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Open AI’s ChatGPT: How Consumers Use The Application
In July of 2025, 700M users were sending 18 billion messages each week. The speed of adoption is unprecedented. About 10% of our global...

Julie Ask
Oct 7, 20254 min read


Customer Experiences Must Incorporate Smartphone Capabilities
Google gave us an update of Gemini - their "universal AI assistant" during the Pixel 10 smartphone rollout on August 20, 2025 at a live...

Julie Ask
Sep 8, 20254 min read


Are Consumer Experiences Ready for Autonomous AI Agents? No.
In late August, Taco Bell recently announced that their rollout of AI voice assistants to take drive-thru orders had mixed results. It...

Julie Ask
Sep 7, 20252 min read


Use AI To Reduce Toil - Not Layoff Employees (AWS Summit 2025)
The AWS Summit in NYC balanced product announcements with customer stories and demos, showing both AI's potential and its current...

Julie Ask
Aug 6, 20256 min read
Math On White-Collar Job Elimination?
More articles this past week with headlines around CEOs talking about how AI will eliminate jobs. Latest article in the WSJ on July 3rd...

Julie Ask
Jul 8, 20252 min read


AI Customer Service Agents Fail Without Quality Data
In the absence of knowledge or insights based on high quality data, humans may not make the best decisions. I say "may" because they are...

Julie Ask
May 19, 20253 min read


Why Are We Obsessed With Virtual Assistants? (Figma's Config 2025)
I had the opportunity to listen to John Lewenstein of Anthropic give a talk at Figma’s Config event in early May 2025 in San Francisco....

Julie Ask
May 15, 20252 min read


GenAI Services Will Redefine Personalization
Augie Thumm took over his father’s bike shop (Thumm’s) in my home town of Warren, Ohio when I was just out of college. My parents bought...

Julie Ask
May 15, 20253 min read


Anthropomorphism of AI Agents: Yes? No?
There has been a lot of buzz this year surrounding AI Agents - how they code, will replace humans, how humans will manage teams of AI...

Julie Ask
May 14, 20252 min read


Should We Outsource Our Thinking To Machines?
I recently reviewed two pieces of academic research on the impact of use of GenAI tools on a human's critical thinking abilities. The...

Julie Ask
Apr 11, 20255 min read


A Perspective on CEO Andy Jassy’s (Amazon) 2024 Letter To Shareholders
Amazon (including AWS) is investing heavily (billions - hundreds) in generative AI. This is no secret given its public plans for chips,...

Julie Ask
Apr 11, 20254 min read


AI Funding Is Growing - And Bringing Entrepreneurs to San Francisco
The San Francisco Examiner published a summary of Pitchbook’s Q1 2025 Global VC First Look . A few key take away’s: 1) VC fundraising is...

Julie Ask
Apr 9, 20252 min read


Use Your Words: Teaching Prompt Engineering (Google's Whisk)
Whisk is a "new experimental tool that lets you use images as prompts to visualize your ideas and tell your story." Everyone knows the...

Julie Ask
Apr 4, 20252 min read


Nvidia Keynote 2025: Missing: Consumer Use Cases
Technologists leave consumers out of the agentic AI conversations - still.

Julie Ask
Mar 19, 20253 min read


Retain Human Element In Sports’ GenAI Use Cases
Background: I had the privilege to host a panel of female executives in sports management for a panel discussion at Oakland Roots and...

Julie Ask
Mar 19, 20252 min read


Apple Reinforces Measured Approach to GenAI In Consumer Services With 16E
Apple launched its smartphone portfolio's latest device (16E) on February 19, 2025. As an analyst, I’ve covered Apple for nearly 20...

Julie Ask
Feb 24, 20254 min read


Virtual Agents (and Assistants) Aren't Ready for Mass Consumer Use Cases
To be clear, the technology is impressive - its aspirations, capabilities, and more. Using it involves too much friction today for most...

Julie Ask
Feb 10, 20252 min read


Bring Humans Back Into Agentic AI Discussions
Too many genAI stories lack a human component. It feels a bit like Kevin Costner’s 1995 movie Field of Dreams. “Build it, and they will...

Julie Ask
Jan 25, 20253 min read


Context Will Make Conversational Interfaces Better Sources of Answers Than Search
Search is a big business. Google has grown its revenue from search ad revenue from $45B in 2014 to $175B in 2023. During the same time...

Julie Ask
Nov 11, 20243 min read


Robots: Are Consumers Ready for GenAI-Powered Agentive Machines?
Physical Intelligence raised $400M in “early stage funding” in November 2024. In doing so, they pulled the spotlight back towards...

Julie Ask
Nov 10, 20245 min read
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