Four of Six Headlines
Four of the six headlines in the business section of my own news feed were about AI. Not on a launch day, not during a conference week — an ordinary morning, on a dashboard I put together for myself and read the way anyone reads the news, without expecting to notice anything in particular.
I counted because the ratio surprised me, and then it stopped surprising me, which is the part worth writing down. A year ago that would have been a story about the news cycle. Now it’s just what the business section looks like.
I run a lot of conversations with people who own small and medium businesses — the ones doing real work in real markets, not the ones building software. The gap between how present this subject is in the press and how present it is in those businesses is wide. Most of them know something is happening. Very few have done anything specific about it beyond opening a chat window once and being mildly impressed.
A client put it to me plainly: the deadline for this is yesterday. He wasn’t panicking and he wasn’t selling me anything. He’d simply arrived at the conclusion that the window where this was optional had already shut behind him, and he’d rather say so than pretend otherwise.
The obvious caveat first
A headline count measures what the press is excited about. It does not measure what’s actually useful in your business, and treating media volume as evidence is how people end up buying things they don’t need. Plenty of what sits behind those four headlines is noise, some of it is genuinely overhyped, and a business owner who ignored all of it for another six months would not necessarily be worse off than one who spent those six months trialling tools.
The reading I’d push back on is the panicked one. The answer to four of six headlines is not to subscribe to six products.
What the count actually tells you
What it does tell you is where the attention of your market has gone. Your customers are reading the same section. Your competitors are. The people who’ll be pricing work against you next year are. That’s a fact about the environment you’re operating in, independent of whether any specific tool in those articles is worth your money.
The practical version is narrow, and it’s the same advice I’d give whether the count had been four of six or one of six. Pick one process in your business that eats hours and produces something repetitive — quotes, follow-ups, writing up what was agreed on a call, chasing the things that go quiet. One. Get that one automated properly, with your own material behind it, and see what it actually does to your week before you decide anything about the rest.
Doing that with one process teaches you more about whether this matters to your business than reading a year of headlines will. And it’s small enough to start this month, which is the only property that really matters for someone whose time is already spoken for.
If you’ve been meaning to and haven’t, the thing standing in the way is almost never the technology. It’s that nobody has picked the process yet. Pick it, and then it’s a normal project with a normal beginning.