It's easier than Googling

Hello and welcome to Look Up Tech, your field guide to navigating our increasingly digital world.

In an era where nearly everything we do is enabled by technology, the line between ‘tech’ and ‘not tech’ has almost disappeared so this isn’t (just) about gadgets or coding— it's about understanding the digital forces reshaping our work, play, and connections.

📊 Spotlight: The AI Gender Gap

Word on the street (and in the research) is that despite AI consumer tools only being around for a few years, there's already a gender gap in usage. I won't go into all the reasons this is bad, but let's all work to change this.

After all, this is not as hard as all the wellness things Instagram and Tik Tok get women to do like ‘walk an hour each day’, ‘no more carbs’, or ‘meditate each morning’. This is easy. In fact, one research participant said, "It's easier than googling." (And you can always use it to research wellness…)

Two easy ways to start using AI regularly:

• Replace searches with answers: Instead of having to ‘google’ a question, the click links to cobble together an answer we now have much better solutions. Google, playing catch up to Perplexity, now sometimes offers AI summaries on search queries, but IMO they’re still not very good. Try Perplexity for a more helpful experience that builds knowledge.
• Your new thinking partner: Use Claude (my recommendation for its interface and "character") to talk through work or home challenges. You'll be surprised by how useful this can be. Top tip: Use the mobile app so you can literally ‘talk’ to it, great to do while waiting to pick up kids.

Worried about privacy? Check out this Perplexity Q&A on what happens to your conversations.

🔍 What’s new this week

🍎 Apple Air updates

New Apple hardware launched this week to a muted response. As AI models debut weekly with seemingly magical abilities, a laptop that's "a bit lighter" lacks the same wow factor.

Apple Intelligence features have yet to deliver meaningful results, and they lag behind competitors. While their strong brand for quality prevents market "experimentation" like Google might attempt, declining iPhone sales suggest they'll need major AI investments or a strong partnership soon.

💆 Wellness Tech

Ever feel awkward during massages—eyes open or closed, talk or don't talk? Aescape might be your solution. This ‘World's Most Advanced Massage’ features robot arms, on-demand booking, AI memory and special ‘Aerwear’ that eliminates the need for a shower.

They just raised over $80USD and are Launching at Equinox health clubs soon. (Who’s going to tell the vibrating massage chairs their day may have come?)

💼 Future of Work - AI Agents incoming

Previously I mentioned that perhaps the big AI models and infrastructure won't be where value is captured (despite their mammoth valuations). The real value might lie in the user products built on top of them. It's no surprise then to see major players talking about AI agents recently:

• OpenAI's Premium Agents: Plans to launch specialized agents with premium pricing—reportedly $2,000/month for knowledge workers and $10,000/month for developer agents.
• Manus: China based companies continues to drop innovation, this time with a focus on autonomous agents which can be set on complex, end-to-end tasks like searching and booking flights. Currently in ‘invite only’ mode.

Microsoft vs. Salesforce: Both racing to dominate AI-enabled sales. ‘Agentforce’ is the Salesforce product, and this week Microsoft showed the two agents it is planning to launch (sans cool name).

Sales Agent qualifies leads and schedules meetings
Sales Chat provides insights from CRM data, emails, and meeting notes.

🏠 AI for Everyday

• Perplexity: Despite having budgets far less than the behemoths they are competing with, Perplexity keep shipping new features. They're now planning to launch an AI-enabled web browser to compete with Google Chrome. As a fan of this platform I’ll be looking forward to this launching.
• Alibaba's Open Source Model: Another big launch out of China, the retail giant’s model is similar to DeepSeek, delivering high performance with far less computing power required.
• Sesame: Aiming to ‘cross the uncanny valley of voice’ (love this) this team are trying to crack the natural speech problem with realistic pauses and intonations. Their voice demo is so conversational, I found myself politely saying "ok thanks for the call, bye" instead of just hitting "end call." You can give it a try with a few clicks.

That’s a wrap for this week. I'd love to hear what you're interested in learning more about in future issues. What tech challenges are you facing? What innovations have you excited? Drop me a reply and let me know. Now go chat with Claude and help close the AI usage gender gap!