Weekly bull and bear case deep-dives on AI topics relevant to Australian small business.
The AI tools that cost nothing or next to nothing are fine. They’ll answer your questions, write a passable first draft, and summarise a document. But “fine” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. For a business that’s serious about using AI as a competitive tool rather than a novelty, the gap between…
Spend five minutes on any AI forum and someone will tell you that the free tier is holding you back. Pay for the premium. Get the good models. Upgrade to the business plan. For most Australian small businesses, that advice is wrong. A carefully chosen stack of low-cost or free AI tools does 90% of…
AI in hiring sounds like progress. Faster screening, less bias, smarter shortlists. In practice, the reality for Australian small businesses is messier: and the risks are ones that most SMB owners aren’t equipped to manage. AI learns from the past. And the past wasn’t fair. The core problem with AI screening tools is that they’re…
The hiring process before AI was not a meritocracy. It was a human process: and humans are inconsistent, tired, distracted, and often unconscious in their biases. Research has shown that identical CVs with Anglo-Saxon names receive more callbacks than those with non-Anglo names. The screener reading applications at 4pm on Friday is not performing at…
Australian AI sovereignty is a compelling idea. It’s also, for most small businesses, a distraction. The tools that will help you run your business better are already here, they work, they’re cheap, and they were built in the US. Waiting for Australian alternatives: or paying more to use inferior ones: is a cost your business…
There’s a version of Australia’s AI future where we’re permanent consumers: buying tools built in California, running on servers in Virginia, trained on data that has nothing to do with us. That future is available right now, and it’s cheap. But it comes with costs that don’t show up on the invoice. Data sovereignty isn’t…
The promise is irresistible: AI will save you hours every week, cut costs, and let your small team punch above its weight. For many Australian businesses, the reality has been messier. Subscriptions that go unused. Tools that take longer to set up than they save. “Productivity gains” that are hard to measure and harder to…
Scepticism about AI ROI is fair. But the numbers are hard to argue with. AI tools aren’t saving businesses a few minutes here and there. Used well, they’re compressing hours into minutes, cutting error rates, and letting small teams do work that used to need more people. The time savings are real A McKinsey study…
The optimists will tell you history is reassuring: every technological wave has created more jobs than it destroyed. They’re right about the past. But there are serious reasons to think AI is different in kind, not just degree. The historical analogies don’t hold as cleanly as they’re being used to suggest, and the pace of…
Every major technological shift in history has triggered the same fear: that machines would take all the jobs. The power loom, the steam engine, the assembly line, the personal computer. Each time, the fear was understandable, and each time, the economy adapted: creating new categories of work that nobody had imagined before. The case for…