This week: AI has undergone so much transformation in a very short period of time. I used to get asked, "What are you favorite tools?" Now I get asked, "What can I really do with AI?" This week, I break down how real people are building super interesting automations to help their customers and their communities.

Hi Reader

Last week I told you I was selected as one of 12 finalists in the Make.com Community Challenge. This week, that got elevated as Make.com announced that I was one of the top five finalists. Woot!

The prize is 1.5 million AI credits over the course of a year (or about 120K per month.) For context, the automation I built (Ask A Farmer) used fewer than 1,000 credits. So I have my work cut out for me. But I'm determined to use them all!.

As I was reading through the projects submitted by the winner and the other finalists, I was blown away by all the great work every day people are doing with AI automation.

Although everyone's talking about automation right now, if feels like they are ONLY talking about automating content planning or they are talking about using AI for enterprise solutions designed to downsize humans,

But automation offers so much more than that. It is giving people access to deploy BIG ideas. To inspire you, this week's blog post includes a summary of some of the super cool things REAL people are automating, including a teenager in Maine who built Cully, an automation that helps landowners and road crews identify fish-unfriendly culverts

All of that to say, automation is not beyond your reach. You don't need the tech skills to get started. You just need one burning question. What is causing unnecessary friction in my business or my community?

If you want to talk about what automation looks like for your business, we should talk. Book a Vision Call (or a coffee date) and let's get acquainted.

Monica

PS: This month's FREE SCORE.org webinar is all about customer care. In the next session (June 23), we’ll talk about how to connect your AI with your other apps so your can turn it into your personal outreach assistant. [Register Here ->]

AI Automation - What Real People Are Building

A farmer in Spain kept up with new national regulations by filing invoices through a voice bot on his phone. A 13-year-old in Maine built a chatbot to protect fish habitats. A doctor at the VA now gets to make eye contact with his patient instead of spending all his time typing notes. Learn what real people (like you) are doing with AI automation

What I'm Reading

🔵 Anthropic Invests $150 Million to Launch 1,000 "Claude Corps" Fellowships — Anthropic is placing 1,000 early-career workers inside more than 400 nonprofits for a year, with each organization also receiving a $10,000 grant and free Claude platform credits. Fellows earn $85,000 plus benefits for twelve months of embedded AI coaching. [Forbes]

Personal take: Peace Corps for the AI era. If you work with young people (or at a non-profit), this is worth learning more about. But Anthropic is pre-IPO, and Claude is smart to add non-profits to its customer acquisition play. My question is what happens to those fellows in month 13, when the fellowship ends and the entry-level job market hasn't caught up.

🟢 Microsoft Cut Its Engineers Off from AI Because the Bill Got Too Big — Microsoft told engineers to stop using an AI coding tool because the bills got too big. The company is canceling Claude Code licenses across its Experiences and Devices group (Windows, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, Surface) and moving engineers to its more affordable in-house tool. Meanwhile, Uber burned through its entire $3.4 billion 2026 AI coding budget in four months, with per-engineer API costs reaching between $500 and $2,000 per month. [Yahoo Finance]

Personal take: The tools work well, people use them, and that's breaking the budget. AI is expensive which changes the "ROI savings" story everyone is using to justify adoption.

🔴 Perplexity AI Says 'You Can't Copyright Facts' in Defense Against CNN Copyright Suit — CNN sued Perplexity in federal court, accusing the AI company of scraping more than 17,000 CNN stories, photos, videos and other content and using it to train its products without consent. CNN had previously tried and failed to reach a licensing deal with Perplexity, meaning the company was on notice that it lacked permission. Perplexity's four-word response: "You can't copyright facts." [CNET]

Personal take: Facts are not copyrightable. But the expression of those facts absolutely is. CNN tried to negotiate. Perplexity refused. Then used CNN's journalism to train a product that competes with CNN. That's not a philosophical stance on copyright — that's just taking without paying.

My Upcoming Events

How to Create Better Customer Relations Using AI
​June 23, 2026 | noon | SCORE.org | Webinar; Free
Learn how to connect your everyday tools so you can put AI to work as your customer relations secret weapon. [Register Here ->]

AI-Ready Associations: Building Systems That Last​
July 10, 2026 | 10:00 a.m. | NMSAE | Webinar
Move beyond AI experiments and start building systems that support your mission, members, and long-term goals. [Register Here →]

Work with Me

💸 Work with Me — If you’re ready to dive in, upskill your team, or just figure out if this whole “AI thing," let's talk about how AI fits into your business strategy.

🎤 Hire Me to Speak or Train — My presentations are largely built around one theme: How to use AI to accelerate your Unfair Advantage. Each session is audience-specific, customizable, and built to give you and your employees strategic skills you can put to work immediately.

☕The Great Coffee Date — I'm exploring 50 of Albuquerque's finest coffee shops in 2026 — talking to real humans about AI, what's working, and what's not. Want to join me? Not in Albuquerque? Virtual coffee works too. No sales pitch. Just great conversation.

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