The Local Voice 2026 Predictions for Local Businesses

Hey, welcome to the first episode of 2026 for the local Voice. Hello, I'm Jeff Harrison and I'm excited to have this particular episode because it's doing something I've, I've not really ever done before. And that's kind of looking back at 2025 and then looking forward as far as predictions and what I want to look at is, hey, what I did three predictions and let me just read them as I go as I, as I do this, and then I'll go more into depth of this. And if you don't, you know, you probably have some of these. But I'm going to be really focused on, hey, how is this affecting businesses within kind of my domain when I say that my business, I have a company called Swing Point Media and we create content for local businesses to help them get found and give them a, basically a footprint online, a digital footprint online so that customers who are seeking answers to problems that their product or service solves, they show up. So I looked at those areas about what's going on. And before we, before we jump into that, as far as what are my predictions, let's take a step back and let's talk about 2025. And for a lot of people, especially if they're not really into artificial intelligence technology, you know, they're saying, you know, not a lot change. Some things change. I still look at YouTube, I still do my social media and things that nature. But when we pull back the curtains a little bit, we talk about some things that have changed dramatically when it comes to artificial intelligence and how it's impacting almost every segment that, that I'm aware of. And one of the most important things, and I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna belabor a lot of points, but one of the most important things I remember, I was listening to a podcast that I love listening to gather information called Moonshots. And on this they talked about the arc1 and arc2 reasoning test. And that's arc1, arc2. And it's, it's a benchmark to find out how smart AI has become and how really kind of how valuable it is in our day to day. And one of the things that they said, hey, that the difference between an AI and a human is this ability to reason. Well, one of the things in this arc 2 is it does measure reasoning. And so what it did is in the headline of this was knowledge Work as we know it is dead. And I'm not, I'm not subscribing to that. I'm Just going to point out some facts. It said. It pointed out 44 specific industries or jobs where I could do the job as well or better than 70% of those in the field. So basically what they did is they tested these people and said, hey, if we get a job to AI and we gave it to the same person who's a professional, 70% of the time it outperformed that human being and it did it 11 times faster at 1110 the cost. So if you think about that, it, you know, it's almost, it's, it's rather disturbing and, and at the same time, it's freeing. Let me give an example. I have a dear friend who, he was doing some things with his trust and he was engaging with his attorney back and forth, and we were having dinner and talking this over, and I said, well, gosh, I said, you know what I do as I said, take those documents. Because, you know, a lot of times that what'll happen is we'll get something that has 50 or 60 pages of documents and everything is kind of electronic signature and it just says, hey, sign. And you, you can kind of go through them mindlessly and click things off and realize, wait a minute, maybe I signed something. I don't even know exactly what's in there. So what I recommended is I said, hey, why don't you take that document and feed it into, you know, from your attorney who says, hey, it's ready to go. Just sign it and feed it into ChatGPT, and then you can ask it questions about what it does and ask if there's anything based on what you do that needs to be changed. Well, it came back and it made some recommendations and it saw some errors. I think it was two, two, maybe three things that shouldn't have been in there, that had they just signed and moved on, it could have made a difference in, in the future, according to his trust. Well, well, he came back and he says, wow. He said, from now on, he says, why do I need an attorney? I'll just have this information in here. And my point is, that is an industry that is at risk. That's knowledge. And it did it in seconds, not hours or weeks. And they're not paying by, you know, $400 an hour. So that's something, again, that can be at risk. Another one is somebody like an accountant. I just for the heck of it, because here it is the end of the year, and I've got a couple of different corporations and we're doing the taxes for it. And so I just Casually ask my chatgpt, whom I've not named yet by the way, and I just ask it, if I gave you my bank accounts and credit card statements and the information needed to be done on a monthly basis, could you reconcile it, categorize it and do that for me every month? And it basically said, well of course you can. And it recommended that I block out any information like names and account numbers for those particular statements. But then the cool thing is not only can I do that for you and prepare it for your, you know, for a P and L, but I can also look at what's going on and I can make some recommendations that could help you run your business better. I thought, dad Gummett, that's pretty