiting for the demo, I look forward to seeing you on the other side. Sign up to our Beta here if youre nosy and get in touch if you'd like a demo. Bags of $$$ welcome too, as we are actively fundraising now.

✦ SCOOPS ✦

Elon's chatbot, Grok, spent the past two months in headlines for allowing users to generate non consensual sexualised deepfake images of real people, including minors.

The UK’s Information Commissioner's Office opened a formal investigation. Ofcom launched its own probe under the Online Safety Act. French authorities searched X’s Paris offices as part of wider inquiries. Lawmakers across Europe and beyond publicly raised concerns.

Meanwhile, Musk said he "wasn’t aware of illegal content being generated" as xAI reportedly closed a $20 billion funding round.

Because apparently the only thing that moves faster than regulators, is Venture Capital.

Long before the $11B valuation headlines, I was using ElevenLabs in my art projects, meeting at their nible team HQ with other micro influencers testing new features and comparing our gate kept notes. I was giving my artistic ancient goddesses voices and testing how synthetic sound could move people inside immersive, meditative spaces. ElevenLabs was my secret weapon.

Fast forward a hop & skip and it’s now a global empire and everyone and their McConaugheys are in.

And their milestones keep getting wilder. From adding Michael Caine to their Iconic Voice Marketplace to subtly announcing Matthew McConaughey an early investor, partnering with the Ukrainian government and major telecoms to deploy voice AI at scale. Wait, I think I just saw a post of them banking Google... no? Not just yet then.

In any case. Its official. Synthetic speech is no longer a novelty. It’s localisation, accessibility, dubbing, audiobooks, education, brand cloning, customer support. It’s IP expansion at scale. And if you’re building a service based app in 2026, you should be thinking seriously about how this business layer can level yours up.

Through the ElevenLabs Startup Program - which we won, yay - we were awarded mass usage credits that give us some juicy runway to test and integrate their capabilities in Bloomsuite.

Sure, users can clone, train, and monetise their own voice for video podcasts and training videos. But as a human first storytelling platform, what excites us more is....

– Flipping voiceovers into 70+ languages, opening creators up to entirely new markets without recreating content from scratch.

– Elevating everyday content into commercial level audio, making studio quality audio accessible.

– Adding immersive audio layers to educational and brand content, increasing retention and accessibility.

& sooo much more. Voice isn’t replacing the creator. It’s amplifying their reach. We’re still testing the edges of what their API can unlock, but I am eyes and ears wide open.

My goodness, Anthropic is firmly in its headline era. Born from the promise of building the “safer” AI, now in the same breath as defence deals and dark money, suddenly topping the charts… and then, an outage. Let’s break it down for y’all.

Once upon a time, Anthropic was the responsible one. The lab born from THE MANIFESTO. The one that said, if it gets too risky, we pause.

That hard "we will stop if X threshold is crossed" fast became conditional. More aligned with industry standards and ongoing evaluation. AKA: we still care about safety, but we are not sitting this race out. And with that, the gloves came off.

They started with the Super Bowl. Anthropic dropped four ads titled Betrayal, Deception, Treachery and Violation. A chatbot posing as a therapist recommends a dating site for "sensitive cubs and roaring cougars." Another suggests height boosting insoles to a man who asked for fitness advice.

The tagline: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude." A pointed, dark funny swipe at OpenAI's decision to introduce ads to ChatGPT. Sam Altman laughed. Then wrote a 420 word rant calling the ads "dishonest" and "authoritarian" and accused Anthropic of serving "an expensive product to rich people."

Then came the $20 million drop. Anthropic slid a cheque to PAC (Public First Action - a "dark money" nonprofit whose stated mission is to stop political power from concentrating around one single AI Power AKA OpenAI). Dark money means political ads, no donor disclosure and nobody has to sign their name to anything.

No stopping them, Claude dethroned competitor OpenAI's ChatGPT in Apple's App Store, hitting number one as the most downloaded free app in the U.S. Free Claude users increased more than 60 percent since January.

The win came notably after President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. government would no longer use Anthropic tech including Claude, after which OpenAI entered into a deal with the U.S. Department of War to provide its AI technology for military use in "classified environments".

Cancel Culture turned its glare toward OpenAI and almost overnight, embraced Claude like the principled alternative. All hail the new King.

Until.

At the height of the coronation, the crown slipped. Unprecedented demand, and the kingdom went dark.

