What's changed

Course update log

What's new in AI Tools Academy. Newest first.

30 October 2026

A currency sweep against the official release notes for October 2026.

New

• AI at Work: October 2026, the month's product news filtered for people who use these tools at work: what GPT-6 changes about an answer, locked chats, the dates Google has set for retiring Gems, and audio uploads.

Corrections

• ChatGPT, "a tour of the screen". GPT-6 and its Intelligent UI began rolling out on 7 October 2026, so a reply is no longer always a paragraph of text: ChatGPT picks a format to suit the question and can start answering before it has finished thinking. The lesson no longer promises a tidy paragraph, and the Keeping current note covers the rollout order and the Pro reasoning option, which still answers in plain text.
• ChatGPT, "files and data analysis". Audio uploads arrived on 6 October 2026 on paid plans and workspaces. The list of supported formats now includes audio, with a warning that a transcript is a draft.
• ChatGPT, "security and data controls". Added locked chats, which arrived on 20 October 2026. They hide a conversation from your history, pinned chats and search behind a four-digit PIN or your device unlock, but they are not encryption and they do not change your retention or model-improvement settings.
• ChatGPT, "connectors and MCP". iCloud Mail and Calendar became connected apps on 27 October 2026, on every plan.
• Gemini, "reusable Gemini instructions". Google has published the rest of the Gems timeline. Gems move into the Settings panel of the Gemini app on 17 November 2026, and stop working from 1 March 2027 at the earliest on business and enterprise accounts and 1 June 2027 at the earliest on education accounts, with anything left migrated to draft skills. Workspace Studio flows that already use an Ask a Gem step keep working, but new flows cannot add one.
• Copilot, "Pages, Notebooks and agents". A Notebook can now take a web link as a reference, the lighter Notebooks design reached the Copilot app on iOS on 27 October 2026, and Microsoft added a Learning agent in the same release.
• ChatGPT cheat sheet. Audio recordings added to the list of things you can attach on a paid plan.

Maintenance

• Microsoft stopped publishing Power Platform release-plan waves after September 2026 and moved new capabilities to its AI at Work roadmap, so the monthly sweep in MAINTENANCE.md now points somewhere current.

21 October 2026

• New judgement checks across the main lessons, applied exercises in short courses, and practical acceptance checks in role guides and scenarios.
• Revised guidance on reusable Gemini instructions, source checking, AI-assisted assessment evidence and privacy.
• More varied checkpoint answer positions, clearer quiz feedback, safer backup restoration and improved search keyboard behaviour.
• Certificate purchases and new issuance remain unavailable while buyer verification is strengthened. Existing signed certificates can still be checked.
• Updated the site framework and MDX renderer. Lesson revision dates are separate from product guidance verification dates.

27 September 2026

A new practical layer: places to practise, decide and apply, not just read.

New

• Practice lab (/practice/): one home for the interactive practice.
• Can I put this in ChatGPT? A decision tool with 26 workplace examples and a five-question check on your own situation. Each result is lower risk, caution or high risk, with the reasons, what to remove first and what to check. It runs entirely in your browser.
• Do this job with AI. Five complete workplace scenarios with fictional files to download: meeting notes to actions, comparing supplier quotes, replying to a difficult complaint, turning a policy into a staff briefing and analysing survey feedback.
• Spot the Hallucination. Twelve realistic AI answers, from easy to hard, to practise telling invented, outdated and overstated claims from sound ones.
• AI for managers. A role hub with seven guides: managing a team that uses AI, shadow AI, choosing suitable tasks, reviewing AI-assisted work, measuring time saved, introducing AI without panic and simple team rules. Includes three templates.
• AI for office and admin teams. A role hub with seven workflow guides and five templates. It replaces the short EA and PA guide, which now redirects here.
• How to use AI safely at work. The short guide is now a full cornerstone guide, with a five-question framework and a pre-AI checklist. "What can I put into ChatGPT at work?" is also now a full guide.
• New guides: how to anonymise a document before using AI, and should I tell my employer I used AI?
• AI Made This Worse. A series of seven short, fictional cases where AI was the wrong choice, and what worked better.

