Two videos stood out in my feed yesterday.
“Blunt Advice About AI”
The first is a six-minute video from Jim VandeHei, CEO of Axios. He wrote a letter to his family—his wife, his kids—pleading with them to start using AI immediately. Not suggesting. Pleading.
VandeHei’s argument is stark: entire categories of jobs will be unrecognizable within a year or two. Research, legal clerks, entry-level marketing, computer programming. He’s not speculating from the outside—he’s talked directly with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. He’s seen what they’re building. And he says employers across America are thinking about this but not saying it out loud.
What makes the video compelling isn’t the doom. It’s the pivot to personal agency. VandeHei describes building an interactive app in 90 minutes—something that would have required a team and months of work before. His AI-skeptic daughter used Claude to build a detailed podcast launch plan in 24 hours. His message to her, and to his family: AI isn’t a replacement for creativity. It’s a force multiplier for everything you’re already good at.
The video ends with an acknowledgment that AI could also consolidate wealth, spread misinformation, and enable bad actors at scale. But his answer to that isn’t to disengage—it’s to engage harder. Understand the tools. Shape how they’re used.
“I Built an 11-Tab Financial Model in 10 Minutes”
The second video is from a tech analyst demonstrating Claude’s new Excel integration. He built a comprehensive rent-versus-buy financial model—eleven tabs, sensitivity analysis, opportunity cost comparisons against S&P 500 returns, tax implications—in the time it takes to make coffee.
But the spreadsheet isn’t the point. The point is what Anthropic is doing strategically.
The analyst argues that the foundation model race—who can train the biggest, most capable model—is hitting diminishing returns. The new competition is workflow integration. Anthropic has embedded Claude directly into Excel as a sidebar add-in with full structural awareness of your workbook. It knows every tab, every formula, every cell reference. And through data partnerships with providers like Moody’s, S&P Capital IQ, and the London Stock Exchange, Claude can pull live institutional data that generic models can’t access.
The result is something that feels less like a chatbot and more like infrastructure. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund reportedly saved 213,000 hours using it.
The video also highlights the strange coopetition between Microsoft and Anthropic: Microsoft hosts Claude on Azure, offers it as an alternative to OpenAI in Copilot, and simultaneously competes against it with their own Excel AI. Meanwhile, Claude’s Excel add-in works with local files—a deliberate product decision that exploits Microsoft’s own cloud-first strategy.
The Common Thread
Both videos landed the same point for me: the window for treating AI as optional is closing.
VandeHei is speaking to individuals and families. The Excel video is speaking to enterprises and finance teams. But the message is identical. The tools are here. They work. The people who learn to use them as force multipliers will pull ahead of those who don’t.
I’m already on board.