Good morning {{first_name| Artificial intelligence lovers}}. CEOs like to predict that all companies will eventually become AI companies. It’s doubtful that any of them had a “sustainable sneaker brand pivot to AI computing.”
Allbirds, a $4 billion wool sneaker valued at its IPO peak, just closed a $50 million financing deal to become a GPU rental shop – sending the stock soaring 600%+ in a single day and taking the crown for wildest AI pivot of the year.
-
Allbirds is ditching sneakers for AI computing
-
Gemini arrives on your Mac with the native desktop application
-
Business auditing with Claude agents built into Notion
-
Snap cuts 1,000 jobs due to boosting AI productivity
-
4 new tools for AI, community workflows, and more
All birds
Image source: Louvart/Rundown
Rundown: All birds only Announce A $50 million financing deal to reinvent itself as “NewBird AI,” turning the battered shoe company into a GPU leasing company and taking the stock more than 600% on the pivot.
-
Allbirds initially sold its brand assets to American Exchange Group in March for $39 million, a decline from the company’s $4 billion IPO peak in 2021.
-
The AI calculation move sent $BIRD shares from $3 to more than $20, lifting a market cap that closed Tuesday at just $22 million.
-
The $50 million deal will fund GPU purchases to launch a GPU-as-a-service business, and lease out AI compute under long-term contracts, the company said.
-
Shareholders will also vote next month to strip Allbirds of its “public benefit” status, officially ending the company’s mission in sustainable footwear.
Why it matters: Many CEOs like to say that every company will eventually be an AI company, but that’s probably not what they had in mind about scrapping a parts business and retooling it as a GPU rental. Allbirds is making the same move that blockchain rebranding used to revive dying indices, this time with an algorithmic crunch that gives the playing field a lid.
Along with decoding
Rundown: Unwrap’s customer intelligence platform collects all your feedback (surveys, reviews, support tickets, social comments, etc.) into one view, then uses AI and natural language processing to surface actionable insights and deliver them directly to your inbox.
-
All customer reviews are automatically rated
-
Ask for feedback using Unwrap Assistant, or in your favorite tools via MCP
-
Real-time alerts of feedback as it appears, and clear visibility into customer sentiment
-
Trusted platform and extensively tested by DoorDash, Stripe, Clay, lululemon, WHOOP, and more
Rundown: Google only Rolled A new Mac app for its Gemini assistant, giving the AI a native desktop Chatbot experience, comes a year after competitors like ChatGPT and Claude made their moves.
-
The app runs via Option+Space and offers screen sharing, access to Drive files and photos, and creation of Nano Banana photos and Veo video.
-
Gemini lags behind in proxy capabilities, remaining a chat-first assistant, while Claude and ChatGPT can perform tasks directly on users’ devices.
-
Google describes this release as “just the beginning” of its desktop assistant, with more features to be announced in the coming months.
-
The company too Rolled The Windows app combines Gemini and Google Lens into a search bar, but only ships in English versus the global Mac version.
Why it matters: The desktop has become a battle for muscle memory, with native apps unleashing stickiness as a user’s daily driver. Gemini is showing up a year late, which follows a trend of losing to Claude/ChatGPT in terms of accessibility and ease of use, even more so than performance – but Google’s distribution can make up for things in no time.
Artificial intelligence training
Rundown: In this guide, you’ll learn how to take pre-built AI agents powered by Claude from Notion and use them to audit your workspace for efficiency. We found the audits to be comprehensive and well-coordinated, like the report you would get from a real consultant.
-
Give the agent access to the relevant pages and workspaces, and then press the Save button. Then open it and @mention the pages/databases you want to review
-
Just say: “Audit this page” and it will run, run the pre-configured audit and generate an issue report with severity and recommended fix for each item
-
If you give the agent edit permissions on the page/database they audit, you can tell them to make the recommended fixes themselves as well
Pro Tip: This flow works with other templates as well. Try Business Process Auditing to map and diagnose workflows, or Task Trigger to direct information dumps to your task database.
Submitted by the postman
Rundown: Postman’s cost savings analysis evaluates six engineering workflows to demonstrate how native AI development provides measurable ROI by eliminating manual API tasks and external tool friction.
In this report, you will explore:
-
Measurable ROI of real time and money saved per team
-
Why native, built-in AI outperforms external tools
-
These can be used by engineering leads before and after to measure impact
pop
Rundown: Just snap Announce It laid off 1,000 employees, representing 16% of its workforce, with CEO Evan Spiegel attributing the reduction to AI efficiency rather than shareholder pressure.
-
Snap is replacing traditional teams with small, AI-enhanced silos, with the technology writing 65% of new code and fielding more than a million inquiries a month across the company.
-
Spiegel said advances in AI “enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase speed, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers.”
-
The social media giant’s stock rose 7-9% on the news but remains down 30% since the start of the year, as the plan targets $500 million in annual cost savings by the end of 2026.
-
roadblock open A wave of AI layoffs in 2026 in February with 4,000 layoffs (40% of employees), and more than 70,000 technology jobs eliminated. erased across companies this year.
Why it matters: Wall Street rewards two AI moves above all else right now: wholesale pivots (Allbirds) and AI-driven layoffs. With tech sector sentiment at an all-time low and concern about job losses growing, the disconnect between what markets are cheering about and what workers fear is widening.
-
🌎 Lyra 2.0 – NVIDIA AI to transform text and camera paths into explorable 3D scenes
-
🎆 Ernie’s photo – Baidu’s new powerful text-to-image model
as soon as possible Nirmal Mukhi and special guest Kate Leggett analysis The latest research from Forrester on planning, hiring, and enacting the new roles that AI agents bring to the customer service workforce.*
Adobe For the first time Firefly AI Assistant, pushing it toward “agent creativity,” with chat that manages cross-app creative workflows across Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom, and Firefly.
Google Released Gemini 3.1 Flash Text-to-Speech, a new model with audio tags that can guide pitch, pace, and accent, is currently No. 2 on the TTS leaderboard for synthetic analysis.
GPT-5.4 Pro produced Evidence of a 60-year-old mathematical problem that mathematician Jared Lichtman says has found a path that humans have ignored for nearly a century.
Anthropic He is Switch Claude Enterprise Pricing to charge companies based on token consumption, a shift that could lead to a significant increase in energy users’ bills.
In each newsletter we show how the reader is using AI to work smarter, save time or make life easier.
Today’s workflow comes from the reader Kirsten R. In London, United Kingdom:
“I have a lot of clothes that I no longer need. Although I donated some of them, there were some higher-ticket items that I was looking to sell. But getting all the items listed on the used sales platform seemed too time-consuming and daunting.
So I built my own system, where all I need to do is take a few photos of each item, add some keywords, brand, size, and price, submit it via Airtable form right from my phone, and Cloud creates all the copy for every text field I need from title to description to make it a very compelling and optimized list.
Claude also helps me gauge prices based on the listings on the platform. Huge time saver, and I can finally make some money back on things I no longer need.”
How do you use artificial intelligence? Tell us here.
That’s all for today!
Before you go, we’d love to know what you thought of today’s newsletter to help us improve The Rundown experience for you.
Rowan, Joey, Zack, Shubham and Jennifer – the humans behind The Rundown
