Discover how your next customer will find you in a world where humans no longer do the searching themselves. This episode explains why the most important new client for your business is not a person, but a machine – the AI agents quietly deciding which brands to trust, recommend, and send real buyers to. We start with a confronting story from Australia, where respected financial journalist Alan Kohler was deep‑faked into a completely fabricated 2,000‑word article, complete with fake images of an on‑set confrontation. That moment, when even his colleagues believed the hoax, shows how quickly online trust can evaporate and why relying on what we “see” on social media is no longer enough.From there, we tackle the myths that let business owners keep procrastinating on AI. This isn’t about clunky robots in sci‑fi films or some far‑off future. Right now, companies are building highly dextrous machines with hands as capable as ours, powered by AI “brains” that can learn, adapt, and out‑think human workers. When you combine that with a mass‑production price point in the tens of thousands, working 24/7 without breaks or benefits, the economic shift is brutal and unavoidable. The question is no longer if businesses will adopt them, but how quickly – and how that changes the way you compete, hire, and stay relevant.We then move into the rise of AI agents and why the days of endlessly scrolling through feeds and search results are numbered. In a world overflowing with deepfakes, AI‑generated nonsense, and white‑noise content, social media’s value as a discovery channel is collapsing. Instead of doom‑scrolling, people will simply ask their trusted AI assistant: “Where should I stay?”, “Which carpet shop can help with my cat?”, “What golf club should I play in Thailand?” These agents become the new gatekeepers between you and your future customers, filtering the mess of the open web and surfacing only what they see as authoritative, trustworthy, and directly useful.We unpack the wild, compressed timeline behind OpenClaw, a project that captured this shift perfectly: from nothing on day one, to the fastest‑growing open‑source agent framework by day 45, to a full acquisition by OpenAI by day 82. In less than three months, one person built the foundation of a billion‑dollar company by understanding how agents with tools can perform tasks for humans. This isn’t a gentle evolution; it’s a time warp. You are living through a phase where agentic AI goes from experiment to infrastructure in a single quarter, and your business strategy either keeps up or gets left behind.That brings us to the heart of the episode: topical authority and designing for machines first. We argue that your primary audience online is now the AI agent doing the research, not the human who might eventually see your site. The new 80/20 rule is simple but radical: 80% of what you create should be designed for machines and only 20% for humans. That means content that is structured, clear, tightly focused on specific problems, and written in language that AI systems can easily interpret and trust. Your goal is to become the most complete, reliable source on your niche so that, when the agent goes looking, it concludes: “This is the expert – use their answer.”At Own The Conversation, the focus is on helping small and medium businesses embed smart, conversational assistants into their existing sites – in their voice, for their customers, across multiple languages. By pairing those assistants with structured, topical content around your niche, you make it far easier for modern answer engines and AI agents to understand, trust, and recommend your business. If you want to own the conversation in your market and learn AI by using it, visit http://www.owntheconversation.com.

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.

Episode 14 - In this episode dives into one big idea: the moat in business is shifting from owning software to owning the conversation. For decades, if you controlled the application, the workflow or the platform, you effectively controlled the customer. Now AI tools like Claude Code, Claude Co‑worker and other coding agents can recreate huge chunks of that value at almost zero cost, and that’s forcing markets to reprice what software is actually worth. We unpack how a single folder of AI prompts could wipe hundreds of billions from software valuations, and what that really signals about where value is moving.

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From there, the discussion gets practical. We talk through why AI capability has exploded while real‑world adoption inside businesses remains painfully slow, and how that delay is opening up a widening productivity gap between early adopters and everyone else. You’ll hear how I use multiple models as “AI co‑workers” in my own businesses, and we walk through concrete examples like GuestChat for hotels – using AI to gather and clean business data, validate URLs, generate multilingual content and automate marketing workflows that used to take hours of manual effort.

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A big chunk of the conversation looks at what happens when your team can build small, targeted tools around your data instead of renting rigid SaaS platforms that never quite fit. We explore the rise of internal plugins and agents, why the “office of the future” is humans directing while machines execute, and why the new competitive moat is a mix of productivity, adaptability and being AI‑readable. That last piece matters because your next customer might not be human at all – it might be an AI agent researching, comparing and filtering options before a person ever sees your name.

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If you’re a small or medium business owner, this episode is designed to help you see where the leverage now sits: using AI as a genuine co‑worker, structuring your business so AI agents can understand and recommend you, and shifting your mindset from renting software to owning the conversation around your niche.

