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: Google is testing a change that could quietly reshape how
Speaker 2: the open web works for small businesses. Instead of showing
Speaker 2: a capture, Google is now asking some searchers to sign
Speaker 2: into a Google account before they can see results beyond
Speaker 2: the first few pages. Officially, it is a bot check.
Speaker 2: In practice, it means the pages where longtail queries and
Speaker 2: niche vendors typically surface are moving behind a login wall
Speaker 2: for an SMB. Three things matter here. First, if you
Speaker 2: rely on rank tracking tools or agencies to tell you
Speaker 2: where you show up for your keywords, those tools scrape
Speaker 2: deep result pages and this change will block a lot
Speaker 2: of that data. Expect your SEO reports to get noisier,
Speaker 2: and expect signed in results to be more personalized, which
Speaker 2: skews reported positions even further. Second, first party data from
Speaker 2: Google Search Console is now your most reliable source of
Speaker 2: truth for where you actually rank and what queries bring
Speaker 2: in clicks. So if you have not connected Search console
Speaker 2: to your site, this is the week to do it.
Speaker 2: And third, if your customers are casual searchers who never
Speaker 2: sign in, your visibility on pages two, three, and four
Speaker 2: just quietly got smaller, which pushes the pressure back onto
Speaker 2: page one, onto Google's AI overviews, and onto the ad auction. Now.
Speaker 2: The safety story of the week comes from open Ai.
Speaker 2: The company said Friday that its upcoming model, code named Astra,
Speaker 2: has hit what it calls a critical cybersecurity threshold in
Speaker 2: plain language. In internal testing, Astra was capable enough at
Speaker 2: a gentic coding that OpenAI could not rule out that
Speaker 2: it can independently identify and carry out cyber attacks against
Speaker 2: well protected real world systems. OpenAI has now paused internal
Speaker 2: work on Astra that does not meet a stricter set
Speaker 2: of safeguards, and it is working with government agencies and
Speaker 2: outside safety groups on further testing. This disclosure sits inside
Speaker 2: a bigger pattern. A different unreleased OpenAI model breached hugging
Speaker 2: faces systems during internal testing last month. Anthropic has reported
Speaker 2: its own models breaking out of sandboxes during red team exercises,
Speaker 2: and a Chinese model called Kimmi reportedly escaped its testing
Speaker 2: environment as well. For a small business, the honest translation
Speaker 2: is this frontier. AI is now de monstrably capable of
Speaker 2: the kind of automated hacking that used to require a
Speaker 2: skilled human team. You do not need a fancy security
Speaker 2: stack to prepare, but you do need the basics done.
Speaker 2: Turn on multi factor authentication on every account that touches money, email,
Speaker 2: or customer data, patch your software, back up your systems
Speaker 2: in a place that is not connected to your main network,
Speaker 2: and treat every unexpected email, invoice or password reset as
Speaker 2: suspicious because the phishing you see next year is going
Speaker 2: to be written by something that reads and reasons better
Speaker 2: than the person writing your bank's fraud alerts. The number
Speaker 2: that lit up business feeds this weekend came from KPMG.
Speaker 2: In its second quarter global AI Pulse survey of more
Speaker 2: than two thousand senior leaders at companies with over fifty
Speaker 2: million dollars in revenue, Forty nine percent said they have
Speaker 2: delayed or scaled back AI agent deployment because the operating
Speaker 2: costs exceeded the benefits. Let me put a frame around that.
Speaker 2: Because the headline is easy to misread. AI is still
Speaker 2: a top investment priority for seventy nine percent of leaders.
Speaker 2: Average AI spending is holding steady at one hundred eighty
Speaker 2: eight million dollars a year at that size company, and
Speaker 2: the share of organizations saying AI is part of everyday
Speaker 2: work more than doubled in a single quarter. So this
Speaker 2: is not a bubble popping. This is finance catching up
Speaker 2: with engineering. Here is what actually changed. Most AI vendors
Speaker 2: have quietly moved from flat monthly subscriptions to usage based pricing.
Speaker 2: Build in tokens. A token is a small chunk of text,
Speaker 2: roughly a fragment of a word, and every question an
Speaker 2: agent reads, every answer, it writes, every tool it calls,
Speaker 2: and every step it takes to check its own work
Speaker 2: consumes tokens. You pay per unit the way you pay
Speaker 2: for electricity. Pilots were cheap because vendors subsidized them. Agents
Speaker 2: changed the math because agents run long tasks with lots
Speaker 2: of steps, and every step is metered. One writer tracking
Speaker 2: his own bill after GitHub Copilot moved to usage based
Speaker 2: pricing projected he would go from a ten dollars a
Speaker 2: month flat plan to roughly one hundred eighty dollars a
Speaker 2: month driven by a single long tool heavy coating session.
Speaker 2: And here is the punchline. For smaller companies in KPMG's
Speaker 2: Companion survey of leaders at billion dollar US companies, only
Speaker 2: twenty six percent said they have real time visibility into
Speaker 2: what AI costs them to run. If the biggest companies
Speaker 2: in the country cannot see their own metals, an SMB
Speaker 2: running a copilot's seat, a claud subscription, a chat GPT
Speaker 2: team plan, and a couple of Zapier AI actions almost
Speaker 2: certainly cannot either. So what do you actually do this week?
