Hi Sparklers!

Welcome to The Weekly Spark.

If AI feels like fifty tabs open and no time to read a single one, you are in the right place. The overwhelm is real, and it is solvable. Even the people building AI admit they cannot keep up, which might be the most reassuring thing you read all week. You are not behind. Nobody is ahead. The road is being laid while we walk on it.

Me, I got here by accident: a few sideways swerves landed me at the junction of technology, creativity and business, via years marketing AI products (honestly, and with the guardrails on) and a career in brand before that. Underneath it all, a lifelong itch about who gets the opportunity and who gets left holding the coats, and a deep belief in joy. And sequins. It turns out I am a geek. A late diagnosis, and a happy one.

The mission is simple. Get past the overwhelm. Grow. Get a hand on the wheel of what comes next. Get Switched ON.

Every week I listen, test and translate: the news that matters, taken apart honestly (takedowns included), what worked for me and what fell flat, your questions answered where I can. Plus a large flag for Gen X, because we did not survive dial-up, Teletext and the Millennium Bug to be told the next bit is not for us.

There will be free online sessions and real-life ones too, because some conversations need a room and a drink: time to switch ON, and, just as deliberately, OFF.

This first one lands on 1 September on purpose: new term, new chapter, possibly a new album. Though I have been in rehearsals for a year, and shorter sprints than my 30 day challenge are coming, because 30 days is a lifetime in AI.

Follow along, and tell me what you want more of. I read every reply.

Switch ON to AI News

The AI boom has a guest list.

Are you on it?

Paris Hilton is on TIME's AI 100, and not for being famous: she lobbied the DEFIANCE Act with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after more than 100,000 nonconsensual deepfakes of her were made. So I counted the rest of the list. 31 of the 100 are women. LinkedIn's study of 15,000 companies says the same at industry scale: women hold 13 percent of executive roles at AI companies, against 19 percent everywhere else.

My take: the number is basically 30 wherever you look, then falls off a cliff at the top: just 5 of TIME's 26 Leaders, where the chief executives sit and the money lives. It is not that women are not building this. Half the women on that list are builders. We thin out exactly where the pay and the decisions live, and these are the jobs handing out the next decade of money and decision-making power. An AI economy shaped without half the workforce is not just unfair. It is a worse economy.

I have written more on this: Mad Men, the AI reboot. Read the essay​

Gemini Notebook reads the books you own

Buy a book on Google Play and it drops straight into Gemini Notebook, which answers from inside it and turns it into something like a workbook. 100,000 titles at launch, from Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Bloomsbury and O'Reilly. You have to own the book, and so does anyone you share the notebook with.

My take: super smart. The author gets paid, and you get more from the book than underlining half of it and pretending you will remember, which is my entire system. Interrogate it, play with it, actually use what is in it. It also treats someone else's IP with more respect than this industry has managed so far, a bar currently lying on the floor. Publishers, this is your moment. Do not fumble it. Read it​

AI has moved into the apps you already open.

Claudeforce makes Claude the default model behind Slackbot. In the same week, Google put Gemini inside Google Chat, reading across Gmail, Drive and Calendar, with free limits raised until 1 October.

My take: this is the shift that actually changes your day. AI stops being a place you visit and starts living inside the tools you already open. Notion went from a five to a solid eight for me on its AI alone. Notice who Slack chose, too: Salesforce picked Anthropic over Microsoft, whose entire Teams pitch is Copilot. Either way, go and check what is switched on in your tools by default, and whether it can read your DMs. Worth two minutes of anyone's morning.

​Claudeforce · Gemini in Google Chat​

Still Dre​

Talking to the New York Times alongside Jimmy Iovine, Dre said he produces with AI and has no patience for people who will not. “I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating.” To one objector: “You sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.” Iovine reckons there are “a lot of closet AI producers out there”.

