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Stay ahead with the most recent breakthroughs—here’s what’s new and making waves in AI-powered productivity:

Later Launches Creator AEO

Creator AEO is a new AI-focused marketing system designed to help brands appear more often inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT and other large language models. Instead of focusing only on Google SEO, Creator AEO helps businesses understand how creators, reviews, Reddit posts, and social conversations influence AI generated recommendations.

For small businesses and creators, this matters because AI-powered search is rapidly becoming a major discovery channel. A local business, creator, or ecommerce brand that appears frequently in AI generated answers could gain a major visibility advantage without relying entirely on traditional advertising. The platform includes AI visibility audits, creator campaign recommendations, and tools for measuring how often brands appear in AI answers.

Use.AI’s Unified AI Workspace

Use.AI’s unified AI workspace gives users access to multiple leading AI models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Llama — inside one centralized interface. Instead of switching tabs between different AI systems, users can manage projects, conversations, and workflows in a single environment.

This type of “AI operating system” approach is becoming increasingly popular among freelancers, startups, and small businesses that rely on several AI services every day. Use.AI aims to reduce friction and improve productivity by centralizing prompts, knowledge, collaboration, and workflow automation.

CodeSignal Expands AI-Native Authoring Tools

CodeSignal new “AI-native authoring” allows teams to generate interactive technical training content at scale. The system uses AI agents to help companies create hands-on exercises, assessments, and training materials significantly faster than traditional manual methods.

While CodeSignal has historically focused on technical hiring and engineering skills, the new launch broadens its appeal to startups and businesses building internal AI training programs. Small companies often struggle to keep onboarding and employee education materials current, and AI-assisted content creation will help to dramatically reduce that workload.

Zoovu Acquires XGEN AI for Ecommerce Discovery

Ecommerce AI company Zoovu announced the acquisition of XGEN AI this week in an effort to build a more advanced AI-native product discovery engine for online shopping. The combined platform focuses on helping consumers find products more naturally using conversational AI, recommendations, and intelligent search.

For consumers, this means online shopping experiences may become significantly more personalized and conversational. Rather than manually filtering hundreds of products, users can increasingly ask AI assistants for tailored recommendations based on goals, budgets, or preferences.

For small businesses running ecommerce stores, the technology could improve conversion rates and reduce abandoned shopping sessions by helping customers locate the right products faster.

Thunkable AI Brings No-Code App Creation to Everyday Users

Thunkable’s new AI-powered no-code app builder continues gaining momentum among creators, educators, entrepreneurs, and small businesses looking to build mobile apps without coding skills. The platform allows users to describe app ideas using natural language prompts while AI helps generate workflows, layouts, and application logic.

Thunkable AI stands out due to its focus on native mobile publishing for both iOS and Android. Many AI coding tools can generate prototypes, but Thunkable is targeting people who want to actually launch functioning mobile apps quickly.

Why Later’s New Creator AEO Tool Matters for Small Businesses

Artificial intelligence is quietly changing how consumers discover brands online. Increasingly, people are asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other AI assistants for recommendations instead of typing traditional Google searches. Later’s new Creator AEO platform was built specifically for this shift.

The platform focuses on helping businesses improve how they appear inside AI-generated answers. Instead of relying only on SEO for search engines, Creator AEO analyzes creator content, reviews, Reddit discussions, social media conversations, and editorial mentions that influence large language models. Businesses can then identify visibility gaps and launch creator campaigns designed to improve AI-generated brand mentions.

One of the biggest benefits for small businesses is that the system may help level the playing field against larger competitors. Traditional search engine optimization can require massive budgets, but AI-generated recommendations are often influenced by creator conversations and authentic community engagement. That creates opportunities for smaller brands that can build strong customer communities and creator partnerships.

Another useful aspect is measurement. Later says the platform can track metrics such as citation rates, mention rates, and “Share of Model” growth over time. As AI-generated discovery continues expanding, tools like this may become essential for businesses that want to remain visible as online search behavior changes.

When the Pope Has Opinions About AI

Every week in the world of AI, there are stories of new models and data center controversies, but there was a new kind of AI story this past week: the Pope wrote a long letter about AI. About forty-two thousand words long, actually. Published last Monday. Available on the Vatican’s website.

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical — a document called Magnifica Humanitas, “Magnificent Humanity” — is the most extensive papal treatment of AI to date (unless I’m missing a previous pope writing fan fiction about Skynet). He signed it on May 15. The Vatican released it on May 25.

The signing date is the one that matters. May 15 is exactly 135 years to the day after Pope Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum — the document that became the Catholic Church’s defining statement on industrial-era labor: workers’ rights, fair wages, the moral weight of what factories were doing to ordinary lives. The new Pope picked his name on purpose, picked his date on purpose, and then sat on the signed document for ten days before letting the Vatican put it out. The message is hard to miss. That moment, then; this moment, now.

I’m not Catholic. You may not be either. That’s fine — this isn’t a religion piece. It’s worth paying attention to anyway, because for most of the last three years the loudest voices defining what AI is for have been the people building it and the people regulating them. This is a different voice, with a different vocabulary, talking to a much larger audience. And the things he’s worried about are the same things a lot of us have been worried about — we just don’t always have the words.

What He Actually Said

The encyclical isn’t really a list of policy recommendations. It’s a way of looking at the question.

Strip away the theology and the historical references and the bits in Latin, and Leo is making three or four moves that any reader can follow.

First: technology is never neutral. Tools shape the people who use them. He puts it as a choice — humanity is currently picking between “constructing Babel and rebuilding Jerusalem.” One image is prideful, top-down, concentrated power. The other is human-scale and oriented toward community. You don’t have to grant the biblical frame to feel the contrast.

