An AI agent that orders your office supplies, checks the prices, and asks before it spends. That is Claude Duet, and it leads this episode of the Web Guy Nick Podcast. Alex, Jordan, and Nick also dig into a survey of fifteen hundred owners that found eighty six percent trying AI before hiring, plus why almost nobody has it wired into the real work yet. The episode closes with one simple build: a single page that lists what your AI may do on its own and what always needs your approval. Listen on Spotify, and visit webguynick.com for practical AI help for your business.
Listen to this episode on Spotify
And I will tell you right now, the part that matters is not the shopping. It is the approval step. An agent that asks before it spends is a tool. An agent that spends first is a liability.
Nick
That fifteen percent number is the whole ballgame. Everybody has a chat window open. Almost nobody has AI wired into the actual work, the estimates, the follow ups, the invoices, the review replies. That gap is not a technology problem. It is a workflow problem. The owners who close it first are the ones who will feel it in their schedule and their bank account.
Nick
One Thing to Try This Week, and it ties the whole show together. Call it the one workflow build. Pick one recurring task, just one. Write two short lists on a single page. What an AI assistant may do on its own, like draft, gather, and remind. And what always needs your approval, like send, spend, sign, and delete. Then run that one workflow for seven days and fix the lists as you go. That single page is the difference between the eighty six percent who dabble and the fifteen percent who actually run on it.
Jordan
Full transcript
Alex: Before we start: this podcast is produced with AI. Jordan and I are AI hosts, and Nick's voice is an AI clone of his real voice. Every story is researched from public sources, with links in the show notes.
Alex: Here is the shift nobody priced in. As of yesterday, there is an AI agent that messages you first, notices you are low on printer paper and cleaning supplies, and offers to buy them before you even knew you needed them. It does the shopping. You just approve the spend.
Jordan: That is Claude Duet, and it is our lead story today. I am Jordan.
Alex: I am Alex, and joining us as always is Nick, who runs Web Guy Nick here in Rialto and spends his days inside real small businesses.
Nick: And I will tell you right now, the part that matters is not the shopping. It is the approval step. An agent that asks before it spends is a tool. An agent that spends first is a liability.
Jordan: Let us get into it. Story one. Anthropic announced Claude Duet on Wednesday. It is a standalone app built on Claude Opus five point five, and Anthropic calls it a proactive agent. Instead of waiting for you to type a prompt, Duet checks your connected apps every few hours, sends you a morning brief on what needs attention, and keeps working on tasks even when your laptop and phone are off, because it runs on its own cloud computer.
Alex: The details that matter for owners. Duet connects to more than six thousand apps and plug ins through the Claude Marketplace. It can build a dashboard, handle scheduling, and yes, purchase business supplies. When it buys, it confirms the item with you first, then pays through Link, the Stripe wallet, using a virtual card so your real card number is never shared. It can also check out at online stores through Shop Pay.
Nick: Here is why I like the design. Anthropic built in a hard line. Duet waits for your approval before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document, or deletes anything. That is exactly the rule I gave my own clients after the agent stories we covered on Monday and Tuesday. Read and prepare on its own. Ask before anything that sends, spends, signs, or deletes.
Jordan: Access is the catch. Duet is a research preview, waitlist only, for individual Pro and Max subscribers in the United States. Team and Enterprise plans are not included yet, so most businesses cannot put the whole office on it today. And background checks count against your plan usage limits.
Alex: So the practical move this week is not to wait for the waitlist. It is to copy the pattern. Pick one recurring job in your business, say reordering supplies or drafting the weekly schedule, and write down two lists. What an assistant, human or AI, may do without asking. And what always needs your yes. When tools like Duet open up to business plans, you will already have the rules written.
Nick: I did this with my own supply orders. Paper, ink, cleaning stuff for the office. The list of approved items is written down, the dollar cap is written down, and anything off list needs my thumbs up. Took twenty minutes to set up. It saves me a trip every single week.
Jordan: Story two puts numbers on that gap between using AI and actually running on it. Goldman Sachs just committed five hundred million dollars to expand its Ten Thousand Small Businesses program, and as part of that it launched a Small Business AI Institute with four partners you have heard of. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta.
Alex: The survey behind it is the real story. Goldman surveyed more than two thousand four hundred graduates of the program. Eighty six percent said they already use AI in their business, up from fifty six percent in twenty twenty four. But only fifteen percent said AI is fully integrated into their core operations. And more than three quarters said they could use more training and resources.
Nick: That fifteen percent number is the whole ballgame. Everybody has a chat window open. Almost nobody has AI wired into the actual work, the estimates, the follow ups, the invoices, the review replies. That gap is not a technology problem. It is a workflow problem. The owners who close it first are the ones who will feel it in their schedule and their bank account.
Jordan: Goldman CEO David Solomon put it bluntly in an interview. Businesses need to work out how technology improves what they do, and those unwilling to engage risk falling behind. The institute aims to reach nearly twenty thousand entrepreneurs with hands on training and tools from those four AI companies.
