Episode one of the Web Guy Nick Podcast starts with the question every owner is asking: what can AI actually do for a small business right now? Alex and Jordan are joined by Nick, the third host, who runs Web Guy Nick and has to make this tech work on Monday morning. The episode covers AI agents that finish jobs while you sleep, a price check study with a 2,500 percent gap between two shops quoting the same work, and new Higgsfield tools that turn one website link into a stack of ad creatives. Listen on Spotify, and visit webguynick.com when you are ready to put AI to work.
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Hey everyone, Nick here. I run Web Guy Nick, I build websites for local businesses, and starting today I am your third host. I am the guy who actually has to use this stuff on Monday morning, so if it does not work in a real business, you will hear about it.
Nick
The catch is the same as always. You have to check the work. An agent that works while you sleep is amazing until it emails the wrong quote to your best client at three in the morning. Trust, but verify.
Alex
That is the real shift nobody is talking about enough. We went from people Googling you, to people asking an AI about you. If your business is invisible to the agents, you are invisible, period.
Jordan
Full transcript
Alex: Your next employee might never sleep, never take a lunch break, and cost less than your coffee budget. This is Superintelligence Daily, the show where AI news meets real business. I am Alex.
Jordan: I am Jordan, and today everything changes, because we have a third voice at the table.
Nick: Hey everyone, Nick here. I run Web Guy Nick, I build websites for local businesses, and starting today I am your third host. I am the guy who actually has to use this stuff on Monday morning, so if it does not work in a real business, you will hear about it.
Alex: That is exactly why you are here. Jordan and I can talk about the tech all day, but Nick is the one with fifteen years of clients asking, will this make me money.
Jordan: And today is the perfect episode to start, because the news this week is basically all about AI doing your job while you are asleep. Nick, you are going to love this first story.
Nick: I am already nervous.
Alex: So OpenAI just rolled out an update to ChatGPT that changes the whole game. You can now hand it a task, close the app, go live your life, and the agent keeps working in the background. Researching, drafting, organizing, and it comes back when it is done.
Jordan: Think about what that means for a small business owner. You tell it on Friday afternoon, compile a list of every competitor within twenty miles with their pricing, draft next week’s social posts, and sort my inbox. Then you go home. Monday morning, it is all sitting there waiting for you.
Nick: Okay, as someone who has spent way too many Sunday nights writing social posts for clients, that just got my attention. But be honest with me, does it actually work, or is this one of those demos that falls apart the second a real customer is involved?
Alex: Fair question. Here is the context. OpenAI has been building toward this for a while. Web browsing, tool use, multi-step actions, all of that already existed. What is new is persistence. Before, you had to babysit it. Now you hand off the task and walk away. Competitors have had versions of this, but ChatGPT has the biggest small business user base by far, so when they flip the switch, it reaches everybody.
Jordan: And the framing from OpenAI is all business. Market research, content creation, scheduling, data analysis. They are not pitching this to developers. They are pitching it to you, the person running the shop.
Nick: Alright, I will say it. If this works half as well as they claim, the boring work that eats every small business owner’s weekend just got a whole lot smaller. I am in. What is the catch?
Alex: The catch is the same as always. You have to check the work. An agent that works while you sleep is amazing until it emails the wrong quote to your best client at three in the morning. Trust, but verify.
Jordan: Which brings us to story number two, and Nick, this one is about money. Anthropic just launched Claude Haiku five point five yesterday.
Nick: Haiku? Like the poem?
Jordan: Like the poem, but it is their small, fast, cheap model. And the timing is perfect, because if agents are going to run in the background doing hundreds of little tasks, you do not want to pay premium prices for every single one. Haiku five point five is built for exactly that. High volume grunt work. Sorting, classifying, routing, summarizing. It has a one million token context window, which is enormous for a small model.
Alex: Here is why a business owner should care. Every time an AI agent does something, it costs a tiny amount of compute. Do that ten thousand times a month and the tiny amounts add up. A cheaper small model means you can actually afford to let agents run wild in the background without watching the meter like a hawk.
