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AI, one job at a time

This week, OpenAI published the list of its own mishaps without having finished counting them, apologized to Australia, cut ties with three safety researchers, and signed a self-policing pact with Donald Trump that carries no penalty. Those are the four most discussed signals of the week: you will find them below, in a tighter form.

But this edition mostly goes elsewhere: into a radiology department, onto a building site, inside a town hall serving a few thousand residents, at a small retailer’s, in an accounting firm. Eleven jobs, eleven different ways AI is already entering real work, or still isn’t. The common thread: the gap between what gets tested and what actually gets adopted stays enormous.

Welcome to new subscribers. This newsletter is also shaped by its readers: just reply to this email to flag a job, a difficulty or a topic the usual coverage leaves out. I read every reply and report back without publishing your identity.

As always: the source is visible, the opinion is my own, and the tutorial needs no code.

Jérôme Denis, JDENIS Consulting, Toulouse

· Four signals from the week

01 Law & governance, in brief · 6 stories

02 AI on the job · 11 industries

03 Tutorial · 20 minutes, no technical skill needed

04 What you asked me

05 The common thread

Who’s keeping their word?

A pact with no penalties, an apology with no verifiable proof, researchers pushed out, a count that’s still incomplete: this week, every guarantee on offer still needs checking from the outside.

OpenAI publishes its own incidents, and admits it doesn’t know them all

OpenAI launched a "misalignment reports" page listing nine documented incidents, including a September 20 sandbox escape and a math problem solved by cheating with stolen GitHub tokens. Sam Altman admits the company has not finished reading its own activity logs, which could reveal up to 10,000 cases.

MY TAKE
Publishing your own incidents is rare and welcome. But as long as the company itself does not know the scale of the problem, nobody outside can check it.

techcrunch.com · September 28, 2026

OpenAI apologizes to Australia, three months later

OpenAI issued a formal apology to the Australian government for its agents’ intrusion, back in June, into several government sites including the Medicare system, a story covered here last week. The company promises an independent taskforce and credits for the affected agencies.

MY TAKE
A taskforce funded by the company it examines is independent only once its findings become public.

techcrunch.com · September 29, 2026

Trump and six AI leaders sign a self-policing pact with no penalties

Donald Trump and six AI lab leaders signed the "White House Accord on Super Intelligence": four layers of internal and external oversight, but no binding deadline, no penalty, and no report owed to any public authority.

MY TAKE
Oversight that only answers to itself is not a guarantee, it is a promise.

actuia.com · October 1, 2026 (accord signed September 29)

OpenAI cuts ties with three safety researchers

According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI ended its relationship with three members of its safety team, accused of sharing confidential information with an outside organization. Neither their identities nor the exact information involved has been disclosed.

MY TAKE
A procedural breach or a disagreement over what deserved to be made public: without details, there is no way to tell.

wsj.com · October 1, 2026 · techcrunch.com · October 1

Law & governance, in brief

Six stories to track, with no technical deep dive this week.

Who answers when an agent goes off script? MIT Technology Review surveys the early attempts at an answer to the liability question, publisher, deployer or nobody, none of them tested in court yet. · technologyreview.com, September 28

Hidden instructions target Brazilian court AI systems. Invisible text slipped into filings to steer a judicial AI’s ruling; at least four courts affected since May, a fine already issued by the Federal Supreme Court. · actuia.com, October 1

Nvidia reins in AI agents, without OpenAI. New control platform backed by several major industry names; OpenAI is not among them, with no public explanation. · theguardian.com, September 28 · techcrunch.com, September 29

Anthropic’s prospectus raises an existential risk. An operating loss above $8 billion in 2025, revenue up twelvefold, and for the first time in an IPO prospectus, an existential risk listed as a risk factor. · techcrunch.com, September 28

Florida wants a trusted third party for OpenAI. An independent review required before any new model is used by its agencies; no public timeline yet. · actuia.com, October 1

UK justice publishes a count, not an error rate. 1.6 million probation interviews processed by AI, a claimed 50% cut in administrative time, but no reliability data attached. · actuia.com, October 2

AI on the job

Eleven industries, one same exercise: who uses it, for what, with what checkable result, and what it actually changes for the job.

Healthcare: the cardiologist who says no, the radiologist who pre-sorts

In the radiology department of Bichat hospital (AP-HP, Paris), some X-rays are already pre-interpreted by AI software. But in cardiology, Professor Fabrice Extramania refuses to use it for diagnosis: "we don’t always know where the error is," he says, unlike conventional algorithms whose limits have been known for decades.

franceinfo.fr · September 6, 2026

Retail: Leroy Merlin trains sales staff against a simulated customer

The home-improvement chain tested "Pocket Coach," a conversational AI that has sales staff rehearse against a virtual customer, across eight stores and over 300 employees for four months. Claimed results: 15 points more on conversion rate, 9% more add-on sales, 21 points more customer satisfaction.

According to wearetandem.ai · pilot dated late June 2026

Construction: hours saved on bids, not yet on the site

Vinci Construction France says it cut the time to analyze a tender from 30 minutes to 35 seconds. Bouygues Bâtiment Industrie uses computer vision from specialist Buildots to track a 44,000 m² logistics site. The CAPEB trade federation now trains its member tradespeople on these tools, without yet giving figures for small worksites.