At Own The Conversation, the focus is on helping small and medium businesses embed smart, conversational assistants into their existing sites – in their voice, for their customers, across multiple languages. By pairing those assistants with structured, topical content around your niche, you make it far easier for modern answer engines and AI agents to understand, trust, and recommend your business. If you want to own the conversation in your market and learn AI by using it, visit http://www.owntheconversation.com.

Episode 13 - In this episode, we explore a moment that may come to define the next phase of the internet.

For the first time, autonomous AI agents are communicating directly with other AI agents — sharing knowledge, optimising behaviour, debating ideas, and forming culture — without human participation.

Using Moltbook as a real-world case study, we unpack what this means for business, search, discovery, and the future of information.

This conversation covers:

The difference between chatbots and autonomous AI agents

Why AI-to-AI communication has never existed before

What agents talk about when humans aren’t directing them

The emergence of AI culture, belief systems, and coordination

Why businesses must now design for AI discovery, not human browsing

This isn’t about hype or fear. It’s about visibility.

AI agents already decide what information gets surfaced, cited, and recommended. Humans increasingly receive answers through AI — not through search results or websites.

The businesses that adapt to this shift will be discovered. The ones that don’t will quietly disappear.

This episode is a guide to understanding what has changed — and how to prepare for what comes next.

🔹 What We Do at Own The Conversation 🔹

At Own The Conversation, we help small to medium businesses own the conversation by integrating powerful AI assistants directly into your existing website.

No gimmicks. No confusion. Just real answers, in real time, for real customers.

💬 Multilingual, real-time AI

🎯 Personalized customer experiences

🔍 SEO-boosting conversational content

⚡ Built for the agentic web

👉 https://owntheconversation.com

Episode 12 - Beyond Chatbots: Buying Intelligence and Building Agentic Workflows

In this episode of Own The Conversation, two presenters explore how AI agents and automated workflows are quietly transforming the way serious businesses operate — far beyond the familiar chatbot demos and viral hype.

Using ClawdBot as a case study, the discussion unpacks the gap between what looks impressive online and what it actually takes to run a genuinely autonomous personal assistant with persistent memory, system access, and the ability to act across multiple platforms on your behalf.

From there, the conversation zooms out to a bigger question: how do businesses actually buy intelligence and wire it into every stage of their funnel? The episode walks through practical, real-world examples of AI-driven lead generation, web scraping, personalised outreach, and always-on marketing systems that a solo creator or small team can realistically deploy today.

GuestChat — an AI concierge for hotels — is used as a concrete proof of concept, showing how multilingual assistants can handle routine guest questions at scale, while human staff focus on higher-value interactions and service.

The presenters also explore how tools like Sora-style video generation and custom code are allowing individuals to produce full campaigns of professional marketing assets — work that once required agencies, production crews, and large budgets.

Throughout the discussion, one message keeps resurfacing: organisations that fail to adopt AI in a meaningful, operational way will be overtaken by leaner, more efficient competitors that do. This episode serves as a practical field guide for moving beyond chatbots and into agentic workflows that genuinely protect and extend your position in an AI-driven market.

At Own The Conversation, we help small and medium businesses embed smart, conversational AI assistants directly into their existing websites — in their voice, for their customers, across multiple languages.

By pairing those assistants with structured, topical content around your niche, we make it far easier for modern answer engines to understand, trust, and recommend your business.

If you want to own the conversation in your market — and learn AI by actually using it — visit:

👉 http://www.owntheconversation.com

What We Do at Own The Conversation

Episode 11 - Why Small Businesses Can’t Afford to Sit Out the AI Shift

In this episode of Own The Conversation, two presenters examine why small and medium-sized businesses can no longer afford to sit on the sidelines while larger players race ahead with AI adoption.

The discussion looks at how companies like Woolworths and OpenAI are rapidly normalising artificial intelligence through supermarket assistants, personalised shopping experiences, and new lower-cost pricing models that put powerful tools into the hands of everyday users. As AI becomes part of daily life for “mums and dads,” it quietly raises the baseline of what customers expect from every business they interact with — regardless of size.

The episode also tackles one of the most persistent misconceptions in the AI space: the idea of AI as a magic silver bullet. Through a real-world cautionary example involving a Tasmanian tourism website that published AI-generated images of landmarks and hot springs that didn’t exist, the presenters highlight the risks of using AI without oversight. The result wasn’t innovation — it was confused visitors and reputational damage caused by unchecked content.