Nick: So the big expensive models do the thinking, and the cheap little ones do the running around. Like hiring one strategist and a whole team of interns.
Jordan: That is exactly right. And honestly, that is a perfect description of how smart businesses will use AI this year.
Alex: Third story, quick one. Meta’s Muse, their personal AI agent, just launched a dedicated iPad app. It came to phones about a month ago, now it is on tablets too.
Nick: Wait, Muse? Like the thing I am talking to right now?
Alex: The very same family. Meta is pushing it onto every screen you own. Phone, tablet, and the glasses are coming. For a business owner, here is the angle. Your customers are going to start talking to AI agents on every device, asking them to find a plumber, book a table, compare quotes. The question is whether your business shows up when they ask.
Jordan: That is the real shift nobody is talking about enough. We went from people Googling you, to people asking an AI about you. If your business is invisible to the agents, you are invisible, period.
Nick: Okay, that one hit me. I literally do local SEO for a living, and even I am realizing the game is changing under my feet. Reviews, accurate hours, real answers on your site. The agents are going to read all of it.
Alex: And one more before we move on. A company called follow just launched followOS email, an AI email marketing platform built specifically for small and mid sized businesses. You describe your business, bring your customer list, and it builds the whole program. Campaigns, automations, brand voice, analytics in plain English. It launched in beta on October first, months ahead of schedule.
Jordan: Email marketing is one of those things every small business knows they should do and almost nobody does well. If an AI can genuinely run it, that is a big deal.
Nick: I have set up email automation for clients for years, and the hard part was never the software, it was the writing. If the AI writes like you and it actually sends, that is the whole ballgame.
Alex: Alright, time for everyone’s favorite segment. Nick, you have been dying to talk about this one.
Nick: Oh, you have no idea. It is time for the Higgsfield Corner.
Jordan: For the new listeners, Higgsfield is Nick’s obsession. It is an AI video platform, and Nick has been making ads and content with it that look like they cost ten thousand dollars.
Nick: Okay so here is what is happening at Higgsfield right now, and it is wild. On October second they launched AI Influencer. You build a character from scratch, nineteen categories, type, age, style, accessories, or you upload your own photo, and then you drop that character into videos. A virtual spokesperson for your business that never has a bad hair day and never asks for a raise.
Alex: I need everyone to sit with that for a second. A local business can now have a consistent on camera personality for their ads without ever hiring an actor or picking up a camera.
Nick: And it gets better. They also launched Ads Studio on September thirtieth. You paste in your website link, and it generates up to twenty static ad creatives per product, with your brand, your products, your colors. Then on October sixth, Ad Multiplier got a visual interface. You take a video ad that works, and you recreate it with your own product, your own cast, your own location, up to ten eighty p.
Jordan: So the workflow for a small business is becoming, find an ad style that works, plug in your business, ship it. That used to be an agency retainer. Now it is an afternoon.
Nick: And for the nerds, and I say that lovingly, xAI’s Grok Imagine Video one point five just landed on the platform on October first, with sound generated in the same pass as the motion, plus FLUX three for images. There are more than fifty models on there now. It is honestly the most fun you can have on the internet for the price of lunch.
Alex: You are such a fanboy and I love it.
Nick: I am not even sorry.
Jordan: Alright, new segment alert. We needed a game for this show, something with stakes, something where Nick can embarrass himself on episode one.
Nick: I am already regretting joining.
Jordan: It is called AI or BS. Here is how it works. Alex and I each bring a claim about AI. One of them is a real thing that actually happened. The other one I made up five minutes ago. Nick has to guess which is which. Ready?
Nick: Hit me.
Alex: Claim one. There is now an AI model that can predict what a customer wants to buy before they walk into the store, just by analyzing the weather, local events, and traffic patterns.
