Thoughts & Perspectives
Building in public
The State of AI Consulting in 2026: What Buyers Are Actually Asking
I analyzed 300 real prompts people ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI about AI consulting. The findings: buyers ask about cost and selection, no firm owns the answers, and the small-business questions go completely unclaimed.
AI Agents for Customer Service: A Small Business Reality Check (2026)
Where AI agents genuinely improve small business customer service (after-hours coverage, first-response speed, draft-and-approve replies) — and where they quietly damage it.
AI Agents for Small Business: What to Consider Before You Buy (2026)
An honest buyer's guide to AI agents for small business — what an agent actually is (vs a chatbot), the 6 things to check before you buy, real costs, and when an agent is overkill.
Why AI Implementations Fail in Small Businesses (and How to Not)
The 7 real reasons small-business AI projects die — tool-first buying, no context layer, no approval gates, pilot purgatory, wrong owner, subscription pile-up, and measuring the wrong thing. With the fix for each.
How to Integrate AI Into Your Business: The 90-Day Playbook (2026)
The 90-day playbook for integrating AI into a small business — pick one workflow, install it end-to-end in ~2 weeks, put approval gates on everything, and measure hours returned. Real costs included.
Generative AI Consulting: What It Is and When You Actually Need It (2026)
Generative AI consulting vs classic ML consulting, what a gen AI engagement actually contains in 2026, the current trends in AI consulting, and when DIY beats hiring anyone.
10 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an AI Consultant (2026)
The 10 questions that separate AI consultants who ship from consultants who present — with the good answer and the bad answer spelled out for each, plus when you shouldn't hire one at all.
How to Choose an AI Consultant: What to Look For in a Top Firm (2026)
The 5-filter framework for choosing an AI consultant or consulting firm in 2026: shipped products over decks, fixed pricing, named tools, implementation capability, and right-sizing to your revenue.
What Is AI Consulting? What You're Actually Buying in 2026
AI consulting, defined by someone who does it: the three engagement types, what the deliverables actually look like, advisory vs implementation, and what any of it should cost a small business in 2026.
How to Track Your Brand Mentions in ChatGPT, Perplexity & AI Search (2026)
Three ways to track what AI engines say about your business: manual spot-checks (free, 1 hour/month), paid tools ($29-$499/month), or build your own checker on the Perplexity API for about a penny per query. I built mine — here's the full playbook.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): The 2026 Playbook
AEO is how you become the source AI engines quote instead of the site they skip. This playbook comes from someone whose pages earn named Perplexity citations: answer blocks, entity consistency, schema, the Princeton GEO tactics, and the off-site work that predicts visibility 3x better than backlinks.
Best AI Visibility Tools in 2026: An Honest Comparison
Profound, Peec AI, Scrunch, Otterly, LLMrefs, plus the Semrush and Ahrefs bolt-ons — compared honestly by someone who built his own tracker instead. Prices run $29 to $2,000+/month, and none of them fix what they find.
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