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š° Charge $2,000/month to automate old software
OpenAIās new model sees the screen and operates apps with no API, at half the old price. Most small teams still copy and paste between those apps by hand. That gap is paid work.
Ezgi Acar
October 28, 2026
In partnership with
š $1,000+ in free AI tools. Access Offers ā
The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. Thatās what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.
ā” Today In 30 Seconds
01 OpenAIās GPT-6.1 Terra operates software by reading the screen, at half the price of the last version. |
02 That makes automations for apps with no API affordable for small businesses. That is your opening. |
03 Microsoft and Alphabet report tonight. Amazon reports tomorrow. |
04 Meta priced a giant stock sale to pay for its AI build-out. |
05 SK hynix posted record profit as AI memory demand keeps climbing.. |
06 Daytona hit a $1B valuation building the computers AI agents work on. |
š° Opportunity Card
ā” Earning Potential | šÆ Best for Zapier, Make and n8n builders, ops consultants, automation agencies | ā± Window 2ā4 weeks |
š° This Week's Opportunity
Every small business has one painful job: copying data from one screen into another, because the two tools donāt connect. AI can now do that job by looking at the screen.
What Happened
OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Terra, available to Plus, Pro, Enterprise and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex, and in the API as gpt-6.1-terra. openai
What it does: a fast model for visual reasoning, computer use and writing. It clicks, types and navigates menus like a person. marktechpost
The price: $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, 50% lower than GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-6.1 Sol. openai
OpenAIās own example: reading incoming invoices and entering their details into accounting software. openai
The number that matters: on OpenAIās own benchmark chart, Terra matches its top model at an estimated $0.29 per task versus $4.82. kingy
Caveat: these are OpenAIās numbers. Test on your own tasks first.
Why it matters
Most automation tools need an API. Many tools small businesses depend on donāt have one: supplier portals, old practice software, government sites, legacy CRMs.
Screen automation existed before. The cost killed it. As DataNorth puts it, running a computer-use agent on a flagship model was expensive, which kept many admin automations stuck at the business case. datanorth
At half the price, that business case now works for smaller jobs.
Who actually needs this
Logistics and dispatch teams re-keying orders into old systems
Property managers moving data between portals
Insurance brokers and accountants working in client and carrier portals
How you benefit
Win projects that Zapier-only builders have to turn down
Sell by hours saved, which is easy to measure
Reuse one workflow across firms in the same industry
Analytics on Live Data Without Leaving Postgres
When analytics on Postgres slows down, most teams add a second database. Then come the pipelines, the sync jobs, and a copy of your data that's always a little behind.
TimescaleDB takes a different approach: extend Postgres instead of splitting away from it. Hypertables partition your data automatically as volume grows. Hypercore compression cuts storage up to 95%. Continuous aggregates keep dashboards live without re-querying everything.
CERN runs Postgres this way for sensor data from the Large Hadron Collider.
No split architecture, no pipeline lag, no new query language to learn. Same SQL, same drivers, same tools.
Start on Tiger Cloud and get $1000 in credits.
How to get started
Find one copy-paste job. Ask a client: āWhat do you type into one system from another every week?ā
Record it once, narrating each step. Last Saturdayās SOP method works as your spec.
Prototype it. Computer use is a hosted tool in OpenAIās Responses API. Plus users can also test in ChatGPT Work. truefoundry
Run it on a test account first. A human approves before anything is submitted or paid.
Price by time saved. Ten hours a week saved is an easy yes at $2,000.
š° Ways To Make Money With This
Copy-paste audit, $300ā$500
Map every manual data transfer in one team and rank the top three by hours lost. Buyer: an ops lead who knows something is slow but not what.
No-API automation build, $1,500ā$2,500
One working screen automation, with a human-approval step and a written SOP. Buyer: a firm stuck on software with no API.
Monitoring retainer, $300ā$600 a month
Screens change and automations break. You watch, fix and report. Buyer: every client after the first build.
Industry package, from $2,000
The same automation sold to ten firms that use the same portal. Buyer: brokers, clinics or property managers in one niche.
One rule: never let the agent pay, submit or delete without a human click. Start read-only, then expand.
