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: Open ai is opening a dedicated front door for small businesses.
Speaker 2: This week, the company launched its Chat GPT for Small
Speaker 2: Business Program, an initiative built to help lean teams do
Speaker 2: the work of a whole back office without hiring one.
Speaker 2: The program bundles three things owners have been asking for. First,
Speaker 2: hands on virtual training with product specific webinars that walk
Speaker 2: through real small business use cases across accounting, marketing, e commerce,
Speaker 2: and operations. Second, in person AI academies in cities across
Speaker 2: the US where owners can sit down, build a workflow
Speaker 2: and leave the room with something that actually runs. And Third,
Speaker 2: a curated set of partner integrations and skills built with
Speaker 2: the tools small businesses already use, Dropbox, Shopify, into It,
Speaker 2: slack at, Lassian, and WIS. The centerpiece is chat GPT work,
Speaker 2: an agent that can take on multi step projects end
Speaker 2: to end. It connects to your files, your apps, and
Speaker 2: your calendar, and it holds memory on how you write
Speaker 2: and how you decide. Owners can send a voice note
Speaker 2: and have it turned into a Slack update pushed to
Speaker 2: multiple channels. They can ask it to scan customer reviews
Speaker 2: and draft a training deck. They can stand up a
Speaker 2: live market watch page that updates itself, and it all
Speaker 2: runs on GPT five point six, which Open AI is
Speaker 2: now making available to businesses of every size, not just enterprise.
Speaker 2: Why it matters for small businesses. For years, the state
Speaker 2: of the art model tier lived behind an enterprise contract.
Speaker 2: That wall is gone. A three person shop can now
Speaker 2: use the same underlying intelligence as a Fortune five hundred
Speaker 2: team reference. Data from last year's Small Business AI jams
Speaker 2: is worth noting seventy eight percent of participants built a
Speaker 2: functional workflow in a single day, and forty two percent
Speaker 2: said they saved more than five hours a week that
Speaker 2: is real time back into billable work, sales calls, or sleep.
Speaker 2: The SMB implication is clear. If you have been waiting
Speaker 2: for AI to feel less like a tech project and
Speaker 2: more like a hire, this is the moment to pilot it.
Speaker 2: Pick one workflow that eats a full afternoon every week, bookkeeping,
Speaker 2: reconciliation proposal, drafting, review responses, and hand it to an
Speaker 2: agent for a month measure the hour saved if the
Speaker 2: number is real, expand from.
Speaker 3: There, Anthropic quietly shipped a feature that could change who
Speaker 3: inside a businesses actually gets to automate their own work.
Speaker 3: It is called record a Skill, and it lives inside
Speaker 3: the Claud Cowork desktop app. Here's how it works. You
Speaker 3: open Claud, hit the plus icon, choose record a skill,
Speaker 3: and then you just do your job. You screen record
Speaker 3: yourself completing a task, pulling a report, reconciling an invoice,
Speaker 3: answering a customer email, and you talk through what you
Speaker 3: are doing as you go. When you stop the recording,
Speaker 3: Claud turns that demonstration into a reusable skill. It can
Speaker 3: run again on your behalf. No prompt engineering, no writing instructions,
Speaker 3: no documentation. You show it once and it learns. This
Speaker 3: is a meaningful shift. Until now, teaching an AI to
Speaker 3: do a repeatable business task required either technical documentation or
Speaker 3: a specialist who knew how to write clean agent prompts.
Speaker 3: That skill set does not live inside most small businesses.
Speaker 3: But every small business has a bookkeeper, an operations lead,
Speaker 3: or a customer service manager who knows exactly how a
Speaker 3: task should be done. Record a Skill gives that person
Speaker 3: away to hand their expertise to an agent directly availability.
Speaker 3: It is live for pro Max and Team subscribers. Free
Speaker 3: tier users are excluded. The team plan angle is the
Speaker 3: interesting one. A shared library of company specific skills built
Speaker 3: by the people who actually do the work is the
Speaker 3: kind of asset that gets stickier over time. Now, a
Speaker 3: candid caveat the reporting doesn't yet cover what happens when
Speaker 3: the underlying app changes and a replay breaks, or how
Speaker 3: the recording handles sensitive data that scrolls pass on screen.
Speaker 3: Those are the questions that decide whether this becomes real
Speaker 3: infrastructure or a novelty. But for owners, the SMB takeaway
Speaker 3: is direct. If there is one task in your business
Speaker 3: that takes thirty to sixty minutes and repeats every week,
Speaker 3: that is your first candidate. Have the person who does
Speaker 3: it best record themselves once with narration, then run it
Speaker 3: again next week and see how close the output gets. Now,
Speaker 3: sticking with the money side of the ledger, into It
Speaker 3: this week launched the into It Business credit card, a
Speaker 3: world elite business MasterCard built specifically for small businesses and
Speaker 3: more importantly wired directly into QuickBooks. The pitch is straightforward,
Speaker 3: open the card and a dedicated account is automatically created
Speaker 3: inside QuickBooks, every transaction, every receipt, every statement flows into
Speaker 3: your books in real time. Snap a photo of a
Speaker 3: receipt and the card matches it to the corresponding transaction,
Speaker 3: automatically month end reconciliation. The hours of manual categorization every
Speaker 3: small business owner knows too well largely goes away. Layered
Speaker 3: on top is into its AI platform, which uses the
Speaker 3: card data plus your quick Book's history to give forward
Speaker 3: looking cash flow insights, not just what you spent, but
Speaker 3: what today's spending means for next month's runway. The Economics
Speaker 3: unlimited two percent cash back on everyday purchases, five percent
Speaker 3: cash back on into IT products and services, no annual fee,
Speaker 3: unlimited employee cards with spend controls, and a customized credit line.
