How we have automated AI to summarise industry news, trends, and other updates – every single week

If you've ever opened your inbox, seen a wall of industry newsletters and thought,

hmm, I'll come back to those later, only to never come back to it, you are not alone.

Keeping up with industry news, research and trends is meant to make us better at our

jobs, but somewhere along the way, and certainly for me, it's turned into a source of guilt

and cognitive overload.

The issue isn't curiosity, it's that staying informed has become a job in and of itself,

and most of us don't have time for that.

So in this episode, Neo and I are going to talk about how to use AI as a proper research

assistant, not just to summarise things, but to filter, prioritise and surface what actually

matters to you, and to do it automatically, so that you can simply schedule regular

briefings to land in your inbox so you don't even have to press a button.

By the end, you're going to have a much more efficient and intentional way to stay informed

about the things that you need to know in your world of work.

Welcome to How AI AI.

With me, Dr. Amat Limba, and Neo, Applin, head of Inventium AI.

In each episode, we share one practical way to use AI better at work and in life.

No fluff, no tech jargon, just things you can use straight away.

So a problem that I have is that I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, some of them are industry

news around AI, some of them are psychology and academic newsletters where I'm trying

to stay on top of, you know, what are the latest findings in the world of behavioural

science and productivity and well-being in the areas that we work in at Inventium.

And it can be really time-consuming to go through my inbox every week and, you know,

look to me and I'm really bad at it.

I've just got a backlog of literally hundreds of newsletters that I'm like, ah, I need

to get on top of this.

So how can AI help with this problem?

Are you trying to stay on top of certain things, whether that be industry news or trends

or something else and not just let things pile up in the inbox?

I'm going to tell you about two, probably three awesome tips to be able to be, get AI to

be your research assistant.

And it's awesome for this.

Now the first thing I'm going to say is with all these and you probably get sick of these

data, give it context, give it background, tell it what you really need to know.

So if you were, say, doing yours and Matthew, you wouldn't say, tell me about the latest

in productivity.

It's not going to give you a great result.

You'd have to say what type of productivity you're caring about, what kind of resources

you want the AI to tell you about when you say new or the latest.

What is new or latest to you?

Was that last week, the last month, the last year?

That was kind of thing.

So we need to be really clear with AI what we want it to search for, where we're getting

it to search and then how we want it to give us that information.

So this is your research assistant, you're the boss.

So let's boss this research assistant around to get it to do the things you want.

So you could just run it just a standard prompt, didn't get it to search the internet.

But with this, I encourage you to be specific.

So here's just a really sample, a small one that I've done from my AI, which is scan the

frontier of AI for productivity across official product release notes, credible tech press,

expert commentary, practical workflows.

So that's a little bit of a quick snippet of what I want to learn about AI.

So I don't really care about, oh, there's model XRP, five, which is such and such.

No, I care about AI for productivity in this particular search.

I've said here across official product release notes.

So I care about something that open AI or something that Claude and my, and an Anthropic

could put out rather than, you know, Bob's AI company in, you know, in a basement somewhere.

Critical tech press rather than, you know, just people having their blog and practical

workflows and things like that.

So it's like, where do you want it to search?

How do you want it to search?

What do you trust?

What do you want it to trust?

So for example, if you're in HR, you might say, I want to know the latest legislations

changes.

And I'm in Victoria.

So therefore I want the Victorian government and I want these particular government departments.

I may want, in jurors, in case they're talking about things there.

So be really clear.

Maybe law firms, you go, yeah, I rate these five law firms, whatever they say, I really

want to know.

So tell AI where you want it to search.

Then tell it how you want to present this report.

So is it a short report?

Is it a long detail report?

What kind of points do you want it to make?

How do you want it to be structured?

So for me, I like to be able to show you some extra tips on this.

I like to be able to quickly parse it and get it to say, what's new, why does this matter

to me, why is this different, those kind of things?

Because there's so many text release stuff and most of it doesn't want to make a difference.

Right?

It's just like product release version 3.5, who cares?

Then also what you may want to say is how you want this news to be prioritized.

So you might say prioritize the one from the official sources, the government sources,

those kind of things and put in some industry commentary and things like that so I can

learn what's going on, those kind of things.

So you can do this and just run this manually.

So this is a prompt you can save in your prompt library and then run this whenever you

want that report.

A bit of a got you there.

If you're going to run this regularly just by yourself, when you hit the go button, then

I would put in the dates.

So for the last month, tell me these things for the last week or whenever it was you last

ran it.

Rather than just say, tell me the latest and of course it has no idea what latest actually

means.

So that's just an easy way to do it.

Easy simple prompt, be clear about what you want, run it when you like.

So that all sounds good, but I know for me, I want regular updates.

I don't want to have to manually go into my prompt library and just remember to do it

every week, for example.

So how do I solve that problem?

Yeah, it's really annoying to have to remember, oh, Jesus Friday, I've got to run this

damn reporting it.

So how do you get this to be scheduled?

Now with co-pilot and with chat GPT, there are schedule functions, which are really awesome.

I particularly like the chat GPT one better, but let me tell you about it.

So with chat GPT, what you'll do is, in fact, what you need to use the magic words of

schedule this.

So I want you to run this every Friday at 5 p.m. or something like that.

And you'll then tell AI to run that prompt every Friday at 5 p.m.

And what it does is it puts it within the schedule's function, which you go into settings,

and then you go to the scheduled function and it will then show up there.

So you can have multiple ones of these running.

So you might have a productivity one, you might have an industry thing, you might have whatever

you want, you can have multiple ones of these.

And you can then click on them and then tweak what you want.

