The AI Guy Podcast

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...

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...

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...

Meta just made Advantage+ the default in Ads Manager. Campaigns Meta moves to Advantage+ are running 22% higher ROAS and 10% lower cost per qualified lead than the same business running manual. Every SMB with Facebook or Instagram ads is affected — pizza shops, plumbers, med spas, boutiques, course creators. Marcus and Jules break down the 4-step playbook every owner can run this week: promote you...

Three regulatory and platform deadlines are converging on small businesses this summer. California SB 942 plus the EU AI Act hit August 2 with a $2,500 penalty per undisclosed chatbot conversation. Microsoft 365 Copilot for SMB lands July 1 alongside a 12-17% price hike on E3 and E5 plans. And the Fable 5 model shutdown on June 12 set the precedent — your vendor can pull the rug in 90 days. In thi...

On June 25, 2026, Intuit turns on AI expense categorization across every US Small Business plan of QuickBooks Online. Twelve months of your transactions get re-categorized automatically by a model trained on twelve million other businesses. It is on by default. No opt-in. In this episode, Marcus and Jules break down the four-step playbook every small business owner should run THIS WEEK before the...

On April 14, 2026, HubSpot did something no major CRM has ever done. They flipped their AI sales agent to pay-per-result pricing — fifty cents per resolved conversation, one dollar per qualified lead. In this episode, Marcus and Jules walk small business owners through the four-step playbook to audit their AI sales spend, compare HubSpot Breeze against Salesforce Agentforce, and layer voice AI age...

The Federal Open Market Committee meets June 17-18 with 50 percent odds of an October rate hike. QuickBooks just raised prices 15-25 percent across the board. If you own a business, your subscription stack is leaking money in two directions at once. In this episode, Marcus and Jules walk through the four-step bookkeeping audit a six-person Phoenix HVAC shop used to cut their monthly bookkeeping sp...

Last month, Meta quietly turned its entire advertising platform into a chat window. In open beta. No enterprise contract. No agency required. And ninety-seven percent of small business owners still haven't logged in. On June 3rd, 2026, MIT's Work Analytics Lab confirmed sixty-five percent of marketing specialist tasks are now automatable by AI. Meanwhile Meta's ad revenue is growing twenty-four pe...

Two weeks ago at Google I/O, Sundar Pichai declared the chatbot era over and announced the Agentic Gemini Era — an era where AI does not wait for your prompt, it does the work. Days later, Business Insider ran a story about a four-person Amazon seller named Lee Simms who lifted her year-over-year Amazon sales 97 percent by hiring not a person, but an AI inventory agent that runs in the background...

A five-person sales team in Austin closed 31 percent more deals last quarter than the quarter before. Same five people, same product, same market. The only change: a 400-dollar-a-month software stack (less than what most companies pay one SDR for a single day). Marcus and Jules unpack the math behind the gap: the average cold email reply rate in 2026 is 3.43 percent, while the top decile is pullin...

Airbnb is taking 15.5 percent of every booking on your portfolio. And if Vrbo finds you responsible for a cancellation, they can claw back 100 percent of the booking value. For a 5-property operator at 70 percent occupancy, that is 58,000 dollars a year gone before your first mortgage payment. In this episode, Marcus and Jules break down the AI-enabled direct-booking stack that cuts both platforms...

In early May 2026, OpenAI shipped GPT-Realtime-2 — the first voice model with GPT-5-class reasoning, 232-millisecond first-audio latency, and mid-call tool use. Zillow tested it on their hardest call benchmark and watched success rate jump from 69 percent to 95 percent. Inside the same three weeks, Aircall acquired Vogent, 8x8 added GPT-Realtime-2 to AI Studio, Zendesk launched the Autonomous Serv...

Airbnb now takes 15.5 percent of every booking on your portfolio. Vrbo will charge you 100 percent of a booking value as a penalty if you deny a guest entry. For a 5-door operator at 60 percent occupancy and a 280-dollar ADR, that is roughly 58,000 dollars a year transferred off your portfolio to two companies that are actively competing with you for the direct booking. Marcus and Jules walk throu...

Eighty-two percent of CPA firms with revenue under five million dollars lost at least one partner or senior to retirement or burnout between 2022 and 2024. Marcus and Jules walk through the four-step AI workpaper stack a documented Cleveland firm (4 partners, 11 staff) built between January and March — cutting prep hours 38 percent, adding 41 advisory calls, and pushing realization from 62 to 74....

A bonus Phoenix HVAC episode. Mac and Quinn walk operators through where AI actually moves the needle in 2026: revenue forecasting tied to NOAA cooling degree days, predictive maintenance from smart thermostat data, and AI dispatch routing for the long-windshield-time Phoenix metro. Real 2026 pricing for ServiceTitan Dispatch Pro, Workiz (Kickstart $225, Standard $275, Pro $325), Housecall Pro (Ba...

AI for SMB marketing is the most crowded and most overhyped of all the SMB AI categories. Mac and Quinn walk through the four buckets that actually matter for small business owners — content and copywriting, email and CRM automation, social media scheduling and design, and SEO and analytics — with current 2026 pricing for Jasper, Copy.ai, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Brevo, Klaviyo, Buffer,...

AI for SMB finance is where the ROI gets impossible to argue with in 2026. Mac and Quinn walk through the four buckets of finance AI for small business — bookkeeping and reconciliation, accounts payable and expense automation, cash flow forecasting, and tax prep — with current pricing for Digits, Docyt, QuickBooks AI, Ramp, Bill.com, Cash Flow Frog, Float, and more. Then a documented Phoenix HVAC...

Operations is where AI quietly delivers the biggest ROI for SMBs. Val Kleyman and AI co-host Alex break down the four buckets of operations AI: workflow automation (Zapier vs Make vs n8n), document processing (Rossum, Klippa, Nanonets), scheduling and inventory (Deputy, Odoo), and AI agents (Lindy). Then we walk through a real Cincinnati manufacturing case study where a $300/month stack pulled 47...

Most SMBs spend 25-75 hours a month manually qualifying leads. In this episode, Val and Alex break down the 4 categories of AI sales tools that change that math: lead qualification (Lindy, Clay), AI SDRs (Smartlead, Apollo), call coaching (Fathom, Fireflies, Gong), and pricing/proposal automation (Prisync, PandaDoc). Then we walk through a real case study — a 6-person Cleveland cleaning company th...

A deep-dive case study into how a small dental practice used AI to slash 60% of their admin overhead. Real numbers, real tools, real implementation timeline — and lessons every small business owner can steal. ⚠️ AI Disclosure: All voices in this episode are AI-generated. This podcast is fully produced using artificial intelligence, including scripts, research, and narration.

No theory, no charts — just the exact AI tools you need, what they cost, and how to set them up this week. The complete $47/month AI stack for small businesses. ⚠️ AI Disclosure: All voices in this episode are AI-generated. This podcast is fully produced using artificial intelligence, including scripts, research, and narration.

The pilot episode. Val and Alex break down why AI adoption is accelerating faster than anyone predicted, what it means for small businesses, and the three things every owner should do this month. ⚠️ AI Disclosure: All voices in this episode are AI-generated. This podcast is fully produced using artificial intelligence, including scripts, research, and narration.