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The AI your stack deployed is losing customers.
You shipped it. It works. Tickets are resolving. So why are customers leaving?
Gladly's 2026 Customer Expectations Report uncovered a gap that most CIOs don't see until it's too late: 88% of customers get their issues resolved through AI — but only 22% prefer that company afterward. Resolution without loyalty is just churn on a delay.
The difference isn't the model. It's the architecture. How AI is integrated into the customer journey, what it hands off and when, and whether the system is designed to build relationships or just close tickets.
Download the report to see what consumers actually expect from AI-powered service — and what the data says about the platforms getting it right.
If you're responsible for the infrastructure, you're responsible for the outcome.
Good morning and thank you for joining us again!
Welcome to this daily edition of Beginners in AI, where we explore the latest trends, tools, and news in the world of AI and the tech that surrounds it. Like all editions, this is human curated and edited, and published with the intention of making AI news and technology more accessible to everyone.
THE FRONT PAGE
AI Is Prescribing Psychiatric Meds in Utah for $19 a Month. Here's What That Means
TLDR: For the first time anywhere in the world, a chatbot has been approved to renew psychiatric medications without a doctor reviewing each request, and the company behind it wants to be in every U.S. state by the end of the year.
The Story:
Utah just made history. A startup called Legion Health has been approved by the state to let an AI chatbot renew psychiatric prescriptions for $19 a month, with no doctor signing off on each request. It's the first time any government in the world has given a company that kind of authority over psychiatric medication. The chatbot can renew 15 specific lower-risk drugs, including common antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft, and Wellbutrin, but only for patients who already have a prescription and haven't had any major changes to their medication or a psychiatric hospital visit in the past year. Patients answer 15 screening questions, the AI reviews the answers, and if everything looks stable, the renewal goes straight to a pharmacy. The program runs for 12 months. The first 1,250 prescriptions must be reviewed by a human doctor before the AI can fly solo. If it hits a 98% approval rate, the human oversight goes away.
Its Significance:
There are not nearly enough psychiatrists to meet demand. Long wait times, missed appointments, and prescription delays cause real harm to people managing depression and anxiety. AI that handles stable, routine refills could help, and for $19 a month, it's cheaper than most copays. But the risks are real too. A Harvard psychiatry professor pointed out that AI "can't understand the unique context and factors" behind a medication decision. There are no controlled substances in the program, which is a good guardrail. These types of programs will likely scale with time to include more powerful drugs, and it's not clear who is responsible if things go wrong.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Matthew Gallagher built Medvi, a telehealth company, with $20,000 and no staff. By using AI tools for code, marketing, customer service, and website work, he pulled in $401 million in the first full year with a 16.2% net profit margin, nearly triple the margin of his biggest competitor which employs 2,442 people. Medvi is now tracking toward $1.8 billion in 2026 revenue with a team of two.
Your takeaway: We've covered this wave before: Harvey AI, built by two people into an $11 billion legal company A Lawyer Played D&D with a Chatbot. It's Now Worth $11 Billion ; Mercor, where three college friends became the youngest self-made billionaires in history. The pattern is the same. AI is removing the one thing that used to stop a good idea in its tracks: the cost of people. That's a real opportunity if you have an idea, and a real complication if your job is something a chatbot can now replace.
The story: Researchers ran 16 experiments with 27,491 participants and found the same result every time: people rate creative writing lower the moment they know AI helped write it, even when the writing itself is identical to human work. The effect held across every format they tested, and it didn't go away when researchers tried to change people's minds about it. They're calling it the "AI disclosure penalty."
Your takeaway: If you use AI to write anything creative, from marketing copy to a blog post, the label matters more than the quality. People aren't just judging the words. They're judging who (or what) made them. For now, that bias appears to be baked in.
The story: AI tools are getting good enough at financial advice that they could replace human advisors, according to MIT finance professor Andrew Lo. But there's one thing they don't have: a fiduciary duty. That's the legal requirement that forces a real advisor to put your best interest first, with actual consequences if they don't. AI companies currently have no such obligation. A 2024 poll found that 66% of Americans who use generative AI say they've used it for financial advice, rising to 82% for millennials and Gen Z.
Your takeaway: Using AI for financial decisions isn't the same as using a licensed advisor, even if the output looks similar. If the AI steers you wrong, there's no one legally on the hook for it. Until the law catches up, treat AI financial advice as a starting point, not a final answer.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🦢 Goose Free and Open Source: A remarkably advanced and extensible artificial intelligence agent that runs locally on your machine to automate complex software engineering tasks from writing and executing code to debugging entire project pipelines. (Alternative to Claude Code)
⚓ Hooksy Paid: A comprehensive ad intelligence platform that indexes millions of social media advertisements to help you extract high performing video scripts and detect the most effective hooks for your own marketing campaigns.
📦 kubbi Freemium: A secure data transfer layer designed specifically for artificial intelligence systems that creates temporary encrypted claim links to pass sensitive payloads and multi file bundles between different agents or humans.
Taiga Free and Open Source: A beautifully designed project management platform for agile teams that provides intuitive Kanban boards and sprint backlogs to help you track your progress without high monthly fees.
