🛠️ Welcome to Tool Kit Tuesday, friend. This is the one that earns its keep. No buzzwords, no 40-slide decks, just the AI shortcuts worth using. Pull up a chair and make a Splash. Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here, it’s free.

HERE’S WHAT’S IN THIS ISSUE:

📊 Make a 14-tab spreadsheet explain itself.
🧼 “AI washing” decoded + the 120,136 layoffs behind it.
🌿 A free app that names any plant, bug or mushroom.
⚠️ Your meeting bot could cost you big-time. 
🎚️ ChatGPT settings that mute the cheerleader.
🛞 Delivery robots are having a very bad time.

But first, trivia. AI may be trying to steal everyone’s job, but there’s a very specific human superpower involving lightning-fast evaluations.

A worker at a hatchery scoops up a fuzzy, day-old baby bird, takes a quick peek at its rear end and drops it into one of two bins. Total time? About a second. 

🐣 What’s this oddly high-skill job called? A) Truffle hunter, B) Chick sexer, C) Egg candler or D) Professional rooster whisperer? Don’t fly off yet, the answer hatches at the end.

✅ Quick favor: Reply with the most annoying task on your plate this week. If AI can kill it, I’ll show you how.

💨 Once it’s gone, it’s gone. My amazing innovative fun new crewneck, tee, jumbo tote and beanie are here. There’s no second batch, and the drop closes when they sell out. Scroll down to see what everyone’s grabbing. — Kim

I can feel my shoulders rise when someone sends a 14-tab Excel file named FINAL_v7_REAL.xlsx. 

Half the headers look like airport codes, formulas disappear into hidden columns and the person who built it has left the company, the state, possibly society. From the looks of the formulas, the great unraveling started sometime around Q3 2019. 

You could spend an afternoon clicking tabs and hoping the spreadsheet eventually introduces itself. Or you can make AI interrogate the thing.

Start with a copy, never the only version. Remove customer names, employee details, financial account numbers and anything confidential before uploading. If company policy blocks uploads, paste the column headers, a few typical rows and the ugliest formulas into your approved AI tool.

Then paste this into your favorite chatbot: 

AI can explain a formula. It can’t know that Finance stopped using Tab 6 nine months ago while Sales still treats it like scripture. Check totals against a trusted report, test suspicious formulas and ask the people who use the output whether the narrative matches reality.

Your move this week: Open the spreadsheet you dread most and produce the one-page note. Then send it to the people who rely on the file and ask, “What’s wrong, missing or outdated?”

You’ve turned spreadsheet archaeology into visible leadership. I Excel at it… Word.

📩 Send this to someone who inherited FINAL_v7_REAL.xlsx.

This free newsletter brings you the terms you need to know to be AI literate!

AI washing (noun): When a company slaps “AI” on something to sound smarter than it is. Think of an AI drive-thru that still needs humans to take most orders or a layoff memo that blames robots for chopping budgets. 

The tell? This year, companies cited AI in 120,136 announced job cuts. New York’s official layoff form even has a box for AI.

When this word comes up in conversation, people are talking about either layoffs that were blamed on AI but really about money, or products with AI on the label that don’t do anything new or even use AI.

I went out for a 20-minute walk. It took an hour and 10 minutes, because I’d downloaded Seek. Point your camera at a plant, bug or mushroom, and it narrows the ID live, from “plant” to “fern” to the exact species, then hands you a badge.

Grown adults shouldn’t care about badges. I care deeply. The app is free from the nonprofit iNaturalist, needs no account and never stores your exact location.

The catch? It’s a guide, not a field biologist. Double-check anything that matters, like whether that vine is poison ivy. Leaves of three, let it be.

📩 Send this to someone who stops on every walk to ask, “What IS that?”

You know that little transcription bot in every Zoom meeting we’ve all sort of grown OK with being there? Four consolidated class actions say that’s a huge problem.

This gets even dicier. OtterPilot hooks into your calendar, so it joins the call on its own. You don’t press record. It’s already in. Which means in a two-party-consent state like California or Washington, the bot in the corner is technically you, recording someone without asking.

California’s wiretap law runs $5,000 per violation. Multiply that by every meeting and every attendee, and the math gets ugly fast. And since the recording happened on your invite, you’re the one holding the receipt.

Here’s what to shut off before your next “quick sync” becomes a $5,000 problem. If you use Otter, go into your settings and disconnect the calendar integration. Check that setting even if you never turned it on. Then say out loud at the top of every call that a bot is recording, and give people a chance to object. Fireflies and Zoom AI Companion have similar features. 

Even better? Be the person who adds “no AI notetakers” to invites where coworkers are venting, negotiating or discussing anything with a dollar sign on it. While you’re at it, scroll your old transcripts to see who got emailed what.

📩 Forward this to the coworker whose bot joins every meeting before they do.

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I asked ChatGPT to poke holes in a terrible proposal. It called the document “a fantastic start! 🚀” and handed me nine bullet points and a pep talk.

There’s a fix most people have never touched. ChatGPT’s Personalization menu has a base style setting (Professional, Candid, Efficient and four more) plus dials for Warmth, Enthusiasm, Headers and lists and Emoji. Turn them up or down once, and ChatGPT talks to you that way from then on.

Your quarterly numbers don’t need confetti.

Setup takes about a minute, and my walk-through, the exact prompt and the one setting that can quietly undo all of it are one tap away.

⏱️ Do the 60-second setup →

Your dinner is being delivered by a robot with the survival instincts of a shopping cart. A lowlight reel shows sidewalk delivery bots getting stuck, struck and tampered with, turning a simple food run into an obstacle course.

These little rolling lunch boxes use cameras and sensors to navigate the world, which includes curbs, pedestrians and people who seem to be taking out their anger issues with the toaster on wheels.

Watch it all go down here. The future of delivery is here. Your fries need a bodyguard.

Share this now:

Here’s your haul for today. You made a 14-tab spreadsheet explain itself, learned to spot AI washing, found a free app that names any plant, kept your meeting bot from becoming a witness, turned down ChatGPT’s cheerleader and watched delivery robots lose to a curb. Not bad for five minutes of reading, look at you so AI aware and loving it!

🐥 The answer: B) Chick sexer. Yes, that’s a real job, and that’s the name. It sounds made up by someone who lost a bet at a county fair. Chick sexers sort newborns into future hens and roosters, since egg farms only need hens for production. 

The wild part? Skilled pros can sort roughly 700 an hour with 98% accuracy, after years of training. The pay can top $60,000 a year, and it’s still one of the hardest jobs to fill. But now AI and MRI scanners are coming for it, peeking inside the egg before anything hatches. Talk about a job you can’t wing.

🐓 My farmer friend used his inheritance to buy baby chickens. He got the money for nothing, and the chicks for free. (I heard that groan all the way from here!)

Before you go: My exclusive limited time merch drop is happening now. Grab the crewneck, tee, jumbo tote or beanie while you can. These are amazing gifts for you or that person who comes to mind when you saw it!

🌱 Every expert started as a beginner who kept showing up. That includes you.AI won’t make you the smartest person in the meeting. Asking it better questions might. Forward today’s newsletter to your favorite person. I’ll see you on Thursday with another issue of this great free newsletter. Appreciate you being here! — Kim

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Arlo, @phillychitchat via Instagram

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