Updated

• AI skills health check now has fourteen statements across six areas, asks about your role, and gives a suggested route. Your answers stay in your browser so you can come back to them.
• Which AI tool should I use for work? now asks five questions, including what your organisation has approved, and can suggest not using AI at all. Its product descriptions are reviewed monthly.

Launch checks (later the same day)

• Menus. The phone menu now links to AI for managers, AI for office teams and About, so the role guides are one tap away on every page.
• Fixes. Pages no longer fail to load if your browser holds progress saved in an unexpected format. Form fields no longer make iPhones zoom in. Fifty-one course lessons have proper search descriptions instead of cut-off ones.
• Rechecked. The ChatGPT lessons on choosing a thinking level, Temporary Chat, memory, writing blocks and custom GPTs were checked again against OpenAI's release notes; no further changes were needed.

26 September 2026

Corrections from a check against OpenAI's and Anthropic's release notes, plus new guides and tools.

Corrections

• ChatGPT Level 1, "A tour of the screen". The model picker section now describes how choosing a model works on each plan: Free and Go have a Think button and no picker; Plus, Pro and Business have a thinking control starting at Instant. On 14 September OpenAI stopped Instant switching itself up to Thinking on Plus and Pro, so the old advice to leave it on Auto has gone. The note on ads now says personalised ads are on by default where offered, with a setting to turn them off.
• ChatGPT Level 2, "Editing long drafts with ChatGPT". Rewritten around writing blocks and code blocks, which is how OpenAI's help now describes the feature that began as Canvas. Claims about version history and highlight-to-edit shortcuts, which the current help no longer describes, were removed; the activity now uses undo and saved copies. The Level 2 checkpoint and the glossary were updated to match.
• ChatGPT, memory and security lessons. Temporary chats now let you choose Personalised (can read your memories, custom instructions and plugins) or Unpersonalised at the start. Neither creates memories.
• Claude Level 1, "A tour of the screen". Notes Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5, and that Claude Cowork became part of ordinary chat on 16 September.
• Claude Level 2, "Styles and memory". Memory is now saved as individual topics, viewed and edited under Settings, Memory, Topics. Sensitive topics are left out by default; an earlier version of this lesson said the opposite.
• Copilot Level 2, "Pages, Notebooks and agents". Flags Microsoft's September redesign of Copilot Notebooks.

Full sweep (later the same day)

Every lesson in the main course was re-checked against the vendors' own help centres and release notes. Dates were updated on each page that was checked; these are the ones where something changed.

• ChatGPT. Connectors are now "connected apps", managed under Settings, Plugins, and can come bundled in plugins. Custom GPTs retire on 11 December 2026 (some Enterprise workspaces have until February 2027). ChatGPT agent has been retired in favour of ChatGPT Work, on Plus and above. Scheduled Tasks now run on every plan, with event triggers on Plus and above. Record Mode is Mac desktop only, up to four hours. Projects: memory is a per-Project setting, and only project-only memory keeps a Project sealed off. Memory lesson: unverifiable claims about a "time-aware" rebuild removed. Lockdown Mode's location and restrictions corrected.
• Microsoft Copilot. Explains the three licence labels (Copilot Chat Basic, M365 Copilot Basic, M365 Copilot Premium) that decide whether Copilot appears inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, replacing a statement that in-app Copilot always needs the paid add-on. Copilot Pro is described as discontinued, not "retiring in August". Notebooks: what they can produce, the new design, and licence needs.
• Claude. Cowork is now part of every chat (Pro and Max first). Artifacts: the Artifacts tab, templates for designs, decks and docs on paid plans, export options. Claude in Chrome is generally available on paid plans; the Office add-ins are now Claude for Microsoft 365, covering Word and Outlook too. Connectors are on every plan (Free limited to one custom connector); Research needs a paid plan; Free is capped at five Projects.
• Gemini. Gemini in Chrome is available in the UK; its auto browse feature is a US-only preview. Scheduled actions: up to ten, managed under Settings and help. Gems: the unverified "ten files" limit removed, and NotebookLM notebooks can be added as knowledge.
• Power Automate. AI Builder credits end on 1 November 2026, after which AI steps use Copilot Credits.
• Foundations. Ads in ChatGPT: personalisation is on by default where offered; the claim that ads reached the UK in May could not be confirmed and was removed.