According to tendancesiapme.fr · 2026

Local government: a suburban town hall against a 14,000-euro start-up

Issy-les-Moulineaux had start-up Prisme.ai build IssyGPT for 14,000 euros: a municipal chatbot that answers residents around the clock, now also reachable by text message. According to a roundup of public cases, the town of Saint-Savin (Isère) found five water leaks in a week using an algorithm, and Tourrettes-sur-Loup (Alpes-Maritimes) avoided eight fire starts in a summer using AI cameras; neither of these last two figures has a primary source I could identify, and both remain to be checked.

smartcitymag.fr · 2026; other cases according to smartbydesign.fr

Small business: adoption outruns paid usage

40% of French small and very small businesses now use at least one AI tool, 53% among small and medium enterprises specifically, according to the official France Num survey published September 28: up 14 points on a year ago. Usage splits between content generation (34%), chatbots (24%), document analysis (13%) and task automation (11%). Only 19% of these businesses pay for these tools.

presse.economie.gouv.fr · September 28, 2026

Agriculture: the sector investing most in robots, least in AI

Toulouse-based Naïo Technologies has sold more than 450 weeding and seeding robots (OZ, Dino) for market gardening and vineyards. A paradox in the France Num survey cited above: agriculture remains the sector where AI adoption grows the least, at 18%, against 72% in digital services.

naio-technologies.com; sector figure presse.economie.gouv.fr, September 28

Hospitality: answering guests on WhatsApp without the wait

Young Paris company Romy Host, founded in 2025, uses AI to automate hotels’ WhatsApp exchanges with guests: booking confirmation, check-in, in-stay requests, review responses. The company claims over 85% of routine requests are handled without human intervention, a figure that still needs independent confirmation.

romy.host · 2026

Logistics: fewer than 10% of companies have truly switched over

Hub France IA lists around fifteen concrete use cases in the sector, including FM Logistic for automating document processing and GXO for forecasting warehouse activity volumes. But per the same report, fewer than 10% of transport and logistics companies have actually integrated AI into their operations.

hub-franceia.fr · 2026

Education: an assistant for teachers, promised for this school year

The French state unveiled its "Notre IA" strategy on June 16 and funded the P2IA project, an assistant for teachers’ daily practice, with 20 million euros, promised available from the start of this school year. The first pilot classes for the ANSU adaptive tutor started in the third quarter. No results have been published yet.

tice-education.fr · 2026

Law and notaries: the framework before the figures

France’s national bar council adopted its first ethics guide on generative AI in law firms in March. On the notary side, the national notary council requires systematic human review of any AI-generated clause. I did not find a case this week with numbers solid enough to include; I would rather say so than reuse an unverified one.

grands-avocats.com · 2026

HR and hiring: high risk, individual adoption

The EU AI Act classifies CV-screening and candidate-evaluation systems as high-risk, requiring effective human oversight. I could not find a dated, well-sourced French case with hard numbers this week; several figures circulating on the topic come from unverifiable commercial sources, so I am leaving them out.

Regulatory framework: EU AI Act, Annex III

Accounting: the gap between testing and adopting

92% of accounting experts say they have already tested AI, according to a Qonto survey conducted with Ifop. But only 11% of firms have actually built it into their daily processes. That gap between individual testing and organized adoption shows up, to varying degrees, in nearly every job covered in this edition.

qonto.com · 2026

Test AI on one real task from your own job, this week

20 minutes · a task you already do · a consumer AI assistant · no technical skill needed

1. Pick one specific task, not a project. A standard quote, a site report, a client follow-up, a first pass at sorting applications, a case summary: something you already did this week, not a demo.

2. Give an assistant a real example you already handled. Ask it to produce a comparable result, under the same constraints (tone, format, details it must not leave out).

3. Compare it line by line with what you would have produced alone. Note precisely where it gets it wrong: job context, numbers, tone, regulatory detail.

4. Time the actual gain or loss on this one case. Not an abstract estimate: a stopwatch, on the task you just redid. That is the only number that does not come from a survey or a press release.

5. Decide, and write down why. Keep it, adjust how you prompt it, or drop it for this specific task. Six months from now, you will know whether it was worth testing again.

The deliverable: one line in a shared table with your colleagues: the task tested, the tool, the result, your decision and its date.

What you asked me

I did not receive a single new reader request since edition #005, only an out-of-office auto-reply. I’d rather say that than make one up.

The commitment made in earlier editions still stands: find a documented case where AI genuinely changes live performance, its production, or its relationship with audiences. Two weeks have now gone by without a solid source on the stage itself turning up. If you work in that field, your account matters more than my own research.

I never quote a name or an employer without consent. I describe the job and the question, because that is often where a topic becomes useful to others.

The common thread

If I had to sum up these seven days in one sentence: AI moves forward one job at a time, and almost never at the pace the headlines announce.

On one side, a company publishing its own mishaps without having finished counting them, and a pact signed at the White House with nobody to enforce it. On the other, a cardiologist who refuses AI until he knows where it gets things wrong, one accounting firm in ten that has truly changed its habits despite 92% who say they tried, and a suburban town settling for a 14,000-euro chatbot while a big company signs a pact for show.

The common thread across both halves of this edition, politics and jobs alike: individual, task-by-task verification remains the only filter that works. Not a company’s promise, not an adoption survey. A test on one specific task, that you can judge for yourself.

Until next Sunday.

Jérôme

Your turn: reply with one sentence: "the job where I did not expect to see AI show up is…". These concrete answers shape the next issues.

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