Applied Intelligence                        Issue #57 

Practical AI. Real Impact.

As AI continues to evolve and expand, organizations face an abundance of choices. The real challenge is knowing where to invest for meaningful impact. With 2026 on the horizon, we're dedicating our newsletter to Applied Intelligence, a series focused on what actually works in practice across our client work and broader AI initiatives.

We're doubling down on sharing practical insights, clear examples, and proven approaches to help you better navigate AI opportunities with confidence.

To kick things off, we’re sharing a fun, holiday-themed internal project that highlights what what we cover in our ⭐️ AI Readiness & Opportunity Assessments ⭐️ framework like: data transformation, AI-enhanced search, generative AI, personalization, agents and automation, privacy and security, and training.

And you get that all in one cheerful weekend hack you won’t want to miss! 👇

📣 AI-powered Secret Savas: How we enriched our gift giving exchange with a decade of Slack data and RAG

This year, we gave our annual Secret Savas™ gift exchange an AI-powered upgrade. Using more than a decade of Slack messages, we built a lightweight data pipeline and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system to extract interests, themes, and sentiment, and used those insights to generate personalized gift ideas for our teammates.

Read the full story. 

⭐️ AI Readiness and Opportunity Assessments ⭐️ 

If you're exploring where AI can drive real impact in your organization, our assessment helps you identify high-value opportunities, evaluate your overall readiness, and chart a practical path forward.

Learn more

Practical AI News

⭐️ If you haven’t tried it yet, Google’s Gemini 3 mid-November release is worth a look. It has positioned Google as a frontrunner across a surprising number of domains and may be a strong addition to your models of choice.

⭐️ Or... if you don't want to choose a model, have them battle each other for your heart with OpenRouter.

The Hoot Take 

Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is You is overrated!