My take: great creativity is great creativity. The tools change, the talent does not. He says drum machine, I say washing machine, and neither made anyone less of an artist. What matters is who is saying it: two people with nothing left to prove, treating AI as a thing to play with rather than a thing to confess. If you are a creative quietly working with AI and hoping nobody asks, consider the shame officially lifted. Dre said so. Read it​

An AI helped take out a brain tumour

At the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, Rhys Hibbert, 48, from Bedfordshire, became the first person in the world to have a brain tumour removed while an AI read the live video feed, flagging nerves and blood vessels at the base of the brain. Not scans taken beforehand. The operation itself, as it happened. The surgeon was in full control throughout. Rhys kept his sight.

My take: the version I want more of. Not AI replacing the expert. AI handing the expert a better view, then getting out of the way. British, NHS, and a man in Bedfordshire who can still see. File this one away for the next person who tells you it is all slop and stolen art. Read it​

Spark Switched ON Spotlight

The detectors that cannot read you.

I have always been a talker more than a writer. My team used to say it outright: better if Nishma walks around and says it. Yes, I work with AI to turn a messy head of thoughts into something with a shape, and last week a detector decided something I wrote was machine made. Machine assisted, if we are being accurate. Anyone who knows my work can tell my voice from something I have tidied up with help.

My real issue is the policing. The detectors cannot tell care from cheating anyway: Stanford found the AI detectors wrongly flagged over 61 percent of essays by non-native English speakers as AI written, and the same wire trips dyslexic and neurodivergent writers. Build a tool to catch people writing wrong, and it will catch the wrong people.

It made me genuinely cross, so it got the full essay treatment:
​Do Androids Dream of Em Dashes. Read the full piece here​

Switch this ON this week

Everyone knows Wispr Flow for the dictation. The bit I actually live in is the scratchpad.

I talk, it lands there as the mess it really is: ideas, half-stories, things I do not want to lose. The part that changed everything is the plumbing.
I added Wispr Flow as a connector in Claude (and in ChatGPT), so my AI tools can read the scratchpad directly and pull those messy thoughts straight into my content planning. Nothing gets lost between my mouth and the plan. Getting started was always the thing that froze me. This took it away. Try it on the thing you have been avoiding since Thursday.

The Real Takeaway

Look at one week. AI moved into Slack and Google Chat, read a book you own, and helped save a man's sight in an operating theatre.

It is not coming. It is in.

And women are still not: 31 of TIME's hundred most influential people in AI, five of the 26 leaders. That is the list deciding what this thing is for and who it works for.

I am not going to scare you into a seat at the table. Curiosity is the better door, and midlife is not behind: this technology runs on context, judgement and lived experience, and we have decades of all three. The top of AI is still a man's, man's, man's world, and we all know how the rest of that song goes. Opting out is not neutral. The less we use it, the less it learns from people like us. Stay in. Stay curious. Play.

If this sparked something, forward it to one woman who should be in that room.

Come and find me

September is a busy one, and I would genuinely love to see you at any of these:

The F World by FFinc, Tuesday 8 September, The Bulgari Hotel
​FFinc is an amazing community of fierce, ambitious women, and this is their biggest event of the year: high tea with a twist, for women who want more. Join in​

Ideas Fest, 9 and 10 September, Champneys, Tring.
​It calls itself the Glastonbury for business, and as someone who has always wanted to do something at Glastonbury, that is pretty darn close. I am doing four sessions across the two days. See what and when​

Switched ON Session, Wednesday 23 September.
​Think sip and paint, except the canvas is my AI OS. Dinner, a glass of something, and the actual setup that runs my business opened up on the table, so you leave with the shape of your own. Seats are few and they go fast. Grab a seat​

Technology for Marketing, Thursday 24 September.
​This year’s Top 30 Marketing Influencers are being revealed (I had the great joy of winning last year), and I will be giving a talk on influence in the AI age. Come along​

AllBright’s Live Well Festival, Friday 25 September.
​A masterclass on confidence and self-advocacy with the brilliant Rosie Nixon, where I will be talking personal branding in the AI age. The code SpeakerL20 gets you 20 percent off. Grab a ticket​
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with love and sparkle,
Nish x

P.S. This should have landed yesterday. A bank holiday got in the way, so take this as the first and last time The Weekly Spark turns up on a Tuesday.

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