New

• Guides to common questions, starting with what you can put into ChatGPT at work, using AI safely, checking AI answers, and ChatGPT or Copilot for work.
• Free tools: an AI policy starter that drafts your team's AI rules, and a cautious time-saved calculator. Both run in your browser and send nothing.
• AI training for teams, for organisations that want help rolling AI out safely.
• The specialist courses and paid workbooks now say plainly that they aren't on sale yet, instead of showing a price and a licence box.

13 September 2026

Corrections to the ChatGPT and automation lessons, from a fact-check against the live products.

Corrections

• Phase 6, "Custom assistants compared" (now "Custom assistants compared: Projects, Gems and Copilot agents"). OpenAI has stopped new custom GPTs being created on personal accounts, and plans to retire them in favour of plugins, starting with Enterprise workspaces in December 2026. The lesson now uses ChatGPT Projects, which work on every plan, and adds workspace agents for Business, Enterprise and Edu plans. The decision table no longer suggests a custom GPT as the free way to try the idea.
• ChatGPT Level 3, "Custom GPTs" (now "Reusable assistants: build one for a repeated job"). Rebuilt around a ChatGPT Project, since personal accounts can no longer create GPTs. The Level 3 capstone, the Record Mode stretch activity, the Level 3 and Phase 6 checkpoints, the ChatGPT cheat sheet and the glossary were updated to match.
• Phase 6, "Zapier and Make vs Power Automate". Make now counts credits, not operations. Added the current free plans: Make gives 1,000 credits a month, two active scenarios and a 15-minute minimum gap between runs; Zapier gives 100 tasks a month, two-step Zaps only, and checks for new data every 15 minutes.

13 September 2026

Short courses and workbooks.

New

• A Short courses section, linked from the top menu, the course menu and the home page. Each course has four short modules, a knowledge check after each, and a final task you do on your own work.
• Three free courses:
  • Prove It: catching AI when it is wrong, before it costs you.
  • The AI-Safe Desk: what you can and cannot put into an AI tool at work, ending with a personal rulebook.
  • The Team Brain: build a shared assistant your team can ask instead of you.
• The Finisher's Workbooks: fill-in workbooks that take one job from start to finished. Sound Like Yourself is a free download.

Checked before publishing

• Every course and workbook was checked against current product documentation and UK guidance, and corrected where things had moved. Examples: ChatGPT's workspace agents replacing custom GPTs on business plans; the full UK GDPR list of special category data; what temporary chats actually keep; pass and distinction grading after the 2025 apprenticeship assessment reforms; and the limits of the free Zapier and Make plans.

Fixes

• Tables in lessons now display as tables, not as rows of vertical bars.

12 September 2026

Free lessons, checkpoints, cheat sheets and completion certificates remain available.

12 September 2026

The September currency sweep, plus a set of sharing and behind-the-scenes fixes.

Kept current

Checked every product's release notes for changes since the August sweep. Most of what shipped is additive, so these are new "keeping current" mentions rather than corrections:

• ChatGPT: Box, Dropbox and SharePoint joined Google Drive as connectors; a temporary chat can now use your saved memory and be saved, so "temporary" no longer always means "no personalisation".
• Copilot: the web and work chats merged into one view with a "Work IQ" toggle, and the app got a refreshed design.
• Claude: memory now works across chat and Cowork, with a new "sensitive topics" setting worth checking.
• Gemini: a new Windows desktop app; Google Vids can now turn a document into a narrated video; and a standalone image product (Pics).
• Power Automate was quiet this cycle; nothing needed changing.