good. So I'm not doing that. I'm doing, well, kind of a side by side example. Starting in 2026, along with my bookkeeper and my accountants, I'm going to do a side by side and just see what happens. Because you know how many of us, as an example, we get to the end of the year and our accountant says okay, it's all done. This is how much you owe versus if every month your friend in the AI world is looking over your shoulder and said, hey, you know, based on what's going on, your income is up or down, whatever it should do and should maybe consider these, these changes. Well then, then if you went to your accountant or you went to your bookkeeper and had these, these conversations, a would you be more knowledgeable and, and prepared and then maybe towards the end of the year or the quarter, whatever, however you pay your taxes, you're, you're more ready. It's not a surprise, I think. So there's another industry that could be at risk, another one, as we all know. And there's been a little bit of an adjustment and I'm not going to speak too much that, because I'm not an expert on the, on the verbiage for this but you know, I personally went through a little bit of a health issue at the beginning of the year in April. And, and when I say a little. It was a, it was a hernia surgery. I had a double hernia and starting in April I started to have this lump appear on, in my groin area. And so I did what I went to ChatGPT and I put the information in and in seconds it said hey, you probably have, I can't remember in guanial, some kind of hernia. And they said, but what I'd recommend is get a hold of your doctor and having an Ultrasound done. So I called my doctor, went in the sun the next day, the following day I went ahead ultrasound. Sure enough, that's exactly what it was. My point being is I'm not self diagnosing but I'm, I'm, and this was early on in the year when I'd say, you know, anytime you put something into Chat GPT you tell them who you want them to be. You know, I want you to be the best, you know, you know, health expert. Focusing on this type of understanding and then put the question in. Now what that does is it doesn't have this broad scope of information. It goes down to a really tight, focused area and you, I think your answers are better and they're, they're more, they're quicker to get to where you want it to be. So these are things that are changing. And again the, the big thing is here is 44 knowledge based industry jobs were tested and 70% of the time chat GPT 5.2 had outperformed it 11 times faster and 1110 of the cost. So I think it, I, I think it, it makes it one of those things where maybe those particular industries need to look at saying hey, how can we start adopting this into our process so that we can, we can now better and when we do need the one on one, I'm there to help them. But to create documents and things like that, shoot, I can, I can use AI to do that. Never to be sent without human overview, but it could generate the content for you, the contracts, things of that nature and then you as that knowledge worker overview it and make sure that it's correct. So this is one of the things that I look at when I say okay, what's happened in 2025, looking back, I mean we went to more what I call multimodal reasoning models. Meaning models evolve to process not just text, but images, video and audio seamlessly and improving reasoning and understanding complex inputs like charts and videos. And now to give you an example of this for most of my customers we recommend now is hey, if you come aboard as a client and again I have a marketing, a digital marketing agency that we use artificial intelligence to help do this with our clients. But now because our clients, we know they are so busy. So let's use an example. One of my, one of my clients is a real estate agent. So one of the things we, we recommend and require from all of our clients is we create, if we're going to make videos for you is we create an AI avatar that with, with four or five different versions of them. So we can create content on demand without saying, hey, we need to block off another time to do the filming. Well, the beautiful thing about this is, is now we can have the script created in the voice of that particular client and then we can actually feed that script into a platform like 11Labs and it will synthesize that client's voice. And we can. Now here's another adjustment they've made this year is we can now do voice design to put in the right inflections and changes in the temperature of the voice and how they respond. Well, this makes a huge difference because we don't sound robotic and it's, it's not designed to make it so we fool people, we spoof you or we deep fake you. The point is it allows the business owners to, to work on the business and still get their messages out where the, you know, videos on YouTube and across all the different platforms or whatever it may be. That's another thing that's improved. The other thing is what's called agentic AI and this is where agents, AI agents become more autonomous and they're capable of handling multi step tasks and integrating to D work and life, acting as a personal assistant and strategist. Now let me give you a specific example. If you don't have more than a thousand emails in your inbox that you haven't opened up, don't raise your hand. I've got tens of thousands. Okay. And it's not that I. Well, the point