Happy Wednesday, Lattice Community!
We’ll dissect big stories in AI this week, provide insights to keep you informed in your industry, and share updates on the work we’re doing at Lattice Partners. We’re an AI consulting firm that helps businesses with AI strategy and custom implementations.
This week’s TL;DR:
• The AI doomer era is here, and we’re currently on one end of the pendulum
• Fewer people and businesses are using AI than you’d think, but the ones who do are power users
• How you can build AI rules for your company
The arrival of the anti-AI notetaker: Kalypta
Deveillance released a new Mac application called Kalypta on September 16th. Kalypta scrambles your voice in real time so AI notetakers like Granola can’t transcribe what you say; their pitch is that you can “become inaudible to AI,” while the humans on your call can still hear you clearly.
Takeaways
1. We’re swinging to the other side of the AI pendulum
It was only a few months ago that companies were over-indexing on the term “AI” in product offerings and job titles. Weeks later, the same AI tools that were trending for optimizing our workflows are now facing backlash.
2. Not everyone views AI the same way
Some people use AI for practically every task in their workflow, and some avoid it entirely. We can learn something from both sides.
If you’re in the weeds of AI, talk to someone doing the opposite - it’ll show you how people work without outsourcing all their thinking to an agent. If you're AI-hesitant, ask an AI-obsessed person about what they've built, where it's helped them day-to-day, and what challenges they've encountered.
Leaning too hard in each direction is not the answer. Using this technology responsibly means having conversations across the whole AI spectrum.
The AI usage divide
Casual AI users are fading and power users are doubling down.
Epoch AI polling found near-daily AI use among Americans more than doubled, jumping from 8% to 19% between March and August 2026, while people using AI only one day a week dropped from 17% to 10%.
Takeaways
1. AI adoption is not spreading evenly
There’s no more “middle” of the spectrum. Heavy AI users are intensifying their usage, while fewer people remain casual users.
2. The AI conversation is loud, but the numbers are shocking
Roughly 1 in 5 businesses are using AI at all, far lower than what we’d assume. Among the companies and people who already use it, daily-use is increasing, while the number of newcomers joining is decreasing.
What might this mean for the future of AI adoption, if there’s such a divide between the experts and everyone who’s anti-AI or intimidated by it?
We dive into all these topics more on the Lattice Partners podcast, the AI Playbook, linked here.
Something you can use
Clay’s AI writing policy - a great example of our co-founder Martin’s rubber band theory.
1. You must stand behind every idea and every sentence in your docs.
2. Writing is thinking.
3. More time should be spent authoring a document than consuming it.
4. Longer is not better.
The optimal position of a rubber band is when it’s stretched enough to hold something and be functional. But when it’s stretched too far, it snaps and breaks.
Enterprise AI usage is the same; you have to stretch it to find out its optimal position. Leaders should push their teams to race to the slop as fast as possible! Employees will learn what AI is helpful for, witness what it’s bad for, and these companies can build AI policies after they understand the limits of this technology.
If you’re using AI to help you write…
Always start with pen to paper.
There’s no need to rush. Sit with your thoughts and take your time!
Think through what you want to say, your opinion, analysis, and the structure in which you want to communicate your thoughts.
And THEN, feed this into Claude to clean up the grammar or use spell check.
This way you’re never outsourcing your actual thinking to your agent and you’re keeping the original thoughts in your voice. AI can polish the writing, but shouldn’t be the starting point.
This week at Lattice Partners
Our client’s payroll success story!
We completely transformed one of our manufacturing client’s payroll processes. The manual data entry that used to take her a full workday every week is now fully automated.
She shared that it was the first time in years she was able to have dinner with her kids on a Monday night. It’s client stories like these that make our work so fulfilling for our team.
We attended the SpaceX AI Community’s first Grok Bot build night for Marketing in NYC.
Our marketing strategist Bella learned how SpaceX employees are using Grok Bot to optimize their workflows, networked with other tech marketers in NYC & experimented with building agents for field and events marketing.
We’ve made the conscious decision to only use real photos and no AI-generated images on our website and content moving forward.
We want to keep the core of our business as authentic and human as possible.
See you next Wednesday!
Cheers,
Lattice Partners
