👋Good Morning! AI isn’t waiting for permission anymore, it’s stepping directly into culture, workplaces, and everyday technology. A Swiss church is experimenting with an AI-powered Jesus that answers questions from visitors. Consultants are using software to cut hours of spreadsheet work into minutes. Android is pushing AI deeper into notifications, customization, and system behavior. And the funding news shows where the momentum is heading next — agentic systems for computers, monitoring layers for AI agents, and tools for real-world communication training. The pattern is clear: AI is no longer just a feature, it’s becoming infrastructure across products, workflows, and even traditions.
✝️Deus in Machina: A Swiss Church Lets AI Play Jesus
👀 Imagine walking into a 800-year-old church in Switzerland and instead of a priest waiting at the altar, you find a glowing, digital Jesus staring back at you.
That’s exactly what happened at the historic church in St Peter’s Chapel in Lucerne, where an AI-powered “Jesus” was installed as part of a project called Deus in Machina. The system doesn’t preach from the pulpit, instead, it responds to visitors through a screen, answering questions about faith, forgiveness, and life using a synthetic voice and a digital face modeled on the traditional image of Christ.
According to the curator behind the project, the goal wasn’t to replace clergy or provoke outrage, but to explore what happens when a sacred space meets modern technology. And people definitely showed up. Visitors asked the AI-Jesus about everything from religious doubt to personal struggles, and received responses generated in real time. Some found it moving. Others called it unsettling, even eerie, a sign that not everyone is ready for divine guidance delivered through code.
Whether it’s seen as innovation or irreverence, the installation forces a bigger question: when AI is capable of offering comfort, advice, even moral guidance, where do we draw the line between machine and ministry?
🤖AI In Action: From All-Night Excel to AI-Powered Analysis
Ascentra Labs just raised 2 million to tackle a problem every consultant knows too well: late-night Excel marathons. Instead of manually cleaning survey data and building spreadsheets formula by formula, the platform promises to automate the process. According to the founders, consultants will be able to upload raw survey responses, and the system will generate a structured Excel workbook automatically, complete with formulas and traceability baked in.
The founding team comes from the consulting world themselves, and they’re betting that workflow automation inside consulting is still in its early stages. Ascentra is positioning itself as a tool that sits directly in the middle of traditional due-diligence and market-analysis work, where teams spend huge amounts of time transferring, organizing and analyzing survey data. In the article, one of the founders argues that consultants don't necessarily need generative AI writing whole reports, they need something that handles repetitive, mechanical spreadsheet work so analysts can move faster toward interpretation and recommendations.
The company says some early users have already seen significant time savings when processing large datasets. It’s not trying to replace consultants or their judgment, instead, it’s focused on removing the grind that happens before insights are even possible. If the product delivers on its promise, it could shift how early-stage analysis is done inside firms, freeing employees from hours of formatting, cleaning and manual calculation.
Why it matters: Consulting is known for high-pressure workflows, and much of the workload is still built on tedious spreadsheet work. Ascentra's pitch is simple, let AI handle the repetitive setup, let humans think. If adoption grows, it could mark the beginning of a broader shift in how analysis-heavy, project-based work gets done: less manual input, more strategic output, and maybe fewer 2 a.m. nights staring at Excel.
🔨AI Tools And Updates: Android 16 Introduces AI Powered Notifications
Google just pushed a major Android update that leans heavily into AI, not as a gimmick, but as a core piece of everyday phone use. Android 16 introduces AI-powered notification summaries, meaning your phone will read long messages, group chats and multi-thread updates, and compress them down into short summaries you can grasp instantly. No more doom-scrolling through 37 unread messages just to understand what’s going on, the system pulls the key points and surfaces them for you automatically.
Alongside that comes a more powerful notification manager. Low-value alerts like promo emails or random app pings can now be grouped and toned down, while personal messages and important updates sit at the top. It’s a small change, but for most users this is where AI actually matters, less noise, more signal, less time wasted.
Android 16 also expands customization. You can adjust icon shapes, theme your home screen more freely, and even force dark mode on apps that don’t support it. It’s not groundbreaking, but it gives the interface a more unified, less patchwork feel. Families also get a new centralized parental control hub with app restrictions, screen-time limits and downtime schedules, all PIN-locked and accessible straight from settings.
The real strategic shift here is how Google is delivering updates. Instead of saving everything for yearly releases, Android features will roll out in smaller waves throughout the year. Faster improvements, more experimentation, but also more fragmentation depending on device manufacturers. Pixels will almost certainly get everything first, while Samsung and others may lag or selectively enable features.
Bottom line: Android 16 is trying to make your phone feel less chaotic and more personal. AI notification summaries could be genuinely useful, or occasionally miss context and confuse things, but it’s a clear sign that Google wants AI running quietly in the background, not just as a chatbot feature. The OS is evolving into something more attentive, more proactive, and more opinionated about what deserves your attention.
💡Quick Hits and Numbers
Simular just raised US $21.5 million and launched its first-ever macOS AI agent, a system that can control your PC (moving the mouse, pasting data, automating workflows) rather than just acting inside a browser.
Raindrop secured a $15 million seed round to build what it calls a “Sentry for AI agents”, monitoring infrastructure that detects hidden failures, bugs or “silent” errors when AI agents run complex, long-running tasks.
Yoodli, an AI-powered roleplay training startup, raised $40 million in Series B funding, after reporting roughly 900% revenue growth over the past year, as companies increasingly use AI to help employees practice communication, sales calls, feedback sessions and real-world conversations.
🧩 Closing thought
AI’s role is shifting from novelty to utility. It can summarize, automate, guide, analyze, even offer spiritual answers on demand. Some of these changes will feel helpful and efficient, others strange or uncomfortable. But each example shows the same trend: AI is moving closer to the core of how people make decisions, interact, and work. The challenge now is using it deliberately, not just to move faster, but to move smarter.