In this episode of the AI Cookbook podcast, host Jeff Hassemer and co‑host Nate Lamis walk listeners through five emerging AI trends that small businesses can leverage right now. They begin with a QuickBooks study showing that 77 % of SMBs report AI improves productivity (74 % boost) and revenue (41 % increase), underscoring the tangible business impact of AI tools. Next, they discuss Meta’s integration of AI into its ad suite, turning Facebook and Instagram into free, conversational marketing analysts that can answer plain‑language questions about ad performance. The conversation then shifts to the “agentic era” of search, where Google’s AI can call a business, schedule appointments, and book leads directly from a company’s Google Business Profile and website, creating a first‑mover advantage for firms with AI‑enabled chat or phone agents. They examine OpenAI’s new unlimited free tier for ChatGPT, noting how the pricing model is shifting higher‑order, compute‑intensive use cases into paid plans while basic usage becomes free, and they reflect on the broader economics of AI compute costs. Finally, they cover the EU AI Act’s requirement that AI‑generated content be clearly labeled, prompting businesses to adopt disclosure badges and stay compliant. Throughout, Jeff and Nate stress the importance of early adoption, building AI‑optimized sites, integrating chat/phone agents and booking links, and staying ahead of regulatory changes to capture revenue and productivity gains.
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Hey, welcome to the AI Cookbook podcast. That's AI for small business. This is week 5, uh, the week of August 18th, and I'm Jeff Hassemer. I'm here with Nate Lamis. All right, Nate, we ready to rock on this?
You bet.
Okay, so we got 5 things. Um, so QuickBooks did a, did a study and saying 77% of small businesses say AI works for them, although they haven't get They didn't have much detail on how it works for them. They have seen that their small businesses are using it quite a bit, reported revenue increases from 41%, and definitely productivity improvements of 74%. For myself, I've seen this deeply. You know, I'm able to produce more, bring in more revenue without, without, and expanding my services with AI. That it's been super helpful. Do you have any comments on this, Nate?
Yeah, absolutely. I think the, you know, when we talk to people about this, it's the productivity is easy, right? And but then you start to get this kind of vagueness even when you ask, well, how productive? But it's easy for people to spend half an hour and then figure that out and then feel triple good about, you know, what they've done with AI. This middle part about the revenue increase, It's harder to unpack for them, but once we help them do that, then it's just this full, uh, you know, full throttle with AI. Hey, I'm all about this. Um, so it's nice to see this coming along. I think it's coming along as the market matures, uh, the way that we would expect it to. Um, it's nice to be in this, this kind of a scenario versus people questioning everything about it 6 months ago, 8 months ago, 9 months ago.
Well, and here's the other thing I would say, you know, this is bleeding into what we're going to talk about later. But, you know, with a lot of our clients, and once we get them set up with the new sites and they're, and they're AI optimized, geo optimized, we're starting to see an uptick in volume from their lead generation and things like that. And now as we're getting into Agentix, having an AI agent on the site and booking and scheduling and all that from an AI perspective that's increasing revenue for the people that are taking advantage of that right now as well. Yeah, so I think that leads us into— well, no, that's number 3. So Meta turns AI into your free marketing analyst. So Meta's been going really, really hard at AI and implementing this within the, um, within the ad suite. I think you're starting to see now You can go into Facebook and Instagram and look at ad performance and all that and actually have it answer plain questions about what content's working and what to improve within your environment as well. I think we're gonna see more of this across social media too and marketing. What do you think?
I absolutely agree. Yeah, so I think that these are the, what I call the low-hanging fruit that all of us independently were starting to build because, you know, we realized, hey, these big platforms aren't doing the most basic things they should be doing and now they're catching on. and starting to add these types of features. So we welcome more and more of it because it actually frees up a lot of us that do pro services around this type of work, um, to, you know, to work on the meatier stuff underneath it all.
Yeah, exactly. Get the analysis so we can improve and get to the next stages with people, for sure. Um, so here's where we go, you know, the agentic— I, I've been talking a lot about this— the agentic era of search is upon us, and we're just at the beginning phases of this. But Google's AI will now call a business and set an appointment for you if the business has the ability to answer the phone and they have the ability to set appointments on their website.
Yeah.
And their Google Business Profiles is up to date and ready to go. But AI is choosing for these customers now, and we're going to see more and more of this into 2027. And if, if You know, what I'm finding as we do our analysis is a lot of sites don't have these basic things that, that need to be on there to take advantage of this that's coming out. This is an opportunity for people who move first.