Sharing and behind the scenes

• Every page, not just lessons, now has its own title and description when shared, so a link to the certificates page, a cheat sheet or the About page shows a proper preview instead of the generic one.
• The sitemap now tells search engines when each lesson was last checked, so updated lessons get recrawled sooner.
• Added a few more security headers.

20 August 2026

Completion certificates, and a behind-the-scenes SEO fix.

Certificates

• A new Certificates page. Pass a tool at Power User level and you earn a certificate for it, six in all, including an AI Champion for finishing everything. Download it as an image, or add it to your LinkedIn profile in one click. You type your name once and it stays in this browser; it travels only inside links you choose to share. Each certificate links to a verify page that explains, plainly, that this is a self-recorded record of completing a free, open course.

Behind the scenes

• Fixed the site's canonical and social-share addresses, which still pointed at the old Netlify subdomain rather than aitoolsacademy.co.uk. The old address now forwards to the real one, and shared lesson links get a proper preview image.

20 August 2026

The August currency sweep. Checked each product's release notes for changes since the mid-July sweep and updated the lessons whose specifics had moved. Only the lessons listed here had their "last checked" dates changed.

Corrections

• ChatGPT, "Agent Mode in plain English". OpenAI retired the standalone Agent Mode toggle in August 2026 and folded the capability into ChatGPT Work, with the research side reachable through Deep research. Reframed the lesson so it no longer describes a switch that has gone; the supervision judgement it teaches is unchanged. Confirmed in-product that the toggle is no longer present.
• ChatGPT, "A tour of the screen". The model choice was simplified again: instead of picking between Instant and Thinking models you now turn on a single Think control (a how-much-effort setting on paid plans). Updated the picker section to match what is on screen, and replaced an out-of-date model help link with the release notes.
• Gemini, "A tour of the screen". De-pinned the named default model, since the Flash line has moved on since mid-July. The lesson now points at the model switcher on your screen rather than a version number that dates within weeks.

New capabilities noted (as "keeping current" mentions)

• Copilot Notebooks can now generate a Word document, Excel workbook, PowerPoint deck or interactive mind map from a notebook's sources.
• Copilot in Outlook now reasons across your whole inbox and calendar, not just one open thread.
• Gemini in Docs can now generate and edit images inside a document and work with comment threads.
• Gemini video generation and editing in Google Vids, including personal avatars.

Verified and unchanged

• Power Automate and Claude showed no beginner-facing changes needing a lesson edit in this window. Their lessons stand as fact-checked in July.

15 July 2026

An audit-driven maintenance release: fixing what the July site audit found, and starting a run of behind-the-scenes improvements.

Fixes

• Attribution and contact. The About page now explains who maintains the course, and a real contact address replaces the old placeholder everywhere it appeared.
• Phase 6 restored. Confirmed the Cross-tool mastery phase is exactly eight items in the right order, with a clean Continue chain through to the whole-course exam.
• Sample files repaired. Fixed a punctuation glitch across the Fernway pack, and rebuilt a mangled org chart, while keeping the deliberately messy sales export messy: that mess is part of the exercise.
• Cheat sheets surfaced. Every one-page cheat sheet now has a home in the sidebar and a link from its phase's final checkpoint, and its own heading.
• Links and glossary. Added a proper index page for the sample files, added a "knowledge cut-off" glossary entry, fixed a glossary link, and repointed two dead Microsoft Power Automate links to their current pages.
• Clearer checkpoints. Trimmed the checkpoint intros so the pass rules are stated once, not twice.

Under the bonnet

• Hand-written search descriptions for every lesson and checkpoint, a favicon and web app manifest, and sensible caching and security headers for the site.

