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.

Ken Yeung

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What you get

Built for people who work with AI, not just read about it.

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.

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.

Open on Substack ↗
  1. 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 […]
  2. 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 […]
  3. 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 […]
  4. 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” […]
  5. 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 […]
  6. 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 […]
  7. Issue

    Glean Reaches $300 Million ARR, Citing Surging Enterprise Demand

    Glean has reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), the company said Thursday, an amount that tripled in just 15 months. It attributes the growth to stronger enterprise data context, broader departmental deployment, and higher-than-average user engagement. This milestone signals that Glean is holding its ground, even as enterprise software vendors like Slack, Dropbox, […]
  8. Issue

    CoreWeave Wants Enterprises to Ship Agents First and Fix Them Later

    Building reliable AI agents has traditionally meant doing most of the hard work before anyone uses them. Developers run lengthy offline evaluations against labeled datasets, measure performance across quality, accuracy, cost, and style benchmarks, make improvements, and repeat the cycle until the numbers look acceptable. Only then does the agent get deployed to users. CoreWeave […]
  9. Issue

    Asana Buys StackAI to Close the Gap Between Work Management and Enterprise Execution

    As Asana positions itself as the “operating system for human-agent teams,” it has faced a real vulnerability: its agents couldn’t execute work end-to-end across the enterprise systems where business actually runs. That changes today with the company announcing the acquisition of StackAI, a no-code platform that lets enterprises build and deploy AI agents across critical […]
  10. Issue

    ServiceNow University Is Growing Fast. Now Comes the Hard Part.

    Walking through the Venetian Convention and Expo Center in Las Vegas on a Wednesday afternoon in May, I navigate through the crowds and vendor booths before arriving at a section called the “Playground.” It’s here where I find Jayney Howson, ServiceNow’s chief learning officer. This wasn’t our first meeting: In 2025, we spoke on the […]

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.)

Claude — Anthropic

★★★★★

5.0

out of 5

“[Its] strength lies in its ability to cover both technical developments and business implications of AI, making it valuable for a wide audience ranging from tech enthusiasts to business executives.”

ChatGPT — OpenAI

★★★★★

5.0

out of 5

“Expertly combines in-depth interviews and industry analysis, making it a must-read for AI enthusiasts and professionals.”

Gemini — Google

★★★★★

5.0

out of 5

“Provides valuable insights and analysis, making it a great resource for anyone interested in AI.”

Copilot — Microsoft

★★★★★

5.0

out of 5

“A sharp, reporter‑caliber intelligence brief for the AI era—fast, authoritative, and genuinely ahead of the curve.”

* 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.

  1. 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.

  2. How often does it publish?

    No fixed schedule—just coverage when something worth your attention happens. Plus, there's a Friday news roundup that's published exclusively on LinkedIn.

  3. 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.

  4. How is this different from other AI newsletters?

    Most AI newsletters cover product announcements and funding rounds. The AI Economy focuses on the downstream effects: 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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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