is. So what I did is I said I'm going to create an AI agent that will check my inbox every day and it will. Is this, is this something I should be aware of? Should I just go ahead and delete it? You know, in other words, I gave it a set, a set of instructions on what to do and then it would write drafts, email drafts for the ones that it felt like I should go ahead and respond back to. So let's say it's one of my clients have a specific question. They would understand that it would, it would spin up a draft and, and then it would, at 10 o' clock every morning it would do this to. At 10 o' clock. And I think I have at 3 o' clock in the afternoon and at 10 o' clock it would give me a report and said, hey, this particular client, they sent an email. Here's a suggested response. Well, I'd look at that response or I'd look at the email, I look at the response and say, looks good to me. Click send. In other Words, it was, it was doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Sometimes we hear this, this sequence of 10, 80, 10, and what that means is 10% is done by the human, 80%, the big lift is done by the artificial intelligence. And then we come back as the human and we give it the thumbs up, do a little polishing, whatever it may, may be, and then send it out. Just before I came on this program today, one of my clients, they are, they are a church in our local area and they send out a bulletin every week before the Sunday service. And I thought, and she had told me the, the woman in, in the church had told me, she said my person who normally does my spell checking, grammar check for me on my newsletters has moved away. And so I thought, well, why don't you just send it, send it to me, I'll download it, give it to ChatGPT and tell it what we're looking for and then tell it to examine that document and point out anything that is either misspelled, grammatical or punctuations are incorrect. Well, it took all about, you know, 12 seconds for this to occur. And I looked at, I'm like, okay, I see it. And I looked on the document to make sure it really, it didn't hallucinate that. And then I sent it back to the staff at the church. Now we'll see what she does with it. But this is one of those things where now what I could do is I could say, hey, let me show you how to put this together for yourself. So when you put this together, you can run it through. And once again, now you have an AI agent, if you will, that is working side by side with you to double check your work. And they can do it at, in this case, you know, 10, 11, 12, 15, 15 times faster. And then it will tell you what to spot check it is, is a big, big deal. So the next thing, and these are things that have already happened in 2025 and back in 2020, I say back in 2025, I'm recording this on January 2nd. The other thing is what's called edge AI and this is devices like phones and cars increasingly ran AI locally, in other words, on the device through cheaper and more private operations. And so what this means is, you see every time a new model comes out, it's not like buying a car. And every time a new model comes out, it's been new and improved. And what happens to the price, it's also new and improved. Well, the cool thing about the technology that we're going through right now, and I don't know how long it'll last, but when it comes out, it's gotten faster. And it means it can produce more information for less cost. So it drives the cost down. And an example of this might be, let's say 15 years ago when you went out to buy a television, it was a 55 inch TV and it was five grand. Now you go to Costco, and I'm not promoting Costco, I'm just using an example. You can go to Costco and get that same 55 inch TV for $289 or $389. In other words, it's a fraction of the cost because the technology to build it has increased and decreased the cost. So the technology has increased, but the cost to produce has gone down. And that's what we're seeing with this technology. So it used to cost millions and billions of dollars to train and now can be on our phones. And all of a sudden, you know, you can open up this device right now and have a conversation with the smartest entity on the planet and get questions answered for you. It doesn't matter what it is. So that's another one. So the other thing is, so that's, that's kind of looking back on 20, 25. In other words, a lot of stuff happened. A lot of cool stuff happened. We had, we had Sora, which I think, you know, some people call a nano banana. And that was the, that was the video producing, where it was, it was vibing. We would just talk it in and say, hey, make a video doing X, Y and Z. And it would make a video. And when it first came out, it was again, sometimes we had too many digits or not enough arms or whatever it may be. Now guess what? They're using it in Hollywood. They're using this to create videos and motion pictures. We're using it when it comes to saying, hey, we have a client who, they don't really have a lot of opportunities to create B roll. So when we're making their video, we now go to these platforms and talk into it, what we want to have done. And next thing you know, there's our B roll and it's done incredibly high level. We can, we can make it at any level we want, but most time we use realistic. And then we can finish building these videos. And these are things that are happening right now. So if you're, if you're not aware