Mon, October 19, 2026
3-minute read
3
DID YOU SEE
2
THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU CAN DO WITH AI
1
FUN FACT
👋 Good morning.
ChatGPT now builds the deck, not just the outline. OpenAI started rolling out Slides on Friday: hand it a chat, your files or an old deck for style, and your team edits the result together, then exports it to PowerPoint or Google Slides.
On Friday's poll, 50% of you keep coding-agent specs in Google Docs or Notion, and 50% don't write specs yet. Hand off the slides, keep the Q&A.
IN 3 MINUTES, GET 1% BETTER THAN EVERYONE YOU KNOW:
ChatGPT builds the deck. Your team fixes it.
Your AI queues the Mercury payment. You still sign.
ElevenLabs scores your video, sound effects included.
Claude in your voice, plus a free CapCut swap.
Your agents sit idle 80% of the time.
3 Did you see
ChatGPT Slides. Source: OpenAI.
OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT Slides, presentations built and edited inside ChatGPT Space, per its release notes (Oct 16). Start from a chat, files, an outline or an example deck that sets the style. Edit text, images, shapes and charts yourself, or ask ChatGPT to make the change. Teammates co-edit the same deck live and leave comments. Present from ChatGPT, or export to PowerPoint, PDF or Google Slides on the web. It's for eligible Pro, Business and Enterprise users with Space access.
Do this: Hand it last month's report plus your best old deck as the style sample, then edit the draft instead of building from a blank slide.
The blank slide just lost its job.
How does your next deck get made?
Mercury's MCP connector, the plug that lets AI tools act inside your Mercury account, gained write actions on Oct 15. ChatGPT and Claude (plus Cursor, Perplexity, Gemini Enterprise, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Grok Bot, Notion and Replit) can now request transfers between your Mercury accounts, pay recipients you've already added, and categorize transactions. Nothing moves until you approve it in the Mercury app, and each approval request expires after about 5 minutes. Categories and notes apply instantly. Connected before? Reconnect once to get the new actions.
Do this: Ask your AI to tag last month's uncategorized spend, then queue one vendor payment and approve it in the Mercury app.
Your AI can hold the checkbook now, just not the pen.
ElevenLabs launched Instant Soundtracks on Oct 15. Upload a video in ElevenCreative and it scores the clip with original music, then drops synced sound effects at the right timestamps, like a whoosh on the logo reveal. The effects sit on separate layers you can tweak, and it can use the clip's existing audio as a mood and tempo reference. It also works in ElevenMusic and the Studio API, which takes up to 10 videos, 200 MB or 10 minutes per request.
Do this: Run your next ad or Reel through it before paying for stock music.
Finally, a sound guy who never asks for a bigger cut.
2 Things you didn't know you can do with AI
1. ✍️ Teach Claude your voice once, then let it write your posts · Social Media Skills · free, open source · Claude, Codex
Social Media Skills by Charlie Hills is 17 free, open-source skills for Claude and Codex. Build a voice profile once, from a short interview and a few writing samples, and LinkedIn posts, research, Reel scripts and image prompts all write in it. The catch: you need a Claude or Codex plan to run them, and the Reel and image skills also want Apify and Gemini keys.
2. 🎬 Edit video for free, and let your agent drive the cut · Concat · free, open source · Mac, Windows, Linux, Android
Concat is a free, open-source CapCut replacement: auto-captions, text-to-speech, background removal, keyframes and 4K export, all on your own machine. No watermark, no account, no subscription, and it ships with an MCP server and an API so Claude or another agent can make the edit for you. The catch: it's in beta and the builds aren't code-signed yet, so expect a SmartScreen or Gatekeeper prompt on first open.
1 Fun fact
Anthropic's How employment is changing at Anthropic (Oct 16) says that by August, interactive agent hours outnumbered employee hours 6 to 1, yet around 80% of agent session time was spent waiting on a human. Reading all their Claude output would take non-technical staff over half the work week. Meta-work, meaning specs, standing instructions and agent reviews, rose from 10% to 22% of sessions, and written standing instructions grew from a few hundred to 8,500.
Do this: Write one standing-instructions file for your most repeated agent task, then batch your check-ins into two windows a day.
Turns out the bottleneck has a coffee mug.
LAST FRIDAY IN LABS
What members watched on Friday
Kushank took questions live in PracticalyAI Labs on Friday: the best tools for AI video generation, why he reaches for Claude Code instead of the chat window, and the most unusual way he's used AI himself. The clips are on the session post inside Labs. Subscribe to the daily first, then join Labs from any issue.
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That's your 1% for today.
Kushank, AI teammates, and the human team
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