Writing
Practical guides on AI and automation for small businesses. Everything here is something I built, broke, or fixed first.
AI Explained ChatGPT vs Gemini for Small Business: Which Fits Your Work
There is no winner between ChatGPT and Gemini for a small business: pick by where your work already lives, and first check which assistant your Google or Microsoft plan already includes.
AI Explained What Is Agentic AI? A Plain Definition and Whether You Need It
Agentic AI is a label, with no single definition among the vendors that use it, for AI that pursues a goal across several steps with some autonomy; this site's rule of thumb is that a fixed-step automation is the simpler start until a job truly varies from case to case.
AI Explained What Is an MCP Server? A Plain Answer for Business Owners
An MCP server is a small program that exposes one app or data source to an AI assistant through an open standard; an owner usually meets it as a 'connector' inside an assistant.
AI Explained What Is an AI Agent? A Plain-English Answer for Small Business Owners
An AI agent is software that is given a goal, chooses its own steps, uses tools to carry them out and checks the result; if the steps never change, an owner wants an automation instead.
Research Do Businesses That Use AI Report Better Results?
Public Census data cannot show whether businesses that use AI report better results: the within-group comparisons are uninterpretable and the overall verdict is inconclusive.
Research San Francisco Jobs and AI: 419 Occupations Compared
Across 419 occupations, no relationship was found between one vendor's chat-usage measure and how San Francisco-area employment compared with the national count between two published snapshots; a difference of up to about 10% between the least and most chat-used occupations cannot be ruled out.
Research AI Agent Search Interest by City: San Francisco, Seattle and Four More
For the agent-tool phrases we chose, Google searches from San Francisco run at 9.5 times the city's share of the US population and Seattle's at 8.6 times, so the two are similar; this measures searches, not use.
Research California Software Developers by Age: Census Data to 2024
In Census survey data, the share of California software developers aged 22-27 shows no detectable change between 2019 and 2021-22 and 2023-24, and the data cannot identify any role for AI.