🧠 Skills, tutors, and a talking plant

Copilot in Excel is Microsoft's AI assistant that lives inside your spreadsheet. The new piece is skills. You describe how a repeatable job should be done, like building a DCF, closing the books, or running a variance analysis, and save it as a simple markdown file (a SKILL.md) in your OneDrive. From then on, Copilot follows your exact steps instead of starting from scratch.

Microsoft also added financial data connectors, so live market data and company fundamentals from sources like FactSet, Morningstar, PitchBook and S&P Global flow straight into the sheet. A new "Plan with Copilot" mode shows you what it intends to change before it touches anything, and every edit it makes traces back to the exact cell.

For anyone who rebuilds the same model every month, this is the useful part: teach the process once, reuse it forever. The core features are live now, custom skills roll out to everyone next month, and partner-built skills arrive in Q3.

Study notebooks is a new space in the Gemini app that turns it into an adaptive learning tool. You upload your syllabus, notes or reading material, it runs a quick diagnostic quiz to find your weak spots, then builds short lessons with practice questions aimed right at those gaps.

A progress dashboard breaks your goal into more than 100 objectives and sorts them into strengths, focus areas, and not started yet, updating as you go. It also handles exam prep, starting with the SAT (using Princeton Review questions), with JEE, NEET, ACT and GRE coming this summer.

It's free, rolling out globally in every language, and works on the web today with mobile coming later this summer. Useful for students, and useful for you the next time you need to get up to speed on something fast. Upload the material and let it quiz you.

Most AI you use runs in someone else's cloud. Google's Gemma 4 is the open alternative you download and run yourself. The smaller versions run on a phone or a Raspberry Pi, and the mid-size 12B model runs on any laptop with 16GB of memory.

Everything stays on your device, it works offline, there's no per-use cost, and the license lets you use it commercially. For anyone handling sensitive data, or who just doesn't want to send everything to the cloud, that's a real option.

We also have a video on our YouTube channel walking through exactly how to install and run Gemma models on your phone or computer, step by step. Watch it here

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At its Config 2026 conference this week, Figma brought motion design directly onto the canvas. You now get a real animation timeline with keyframes and presets inside Figma Design, and you can ask its AI agent to generate a starting animation from a prompt. The motion lives in the same file as your components and exports to CSS, React, MP4 or GIF, so simple animations no longer mean a round trip through After Effects.

Pro tip: you can also generate motion and interactive prototypes straight from a prompt using Claude Design, and it works really well. We've got a walkthrough dropping soon on the Practicaly AI channel.

Playwright MCP is a free tool from Microsoft that lets an AI assistant actually control a real web browser. Point Claude, Copilot or Cursor at it, and the AI can navigate sites, click buttons, fill forms, pull data and test your own pages, all by reading the page structure rather than guessing from screenshots. Best for anyone who wants their AI to handle repetitive web tasks or check that a site works, without writing automation scripts. One command sets it up.

OpenAI just published a build guide that turns a houseplant into something you can actually hold a conversation with. Here's the short version:

Works with just a webcam and mic, though the sensors make it far more accurate.
Here's the build guide

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