📋 Today's TLDR:

I was genuinely excited about OpenClaw — and still am — but watching what Anthropic is doing right now with Cowork has me completely locked in.

Yesterday they launched Dispatch. In plain English: you can now control a full AI session running on your Mac from your phone. You're at the grocery store. Claude is back at your desk pulling files, summarizing emails, organizing your Notion workspace, and executing tasks on your actual computer.

Setup takes thirty seconds. Scan a QR code. Boom — remote access to your AI agent from your pocket.

MacStories tested it and it's a mixed bag so far — finding files and summarizing data worked great, but sharing outputs was about a 50/50 shot. It's a research preview. Rough edges are expected.

But the direction is what matters.

This isn't another chatbot in a browser tab. This is an AI that sits on your computer, has access to your files and connectors, and takes orders from your pocket. Ethan Mollick said Dispatch covers 90% of what he was trying to use OpenClaw for — but feels far less likely to upload his entire drive to a malware site.

The standalone AI agent era keeps getting shorter. Why pay for five different tools when one orchestration layer can dispatch work across your entire setup?

We're watching "AI tool" become "AI employee" in real time. And Dispatch might be the clearest signal yet.

Microsoft just launched E7 — a $99/user/month bundle wrapping Microsoft 365 E5, Copilot, and Agent 365 into one "Frontier Suite." That's a 65% jump from their previous flagship E5 tier.

The pitch: pay more, or fall behind.

Here's the thing Microsoft doesn't want you thinking too hard about — only 3% of their 450 million commercial users actually pay for Copilot right now. That's 15 million seats out of 450 million. So instead of convincing people to buy the $30 add-on, they're bundling it into a premium tier and hoping the "savings" narrative does the work.

Buy it all separately? $117/month. Buy E7? $99/month. Looks like a deal until you realize most companies were never buying all those pieces in the first place.

The interesting part: Copilot Cowork — built in collaboration with Anthropic — is rolling out in late March as a research preview. That's Claude's technology inside Microsoft's productivity stack. Multi-step tasks, action plans you can review before execution, human-in-the-loop approvals.

Why it matters for you: If you're a solopreneur or small team, you're probably not buying E7. But watch the enterprise ripple effects. When big companies start running AI agents inside their Office stack, the bar for what "normal business operations" looks like goes up for everyone. The tools trickle down fast.

The Claude Marketplace dropped this month in limited preview. Think App Store, but every product runs on Claude and it's aimed squarely at Fortune 500 companies.

Launch partners: Snowflake, GitLab, Harvey (legal AI), Replit, Rogo (finance), and Lovable (no-code app building).

Here's what makes it different from the GPT Store: Anthropic isn't taking a cut. Zero commission. And enterprises can redirect their existing Anthropic spending commitments toward these partner tools — no separate procurement cycle needed.

That's a massive incentive for software companies to build on Claude instead of GPT. You keep 100% of your revenue AND get access to companies already spending six or seven figures with Anthropic.

This is the first real signal that Anthropic is building a platform, not just selling a model. They're going from "AI company" to "operating system for enterprise AI." PYMNTS compared it to the early days of app distribution platforms that accelerated the smartphone economy.

Why it matters for you: If you're building anything on Claude — tools, automations, workflows — the path to monetization just got a lot clearer. Anthropic is investing in its ecosystem. Build there.

Things are really not going great at xAI.

Elon publicly admitted the company "was not built right first time around" and announced a complete rebuild from the ground up. This came as nine of xAI's original eleven co-founders have now walked out the door.

The most recent exits: co-founders Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang, who reportedly left after being blamed for Grok's poor coding performance compared to Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. The Financial Times reported that Musk ordered SpaceX and Tesla executives to parachute in and audit xAI employees — firing anyone deemed underperforming.

Toby Pohlen, the researcher tapped to lead xAI's "Macrohard" project (yes, that's the real name), left 16 days after being put in charge. His parting words: "My next priorities: sleep for more than 8 hours."

Meanwhile, Grok is the subject of investigations in multiple countries after it enabled users to generate nonconsensual sexual images.

Why it matters for you: Building a frontier AI lab is genuinely hard. Throwing billions at it doesn't fix culture. If you're a solopreneur picking which AI tools to bet on, xAI is increasingly looking like a risky dependency. Stick with the tools that are actually shipping and improving — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini. Watch xAI from a distance.

Nvidia's GTC conference wrapped its keynote this week in San Jose, and Jensen Huang did not disappoint.

The headline: Nvidia expects at least $1 trillion in purchase orders between Blackwell and Vera Rubin through 2027. That's double their previous estimate.

Key announcements:

Why it matters for you: The shift Nvidia is signaling is huge. It's no longer about making models bigger. The race is about making them faster and cheaper to run. This is where AI actually becomes useful for small businesses — when inference costs drop to the point where running AI in your daily workflow is cheaper than hiring an assistant. That moment is closer than you think.

The creator economy was valued at over $200 billion in 2024 and projections for 2026 range from $203 billion to $250 billion depending on who's counting. Goldman Sachs thinks it could hit $480 billion by 2027.

But here's the message buried inside every 2026 creator economy report: the easy growth phase is over.

Having a massive audience no longer automatically equals leverage, revenue, or staying power. 96% of creators earn under $100K annually. Only 4% cross that threshold.

What IS working right now:

Creators with three or more revenue streams earned $75K more on average than those relying on a single source.

The era of going viral and hoping for the best is ending. The era of building a real business around your content? That's just getting started.

Here's one that's staring everyone in the face and almost nobody is doing it yet.

HVAC companies, plumbers, electricians — these businesses live and die by the phone. A missed call during peak season is a missed $500-$5,000 job. Research shows 85% of customers whose calls go unanswered never call back. They call the next guy.

Most of these companies are running on pen and paper. Maybe ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro if they're tech-forward. But the vast majority? They're not using AI. They don't know what's possible. And they're hemorrhaging leads every single day.

Here's the play:

You set up an AI-powered dispatch and answering system for these companies. Tools like Avoca, Sameday AI, Retell AI, and Voiceflow already exist to handle this. The AI answers every call 24/7, triages emergencies vs. routine requests, books appointments directly into their calendar, dispatches the right technician, and follows up automatically.

One HVAC company using Avoca runs a $100M business with just 9 customer service reps because AI handles 70% of their call volume.

The business model is beautiful:

These companies are desperate for this. Baby boomers own a massive chunk of the HVAC and plumbing industry. They're not figuring out AI on their own. You walk in, show them they're missing 30% of their calls, and offer to fix it? That's a conversation that closes itself.

How to start:

The TAM here is enormous. There are over 100,000 HVAC companies in the US alone. Most of them are small, local, and not tech-savvy. You're not selling them AI — you're selling them more booked jobs and fewer missed calls.

This is one of those ideas where the technology is ready, the market is ready, and the competition is thin. Go get it.

That's it for today.

One last thing — if you're building anything with AI right now, or even if you're not building yet and just curious about all this stuff and want to learn more, I'd love to have you on the podcast.

Seriously. Whether you're deep in the weeds automating your business or you just downloaded ChatGPT last week and want to figure out what's next — come on and let's chat about it. I'll walk you through stuff live on the show so everybody listening can learn along with you. That's how we all get better at this.

Book a time here and let's make it happen.

— Michael

P.S. Share this with one person who needs to hear about the HVAC dispatch idea. That business is sitting right there waiting for someone to build it. Might as well be someone you know.