The morally superior migration crashed the servers and as you can imagine, Reddit is ripe with conspiracy. The consensus is that this is a DDoS attack from the US military as payback for Anthropic's ethical stance on the war. Tinfoil hats mandatory.

As of writing, this is where we stand. I’ll be watching for the next twist, because it’s getting undeniably messy. If Tyra Banks doesn't host the next AI summit, frankly, what are we even doing.

⚡ SIZZLERS ⚡

⚡ Rent-a-Human is making waves on Reddit after users spotted AI agents hiring real people to act as their “hands and eyes” in the physical world, think running errands, verifying locations, even interacting with other platforms on their behalf. Check out the Reddit chat here.

⚡ AI Agents now have their own Social Network. “Moltbook,” a social network designed only for AI agents to interact (humans can watch but not post) is gaining traction. Allegedly, they can create their own language, their own religion, their own fleets of mini agents. As TechTarget highlighted, some of the community messages are pretty creepy......

⚡ Google Gemini will now do human errands, booking your Uber 'cos its time for you to depart the scene, and ordering your Five Guys en route home. Consumer AI agents have arrived and delegation just went mainstream. Sweet. More at Wired.

⚡ Apple ditched OpenAI and gave Siri's brain to Google Apple signed a $1 billion/year deal to power Siri with Google's Gemini. Yes, the two biggest rivals in tech just became AI bedfellows. Details on CNBC.

⚡ OpenAI disclosed that the perp of the mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge had their ChatGPT account suspended in June '25 for content indicating potential real world violence. Though the user was banned OpenAI chose not to notify law enforcement. A decision that is now prompting an overhaul of its safety protocols and how it escalates threats. Read more.

✦ WHAT’S IN MY STACK ✦

Between being Mama, fundraiser, founder, writer, and still somehow the housekeeper, the juggle is very real. I’m not sure how I’d keep it all moving without my stack quietly working in the background. So for the mamas and the master jugglers, here are the tools helping me keep my plates spinning.

Right now i’m building a mammoth user journey spreadsheet for Bloomsuite.

A few days ago I needed to add and restructure it, across tabs and was exhausted just thinking about it. I’d heard about Claude’s CoWork integrations, so I gave it my task - and holy crap. It restructured every tab exactly as requested. No hallucinations. No weird creative manifestations. Just did the job like i asked, across tabs. Claude is officially my spreadsheet queen.

I pushed it further. I needed to mock up a platform interface for a presentation. I’d normally use Lovable for this but decided to go rogue. It worked. Fast, accurate, one interface smashed out in no time. I did have to top up my credits (only by $5) and it did have a small diva moment with flipping out on full height logo margins. But I’ll take the minor spacing tantrum over having to stock up on Lovable credits. This could be a great affordable solution for mockups.

When its back, up and running.... Try it. (Or dont. Cos we dont need another Outage.)

ChatGPT only just, still has a place on my subscription list. But I’ve def pulled back on how much i use it for writing. The newer updates with the over explaining and AI nuances is driving me bonkers. Where it continues to shine for me is R&D. It still understands logic and references historical conversations better than most. Its great for stress testing whilst keeping brand rules and historic thoughts, intact. It’s basically a good sparring partner. But ghostwriter? Not so much.

Nano Banana by Gemini is still my fav for social imagery mockups. Pitch deck assets, blog images - tinker, tinker and done. This one took all of 15 minutes though full transparency i added the branding in Photoshop.

Notee is one of those cute apps that just works. You record a voice note, it gives you a clean transcript and a detailed summary. As someone who loves soaking up knowledge from industry leaders on panels and talks this is super handy. I can record talks, pull out the insights and revisit them later instead of relying on finding iOS note #3466 and good intentions.

Oddly it also generates a quiz from your transcripts so you can test what you actually absorbed. I haven’t gone full revision mode myself… but the option is there.

I mean, look, does it drive me crazy with its design constraints and tripping up on saving updates? Yes. But in its defence I am a trained designer having spent decades in the Adobe Cloud Suite, pixel pushing with full control with the likes of Illustrator and InDesign. My co founder, however, has not. And therefore, when it comes to being able to co work on multiple versions of our multiple deck and multiple presentations, Gamma wins.

The end of '25 saw Gamma raised $68 million in a Series B funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). At a valuation of $2.1 billion now, i look forward to it stepping up its game but for now whilst we are collaboratively trying to work harder, faster and smarter - it works.