🤖 The Blockbrain Brief #3

A field guide to the newest agent features in Edge, Claude, and ChatGPT (and what Blockbrain can borrow).

🎯 Action Points

• Explore Claude Agent Skills, Edge’s updated Copilot Mode, and Claude’s finance features to identify what actually improves productivity and what doesn’t.
• Understand Claude’s attempt at finance focused capabilities to explore more domain-specific features for Blockbrain.
• Deep-dive how Claude integrates third-party apps (e.g., Excel) to create stickier, higher-impact productivity workflows and borrow the patterns that work.

📩 High-level Summary

Agentic Browsers

Microsoft repositions Edge’s Copilot Mode as an “AI browser” with Actions (form-fills, bookings) and Journeys (reason over tabs/history); Opera launches Neon ($19.90/mo) with Chat/Do/Make but early reviews flag verbosity, steering limits, and clunky build tools. Signal: browsers are becoming OS-like task surfaces, but reliability/steerability are the hurdles.

Commerce Integrations

PayPal will power in-chat shopping in ChatGPT, enabling product discovery and checkout inside conversations with phased rollout. Signal: agentic commerce is going mainstream as payments networks plug directly into chat surfaces.

AI Browser Optimized

Atlas-style browsing rewards clean structure: semantic headings, concise sections, public access, and scannable FAQs to improve how pages are read, ranked, and highlighted. Signal: “AI-browser-optimized” content is the new SEO.

AI Product Features

Anthropic ships Claude for Excel (beta) plus finance connectors (LSEG, Moody’s, Aiera, etc.) and Skills for DCFs/comps/coverage turning spreadsheets into AI-aware workspaces; ChatGPT’s Company Knowledge connects Slack/Drive/SharePoint/GitHub for cited, time-filtered answers;

Browsers & Agentic UX

Microsoft Edge reintroduces Copilot Mode as an “AI browser”

Edge’s Copilot Mode officially launched in July with basics like a new-tab search bar and natural voice navigation. Two days after OpenAI unveiled Atlas, Microsoft reintroduced Copilot Mode, making Edge look more explicitly as an ‘AI browser’ similar to Atlas.

Copilot now summarizes, compares, and acts across pages (with permission) via Actions (e.g., form-filling, hotel booking) and Journeys that reason over your open tabs/history. The UI shifts to a new-tab side panel (vs split-screen) but still rides on underlying model capability for quality. It’s explicitly opt-in for cross-page access and designed for supervised, end-to-end tasks like trip planning.

Opera launches Neon, a $19.90/mo AI browser with three agents (Chat, Do, Make)

Chat handles Q&A/summarization, Do performs agentic browsing to click through tasks, and Make lets you generate small tools/apps; Cards are reusable prompt presets.

Reviewers report that Chat tends to be verbose and is sometimes inaccurate about what’s on the page. They also note that Do is difficult to redirect once a task is underway, and that Make, while functional, feels clunky in practice. The ambition is clear, but the current gaps in execution and reliability make the subscription hard to justify today.

Users are Optimizing Websites to be “Atlas-Ready”

The tip is to use ChatGPT to edit site copy so Atlas can read, rank, and highlight sections cleanly. In practice that means semantic structure, clear headings, concise paragraphs, and publicly accessible content (paywalls/interstitials reduce what Atlas can surface). Consider adding scannable summaries/FAQs so Atlas has quotable blocks.

Commerce & Platform Moves

PayPal will embed payments in ChatGPT; merchants can sell in-chat.

Starting next year, users will be able to discover products and check out directly through ChatGPT, with PayPal as the payments backbone

OpenAI is betting its 700M+ weekly users will use the chatbot like a personal shopper; PayPal gets front-row access to agentic commerce. Users will be able to purchase from Shopify and Etsy merchants, and two weeks ago it also announced an e-commerce partnership with Walmart.

The firm added that it will manage routing, payment checks, and other processing on behalf of PayPal merchants transacting in ChatGPT, meaning merchants don’t have to contract directly with OpenAI.

AI Product Updates

ChatGPT adds a GPT-5–based “Company Knowledge” connector layer.

ChatGPT is great at answers; your work context is trapped in tools. Company Knowledge connects docs, messages, emails, tickets, and trackers so the best answer, often spread across them, shows up in one place.

Business/Enterprise/Education orgs can let ChatGPT search Slack, Google Drive, SharePoint, GitHub and more, then answer with citations and time filters. It respects existing permissions and, when enabled, keeps responses grounded in org data (no public web). The system can compose cross-tool briefings (e.g., client prep with threads, docs, and tickets)

Just turn on Company Knowledge, connect your work apps once, and ChatGPT will search across them to answer with cited snippets which resolves conflicts and uses date filters for the most current or time specific view.

What Can It Do?

• Turn customer insights into strategy docs by pulling the latest feedback from Slack, survey takeaways from Slides, and themes from support tickets to inform roadmaps.
• Create reports using the freshest info by assembling campaign contacts/deals from HubSpot, briefs and post-mortems from Docs, and highlights from email into a performance summary.
• Build release plans by scanning GitHub TODOs, related tickets in Linear, and unresolved bugs in Slack—then summarizing what’s outstanding, tracked, and still missing.

Remember Clippy? Meet Mico.

Mico is a customizable animated face living in Copilot that reacts in voice mode, can save memories, and even transforms into Clippy as an Easter egg! Named as a nod to ‘Microsoft Copilot,’ Mico gives Copilot a warm, customizable face that listens, reacts, and even changes color to match your interactions.

Real Talk mirrors your style but pushes back constructively; Learn Live walks you through concepts step-by-step. The fall update adds multi-user chats and new connectors to pull context from email/cloud storage. 

“As we build this, we’re not chasing engagement or optimizing for screen time. We’re building AI that gets you back to your life. That deepens human connection. That earns your trust,”

Anthropic debuts Claude for Excel (beta) & Financial Services

Claude for Excel is a sidebar inside Microsoft Excel where Claude can read, explain, modify, and even create workbooks—tracking its edits, preserving formulas/structure, and letting you jump to referenced cells. Rolling out as a research preview to Max, Enterprise, and Teams

New integrations in Claude bring real-time data and documents into workflows: Aiera (earnings calls/events) + Third Bridge feed, Chronograph (PE portfolio data), Egnyte (governed data rooms), LSEG (live market data), Moody’s (credit research/ratings, company data), and MT Newswires (global market news)

Finance-specific Agent Skills were launched. These are prebuilt skills for comparable company analysis, full DCFs (WACC, scenarios, sensitivities), due-diligence data packs, company teasers/profiles, earnings analyses, and initiating coverage reports

Claude Skill can auto-generate branded YouTube thumbnails

Turn AI learning into actionable tasks. To use a Claude Skill, first enable code execution and file creation, then use the skill-creator to scaffold the project and upload your logo and brand rules. The Skill can analyze top-performing videos and generate thumbnails using PIL (handling layout, placement, and fonts).

You iterate in chat, e.g., ‘Use Roboto’ or ‘Make the text bolder’, until it’s CTR-ready. The same approach works for slide decks or email campaigns, and packaging it as a reusable Skill converts one-off prompts into a repeatable workflow.