More demand but less trust

Welcome back to The Shift. Let’s get straight to what matters in AI today…

Today we have:

🤖 AI Usage Is Rising, But Trust Is Falling

✨How to Edit AI-Generated Videos Without Leaving Your Timeline With Palmier Pro

🧠 Anthropic Studied How Humans Actually Work With AI

🔨Tools and Shifts you cannot miss

🤖 AI Usage Is Rising, But Trust Is Falling

Pew Research's latest survey reveals a growing disconnect between how often people use AI and how they feel about its long-term impact. While chatbot adoption is accelerating across the U.S., concerns about society, jobs, and the future continue to outweigh optimism.

The Decode:

Mainstream Adoption Grows - AI chatbots have reached a major milestone, with roughly half of U.S. adults now using them. Daily usage has climbed to 25%, up sharply from about one-third of Americans using chatbots just two years ago.

Pessimism Takes Hold - Despite growing adoption, nearly 40% of respondents expect AI to make society worse over the next 20 years. Only 16% believe the technology will have a positive long-term impact.

Young Users Stay Skeptical - Adults under 30 are using AI more than any other age group, yet they remain among the least optimistic about its societal benefits. Just 14% believe AI will ultimately make things better.

ChatGPT Keeps Leading - OpenAI's ChatGPT remains the dominant AI assistant, reaching 44% of U.S. adults, double its 2023 penetration. Google's Gemini sits at 24%, while Anthropic's Claude trails at 6%.

AI is rapidly becoming a daily habit, but public confidence isn't keeping pace. The latest Pew data suggests adoption alone isn't translating into trust, creating a challenge for AI companies as they push these tools deeper into work, education, and everyday life.

Together with Viktor

Six people doing the work. Your headcount is one.

Your finance close runs in #finance. Stripe and QuickBooks reconciled, runway updated, posted Sunday night without you asking.

Engineering review lands in #eng. Viktor pulled the open PRs, left comments on auth-refactor, flagged a dependency blocking api-pagination.

Campaign brief lands in #growth: Meta CPA up 18%, recommendation to pause broad match, a draft landing page already deployed for the variant test.

You hired him on day zero. He lives in Slack and Microsoft Teams alongside your contractors and investors, connects to 3,000+ tools, pushes back when you ship something dumb.

"Viktor is now an integral team member, and after weeks of use we still feel we haven't uncovered the full potential." Patrick, Director, Yarra Web.

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✨How to Edit AI-Generated Videos Without Leaving Your Timeline With Palmier Pro

Every other AI video workflow has the same problem, generate on the web, download, import, rebuild the edit. Palmier puts generation directly on the timeline.

Step 1: Download Palmier Pro: Install the Mac app. Requires macOS 26 (Tahoe). The base editor is free, credits cover AI generation.

Step 2: Start your timeline: Import your own footage or start from scratch. Mix real clips and AI-generated media on the same multi-track timeline from the beginning.

Step 3: Generate directly in the editor: Prompt Kling V3, Seedance 2.0, Veo 3.1, Grok Imagine, and more without switching tabs. Generated clips land on your timeline instantly, no downloading, no importing.

Step 4: Edit like a pro: Trim, split, adjust speed, opacity, and transform. Everything a professional editor needs, built around AI generation instead of bolted on top.

Step 5: Connect your AI agents via MCP: Enable the MCP server in settings. Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible agent can now read your project and make timeline edits directly.

Step 6: Export: Export as MP4 or NLE XML straight to Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve when you need to finish elsewhere.

Backed by Y Combinator. Pro starts at $29/month. You can download Palmier Pro here.

🧠 Anthropic Studied How Humans Actually Work With AI

Anthropic analyzed 400,000 Claude Code sessions to understand what separates successful AI-assisted work from unsuccessful attempts. The results suggest that knowing your domain may matter more than being an elite programmer when working with coding agents.

The Shift:

Humans Plan, AI Executes - Users were responsible for roughly 70% of planning decisions during a session, while Claude handled about 80% of execution choices. The data suggests AI works best as a powerful operator rather than a fully autonomous decision-maker.

Expertise Boosts Output - User skill dramatically changed what they got from Claude. Beginners averaged around five actions and 600 words per prompt, while experts extracted roughly 12 actions and 3,200 words from the same interaction.

Success Rates Climb - Verified success rates, measured through passing tests or saved work, reached 28% to 33% for intermediate and advanced users. That's more than double the 15% success rate seen among novice users.

Domain Knowledge Wins - Lawyers, managers, and scientists without formal coding roles performed surprisingly well on coding tasks. Their completion rates came within seven percentage points of software engineers, showing that subject expertise often matters more than programming credentials.

Anthropic's data suggests the people who get the most from AI agents are those who already understand the problem they're trying to solve, using AI to accelerate execution rather than replace expertise.

Together with Unblocked

8 levels of context maturity in AI-native engineering

More MCPs give agents access to information, not understanding. You agents are still missing the context to generate output you can fully trust. This 8-level model explains where teams get stuck and what fixes it. Join this live webinar on June 24 (FREE) and grab the free assessment to see where your team stands.

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🔨AI Tools for the Shift

🗄️ Datascale – Combines database diagrams, documentation, flowcharts, and AI chat on a single visual canvas for exploring complex data systems.

✂️ Retoucher – Removes image backgrounds automatically for free, making photo editing fast and effortless.

🔗 Verify Backlinks – Verifies backlinks before Google indexes them so you can monitor and validate your SEO efforts more effectively.

🔥 RoastMyResu.me – Uses AI to critique your resume, uncover weaknesses, and suggest improvements to strengthen job applications.

📚 Samwell – Generates academic-style papers complete with images, quotes, and graphs to support research and writing workflows.

🚀Quick Shifts

🩺 Midjourney unveiled a full-body ultrasound scanner, expanding from AI image generation into preventative healthcare with AI-powered body imaging and analysis.

🤖 Noam Shazeer, co-lead of Google’s Gemini and co-founder of Character.AI, has joined OpenAI, marking another major talent shift in the AI race after his high-profile return to Google in 2024.

🔐 CISA finally gained access to Anthropic’s Mythos Preview model, according to reports, arriving amid controversy over the U.S. government's shutdown of the public-facing Fable model on national security grounds. 

🔊 Google launched its first Gemini-native smart speaker, enabling natural conversations, multi-step smart home commands, follow-up questions, and AI-powered home insights. Premium Gemini features cost $10/month after a six-month free trial.

💰 OpenAI reportedly burned $3.7 billion in Q1 2026 while generating $5.7 billion in revenue, according to The Information. Both figures nearly tripled year-over-year, highlighting the massive costs and rapid growth fueling the AI race. 

🧩 Prompt of the Day

Executive Summary Writer That Gets Decisions Faster

Most executive summaries are too long, too vague, or buried in context. A strong one makes the problem, recommendation, evidence, and decision clear within seconds.

Turn any business document into a decision-ready read.

Paste the prompt: Drop this into ChatGPT, then fill in your document details.

Prompt to paste

Write a tight executive summary for [Insert document type]. Capture the core problem, recommended solution, key evidence, and desired action from the reader. Use [Insert core message], [Insert key evidence], and [Insert desired action] as inputs. Keep it under 250 words, avoid jargon, remove filler, and make the summary clear enough for a busy executive to understand the decision quickly.

🤳AI Shift of the Day

That’s all for today’s edition. See you tomorrow as we track down and get you all that matters in the daily AI Shift!

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