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

    Canva Unveils Brush, an AI Model Built to Edit Designs at Lower Cost

    Canva spent the past week showing off an AI model that creates images, and now it’s turning to the harder task of reworking them. On Thursday, the company introduced Brush, an in-house vision-language model built to edit designs. Because Brush reads both what’s in a design and how it’s arranged, Canva AI users can make […]
  2. Issue

    GitHub Bets AI Can Bring More People Into Coding While Pushing Pros Further

    Somewhere in prehistory, someone figured out how to make fire, showed others, and watched the knowledge spread until anyone could summon a flame. Mario Rodriguez, GitHub’s chief product officer, considers it probably the first open source project on Earth, and he sees that same instinct to share and remix at the heart of everything his […]
  3. Issue

    Oracle Embeds OpenAI Into Its Business Software in What It Calls an Enterprise ‘Coming-Out Party’

    Oracle has become one of OpenAI’s most important infrastructure partners. The AI company trained its GPT-6 Astra model at Oracle’s Abilene, Texas, data center site, the flagship campus of Stargate, the $500 billion data center venture OpenAI formed with Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX. Karan Batta, who runs product for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), described the […]
  4. Issue

    SAP Expands Tabular AI Lineup With RPT-2 and New Forecasting and Decision Models

    For nearly a year, SAP has relied on a single general-purpose AI model to make predictions from business data rows and columns. At its annual TechEd conference this week, the company expanded that lineup with SAP-RPT-2, a next-generation model, and two specialized models for forecasting and decision-making. First introduced in November 2025, SAP’s Relational Pre-Trained […]
  5. Issue

    With Craft, Canva Turns Its Design Templates Into an AI Advantage Over Adobe

    For the past year, Canva has worked to become what it calls a creative operating system: a single platform where AI, design, and productivity come together. To make that idea a reality, the company has been developing its own models to handle everything from style transfer to video generation faster and more cheaply than frontier […]
  6. Issue

    Amazon’s SageMaker Gives Developers More Control Over How They Train AI Models

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) now lets machine learning engineers, applied researchers, and data scientists write the training code for their AI models while the company supplies the computing power. On Thursday, AWS made a feature called training sessions generally available in Amazon SageMaker, expanding a service that lets customers fine-tune open-weight models without managing hardware. […]
  7. Issue

    Ai2 Releases OlmoEarth v1.3 With Free Satellite Embeddings for the Entire Planet

    For two years, gold miners moved through the rainforest along the edge of Peru’s Tambopata National Reserve, clearing more than 1,200 hectares around a settlement called La Pampa, according to Amazon Conservation’s MAAP monitoring program. In February 2019, the country’s government launched a crackdown to shut down the mining operations. Since then, conservationists have asked […]
  8. Issue

    GM Turns OnStar Into an AI Assistant Drivers Can Talk to Every Day

    Thirty years ago at the Chicago Auto Show, General Motors introduced OnStar, an optional in-vehicle service that paired a built-in cell phone and GPS satellite technology with round-the-clock access to a live advisor. GM sold it as peace of mind on the road, a way for drivers and their families to get help after a […]
  9. Issue

    Slack Frontline Gives Shift Workers a Simpler Slack, With AI Agents to Follow

    Roughly 80 percent of the world’s workers don’t sit at a desk. They stock shelves, ship orders, and care for patients in their homes, and they’re often the only people a customer ever meets from a company. Yet much of the conversation about workplace collaboration and artificial intelligence has centered on the other 20 percent, […]
  10. Issue

    Live Blog: Microsoft Unveils the Surface Laptop Ultra and RTX Spark

    When Satya Nadella takes the stage in San Francisco on Wednesday, he’s expected to show off the Surface Laptop Ultra, the latest step in Microsoft’s push to bring AI directly into the PCs it sells. He’ll be joined by Pavan Davuluri, executive vice president overseeing Windows and devices, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose RTX […]

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?

    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.

  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?

    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."

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

The AI Economy

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