Speaker 3: The card is issued by web Bank on the US
Speaker 3: the master Card network and is available now for US
Speaker 3: small businesses. The SMB implication. If you already run QuickBooks,
Speaker 3: this is one of the cleaner AI plus fintech plays
Speaker 3: we have seen this year. You are effectively getting expense management,
Speaker 3: receipt capture, cash flow forecasting, and a credit line collapsed
Speaker 3: into a single tool that already sits inside your accounting workflow,
Speaker 3: worth pricing against your current business card and expense tracking stack.
Speaker 3: If the two percent cash back and the eliminated reconciliation
Speaker 3: hours net out ahead, it may be time to switch.
Speaker 2: Now for a shift that every local business needs to hear.
Speaker 2: Google's core algorithm updates this year are quietly rewriting the
Speaker 2: rules of local search, and the phrase to know is
Speaker 2: proximity authority. Here is what is happening. For years, local sea,
Speaker 2: that is, search engine optimization was a game of clever workarounds,
Speaker 2: stuffing keywords into your Google business profile name, renting virtual
Speaker 2: addresses to appear in more cities, building thin location pages
Speaker 2: that repeated the same content with the city names swapped out.
Speaker 2: Google's twenty twenty six crackdown is filtering all of that out.
Speaker 2: Deep learning classifiers now cross reference your Google business profile
Speaker 2: against state business registries, licensing systems, and postal records. If
Speaker 2: your registered name is Denver Plumbing, LLC, but your profile
Speaker 2: says expert Plumbing, Denver Best Emergency Plumbers, that is now
Speaker 2: an automated suspension trigger, not a ranking trick. Cellular ping data,
Speaker 2: street level validation, and video verification confirm you actually operate
Speaker 2: where you claimvirtual offices and residential addresses without proper setup
Speaker 2: get flagged. What replaces the old SEO playbook is proximity authority, genuine,
Speaker 2: verifiable local presence. That means your business name across Google, Yelp, Apple, Maps,
Speaker 2: being Places, and your local chamber of commerce all match
Speaker 2: your legal registration. That means detailed local schema on your
Speaker 2: website with real coordinates and defined service areas. And it
Speaker 2: means content that actually reflects your community local case studies, sponsorships,
Speaker 2: coverage of building codes and neighborhood specifics, not templated pages
Speaker 2: with a city name pasted on top. The SMB implication
Speaker 2: is urgent. If your map pack ranking has dropped in
Speaker 2: the last ninety days, this is likely why the is
Speaker 2: not another round of keyword optimization. The fix is entity alignment.
Speaker 2: Get your legal name, your addresses, and your local citations consistent,
Speaker 2: then invest in genuinely local content. Businesses that make this
Speaker 2: shift early will lock in visibility that competitors using legacy
Speaker 2: tactics simply cannot recover. Finally, our closing story, gen Spark
Speaker 2: this week unveiled AI Workspace six point zero, and the
Speaker 2: thesis behind it is worth flagging for any owner thinking
Speaker 2: about how AI actually fits into a small team. The
Speaker 2: core insight the next AI breakthrough is not a bigger model.
Speaker 2: It is context, or, as gen Spark's CEO put it,
Speaker 2: using AI today is like collaborating with a genius who
Speaker 2: has a goldfish memory workspace. Six point h tries to
Speaker 2: fix that with a a persistent memory layer they call
Speaker 2: second Brain, which connects your email, meeting notes, calls, documents,
Speaker 2: and CRM into a single memory that both you and
Speaker 2: your agents can read from and write to. There is
Speaker 2: also gen mail, an agentic email client that learns your
Speaker 2: priorities and drafts in your voice. Gen Team, a shared
Speaker 2: workspace where people and AI agents sit in the same channels,
Speaker 2: Agent Base, which lets you spin up custom software, a CRM,
Speaker 2: a dashboard, a tracker from a spreadsheet, and a prompt
Speaker 2: without writing code, And notably, a hardware device called second
Speaker 2: Brain Note, a card sized recorder that captures conversations that
Speaker 2: happen away from the keyboard, client meetings, phone, calls, hallway ideas,
Speaker 2: and synks them into your memory layer. It ships now
Speaker 2: at one hundred seventy nine dollars introduct pricing. Why this
Speaker 2: matters for small businesses. A small team's biggest weakness against
Speaker 2: a larger competitor is institutional memory. Enterprises pay for it
Speaker 2: with people, systems, and process. A shared, persistent AI memory
Speaker 2: closes that gap. Every conversation captured, every decision searchable, every
Speaker 2: agent starting the task with full context. That is the
Speaker 2: leverage a five person shop needs to compete with a
Speaker 2: fifty person one zoom out on the whole week Open
Speaker 2: AI is lowering the entry ramp with training and partners.
Speaker 2: Anthropic is putting skill authoring in the hands of the
Speaker 2: people who actually do the work into it is folding
Speaker 2: a business credit card, expense management, and cash flow AI
Speaker 2: into the accounting tool you already open every morning. Google
Speaker 2: is telling every local business to trade tricks for real presence,
Speaker 2: and Jen Spark is arguing that the winning move is
Speaker 2: not a better prompt, it is giving AI everything it
Speaker 2: needs to remember. The through line for owners is simple,
Speaker 2: the tools have grown up. This is the quarter to
Speaker 2: stop experimenting and start integrating.
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
Speaker 1: to know whether AI tools can find and recommend your business.
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Speaker 1: Slash ai ready until next week.
Speaker 2: Keep innovating and keep it real