Speaker 1: Welcome to AI Assembled, the top AI news for small business.
Speaker 1: I'm Chris Daily and each week I bring you the
Speaker 1: most important AI developments that can transform your business. Let's
Speaker 1: dive into this week's top stories.
Speaker 2: Anthropic shipped Claude Opus four point eight on May twenty eighth,
Speaker 2: and what stands out is not the model, it's the framing.
Speaker 2: Anthropic itself called the release quote a modest but tangible
Speaker 2: improvement end quote. That kind of honesty from an AI
Speaker 2: lab is rare, and it sets the tone for what
Speaker 2: is actually in the box on the headline. Coding benchmark
Speaker 2: swe bench Pro Opus four point eight scored sixty nine
Speaker 2: point two percent, almost five points ahead of the previous
Speaker 2: Opus and more than ten points clear of GPT five
Speaker 2: point five and Gemini three point one pro. Even more interesting,
Speaker 2: for any small business that has tried to vibe code
Speaker 2: its own internal tools, Opus four point eight is roughly
Speaker 2: four times less likely than its predecessor to let flaws
Speaker 2: in its own code slide by unremarked in plain English.
Speaker 2: It now tells you when it's not sure. The mixed
Speaker 2: reviews come from two places. First, a smaller, cheaper model
Speaker 2: Gemini three point five Flash Beat Opus four point eight
Speaker 2: on Finance Agent Work. Second, heavy users on Reddit are
Speaker 2: reporting that the new Opus models consume noticeably more tokens
Speaker 2: per task than older versions, partly because of tokenizer changes.
Speaker 2: So even though the headline pricing is unchanged at five
Speaker 2: dollars per million input and twenty five dollars per million output,
Speaker 2: the real world bill can creep up. The fast mode
Speaker 2: tier did get a major price cut, three times cheaper
Speaker 2: than before for a small business. The takeaway is simple,
Speaker 2: if you're paying per token in any Claude powered tool,
Speaker 2: watch your usage this week. The intelligence per dollar is better,
Speaker 2: but the tokens per task may also be higher. While
Speaker 2: Anthropic was launching its modest upgrade, deep Seek was rewriting
Speaker 2: the floor of the entire AI pricing war. On May
Speaker 2: twenty third, the Chinese AI lab deep Seek announced that
Speaker 2: the seventy five percent discount on its flagship V four
Speaker 2: Pro model, which was supposed to expire May thirty first,
Speaker 2: is now permanent. That puts V four Pro at roughly
Speaker 2: one quarter of its original price, with input tokens landing
Speaker 2: as low as forty three cents per million. To put
Speaker 2: that in perspective, that is a fraction of what Claude
Speaker 2: or GPT five point five charges for comparable frontier tier inference.
Speaker 2: Deepseek did not disclose whether the cut was driven by
Speaker 2: new supply of Huawei Ascend nine to fifty chips, which
Speaker 2: it uses to run V four pro, but the signal
Speaker 2: to the rest of the market is clear. The cost
Speaker 2: of high end AI is collapsing fast For a small business.
Speaker 2: This has two implications. If you're paying for an enterprise
Speaker 2: model through a third party tool that supports multiple providers,
Speaker 2: and Microsoft Copilot now offers exactly that, which we'll get
Speaker 2: to in a minute, you may soon see Deepseek as
Speaker 2: an option. And second, every AI tool vendor pitching you
Speaker 2: a subscription this year is now under enormous pressure to
Speaker 2: either drop their price or prove their value. Ask vendors directly,
Speaker 2: what does my monthly bill look like if inference costs
Speaker 2: drop another fifty percent in the next twelve months. If
Speaker 2: they can't answer, that tells you something. Speaking of Microsoft,
Speaker 2: this is the most important small business announcement of the week.
Speaker 2: On May twenty eighth, Microsoft introduced two brand new SKUs,
Speaker 2: Microsoft three sixty five Business Standard with Copilot and Microsoft
Speaker 2: three sixty five Business Premium with Copilot they launch July first.