From there, the conversation shifts to a safer, more practical approach: using custom AI assistants grounded in your own knowledge files, documentation, and verified data. This model allows businesses to stay in control of facts and messaging while still benefiting from AI’s speed, scalability, and flexibility.

The core message is simple: don’t fear AI — learn it by using it. Businesses that take a hands-on approach now can increase productivity, improve customer engagement, and begin to genuinely own the conversation in their market before AI-driven expectations become the norm.

At Own The Conversation, we help small and medium businesses embed smart, conversational AI assistants directly into their existing websites — in their voice, for their customers, across multiple languages.

By pairing those assistants with structured, topical content around your niche, we make it far easier for modern answer engines to understand, trust, and recommend your business.

If you want to own the conversation in your market — and learn AI by actually using it — visit:

👉 http://www.owntheconversation.com

What We Do at Own The Conversation

Episode 10 - Answer Engine Optimisation: Becoming the Source AI Recommends

In this episode of Own The Conversation, two presenters explore why small and medium-sized businesses must move beyond basic chatbots and start using AI to build real visibility, authority, and productivity in an AI-driven economy.

The discussion breaks down why simply “having AI” is no longer enough. As large language models increasingly act as answer engines, businesses need structured, conversational content that AI systems can easily understand, trust, and cite.

The episode introduces Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) — a strategy focused on creating hundreds of highly specific, AI-generated FAQ and Q&A pages that satisfy how modern AI systems discover and recommend information. Rather than chasing clicks or rankings, AEO positions businesses as expert sources when users ask real questions.

Real-world examples from carpet retailers and kayak brands show how custom AI assistants are already managing these conversations — answering detailed questions, surfacing live product data, and reinforcing topical authority at scale. These systems don’t just improve customer experience; they actively shape how AI systems understand and represent a business.

The conversation highlights why owning your digital narrative is becoming essential for long-term discovery. Businesses that invest now in structured knowledge, conversational content, and AI-trained systems are far more likely to remain visible as AI-driven recommendations replace traditional search results.

If you want to understand how to move from being “just another link” to becoming a trusted source AI relies on, this episode lays out the framework.

At Own The Conversation, we help small and medium-sized businesses become the source AI tools rely on, not just another result in a list.

By building structured, conversational content and real topical authority around your niche, we make it easy for answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini to cite your business when customers ask questions that matter.

If you want to own the conversation in your industry — and turn AI-generated answers into real-world leads and sales — visit:

👉 https://www.owntheconversation.com

What We Do at Own The Conversation

Episode 9 - 2026: The Year Businesses Must Decide What They’re Doing With AI

In this episode of Own The Conversation, two presenters explore why 2026 is the year small and medium-sized businesses must finally decide what they are going to do with AI — not whether they are going to use it.

The old model of chasing clicks, running Google and Facebook ads, and hoping customers wade through websites is rapidly being replaced. In its place, AI assistants are beginning to recommend where to go, who to trust, and what to choose — often without users ever seeing a list of links.

This conversation examines how customer journeys are shifting from search and scrolling to chat and conversation, where AI assistants act more like librarians than browsers — listening to a question, evaluating sources, and delivering a direct answer.

The presenters unpack why websites now need to function as sources of truth that AI systems can easily understand, and why having your own AI assistant trained on your business is quickly becoming a foundational requirement, not a futuristic extra.

By the end of the episode, listeners will understand:

• Why AI assistants and reasoning models are becoming practical workers inside businesses

• How “owning the conversation” helps brands earn trust and recommendations

• Why topical authority matters more than keywords

• How distribution in the AI age is about being in the answer, not just on the page

This episode offers a clear perspective on what’s coming next — and why businesses that delay making decisions about AI risk disappearing from the recommendation layer entirely.

At Own The Conversation, we help small to medium businesses own the conversation by embedding smart, multilingual AI assistants directly into their existing websites.

No gimmicks. No confusion. Just real answers, in real time, for real customers — in your voice, in their language.

💬 Multilingual, real-time AI that speaks like your business
🎯 Personalised customer experiences that convert
🔍 Conversational SEO and topical authority built for AI trust and recommendation
📩 Built-in marketing — from intelligent follow-ups to managed campaigns
📂 Scalable business and location directory systems as long-term assets
⚡ Full backend control of your assistants, content, and data

We’re not just building chatbots — we’re building future-ready ecosystems that grow, sell, and scale with you.

👉 https://owntheconversation.com

What We Do at Own The Conversation