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: Washington is telling its allies they have to pick a
Speaker 2: side in the artificial intelligence race with China. A State
Speaker 2: Department framework called Pax Silica is now being presented to
Speaker 2: dozens of US partners, pressing them to join American led
Speaker 2: joint projects on semiconductors and the chips that power frontier AI,
Speaker 2: or risk finding themselves on the outside of the US
Speaker 2: technology ecosystem. A leaked draft of the agreement makes the
Speaker 2: choice explicit. Countries that participate in the American AI partnership
Speaker 2: are expected to align with US export controls aimed at
Speaker 2: keeping advanced chips and chip making equipment out of sad
Speaker 2: Chinese hands and to steer clear of a rival China
Speaker 2: led initiative for small and mid sized businesses, this is
Speaker 2: not abstract geopolitics. If your supply chain, your cloud providers,
Speaker 2: or your customers touch Asia, the chipwar is about to
Speaker 2: get more rigid. Expect tighter controls on where advanced computing
Speaker 2: can be sold, more compliance questions from vendors and potentially
Speaker 2: diverging technology stacks between the American and Chinese spheres. Businesses
Speaker 2: that source hardware, sell internationally, or rely on global cloud
Speaker 2: regions should start asking their providers a simple question, now,
Speaker 2: which side of this line are your services built on?
Speaker 2: Now to the Vatican, where the leader of the Catholic
Speaker 2: Church just told lawmakers exactly where he thinks AI guard
Speaker 2: rails should go. On August twenty first, Hope Leo the
Speaker 2: fourteenth addressed the seventeenth Annual Meeting of the International Catholic
Speaker 2: Legislator's Network, a gathering of Catholic lawmakers from around the world,
Speaker 2: on the theme of human dignity and artificial intelligence. His
Speaker 2: message was direct. AI must never be allowed to erode
Speaker 2: the family, whether by reducing people and relationships to data
Speaker 2: and simulations, by flooding young minds with content that distorts desire,
Speaker 2: or through economic models that make family life precarious. He
Speaker 2: told the legislators their job is not to hinder innovation,
Speaker 2: but to guide it wisely, and he laid out what
Speaker 2: sound legislation should do protect users from exploitation, preserve personal privacy,
Speaker 2: insure transparency in how emerging technologies are used and guarantee
Speaker 2: that they strengthen democratic institutions. Follows his first encyclical earlier
Speaker 2: this year, which called for AI to be, in his words,
Speaker 2: disarmed and to serve human dignity and the common good.
Speaker 2: Why should a business owner care what the Pope says
Speaker 2: about AI? Because moral framing from institutions with global reach
Speaker 2: has a way of becoming regulatory framing. The principles he
Speaker 2: named transparency, privacy, protection from exploitation are the same pillars
Speaker 2: appearing in the EU AI Act and in state level
Speaker 2: bills across America. When you build or buy AI tools,
Speaker 2: these are the criteria your future regulators and your customers
Speaker 2: will be judging them by.
Speaker 3: AI literacy is officially becoming homework. State lawmakers across America
Speaker 3: are moving fast to put artificial intelligence into the high
Speaker 3: school curriculum. During this year's legislative session, seventy seven bills
Speaker 3: across twenty seven states have been introduced addressing AI in
Speaker 3: classroom instruction, and ten have already been signed into law.
Speaker 3: Alabama now requires every student to complete an approved computer
Speaker 3: science course that includes AI instruction in order to graduate.
Speaker 3: Idaho has directed its education department to build a comprehensive
Speaker 3: generative AI framework covering privacy, transparency, academic integrity, and literacy standards.
Speaker 3: Maryland's Artificial Intelligence Ready Schools Act requires every district to
Speaker 3: adopt AI policies and designate an AI coordinator, and UTAH
Speaker 3: is establishing a required digital skills course for seventh and
Speaker 3: eighth graders covering AI literacy alongside cybersecurity and digital privacy.
Speaker 3: The driver behind much of this AI literacy will be
Speaker 3: assessed for the first time on the twenty twenty nine
Speaker 3: PISA Exam, the global test compared fifteen year olds across countries.
Speaker 3: For small businesses, this matters in two ways. First, the
Speaker 3: entry level employees you hire three to five years from
Speaker 3: now will arrive AI literate by law, not by chance,
Speaker 3: and that changes what you can expect from them on
Speaker 3: day one. Second, if you sell products or services to schools,
Speaker 3: AI curriculum requirements are creating a brand new buying category overnight. Next,
Speaker 3: the technology plumbing that is quietly making agentic AI reeal.
Speaker 3: Agentic AI means AI systems that do not just answer questions,
Speaker 3: but take actions on your behalf, reading your data, updating
Speaker 3: your systems, completing tasks. The breakout standard making that possible
Speaker 3: is called the Model Context Protocol or MCP. Think of
Speaker 3: it as the USBC of AI, a universal connector that
Speaker 3: lets AIAH plug into your existing tools and data sources
Speaker 3: without expensive custom integration work. Adoption has been staggering, with
Speaker 3: MCP's software development kits hitting ninety seven million downloads per month.
