How the Best Companies Use AI

Today, we are discussing how the best companies at using AI are using AI. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright, friends. Quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Blitsy, Granola, Section, and Assembly. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Ad free is just $3 a month. To learn more about sponsoring the show or really anything else about the show, you can go to a idailybrief.ai. It's gonna have links to pretty much everything we got cooking from free education programs, to our AI operators community, to the new newsletter that is where you can find all the links that I talk about in the show, to, of course, our companion experience page. We did one of those for our how to use Opus four seven and the new codex app episode on Friday. Today's episode combines a number of the big themes that we've been talking about this year. 2026 kicked off with everyone coming back from the holiday break, really understanding and grappling with just how big an advance we had gotten between the harnesses like Claude Code and Codex, and like the models like Opus four five and the g p t five two five three series that had come out around the end of last year. Ever since then, it has just been a race and it has been very clear that there is a massive difference and a growing difference between the people who are best at using AI and using it most fully and those who are not. Now clearly, a huge amount of that work is running through code even when the ultimate output is not building software. Turns out that when you give AI and agents the ability to write code, it in fact unlocks a huge amount of other capabilities that are relevant for knowledge work way outside of just software engineering. When OpenAI announced their new codex app, they said that a full 50% of the usage is not about coding specifically. Now in many ways, the conversation that we've been having is focused on the individual, what you can as an individual do to get the most out of this new set of tools, how you can build and set up your own OpenClaus, what features of the new codex or Cloud Code app you should be using, things like that. And yet at the same time, another big theme for this year is that there is clearly a growing gap between the companies that are using AI best and those who are farther behind. A great example of this was on display with the PwC study we talked about earlier this week that found that three quarters of AI's economic gains were being captured by just 20% of the companies. And importantly, it wasn't …