Two Of These Twelve Upgrades Need The Tool They Replace
Two columns, twelve rows, a job label down the left-hand side. 2025 in red with a cross. 2026 in green with a tick. Google, Excel, Chrome, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, PowerPoint, Canva, Gmail – all crossed out. The caption is blunt about what that means: “if you’re still stuck in 2025, you’re working too hard.”
I want to take one row seriously and see where it leads.
Row two says: SPREADSHEETS – Excel ✗ → Claude in Excel ✓
Claude for Excel is an add-in. It runs inside Excel – on the web, on Windows with a Microsoft 365 subscription, on Mac – and it works on the formulas and charts in your workbook. You install it from the Microsoft marketplace. Which means the thing in the green column cannot run without the thing in the red column. You cannot stop using Excel and start using Claude in Excel. The row crosses out its own prerequisite.
Row ten does the same thing. EMAIL – Gmail ✗ → Google Workspace Studio ✓. Workspace Studio is Google’s no-code agent builder; the agents it makes act across Gmail, Drive and Chat. It automates your Gmail. It is not an email client and it does not replace one.
So two of the twelve upgrades require the tool they are marked as replacing. That is not a gotcha – both are genuinely useful products, and the card is pointing at something real. It is a sign that the axis is wrong.
The card this post is about
Watch the original reel: “Legacy vs Future – 2025 vs 2026”
Twelve jobs, from SEARCH to THUMBNAIL GEN, footed “Tools change fast. Check what fits your work before you switch.” The table below reproduces every row as printed.
Google is crossed out twice and ticked twice
Here is the second piece of evidence that the year is not doing the work.
Google appears in the 2025 column twice: row one (SEARCH) and row eleven (RESEARCH). It also appears in the 2026 column twice: Gemini is Google, and Google Workspace Studio is Google. Same company, both sides of the line, on the same card.
If the divider were really old-versus-new, or legacy-versus-future, a company could not be on both sides of it. So something else is being sorted here, and it is worth naming because once you name it the whole card becomes useful instead of alarming.
Diagram: operate or brief
Look at what changes as you move left to right on this card. On the left you operate: you move the pixels yourself, you write the formula yourself, you cut the timeline yourself. On the right you brief: you describe a result and something produces a draft of it.
| Left column: you OPERATE it | Right column: you BRIEF it | |
|---|---|---|
| What you supply | The actions. You click, drag, type the formula, cut the timeline | The intent. You describe the result you want |
| What the tool supplies | Precision. It does exactly what you told it, every time | A draft. It does roughly what it understood |
| Where the skill lives | In your hands. Years of shortcuts and muscle memory | In your description. Knowing what to ask for, and what good looks like |
| What it is good at | The last 10% – the exact crop, the specific cell, the frame-accurate cut | The first 80% – getting from blank page to something you can react to |
| How it fails | Slowly. You know exactly what you did wrong | Confidently. It hands you a finished-looking wrong answer |
| What you still have to do | Nothing. The output is what you made | Check it. Every single time. This step never goes away |
That is a real and significant shift, and it is the one the card has spotted. It just is not a shift from one year to the next. Briefing tools existed in 2024; operating tools will still be the right answer in 2030 for the jobs that need precision. The two modes are not sequential, they are complementary – which is exactly why rows two and ten ended up recommending an add-on while marking its host with a cross.
All twelve rows, with the move named
The first three columns below are the card’s own text, unedited – including its job labels, which are better than most cards manage. The last two are ours.
| Job (card’s label) | 2025 ✗ | 2026 ✓ | What the move actually is | Our note (not on the card) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SEARCH | Gemini | Operate → brief | Ten blue links you sift, versus one answer you have to verify. Same company. Genuinely different mode of working | |
| SPREADSHEETS | Excel | Claude in Excel | Add-on, not replacement | It is an add-in that runs inside Excel and needs a Microsoft 365 subscription on Windows. The left column is a prerequisite, not a rival |
| BROWSER | Chrome | Perplexity Comet | Operate → brief | A real swap. You stop navigating and start delegating the navigating – which also means a browser now acts on your behalf. Worth knowing before you log it into things |
| IMAGE EDITING | Photoshop | Nano Banana | Different job | Prompt-editing versus pixel control. Nano Banana will change a whole image beautifully; it will not let you mask one hair at 400% zoom |
| VIDEO EDITING | Premiere Pro | Kling | Different job | Kling generates footage. Premiere edits yours. You cannot cut your own interview in Kling. The label on this row says EDITING and the right column does not edit |
| WRITING | ChatGPT | ViralSky.ai | Brief → brief | Both sides are brief-style tools. This is product preference, not an era change. ViralSky is a small indie product built around viral post templates |
| NOTE-TAKING | Fireflies | Granola | Brief → brief | Two AI note-takers. A fair comparison, but neither one is “2025”. Recording other people has consent rules that vary by country – that applies to both |
| PRESENTATIONS | PowerPoint | Gamma | Operate → brief | The cleanest row on the card. Describe the deck, get a deck. Check whether you can export to .pptx if anyone will ever edit it without you |
| DESIGN | Canva | Vislo | Unclear | We could not confirm what Vislo is, and the card does not say. Before you move design work into it, open the link yourself |
| Gmail | Google Workspace Studio | Add-on, not replacement | Workspace Studio builds agents that act across Gmail, Drive and Chat. It automates Gmail. It is not an inbox | |
| RESEARCH | Perplexity | Operate → brief | Note the card splits SEARCH from RESEARCH and gives them different answers. That is a sharper distinction than most lists make, and it is correct | |
| THUMBNAIL GEN | Midjourney | SkySnail.io | Brief → brief | Both are prompt-driven image tools. SkySnail is a small indie thumbnail generator; Midjourney is not “legacy” by any definition |
Three rows already had a 2026 tool in the 2025 column
Count the fourth column and a pattern falls out. Five rows are a genuine operate-to-brief shift. Two are add-ons sitting on top of their own host. Two are a different job wearing the same label. And three – WRITING, NOTE-TAKING, THUMBNAIL GEN – have a brief-style tool on both sides.