So maybe you want to run it instead of every Friday, you want to run it every day at 5 p.m.

or something like that.

And so you can say whether it's daily, weekly, monthly, annually, you can get some custom

things and whatnot.

And you can, of course, turn the schedules on and off if you want.

So does that mean then in the prompt, I need to give it a specific time frame?

Like would I need to say in the last seven days or in the last 24 hours, for example?

Yep, absolutely.

Yeah, rather than saying from the 14th of April on that kind of stuff, yep.

So for the last seven days, time frame, and I want you to run this every Friday at 5 p.m.

And then how do I receive that information?

So for people that have never set up like a scheduled task, where is this information

going?

Do I have to go into a chat thread?

Is it going to land somewhere else?

Where do I find it?

Yeah, they tried it a little bit of a chat thread is the home for it, but they'll

also send you an email saying, hey, look, it's done.

Now sometimes the email will end up in your junk folder, so you'll have to dig for that.

But yeah, what it does is it runs that prompt in that chat thread again next Friday, if

that was the weekly one you wanted.

So yeah, you've got to go back into that chat thread to be able to see that latest inverted

commas report from it.

So yeah, it's there, it's accessible.

You can then turn it on or off and then be able to manage it that way if you want to.

So yeah, email notification as well as chat thread.

So that's how a chapic chat to BT does it.

Microsoft's a little bit different with their co-pilot, so at least within the co-pilot

for Office 365, what you can do is after you've given it a prompt, so as like review the

last seven days of AI news or whatever it is, it will then give you the report.

At the end of its report, you've got to click the three dot points, and then you go schedule

this, and then it'll give you a pop up, and then you can say when you want to schedule

it daily, weekly, monthly, all those kinds of things.

At the moment, there is a limitation, and by the time you're listening to this podcast,

it may have changed.

The limitation is you can only run a schedule 15 times.

So if you want it to run it daily, it runs at 15 days, and then it stops.

You can't say I want to run it weekly for the rest of my life, unfortunately.

So maybe you might need to send yourself a reminder in your calendar after that 15 to

then redo that, which is a little bit of a limitation at the moment, but that is how

Microsoft are running it at the moment.

Anything else that listeners should know?

Yeah, this is more of like an expert level of this.

I'll give you some tips on how I structure my, I've got a weekly AI, review, news, type

stuff in case something comes up that I didn't picked up in all of my other feeds that

I get.

So I've got pretty much what I've told you about before, which is AI productivity and

what are, what areas I care about with AI productivity.

So I've got in, you know, like features, include hyped items, only verifiable, and here are

the sources that I want you to search for.

So I've already said, you know, that the major industry players and things like that, but

I've actually been really specific about which of the players I care about.

I've also said major productivity partners that affect are affected by these releases as

well.

So if notion to an AI update, I will need to know that.

So I've put that in there as well.

So when you're putting in your, here are my sources, he's what I care about, put it as

wide as you need to be, but also quite pretty specific in there.

You can also get as, due to search social sources.

So X slash Twitter, you can get it to search certain people's feeds there, newsletters, blogs,

if you've got it like a resource or links, you can put them in as well.

So be really specific about where you want it to search, it doesn't have to be industry

kind of sources.

You can go a little wider than that.

And then from there, I categorize it into a couple of different sections.

So first off, I've got a categorized drop, which is what's the feature or what's the

change, how big of an impact AI thinks it is, whether it's a broad or a niche kind of

reach, where it's available, because some of these features are only available in America

and they'll come to Australia later on.

What's the news, how to try it, if there's any caveats, like if there's people talking

about risks or privacy and things like that.

After that, I get a section on quick hits, so effectively, you know, other, other quick

news, a watch list of things that are coming up that haven't been released.

I put in there as well as a hype watch.

So things like this last week, Claude Botnebott has been massive.

And so that probably would have ended up in the hype watch, which is, you know, things

that maybe don't change people's lives, but oh my god, everyone's talking about it.

So I'll put that in there.

So you can put in the sections that you want for the report you want to read.

So don't just say, just give me a report.

Tell it exactly what you want to get and you'll get those things.

Major tip is get it to give you links for these things so that you can go, that's interesting

and go straight to that source.

So you can verify the source.

You can understand more about those things.

So ultimately, all these things are up to you.

There's like extra little bonus tips if you want to get one of these scheduled reports

out every day.

Now these are the schedule reports.

Of course, you can go deep into reports with doing deep research.

If you want to, that's a separate function and probably a separate podcast, but that

is another way that you can get some information from these AI tools.

So hopefully you have listened to this and I would encourage you to set up your first

scheduled search for whatever matters to you.

I have done this for numerous topics that relate to the work that I do and that we do at

Inventium and Inventium AI.

It's super, super cool and it means that you don't have to be carrying onto that cognitive

load or feeling a little bit guilty that you have a lot of unread newsletters sitting

in your inbox.

And if you have a listener question, something that you would like Neo and I to tackle, please

drop us a note.

We love hearing from listeners.

There is an email address in the show notes.

We will see you next Monday.

If you found this useful, please help us spread the AI love and share it with someone

who you think would benefit from knowing what you now know.

And if you're ready to really start mastering AI, check out Inventium.ai.

We help individuals, teams and organizations turn Gen AI into a real work superpower,

saving 10 plus hours a week and staying future ready without the jargon or overwhelm.

Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next time on How AI.

How AI was hosted by me, Amanda Ember and Neo Applen.

A big thank you to Martin Ember who does our sound editing and Gem Rubio for production

support.

And thank you to John Kilby who composed the theme music.