It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Aside from the holidays, I have spent the last 30 days in full business recovery mode following a disastrous workspace migration in ChatGPT on November 30th. I didn’t want to come back until I had something positive to report. Over the summer, before joining the AI Advantage I launched my startup using a ChatGPT Plus account tied to my personal email. As a (now) professional founder, I eventually realized it was necessary to separate my personal data from my business for IP protection, liability, and future HIPAA compliance with the app I’m building. When I started my ChatGPT account I hadn’t even thought about starting a company yet. Everything was mixed up. All my personal topics and my business building topics were in one account. Which is not a good thing. I knew enough to upgrade to a ChatGPT plus account when I started iterating business ideas, because I did not want them being trained on any of open AI models. I did everything by the book. I followed the documentation and even used ChatGPT to build a migration checklist. What happened next took my business out at the knees. ChatGPT wiped out every last bit of my data. Their support was nonexistent—no apology, no refund, and no path to recovery. $632.00 spent for a two year Business Workspace and nothing to show for it, everything gone. While my "founder discipline" meant I had backed up my core IP and design docs locally, I lost months of context and chat logs that served as the backbone of my cognitive scaffolding system. It was a disaster of epic proportions. I’ll admit it: I cried. Sobbed actually. I’m normally not a crier, but I had worked so damn hard for several months building something that I know is going to help people. I refused to let it be the end. I have spent December reconstituting my operations from the ground up, but I didn't go back to what broke. After learning that this has happened to dozens, if not hundreds of other founders and businesses, I migrated my entire company to Google Business Workspace (Enterprise Standard) and Gemini. The difference in professional stability and support has been night and day. Because of this move, I’ve recovered enough momentum to stay on track for our first product launch this January.

📝 TL;DR Retailers are quietly rolling out AI tools that scan your holiday returns for fraud before your refund is approved. With nearly one in ten returns suspected of fraud, AI is being hired as the new bouncer at the returns desk. 🧠 Overview A new AI system is being tested to catch fake or abusive returns as holiday return season surges. A major returns logistics company reports that U S retailers lose tens of billions of dollars each year to return fraud, with almost 16 percent of total retail sales coming back as returns and around 9 percent of those believed to be fraudulent. To fight that, they have built an AI tool that screens returns in real time, looking for suspicious patterns before the money goes back to the customer. Big brands are already piloting it across thousands of physical drop off locations. 📜 The Announcement A new report highlights that a UPS owned returns service has launched an AI system to flag suspicious returns at scale during the 2025 holiday season. The company handles box free, in store returns for online brands at thousands of locations and has seen how often fraud slips through when refunds are issued quickly. The AI tool is currently being tested with well known fashion and sportswear brands while retailers process an estimated eight hundred fifty billion dollars worth of returns this year. The goal is simple, reduce the roughly seventy six and a half billion dollars lost annually to return fraud without making honest customers feel punished. ⚙️ How It Works • Pattern spotting - The AI scans return requests from the moment they are started online, looking at timing, frequency, locations, order history and product details. • Risk scoring - Each return is given a risk score, most sail through automatically, but higher risk returns are flagged for extra checks before the refund is approved. • Network wide view - Because the system sits across thousands of drop off points, it can spot people trying similar tricks at different locations or across multiple brands.

AI often enters our work lives as a promise of simplicity. Faster outputs, smarter assistance, less effort. Yet for many teams, the first real experience of AI feels like the opposite. More tools, more tabs, more decisions, and more cognitive load. This early friction is not a sign that AI is failing. It is a sign that we have not yet moved from tools to workflows. ------------ Context: When Possibility Becomes Overwhelm ------------ Most people do not meet AI through a single, well-integrated system. They meet it through a flood of options. Chat tools, image generators, automation platforms, and plugins all appear at once, each claiming to be essential. The result is not clarity, but paralysis. Inside organizations, this often leads to scattered experimentation. One team uses AI for drafting. Another uses it for analysis. A third tries automation. None of these efforts connect. AI becomes something people occasionally try, rather than something that reliably supports how work gets done. This fragmentation creates a subtle sense of failure. People know AI can be useful, but they cannot feel that usefulness consistently. Every interaction feels like starting over. The cognitive cost of choosing the right tool or prompt outweighs the benefit of the output. The mistake is assuming that value comes from finding the right tool. In reality, value comes from fitting AI into a repeatable way of working. ------------ Why Tools Alone Rarely Create Value ------------ Tools are easy to acquire and hard to integrate. They promise capability, but they do not automatically create coherence. Without a clear place in a workflow, even powerful tools feel optional and fragile. AI tools amplify this problem because they are general purpose. They can do many things, which makes it unclear what they should do first. When everything is possible, nothing feels necessary. This leads to a pattern where people try AI for impressive but disconnected tasks. A polished document here. A clever summary there. The outputs look good, but they do not reduce friction in the overall process.

How can I build my avatar, please? I think it was a home exercise in week 3, or 4, but I can’t find it.