Hi Lattice Community,
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We’ll be dissecting big stories in AI this week, providing some insights to keep you informed in your industry, and sharing 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:
• New York City is banning the use of AI in classrooms
• Two new models dropped
• Claude in Excel tip you can use
NYC’s one-year ban on AI use in K-8 classrooms
Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, recently announced a one-year moratorium on AI in the classroom for kindergarten through 8th grade during the 2026-2027 school year. This follows pushback from parents who want their children interacting more with humans rather than chatbots at a young age.
Takeaways
1. Children need to learn to think for themselves, but they also need to learn how to use AI as a helpful, not harmful, tool.
It’s important that students eventually learn when AI use is appropriate in a project. It should be treated as a tool to learn, but not be students’ go-to solution for solving problems.
2. AI Competence vs. Confidence
Kids with limited AI access may appear to be learning subjects more slowly than those with more exposure early on, but these students come out learning how to critically think. On the other hand, kids who lean on AI as a crutch risk being overconfident in their abilities.
3. Should we be treating AI usage like a language, and not a subject?
There’s research suggesting that the brain is best primed for language acquisition before the age of 14. Should we be equipping students with tools to learn how to use AI appropriately at a young age or hoping they learn to adopt these skills on their own? It’s similar to how students used to have to attend computer or typing class to make sure they could learn proper technology skills.
Two new models dropped last week. Goodbye, Claudese.
Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra have arrived.
Anthropic’s release notes highlighted a writing pattern known as “mannered prose.” This includes em-dash-heavy, metaphor-laden, “it’s not this, it’s that” type of writing that makes AI-written pieces too easy to flag.
One of our co-founders, Martin, ran Fable 5.1 on a simple task instead of running it on a cheaper model and the writing output was very similar to his natural writing. The gap between human writing and model-writing is beginning to close, but we’ll see how this evolves in the future.
We dive into all these topics more on the Lattice Partners podcast, the AI Playbook, linked here.
Something you can use
Turn any recurring spreadsheet into a simple Skill in Claude to reuse.
If you’re going through a complicated Excel workflow weekly or monthly, you’re likely redoing work that Claude could “skillify” for you.
1. Open a version of an Excel project you’ve already completed, the finished output.
2. Make sure Claude and Excel are connected. Ask Claude in Excel to explain the work that was done to get from starting sheet to the finished output.
3. Ask Claude to turn this explanation into a reusable prompt.
4. Paste this prompt into next week’s file or type “/skillify” to save everything as a skill you can re-run with one click.
Our co-founder Christian helped one of our clients do this last week during one of our training sessions. One day of work is now being done with one prompt!
Bonus tip for you:
If you’re comparing two different AI tools, use an Incognito chat for each one, so neither platform has memory of the other’s answer skewing the output.
This week at Lattice Partners
We had some of our employees visit our office in LA!
Lattice Partners is an AI consulting firm, where we help businesses leverage the power of AI through strategic consulting, hands-on training, and custom implementations.
We celebrated one year as a company.
We want to give a big shout out to our incredible team, partners, clients, and friends and family! Lattice has grown so much in one year and we can’t wait for what’s in store for year two.
See you next Wednesday!
Cheers,
Lattice Partners