of these things, it's okay. Just know, it's almost like saying, hey, you still have one of those phones on the wall where you can only walk so far away because there's a cord with it versus you got a headphone on and you're walking around the house and you get in the car and drive and you don't miss the call, you don't lose the call. Things are changing. So these are some things when it comes to technology that are changing. So let's look at the predictions for 2026 and this is, I think this is kind of where the fun for me is kind of beginning. It says, here's one of my predictions and I've got it on my phone, so I'm going to read it off. Businesses will be slow to adopt AI in their business. And I say why? They are thinking AI is like software. They install specific task. When it does not, it is considered a failure. And AI is more like hiring an extremely competent individual that is literally the smartest in the room. They just need directions and support. And the second reason. Let me stop that for a second. So over the last four or five days, I've been working on creating some architecture and updating some, I guess, structure for our content accelerator. And that's what we use to build everybody's content. It's all AI driven and it's human. Overview. But I wanted to put another level of, of there, kind of a commercial grade, excuse me, commercial grade, I guess automation, if you will. And so what we did is I couldn't just pull something off the rack and say, here it is, it was built specifically for that job. Well, this is the difference of the days of saying, hey, I'm going to get something like Mondays.com, i need a CRM or Zoho and I'm going to get that. But then what happens is it has so much in there and we're using about 10% of what we're paying for that. We're going, I'm paying a thousand or two thousand or sometimes a lot more than that every month to use this platform and I use a fraction of it. Well, what's happening now is we're able to go in and say, why don't I build my own custom piece? Couldn't do that a few years ago, but we can build our own custom CRM and we can have it do exactly what we want using something I didn't mention in 2025, which is vibe coding. I kind of snuck it in there when I said we can talk to the, the agent. Vibe coding is where I can now talk to platforms. You know, it doesn't matter what platform. But let's use that as an example. Like cursor as an example. I can talk into. You can talk into cursor and say, hey, I'm thinking about. And you can really have kind of a conversation. I'm thinking about building this website. This is what I wanted to do. This is why I'm having it. This ain't my business. And here's a little data sheet on who I am in my business. And by the way, here are three examples of what I'd like you to build. And go build it. Shockingly enough, it'll go build your website. Well, we're getting that point now where we have the ability to say, hey, let me talk into my chatgpt or my GROK or, you know, whomever it is, and I'm going to build that specific tool I need. That's going to be a big difference. But here's why I think a lot of businesses are going to be slow to adopt, is because they're trying to, they're kind of, they're trying to strap this on to their existing. What I'll call, I don't want to call it ancient architecture. You know, as an example, let's a particular, let's use Zoho as an example. But now they want to automate something else. Well, somehow they have to have the new AI communicate with Zoho or whatever that that platform is. Most of the time it's okay, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's very challenging. And so there's that resistance of like, man, this is so much work. Let's just stay where, where we're at because it works. It just, we could, we could be 11 times faster and cut our cost down. But you know what? This is so hard. Let's move on. And more and more, this is what I hear with this. Instead of trying to force your, your legacy systems to fit these AI systems, which can be very dynamic. And example, if I. And the word dynamic, what I mean is it can change on this, on the go. So if I go back into. Use that cursor example and let's say I, I have a website built for it, but then I can open it up and have another conversation. Say, I'd like to build a landing page now on this website and this is what it's for and this is how I wanted to do it. And boom, it'll build that landing page and it'll put it on the website. So it's dynamic, it's ongoing. It's like this Clay that never gets hard. You can constantly be making it better. So these are things that when it comes to AI being adopted slowly by local businesses, I think we're going to see some pushback with that. I'll give you an example of something that I think that that is a, it's a real easy win for local businesses. And again, probably if you, if you tried this as much as little as four or five months ago, you thought you heard about AI voice agents that could be doing customer service intake calls or calling and confirming, appoint or even take sales calls. Quite frankly, they were effective, but they were still a little bit robotic. Not today. Not today. In fact, we have one we're building. It's not launched yet. It's, it's done being built. I just have to, I just have to put it on the website. And my goal is this, is that you can come to my website and you can have an interaction with