ChatGPT wants to see your bank statements (in the best way possible), Claude just became every small business owner's dream assistant, OpenAI's Codex goes mobile, and both OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to put their AI engineers inside your company, all in this week's edition.

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Hi! Welcome to the 49th edition of the TomorrowToday newsletter.

We’re here to decode the AI chaos so you don't have to. Think of us as your friendly neighbourhood tech translators - we cut through the chaos, translate the jargon, and spotlight new AI tools that matter for founders, builders, and curious minds.

Buckle up, because the future's moving fast and we're here to make sure you don't get left behind! ⚡

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/Finance /ChatGPT /Banking

OpenAI has quietly dropped one of its most practically useful features yet: a personal finance experience, currently in preview for Pro users in the US. You can now securely connect your financial accounts directly to ChatGPT - and suddenly you have something that feels less like a chatbot and more like a genuinely smart financial coach who actually knows what's going on in your wallet.

Think about what that means in practice. Instead of staring blankly at your bank app wondering where your salary went (again), you can simply ask: "Where am I spending the most money this month?" or "Am I on track to hit my savings goal?" ChatGPT now has full context of your financial picture and can give you answers tailored to your situation - not the kind of generic advice you'd find on a 2009 personal finance blog.

It's currently US-only and behind the Pro plan (roughly R1,800/month), but this is very clearly a preview of where things are heading. A personal financial coach has historically been a luxury reserved for the wealthy. AI is about to make that table a lot more crowded.

Read more →

/SmallBusiness /Claude /Productivity

If you run a small business and you're still manually chasing invoices, piecing together monthly reports at 11pm, or spending your Sunday building next week's marketing plan - this one's for you.

Anthropic just launched Claude for Small Business, and it's one of the most practically useful AI releases we've seen in a long time. Rather than being yet another chatbot you have to figure out how to use, it's a toggle-install that slots directly into the tools you're already running: QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365.

It ships with 15 ready-to-run agentic workflows across finance, operations, sales, marketing, HR, and customer service. We're talking:

There's also a margin analyser, a month-end prepper, a tax-season organiser, and more. The clever bit? You stay in control throughout - Claude does the work, but you approve before anything sends, posts, or pays.

Anthropic's Co-founder Daniela Amodei put it well: "People run the business, and Claude helps take the late-night work off their plates."

/OpenAI /Codex /Mobile /Coding

If you've been using OpenAI's Codex for longer-running coding tasks, you'll know the slightly unsettling feeling of being away from your laptop while your AI agent is quietly chewing through a big job. That problem just got solved.

Codex is now on the ChatGPT mobile app, meaning you can check in on running tasks, review what the agent found, redirect it mid-flow, or fire off a new idea - all from your phone. More than 4 million people use Codex every week, and this is a smart acknowledgement that good AI agents shouldn't be desk-bound.

Think of it like having a developer you can nudge on WhatsApp. They're busy working, but you can send a quick "actually, let's approach this differently" without killing the momentum. OpenAI calls it a "new rhythm for collaboration" - and honestly, that's a good way to put it. The future of human-AI teamwork isn't you sitting at a screen watching it work. It's lightweight, asynchronous check-ins that keep things moving.

In this section, we aim to spotlight an incredible AI tool or use case and guide you on how you can try it.

You know that stack of research, project briefs, client reports, or meeting notes you've been meaning to "get to"? NotebookLM just made that pile a lot less intimidating.

Google's NotebookLM is one of the quiet heroes of the AI tool landscape - and its Video Overview feature is genuinely one of the cleverest things in the space right now. Upload a collection of documents (PDFs, Google Docs, web links, even YouTube videos), click one button, and it generates a structured video walkthrough that synthesises everything you uploaded. It pulls out the key ideas, connects the threads, and presents it back to you in a format that's infinitely easier to consume than staring at 80 pages of notes.

Think: project briefs, company reports, market research, investor decks, study materials - all distilled into something you can actually watch.

Here's how to try it:

Pro tip: The more focused your sources, the sharper the output. Try uploading everything from a single project or topic rather than a random collection.

In this section, we're spotlighting real businesses using AI to solve actual problems.

For the past few years, the biggest AI labs have been locked in a race to build the most powerful models. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google - all sprinting to top the benchmarks and capture the headlines. And largely, they've succeeded. The models are genuinely extraordinary.

But here's the problem nobody talks about enough: most companies have absolutely no idea how to actually use them.

Building a powerful AI model and deploying it inside a real organisation - one with messy legacy systems, complex workflows, compliance requirements, and deeply ingrained human habits - are two completely different challenges. The gap between "this AI is incredible in a demo" and "this AI is saving us 10 hours a week in production" is enormous. And bridging that gap requires engineers, project managers, change management expertise, and deep knowledge of how a specific business actually runs. Most mid-sized companies simply don't have those resources sitting around.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have now acknowledged this gap publicly - and both have made their move in the same week.

Anthropic, together with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs, has formed a new AI services company focused specifically on mid-sized businesses: community banks, regional health systems, manufacturers, and similar organisations. The model is straightforward: Anthropic's applied AI engineers will sit directly inside these companies, figure out where Claude can have the biggest impact, build the solution, and stick around long enough to make it actually work.

OpenAI took a near-identical step. They launched the OpenAI Deployment Company - "DeployCo" - backed by more than $4 billion (roughly R75 billion) from a 19-firm syndicate that includes TPG, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, and Capgemini. They've also agreed to acquire Tomoro, an applied AI consulting firm, bringing roughly 150 experienced "Forward Deployed Engineers" into the fold from day one.

The parallel announcements are telling. As OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer put it: "AI is becoming capable of doing increasingly meaningful work inside organisations. The challenge now is helping companies integrate these systems into the infrastructure and workflows that power their businesses."

What this signals is something important: enterprise AI is entering its installation era. The technology exists. What's been missing is the plumbing - and two of the most powerful names in AI are now racing to become the plumbers. For South African businesses looking to adopt AI beyond the chatbot stage, this maturation of the implementation market is very good news. The frameworks, the playbooks, and eventually the local partners will follow.

AI is full of jargon, and we’re here to decode it. Each week, we’ll give you a plain-English definition of a buzzy term you’ve probably seen (but never fully understood).

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