Speaker 3: This spring up from roughly two million at launch less
Speaker 3: than two years earlier, and it is now suddenly on
Speaker 3: executive agendas everywhere. But there is a catch. Security researchers
Speaker 3: warn that MCP connectors can be over permissioned, untrusted connectors
Speaker 3: can leak data or enable attacks, and governance is lagging
Speaker 3: far behind adoption. Fewer than four percent of security conference
Speaker 3: submissions about MCP focus on opportunity, the rest focus on
Speaker 3: risk and a personal note here from our host, he
Speaker 3: is putting this exact idea into practice, building a company
Speaker 3: knowledge base that multiple AI systems can access and understand,
Speaker 3: one shared, structured source of truth that any AI assistant
Speaker 3: can plug into, rather than knowledge trapped in scattered documents.
Speaker 3: That is precisely the architecture. This new standard enables the
Speaker 3: takeaway for small businesses the era of AI that can
Speaker 3: actually do things inside. Your company has arrived, and the
Speaker 3: winners will be the ones who get their knowledge organized
Speaker 3: and their permissions governed before they plug agents in. New
Speaker 3: data confirms a hard truth about AI adoption. Most pilots fail,
Speaker 3: and the way you start largely determines whether yours does.
Speaker 3: Research now circulating among chief financial officers finds that roughly
Speaker 3: ninety five percent of enterprise generative AI pilots deliver no
Speaker 3: measurable return, and separate analysis has long put the failure
Speaker 3: rate for AI projects overall above eighty percent, about twice
Speaker 3: the failure rate of traditional IT projects. The pattern is
Speaker 3: remarkably consistent. Pilots launched without structure, without a defined problem,
Speaker 3: without integration into real workflows, and without an owner who
Speaker 3: is accountable for results are the ones that die. The
Speaker 3: research points to flawed enterprise integration, not model quality, as
Speaker 3: the core issue. Generic tools impress individuals but stall inside
Speaker 3: organizations because they do not learn from or adapt to
Speaker 3: actual workflows. What works.
Speaker 4: Buying specialized tools and partnering with vendors succeeds about sixty
Speaker 4: seven percent of the time, while building your own internally
Speaker 4: succeeds only about a third as often, and the biggest
Speaker 4: return on investment is not where most budgets go. More
Speaker 4: than half of generative AI budgets flow to sales and
Speaker 4: marketing tools, Yet the strongest return are showing up in
Speaker 4: back office automation, eliminating outsourced processes, cutting agency costs, and
Speaker 4: streamlining operations For a small business. The lesson is blunt,
Speaker 4: pick one pain point, buy rather than build, put a
Speaker 4: line manager in charge, and measure the result. The eighty
Speaker 4: percent who fail are overwhelmingly the ones who started with
Speaker 4: a vague ambition instead of a structured plan. Finally, the
Speaker 4: staggering price tag of the AI arms race. This week
Speaker 4: brought two massive infrastructure deals that underscore just how expensive
Speaker 4: powering frontier AI has become. Google signed an agreement with
Speaker 4: chip maker Marvel Technology to co develop custom AI chips,
Speaker 4: a deal that extends to twenty thirty three and grants
Speaker 4: Google a warrant to buy up to twelve point two
Speaker 4: billion dollars of Marvell's stock nearly fifty nine million shares,
Speaker 4: with the tie up potentially generating up to one hundred
Speaker 4: and twenty billion dollars in custom chip sales. Days earlier,
Speaker 4: in Nvidia agreed to guarantee up to one hundred and
Speaker 4: five billion dollars in financing to help open ai lease
Speaker 4: a sprawling data center being built in Ohio, while also
Speaker 4: investing one point five billion dollars directly in sb Energy,
Speaker 4: the soft bank link developer behind the project. That is
Speaker 4: one company in Vidia effectively underwriting its own largest customer.
Speaker 4: Two things for small businesses to take from this. First,
Speaker 4: compute costs are not coming down anytime soon. When the
Speaker 4: biggest players on Earth are locking in chip supply and
Speaker 4: data center capacity a decade out, they're telling you demand
Speaker 4: will keep outpacing supply, so budget accordingly, and watch your
Speaker 4: AI subscription pricing. Second, circular deals like in Nvidia financing
Speaker 4: OpenAI's infrastructure have some investors nervous about an AI bubble,
Speaker 4: which means volatility in AI vendor pricing and even vendor
Speaker 4: survival is a real risk. Diversify the AI tools your
Speaker 4: business depends on, and make sure your data is portable
Speaker 4: if one of them stumbles. And that is the week
Speaker 4: in AI Assembled for your business. I'm James for all
Speaker 4: of us here, thank you for listening, and we will
Speaker 4: see you next week.
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. And if you want
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Speaker 1: Slash ai ready until next week.
Speaker 4: Keep innovating and keep it real