this demo AI agent so you can see how it works, how it sounds now for a female voice so you can hear how she sounds and realize that based on how you're going to use it, we can train this voice just like you would train an employee how they want to answer the phone. If this question comes up, how should you respond? You know, when you're, when you answer a phone, are you warm and friendly? Are you polite and professional? How do we can, we can program on all that? Now I think that is one of those easy pieces that can work alongside, let's say like an H Vac company, maybe they get, especially in certain times of year, they're over and they're inundated with phone calls and they can't get back that they miss. Well, here's the thing. We all know this. If I call and I'm an H Vac, I need an H Vac repair some, you know, for somebody or a plumber, and I call that particular agency or business and they don't answer, I go to a recording message meaning, hey, this guy or gals out in their vehicle and they'll call me when they get back. What have we done? We've gone to the next name on the, on the list. But what if you had an AI agent in place that answered those phone calls, can look at your schedule, can make appointments and then call that customer back. If it's, you know, a couple days later, it can call them back and confirm that appointment so it doesn't waste your time or your money. So it does two things. One is it, it reduces lost opportunity and it confirms that people are going to be there because the last thing you want to do is roll up in your vehicle and these people now have changed their mind or they found somebody and they forgot to call you back and cancel the appointment and you roll out there. Now you've lost two opportunities. One is that one and anybody else that you could have filled that appointment with. So I think that's an easy one. So we're going to be putting that on the Swing Point Media website where you can go and just demo that. I think that's an easy one. And here's the thing, it's not outrageously expensive. Depending on your use case. It's like, you know, $500 to set up, takes about two weeks to train it and get everything put together. And then there's some ongoing training but you can start using it in about two weeks and it will start doing what you needed to do. Answer phones, process, you know, whatever it may be. And again it's like $500 set up and it's like $200 a month. Well I don't think you can hire full time phone answering or customer service person for $200 a month. And they'll answer your phone 24. 7. They'll always be happy, they'll always be kind. They have the answers. And here's the other thing. Every conversation is recorded. So if you look at the records and they've answered something incorrectly, we can then use that to train future questions, the future interactions. Well let's face it, that's a cool idea and it's no different than if you were to hire a real person. The only difference is they're working 24. 7. The real person is working during the day. So in many situations, if that plumber or that H Vac company, they have people answering the phone. Guess where the agent comes in. When the real person's on the phone, the AI agent answers it and everybody's taken care of. They're not put on hold. They don't get into the one of those, what do they call it, the tree that press one for this press. I hate those things. It can even forward calls to people. And so if John Smith is in a meeting, it'll go to his phone and they'll leave a recorded message. It's just as if a human's there and that's only like 190. Again you'll be looking at probably by the time this comes out, you'll see the demo on the swingpointmedia.com website and you can just check it out. I thought it would be a lot easier than me trying to explain how this works. Why don't you just interact with it and see if it works for yourself and then, and then just, you know, let's make one for you. So that's the, that's the first one is, is I think, I think businesses are going to be really slow to uptake AI into their business for many reasons. The other one, the other one is they think it's cost and integration. You know, this, this is, this can be a challenging thing. But like I just pointed out, for $500 a one time setup, be like training and then 199amonth for somebody to answer your phone and make calls, going back to confirm your appointments. That's not much. That's, that's very, very inexpensive. The second prediction I had is what I call fractional CTOs, fractional. Technology officers. I almost said training officer. I don't know why I was thinking about that. Technology officers. And the reason I bring that up and I call it fractional is because a lot of, there are not a lot of people out there that really know how to set these things up. Or more importantly, like we do at Swing Point Media, we come out to your business and let's, let's analyze your business and your operating procedures and say, hey, you don't need a full this, that and the other. We can do this, this and this and it will streamline and it will reduce your overhead and increase this. And we can help if you will, through a consultation, put together an idea for your business to say this is how your AI would go. I think a lot of businesses are going to need that going into the future because here's the thing, it's not slowing down. This is like a wave that has been growing