Google bought a dead airline's inbox

Google paid $10 million for a bankrupt airline’s emails. It wants to learn how work gets done. Spirit Airlines went to the wall. Google bought 600 million of its emails, documents and Teams messages at auction, so its agents can study how people actually work: the meetings, the back-and-forth, the stuff that never makes it into a process map. Neil Watkins and Kieron White have one question. If you want to teach an AI how to run a business, why start with one that failed? And haven't you got your own data to play with? That leads into the week’s other lesson in dependency. The White House ordered the frontier labs to shut the UK out of pre-release model testing, then reversed it 17 days later. OpenAI’s revenue went from $70 billion to $50 billion in the space of a week, and its IPO slipped to 2027. If your business now runs on someone else’s model, what’s your plan for the day it changes price, changes terms, or goes away? Kieron looks at the new personal agents, Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s equivalent, and explains why he’s not connecting one to his bank account any time soon. Then Walmart’s agent-to-agent contract negotiation, and what it means for a business like Leading AI’s own procurement work. Also this week: a government AI risk management toolkit that’s been out for a month and nobody has mentioned. Why Turnitin and the AI detectors may have had their day now Google’s SynthID is free. The senior manager who has a junior cutting and pasting emails into Word before they go into the AI. The customer who’s been with Leading AI three years and had no idea there was a bid-writing tool. And what rubbing a genie lamp has in common with writing a prompt. We're getting up super early tomorrow because Dr Jo Orlando joins us from Australia for a special guest episode on children, AI and staying safe.