14 July 2026

A currency catch-up on the June and July 2026 releases, plus a set of website improvements. Only the lessons listed here had their "last checked" dates moved.

New lesson

• Phase 6, "The AI coworker". A new lesson on the autonomous coworker products every vendor shipped in 2026 (ChatGPT Work, Copilot Cowork, Claude Cowork, Gemini Spark). It teaches the category, not the branding: how a coworker differs from a chat and from a supervised agent run, the governance questions to ask at work, and when a plain flow still beats an agent.

Corrections and updates

• Phase 0, The 2026 tool landscape. Fixed an error: Copilot no longer only "uses OpenAI's models". Since mid-2026 Copilot Chat can also use Anthropic's Claude and often picks the model for you. Added notes on model-picker tier names and on ads appearing in some free tiers.
• Phase 0, Privacy and safe use. Added a short section on ads and personalised targeting in free AI tiers, and why not to opt in at work.
• ChatGPT (Phase 1). Canvas lesson rewritten around the current inline editing experience (the side-by-side panel now survives only on legacy models). Added the 9 July 2026 desktop app and ChatGPT Work to the interface and Agent Mode lessons; refreshed the Memory lesson for the June 2026 rebuild; added Lockdown Mode to the security lesson, tied back to the Phase 0 prompt-injection teaching.
• Copilot (Phase 2). Added a consistent "if you don't see Copilot in the app, it's licensing" note to the in-app lessons; widened Notebooks to Copilot Chat users; added Copilot Cowork and reframed the Power Automate handoff as a three-way choice (flow, agent or coworker).
• Claude (Phase 3). Broadened the agentic lesson to cover Claude Cowork for non-developers; added a frontier-model note to the interface tour and Microsoft 365 write tools via connectors.
• Gemini (Phase 4). Refreshed model defaults; expanded the NotebookLM lesson for its June 2026 upgrade; folded "Fill with Gemini" into the Sheets lesson; added the consumer agent layer (Spark, Daily Brief) and the AI Expanded Access add-on.
• Power Automate (Phase 5). Noted Advanced Connector Policies replacing the classic DLP model, and refreshed the agent-flow direction for 2026 wave 1.

Diary note

• Worth a re-tour of the Power Automate maker portal as 2026 wave 1 lands (April to September 2026). The agent-flow and Copilot Studio surfaces are shifting, so the written walkthroughs may drift.

Website improvements

• Per-page titles and descriptions, a sitemap, canonical and social-share tags.
• A mobile navigation drawer, so a lesson opens at the top on a phone instead of below the whole course menu.
• A footer with About and Privacy pages, stating plainly: no accounts, no tracking, no cookies.
• Download and restore your progress as a backup file (on the My library page).
• The progress counter now shows the current phase, not the whole course.
• A light and dark theme toggle in the top bar.

13 July 2026

All lessons checked against the live products in July 2026. We worked through every tool covered in the course and made sure the menus, features and steps match what you actually see today, updating the wording wherever the products had moved on. If you spot anything that no longer matches, let us know.

7 July 2026

Version 3 relaunch. A ground-up refresh of the whole Academy, built around getting real work done:

• Three levels per tool: each tool now has a beginner, intermediate, and advanced path, so you can start where you are and go as deep as you need.
• Workplace focus: lessons and examples are built around everyday work tasks, using safe, fictional practice material rather than real data.
• Prompt libraries: ready-made, editable prompts for common jobs, grouped by tool and task.
• Personal library: save your own prompts, notes, and favourites in one place and come back to them.
• Test-out: already confident on a topic? Take a short test-out to skip ahead and only spend time on what's new to you.
• Search: find any lesson, term, or prompt across the whole course in seconds.
• Progress summary: a printable summary of what you've completed, to show a line manager if you want to.

Due a review

These pages were last checked more than 90 days ago. They may still be right, but the products move quickly, so read them with that in mind.