Episode 15 - This podcast digs into how AI is quietly rewriting the rules of customer discovery, trust and competition for small businesses. Instead of a solo rant, it’s a conversation that unpacks the weird new reality where AI agents are hiring humans, Super Bowl ads are arguing about manipulation, and your next “customer” may actually be a bot acting on someone’s behalf. The discussion starts with Maltbook – a social network where AI agents talk to each other and even post jobs for people – and explores what it really means when machines openly admit they need human culture, humour and judgement to improve.From there, the pod turns to the Anthropic vs OpenAI Super Bowl ad battle and the deeper clash over how AI assistants should handle advertising. One side is comfortable with assistants blending recommendations and sponsorship in a single friendly answer, while the other insists that ads must be obvious and clearly labelled. The conversation digs into why this isn’t just tech drama, but a foundational question about trust: if your assistant can quietly steer you towards high‑margin products or 400% APR loans, who is it really working for – you, or the advertiser?The episode then brings it down to street level for small businesses. Traditional click‑through websites are compared to “digital dinosaurs” in a world where people and their AI helpers expect direct answers, not multi‑step navigation. The British carpet company story illustrates a simple, practical shift: turning scattered Google reviews into an AI‑readable knowledge base so both customers and large language models can instantly see why the business is trusted. That one move turns a regular website into something modern AI tools can understand, surface and recommend.Finally, the pod explores the rise of agentic workflows – AI agents that don’t just chat, but actually carry out multi‑step tasks. Using examples like automating hours of research into a 30‑second workflow, the conversation highlights the widening gap between businesses that embrace this capability and those that ignore it. The group keeps circling back to one central idea: your most important future customer is likely to be an AI agent, and it will be looking for clear, honest, machine‑readable answers. The episode asks whether your business is ready for that reality, and what you can start changing today so you don’t get quietly filtered out of the conversation.