š Global AI Radar
Americas | Europe / Asia / Global |
|---|---|
Microsoft and Alphabet report tonight, Amazon tomorrow Why it matters: investors want proof that AI spending is turning into revenue. Interest rates are widely expected to stay unchanged at todayās Fed decision. businesstoday Business Today, TradingKey Ā· Oct 28 | Anthropicās IPO filing goes public, and Asian chip stocks rebound Why it matters: the Kospi rose as much as 4.9% as the filing eased funding concerns. AI lab finances are about to become public information. Substack Dow Jones via MarketScreener, Crunchbase News Ā· Oct 26ā27 |
Meta prices a giant stock sale to fund AI Why it matters: Meta raised the common stock part of the offering to $25 billion, from $22.5 billion. Big Tech is now funding AI with shareholdersā money, not just cash flow. aidapted Meta SEC filing Ā· Oct 26ā27 | Mistralās Large 4 is due to go open-weight by Friday Why it matters: Mistralās Hugging Face page lists an open-weights release date of October 31, 2026. European firms get a frontier-class model they can run on their own servers. aiweekly Mistral, Hugging Face, Startup Fortune Ā· Oct 2026 |
Apple holds its āPro and tellā event today Why it matters: it starts at 10 a.m. PT (18:00 CET) in Los Angeles. Watch how much of the Mac pitch is about AI. Reuters, Business Today, GadgetBond Ā· Oct 28 | SK hynix posts record profit as AI memory demand surges Why it matters: operating profit hit KRW 83.33 trillion, up 632% from a year earlier, with an 80% operating margin. Shares closed almost 11% higher. The chips behind AI are still selling as fast as they can be made. biggo CNBC CNBC, Benzinga, Venture Atlas Ā· Oct 28 |
Stop typing AI prompts. Start talking.
You think 4x faster than you type. So why are you typing prompts? Wispr Flow turns your voice into ready-to-paste text inside any AI tool. Speak naturally, tangents and all, and Flow cleans it up. Available on Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android.
š Funding Radar
DeepSeek ~$15B (reported) | Chinaās DeepSeek raised about 100 billion yuan ($14.98 billion) from investors including chipmaker GigaDevice, Meituan and automaker Geely. The round came just two days after the US ordered federal agencies to remove DeepSeekās technology. The US-China AI split now runs on two separate pools of capital. |
Ramp $1.85B | The corporate spend platform raised $1.85 billion at a $60 billion valuation, four months after raising at $44 billion. Its pitch is now tools that help companies manage AI spending. Watching AI costs is becoming its own software category. |
Modal $750M | An AI cloud that raised at a $15.75 billion valuation, led by Accel, after crossing $1 billion in annualized run rate. Its Sandboxes product alone has a $300M run rate. The infrastructure where AI agents run is one of the fastest-growing markets in tech. |
Blackwall $100M | An Estonia-founded company that protects websites with bot mitigation, DDoS protection and AI agent traffic management, now valued at $2.2 billion. More agents on the web means more demand to filter them. Europe now has a cybersecurity scaleup worth over $2B. |
Daytona $60M | Cloud āsandboxesā where AI agents run code and operate software. Led by FirstMark Growth at a $1B valuation, taking total funding to $91M. Agents that click through apps need a safe place to run. That links directly to this weekās main story. |
š Research Spotlight
Ten minutes of AI help can make people worse at working alone.
1,222 participants in randomized trials
~10 minutes of AI use before the effect appeared
61% of AI users mainly asked for direct answers
What happened: In randomized trials, AI help boosted short-term performance, but people did significantly worse without it and gave up more often. The effect appeared after about 10 minutes. arxiv quintarelli
Why it matters: The drop hit only people who asked AI for direct solutions, not those who used it for hints. How your team uses AI matters as much as whether it does. emergentmind
Who should care: managers rolling out AI and anyone onboarding junior staff.
What could change: expect āhint modeā AI tools that keep people practicing.
š¬ Latestly AI Take
This weekās pattern: AI got cheaper to run, and more expensive to build. Meta is selling stock to fund data centers. OpenAI just halved the price of an agent that uses a computer. The builders carry the cost. Operators get the discount. If you sell services, this is the best moment in years to price by outcome instead of hours.
Sources: OpenAI, TrueFoundry, DataCamp, AI Magazine, DataNorth, OpenRouter, MarkTechPost, Technology.org, Kingy AI, DEV Community, Business Today (Malaysia), TradingKey, Meta (SEC filing), Aidapted, MarketScreener (Dow Jones), Crunchbase News, Hugging Face, Startup Fortune, Forklog, AI Weekly, CNBC, Benzinga, Venture Atlas, BigGo Finance, GadgetBond, Business Today (India), TechCrunch, DealStreetAsia, The Standard (Hong Kong), FourWeekMBA, The Paypers, The Next Web, Beinsure, Tech.eu, Dealroom, TechFundingNews, RuntimeWire, arXiv 2604.04721, Berkeley News, Emergent Mind. Reuters items are as reported by DealStreetAsia, ARY News and The Daily Guardian. Bloomberg items are as reported by FourWeekMBA and The Paypers. Data as of October 28, 2026. Income figures are estimates, not guarantees. Product and benchmark claims are the vendors' own. Not legal advice. Latestly AI is independent. Sponsored content clearly labelled. No undisclosed paid placements.
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