in the ocean and it's getting closer and closer. And as it comes, guess what, what do waves do? They get smaller, bigger. This is getting bigger. And so I think those businesses that, that kind of set on their hands and say, ah, you know, I'm just going to go do whatever I've been doing and I think we're going to be fine. Well, I think that that is going to, that's going to be a challenge for a lot of businesses. I'm just going to read this because of the need to implement or design and train for AI. And so very few who really know what to do are available. Hiring a fractional CTO may be the least expensive with the highest rate of success versus trying to do it from within by a Staff who is not fully understanding of what can be done from operations to sales with AI. Now give me an example. I had a client I used to take care of and we did really well with them. They did really well. They 5x their business well, then the business sold, somebody else came in, they hired a young person, work in house and it just wasn't working out. I stepped aside, that young person made some recommendations and immediately wiped out their sales and their traffic to their business. It was somebody in house, they were enthusiastic instead of. You know that old saying is if you think expert paying for extra expertise is expensive, hire someone who isn't. And because then you have to do it twice what they screwed up. So about eight months later they called me back and said, hey, would you come fix this? And that's what we did. And we got their numbers back up as far as their traffic is concerned and fix their website and. But the point is just bringing someone in that says, yeah, I have a phone, I know how to use chat GPT gang. It's way beyond that. It's way beyond that and it's moving it at record speed. So I think that's where this second prediction, the fractured fractional CTO is going to be a play, the third one. And this is what I'm excited about because this is what I've been working on for about the last four or five days. When I told you at the very beginning, I was updating my, my content accelerator and that's recursive learning models. And basically what that means is the AI is constantly learning from its own outputs. So for example, making ads see this already or making ads sees this already. In other words, the ads are going out there, it's collecting the data from the interaction, the conversions, all that kind of stuff, and then it's improving upon itself. Well, this has been really good for a lot of the big models, but it's coming to all of us and that's what I've been working on. So as an example, I mentioned before, Swingpoint Media, we make content for clients, we make blogs, videos, social media posts and emails. We do more than that, but that's basically the bulk of what we do. And so what this is going to do now, this new piece that I'm building and adding to my already existing workflow, we've been using for now three years to create the content, it's now going to be smarter. In other words, it will every time it sends out a piece of content and it will then grab the data from that content, the analytics, whether it's a blog post, it's a social media post, it's a video, whatever it is, and then it will bring that information back in and learn from it and then improve it on the next, on the next go. So it's constantly changing. It's getting better and better every time. Can you imagine having an employee that every time they do a task, they do it better, they do it faster, their results get better? Well, that's kind of what we're doing. It's called recursive learning. And we're going to see that more and more. We're going to see it a lot in, I think, the health industry, where, you know, it will be able to take a particular problem, you name it, and it can just 24, seven, it can be working on this problem and every time it does a test, it's learning and it's proving, learning and improving. I think we're going to see some things really get solved in 2026 that we thought, wow, I thought, I probably wouldn't see the answer in my lifetime. I think we're going to see that that might be a fourth prediction. So let's see if that, if that does everything. So we may see it, I put in here, we may see it in customer service, like AI voice agents, as an example, where every call is fed back into the system and analyzed and then prompts and scripts are improved automatically to improve results. Now imagine this. You have an AI voice agent and they handle sales calls. And you know, you're getting, you're getting, you've, you've already added in your, your process, your selling process that you would train a human with. But you now have added this into the knowledge base and the training for your AI sales agent. But now we have the ability to say every one of those interactions, we bring it back in house, run it through AI, analyze it and say, hey, if we could improve this line, it would improve the results by 2.3%. So we go back in, into the AI training and the information it has, and we add that change and it's constantly going on like that. Now, the cool part about that is we can automate that. So now when it, now when it creates that, it shows it automatically takes that conversation, analyzes it and said, okay, this is what we'd recommend. So now it's, it's reviewed by us as a human, as a business owner, if you will, and say, do I want to put that in there