Jordan: Claim two. A restaurant in Tokyo now lets an AI take your order, cook recommendations based on your face, and the AI refuses to serve you dessert if it thinks you look tired.
Nick: Okay. The first one sounds completely plausible. Retailers have been doing predictive stuff forever, weather and events affecting sales is like retail one oh one. The second one, an AI judging my face and denying me dessert? That sounds like a Black Mirror episode. I am going to say claim one is AI, claim two is BS.
Jordan: And you would be right! The Tokyo dessert police is pure fiction. I invented it while drinking my coffee.
Alex: But here is the scary part. The first one is barely even news anymore. Predictive inventory, demand forecasting, that is just Tuesday now.
Nick: I do not know whether to be impressed or terrified that I got it right so easily.
Jordan: Round two, rapid fire. Alex, go.
Alex: Claim one. An AI animator just made a one minute twenty second animated episode in about four hours using Higgsfield, and he releases new episodes every day or two.
Jordan: Claim two. A law firm now employs an AI paralegal that bills clients by the hour and has its own parking space.
Nick: Oh come on. The parking space gives it away. Nobody gets a parking space anymore. Claim one is AI, claim two is BS.
Alex: Two for two! And claim one is real. Hugo Blendl, he animated on Rick and Morty, is making a whole animated comedy series mostly solo with Higgsfield. Four hours for eighty seconds of animation. His last pilot took two years with a team.
Nick: That is genuinely mind blowing. Two years versus four hours. If you are a creative person, the excuses are officially gone.
Jordan: Final round, and I am making this one hard. Claim one. AI agents completed over two thousand real business tasks in testing at a median speed seven hundred thirty six times faster than human estimates, at about one five hundredth the cost of freelancers.
Alex: Claim two. A startup is selling AI generated motivational posters where the quotes are written by an AI that only speaks in pirate slang, and they have forty thousand subscribers.
Nick: Hmm. The pirate thing sounds like something that would absolutely exist on the internet. But seven hundred thirty six times faster? That number is so specific it has to be real. Nobody inventing BS says seven hundred thirty six. I say claim one is AI.
Jordan: Three for three! That is NiteShyft, they are launching an AI business operating platform this month. Hundreds of specialized agents doing research, marketing, sales, finance, around the clock. Their testing numbers are wild.
Nick: Okay, I am officially the champion of AI or BS, undefeated, retiring at the top.
Alex: It is episode one, you cannot retire.
Nick: Watch me.
Alex: Before we wrap, it is time for our closing segment. One Thing to Try This Week. Each of us gives the listeners one concrete thing they can actually do. Jordan, you start.
Jordan: Mine is simple. Open ChatGPT, or whatever AI you use, and hand it one annoying task you have been putting off. A boring email, a messy spreadsheet, research you keep avoiding. Let the background agent chew on it while you do something else. Just check the work before you use it.
Alex: Mine is for the business owners. Google your own business like a customer would, then ask an AI agent about your business and see what it says. If the answers are wrong or thin, that is your wake up call. Fix your reviews, your hours, your website copy. The agents are reading everything.
Nick: Mine is the fun one. Go to Higgsfield, and make one short video ad for your business. Just one. Fifteen seconds. Pick a model, type what you want to see, and watch what comes out. It will not be perfect, but it will show you what is possible now, and I promise you will have ideas for ten more before dinner.
Jordan: That is a great first episode lineup.
Alex: So here is the deal. This show is now three hosts. Alex, Jordan, and Nick, the guy who will tell us when the tech actually works in the real world.
Nick: And when it does not. I am very good at that part.
Jordan: If you got something out of today, share it with one business owner friend. That is how shows like this grow.
Alex: And if you want help making AI actually work in your business, Nick is your guy. Web Guy Nick dot com.
Nick: That is webguynick.com. No spaces, no funny business.
Alex: Thanks for listening to the new Superintelligence Daily. We will see you tomorrow.
Jordan: Go try one thing this week.
Nick: And somebody please dethrone me at AI or BS. See you tomorrow.
