AI Cookbook Podcast September 18, 2026

Hello and welcome to the AI Cookbook podcast for the week of September 19th, 2026. I'm Jeff Hassemer. I'm the CEO of FirestarterMarketing.ai. Hello, I'm And we work with small businesses to help them adopt AI, um, get the most out of their AI marketing, all that kind of stuff. So here are the 5 big pieces of news this week that we'll be covering off on here. There's an AI tool story, local marketing story, some small business adoption news that might make you feel better if you're falling— feel like you're falling behind, um, a little bit about policy and, and, uh and government, uh, authority here, and then some operations information that's coming through. So first off, AI phone receptionists just got good enough to actually use. So to date, they've been a little choppy, and part of that is the lag between the model and, and determining that. But OpenAI just shipped a full duplex voice mode in its API this month. Meaning that AI phone agents can now listen and talk at the same time and handle interruptions really well, run over real phone lines. That's gonna make that voice seem less robotic and pass the Turing test. That is knowing— not fooling a human into believing that the machine is human, right? Mm-hmm. So for anybody who has, you know, a phone answering problem or is missing phone calls, like maybe a contractor or salon or dental office, This is no longer close. You can deploy these agents for under $200 a month and get all those answers, those phones answered during the workday. Even better, you can stop the solicitor calls coming in too. And so you don't have to answer the phone every time. Let your AI agent do that, but escalate those high-emotional, high-dollar calls to you immediately. So now when your phone rings, you know it's actually escalated from your AI a little bit better. Um, it's all within reach at this point, which is really, really great. So Google now shows how much you— you're, uh, in local marketing news, essentially Google now shows how much traffic AI is taking from you or sending your way, depending on which way you want to look at it. So the Google Business Profile is now breaking your impressions into 3 core buckets. Your classic local panel, the Maps AI summary, and now AI overviews. It'll show you if you're showing up or not. This is starting to come in Google Analytics as well. It's coming in Google Search as well. So all of that's there. Google's now— we're starting to get really good data about are you or are you not showing up in AI. And I can tell you from my analysis, most of you are not showing up. In AI. So the good news is this is an opportunity because it's easy to get there. The bad news is if you're not going to take advantage of it, you're going to get left behind. I'll quote a stat I quote often. At the beginning of the search engine marketing craze 20-some years ago, those who jumped on search and realized that people were going to find me during search had a 10-year lead on everybody else. I feel like we're in the exact same spot with AI search. If you can get up there and own that first spot in AI search, you will have a long lead of getting in front of that. And these are high-intent searches, so don't sleep on this. So small business adoption— most businesses say that they're using AI, but far fewer really do. So when you ask somebody They're saying, oh yeah, I'm using AI 55-68% of the time. But when you verify it, you actually get in there and see if they're actually using AI in real operations, less than 18%, 17.7% do. That's a big gap, right? And self-reported surveys put small business, you know, that self-reported surveys don't usually give you the great idea. Plus, there's always, you know, misinterpretation of what using AI means. I think this is really true about how people are using AI in general too. Most people, when they use it, are using it either to fill out their emails for them or for search purposes. Very few are actually using it to run operations within their world and really drive that forward. That's a big miss for these small businesses. It's huge for you. It saves you time, it saves you money, it saves you effort. It allows you to work on your business and especially the things that you like in your business. So I'd encourage you to learn more about this and really start to get into adoption for you because it will help you if you deploy it right. And finally, we always talk about the policies. More and more regulation is coming. But here's one that's really interesting to small businesses. If you run an AI chatbot, the law says you're now responsible for the answers. Should be true. Act— it's the same thing would happen if you give an employee, that you're responsible for that, the, the answers that are showing there. All this really means for you is that you need to make sure that you got a trained AI, and you should be looking at how it's answering things. Within that environment, because you can always correct that over time and train that model into the right answers for you. But just keep that fresh, maybe look at it once a month, make sure that everything's right and, and correct in that, in that environment. Finally, um, we're starting to move into a world where it's becoming easier to deploy agents within your business now. I don't know why anybody would do this per se, because I do think it's fairly easy to build a really custom agent for yourself. But I do understand that can get technical for people. What's happening now is Salesforce is starting to ship 7 named job-ready AI agents that are already ready to go. Um, and OpenAI opened its agent infrastructure to everyone, which means you can now buy an agent instead of building one. So you could stand this up over a short amount of time. Live Nation did theirs in 30 days. They're a pretty big company. I stand these up within an hour for most people within their environment. The catch is governance, right? You wanna make sure that you are governing this and that you understand your choke points. Choke points are where you should have a human in the loop. And then what you can automate through the process and, and pulling those together and really understanding that in a plan when you're deploying core agents to do work for you. That's where you're really gonna, gonna win this game. It's not hard. It just requires a little upfront thinking. That's about it. But it's interesting to get these pre-built agents for you because now you don't have to do any of the instruction coding or things like that. But don't forget, you're still going to have to hone this into your core business. So, some key takeaways for this week. So start to think about getting a phone agent this week. If you miss calls during the day, you're missing opportunities. If you're answering the phone for people that are trying to sell you something, you're missing opportunities, right? So this is the highest ROI move on the list. Without a doubt, get this going. Um, it's low cost and it gets your phone answered. It's pretty critical to your business. I'll say this again, agentic search is coming where agents are going to be talking to other agents within your environment, and you're going to want that answer to be shown up in that kind of play. If you don't have this in 6 months, you're definitely getting passed over. Um, Understand on your Google Business Profile and check your AI surface impressions. Are you showing up or are you not? And if you're not, you can go ahead and do a free audit on firestartermarketing.ai, show you what needs to be done to fix that. Or come call us and talk to us, we can figure that out. Um, number 3, stop benchmarking against all the noise out there. Um, you know, verified user use is under 20%. You're not behind, but pretty soon if you don't start getting into this, you will be. In the next 12 months, 12-24 months, this is going to get way more prevalent. Um, don't forget, regulations are coming. They're going to be really widespread over the next year, and that's going to happen at the national level all the way down to local levels and state level type of play. Really what this boils down to is You're responsible for what your AI does and says. You should disclose when you're using AI and your content and things like that, and just make sure people know where the information is coming from. And finally, before you buy an agent, don't worry or think about building it from scratch. These tools aren't that hard to do. Um, and then, but if you are going to do this, understand what it can touch, what it can do, who approves it, what access it has to your environment, and understand what you can and where you want the human in the loop. Plan that out. Takes a little bit of planning to do. We'll have much more successful deployment than any other tool. That's it for this week. Hopefully you found this helpful and you keep, keep watching.