or not? And if it says, yeah, let's do it, boom, I decide Yep, it's approved for implementation. And now every call from that point on, they handle those types of objections or the conversations differently. And it's constantly learning. It's getting better and better and better. So these are some of the things that I think, you know, the things that have happened in 2025 that were just, I got to tell you, mind blowing. Just mind blowing. When. When we saw that we were taking agents or videos of myself, if you will, feeding it back into a platform like Heygen or Synthesia, and then it would lip sync almost perfectly. The audio would be almost perfect, if not even better. The one thing that we have to play with, and maybe it's me, I have to create some image or some videos without my hands moving around. That would probably do a little better job. But we can now play with all that because where before it was it was robotic, it was just reading the script. Now those same avatars are like actors and actresses. It interprets the script and the intent. Now I'm playing around with this a little bit to actually add some of these words to help it understand the intent of that particular line. Seriously, they said or with. With deep thought. I'm just playing around with that. I don't have a particular. I don't have any answers on that yet. But what I am seeing is the results for avatars for our clients are just getting better and better and better. In fact, I sent one out to a dear friend of mine. Of mine. I created three different videos, and one of them was an AI voice agent, or excuse me, my avatar sent it out and she said, I showed it to my husband. We didn't know for sure, but when it was done, I told him that was an avatar that wasn't really Jeff. And he's like, no way. That's the cool part. That's where we're at. Well, again, what that will allow us to do as a business owner, it will allow us to create content at scale. So whenever, you know, there's a. There's a thing. His name is Marcus Sheridan. There's a gentleman, Marcus Sheridan. He wrote a book a long time ago. But he says when they ask, we answer. So my point is, my business is we solve the questions or provide answers to the questions your ideal customers are asking. That's how we connect people. They're asking, hey, why is my air conditioning blowing hot air? Or why is, you know, that noise happening in the wall when I turn my water on? And we make a video about that or write an article about that, and that connects Them to that business that gives them the answer and they say, well, ABC Plumbing, help me with that. Oh, they have a special on, you know, do you have noise in your wall? We have the special and it connects the dots. So it's a lot of fun. But I'm curious, what are your top three predictions for 2026? Put them in the comments. I'd be, I'd be, I'd love to see them and see what you're thinking. Does that be technology? Could be. It doesn't have to be, but maybe in your business, you know, what are you going to, what are you going to do in your business? Will it be more online? Maybe you don't do anything online. Will it be, you know, will you, you do more things where there's referral, marketing, like join a BNI group? Will you do chamber of commerce meetings, whatever, whatever it is. I'd love to know what your predictions are. You know, one of the last things, and this is we have this, you utopian and dystopian view of what's going to happen 2026 for some people when that are. That are pretty involved in AI said 2026 could be an incredibly disruptive year because of things like robots and not just AI, but robots that will now do all the work that probably mainly in warehouses and plants, they'll do most of the work. And so that could, that could change roles for a lot of people. Here's my prediction on that. I think yes, we will see a lot more of that in, in the space but at the same time we still need a human involved in that process just to be the guardrails and to be that, that one, gosh, that one last stop in case it needs to happen, you know, that, that there's a human involved there. And you know, let's face it, if I had, if I had, you know, we joke about this is if I had a thousand AI agents that work for me, or let's just say if I had two or three AI agents that work for me for every position we have in our company, we could do incredible amounts of work. Will that happen in 2026? Probably, probably. But what will happen is in each one of those roles, we'll also have a human to double check all that work before it ever goes out live. So anyway, so these are some of my thoughts. I hope you enjoyed this. Again. My name is Jeff Harrison. This is the company called or this is a show I call the Local Voice. And you know, I, I want to end with this and this is the risk of slow or no adoption. And I just pulled this up off the Internet. It said, while some delay might seem safe, companies not adopting AI risk falling behind competitors who are streamlining the process, gaining customer insights and driving growth through AI Because I think here at the end of the day, we, as people, we want, we want the least amount of friction to get our problem solved. Whether it's calling to update our cable bill, make an appointment for a restaurant, doesn't matter. We want the least level of friction. And if we can have it done in such a way that it sounds very close to a human, we would