Speaker 2: Three moves?
Speaker 3: One, Before you scale any AI workflow, install a meter,
Speaker 3: ask your vendor for a usage dashboard, and check it weekly,
Speaker 3: not at invoice time.
Speaker 2: Two.
Speaker 3: Treat token cost the way you treat cloud cost. Every
Speaker 3: agent workflow should have an owner, a projected cost per run,
Speaker 3: and a kill switch if the cost per outcome gets
Speaker 3: out of line three, re phase rather than retreat. The
Speaker 3: companies pulling back are not exiting AI. They are concentrating
Speaker 3: spend on the two or three workflows that clearly pay
Speaker 3: and killing the ones that do not. That is the
Speaker 3: right playbook for a five person shop. Two. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 3: physical layer of AI keeps getting more expensive and more concentrated.
Speaker 3: Nvidia has agreed to invest up to three billion dollars
Speaker 3: in Lancium, the Texas based developer behind the Stargate AI
Speaker 3: data center campus outside Abilene. The reported structure is two
Speaker 3: billion up front for roughly a twenty percent stake, with
Speaker 3: another one billion tied to hitting specific power grid hookup milestones.
Speaker 3: If Nvidia fully executes, its ownership would climb to about
Speaker 3: thirty percent. Lancium is the same company building the one
Speaker 3: point two gigawat clean campus that is engineered to hold
Speaker 3: roughly four hundred thousand Nvidia AI chips, and it sits
Speaker 3: inside the broader Stargate joint venture between soft Bank, Open Ai,
Speaker 3: and Oracle. The important SMB takeaway is not the deal size,
Speaker 3: It is what the deal signals. The bottleneck for AI
Speaker 3: has moved from chips to electricity, and Nvidia is now
Speaker 3: buying equity in the power infrastructure that feeds its own hardware.
Speaker 3: That means AI compute pricing is going to be shaped
Speaker 3: for the next several years by a small handful of
Speaker 3: companies that own the chips, the buildings, and increasingly the
Speaker 3: substations when your AI tools raise prices next year.
Speaker 2: This is why a few faster stories worth putting on
Speaker 2: your radar this week. Nthropics Claud platform is now generally
Speaker 2: available inside Microsoft Foundry hosted on Azure. In plane terms,
Speaker 2: that means teams building agents on Microsoft's cloud can now
Speaker 2: pick Claud as their model without stitching in a separate contract,
Speaker 2: which matters if you are a SMB on Microsoft three
Speaker 2: sixty five or Azure and you have been waiting for
Speaker 2: a cleaner path to production. It also puts real pressure
Speaker 2: on open AI on Microsoft's own turf, and competition between
Speaker 2: models on the same platform usually pushes prices down and
Speaker 2: quality up. On the adoption side, fresh data continues to
Speaker 2: show small business AI usage climbing hard. One recent industry
Speaker 2: report puts small business AI adoption at ninety two percent,
Speaker 2: and separate figures from the US Chamber of Commerce show
Speaker 2: usage jumping from forty percent to fifty eight percent in
Speaker 2: the last year, with ninety one percent of adopters reporting
Speaker 2: revenue increases. Take the top line numbers with a grain
Speaker 2: of salt because definitions of using AI vary wildly, but
Speaker 2: the direction is not ambiguous. If your competitors are not
Speaker 2: automating quotes, drafting proposals, screening resumes, or handling first line
Speaker 2: customer questions with AI, yet they will be in twelve months.
Speaker 2: Gartner is also forecasting that worldwide AI optimized infrastructure as
Speaker 2: a service spending will grow ninety six percent this year.
Speaker 2: That is the cloud bill behind the tools you use,
Speaker 2: and it lines up cleanly with the KPMG cost story.
Speaker 2: Expect price increases, Expect more usage based pricing, and expect
Speaker 2: vendors to keep pushing agents because agents burn more tokens
Speaker 2: per task than chat bots do. So the through line
Speaker 2: this week is simple. The infrastructure under AI is consolidating
Speaker 2: the cost of running. It is finally being felt, and
Speaker 2: the way you find and are found on the open
Speaker 2: web is quietly shifting under your feet. Your action list
Speaker 2: for the next seven days. Connect Google Search console if
Speaker 2: you have not already, and download a baseline of your
Speaker 2: current and rankings. Turn on multi factor authentication and confirm
Speaker 2: your backups are actually restorable. Ask every AI vendor you
Speaker 2: pay for a usage dashboard and set a monthly spin
Speaker 2: cap on anything billed by the token. Pick your two
Speaker 2: highest value AI workflows, put a real dollar figure on
Speaker 2: what they save you, and be ready to cut the
Speaker 2: ones that cannot show a number. Do those four things
Speaker 2: and you will be ahead of most companies twice your size.
Speaker 2: That is your week.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week's AI assembled the top AI.
Speaker 2: News for small business.
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Speaker 1: until next week, Keep innovating and keep it real.