Alex: Owner takeaway. Do not measure yourself against the eighty six percent. Measure against the fifteen. Ask one question. Is there one core job in my business where AI does the first draft or the first pass every time, without me remembering to ask? If the answer is no, that is your project for the next thirty days. One job. Not ten.
Nick: Story three is the cautionary tale, and it is a supply chain one. A popular developer tool called LiteLLM, which many apps use to talk to AI models, shipped a compromised version on PyPI, the Python software library. Version one point one zero seven point zero carried a backdoor that stole credentials. We are talking SSH keys, cloud credentials, build system secrets, browser passwords, and the API keys for AI providers.
Jordan: According to the incident reporting, the attacker got in using stolen GitHub credentials from three of the project developers, slipped the malicious code into the release files, and left no trace in the public code anyone reviews. PyPI pulled the bad version within hours. And this is the second major incident for that project in a year.
Alex: Nick, most of our listeners are not installing Python libraries. Why should a roofing company or a med spa care?
Nick: Because your website, your booking tool, and your chat assistant are all built out of pieces like this, assembled by vendors you trust. You cannot audit their code. But you can do two things. One, ask your key vendors a simple question in writing. How fast do you apply security updates, and how do you tell me when something goes wrong? Two, treat every API key and password connected to your business like a credit card. Caps on spending, alerts on charges, and rotate the keys when a vendor has an incident. We said it Monday with a different breach. It is the same lesson, and it keeps being the right one.
Jordan: Story four is short and it rhymes with Monday's hacker story, but it is a different tool and a different target. A Japanese security firm, GMO's IERAE, found that an autonomous AI penetration testing tool called ARTEX was used against about twenty Japanese companies. This is software that probes networks and carries out intrusion steps on its own, and the attack infrastructure was focused almost entirely on Japan.
Alex: The pattern across this whole week is hard to miss. The same class of AI that writes your emails can now run a break in attempt while the operator sleeps. The defense is boring and it works. Current updates, strong passwords with two factor sign in on every admin account, and knowing exactly who you call at your host when something looks wrong.
Nick: And story five, quick one. Bloomberg reports DeepSeek just raised fifteen billion dollars to take on the big United States labs. Put that next to yesterday's story, where Washington ordered DeepSeek out of federal civilian systems. Both things are true at once. The cheap open models are getting a giant war chest, and governments are drawing hard lines about where they run. For a small business the move is unchanged. Ask your vendors which models touch your customer data, and keep that answer in writing.
Jordan: Time for Higgsfield Corner, our weekly practical look at AI video for local businesses. No headlines this week, so here is the workflow worth stealing. Take two phone photos of a finished job, the before and the after. Turn them into a fifteen second clip that pans across the work, add one line of text with the neighborhood and the service, and post it where your reviews live.
Alex: And the standing rule from this show still applies. AI video is a draft, not evidence. Compare every generated clip against the original photos before it goes out. If the clip invents a window, a wall, or a view that was never there, it does not get posted. Real photos make the claims. The clip just earns the attention.
Nick: I will add the business math. Judge any AI video tool by cost per finished, posted clip, not cost per generation. If you generate ten clips and post one, your real price is the ten. The owners winning with this are shooting better before and after photos, because the input photo is now the whole game.
Jordan: Now the game. AI or BS, three claims, rapid fire. Claim one. Claude Duet will buy supplies on its own, but it checks with you before it pays. True or BS?
Alex: I am going true. The approval step was the whole announcement.
Nick: True. It confirms the item, then Link asks you to approve the spend, and it pays with a virtual card. Claim two is mine. Eighty six percent of surveyed small businesses use AI, but only fifteen percent have it fully built into core operations. Jordan?
Jordan: That gap sounds too big. But after today I will say true.
Nick: True, and it is the most useful stat an owner will hear this month. Claim three. The new Goldman institute charges each small business five hundred dollars a month for AI training. Alex?
Alex: Five hundred million was the program expansion number, not a price tag. That is BS.
Nick: BS, correct. The five hundred million is Goldman's expansion commitment for the whole program. Nobody announced a five hundred dollar monthly fee for owners.
Jordan: One Thing to Try This Week, and it ties the whole show together. Call it the one workflow build. Pick one recurring task, just one. Write two short lists on a single page. What an AI assistant may do on its own, like draft, gather, and remind. And what always needs your approval, like send, spend, sign, and delete. Then run that one workflow for seven days and fix the lists as you go. That single page is the difference between the eighty six percent who dabble and the fifteen percent who actually run on it.
Alex: If you do that this week, you are ahead of most businesses in the country, and you will be ready the day tools like Duet open to business accounts. That is our show. One page, two lists, one workflow. Start today.
Nick: And if you want a hand wiring that first workflow into your website and your follow ups, you can find us at webguynick.com. See you tomorrow.