TRENDING
Japan Is Proving Experimental Physical AI Is Ready for the Real World — Japan is deploying AI-powered robots in warehouses, factories, and care facilities not because it wants to, but because it has no choice. The country's working-age population is shrinking so fast that businesses can't find enough people to fill shifts. Japan's government has committed $6.3 billion to physical AI development and wants to capture 30% of the global robotics market by 2040. While the U.S. debate about AI is mostly about job displacement, Japan's question is simpler: can robots show up for the jobs that humans no longer will?
Copilot Is "for Entertainment Purposes Only," According to Microsoft's Terms of Service — Microsoft's own terms of use, updated in October 2025, quietly label Copilot "for entertainment purposes only" and warn users not to rely on it for important advice. This is the same tool Microsoft has been aggressively pitching to businesses and bundling into Windows, Office, and Teams. A spokesperson told PCMag the language is "legacy" and will be updated, but gave no timeline. Other AI companies have similar disclaimers; none has used the phrase "entertainment only." Only 3.3% of eligible Microsoft 365 users are paying for Copilot.
Google DeepMind Teams Up With Agile Robots for AI Robotics Push — Google DeepMind has partnered with Munich-based Agile Robots, which has already deployed more than 20,000 robotic systems worldwide. The deal puts DeepMind's Gemini Robotics AI models inside Agile's hardware, creating a feedback loop where real-world robot data improves the AI, and better AI makes the robots smarter. The initial focus is electronics manufacturing, automotive, logistics, and data centers. It's at least the third major robotics partnership DeepMind has announced this year, following deals with Boston Dynamics and Apptronik.
China Announces AI Boost to Radar as Drone Swarms Confound Detectors in Iran War — A senior Chinese military scientist revealed that China is using a new AI algorithm to help its radars detect large numbers of low-altitude drones, saying the algorithm showed an "unexpected boost" in test results. The announcement comes as drone swarms have become a central tactic in the ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict, where traditional radar systems are struggling to separate real threats from decoys. China's current five-year plan calls for faster development of counter-drone technology, partly with an eye on any future conflict over Taiwan.
AI Breakthrough Cuts Energy Use by 100x While Boosting Accuracy — Researchers at Tufts University found that combining traditional neural networks with human-like symbolic reasoning slashes AI energy use by up to 100 times compared to standard systems, while actually improving accuracy on complex tasks. During training, the new approach used just 1% of the energy a conventional system would need. During operation, it used 5%. The lead researcher pointed out that a single AI-generated Google summary already uses up to 100 times more energy than producing the regular search results below it. This approach could make AI far cheaper and more sustainable to run.
FT: The Economic Shift No One Is Talking About — The Financial Times takes a close look at how the shift toward AI agents, systems that can take actions on your behalf without you being involved in each step, is beginning to change how economic activity works. As agents start booking travel, managing finances, and handling purchases automatically, the relationship between consumers and markets changes in ways that existing rules weren't built to handle.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
💧Build a Dehydration Prevention Tracker for Daily Drinking Goals
Build a water intake tracker app. Features: quick-add buttons for 150ml, 250ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, custom ml entry field, daily goal setter, animated water tank visual that fills as you hit your goal, full entry log with timestamps and delete buttons, hourly bar chart showing when you drank throughout the day, stats panel showing total ml, remaining, number of entries, and status. Style: dark midnight blue background, sky blue accent color, 900px wide. Use React with useState.What this does:
This app tracks every drink you log throughout the day. Set your daily water goal, tap a quick button for common amounts like a cup or bottle, or enter a custom ml value. The water tank fills as you approach your goal, the hourly chart shows when you’ve been most hydrated, and the running log on the right tracks every entry with timestamps.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Renew psychiatric prescriptions without a doctor reviewing each request, at least for stable patients on lower-risk medications in Utah.
❌ Still Can't: Be held legally responsible if that prescription causes harm. No fiduciary duty, no liability framework exists yet.
✅ AI Can Now: Run a warehouse or factory floor with a physical robot that learns from real-world data and gets smarter with every shift.
❌ Still Can't: Replace the human judgment that decides which factory worker to promote, which safety concern to escalate, or when a situation has moved outside the script.
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Walter Isaacson had unprecedented access to Musk for two years and the result is a biography that doesn’t pull punches. It covers his chaotic childhood, the founding of PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink, and his acquisition of Twitter. Whether you admire or distrust him, Musk is shaping more technology than anyone else alive right now, and this book does a credible job of explaining how someone like that actually thinks and operates. Go into it with an open mind.
Big Pharma's $240B White Flag Is One Startup's Ticket
Big Pharma has spent billions on osteoarthritis and keeps coming up empty. Cytonics figured out why: they were only targeting one culprit in a gang of bad actors. Cytonics targets all of them. Already proven across 10,000+ patients, they're now pushing a 200% more potent version toward FDA approval with a clean Phase 1 trial behind them. Claim an early-stage Cytonics stake before it happens.
Thank you for reading. We’re all beginners in something. With that in mind, your questions and feedback are always welcome and I read every single email!
-James
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