The AI Guy Podcast

On September 15, 2026, TRM Labs and PYMNTS reported that the x402 agent-payment lane is live but tiny: 198.9 million settlements worth 52.7 million dollars, and after removing self-payments and wash loops, only 25.62 million dollars looked like genuine commerce. Marcus and Jules reframe that small receipt as good news: the price of being ready is a weekend, not a transformation. The 4-step free or cheap playbook: make product data machine-readable, fix fraud rules that false-decline agents, turn on the machine payment lane via Coinbase Business or JSON-LD checkout schema, and price separately for high-volume low-margin robot traffic. Includes the 1999 dot-com parallel: the small stores that exported clean, structured data got picked up by the first crawlers, while the ones that stayed invisible got bought out. They did not survive. They bought their competitors. Standard agent-readiness audit: 3,500 dollars in 24 hours. Rush: 5,500 in 12 hours. Research desk: 7,500 a month. Discord is free: discord.gg/gErgtp9gTS. The AI Guy is part of the AdValorem podcast network. Voices and content are AI-generated.

On September 9, 2026, Mastercard launched Agent Connect: one integration that lets an AI shopping agent find your products, build a cart, confirm the final price, and check out. The day before, Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent that shops and pays using Stripe's Link. And Microsoft's Copilot Checkout now covers more than 500,000 merchants. The AI shopping shelf is being built this week. The catch: those agents can only buy from businesses whose product data they can actually read. If your catalog is thin, has no structured feed, or you're only found by people who already know your name, you are not on a lower shelf - you are not in the running at all. Marcus and Jules break down why this matters this week, and walk through a four-step weekend playbook that costs zero dollars. Step one, spend thirty minutes inventorying every SKU and checking the five fields an agent needs: name, price, availability, specs, and brand. Step two, tag each product with those five fields. Step three, publish a clean structured product feed - and if you're on Shopify, you're likely already wired into Copilot Checkout automatically. Step four, give your top ten products a one-sentence, machine-readable description plus image alt-text. Total cost, about zero dollars. Total time, about four hours this weekend. Includes the 1990s dot-com parallel - the small stores that exported clean, structured product data to the early search engines got found and became the winners, while the ones that stayed print-only became the ones who got bought out. They didn't survive. They bought their competitors. Strategy packages at https://ai.advalorem.io/strategies/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=ai_guy&utm_campaign=ep29_agentic_commerce. The AI Guy is part of the AdValorem podcast network. Voices and content are AI-generated.

In one month the entire price structure of frontier AI moved. On July 30 OpenAI cut the Luna tier by 80 percent, from one dollar and six to twenty cents and one twenty. On August 21 they cut the Sol flagship by twenty percent, from five and thirty to four and twenty, for the next three months. And on September 3 they released GPT-6 Astra, the new flagship, at ten dollars a million input tokens and fifty a million output. Meanwhile a Layer3Labs audit of forty small and mid-sized business AI stacks found that sixty-eight percent of SMBs are still paying more than double the current market rate, with a median of one thousand one hundred dollars a month in savings sitting unclaimed. Marcus and Jules break down why a price drop is a signal to renegotiate, not a discount to ignore, and walk through a four-step weekend playbook that costs zero dollars. Step one, inventory every AI subscription, API bill, and SaaS add-on in thirty minutes. Step two, tag each tool as routine, standard, or frontier. Step three, move ninety percent of routine work to the new cheap tier. Step four, add a one-sentence repricing clause to every annual contract. Includes the 2013 4G rollout parallel, the owners who renegotiated after the price collapse saved forty to sixty percent in year one, while the ones who let their contracts auto-renew paid the 3G price for 5G speed. Strategy packages at https://ai.advalorem.io/strategies/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=ai_guy&utm_campaign=ep28_ai_cost_reprice. The AI Guy is part of the AdValorem podcast network. Voices and content are AI-generated.

On August 27, 2026 OpenAI started showing ads on ChatGPT Free and Go tiers in India - the cheapest entry point the AI answer surface has ever had: a minimum daily budget of seven dollars and sixty cents, versus the sixty dollar CPM the U.S. program launched at in February. Six days earlier, ChatGPT Ads went live in 31 European markets, the largest expansion to date. Marcus and Jules break down what it means for small business owners: their customers are already asking AI "what should I buy," and that answer is about to get a paid shelf underneath it. The 4-step free playbook: audit the ten questions your customers already ask you, answer all ten on your own website in plain language, get found in chat with a complete Google Business profile plus schema, and run a seven dollar sixty pilot budget line next to your Google and Meta numbers for thirty days. Includes the 2010 app-store gold rush parallel - the small businesses that listed in year one got found for free for a decade; the ones that waited paid for the same attention forever after. Strategy packages at https://ai.advalorem.io/strategies/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=ai_guy&utm_campaign=ep27_chatgpt_ads_india. The AI Guy is part of the AdValorem podcast network. Voices and content are AI-generated.

On July 22, 2026 OpenAI launched Presence, an enterprise voice and chat agent stack for Fortune 500 customers - and 24 hours later announced the ChatGPT for Small Business program with free OpenAI Academy events across the US and a curated partner list every SMB owner needs to memorize: Dropbox, Shopify, Intuit, Slack, Atlassian, and Wix. ChatGPT Work and Codex just crossed 10 million users. Marcus and Jules break down the 4-step weekend playbook every business owner can run right now: pick the ONE partner from the list of six where you already spend the most money every month, register for the free OpenAI Academy event closest to your zip code, build ONE workflow this weekend that connects ChatGPT Business to your chosen partner, and put a printed Academy certificate on your office wall as a trust marker your customers will notice. Includes the 1995 Microsoft Office historical parallel - the small businesses that bought Office 95 and standardized their team on Excel and Word did not just survive the transition, they bought their WordPerfect and Lotus competitors for pennies by 1999. Total cost: zero if you already pay for one of the six partners, or 25 dollars a month for a single ChatGPT Business seat if you do not. Total time: one weekend, four hours, no consultant, no agency. Strategy packages at https://ai.advalorem.io/strategies/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=ai_guy&utm_campaign=ep26_openai_smb. The AI Guy is part of the AdValorem podcast network. Voices and content are AI-generated.

