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As we slide into the month of parties, catch-ups and questionable office prosecco, I know plenty of you are still head-down making sure the business finishes the year in the shape you want. Same here. So before December turns into a blur, here are a few stories that will either make you smile, sharpen your thinking or give you something useful to take into 2026.

Enjoy!

Why baby steps are the way forward for AI prompts

Researchers just pulled off something that sounds impossible: a million-step AI task completed with zero errors – using one of the smallest, cheapest models available. The method is what matters: the team broke the problem into microscopic actions, checked every move with a paired validator and let the sequence run. What caught my attention is how close this is to the prompting approach that consistently works for me in real life: simple steps, tight feedback loops and corrections built into the flow. In other words, reliability increases when the work is sliced thin and audited as it goes. So stop writing those essay-length prompts and get granular instead. Read the report here.

What does the UK Budget mean for M&A?

The standout line for me from the Autumn Budget isn’t the debate about stealth taxes – it’s the halving of the CGT exemption on Employee Ownership Trusts. EOTs have been a pressure-valve exit route in a cold M&A market, but the numbers now shift: the tax advantage narrows, the structuring gets tighter and seller expectations move closer to independent valuations. The one bright spot is the huge expansion of the EMI scheme – the UK’s flagship share-option programme that lets growing companies give employees equity at a fixed price, usually without income tax or NI. EMI limits have now doubled or quadrupled across the board, making it far easier for founders to lock in key people during longer exit horizons. Get the story here.

Why 2026 will reward the teams that can judge AI – not just use it

Dentsu’s new “Algorithmic Era” report makes strong two points: AI capability is accelerating far faster than our ability to interpret it, and trust is becoming the real currency layer of the digital economy. In other words, the competitive gap is human judgement. Teams who know when to trust an output (and when to challenge it) will outperform the ones who simply automate faster. And because audiences now care as much about the process behind a message as the message itself, companies that build transparency and verification into their workflows will have a structural advantage. Find out more here.

Social is the spark. Culture is the distribution.

Zaria Parvez – the creative mind behind Duolingo’s TikTok rise and now DoorDash’s head of social – says that brands are misreading the game. “Social-first” isn’t about feeding the algorithm with more content; it’s about creating moments that travel far beyond the platform. In a great LinkedIn post, she breaks it down into a three-stage loop – the invasion point, the cultural spread, the compounding effect – using smart examples such as the Fiji Water Girl at the Golden Globes and Ramp hiring “Kevin from The Office” as their CFO. The takeaway is that social isn’t a channel you post to – it’s an ignition. The real distribution now happens in group chats, creator ecosystems and IRL culture. The brands that learn to orchestrate those loops, not just pump out posts, are the ones cutting through. Read the full breakdown here.

How to create a social campaign on (almost) no budget

Here’s another terrific little LinkedIn story I spotted recently. It reveals how a Google Domains campaign came together in a week, cost nothing to produce and still cut customer acquisition costs by 30 per cent. The brief was unglamorous: encourage people to buy the less desirable domain endings. The team spotted that domain searches spike around New Year and built the whole idea around resolutions – “start your .business”, “take your .photography seriously”, “buy your .wedding domain”. The result was that clever timing, relevance and a few dozen lines paired with stock photos created their most successful campaign of the year. It just shows you that when teams don’t have the luxury of budget or time, that’s often where the best ideas come from. Read the story here.

The moment the internet stopped sounding human

I enjoyed this fun little motion graphic that tracks who writes the internet: humans or LLMs. For years, the lines barely move. Then 2022 arrives, ChatGPT launches, and the share flips in a way that looks less like a trend and more like a regime change. Worth 10 seconds of your day. Check it out on Reddit.

Stuck in a creative rut? Try these strategies

YouTube put out a piece recently that’s meant for creators, but it also maps perfectly to anyone who has to come up with ideas on command – founders, marketers, operators, anyone staring at a blank page with mild resentment. There’s some great practical advice: mine your old work for unfinished threads, steal questions from your customer queries, flip a common idea on its head, and use actual search data instead of guessing what people care about. It’s simple, but if you do two or three of these properly, you never really run out of things to make. The full list is here.

Why your brain keeps blocking your best ideas

Staying with the creative thinking theme, I came across a simple but useful explainer on functional fixedness – the bias that tricks you into seeing things only in their most familiar role. It’s the reason teams recycle the same solutions, founders cling to one interpretation of a problem and product ideas start to feel samey. The piece makes the point that creativity is about breaking the mental label you’ve stuck on something. If you’ve felt locked in the same thinking loops lately, check it out here.

AI prompt of the week: startup health check and turnaround roadmap

The end of the year is when many first-year founders face an uncomfortable truth: the business isn't gaining the traction they expected. Whether it's flatlined growth, customer churn or burn rate concerns, the instinct is often to push harder on the same strategy. But the smartest founders use this moment differently – to diagnose what's broken, separate symptoms from root causes and design a realistic turnaround plan before diving into another year of the same mistakes.

Conduct a comprehensive health check for my struggling first-year business. My context: [business model, launch date, current metrics – revenue, customers, burn rate], [what's not working], [initial assumptions vs. reality]. Diagnose the core problems – is it product-market fit, positioning, distribution, pricing, or execution? Separate symptoms from root causes. Then create a realistic 90-day turnaround roadmap for Q1 2025: quick wins to generate momentum, strategic pivots that require testing, what to stop doing immediately and key metrics to track progress. Include decision triggers for when to persevere vs. when to pivot more dramatically.

The five forces that wreck good deals

A surprising number of sales fall apart not because the business is weak, but because the process is. Misaligned valuations, late-stage surprises and momentum killers take more deals down than market conditions ever do. This cheat sheet highlights the patterns to watch — and avoid — long before you reach the finish line.

Drop me a line

If you’re using the last few weeks of the year to line things up for 2026, feel free to share what you’re working through. The best founder conversations usually start with: “can I get your take on something?”

Cheers!
Adam

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