What Happened In The Room This Month. The May 2026 Fishing Report.

We Built a Marketing Campaign, a Financial Dashboard, and a Retirement Tool. All Live. All in the Room.

May was one of the busiest months we have had in a long time. Three very different audiences. Three very different industries. And in every single room, we did something that stopped people in their tracks.

At a Financial Technology conference, we sat down at lunch with someone we had just met in line. By the time the session started, we had built them a full twelve-month marketing campaign, live, in front of the audience. Not a template. Not a rough outline. A real, usable campaign with messaging, channels, timing, and copy. Then, to close the session, we built a brand new sample homepage for the conference itself, live on stage. The audience did not just applaud. They asked how fast they could get started.

For a manufacturing company on the East Coast, we pulled together a live financial dashboard of their annual results alongside a competitive scorecard, so their leadership team could see exactly how they stack up against their competitors. Numbers they had been waiting weeks to compile and visualize were on screen in minutes. The room went quiet in the best possible way.

For a Financial Institution, we built a Customer Dashboard that would allow civil employees to see what their retirement would look like based on their own data inputs. A tool their IT team had been discussing for months was prototyped, live, in under an hour. The reaction from the room said everything.

None of this was prepared in advance. No pre-loaded files. No staged demos. Everything was built from scratch, in the room, with the audience watching every step. That is the point. AI is not a writing assistant. It is a real-time business tool that builds things. Dashboards. Campaigns. Customer-facing products. Competitive intelligence. All of it, in the time it used to take to schedule the meeting to talk about doing it.

This is what we teach in every workshop. Not theory. Not slides about AI. Actual tools, used in real time, producing real outputs that people can walk out with the same day. If your team has not experienced this yet, that is the next conversation we should be having.

OpenAI and Anthropic Both Had Big Weeks. Here Is What You Actually Need to Know.

There has been a lot of news in the AI world this past month. Two platforms in particular made moves that are worth paying attention to, not because they are interesting from a technology standpoint, but because they change what your team can do right now.

On April 21, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Images 2.0, a completely rebuilt image generation model. The difference from previous versions is significant. Text inside images now renders cleanly and accurately, something that has been a persistent weakness of AI image tools for years. It also supports multilingual text in images, advanced visual reasoning, and a new thinking mode for complex creative requests. It is available to all ChatGPT users, with the more advanced thinking features on Plus, Pro, and Business plans.

Then on April 23, OpenAI released GPT-5.5, followed by GPT-5.5 Instant on May 5, which is now the default model for all ChatGPT users. It is faster, more accurate, and produces fewer hallucinations than previous versions. The personalization controls have also been improved, meaning the more you use it, the better it gets at understanding how you communicate and what you need.

Claude Opus 4.7 launched on April 16, bringing meaningful improvements in software engineering, instruction-following, and handling complex multi-step work. But the bigger story is not the model. It is the growth. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei revealed that Anthropic saw 80-fold growth in Q1 2026. They had planned for 10 times growth. They got 80 times. Revenue hit a $30 billion annual run rate, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. More than 1,000 enterprise customers are now spending over $1 million per year on Claude.

Claude now has the highest enterprise adoption spike of any AI platform in history. That is not a marketing claim. That is the CEO saying they could not keep up with demand. What does this mean for you? The organizations moving on AI right now are not small startups. They are large enterprises with serious budgets making serious commitments. If your team is still in the evaluation phase, the window to be an early mover is closing faster than most people realize.

For the First Time, Manus Cracked the Top Five. Here Is Why That Matters.

Those of you who have been in our workshops know that Manus has been one of our favorite platforms for a while. It is not a chatbot. It is an AI agent, which means it does not just answer questions. It plans, executes, and delivers finished work. There is a meaningful difference between those two things.

This month, something notable happened. When you ask ChatGPT to rank the top five AI platforms for general business purposes, Manus now appears on that list. That is a significant shift. For most of the past year, the top five conversation has been dominated by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity. Manus breaking into that conversation reflects how quickly its capabilities have expanded.

What can Manus do that most people do not realize? In 2026, Manus builds complete, functional websites from a text description, creates interactive financial and operational dashboards from raw data, generates music and audio content, produces wireframes and app prototypes, conducts deep multi-source research and delivers structured reports, and handles complex multi-step projects from start to finish.

Manus is not trying to be the best chatbot. It is trying to be the most capable AI agent for getting real work done. In 2026, those are very different goals, and Manus is winning the second one. If your team is using AI only for writing assistance and email drafts, you are using about 10 percent of what is available.

We use Manus regularly in our own work. The website you are reading this newsletter on was built with AI assistance. This newsletter was designed with AI assistance. The dashboards we built live in our workshops this month were built using AI tools including Manus. This is not theoretical. It is the workflow we use every day. If you have not explored Manus yet, start at manus.im and give it a real task from your business.

We Have Been Building Something. Today We Are Ready to Talk About It.

This one is a little different from our usual content. It is not about an AI tool someone else built. It is about something we built.

For the past several months, my co-founder Timothy Jones and I have been quietly developing a platform called SpeakFeed. And I am genuinely excited to finally share it with you.

Here is the problem it solves: speakers work hard to deliver great sessions. Attendees leave energized. And then almost nothing gets captured. No structured feedback. No leads. No data the speaker can use to improve, prove their value, or book the next event. The moment the room empties, most of that energy disappears. SpeakFeed changes that.

Here is how it works. Before your session, you generate a QR code and display it in the room. Attendees scan and answer a few quick prompts in seconds. You see everything in a clean, social-style dashboard: feedback, testimonials, leads, and stats. Then you use AI-powered follow-up tools to reach the right people and book the next event.

SpeakFeed is built for the room. Mobile first. No friction for attendees. No complicated setup for speakers. Just fast, clean feedback that turns into real business outcomes. The AI integration is woven throughout the platform in ways that actually matter. Follow-up messages are drafted by AI based on what attendees said, and you edit them before they go out. Analytics surface patterns across sessions so you can see what is landing and what is not. The platform is available in multiple languages, so it works in any room, anywhere in the world.

We are proud of what we have built, and we are excited to see it in more rooms. Try SpeakFeed free at SpeakFeed.com.