rather have that with no waiting than a human on the other end. So I think you need to be aware of that and think, how can I make them work together? Like I said, it would be, it would be really cool to have your, your voice agent that answers your phone. And maybe they're just a backup to somebody who already works for you. Or if you don't have one right now that your best choice is voicemail, then you should probably implement a voice agent right away. Yesterday. You should call me before you finish this. You should get a hold of me at Swing Point Media right away. In fact, here's a, here's a fun phone number. My voice agent, his name is Tony. And he answers the phone for Swing Point Media. It's, I'm just going to put it on here. It's, let's see, 760-548-3705. And that's Tony. And so I would say, you know, check that out. Talk to Tony. Let me get to back up there. 760-548-3705. He's my voice AI agent. I want, if somebody calls into Swing Point Media, I want them to be able to have questions answered. And I have Tony tweaked to say, hey, I'd like you to encourage people to make an appoint. And so when you call in, he's going to answer all your questions. But he's also has this objective of saying, hey, you must have called for a reason. Let's see if we can make an appointment. Can he forward phone calls to me? Absolutely. Can he take messages? Absolutely. So he does almost everything. Well, really, he does everything a human would, would do. Plus he works 24 7. So that's Tony at 760-548-3705. All right. Meaningful adoption of AI is a gradual process hampered more by organization and human factors than technology itself, creating a significant gap between potential and reality. I have this conversation a lot with a Dear friend of mine. And it's one of those things where. And we always talk about this. It's kind of what we call the curse of knowledge. And it's true on every level. Any field. You can be a badminton player, right? It doesn't matter. You have this level of expertise. And when we get there, we think everyone should be at that place. And so we always talk from that level. When the reality is there's this mass. I'm talking probably 97, 98% of the humans on the planet are really, if we think of a ladder, they're at wrong number one or they're trying to get on wrong number one when it comes to adopting AI. But what happens is somebody like me who hangs out with other people that do what I do, what happens, I think everybody thinks this way when nobody thinks this way. That's the wild part about it. And it's true for everything. You do too as well, whether you're an H vac repair person, you're a plumber, you're a carpenter, it doesn't matter. You're electrician, it doesn't matter. Meet them, what they are. One of the things I noticed many years ago is I was working with a doctor many years ago, and he was doing something very cutting edge. He was, at that point, he was doing some longevity work and stem cell work. And he told me, I said, God, why doesn't everybody do this? This is so positive and it makes it everybody so much healthier and blah, blah. He says, he says it takes about 17 years to make a change in the health industry. And I was like, why? And part of that is because we, they are so trained in the knowledge of that is the right way. Because, let's face it, the last thing you want to do is have a doctor over you going, well, you know, I don't know, maybe. Maybe this will work. Maybe. No, they wouldn't need to be very confident. Well, they are trained like that. And it takes a, it takes a generation or two to actually make that change in a process. Now we hear stem cells and, you know, longevity and life extension. That's normal. But back then, this was about 15, 14 years ago, 13 years ago, it was very like, oh, you know, the guy's a quack. In fact, when I first heard about it, he wanted to talk to me. I was like, this guy's a quack. Is, is this guy. And when I listened, understood and saw that, saw the data, I'm like, didn't take me 17 years to figure it out. So anyway, Today, we just want to talk about, hey, what are the predictions for 2026 and how will they affect you? How will they affect you? Can you take advantage of using some of the technologies out there and make your business run for one tenth the cost that it costs you now? Can you do things for your clients 11 times faster than you're doing right now? Can you add one or two pieces of this into your business and make a huge business, make a huge difference? Do you need to hire a fractional cto? Maybe? Call me, let's talk. This is what I do. And because we look at a broad spectrum, we're not like a hammer and everything looks like a nail. We look at every business independently and say, well, let's look at what you do and see what would make the most sense. Not just to say, oh, let's put it in there, but what would make the biggest impact with the least amount of friction. Because that's the biggest part. If your staff or your business has a lot of friction with this, seen it for years, we'll just toss it aside. I'm the same way. When it becomes too hard, I'm like, this just is not working. Let's just, let's go back the way we're doing it right now. And so, Anyway, predictions for 2026, I encourage you to, in the, in the notes or in the comments, let me know what your predictions are. And until next time, my name is Jeff Harrison with the local V, and I'll see you then.