Changelog

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

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 names Tom Ayed, 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.