ChatGPT is not a 2025 tool in any meaningful sense; neither is Fireflies, and neither is Midjourney. You already describe what you want to all three and they already produce a draft. Putting a red cross on them does not describe a change in how work is done – it describes a preference for a different product.
That matters because those three rows are the ones where the card is asking the most and justifying the least. Swapping Chrome for an agentic browser is a genuine change in your working day. Swapping Midjourney for SkySnail is swapping one prompt box for another prompt box, and the only honest reason to do it is that one of them makes better thumbnails for you – which is a question about your thumbnails, not about the year.
It is also worth noticing the scale gap hiding in the right-hand column. The left side is Google, Microsoft, Adobe and Alphabet. The right side mixes those same giants with three small indie products – ViralSky, Vislo, SkySnail – at least one of which we could not identify at all. Small is not bad; some of the best tools anyone uses are one-person products. But a one-person product can be excellent and disappear, and the card gives you no way to tell which of the twelve carries that risk. We went through the four ways that ends in a post about who actually owns your free stack.
So which column should you be in?
Both, per job. That is not a cop-out – it is the only answer the add-on rows permit, since two of them literally require both. Here is the version you can act on.
| Job | Brief it when… | Operate it when… | The tell that you picked wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search / research | You want an orientation on something unfamiliar, fast | You need the primary source, the exact page, the original wording | You are quoting a number and cannot say where it came from |
| Spreadsheets | You are exploring – “what does this data say?” | The number goes to a client, a tax office or a payout | You shipped a figure you could not reproduce by hand |
| Image editing | You want a different version of the whole image | You need one specific thing changed and nothing else to move | Something in the background quietly changed and you did not notice |
| Video | You need footage you do not have and cannot film | You are cutting your own material to a rhythm | You generated a shot when you already had the real one |
| Writing | Blank page, first draft, you need something to react to | It is your voice, your claim, your name on it | It reads fluently and says nothing you actually believe |
| Presentations | Structure and layout, which is most of the work | One slide carries the argument the whole meeting turns on | You cannot defend a slide somebody asks about |
| Triage, summarising, routing – the volume problem | The message changes a relationship or commits you to something | An agent sent something you would have worded differently |
The last column is the useful one. Each of those tells is cheap to check and expensive to miss, and none of them has anything to do with which year it is.
This is the same sorting we keep ending up with. A card of sixty tools turned out to be ten slots with six candidates each; a card of thirteen swaps turned out to hinge on whether you were replacing an interface, a catalogue or your own address. Every time, the author’s axis is the least useful one in the picture, and re-sorting on your own axis is where the value is.
Four honest caveats
The job labels are the best thing on this card. Most swap lists give you two columns and leave you to work out what the row is for. This one tells you: SEARCH, SPREADSHEETS, BROWSER, EMAIL. It even splits SEARCH from RESEARCH and gives them different answers, which is a genuinely sharp distinction – orienting yourself is not the same job as finding a source you can cite. Credit where it is due.
The footer is right and the headline overrides it. At the bottom: “Tools change fast. Check what fits your work before you switch.” That sentence makes the decision personal and conditional, which is correct. The red cross at the top of the left-hand column makes it universal and already decided. The footer is the better advice.
An agentic browser is a bigger decision than a prettier deck. Row three asks you to replace Chrome with a browser that acts on your behalf. That is a real upgrade in capability and also a real change in exposure: a browser that can click things for you can click things you did not intend, and anything it reads on a page is not an instruction from you. Treat it like a tool with hands, not a faster Chrome – and be deliberate about which accounts you sign it into.
This post is dated. Everything in the last two columns was checked on 8 October 2026. Add-ins become standalone products, products get bought, small tools vanish – we have watched a card recommend a product that had closed over a year earlier. Our check will age too. Open the links yourself.
The one-line version
Two of these twelve upgrades run on top of the tool they are crossing out. Google is on both sides of the line. Three rows have a brief-style tool in the column marked 2025. The year is not the axis – it never was.
The real axis is operate or brief: are you doing the work, or describing it and checking the result? Both are correct, for different jobs, often on the same afternoon. Decide per job, and let the footer rather than the headline be your guide – check what fits your work before you switch.
Learning a lot does not make anyone good. Doing a lot does. Replacing twelve tools in a weekend is learning. Finishing one video with the tools you already have is doing.
If you want to be held to that, we run a free challenge at BANI Academy. There is no barrier to entry – you commit a small fee that is refunded when you finish, and the only requirement is that you actually do the work for the length of the challenge. Nobody’s channel ever failed because they were on the 2025 stack.
Which row on this card would genuinely change your week – and which one are you about to switch just because of the year on it? Tell us in the comments under the original reel.
More on building a channel for a global audience at mmoyoutube.com.
