Discover how your next customer will find you in a world where humans no longer do the searching themselves. This episode explains why the most important new client for your business is not a person, but a machine – the AI agents quietly deciding which brands to trust, recommend, and send real buyers to. We start with a confronting story from Australia, where respected financial journalist Alan Kohler was deep‑faked into a completely fabricated 2,000‑word article, complete with fake images of an on‑set confrontation. That moment, when even his colleagues believed the hoax, shows how quickly online trust can evaporate and why relying on what we “see” on social media is no longer enough.From there, we tackle the myths that let business owners keep procrastinating on AI. This isn’t about clunky robots in sci‑fi films or some far‑off future. Right now, companies are building highly dextrous machines with hands as capable as ours, powered by AI “brains” that can learn, adapt, and out‑think human workers. When you combine that with a mass‑production price point in the tens of thousands, working 24/7 without breaks or benefits, the economic shift is brutal and unavoidable. The question is no longer if businesses will adopt them, but how quickly – and how that changes the way you compete, hire, and stay relevant.We then move into the rise of AI agents and why the days of endlessly scrolling through feeds and search results are numbered. In a world overflowing with deepfakes, AI‑generated nonsense, and white‑noise content, social media’s value as a discovery channel is collapsing. Instead of doom‑scrolling, people will simply ask their trusted AI assistant: “Where should I stay?”, “Which carpet shop can help with my cat?”, “What golf club should I play in Thailand?” These agents become the new gatekeepers between you and your future customers, filtering the mess of the open web and surfacing only what they see as authoritative, trustworthy, and directly useful.We unpack the wild, compressed timeline behind OpenClaw, a project that captured this shift perfectly: from nothing on day one, to the fastest‑growing open‑source agent framework by day 45, to a full acquisition by OpenAI by day 82. In less than three months, one person built the foundation of a billion‑dollar company by understanding how agents with tools can perform tasks for humans. This isn’t a gentle evolution; it’s a time warp. You are living through a phase where agentic AI goes from experiment to infrastructure in a single quarter, and your business strategy either keeps up or gets left behind.That brings us to the heart of the episode: topical authority and designing for machines first. We argue that your primary audience online is now the AI agent doing the research, not the human who might eventually see your site. The new 80/20 rule is simple but radical: 80% of what you create should be designed for machines and only 20% for humans. That means content that is structured, clear, tightly focused on specific problems, and written in language that AI systems can easily interpret and trust. Your goal is to become the most complete, reliable source on your niche so that, when the agent goes looking, it concludes: “This is the expert – use their answer.”At Own The Conversation, the focus is on helping small and medium businesses embed smart, conversational assistants into their existing sites – in their voice, for their customers, across multiple languages. By pairing those assistants with structured, topical content around your niche, you make it far easier for modern answer engines and AI agents to understand, trust, and recommend your business. If you want to own the conversation in your market and learn AI by using it, visit http://www.owntheconversation.com.

Episode 15 - This podcast digs into how AI is quietly rewriting the rules of customer discovery, trust and competition for small businesses. Instead of a solo rant, it’s a conversation that unpacks the weird new reality where AI agents are hiring humans, Super Bowl ads are arguing about manipulation, and your next “customer” may actually be a bot acting on someone’s behalf. The discussion starts with Maltbook – a social network where AI agents talk to each other and even post jobs for people – and explores what it really means when machines openly admit they need human culture, humour and judgement to improve.From there, the pod turns to the Anthropic vs OpenAI Super Bowl ad battle and the deeper clash over how AI assistants should handle advertising. One side is comfortable with assistants blending recommendations and sponsorship in a single friendly answer, while the other insists that ads must be obvious and clearly labelled. The conversation digs into why this isn’t just tech drama, but a foundational question about trust: if your assistant can quietly steer you towards high‑margin products or 400% APR loans, who is it really working for – you, or the advertiser?The episode then brings it down to street level for small businesses. Traditional click‑through websites are compared to “digital dinosaurs” in a world where people and their AI helpers expect direct answers, not multi‑step navigation. The British carpet company story illustrates a simple, practical shift: turning scattered Google reviews into an AI‑readable knowledge base so both customers and large language models can instantly see why the business is trusted. That one move turns a regular website into something modern AI tools can understand, surface and recommend.Finally, the pod explores the rise of agentic workflows – AI agents that don’t just chat, but actually carry out multi‑step tasks. Using examples like automating hours of research into a 30‑second workflow, the conversation highlights the widening gap between businesses that embrace this capability and those that ignore it. The group keeps circling back to one central idea: your most important future customer is likely to be an AI agent, and it will be looking for clear, honest, machine‑readable answers. The episode asks whether your business is ready for that reality, and what you can start changing today so you don’t get quietly filtered out of the conversation.

Episode 14 - In this episode dives into one big idea: the moat in business is shifting from owning software to owning the conversation. For decades, if you controlled the application, the workflow or the platform, you effectively controlled the customer. Now AI tools like Claude Code, Claude Co‑worker and other coding agents can recreate huge chunks of that value at almost zero cost, and that’s forcing markets to reprice what software is actually worth. We unpack how a single folder of AI prompts could wipe hundreds of billions from software valuations, and what that really signals about where value is moving.

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From there, the discussion gets practical. We talk through why AI capability has exploded while real‑world adoption inside businesses remains painfully slow, and how that delay is opening up a widening productivity gap between early adopters and everyone else. You’ll hear how I use multiple models as “AI co‑workers” in my own businesses, and we walk through concrete examples like GuestChat for hotels – using AI to gather and clean business data, validate URLs, generate multilingual content and automate marketing workflows that used to take hours of manual effort.

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A big chunk of the conversation looks at what happens when your team can build small, targeted tools around your data instead of renting rigid SaaS platforms that never quite fit. We explore the rise of internal plugins and agents, why the “office of the future” is humans directing while machines execute, and why the new competitive moat is a mix of productivity, adaptability and being AI‑readable. That last piece matters because your next customer might not be human at all – it might be an AI agent researching, comparing and filtering options before a person ever sees your name.

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If you’re a small or medium business owner, this episode is designed to help you see where the leverage now sits: using AI as a genuine co‑worker, structuring your business so AI agents can understand and recommend you, and shifting your mindset from renting software to owning the conversation around your niche.

At Own The Conversation, the focus is on helping small and medium businesses embed smart, conversational assistants into their existing sites – in their voice, for their customers, across multiple languages. By pairing those assistants with structured, topical content around your niche, you make it far easier for modern answer engines and AI agents to understand, trust, and recommend your business. If you want to own the conversation in your market and learn AI by using it, visit http://www.owntheconversation.com.