Speaker 2: The key phrase is built in, not bolted on. Copilot
Speaker 2: will live directly inside word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and
Speaker 2: it connects to more than one thousand outside business tools Shopify, PayPal, Zero, Docu,
Speaker 2: sign Asana, Canva, Monday, dot Com, Bamboo, HR and on
Speaker 2: and on without the small business owner doing any plumbing.
Speaker 2: The most interesting feature Microsoft is shipping a model chooser.
Speaker 2: You will be able to pick whether your task runs
Speaker 2: on a model from Open AI or from Anthropic Yes,
Speaker 2: including the new Claude Opus four point eight we just
Speaker 2: talked about, and switch between them job by job. That
Speaker 2: means the average small business owner no longer needs to
Speaker 2: maintain separate subscriptions to Chat GPT, claud and Copilot one
Speaker 2: skew multiple frontier models. The premium tier also enforces data labels,
Speaker 2: mark a customer list or a contract as confidential, and
Speaker 2: Microsoft prevents it from being forwarded, copied to personal email,
Speaker 2: or accidentally shared even with the AI. For small businesses
Speaker 2: that have been quietly worried about whether chat GPT was
Speaker 2: leaking their data, this is the answer Microsoft is betting
Speaker 2: will close the deal. Watch for pricing details in the
Speaker 2: coming weeks. If you're already on Business Standard, expect an
Speaker 2: upgrade prompt as soon as July first arrives.
Speaker 3: Now to the biggest shakeup in paid advertising in years.
Speaker 3: At Google Marketing Live last week, Google announced it is
Speaker 3: killing dynamic search ads in favor of a fully AI
Speaker 3: driven system called AI Max for Search. The rollout has
Speaker 3: two phases. Phase one is happening now with US upgrade tools.
Speaker 3: Phase two hits in September, when every remaining eligible legacy
Speaker 3: campaign will be auto upgraded. After that, advertisers will no
Speaker 3: longer be able to create new dynamic search ad campaigns
Speaker 3: in Google Ads, in Google Ads Editor, or through the
Speaker 3: Ads API. That's not a soft sunset. That's a hard deadline.
Speaker 3: Here's what it means for a small business running paid
Speaker 3: search today. You tell Google what keywords to bid on
Speaker 3: and roughly where your ads should show up. Under AI Max,
Speaker 3: Google's AI infers customer intent and chooses the keywords, the
Speaker 3: asset combinations, the landing pages, and the moment to enter
Speaker 3: the auction all on its own. You lose direct control
Speaker 3: of channel placement. You're trading granularity for reach, and Google
Speaker 3: is asking you to trust the black box. Google did
Speaker 3: announce some guard rail features, including something called AI Brief,
Speaker 3: where you can give the AI plain language instructions about
Speaker 3: your brand and conversational attributes in Merchant Center for richer
Speaker 3: product data. But the reporting transparency that paid search managers
Speaker 3: have relied on for a decade is genuinely collapsing. For
Speaker 3: a small business with a tight ad budget, the immediate
Speaker 3: to do list is short, clean up your landing pages
Speaker 3: right now, because that is what AI max actually reads.
Speaker 3: Tighten your product feeds, and consider locking down a percentage
Speaker 3: of budget into exact match keyword campaigns that AI max
Speaker 3: cannot touch, at least until you can see how it
Speaker 3: performs on your account. Open ai is racing into that
Speaker 3: same ad market from the opposite direction. At the end
Speaker 3: of May, OpenAI rolled out a self service ads manager
Speaker 3: for Chat GPT, and this is the line that matters
Speaker 3: for small businesses. The previous fifty one thousand dollars minimum
Speaker 3: spend has been completely removed. That fifty thousand dollar barrier
Speaker 3: was the mote keeping Chat GPT advertising the exclusive playground
Speaker 3: of big brands. It's gone. With the new ads manager,
Speaker 3: any merchant, including a one person operation, can set daily budgets,
Speaker 3: upload creative and target by state, by media market, or
Speaker 3: even by zip code. Open ai also added pixel tracking
Speaker 3: and a conversion API so you can measure real ROI clicks, purchases,
Speaker 3: form submissions, and it's plugging in dynamic call to action
Speaker 3: buttons buy now, book now, register directly into the conversation flow.
