Hi Sparklers!

Marissa Mayer, an early Googler and the former Yahoo boss, is building an AI assistant called Dazzle, pitched at busy mums. In last week's New York Times interview, her opening example was asking it for three bullet points to describe her own daughter for a school presentation.

I'm sorry, but that's not mental load. That's parenting. There's loads I'm happy to hand to AI. But finding the words for your own child, the messy, lovely bits of being a parent? That's just living. That's the stuff I don't want to go away. The rest, happily take it off me. (To be fair to her, she says she was testing an early version, not outsourcing her parenting.)

On the mental load itself, Marissa and I are on the same page. Women still carry most of it: the home, the children, the caring. I'd love AI to take a big chunk off us. But if AI for the home is mainly sold to mums, the load stays ours, just with better software. Where's the version marketed to dads? How will we ever get to equality if men aren't the target too?

And we want more from AI than a tidier home. I'm working with more and more female founders, some building businesses with AI at their heart from day one, others scaling fast. They're growing brilliant businesses while raising families, and they don't want to be held back by their own limits or their own time. I'll write a longer piece on this on Substack.

Which brings me to this week's news: who AI is really working for. Women's jobs and the Budget, bots pretending to be the public, a chatbot that called a melanoma safe, and the adverts heading into your Christmas shopping.

1. 9 to 5

Pew Research compared US job growth before the pandemic with growth since 2023. The more a job is exposed to AI, the more men's employment has grown, while women's has barely moved. The gap is biggest for people without a degree. In those jobs, think receptionists, secretaries and customer service, women's employment has actually shrunk as AI exposure rises. It's US data, and a pattern rather than proof, but look closer to home. Barclays is cutting around 5,000 jobs this year, about 5% of its staff, mostly in operations and support roles. Its boss calls AI “the icing on the cake” and says “it's not the cake”. But it's on the cake. The Dutch government plans to cut 25,000 civil service jobs over several years, partly by using more AI. And Microsoft has offered voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 staff, including in the UK. It hasn't said AI is replacing them, but it's spending billions on it.

Then came Wednesday's Budget. The good news: the British Business Bank will double its commitment to women-led businesses and funds to £200m, there's a new scale-up programme for female founders (a Women in Tech taskforce recommendation), and the Chancellor promised to act soon on fair pay for women. What I couldn't find: money set aside to help working adults learn AI. There's £100m for apprenticeships to match young people with local firms, but techUK, the tech industry body, says the Budget “offered little new on skills”.

Read Pew's research →

2. The Great Pretender

In 2023 the government asked the public what it thought about banning disposable vapes. It got 118,756 responses. New research in the journal Tobacco Control, by researchers at the University of Edinburgh, shows the Department of Health flagged 90,835 of them, 76%, as bots. Every one of the bot responses opposed restricting disposable vapes. They were thrown out, and once they were gone, about 77% of real people backed the restrictions. Nobody knows who sent them. And the ban on disposable vapes went ahead anyway, in June 2025. The bots lost.

Read the research →

3. Doctor! Doctor!

Dr Magnus Lynch, a consultant dermatologist at Guy's and King's College London, tested two leading chatbots, GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1, on 200 skin spots already confirmed by biopsy. He also tested a skin-only AI built on Google technology from 2015. That old specialist got the first diagnosis right 62% of the time. Both chatbots managed 42%, and each called three or four of the 30 melanomas safe. It's a small test, published on his own website rather than in a journal. The interesting twist: when he asked them as a worried patient, “should I see a doctor?”, both said yes almost every time.

Read Dr Lynch's results →

4. Money, Money, Money

Bank of America has emailed customers telling them not to give their username and password to any outside service, including AI tools that offer to act for them. If they do, they're responsible for what happens. It's an American bank, but it's a sensible rule here too. Meanwhile, the password manager 1Password has added a feature, at no extra cost on its Individual and Family plans, that lets an AI sign in for you without ever seeing your password. You approve it on your own device.

Read the full story →

5. Material Girl

Google is putting adverts inside AI Mode, its chat-style search, and plans to bring them to the UK before the end of the year. So possibly just in time for your Christmas shopping. They'll be labelled “Sponsored”.

Read Google's announcement →

Ask for the receipts.

The company Trakkr asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews 200 questions that needed a number, then followed 1,285 statistics back to where they came from. Only about 40% led to a study that said the same thing. The rest had changed along the way, hit a paywall or a deleted page, or led nowhere at all. One famous stat, that 94% of first impressions are about design, started life as a 2004 study of just 15 women looking at health websites. (Trakkr sells AI tools to brands and ran this once, with US settings, so it's a warning light, not a verdict.)

Then click the link and check the number is actually there. AI can invent a study as easily as a statistic. Use it before you repeat any number AI gives you. Try it this week on:

• Your work: a board paper, a pitch or a LinkedIn post. One zombie stat and your credibility goes with it.
• Health claims: that “studies show” in a WhatsApp forward about menopause or supplements.
• Money: any figure behind a big decision, from pension returns to energy savings.

And remember: three AIs agreeing isn't proof. They all learned from the same internet.

Binhui Shao is the founder of Easy Digital in Cambridge. On 12 October she won the Linklaters AI Impact Award at the Women of the Year Lunch for her Internet Hub, an AI-powered audio device that lets blind and partially sighted people, and older people, get online without needing their eyesight or tech skills. It learns how each person uses it, and she works with Talking Newspapers and British Wireless for the Blind.

She talks about AI helping people “become more capable and independent”.

In a week of AI for busy mums, here's a woman using it to let the people the internet left behind back in. Thank you, Binhui.

Read about Binhui →

THE REAL TAKEAWAY

Girls Just Want to Have Fun

Back to Dazzle for a second. AI can absolutely help carry the mental load. But I don't want “help with the housework” to be the only thing AI offers women. Watching the founders I work with speed up their businesses and shrink their mental load makes me so happy. I want that for all of us. And I want men handed the same tools for the home, so the load gets shared, not just automated.

That's why I keep running my free Switched ONline sessions. Tomorrow is all about making AI do the running around, so you don't have to. I'm on a mission to beat the overwhelm and help more women get Switched ON, so we can spend more time Switching OFF and doing what we love.

As I shake the sequins off from last night's disco, I can tell you this work fills my soul with joy. See you tomorrow.