Weekly bull and bear case deep-dives on AI topics relevant to Australian small business.
Not today, maybe. Not right this minute. But if you’re running a business in 2026 and you’re confident you’ll never need AI agents, you’re making the same bet that felt safe when someone decided not to build a website in 2000, or skipped getting a business email address in 1998. One comment in a recent…
The pitch sounds logical enough. Your business has inefficiencies. AI agents can handle repetitive tasks. Here’s a monthly subscription. Sign here. But spend a few minutes in any Australian small business forum and a different story emerges. “Businesses need problems solved, sell me a solution to my problem, not an AI agent.” That comment, from…
Daniel Rodrigues is 38, lives in Perth, has ADHD, and was about to have his second child when his wife told him she was pregnant. He needed money. He found Google Gemini. What followed wasn’t a cautionary tale about a tech-obsessed loner. Rodrigues is a normal person under real pressure. Within weeks he was spending…
One in five Australians delayed or skipped mental health care last year because they couldn’t afford it. That’s not a fringe statistic, it’s from the National Mental Health Commission’s 2024 Report Card. Psychologists are stretched. Wait times are long. The gap fee on a subsidised session can still run $60-80 out of pocket. And if…
There’s a term that didn’t exist three years ago and now has 12,000 people searching for it every month: AI slop. Wikipedia defines it as “digital content made with generative AI that is perceived as lacking in effort, quality, or meaning, produced in high volume as clickbait.” If you’ve spent any time on the internet…
“AI slop” has become the internet’s favourite way to dismiss anything written with AI assistance. And yes, there’s a lot of genuinely bad AI content out there. But the slop label is getting slapped on everything indiscriminately, and for small business owners trying to compete without a marketing team, that matters. Here’s the case for…
The productivity promise of AI goes like this: automate the repetitive stuff, free up time for the work that actually matters. It’s a compelling pitch. And eight months into a UC Berkeley study watching 200 workers use AI on the job, the researchers found the opposite. People were busier. Their working hours were blurrier. They…
There’s a UC Berkeley study doing the rounds. Eight months, 200 workers, and the headline finding is uncomfortable: AI made people busier, not freer. More tasks, blurred work-life lines, constant multitasking. The AI treadmill is real: nobody is disputing that. But here’s what most of the commentary misses: the treadmill is what happens when you…
There is a widespread assumption that Australian small businesses are exposed when they use AI tools. That their customer data is being scraped, sold, or used to train models without consent. That assumption is mostly wrong, and the fear is making some businesses hesitant about tools that could genuinely help them. Australia has real privacy…
Every time you paste a customer email into ChatGPT, upload a document to an AI tool, or let a chatbot handle a support query, data leaves your business. Where it goes depends on which product you’re using, which plan you’re on, and whether you read the terms of service before clicking accept. Most small business…