Second: AI is changing the structure of power. This is the line that I think will outlive the rest of the encyclical. The question, Leo writes in effect, isn’t really whether machines will become “intelligent.” It’s who governs the systems that are quietly taking over communication, work, memory, administration, creativity — even war. He keeps coming back to the same worry: power that used to be diffuse is getting concentrated in a small number of private institutions that are increasingly opaque to anyone outside them.

Third: he names specific harms. Job insecurity. Manipulation of information. Privacy. Autonomous weapons. He’s especially pointed on that last one — the more we reduce human control of the decision to use force, the harder it gets to justify any war at all. (“The ‘just war’ theory which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war is now outdated,” he writes — a striking sentence from any pope.)

Fourth: humans are not interchangeable processing units. This is the one a lot of secular commentators tripped over, and it’s the heart of the document. There’s a passage worth pulling out in full:

Humanity — in all its grandeur and woundedness — must never be replaced or surpassed. We can embrace the technological progress that alleviates suffering and unlocks new possibilities, provided that we do not abandon the very essence of our humanity, namely the capacity for relationship and love.

You can disagree with the metaphysics behind that sentence. But the practical implication is plain enough: if you start treating people as systems to be optimized, you eventually stop treating them as people at all. And he warns where that road goes:

If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy.

That is a hard sentence. It also lands.

The Reactions Say Almost as Much as the Document

What’s actually fascinating about Magnifica Humanitas isn’t just the encyclical itself — it’s what people projected onto it within twenty-four hours of its release.

The New York Times thought it was too mild and wanted more radical institutional prescriptions. Forbes read the same document as nearly apocalyptic. The Guardian read it as a humanist message the secular world should embrace. Le Monde read it through a continental lens about building a different kind of society. TechCrunch’s sharpest line was that “AI is the hook, the problems Leo focuses on are older and more pervasive.”

The tech industry response was muted. NBC reported that the biggest names — Altman, Musk, Zuckerberg — said nothing publicly. One notable exception: Anthropic’s co-founder Christopher Olah literally appeared alongside the Pope at the presentation and welcomed “moral voices” attempting to guide his industry. The investor David Sacks pushed back hard — who guards the guardians? — worrying that handing governments more AI oversight just shifts the concentration of power somewhere else. The AI researcher Pedro Domingos was blunter: “The Pope is infallible, and on AI he’s infallibly wrong.”

The varied takes weren’t really arguments about the encyclical. They were people grabbing whichever piece of it confirmed what they already feared most about AI — loss of jobs, loss of control, loss of community, loss of judgment, loss of the human face of things. That’s actually the most revealing part. The document gave a lot of different people permission to say out loud the thing they were already thinking.

Why This Matters Even If You’re Not Catholic

Most consumer conversation about AI happens at one of two volumes. Either it’s small — what’s the best tool for my emails, how do I prompt this thing, should I be using Claude or ChatGPT this week — or it’s huge and abstract — superintelligence, alignment, existential risk, what will the year 2040 look like.

There’s a missing middle. And the missing middle is exactly where most of us actually live: working a job, raising kids, scrolling at night, wondering if the tools we’re now using fifteen times a day are making us more capable or just more dependent, sharper or just faster, more present in our lives or more distracted from them.

That middle layer — what does this do to me, and to us — is the layer Leo is writing at. And he doesn’t need you to share his faith to make the point land. He’s saying:

— A tool that’s never neutral is shaping you whether you noticed or not.

— Convenience that’s offered to you for free is rearranging power somewhere you’re not looking.

— Faculties you don’t use, you lose — writing, remembering, deciding, creating.

— A world organized around what’s optimal for systems will, eventually, produce different kinds of people.

You don’t have to be religious to take any of that seriously. It’s the same set of intuitions you can hear from secular AI critics, doctors worried about screen time, parents watching their kids stare at phones, anyone who’s noticed they don’t write a real letter anymore. The encyclical’s contribution is that it pulled all of those private worries into one public document, gave them a vocabulary, and made it a global conversation for a week.

Whether or not the document will do anything is a different question. Rerum Novarum didn’t fix capitalism. It did, however, give the conversation about industrial labor a moral center that hadn’t existed before. People started asking “what are we doing to workers?” partly because someone with a microphone had finally framed it that way.

The same thing may be true here. The point of an encyclical like this isn’t to legislate. It’s to put a question into the air that’s harder to ignore once it’s there.

The Question He Wants You to Walk Around With

If I had to compress all forty-two thousand words into the question Leo is actually asking, I’d put it like this:

What kind of person do you want to be after twenty years of using these tools?

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Not whether AI is good or bad. Not whether your job is safe. Not whether the chatbot is sentient. Just — when you look up in 2046 at the version of yourself the daily use of these tools has slowly made, do you recognize that person? Do you like them? Did you stay sharp, or did you outsource the parts that made you you?

It’s a religious question only if you want it to be. It’s also a perfectly secular one. It’s the question a smart friend would ask you over dinner if you were honest enough to bring it up.

One More Thing

There’s an old line — usually attributed to a few different people — that the future arrives gradually and then all at once.

This encyclical is what gradually sounds like when it finally finds words. Forty-two thousand of them, in fact, in a document signed exactly 135 years to the day after the church last had to take a serious moral position on a technology that was rearranging everything.

You don’t have to read it. You probably won’t.

But it’s worth knowing, this week, that the conversation about what AI is doing to us is no longer happening only in San Francisco. That’s new. And whatever you think about the Pope, the question he just put on the table — what does this do to the kind of person you’re becoming? — is going to be a lot harder to put back in the drawer.

Most weeks, the AI news is about a model. This week, it was about us.

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Stay productive, stay curious—see you next week with more AI breakthroughs!