On July 2, 2026 Google confirmed the AI Performance Report is rolling out to more Search Console accounts. The day before, Bing backfilled its own equivalent report all the way to June 1. For the first time in the history of AI search, small business owners can see - for free - exactly which of their pages get cited inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover AI features. Marcus and Jules break down the 4-step weekend playbook every SMB owner can run right now: open Search Console today and write down your AI Performance baseline, fix your business identity across Google Business Profile, Bing Places, and Apple Business Connect in the same 24-hour window, write one clean answer page for each of your top ten customer questions, and get five real reviews this week from customers who name the specific thing you did. Includes the Seer Interactive study across 2.43 billion impressions showing the 37 percent CTR gap between queries with AI Overviews and queries without, and the 2005 Google Analytics historical parallel - the owners who opened Analytics when it launched for free spent the next fifteen years running circles around competitors who were flying blind. Total cost: zero dollars for every step. Total time: one weekend, four hours, no developer, no agency. Strategy packages at https://ai.advalorem.io/strategies/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=ai_guy&utm_campaign=ep25_ai_scoreboard. The AI Guy is part of the AdValorem podcast network. Voices and content are AI-generated.

On July 8, 2026, Meta launched the Meta Business Agent at WhatsApp's third annual Business Summit in Mumbai. Every small business owner on the planet now has an AI employee inside WhatsApp - answering customer questions, recommending products from the catalog, booking appointments, qualifying leads, handing off to a human when the conversation matters. 3.3 billion monthly WhatsApp users. 175 million business conversations a day. And customer-initiated conversations inside the 24-hour window have been free since November 2024. Marcus and Jules break down the 4-step weekend playbook every SMB owner can run right now: open a WhatsApp Business account today, write your top 20 customer questions into a text file, connect Meta Business Agent (or Wati, Trengo, Respond.io) with human handoff for anything under 90 percent confidence, and add your WhatsApp number to every customer touchpoint by Friday. Includes the 2009 Facebook Pages historical parallel - the businesses that opened a Page for free that year harvested a decade of organic reach while everyone else paid per click. Total cost: zero for steps 1, 2, and 4. Total time: one weekend, four hours, no developer. Strategy packages at https://ai.advalorem.io/strategies/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=ai_guy&utm_campaign=ep24_whatsapp_agent. The AI Guy is part of the AdValorem podcast network. Voices and content are AI-generated.

On July 8, Clockwork.ai launched Mira — the first agentic FP&A analyst that plugs into QuickBooks and Xero. The same week, Xero shipped JAX into Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Forbes reported that 87% of CFOs now say AI is critical to how finance runs. The AI CFO stopped being a Series B luxury and became a fifty-dollar-a-month SaaS. Marcus and Jules break down the 4-step playbook every SMB owner can run this weekend: pick one agentic FP&A tool and connect it to your books, ask the agent three specific questions before Monday morning, build a 10-minute Monday-morning ritual, and turn one number the agent surfaces into a business decision this month. Includes the 1983 Lotus 1-2-3 historical parallel — the accountants who learned spreadsheets in the first six months became the CFOs by 1988. Strategy packages at https://ai.advalorem.io/strategies/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=ai_guy&utm_campaign=ep23_ai_cfo. The AI Guy is part of the AdValorem podcast network. Voices and content are AI-generated.

On June 25, 2026 at Cannes Lions, OpenAI moved ChatGPT Ads from behind-the-curtain brand pitches to a public self-serve platform. No agency, no thousand-dollar minimum, three to five dollars per click. Nine hundred million weekly active users, most on the free/Go tier where the ads run. This is Google Ads 2003 again. Marcus and Jules break down the 4-step playbook every SMB owner can run this week: open the ChatGPT Ads self-serve account with a twenty-dollar daily cap and turn nothing on yet, list the three questions your customer types the week before they hire someone like you, write one conversational question-shaped ad instead of a coupon, and build an answer-first landing page that treats the click like a conversation not a discount. Includes the 2003 Google Ads parallel — the businesses that opened accounts when clicks were seven cents and fewer than 100,000 advertisers existed built entire brands on those cheap early clicks. Strategy packages at https://ai.advalorem.io/strategies/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=ai_guy&utm_campaign=ep22_chatgpt_ads. The AI Guy is part of the AdValorem podcast network. Voices and content are AI-generated.

On June 23, 2026, Zapier turned MCP access on for every paid plan. If you already pay Zapier $19.99 a month, you now have an AI orchestration layer that can drive 9,000 apps through one connection. Booking, invoicing, follow-up, lead routing — the work that used to require an assistant. In this episode, Marcus and Jules break down the 4-step playbook every owner can run this week: list the 3 most repetitive tasks in your business, connect Zapier MCP to ChatGPT or Claude, write the job description in plain English, and run one agent for 7 days before adding the second. Includes the 2007 Shopify parallel — the merchants that opened a store that year owned their category by 2010. Strategy packages at https://ai.advalorem.io/strategies/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=ai_guy&utm_campaign=ep21_zapier_mcp. The AI Guy is part of the AdValorem podcast network. Voices and content are AI-generated.