Speaker 3: So picture a customer asking chat gpt what running shoes
Speaker 3: to buy for planter fasciitis. That used to be an
Speaker 3: unmonetized conversation. Now it's a paid placement with a shoppable
Speaker 3: carousel attached. Open ai ui is internally targeting two point
Speaker 3: five billion dollars in AD revenue this year, which tells
Speaker 3: you how serious this is for small business owners. Here's
Speaker 3: the practical play. If you sell something local or specific,
Speaker 3: a service in one zip code, a product to a
Speaker 3: narrow audience, Chat gpt ads are now a real channel
Speaker 3: worth testing with a small budget, probably two hundred to
Speaker 3: five hundred dollars in spend will tell you whether it
Speaker 3: works for your business before competitors flood. In story three
Speaker 3: in this block, and one that small businesses outside of
Speaker 3: India should still pay attention to. Meta this month launched
Speaker 3: business Ai inside the WhatsApp business app starting in India.
Speaker 3: The feature lets a small business train an AI agent
Speaker 3: on its own product catalog and FAQ no coding, no
Speaker 3: third party software, and then have that agent handle customer
Speaker 3: questions twenty four hours a day. It answers product questions, captures, leads, books, appointments,
Speaker 3: recommends products, and the business owner can step in and
Speaker 3: take over the conversation at any time. Meta is reporting
Speaker 3: early case studies that are striking. One personal care brand
Speaker 3: says it's late night conversion rate jumped to eighty to
Speaker 3: ninety percent after turning business AI on. A gifting company
Speaker 3: says it's now closing six to seven orders per day
Speaker 3: directly through AI handled queries, with a forty per cent
Speaker 3: increase in sales. The reason this matters even if you're
Speaker 3: not in India ninety one per cent of online adults
Speaker 3: in India already chat with a business weekly, and Meta
Speaker 3: is using that market as the proving ground for a
Speaker 3: feature that is coming to other regions. If WhatsApp or
Speaker 3: Messenger is part of how your customers reach, you expect
Speaker 3: a similar business AI rollout in your market within the
Speaker 3: next twelve months. The lesson to take away now start
Speaker 3: documenting your most common customer questions your pricing rules, your
Speaker 3: shipping policies, and your tone of voice. That is the
Speaker 3: exact input these AI agents need to be trained on,
Speaker 3: and the businesses that have it ready will move first.
Speaker 2: The big small business research story of the week came
Speaker 2: out of Into It. QuickBooks released its twenty twenty six
Speaker 2: AI Impact Report, and it is the most comprehensive look
Speaker 2: so far at how small and mid sized businesses are
Speaker 2: actually using AI. The headline numbers are big. Seventy seven
Speaker 2: percent of small businesses now use AI at least regularly,
Speaker 2: up from forty eight percent in mid twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: Forty one percent reported revenue increases they attribute to AI,
Speaker 2: seventy four percent reported productivity improvements. The reports surveyed thirty
Speaker 2: four thousand business owners across the US, Canada, the UK
Speaker 2: and Australia, and combine that with anonymized data from over
Speaker 2: five point three million quick Books accounts. Sounds like an
Speaker 2: unambiguous win. But Forbes did the most useful thing anyone
Speaker 2: is done with this report, which is look at the
Speaker 2: fine print. More than half of those businesses describing productivity
Speaker 2: gains base the answer on quote a general feeling that
Speaker 2: the business was better. Fewer than half were tracking specific metrics.
Speaker 2: The productivity number came from self reporting, not time studies.
