The Huddle: Issue 03

A biweekly look at what's changing in AI, ways to apply it today, resources you didn't know you had, and sharing wins and what's working.

The Race Has No Frontrunner, And That's The Point

Ask anyone who built workflows, agents, or daily operations on Claude how the last two weeks went. Max subscribers paying $100 or $200 a month watched five-hour session windows evaporate in 90 minutes. Prompt caching bugs drained token budgets overnight. Peak-hour throttling turned a premium plan into a "maybe try again after lunch" plan. Anthropic's own engineer acknowledged the changes publicly.

While there were technical bugs in play, there’s also a bigger story behind the compute crunch at Anthropic. The Pentagon standoff drove a wave of new signups (some reports say 4x user growth in a matter of weeks). The Super Bowl campaign put Claude in front of millions of people who'd never heard of it. Claude Code went from developer favorite to mainstream tool seemingly overnight. Stack all that demand on infrastructure that was sized for a smaller user base, and something had to give. No wonder OpenAI has been committing over $1T on infrastructure in the last year or so.

If your business ran on Claude during the last couple weeks (and some of our clients do!), the reasons didn't matter much – you just know it was painful.

Meanwhile, over at OpenAI, Fidji Simo (probably the second most powerful person at the company) held an all-hands meeting that was essentially a course correction. "We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests," she told staff. In short order, they shelved the adult mode feature, shut down the Sora video app (burning a billion-dollar Disney partnership in the process), cut the Atlas browser project, and declared an enterprise pivot to catch up where Anthropic had been quietly stealing their lunch money for months. The Sora app was costing roughly a million dollars a day to run and downloads had fallen 75% from their November peak. That's a lot of compute being spent on something that wasn't paying for itself while Anthropic was winning over the enterprise customers who generate recurring revenue.

So where does that leave operators like us? Paying very close attention. We are encouraging clients to stay flexible where possible. There are huge benefits to being “all in” with a single provider, but a backup plan may be just as valuable.

The model wars are one thing, but the infrastructure wars are something else entirely. Both matter when you're building systems for your business and need to understand the landscape. If you want to talk about what your company’s “backup” plan looks like, we’d love to have that conversation with you.

And if you're tracking what's next, keep your eyes open. Both labs have new models in the chamber (we’re talking weeks, not months).

5 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU COULD DO WITH CHATGPT AND CLAUDE

While everyone was watching the headlines, both platforms quietly became a lot more useful than most people realize. Ask any power user of AI how different the way they work is now compared to how they worked at Thanksgiving, they’ll gladly tell you. We want to graduate our readers from using AI as Google 2.0 and an email re-writer into a fundamental way to change the way you work.

1 - Connect them to your work tools

Both ChatGPT and Claude now plug directly into Google Drive, Slack, Notion, and dozens of other apps you already use (Outlook, Sharepoint, Granola, Gamma, Hubspot, Salesforce, Dropbox). You can ask "find the proposal we sent last week" and it searches your actual files, not the open internet. Claude has over 50 connectors in its directory. ChatGPT calls theirs "apps" and the list is growing fast. Your Team or Enterprise Admin has to enable these – but it’s worth pushing your team to consider opening up an entirely new way to work.

2. Run deep research across your own data

Both platforms can now run deep research that pulls from your connected work tools alongside the open web. A competitive analysis can cross-reference your internal strategy docs, your Slack threads, and published market data in a single pass. If you've been copying and pasting documents into chat windows, this replaces that entire workflow.

3. Use AI inside the apps you already live in

Claude now renders interactive tools from Canva, Figma, and Asana directly in the chat window. You're not switching tabs. The tool shows up inside the conversation, and you interact with it right there. ChatGPT connects to HubSpot with write actions, meaning it can create contacts and log activities from inside the conversation. Both work inside Slack, which for most teams is where work already happens. The pattern is the same: instead of leaving AI to go use your tools, the tools come to you.

4. They remember you

Both platforms now carry context across conversations. Your writing preferences, your role, projects you're working on, even your communication style. Claude can import your ChatGPT conversation history if you're switching (or using both, which is what I'd recommend right now). You can view and edit what they remember at any time. If you haven't looked at your memory settings, spend five minutes checking what's there. I've seen clients surprised by what Claude or ChatGPT picked up from casual conversations, and it's worth cleaning up.

5. They can build your files for you

Both Claude and ChatGPT can create finished, downloadable files directly from a conversation. Not copy-paste text you have to format yourself. Actual Word documents, Excel spreadsheets with working formulas, PowerPoint decks, and PDFs. I’ve watched a client describe a cash flow model in plain English and walk away with a working spreadsheet three minutes later. Claude calls these “skills” and they’ve gotten surprisingly good, especially for financial models, project trackers, and internal reports that used to eat an afternoon. ChatGPT does the same through its code interpreter. Neither one is going to replace your finance team’s quarterly close workbook (yet), but for the first draft of a budget template, a vendor comparison, or a slide deck you need by tomorrow morning, it’s worth trying before you open a blank file and start from scratch.

THE BUZZER

If the last few weeks taught us anything, it's that the tools are moving faster than most people's habits. The gap between what these platforms can do and what most teams use them for is still enormous. You don't need to master all five of those features this week. Pick one. Try it on a real task. See what happens. That's the whole playbook right now: one rep at a time.

Happy Q2. The best is ahead of us.

Thanks for huddling with us before the weekend,

Bryce Stuckenschneider

Founder, Trailblaze Labs

ABOUT TRAILBLAZE LABS

We started Trailblaze Labs because we saw a gap forming between what AI could do and what most businesses knew how to do with it. Turns out, that gap is where we live now. We help business leaders set real AI strategy, train their teams to use these tools with confidence, and build the workflows that actually move the needle. Trailblaze translates AI to the language of your business.

If something in this newsletter sparked a question, gave you an idea, or made you want to push back on something I said, I want to hear about it. Seriously. Reply to this email, connect with me on LinkedIn, or just say hi. I read everything and I love a good friendly argument about where this is all headed.

Let's keep building.