In this solo episode of the AI Cookbook podcast, Jeff Hassemer delivers a concise briefing aimed at small‑business owners on the most actionable AI developments affecting day‑to‑day operations. He begins by highlighting Meta’s new AI that can plug directly into business accounts—Instagram Insights, Meta ad campaigns, and Google Workspace—allowing owners to query performance data. He stresses the emerging trend of AI being embedded in core systems and the need for clear audience definitions as platforms like Meta and LinkedIn shift to AI‑driven content surfacing. Next, Jeff discusses the heightened difficulty of ranking in AI‑driven local SEO, noting that AI recommendations are up to 30× harder than traditional Google rankings and that franchises must build local authority through chamber links and neighborhood‑specific content. He cites a statistic that only 1.2% of local businesses appear in ChatGPT recommendations, positioning Firestarter Marketing as a service that helps clients achieve top placement. He then moves to white‑collar automation, describing Xero’s AI agent (Jaxx) that auto‑reconciles bank transactions, and mentions comparable capabilities in QuickBooks, Codex, and the new ChatGPT Work. The episode covers the global launch of ChatGPT ads with no minimum spend, urging small advertisers to test low‑budget, highly personalized campaigns while questioning user appetite for AI‑served ads. Jeff presents survey data showing 82% of businesses use AI in some form but only 14% have fully embedded it into operations, and he outlines how Firestarter Marketing embeds AI into processes such as bid estimation, crew scheduling, and RFP analysis. He concludes with key takeaways: leverage Meta AI for performance insights, measure AI visibility beyond Google rank, adopt AI bookkeeping, experiment with ChatGPT ads, and consider Firestarter’s 8‑step implementation framework. Listeners are invited to contact firestartermarketing.ai for hands‑on assistance.
Chapters
Hello and welcome to the AI Cookbook podcast for the week of August 24th. I'm Jeff and I'm alone this week. My partner Nathan is off. So this is a podcast for small business owners who are looking to know what's going on with AI and what affects them, rather than all the big news about the Frontier Labs and things like that. So let's start here. Meta plugs its AI directly into your business accounts. So Meta AI can now connect straight to your Instagram Business Insights, your Meta ad campaigns, your Google Workspace. And you can ask it how your content performed if you trust Meta. Um, this is where we're heading, by the way, is that your AI was going to be plugged right into your systems and you're going to be able to ask it things about your business across the board. Google's heading this path, so is Meta. Um, you're going to be able to choose, uh, how you want this to kind of play out and, and take that forward. We're already seeing this in Meta's ads environment where you just put in your ads there and it's going to start to pick out where and who your audience is, which means it's really important when you build your content to be clear about who your audience is and who you're looking to see. LinkedIn just made a change like this recently as well. They've got— they've dropped an algorithm They're fully AI and how they surface content. So putting in who you're targeting at first is really, really critical. Number 2, uh, local SEO geo. So getting recommended by AI is not easy. It's up to 30 times harder than just ranking on Google. That may be true from a national perspective, but I think locally you could still win this game. With very, very key information. So the 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands— this is where your problem lies, is that if you are a franchise and you're working within a multi-location strategy and you're using national content, you won't rank well at all. This is where if you own a franchise or a local business, you have to establish local authority. Links from local chambers of commerce, but also in your content be mentioning keys of, of your neighborhoods and landmarks that exist within your environment. That will help you get in there. And you, you have to be tight with the questions that you answer, because if you answer the question that was asked in GPT directly, the chances of you surfacing are much higher. Within that environment. You— we see that only 1.2% of businesses and local businesses are, are recommended by ChatGPT, but that's mostly because nobody is doing this right now. This is where Firestarter Marketing helps you out immensely. Most of our clients are pinned at the top of most of their important query questions. So here's something new. Um, Xero's AI agent now does bookkeeping nobody wants to do. So now this is kind of the white-collar move, right, where AI is taking over a lot of white-collar jobs. So if you use Jaxx, the AI financial agent, it now auto-reconciles your bank transactions and pulls this together. By the way, you can also do this with connections into your QuickBooks from an agent in Codex or an agent in Uh, Cowork, or now the new ChatGPT Work. These all do these things already for you. If you're still doing things manually, you might want to look into having an agent do some of this work for you. So ChatGPT ads go global now, so there's no minimum spend. It's now accessible to you as a small business if you want to use ChatGPT. I think the jury's still out. On this personally. Um, you know, ads, ads and AI— people don't necessarily love ads. They should be highly personalized to the query and things that are going on, which is great, but will people really want ads in their AI is the major question here. And does the spend make sense? If you do it, test it, go in low, see what works, and then you can expand from there. But now it's global. It's in Europe as well as the US. And finally, almost everyone's using AI, but almost nobody's really embedded it into their systems. So there's new survey data showing that almost 82% of you are using AI in some way, shape, or form in your business, but only 14% are fully embedding that in operations. We do this for our clients quite a bit. So we're embedding into operations in things like bidding with square footage analysis off the RFP or off a drawing to turn that right into bidding management for you. We've built schedulers for a lot of our clients, especially for general contractors and things like that that have crews all over the place. That's where you're going to get a big lift on what you're going to do. It saves a lot of time when you can embed this stuff into your operations rather than just having it write emails for you. So here's the major takeaways here. So Meta AI, and you can connect that to your Instagram and see it helps you figure out your performance and, and how that's going to work. You're going to see this over and over again in systems. You can stop measuring only Google Rank. You need to figure out how you're showing up in AI and how to get there. Um, there's an 8-step process that we take our clients through, gets you there very, very quickly. You can now use AI to audit your bookkeeping and operationalize that— I'm going to number 5 right now— into your system to get real value out of AI. And finally, if you feel like it, test the GPT ads. I'm still, like I said, tepid on it personally, but if anybody wants to test that out with me, I'm happy to build your campaigns for you and take them forward. So that's the, uh, the major news for the week of August 24th. Hopefully you're finding this helpful and it's, uh, it's meeting your needs as a small— uh, again, firestartermarketing.ai if you want to see what we do and how we apply this to your business day in and day out. Have a good one.