Speaker 2: The revenue gains were attributed to AI based on correlation,
Speaker 2: not controlled measurement. In other words, businesses are buying AI
Speaker 2: feeling busier and assuming the AI is the cause Forrester
Speaker 2: separately predicts that fifty five percent of AI projects in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty six will miss their intended goals, usually because
Speaker 2: nobody defines success upfront. For a small business. The takeaway
Speaker 2: is uncomfortable, but important. Adoption is not ROI. If you
Speaker 2: cannot tell someone in one sentence what task is now faster,
Speaker 2: how much faster, and by how many dollars per month?
Speaker 2: You are not measuring your AI investment. You are paying
Speaker 2: for it. Meta made one more move worth flagging. On
Speaker 2: May twenty seventh, Meta officially launched paid subscriptions on Instagram, Facebook,
Speaker 2: and WhatsApp, with explicit confirmation that AI subscription tiers are
Speaker 2: coming next. This is the unwind of fifteen years of
Speaker 2: free everything. Meta is betting that some users will pay
Speaker 2: for an ad free experience, premium creator content, and eventually
Speaker 2: exclusive AI features inside the apps. The reason this matters
Speaker 2: to a small business. Paid users see fewer ads, and
Speaker 2: the audience your organic posts and ads reach is about
Speaker 2: to fragment by tier. Customer is the kind of person
Speaker 2: who will pay for an ad free Instagram, Your organic
Speaker 2: strategy needs to work harder, and your paid targeting needs
Speaker 2: to get sharper Watch what audience targeting controls META gives
Speaker 2: advertisers Once subscriptions reach scale, expect higher CPMs for high
Speaker 2: value audiences and start diversifying any business that relies heavily
Speaker 2: on a single meta platform for customer acquisition. So here's
Speaker 2: the bottom line on this week. Frontier AI capability gains
Speaker 2: are getting smaller and more honest. Anthropic literally called its
Speaker 2: release modest. At the same time, inference costs are collapsing.
Speaker 2: Deepseek made a seventy five percent cut permanent, and Microsoft
Speaker 2: is now letting you switch between Open AI and Anthropic
Speaker 2: from inside office on July first. The platforms that small
Speaker 2: businesses depend on for distribution, Google Search, Ads, Chat, GPT, WhatsApp,
Speaker 2: Instagram are all simultaneously layering in AI in ways that
Speaker 2: take control away from the marketer and hand it to
Speaker 2: the model. And QuickBooks just confirmed what a lot of
Speaker 2: owners suspect most small businesses adopting AI cannot actually prove
Speaker 2: its working. Here is your five step action plan for
Speaker 2: the next thirty days. One audit your AI spend right now.
Speaker 2: List every subscription, what it is for and what you
Speaker 2: would lose if you canceled it tomorrow. If you can't
Speaker 2: justify it in one sentence, cancel it. Two. Pick three
Speaker 2: tasks you do every week and time them, then time
Speaker 2: them again with AI doing the work. Use a stopwatch,
Speaker 2: not a feeling. That is your baseline. Three. If you
Speaker 2: run paid search on Google, prepare for AI max. Clean
Speaker 2: up your landing pages, update your product feed, and lock
Speaker 2: in a portion of your budget on exact match keywords
Speaker 2: before the September auto upgrade. Four test chat gpt ads
Speaker 2: with a small budget two hundred to five hundred dollars
Speaker 2: over two weeks targeted to your actual local zip codes
Speaker 2: with pixel tracking turned on. Treat it like a real
Speaker 2: channel before the rest of your market wakes up. Five.
Speaker 2: Document your customer FAQs, your pricing rules, your shipping policies,
Speaker 2: and your brand voice in writing That document is the
Speaker 2: fuel you will need to train a business AI agent
Speaker 2: on WhatsApp, on Messenger, or inside Microsoft three sixty five
Speaker 2: copilot before the end of the year. That's the brief.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week's AI assembled the top AI
Speaker 1: news for small business. If you found this valuable, share
Speaker 1: it with a fellow business owner. If you want a
Speaker 1: hands on group that you can work with on your
Speaker 1: specific AI needs, consider joining Business Success Academy at Freshmediaworks
Speaker 1: dot com slash BSA until next week. Keep innovating and
Speaker 1: keep it real.