⚠️ Microsoft CEO Concerned AI Will Destroy Company

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Microsoft is going all-in on AI, but CEO Satya Nadella admits he’s haunted by the fear that it could destroy the company.

PLUS: How to automate cold email outreach

TODAY IN AI

⚠️ Microsoft CEO concerned AI will destroy the company

At an internal town hall, Nadella compared Microsoft’s situation to Digital Equipment Corporation, a tech giant of the 1970s that collapsed after missing industry shifts. He stressed that even long-loved products may need to be abandoned if they become irrelevant in the AI era.

→ Microsoft is committing $80B to AI data centers, more than Google or Meta
→ Layoffs and culture shifts are hitting morale across the company
→ Rival Elon Musk mocked Microsoft with a new AI project, “Macrohard”
→ Strains with OpenAI continue, with both sides negotiating new terms

Why is important: Microsoft is betting everything on AI to stay ahead, but Nadella’s remarks show the enormous risks involved. Just as past tech giants fell by failing to adapt, Microsoft must reinvent itself, or risk becoming the next cautionary tale.

⚡ xAI launches Grok 4 Fast

Elon Musk’s xAI launched Grok 4 Fast, a cost-efficient AI model combining reasoning and non-reasoning capabilities in a single system. It uses fewer tokens than Grok 4 while maintaining similar accuracy, and is available on xAI’s platform, iOS, Android, OpenRouter, and Vercel AI Gateway.

→ Uses 40% fewer “thinking tokens” than Grok 4
→ 2M token context window for handling large inputs
→ Benchmark scores: 85.7% GPQA Diamond, 92% AIME 2025, 93.3% HMMT 2025
→ Two versions: reasoning and non-reasoning, pricing starts at $0.20 per million tokens
→ Integrated system reduces latency and cost for enterprise and consumer use

Why is important: Grok 4 Fast demonstrates that top-tier AI doesn’t need massive compute to succeed, marking a new era of cost-efficient intelligence. Models like this are pushing us closer to the “intelligence too cheap to meter” reality envisioned by leaders in the space.

HOW TO AI

How to automate cold email outreach with Activepieces

This is a step-by-step introduction to ActivePieces, a free and open-source automation platform that lets you create AI agents with ease. We’ll use a lead generation workflow as the example, but the same setup works for outreach campaigns, social media posting, data processing, or any repetitive task you want fully automated.

🧰 Who is this for

• Sales professionals who want to automate cold email outreach

• Marketing teams aiming for personalized campaigns

• Founders and solopreneurs looking to save time

• Anyone combining AI research with humanized email outreach

STEP 1: Access Activepieces

Go to Activepieces and sign up for a free account. Once logged in, you’ll land on the Dashboard. On the left-hand sidebar, locate and click Flows. At the top right corner of the Flows page, you’ll see a button labeled Create Flow. Click it to start a new automation.

You’ll be prompted to choose between starting from scratch or using a template. For this tutorial, click Start from Scratch. Give your flow a name like AI Sales Agent for Cold Outreach and click Create. You will now see a blank canvas with a prompt in the middle that says “Select Trigger”.

STEP 2: Add Your Trigger

Click the Select Trigger button in the center of the canvas. A panel will slide in from the right-hand side showing all available triggers. For a cold email agent, scroll down and select Schedule under the “Highlighted” triggers. This allows you to run the flow on a weekly or daily schedule automatically.

Once you click Schedule, a configuration panel will appear. Set the frequency to Weekly, choose the day of the week you want the automation to run, and select the time.

After configuring the schedule, Test Trigger by clicking on Load Sample Data button at the bottom to make sure it activates correctly.

STEP 3: Add Action Steps

Below the trigger, click the + Add Action button. First, select Google Sheets → Get Next Row(s), connect your Google account, choose your spreadsheet and worksheet, map columns like Name, Email, and Company, and click Save.

Add a Loop next, dragging the Google Sheets output into it to process each lead individually. Inside the loop, add Perplexity AI → Research Prospect to gather lead info, then ChatGPT → Generate Text to draft personalized emails using dynamic fields.

Next, add Claude → Edit Text to humanize the email and optionally Claude → Generate Subject Line. Finally, add Gmail → Send Email, map the recipient, subject, and body, and click Save.

STEP 4: Test and Publish

Once all steps are set, click “Publish“ button at the top right. Your AI Sales Agent will now run automatically on your schedule.

ESSENTIAL BITES

• OpenAI is aggressively hiring from Apple’s hardware teams and partnering with iPhone manufacturers for its upcoming AI devices.

• Scale AI launched SWE-Bench Pro, a tougher, updated version of its software development benchmark for AI agents.

• Mistral AI rolled out Magistral Small & Medium 1.2, adding multimodal support, better tool use, and performance improvements.

• Silicon Valley is racing to build RL environments, letting AI agents train in simulated workspaces. Startups and big data firms see huge potential, but scaling remains a challenge.

⚙️ Hot AI Tools:

• ⚡Grok 4 Fast: xAI’s efficient reasoning model

• ✍️ Metaprompt: Boosts AI prompts easily

• 🎥 Ray 3: Luma AI’s new video model with studio-quality outputs

• 🧠Oboe: Instantly create AI-powered learning courses

That's it! See you tomorrow

- Dr. Alvaro Cintas