Absolutely. This is— all of this stuff is first mover status. I mean, you're going to be taking a bigger share of the pie by staying up to date on this stuff and having these things the minute it comes out. And it's going to take your competitors so much longer to figure out what's going on and why their sales dropped for half a year or a full year. Um, yeah, so, so I, I love the people who jump on this type of stuff and, you know, work with us and work with others to try to figure it out, implement it into their business.
For sure, for sure. Um, ChatGPT is making things free. Um, their new, their new free tier just got unlimited. The change took effect in August, so this means that you can cut your business plan pricing and put capable AI tools. And it looks like they're starting to then adjust the $20 plans into higher-order efforts like agentic marketing or agentic efforts and things like that than this. What do you think about this? Kind of, is this the cost of AI coming down, or what do you think this means?
Yeah, so at first I always look at these things like, oh, it's marketing, it's competition, right? It's like all the work we've done over our careers in pricing strategy. But when you really start to think about it and you really start to dig into all these different models across all the frontier models and platforms, you start to realize, oh, they're zeroing in on these types of businesses only really need this much compute and this type of compute, and these types of individuals only need this much compute and that type of compute. compute. And frankly, we can subsidize that with the bigger work that we're doing across enterprises and governments and what have you. And so, hey, it's totally fine to have it free and get that user base going. It's totally fine to drop the prices on some of these things. So I think this will become much more refined over time, um, very much like I use like 3D printing software and some other things for hobbies that I do, and they're incredibly good at changing month by month. Here's how many tokens you're actually using. So you get a cheaper price now because you don't really cost as much as we thought a year ago. I think it's exactly what's happening at a meta level with these, you know, these big frontier models.
Yeah, it's a really good point. I really— I think that's right. And we're going to start to see this. And, and I think also, you know, they're moving the higher-order efforts and the things that are really taking advanced steps up into the paid tiers and then trying to get early adoption for those, for those who just aren't using it in the right way. Or in the deeper ways, right?
Yeah, and we see that as advanced users, you know, or early users of this type of technology. It's getting much better at saying, hey, what you just asked for is big. This is heavy. This is going to take some time, right? This is going to— and in some models, it's even saying it's going to take this many tokens, right? It's going to cost you, and here's why. And the more— I love that. The more there's transparency on, okay, I'm asking this thing to do some pretty heavy work. I get it, but it's worth it. I'm willing to pay. And I think that's the kind of model we're gonna start moving towards.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, to that point, I've been coding on Fable for 5 straight days on one client app right now.
There you go.
But it's been, I mean, it's amazing. And it told me it was gonna take this long to do it. And I'm like, it never takes that long. And sure enough, here we go. But it's big. Once we're done with this, it's gonna save the client 8 hours per proposal. So it's so cool what we're gonna get done there. So anyway, the, um, finally, you know, the EU Act on AI came into effect in early August. A lot of people think that they're exempt from this, um, but they're not. If anything that's generated with AI needs to be, um, clear that it was generated with AI. With clear disclosure labels. So I think people are still figuring out what that means, but you're going to need to put this into your content if you're generating with AI.
Absolutely.
Really, really quick. Not a crisis.
And it's, it's, yeah, it's just so easy to do. It's like, just do it. This is, this is AI, this is AI-assisted, this is completely human, right? I mean, that's—
yep. Yeah, I have a friend who's actually working on a whole series of badges that have, you know, everything from this is human generated to this is AI generated.
That is a great, great idea.
Yeah, like the trust of the websites. Um, but yeah, I've already put this into, uh, to Moxie as well. Yeah, for that. So that's the major 5 here. You know, I think, um, the big takeaways here is, is You know, AI is going to help you increase revenue and increase productivity in your small business. Just make sure you understand how and really jump into it and build that out. The, uh, there's more and more marketing capability that's being put out by the people, places where you're marketing in Google, Instagram, Facebook. AI is taking over and it's this slow crawl of it just being injected into the tools you use every day. Do not forget and do not sleep on agentic search. That is going to be the next frontier. So make sure that you've got the core things, you know, an AI chat agent, phone agent on your, on your systems, a booking link on your website, and the ability and pricing so that AI can actually pull that stuff together. Um, and then, then, you know, AI is looking for bigger adoption even though we're, you know, compute constrained. But they're trying to get people, I think, a little bit more aligned with the, the pros of this, um, as there is a big, uh, PR issue out there. And then, you know, make sure that you're in line with all this new regulation coming down there. Don't sleep on the regulations because they will sneak up on you.
Yep.
Uh, anything else you got to add there, Nate?
No, it's good topics for this week. Thank you.
Yep. Well, stick with us for, you know, how you handle this with small businesses and how to make this happen. We're, uh, we're applying our enterprise experience to the small business world, so hopefully you find this helpful and we'll keep going.
