Reported, not aggregated
Enterprise AI coverage from a journalist who covered the space before “generative AI” was a mainstream phrase. Sourced, contextual, with a point of view.
A newsletter by Ken Yeung
The AI
Economy
A sharp, curated look at the stories that reveal how AI is rewriting business, work, technology, and culture.
What you get
Built for people who work with AI, not just read about it.
Platform strategy focus
Beyond the product announcements. Analysis of how AI is restructuring enterprise workflows, editorial operations, and the economics of content at scale.
Written for practitioners
Not for the hype-chasers. For the people who have to act on it.
Archive
Every issue.
All issues published to date. New issues arrive every week.
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Issue
Agent Plugins Explained: What the New AI Standard Actually Does
You may think of the agentic world as the Wild West, but over the past two years, technologists have been developing rules of the road. Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol settled how agents access external tools. Google’s Agent2Agent and Cisco-backed AGNTCY took on the question of how agents reach each other. Now, there’s Agent Plugins, a […]
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Issue
Adobe’s AI Collaborators Turn Outside AI Agents Into Governed Workfront Teammates
At the Adobe Summit last April, the company announced the Workflow Optimization Agent designed to automate “intelligent, connected actions” across workflows. Four months later, the agent—since rebranded as AI Collaborator—is now generally available. Through Adobe Workfront, the company’s work management application, users can delegate work to these virtual teammates similarly to how they might with […]
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Issue
Why AWS Built Dogwood, an Open-Source Policy Language That Limits What AI Agents Can Do Over Time
You’ve tasked your AI agent to process vendor payments on your behalf. An invoice arrives one day, and the agent autonomously handles the transaction. It runs like clockwork—until the morning you find your bank account overdrawn. Digging in, you discover payments to vendors who never submitted an invoice and, in a few cases, never delivered […]
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Issue
Adobe Widens Its ChatGPT Presence With Plugin Built for Creative Workflows
When Adobe began abandoning shrink-wrapped software for the cloud in 2011, it dragged the entire industry toward subscriptions. Now the company is attempting its next migration, this time into territory it doesn’t control: chatbots. On Thursday, Adobe launched a plugin for ChatGPT that brings more than 70 of its tools natively into an assistant used […]
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Issue
Zscaler Takes Zero Trust Beyond Human Users to Govern the Rise of AI Agents
As new AI agents accelerate their entry into the workplace, cybersecurity platform Zscaler is extending its Zero Trust Exchange to govern how these autonomous systems connect, access data, and operate across enterprise networks. On Tuesday, the company unveiled three new capabilities—AI Broker, AI Access Graph, and Endpoint AI Security—that together constitute what Zscaler calls the […]
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Issue
OpenClaw Won. Big Tech Is Now Playing Its Game.
The definition of an AI agent has evolved rapidly since the term first entered the zeitgeist. The earliest versions were chatbots with better manners: systems that answered questions, drafted text, and waited for the next prompt. Tool use and function calling took them a step further, allowing models to query databases or call APIs, but […]
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Issue
Web IQ Is Microsoft Rebuilding Search Around the Machines
Search engines learned what a good result looked like by observing how people behaved. A click followed by a long page stay signaled satisfaction, while a quick bounce back to the search results signaled a miss. Microsoft built its Bing search engine on those patterns. But in the AI era, there’s a type of user […]
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Issue
Asana Launches Agentic Work Management Platform, Pitching Itself as the ‘Easy Button’ for AI-Driven Enterprises
Asana has spent over 18 years telling companies how to manage work. Now, it wants to tell them how to manage AI. On Thursday, the company unveiled its Agentic Work Management Platform, a system designed to align humans and agents around the same plan, context, and governance. Asana calls it the “most significant product evolution” […]
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Issue
Microsoft Debuts MAI-Thinking-1, Its First In-House Reasoning Model
For most of the generative AI era, Microsoft has been the most prominent buyer of someone else’s intelligence. Its Copilot stack runs on OpenAI’s GPT models. Azure customers reach for frontier reasoning through the partnership. The arrangement has worked, and it has also been a structural dependency that the company has spent the last year […]
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Issue
Don’t Believe the Hype: AI Capabilities May Not Create Real-World Value
Kevin Scott always has something to say on the eve of Microsoft Build. The company’s chief technology officer shares his read on where technology is headed, typically in step with whatever the company is about to announce. This year, I joined executives, developers, and my fellow journalists in a downtown San Francisco bar as Scott […]
Peer review
What the AIs say.*
We asked the leading AI tools to weigh in on The AI Economy. Their ratings speak for themselves. (Results may vary depending on training data and general disposition toward newsletters.)
* Disclaimer: My newsletter has not been actually endorsed by OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic. I solicited reviews from their respective gen AI services. Sounded cool though, huh?
Questions
Common questions.
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What is The AI Economy?
A newsletter covering consumer and enterprise AI, platform strategy, and the companies reshaping how work gets done. Reported, not aggregated — written by a technology journalist who has covered the space since before generative AI was a mainstream phrase.
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How often does it publish?
Enough to keep you ahead, never enough to clutter your inbox. You'll also get first-look coverage and original interviews whenever the story is worth your time—which, lately, is often. Nothing filler-grade goes out under this masthead. A weekly roundup is delivered Fridays on LinkedIn.
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Is it free?
Yes. Every issue is free. Subscribe on Substack and it arrives in your inbox. No paywall, no premium tier. If that changes, subscribers will be notified well in advance.
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How is this different from other AI newsletters?
The AI Economy explores the people building AI and the reasons behind what they build. I'm interested in how enterprise teams are actually deploying AI, where the editorial and operational models are breaking down, and what platform-level shifts mean for practitioners making decisions this quarter. It is written for people doing the work, not watching it from the outside. My goal is to not focus just on what's being announced, but why it exists and why we should care. The stories are what you'd expect to read on Inc. and First Round Review or see on "60 Minutes."
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Can we pitch you stories?
Yes, I do accept embargoed news and exclusives. Please reach out with your announcements, launches, and story ideas—email me or use this form. I also accept tips securely via Signal at @kenyeung.888.
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Where can I read past issues?
The full archive is listed above on this page. All issues are also available on Substack. The plan is to host the canonical archive here on thelettertwo.com as the publication grows — independent of any platform.
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Can I republish or cite content from the newsletter?
Yes, with attribution. Short excerpts with a link back to the original issue are fine. For longer republication or syndication, reach out via LinkedIn.
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