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Applied AI·July 23, 2026·1 min read

Wall Street’s deal toys are booming. AI is making them weirder.

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Even deal toys—pure signaling artifacts—are absorbing AI aesthetics, which is a small but telling sign of how quickly AI-generated design is normalizing in high-status contexts. For brand and design teams, the question shifts from “should we use AI?” to “where do we deliberately keep a human hand to stand out.”

Applied AI

A Google study using millions of de-identified AI interactions finds AI is helping workers, not replacing them, and much AI use is "shallow" for certain tasks

Usage telemetry from millions of interactions suggests most enterprise AI today is lightweight assistance, not deep workflow automation. That’s a green light to invest in higher-friction, embedded use cases — the shallow stuff is getting commoditized, but the real productivity delta is still mostly untapped.