Welcome to The Bridge AI Newsletter. I'm kicking this off because every week I find myself having the same conversations with business owners and friends who want to use AI but don't know where to start.

There's so much noise out there. New tools every day, breathless headlines, everyone telling you AI is going to change everything without telling you what to actually do about it. This newsletter is my attempt to cut through all of that. One thing I'm seeing work right now, a few stories worth your time, and nothing else. Just what's important and what you can actually act on.

This week: why Claude Cowork is the best AI product right now, and the feature inside it that everyone should be using.

I've used a lot of AI tools. Built businesses around them. Tested things I probably shouldn't have wasted time testing.

And right now, the best product in AI is Claude Cowork. And people are starting to notice.

Here's what makes it different. Most AI tools do one thing at a time. You ask a question, you get an answer. You paste it somewhere, clean it up, and move on. Cowork doesn't work like that. It thinks in steps. You give it a task, and it figures out what needs to happen first, second, third. It reads your files, writes new ones, runs code, checks its own work, and keeps going until the job is done. Not "here's a suggestion." Actual work, multiple steps, saved to actual files, ready to use.

It's the difference between asking someone a question and handing someone a project. Cowork takes the project.

But the real magic is something most people haven't discovered yet.

Skills.

Skills are instructions you give to Claude (not just Cowork) that teach it how to do a specific task your way. Think of it like training an employee. You explain the process once, and from that point on, Claude knows how to do it exactly how you want it done.

And the best part? There's a built-in Skill Creator that helps you build those skills through conversation. You don't need to code anything. You don't need to write a prompt engineering guide. You just describe what you want, and the Skill Creator walks you through building it, testing it, and refining it until it works.

Here's the simplest example I'd recommend starting with: build a "your voice" skill. Feed Claude a few emails or messages you've written, tell it what you like and don't like about how you communicate, and the Skill Creator turns that into a writing style guide that Claude follows every time. From that point on, whenever you ask Claude Cowork/Chat/Code to draft an email, write a rough draft, or put together a client message, it sounds like you. Not like AI. Like you.

That alone saves hours a week for most people.

And these can get way more complicated. We've built skills that reference Python files to generate PowerPoint decks in a company's exact style from raw data. But start simple. Start with your voice. You'll get it immediately.

If you're running a business and you haven't tried Skills + Cowork yet, I'd say it's the single best way to understand what AI can actually do for your day-to-day. Not in theory. In practice.

And if you want help building skills that are specific to your business, well. That's our sweet spot at Bridge AI.

Anthropic used Claude to interview over 80,000 users across 159 countries about what they want from AI, what scares them, and whether it's delivering. The biggest insight? People aren't split into optimists and pessimists. Most hold both feelings at once. They love the productivity gains but worry about dependency. 81% said AI has already taken a real step toward their vision for it. Worth reading if you want to understand how real people (not just tech Twitter) actually feel about all of this.

Anthropic just dropped computer use for Claude Cowork and Claude Code. Claude can now point, click, scroll, and navigate your actual screen to complete tasks. If there's no direct integration for what you need, Claude just uses the app like a human would. Pair it with Dispatch, their new feature that lets you assign Claude tasks from your phone, and you're handing off real work while you're on the train. It's worth noting what Anthropic is doing here. Step by step, they're building their own version of what the open-source community has been doing with tools like OpenClaw. Computer use, agentic workflows, persistent task management. Except Anthropic is baking it all directly into the product. No setup, no config files, no terminal. Just works. That's the pattern to watch.

The WSJ reported that OpenAI's head of applications told employees to stop getting "distracted by side quests." They're shelving experiments and building a desktop "super app" that combines ChatGPT, Codex, and their browser. My take: it's about time, but Anthropic is too far ahead. Last year OpenAI launched a video generator, a browser, hardware, and shopping features. It felt like a company trying to be everywhere instead of being great at one thing. Consolidating is the right move, but it's a catching-up move. And in this space, playing catch-up is expensive.

That's it for this week.

If you found this useful, forward it to someone who's still copy-pasting ChatGPT responses into Word docs. They need this more than you do.

And if you want to talk about what AI could actually do for your business, not in theory, but in your workflows, with your team, on your timeline, just reply to this email. That's what we're here for.